During last month’s SharePoint Virtual Summit, we unveiled SharePoint communication sites—beautiful, dynamic sites that let you reach a broad internal audience, and that look great on the web, in the SharePoint mobile app, on PC and on Mac. Today, we’re excited to announce that communication sites are now rolling out to Office 365 First Release customers, followed by full worldwide rollout to Office 365 customers in the coming months.
Create a beautiful communication site in seconds
Communication sites are perfect for internal cross-company campaigns, weekly and monthly reports or status updates, product launches, events and more. To help you jumpstart getting your message out fast, communication sites provide configurable templates for the sites and pages within. When you click Create site from the SharePoint home in Office 365, you have a choice of three initial site designs:
Topic—Select the Topic design when you have a lot of information to share, such as news, events and other content.
Showcase—Use the Showcase design to feature a product, team or event using photos or images.
Blank—Start with a blank site and make your design come to life quickly and easily.
Communication site designs (from left to right): Topic, Showcase and Blank.
And it is easy to tell your story. Once your new site is created, simply drag-and-drop to reorganize web parts on the page to bring your use cases and scenarios to life. News and pages allow for multi-column layouts to represent your message in a meaningful, intuitive fashion.
Share your plans and updates in engaging, interactive ways
Communication sites allow people to create and share recurring updates beyond email. When you create a page on a communication site, you can embed documents and video, and dynamically pull in real-time data from across Office 365, including documents from SharePoint, Power BI reports, Microsoft Stream videos and Yammer discussions. The resulting page is a rich and dynamic communication. And the page persists on the site, so people can refer to it easily, even as the membership of your team changes, so new members can more easily get up to speed.
The new capabilities for the rich section layouts and new web parts can be utilized on SharePoint team sites as well.
Consume, create and connect from your mobile device via the SharePoint apps
It’s easy to access, engage with and create content for communication sites from any device. The full site, pages, news, navigation, search and more are natively viewable, functional and engaging. Read a page, create a news article, engage in a Yammer conversation—all in the context of the site—from within the SharePoint mobile app experience.
Communication sites help further refine and enhance your message
Beyond what we shared during the SharePoint Virtual Summit, communication sites have additional capabilities to further refine and enhance your message.
Make your home page and sub-pages look great
Full-width layouts—The Hero and Image web parts can be placed in a section layout that spans the page from left to right, giving you ways to emphasize your most essential information.
Enhanced title region with custom header image—Visually represent your home page, news and subpages with a compelling header graphic and title. You control what portion of the image is the most important, so it looks great, and as intended, across web and mobile experiences.
Continue the discussion in context to ensure reach, retention and engagement
Comments on pages—Each news article and page can have its own set of comments. It is possible to use the Yammer web part for broad discussion scenarios as well as targeted responses to engage your viewers on the sole message and content on the page—all keeping within the context of the page.
Share news via email—When you share news via email from a communication site, it’s not just a blue link; it’s a visual, informative preview that adds context to both the email and the news article itself. Within the email, the recipient(s) will see a thumbnail, title, description and an optional message from the sender.
Dynamically pull in and display data, documents and information via web part improvements
Power BI and Microsoft Stream—Bring in interactive reports using the Power BI web part, and embed single videos or full channels from Microsoft Stream—the single destination within Office 365 for your cross-company video management. Both Power BI and Microsoft Stream are now generally available.
GIF support—When you add an Image web part into a news article or page, you can now include animated GIFs in your layout.
New “See all” pages—When there is more content than can be shown within the first view the Highlighted content and Site activity web parts, you can click See all to go to a full-page experience to see all the content and activity.
Updated News web part—Showcase your news using multiple layouts to highlight what’s important with greater flexibility. You can use the default Top story layout, view news as a list or side-by-side.
Join us for one or more of our events in the coming days and weeks to share and explore the value of communication sites.
SharePoint communication sites AMA—On Wednesday, June 28, 2017 from 9–10 a.m. PDT, bring your questions and feedback to the SharePoint communication sites AMA within this dedicated SharePoint community space of the Microsoft Tech Community for SharePoint. We’re inviting our deepest business and technical subject matter experts for an active, informative hour—driven by YOU!
