Viva Engage connects employees and leaders through communities and conversations. We’re announcing powerful new leadership capabilities to unlock the potential of your organizations.
Leadership Corner is a new experience for employees to engage directly with key leaders. Employees can:
See and participate in activities from their leaders
Take surveys and join the discussion with #Campaigns and AMAs (Ask Me Anything)
Connect with new leaders across the company
For leaders, communicators, and their delegates we’re introducing:
A new leader dashboard with organizational analytics
Storyline announcements for reaching their teams
Powerful social #Campaign experiences
New “Ask Me Anything” style events
These experiences will bring leadership to life, fostering a two-way dialogue throughout the organization, and creating an environment where employees thrive. Learn more about these experiences in the Viva Engage announcement blog.
New Microsoft Mechanics Video featuring Viva Engage
Additionally, we released a walk-through video of Viva Engage on Microsoft Mechanics. I’ll show you a deep dive into how to build communities, share experiences with storyline and stories, a demo of the new leadership corner, Ask me Anything’s and Answers within Microsoft Viva and more. Take a look and let us know how you are using Viva Engage in your organization.
Leadership Corner and Answers will be available in 2023 to licensed Viva suite users within the Viva Engage app.
Get Inspired
New to Viva Engage? Find best practices and inspiration on how to make the most of communities, conversations, and storyline in the newViva Lookbook. And find even more playbooks and resources in our Viva Engage Adoption Center.
This article is contributed. See the original author and article here.
CISA has added one new vulnerability to it’s Known Exploited Vulnerabilities Catalog, based on evidence of active exploitation. These types of vulnerabilities are a frequent attack vector for malicious cyber actors and pose significant risk 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.
Hey Folks – Do you have slow workbooks due to size bloat? If so, then I am super excited to unveil Excel Performance team’s new capability to detect and remove unwanted size bloat and speed up such workbooks.
At Excel, customer focus is at the core of what we do; often this uncovers new or improved innovations in features and other times in fundamentals like Performance. In this case, we observed thatover time, a workbook can collect cells that have no data but still contain hidden information of little or no use anymore.These cells may have had data and formatting to start with, however now they do not have any data, but still take up space because they contain formatting. Consequently,too many of these cells can cause your workbook to slow down or become unresponsive.
And so,we’ve enabled you to detect and remove these cells slowing down your workbooks, with “Check Performance” in Excel for the Web!
Try Check Performance with Excel for the Web and send us feedback
When you open your workbook,Excel now detects whether your workbook contains too many of these unwanted formatted cells. If it does, Excel shows a business bar to launch the “Check Performance” feature. You can manually launch the feature from Review > Check Performance, as well.
Once launched, there aretwo ways to remove these cells:
By navigating to a sheet in the task pane to review each range of these cells to optimize, and then pressing the “Optimize Sheet” button, OR
By pressing the “Optimize All” button to remove all unwanted cells from all sheets in the workbook.
This is illustrated in the demo below, wherein Check Performance reduces a 3.14 MB file down to 17.5 KB, by detecting and removing more than a million unwanted formatted cells. Check Performance: Detects and removes unwanted formatted cells
Now, you may ask,why doesn’t Excel remove these cells in the background without alerting me?This is because, even though the cell has no data, removing its formatting may result in visible changes. For example, removing yellow fill from a cell may reset its fill to “No Color”, as illustrated in the demo above. We do not want any Excel users to be surprised by visual changes by doing this in the background without alerting.
Check Performance is available for Excel M365 subscribers in the Web! Please keep in mind features are enabled gradually to more and more users over time as we build confidence in the success of it working correctly. And so, if you do not see the “Check Performance” button in the “Review” Menu Tab, then the feature may not be enabled for you, yet. That said, we are working hard to enable it for all as soon as we can.When you see it, please try it out!We’d love to hear from you whether this meets your expectations or not.Please send us feedback by clicking Help > Feedback!
Finally, ourupcoming plans are to enable Check Performance in Excel Windows and Mac. Also, we are investigating other areas contributing to size bloat that we can integrate into Check Performance’s detection and removal capability. We’d love to hear from you, and so once again please send us feedback by clicking Help > Feedback! Learn more on Check Performancehere.
