Shifts in Microsoft Teams: How to Engage Frontline Workers in the GCC

by Scott Muniz | Jun 22, 2020 | Uncategorized

This article is contributed. See the original author and article here.

This post is authored by Jay Leask and originally published in the AvePoint blog.

In early 2017, Microsoft announced the release of StaffHub, a tool designed to help companies manage the frontline worker scheduling environment. Two years later they decided to build on the success of Teams and announced Shifts, taking the best of StaffHub (now retired) and integrating it into Microsoft’s flagship collaboration hub.

With Microsoft Teams you get the power of Skype for Business, SharePoint, Forms, Power Automate, and much more, all pulled into a single interface truly designed for ease of use.  A traditional mindset says that ends with the desk worker, but Microsoft took it a step further by integrating Shifts directly into the platform.

Shifts in Microsoft Teams (or just “Shifts” for short) is a Schedule Management Tool, but not a simple carbon copy of every other schedule management tool out there. Shifts combines the administrative need to build and share schedules with employees with the ability for employees to interact with the schedule themselves. Remember working your first shift job and trying to scribble down the week’s schedule from a print-out on the wall? Shifts makes that a thing of the past.

Frontline Worker Engagement

The most immediately noticeable part of Shifts is that frontline workers can interact with their schedule in ways that make complete sense.

First, it’s electronic and on Teams. So if Bill forgot his schedule, he can simply unlock his mobile phone, open Microsoft Teams, click on Shifts, and BAM, he can see that his shift started 5 minutes ago is scheduled to start soon. Don’t worry Bill, you can make it.

Second, workers can easily request time off and swap schedules with other employees electronically. And it’s tracked, so your manager doesn’t have to worry about why Bill didn’t show up but Sandy did. And if the manager has never worked with Sandy or if Bill had a special assignment to complete that day, any special instructions can be added directly to the shift in the Shifts app for Sandy to see.

During the creation of shifts, you can add specific activities. This is completely transparent to the frontline worker, who can see what activities they are expected to do and even when, if relevant.

Once a worker arrives on the job, they can easily clock in on their mobile device and even hit pause when it’s break time! From a management perspective, you can also set location detection and ensure that your worker is only able to check in once they arrive on site.

Location detection enables management to set the desired location for clocking in to ensure employees are working from the right location.

On top of the convenience of clocking in on your mobile and no longer requiring the time punch card in the backroom, Shifts has made swapping shifts, requesting a shift, and finding open shifts very easy.

Swapping shifts is no foreign concept to shift work, and management often requires employees to come to them with suggestions or ready volunteers prior to shift swaps (at least, they did in my experience). In Shifts it’s very easy–if you’re looking at the schedule you can click on a shift, review the details (times, location, activities, etc), click Swap, and even include a reason for the swap (such as “doctor’s office” or “out sick”).

And if you find an open shift in the calendar that fits your availability, click it and offer to take it.

The best part about all these features is that you can easily configure management approval of this process, to ensure the shift swap meets your needs.

Shifts for Government?

Yes! Absolutely! Shiftwork happens all across the government.

• Community-owned Pool: Our local municipality owns a series of over a dozen pools and, as described above, they need to manage shift workers’ schedules, locations, and activities on a daily basis.
• National and State Parks: Park Rangers, volunteers, and more all have set times they need to be at the park. And in such large areas, the “back room” schedule and punch card is even more restrictive than in a cafeteria or building. Get your staff directly to where they need to be to start their shift; no reason to start at a specific building.
• Analysts: I’ve spoken with customers who collect a lot of data and need people to analyze it. For 24-hour operations, shift workers come in, work on a task, and leave, but the next shift picks up where they left off.

Let’s dig into this one a little more.

Schedule Management with the Power of Teams

It has been documented everywhere how powerful collaboration can be with Microsoft Teams. In our Analysts example, there are a few key features of Teams that support the ability to have continuous work on something from shift to shift:

Teams

First and foremost, the ability to ensure there are security boundaries across topical areas—making sure only the right people can see the conversations and documentation on a specific subject—is of the utmost importance here.

Channels

The ability to organize conversations, be it functionally (map analysts vs. persons experts) or topically (foreign persons or specific countries of interest) allows you to ensure “conversation overload” is minimized based on your specific interests

Discussions

Within a channel you have threaded discussions. Our analyst can have a specific subject of interest within their channel and use the subject name as the title of the thread. They can @mention a SME to get their attention. Heck, you can even @mention the next shift worker and draw their attention to something of the utmost importance. NOTE: Can’t remember who the next shift worker is? Check out the schedule in Shifts.

Document Sharing

This one is really interesting, take note. Document sharing is nothing new to Teams. Co-authoring is built in. When you upload something to a channel, it’s automatically organized with the right permissions in the related document library.

