> "Empower every person and every organisation on the planet to achieve moreΓÇª.most importantly, not just celebrating any platform or technology of ours but celebrating what you can do with that technology to have broad impact." - Satya Nadella, May 2017

Build is Microsoft's annual developer conference which is being held in Seattle as I write. Not everyone who reads this will be a developer so why should you care? Last year, they announced the Bot Framework and talked more about the HoloLens and the possibilities of augmented reality. They also talked about their newly released Cognitive Services and how it gave more access to AI. Looking back at the last 12 months, the growth in AI, bots and augmented reality has been massive. So why should you care about what developers are seeing? Because that is what you will be seeing very soon with 500 million active Windows 10 devices (twice as fast as Windows 8 growth).

## What were the hot topics this year?

Intelligence and Bots are still very hot topics with the fruition of an extra year's worth of innovation showing up, most noticeably with the demo of live translation for PowerPoint presentations - more on this later.

Another big theme is the support for ISVs and others to publish their solutions out for people. There has been a common gripe with many of these new frameworks that they are only catered to developers and it is not easy to get these great solutions out to the people that need them - one of [my thoughts on what would be announced at the SharePoint Virtual Conference](https://www.mcd79.com/here-is-what-i-think-is-going-to-be-announced-for-sharepoint-in-may/) talked exactly about this.

Finally, there is a lot more exposure to the extra set of hubs that Microsoft is putting in place to access all these services. Exposing more products (Microsoft and third party) in Teams and adding more to the Microsoft Graph to power everyone's own interfaces. This further opens up the capabilities that I think should be built for organisation's Digital Workplaces in my [earlier blog](https://www.mcd79.com/why-you-should-build-components-and-connectors-for-your-intranet-not-a-gargangtuan-beast/).

## More AI for all

The keynote had a demonstration of a new app for PowerPoint that automatically translates the speaker to up to 9 different languages. This has come from one of Microsoft's Garage projects and you can [sign up](https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/garage/project-details.aspx?project=translator-ppt) to be one of the early adopters.

While this is amazing, what is more impressive is that this is using the platform of cognitive services and so is something that others could have made - it is not using anything that Microsoft has not made available to others. The capabilities that this could bring are only just being thought of and could open up new ways of working.

#### Bot Framework enhancements

To help build these new ways of workings, Microsoft has opened up more ways of connecting with its Bot Framework.

![New channels for Bot framework](https://blog.botframework.com/images/build2017/3_new_channels.png)

The truly exciting news for enterprises is the Skype for Business bots. Many people I've spoken to have been holding off working with the framework due to its lack of integration and I see this as being a large growth area. The management of these bots will be key to allowing this though with security teams still rightly nervous and devs must learn to see what can be used and what can't - for example, while I am a big fan of [LUIS](https://luis.ai), more information will be needed on where the data that is passed is used and held.

#### LUIS LUIS

Talking of LUIS, Microsoft has extended the number of intents that can be used and also introduced Phrase Lists. These allow a list of entities to be more easily defined and also suggests matching items e.g. a list of cities can suggest additional ones as well.

Enterprises will also appreciate the ability to manage multiple versions of your Luis application, allowing better managed deployments of changes and ability to test those changes. This is also supplemented with the Bot Analytics to see how your bots are being used.

#### Adaptive cards for bot framework

Adaptive cards will increase the UX of bots across multiple channels and reduce the inconsistency that has sometimes been seen with more complex bots.

#### Custom models for cognitive services

The final main part of the intelligence news are the custom models for cognitive services. The initial release of the services opened up a lot of capabilities but if your use case did not meet these, you were left with a far more complex scenario with your own machine learning algorithms. Services such as [custom vision](https://customvision.ai/) have bridged the gap between the two, allowing you to hold your own trained models. Again, this will be of interest to enterprises who may have concerns about wider access to their own materials.

## More places to access your information

There were more announcements around the popular Microsoft Teams with the ability to preview information from third party services without leaving the app.

![Teams previewing info](https://blogs.office.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/Office-at-Build-2017-1b.png)

There is also further integration to the newsfeed for third parties and extensions now available in the App Store. This will open up easier access for people for more services.

Interestingly, Jeremy Thake [suggested that Teams will soon become the primary collaboration app for Microsoft ahead of SharePoint](https://twitter.com/jthake/status/862421327688290305) and others certainly feel this as well. My view is that it will become another hub and some people will use this as the main area. However, Comms teams will still want their homepage, Sales people will still be focussed on their CRM and everyone will still have a homepage to land on when they open their browser. Things are changing but larger organisations still have many different ways of people working.

#### Microsoft Graph enhancements - the glue that binds them

What opens this up is the ever improving capabilities of the Microsoft Graph. I mentioned Content As A Service in my [last blog](https://www.mcd79.com/why-you-should-build-components-and-connectors-for-your-intranet-not-a-gargangtuan-beast/) and the news around the general availability of SharePoint Sites in the graph and also the Planner API mean that you can do more with the data in more places. The improved ability to connect to the graph from services like Teams and the Bot Framework using the newly announced MSAL will greatly improve the time taken to develop these services although I have heard mixed voices so far from those who have used it. I certainly found mixed experiences previously, especially when using with the Bot Framework and if it is not smooth for authenticated users, they will quickly find alternatives.

![Graph roadmap](/images/2017/05/Graph-Preview.jpg)

#### Cortana Skills

Cortana is still getting some good airtime and there are now new Skills to help it catch up with Amazon's Alexa. I have not seen many details of these skills yet to compare them but there is a lot to catch up on with Amazon. The difference may be the number of devices available for this and whether people can be encouraged in offices to start chatting to their computer more - something that remains to be seen so far.

## More in Store

While there has been great work with the Teams extensions and the SharePoint Framework, it still takes a lot of work to use these for non-devs. With Teams Apps now available to be submitted to the Office Store and news coming today around SPFX, vendors can start to show off more of what they have been able to do. This will help enhance capabilities as companies stretch the capabilities further.

#### News for non-devs too

The other news is a store for Flow and PowerApps connectors. The custom story had already been improved but to open up for easy access for others will keep things moving.

## Great start, can't wait for more on Day 2

There is so much content to digest and I am already hearing information appearing on the SPFX enhancements. This blog has already been delayed by my two week old baby and is being finished one handed while he's fed so time to wrap up for now!

![one handed feed](/images/2017/05/one-handed-feed.JPG)

## Further Reading

https://blogs.office.com/2017/05/10/office-at-build-2017-announcing-new-opportunities-for-developers/

https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/what-s-new-for-serverless-at-microsoft-build-2017/

https://news.microsoft.com/features/microsoft-aims-empower-every-developer-new-era-intelligent-cloud-intelligent-edge/#4vPUBJrDoDyor7MH.97

https://blog.botframework.com/2017/05/10/Build

At Build, MicrosoftΓÇÖs Vision Of The Future Workplace Looks Both Helpful And Intrusive - Fast Company
https://apple.news/AAjlpbiT7Qvqm9LYG0zgRMA

Insights API in Graph
https://developer.microsoft.com/en-us/graph/docs/api-reference/beta/resources/insights


My thoughts on Build 2017 so far

Following on from my [last post about building components for your Digital Workplace](https://www.mcd79.com/why-you-should-build-components-and-connectors-for-your-intranet-not-a-gargangtuan-beast/) and not just one big project, I looked in to how you could use bots to help find information across the workplace. The problem is that there are already a plethora of different bots out there and different teams will want to create different bots for their specific scenarios. While internal governance can help this, updating a single bot to deal with every scenario is just not sustainable. Microsoft Teams has addressed this by allowing you to side-load multiple bots and use @ mentions to chat with them. What I was looking for was to use this on a Digital Workplace hub page (aka Intranet homepage).

