Archive for the ‘Teams collaboration remote access’ category

Microsoft 365 Copilot general availability and Microsoft 365 Chat

October 31st, 2023

Microsoft Copilot is a digital companion for a single Copilot user experience across Bing, Edge, Microsoft 365, and Windows.

Over the past few years, the pace and volume of work have increased. On a given workday, users typically search for what they need 18 times, receive over 250 Outlook emails, and send or read around 150 Teams chats. Teams users globally are in three times more meetings each week than they were in 2020. In Windows, some people use 11 apps in a single day to get their work done. Microsoft 365 Chat will help everyone lift the weight of work.

Last week’s announcement in New York impacts all the product line-up for commercial customers:

Microsoft Copilot in Windows to create faster and to complete tasks with ease and make once-complicated tasks simple. Find it on the taskbar or with the Win+C keyboard shortcut, to get assistance alongside all your apps. Copilot in Windows will feature the new Copilot icon, the new Copilot user experience, Bing Chat, and will be available to commercial customers for free.
Bing Chat Enterprise builds on Microsoft Copilot and adds commercial data protection. Bing Chat Enterprise, chat data is not saved, Microsoft has no eyes-on access, and your data is not used to train the large language models (LLM). Bing Chat Enterprise is available as a standalone for $5 per user per month and is included in Microsoft 365 E3 and Microsoft 365 E5. Bing Chat Enterprise is now available in the Microsoft Edge mobile app and Microsoft is bringing support for multimodal visual search and Image Creator to Bing Chat Enterprise. Bing Chat Enterprise is already part of Microsoft 365 E3 and E5, Business Standard, and Business Premium, which means more than 160 million people already have access.
Microsoft 365 Copilot is your AI assistant at work. It builds on Bing Chat Enterprise and includes enterprise-grade security, privacy, compliance. This responsible AI ensures that all data processing happens inside your proven Microsoft 365 tenant
. Microsoft 365 Chat is the new experience for Microsoft 365 Copilot and goes far beyond simple questions and answers. It combs across your entire universe of data—all your emails, meetings, chats, documents, and more, plus the web—to solve your most complex problems at work. It’s integrated into the Microsoft 365 Apps:Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, Teams, and more. Microsoft 365 Copilot will be generally available for enterprise customers for $30 per user per month on 1 November 2023.

Copilot in Outlook helps you stayon top of your inbox and create impactful communication in a fraction of the time.:

Ask Copilot to summarize an email thread to get key information with annotations that help you quickly jump to the source of the summarized content, and suggested action items, replies, and follow-up meetings.

Choose “Sound like me” tomatch your unique writing style and voice when you’re using Copilot to draft an email.
Follow a Teams meeting that you could not attend live, directly from Outlook on your own time. When the meeting starts, Teams notifies participants to record it. When the recording is ready, Copilot notifies you in Outlook.

Copilot in Word transforms every part of the writing process to make you more creative and efficient::

Ask Copilot for a summary of any document to share as a recap or quickly get up to speed, and Copilot will now deliver a more in-depth bulleted summation with all the information you need.
Ask Copilot to “rewrite” a paragraph, then scroll through a series of options to see what fits best. You can then adjust the rewrite tone to make it more neutral, casual, or professional.
Refine a prompt by asking Copilot to do things like “make answer more concise” or “add a column in the table for the project owner.”
Save time on formatting by asking Copilot to generate a table from your copy.

Copilot in Excel enables anyone to analyze and visualize data like a data analyst. :

with Copilot in Excel to help analyze, format, and edit your data to gain deeper understanding and insights.
Quickly add a formula column, highlight key data with a prompt like “make all cells red where the value is under 1000,” filter and sort your data, and ask questions to instantly uncover key insights.
Use Copilot to access advanced analytics; create powerful, professional visualizations, generate forecasts, and save time sorting through data with Python in Excel.

Copilot in Loop unlocks the power of shared thinking,helping teams cocreate, stay up to date, and pick up where others left off. :

Iterate with Copilot collaboratively as a team, cocreating prompts and reviewing earlier interactions to edit and improve on work together.
Ask Copilot to generate a quick table on the page to help organize team projects. You can easily turn the table into a Loop component to share with teammates wherever they’re working—in Teams, Outlook, Microsoft Whiteboard, and Word on the web.
Quickly catch up where your teammates left off by asking Copilot for a summary of a page or asking open-ended questions like “What key assignments were made since I was last on this page?”
Generate a recap for a teammate that you’re handing work off to, so they can get up to speed on any updates or changes.
Save time writing code with Copilot-suggested Code blocks that pop up automatically using the context of your work.

Copilot in OneNote helps you stay organized, prepared, and ready to take action. :

Gain deeper insights on your notes by asking comprehensive questions like: “What are the pros and cons of this process?”
Quickly generate summaries of your OneNote content.
Type just a few sentences and get a Copilot-generated paragraph, bulleted list, or organized section.
Make your writing clearer and more effective with a quick Copilot edit.

