This article is contributed. See the original author and article here.
Today, the technology sector is growing very rapidly across Europe and requires many trained, prepared, and qualified professionals to help large, medium, and small companies meet the new global challenges ahead. A report by the agency DigitalES estimates that there are currently more than 120,000 unfilled jobs in Spain related to software development, communications, security, Cloud, Big Data, AI, and AR/VR.
From the Spanish Microsoft Technical Communities, we have always tried to bring technology to all people. That’s why we’ve designed a new type of event focused on learning with the aim of training professionals who are starting to work with the Microsoft 365 ecosystem and who need to get the most out of its services.
In 2021, We Designed Academy365
This new type of event was born last year under the name of Academy365, and it was organized by a few Most Valuable Professionals (MVPs) and coordinators of MadPoint, the Microsoft 365 Technical Community of Madrid. As the objective of the event was to train the attendees, we organized an agenda of level 100 and 200 sessions, and we got several Microsoft Certified Trainer (MCT) professionals to help us teach attendees about Microsoft Teams, SharePoint, Planner, Power Automate, Intune, Security, and other technologies.
Last year, Academy365 was broadcasted as a virtual experience on Twitch, and it was a success in Spain, with an average of 300 attendees on each training and an extraordinary reception. Attendees finished the event with a diploma that certified they had received quality training from our MCT and MVP people.
Example of one of our sessions during 2021
MadPoint coordinators prepared a professional-quality broadcast of the event, leveraging Microsoft Teams’ NDI capabilities, which allow us to extract video and audio signals from each trainer inside a Teams meeting and take that signal to a professional production environment such as OBS Studio.
Here you can check the recording of last year, in which you can see how Microsoft Teams helped us to have a fantastic production: YouTube – Academy365
In addition, Academy365 is a solidarity event. Last year we collaborated with the Food Bank Foundation of Madrid, which is a non-profit organization that is responsible for helping the neediest families, bringing them food and helping them as much as possible, especially on Christmas dates. All the amounts received by sponsors and individuals were invested in helping many families.
And this year?
This year we want to resume the physical events experience, and we have designed a second hybrid edition. Attendees can join online on Twitch, but they can also come in person to the Global Sports Innovation Center in Madrid. This center is powered by Microsoft, and it is a non-profit association that facilitates synergies and provides its members with value-added services that enable sports entities and companies to grow and develop with the help of experienced professionals in sports tech ecosystem.
In person attendees will be able to receive the training live from our speakers and will have some additional surprises, as we are preparing an innovation tour of the center, a Metaverse Corner and some additional activity thanks to our friends at Microsoft Education.
As for the online experience, we maintain our Twitch broadcast. We will combine live speakers and speakers by Microsoft Teams in a single production.
This year we have a very interesting agenda, where Microsoft Teams and Microsoft Viva will be the main protagonists. In addition, we can learn about security, Mixed Reality, Power Apps, migrations, development, accessibility, and Windows 365.
If you live in Spain and you are interested in our event, we recommend that you visit our website to know all the details and register for the event.
This article is contributed. See the original author and article here.
As technology advances, so do customer expectations. Whether a consumer or a buyer, it no longer matters as the respective lines between customer expectations have blurred, and, at the end of the day, the business-to-business (B2B) buyer is a consumer too. Hyper-personalized, self-driven, seamless interaction across any channel at any time is no longer a nice-to-have but a must-have as customers want to engage on their own terms and expect businesses to deliver even better experiences. At the same time, exacerbated by a turbulent economy, businesses need to reduce cost and complexity to innovate quickly and stay resilient so they can meet current customers’ expectations and find new ways to engage them. Businesses that take the opportunity to optimize their processes to do more with less will stand out against the competition and be better positioned to drive loyalty, retain customers, and emerge stronger from these uncertain times.
We’re excited to share the new capabilities coming in the 2022 release wave 2 for Microsoft Dynamics 365 Marketing and Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Insights, and, more importantly, how these new capabilities will help you deliver greater efficiency, empower marketers to be more productive, and provide value to customers in moments that matter. Ready? Let’s get started!
