by Contributed | Jul 28, 2023 | Technology
This article is contributed. See the original author and article here.
We are excited to announce some updates to our Viva Insights Meeting effectiveness report template that will enhance your experience and make the insights more actionable! As part of our ongoing commitment to providing valuable tools for our customers, we have reevaluated the insight naming conventions for this template and made some changes.
In our quest to enhance meeting effectiveness, we have focused on ensuring insights resonate with users. While the conclusions drawn from the data remain unchanged, you’ll notice a shift from a passive tone to a more actionable sense in our insight framing.
To improve clarity and eliminate confusion, we have revisited the names of several insights, making them easier to comprehend. We understand the significance of intuitive and understandable naming conventions, and addressing this issue has been a priority for us.
Existing insight name |
New insight name |
Short and small |
Large and long |
Advanced meeting notice |
Short notice |
Attendee availability |
Conflicting |
Joined on time |
Joined late |
Ended on time |
Ended late |
No multitasking |
Multitasked |
New name descriptions and actionable takeaways for improved meeting effectiveness
1. “Short and small” is now “Large and long”: This insight highlights meetings that have 9 or more invitees and last more than 1 hour.
Action: Foster focused discussions and prevent attendee fatigue to ensure more productive and impactful outcomes.
2. “Advanced meeting notice” has been renamed “Short notice”: This change aims to emphasize meetings that have are scheduled with less than 24 hours of notice.
Action: Ensure that important meetings are scheduled with enough lead time to enable employees to feel in control over their days and sufficiently prepare for meetings.
3. “Attendee availability” is now “Conflicting”: This insight highlights meetings where scheduling conflicts are present amongst participants, potentially impacting meeting attendance.
Action: Identify and address scheduling conflicts, optimize attendee availability, and facilitate more productive meetings by effectively managing conflict commitments.
4. “Joined on time” is now “Joined late”: This insight highlights meetings where attendees were unable to join a Teams meeting within five minutes of the scheduled start time.
Action: This can be caused by back-to-back meetings that make it challenging for employees to take breaks and join the next meeting on time. Use the Shared meeting plan to automatically build in a few minutes between meetings to provide a short break.
5. “Ended on time” is now “Ended late”: This insight focuses on meetings that exceeded their scheduled duration.
Action: Prompt participants to conclude discussions within the allotted time and ensure timely transitions to subsequent tasks.
6.”No multitasking” has been changed to “Multitasked”: This insight highlights the instances where attendees are sending chats or emails during meetings.
Action: Encourage attendees to minimize multitasking and prioritize focused engagement, enhancing meeting productivity and outcomes.
To see these changes, simply download a new version of the Power BI template from the product and load in data from a Meeting effectiveness query. All your existing Meeting effectiveness queries will be compatible with this new version. Any Meeting effectiveness reports that you have created before this update will also continue to work, however from this point forward, the prior version of the template will not be available to download.
We’re committed to continuously improving our products to better serve our customers. The updates to The Meeting effectiveness report template are rooted in research and user feedback, with the aim of providing actionable insights and eliminating confusion. We believe that these changes will significantly enhance your experience with our product and empower you to drive better outcomes in your meetings. We look forward to your feedback and encourage you to explore the newly refined template.
by Contributed | Jul 27, 2023 | Technology
This article is contributed. See the original author and article here.
In this guest blog post, Stig Panduro, Senior Director of Microsoft Alliance at Silk Technologies, explores software as a service (SaaS) and what your business should consider and prepare for as you plan your cloud migration.
In the fast-paced world of software development, staying ahead of the competition is vital for success. Simply dominating the market today is no guarantee of continued leadership in the future. To maintain a competitive edge and meet evolving customer demands, software companies must explore new technologies and business models.
One model that has gained significant traction is providing software as a service (SaaS). By adopting SaaS, companies can offer customers seamless access to software without the hassle of physical installations, making it an enticing choice, particularly in today’s remote work environment.
Is your product ready for this transformation into a SaaS offering? Achieving this requires migrating your software from traditional on-premises infrastructure to the cloud. If your software relies on databases like Oracle or Microsoft SQL Server, the migration process becomes far more complex.
