During VMware Explore I attended the VMware EUC keynote. During this session Shankar Iyer, Shawn Bass and others dug into the every changing world of hybrid working and how VMware aim to assist.

The session is now available to be viewed online if you have a VMware Explore account
VMware Explore Video Landing

One of the most important aspects for me to hear during the session was VMware’s focus on digital employee experience and not just the technology. It is important in the hybrid world of working that experience, security and productivity are at the front of our technical strategies.

You can read more about this session over at the VMware End-User Computing Blog at the link below

Workspace Security and Digital Employee Experience, intertwined: Conclusions from VMware Explore 2022 Europe - VMware End-User Computing Blog

Please find my doodle with my key thoughts from the session below

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Today saw the start of Microsoft Ignite November 2021, this keynote focused on hybrid work with Microsoft 365. Jared Spataro Corporate VP of modern work spoke about the key elements and innovations regarding hybrid working.

Jared spoke about organisations requiring a digital fabric to successfully adopt hybrid ways of working, this is made up of communication, collaboration and creation.

Announced today was Microsoft Loop a new app acting as a collaborative canvas allowing you to bring multiple elements together for interactive collaboration.

Within Loop there are 3 core elements, Workspaces, Pages and Components. This is the evolution of fluid components and the elements can be copied from Loop into Teams, Outlook and more and importantly still remain live and interactive.

Read more about Loop here.

Next was ContextIQ, allowing users to get recommendations regarding content and resources directly in the editor to improve productivity and making it more simple to include the elements that matter where you need them.

Read more about Context IQ here.

Finally, I was pleased to see there will also be improvements to Teams webinars including virtual green room, structured Q&A as well as curated experiences allowing specific people and content to be shown within the webinar when required.

Read more about improvements to Teams Webinars here.

You can see my doodle summarising this session below.

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If you are managing Microsoft 365 for a large organisation CoreView will allow you to easily create actionable reports to maintain organisational standards, securely delegate administrative tasks to the relative parties such as HR and maximise the use of your Microsoft 365 licencing with licensing optimisation reports and related actions.

You can learn more about CoreView over at their website https://www.coreview.com

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The doodle above was created as part of a paid engagement with CoreView to understand the features of their platform and to doodle my thoughts. There has been no expectations set or influence on the content of the doodle or this blog post by CoreView. All thoughts are my own.

I recently had the opportunity to meet with Doug Hazelman - Senior Vice President and Cheif Evangelist of CoreView. Many like me from the virtualisation community will know Doug from his time at Veeam and it was great to catch up with him to hear all about CoreView.

CoreView is a SaaS platform designed to help enterprises that have a heavy reliance on Microsoft 365 within their organisations.

A quick look on their website summarises the product quite well in three given areas;

• See it - Action Enabled Reporting

• Manage it - Granular Privileges for Each User

• Automate it - With cross-SaaS workloads

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The reporting functionality is the core element of the platform with over 240 inbuilt reports and the ability to fully customise and filter what is included. The word ‘reporting’ to describe this functionality doesn’t really do it justice, the reporting within CoreView is fully actionable, so once you have found the information that is relevant to you, for example, users who aren’t configured with MFA, you can then undertake the relevant corrective action directly from inside CoreView. Even more impressively you can schedule these reports to run regularly including the corrective actions to easily maintain standards.

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Reporting is available for all areas of Microsoft 365 and of particular interest to me, was licensing optimisation and user management as well as the application-specific reports including SharePoint and Teams.

One of the areas I was most impressed with was the ability to delegate administrative access to Microsoft 365 to anybody in the business, including none technical members of the team whilst maintaining security and governance.

CoreView has the concept of virtual tenants or V-Tenants, this allows you to granularly carve up administrative functionality to specific subsets of users within your business. With Microsoft 365 taking such a large role within organisations today there is increasingly becoming a large burden for IT teams to be able to manage the associated administrative tasks. This is exactly where virtual tenants within CoreView comes to the rescue, whether this is delegation from a central Microsoft 365 admin team to certain controls to a service desk or even delegating user management to a representative of an HR department.