Copilot in Stream helps you find the insights and information you need from a video—in the Microsoft Stream web app or anywhere Stream videos work across Microsoft 365 apps—in seconds. :

Get a quick summary of the video with a transcript of the relevant spots you need to review.
Ask Copilot open-ended questions—“What was the discussion outcome?” “How did the site walkthrough go?”—to quickly understand outcomes and key points.
Ask Copilot to identify when people, teams, or topics are discussed, then jump right to that point in the video.
Ask Copilot for suggested follow-ups or actions from a video you missed.

Copilot in OneDrive helps you find all the insights and information you need—without ever opening a file.
Now you can:

Ask Copilot open-ended questions related to an individual file or get a summary of the content.

Copilot in Windows

In May, we announced that Copilot was coming to Windows 11. Copilot in Windows—in preview starting September 26—empowers you to create faster, complete tasks with ease, and lessens your cognitive load—making once complicated tasks, simple. We’ve made accessing the power of Copilot seamless as it’s always right there for you on the taskbar or with the Win+C keyboard shortcut providing assistance alongside all your apps, on all screen sizes at work, school, or at home. 

MANAGING COPILOT IN WINDOWS

To help bring Copilot to more people across more organizations, Windows 365 Boot and Windows 365 Switch will also be available in this update, making it easier than ever to get a full, secure, personalized Windows 365 Cloud PC with Copilot—on any device. 

Microsoft was recently recognized as a Leader in Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Desktop as a Service (DaaS).Copilot Copyright Commitment means customers can be confident using the Copilot services and the output they generate without worrying about copyright claims.

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Posted in Dynamics 365, Microsoft, Security and Compliance, Teams collaboration remote access, Technology

Copilot in Viva Topics ask Synergy Software Systems

April 26th, 2023

Microsoft Viva Topics applies next-generation AI to empower people with knowledge and expertise in the apps they use every day.

Viva Topics automatically organizes content and expertise into related topics like projects, products, processes, and customers.

Topic cards deliver knowledge just-in-time across Outlook, Microsoft Teams, and Office. And topic pages—created and updated by AI—enable experts to cultivate and share knowledge with simplicity.

New features that will free up time and make it easy for people to find information and to apply knowledge – including Copilot in Viva Topics, Teams app, and more.

Copilot in Viva Topics

Use Copilot in Viva Topics, in your organization’s to :

share intelligence to distribute best practices and knowledge to everyone
– uncover new opportunities b
summarise complex topics across multiple connected documents,
translate topic pages based on sources even in other languages,
analyze connections between what may seem disparate concepts
Then validate & augment the source of organizational knowledge to ensure accuracy and credibility.

Expected release for preview insSeptember 2023.

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Announcing Copilot in Viva Topics

Explore and query your organization’s knowledge graph with relevant people & resources

Answers in Viva

Copilot is also coming to Answers in Viva. When an employee asks a question, Copilot can:

suggest additional details to clarify of the question.
recommend existing resources and potential answers.
curate knowledge by providing a summary of all the replies and contributors
and to brings it all together into an aggregate view with FAQs, experts, and other resources.

These Copilot capabilities will use natural language AI interfaces to improve employee experience

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Announcing Copilot in Viva Topics

Copilot can help people provide answers to questions by recommending existing resources and potential answers.

Viva Topics Teams app:

The new Viva Topics app in Teams will be available for all licensed Viva Topics users.
You can now use the Viva Topics app in Teams as a destination to see ‘their’ associate Topics, and knowledge managers can even access Manage Topics and the upcoming analytics tab. You will no longer have to navigate out of Teams to access their Topic Center. The app will also include new Viva components that will allow Viva Suite users to easily transition between Viva apps, submit feedback, and get support.

Updates to this feature can be tracked should reach GA in May 2023.

Multi-Hop queries for Related Topics

This generally available version of Related Topics adds a second layer of connections so that topics that are two degrees of connection away from the focal node are shown. Click on a node to expand the visualization to show more topics connected to that node.

Viva Topics in Feed

Microsoft Feed is a dedicated Feed experience in Office.com and Edge New Tab Page that helps Microsoft 365 users feel connected and up to date on the people, topics, and tasks most important to them-files, meetings, tasks, news, links, people highlights and community posts.

Your Feed, will show you relevant Viva Topics. When a SharePoint object that is already associated with a Topic is shown in Feed items, you will see a corresponding Topic to help you further understand the context and do more. Only SharePoint objects that are associated with an existing Viva Topic are highlighted with a Topic.

Updates to this feature should be GA by end April 2023.

Viva Engage conversations and Q&A on Topic Card as Activity

Viva Topics will be a continuous source of information with Viva Engage conversations and Q&A associated with a topic appear on the Topic Card as new activity.