Jeff Teper takes over @SharePoint—On Tuesday, July 10, 2017 from 9:30–10:30 a.m. PDT, Jeff Teper, corporate vice president for SharePoint, OneDrive and Office, will take over the @SharePoint Twitter handle. He’ll tackle your questions and feedback both with written responses and video snippets as only he can—no tweet left behind!
LIVE customer + MVPs panel webinar—On Wednesday, July 13, 2017 at 8 a.m. PDT, join in to hear how one of our customers, Shire, successfully planned and implemented their new digital workspace—inclusive of communication sites. You will hear both from Shire employees and Office 365 MVPs. Register today.
On-demand webcast—On Wednesday, July 19, 2017, Farren Roper and I present the “SharePoint: Inform and engage your employees” business webcast. Be the first to be notified when it’s available: sign up today. And in advance, read the new, related eBook, “4 secrets to a connected workplace.”
Throughout the lifecycle of your projects, launches and internal campaigns, let the SharePoint intranet help you move seamlessly from concept to final product. The powerful, dynamic SharePoint user experiences let you clearly communicate your message throughout your company.
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New in Yammer—building a more connected and engaged organization
Yammer empowers every person in your company with an open space to connect, share and work out loud. With 70 percent annual growth in active groups, there’s greater momentum in Yammer than ever before. Yammer and SharePoint have always been natural complements, because together they deliver powerful connections and discoveries of people, content and information. Today, during the SharePoint Virtual Summit, we unveiled several new capabilities that make it easier to connect and engage through Yammer, whoever and wherever you are in the organization.
Spark conversations on your intranet by bringing Yammer and SharePoint together
Productive conversations can arise from anywhere you do your work. Last year, we enabled a more seamless document sharing capability across the Office 365 suite, including SharePoint, while collaborating in Yammer. You can now enrich your new SharePoint communication sites with a conversational layer by using the existing Yammer embed capability, triggering contextually relevant discussions and increasing the virality of your content.
Over the coming year, we will enhance the integration between Yammer and SharePoint by further improving the way SharePoint content appears in Yammer and making conversations from Yammer render more naturally within SharePoint on the web, desktop and mobile.
Share, view and discuss videos from Office 365 Video and Microsoft Stream
Companies are increasingly looking to use video as an effective way to reach employees and drive engagement across the organization. Now, you can share and play videos from Office 365 Video and Microsoft Stream directly within your Yammer conversations. Yammer already offers high quality, in-line viewing of video uploads or external websites like YouTube and Vimeo. These new integrations with Office 365 Video and Microsoft Stream make it seamless to embed internal videos in Yammer conversations and include security controls and infrastructure to keep valuable information secure.
To share a video from Office 365 Video or Microsoft Stream, copy the URL of the video and paste it into your Yammer conversation either as a reply or post. Yammer recognizes that the URL is a video, adds a playable thumbnail and allows people in the group to watch the video in the context of Yammer. They will also see the number of views and likes. Those who don’t have access to a specific video will be shown a message that the video is private or the user is not authorized.
Whether you are running a monthly Q&A session, sharing an executive message, broadcasting product updates or releasing a campaign, your employees can now share, watch and discuss videos right within Yammer and see tallies of views and likes.
Discuss relevant information from third-party apps and services using Connectors in Yammer
You can now use Office 365 Connectors to bring relevant content and updates from over 90 popular third-party apps and services directly into your current Yammer conversations. Connectors allow you to configure automatic posts to groups from a wide variety of tools, such as news and social media sources like Bing News and Twitter, developer tools including GitHub and PagerDuty, and project management tools like Trello and Asana.
Anyone in the group can add or delete a connector in Yammer, as long as the group is connected to the Office 365 Groups service. Simply click Add or Remove Apps under Group Actions (on the right of your group’s feed) and then follow the instructions on how to add the connector. To learn more about Connectors in Yammer, please visit the support article.