The virtual tenant allows you to initially configure which users are within the virtual tenant (this is useful for dept specific delegations) and you are then able to granularly control which permissions are allowed and what should be included in the user interface for these users. Together this allows you to securely and effectively delegate granular administration tasks within Microsoft 365 without risk.

As previously mentioned there are full licensing optimisation reports available allowing you to review per user utilisation of features and functionality in line with the licensing that is in place across the organisation. With the virtual tenants mentioned above, it is possible to take this a stage further and carve up licensing into the virtual tenants, allowing departments to manage their own licensing and to review the relevant reports.

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The final component I want to talk about is the ability to review and filter the Microsoft 365 audit logs, from the day you configure CoreView by default it will store a rolling years worth of history with the option to pay for further retention. The audit review capability allows you to quickly and easily search and filter the audit logs to get drilldown to the elements that matter to you. Further to this there are a number of out of the box reports that highlight certain activity from the audit logs such as failed logins and logins with impossible travel.

I was really impressed by what I saw from CoreView and whilst it is focused on enterprise use cases I could see how the functionality would be useful to other organisations and managed service providers. I am hoping to get some time looking into the platform myself and will post any thoughts that I have.

Be sure to checkout CoreView for yourself https://www.coreview.com

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Today Microsoft announced Viva, an Employee Experience Platform integrated right into Microsoft Teams.

Initially, Viva will contain four separate modules.

Viva Connections - Culture and Communication - Utilising SharePoint and Yammer

Viva Insights - Productivity and Well-Being - Utilising Insights

Viva Learning - Utilising content from LinkedIn Learning, Microsoft Learn, Your own content and content from leading providers

Viva Topics - Knowledge and Expertise utilising AI to and in-house experts to tag content with Topics to create your organisations own Wikipedia to be sure people can find the right information at the right time. Previously Project Cortex

For more information check out this the Microsoft VIva page here

Employee Experience & Engagement | Microsoft Viva

Alongside VMware I have found the NetApp presentation to be one of the most interesting and relevant for myself. NetApp presented the Microsoft Azure NetApp Files services as well their Virtual Desktop Services offering. This was a really refreshing presentation for me, I had assumed with NetApp presenting we would have seen traditional storage solutions running in the cloud but I was presently surprised by the content presented.

Azure NetApp Files

Firstly we saw the Microsoft Service named Azure NetApp Files. A service ran by Microsoft natively in Azure (Not through the marketplace) allowing you to run Windows and Linux workloads in the cloud with high performance, as well as offering enterprise grade storage management including snapshots, clones, replication and tiering)

Azure NetApp Files supports NFS v3 and v4.1 as well as SMB3 allowing for a range of file based use cases, discussed was use cases around Enterprise File Repositories, Databases, HPC and VDI

https://cloud.netapp.com/azure-netapp-files

NetApp Virtual Desktop Services (VDS)

NetApp VDS comes from the acquisition of CloudJumper earlier this year. VDS is SaaS control plane allowing you to deploy, manage and optimise virtual desktop environment across on-premises and public clouds. Unlike Citrix and VMware Horizon, VDS leaves the brokering up to Microsoft RDS or WVD in the native cloud infrastructures and concentrates on the management capabilities mentioned previously.

With Microsoft’s release and continued improvement of WVD I am increasingly seeing customers wanting to look at the native Microsoft offering without rapping a third party brokering service. As such NetApp VDS sits nicely in this gap allowing admins to rely on WVD for the element it is best at whilst adding full lifecycle management capabilities.

https://cloud.netapp.com/virtual-desktop-service

Conclusion

It was refreshing to see cloud services from a traditional storage vendor like NetApp and I look forward to learning more and covering more about these technologies.

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This doodle covers some bascis of Microsoft Teams calling alongside some of the new features coming to calling within Microsoft Teams. It also covers the session looking at the capabilities for First-Line workers available in Microsoft Teams.

