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Tag: digital transformation

  • Back from vacation – what did we miss?

    Like the swede I am, I’ve been off work for the last 4 weeks to get my summer vacation. I’ve actually done my best to try to stay away from IT stuff this summer, to disconnect and focus on other things (like golf and getting our house in order).

    But the world of IT does not slow down just because of summer, so here is a summary of some of the highlights that I missed during my time off!

    I got renewed as MVP

    Okay, this I already knew before the summer. But I was awarded for my 2nd year as an MVP within Windows and Devices for IT. I’m truly honored to be awarded for yet another year and being part of such a cool community of awesome people!

    Ola Ström | Most Valuable Professionals (microsoft.com)

    I will be speaking at WPNinja Summit

    I was picked to do two session at the WPNinja Summit in Baden, Switzerland, the 27th to 29th of September.

    I will do one session about Windows 365 networks and one about how to do better deployments of Windows 365.

    I’m really looking forward to this and I hope to see you all there!

    Windows 365 Switch in public preview

    At Microsoft Ignite 2022, Microsoft introduced three big new features coming to Windows 365. In May, Windows 365 Boot reached public preview as the first of the three. Now in August, the second and maybe my favorite, Windows 365 Switch reached public preview!

    Windows 365 Switch lets you switch between your physical PC and your Cloud PC through the task viewer, just like the other desktops you can have. It’s a really cool feature and I will cover this in a blogpost the upcoming weeks!

    You can read more about it in the official Microsoft blogpost found here: Windows 365 Switch now available in public preview – Microsoft Community Hub

    Windows 365 Frontline released

    This was actually announced before I left for summer vacation, but Windows 365 Frontline finally reached general availability!

    For those of you not familiar with this concept, this is a different licensing modell designed for scenarios where the users are not using their device all the time, user who work in shift where you have users coming an going. The concept is that you buy one license, but you get three Cloud PCs but only one can be used at the time.

    It sounds a little bit tricky, I know, but I covered this in an earlier blog post which you can have a look at.

    Read more about it in the Microsoft blogpost: Windows 365 Frontline is now generally available | Windows IT Pro Blog (microsoft.com)

    What’s new in Windows 365?

    Windows 365 got some other great updates during the summer as well as Microsoft released a lot of new features in both July and August.

    Some of the new features released was:

    • Move Cloud PC is now generally available
    • New setting to allow users to reprovision their own Cloud PC
    • Azure network connection (ANC) least privilege update
    • Provide feedback button for admins is now generally available
    • Windows 365 web client camera support (preview)
    • Group-based license support for Cloud PC resizing
    • Windows 365 app update notifications for users

    You can read more in details here about the new features: What’s new in Windows 365 Enterprise | Microsoft Learn

    Windows 11 23h2 release update

    Microsoft released new information about the Windows 11 23h2 update coming later this year. It is currently scheduled to be released in Q4 and will be released as an enablement package. This means that there are no big changes coming to the code base of Windows 11, and you can keep doing you testing on Windows 11 22h2 if you are still transitioning over to Windows 11.

    Microsoft also mentions a Windows 11 LTSC version in this update, which means that if you are waiting for that release, you can start preparing.

    Windows client roadmap update: July 2023 – Microsoft Community Hub

    What’s new in Intune?

    As per usual, Microsoft Intune has gotten it’s weekly updates during the summer. I think the most impactful update was the fact that uninstalling applications as an end-user in Company Portal is FINNALLY available! I know this has been something a lot of IT Pros has been waiting for. There are also a lot of new stuff in the 2307 Service release.

    Some highlights:

    • Uninstall Win32 and Microsoft store apps using the Windows Company Portal
    • Use the Turn off the Store application setting to disable end user access to Store apps, and allow managed Intune Store apps
    • New BitLocker profile for Intune’s endpoint security Disk encryption policy
    • Intune supports new Google Play Android Management API
    • Change to default settings when adding Windows PowerShell scripts
    • New settings available for the iOS/iPadOS web clip app type
    • Settings insight within Intune Security Baselines is generally available
    • Tamper protection support for Windows on Azure Virtual Desktop
    • Endpoint Privilege Management support to manage elevation rules for child processes

    What’s new in Microsoft Intune | Microsoft Learn

    Screen capture protection and watermark

    During the summer Microsoft updated how you can enable screen captrue protection and watermarks for Windows 365 (and Azure Virtual Desktop).