Connectors bring relevant third-party information right to your group. For example, you can set up a connector to deliver a weekly digest of social media posts or articles regarding a specific hashtag or search term. For groups managing the customer experience, you can set up a connector with your organization’s customer support system to escalate important tickets and drive group problem solving.
Keep group membership up to date by enabling dynamic groups in Yammer
Starting today, you can more easily manage groups in Yammer using dynamic group membership. Dynamic groups are Office 365 groups with membership defined as a rule, rather than as a static list of members, in Azure Active Directory. Whether you’re looking to group people based on role, geography, department or any other attribute, once created, these groups update automatically as people join, leave or move within your organization. So you can rest assured that you are including the right people from across the company to engage and collaborate in your Yammer conversations.
To create a group with dynamic membership in Yammer, an Office 365 administrator will need to sign in to the Azure portal, select the Yammer group to configure and set up the membership rules for that group.
Group members are added and removed based on membership rules set in the Azure portal.
This new capability works well for organizations where people often change teams, roles and geographies. For quickly growing companies seeking to bring new hires into group conversations relevant to them, dynamic membership helps to ensure these employees have all the right permissions to find applicable content and make meaningful connections from day one.
For companies looking for a reliable and secure way to engage with the frontline, a group with dynamic membership can be created based on a specific role or location. Group managers can then announce major updates, sending a notification to employees’ mobile apps. Conversely, workers on the frontline can share input and escalate issues knowing they’re connected to the right people back in the central office.
Connect wherever you do your best work with new Yammer apps for iPad, Windows and Mac
Staying connected requires tools that have the versatility to fit your work style. Whether you are highly mobile, moving from meeting to meeting, on the ground talking to customers or jumping from app to app on your desktop, your cross-company conversations should be accessible, highly engaging and easy to navigate. We are pleased to share new Yammer apps for iPad, Windows and Mac.
The Yammer iPad app has been re-launched with a richer navigation and group experience, as well as universal search capabilities.
With great feedback and usage of our current Desktop Notifier, we will also be delivering a more full-featured desktop app for Windows and Mac within the next couple months. The new app will enable automatic sign-in and will have a similar look and feel as the current browser experience. Organizations will also be able to broadly deploy the desktop app through central management.
Learn more and join us for our Ask Microsoft Anything (AMA)
The features and capabilities announced today represent the next steps in Yammer’s journey of empowering people to connect and engage across their organization. With several exciting announcements, we invite you to watch our latest Microsoft Mechanics video:
Also, join us next Tuesday, May 23, 2017 at 9 a.m. PDT for a special Ask Microsoft Anything (AMA) in the Microsoft Tech Community. Our product and engineering teams will be available to answer questions you have about new features in Yammer. Add the event to your calendar and join us in the Yammer AMA group next week. To keep up with Yammer releases and connect with our product teams on an ongoing basis, please join the Yammer Service Updates External Group.
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Manage your business needs with new enhancements in Azure Autoscale
Automatically scaling out or scaling in applications to handle the demands of your business is an essential element of the cloud strategy. Azure’s Autoscale service empowers you to automatically scale your compute and App Service workloads based on user-defined rules regarding metric conditions, time/date schedules, or both. Azure Autoscale is available for Classic Cloud Services, Virtual Machine Scale Sets (VMSS) and App Services. Today we are excited to announce a host of improvements to Autoscale, including faster auto scaling, simplified configuration, the ability to scale by a custom metric using Application Insights, and more troubleshooting information available in the Activity Log.
Faster Autoscale
Classic Cloud Services: The Classic Virtual Machine infrastructure that powers Classic Cloud Services now supports more reliable, host-level metrics via the Azure Monitor metric pipeline. Because of this, an Autoscale setting can now be set to have as low as a five-minute time window to activate (previously we recommended a time window of no less than 30 minutes). With this, you can now do faster and more reliable auto scaling. If you have a Classic Cloud Service Autoscale setting where you wish to take advantage of the improved scaling, please update it with a shorter time window (as low as five minutes).