####Getting bots on to the homepage

The first step was investigating how bots could interact on a web page. From the fantastic bot framework documentation, I found details of the [Web chat](https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/bot-framework/embed-chat-control-web-page) tool (full details on [Github](https://github.com/Microsoft/BotFramework-WebChat)) that allowed you to embed the a bot on to any site with some simple html. This worked well with a single bot but there was no way to extend this and dynamically change the bot that was in use.

![Web chat](https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/bot-framework/media/chatwidget-client.png)

####Back Channel to the rescue
That's when my love of a good technical podcast kicked in. I was listening to [Richard diZerega](https://twitter.com/richdizz) on the [Office 365 Developer podcast](https://dev.office.com/podcasts) talking about Contextual Bots in SharePoint (episode 118). He referred to a [blog post](https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/richard_dizeregas_blog/2017/02/15/sharepoint-framework-and-contextual-bots-via-back-channel/) that he had done on the subject and the Back Channel was the perfect route for a bot to be able to talk back to the bot channel and change details accordingly. This extended from the webchat project but allowed me to change the bot dynamically.

As this was going to be in SharePoint, I started off with a basic SPFX app in React. I chose React due to the larger number of samples available for SPFX, even though I was more comfortable in Angular. I also referred to the [React-bot-framework sample](https://github.com/SharePoint/sp-dev-fx-webparts/tree/master/samples/react-bot-framework) from the SharePoint repo in a few cases when things went a little wonky!

####Creating the SPFX app

I am intending to create a set of webparts that could be used in a Digital Workplace Hub page so set up the initial webpart under my [Hollis project](https://github.com/kevmcdonk/Hollis). Currently the webpart is called TheHubBot but I'm working on renaming that - who needs more things called TheHub...

The code makes use of [Direct Line](https://docs.botframework.com/en-us/restapi/directline3/#navtitle) to handle the calls to the Bot in a secure way so you will need to enable the DirectLine bot for any you use. The list of bots is held in the webpart configuration with the DirectLine ID for each used to talk to it.

    PropertyFieldCustomList('botList', {
                  label: 'Bots',
                  value: this.properties.botList,
                  headerText: 'List of bots that can be queried',
                  fields: [
                    { id: 'Title', title: 'Title', required: true, type: CustomListFieldType.string },
                    { id: 'DirectLineId', title: 'DirectLineId', required: true, type: CustomListFieldType.string }
                  ],
                  onPropertyChange: this.onPropertyPaneFieldChanged,
                  properties: this.properties,
                  context: this.context,
                  key: "botListField"
                })

The botConnection object is then subscribed for each of the bots configured in the list to listen to events from the bot itself. These events are filtered to look for any with an @ mention that matches the name of one of the bots. If these match, then it re-intialises the chat app with the new DirectLine Id.

    this.properties.botList.forEach((item, index) => {

      var botItem:IBotItem = this.properties.botList[index];
      botItem.InstanceId = this.context.instanceId;
      debugger;

      botConnection.activity$
      .filter(activity => activity.type == "message" && activity.from.id == "thehubbot" && activity.text.indexOf('@' + botItem.Title) > -1)
      .subscribe(a => {
          debugger;
        var act: any = a;
        var messageText = act.text;
        var botConnection = new DirectLine({
          secret: botItem.DirectLineId
        });

        var user = { id: "userid", name: "unknown" };
        var bot = { id: "userid", name: "unknown" };

        document.getElementById(botItem.InstanceId).innerHTML = '<div>loading</div>';
        // Initialize the BotChat.App with basic config data and the wrapper element
        App({
          user: user,
          bot: bot,
          botConnection: botConnection
        }, document.getElementById(botItem.InstanceId));
        console.log('Need to change the direct line bot');

        // Call the bot backchannel to give it user information
        botConnection
          .postActivity({ type: "event", name: "initializeBot", value: messageText, from: user })
          .subscribe(id => console.log("success initializing bot"));
        }
      );

####Writing the bot

I started off writing the bot in NodeJS as I had written bots in this before but I found a few too many challenges when it came to having multiple bots hosted on the same website. This wasn't essential to the overall architecture but it meant that I could limit the number of Azure Web Apps I was going to spin up. If anyone has a solution for this with NodeJS hosted bots, I would certainly love to hear from you.

I built the bot using the Bot Builder SDK and following the [Getting Started guidance](https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/bot-framework/dotnet/bot-builder-dotnet-quickstart) in the Bot Framework documentation. All the code is available at https://github.com/kevmcdonk/HollisBots.

I started with the main Messages Controller which would act as the inital bot to call. This would take the initial queries and then root them through to the relevant bot. As this would need to be natural language so that people did not need to use a specific syntax, I used the LUIS service that is part of the Microsoft's Cognitive Services. LUIS stands for Language Understanding Intelligence Services and is the engine that takes a phrase and detects what the intention for that is. You define a set of "intents" for it such as "How do I book leave" or "Where is the security policy" and extracts that as a common query. This means that it can understand "book holidays", "how do I book holidays" or "how to book hols" all as the same intent and route the bot to the appropriate answer. It can also extract entities from that so you could use it with Wikis to pull out the name of an application and send it to the right area within that, e.g. "How do I log in to Phoenix". It would recognise Phoenix as an entity and pass that to your bot logic.

You can read more about [Luis](https://azure.microsoft.com/en-gb/services/cognitive-services/language-understanding-intelligent-service/) and even try it out yourself without any programming.

I used the Luis service at https://luis.ai to set up intents for each of my core bots:

![Intents](/images/2017/05/intents.PNG)

I have taken an export of these and placed in the [github repo](https://github.com/kevmcdonk/HollisBots/blob/master/HollisBots/The%20Hub%20Bot.json) if you want to use or just review. There isn't much detail right now but I will be adding further stuff.

I followed the Bot Framework documentation and had working a simple bot which matched the Intents and matched them to different bots:

    [LuisIntent("SearchPerson")]
        public async Task SearchPersonTask(IDialogContext context, LuisResult result)
        {
            await context.PostAsync("I will ask the @HubPersonBot: " + context.Activity.AsMessageActivity().Text);
            context.Wait(MessageReceived);
        }

        [LuisIntent("SearchInformation")]
        public async Task SearchInfoTask(IDialogContext context, LuisResult result)
        {
            await context.PostAsync("I will ask the @HubInfoBot: " + context.Activity.AsMessageActivity().Text);
            context.Wait(MessageReceived);
        }

        [LuisIntent("")]
        public async Task None(IDialogContext context, LuisResult result)
        {
            string message = "Sorry I did not understand.";
            IntentRecommendation bestBet =  this.BestIntentFrom(result);
            await context.PostAsync(message);
            context.Wait(MessageReceived);
        }

Anything that doesn't match get the default response at the end there. You will see that each matching intent returns a message saying that it will ask one of the bots with an @ mention. This is the mechanism that triggers the back channel. It could be asked directly if anyone knows how e.g. "@HubInfoBot how do I book leave?" but I wanted to make sure that people could use it without having to know the names of the different bots.

Each bot has its own Controller. They are fairly standard though with the main difference being the RoutePrefix - I will definitely be looking in to reducing the amount of code repeat in these.

    [RoutePrefix("/api/HubInfoMessages")]

Currently, the individual bots are very simple but will be extended to talk back and forth with the various SharePoint APIs to pull information, especially the search API - that will be something for a future blogpost.

This was the core of the bots and it was not too much trouble to pull this together once the core elements were worked out. So what was harder then?

