One of my favorite new Microsoft Teams features - |
 | This is a great way to further engage new colleagues, younger personnel, or mentees in the "meat" of your meetings on Microsoft Teams. And - it's available now. |
Realizing I haven't blogged at all over the last year is, I suppose, one of those personal self-discoveries we were all challenged to learn over the last year due to the seismic impact of Covid-19. One thing we've all become better at in work and personal life is virtual / video meeting.
For Teams, there are some great enhancements to administration, sharing, engagement, and live events - but one that I want to highlight is Live Meeting Transcription.
Do you participate in regular or recurring meetings? Perhaps for strategic planning, project management? Following our Women's History Month theme, do you find that - as a woman - you might be expected to capture action items and notes for your meetings? Your life in Teams is about to get easier. Besides being a tool that you can utilize to break the group habit of expecting the woman in the group, or the new hire, or the junior member to take meeting notes - now you can turn on Live Transcription.
For Teams, there are some great enhancements to administration, sharing, engagement, and live events - but one that I want to highlight is Live Meeting Transcription.
Do you participate in regular or recurring meetings? Perhaps for strategic planning, project management? Following our Women's History Month theme, do you find that - as a woman - you might be expected to capture action items and notes for your meetings? Your life in Teams is about to get easier. Besides being a tool that you can utilize to break the group habit of expecting the woman in the group, or the new hire, or the junior member to take meeting notes - now you can turn on Live Transcription.
This article provides a good overview and demo, and this MS Doc info provides some detail. At the time of drafting this blog entry, neither had step-by-step instructions so I've created them here, with a screenshot below.
- Transcription must be enabled by a Global admin, and depending on your tenant seat volume, it could take 48-72 hours to deploy globally.
- Visit 365 Admin Center
- Visit Teams Admin Center
- Select Meetings / Meeting Policies tabs at left
- Create new or modify an existing one (I added the one for my tenant to Global policy, because I want to empower everyone to use technology to do some of their lesser-value, time impact work)
- Under Audio & Video heading, turn on the slider for Allow Transcription
Caveats:
- Right now there is no automated Governance around the Teams Transcription creations in the Teams channel.
- Someone from a recurring meeting group would still need to scan transcriptions for ACTION ITEM or FOLLOW UP or a few key phrases to capture those from the meeting.
- I suspect a PowerAutomate / Flow is on the horizon that can help with this, or perhaps the AI in Viva will do this for users in the near future.
| ALSO: | There are a TON of great new features that the Work From Anywhere shift has illustrated, and the Microsoft Teams folks have worked to quickly implement. Chris O'Brien, a Microsoft MVP and prolific information sharer, has blogged about the Big 4 groups of announcements from the March 2021 Virtual Ignite, and you can read more about Viva, Compliance, Azure, and Teams here. |
Teams Announcements Summary by Chris O'Brien, Microsoft MVP
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Happy International Women's Day! I first learned of this global celebration while in Norway in 2005. I was shopping for shoes at a mall, and kept being handed a long stem rose in each store I visited, and as I exited the mall. I had to ask my colleague Anita Holmebakken Jakobsen what it all meant. Then we were both surprised it wasn't a 'thing' in America.
I'm happy to say that it is more a 'thing' in America than it has ever been before, for lots of reasons. I applaud all who take the time on this day to recognize the efforts women have been making historically in order to be taken with equal seriousness and respect as men, and applaud all male allies who have worked to further equality. It started over a century ago motivated by women demanding the right to vote and hold office.
We all have an opportunity to call out bias and inequality, in any form. Collectively, we can all help create a more inclusive world. From challenge comes change, so let's all choose to challenge.
#ChooseToChallenge #choosetochallenge2021 #IWD2021
I'm happy to say that it is more a 'thing' in America than it has ever been before, for lots of reasons. I applaud all who take the time on this day to recognize the efforts women have been making historically in order to be taken with equal seriousness and respect as men, and applaud all male allies who have worked to further equality. It started over a century ago motivated by women demanding the right to vote and hold office.
We all have an opportunity to call out bias and inequality, in any form. Collectively, we can all help create a more inclusive world. From challenge comes change, so let's all choose to challenge.
