Steve and Marijn are realizing that Stream deprecating the feature “who is saying what when” might be their fault..
For once we know what we want to talk about: search and the way we want to let the business drive the decision making process!
Steve did some home repair on his Surface Book, and realized that he should leave that to a professional.
Search: IT2B
When you look back at episode 26, where we had some really good friends over to talk about some subjects, one of the questions was how to get close enough to the business to be succesful.
We realised that SME (Subject Matter Experts) are important in search. There are so many things we as consultants don’t know about the business.
We spend a couple of years there, rolling out Office 365 and building worklows. But we never get to deeply understand the business. We don’t walk in their shoes.
Who is actually knowleadgeble about production? People will point us to the most insightful people in their department who can deliver the knowledge to empower the search.
Microsoft added inclusion features in Word
A new addition to the Word installation, where you can select if the editor (that checks your grammar and writing style) needs to check for gender bias and others.
Planner integration for the Message Center
For years, Marijn has been explaining to organisations that Office 365 is an evergreen platform: every week, new additions are made, functionalities come to life, buttons are replaced…
It just is what it is. One important source for all this information on what is changing is coming from the Message Center in your admin app. A recent addition is that now you can select a Planner plan where these messages will appear. This way you can send them to the right people, notify others with the Power Automate functionality and so much more.
How do you get buy in from the business around new functionality?
Have people been asking for custom backgrounds in Teams meetings? Ofcourse they have!
How do you decide that a business needs that function and it is going to add value?
- Can we legally use them ?
- Do the internal comms people want to regulate ?
- Are there issues around legal? IP? GDPR ?
Getting these approved in higly regulated environments can have a big impact with lots of time wasted in meetings.
One of the contracts we worked on together, we had regular meetings (every few weeks) with various people in the business.
The business has a responsibility to tell IT what they need, not only now, but also in the future. IT in turn needs to inspire the business so they can see the value of the platform. Therefore communication needs to be transparant and open, agile methodologies are great to open up silos like these.
Whisky: Tobermory 1995 20 yo (Deer, bear and moose)
This is one of the nicest whiskies Marijn has ever tried.. The depth is just inmense! We managed to get some nice samples from the Flaviar Vault..