The SaaS phenomenon
Migrating to SaaS is the process of transitioning from a conventional on-premises software model to a dynamic software-as-a-service paradigm. Gartner’s extensive market research indicates SaaS is expected to grow 17.9% in 2023. This surge in popularity can be attributed to several factors. SaaS empowers software customers with unparalleled flexibility, allowing them to purchase and install software at their convenience, and providing remote accessibility. No longer must they schedule on-site visits from the vendor for hardware installations. Moreover, SaaS offers subscription-based pricing, replacing hefty upfront costs with a pay-as-you-go model, significantly reducing capital expenditures.
Simultaneously, SaaS presents software companies with a wealth of opportunities. By offering a SaaS version of their products, companies can tap into a broader customer base. The subscription-based pricing model enables them to achieve stable, recurring revenue. These factors combine to make the transformation into a SaaS offering an enticing prospect.
Challenges you might encounter
While the potential rewards of migrating to SaaS are immense, cloud migration itself poses formidable challenges. Moving your applications to the cloud is a complex undertaking. Some applications can be effortlessly lifted and shifted to the cloud, but others require significant refactoring. This process is time-consuming, costly, and inherently risky. If your applications rely on databases, expect additional hurdles during the migration process. These databases demand unparalleled performance levels, which might not be achievable through native cloud infrastructure alone unless you’re willing to pay for additional cloud resources. These challenges frequently surface unexpectedly during the migration process, causing significant complications.
Implementing a zero-downtime deployment strategy is another potential stumbling block. SaaS applications are expected to be available around the clock, serving a global user base. Any downtime is met with little tolerance from users, who demand uninterrupted service. By adopting a zero-downtime deployment approach, you can seamlessly update your application without disrupting customer workflows. However, downtime events can occasionally be beyond your control. It becomes crucial to establish a robust disaster recovery plan to minimize the impact of outages on your zero-downtime deployment strategy.
As you onboard more customers, achieving seamless and cost-effective scalability becomes paramount. Furthermore, the inherent flexibility of SaaS makes it challenging to calculate an accurate total cost of ownership (TCO) and offer competitive pricing. Questions concerning user capacity, traffic handling capabilities, and storage volume must be thoroughly analyzed during the early stages of SaaS cloud migration to ensure optimized TCO and cost control.
Formulating your SaaS migration strategy
In the face of these daunting cloud migration obstacles, hope shouldn’t be lost. By bringing together your business analysts, architects, and developers and meticulously outlining business and application requirements, you can begin to simplify your SaaS migration strategy. Careful analysis of your software’s architecture will help identify elements that can be smoothly transitioned to the cloud, as well as areas requiring more extensive adjustments. Significant code optimization will likely be necessary to achieve the desired outcome.
If you find yourself at a loss on how to execute a SaaS cloud migration, turn to Silk. The Silk Data Virtualization Platform acts as a bridge between your applications and the underlying infrastructure. By utilizing a higher-performance compute network, Silk connects with compute VMs, surpassing the limited-capacity data network of cloud infrastructure. This empowers Silk to support performance-intensive workloads, eliminating the need for oversized compute VMs to achieve faster performance. Silk’s innovative design decouples performance and capacity, eliminating wasteful spending on unnecessary resources to meet IOPS or throughput targets. By offloading network layer tasks to the compute layer, Silk significantly reduces latency, resulting in highly responsive applications.
In addition to performance optimization, Silk offers enhanced resiliency through a self-healing architecture that proactively avoids disruptions and an active-active architecture that eliminates single points of failure by distributing management across cloud zones. The platform also provides critical enterprise data services like zero-footprint snapshots, enabling the creation of data copies for dev/test or disaster recovery purposes without compromising performance or incurring additional storage costs.
Scalability is a core pillar of Silk’s value proposition, ensuring seamless and cost-efficient migration of customers and their data as your SaaS platform expands. Leveraging machine learning-based monitoring capabilities, Silk analyzes cloud usage patterns to optimize your cloud experience and achieve the most cost-effective price point.
SimCorp’s success story
One company that recently made a successful move to SaaS was SimCorp. SimCorp is a leading provider of investment management solutions serving 40 percent of the world’s top financial companies. SimCorp’s flagship product, SimCorp Dimensions, empowers over 200 global clients with efficiency and flexibility in asset management. Initially available solely as an on-premises solution, SimCorp recognized the market was increasingly turning toward SaaS and embarked on transitioning SimCorp Dimensions into a SaaS offering. Considering the time and effort required for a full refactor, it opted for a lift-and-shift approach to Microsoft Azure. However, it needed to ensure the consistent high performance needed for its SaaS offering to be a success.
