Tag Archives: teams

Office365

The joy of modern cloud platforms – Great new features that nobody knows about – Teams shared channels

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OK unless you’re someone that devours the tech press or continuously monitors release notes for every release of the particular cloud platform in question this is sadly the case with a lot of platforms. New features will be added that you’ll find out about weeks or months later.

I don’t think I’m too far behind on this one from a general release point of view but if you’re one of the former people then you’ll know this has been tested for a few months!

Teams Shared Channels

A simple concept but I think really useful. Basically two teams with their own Teams (anyone else get confused by this language?!) can share a single channel without having to create another new Team for the two groups of people.

So rather than proliferate the amount of Teams I have to be in, I can simply get a specific channel shared to me and place this channel in a Team of my choosing. See note 1 on this below though.

There are many other scenarios where this could be useful, for example using hierarchies of shared channels where say Architecture could use an announcements channel in their Team where new standards or patterns are communicated, this could be then set as a shared channel that could then be used by other teams, simply adding the channel to their own Teams workspace to see this information rather than having to create another Team to have to goto.

It feels as if this will really improve collaboration, certainly internally but as this is available across tenants maybe externally too.

Note 1: this depends on the way the shared channel is shared. If it is shared to a Team owner, then they can place the channel in a Team of their choosing. If it is shared to an individual person then they will simply see a new Team with a single channel.

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General IT, Technical, Tips & Tricks

It’s been a while……and we still haven’t cracked hybrid meetings!

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Well it’s been two years since my last post, I gone through lots of should I shouldn’t I continue hosting this blog? But I’ve come to realise it has helped me horizon scan the legal business and it’s technology use, something I’ve missed doing for a couple of years. So how best to restart?

Well why not start where I left off and continue on from the last post on remote working tools.

I have to say the post was pretty spot on, Teams really has become much more standard in business, we all quickly transitioned more or less back to normal routines, but it’s clear now that the pandemic is behind us that hybrid working is now fully embedded in the working day. No more 5 days a week in the office.

But has anyone else cracked those hybrid meetings, the ones where half the participants are in the office, half online? No me neither! It starts with the tech problems, everyone at home is on ready (we’ve all cracked the when to mute, when to camera etc) , but the meeting room goes through the obligatory ten minutes of struggling to connect the tech, echoing mics and squealing speakers, “can you hear me” etc. And then the room proceeds to dominate the meeting, have side chats and pretty much forget there are others on the call.

I’m not sure what the answer is yet, maybe you can add in the comments any tips you’ve got on improving the experience. But I did come across this BBC article from 2021 on various ideas companies have for this space and improving remote meetings. It will be interesting to see how the tech unfolds in this area.

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General IT, Office365

The battle of the video communication platforms – Is lock-down over yet?

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I was going to write this post during the lock-down, when Zoom lived up to its name and took off in a big way. I had the idea of looking at Zoom vs Teams and why the former got such traction early on. But things changed week by week and much like the government guidance or the medias latest stick to bash them with, as soon as you think you have understood it things change again!

But during these past months I do seem to have used pretty much all the platforms rather than sticking to one specific one. Zoom, Teams, Skype for Business and Skype. And I can understand why Zoom became the to go to platform, it’s simplicity is its key. It’s stripped away all the complexity and focussed on the communications aspects, the video is done right – who’d have thought we wanted most to see everyone in the meeting not a constant slipping in and out of a big image of the speaker (or more likely see the person who is unmuted and crashing about) with a random 3 or 4 others in a small box or circle. Then add simple, but useful extra features like the ability to break out into small groups and top it off with an experience that most of the time just works and you’ve a winning formula.

There were some security concerns at the start, some valid and some I suspect stoked by competitors. But a number of updates seems to have addressed most of these (though I know some companies are still stopping use for reasons that have been patched weeks ago).

That was the original angle for the post, but Teams is now catching back up, by end of April they were talking about 3×3 video which was a welcome addition. By May breakout rooms were on the cards. Proving the benefit of the 365 platform, turning feature around quickly. So by the time we all get back to the offices there won’t be much feature wise to split Zoom and Teams for most firms.

