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MVP Webinar Series Highlights – Advancing Modern Work Through Microsoft Teams Part 2

CMMA Blog

MVP Webinar Series Highlights – Advancing Modern Work Through Microsoft Teams Part II

Microsoft Teams has proved to be an invaluable tool, enabling businesses to communicate and collaborate more effectively and efficiently. Microsoft Teams is a vast platform and navigating its extensive list of capabilities can be challenging. Our MVP series was developed for this purpose – to help users get the most out of their Teams subscription by connecting them with the foremost experts in the field.

From optimizing your network to uncovering Teams strategies and tools to improve your workflow, this webinar series covers a range of useful topics:

Episode 1: Optimizing Your Network for Microsoft Teams
Episode 2: Empowering Collaboration with Microsoft Teams Devices
Episode 3: Developing Inclusive Communications Through Microsoft Teams
Episode 4: Supporting Neurodiversity with Microsoft Teams

In this article, we will briefly recap episodes three and four, highlighting some of the top tips from each episode. Highlights from episodes one and two can be seen in part one of our webinar series highlights .

Episode 3: Developing Inclusive Communications Through Microsoft Teams

With millions of users working daily in Microsoft Teams, companies must understand the different video-based communication and collaboration interfaces available before choosing the right format for any given situation. In episode three Daniel Glenn , M365 Apps & Services MVP, walks you through:

  • Using Live Events and Webinars
  • Breakout Rooms and when to use them
  • Using video to communicate through Microsoft Teams
  • Viva Engage and Microsoft Teams

In the clip below, Daniel when and how to use breakout rooms to increase engagement and collaboration in meetings.


Tips for Creating Inclusive Meetings

  1. Select the best type of meeting – Understand the capabilities of each meeting type and pick the interface that best matches your participant’s needs.
  2. Use breakout rooms – Large meetings can deter engagement. Breakout rooms create smaller spaces that make it easier and more comfortable for people to interact and share with the group.
  3. Turn your video on – Video shows people that you are engaged. It also allows them to understand your level of commitment while letting them engage with you more easily.
  4. Connect with Viva Engage – Use Viva Engage to connect with leadership and communities, share knowledge, and spark engagement.

Episode 4: Supporting Neurodiversity with Microsoft Teams

Global studies estimate that as much as 40% of the population lives with cognitive differences like ADHD, dyslexia, and dyspraxia. In theory, at least one person you work with has a cognitive difference. This means that they may communicate, consume, and interpret things differently.

Episode four features Megan Strant and Loryan Strant , M365 Apps & Services MVPs who share tools available on the M365 platform that support neurodiverse individuals and help them work more efficiently. In this episode, they cover:

  • Enhanced focus
  • Reading and writing
  • Leveraging audio and video tools
  • Other M365 app enhancements

In the clip below, Megan Strant and Loryan Strant discuss the Enhanced Focus tools that are available in Microsoft Teams and how they can be used to improve your workflow.

Tips for Creating Enhanced Focus

  1. Viva Insights Focus Time – Carve out time to focus and get work done. The Focus Time feature automatically schedules focus time for you, sets your status to “Focus” to alert others, mutes notifications and gives you reports to track how much focus time you honored.
  2. Teams presence and status messages – A Focus mode status is only sometimes enough to deter people from booking a meeting or messaging you. You can manually change your Teams status to let people know you are unavailable and add a status message to let them know why you can’t respond immediately and/or when you will be available again.
  3. Tuning out – Sometimes you need to tune out all the beeps that can derail your focus and reduce the noise and distractions. Learning to manage notifications for posts and chats and leaving meeting chats that you are not attending can help cut the volume. If a conversation has caught your attention and there is an action item in there, rather than becoming a part of the conversation, consider using “Create a Task” to help narrow your focus and return to it when you are ready.

Explore Each Topic On-Demand

Microsoft Teams has become an integral tool in the modern workplace, enabling seamless communication and collaboration regardless of device or location. The multitude of features in the Teams platform can be overwhelming to approach on your own. However, by leveraging the tips and strategies provided by the Microsoft MVPs who joined us for this series, you can easily get the most out of your Teams subscription while improving your workflow.

