A GIANT LEAP FOR PEOPLE POWER

Britt Boston, Customer Success Program Manager, Microsoft

Eric Gradel, Senior Program Manager, Microsoft

According to Britt, people spend up to an hour a week (about seven weeks a year) searching for information that exists in their organization – or recreating that information because they can’t find it.

That’s why M365’s new offering, Microsoft Viva Topics, strives to address employees’ knowledge challenges, including:

1. 1. 1. Finding the right information (when you don’t know where to search for documents).
      2. Loss in productivity (when you’re context switching too much).
      3. Information overload (when you have to sift through a large number of documents).
      4. Lost knowledge (when you can’t find what you’re looking for).

To combat these challenges, Viva Topics applies AI across your M365 suite to identify and categorize knowledge across your organization. It creates topic pages for your different categories, which can be customized and edited.

Britt described it as a Wikipedia for your organization, but AI creates the draft for you and applies it across SharePoint, Teams, Outlook, and Office.

In this presentation, Eric demonstrated its capabilities. In SharePoint, if you don’t recognize a term, all you have to do is hover over it and a topic card will appear with a quick overview. For example, if the term is the name of a project, it will provide its summary, a list of people related to the project, and a list of related files and pages.

If you want to learn even more, you can click on the topic title (within the card) and go to the full topic page, which provides more in-depth information.

While AI can do all the hard work of building the pages, experts can also contribute by (1) manually building pages themselves or (2) editing and expanding upon what the AI has already built out.

Viva Topics works similarly in Teams. If you’re chatting with a colleague and they use a term for an established category (like a project name), Viva Topics will automatically highlight that for you. Just like in SharePoint, all you have to do is hover over the term to see the topic card. The same process goes for emails in Outlook.

In Word, if you see an unknown term, you can highlight it and use Smart Lookup to reveal the term’s topic card.

CAN M365 HANDLE IG’S HEAVY LIFTING?

Gordon Brown, Program Manager – Information Management, Delta Air Lines

Mimi Dionne, Records and Information Project Manager

In this Ask Me Anything session, Mimi and Gordon set out to answer the audience’s questions about M365’s ability to combat our current information chaos challenges.

1. 1. 1. What grade would you give organizations when it comes to information governance (IG) effectiveness in M365, and why?

Gordon said he would give most organizations a middling grade when it comes to IG effectiveness in M365. The emergence (and quick adoption) of new M365 tools like SharePoint, Teams, and Stream are making it a little bit more difficult to keep up with IG.

1. 1. 2. How does your organization plan to migrate existing SharePoint On-Premises content into M365 as the platform goes out of support?

According to Gordon, Delta Air Lines is going to take a hybrid approach for as long as possible. While most of their information is in the Cloud right now, there are some things they don’t want to move yet.

1. 1. 3. How much does your organization rely on third-party providers to enhance IG and records management capabilities in M365?

Mimi said her projects have always had a limited budget, so she’s “made-do” with readily available tools, including online resources and a book: Office 365 for IT Pros by Tony Redmond.

Since she’s never had the means to incorporate third-party tools, her typical approach is to make governance implementations “sing” with out-of-the-box functionality plus PowerShell.

Gordon agreed and told the audience to leverage the out-of-the-box capabilities as much as they can. But it does depend on what you’re trying to implement. He said the more granular you are with your records categories, the more you will have to go to those third-party providers. If you choose to categorize your records into big and broad buckets, it will be easier to use just the out-of-the-box capabilities.

1. 1. 4. What’s your best advice for an organization trying to establish governance for the first time?

Gordon’s advice is to get your stakeholders bought-in as early as possible. He said it’s important to get their input on the implementation from the very beginning.

ACHIEVING YOUR MOONSHOT WITH AI-POWERED CLOUD CONTENT SERVICES

Naomi Moneypenny, Director, Product Development, Microsoft

In this presentation, Naomi demonstrated how M365 empowers innovative content collaboration, content intelligence, and actionable knowledge through its content services.

Content Collaboration

She explained that they are continuously looking to innovate M365’s collaborative capabilities. Recent improvements made include:

• • • A modern, thumbnail-centric view in Microsoft Teams and SharePoint.
    • User responsive designs and accessibility standards for every device.
    • Bulk editing capabilities.

However, all this improvement and innovation calls for more security and compliance, and M365 delivers that through built-in encryption and key management, built-in retention and records management, and more.

Content Intelligence

In terms of content intelligence, M365’s SharePoint Syntex uses AI and machine learning to automate content processes, which help turn content into knowledge. Organizations are able to teach the machine to use its information (in the way it would normally be used in day-to-day operations).

You’re able to teach the AI to read documents the way you do, recognize information, automatically tag content to increase its findability, streamline everyday processes and tasks, and more. While it’s doing some of that work for you, you can be focused on your higher-value activities.

