On the SPOT - Technology Podcast Jay Leask and Craig Jahnke

In this episode of This Week in Teams, Jay and I continue with our Microsoft Viva series by talking with Asif Rehmani, the CEO and founder of VisualSP, about Employee Learning and Training | Microsoft Viva.







Asif introduced himself and expressed that he does not work for Microsoft, have never worked for Microsoft, but his career has been aligned with Microsoft. He joined Jay and Craig to talk about the good and the not so good of Viva Learning.



















Viva is a brand came up because of the whole exposure while the the focus on employee experiences. Asif has looked into and played around with all the different modules modules or Viva. Some Viva connections, Viva topics, Viva insights, but because of his background, he dove deep on Viva learning.







We then talked with Asif about both pros and cons of it. First found out the licensing model of Viva learning. Actually, in the beginning there wasn’t licensing licensing model. You know, it came out slowly, but when it was revealed, that would be $4 per user per month. That surprised Asif and it is something that he has given feedback to Microsoft about because we’re talking about aggregation of all this content in one place using Viva learning. We’re not talking about the actual LMS system that you still need. We’re not talking about the content source like and when I say content source and talking about edx, Coursera, LinkedIn. You need to Viva learning to put it all together. When he speaks with organizations and talks about this, they tally up the cost and it becomes pretty big.







There’s a free version of Viva learning too. That one that he has seen many, many organizations adopt because there is no downside to it. In fact, it’s already pushed out to almost every tenant anyway. So you have it already. Organizations need to decide to do with it, that’s up to you. Do you publicize it? Do you like, just let people discover it by chance? Asif’s advice has always been that you do let your users know that it exists and here’s what it’s going to do for you. But you also let them know some of the gotchas as well.







So here’s a gotcha which I definitely do not like, you get to see all the content that’s available through, let’s say LinkedIn library in Viva learning, not everything that you have access to, but everything that’s there and you can get to a point where you see it see it in it, I’ll say Oh yeah this course on I don’t know dynamics 365 sales help makes a lot of sense. Let me figure that out. You click on it you get the next screen where it tells gives you a tile gives you all the synopsis everything else. You’re happy and think, “OK, I have access to it. I was going to learn to learn it anyway.”, and then you click on it and you’re surprised when you when it asks you for your login credentials. Then you will have access to only the things you have permissions to actually view.







We then talked about the good. You get to show everything that your organization has in terms of learning in one place so that people don’t have to go to different places. In fact, if you have the paid version of it, you can get into the assignments which your analytics are. You can expose all that stuff from your LMS through Viva learning as long as there’s integration, which is huge because it is truly learning in the flow of work, you’re looking at your chats, you doing your meetings,

In this episode of This Week in Teams, Jay and Craig talk about the new releases feature updates from Microsoft for January 2022. They talked about how, due to the holiday season, it seemed like there were few exciting announcements, they then proceeded to talk for 25+mintues.



















The first thing they covered was unmute keyboard short cut, they would like to see it as a global hotkey. They talked about custom backgrounds from the web being a nice release and how Craig really needs to clean his office up so he could be like Jay and not need to use a background. That conversation transitioned to Craig wanting to use multi-cameras and multi-camera support being more easily supported in Teams. They also referenced an episode with Andy Hunneycutt and the setup he uses to make more interesting videos and drive better viewer engagement.







Moving on to “Mirror my video”; this is a feature where you no longer have to see the text in your video flipped. Which, of course, led to hilarity because it is only visible to the presenter but everything is the same for all the viewers; Jay thought it was backwards for everyone.







They then talked about Teams meetings recordings. Ever since meetings were moved into OneDrive, organizations saw their SharePoint storage skyrocket. Onedrive provides nifty capabilities, from sensitivity labels to eDiscovery, and now the admin capabilities support cleaning up your videos automatically – so check out Stream if you’re recording things that should be turned into long-term education. Jay and Craig talked about how recordings of 1 on 1 calls can be useful but also posed interesting problems because people can be more candid than normal and need to be careful of what’s recorded.