SimCorp turned to Silk and its data virtualization platform that sits between SimCorp Dimensions and the underlying Azure infrastructure. Silk proved ideal for performance-intensive workloads, giving SimCorp the boost it needed while providing dramatic and consistent reductions in latency for maximum application responsiveness. With Silk, SimCorp migrated one of its largest clients from an on-premises setup utilizing expensive compute and storage solutions to its SaaS offering. By leveraging Silk’s capabilities, the client experienced a remarkable 20 percent improvement in performance compared to its previous on-premises setup.
Ulrik Elstrup Hansen, VP and Head of SaaS Innovations at SimCorp, attests to the value of Silk: “I would recommend other companies to use Silk because of their ability to provide you with the right level of performance and resiliency. You get a partner that is truly invested in your success. With Silk, we are able to get closer to the promise of the cloud.”
Embrace the SaaS revolution with Silk
The shift toward SaaS holds immense potential for software companies seeking sustained growth and customer satisfaction. Overcoming the challenges of cloud migration is a prerequisite for unlocking the benefits of this transformative model. And while it might be a mountain to overcome, it is not, in fact, impossible.
by Contributed | Jul 26, 2023 | Technology
This article is contributed. See the original author and article here.
Sharing and collaboration are at the heart of Microsoft 365, empowering you to work seamlessly with coworkers and partners on files and documents. Collaboration across Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Teams, Outlook, OneDrive, SharePoint and other applications maximizes your efficiency and productivity at work. We understand the importance of file sharing, and that’s precisely why we’ve focused on refining and improving the experience based on the feedback you have given us. When you click the “Share” button, the Share Dialog box pops up. It’s this experience, used over eight hundred million times each month across Microsoft 365 applications, that we set out to improve. Our goal was to make it easier for you to share and collaborate. Today, we’re thrilled to announce that the Simplified Sharing experience is available across more than fifty Microsoft 365 applications on all platforms: Web, Desktop, and Mobile!
The new Simplified Sharing in Microsoft 365 applications makes file sharing easier and faster than ever before!
Simple and fast sharing across Microsoft 365
As part of the Simplified Sharing experience, we’ve refreshed the Share dialog to be streamlined and free of distractions. Let’s take a look at these enhancements and the various ways you can share today:
Easily and quickly share a file with your coworkers by sending them an email or copying a link.
Email a link: When you want to email someone a link to a file, simply start typing a name, group or email and you’ll be given suggestions based on your most frequent collaborators. You also have the option to add a brief message. Once you hit “Send,” OneDrive will craft an e-mail and send it to your chosen recipients!
Copy a link: If you want to send your file in a different application, such as Teams or Outlook, you can always copy a link to your clipboard. We’ve made it easier to create and copy a link with a single click and see a quick confirmation. Once copied you can paste it into a Microsoft Teams chat, document, or email to give others access to the file. If you want more granular control around how others can access your file, such as giving them edit, view, review permissions or if you want to block downloads, just click the gear icon for further customization.
It’s now simple to share externally while respecting admin settings and external policies in Microsoft 365.
Share files externally: You can also share links easily with people external to your organization. The new streamlined experience asks for your confirmation before creating an external share link while respecting admin settings and external policies, making it a lot easier and faster than the previous experience.
Granular control when sharing files
We are making it easier to view and control who has access to shared files or folders and what permissions they have.
Manage who has access to shared files and their respective permissions.
Manage Access: At the bottom of the Share dialog, you’ll see the people who have access to the shared file. Clicking on the people’s profile pictures or initials will take you to the Manage Access dialog which shows a comprehensive list of people and groups who have access to the file or folder, along with their respective permissions. The Manage Access dialog also lets you grant additional access, stop sharing, or set controls for how recipients access the files and folders you’ve shared with them.
Links: Clicking on the “Links” tab will surface a view of all the sharing links that have been created for the file or folder and who has access via each link. From the links view you can fine-tune who has access and what permissions they have.
Easily determine a file’s sensitivity level in Microsoft 365 before sharing it.
Sharing sensitive files – We understand that some organizations want to handle sensitive information with an extra layer of protection. Sensitivity Labels in Microsoft 365 allow you to classify files based on their level of confidentiality, enabling better control over access and distribution. We’ve seamlessly integrated these labels into the Share dialog and Manage Access dialog. These labels, specific to each file, give you at-a-glance understanding of file sensitivity before sharing, helping to ensure security for your sensitive documents.