VMSS and App Services: The Autoscale engine for VMSS and App Services can also now trigger scale actions faster. The new engine is tuned to check for your metric based rules every minute, thereby enabling the ability to scale your instances as early as 1 minute after a metric value crosses the threshold set in an Autoscale setting. To take advantage of the faster Autoscale, please update your existing autoscale setting. All new Autoscale settings created or updated on VMSS or App Services after May 10th will automatically use the new engine.
Simplified management experience in the portal
Based on your feedback, we made it easier to discover and manage Autoscale settings in the portal. Autoscale settings can now be accessed directly from within the Azure Monitor blade, use a completely re-vamped configuration blade, and enable you to easily see the full template in JSON or scale action history for that setting. Learn more about how to get started with Autoscale today.
Figure 1. the new tab within Azure Monitor for accessing and managing Autoscale settings.
Figure 2. the simplified Autoscale blade with options to view scale action history, view the JSON object and edit notifications.
Autoscale using custom metrics
One of our top customer asks was to be able to Autoscale based on a custom, user-defined metric, and we’ve now enabled it using Application Insights. This new capability is available now and enables you to scale Classic Cloud Service, VMSS or App Service workloads by any Azure Monitor based metric or custom and application metrics collected by Application Insights, Azure’s application performance management service. Here is a sample of an Autoscale setting that allows you to scale your Web API app based on a custom metric ingested to Application Insights. This ability to Autoscale via Application Insights based metrics is now available in public preview, please try this out and share your feedback.
Figure 3. the ability to select Application Insights as a source of metrics and the ability to select a standard or user-defined metric by which scaling will occur.
Improved Autoscale troubleshooting
The Autoscale engine logs an event in Activity Log every time it triggers a scale action, however, the target resource that is being scaled out or in can take the time to complete the scale action. It is important to know when the scale action completes or reports as failed so that you can take automated actions on the resource. To support this, the Autoscale engine now generates a scale action result event when the underlying target service completes the action or reports it as failed. This scale result event is also logged in the Activity Log and includes valuable information about why your Autoscale event failed. We’ve also introduced a new Autoscale Activity Log category so that you can easily filter to view only Autoscale-related events. You can leverage the new Activity Log Alerts to receive notifications or take automated actions via webhooks and Azure Automation, Logic Apps or Functions. This feature is now enabled for Cloud Services, VMSS and App Services.
Figure 4. A view of Activity Logs filtered by Autoscale events, listing the Autoscale trigger action and result event.
Wrapping Up
These new capabilities in Azure Autoscale enable you to efficiently leverage the compute power of Azure to scale your applications to best suit your growing business needs. We are eager to hear your feedback to inform our future work on Autoscale. Please try these new features and let us know what you think. Also be sure you’re getting the most out of this feature by checking out our Autoscale best practices, and most common autoscale patterns.
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OneNote Class Notebook supports English Language Learners at Klein Forest High School
Klein Forest High School is located in Houston, Texas. Our student body is about 3,700 students; our faculty and staff total approximately 500, and we are 1:1. We have an on-campus repair center that services our devices, but they do not teach teachers and students how to use software. That’s where we step in. As the instructional specialists in technology on campus, it is our responsibility to ensure that teachers and students can utilize the technology effectively for teaching and learning.
We first saw OneNote Class Notebook while attending the TCEA annual technology conference last February. We attended an amazing session called Personalizing Student Learning with the OneNote Class Notebook. We were in love with so many features of the class notebook, but what sold us was Learning Tools because of our high English Language Learner (ELL) population.
As our campus struggled to step away from excessive paper copies in our 1:1 environment, administrators asked us for solutions utilizing our technology more effectively. We knew OneNote was a perfect solution. Before we could sell it, we had to become experts ourselves. So, we created a Class Notebook for our 13-member, cross-content specialist PLC. Our PLC was a team of guinea pigs. Once we gained confidence in the tool, we were ready to bring it to the staff. Like any school, our teaching staff contains all kinds—from technophobes to tech enthusiasts. Knowing that, we asked a few tech enthusiasts to pilot OneNote Class Notebook with their students. This way we would have tried and true testimonials for our technophobes from within the building.
This Sway showcases the use of OneNote at Klein Forest High School.