#ChooseToChallenge #choosetochallenge2021 #IWD2021
Image from Sarah Rose Creative; the 2021 IWD Theme: Choose to Challenge
| Our local internet service provider, TCT West, is working toward eliminating email hosting from their services. As a result, letters have been sent to tct email users of other no-cost email platforms. Their website also hosts an informative FAQ to help people through the process, and customers may also dial 611 to speak to a customer service agent directly. However, there are those of us who prefer to make an electronic change like this with the help of a live person to help guide us along the way. |  Live Training Events Schedule |
We are having a "Road Tour" of live, hands-on classroom events. Bring your laptops, phones, tablets, and perform the step-by-step instructions live on the classroom Wi-Fi. Have a large desktop unit at home, but you don't want to unplug 12 million cables? No problem - the classes will also provide handouts illustrating the same exact steps that we'll be doing live, so that you can repeat them at home on larger computers.
I'd like to thank TCT West for partnering up with Paintrock Consulting to offer a community education and support forum as part of their email changes.
I'd like to thank TCT West for partnering up with Paintrock Consulting to offer a community education and support forum as part of their email changes.
I predicted this 18 months ago....but today at a tech conference in China, Microsoft has announced that its new Windows 10 Operating System will be free to anyone using Windows 7 or later. Previous articles mentioned that Windows 10 was floating the idea of a subscription service, but 18 months ago, Apple announced that they were doing away with the pay-for-operating-system structure, and Microsoft is wise to follow suit.
Last quarter Microsoft’s revenue from consumer licensing accounted for only 16 percent of the company revenue, down from 23 percent the previous year. With Apple and Google Chromebooks slowly eating into Microsoft’s market share, a non-paying customer is better than no customer at all.
As I mused earlier, the business world, for the most part, runs on Microsoft Office. It's a smart move for Apple; it would be equally so for Microsoft.
Last quarter Microsoft’s revenue from consumer licensing accounted for only 16 percent of the company revenue, down from 23 percent the previous year. With Apple and Google Chromebooks slowly eating into Microsoft’s market share, a non-paying customer is better than no customer at all.
As I mused earlier, the business world, for the most part, runs on Microsoft Office. It's a smart move for Apple; it would be equally so for Microsoft.
The General Accounting Office (GAO) has issued a report detailing the failures of the healthcare.gov website, and the findings are astounding - starting with the billion (yes, with a B) dollar price tag. Regardless of your thoughts about the policy, the report provides some great lessons learned for IT Project Managers.
The biggest culprits that the GAO study identifies are ineffective planning, ineffective oversight, and ineffective contract management. I've written about this to some degree before, when a study completed 9 months prior to the website's rollout identified numerous issues that weren't resolved. The GAO study dives a bit deeper into these issues.
CMS, Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, undertook the website development project. They incurred significant cost increases, schedule slips, and delayed system functionality due primarily to changing requirements that were exacerbated by oversight gaps.
The study concludes that the efforts by CMS were plagued by undefined requirements, the absence of a required acquisition strategy, confusion in contract administration responsibilities, and ineffective use of oversight tools. In addition, CMS did not adhere to the governance model designed for the process, resulting in design and readiness reviews being diminished in importance, delayed, or skipped entirely. By combining that governance model with a new IT development approach the agency had not tried before, CMS added even more uncertainty and potential risk to their process. The result was that problems were not discovered until late, and only after costs had grown significantly.
What does this mean for you? Well, besides having to pay the price for ineffective project management, it also provides a lessons-learned opportunity when pursuing your own IT projects. If you have any hesitation on launching your new IT projects, it pays to have experienced professionals guide you on the front end as opposed to suffering a public meltdown and significant cost overruns on the tail end.
If you have an IT Project on the horizon, Paintrock Consulting can help you manage that project effectively and efficiently. From helping you shape your scope requirements into information that is logical to developers, to determining which project management methodology is best for your goals, to implementing and managing your project and helping you secure additional short-term resources that can come together to help your organization reach its goals - let us help!
The biggest culprits that the GAO study identifies are ineffective planning, ineffective oversight, and ineffective contract management. I've written about this to some degree before, when a study completed 9 months prior to the website's rollout identified numerous issues that weren't resolved. The GAO study dives a bit deeper into these issues.
CMS, Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, undertook the website development project. They incurred significant cost increases, schedule slips, and delayed system functionality due primarily to changing requirements that were exacerbated by oversight gaps.
The study concludes that the efforts by CMS were plagued by undefined requirements, the absence of a required acquisition strategy, confusion in contract administration responsibilities, and ineffective use of oversight tools. In addition, CMS did not adhere to the governance model designed for the process, resulting in design and readiness reviews being diminished in importance, delayed, or skipped entirely. By combining that governance model with a new IT development approach the agency had not tried before, CMS added even more uncertainty and potential risk to their process. The result was that problems were not discovered until late, and only after costs had grown significantly.
