Ensure Your Employees Thrive with Microsoft Viva in our Hybrid World
As a result of the pandemic and a gradual return to 'normality', the shift to hybrid work has become a reality. It's clear that the workplace today is different than it was two years ago. Employees’ expectations continue to evolve as they reconsider their “worth it” equation. In Microsoft's 2022 Work Trend Index, 53 percent of employees say they’re more likely to prioritise their health and wellbeing over work than before. At the same time, 43 percent of employees are somewhat or extremely likely to consider changing jobs in the coming year, with younger employees even more likely to consider changing employers.
What are employees looking for in a job now? Research shows that they want purpose, flexibility, growth and development, and a culture where they feel like they belong. Based on the latest data from the 2022 Work Trend Index, beyond pay, the top three aspects of work that employees view as “very important” are for an employer to provide: a positive culture (46 percent), mental health/wellbeing benefits (42 percent), and a sense of purpose/meaning (40 percent).
Introducing the Viva Insights Inspiration library
Creating a great employee experience isn’t just about providing great technology, it’s also about cultivating a culture where every individual can learn and share best practices that help bring balance to work and life, be more productive, and foster an engaged and productive workforce.
Microsoft announced the new Inspiration library, available in preview through the Viva Insights app in Microsoft Teams. The Inspiration library brings together a curated set of best practices and thought leadership content written by experts from Harvard Business Review (HBR), Thrive, and Microsoft on how to approach resiliency, wellbeing, culture, and leadership amidst the evolving world of work.
“We’re excited that HBR will be part of the Inspiration library. Our hope is that it provides some useful ideas on hybrid work, productivity, leading a team, and more to help Viva users in the flow of their workday.”—Maureen Hoch, Editor, HBR.org.
With the addition of the Inspiration library, productivity and wellbeing insights delivered by Viva Insights are enhanced by premium content focused on topics that are top of mind for employees—from burning out, to rediscovering joy at work, to proven ways to inspire your team—there’s insightful, research-backed guidance for individuals, managers, and leaders that gives everyone a space to learn and grow. Embedding these resources directly into the Viva experience will meet employees where they are, enhancing the digital employee experience.
“Fostering a culture focused on employee wellbeing is now more important than ever. That is why we are delighted to partner with Microsoft to bring content from Thrive directly into people’s workflow through the new Inspiration library in Microsoft Viva Insights. With access to articles and science-backed Microsteps on everything from how to improve your leadership style to why takingbreaks can help you have a more productive workday, we hope to inspire new ideas and best practices among employees—giving them tools they need to thrive.”—Arianna Huffington, Founder and CEO, Thrive.
Inspiration library content will be refreshed periodically and will expand to include additional high-value and impactful content from other respected thought leaders.
Focusing on employee work-life balance and wellbeing
Beyond inspiring ideas and providing employees with ways to make the most of their workday, managers and leaders can use these insights and real-world examples along with recommendations from Viva Insights to take action, and then use advanced insights to measure the impact of their actions.
A manager may notice that the team’s overall after-hours work and time spent in meetings are trending upwards. Effective collaboration is important to your business, but people also need focus time to think and work without distraction. With Viva Insights, managers now have the toolkit to build a set of best practices for their teams, such as tips for staying focused, giving permission to say no, and other tools like setting up a no-meeting day for the team or encouraging the team to enroll in a personal focus plan to protect time for important projects during their regular working hours.
The business case for employee experience
Organisations are now beginning to understand that robust employee experience programs supported by the right technology and insights can lead to significant business value. The more employees are invested in the mission and purpose of the organization, the more committed they are to its business outcomes.
Leaders recognise this change and are shifting investments accordingly. While business leaders are using it to accommodate hybrid work environments (like better connections and access to resources), employees say they also value personalised, curated learning experiences, stronger feedback loops, and an inclusive culture. Additionally, there are too many tools and too little adoption.
The good news is, both business leaders and employees agree that technology can help and that a single, integrated EXP can help organisations improve in ways that match the priorities of both groups.