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Announcing Copilot in Viva Topics

Updates to this feature will reach GA in May 2023.

Verified Topic badges

Mark published topics as verified and add a specific group of SMEs as editors to the topic.

Verification helps readersto identify topics with added reliability.

Topics that are verified are identified by a special badge and indicate the content is reviewed for accuracy and are regularly updated by assigned editors.

Updates to this feature will reach GA in April 2023.

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Announcing Copilot in Viva Topics

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Announcing Copilot in Viva Topics

Topic engagement analytics for knowledge managers

Usage and engagement analytics showing Viva Topics adoption and value will be available to knowledge managers in a new analytics tab in topic center. Analytics will include:

• Unique user counts and Usage counts for:

o Topics activities overall
o By activities like consuming, contributing and sharing Topics

• Detailed breakdown for Topics consumption usage from Topic card, page, search, Topic center cards; Usage count details for;
• Detailed breakdown for Topics contribution activities like Editing and publishing topics, will provide feedback.

Updates to this feature will reach GA in May 2023.

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Announcing Copilot in Viva Topics

Topic Engagement Analytics for Admins

Usage and engagement analytics on topics (views, edits, etc.) to the Microsoft Admin Center for Admins.

Updates to this feature will reach GA in May 2023

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Announcing Copilot in Viva Topics

Control topic highlights on SharePoint

SharePoint includes a Viva Topics experience that identifies topics on SharePoint pages, news posts and automatically highlights those on the page.

Both page authors and editors can control which topics get highlighted on the page to ensure the messaging and styling of the content is accurate.

A new dedicated space for Viva Topics within SharePoint pages o discover and consume all the topics on the page in a single place without scrolling to look for a highlight.

Updates to this feature will reach GA in April 2023.

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Announcing Copilot in Viva Topics

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Announcing Copilot in Viva Topics

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Posted in Microsoft, Teams collaboration remote access, Technology

April 24th, 2023

Microsoft 365 Copilot combines the power of large language models (LLMs) with your data in the Microsoft Graph and the Microsoft 365 apps to turn your words into the most powerful productivity tool on the planet.

Microsoft Graph is the gateway to data and intelligence in Microsoft 365. It provides a unified programmability model to access the tremendous amount of data in Microsoft 365, Windows, and Enterprise Mobility + Security. Use the wealth of data in Microsoft Graph to build apps for organizations and consumers that interact with millions of users. Custom applications can use the Microsoft Graph API to connect to data and use it in custom applications to enhance organizational productivity.

Microsoft Graph provides a single endpoint that the app can use to access the required data and to simplify the overall development process.

Organizations store vast amounts of data and intelligence across Microsoft cloud services, but how accessible is the data to users?

For example, a salesperson is setting up a meeting with a customer, wants to easily access files and previous meetings and notes but are those emails and chats between a salesperson and customer easy to find? What people within the organization can the customer contact for support?

Data and intelligence like the following types can be accessed through the Microsoft Graph REST APIs and client libraries:

Users and groups
Teams data
Tasks
Files
Mail
Meetings and calendars
Organizational charts

Copilot is an AI-powered tool that uses natural language processing and machine learning to understand users’ requests and provide personalized recommendations, tips, and assistance. Users can ask Copilot questions and get instant answers, guidance, and suggestions to help them work more efficiently.

Copilot is designed to be available across multiple Microsoft 365 applications, including :Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Teams and Outlook, and is intended to be context-aware. It ‘understands’ the user’s specific needs and the task at hand. Some examples of this functionality are the ability to point copilot to a word document, and request to create a power point presentation based on the data in the document.

Copilot will also work with tools from the Power Platform and Dynamics 365 products. Copilot for Power Virtual Agents is already in preview.

Copilot enables marketers to create targeted customer experiences and interactions that are informed by data-driven decision making. With access to the natural language data discovery feature in Customer Insights, they can build confidence by validating and discovering customer insights for their marketing strategies. For example, a marketer can ask Copilot how many of their customers fit the profile of currently residing in Washington, DC, who are over the age of 25, who have also attended a promotional event in the last six months.

With just a few clicks, Copilot will present the results of their query, including the number of customers that match the attributes or behaviors, as well as other useful information such as the customer lifetime value, product preferences, or average purchase price.

Copilot in Dynamics 365 Customer Insights removes the barrier of needing to craft queries in SQL to get a deeper understanding of customers, enabling marketers to speed and scale the delivery of hyper-personalized experiences that customers expect.

Copilot in Viva Sales

Automatically generate contextual email replies and meeting summaries with Copilot in Viva Sales, available to Dynamics 365 Sales customers. Copilot in Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales and Viva Sales helps sellers dramatically reduce the time they spend on clerical tasks. AI helps write email responses to customers and can even create an email summary of a Teams meeting in Outlook. The meeting summary pulls in details from the seller’s CRM such as product and pricing information, as well as insights from the recorded Teams call. With sellers spending as much as 66% of their day checking and responding to emails, this presents a significant business upside to give the seller more time with their customers.

