The challenges of running a Microsoft Teams migration in a non-IT company

by Scott Muniz | Aug 19, 2020 | Uncategorized

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

Customer Story: Within this story, I will give you some insights into how user adoption is different between a company comprised of mainly office workers and a company where the main focus is to create, sell and maintain key infrastructure components on a global market.

Customer Background: During the last months, I’ve been working with a customer who’s a “hidden champion” or global player. This company is producing devices responsible for cooling in industrial, transportation, tourism, building and many more sectors. Their headquarters is in Germany.

Due to the focus on creation, sales and production, the number of people sitting behind a desk is just one third of all employees and IT is just something that must work 24×7.

The last component to make it even more difficult is the fact that this company is a holding of multiple single companies, part of the company group over months or even years, but still not (fully) integrated from the IT perspective.

So, let’s start with the hard facts:

• 60 locations worldwide
  • Sizes from 3 to 500 people in each office
  • Larger ones with standalone IT
• No overall governance or policy to enforce specific technology or trainings
• Small central IT with multiple local supports / admins
• Every country has its own company with a local Director, responsible for IT as well
• Microsoft 365 E5 licenses are available for all desk workers but mostly used for Office suite licensing only

Customer Target: We’ve started with the target to implement Office 365 as “another” IT solution additionally to the local IT like file servers, email systems, Skype for Business, etc.. Some in the cloud and some on-premises.

Over the initial implementation phase, we’ve figured out that Microsoft 365 needs more governance and principals to ensure a secure environment, combined with Azure infrastructures.

The main goal for the project became a M365 full stack implementation with the main driver: Microsoft Teams.

Adoption insights
We’ve started with a small but important step: we’ve involved the central IT and especially the IT Director, responsible for all IT decisions within the whole group and first contact for any IT questions of the local directors. He’s also in direct discussions with the C-Level executives for business decisions like “more cloud” or “less cloud.”

From a general change management perspective, we’ve made our first alliance with the Management level.

The next step was to identify people who are involved in many business processes in the company and willing to help the IT department for the implementation.

We found these people in a special group of persons, distributed in every department and on a global level: the assistants.

These people already had strong experiences by creating global projects and bringing some new digital workstyles into the whole company group like travel management portal. Another benefit is the direct contact of these assistants with the head of departments or even the C-Level itself. These people became the champions for the whole project.

We’ve created a strong relationship with these assistants by creating 2 weekly calls, providing direct trainings, sharing knowledge of the M365 products as well as the current project status for our global rollout.

Anyhow, all of them had different backgrounds for IT, beginning from a person with more knowledge of the manufacturing process as the PC handling, to someone who delivers IT trainings to multiple departments within the customer group.

Our initial idea was to run the following deployment process:

• Creation of the team can be done via Head of Department or Assistance only
• Every user will be enabled for Teams right away and we will announce trainings etc. on a central platform
• Rapid rollout

Within the regular champions call we’ve tried multiple trainings ideas and asked for feedback about them:

• Create an internal knowledge base with know-how articles
• Online articles from Microsoft
• Self-created Training materials
  • Just consumption
• Self-created training tasks / challenges
  • Small references to Microsoft and internal training material to provide help
• Offer open office hours
• Create a test team with full access to create
• Providing showcases with a dedicated trainer

With the experiences of our Champions network, we’ve adjusted our plans. One was an “easy to use” Teams online request form, based on a request template with basic questions for all users AND the other one was the decision to provide more training and start with another rollout approach: activate the users in groups, divided by department with a slower rollout to ensure a good user experience.

Based on these insides we’ve also identified a strong need to create valid personas for different target groups. We also made the decision to separate the persona groups by office worker and production worker.

These different persona groups enforced the whole project to create different rollout plans and different training concepts.

The following onboarding concept has been used for the office workers:

Marketing 

• Internal newsletter with the announcement of Microsoft Teams is coming
• Intranet-Posts on the daily startup page in the browser
• Article / extra in the internal news page magazine

Pilots

• Low risk pilots with IT friendly users
• Creating best practices and marketing
• Create a show case to visualize the success

Build up a Champions community

• Create a champions community with interested people
• Clarify the future role as a direct contact during rollout
• Announce these champions directly

Rollout – Communication

• Start with e-mail communication before the rollout starts
  • multiple weeks before as announcement
  • couple of days before rollout with a description what happens during the rollout
  • 1 day before with some reference links to training material
• Send out a welcome Mail and invite to a welcome team with reference and training material as announcement during rollout
• Floor walkers offer a help on migration date
• Multiple open office hours during the whole migration phase
• Provide direct and anonymous feedback via feedback forms

Rollout – Trainings

• Invite for a kick-off when the rollout happens in the background
• Provide mandatory basic trainings
• offer optional advanced trainings

But this was just the on-boarding concept. We also needed a training concept as well.
Based on our experience with the champions and the feedback of the PoC / pilot users, we’ve decided to offer multiple training options, instead of single one. But the key for the rollout kick-off was a classroom training where all user of the migration wave should meet some of the champions and get some first hands-on experiences within the test-team.