1. Maximize the value of your data to understand your customers
The first step in driving impactful experiences is to grasp the needs and intent of each customer.
If you are a new Customer Insights user, you will be delighted by the first-run experience feature that helps you accelerate understanding your customers. To fuel your journeys, valuable insights are generated in a matter of minutes simply from a customer list, saving you time and avoiding advanced configurations.
2. Engage your customers in moments that matter with real-time marketing
To deliver unforgettable experiences, marketers need to send the right message on the right channel at the right time. To allow you to do just this, we have further developed our real-time engagement capabilities in Dynamics 365 Marketing.
Whether it’s to catch your customer’s attention to collect relevant details, or capture leads to nurture and strengthen the sales funnel, we’ve enhanced our capabilities so that marketers can effortlessly design customized forms with a few clicks. Through the modern drag-and-drop editor, marketers are guided step-by-step from creation to preview, test, and publish. Within seconds they can deliver compelling branded forms, on websites or landing pages, while directly tracking conversions.
To engage customers through their preferred channel, marketers can now easily build custom channels in real-time marketing. We’ve improved upon the model in outbound marketing by providing the ability to create a channel with all the power and flexibility that the box channels have. It enables marketers to extend their reach across bespoke text message providers, Viber, or direct mail, and activate these new channels in customer journeys using out-of-the-box modern templates, text message editor, and consent collection. In addition, marketers can natively track deliverability analytics to monitor the success of the custom channel activation.
Customers often qualify for multiple journeys and campaigns that run simultaneously. The frequency cap feature prevents message fatigue by setting limits on the number of messages that can be sent per channel per day, week, or month. At the same time, marketers can bypass the limit for the most important journeys, ensuring customers never miss an important message.
Define the maximum number of commercial messages with the frequency cap feature.
3. Personalize content to grow your audience engagement
Each customer is unique and driven by different incentives. To get noticed, businesses need to easily create personalized content that stands out and resonates to keep their brand top of mind.
Finding inspiration to create enthralling emails has never been so easy. Thanks to AI, marketers receive engaging content ideas, based on the key messaging points they want to convey. Marketers can also use feature-rich text links and QR codes for events and coupons within email campaignsto get more customers to engage, click, and convert.
Kick-start your email creation thanks to AI-generated content ideas.
Managing multi-brand content is often demanding as marketers spend time customizing each email to comply with specific brand guidelines. The new brand profile functionality helps them to gain time and consistency, and reduce content-related errors by defining default senders for emails and social links, as well as custom values such as URLs or compliance messages, and easily switch these settings for the brand they are working on.
To ensure compliance and privacy of customer interactions across multiple brands or business units, marketers now have the ability to fully customize out-of-the-box preference centers to match their business needs, from tracking or isolating consent data to adhering to brand guidelines for logos, styles, and colors. Furthermore, marketers can create and manage topics that align with your brands and business for customers to opt-in to marketing subscriptions, for example: “Get cooking tips and tricks”. Last but not least, consent is becoming entity agnostic and will work with customer profiles, contacts, leads, and custom entities.
Maximizing the impact of personalized content requires effectively targeting the right audiences. As part of our effort to improve marketers’ efficiency, we have redesigned our segment builder. The workflow and UX have been enhanced, and we’ve set the foundation for supporting contacts, leads, and any entity, including custom, in the future. Segments can be created instantly using an intuitive and powerful logic builder that doesn’t require specialized knowledge of complex data structures. Marketers are empowered by AI-assisted natural language capabilities, the ability to create a static snapshot of segment membership, as well as previewing segment members and size. This not only scales reach but improves marketing productivity.
Improve your efficiency with the new segment builder, target both contact and leads, and preview segment members.
4. Connect your sales and marketing to provide seamless experiences
By placing customer needs at the center of the organization, deep collaboration within and across departments unlocks significant business growth opportunities.