. For example, with Viva Sales, Copilot can learn how to connect to CRM systems of record to pull customer data — like interaction and order histories — into communications. As Copilot learns about new domains and processes, it will be able to perform even more sophisticated tasks and queries.

Copilot in Microsoft Viva Goals simplifies goal setting by guiding leaders through the process of creating objectives and key results (OKRs) as well as simplifying goal management across the organization. Copilot can suggest draft OKR recommendations based on existing Word documents, such as an annual business plan or a product strategy paper. Once created, Copilot saves employees time by summarizing the status of OKRs, identifying blockers, and suggesting next steps. Lastly, Copilot can consolidate existing data to generate more comprehensive check-ins so teams can leverage a breadth of knowledge across different sources of truth.

An entirely new experience is Business Chat that works across he Microsoft 365 apps, and your data — your calendar, emails, chats, documents, meetings and contacts — to do things you’ve never been able to do before. You can give it natural language prompts like “Tell my team how we updated the product strategy,” and it will generate a status update based on the morning’s meetings, emails and chat threads.

You will be able to access Business Chat from Microsoft 365.com, from Bing when you’re signed in with your work account, or from Teams.

Copilot will fundamentally change how people work with AI and how AI works with people. As with any new pattern of work, there’s a learning curve — but those who embrace this new way of working will quickly gain an edge. Copilot is integrated into Microsoft 365 and automatically inherits all your company’s valuable security, compliance, and privacy policies and processes. Two-factor authentication, compliance boundaries, privacy protections, and more make Copilot the AI solution you can trust.

I have only scratched the surface – Teams swept the business world during COVID now Co-Pilot and VIVA integrated across your favourite apps erps and crm systems – we often read about game changing software and paradigm shifts- but this times it’s for real and faster than we realise.

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Posted in Corporate Perfomance Management, Dynamics 365, Microsoft, Microsoft Dynamics CRM, Power Apps, Project Management, SCM, SharePoint and EPM, Teams collaboration remote access, Technology

CoPilot and Business Chat

March 17th, 2023

This week Microsoft demonstrated how its natural language AI capabilities in Microsoft 365 Copilot will extend across the company’s products and services.

Microsoft also owns a 49 percent share of OpenAI, a generative AI firm that announced the next iteration of its natural language AI chatbot.

Microsoft has already integrated ChatGPT into its: Azure cloud, the Bing search engine and the Edge browser, Microsoft 365 Copilot further promises to embed natural language querying capabilities into Office productivity tools in the Microsoft 365 apps like: Word, PowerPoint, Excel and Teams.

In a livestreamed presentation, CEO Satya Nadella positioned Copilot as a turning point in computer-user interactions. For years, AI has been working “behind the scenes” in search engines, auto-correct and recommendation lists. “You can say we’ve been using AI on autopilot,” Nadella said. The new generation of AI — specifically, natural language and generative AI — will let users run it “on co-pilot.” “We believe this next generation of AI will unlock a new wave of productivity growth,” he said.

Microsoft 365 Copilot similar to ChatGPT uses large language models (LLMs) with the Microsoft Graph API. It’s powered by the Copilot System, “a sophisticated processing and orchestration engine.”

“Copilot is more than OpenAI’s ChatGPT embedded into Microsoft 365. It’s a sophisticated processing and orchestration engine working behind the scenes to combine the power of LLMs, including GPT-4, with the Microsoft 365 apps and your business data in the Microsoft Graph — now accessible to everyone through natural language.” said Microsoft Corporate Vice President Jared Spataro

The demos showed how a user can prompt Microsoft 365 Copilot within in minutes or even seconds to:

Create a personalized slide deck in PowerPoint.
Highlight relevant data in an Excel sheet in response to a question.
Create a customized marketing document, as well as a corresponding PowerPoint presentation (with presenter notes).
Summarize a Teams meeting and identify calls to action.

Microsoft acknowledge that Microsoft 365 Copilot is not infallible as put it sometimes, it will “be usefully wrong”. A user might then choose to manually make edits, corrections or stylistic changes to the file that Copilot generated. , Sumit Chauhan, head of Microsoft’s Office product group, cautioned: “Now remember — you’re not going to send this off to a customer without a review.”

. Microsoft also debuted a brand-new feature on Thursday called Business Chat, which Spataro described as a “knowledge navigator” that users can access from Teams, Bing or Microsoft365.com. From his blog:

“Business Chat works across the LLM, the Microsoft 365 apps, and your data — your calendar, emails, chats, documents, meetings and contacts — to do things you’ve never been able to do before. You can give it natural language prompts like “Tell my team how we updated the product strategy,” and it will generate a status update based on the morning’s meetings, emails and chat threads. “

Jon Friedman, head of design and research at Microsoft said. “Our goal is to give people agency,” …. “You always have the option to use, discard, adjust or undo.”