Before and during rollout

• Provide training
  • materials via internal knowledge base (multi-lingual)
  • Know-How videos (multi-lingual)
• Create a Test-Team for each wave
  • with welcome message
  • specified trainings / hands on experience tasks for testing
  • Add Microsoft Teams (and additional) licenses to the users of the current wave 1 day before the kick-off is planned

During Kick-Off Event

• Add these users to the Test-Team
• Present basic, quick enable knowledge during Kick-Off event

Complimentary basic training

• Invitation will be send during Kick-Off event

Optional Offers

• Multiple advanced trainings for new tools and options like Planner, Forms, PowerApps, …
• Open office hours

During all the time we’ve got constant feedback from the champions to create an additional Q&A channel to the new users but also between the champions and the IT department.

Due to multiple projects we’ve been aware of the general approach for office worker but for production worker, we had other needs and requirements. The production worker also has another “relationship” with IT.

For the production users we had the following dependencies:

• Not every worker has an account
• Generic accounts with Internet access are used in “open areas”
• The foreman has a direct account
• No mobile phones in production just customized iPads

With these prerequisites, we’ve identified the following personas:

Unlucky for the integration, but good for the adoption concept: The initial idea to implement shifts for the whole production area was rejected due to the huge invest regarding training and hardware. This decision reduced the change impact to a smaller set of production users: the production lead and the foreman.

Over 2 weeks, we’ve evaluated the original way to work and identified typical business processes where we can bring in some benefits for the target groups.

This knowledge allowed the creation of specific water-proofed handouts and quick-start guides.
We’ve also created another rollout concept with single parts from the concept for desk worker but provide more production specific marketing and training strategies.

Workbook Link support coming to Excel for the web

by Scott Muniz | Aug 18, 2020 | Uncategorized

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

When collecting data from multiple workbooks, it’s often desirable to link directly to the data. Why? It provides a record of where the data was sourced and, if the data changes, you can easily refresh it. This has made Workbook Link support a highly requested feature for our web users. Today, we are excited to announce that Workbook Link support is beginning to roll out to Excel for the web.

This was previously only available in Excel for Windows and Excel for Mac, and is an important step on our journey to meeting one of our key goals: “Customers can use our web app for all their work and should never feel they need to fall back to the rich client”. You can read more about our web investment strategy in Brian’s recent post.

Creating a new Workbook Link

To create a new Workbook Link, follow these simple steps:

• Open two workbooks in Excel for the web. They should be stored in either OneDrive or SharePoint.
• In the source workbook, copy the range.
• In the destination workbook, “paste links” via the right click menu or via paste special on the home tab.

The gif below provides a brief demonstration.

Creating Workbook Links

You can also explicitly reference the workbook using the following reference pattern. =’https://domain/folder/[workbookName.xlsx]sheetName’!CellOrRangeAddress

Opening a workbook that contains Workbook Links

When you open a workbook that contains Workbook Links, you will see a yellow bar notifying you that the workbook is referencing external data.

Data Connection Warning

If you ignore or dismiss the bar, we will not update the links and instead keep the values from before. If you click the “Enable Content” button, Excel for the web will retrieve the values from all the linked workbooks.

Managing Workbook Links

To help you manage Workbook Links, we’ve added a new Workbook Links task pane. The task pane can be accessed by pressing the Workbook Links button on the Data tab or via the “Manage Workbook Links” button on the yellow bar above.

Workbook Links button on the Data tab

You can see the task pane below with its menus expanded below.

Workbook Links Taskpane

The task pane lists all your linked workbooks and provides you with information on the status of each of the linked workbooks. If the link could not be updated, the status will explain the cause. So that you can quickly spot issues, any workbook that cannot be updated will be bubbled to the top of the list. 

At a global level you can take the following actions:

Refresh all: This triggers an immediate refresh of all linked workbooks.

Refresh links automatically: When enabled, this causes Excel to periodically check for updated values while you are in the workbook.

Break all links: This removes all the Workbook Links by replacing those formulas with their current values.

At a workbook level you can take the following actions:

Refresh workbook: This triggers an immediate refresh of that linked workbook.

Open workbook: This opens the linked workbook in another tab.

