Ten articles preserved from the original Mcd79 site, ordered from the most recent. Their dates, context, and source links remain visible.
2023—2021 / MIGRATION 01At Ignite last year, SharePoint Syntex became Microsoft Syntex and there were a whole load of new announcements including things like Archival, Backup, bulk translation and digital signatures, all coming to Syntex. One of the smaller updates announced has now come into public preview and that is a change to the cost model with Pay As You Go pricing.
On September 2022, Jared Spataro and Satya Nadella held an online event that talked about the impact to employees in these troubled times. Using the insights Microsoft gathers as anonymised productivity signals and through their 2022 work trends report, it was clear that the gap in perception of productivity between leaders and employees is large, the expectations around why to come to the office is all about the social connections and now is the time to re-energise your teams through re-recruitment. The event balanced the insights from the report, discussions about the impacts to organisation and announcements of the new pillars of Viva Pulse, Viva Amplify and Answers for Viva.
With the general availability of Viva Goals at the start of August 2022, many people have been wondering what the benefits are. The honest answer is that the majority are to do with the OKR (Objective Key Result) framework that Viva Goals helps organisations to implement it but the tools are just part of the equation. This blog post looks into some of the challenges that OKRs along with Viva Goals look to address. Future posts will look into:
On 16 June, Microsoft dropped a surprise on us - a brand new Viva pillar. Viva Sales has allows employees to enter CRM data, whatever your CRM and powered by AI. With nudges and hints to help you do the right thing, it will truly power a more productive and effective sales force (whether with Salesforce, Dynamics or something else). What is more interesting though is what this means to the future of Viva.
Beautiful city, great speakers, all the Microsoft content, plenty of drinks - that is the way to spend a couple of days. At the start of June, I was one of the over one thousand people who attended the Scottish Summit in Glasgow, a Microsoft Community event that has been running for several years now but was the first year back in person since the start of the pandemic. Here are a few of my thoughts as I head back home.
“In 2022, a crack community unit was sent to Microsoft for some contracts that they couldn’t commit. These people promptly got together, not escaping from Teams, to explore the world of Microsoft Viva. Today, still wanted by the community they serve, they survive as collaborators of fortune. If you have an employee experience problem, if no-one else can help and, wherever you can find them…maybe you can hear from the Viva Explorers.”
A few days ago, Microsoft announced that they were acquiring Ally.IO, an OKR company. Now Microsoft has made quite a few acquisitions over the years but what was interesting about this one was that it announced as the service that would power the next Viva module. It had been heavily hinted that the first four pillars (Connections, Topics, Insights and Learning) would not be the last ones and here it is, the focus for the next release.
On 15th and 16th September, I spoke at my first in-person conferin almost two years and it was so incredible to be back with real people. The organising team have been through so many rollercoasters with this conference so seeing everything come together was so so heart warming. Here are my key takeaways from the event.
Do you know what Microsoft Search is capable of? It has so many options for Answers but it can often be hard to see samples of this. To help with this, I have created a GitHub repo of search samples that you can use to import and get started faster
I’m getting bored of some tweets. You know the ones. “Here’s another unsolicited message I received today”. I’m bored of these because in 2021, these shouldn’t be needed. The unsolicited DM should not be sent. End of story. People shouldn’t have to share these Tweets, because we live in a world where we respect each other, especially women. But this isn’t about everyone, this about how men treat women online.