I think though Zoom is here to stay and though. Teams will be a fixture for many, but I do think Microsoft missed a trick early on that could have removed the need for firms to also have Zoom. And it highlights that it really does need to sort out it’s mess of technologies and give a clear view of it’s platforms, let firms and consumers have a totally SaaS version of Teams without the need to configure a tenancy, that maybe is a stripped back version (but not separate!) to just communicate and have basic desktop sharing. Then bin Skype, both versions (look they ruined the consumer version, they had a killer cross platform solution, it was what Zoom was years ago but got ruined integrating in the Microsoft ID and all the other bloatware).

Simplicity of the Zoom offering will keep it in play, especially as it has got such a hold across the consumer space now (we’ve mentioned the Skype shambles, but Google and Facebook were late to this too and didn’t have their platforms ready to go). Personally during the lockdown Zoom has been the go to platform for pretty much every outside work situation my family has been in.

It’s hard to argue that home working has been a huge success, something that is now embedded and won’t shift backwards to the previous “normal”. But there are a couple of challenges left  that need further work:

First the big challenge we will face going back to our offices, online conference calls have worked very well because everyone is remote. They still leave a lot to be desired though when the majority of attendees are in a physical meeting room. The remote workers start to get side-lined in this scenario.

As I mentioned in a talk just before the lockdown at the BLTF 2020, this is the area we need to start to develop and get right. The technology used to share video, presentations and whiteboards will need to be in every office collaboration area or spaces will need to be designated for hybrid meeting use and in person only meetings. There are so many scenarios we will all be familiar with of being unable to connect visitors, having the wrong video connection etc We will need to solve these quickly as we are not going to get rid of home working now!

Second challenge is another I raised at that presentation. Voice quality. Thankfully in work situations we have developed the etiquette of using good quality microphones (usually headsets or quiet rooms and a good PC/Mac mic), muting yourself when not speaking and the host managing the meeting to keep the background noise down. Even with all the childcare challenges people have had this discipline has meant meetings have run extremely well. I can’t say the same for the outside meetings though, the difference is noticeable (“unmutees”, “camera fiddlers” and “upnosers”) and this will unfortunately be the same when we’re having the hybrid office & remote meetings.

One ray of hope though is work companies like nVidia have been doing to utilise spare capacity in their graphics cards to run AI technology to eliminate background noise. Could this be the audio equivalent of the background blur in video?? Watch the video on the BBC site, the results are pretty amazing! And it’s early days too so to see that companies are starting to see the challenge and doing work to develop this area is great news.

It’s clear that after this situation we are in is over things will be different. I hate the term “new normal” as I don’t things will be revolutionary different, we’ll quickly slip back to a recognisable normal (it’s already underway) but we will embrace remote working as it works (as a lot of us who were doing it previously knew anyway). So it’ll be more an acceleration of what was already happening. What we will need is the same acceleration in the tech at the office end when we start to go back in.

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General IT, General Legal IT

Not more feature creep

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It’s good to be reminded every so often how poor twitter can be at conveying ideas. Yes it can be great conversation for conversation, well when you’re dealing with people you genuinely interact with rather than shouting into the ether! But it did remind me how much better blogs are for this. More blogs and less twitter, maybe that should be my resolution for the new year!

This was the post I put out here today.

I can’t say exactly who the product was, but that doesn’t really matter as the issue certainly isn’t just unique to them. The problem isn’t that the extra feature isn’t useful or that it won’t actually add something a fair few people will use. But the issue is the “feature” itself being something stock or boiler plate, something that is not specific to the actual problem this product is solving and easily used elsewhere.

This example today was ‘chat’ or threaded conversation around a topic, something that appears in so many platforms. Whether it’s the document management system (thanks to a good friend for reminding me of that one!), an intranet platform, a Microsoft product (you can substitute any other big IT vendor here) with Yammer/Teams etc they get everywhere. BUT and here is my issue, they’re all proprietary. So chat about the document in one system but don’t expect to see that in your topics in Teams for example.

From the vendors case I get it (new feature, extra sales etc). But I don’t know of any firm that decides to buy everything from one supplier, in fact we’re all in a brexit type compromise (sorry!). An unsatisfactory compromise between not wanting the best of breed in everything & the lack of interoperability on one hand and the compromise in some services & risk that everything from one supplier brings.

The answer? Maybe vendors could look at the building blocks out there and if someone has done it well already then look to add the feature through integration and cooperation? Want a chat facility? Maybe integrate with Teams? If you’re a legal specific vendor and want to store a document, integrate with iManage or netdocuments? It’s not much to ask for 2019 right?

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