Break links: This removes links to that workbook by replacing those formulas with their values.

Find next link: This selects the next occurrence of a link to that linked workbook. (Great for quickly finding phantom links)

Workbook Links vs External Links

Direct links to external workbooks have historically been referred to simply as “External Links”. As we continue to add more external data sources to Excel, the term “External Links” has become ambiguous. To improve clarity going forward, we will use the term “Workbook Links” instead.

Learn More

You can find additional information about Workbook Links on our help page.

Changes to KB articles used for Cumulative Updates

by Scott Muniz | Aug 18, 2020 | Uncategorized

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

Back in March 2020, the main Knowledge Base (KB) articles for Cumulative Updates (CUs) started including inline description for fixes. We call those descriptions “blurbs” and they replace many of the individual KB articles that existed for each product fix but contained only brief descriptions. In other words, the same short one or two sentence description that existed in a separate KB article before, now appears directly in the main CU KB article. For fixes that require longer explanation, provide additional information, workarounds, and troubleshooting steps, a full KB article is still created as usual.

Detail

SQL Server used the Incremental Servicing Model for a long time to deliver updates to the product. This model used consistent and predictable delivery of Cumulative Updates (CUs) and Service Packs (SPs). A couple of years ago, we announced the Modern Servicing Model to accelerate the frequency and quality of delivering the updates. This model relies heavily on CUs as the primary mechanism to release product fixes and updates, but also provides the ability to introduce new capabilities and features in CUs.

Historically, every CU comes with a KB article, and you can take a look at some of these articles in the update table available in our latest updates section of the docs. Each one of these CU main KB articles has a well-defined and consistent format: metadata information about the update, mechanisms to acquire and install the update, and a list of all the fixes (with bug IDs) and changes in the update. In some rare occasions when an issue is found after the CU is released, there might be a section that provides a heads-up to users about a known problem encountered after applying the update, and its scope.

Now imagine a CU with a payload of 50 fixes. If you want to know more about each fix, you’d have to click through 50 child KB articles (one per fix) and we received strong feedback that wasn’t a friendly experience. We all agree that frequent context switching is not efficient – be it computer processing code or human brain reading things. So how do you optimize this experience and still maintain the details provided in the shorter individual articles you used to click and read?

With the concept of “article inlining”! Yes, we borrowed the same concept we use in the SQL Database Engine (e.g. scalar UDF inlining) and computer programming in general (e.g. inline functions).

Why this change?

We will take this opportunity to explain the thought process that went into this change and what data points and decision points we use to drive this change. Besides user feedback, and because we are data-driven after all, we also looked at page views and hit rate from search engines for these individual articles compared to the main CU KB article. We found that usually the page views for the main CU KB articles is measured in the thousands, while the individual fix KB articles are read very few times.

Using blurbs

The normal format used for the individual fix KB article include: Title, Symptoms, Status, Resolution, and References. However, not all fixes are implemented the same way. For example, let us look at SQL Server 2019 CU1 article. The first fix in the table is FIX: Transaction log isn’t truncated on a single node Availability Group in SQL Server, and when you install it, the fix is simply applied and enabled.

Let us click on the link and open this article to understand more details about this fix. Here is what we see:

The only useful information you get from this lengthy article is the Symptoms section. Usually the title of the article provides a summary of the symptoms section. Now look at other sections:

• Status: of course we know this is a problem in the software – otherwise why is a fix needed?
• Resolution: this seems obvious enough – that you need to apply this cumulative update to fix this problem.

By moving the two lines from the Symptoms section in this individual fix KB article to the main CU KB article, then you can avoid extra clicks and context switches.

You can go down the list of fix articles in that KB and find many articles that fit this pattern. Our Content Management team did a study of several past CUs and found that the majority of individual fix KB articles (to the tune of 85%) follow this pattern and can be good candidates to “inlining” the symptom description in the main CU KB article table.

Criteria for creating a full KB Article

However, you can identify KB articles in that list with different patterns of information:

• For FIX: Orphaned CLR sessions cause blocking in SQL Server, you need to perform additional actions to activate the fix using a trace flag.
• For FIX: Data masking of user-defined functions may result in crashes in SQL Server 2019, even before applying the CU, you can choose to use the available workaround.
• And for FIX: Upgrading FCI passive node from SQL Server 2019 RC1 to RTM fails when you try to access the MSSQLJOBS which is on the shared drive, you may need to take special steps to apply this cumulative update.

In such scenarios, we carefully evaluate if we can perform inlining and still manage to represent this additional information in the main CU KB article. If not, then these are good candidates to have an individual KB article. For example, FIX: SQL Writer Service fails to back up in non-component backup path in SQL Server 2016, 2017 and 2019 is very detailed, and includes error log snippets and other details that can’t be inlined.  