Looking ahead
To make hybrid work work, leaders will need to embrace this shift in employee expectations and transform their organisation’s employee experience. We’re learning together with our customers and partners, and it’s just the beginning of what’s possible.
For more information about Microsoft Viva, read our blog.
Microsoft Defender for Business rolling out now
The commercialisation of cybercrime has led to an increase in the frequency and sophistication of attacks on small and medium-sized businesses. Business interruption is a concern, especially from a cyber-attack such as ransomware (Allianz Risk Barometer 2022). For smaller businesses this type of impact can be hard to manage with potential operational, financial, and customer trust implications.
Microsoft are pleased to announce the general availability of Microsoft Defender for Business for Microsoft 365 Business Premium customers. This brings cross-platform endpoint security capabilities to many small business customers worldwide. At no additional cost!
Microsoft Defender for Business now rolling out to new and existing Microsoft 365 Business Premium customers
Microsoft introduced Microsoft Defender for Business, built to bring enterprise-grade endpoint security to businesses, in a solution that is easy-to-use and cost-effective. Defender for Business goes beyond traditional antivirus and delivers threat and vulnerability management, endpoint detection and response, and automated investigation and remediation capabilities in a single solution.
Defender for Business has started rolling out to existing Microsoft 365 Business Premium customers. No action or additional transactions are required for existing customers, the service will become available within the Endpoint section of the Microsoft 365 Defender security portal over the next few weeks. For new Microsoft 365 Business Premium customers, you will see Defender for Business available immediately.
If you have an existing Microsoft Defender for Endpoint license within your tenant this will affect the administrative experience, within the Microsoft 365 Defender security portal. Enabling the Defender for Business service changes the following experiences:
Microsoft Defender for Endpoint P1 changes to Microsoft Defender for Business.
Microsoft Defender for Endpoint P2 will remain in place and Microsoft Defender for Business product experience will not be seen until the Defender for Endpoint P2 license is completely removed from the tenant. Then the Defender for Business experience will be seen.
Microsoft Defender for Endpoint Servers, or Microsoft Defender for Cloud is active within the Azure tenant. This will also impact the Microsoft 365 Defender admin center and switch it to a more advanced Microsoft Defender for Endpoint Plan 2 product experience. Defender for Business experience will not be seen.
The transition from Microsoft Defender for Endpoint P1 or P2 to Microsoft Defender for Business will not require offboarding and onboarding devices again. Security settings will remain in place.
Defender for Business will also be offered as a standalone package. This will be coming later this year. You can continue to preview the standalone solution by signing up at https://aka.ms/MDB-SA-Preview.
To read the full Microsoft announcement, click here.
If you are looking for more support and guidance on Microsoft Business Defender, Adepteq can assist you. Contact us today.
Accessibility overview of Microsoft Teams
Microsoft Teams is a messaging and collaboration app that lets everyone in your business join the conversation, communicate and work together. Our blog contains an overview of the many accessibility features that make sure all users can have the best possible experience using Microsoft Teams.
Meet, chat, and collaborate inclusively with Microsoft Teams
Meet
Access meetings and participate from anywhere with Microsoft Teams desktop and mobile apps and Microsoft Teams on the web.
Live closed captioning for meetings
Blur background or use a background image free from the Teams background library, or upload and use your own
Pin a meeting participant's video to highlight an important participant
Dedicated chats for each meeting to keep all conversations and details in one place
Raise your hand in a Teams meeting to stand out
Reduce background noise in Teams meetings to avoid interruptions such as calls or messages
Add someone, like a coworker or interpreter, to a call with the click of a button
Chat
Communicate effectively with everyone regardless of language, cognitive needs, or visual capabilities.
Limit distractions with Do Not Disturb mode to prevent interruptions from calls or messages
Minimise communication barriers with language translation
Customise the reading and viewing experience for different visual and cognitive needs suited to your co-workers
Send audio messages on Microsoft Teams mobile and use Windows dictation on Microsoft Teams desktop
Collaborate
Enable collaboration for everyone by adapting to different learning paces, motor skills, and communication preferences.