####Working out the security and hiding my keys

Where I hit a lot of problems was how to add my code to Github without exposing the various keys involved. Much of the sample code has the Luis keys held in a LuisModel Attribute such as below from the bot framework documentation:

    [LuisModel("c413b2ef-382c-45bd-8ff0-f76d60e2a821", "6d0966209c6e4f6b835ce34492f3e6d9")]
    [Serializable]
    public class SimpleAlarmDialog : LuisDialog<object>
    {
        ...
    }

For the multi-authentication, I found a [great thread](https://github.com/Microsoft/BotBuilder/issues/2258#issuecomment-280506334) in the BotBuilder issues that supplied a way to use a MultiCredentialProvider. This allowed you to supply multiple keys in the class and would then try and match each bot against these. I [extended this class](https://github.com/kevmcdonk/HollisBots/blob/master/HollisBots/MultiCredentialProvider.cs) so that the list of bots was held in web.config.

        public static Dictionary<string, string> GetBotList()
        {
            NameValueCollection section =
        (NameValueCollection)ConfigurationManager.GetSection("BotList");
            Dictionary<string, string> botList = new Dictionary<string, string>();
            foreach(string botName in section.AllKeys)
            {
                botList.Add(botName, section[botName]);
            }
            return botList;
        }

I then removed the config from web.config in to its own file named web.botlist.config which I added to .gitignore so that it was not exposed. I have added comments to the web.config file to explain the correct format:

    <BotList file="Web.botlist.config">
    
    </BotList>

This allowed each of the bots to be set up securely.

For the Luis config, I found this very hard due to my limited knowledge of Autofac. I read several threads that said this needed to be set up in the Autofac config but none of the examples worked outright. The best example I had to go on was the [AlarmBot sample](https://github.com/Microsoft/BotBuilder/tree/master/CSharp/Samples/AlarmBot) from the BotBuilder repo. This mostly worked although I found that with my own custom intents, this didn't work consistently.

After many iterations, the version that I found worked was mostly around the code in the controller:

    if (activity.Type == ActivityTypes.Message)
                {
                    //await Conversation.SendAsync(activity, () => new Dialogs.RootHubInfoDialog());
                    using (var scope = DialogModule.BeginLifetimeScope(this.scope, activity))
                    {
                        //var postToBot = scope.Resolve<IPostToBot>();
                        //await postToBot.PostAsync(activity, token);

                        await Conversation.SendAsync(activity, () => scope.Resolve<IDialog<object>>());
                    }
                }

The original version from AlarmBot is commented out and never worked for me. Resolving around the IDialog<object> was the key change. Also, in the HubModule.cs, it register each of the Luis attributes from the config file:

    NameValueCollection section = (NameValueCollection)ConfigurationManager.GetSection("LuisList");
            foreach (string luisId in section.AllKeys)
            {
                builder.Register(c => new LuisModelAttribute(luisId, section[luisId])).AsSelf().AsImplementedInterfaces().SingleInstance();
            }

For the Luis objects, they are registered in Autofac as:

    builder.RegisterType<RootHubInfoDialog>().As<IDialog<object>>().InstancePerDependency();
            builder.RegisterType<RootHubNewsDialog>().As<IDialog<object>>().InstancePerDependency();
            builder.RegisterType<RootHubPersonDialog>().As<IDialog<object>>().InstancePerDependency();

This gave a nice working version that you can chat to. I will update this post with a video shortly.

####So what is next?

The biggest work is to build out each of these bots with some sample content and get the bot searching SharePoint. However, first I would like to look at how I could integrate this in with the [PNP Intranet Starter](https://github.com/SharePoint/PnP/tree/master/Solutions/Business.StarterIntranet). This is a sample starter for an Intranet solution that I think could be extended further with more support.

For the main SPFX app, I would like to show a list of the bots configured on the screen and make it more obvious which bot you are talking to as well.

There are lots of updates coming out with Build 2017 so it will be interesting to see if any of those can be built in as well.

Building a bot to link to all your internal bots

At the start of every year, the Nielsen Norman Group releases its [annual report on the best Intranets](https://www.nngroup.com/articles/intranet-design/) for that year but for many, the most interesting part is the analysis they release on the intranets. The part of this that I enjoy most is seeing the average time for creating an Intranet with this year's chart showing an average of 1.4 years. That is 1.4 years duration. Throw in the average team size of 12 people and assuming 8 hour days for 220 days a year, that's almost 30 000 person hours of effort. Just for that one release. For pretty much every company, that is a significant investment.

### Make the most of what you have already

In many cases, companies will have many existing systems that teams use regularly and work well for them. Projects may be using Slack or Yammer to update on work and share the latest news and would be unlikely to change to share news on a new platform instead without good reasons. You could roll out improvements as a carrot to bring them across or push down from the top as a stick to force them across but a better way is to integrate that information instead.

### Keep it slim

There is a natural feeling to make a new project as large and impactful as possible so that people feel that it is important and get on board with it. This is a natural human emotion as people feel that the bigger, the better. Buildings like the Burj Al Arab in Dubai and The Shard in London show that people remember huge structures and talk about them more so there is the temptation to do the same with your Intranet projects.

The problem is that this initial excitement and enthusiasm drops when it becomes too large and doesn't tie in to what you do. Hundreds of thousands of people take the train past the Shard in London Bridge every day and don't notice it at all now. If it offered useful information on train times or special offers then people would still gaze in its direction (although please, please know that I don't think this is a good idea at all!!!) and find it useful.

A thin Intranet homepage that integrates with what people use is the key. Relevant news and information along with links to connect them to relevant people and apps that they use will keep people coming back.

### So how can you surface all these different components?

When you are talking about Intranets, the natural place to share links and integrations to all these different services is via the Intranet homepage. Many out of the box Intranet services based on SharePoint allow you to extend a list of apps for a user that can either be a simple link to another service or can add additional integrations. The basic link could be done with Office 365 using the launcher in the corner which will automatically learn from your most used apps and surface those. However, with a little development, you can extend this add your own notifications and prompts as you would expect with a mobile device. For example, show how many HR platform approvals you have or number of outstanding training materials you have to complete. This doesn't need to have the platforms re-worked but you can pull using existing APIs to show a summary and link directly to somewhere in that tool to action that.

### The API driven workplace

The other area is to use those APIs in other areas and surface those notifications all over the place. Microsoft Teams is a good example of this. Bots also make this possible where either via your chat tool or with email, you can get responses where you work most. Microservices are allowing even more integration and with standardised security with tools like Okta and Azure AD among others, the complication of authentication and authorisation is reducing.

The key is to give people the flexibility to change and adapt. Don't force emails on people who don't use them - allow people to unsubscribe. If people aren't using Yammer, then they won't start using it just to receive news. Help people who are using the services well to communicate the benefits they see to others and this will increase the usage. Measure which areas are successful with this and back this - don't just assume that everyone wants the latest.

### So are you suggesting the end of the Intranet in a box?

Absolutely not. There are great products out there like Add-In365, Powell365 and Valo Intranet that improve the experience of publishing news and other common features for sharing info. Phone directory, key events list, project spaces, job boards, buy/sell/rent and standard content pages can all get a great jump start with these products.

The problem becomes when these are seen as the only solution and everything must run through these. The phrase [Content As A Service](https://www.contentful.com/r/knowledgebase/content-as-a-service/) has been growing in usage and covers that content can be captured in one place but used in many through APIs. The Intranet in a box can capture and maintain content well and also provide one endpoint but it should not be the only one.

Bots, voice services like Alexa, Chat services and mobile apps can all surface content. This follows on from the Hub and Spoke model and means that people get the right information where they use it. Outlook, Salesforce, Dynamics and others all have the ability to integrate info in to their main areas to show the content in the right hub for each staff member.

![hub and spoke](/images/2017/05/Hub-and-spoke-diagram.PNG)

### Things change so keep adapting

The beauty of these flexible components is that you can maintain existing components while still bringing in new ideas. Monitoring the success allows you to gradual phase out unpopular components and build on the successful ones. In the personal space, people are more comfortable with the ever increasing change and updates taking place and this can now be supported in the workplace too. Communicate, support new ideas and keep what works going.

![Components](/images/2017/05/Components.jpg)


Why you should build components and connectors for your Intranet, not a gargangtuan beast

I have a confession to make. I don't hate meetings. Most conversations and reading that I have done suggests that I'm in the minority here. Wasted time, lack of follow up and running round in circles are the common problems I hear. So why don't I find these time wasters so bad?

