New Diagnostic: 1:1 Call Recording in Teams

by Contributed | May 28, 2021 | Technology

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

Hi Teams Community,

In conjunction with the upcoming release of 1:1 Call Recording Policy, @Sorin Duta has coded up a new Diagnostic for us.  Before you check out the diagnostic we highly recommend reviewing this earlier blog post which explains the upcoming changes, so please go review that first: 1:1 Call Recording Policy Controls Are (Almost!) Here – Microsoft Tech Community

After the policy takes effect, some users might experience a greyed out “Start Recording” button in 1:1 Calls.  This new diagnostic is pretty simple and will check the user’s Teams Calling Policy for the AllowCloudRecordingForCalls parameter – if that’s $false (and it will be by default), the user will not be allowed to record 1:1 Calls.  

Here’s what it looks like in the Admin Portal (reminder, in your Admin Portal click on “need help” or under Support – New service request” – type in the shortcut Diag: Teams 1:1 Call Recording 

In this case, the user’s policy setting AllowCloudRecordingForCalls is set to $false, and they’re not allowed to record 1:1 calls.  The Diagnostic returns detailed instructions on how to change that policy setting.  We also cover that in depth on the previous blog post mentioned above.

In the case AllowCloudRecordingForCalls is set to $true – we’ll display the following: 

It’s possible due to policy change replication time a user might still have the “Start Recording” button greyed out after a policy change to allow it – so be sure to wait a couple hours and try again if you’ve recently made a change.

While this one is pretty simple, we hope it helps you determine if a user’s 1:1 Call Recording policy is what is preventing them from recording calls.  On the other hand, if you want to prevent users from recording 1:1 Calls, this diag can help you confirm you have it set correctly.

As always we hope this helps, and welcome your feedback in the comments below.  

Thanks!
Microsoft Teams Support

Cloud Adoption Framework – Innovate with AI best practices

by Contributed | May 28, 2021 | Technology

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

Customers are looking to gain insight and value from their data in achieving their business outcome and have industry knowledge and domain expertise to build resilient data culture and customer capability. Advance analytics and AI play a pivotal role in accelerating the digital transformation journey.  With the advances in powerful machine learning algorithms, democratization of computing power through cloud computing, and ever reducing cost of storage and accessible to vast amount of training data, new and sophisticated AI systems are emerging today.  

So, how can we adopt AI at scale? Bringing all the experience that we have built internally at Microsoft and working along with our customers, and democratize the use of people, process, and technologies in a secure and responsible way, through the lens of enabling AI using Microsoft Cloud Adoption Framework. 

So, let’s start by defining what is Cloud Adoption Framework (CAF). CAF is a collection of documentation, technical guidance, best practice, and tools. Ultimately, its goal is to enable your organization to achieve the desired business outcomes faster and adopt the cloud in a more holistic way. The objective of Enabling AI solutions using CAF is to help you align your thinking and language you are using with wider cloud adoption efforts. It will help to accelerate the delivery of your AI projects by aligning people, process, and technology with an actionable, efficient, and comprehensive way.  In particularly, it is looking to address the following challenges.  

What is the challenge these addresses? 

First, how do you operationalize machine learning, what approach do you take to achieve ML Operationalization?  This is an industry wide challenge and requires detailed thinking about the people, process and technology, which is commonly referred to as the MlOps process. MlOps amalgamates the three dimensions to provide an end-to-end enterprise scale machine learning operating motion in an iterative manner. Cloud adoption for AI provides guidelines related to environment/workspace provisioning, roles, responsibilities, process, and technology to facilitate MlOPs in an enterprise ready way. 

Second, how do you determine the appropriate training and deployment compute instances for your machine learning model? The choice of compute instance can have an implication on the performance efficiency, scalability, as well as the cost.  Once a model is produced, it is important to choose the correct inference target to meet the business requirements. How do you choose the correct inference target that handles the scalability, security and response time need? What is the decision process to target the correct compute instance and inference path is addressed by the CAF for AI. 

Third, how do you achieve machine learning security, that not only facilitates keeping your data secure on transit and rest, but restricts in-bound and out bound traffics, both within and outside of the virtual network.  On top of that, be able to provision various level of access control using RBAC and enforce policies.  More importantly, be able to run experiments on PII and confidential data, without compromising the privacy and integrity of the data.  