Just like we expected, they LOVED it. One staff member, an English IV teacher, used it with her students and immediately gravitated to the collaboration space. She had her students revise and edit each other’s essays and then leave quality feedback using the Record Audio feature. Her students asked her, “Why haven’t you been using this all year?”
Another staff member, an ELL teacher, used it with his students who are new to the country and learning the English language. He was drawn to the Learning Tools add-in. He saw vast improvements in the students’ writing and language acquisition over time. He even made some tutorial videos as a supplemental resource for our teachers ready to jump in. A third staff member, a math co-teacher, used Class Notebook with his SPED students. He, too, liked the Learning Tools, but he loved how easy it was to organize. This proved to be extremely beneficial for his population because it made providing individual accommodations easier. Additionally, the teachers provided us feedback about potential obstacles, which allowed us to anticipate problems and have possible solutions readily available.
To prepare for our summer trainings, we decided to actively “promote” OneNote. We visited PLC meetings, made infographics, emailed the details out and posted on our website. During the summer of 2016, we provided professional development for our staff introducing OneNote and had them participate as students using a Class Notebook that we had created. Most of them fell in love with it on the spot. We also had the teachers who piloted OneNote during the previous year assist with staff development for additional buy-in.
Once school started this August, things got off to a slower start than we anticipated. Teachers were falling into old habits. Therefore, we decided to switch our approach from marketing to grassroots. We targeted specific teachers who we felt were catalysts, teachers that would share our sentiments. This proved to be successful because—just like we suspected—it spread like wildfire!
Teachers and other campuses within our district began contacting us about OneNote daily. Soon, our district’s chief learning officer asked us to do a guest blog post in The Exchange, an in-district blog. As you can imagine, we were pumped.
One question that always emerges is how we support our teachers with OneNote. The first thing we do is schedule two appointments with the teachers. We have found that initial and ongoing support are a huge indicator of success, especially for teachers that are weary about trying a new tool. OneNote can be daunting for some. Additionally, we provide supplemental trainings like Using OneNote for Accommodations or OneNote Tips and Tricks for people at various places in their OneNote journey. Another way we support teachers is sharing and showcasing their efforts and ideas on our website. Lastly, we ensure we follow up with teachers frequently, whether it is a quick conversation in the hall or an email asking, “How’s OneNote going?”
OneNote has been an excellent tool for our struggling students and co-teach classes. A few accommodations we have seen incorporated into OneNote are Read Aloud, enlarged text, graphic organizers, to-do list and use of calculator. (Did you know OneNote can solve simple equations?) OneNote helps students who may struggle with learning disabilities to keep their work organized because the teacher can distribute the work to their notebooks. Students are not losing or misplacing their work anymore. The differentiation of assignments is also made easy with the Distribute Page tool. Teachers can send out different assignments based on the needs of the students within the same class. Teachers also can watch the students work on their own computers and offer direct feedback during and after the assignment.
OneNote Class Notebook has been a powerful addition to our technology toolbox. OneNote Class Notebook integrates with many different programs and, lucky for us, it integrates with both our LMS and SIS. OneNote Class Notebook integrates with our LMS, which means it can automatically enroll students in the OneNote Class Notebook—one less thing for teachers to do. Another nice integration is our SIS/gradebook. Our teachers can grade an assignment in OneNote, and with the click of a button, have those grades automatically added to their gradebook.
What we have learned in the last 10 months is that OneNote can work for everyone. We have just about every subject represented, from our math teachers to our dance teachers. We have also learned that initial and follow-up support are important for continued success. There are so many awesome features in OneNote, and it can be intimidating for some when trying to show them everything up front. We try to scaffold them as we continue to follow up with our teachers. Without a doubt, OneNote has positively impacted our campus instructionally, for teachers and students alike.
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IT organizations put great focus into drawing up their outsourcing contracts, but those agreements alone do not guarantee satisfactory outcomes. Attorney Brad Peterson has seen it time and time again. “Time and money are spent on drafting the contract—often a substantial amount of money. And a tremendous amount of potential value is created in that contract,” says Peterson, partner in Mayer Brown’s Chicago office and leader of its technology transactions practice.