What does this mean for you? Well, besides having to pay the price for ineffective project management, it also provides a lessons-learned opportunity when pursuing your own IT projects. If you have any hesitation on launching your new IT projects, it pays to have experienced professionals guide you on the front end as opposed to suffering a public meltdown and significant cost overruns on the tail end.
If you have an IT Project on the horizon, Paintrock Consulting can help you manage that project effectively and efficiently. From helping you shape your scope requirements into information that is logical to developers, to determining which project management methodology is best for your goals, to implementing and managing your project and helping you secure additional short-term resources that can come together to help your organization reach its goals - let us help!
How connected is IT within your Business? I mean more than connected...to the internet. A new Forrester Research survey commissioned by Effective UI (User Interface) finds that approximately 39% of the IT Executives polled believe that their internal IT organizations deliver projects on time, and on budget.
Think about that for a minute. Thirty-nine percent of anything, for most people, would represent failure. Let me illustrate that another way:
Think about that for a minute. Thirty-nine percent of anything, for most people, would represent failure. Let me illustrate that another way:
The eye-opening part of the above statement is that this is considered pretty normal. Other studies peg that success rate at closer to 30%. Several reasons are cited for this, and I can second many of them from my own experience.
Notably, larger companies have a lack of Business and IT alignment internally. This creates an us-versus-them mentality, particularly when budget dollars are closely held. It creates walled little cube-lands where information is hoarded rather than shared, and self-preservation ranks higher than collaboration.
Drilling deeper into some of the issues are continuously changing requirements midstream (this is where Agile or Waterfall IT Project Management techniques can help), overburdened in-house IT organizations, and lack of big-picture project management skills or experience in house for IT projects.
Paintrock Consulting Services can help you beat that paltry 39% success rate across the industry, because we allow you to focus on your core business. We work with stakeholders at each level of your organization to help shape your IT project. We can manage a portion or an entire IT project, including development and testing process, security, collaboration platforms, cloud services, coordinating local and offshore teams, new technology deployments, communication and training planning, and stakeholder engagement.
This work should be done in alignment with your business's goals and objectives, using your brand and voice for consistency to communicate your changes, and in collaboration with - not in opposition to - your existing departments.
Notably, larger companies have a lack of Business and IT alignment internally. This creates an us-versus-them mentality, particularly when budget dollars are closely held. It creates walled little cube-lands where information is hoarded rather than shared, and self-preservation ranks higher than collaboration.
Drilling deeper into some of the issues are continuously changing requirements midstream (this is where Agile or Waterfall IT Project Management techniques can help), overburdened in-house IT organizations, and lack of big-picture project management skills or experience in house for IT projects.
Paintrock Consulting Services can help you beat that paltry 39% success rate across the industry, because we allow you to focus on your core business. We work with stakeholders at each level of your organization to help shape your IT project. We can manage a portion or an entire IT project, including development and testing process, security, collaboration platforms, cloud services, coordinating local and offshore teams, new technology deployments, communication and training planning, and stakeholder engagement.
This work should be done in alignment with your business's goals and objectives, using your brand and voice for consistency to communicate your changes, and in collaboration with - not in opposition to - your existing departments.
I'm proud to announce that I was voted as one of Hyattville Community Center's new Board Members recently, while out of town! My first order of duty was to migrate our outdated and unused website. It had been hosted as a free community service by a company that was decommissioning the option, and the platform used to create it ceased being supported by its maker in 2003.
It also had to meet the following specifications; the first and most important of which was FREE hosting. This was difficult, but we landed on Blogger (over Wordpress, for a variety of reasons). Once that was decided, the community desired the following - which required notable customization due to the platform. That included some of the following:
It also had to meet the following specifications; the first and most important of which was FREE hosting. This was difficult, but we landed on Blogger (over Wordpress, for a variety of reasons). Once that was decided, the community desired the following - which required notable customization due to the platform. That included some of the following:
- Addition of page / tabs at top
- Free email
- Free cloud / community access to documents
- Free online reservation for the community center
- Free online calendar of events
- Ease of navigation
- Customizing the blog platform to function more like a landing page with recent and archived information
- An easy way to contact the Board
- Responsive design, particularly for iPad readers
- Commenting option on articles / blog posts
- Linking and/or integration with a Facebook page (also a new mini project)
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