There are plenty of detailed posts out there on how to ensure that you set an agenda for a meeting correctly, pushing a focused meeting that doesn't deviate and ending a meeting when that aim is met, not using up time for the sake of it. For me, it's the time needed afterwards to get the most out of it that gets me. Discussion on the right topics and making sure that everyone is thinking a similar way is so important but if you end the meeting and that is the end of it, then it is time wasted. Those good ideas discussed are just ideas and without any follow up, then they are gone.

####Taking notes that you can do something with

This blog appears to becoming a confession blog. I confess that I am a OneNote addict. For about four years now, I have used OneNote mostly on my Surface tablet and phone. Why? Mostly because I like the freedom of scribbled notes that act as enough of a reminder for me to remember what I needed. Paper notebooks are still great at this as you don't need to have a set format and can let the topic evolve as you see fit. They can be artistic, simplistic, scientific or just basic. What they don't offer though is the searchability and findability that a digital solution can offer and for me, that is where OneNote meets all that I need. With my Surface and pen, I can scribble notes as I do on paper, creating a page for each meeting but then quickly reference back either to that meeting through different notebooks or by searching for my scribbled text.

If you need to add more, such as when you need to take a photo from the screen, you can easily embed that photo in to your notes. When you realise that the order you wrote things is wrong, then you can quickly re-order the written notes. This is something I do regularly at talks and conferences to save time copying out exactly what is said. OneNote makes it easy to capture what you need and get back to it. So that's it, right?

####Following up on actionable tasks

OK, that heading is a little tongue in cheek for fans of buzzword bingo. But the reality is that it has always been easy to take notes but to turn these in to things that you can track and make sure happen has always been harder. Some projects and teams set someone to track minutes for each meeting but this is not always natural for people and is easy to let slip. Someone takes the notes but then doesn't capture those tasks in to your task tracking tool.

####Did you know that in OneNote, you can now track an item as an Outlook task?

Slightly confusingly, there are two versions of Outlook for Windows users - the core desktop version (OneNote 2016) and the Windows Store version (OneNote for Windows 10). If you are using OneNote 2016, then you have the option to set a to-do item and have this as an Outlook Task. Under the Home Menu, you can mark a line as being a To-Do task and then you can right click on that line to have it added as an Outlook task.

![Adding an Outlook task in OneNote](/images/2017/05/Outlook-tasks-in-OneNote.PNG)

Many people will see this and say that they don't like using Outlook but that is where To-Do comes in. Outlook tasks from Office 365 are now synced back to To-Do where it will be appear as a suggested task for that day. Tag it in OneNote and it will appear in your mobile app as your daily to-do!

![Showing the task in To-Do](/images/2017/05/MS-To-Do.jpg)

I had a great chat at the last #SUGUK session in London with Bill Ayers and Chris O'Brien about capturing tasks in meetings and that spurned an idea to take a look at the OneNote API to pull through tasks given a specific notation. What I love is that it wasn't anywhere near as hard as that!

With the tasks in Outlook and To-Do, you can also set up a daily schedule in Flow for any items assigned to you for anyone who is more comfortable with using email for tracking items. I have also set up a Flow which picks up certain codes from a task and assigns it in to SharePoint to track actions rather than just having generic tasks for each person.

####So what is missing?

While you can assign tasks to a SharePoint list, if you are a fan of Microsoft Teams and using Planner with it, there is currently not a way to trigger that using Flow. I think with the benefits of Teams integration, Planner will become more popular as a task tracking tool and I hope this will expand to be more available through Flow and Custom APIs. You could also use other tools such as Jira with Flow already if you are using them.

Given this, I think it would be great to have OneNote tasks pushing straight to Planner or other task tracking tools directly. Maybe this is where the API will kick in and could even be a future blog post...


Tracking actions from meetings just got much easier thanks to Microsoft's To-Do and One-Note

Following on from one of my earlier and most popular blog entries about [creating a daily tasks app in PowerApps](https://www.mcd79.com/stay-productive-creating-a-three-daily-tasks-app-in-powerapps-and-flow/), Microsoft today [announced a new To-Do app](https://blogs.office.com/2017/04/19/introducing-microsoft-to-do-now-available-in-preview/).

####Why should you use this and not Trello/Wunderlist/etc?

The app has been built by the team behind Wunderlust and is designed to neatly segregate your tasks in to groups. This means you can quickly see what you have to do.

The difference that you don't see in many other apps is that it builds on Microsoft's intelligence as a service platform to suggest tasks for that day. It will look at repeating tasks that you have done before and suggest them. Forgotten to add your weekly report? It will notice that you've done this a lot before and suggest it.

Finally, it is built in to Office 365 so if you are already using that, you will have the same security features as you see in other apps. You don't need to have Office 365 to use it (I've tried with my live.com account as well) but if you do, then you can have all your key tasks secured safely across multiple devices.

####Can I use it now?

The apps are available on iOS, Android, Windows and the web right now - check the [blog link](https://blogs.office.com/2017/04/19/introducing-microsoft-to-do-now-available-in-preview/) for links. I have checked my own Office 365 tenant and don't yet have the ability to enable it there but will update this post as soon as I see it there.

I have tried many of the different task apps and the lack of focus for a daily set of tasks has always put me off using them consistently. From what I have tried so far (about 30 mins worth), this fits much closer to what I tried to achieve in my basic PowerApps version.

####What next?

Unfortunately for all the Wunderlist users out there, it does appear that they are looking to gradually shutdown Wunderlist. They have promised to provide all the functionality in To-Do and I would hope that this includes a migration of tasks as well.

They have also promised more to come with additional integrations appearing. Look forward to seeing how this will integrate in to teams and can see more bots to help you add and manage tasks as well.


Microsoft helps you stay productive with To-Do

####Some thoughts on platform change and how we should think about it####

There was a great piece of news today with [the announcement that Yammer now allows editing of existing posts](https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/Yammer-Blog/Edit-Post-is-Here/ba-p/61461). You will be able to see that posts have been edited and the history of changes are shown. What is great about this announcement is that it was announced through a small post on the community site and echoed on the Yammer Twitter account - not through massive announcements.

####But, if it was that small a thing, why has it taken so long?####

While involved in a recent plan to roll-out Yammer, there was a lot of discussion about the ability to edit posts. Small typos still wind up a lot of people and there are times that your first post just doesn't quite meet what you are really trying to say. This was certainly a big topic so you would think that the Yammer team would get everyone on it and make it happen. That's all it needs right?

This is where some experience with development helps to understand why things take longer than others. Platforms like Yammer are geared up to huge volumes of data that changes on a regular basis. Setting data up to be written and then read allows it to be performant and quick to consume, with filtering and sorting all in place. If you allow that content to be edited, the performance of accessing that content plummets as well.

So now something that feels like a simple change suddenly has a potential impact to the entire performance. Of a cloud platform. Used by tens of thousands of people. And they depend on it.
![Bad idea](http://funny-pictures-blog.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/Bad-idea_3.jpg)

Instead, there will have been hours of unit and automated testing followed up by beta testing and pilots. This is where the Dev Ops practices that have been talked about really kick in. The modern ways of working that the cloud espouse allow for changes to be made and tested effectively but that isn't all that is required. No amount of automated testing can stop a hard to use user experience so there also has to be real world usage of it as well.

####Why does it matter to me?####

There are different streams to how these thoughts could impact you.

![User](/images/2017/04/Photo-Android-Smartphone-Phone-User-Instagram-634069-1.jpg)

**You're a passionate user of these platforms** - you want to see change happen fast but you need it to be reliable. You won't know whether a nosql database that doesn't need re-indexing into bla bla bla or not. You just want to be able to share content with your connections and build relationships. And it should work all the time.

What you should do though is keep talking with the product teams and their connections. Tell people what it is that you want to see and help them realise the importance of things like editing. Sign up for the [User Voice](https://yammer.uservoice.com/) and fill out those surveys that are sent round. When there is some A/B testing, feedback that you like or don't like it with some constructive thoughts. Finally, be nice! There are rare times that people do things just to wind people up.