Finally, how do you ensure you implement do responsible and trusted AI?  This incorporates principle of fairness, reliability, safety, privacy and security, inclusiveness transparency and accountability.  An AI system needs to be reasonably be able to justify the decision it has made, and how it came to the conclusion. As well as the people who design and deploy the AI system need to be accountable for the action or decision it takes.  

What are the assets available are? 

The following assets are available to address above challenges.  The web contents are organized into four buckets: AI Ops, AI training/inferencing, AI security and Responsible & Trust AI.  

Web contents 

The Web contents can be accessed by visiting the the following link (click here)

Videos  

There are supplementary videos which provides end-to-end overview of the CAF innovate with AI more from a holistic perspective.   

We recommend starting with the introduction video.  

Introduciton

The introduction video outlines various concepts, terminology and building blocks for CAF. 

CAF provides six pillars, which are executed in the chorological order, starting with the strategy, then plan, followed by ready and adopt, and finally govern and manage. Each video provides a detailed overview of activities that are undertaken and accomplished.  Please click on each pillar below to view the videos.

Plan

Ready

Adopt

Govern

Manage

When and how to use them

Every organization should consider adopting the CAF – Innovating with AI as a first principle for any AI-based workload.  This would enable organizations to establish recommended operational processes and tools with best practice guidelines.  

As a starting point it is important to get familiar with various terminologies and concepts underpinned by the best practices. It is therefore recommended to go through all the videos first, before covering through the web contents.  The Web contents should act as a reference point throughout the lifecycle of a project/workload.

Co-authors: Donna Forlin,  Pratim Das and William Mendoza

Tips & Tricks #1: Creating alerts for Azure SQL Managed Instance

by Contributed | May 28, 2021 | Technology

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

By using these collected metrics, you can create custom monitoring rules and alerts. Azure SQL Analytics helps you to identify issues at each layer of your application stack. It uses Azure Diagnostic metrics along with Azure Monitor views to present data about all your Azure SQL databases in a single Log Analytics work-space. Azure Monitor helps you to collect, correlate, and visualize structured and unstructured data. More information can be found here.

Let us Begin:

1. From Azure Portal search field go to Log Analytics workspaces the click Add, please have a look at the following snapshot:
   
   

    

   
   
   
   


2. Fill the values then click on OK, please have a look at the following snapshot:
   
   

    

   
   
   
   


3. Go to your Azure SQL MI that you want to create an alert for it, then click on Diagnostic Settings (Left-menu), please have a look at the following snapshot:
   
   

    

   
   
   
   


4. From the right-side, click on the Add diagnostic setting and select the Log Analytics work space that you have created above then click on save, please have a look at the following snapshots:
   
   

    

   
   
   
   
   

    

   
   
   
   


5. Click on the Log Analytic Workspace that we have created, please have a look at the following snapshot:
   
   

    

   
   
   
   


6. From the right-side, click on view logs under Search and analyze logs, please have a look at the following snapshot:
   
   

    

   
   


7. From the Queries dialog, select Topic from the top-left drop down list then Azure diagnostics from All Queries and finally click Load To Editor, please have a look at the following snapshot:
   
   

    

   
   
   
   


8. Clear the editor and copy the query from here (This query is responsible on monitoring if Azure MI storage is above 90%) then paste it in the editor and click on New alert rule, please have a look at the following snapshot:
   
   

    

   
   
   
   


9. An alert will be created using the above query, please have a look at the followings snapshot:
   
   

    

   
   
   
   


10. Click on the condition that you want to add the threshold in, please have a look at the following snapshot:
    
    

     

    
    


11. Enter a specific threshold in the Threshold value field, then click Done, please have a look at the followings snapshot:
    
    

     

    
    
    
    


12. In Customize Actions section, select the Email subject and enter your specific email, please have a look at the following snapshot:
    
    

     

    
    


13. In Alert Details section, fill alert rule name and description and finally click on Create alert rule button, please have a look at the following snapshot:
    

     

    
    
    
    


14. To check if the alert created, from the portal search for Alerts then manage alerts, and you will find your created alert, please have a look at the following snapshot:
    
    

     

    
    

More information can be found in the following documents:

 Tutorial: Get started with Log Analytics queries
 Get started with log queries in Azure Monitor

What’s New in Microsoft Teams for Education | May 2021

by Contributed | May 28, 2021 | Technology

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

For many of you—congratulations! You’re almost done with an intense year. For many others, hang in there!