Have documents read aloud and broken down by syllables with Immersive Reader
Ensure Microsoft Office content is easy for all people to read and edit directly from the Microsoft Teams desktop app
Pin chats, channels, apps, and documents for quick and easy access
Manage notifications and set your status to let your co-workers know where you are
Dark, light, and high contrast theme
Zoom in and out of Teams
Search for messages to find information quickly and easily
We are delighted to announce that we have achieved the Microsoft Project and Portfolio Management competency. This competency increases our breadth of our certified Microsoft 365 skills.
Microsoft competencies are designed to help meet customer needs and help Microsoft Partners such as ourselves, attract new customers who are looking for Microsoft-certified solution providers. We are amongst the elite tier of Microsoft partners, which helps us stand out from our peers. By attaining this silver competency, we are able to demonstrate our consistent capability and commitment to our clients and the projects we work on. By attaining a gold competency, this allows us to showcase our best-in-class capabilities within a Microsoft solution area.
We have enhanced our existing Microsoft Gold Partner status by adding the Silver Project and Portfolio Management competency. This reflects the knowledge of our team, a high level of access to Microsoft’s tools, intelligence, training programmes and support.
Our competencies focus on Microsoft 365, Office 365, SharePoint, Teams and the Power Platform. This enables us to deliver the best services for our clients, and continue to do so with great skill and practice.
If you want to change your business with intelligent Microsoft Technologies, choose Adepteq, with technical expertise, recognised dedication to our clients, a track-record of success and the Microsoft competencies to match.
Threats are becoming increasingly significant at a higher rate with a rise in cyberattacks targeting small and medium-sized businesses. In the last year, Microsoft have seen a 300% increase in ransomware attacks with over 50% reaching small businesses. Microsoft is investing in security solutions purposefully designed to help protect businesses from cyberattacks.
Microsoft Defender for Business is a new endpoint security solution that’s coming soon. Microsoft Defender for Business is specially built to bring enterprise-grade endpoint security to businesses with up to 300 employees, in a solution that is easy-to-use and cost-effective.
Microsoft Defender for Business elevates security from traditional antivirus to next-generation protection, endpoint detection and response, threat and vulnerability management, and a lot more. Defender helps businesses protect themselves against cybersecurity threats including ransomware and malware across macOS, Windows, Android and iOS devices.
Defender for Business includes the following capabilities:
Threat and vulnerability management
Next generation protection
Automated investigation and remediation
Attack surface reduction
APIs and integration
Endpoint detection and response (EDR)
Threat and Vulnerability management dashboard helps you to proactively discover and prioritise software vulnerabilities and misconfigurations.
Defender for Business delivers maximum security value at a price point that works for your organisation. Included as part of the Microsoft 365 Business Premium license (or as an addon license), this security and productivity solution brings together MS Teams and Office 365 with the essential security tools for organisations.
Contact Adepteq today to find out how we can help your organisation implement Microsoft Defender for Business to help secure your business.
Update to Microsoft 365 and Outlook for Windows connectivity...
To ensure that Microsoft meet performance expectations, they are updating the supported versions of Outlook for Windows that can connect to Microsoft 365 services.
From November 1, 2021, the following versions of Outlook for Windows, as part of Office and Microsoft 365 Apps, were no longer able to connect with Office 365 and Microsoft 365 services.
If organisations do not update, they may over time, encounter performance or reliability issues. Organisations that use these older clients will almost certainly face an increased security risk and may find themselves out of compliance depending upon specific regional or industry requirements. Therefore, administrators should update older Office clients to versions of Office supported for connecting to Microsoft 365 services.
Office and
Microsoft 365 Apps
Outlook for
Windows Version
Office 2013
15.0.4970.9999
and older
Office 2016
16.0.4599.9999
and older
Microsoft
365 Apps for enterprise (formerly Office 365 ProPlus)
1705 and
older
Microsoft
365 Apps for business (formerly Office 365 Business)
1705 and
older
If this is something your organisation is considering in order to prevent encountering performance or reliability issues, Adepteq are able to help your organisation update older Office clients to versions of Office supported for connecting to Microsoft 365 services. Contact us now.