Got other feedback? Want to learn more about upcoming Excel features?
Do you have an idea to make Excel better? If yes, we’d love to hear about it. Go to the Excel forum in Microsoft Feedback to submit your idea or vote for other ideas. You can also click the Feedback button in Excel and choose “I have a suggestion”.
Want to know more about Excel? See What’s new in Excel and subscribe to our Excel Blog to get the latest updates. Stay connected with us and other Excel fans around the world – join our Excel Community and follow us on Twitter. We look forward to hearing from you.
This article is contributed. See the original author and article here.
CISA and the National Security Agency (NSA) have published a joint cybersecurity advisory about control system defense for operational technology (OT) and industrial control systems (ICSs). Control System Defense: Know the Opponent is intended to provide critical infrastructure owners and operators with an understanding of the tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs) used by malicious cyber actors. This advisory builds on NSA and CISA 2021 guidance provided to stop malicious ICS activity against connect OT, and 2020 guidance to reduce OT exposure.
CISA and NSA encourage critical infrastructure owners and operations to review the advisory, [Control System Defense: Know the Opponent], and apply the recommended mitigations and actions. For more information on CISA’s resources and efforts to improve ICS cybersecurity, visit CISA’s role in industrial control systems webpage.
This article is contributed. See the original author and article here.
The Internet Systems Consortium (ISC) has released security advisories that address vulnerabilities affecting multiple versions of the ISC’s Berkeley Internet Name Domain (BIND) 9. A remote attacker could exploit these vulnerabilities to potentially cause denial-of-service conditions. For advisories addressing lower severity vulnerabilities, see the BIND 9 Security Vulnerability Matrix.
This article is contributed. See the original author and article here.
Today we’re announcing the general availability of Microsoft Viva Sales on October 3, the first Viva application designed to improve the employee experience for a specific role: sellers. Viva Sales brings together a seller’s customer relationship management (CRM) system, Microsoft 365, and Microsoft Teams seamlessly in their workflow, enabling them to save time and return to what they loveconnecting with customers and closing deals.
Designed for seller productivity, Viva Sales:
Delivers real-time business context from a seller’s CRM system in Microsoft Outlook and Teams to reduce time spent searching for relevant information.
Keeps sales teams easily connected and deals moving forward by facilitating knowledge sharing and efficient collaboration.
Augments a seller’s actions and decisions with AI-powered insights to improve customer engagements.
Viva Sales does all this while eliminating the burden of manual CRM updates, thus boosting sales team productivity.
Partner solutions enhance the Viva Sales experience
We’re looking to grow an ecosystem of complementary solutions to enhance the Viva Sales experience starting with a partnership with Seismic, the leading enablement platform that equips customer-facing teams with the right skills, content, tools, and insights to ignite revenue growth. Through this partnership, our joint customers can streamline the meeting and buyer engagement experience for sales teams and improve productivity through preparation, automation, and intelligence in their daily flow of work. As the first step in this journey, Seismic Enablement Cloud uses AI-powered insights from Viva Sales to recommend content, training lessons, and a prebuilt digital sales room as post-meeting follow-up actions in Viva Sales. This delivers value to sellers right in their flow of work. As a customer of Seismic, Microsoft’s global sales team will take advantage of this partnership and looks forward to seeing the results.
“We’re excited to partner with Microsoft to reimagine the future of selling with Viva Sales, streamline the fragmented seller workflow and give salespeople precious time back to do what they do best: sell. Now with Seismic’s leading enablement solutions used by some of the largest enterprise companies, sellers can not only show up to a customer meeting better prepared, but also be equipped with personalized, automated,and intelligent sales tools to help them delight customers and grow revenue.”Hayden Stafford, President and Chief Revenue Officer, Seismic.
Viva Sales supports customer choice in CRM
The next era of selling must embrace a hybrid worldnot only where and how people work, but their technology stack, too. That’s why Viva Sales includes out-of-the-box functionality for both Microsoft Dynamics 365 and Salesforce CRM. We’re excited to announce our launch customersAdobe, Crayon, and PwC. Here’s what they have to say:
“As our sales teams are spending more time out meeting with customers and balancing the world of hybrid work, the need to navigate multiple systems and tools quickly and easily is vital to their success. Adobe is evaluating Viva Sales to determine how it can improve our team’s productivity and effectiveness, and give them more time to spend building strong relationships with our customers,” said Stephen Frieder, Head of Global GTM and Sales, Adobe.