THANK YOU for being amazing. We know that this school year has had its ups and downs, and we are so grateful to you for all your hard work and dedication to not only helping students learn, but supporting their wellbeing. If there’s something you’d like to see more of, please let us know! We’re always listening.

And in case you missed it, check out the more than 35 innovations, inspired by and built for you, that we shared earlier this month, including better LMS integrations, upcoming Assignment improvements, and much more.

For today, we’re excited to share the latest updates in Teams available to help you:

1. Personalize learning for each and every student


2. Make Assignments more engaging and fun…and easier for you, too!


3. Understand student engagement and emotional wellbeing with Education Insights


4. Help keep students safe with more options for chat and meetings in Teams


5. Create better large meeting and webinar experiences


6. Encourage class participation and an improved presenter experience


7. More meeting settings on Mac, and ways to see your class on Edge and Chrome


8. Broader ways to connect and work together as a team


9. Create engaging, interactive classes with Whiteboard.chat and eCareVault in Teams


10. Find new Teams resources for training, graduation, and summer

Let’s dive in! (Click here to jump right into a quick list without extra description)

1) Personalize learning for each and every student

Reading Progress
Hundreds of educators and school leaders have shared the challenges and importance of reading fluency checks with us. After collaborating with reading experts and testing with educators, we’re excited to share a new learning tool called Reading Progress. Whether educators are helping emerging readers build confidence or teaching English as a foreign language, Reading Progress enables readers to practice their skills in a safe, student-centric environment. Fluency data from Reading Progress is collected in Insights to support educators in taking evidence-based action for literacy in their classrooms. Reading Progress will be free and available in Teams come August. Learn more about Reading Progress here.

Career Coach
The journey from higher education to career can be challenging. Career Coach, a Microsoft Teams app powered by LinkedIn, provides personalized guidance for higher education students to navigate their career journey. Career Coach uses an AI-based skill identifier and LinkedIn integration that aligns a student’s comprehensive profile with job market trends. Students can discover their career path, grow real-world skills, and build their network as they make progress towards their goals. Education institutions gain insight to enhance the student experience, improve student success, and drive employment outcomes. Learn more.

When: May

2) Make Assignments more engaging and fun…and easier for you, too!

Add assignments to Office 365 calendar
Stay on top of due dates and classwork by turning on calendar sync for Teams assignments. Educators can use this setting for individual assignments or across all assignments for the whole class. Once toggled on in Assignment Settings, the calendar feature adds an entry at the due date and time for that assignment in Teams and Outlook calendars for both educators and students. That way you can see all the things in one place!

Snap a photo from your mobile phone and submit
We’ve heard from many educators that it’s often simpler for students to snap a quick picture on their phones of their work. Now the new Lens integration in Assignments allows students to take a picture of their paper, whiteboard, or other physical work with their mobile device and turn it in. It’s a snap.

Send grade data automatically to your Student Information System
Educators shouldn‘t have to copy and paste grades – ever. Grade Sync is the time-saving solution within Teams Assignments that automatically sends grades you enter to your Student Information System (SIS) gradebook. We now support syncing to OneRoster v1.1 compliant providers including verified providers: Aequitas, eSchoolData, Infinite Campus, PowerSchool, and Skyward. Learn More about getting started syncing grades.

Create and edit a quiz directly from an assignment
We’ve streamlined the experience of creating, editing, and assigning quizzes in Teams. Now you can create your entire quiz without leaving Teams – no extra windows or tabs needed! If you need to make an edit later, quizzes can be updated directly from Teams Assignments.

Assignment limit increase to 300 students
If you’re teaching or lecturing to a large class, we’ve got you covered. You’ll now be able to distribute an assignment to 300 students (up from 200). Learn more about the expanded Assignment limits.

3) Understand student engagement and emotional wellbeing with Education Insights

Reflect app, with new goals and intentions questions (for end of a semester or school year)
Reflect is a check-in tool that educators can leverage to open conversations about social-emotional learning or simply take the temperature of their class. Now you can gain insights into goals and intentions for the next school year, quarter, trimester, or semester with new Reflect questions.