Copilot has “mitigations against mistakes, biases and misuse, said Chief Microsoft Scientist Jamie Teevan,. “Every Copilot feature has passed privacy checks … and is monitored in real time,” “We’re going to make mistakes, but when we do, we’ll address them quickly.” she said.

Copilot has two-factor authentication enabled and will fall in line with the Microsoft 365 security, compliance and privacy policies that a company already has in place. It also has protections against data leakage, Spataro wrote:

“Copilot LLMs are not trained on your tenant data or your prompts. Within your tenant, our time-tested permissioning model ensures that data won’t leak across user groups. And on an individual level, Copilot presents only data you can access using the same technology that we’ve been using for years to secure customer data “

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Posted in Microsoft, Security and Compliance, Teams collaboration remote access

Microsoft Edge update will permanently disable the Internet Explorer 11 desktop web browser

December 19th, 2022

Microsoft announced last week that in February. 2023 a future Microsoft Edge update will permanently disable the Internet Explorer 11 desktop web browser on some Windows 10 systems.

115 June 22was the day Internet Explorer reached its end of support, and the company told customers that the legacy web browser would get disabled via a Windows update.

“The out-of-support Internet Explorer 11 (IE11) desktop application is scheduled to be permanently disabled on certain versions of Windows 10 devices on February 14, 2023, through a Microsoft Edge update, not a Windows update as previously communicated,” Redmond said on Friday.

“All remaining devices that have not already been redirected from IE11 to Microsoft Edge are scheduled to be redirected with the Microsoft Edge update scheduled for February 14, 2023.”

Enterprise admins should to transition from IE11 to Microsoft Edge with IE mode and remove IE visual references from the Start Menu and the Windows taskbar with the Disable IE policy before February 14 to avoid “business disruption at scale when users lose access to IE11-dependent applications.”

Next year’s May non-security preview release and the June Windows monthly security update are designed to remove those in environments where admins do not act before IE11 gets permanently disabled.

Internet Explorer will redirect users to the new Chromium-based Microsoft Edge when launching the Internet Explorer 11 desktop applications. During the process, users’ data (including settings, passwords, and favorites) will be imported into Microsoft Edge to make the switch easier.

Since October 2020, IE11 has automatically launchrd Microsoft Edge when visiting incompatible sites. The list of incompatible sites (managed by Microsoft) contains 7,562 domains, a long list of high-profile online platforms and services, including Facebook, Instagram, Google Drive, Microsoft Teams, Twitter, and many others.

Internet Explorer around for some time yet

Although officially retired from multiple Windows 10 versions on the semi-annual channel (SAC) servicing channel and not shipping with Windows 11, IE11 will still be available on Windows 7 ESU, Windows 8.1, and versions of Windows 10 LTSC client, IoT, and Server. The web browser will continue to receive technical support and security updates on systems that run these Windows versions for the lifecycle of the Windows version.

You can switch to Microsoft Edge with IE mode which enables backward compatibility and will be supported through at least 2029. To enable IE mode in Microsoft Edge, go to edge://settings/defaultbrowser, toggle on the ‘Allow sites to be reloaded in Internet Explorer‘ option, and restart the browser.

Microsoft also discontinued IE support in Teams in November 2020 and also ended support across Microsoft 365 apps and services in August 2021. Other Microsoft services and apps have also ended support for Internet Explorer during the last few years.

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Posted in Microsoft, Security and Compliance, Teams collaboration remote access, Technology

Microsoft Teams – many enhancements announced.

August 9th, 2022

Mac devices now have a versions of Teams that is designed to support all of Apple’s Mac devices.

We are rolling out a production grade universal binary version of Teams, which means it will run natively on the entire Mac lineup, including those with Apple silicon. For Mac users, this means a significant boost in performance, ensuring efficient use of device resources and an optimized Teams experience even when using multiple high-resolution monitors during calls or meetings.

Mac devices will be “automatically upgraded” to it. Microsoft plans a gradual rollout, with the “general availability” commercial release expected “over the coming months.”

Teams Chat Embedded in Dynamics 365
Teams chat embedded in Microsoft Dynamics 365, Microsoft’s enterprise resource planning solution, is at the preview stage and is scheduled to reach general availability in September https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/microsoft-teams-blog/boost-productivity-with-microsoft-teams-chat-in-dynamics-365/ba-p/3584286

Users c can use records in Dynamics 365 to start a chat. Sales teams will see all “connected chats” related to a customer record. A use case is when a sales rep leaves an organization and others need to know what happened with an account.

To turn on this connected chat feature https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dynamics365/teams-integration/enable-teams-chat

When connected chats are used to share Dynamics 365 records information with another person, “the recipient doesn’t need a Dynamics 365 license to collaborate,” the announcement clarified.