Learn more
When you’re ready to try the simplified sharing experience in Microsoft 365, just tap the Share button in the file you are working in to get started. And keep the feedback coming! To give us feedback just tap the feedback icon 
in any Microsoft 365 app. Your feedback is invaluable in shaping a better experience tailored to your needs. Let’s elevate collaboration in Microsoft 365 together!
Learn more in the following support articles:
Sharing files, folders, and list items – Microsoft Support
Managing access in OneDrive for business – Microsoft Support
About the author
Ihcene Cheriet is a Senior Product Manager on the OneDrive team. She joined the team in 2020 where she focused on improving the sharing and collaboration experience across the M365 ecosystem. In her free time, she enjoys learning more about photography and exploring diverse cuisines.
by Contributed | Jul 25, 2023 | Technology
This article is contributed. See the original author and article here.
As a tech professional, you’ve got unique insight into the complex challenges—and exciting opportunities—presented by the rapid evolution of technology. For better or for worse, it’s your job to quickly understand, internalize, and advance how new tools and technologies work, and then use them to help your organization, team, or customer to be successful.
But let’s be honest, that’s a lot to ask—especially with competing priorities, varying levels of organizational support, and often limited learning tools that may not suit your learning style, level of knowledge, or even be relevant to your role. What’s important to recognize, though, is that you’re not limited to the training opportunities your organization provides, and that leaning into learning can help you save time by becoming more efficient, gain an edge that separates you from the pack, make your job more fulfilling today, advance your career long term, and just plain make cooler stuff than anyone else.
Doing and feeling better at work
Have you ever noticed how much more invested in your work you feel when you have the tools and knowledge needed to perform at your best? Learning not only improves efficiency but also engagement and increased job satisfaction. In fact, in this study by PearsonVUE, 92% of people who earn technical certifications feel more confident in their abilities (and 37% received salary increases).1
Learning new skills (especially through relevant, real-world scenarios and immersive experiences) grants control over your own professional development. You may find novel ways to specialize in your current role, apply new technologies, identify adjacent opportunities that require only simple additions to your existing skillset, or find and consider entirely new paths for yourself. Together, skilling and the feeling of empowerment that comes from it can enable better outcomes that will benefit you throughout your career.
Navigating job growth and transformation
Deepening and diversifying your skillset is one of the most effective ways to fast-track your career growth, and the resources to do so are more accessible than ever. Modern skilling programs often offer a seamless way to develop your abilities while working, enabling you to stay ahead of evolving demands at work and in the industry with much less lift than was possible in the past.
This is critical now because organizations are creating and evolving roles to keep up with innovation and often can’t find people with the skillsets needed to do them. They’ve learned that upskilling their workforces will be key—in fact, The World Economic Forum’s Future of Jobs Report 2023 found that at 81.2% of surveyed companies, investing in learning and training on the job is the most common workforce strategy that will be adopted to deliver their organization’s business goals in the next five years. 2
This signifies tremendous opportunity for individuals interested in advancing at their current organization (or in differentiating themselves to break into a new career path, or finding a more advanced role at another organization…). As you update and expand your skillset, you’re paving your own path to success by identifying what skills are becoming most in-demand, assessing your competencies, and setting targeted goals to achieve new strengths.
Influencing team outcomes and dynamics
Beyond individual career growth, skilling enhances the quality of your work and team dynamics. Seeking out and learning new skills can help set you apart as an innovator on your team: one who’s got more tools in your toolbox and a leader with the deepest knowledge of the critical technologies. By enabling people to bring innovative ideas to the table, skilling can also foster a culture of continuous improvement and innovation. After all, highly skilled professionals frequently are catalysts for positive change—they’re thought leaders among their peers, promoting the adoption of new technologies and methodologies within teams, which can be key for organizations navigating uncertainty in their industries—and positions you as a standout member of the team.
By staying at the leading edge of technology, you can demonstrate how new skills can transform your team’s work, positioning yourself as a role model for teammates and a catalyst for change. Sharing your expertise can motivate others to seek new skills, too, nurturing an environment that encourages learning, creative collaboration, and professional development.
Making learning a priority
The most important step in upgrading your technical skills is making the commitment to yourself. Once you’ve made that decision, there are a few more steps you can take to ensure success, including:
- Assess your skills—Learn what the market needs, then compare that with what you already know and identify which skills you should focus your energy on.
- Set clear goals—Break them down into manageable tasks or topics so you can achieve them.
- If you can, get your manager’s buy-in and support—This will make it easier for you to make time in your schedule for learning.