And through Education Insights, educators can see how students respond to check-ins over time, including now added colors for the digital activity report when you filter the activity for “Reflect”. These can help educators identify areas of growth and provide additional support when needed. Learn more about Reflect and Insights.

Check engagement with OneNote Class Notebook
You’ve asked and it’s here! Now educators can gain insights into how students are engaging with their OneNote Class Notebooks – specifically, which pages students have edited and created. If you’re using Class Notebook now for notes, homework, or assignments and want to check it out for yourself, just head to the Insights tab in your class, click on Digital Activity, and filter All activities by OneNote. You can sort by most active and least active from here.

4) Help keep students safe with more options for chats and meetings in Teams

Supervised chat
Chat messaging can be a vital tool for one-on-one follow-up between educators and students or group collaboration between students, but many institutions have concerns about inappropriate use of chat once it’s made available to students. Supervised chat allows designated educators to initiate chats with students and blocks students from starting new chats unless an appropriate educator is present. When chat supervision is enabled, supervisors are not allowed to leave chats, and other participants are not allowed to remove them, ensuring that chats involving students are properly supervised. This means that students can engage in safe chat conversations, and that schools can enable chat at different levels for students, faculty, and staff. Learn more.

And if you’re an IT admin, you can learn more here about supervised chat, and don’t forget about the existing automated chat content monitoring solutions that are already available today.

Disable video for a student or the whole class
Disable video allows a meeting organizer to disable the video of an individual or all attendees. As a meeting safety capability, disabling video can help educators manage unwanted class disruptions. Similar to hard mute, once an attendee has had their video disabled, they can’t override the organizer and turn their video back on. You can choose to have all students’ cameras disabled by turning Enable camera for attendees to Off from the Meeting Options web page before the meeting. Once this new setting is turned off, you can also reverse it during the meeting to allow all attendees to turn their camera on. Finally, you can also enable or disable the camera for individual attendees. Note that these settings do not automatically turn on attendees’ camera or affect presenters and meeting organizers. Learn more.

5) Create better large meeting and webinar experiences

Large meeting support
Hold interactive meetings and webinars with more attendees—up to 1,000 people, including chats, polls and Live Reactions. If you go over that limit, your meeting seamlessly scales to accommodate up to 10,000 people in a view-only experience. During this time of increased remote work, you can take advantage of view-only broadcasts for up to 20,000 attendees through the end of this year. Learn more.

Custom attendee registration
Add a custom attendee registration page to your meetings or webinars to better manage attendance before your virtual event starts. You can add custom questions and images to learn more about your audience and promote your brand. Once your attendees finish registering, they’ll automatically receive a confirmation email with a calendar invite to join the event.

Improved participant list
The participant list is now broken out into three sections: Lobby, Presenters, and Attendees. For Lobby, you can now review the full list of people waiting before admitting them all into the meeting. Attendees are sorted in alphabetical order with those who raised their hands elevated to the top of the participant list.

These webinar capabilities are available for Microsoft Education A3 and A5 customers. Learn more about webinars with Teams here.

6) Encourage class participation during synchronous learning for better hybrid and remote classes

Breakout room updates, including timer, participant retention, and room reassignment

• Meeting organizers can now set a timer for breakout rooms from the Breakout Room settings. Once the timer has expired, rooms will automatically close, and students will return to the main meeting.


• We know many classrooms work in the same group configurations over and over again, so it’s now possible to set up groups and then reuse them for future breakout room sessions, saving you time during a busy day of teaching and learning.


• Now it’s easier to manage your meetings with students and get every student into the right breakout room. Organizers can reassign participants to rooms whether they are open or closed, so you can move students without closing rooms first.

Learn more

Improved experience for sharing content in a meeting
The new share content experience helps presenters find their desired content more quickly and easily. Windows are consolidated into a single area to provide a concise view and all PowerPoints are automatically organized to present with PowerPoint Live. Now you can focus on the content of what you’re sharing instead of rummaging through files to share in your meeting. Learn more.

Search in meeting participant roster
Ever want to quickly find a student in the Participant pane? You can now search by name or PSTN within the meeting Participants roster. The user can continue to search for participants outside the meeting and request for them to join. Whether you are trying to admit a specific attendee into the meeting or pin someone during the meeting, this new search feature makes it easy to quickly locate a specific participant and perform the desired action.