![IT Pro](/images/2017/04/laptop-1.jpeg)

**You're an IT Pro managing one of these platforms** - aka the one stuck in the middle. You have to deal with the changes taking place and take the flack when people don't like it. People don't listen to what you think whether it's on your changes or why it takes so long and you always get blamed. So what should you do about it?

Make sure that you have all the latest information at your fingertips and point people towards those references. Not everyone likes what they hear but make sure that they know what is planned and this eases any pain. In the other direction, make sure that you help to pass on feedback as to what has and hasn't worked and what is really being demanded.

![Developer](/images/2017/04/7643288084_09053952da_b-1.jpg)

**You're a developer** - you spent hours on a great bit of code that improves the performance, is fully unit tested, has automated UI tests to ensure it stays working and was delivered ahead of plan. It's delivered and nothing is heard. The next change is a font colour change and Twitter is raving about the improvements. It's a hard life.

What can you do? Keep on doing things as you are. Changes will continue working well with the right level of testing and people will never be happy. One of my favourite stories from Worse Than Failure is the [speed-up loop](http://thedailywtf.com/articles/The-Speedup-Loop). Sometimes, the hard but important work is also the most invisible to give the value. I still believe in the transparency of agile but it does need to be tied up with a pretty bow occasionally!

_UPDATE_ - Yammer kindly [tweeted me](https://twitter.com/Yammer/status/852643424130007040) with a great post about what it took to apply editing to posts. [Interesting read](https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/Yammer/Why-is-Editing-Messages-So-Complex/td-p/28340) on the details.


Finally Yammer allows you to edit a post but why did it take so long?

Around this time last year, there were still a few voices talking about the death of SharePoint and its disappearance as a brand, prompting Microsoft to hold a "Future of SharePoint" event. As someone who has worked with it in various forms since 2004, I was not worried that it would vanish but knew that the branding of things was changing. The name of SharePoint has long been a dirty word for enterprises fed up with difficult to use sites, confusing ways of adding images, badly implemented farms and customisations that argued with each other constantly. However, for me, the Future of SharePoint event changed a lot of that and showed that Microsoft wanted to take a new way forward that was simpler, better looking, mobile focussed and extendable but still keeping that name of SharePoint. The bad name that it had in some places was offset by the large number of people who knew it as the go-to place to find information.

### The SharePoint Virtual Summit

Roll on just over 12 months and Microsoft will run [another online event](https://blogs.office.com/2017/03/21/announcing-the-sharepoint-virtual-summit/) and so we are likely to see more announced for the upcoming year that continues to improve on what has been delivered already- from modern lists and libraries to mobile apps, 25TB site collections to the SharePoint Framework, Team site news to a new landing page for all sites. A lot was promised at last year's event which was delivered and I expect this year's to be exactly the same. But what will it actually include? Here are my thoughts.

### Publishing Pages

The big excitement that came first with the new blog experience and then with the Modern Pages was always offset a little by the lack of publishing and the lack of columns. I loved these new blocks that were more naturally responsive and looked great but knew that many people don't want to have to keep scrolling, especially on desktops where SharePoint is used more.

The good news is that there is plenty of talk about these changes coming which I take to mean that the engineering team want to make sure they get it right. Wes Hackett (CTO of the fantastic [Add-In365](http://www.addin365.com/) and Mark Kashman both spoke with Jeremy Thake ([Hyperfish](https://www.hyperfish.com) - highly recommend the product and the [podcast](https://blog.hyperfish.com/tagged/podcast)) about these pages and the importance that they will bring. There is still a push from page owners to get plenty of info up front and the modern pages just don't quite cut it for that.

> - [Getting the most out of Office 365 with Wes Hackett](https://blog.hyperfish.com/getting-the-most-out-of-office-365-with-wes-hackett-hyperfish-podcast-249618d4656f?source=collection_home---4------1-----------)

- [The future of sharepoint's intelligent Intranet with Mark Kashman](https://blog.hyperfish.com/the-future-of-sharepoints-intelligent-intranet-with-microsoft-s-mark-kashman-hyperfish-podcast-63ff208c0a07?source=---------3)

The other side connected to this is to take Team news and extend to the wider org. There are great products out there that allow for this but to have this built in and readily available will improve the ability for people to get used to sharing info. From previous experience, people want a combination of sites that have info for their team or community and another that is for the wider population. Sharing is definitely encouraged but there are still many times when news needs to just be shared to those that are allowed to see it against those that want to. There is also the aim to surface interesting content to wider audiences.

I think that Microsoft will start to make this a little easier but still leave a space for ISVs to provide an enhanced experience where people want that bit more.

### Full page customisations and a JSLink replacement

Despite a large change in the stack of technology used for SharePoint development that developers need to learn, the SharePoint Framework has generally been well received. The ability to use modern techniques and have a model that allows development without a full SharePoint implementation on their local machine has made life a lot easier for devs - for example, I am more than happy to build webparts on my Surface Pro 3 and still do work while on a plane or train with no wi-fi. There are some impressive webparts out there and [great examples from PnP](https://dev.office.com/code-samples#?filters=sharepoint%20framework%20app) on how best to do this in multiple frameworks like React and Vue.

What is missing though is the larger page experience. There is still the need for the wider add-in model but this now feels lacking compared with SPFX. Deploying connected lists and libraries is still painful despite the good work and I expect to see a solution for replacing more solutions with the modern stack.

I also expect this to extend to the ability to integrate customisations with modern lists as well, replacing the older JSLink model that is not yet available. The citizen developer ([discussed by Jeremy Thake recently](https://blog.hyperfish.com/the-future-of-citizen-development-in-sharepoint-with-the-sharepoint-framework-3116a9dc3e9b)) still like to be able to make small tweaks to single lists and JSLink was a way to do this, however painful it could get. I expect to see a much better solution coming that allows people to add things like dashboard icons to a list.

Microsoft have also discussed making it easier to integrate solutions with the Microsoft Graph and I hope to see more of that announced around the event.

### Better story for ISVs to deliver solutions

Alongside the enhanced customisation solutions above, I believe that there will be more opportunity to monetise customisations for ISPs. At the moment, there has been no store for new webparts and so ISVs have had to find different ways to work on these. I expect this to change and make it easier to grab impressive changes.

Having said that, I hope that it does not kill off the great community work that has taken place with open sourced collections like the [SPFX 40 fantastics available](https://github.com/OlivierCC/spfx-40-fantastics).

### More integration for Flow and PowerApps

I have a love hate relationship with Flow and PowerApps - I absolutely love what they do but often hit weird problems with doing anything beyond the demo level work. The great news is that they are changing all the time and issues like not being able to process JSON that I found from the [European SharePoint Community Hackathon](https://www.sharepointeurope.com/events/espc16-hackathon-results/) were resolved by the time Martin Veen and myself ran a [webinar](https://www.sharepointeurope.com/trump-creating-engaging-powerapp-machine-learning-matter-hours) on this a couple of months ago.

The big chance that will make a difference is to embed these PowerApps in to the browser itself and truly fill what InfoPath can do. Microsoft has been clear that these are not direct replacements for InfoPath and workflows but they can meet all of the needs and more, including a better enhancement process.

### More Bot integration

The release of Microsoft Teams has shown that Microsoft fully intends to be at the forefront of the bot revolution and not just by having the platform in the Bot Framework but built in to their products. There will be more coming with this and SharePoint is a natural place to include bots where you can interact on the home of your shiny new Intranet. The first phase of bots have been more fun and consumer related but Teams has started the flow towards more enterprise focussed bots and SharePoint will likely continue this.

What bots can you expect to see? The Who-Bot (https://www.onmsft.com/news/microsoft-teams-introduces-t-bot-and-who-bot) will be an obvious starter and there will likely be some bots to help people find the right information, building on top of the Microsoft Graph to get people to the right place faster. These will neatly give wider access to the digital workplace through integration with other platforms like Skype for Business and even SMS.