- Consider a microlearning approach—Highly focused mini-modules make it easier to work learning into your busy schedule.
- Join online communities—The Microsoft Learn community is a great place to start!
If you’re ready to make skilling a priority, a great place to get started is by finding the tools and resources that work best for you. Programs like Microsoft Learn allow you to learn at your own pace and in many different formats (like self-paced learning modules, shows, and games, to name a few) so you can stay engaged with your work, achieve your goals, and advance amid rapid innovation in some of the most exciting and rewarding careers in the world. If you’re interested in learning more about why Microsoft Learn may just be the perfect place to start, check out our blog What’s your learning style? Find your fit with Microsoft Learn. Or, dive right in and browse our learning paths and modules to find resources that can help you strengthen your skills and remain at the forefront of your industry.
1 2023 Value of IT Certification Candidate Report, Pearson VUE
2 The Future of Jobs Report 2023, World Economic Forum
by Contributed | Jul 24, 2023 | Technology
This article is contributed. See the original author and article here.
Consider an organization that has thousands of endpoints on their network that are running 10-year old, unpatched SSH servers. Or when a critical vulnerability like log4shell is discovered, having no easy way to know which of those endpoints are exploitable. This is the situation organizations find themselves in when it comes to IoT and OT devices. This problem is so important that the US National Cybersecurity Strategy released a report in March 2023 indicating the IoT security threat as a strategic objective.
With modern endpoint solutions, IT and security analysts get visibility into the software inventories and known vulnerabilities for IT devices. But for IoT and OT devices without an agent, organizations don’t get the same level of visibility into the growing number of devices on their network. The devices are basically black boxes – without insight into what software or patch level was used to build the device, known vulnerabilities, or other potential anomalies. To help address this challenge, we are excited to announce the firmware analysis capability in Microsoft Defender for IoT – now available in Public Preview.
How firmware analysis works
Firmware analysis takes a binary firmware image that runs on an IoT device and conducts an automated analysis to identify potential security vulnerabilities and weaknesses. This analysis provides insights into the software inventory, weaknesses, and certificates of IoT devices without requiring an endpoint agent to be deployed.
To use the firmware analysis capability, navigate to the “Firmware analysis (preview)” blade in Defender for IoT and upload an unencrypted Linux-based firmware image directly. The image needs to be acquired from the device vendor. Once the image is unpacked and the embedded file system is identified, a thorough security analysis of the firmware image identifies hidden threat vectors.
Identifying software packages and vulnerabilities
Firmware analysis begins by producing an inventory of the open-source packages found in the firmware image, like a Software Bill of Materials (SBOM). This information helps manufacturers track and manage the open-source components in their firmware. Relying on this software inventory, firmware analysis helps security teams identify existing vulnerabilities by scanning the firmware for published Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVEs), bringing them to the attention of device builders and enterprises.
Analyzing binaries
After identifying vulnerabilities, firmware analysis goes a step further by assessing binary hardening. It looks at how the code that runs the device was built, and whether it conforms to security best practices such as Stack Canaries. Binary hardening analysis shows the difficulty or ease of possible binary exploitation and is also a good proxy for the overall security hygiene taken by the manufacturer.
Identifying weak accounts and crypto
Another important threat vector in IoT devices is the use of hardcoded accounts. For example, the Mirai botnet is malware that leverages over 60 default usernames and passwords to take over IoT devices and uses them to conduct mass Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks. Firmware analysis in Defender for IoT identifies built-in user accounts and the algorithms used to encrypt password hashes of those accounts. Device manufacturers can use this information to make improvements to their firmware, and enterprise operators will be able to identify devices on their network that may pose risk.
Firmware analysis also identifies cryptographic material embedded in the device. Adversaries commonly target these materials as entry points. For example, expired, revoked, or self-signed SSL certificates can compromise communication from a device to a cloud service, potentially leaking organizational data or opening the device up to exploitation. Another potential threat vector are public and private keys that were inadvertently left in the device by the developers and grant attackers access to the device or cloud service.
Let us know what you think
Navigating the increasingly complex IoT landscape requires the right set of tools to paint a clearer picture into your IoT environment. The firmware analysis capability in Defender for IoT is enabling security teams to get deeper visibility into these IoT/OT devices by providing better insights into the foundational software they are built on.
We are excited to share the firmware analysis capability with you. If you have any feedback, please feel free to let us know in the comments below.
To learn more about firmware analysis, click here.
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