Multiple Choice Quiz option for Microsoft Forms Poll in Teams Meetings
Want to quiz your students during online class? You can now create multiple choice quizzes, powered by Forms Polls in Teams meetings, to engage your students. Create your own knowledge check questions, or try out our intelligent poll and answer choice suggestions that help take care of some of the legwork. As students take the quiz, you get real-time insights that can be used to adjust instruction and support individual students—pretty cool!

7) More meeting settings on Mac and ways to see the class on Edge and Chrome web browsers

Include computer sound when sharing on Mac
Mac desktop users can now include audio when sharing their desktop or window during a Teams meeting. Hooray! This is great when sharing a video with voiceover and music. It allows everyone to watch simultaneously without echoes or sync issues. You can find this setting in the share content. Learn more.

See more participant videos when joining a class in Edge and Chrome browsers
Now when you join a class on Edge and Chrome browsers, users can choose to see participants in a 2×2 Gallery view, Together Mode, or Large gallery. With the ability to see up to 49 participants in a single screen, you can enhance your virtual class experience and help participants feel closer together even when you’re apart.

AI-based noise suppression for Mac users
In November, we launched AI-based noise suppression for Windows. Now, we are expanding this feature for Mac users. Real-time AI noise suppression feature automatically removes unwelcome background noise during your meetings. Your audio feed is analyzed to filter out the noise and retain only the speech signal. You can also control how much noise suppression you want, including a high setting to suppress more background noise. This feature is now available for all Mac users except devices with M1 ARM processor. Learn more.

8)Broader ways to connect and work together as a team

Group chat with external users
Chat with up to 250 participants across multiple organizations in a single chat. This makes it easy to spin up a chat with external partners, just like it is with someone within the organization. External group chat is expanding on the existing ability for Teams users to find, participate in 1:1 chat, call and set up meetings with external Teams users in federated organizations. Learn more about managing external access.

Adobe Sign Integration in Approvals App
There may be times when you need something approved and recorded with more formal attestation and adding signatures to the approval process is necessary. With the new Adobe Sign integration, you can create an approval request with a natively integrated electronic signature. Once submitted, signers are notified with an email and can easily review and sign. Approvals keeps track of the entire workflow right in context within Teams.

9) Create engaging, interactive classes with Whiteboard.chat and eCareVault in Teams

Whiteboard.chat

Whiteboard.chat is an all-inclusive digital notebook to create engaging and interactive lessons for students using the largest library of digitized math, science and languages manipulatives and active widgets. The students get a copy of the instructor’s notebook, where they work independently. The instructor can observe in real-time or asynchronously all students’ notebooks. They can also join and give personalized feedback. Whiteboard.chat makes access to educational resources equitable for students no matter who they are and where they are. Learn more.

eCareVault
Given the growing need to support students with mental health and learning needs, Safe Spaces by eCare Vault enables you with out-of-the-box HIPAA and FERPA compliant collaboration workspace as a dedicated forum to coordinate support services and drive social-emotional learning for students directly from Microsoft Teams. With Safe Spaces, you can send check-in forms to monitor student well-being, drive time-sensitive collaboration with secure file sharing and multi-way communication, and extend collaboration into the community with streamlined referral management and external invites to include community agencies and parents for whole child care. Want to leverage these capabilities for your school? Start supporting your students with Safe Spaces today and contact us to enjoy a special end-of-school year offer or visit our AppSource page to download the application within your Teams environment.

 
10) Find new Teams resources for training, graduation, and school breaks

Sign up for the live Microsoft Teams for Education event to get ready and learn the best practices for hybrid learning
Join us and get ready for the school year with Microsoft Teams. Microsoft Teams for Education experts will share common scenarios, use cases, and answer your questions live. Topics include new updates for Microsoft Teams, LMS Integration, Skilling & Learning apps, driving student engagement, and more!