For instance, as marketers nurture leads with real-time journeys, signals from the lead might indicate an urgency to engage with the sales team. Marketers can directly trigger a sales sequence or assign a follow-up call from the journey to the sales team to ensure the lead gets individualized attention at the right time when they are most likely to engage. Marketers identify potential leads, and sales teams receive smart assistance to optimize their time and prioritize opportunities in the lead nurturing process.
Hand off leads to sales by directly assigning, or phone call, or a sale sequence from the journey.
Businesses can capitalize on B2B contact unification in Customer Insights to create a complete view of accounts and contacts within the same environment. Typically, businesses engage with contacts, however, the context for engagement is based on the attributes of the organization in which the contact resides. Unified contacts provide the ability for marketers to now generate segments of contacts based on account attributes.
5. Use data and AI to optimize your campaigns and scale up your business
Harnessing the power of data and AI is key to marketing at scale and achieving higher levels of marketing maturity.
As businesses create a vast number of assets, they need to organize them according to their organizational structure to remain compliant and productive. They can now effortlessly organize their digital assets, content and journeys according to their business structure. Whether it’s business data or customer data, it can be isolated by departments, regions, brands, business units, and product lines, reducing your compliance risk.
In the upcoming months, you will be able to increase your throughput to send up to 300 million messages per month. This added capacity empowers your team to deliver personalized experiences at scale and will help you grow your business, whether you are increasing your customer base in new markets, expanding geographies, promoting new products, or building your prospective customer pipeline to reach higher sales targets.
Use new features for Dynamics 365 Marketing and Customer Insights with the 2022 release wave 2
From leveraging AI to capitalize on your data, optimizing real-time interactions and personalization capabilities, to customizing tools to meet your unique business needs, or facilitating deeper collaboration between departments, we are thrilled to deliver solutions that are designed to make your job easier, more productive, and ultimately enable you to transform customer experiences.
This article is contributed. See the original author and article here.
CISA has added two new vulnerabilities to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities Catalog, based on evidence of active exploitation. These types of vulnerabilities are frequent attack vectors for malicious cyber actors and pose significant risks to the federal enterprise. Note: To view the newly added vulnerabilities in the catalog, click on the arrow in the “Date Added to Catalog” column, which will sort by descending dates.
Although BOD 22-01 only applies to FCEB agencies, CISA strongly urges all organizations to reduce their exposure to cyberattacks by prioritizing timely remediation of Catalog vulnerabilities as part of their vulnerability management practice. CISA will continue to add vulnerabilities to the Catalog that meet the specified criteria.
This article is contributed. See the original author and article here.
Microsoft Teams has been in extensive use for collaboration features such as IM, Teams meetings, 1:1 or group calls, files collaboration, etc., and has been explored by all organizations without any additional financial costs with existing Microsoft 365 licenses. This has been a boon to organizations for increasing productivity. However, one of the added functionalities of Microsoft Teams, which comes in handy, is to replace traditional telephone systems by enabling the Teams integrated Cloud telephone system that includes Calling Plans and PSTN Audio conferencing options for dial out and dial in capabilities—all without any additional on-premises PSTN infrastructure set up.
The Catch with Microsoft Teams Audio Conferencing Features
Availability across a given tenant is based on the initial data residence location (or organization billing address), and it must align with Microsoft 365 calling and conferencing features available for the given region. For Example, any M365 tenant initially set up with a billing address in India or China is devoid of Audio-conferencing Capabilities by design.
For a complete list of the latest M365 Audio Conferencing and Calling Plans region-wide availability, please Click here. This link is handy for all architect professionals while setting up new tenants to decide on an initial data residence location and to check on available MS Teams audio conferencing features. Owing to taxation regulations and compliance, the M365 tenant’s initial or billing location cannot be updated later, and the given tenant is devoid of the required features.
Microsoft Teams PSTN/calling and conferencing features can be categorized as follows:
Dial out to domestic/telephone numbers for users enabled with the respective calling plans.