We then rolled through Teams Rooms feature that they didn’t think were necessarily important to talk about in detail:







* Rooms on Windows* Cortana updates in Teams Rooms on Windows* Cortana skills now available in additional languages* AAD conditional access support for Teams Rooms on Windows







Last but not least, we closed on talking about Jeff Teper’s twitter post on Mesh for Teams and how important it is for legless avatars to have chairbacks…















and then closed out the recording with their usual witty banter.







Join us next time on This Week in Teams!

While Jay and I were speaking at 365 EduCon D.C., we were able to sit down with Jeremy Wood and talk about Teams in Government and how the US Government uses Teams.







Jeremy Wood is a Federal IT implementer, strategist, and enthusiast specializing in complex business systems. His expertise and career spans infrastructure, service desk, software development, budget, policy, and architecture. He continues to focus on providing value to business through technology solutions to reduce cost and increase efficiency. He is currently in a pivotal role at the Millennium Challenge Corporation (MCC) that will help transform both the business and IT roles and systems through planning, alternative analysis, developing business cases, and facilitating the investment review process. 







Jeremy told us about how his organization was a Skype organization, but with Covid and the challenges his organization faced, they turned to Teams to meet there collaboration needs. They began a process to rolling it out and now his users are constantly asking how can they leverage teams even more.







One of the biggest challenges was governance and what controls did they want to put in place. They created user personas and scenarios on how their users would want to use Teams. We discussed how important using the Teams Adoption guides can be to organizations trying to roll out Teams and change the culture to being a Teams first mentality. We also talked about the challenges that government users face because not all features are rolled out to the government tenants as quickly as they are to enterprises tenants.







Jay talked about card sorting and using Teams and Whiteboard to do card sorting to help with information architecture and Jeremy added his own experiences with Whiteboard. I then told a story about how a customer of mine has created a Center of Excellence in SharePoint for training materials and posting tutorials when new features roll out.







Jeremy talked about the importance about having a business analysts to help understand and build business solutions for his users. He said one of the best tools they use are Learning Pathways and have built out a support solution of Teams and training to help your users including monthly “Ask Me Anything” sessions.







We asked Jeremy what things interested him that are coming up. He talked about Power Bi pro and Analytics are of a lot of interest to him and his organizations. Jeremy is really looking forward to building things out on the Teams platform like adaptive cards and SharePoint pages like Viva Connections.







Jeremy on LinkedIn







Podcast: The Geek Within











Teams for Government Live at #365EduConDC with Jeremy Wood

In This Week in Teams, Craig and Jay started out talking about Craig’s meeting scheduling habit of 45 minutes versus 1 hour minute meetings. He schedules them to start 5 minutes after the hour and goes to 10 minutes before the hour (11:05 am – 11:50 am). He says the first 5 minutes are always spent waiting for everyone and his customers appreciate the 10 minute break before their next meetings. They then talked about MS Ignite and how Jay felt underwhelmed by the announcements compared to past Ignites while Craig added that he didn’t have time to spend on it virtually and would much rather preferred to be in person.



















Recommended Microsoft Ignite Content







Jay & Craig discuss Ignite, but not at the depth a conference of this degree deserves. Check out some of these recommended reviews for fuller details:







* The Microsoft Ignite Book of News is a guide to all the announcements made with all the detail you need. * The MS Refresh Show with Matt Wade and Sean Bugler dives deep into the latest feature announcements.* MVPs Lisa Crosbie and Elaiza Benitez cover everything from keynotes to Power Platform updates







November 2021 Teams Announcements







After the normal chit chat, they then got into the real purpose of this episode, discussing the November 2021 Microsoft Teams product blog which covers the latest and greatest news and announcement for the month.







First off we talked about Jay’s sweet spot, Government and covered:







* Presenter Mode in Desktop & Window Sharing available in GCC-High and DOD* Last month into GCC* New Assignment Experience for Breakout rooms in GCC-H and DOD* Attendance Report in GCC* Isolated Audio Feeds in GCC* 25k Members per Team in GCC-H (yes, Jay misspoke and said 25 members per team, but clearly meant 25,000. Thousand – haha.