The post MVP Webinar Series Highlights – Advancing Modern Work Through Microsoft Teams Part 2 appeared first on Kollective Technology .

To view our Partner blog, click here

How Kollective Solves for Hybrid Work

CMMA Blog

How Kollective Solves for Hybrid Work

In our previous article in this series , you learned about the difficulties of hybrid work as laid out by Microsoft’s study on the effects of remote work on collaboration among information workers. Microsoft’s researchers found that businesses need to adopt flexibility in their operational models and equip themselves with the technology to enable efficient collaboration and communication in hybrid work environments.

In this article, we examine why ECDNs are critical for enabling the hybrid workplace and explore how Kollective’s ECDN Platform and advanced analytics offer businesses an edge over other ECDN providers.

ECDNs Deliver Reliable Communications to Hybrid Offices

In hybrid work environments, collaboration and communications are more important than ever. Achieving a consistent user experience for high-quality video regardless of where employees access streams is essential to ensuring messaging is received and workflows remain productive. ECDNs address these concerns, delivering flawless communications to remote and in-office employees, facilitating collaboration between teams, and keeping employees engaged.

Without an ECDN, the benefits of communication platforms like Microsoft Teams cannot be fully realized. As more companies adapt to this new model of work, those who do not equip themselves with the proper technology risk falling behind the competition.

Dependable Stream Quality

Over the course of the pandemic, workers have grown accustomed to high-quality video streams that most in-home networks provide. With fewer people in the office, many businesses have reduced their bandwidth needs. As more employees begin returning to the office, corporate networks are primed for failure. Company meetings with large viewership; including All-Hands, trainings, CEO addresses and more, can create strain on networks, resulting in jittery streams, buffering and a failed live event. This often leads to low levels of employee engagement and delays essential messaging, reducing output and creating potential bottlenecks.

Happy Leadership

Businesses dedicate lots of time, money, and manpower investing in high-quality streaming events. As such, CEOs expect them to be executed flawlessly. Live events and one-to-many communications performed without an ECDN have a high-risk of overloading your corporate network. Unsuccessful and failed events will set your business behind, resulting in operational delays and frustrated leadership.

Effects on Business Applications

With companies directing more of their critical applications to the cloud, corporate networks have become a lifeline for most businesses. Simultaneous video requests without an ECDN can rapidly overload a network, causing mission critical applications (e.g., financial systems, sales tracking, project management tools) to fail.

Scaling Live Events

Enterprises with large amounts of bandwidth, but no ECDN still struggle to deliver live events at scale without suffering issues to their network, stream quality or both. We have witnessed that even a low percentage of in-office employees watching simultaneous streams can wreak havoc on networks. ECDNs offset this load, enabling businesses to deliver live events and VODs securely at scale to their global workforce.

How Kollective’s ECDN Solves for Hybrid Work

Kollective is the only ECDN platform to offer a comprehensive delivery solution: Agent-Based Peering, Browser-Based Peering, and EdgeCache. This suite of solutions, the logic that connects them, and the unified analytics they provide, set Kollective apart from other ECDNs. The Kollective Platform provides best-in-class coverage, and when combined they address an array of use cases your business is likely to encounter during day-to-day operations. Let’s explore how the Kollective Platform addresses the essential concerns of hybrid work.

Complete Coverage

Henry Ford famously said, “Coming together is a beginning, staying together is progress, working together is success.” Enabling teams to work together is one of the main goals of Kollective’s ECDN platform. Consistent communications that are free of delays are key to replicating in-office collaboration. This is the primary focus of Kollective’s ECDN: we provide reliable coverage regardless of your network’s complexity. Kollective’s solutions are easy to test and can be implemented in minutes. Kollective is also the only platform on the market to connect peering and caching technology through intelligent logic. This allows our solutions to communicate with each other to determine the most efficient content delivery method each time a request is made.

