Our colleagues Tom Ysewyn and Mathias Croket have a busy month behind them. That’s the least we can say. Not only did the teams of Xylos Learning and OASE launch a new, comprehensive digital productivity training service together on May 2nd (Productivity Camp). In the end of April, they also crossed the ocean to visit Microsoft’s headquarters in Seattle and attend the ACM LEAP event. The perfect occasion to get up to date on everything Adoption and Change Management technology has to offer, now and in the near future.
Xylos is back from ACM LEAP
3 key topics and takeaways from the exclusive partner event
Below in this article and in the video, Tom and Mathias go over the topics that triggered them the most, during the event. One major advantage in general, they state, was getting really linked up with people at Microsoft and listening to speakers from product teams, many of which report directly to Satya Naydella. Together with the Dutch Microsoft partners they joined on the trip, they had both a fun and great educational experience.
Tom and Mathias, reporting back from ACM LEAP (in Dutch)
Top topic #1: Microsoft Viva
Brad McCabe (Group Product Marketing Manager), Erik Anderson (Head of Product and Research, Viva Insights): just the speakers alone made it more than worthwhile to follow the sessions. The key thing that became instantly clear, was that we’ve only seen the beginning of Viva. Microsoft has exhilarating plans with the Employee Experience platform. Many of which Microsoft are yet to communicate publicly themselves.
Tom remarks that Viva Connections is the fundament on which other elements of Viva are built, so to speak. The perception people sometimes have that Viva Connections is simply an integration of an intranet platform in Microsoft Teams, is clearly false. With Viva Connections, Microsoft is developing a uniform way to allow for direct communication throughout essential Modern Workplace tools, like Teams, Outlook, intranet and others.
What also sparked Tom’s and Mathias’ interest: recent Microsoft acquisitions like Ally.io and… Glint. Yes, Glint is coming to Viva Insights in 2023. That means Viva Insights data will be enriched beyond data from Microsoft 365. A major advancement.
Top topic #2: Enabling frontline work
Raj Gopalakrishnan (Sr. Director, Strategic Customer Engineering) brought a great session with focus on front line workers. A very important element here is of course the hardware of the frontline worker that tends to differ from a typical office worker. For that aspect, Microsoft continues to build partnerships that allow them to concoct the best possible end-solution for the diverse personas. Perhaps even more crucial here, is of course the aspect of change and adoption. PC devices have been around for a while in the typical office context. People that work in stores, warehouses or healthcare, for instance, are often only just getting acquainted with the new way of working.
Also, the key, as Microsoft suggests more than strongly, is limiting what the end user is confronted with, to the strictly necessary and streamlining the technology as much as possible. A frontline worker that uses the mobile Teams app, shouldn’t be cluttered with the entire Teams environment.
Viva Connections will, by the way, be an essential tool to direct data and tools more precisely to the right end user. Also, to be expected: new interesting license formulas for frontline workers.
Top topic #3: Driving Digital Transformation with Microsoft Productivity Score
Both our Learning Digital Team Lead and our Partner Business Development Manager for OASE were pleasantly surprised by this session by Shilpi Sinha (Group Program Manager).
Microsoft Productivity Score will continue to evolve, not just in terms of its look-and-feel (which you can already notice today). Right now, the tool already gives great insights on communication (via e-mail or Teams), meetings, content collaboration, teamwork and mobility. In a nutshell, soon enough, it will enable organizations more and more to undertake concrete actions based on productivity insights.
In case you would like a preview from Xylos, don’t hesitate to contact us.
Other top topics: Power Apps and Security adoption
The possibilities of Power Apps is something we’re particularly active about at Xylos. So, it comes as no surprise to see our colleagues highlighting it. Due to a non-disclosure agreement, they cannot reveal much detail yet, but it boils down to the fact that Microsoft will make the dataverse more accessible and the tool more powerful. It will allow users to raise the level of their programming.
As for security, today many organizations do have E3 and E5 licenses but are not really making enough use of these. Microsoft is going to raise its efforts to get organizations to adopt things like MFA, thread analysis and compliance management. Something, our security and digital adoption experts at Xylos can only salute. Another fact Tom and Mathias were happy to learn about: the introduction of a Microsoft Security Score (analogous with the Microsoft Productivity Score).
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