Other Teams Enhancements
Microsoft also described Teams other enhancements.

Admins can “clean up individual policy assignments from users in bulk,” with an “Unassign Policies” feature added to the Teams Admin Center portal under the “Manage Users” tab. , Teams users will then “inherit the correct policy either via a group policy assignment or global organization-wide default.”

For organizations using Teams with “frontline workers,” Admins can now “deploy up to 500 teams with 25 users per team using one PowerShell command.” Similarly its also possible to remove members. This capability is in preview.

Microsoft added a Device Test capability for Teams appointments, which will “validate camera, microphone, and browser compatibility, as well as the internet connection at any moment before the scheduled appointment start time.”

The Forms app in Teams is replaced by a new Polls app, available from the Teams app store. It has many user interface improvements, such as t a new “Rating” feedback poll.

LinkedIn profiles are now integrated with Teams, and users can view these from “Teams chat, channels, calls or meetings.

Microsoft added the ability to message team owners in Teams via a @Team Owners” addition.

Microsoft suggested that Teams on iPad devices is “now more responsive to screen size, app orientation, and display modes.”

Microsoft added the ability for users to hide or to remove a call from their call history list when using the Teams desktop or mobile app.

Microsoft enhanced a Common Area Phone offering “to serve a wider variety of scenarios for customers without increasing the price.”

Microsoft added improvements for Teams Room devices, including a “Manage” button for checking out rooms or extending reservations.

Teams calling functionality was also added for certain models of Spectralink Digital Enhanced Cordless Telecommunications (DECT) devices.

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Posted in Microsoft, Teams collaboration remote access

Power Apps Wave 2 2022 enhancements

July 13th, 2022

Power BI continues to invest in empowering every individual, team, and organization to drive a data culture. Creation experience is improved by aligning our experiences with Office and enabling datasets authoring on the web.
By bringing power query diagram view into Power BI Desktop, creators can use a no code experience to perform extract transform load (ETL) on their data.
For teams, there are enhancements to metrics focused on enterprise needs and integration with Microsoft Viva Goals.
The big data experience is increased through:
- automatic aggregations,
- query scale out,
- data protection capabilities via data loss prevention (DLP),
- improved visibility into activity to admins.
Power Apps will expand governance capabilities to allow organizations to enable, manage, and support citizen development across the entire organization.
Makers and developers of all skill levels will be more productive over Dataverse in a unified studio, with modern experiences to build and manage data and logic.
Infused intelligence will: support development, enrich data, and optimize end-user experiences.
In addition to ensuring trust and the ability to leverage rich data experiences, both makers and end-users will benefit from out-of-the-box collaboration capabilities to enable users to be more productive when working together.
Power Pages  brings more out-of-the-box capabilities to support both low-code/no-code development as well professional developers.
In this release makers have additional capabilities to work with forms and lists and to use the design studio to get started quickly with additional solution templates.
There are enhancements for professional developers to do more with the sites and to use both the Microsoft Power Platform command line interface (CLI) tool and visual studio (VS) Code
Administrators can also use those tools to better administer and govern their Power Pages sites.
Power Automate is more accessible with new experiences to help users of every skill level to build out their cloud and desktop flows.
Organizations can automate their deployments of Power Automate, with additional enhancements for application lifecycle management (ALM).
For increased usage of robotic process automation (RPA), new features will make it easier to manage machines in Azure and the credentials of your users and accounts.
Power Virtual Agents bring improvements in:
- the authoring experience with commenting,
- Power Pages integration, data loss prevention options, proactive bot update messaging in Teams, and more.
Creating a bot is typically a complex and time-intensive process, requiring long content update cycles and a team of experts.
Power Virtual Agents gives anyone in your organization the ability to create powerful custom bots using an easy, code-free graphical interface, without the need for AI experts, data scientists, or teams of developers.
A bot can interact with users, ask for clarifying information, and ultimately answer a user’s questions.
AI Builder continues to enable citizen developers to use and customize AI capabilities to build more intelligent apps and workflows. Lifecycle and governance of AI Builder models will be improved with enhanced versioning, deployment, and monitoring capabilities.
Makers will also benefit from new features for intelligent document and text processing like the ability to manage human in-the-loop validation, easier integration of large data sets for automated e-mail processing, and the ability to process contracts and multi-page tables in documents.

