How to do “breakout rooms” in Microsoft Teams – a real life example

by Scott Muniz | Jul 8, 2020 | Uncategorized

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

I’m pretty sure no one missed the rapid increase in remote working during the first half of 2020. Something that also became very clear in the Microsoft Teams UserVoice were entries that were pretty unknown before rapidly rose in number of votes.

One of those entries that I’d like to talk about today is breakout rooms – you know the possibility to have a group of people in a meeting, then automagically move them to separate “rooms” and when you’re finished automagically get all the participants back to the original meeting. Microsoft recently announced that breakout rooms are actually on it’s way, sometime during this fall it will be available – here you can read more.

But I needed the feature now and not later, wherefore I searched for the clever ideas from the Microsoft Teams community. With inspiration from Vesku’s blog post I decided to try this at my new client, follow along the rest of this post where I show you how I did it!

Background
A virtual workshop with 27 participants, in an organization new to Microsoft Teams (besides using meetings and chat for a couple of weeks). Jumping back and forth between the “main room” and breakout rooms between exercises.

This could be exciting – right .

Before the workshop
Let’s start with the prerequisites, and it’s pretty simple – you need a private team in Microsoft Teams.

The next step is very important and that is to NOT invite the participants to the team before you’ve done all the preparations. We don’t want annoyed people getting 1 million calendar invites even before the workshop started. I sent one calendar invite in which I copied the meeting link to the general main room.

And time for prepping, first some “technical” preparations:

1. I added a channel per discussion group. For my particular case we ended with 5 breakout rooms and the general channel as the main room. I made all the channels standard channels, no need to have private channels *transparency*

2. I didn’t find changing the general team settings necessary, but you can do it to remove the possibility of doing anything besides what is needed for the workshop. I removed all options besides deleting and editing posts

3. When we have all the channels it’s time to fill them with content, I added a friendly welcome message. Since everyone in the workshop can jump into any channel, I decided to post all names of the group members to make it easier for the users

4. Then it’s time to create all the different meeting rooms. One channel meeting is the same as a meeting room, so we’ll start with a common room – that needs to be scheduled in the general channel. Just add the channel and no participants

And then it’s just time to schedule a meeting group room per group, when you’re done it should look something like this in your calendar:

And this is how it should look in the channels (this is the general room and a group room):

5. When all of this was done it’s ok to add all the participants, I waited until the day before to add the participants to avoid too much happening in the team

And then we did a couple of preparations for the users, to ensure that the workshop experience would be as smooth as possible for the participants:

1. Since the users were new to teams in Microsoft Teams, I prepared a guide on how to join the meetings and how to switch between the general room and the group rooms
2. We assigned the different groups before and informed the participant about this is your group, so all the people would know what group room to join
3. For each group, a note taker was assigned, this person got the material before and knew that she/he would take all the notes during the exercises

After the preparations were done it was just time to wait .

During the workshop
Fast forward a couple of weeks and it was finally time for the anticipated workshop!

Me and my co-presenter met 30 minutes early to start all the meetings, this to get the nice joining experience for all the participants. But note that you can only be in four meetings at the same time.

Another thing I found important during the meeting (and that I would recommend for most larger meetings) was having a moderator. Someone that will keep track of the chat when the presenter is presenting, makes it much easier.

Once all the people joined it was time to start.

Since this was a group of people not usually working together, we started with a presentation of everyone, tricky you might say? We solved it by going A-Ö by last name and my co-presenter giving the word to the person next in line. It worked super smoothly.

And the workshop was in full speed!

One last thing that I believe was a success factor for this workshop was that before all the groups went to discuss in their own rooms, we asked to assign a timekeeper to keep track of the time. And you know what? People were on time and we didn’t spend too much time waiting at all . Fantastic.

Three hours passed in a minute and the workshop was over, with lots of great insights delivered.

Conclusion
I was really impressed with how smooth it went. Only technical issues we had was with people joining from the mobile since the jumping between meetings isn’t working there. When I do it again, I will probably add a help section on how to do it from mobile.

And don’t forget to follow the UserVoice for live updates about breakout rooms !