Photo Sharing

Shift workers can take a photo on their mobile phone, annotate it, and upload it. Are you a field worker working with the desk-analyst? No problem. Take your photo, annotate it, jump over to the related discussion, attach your annotated photo, and tag the important analyst so you KNOW it’s the first thing they see when they clock in.

Video calls

Need to share something immediately? Get on a video call powered by Microsoft Teams. Are you a janitor in a federal building and have found a broken water pipe? Search for your supervisor in Teams, hit the Video button, and once they answer and see your panicked face, change to your rear-facing camera and show them what you’re looking at. Take advantage of the immediate attention and urgency that can only be expressed with body language.

Forms, Automation, and More

If you have a form your shift workers have to fill out for incidents, it’s as easy as creating a quick questionnaire in Microsoft Forms, automating actions like putting it into a SharePoint list for tracking, and adding a link to the form on the user’s mobile home page. (TPS reports made easy! And no more worry about making sure they’re using the updated one either!!!)

Tied to Microsoft Teams, Shifts integrates collaboration with schedule management for both the commercial and public sectors. With the full power of Office 365 backing it, Shifts is an invaluable tool for the GCC and beyond.

About The Author: Jay Leask

http://jay.leask.com/

Introducing Live Video Analytics from Azure Media Services – Now in preview

by Scott Muniz | Jun 22, 2020 | Uncategorized

This article is contributed. See the original author and article here.

Azure Media Services is pleased to announce the public preview of a new platform capability called “Live Video Analytics” or in short LVA. LVA provides a platform for you to build hybrid applications with video analytics capabilities. The platform offers the capability of capturing, recording, and analyzing live video and publishing the results (which could be video and/or video analytics) to Azure services in the cloud and/or the edge.

With this announcement, the LVA platform is now available as an Azure IoT Edge module via the Azure marketplace. The module is referred to as “Live Video Analytics on IoT Edge” and is built to run on a Linux x86-64 edge device in your business location. This enables you to build IoT solutions with video analytics capabilities, without worrying about the complexity of designing, building, and operating a live video pipeline.

In Canonical URL section in the right sidebar, paste this text: https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/internet-of-things/introducing-live-video-analytics-from-azure-media-services-now/ba-p/1406917

LVA is designed to be a pluggable platform, so you can integrate video analysis modules, whether they are custom edge modules built by you with open source machine learning models, custom models trained with your own data (using Azure Machine learning or other equivalent services) or Microsoft Cognitive Services containers. You can combine LVA functionality with other Azure edge modules such as Stream Analytics on IoT Edge to analyze video analytics in real-time to drive business actions (e.g. generate an alert when a certain type of object is detected with a probability above a threshold). You can also choose to integrate LVA with Azure Services such as Event Hub (to route video analytics messages to appropriate destinations), Cognitive Services Anomaly Detector (to detect anomalies in time-series data), Azure Time Series Insights (to visualize video analytics data), and so on. This enables you to build powerful hybrid (i.e. edge + cloud) applications.

With LVA on IoT Edge, you can continue to use your CCTV cameras with your existing video management systems (VMS) and build video analytics apps independently. It can also be used in conjunction with existing computer vision SDKs (e.g. extract text from video frames) to build cutting edge hardware accelerated live video analytics enabled IoT solutions. The diagram below illustrates this.

Use Cases

With LVA, you can bring the AI of your choice and integrate them in LVA for different use cases. It can be first party Microsoft AI models, open source or third-party models, etc.

Retail

Retailers can use LVA to analyze video from cameras in their parking lots to detect and match incoming cars to registered consumers to enable curb-side pickup of items ordered by the consumer via their online store. This enables consumers and employees to maintain a safe physical distance from each other, which is particularly important in the current pandemic environment. In the non-pandemic environment, retailers can use video analytics to understand how consumers view and interact with products and displays in their stores to make decisions about product placement. They can also use real-time video analytics to build interactive displays that respond to consumer behavior.

Transportation

When it comes to transportation and traffic, video analytics can be used to monitor parking spots, track usage to display automated “no parking available” signs, and re-route those trying to park. It can also be used for public transportation to monitor queues and crowds and identify capacity needs, enabling organizations to add capacity or open new entrances or exits. By feeding business data, pricing can be adjusted in real-time based on demand and capacity.

Manufacturing

Manufacturers can use LVA to monitor lines for quality assurances or ensure safety equipment is being used and procedures are being followed. For example, monitoring personnel to see that they are wearing helmets where required or even checking that face shields are lowered when needed.

Platform Capabilities

The Live Video Analytics on IoT Edge platform offers the following capabilities for you to develop video analytics functionality in IoT solutions.