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Posted in Microsoft, Power Apps, Teams collaboration remote access

Dynamics 365 – Wave 2 highlights for 2022

July 13th, 2022

Dynamics 365 Marketing brings real-time customer journey orchestration to enable business-to-business (B2B) brands to hyper-personalize experiences across the entire buying journey.
Confidently grow your marketing and customer experience programs to target up to 100 million customers with up to 300 million messages and interactions per month.
Intuitive lead capture forms, leads nurturing hands-off automation, and a new analytics dashboard enable alignment between sales and marketing teams like never before.
Organizations can reach new levels of marketing maturity with AI-powered next best content selection and increased support for business units.
Dynamics 365 Sales continues to optimize the seller experience using data and AI .
Help sellers to prioritize their work, blending business with productivity tools to meet sellers where they are.
Drive in-the-moment, collaboration experiences, so that every seller can engage with their colleagues and customers efficiently, reclaiming their time and being more productive.
Dynamics 365 Customer Service is focused on delivering the capabilities that help run contact centers optimally.
Enhancements in unified routing with features such as percentage-based routing, preferred agent routing, and longest idle routing are new features
Customer support swarming in Microsoft Teams will help agents resolve complex cases through collaboration.
Organizations can empower their customers with options to leave voicemail, callback, and dial agents directly in the voice channel.
The agent experience is modernized with an enhanced conversation timeline, horizontal multisession navigation, and AI-powered conversation summary.
Supervisors can view Microsoft Power Virtual Agents analytics within their omnichannel analytics dashboards.
Dynamics 365 Field Service brings new capabilities that enable organizations to better orchestrate service operations for workers. Organizations can now:
- build and maintain location and assets for large facilities,
- keep their cost at bay by configuring “not to exceed” limits,
- and group similar incident types under “trade” for ease of management.
Optimization improvements include booking lock constraints and i myriad of user experience improvements to the mobile app to further empower frontline workers.
Dynamics 365 Finance launches the general availability of vendor invoice optical character recognition (OCR) which automates the reading and recognition of vendor invoices.
There are additional capabilities for subscription billing use cases.
The Tax calculation service will be integrated with Dynamics 365 Project Operations (preview)
The electronic invoicing service will be extended to support new and upcoming e-invoice legislations for: France, Poland, and Saudi Arabia.
Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management continues to invest in capabilities that drive agility and resilience across the supply chain.
New analytics and support for multiple vendors in planning optimization help organizations optimize their sourcing strategies.’
Inventory visibility lets organizations track real-time consumption within allocated quantities in support of promotions, special events, and new product introductions.
Guided warehouse implementation and configuration experiences enable rapid reconfiguration of supply chains .
Manufacturers in the process industry can use Planning Optimization to shorten their planning cycles.
Dynamics 365 Intelligent Order Management expands its ecosystem of providers and builds on the continued success of FedEx. There are now 14 providers that span the supply chain lifecycle from order ingestion to last-mile delivery.
In the upcoming release, there is support for various order types—back orders, subscription orders, manual orders, and purchase orders.
You can also simulate fulfillment to model and understand the impact of choosing various fulfillment strategies.
Contextual collaboration features allow an order to be shared with multiple stakeholders using embedded Microsoft Teams.
Dynamics 365 Project Operations Empower project managers and project teams in this release wave with project budgeting and time-phased forecasting, baselines and snapshots,
The application experiences on the web and mobile form factors is modernised.
For both project accountants and back-office personas, w advanced subcontracting and subscription billing capabilities are added.
Across-the-board investments will ease the complexity of interaction patterns.
Modern and fluent controls are also targeted for this release wave.
Dynamics 365 Guides Improve collaboration experiences for authors and operators on Microsoft HoloLens 2.
The application will also be updated to provide more advanced content authoring workflows versioning and publishing of guides in the coming wave.
Dynamics 365 Human Resources We can now to tailor experiences and automatically complete processes where manual decisions and tasks are needed today.
Improved efficiency is available to managers and employees by providing notifications outside of the application for benefits processes and tasks.
Integrating employee skill and compensation, and leaving information to resource managers in Dynamics 365 Project Operations will also improve collaboration and efficiency.
Dynamics 365 Commerce New and updated B2B experiences, include sales agreements across channels and customer-specific catalogs.
Omnichannel media management features streamline workflows.
Key point of sale investments includes a Store Commerce app availability for iOS and Android devices.
Apple Pay and Google Pay digital wallet integration,
New customer support options through virtual agent and live agent integration will be available for e-commerce.
Dynamics 365 Fraud Protection will offer a new transaction acceptance booster (TAB) offering that allows merchants to increase their bank approval rates without having to rip and replace their incumbent fraud provider solution.
To replace a merchant’s incumbent fraud solution is costly and timely, and this enables the merchant to benefit from Dynamics 365 Fraud Protection TAB capabilities with minimal disruption to their business.
Dynamics 365 Business Central continues to improve the reporting capabilities for customers, including new report datasets for Excel and improvements to the Microsoft Power BI reports which now will support dimensions.
The Microsoft Power Apps and Microsoft Power Automate integration offer new capabilities for low-code development.
The application will get several improvements like: helping users do reverse entries in the payment reconciliation journal and several improvements to the supply chain functionality.
There are steps to scale productivity via more efficient and performant tooling for development and administration.
Dynamics 365 Customer Insights continues to invest in accelerating customer understanding by enhancing time to value with quicker out-of-the-box insights, predictions, segments, and measures with limitless extensibility across technology ecosystems.
New features will power personalized experiences with real-time insights, analytics, and activations to deliver industry-leading personalization and moments-based marketing.
New features also enable ubiquitous insights for an integrated data flow across Microsoft Dataverse, Dynamics 365, and Microsoft Power Platform for seamless workflows.
Dynamics 365 Connected Spaces now supports alerts and notifications via Teams or Outlook when business AI-skills detect actionable patterns within a physical space.
Customers can now use Dynamics 365 Connected Spaces in Germany (besides US and UK) and connect up to 10 cameras for each Azure Stack Edge device maximizing their existing investments in expanding Dynamics 365 Connected Spaces across their physical footprint.
Customers can also leverage the Azure Stack Edge Pro 2 device for configuring Dynamics 365 Connected Spaces at the edge in addition to the existing Pro 1 devices.