Accelerate data extraction from your documents with Form Recognizer

by Scott Muniz | Jul 8, 2020 | Uncategorized

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

This blog has been authored by Neta Haiby (Principal PM, Azure AI) and Prachi Jain (PMM, Azure AI)

Documents are prevalent and often contain vital information that are essential to drive business outcomes; however, extracting data quickly and accurately for processing is often a challenge for so many organizations. Manual extraction can take up long processing cycles, cause errors and inefficiencies. Hence, extracting text and structure from documents with Form Recognizer helps tackle these challenges swiftly and boost productivity.

We are excited to announce the general availability (GA) release of Form Recognizer. You can now extract text, tables, and key value pairs quickly and accurately from documents. It will support multi-page documents (Images, PDFs and Tiff files) and extract a structured representation output of the document and its contents.

Form Recognizer comprises the following:

1. Layout

Detects and extracts text and tables structure extraction:

How to use and get started

You can use Form Recognizer Layout to recognize tables, text lines and words in documents, without needing to train a model. To get started you can use the following:

• Extract the layout of a document, using the StartRecognizeContentFromUri method in the Form Recognizer client library.
• Follow this QuickStart to extract the layout of the a document using the REST API.

2. Pre-built 

These are pre-trained models for common scenarios that extract value of interest from documents. The pre-built receipts model that extracts data from receipts is in general availability today.

How to use and get started

You can use Form Recognizer to extract common fields from receipts, using a pre-trained receipt model. To get started you can use the following:

• Extract data from receipts using the StartRecognizeReceiptsFromUri method in the Form Recognizer client library. 
• Follow this QuickStart to extract data from receipts using the REST API.

3. Custom

This custom service lets you train with your own data to learn the structure of your documents in an intelligent way with unsupervised and supervised learning

How to use and get started

You can train custom models tailored to your own documents. A trained model can output structured data that includes the text, tables, and key value pairs relationships in the original form document. After you train the model, you can test it and eventually use it to reliably extract data from more forms according to your needs. To get started you can use the following:

• Train a custom model without labels and analyze your data using the method Custom Form Model in the Form Recognizer client library or using the REST API.
• Train a custom model with labels and analyze your data follow this QuickStart and try out Form Recognizer sample labeling tool located here.

Code examples

These code snippets show you how to do the following tasks with the Form Recognizer client library for .NET:

Authenticate the client

Extract text and tables from documents using Layout

Recognize receipts

Train a custom model

Analyze forms with a custom model

Manage your custom models

How partners have built solutions with Form Recognizer

” Automation Anywhere has expanded the capabilities of IQ Bot to include Form Recognizer with an easy-to-use, “IQ Bot Forms” solution which combines the power of Microsoft Cognitive Services with IQ Bot and RPA to accelerate the end-to-end processing of complex documents. Use cases supported include Driver’s Licenses, Insurance Claims and Tax Forms. This highly secure solution, comprises Automation Anywhere RPA with native Intelligent Document Processing (IDP) and Azure Cognitive Services Computer Vision API and Form Recognizer.” Shobhana Viswanathan, Director of Business Development, Automation Anywhere

“Blue Prism has always been committed to creating a connected-RPA platform that makes it easy for our customers to consume the best in AI and machine learning technologies. As part of this commitment to innovation, we recently released a Form Recognizer API skill that gives our customers the power to quickly add deep-learning algorithms, advanced machine learning, and key value pair extraction to any Blue Prism process.” Colin Redbond – Senior Vice President – Emerging Technologies at Blue Prism

“Icertis’ suite of AI technologies use machine learning to help understand the contract, its obligations and its environment better. Form Recognizer is an important tool in that arsenal that helps identify structured data in forms quickly and accurately. With a very simple training interface, it empowers the Icertis Contract Management platform users to effectively incorporate AI in their day-to-day processes while ensuring that their data is safe and protected – important steps in our vision of making contracting simple, yet powerful.” Monish Darda, CTO and Co-founder, Icertis

“With the power of forms recognizer, Neudesic was able to create a simple interface for business users to extract data from multiple unique document sets, each containing complex data structures and dozens of data points, including tables. Users simply provide sample documents and label their data – no need to understand how Form Recognizer, or the other powerful Cognitive Services involved, should be applied, dramatically simplifying how AI can be applied to their processes.” Ken Kuzdas, Artificial Intelligence and Process Automation Lead, Neudesic