“With Viva Sales, we can empower our sales team to spend more time with customers by automating tasks such as entering data into CRM, and the platform provides relevant insights, content, and coaching that helps push a deal forward. As a customer-first company, Viva Sales enables us to spend more time focusing on what’s most important and that’s providing business value to our customers,”said Melissa Mulholland, CEO, Crayon.
“When we speak with our clients, we consistently hear about how sellers need a more unified and frictionless experience. With Viva Sales, we see a significant opportunity to offer our clients a chance to cut down on day-to-day repetitive tasks and benefit from insights gleaned to improve customer engagements and stay focused on big picture goals,” said George Korizis, Customer Transformation Practice Leader, PwC.
Reimagine the selling experience with Viva Sales
Sellers are critical to an organization’s bottom line. Yet, according to a survey we commissioned with Futurum, nearly 7 in 10 salespeople (68 percent) shared they would be more productive at work if they didn’t have to enter data into their CRM manually. And 81 percent said faulty data has led to an embarrassing mistake with a customer.1 Viva Sales enriches the user experience with AI-driven insights and actions to help sellers maximize their time with customers. With more than 270 million monthly active Teams users, Viva Sales acts as a bridge connecting the data and insights sellers need to sell effectively and close deals faster with the productivity and collaboration tools, they use every day. Viva Sales enables a seller to:
Eliminate manual data entry by interacting with CRM from Outlook and Teams, and syncing customer engagement data to Dynamics 365 and Salesforce CRM: Viva Sales eliminates the duplicative work of updating CRM systems by allowing sellers to update their CRM data from Teams and Outlook. Sellers can capture new contacts from emails and meetings right into their CRM and see key customer insights such as previous activitiesincluding emails and meetings. Furthermore, sellers can save emails directly from Outlook into CRM so organizations maintain customer connection and relationship history.
Figure 1: Update CRM contact from Outlook.
Easily collaborate with colleagues on customer records within Teams and Outlook: With Viva Sales CRM, sales records are first-class citizens in the digital experiences sellers use most. With contacts, opportunities, and accounts at their fingertips, sellers can move deals forward, make better decisions, and collaborate with others in Outlook and Teams. Sellers can track, search, share, and inline edit CRM entities across Outlook and Teams, leveraging Context IQ, using rich contextual cards, keeping sales teams in their flow of work, reducing unnecessary application and context switching, and boosting satisfaction.
Figure 2: Share business data easily within Teams and Outlook.
Augment customer engagements with AI-powered insights: Professionalism with customers and follow-through are important attributes of any good seller. When communicating with customers on Teams, Sales Conversation Intelligence (SCI) can generate meeting summaries, track customer sentiment, and suggest action items for customer follow-ups post meeting. SCI eliminates the need to take notes during calls by recording, transcribing, and providing valuable insights. Sentiment analysis within SCI helps a seller to better track caller sentiment about a specific topic, helping to guide the conversation and plan the best approach for future conversations.
Figure 3: Sellers can view a meeting summary along with helpful insights that they can copy and share with their team.
Improve business results by improving team productivity and enabling strategic insights on deal wins and losses
Today, businesses cannot track and utilize insights from customer engagement data along with CRM data uniformly and consistently across sales teams. Therefore, they miss opportunities to learn and use insights from deal wins and losses for the next customer proposal. By tracking customer engagement data effortlessly and consistently in CRM systems, Viva Sales allows sales leaders to have a unified view of activities, deals, and revenues while removing the friction of sellers keeping their CRM systems up to date. These views can enable relevant insights for better sales engagement within and across customer accounts. With improved data tracking, businesses can also run timely and more accurate sales reports.
Switching Viva Sales on is an easy decision! Viva Sales respects company security and privacy policies in sharing customer contact information, including CRM access controls and user permissions. Viva Sales is free for Dynamics 365 Sales Enterprise and Premium customers, and otherwise available at $40 per user, per license at general availability on October 3, 2022. Viva Sales is available separately and not part of the Viva suite.
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