    Previously, you had to upload a custom ADMX template to enable these settings (or GPO), but they have now been made available in the built-in ADMX profile in Intune, making this setting much more accessible.

    I will cover this more in a future blog post

    Azure Virtual Desktop Watermarking Support – Microsoft Community Hub

    Screen capture protection in Azure Virtual Desktop – Azure | Microsoft Learn

    Microsoft Inspire 2023

    During the summer, Microsoft also held their Inspire conference which is usually more targeted towards partners, but there was a lot of good stuff announced and shared during the conference.

    Check out the main keynote here: Microsoft Inspire Keynote

    Any also the rest of the sessions: Session catalog (microsoft.com)

  • 7 things I learned working from home in 2021

    7 things I learned working from home in 2021

    This is somewhat of a forgotten post that got left behind in 2021, but I thought I would share this with you.

    Since 2021 has been somewhat of a semi-weird year, where we started seeing a way back to the offices but also faced new trends and buzzwords. My favorite ones during 2021 were “hybrid work” and “digital fabric”, both heavily used in the Microsoft world.

    I’m coming at this from a millennial’s perspective, maybe going back to my posts about being a millennial in the workplace.

    1. Hybrid meetings are here to stay

    Since we are seeing more people going back to offices, but in a more flexible way, hybrid meetings are here to stay! Hybrid means you will have people remote and in the room.

    This comes with a lot of new challenges and a “do’s and don’ts” worthy of a blog post of its own. But it´s clear that some things will be challenging in this and I would say it comes down to culture and good meeting manners. But also the fact that you need a Teams-link in every meeting and you most likely can’t do an old school whiteboard session like you are used to, because most of our conference rooms are that fancy yet.

    Having people remotely connected means that if there is a lot of people in the room, you can’t whisper things to your college since this will most likely be picked up by the mics in the room and you won’t hear the person actually speaking.

    Another thing that might be on the list of things you didn’t think of is if someone brought “fika”/pastry to the meeting for those in the room. This is fairly common in Sweden and is usually delivered in some kind of paper bag made for bread. So it makes A LOT of noise. This is a BIG problem if you join through Teams since all you will hear is that bag.

    Do have your pastry, even though I will be jealous, but please get rid of the bag before the meeting!

    2. Being at an office

    I’ve felt this before, but the pandemic and “the return to offices” has confirmed this and made my belief even stronger. If I’m going to an office I’m going there with a purpose. Not just because “that’s where I go to work”. This is a very personal thing, and I know a lot of people who prefer working from an office. But we are now seeing a shift in the “standard approach” and you are no longer the weird exception wanting to work remotely. If I look at the people I interact with daily, they are not based in the same part of Sweden as me anyway, so I won’t meet them at an office.

    There is a point of showing up and having social interaction, but if I want to get stuff done I’m way more productive at home. However, going in for meetings and workshops is extremely valuable, but then again I’m going to the office with a purpose.

    I keep coming back to this, some of my first posts touched upon this. During my time at Microsoft the phrase “work is not a place, it’s something you do” was something that was really pushed out. I think this is still relevant, and the pandemic has shown this.

    However, I’ve picked up kind of a new take on that quote which is “The endpoint is the new workplace, and the workplace is hybrid”. I will come back to this in 2022!

    3. Corporate life revolves around an office

    One thing I think was pretty clear when we were seeing the light at the end of the tunnel of the pandemic was that everyone got REALLY excited about going back to offices again. I was excited too, this meant that you could meet people again and do things face to face, which is important and meaningful. However, as I stated in the second point, this whole thing “business as usual” at the office and going there every day is not for me but I respect that people feel the need for this.

    The standard has always been that you show up at an office to work, working remotely has always been the exception. If you are the kind of person who thrives at an office, that’s great! But if you are the kind of person like me, whose stress is reduced significantly by not having to show up at an office every day, that should be okay going forward.