After that they moved on to talk about Meetings and Calling







* Communication Access Realtime Translation for Live Captions (new format of captioning)* ALSO Available in GCC* Content from Camera – ok this is really slick* Anonymous User Join Policies (also in GCC)* Custom hold music – only 1 song???







Then Jay wanted to talk about search







* Lost is the ability to search within the subject line, hoping that comes back – A huge loss for Jay, Craig not so much* Gained is an AI based Top Hits* New search results page – actually is nicer, minus the lost search in subject field







Finally they got to big announcement of the evolution of the the Fluid Framework into a new product called Microsoft Loop.







* Built on Fluid Framework (first announced in May 2019)* Composed of Components, Pages, and Workspaces* Loop Pages sound like OneNote pages on growth hormones* Can’t wait for Build next year where they get into how developers can use components in their apps* Rolling out NOW to MSFT Te...

In this time of Thanksgiving, sometimes it helps to sit back and think about how you got where you did. A lot of people will say they are self-made; they put in the work and they are reaping the benefits. And for them, I’m thankful that they have found the success they seek. For me, I know I put in the work, but I also know that were it not for my connections, my friends, and my family, I would not be as successful as I am.







In this episode, Hunter and I review a bit about how we got here, from careers to kindness. We thank you for sticking with us through this past 19 episodes and hope you have enjoyed these conversations as much as we have.











Buzzkill Episode 19 – IT with Empathy, Gratitude Fest 2021

The Microsoft Viva Series includes these great episodes:







* #OTSTWIT Viva Intro with Eddie Lee – Episode 36* #OTSTWIT Viva Insights with Stephanie Donahue – Episode 38* #OTSTWIT Viva Connections with Susan Hanley – Episode 42









This Week’s Episode:







This week Jay & Craig are joined by Stephanie Donahue, founder of The PAIT Group and Microsoft Regional Director and MVP, to discuss Viva Insights.







Often confused as a “big brother” tool, enabling organizations to see what their employees are doing with their time; Viva Insights is designed to make those very statistics more generalized, to give organizations an understanding of their workforce, department by department and as a whole. Additionally, Insights provides tools for the workforce itself, from helping normalize mental wellness to personal working hours and helping surface files and conversations that may be relevant based on an employees tasks and meetings that day.



















About Stephanie Donahue







With over 20 years of experience in the IT Sector, Stephanie is a leader, an innovator, and skilled problem solver. She has a passion for technology and innovation that led her to co-found the PAIT Group. Stephanie believes that technology can minimize risk and maximize business growth and potential.







Stephanie is a recognized member of the SharePoint community where she speaks, writes, and organizes SharePoint events both locally and nationally. Stephanie’s community engagement helps keep her fingers on the pulse of technology to stay ahead of the curve when it comes to emerging technologies. She leverages her knowledge and relationships with vendors, peers, and thought leaders into innovative business solutions for each of PAIT’s clients.







As president and managing partner of PAIT Group, Stephanie leverages her experience and develops relationships to build a dynamic environment for her clients that ensure the right solutions are developed to address their unique business critical projects and issues.







PAIT helps senior management build technology plans that achieve business critical goals and co-executes these solutions with your company ensuring a proper transfer of knowledge. The result for the client is increased ROI with much lower risk. PAIT’s client success is proof that the model works. PAIT matches complex concepts and projects to simple solutions. PAIT Group utilizes Microsoft technology including Microsoft SharePoint, OneDrive, and Yammer to build solutions and solve business problems.







If manual business processes and dated technology are holding your company back, PAIT can help. The experienced PAIT Group team can help your company liberate and automate your IT. No business challenge is too complicated.







Learn More from Stephanie here:







* LinkedIn | StephKDonahue* Twitter | @StephKDonahue* Techsplaining Podcast* The PAI...