Process video in your own environment

Live Video Analytics on IoT Edge can be deployed on your own appliance in your business environment. Depending on your business needs you can choose to process the video on your device and have only analytics data go to cloud services such as Power BI. This helps in avoiding cost related to moving video from the edge to the cloud and helps address any privacy or compliance concerns.

Analyze video with your own AI

Live Video Analytics on IoT Edge enables you to plug in your own AI and be in control of analyzing your video per your business needs. You have flexibility in using your own custom-built AI, open source AI, or AI built by companies specializing in your business domain.

Flexible live video workflows

You can define a variety of live video workflows using the concept of Media Graph. Media Graph lets you define where video should be captured from, how it should be processed, and where the results should be delivered. You accomplish this by connecting components, or nodes, in the desired manner. The diagram below provides a graphical representation of a Media Graph. You can learn more about it on the Media Graph concept page.

Integrate with other Azure services

Live Video Analytics on IoT Edge can be combined with other Azure services on the edge and in the cloud to build powerful business applications with relative ease. As an example, you can use Live Video Analytics on IoT Edge to capture video from cameras, sample frames at a frequency of your choice, use an open source AI model such as Yolo to detect objects, use Azure Stream Analytics on IoT Edge to count and/or filter objects detected by Yolo, and use Azure Time Series Insights to visualize the analytics data in the cloud, while using Azure Media Services to record the video and make it available for consumption by video players in browsers and mobile apps.

Next Steps

Go to Live Video Analytics on IoT Edge to learn more, watch this demo, or see the documentation. Microsoft is committed to designing responsible AI and has published a set of Responsible AI Principles. Please review the LVA Transparency Note to learn more about designing responsible AI integrations.

The Global EdTech Academy – a partnership between CUE and Microsoft Education

by Scott Muniz | Jun 22, 2020 | Uncategorized

This article is contributed. See the original author and article here.

Guest author – Jon Corippo, Chief Learning Officer at CUE.org

In mid-March 2020, education shifted. Powerful outside forces fully disrupted the classic paradigm known as “school.” In a sense, every teacher was now a first-year educator, rapidly developing new skills, trying to engage their students, and struggling with an overload of new applications, tools, and workflows in a highly-compressed timeframe – literally unlike anything ever seen in modern times.

Paradoxically, the classic professional development model of face-to-face training was also nearly 100% shutdown at exactly the same moment. The educators’ need was the greatest in history, and right at that exact same moment – support was nearly eliminated.

We sensed an opportunity to flip the equation – making professional development more available and more customized than ever. CUE and Microsoft are partnering on the Global EdTech Academy is the result.

300 sessions with top educators, free Professional Development through September

Sponsored by Microsoft and delivered by the profession learning provider CUE (an educational nonprofit), the Global EdTech Academy (GETA) is up and running across the globe. Professional and equity minded learning and equity  at no cost to districts, schools, or individual teachers. The GETA team is comprised of more than 30 educators who span the globe, providing just-what-educators-need professional development via Microsoft Teams at no cost. There are nearly FOUR HUNDRED of these free sessions scheduled through mid-September.

To explore the list of speakers and sessions, book mark these two URLs:

• Speaker: https://aka.ms/GETAspeakers
• Sessions: https://aka.ms/GETAschedule  

Many of the best and brightest educational trainers are unable to travel and lead schools and districts in their educational innovation right now, sidelined by the inability to travel safely. The GETA project leverages this capacity to allow professional development to continue, without being bound by time or space.

CUE and Microsoft have teamed up with innovators, authors, and leaders, like Matt Miller, Holly Clark, Ken Shelton, Mark Anderson, Tara Linney, Pernille Ripp, Jon Corippo, Brett Salakas, Pip Cleaves, Kathi Kersznowski, and many others for professional development that’s pedagogy and passion-driven – using the very best of the Microsoft tools available.

3 types of sessions – https://aka.ms/GETAsessions

The Global EdTech Academy offers three types of sessions for educators:

1. Sessions (lively sharing of great pedagogical practices and how Microsoft tools support great academics)
2. CUE Master Classes (three sessions on a theme, each with a model lesson to execute in classrooms, with feedback from the session leader).
3. Office hours (unstructured time to plan, chat, and solve local needs)

Sessions are all shared in Pacific times, but they are nicely spread out through the day and week so many time zones can share in the learning. And if educators miss or cannot attend a session, they’ll be recorded and shared via the website for viewing at any time.

Find any past session on the GETA YouTube Playlist

If you miss a session, it’s easy to find at our playlist: https://aka.ms/GETAPlaylist.

More information for the Global EdTech Academy can be viewed through the website here. The master schedule can be accessed here; sessions are updated weekly. To follow the event via Twitter, follow the hashtags #GETA, #MicrosoftEDU, and #WeAreCUE.