China and Remote Locations

Any company with regular business ties to China understands the headaches caused by delivering content through the “Great Firewall of China.” Kollective’s new EdgeCache solution helps alleviate this by essentially bypassing the firewall. By placing one of Kollective’s EdgeCache virtual applications inside of your network in China, users no longer have to request content from outside the “Great Firewall of China.” Instead, they can source live video and video on-demand (VOD) directly from the EdgeCache. This reduces the load on your internet gateway and more effectively delivers content to your workforce.

The same is true of remote office locations, like oil rigs or manufacturing plants. Kollective’s EdgeCache keeps your offices connected and informed, regardless of location.

Real-Time Analytics and Business Intelligence

Businesses have had to constantly assess and adapt their hybrid work strategies since the beginning of the pandemic. Kollective’s advanced analytics platforms, Kollective IQ and Kollective Free Analytics , supply the telemetry leadership needs to understand the current state of hybrid work across the enterprise. They also provide the intelligence required to determine the best solutions moving forward. Learn Kollective’s real-time analytics can benefit your hybrid strategy here .

Accelerate Your Hybrid Work Strategy With Kollective

Kollective provides best-in-class support to customers no matter where they are in their video journey.

  • Not ready for an ECDN? Try Kollective Free Analytics to determine whether your communications strategy could benefit from an ECDN.
  • Need help developing a video strategy? Contact our EVS team for a free consultation.
  • Need help getting started? Kollective offers 24/7 global support through our in-region and in-language teams.

The post How Kollective Solves for Hybrid Work appeared first on Kollective Technology .

To view our Partner blog, click here

How Comms and IT Can Work Together to Streamline High-Quality Video Distribution

Best Practices

Leading a Communications team at an enterprise organization means you work cross-functionally with multiple departments, including the IT team. Although your goals may be different, when it comes to corporate communications, you share a common objective: Achieving a high-quality meeting experience for all employees on your network and ensuring delivery of a clear and concise message to your organization. In order to meet those goals, Kollective Technology recommends that both teams work together to make a few important decisions when it comes to your tech stack.  

Using the Right Tools 

With so many innovative workplace communication tools to choose from, it can get overwhelming if you don’t know exactly what you’re looking for. From applications like Microsoft Teams, built for seamless collaboration and communication, to your basic email or instant messaging program, there’s quite a long list to choose from.  

Sometimes these tools can be more of a burden than a benefit, especially if they’re not streamlined. Your team may primarily communicate big updates with your organization via email platform A, but when it’s time for a company-wide all hands meeting, your team prefers to run communications on Platform B because it has a live video function. When you use multiple communication platforms, it’s easy for employees to miss messages and get frustrated. More than half of workers say they feel overwhelmed by having to use multiple communication platforms , which is something that can be easily avoided.  

Selecting a single tool like Microsoft Teams allows for inter-department collaboration. With a single tool, you can deliver your message in a high-quality format and meet the needs of both the Communications and IT teams. After you’ve done your research, get in touch with your organization’s lead network architect and work together to select the video communications tool that meets your organization’s needs.  

Setting Expectations 

Not all departments “speak the same language” but if you want your company-wide communication to be successful, you’re going to have to find a way to effectively work with your friends in IT. One way to do so is by setting expectations up front. 

Examine what kind of user experience (UX) you want for your employees. UX is critical to the success of video communications because it asks things like:  

  1. Was the viewer able to watch event with limited interruptions? 
  2. How was the video and audio quality of the meeting? 
  3. Did the viewer understand the message that was being communicated?  

When both your Communications and IT teams have to report back to executive sponsors on the success of the event, UX is something you’ll need to include. But level setting UX expectations can be tricky, which is why Kollective has a formula that will help cross-functional teams work together to manage executives’ expectations. Kollective takes variables like time zones, survey response rate, job title, family, and attendance history into consideration when calculating expectations.  

It’s important for the Communications and IT teams to collaborate on expectations for live video events, setting clear roles and responsibilities ensures the best live video event experience for your employees. After you’ve set expectations and executed your first event, it’s time to dive into analytics .  