1. Leaders & IT Pros – Tuesday Jul 13, 8am-12pm PDT (UTC-7) or GMT (UTC+1)


2. Educators – Wednesday Jul 14, 8am-12pm PDT (UTC-7) or GMT (UTC+1)

Join us and sign up at https://aka.ms/TeamsEduEvent

Other training and resources:

1. Find free professional development training on Teams, blended learning, and much, much more.


2. Check out the Online Virtual Graduation page for more resources and information.


3. Find resources to keep kids engaged and learning new skills with family-led learning experiences (for children 3-12).

And for those that love lists, here’s a quick review of all the features we shared that are now generally available:

1) Personalize learning for each and every student

• Reading Progress (available in August)


• Career Coach

2) Make Assignments more engaging and fun…and easier for you, too!

• Add assignments to Office 365 calendar


• Snap a photo from your mobile phone and submit


• Send grade data automatically to your Student Information System


• Create and edit a quiz directly from an assignment


• Assignment limit increase to 300 students

3) Understand student engagement and emotional wellbeing with Education Insights

• Reflect app, with new goals and intentions questions (for end of a semester or school year)


• Check engagement with OneNote Class Notebook

4) Help keep students safe with more options for chat and meetings in Teams

• Supervised chat


• Disable video for a student or the whole class

5) Create better large meeting and webinar experiences

• Large meeting support


• Custom attendee registration


• Improved participant list

6) Encourage class participation and an improved presenter experience

• Improved in-meeting share content experience


• Search in meeting participant roster


• Multiple Choice Quiz option for Microsoft Forms Poll in Teams Meetings

7) More meeting settings on Mac, and ways to see your class on Edge and Chrome

• Include computer sound when sharing on Mac


• See more participant videos when joining a class in Edge and Chrome browsers


• AI-based noise suppression for Mac users

8 )Broader ways to connect and work together as a team

• Group chat with external users


• Adobe Sign Integration in Approvals App

9) Create engaging, interactive classes with Whiteboard.chat and eCareVault in Teams

• Whiteboard.chat


• eCareVault

We’re always looking to improve the education experience in Teams, and our favorite way to do that is with your support and awesome ideas! If there’s something you’d like to see in Teams for Education, please let us know!

May in HLS – National Nurses Week, Microsoft Business Application Summit, and More

by Contributed | May 28, 2021 | Technology

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

Welcome to the monthly Healthcare and Life Sciences blog recap, May edition! Check out the highlights below:

Power BI

• Learn with the Nerds: Power BI Dataflows: Register for the Power BI Dataflows with Pragmatic Works where you will learn how to build re-usable, scalable ETL work in the Power BI Service. Click here to learn more.


• MBAS: Power BI Vision & Roadmap Part 1: Interested in the new improvements and capabilities coming to Power BI? Click here to learn more.


• MBAS: Power BI Vision & Roadmap Part 2: In this session of MBAS, you’ll learn about the Anomaly Detection coming to Power BI and the integration with Microsoft Teams Channels. Click here to watch.


• Power BI Governance: Need a jumpstart on your Power BI governance strategy? Join Microsoft Gold Partner, P3 Adaptive, lead a Power BI governance practice session for the Health & Life Sciences industry. Click here to sign-up.

Microsoft Teams

• Automate with Teams Part 1 – Follow Up on a Message: Learn how to save time in your day using automation in Microsoft Teams. Click here to learn more.


• Transitioning to Microsoft Teams Video Conference Rooms: Are your employees returning to work? Learn how to configure existing conference rooms for Teams meetings. Click here to learn more.


• Curbside Consults: Learn how a citizen developer set out to solve a clinical problem leveraging Power Virtual Agent and Microsoft Teams. Read the post here.

Confessions of Health Geeks

• Addressing Selfcare for National Nurses Week: Sarah Romotsky, Director of Healthcare Solution Partnerships at Headspace, discusses the importance of selfcare and mental health during National Nurses Week. Click here to watch the webcast.


• Building a Community of Support for Mental Health: Did you know May is Mental Health Awareness Month? Hear from Microsoft’s Senior Accessibility Evangelist, Megan Lawrence, share how Microsoft has built an employee resource group for mental health. Click here to learn more.


• Educating Patients through Social Media: Do you use social media as a platform to educate your patients? In this episode, Stefan Torres, discusses his journey as a nurse and influencer and the importance of patient education. Click here to watch the webcast.


• Nurse Innovators and the Power of Professional Development: Hear from Microsoft’s Chief Nursing Officer, Kelly Robke, and NICU nurse and co-founder of Lumify Care, Jennifferre Mancillas, discuss continuing education and nurse innovation during National Nurses Week. Click here to watch.