Dial out from an Audio-Conferencing meeting to add someone else from anywhere in the world.
Dial out from an Audio-Conferencing meeting to your mobile/office phone with the user logged into Microsoft Teams app.
Dial in (Toll/Toll Free Numbers) and dial out capabilities to MS Teams meetings.
Dial into a meeting using the service numbers or Toll-Free numbers enabled for given tenant.
Audio conferencing features for given users are based upon enablement of the given Audio-Conferencing licenses: as a part of Microsoft Business Voice, Microsoft Teams Phone standard, MS Teams phone with Calling, E5 license, or as an M365 Add-on license.
For leveraging and billing purposes of calling features across MS Teams, Microsoft has categorized all countries across the globe into two zones which is Zone A and another zone for rest of the countries not included in the aforementioned. For example, Albania, Argentina, Cayman Islands, Dubai, Egypt, Zimbabwe, Israel and many more. To access the update list of M365 Zone A countries please click here.
Microsoft Teams Audio conferencing licenses can be categorized in to 2 types:
Pay per minute.
Standard subscription per user
Audio conferencing pay per minute, which is only available as part of volume licensing, allows organizations to pay for all the Audio-Conferencing usage on a per-minute basis. All the inbound and outbound calls are charged based upon the standard pay per minute charges.
On the other end, Audio conferencing standard subscription license enables free dial in capabilities for toll numbers and 60 minutes per user a month for dial out to non-premium numbers in ANY of the Zone A countries. Thus, this license does not enable licensed users to place calls to any other non-Zone A countries within the pooled minutes. Those calls are separate, and any charges are counted against communication credits.
Minutes are pooled against an office 365 subscription are calculated at tenant-level and can be leveraged and shared by all the licensed users in the tenant. If a customer has purchased subscriptions for 500 Audio Conferencing licenses—with 400 users in the United States, 50 users in Australia, and 50 users in Dubai, then all 500 users share a pool of Audio-conferencing minutes. This is calculated as 500 users x 60 min = 30,000 minutes for conferencing dial-out minutes per calendar month. This may be used to place outbound calls to non-premium numbers in any of the Zone A countries. The minutes pooled for an Audio-Conferencing tenant is always based upon the licenses assigned to a user rather than total licenses available across the given tenant.
Call Charges are Calculated Against the Call Destination
The organizer’s country of residence, and the participant initiating the call, do not change the calling charges. Furthermore, calls placed between Zone A: non-Zone A and between non-Zone A: non-Zone A, they are always charged on a per minute basis against the Communication Credits rather than a minute pool for the tenant’s Audio-Conferencing.
To ease the burden of carrier calling charges and facilitate users struggling with internet connectivity, MS Teams Toll free conference number bridges the cost to the organization rather than the caller. All Toll-free conference calls are billed on a per minute basis in tenant Communication Credits and are never calculated against Audio-Conferencing minutes.
Communications Credits: Convenience to Pay for Audio-Conferencing and Calling Plan minutes
In laymen terms, these are a prepaid top-up amount across the tenant to be used for calls not included in Audio conferencing options.
Communication Credits Help Organizations Ensure Users Are Never Caught Without the Ability to:
Add toll-free numbers to Audio-Conferencing meetings, auto attendants, call queues. (Toll Free Numbers are charged on a minute basis.)
Dial out from an Audio-Conference meeting to add someone else from anywhere in the world or add your mobile or office phone in non-Zone A countries.
Dial any international phone number when enabled only with Domestic Calling Plan subscriptions.
Dial international phone numbers beyond what is included in a Domestic and International Calling Plan subscription.
Dial out and pay per minute once the monthly minute allotment is exhausted.
Dial out and pay per minute for all outgoing calls if you have a Pay-As-You-Go Calling Plan.
Communication Credits are specifically utilized for the below scenarios.
Tenants enabled with Audio-Conferencing pay-per-minute.
Enabling Toll-free Bridges across a given tenant, billed per minute.