Diving into Analytics 

Analytics are critical to successful enterprise video strategy because they identify both wins and opportunities for improvement. To get the most detailed look into live event performance, you want a tool that gives you real-time analytics. These are the metrics that will provide the greatest insight: 

  • REACH SCORE: Sum of the number of reported users who viewed the content and the number of anonymous viewing sessions. Reach score provides insight into the total number of unique individuals reached by a live event.  
  • AVERAGE VIEW DURATION: The average amount of time a viewer was reported to have watched the event. Average view duration helps gauge company engagement when compared to baseline metrics.  
  • QUALITY OF EXPERIENCE (QOE) SCORE: Time spent displaying video relative to the total time spent both displaying video and buffering. It quantifies the quality of a live event giving insight into buffering and network bottlenecks.  
  • PEERING EFFECIENCY: Normalized percentage of bytes delivered via peering measures how efficiently network-connected devices transmit live video. 
  • BANDWIDTH SAVINGS: Percentage of bytes delivered via peering highlights ECDN effectiveness and network capacity.  
  • GEOGRAPHIC CONSUMPTION: Country-specific video deliveries displayed as a percent of total deliveries for all content on a scale of 0% to 100%. This figure gives global enterprises the opportunity to see how messaging is received globally.  

For your Communications Team, analytics like reach score, geographic consumption and average view duration are most helpful when breaking down what content employees engaged with and how engaged they were based on location. For the IT team, learnings from QOE score, peering efficiency and bandwidth savings will help quantify how well the meeting tech worked and give insight on what improvements need to be made for next time.   

Set Your Enterprise Video Strategy 

Now that you’ve picked a platform, outlined expectations, and know which analytics are important, you’re ready to finetune your enterprise video strategy. Kollective offers organizations with 1,000+ employees a free one-hour virtual workshop with one of our Event Services Consultants. During this session, you’ll learn: 

  • Live event best practices to ensure success 
  • Advice and links to helpful live event resources 
  • And, if you are a Microsoft O365 customer, a copy of the Kollective Live Event Playbook for Microsoft Teams Live Event 

Streamlining your workplace communication tools and working with your IT team is imperative for curbing burnout and running an efficient business. Let Kollective show you how your Communications and IT teams can strategize and work together to deliver successful, high-quality live events today.  

The post How Comms and IT Can Work Together to Streamline High-Quality Video Distribution appeared first on Kollective Technology .

To view our Partner blog, click here

Teams Live Events Buffering Fix: Peer-to-Peer Streaming

browser-based peering

When distributing important video communications at scale, Teams Live Events is your organization’s most valuable tool, but buffering can ruin the experience for even the most committed employees. Make sure you keep them engaged by using peer-to-peer streaming to deliver the highest quality video at the lowest possible bandwidth.

How Video Buffering Impacts Employee Engagement 

Employee engagement is an important factor in workplace satisfaction and productivity. Interactive live events allow yous to effectively communicate with your team in a way that feels connected and collaborative for employees. When Teams Live Events go off without a hitch, they create an environment that feels more inclusive. However, when buffering is more common than the video itself employee engagement is negatively affected. 

As the distribution of live events and enterprise video communication grows, user expectation for high quality will increase as well. According to Understanding the Impact of Video Quality on User Engagement , “a 1% increase in buffering ratio can reduce user engagement by more than three minutes for a 90-minute live video event. We also see that the average bitrate plays a significantly more important role in the case of live content than VoD content.” 

IBM Watson Media also says 53% of employees report that video buffering is the largest detriment to workplace productivity, and lagging internet bandwidth is largely to blame.

What Causes Live Video Buffering? 

We’ve all experienced the dreaded, seemingly endless buffering icon during an important town hall or CEO update, but why does this happen most often in large, company-wide meetings? It’s simple – unstable internet connectivity due to an overloaded network. 

Enterprise organizations with multiple offices and satellite employees understand and have likely dealt with the challenges that come with broadcasting live and on-demand video to a distributed workforce. Most corporate networks do an excellent job handling the demand for one-to-one voice and video calls, but things can – and often do – go south quickly when trying to deliver video messages at scale.

Think of your network like a highway on college football gameday. Every other day of the week, it’s fine; traffic flows seamlessly. But on gameday, the hour before kickoff, traffic is a nightmare. What normally suffices as a two-lane road, needs to be expanded substantially to meet the needs of ticket holders. 