What I would love to see!

These ones I'm not so sure on but would certainly love to see turn up.

- _Better way to move between different tenants_ - for those that work on multiple instances, it is very painful to move between different tenants with some services remembering your details and not making it obvious who you are logged in as. Not sure what the solution is but there is definitely the chance for a better experience.
- _Even more integration with the Cognitive Services_ - the access to intelligence as a service has opened up more possibilities and ISVs will fill the gap with add-ins if Microsoft doesn't. The ability to add summaries automatically to each of your pages and gauge the sentiment for an organisation from analysis opens up new ways of working and it would be nice to see Microsoft get in there early with these. However, they need to make sure that these can be turned off for enterprises concerned about where this information will go.
- _People to stop asking about whether to use Yammer or Teams or Groups_ - this is a real long shot and I saw another email newsletter today talking about this. I hope that people will start using the different services and decide what best meets the need of the organisation rather than focussing on what each of them can do so much.

### What do you think?

I'd love to hear what else you think might be coming and will definitely revisit this after the May event. To keep you entertained during the event itself, keep an ear out for these #buzzwordbingo phrases. There's a huge prize if you can find all of them - my undying admiration of your listening skills.

- Modern experience
- But that's all changed
- Empowering you
- Content editor web part
- Feature solutions
- Leveraging
- We haven't forgotten on-premise
- Salesforce


Here is what I think is going to be announced for SharePoint in May

Microsoft Teams has brought a new way for Office 365 users to collaborate together and stay productive as a team. As I said in my last post, it also brings together multiple areas to connect different services together. One of the more interesting aspects is the integration with the Bot Framework and how this can be used to bring forward what Microsoft has been calling "Conversation as a Service". The change this brings about is the ease of use of different services through natural interaction in a single place. People can chat to a bot in their Teams channel to either update a client in Salesforce or query a set of knowledgebases to answer a question.

First though, I needed something for the bot to write to and so I picked up on a good idea suggested to me last year - Project Pulse.

#### The Project Pulse app

When a project is running, it is useful to know how the team and key stakeholders are feeling on a regular basis. This is often done with status reports but it would be great if you could quickly capture the "pulse" of a project. Hence, Project Pulse.

The app is created using the SharePoint Framework and uses Node JS. You can view the full source code at https://github.com/kevmcdonk/Mcd79ProjectPulse. It shows a set of emojis that are easy to click on and submit your feeling for the day.

![Capture the pulse](/images/2017/12/Project-Pulse-view-1.PNG)

Once submitted, it will show the average temperature for the day from everyone who has submitted.

![Show the temperature](/images/2017/12/Project-Pulse-view-2.PNG)

The app was built up using much of the great documentation available around the framework starting from https://dev.office.com/sharepoint. The differing parts were how to create the SharePoint list including Content Types and Site Fields - how to do this came from https://dev.office.com/sharepoint/docs/spfx/toolchain/provision-sharepoint-assets but I also found that using the standard Visual Studio 2015 SharePoint template allowed an easier creation of the schema needed.

Once I had a working solution, testing it in my local workbench and then deployed to my tenant's workbench, I took a look at how to host the files correctly. I debated these being deployed in to SharePoint as part of the solution but the more sustainable way that reduced duplication was to use the Office 365 CDN that is in preview. I found that Waldek Mastykarz's great blog had a post that covered how to set this up. I created a new site collection called CDN and placed a folder in Site Assets for my files. During testing, I used the direct link to this folder rather than the CDN link as it took time for files in the CDN to update.

There are more improvements to be added such as better checking for whether the person has already submitted a pulse, more views to show the longer term temperature and the ability to customise further the different emotions (not everyone is a fan of Meh...)

####Adding a bot

The next step was to work out how a bot could be used for this. I kept this very simple and decided that the bot could be used to submit the pulses. With Microsoft Teams now, you can add a new bot to a channel and @ mention it to interact.

The code for this is all available at https://github.com/kevmcdonk/Mcd79ProjectPulseBot.

![Bot on a Team channel](/images/2017/12/Teams-bot.PNG)

Many of the steps to follow are outlined in the main Bot Framework documentation. I decided to create a Node JS bot and so followed https://docs.botframework.com/en-us/node/builder/overview/#navtitle. I downloaded the Bot emulator and within half an hour, had a Bot that replied to a specific message. I next followed the links in the documentation to deploy to Azure and had a working Bot published. The next step was to sideload this Bot into one of my Teams channels and I had a Bot I could interact with from the Teams app. Easy so far!

I wanted to make the interaction process as natural as possible so I introduced LUIS. For those who don't know, [LUIS](https://www.microsoft.com/cognitive-services/en-us/luis-api/documentation/home) is not a friendly developer who could help me out but part of the [Cognitive Services stack](https://www.microsoft.com/cognitive-services) from Microsoft that allows your Bot to better understand natural language. It works by working out what your intent is for your conversation and pulls out the different entities from the text. For example, my main intent was to add a pulse and the entity defined was the type of Pulse, i.e. Happy, Meh or Sad.

The hardest part with the LUIS integration was identifying how to do this from the samples. Many of them worked using the IntentDialogs but I found that a Dialog with a TriggerAction at the end worked best for me. The standard samples at https://github.com/Microsoft/BotBuilder/tree/master/Node/examples often referenced only the inbuilt entities rather than custom created ones.

Finally, I wanted to be able to write back to SharePoint so needed to have Office 365 authentication. For this, I was helped by a [great blog](http://thecollaborationcorner.com/2017/01/25/search-for-your-sharepoint-content-from-a-bot-using-the-bot-framework-oauth2-and-node-js/#.WMl7lTvyjic) by Frank Cornu which talked through much of this process. It suggests using adal-npm and setting up an Azure AD application. As you can see from the image above, the first time you speak to the Bot, it asks you to login and then allows you to submit a pulse.

I have since found that with the Bot in Teams, it does currently ask for you to login for each conversation. If you reply to a comment, it retains the token but loses it within a new conversation. This leads me on to some of the other areas where I'd like to build on. It would be good to be able to ask what the temperature of any specific day is within the Bot and also to reduce the need for the authentication to speed up submitting the thoughts. This could then expand in to being an overall project tracking Bot to capture items for the daily stand-up as well as the daily pulse.

####Summary

It was very simple to pull together a simple Bot that is usable and useful. There will be many other scenarios that could be used for simple ideas like this and I hope that the code acts as a useful guide for others.

I am interested to see how well this scales for larger Bots dealing with more scenarios but think that the majority of situations will be better handled by more single-minded Bots with a directory to help answer your questions on which Bot to use when. There will certainly be a lot of continuous improvements needed for any developed Bots and people should prepare for this. Reviewing the analytics of what people are asking will be key and LUIS is well set-up to capture these details. If people often ask for the same thing, you can set up new intents and entities to cater for it, e.g. if lots of people submit an angry pulse then a new pulse should get added.

I would love to hear from you on your experience with creating Teams Bots and any ideas for taking the Project Pulse Bot forward.

_With thanks to Betsy Weber for the Robot Heart image - https://www.flickr.com/photos/betsyweber/16375995051_


Stay engaged - trying out the Bot Framework with Microsoft Teams to capture a project's daily pulse

## "I do not like them in a box. I do not like them with a fox."

![Green eggs and ham](http://vignette2.wikia.nocookie.net/seuss/images/4/47/6a00e54ef837538833015433a23709970c-500wi.jpg/revision/latest/scale-to-width-down/163?cb=20130813204632)

The trusty kitchen calendar. For many years, we have had a kitchen calendar pinned to the wall, just next to the sink. Each month is neatly divided up so we have a section for each of us - Daddy, Mummy and the two kids. It has even become a tradition for my parents to buy us a new one for Christmas with clear requirements for enough space for us all and preferably a little notepad underneath for the missing sections. If there are any arguments, the calendar is always the word of truth. No appointment is truly booked until it has been etched in stone aka scribbled in biro.