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Posted in Business Central, Finance, Microsoft, Power Apps, SCM, Teams collaboration remote access

Attackers compromising Microsoft Teams

February 19th, 2022

Security researchers at Avanan, a cyber security company warns that attackers are compromising Microsoft Teams accounts to slip into chats and to spread malicious programs to participants in the conversation.

Since January, hackers have accessed compromised accounts and shared executable files titled ‘User Centric’.

The file is a Trojan malware that can eventually take control of a user’s computer should a user click on it. The virus is usually hidden as an attachment in an email or a free-to-download file, then transfers onto the user’s device

Most users trust Microsoft Teams implicitly. However, Microsoft Teams is used both by professionals working from home for sharing files, or with invited external users, so users may click on files attachments with less regard to question the authenticity.

Microsoft Teams surpassed 270 million monthly active users last month. The number of daily active users of Microsoft Teams have almost doubled the past year, increasing from 75 million users in April 2020 to 145 million as of the second quarter of 2021.

When working outside your secure corporate network on your own device you still need an antivirus program that scans and inspects files for malicious content.

Sr its an email or inside Microsoft Teams if are get sent a file, then before clicking on it make sure you carefully read the name of the file and file extension , and the details of who sent it . Contact your workplace’s IT department if you receive any strange files.

If you need to improv your security then ask Synergy Software Systems about Microsoft Defender and other tools like Kasperksy. Data security and data privacy is of increasing concern , and compliance with legislation is increasingly import for example for data privacy.

With Microsoft Defender for Oce 365 you are also protected within SharePoint, OneDrive, and Microsoft Teams. ATP (Advanced Threat Protection) for SharePoint, OneDrive, and Teams helps detect and block existing files that are identified as malicious in team sites and document libraries by locking them and preventing users from accessing such files.

https://www.microsoft.com/en-gb/security/business/threat-protection/office-365-defender

https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/microsoft-defender-for-office/introducing-the-microsoft-defender-for-office-365-migration/ba-p/2952369

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/security/office-365-security/migrate-to-defender-for-office-365?view=o365-worldwide

call: 0097143365589

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Posted in Microsoft, Security and Compliance, Teams collaboration remote access, Technology

Teams meetings with chat bubbles

January 3rd, 2022

With covid omicron rampaging across the globe wishing you all a Happy New Year sounds a somewhat hollow message. So let me pass on some good news.

Microsoft is working on a new update for Teams, for users to see both the messages in chat and the participants in a video call at the same time.

Last year Microsoft , added chat bubbles so that users don’t miss private messages sent during a video call. Similar to WhatsApp or Facebook Messenger, chat bubbles display a floating notification on your screen.

You may not find don’t this is an improvement if it distracts you from the important content discussed in the meeting. It forces you to constantly look around the screen to find and quickly the chat bubbles as they appear and before they disappear.

To turn off the chat bubbles and return to the previous behavior of opening the chat pane, click on the three dots in the control bar to open the menu. Click on the Don’t show chat bubbles item to turn off chat bubbles, see this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MkR8T8pZfyU)

Using chat bubbles is a personal choice and it doesn’t replace the regular chat window. Microsoft says that chat bubbles make chat more central to a conversation, but it really depends on the type of meeting, the topic being discussed, and the number of participants

Microsoft is now planning to make chat bubbles available for group chats so that everyone can simaltaneously see the conversations happening via text as well as the participants in a video call .

Microsoft soft Teams rooms i was previously called Skype Rooms. With a Teams Rooms display set up in a meeting or conference room, the in-person attendees can focus on one screen rather than have to each stare down at their individual laptop.

With chat bubbles on a Teams Room display, remote workers will also be able to add to the conversation in a meeting room and attendees will see their messages in chat alongside a meeting’s video feed.

This new feature is set to roll out in April of next year and will l be a welcome addition for organizations that have implemented hybrid work practices.

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Posted in Microsoft, Teams collaboration remote access, Technology

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