The same is true of your network. Without a solution in place to optimize it), the more employees who log on to participate in a live event, the more network bandwidth is needed, which can lead to substantial buffering – or even a crash.

How to Fix Teams Live Events Buffering

The quickest and most scalable way to fix r Teams Live Events buffering is to invest in an enterprise content delivery network (ECDN) powered by browser-based peering.

With a peering solution, your dispersed workforce can stream Teams Live Events without overloading and impacting your network. Browser-based peering uses your existing network – and an intelligent peer-to-peer architecture,to deliver content to your organization more efficiently. No hardware to buy, no software to install. Kollective’s browser-based peering solution scales these communications across your network, allowing you to deliver high-quality live video to your entire organization and achieve 100% delivery at only 1% the bandwidth. It’s so simple you can be up and running in just six clicks.

Image showing peering with Kollective ECDN

To see how it works, demo Kollective’s browser-based peering for yourself.

The post Teams Live Events Buffering Fix: Peer-to-Peer Streaming appeared first on Kollective Technology .

To view our Partner blog, click here

2021 Digital Transformation Trend: SD-WAN Optimization for Live Video

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One of the many things 2020 has shown us is the escalating need for digital transformation across all enterprise organizations. An increased IT spend focused on network optimization is absolutely necessary as your workplace transitions back to the office post-COVID, because while some pre-pandemic aspects of communication will remain the same, the need for video communication and expanded network bandwidth will increase at least tenfold.

DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION POST-COVID

Returning to the office to then deal with tech debt, dated software and outdated processes is an unnecessary hassle that you don’t have time to deal with. Companies that have started their transformation journeys are ready for the challenge of managing digital communications when the workforce returns.

Among the changes that we’ll see within the next year will be the move to a more distributed workforce and workplace, with digital experiences at the forefront, which will require multiple technologies and platforms connected by digital workflows. This will be the case no matter which one of your offices your employees are working in.

HOW IT BUDGETS WILL CHANGE IN 2021

As the need for digital transformation increases, so will worldwide IT spending. In 2021, spend is expected to reach $3.8 trillion, an increase of 4% from 2020, according to research firm Gartner . Specifically, enterprise software spending should also see tremendous growth in 2021 with an anticipated gain of 7.2%, due to enterprise digitalization efforts.

“In the 25 years that Gartner has been forecasting IT spending, never has there been a market with this much volatility,” said John-David Lovelock, distinguished research vice president at Gartner. “While there have been unique stressors imposed on all industries as the ongoing pandemic unfolds, the enterprises that were already more digital going into the crisis are doing better and will continue to thrive going into 2021.”

THE ERA OF CLOUD END-USER GROWTH

When enterprise organizations increase IT spend, Gartner also expects growth in public cloud to be sustained through 2024. In fact, recent Gartner survey data indicates that almost 70% of organizations using cloud services today plan to increase their cloud spending in the wake of the disruption caused by COVID-19.

“As CIOs think more strategically about how to lay the foundations to support a return to growth, it is clear that the move to digital and associated services will play a big role for organizations in the future,” said Sid Nag, research vice president at Gartner. “Cloud adoption therefore becomes a significant means to stay ahead in a post-COVID-19 world focused on agility and digital touchpoints.”

Network Impact of Increased Cloud Adoption

SD-WAN is a crucial technology that businesses need to invest in to thrive in the “new normal.” As cloud-adoption becomes more prevalent moving forward, the need for SD-WAN technology will continue to increase. Here’s why:

INCREASED DEMAND FOR ROBUST VIDEO QUALITY:

The days of in-person all hands meetings have been traded with back-to-back video calls. While businesses are planning to return to the office in the future, many will have employees stream enterprise video and live events at their individual workstations. Video communications have proven necessary for inclusivity and productivity during the pandemic, but a surge of users using video can completely bog down your network, causing lags and connectivity issues which can be frustrating and ultimately lead to decreased productivity. A simple fix for these issues is adopting a robust and higher bandwidth network connectivity, by way of an SD WAN.