    The two years we have spent working remotely show that we can be just as productive and creative in a remote setup. Since not everyone is the same, we should in the future embrace that we are all different with different needs. Not everyone feels great about being at an office 5 days a week.

    Also, the coffee is usually better at home and the line to the microwave is a lot shorter.

    4. Hangout on Teams

    In my world, I’m really bad at small talk in general and I have always preferred chat over talk. I’m the generation that if I call you, it’s probably urgent (or I’m driving).

    However, working from home missing daily social interaction from others other than my girlfriend and dog have actually gotten me to value to call people or just connect to social team hangouts. I’m not always the person driving the discussion in larger groups, but I enjoy the company and listening in.

    I’ve actually increased the number of 1:1 calls I have with colleges discussing work and other stuff. I usually call people with a purpose, but I’ve caught myself calling people just to small talk. Big learning for Ola!

    5. I miss traveling for work

    I had a really intense period in a previous role traveling A LOT. I actually never counted the number of travel days I had per year, but I easily spent 3-4 days traveling per week during some periods.

    I was so done with traveling for work, and I wanted to settle for something more predictable being more in the same place all the time.

    Now I’ve reached a point where I actually miss traveling for work. Maybe not 4 days per week, but the occasional longer trip to see a customer or just attend a conference.

    I really miss that and I want to do more of that when we get more into a controlled Covid situation.

    6. I’m not used to people anymore

    I don’t consider myself as an introverted person, my conclusion is that I’m somewhere in between introvert and extrovert.

    But this whole thing with only meeting people through Teams has made meeting people IRL something that I get really exhausted by. It really drains my energy.

    We had a 1,5-day gathering with all the people who work at Advania Knowledge Factory and I basically needed a day to recover from just meeting people.

    Getting back to not being exhausted after meeting people several days in a row will take some time getting used to.

    7. Learn to stop working

    This is probably what I’m really bad at during the weekdays, but I try really hard NOT to be in front of the computer on the weekends.

    My typical day starts at around 9:00 am, most meetings tend to start then. I work until about 12:00 where I have lunch and take my dog for a walk, hopefully being back until 13:00 where after lunch meetings usually start.

    Then I’m stuck behind the computer until about 18:00 or something like that when it’s time to start cooking dinner. I might not do actually work that late, it usually involves catching up on tech news and community stuff.

    There is always one more email to reply to, one more blog post to read, and one more tweet to re-tweet. But learning when to stop is key and this is something I need to improve in 2022 to actually keep me sane. One thing that I’ve promised myself to actually start using is the virtual commute in Viva Insights. This is a really cool feature and the days when I’ve used it I’m more disconnected from work and can focus on other stuff. If you haven’t tried it yet, I really recommend you do!

  • Tip of the week – Backgrounds in Teams mobile app

    One feature I really like in Teams on the desktop is the possibility to use different backgrounds in a meeting, to have your video background blurred or replaced by a picture. I think we all are familiar with this feature.

    Now, this feature has finally reached mobile devices, which in my world could be really useful since you tend to be out and about while on your mobile device.

    It’s really easy to get started with and to me, it’s really useful. I tend to connect through my phone when I’m out and about which then can remove any messy background since it’s not a controlled environment like my home office.

    How to enable it?

    When you connect to a meeting, you will get a new option at the top of the screen called “Background effects”.

    When you click that, you will get the option to select a blurred background, a Teams standard background, or a custom background.

    My personal favorite to use is the blurred background since it doesn’t take any attention from me so to speak. It makes it easier to focus.

    But you could just as easily upload a picture from your camera roll and use that. Like faking you are out on the golf course.

  • The road to productivity

    The road to productivity

    Since you read my blog, my guess is that you are in the Microsoft ecosystem. That could be running a Windows computer, using Microsoft 365, or administrating 35 000 devices in Microsoft Endpoint Manager.

    But let’s talk about Microsoft 365, or Office 365 as we can also call it. Because this post will focus more on productivity tools rather than devices.