But then the engagement is handed over to a well-intentioned supplier management team that wasn’t involved in the contract and often can’t make heads or tails of what’s in it. “It’s understandable. Contracts are complex and confusing, and relationship managers are selected based on their knowledge of technology or their skill in building relationships, not on their knowledge of how to run a contract,” Peterson says.
Those professionals managing the engagement often don’t understand how their conduct or communication can impact their company’s legal rights, which can cause a number of problems should disputes arise. “The result is that the benefits for which you negotiated hard and are paying great amounts may be lost,” says Peterson. What’s more, disputes may be more difficult to resolve, and those that aren’t becoming costly to litigate, requiring interviewing dozens of witnesses and sorting through thousands of emails to figure out what has happened and who is responsible.
The real value of IT outsourcing is achieved through active governance—not only of the projects in play, but of the communication and interaction between customer and provider. “Protecting the value of the contract after the ink is dry is about motivating suppliers to deliver on their promises,” says Peterson, “and preserving remedies for failure.” Peterson and Robert Kriss, litigation partner in Mayer Brown’s Chicago office recently share some best practices for governing the IT outsourcing contract once the ink is dry.
1. Control your communication
If someone on the customer side isn’t already designated in the contract, send a notice to the service provider at the start of the engagement identifying one employee authorized to speak on behalf of the customer. IT service providers are savvy. If they want to push a change in approach or document through, they will find the employee most likely to sign off on it. By designating one spokesperson, “You avoid the inadvertent but unfavorable change that occur to your contract when lower level people are approached by the provider to approve a procedural manual, for example, that ends up changing the obligations of all the parties,” says Kriss. “That makes it clear up front and in writing who represents and can bind the customer. It’s just good for the relationship and will result in fewer misunderstandings.”
Designating a customer representative enables the IT organization to control messaging, better adhere to the contract, and avoid situations where the communications or conduct of less informed personnel create ambiguity and uncertainty. And when disputes arise, you’ll only have to review the email of the one person whose communication has legal relevance versus dozens.
2. Require the provider to log requests and complaints
In many outsourcing situations, the only obligation of the customer is to pay the supplier. Not so in IT, where engagements required the customer’s contribution or collaboration. “The customer will tend to have obligations, and if the customer doesn’t perform those obligations, those may be an excuse for performance,” Peterson says.
However, should the IT outsourcing provider have a request for the customer or raise an issue of customer performance that it says excuses one of its obligations, it’s important to compel the provider to write the issue down and keep a log of all such problems.
Require a log showing requests and responses on contractual matters.
3. Clarify cloudy terms early
It’s important to keep the written record of the engagement as clear, complete and accurate as possible. When there are projects or situations that the contract does not explicitly address, the customer should clarify them early on and in writing. “That’s the best time to reach agreement because the parties are most open to cooperation at that point,” Kriss says.
If the details of a more granular project isn’t specified in the main agreement, write down a summary of what each parties responsibilities are and have everyone sign off on that before embarking on their work. “If there’s clarity in the written record, the likelihood of the situation getting worked in the context of outsourcing relationship is much greater,” says Kriss. “It matters so much.”
4. Send breach notices right away
Peterson sees customers who endured problems in their outsourcing relationships for years, but had no record of them because they thought sending notices to the provider would create tension or contention. That’s a mistake. Customer should send a written notice of breach or failure the very first time it occurs—and every time thereafter. “This needs to be a standard best practice that a company always uses,” Peterson says. They need not be combative, but rather polite and factual. “If you can establish that pattern, particularly with a single person comfortable sending these notices that are clear and useful, you will establish a much better record,” Peterson says.
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Skype brings developers and consumers closer together at Build 2017
At last year’s Microsoft Build conference, Satya Nadella announced Skype’s leap into the world of conversational computing, officially opening up the Skype platform with the debut of Skype chat bots—intelligent helpers you can add directly into your chats to make life more productive and fun.
We’ve learned a lot in the past year, and have been taking feedback from our great bot partners, hackathons, and online communities to make Skype the best possible experience for both consumers and developers.