More information about calling can be found here > https://news.microsoft.com/ignite-2020-book-of-news/#4101-new-calling-features-are-coming-soon-to-microsoft-teams

More information about new features for first-line workers can be found here > https://news.microsoft.com/ignite-2020-book-of-news/#4105-new-microsoft-teams-capabilities-support-firstline-workers-as-the-digital-transformation-of-essential-work-accelerates-

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Here is my doodle covering a number of sessions focusing on Microsoft 365 specifically Teams from day one of Microsoft Ignite 2020

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Below you can see my first two doodles covering Satya Nadella’s keynote “Building Digital Resilience” and “The Future of Work” keynote by Jared Spataro. It was amazing to hear how Microsoft are powering all areas of Digital Transformation across organisation especially in these unprecedented times!

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The biggest focus for me is the workspace technology and I was really pleased to see a focus on not only productivity but also well-being! Microsoft announced new well-being features, the first is centred around a digital commute. The digital commute allows you to wrap up your day the right way, allowing you to better disconnect from work. We saw a review of your tasks, a reflection of the day and integration with Headspace for an end of day meditation session! I love Headspace and I am so pleased to see it is coming to teams in 2021!! The next element was enhancement to MyAnalytics giving insights to users right inside Teams to allow you to better make intelligent changes to help your productivity and well-being. Also demonstrated was manager and leader insights powered by Analytics allowing better coaching and proactive management based upon trends within teams. I will be blogging more about all of this over at https://www.definetomorrow.co.uk in the coming days.

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I am talking to a large amount of people about the calling functionality within Teams at present so I’m my usual fashion I thought I would draw a doodle to help me illustrate the architecture.

The diagram above illustrates the different components within the architecture of a simple direct routing implementation of Microsoft Teams Calling including some of the licensing considerations over and above the 365 licence you are likely to already have.

This is just one of the configuration options available for Teams and if you are looking for a more simplistic solution using Teams native calling plans maybe a better option for you.

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Megan Warren and I recently presented at Commsverse Online 2020, covering productivity and well-being in conjunction with Microsoft 365. The doodle above depicts some of the take-aways from the presentation.

Please find links below to a few resources mentioned

Microsoft MyAnalytics

Swipe Gestures in Outlook IOS

Forest

How to be a Productivity Ninja Book

The CORD productivity monitor

Teams integrated status lights

Over the last few days, I have been attending and presenting at Commsverse the Microsoft Teams conference. The conference was originally going to be an in-person conference at Mercedes Benz world but due to the current lockdown status, the team behind Commsverse have moved the in-person conference to next year and pulled together a virtual conference.

My first presentation concentrated on increasing productivity whilst at work and disconnecting from work within your personal time to help protect your well-being. I was joined on this presentation by Megan Warren and we spoke about, Microsoft Teams, My Analytics, productivity methodologies and much more. I will follow up with a doodle covering the content shortly.

My second session focused on driving adoption of Teams and Microsoft 365, with my colleague Anthony Charman. We presented about the importance of treating a Microsoft Teams project as not only a technology project but also a business change project, engage the business leaders and users to make Teams relevant to the users and raise levels of adoption. Again I will share some information separately on this.

I was really impressed by the variety of sessions and the quality of presenters during the conference. With experts covering a wide range of subjects such as calling, meetings, collaboration, devices and much more.

I was really impressed by the amount of effort that the team behind Commsverse put into making the conference possible and the fact the conference was all hosted on Microsoft technologies. The main body of the conference was ran through Microsoft Teams with Teams setup as vendor booths and places to chat for attendees, the sessions were delivered using Microsoft Teams Live Events. Whilst there were challenges behind using this as a platform for a 2000+ attendee global event I think the team behind Commsverse did an amazing event to make this possible.

One of the interesting use cases was the use of AltSpaceVR for a show floor area, whilst it wasn’t widely used during the times I visited I found it a really good interactive platform to walk around and speak to vendors.

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