BOOST BANDWIDTH WITHOUT BREAKING THE BANK:

Adding bandwidth to your network can be expensive. SD-WAN is an attractive option for increased bandwidth pressure because it’s a solution that can meet your demands while remaining cost-effective.

OPTIMIZE CENTRALLY OPTIMIZED NETWORKS:

Once you check the boxes for enterprise video quality and bandwidth, the next step is to ensure that IT teams have the resources needed to effectively operate networks from cloud-to-cloud. SD-WAN is a useful IT tool for network management because it provides full visibility into what’s happening across the network.

WHAT TO DO WHEN YOU NEED MORE ENTERPRISE BANDWIDTH

Simple. It’s time to optimize your network, and Kollective’s browser-based peering is the easiest and most efficient solution to solve your enterprise bandwidth needs. The browser-based peering solution scales video communication across your network, allowing you to achieve 100% delivery at 1% the bandwidth. Kollective’s superior user experience, seamless integration, global scalability, decision-based analytics and effortless onboarding. Kollective optimizes the network you have today, we use peering to distribute content efficiently.

Kollective Browsed-Based Peering offers:

  • Lower transit costs
  • Retain greater control of routing paths
  • Improve overall network performance
  • Increase redundancy by using multiple locations
  • Increase bandwidth capacity

Talk to an expert today to find out how Kollective can help you optimize your network in 2021.

The post 2021 Digital Transformation Trend: SD-WAN Optimization for Live Video appeared first on Kollective Technology .

To view our Partner blog, click here

Increase Executive Visibility with Live Video

CMMA Blog

In 2007, McKinsey & Company wrote an article on the CEO’s role in leading business transformation. More than a decade later, its central message still rings true:

“The role of CEOs is unique in that they stand at the top of the pyramid and all the other members of the organization take cues from them. CEOs who give only lip service to a transformation will find everyone else doing the same. Those who fail to model the desired mind-sets and behavior or who opt out of vital initiatives risk seeing the transformation lose focus. Only the boss of all bosses can ensure that the right people spend the right amount of time driving the necessary changes.”

In summary, the most effective CEOs are those who stand in front of their companies to assert meaningful change. Businesses undergoing digital transformation take note – if you want to increase adoption of new technologies, it must come from the top. Executives need to be visible to reinforce behaviors and values that make new ideas stick – Live Video can help.

Changes to the Global Workforce Driving Live Video Adoption

Prior to the COVID-19 crisis, Owl Labs reported that 52% of employees around the world worked from home at least one day a week. In the time since stay-at-home orders and social distancing were put into place however, millions more have transitioned to working remotely. Gartner recently surveyed 317 CFOs and business finance leaders and found that “74% of those surveyed expect at least 5% of their workforce who previously worked in company offices will become permanent work-from-home employees after the pandemic ends.”

This shift to remote working has significantly increased adoption of collaboration tools like Microsoft Teams – the platform added 31 million users in one month – and employees are increasingly turning to Live Video as a means of communicating with coworkers and leadership. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said, “As COVID-19 impacts every aspect of our work and life, we’ve seen two years’ worth of digital transformation in two months,”

This can partly be explained because Live Video offers offer many of the same benefits as face-to-face meetings. Whether you need to energize your company’s culture, navigate through challenging times or are trying to achieve buy-in for a corporate initiative, Live Video lets you leverage emotion and bond with a distributed workforce.

Employees Want More Communication from Leadership

Although 88% of employees say they’ve already heard at least a little from their employer regarding COVID-19 and business continuity, there is an appetite for more. Put simply, there is no such thing as overcommunicating.

Now is the time for CEOs and other business leaders to step into the spotlight to share regular video updates with employees. As the demand for communications continues to rise, it’s important to retain the quality of your Live Events. Ad hoc All Hands Meetings or CEO daily messages still need to be delivered professionally and without interruption.

Download the Visible Boss White Paper

The seamless incorporation of video into enterprise communication strategy and toolkits needs to come from the top. The Kollective team has developed a white paper, The Visible Boss, to provide practical advice from business leaders on effectively communicating via video.

Download it now to increase executive visibility and learn how to become a more visible boss.

The post Increase Executive Visibility with Live Video appeared first on Kollective Technology .

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