This year at Microsoft Build 2017, we are thrilled to take things even further, evolving Skype as a platform for bots to a fully extensible and open platform for developers to integrate their technologies in order to build great conversational experiences.
What’s New
Evolve – Skype Bots are evolving: This time last year, we announced the first preview chat and calling bots available on Skype. Since then, the capabilities and intelligent APIs have evolved tremendously to enable a blend of natural language and rich GUI interactions. Bots can chat in both 1:1 and group conversations, and can use video and audio cards with quick actions to guide the conversation. And today we announced our real-time video SDK preview for enabling interactive video experiences.
Expand – Talking video bots: These new bots can now be a direct participant in 1:1 or group Skype video calls using the real-time media platform for bots being released in preview. This platform provides real-time, voice and video streams of a Skype call which allows developers to build personal, immersive communications experiences with services and brands. Developers can now use their creative talents to create engaging, entertainment, and educational assistance bots with rich and interactive media content built into the experience.
Extend – You can now build your service directly into Skype: In the next few months we’ll be rolling out Skype Add-ins, a new feature to make it easier for developers to integrate their applications into 1:1 and group conversations. Developers can build on their existing web investments and provide consumers unique ways of bringing experiences into their Skype conversations without leaving the app.
Embed – Bring Skype chat to any website:Another new feature, Skype Web Control, lets developers bring the Skype chat canvas onto any website with only two lines of code. Web Control works with both bots and real Skype accounts, meaning you can easily chat with a bot, business, or individual from any web-control enabled website without needing to sign into Skype. And if you are a business owner or independent developer, you can easily use web control to plug your relevant Skype chat window into Bing to maximize exposure.
Monetize – Bot Payments: Now, as a developer, you can easily enable payments in your bot through the Microsoft Bot Framework, allowing consumers to make purchases directly in a Skype Bot chat, with the security of Microsoft Checkout, giving consumers the power to purchase directly through a bot without switching apps.
Grow – More surfaces for Skype: We’re also happy to share that Skype calling will be available on the Harmon Kardon Invoke, with voice activated commands that enable users to call individual contacts, businesses, or even communicate directly with talking bots, meaning your Skype experience can extend further than ever before. Stay tuned for more to come in this space in the near future!
This past year has been a fantastic learning experience for all of us as Skype and we strive to enable the best conversational experiences that help people be more connected to the things they care about, and more productive in their daily lives. We’re excited to continue to evolve the Skype platform into the best canvas for communication powered experiences. In addition to building more intelligent bots, developers can now also extend the power of the Skype canvas with Add-ins and even embed Skype directly on their website. Whatever your scenario, we want to help developers create the optimal experience across the entirety of a conversations, empowering them to surprise and delight consumers in the process.
Failing Fast: The Quickest Route to Digital Transformation
Speed, agility, and innovation—these are the hallmarks for success in the digital era. What’s less proven is the “fail fast” concept, which encourages exploration by floating trial balloons quickly, then allowing ideas to fail if they don’t help drive positive business outcomes. Using this approach, failure becomes a stepping-stone for success—allowing teams to iterate quickly, learn from mistakes, and triage ideas in rapid succession, much like a startup.
Not too long ago, a failed IT project could be catastrophic, resulting in missed delivery targets, productivity drop-offs, even lost revenue. It’s no wonder that IT teams remain a bit gun-shy about adopting a fail-fast approach to business given that their job stability likely depends on their success. The IDG Cloud Futurecast survey found that just 15% of IT directors believe risk-taking is critical to transforming products and services.
C-level executives, by comparison, are far more bullish on the advantages of fail-fast techniques, in part, no doubt, because their jobs don’t directly hang in the balance. According to the IDG survey, 29% recognize the ability to fail fast as a key enabler for revenue-driving strategies compared with only 17% of vice presidents and general managers.
These forward-thinking leaders understand that the cloud is the engine behind creating an iterative, agile mindset across the entire organization. The cloud allows teams to test-drive many small innovations without the traditional risk of a major setback. A cloud-based, fail-fast approach removes technology constraints and allows organizations to explore new ideas constantly, versus one or two ideas annually.