Dial-out calls exceeding Audio-Conferencing minutes per calendar month are billed per minute using Communications Credits at published rates to that destination.
Dial-out calls to destinations not in the Zone A countries list are billed per minute using Communications Credits at the published rates to that given destination.
For users to leverage the Communication Credits across given Tenant, they are required to be assigned with Communication Credit license, which grant them access to the balance. The minimum amount of Communication Credit balance can be a minimum of $50. Setting up a toll-free number across a given tenant does require a positive Communication Credit.
Below is a quick reference diagram to understand the various types of meeting participant types and how the MS Teams calling charges are applied.
With a subscription to pay per license, Audio-Conferencing Dial-in capabilities are considered free of cost with Toll number. Zone A dial out users are considered with Tenant pool minutes. Non-Zone A Dial out users and users with toll free dial in are charged per minute from Communication Credits.
With only Audio-Conferencing pay-per-minute licenses enabled, the dial in calls with a toll conference bridge and Zone A dial out users are charged against Communication Credits (owing to non-availability of any polled minutes). Toll free dial in users and Non-Zone A dial out users total against Communication Credits.
In conclusion, Toll Free and Calling capabilities to Non-Zone A countries can come with a hefty financial consideration; hence, proper planning and stringent controls in place are required for tracking MS Teams calling budgets to ensure a seamless experience for the required users.
Bio:
Sanjay Kumar Pendyala has a decade plus of experience across architecting, operations, and maintenance of Microsoft collaboration and cloud Technologies. Currently serving as an Infrastructure Architect with Cognizant Technology Solutions, Sanjay Kumar has a technical expertise across architecting and administration of SharePoint On-premises, Azure IAAS/PAAS, Microsoft 365 (Exchange Online, SharePoint Online, Teams, Azure AD, Yammer, Power Automate platform, Graph API automation), and he has been working for a few fortune 500 clients.
This article is contributed. See the original author and article here.
Now you can reach even more customers using the new Apple Messages for Business channel in Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Service. Customers can use the familiar Messages app on their Apple devices to connect with your service teams, confident that their conversation is verified and secure. Rich messages help your service team resolve customer issues, collect information, schedule appointments, and complete sales, all in the same conversation.
Like other asynchronous digital and social channels, Apple Messages for Business gives users the flexibility to start a conversation with your support team and return to it when it is convenient for them. Plus, a customer can initiate a conversation on their mobile device and continue it seamlessly on their Mac or iPad.
Benefits of Apple Messages for Business in Dynamics 365 Customer Service
By including Apple Messages for Business in your digital messaging solution, your service team can provide a more meaningful and personal customer service experience. The enhanced interactions available through this channel help your service team spend less time crafting messages and collecting data, and more time ensuring quality customer experiences.
Apple Messages for Business simplifies many common service interactions. With integration in Dynamics 365 Customer Service, it expands the options for how you engage with customers.
Using Dynamics 365 Customer Service with Apple Messages for Business in your omnichannel digital contact center provides the following benefits:
Customers can look up your company in Apple Maps, Safari, or Search and start messaging by tapping the Messages icon. It’s also easy to add a link directly in your own app, website, or other touch points.
Rich messages are used to simplify interactions like collecting information, scheduling appointments, completing transactions, and authenticating user identity.
Agents can use the same unified, contextual, and productive interface used by chat and other social channels to engage with customers and resolve issues.
Customers engaging with your digital contact center will find a consistent, customer-focused experience across any channel.
Administrators, supervisors, and managers can access the same integrations, services, and insights available for chat and other social channels.
Better together
As a digital channel, the addition of Apple Messages for Business expands and unifies the core omnichannel capabilities of Dynamics 365 Customer Service with a configurable, high-productivity interface. It provides contextual customer identification, real-time notifications, integrated communications, and agent productivity tools, including rich messages, knowledge base integration, and search. Apple Messages for Business helps deliver more innovation and opportunities into your digital contact center to empower you to continually exceed customer expectations.
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