Transform Your Hybrid Working Experience with Microsoft Viva
Microsoft are excited to announce that all four Viva modules shared at the beginning of that journey—Viva Connections, Viva Insights, Viva Topics, and Viva Learning—are now generally available and with the purchase of just one plan, the new Viva suite, you have access to all of them. They are also announcing new capabilities and partnerships for each module and a centralised IT admin experience.
Microsoft Viva ensures every employee is a part of their organisation’s culture, expert knowledge, personal productivity insights, and key learning resources.Viva empowers every level of an organisation to address key challenges of hybrid work and employee burnout, which is a serious, common occurrence in today's working environment.
The Microsoft Viva suite: One plan for an integrated EXP
With the Microsoft Viva suite, customers get an integrated EXP that brings together knowledge, learning, communications, resources, and insights into the flow of work.
Viva Connections: Culture and communications
Viva Connections is a curated, company-branded experience that brings together relevant news, conversations, and resources in the applications and devices you use every day—and later this month, those devices will include your mobile phone.
You are now also able to add cards for Approvals, Shifts, and Tasks from Teams into your Viva Connections dashboard.
Viva Insights: Productivity and wellbeing
Viva Insights helps improve productivity and wellbeing through data-driven, privacy-protected insights and recommendations. Microsoft are announcing expanded capabilities to help managers and team leads navigate hybrid work and to help everyone in an organisation run more effective meetings.
New manager insights and tools will help managers and team leads stay connected with team members
A new effective meetings experience in the Viva Insights app for Teams will help meeting organisers get personalised insights and suggestions to improve their meeting habits.
Guided meditations from Headspace will be generally available in November 2021 in four additional languages.
Viva Topics: Knowledge and expertise
Viva Topics applies AI to automatically organise content and expertise across your systems and teams into related topics, like projects, products, processes, and customers. That content appears as topic pages and topic centers—created and updated by AI—that enable experts to cultivate and share knowledge with wiki-like simplicity.
Viva Learning: Skilling and growth
Viva Learning brings enterprise learning into the flow of work by connecting content from your organisation, Learning Management Systems, third-party providers, and Microsoft.
See assignments from integrated Learning Management Systems to easily stay up to date on required learning.
Search across all the learning sources connected to Viva Learning and filter by interests, provider, or duration to find the exact content you need.
Make learning recommendations to your team and colleagues and track the recommendations you’ve made.
Add a curated set of learning resources as a tab in your Teams channels to bring learning directly into the flow of teamwork.
If you would like to see how Adepteq can transform your hybrid working experience with Microsoft Viva, get in contact with us today. For more information about Microsoft Viva, read our launch post here.
To read the full Microsoft Viva article, click here.
Have you ever wondered whether or not your Microsoft 365 data is secure and protected?
Many users sadly become victims to cyber attacks due to not knowing that Microsoft aren’t actually protecting their valuable data. Adepteq SaaS Protection makes it easier and more cost effective than ever to safeguard all of your Microsoft 365 data- putting your mind at ease.
Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) is an intelligent way to deliver applications over the internet. These SaaS apps have revolutionised the way we do businesses. It allows companies to limit installation and maintenance of software by accessing applications with a click of a button. Adepteq Datto SaaS Protection helps you to remove the risk of losing any or all of your data with a simple, automated and secure backup of your Office 365 Data.
Feeling unsecure and want to know how we can protect your data?
There will also be a short Q&A where our experts and presenters- Ian Loman and Adam Salley will be able to provide additional support.
This webinar is free of charge and is held in English. You can participate using Microsoft Teams in web browser, desktop app or mobile app. If the date and time is not suitable, sign up anyway and we will send you the presentation and a recording of the webinar.
If you want to know how to Secure and Protect your Microsoft 365 Data with Adepteq SaaS Protection, REGISTER NOW for our Free Webinar to avoid missing out!