AI Increases The Pace
Advances in big data analytics and artificial intelligence promise to take fail-fast strategies to entirely new heights, delivering real-time monitoring and robust data access capabilities that can detect failure almost instantaneously.
The cloud’s ability to drive innovation and mitigate risk are also central to a fail-fast mentality. Twenty-eight percent of IDG survey respondents say the cloud is essential for reinventing their businesses. Perhaps more important, 25% of respondents say the cloud’s ability to support testing product concepts in early stages with greater accuracy is a key asset. Another 21% say exploratory, fail-fast methods can help minimize the risk associated with continuous innovation. These percentages, while relatively low, signal an important shift in thinking: The cloud is no longer just a cost-saver, but an innovation engine.
For many organizations, enhancing customer experience is the leading priority for success in the digital era. And applying a fail-fast methodology may be the secret sauce. Organizations emphasizing the cloud for customer engagement strategies are far more likely to embrace fail-fast capabilities—32% of survey respondents, compared with companies using cloud to optimize operations (19%), empower employees (17%), or transform products (15%). Experimenting with new products and services using the fail-fast method may give these leaders a leg up on their competitors.
For all the negative connotations, fast failure in the digital era may be just the right recipe for digital transformation success.
New Microsoft tools integrate LinkedIn data directly into Dynamics 365
Microsoft announced some significant integrations between LinkedIn, the professional social network it bought last year for over $26 billion and Microsoft Dynamics 365, the company’s CRM and ERP suite.
It was clear that when Microsoft paid that much money for LinkedIn, it had plans to use that data in other Microsoft products. Those ideas began to emerge last summer with some Office 365 integration announcements, but now we are starting to see some direct links (if you’ll pardon the expression) to try and leverage LinkedIn as a kind of lead generation and recruitment engine for Microsoft’s enterprise products.
Microsoft is also announcing a tool for HR pros called Dynamics 365 for Talent, which gives Dynamics 365 ERP users, the ability to search for new talent directly from LinkedIn’s Recruiter and Learning solutions, and manage employees from recruitment throughout their time with company.
Microsoft’s Scott Guthrie, executive vice president for the Cloud and Enterprise Group at Microsoft points out in a blog post announcing the new integrations that there are already connections between Dynamics 365 and Office 365 products. The next logical step it would seem would be to build similar connections to LinkedIn, especially for sales. “Sales Navigator with Dynamics 365 will dramatically increase the effectiveness of salespeople by tapping into their professional networks and relationships, giving them the ability to improve their pipeline…,” Guthrie wrote.
Ray Wang, founder and principal analyst at Constellation Research says this opens the door to social selling where you can track connections between people at your company and the target company. He offers an example to illustrate the concept:
“How do you find out who knows whom inside a company? Traverse your Office 365 data, your [Dynamics 365] CRM database and your LinkedIn Sales Navigator, and you realize Joe and Abdul have known each other since university days. Let’s put Abdul on the sales call,” Wang explained.
He says this solves a long-known problem where companies were trying to kludge together solutions to make these different technologies work together. Now, Microsoft is doing it for them.
“Microsoft has been focused on integrating its acquisitions and the LinkedIn to Dynamics 365 [to] Office 365 is the latest [iteration]. Customers already use these three products in disparate fashion spending time doing arm chair integration. What they’ve been looking for is the ability to take the data and insights in these three products and put them to work,” he said. This announcement should give them that.
Certainly finding talent and recruiting has also been a major use case for LinkedIn well before Microsoft bought the company, and the new Talent tool is about providing a direct integration with Microsoft’s HR management functionality in Dynamics 365. The new tool provides the ability for HR to source, recruit, onboard and retain employees while taking advantage of the data and tools inside LinkedIn, according the blog post.
Brent Leary, a partner at CRM Essentials sees this integration as a starting point that could become more automated down the road. “I think generally this is a good first step in bringing LinkedIn and Dynamics 365 together and it hints at the potential LinkedIn-Dynamics 365-artificial intelligence has for sales folks looking for automated relationship insights,” Leary told TechCrunch.
Both of these solutions will be available in July.
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