• How Technology impacts mental health: In this episode, Megan Lawrence, Senior Accessibility Evangelist at Microsoft, discusses the duality of how technology is impacting mental health. Learn more here.


• Hear from Dr. Tim Raderstorf, Chief Innovation Officer at Ohio State University School of Nursing. Click here to watch the webcast.

MidDay Café

• MBAS, Single Platform, VIVA Connections: On this episode, hear from Microsoft’s Kendra Burgess and Sue Vencill as they discuss the Microsoft Business Application Summit, Why I came to Microsoft, and Next Generation Intranets with VIVA Connections. Click here to watch.


• Microsoft Teams Large Events and Microsoft Teams for Home: Learn how the release of Microsoft Teams Webinars brings value to large organizations and the features for family and friends in the newly announced Microsoft Teams for Home. Watch the episode here.


• Microsoft Teams Webinars Deep Dive: Join Microsoft’s Johnathan Wynn and take an in-depth look at the newly rolled out Teams Webinar capabilities. Learn more here.

HLS Show Me How

• Leveraging Virtual Tours Inside of Viva Connections: Learn how to create virtual tours inside of Viva Connections for Return-to-Work Scenarios. Click here to watch.


• Setting Up Microsoft Viva Connections: In this podcast, Microsoft’s Scott Moore and Michael Gannotti walk through all of the elements of setting up and deploying Microsoft Viva Connections. Learn how to deploy here.

January’s HLS Blog Contributors:

Michael Gannotti, Principal Technical Specialist, Microsoft Teams

Claire Bonaci, Director, Business Development, Health and Life Sciences

Vasu Sharma, Senior Customer Success Manager, Microsoft Teams

Kendra Burgess, Senior Technical Specialist, Business Applications

Thanks for reading and let us know how else our Microsoft team can help!

Erin Spencer, Technical Specialist, Microsoft Teams

Friday Five: Power Platform, Xamarin Tips, More!

by Contributed | May 28, 2021 | Technology

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

Power Platform Solution Architect Exams

Kylie Kiser is a Power Platform enthusiast and two-time Business Applications MVP who has been working with Microsoft technologies for over 10 years. Kylie is passionate about the community and shows this through blogging, presenting, and hosting events. Further, she leads a thriving user group based in Washington, DC. For more, check out Kylie’s Twitter @KylieKiser

C# 10.0: Introducing Global Usings

Jaliya Udagedara is a Developer Technologies MVP based in Auckland, New Zealand. Originally from Sri Lanka, Jaliya is currently working as a Technical Lead for a US-based software development company. He has found his most significant interest in the world of Microsoft Software Development Technologies and Azure Stack. He likes to write blog posts and maintains his personal blog. Follow him on Twitter @JaliyaUdagedara

VLC Media Player in Xamarin Forms (an Alternative to AvPlayer and Android Media Player)

Damien Doumer is a software developer and Microsoft MVP in development technologies, who from Cameroon and currently based in France. He plays most often with ASP.Net Core and Xamarin, and builds mobile apps and back-ends. He often blogs, and he likes sharing content on his blog at https://doumer.me. Though he’s had to deal with other programming languages and several frameworks, he prefers developing in C# with the .Net framework. Damien’s credo is “Learn, Build, Share and Innovate”. Follow him on Twitter @Damien_Doumer.

How to set up and use Task Publishing in Teams

Vesku Nopanen is a Principal Consultant in Office 365 and Modern Work and passionate about Microsoft Teams. He helps and coaches customers to find benefits and value when adopting new tools, methods, ways or working and practices into daily work-life equation. He focuses especially on Microsoft Teams and how it can change organizations’ work. He lives in Turku, Finland. Follow him on Twitter: @Vesanopanen

Teams Real Simple with Pictures: Let’s Do Collaborative Calling

Chris Hoard is a Microsoft Certified Trainer Regional Lead (MCT RL), Educator (MCEd) and Teams MVP. With over 10 years of cloud computing experience, he is currently building an education practice for Vuzion (Tier 2 UK CSP). His focus areas are Microsoft Teams, Microsoft 365 and entry-level Azure. Follow Chris on Twitter at @Microsoft365Pro and check out his blog here.