Until now.

## "I will not eat them in a house. I do not like them with a mouse."

![Not in a house or with a mouse](http://vignette3.wikia.nocookie.net/seuss/images/8/83/I_do_not_like_them_with_a_mouse.png/revision/latest/scale-to-width-down/185?cb=20161203013844)

Finally, after years of trying to persuade my wife that we need an electronic version so that we can actually see what we have booked while we're out of the house, I have a break through! As it was my birthday yesterday, she bought me a shiny iPad mini and a holder for it to attach it to the wall. Just slightly further away from the sink than the paper version, we now have an electronic device on the wall.

I spent a few hours setting up new calendars in my O365 account, one for each of us and there was even space for our impending arrival in April. These were then synced up on my phone and my wife's before syncing all on to the iPad. There are plenty of options for calendar apps but for now I kept with Outlook on iOS that we have both been using.

## "I do not like them here or there. I do not like them anywhere!"

![I do not like them here or there](http://vignette1.wikia.nocookie.net/seuss/images/4/41/I_would_not_like_them_here_or_there..png/revision/latest/scale-to-width-down/185?cb=20161203012625)

Next step was to add even more potential efficiency as I set up a Trello account for us all and started putting the list of tasks for all of us. I used the Card Repeater Power-Up (http://blog.trello.com/trello-card-repeater) so that we could have regular tasks, especially for our eldest who has his pocket money linked to getting his tasks done. After a few hours, I then had my long list of tasks up for setting up the baby's room and getting the garden ready for summer. My wife is now busily re-sorting them in to priority order - I did suggest a daily stand-up meeting but this was probably a step too farΓÇª

## "I do not like Green eggs and ham! I do not like them, Sam-I-am."

![I do not like green eggs and ham](http://vignette4.wikia.nocookie.net/seuss/images/0/06/And_not_with_a_mouse.png/revision/latest?cb=20161203131043)

Going back to the title of the post, this is much like the character from Dr Seuss' classic. He refuses to try Green Eggs and Ham because he doesn't like the look of it. He doesn't want to do anything different at all. It doesn't matter where it is, who it is with, how it is with. Whether it is a Mac, a PC, an iPad or a Kindle. It's a change for something that is key to the way our lives work and the thought of that working caused panic. The more I suggested it, the bigger a thing it became. The bigger the swell against it.

Until finally, the boat collapsed, we were in the ocean and my wife gave in. Let's try it.

![I like them](http://vignette4.wikia.nocookie.net/seuss/images/5/5b/I_like_green_eggs_and_ham.png/revision/latest?cb=20161203142750)

So far, she loves it. She has filled her and my weekends and we both know what is happening. She knows when I'm planning to be out and when I can pick up the kids. I know if she's likely to be back late as she's seeing a friend. We have all the kids booked in for their playdates and in some cases have even shared the invite with the parents.

What has been even better is adding some more things on the iPad. It now has the Sonos Controller on there and it's so much easier to set the radio on than unlocking the phone. I've also set up Find iPhone so we can both track down where we left the phone. Another plus is setting up Netflix so I have something to keep me entertained while washing up. I've even debated suggesting the new Office 365 Bookings app so friends can book slots but think I may be taking that too far!

What does this mean to everyone else?

![Everyone else](http://vignette1.wikia.nocookie.net/seuss/images/2/2e/I_do_so_like_green_eggs_and_ham.png/revision/latest?cb=20161203145348)

Am I saying that everyone should have a tablet attached to the wall? No, not necessarily. It works great for us but may not for you. What I'm saying is that you shouldn't just stick with the old way of doing things. Try out new ideas and see if it can make you more efficient. New tips can make life much easier and streamline your day to focus on more interesting things. Try and ditch your paper notepad for a tablet for a while - searching for old notes is so much better.

There are a very large number of processes in most organisations that have gradually slipped in to tradition but are not as efficient as they could be and don't make the most of modern changes. Traditional hierarchy intranets should not be the sum total of the intranet and email should not be your only collaborative tool. Slack and Microsoft Teams offer new alternatives that require people to change the way they do things but the results can be achieved surprisingly easily.

Let me know how it goes and if you have any suggestions for other calendar apps, please do [tweet me!](https://twitter.com/kevmcdonk)

With thanks to http://seuss.wikia.com/wiki/Green_Eggs_and_Ham for images


I do not like green eggs and ham, Sam I am

With the [announcement on March 14th of the general availability of Microsoft Teams](https://blogs.office.com/2017/03/14/microsoft-teams-rolls-out-to-office-365-customers-worldwide/), a new way of wrapping up Collaboration Tools became available for all enterprise Office 365 subscribers.

####So why is this vital?

There are [many](https://www.wsj.com/articles/beware-collaboration-tool-overload-1489370400), [many](http://moxtra.com/blog/why-organizations-should-avoid-too-many-collaboration-tools) [different](https://en.share-gate.com/blog/microsoft-teams-office-365-collaboration-overload) [articles](https://www.tektonikamag.com/index.php/2017/01/26/why-everyone-hates-your-collaboration-tools-hint-theres-way-too-many/) on why there are too many Collaboration Tools and the impact that this is having on employees. Give everyone too many tools and they have no idea where to start, they become clouded by confusion on where to go. However, as I noted in my [last post](https://www.mcd79.com/trump-brexit-and-the-digital-workplace-yes-im-going-there/), you need to consider everyone in your plans. There will also be those who know what they want and want to have access to it....fast. They are happy with chatting to their teams on one social network, updating their tasks in tool, reviewing their CRM data in a third service. What owners of an organisation needs is a way to work for these different groups.

####Hubs and spokes
So do you stop the spread of tools by having fewer? You could but you then restrict choice and ability for people to have the right tool for the right job. Ben Niaulin and Christian Buckley spoke at the European SharePoint Conference in Vienna last November about the need to make sure that you understand what the business wants and deliver the appropriate tools to meet that need (you can view the full speech [here](https://www.sharepointeurope.com/presentations/espc16-keynote-2-form-meets-function-understanding-collaborations-cultural-fit/) but you will need to register - I would highly recommend registering as the ESPC team regularly produce some great content and will put on a [great conference in Dublin](https://www.sharepointeurope.com/) this year). This means that you do not just have a single home where everything runs out of. You won't fit everything that people want in one place. Instead, you have a home area to share key organisational information and news which is then a hub to the rest of the other connected hubs.

Each hub is a relevant collection of information for a specific purpose that connects to the other hubs.

- Working on a project? Connect to your project hub to see the latest status updates, project artefacts and tasks for all team members.
- Interested in client experience? Connect to the client experience community hub to share ideas and work on initiatives together.
- Team meeting coming up? Connect to your team hub to discuss the agenda and make the most of the time.

How does this make things simpler for people? While the diagram below talks about Teams and CRM and others, the reality is that these hubs will be relevant to what people are doing. The focus shifts away from tools to what people are themselves doing. I don't care that much about Slack but I do care about what the Ghost development community are up to - that's why I signed up.

![The digital hubs and spokes](https://mcdonnell-my.sharepoint.com/personal/kevin_mcd79_com/_layouts/15/guestaccess.aspx?docid=055119dce270d4c978d2f62fb5cb1eba8&authkey=AeA3sMq90sAgORaFrhrlOS8)

####So how does Microsoft Teams fit in to this picture?

OK, firstly, whether we're talking about Teams, Slack, Hipchat or something else, the key is how it connects together different services for a specific purpose. What Teams does well is to bring together in one place all the relevant info for a team. If you are a dedicated Microsoft junkie then you probably already have files in OneDrive and SharePoint and possibly some tasks in Planner. What Teams has done well is to allow you to extend that to other services like Trello and SAP using bots (conversations with a service), tabs (views of other content in your applications) and connectors (embed notifications within your team feed). This isn't limited to third party applications, you can connect up to your own in-house hosted of developed services as well.

####But isn't Microsoft Teams all about chat?