To each their own

In SQL Server 2017 and 2019, product improvements or new capabilities (such as DMV, catalog views, or T-SQL changes) are shipped through CUs, as there are no more SPs. You will find plenty of examples about this in the CU article list we are using as reference. Being improvements or new capabilities, information belongs in the product documentation, not in support KB articles. Otherwise this will cause a disconnect when you look at product documentation. Going forward, this is the pattern you’ll see.

We have used this style of fix lists in the past with service packs. An example is SQL Server 2014 Service Pack 1 release information. Also, many modern products use release notes to convey all pertinent information about that specific update. For example: Release notes for Azure Data Studio and Update Rollup 1 for System Center Service Manager 2019

Going forward

As we mentioned, we started piloting this approach around the March 2020 timeframe. The initial releases we attempted this style for were SQL Server 2016 SP2 CU12 and SQL Server 2019 CU3. Our friends and colleagues called it the “Attack of the blurbs!”. Some folks called it the TL/DR version of KB articles. And while the reactions have been predominantly positive and encouraging, we will constantly fine tune these approaches based on user feedback. As part of this change, we are also improving the content reviews done for the CU articles to ensure they contain relevant and actionable information for users.

One important callout we would like to make sure users understand is about the quality of these fixes. When we stated in the Incremental Servicing Model (ISM) post that “(…) we now recommend ongoing, proactive installation of CU’s as they become available. You should plan to install a CU with the same level of confidence you plan to install SP’s (Service Packs) as they are released. This is because CU’s are certified and tested to the level of SP’s (…)”, we meant it, and are continuously making the process more robust. Irrespective of whether a fix has an individual KB article or an inline reference in the main CU KB  article, they go through the same rigorous quality checks. In fact, KB article writing and creating documentation is the last step in the CU release cycle: only after a fix passes the quality gates and is included in the CUs, does the documentation step happen.

Empowering Students and Beginners in Machine Learning with DirectML

by Scott Muniz | Aug 18, 2020 | Uncategorized

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

Over the past few years, there has been increasing demand for introductory coursework in artificial intelligence and machine learning. Enrollment in Introduction to Machine Learning classes at universities in the US have grown as much as 12 times in the past decade[1]. These introductory courses play a key role in educating the future of machine learning professionals.

The rest of this post is meant as a follow-up to our press release highlighting our release of DirectML on WSL, NVIDIA CUDA support, and TensorFlow with DirectML package. Learn more

DirectML for Students and Beginners

The DirectML teams wants to ensure that the Windows devices students and beginners  use can fully support their coursework.  Our solution starts by providing hardware accelerated training on the breadth of Windows hardware, across DirectX 12 based GPU, via DirectML. The DirectML API enables GPU accelerated training and inferencing for machine learning models.

TensorFlow + DirectML

In June 2020, we took our first step to enable future professionals to leverage their current hardware across the breadth of the Windows ecosystem by releasing a preview package of TensorFlow with a DirectML backend.

Through this package, we are meeting students and beginners where they are by providing support for the models they want in a frameworks they use, all while making the most of their existing GPU hardware.

Students and beginners can start with the TensorFlow tutorial models or our examples to start building the foundation for their future.

Engage with our Community

If you try out the TensorFlow with DirectML package and run into issues, we would love to hear your feedback on our DirectML GitHub repo.

We are looking to engage with the community of educators to better understand key scenarios for students and beginners getting into machine learning.  Share your thoughts in this survey to shape investments we make with DirectML to provide GPU hardware acceleration to additional ML tools and frameworks.

[1] https://hai.stanford.edu/sites/default/files/ai_index_2019_report.pdf

Early access: Microsoft Endpoint Manager for education AMA

by Scott Muniz | Aug 18, 2020 | Uncategorized

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

Our Microsoft Endpoint Manager “Ask Microsoft Anything” (AMA) series continues tomorrow with a special event dedicated to helping IT administrators managing devices used in education environments.

Early access is now open. Post your questions by visiting the Microsoft Endpoint Manager AMA space and selecting Start a New Conversation. Myself and my colleagues in the Microsoft Endpoint Manager product and engineering teams will be answering questions live tomorrow, Wednesday, August 19th from 8:00 a.m. to 9:00 a.m. Pacific Time.

We’re excited to hear your feedback–and help you provision and manage Windows, Android, iOS, and macOS devices in a streamlined way that is less work for you and more seamless for your students, teachers, and faculty. No question is too simple or complex. We’re here to support you!