Actionable Knowledge

Microsoft Viva Topics gives employees access to their company’s collective knowledge – when they need it, where they need it. It can be incorporated across the M365 suite.

Described as a Wikipedia for businesses, employees can use a highlighted term to reveal a topic card in SharePoint, Teams, and even Word. If you click on the title in the topic card, you can go to the full topic page to reveal a description, a list of people related to the topic, and a list of related files and pages.

This helps turn content into easy-to-find and easy-to-use knowledge.

“GROUND CONTROL TO MAJOR TOM”: DIALING BACK THE M365 TEAMS SPRAWL

Shawn Acheampong, CEO – Digital Transformation Specialist, Tumii Transformations Inc.

John Daly, Information Governance Manager, Metropolitan St. Louis Sewer District

Shawn and John hosted this Ask Me Anything session to address the audience’s questions about getting their Microsoft Teams environment back in order after sprawl.

1. 1. 1. What factors can be put into place to prevent Teams sprawl?

John said his organization is using Teams to its full potential. To make a new Teams site, internal and external parties have to fill out a request form. An important part of that form asks how long the site will be active. So, from the beginning, they have an idea of its retention schedule.

Shawn’s advice to the audience focuses on the naming conventions of Teams’ sites.  If you’re coming across common themes, titles, or names, pinpoint some standard naming conventions that make sense to your end users and then stick to them to avoid confusion.

1. 1. 2. Can we set retention or expiration of chats?

YES! According to Shawn, there are two approaches to accomplishing that:

• • • • Group Policy, which can be accessed within the Teams admin center.
      • Retention Labels, which can be applied directly to individual chats as well as group chats.

John said in his organization, all one-on-one chats are set to meet their retention after 90 days. Group chats tend to focus more on business-related matters, so those are sent to meet their retention at six months. Lastly, chats within an official Teams site are retained for an entire year.

1. 1. 3. Do your biggest Teams chaos woes come from an increase in the number of users, deeper utilization among existing users, or something else?

Shawn said deeper utilization is great, but it does contribute to that chaos. When you create a new Teams site, you’re also creating a lot of apps along with it, including a SharePoint site, a calendar, a One Note, a Planner, and more. However, M365 regularly rolls out tips and tricks that can help ease that chaos.

One tip John offered is if an app doesn’t bring value to your business, then opt out of releasing it. That will help cut down on some unnecessary information chaos.

EVERYTHING YOU ALWAYS WANTED TO KNOW ABOUT MICROSOFT 365 – BUT WERE AFRAID TO ASK

Chris McNulty, Product Marketing, Microsoft 365, Microsoft

Ian Story, Director, Product Development, Microsoft

Roberto Yglesias, Principal PM Manager, Microsoft

In this Ask Me Anything session, three Microsoft professionals gave the audience an opportunity to ask any questions related to M365.

1. 1. 1. What happened to Project Cortex?

Ian explained that Project Cortex was a research and develop (R&D) project that was launched a couple years ago. It was announced in 2019, teasing advanced content services with AI and machine learning capabilities.

According to Ian, the first product to come out of Project Cortex is SharePoint Syntex, which was launched in October 2020. Earlier this year, M365 rolled out with another one – Microsoft Viva Topics.

1. 1. 2. What’s new with Microsoft compliance and records management?

Roberto said that at last year’s AIIM conference, they talked about their new, generally available records management solution. Over the course of the past  year, M365 has spent time evolving and improving that solution.

He said they have added regulatory record labels, the ability to use machine learning to classify content (SharePoint Syntex), and more.

As a teaser, Roberto added that M365 will have an announcement in the next two weeks regarding the disposition review process.

1. 1. 3. What’s the best way to keep up on all of the changes with M365?

Ian said if you’re a M365 administrator, Microsoft shares upcoming changes in the admin center. If you’re not an administrator, he advises you to pay attention to the major events Microsoft hosts throughout the year like Ignite.

Chris added that the M365 roadmap is public, so anyone can go in and view everything that’s coming up for existing products and new ones.

1. 1. 4. What is your vision for Microsoft Teams compared to SharePoint Online as a collaboration tool? Do they coexist?

Chris said SharePoint has a critical and growing role for Microsoft 365 and Viva. He describes it as the content engine that powers all your file experiences and the digital browser for all the ways that you do work.

1. 1. 5. What retention rules can be placed on Teams chats?

According to Roberto, files stored in Teams can have the same retention policies as your SharePoint or OneDrive. You can also apply retention schedules to Teams chats, whether you want to retain them for compliance reasons or minimize risk by getting rid of them quicker.

Ian said most customers opt to retain chats for 30 days.