“UiPath remains committed to an open Platform and building integrations with partner AI services so you can automate document processing using your service of choice. The UiPath Activity Pack for Microsoft Azure Form Recognizer make it easy to automate tasks that involve document data – for example, reading invoices, timesheets, tables, and reports. By combining AI-powered document extraction services from Microsoft with the industry-leading UiPath Enterprise RPA Platform, you can extract data from any document using the service of your choice – and easily leverage this data in your automated processes.” Brandon Brown, Director Integrations and Solutions Delivery,UiPath

Independent benchmark testing results

Cazton ,a top leader in in IT and Software Consulting, Training and Recruiting services across United States, Canada and Europe performed an independent study comparing available cloud offerings for recognizing form data in the cloud and concluded that Azure Form Recognizer does a fantastic job in creating a viable solution with just five sample documents. It performs end-to-end Optical Character Recognition (OCR) on handwritten as well as digital documents with an amazing accuracy score and in just three seconds.

Chander Dhall, CEO of Cazton quotes that “I am impressed with Microsoft’s focus on creating artificial intelligence powered solutions that have practical uses in the enterprise.”

New in this release

In this release we are introducing the following new features:

1. Enhanced security features

• Bring your own key
  Form Recognizer automatically encrypts your data when persisted it to the cloud. Form Recognizer encryption protects your data and to help you to meet your organizational security  and compliance commitments. By default, your subscription uses Microsoft-managed encryption keys. However, you can now also manage your subscription with your own encryption keys.  Customer-managed keys (CMK), also known as bring your own key (BYOK), offer greater flexibility to create, rotate, disable, and revoke access controls. You can also audit the encryption keys used to protect your data. Learn more here  
• Private endpoints
  Enables you on a virtual network (VNet) to securely access data over a Private Link

2. Better Accuracy

• Table enhancements and Extraction enhancements
  This feature includes extraction enhancements, accuracy improvements and table extractions    enhancements, specifically, the capability to learn tables headers and structures in custom train without labels.
• Currency support
  Helps detection and extraction of global currency symbols

3. Extended Availability

• Azure Gov
   Form Recognizer is available in 22 commercial regions and also in Azure Gov

 Get started

• To get started create a Form Recognizer resource in the Azure Portal and follow one of our quick starts to extract data from your documents.
• To learn more about Form Recognizer and the rest of the Azure AI ecosystem, please visit our website and read the documentation.
• For additional questions please reach out to us at formrecog_contact@microsoft.com

FF: ADX allows data scientists to access data easily and run complex queries with incredible speed

by Scott Muniz | Jul 8, 2020 | Uncategorized

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

Innovative New York-based fintech FINANCIAL FABRIC provides specialized data analytics solutions to the buy-side. With Azure Data Explorer, the company has been enabled to rapidly ingest even the most massive datasets, easily run complex queries and provide near-real time analytics services to a range of financial services end users, achieving exceptional data compression and reducing query times from hours to seconds. “We handle structured data, semi structured data, unstructured data … it’s a fantastic offering for our platform. 

Azure Data Explorer allows data scientists to access data very easily and run complex queries with incredible speed,” says Paul Stirpe, Ph.D., CTO, Financial Fabric. 

Learn more

Microsoft 365 & SharePoint PnP Weekly – Episode 90

by Scott Muniz | Jul 8, 2020 | Uncategorized

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

In this weekly discussion of latest news and topics around Microsoft 365, hosts – Vesa Juvonen (Microsoft), Waldek Mastykarz (Rencore), are joined by Dan Wahlin – MVP and now Microsoft employee as a Microsoft 365 Cloud Developer Advocate on the new Microsoft 365 Cloud Developer Advocate team.

What is a Cloud Developer Advocate?  The bridge between customers & partners and Microsoft 365 & Azure teams.   The role advocates for customers, creates learning plans beyond “Hello World” basics, code samples, videos…  Dan will focus largely on Fluid Framework.  Do you have what it takes to be a Cloud Developer Advocate?  If you can admit you don’t know it all and are not afraid of putting yourself out there as speaker, writer, sample developer and community participant, then you might have the right stuff.  Additionally, in this episode, 17 recently released articles from Microsoft and the PnP Community are highlighted.

This episode was recorded on Monday, July 6, 2020.

• Microsoft 365 SharePoint PnP Weekly – Episode 90

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