Chat is a mechanism to connect with people and Teams definitely empowers that. It helps to silo your conversations and get to the right people at the right time, whether through text chat (and those animated gifs that are much loved/loathed) as well as realtime voice and video utilising Skype for Business. But it doesn't stop there as it allows you to work together as well with the files you need and the tasks together in one place.

The best example I saw on this was at last year's Future Decoded event in London where a team presented on the power of O365 Groups - Teams was announced later that day and I believe much of what they showed was using Teams but they couldn't announce that yet. The group of four people had not met face-to-face before the conference and pulled together a 45 minute presentation using the Teams tools with the single presentation shared and updated directly, meetings organised through the team and ongoing conversations throughout. Many small teams spring up like this and the tools are geared to support this focussed collaborative effort.

####Let's be honest though...this is the final nail in the coffin for Yammer?

When Teams was first announced, Microsoft were very clear that there was still a path for Yammer. The picture above shows Teams working together and they have a common task, a reason to focus on. Whether that is a project team with a specific deadline, a product team that works together to continuously improve on a product or a hierarchical team that sits in an organisation, there is an aim for the team.

> Team - A group of people with a full set of complementary skills required to complete a task, job, or project.

*http://www.businessdictionary.com/definition/team.html*

A community is a group of people with a common interest. The big difference in most organisations is that a community may not know each other before they start and will evolve as people become interested. This was a lot harder to organise and discover in the pre-digital workplace times but with social networks, the ability to search for groups of people with the same interest has become easier. My first day of a job, I asked on our social network if anyone was interested in mud runs and quickly found out that there was a group that had done Tough Mudder and ran a weekly boot camp. I joined the first week and gained a new network of people outside of my main work.

What does this have to do with Yammer? Well it fits best with this latter group, where there is not a specific goal but a set of people interested in the same thing. They may evolve a goal or goals that require a more focused team but more often they are a loose knit collection. Yammer is currently Microsoft's answer to supporting these needs and it has affirmed this with the [recent update](https://blogs.office.com/2017/03/02/yammer-integration-with-office-365-groups-now-rolling-out/) that creates an Office 365 group for each Yammer group. This allows organisations to neatly segregate their open public communities in to Yammer and keep the focused goal-driven teams in Microsoft Teams.

However, the line has been blurred now with Teams now announcing public teams as part of the March 14th general availability. Should you keep Yammer and Teams and have them separate? Well, that is entirely up to you! If you think your organisation is comfortable working across different platforms for different usages, go for it. If you think it will seed confusion, stick to one (and I'd certainly recommend Teams if you pick one at this stage). The choice is yours.

####Has that quietened the cacophony?

Sounds simple, right? Use Microsoft Teams and all your dreams will come true. Obviously it's not as easy as that. What is needed is to develop a structure that meets the needs. There isn't a magic bullet. However, Teams provides a compelling service to pull together different needs. More importantly, it highlights a model of wrapping together multiple services in to one single connected package to help guide people to the right place to do things. Let's hope that this is the start of something beautiful.

_Credit to Emmanuel Huybrechts for use of the cogs image - https://www.flickr.com/photos/ensh/5084228263/_


Here is why Microsoft Teams is vital to cut down a cacophony of Collaboration Tools

Much has been discussed about why the results of the last US Presidential election and the UK referendum on leaving Europe were a surprising result but many of the analyses have agreed that a large part of both was a protest on the current state of affairs and a feeling that voices were not being heard. While I have my own feeling on both of the votes, the interesting thing for people working in the Digital Workplace realm is how similar things could happen in their own space. Both campaigns saw a large amount of polarisation of opinions with people tending to show a huge pull one way or another and not being willing to enter debate on middle grounds that much.

## Squeezing the middle

The risk for Digital Workplaces is that the same polarisation occurs. It is easy to focus on the people that are technically savvy and happy to change their tools on a regular basis. They often have the latest phones and many apps on them, distracting them left, right and centre. They will have accounts on all the major social networks and probably have some in some of the smaller ones too. They will be happy to understand where they use each one, knowing that LinkedIn is best for work connections but you wouldn't link with your Mum while sharing your Facebook account with your boss may be a risk not worth taking. Taking this to work, they are comfortable that they could use Jira, Planner, Outlook or Excel for planning work and different tools work better in different situations. If you have a large development tracking enhancements to a product, Jira works beautifully. If you're keeping track of your daily tasks, pulling tasks out of your mail and in to an Outlook task is just fine (in fact, Cortana can even now pull these out automatically -http://mashable.com/2016/01/25/microsoft-cortana-email-reminders/#cyYF6smmUkqu)

At the same time, Digital Workplaces need to consider the people that are delivering meaningful work using email regularly, who are happy with their current set of PowerPoint templates and are meeting all their objectives. It is easy to sound dismissive of this but the highest paid traders and salesman who bring in the biggest accounts are usually not the people who collaborate most on a corporate network. They know and understand their network and what they need to do to get things done. They can still be helped by the Digital Workplace but to keep pushing new tools on to them will only make them more against the changes being encouraged.

## So how do you help make sure that everyone can benefit?

Firstly, make sure you know what your overall strategy is. It's unlikely that getting as many people on Yammer as possible is actually the aim - you are more likely want to be able to help facilitate connections between areas of common interest. That may involve getting as many people as possible but is not the overall aim. The best way to set out this strategy is to agree on a one line vision statement. To many people, this feels cheesy and cliched but the discussion helps to ensure that all who are closely involved are comfortable that they are thinking the same way.

This leads on to defining your personas who are in the workplace. These should certainly fit your own organisation rather than from a boilerplate template but try to have no more than 4-5 and they could fit:

- Enthusiastic engager
- Follower of the pack
- Quiet observer
- Not interested

Do not spend too long discussing the nuances between these at this stage as the next step is to identify how you will place everyone in the organisation in to one of these personas. Obviously, sticking a post-it note to a wall for each person is not realistic for most larger organisations and you are unlikely to have a single group together that can know everyone. Instead, focus on metrics. Work out what you think people in each of the personas do and then identify metrics for that. One trick I have found useful with this is to think firstly of some natural fits that I know for each of the personas and then some people that blur the edges. Think about how the measures would identify these people and then either refine the analysis or the personas.

Once you have a way of identifying people to each persona, you can start on a plan of how you will engage with each group. This could be communications, training, meeting face to face or just leaving as they are. It could be changing the tone of some of your material to better suit different personas or even delivering different tools or enhancements to those tools. For example, people who have used SharePoint regularly get used to some of the quirks of one editting and webparts but if people only occasionally work with changing their content, it is not easy to know what to do. Products such as WalkMe offer a contextual help to people where they can ask simple or trickier questions and be guided through the right process. This will soon start to be supplanted by bots which understand who you are and what you have asked before, tailoring responses accordingly.

So there you have it all - your vision, your personas, your metrics and your actions to take. You can sit back, relax and maybe sip a cool gin & tonic happy in a job well doneΓÇª.or you could go back to your measures and see if you are helping each persona enough. Are you seeing a shift to the more engaged and a drop in the number of not engaged? If not, why not? Time to get back out there and speak to people, get some feedback, review what people are doing instead of what you had hoped. Much like politics, it never really ends, just moves on to the next thing.

Some may find this depressing but this is where opportunity starts. The chance to take new ideas to help people be more connected and productive, to make life easier to do the simple things so they can focus on the important things.

Could the same be applied to the US elections and Brexit negotiations? Not to the same degree but the same logic applies. Try and understand what it is that people are finding hard and help with that. Easy, right?


Trump, Brexit and The Digital Workplace - yes, I'm going there

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<iframe width="760px" height="500px" src="https://sway.com/s/jSO6bKz9IXsWQmL2/embed" frameborder="0" marginwidth="0" marginheight="0" scrolling="no" style="border: none; max-width:100%; max-height:100vh" allowfullscreen webkitallowfullscreen mozallowfullscreen msallowfullscreen></iframe>

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