Adepteq is happy to announce that we have been re-certified for Cyber Essentials.
What is the Cyber Essential Certification?
This certification is a Government-backed and industry-supported scheme that allows businesses to protect themselves against the growing threat of cyber attacks such as malware and phishing, and provides a clear statement of the basic controls organisations should have in place to protect themselves.
The UK Government provided this certification to create a safer internet space for organisations of all sizes, across all sectors. Developed by the National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC), Cyber Essentials is considered the best first step to a secure network, protecting users from 80% of the most basic cyber security breaches.
With a Cyber Essentials certification, organisations can showcase their credentials as trustworthy and secure when it comes to cyber security.
We hope that our Cyber Essentials certification gives you more trust and security when deciding to work with us for your tech projects in the future. If you have any more questions regarding our certification, please get in touch.
To Find out more about the Cyber Essentials Certification, click here.
Microsoft Inspire: Modern Working
Last week tens of thousands of people from all over the world came together to gain experiences and insights from Microsoft subject matter experts and partner communities as they advance their businesses, with a more thorough understanding of Microsoft's cloud to edge, secure, and trusted business platforms.
The following is a summary of the announcements and news related to modern working for you to keep in mind as you start implementing plans for a very successful year ahead.
Windows 365 Cloud PC:
If you're looking for a new way to experience Windows 10 or Windows 11 as a cloud service, then Windows 365 Cloud is your way to go. You will be able to stream the full Window's experience including Apps, settings and data to any device from the Microsoft Cloud.
With Windows 365, partners can:
Offer their clients and customers a new, flexible, and even more secure way to empower distributed workforces, seasonal, temporary workers and employees, with a need for specialised workloads.
Assist customers when it comes to choosing the size of the Cloud PC that best fits their needs with predictable per user, per month pricing. By instant on-booting to their personal Cloud PC, users can stream their tools, applications, data and settings from the Cloud across all devices.
By using Microsoft Endpoint Manager, partners can help customers procure, deploy and manage Cloud PCs for their organisations.
New collaborative apps from partnerships with independent software vendors (ISVs). These include Atlassian Confluence, SAP Cloud for Customer, Workday and Salesforce- are coming to Microsoft Teams. These integrations allow structured business processes and data to come together increasing collaborative work. Developers and ISVs can build the next generation of apps with collaboration at the core, allowing asynchronous and real-time collaboration for chats, meetings, content creation and business processes.
Microsoft Viva is an employee experience platform that brings together tools for employee engagement, wellbeing, learning and knowledge. Adding integrations with more than 20 partners from the likes of ServiceNow, Workday and Qualtrics comes into play during Autumn. With these new integrations customers can seamlessly surface tools, insights and experiences personalised for employees during their workflow.
Read the Microsoft 365 Blog post from Microsoft CVP Jared Spataro and Microsoft Business Applications CVP Alysa Taylor to learn more.
Benefits for partners building Microsoft Teams or Microsoft Viva apps
Microsoft have announced new benefits for ISVs who want to build and market Modern Workplace apps for Microsoft Viva and MS Teams. Those ISVs that are eligible, will receive access to Microsoft technology, one-on-one consultations, curated training, and marketing resources that will help them reach the 145 million people using and collaborating on MS Teams daily.
Two new tools are now in preview that are intended to make it easier to deliver managed security services and identify opportunities to grow.
Microsoft 365 Lighthouse
Microsoft 365 Lighthouse is a unified portal that assists managed service providers (MSP) partners to easily secure devices, data and users, at no extra costs, for their Microsoft 365 Business Premium customers.
Project 'Orland'
Available in private preview, Project "Orland" is a fresh, new experience in the Partner Centre to help Microsoft Partners grow their cloud business by sharing Microsoft-powered insights about their own customers which will improve account management.
To find out more about the Microsoft Inspire event, head over to the main article.
If you need additional Office 365, SharePoint, Microsoft Teams or Power Platform support, feel free to contact us and one of our expert advisors will be able to assist you.