    Transitioning to modern tools

    My hope is that you are already today using the Office 365 suite, which could be Outlook, Word, Excel, and PowerPoint. I hope all of you are already made the transition over to Teams or have at least planned what your journey will look like moving away from Skype for Business. But Office 365 contains so much more than just these six usual suspects. Office 365 is a suite packed with a lot of different productivity and collaboration tools.

    What you can access depends of course on what licenses you have bought, but you will have a tool for basically every situation.

    File sharing – OneDrive for Business. Collaboration – SharePoint. Project management – Projects. Kanban boards – Planner. Corporate videos – Stream. Big all company meetings – Teams Live Event. Note taking – OneNote. Digital whiteboards – Whiteboard. Personal to-do lists – To Do.

    You get the point. There are a lot of often unknown and unused potential in your Office 365 suite. Microsoft provides a bunch of modern tools which becomes disposable for you and your users when you adopt Office 365, providing you with modern tools from the same eco system.

    Spread awareness

    I way to often stumble across customers, friends and even co-workers who are not aware of the power of Office 365. Instead they turn to well-known consumer products, e.g. Trello or DropBox which lives completely outside the corporate sphere. Not only does corporate data live in a place you don’t control, the free-to-use service does usually only apply for consumer usage, which means that you could be asked to pay for a corporate license for your rouge users.

    Historically, these have been quite common as a solution on the problem that the employer does not provide sufficient tools. But that is no longer the case if you have the Microsoft 365 services. The problem might be that your users does not know this yet. Or simply doesn’t care, that is absolutely a possibility as well.

    Since you are already paying for the Office 365 suite and Microsoft 365 services, you should really encourage your users to do and use the right things. Spread awareness about all the great tools that they have at their disposal!

    Conclusion

    If you have spent the time and money to move to Office 365, make sure that you make the most out of it. You invested a lot in the transition, but that doesn’t mean that the work stops there. The Microsoft services are constantly evolving, and you need make sure you keep up in some way or another and keep deploying new tools and services to your users.

    Another aspect of this is securing your corporate data. If you use tools within the product suite you have decided to work with, this applies not only to the Microsoft world, the data will live in a place which you control and govern. If you start using other services, especially consumer services, that data might not be yours anymore and you can’t apply retention policies and data leak prevention policies to that service nor data. This is a big problem when your corporate data lives on places it shouldn’t. However, that’s a completely different topic which I could dedicate a complete post to.

    But I hope you get where I’m coming from and there are a few takeaways from this.

    1. Make the most of the productivity suite you have bought
    2. Don’t use consumer versions for corporate use
    3. Protect the data by keeping it within the corporate sphere

    Given the development Microsoft have done with the Office 365 suite the last couple of years, most of the tools you need for productivity can be found there. Make sure you tell your users and make the most of the investment you have already made!

    And to be clear, I’m not saying that you shouldn’t go buy other productivty tools. But before you do, make sure you don’t already have what your users are asking for within your exisiting tools.

  • Expectation management and communications

    Expectation management and communications

    Before we get started, I’m in no way pretending to be a communications professional. These are just my experiences and learnings down the road.

    Let’s face it, and we all know this. In general, we in IT are not great in end-user communication and expectation management. We live and breathe technology, and somewhere we sometimes forget that someone is supposed to use our fancy-best-of-breed-solution.

    Okay, a bit over generalizing but if you have worked in IT, I think you might recognize this. We often forget about the end-user and we fail to tell them about all the wonderful things we do, but also what they can expect from us.

    I will try to provide you with a high-level view, to help YOU take the decisions what to do and why, not really the HOW in this post.

    Now that we have managed the expectations, let’s get into this.

    Expectations management

    Since you are reading this, I assume that you are in some way involved in the end-user service area and are either providing or helping to provide services to end users. You are operating in the layer where most users interact.

    But what have you promised your end users? What are they buying from you? Do they know or are they just “paying the bill”? This is something that varies between organizations, depending on size, location, culture, and previous structures of the IT department.

    But what are you selling to your end users? Are they just buy “a computer” or are there more services attached like deskside support and a helpdesk?

    There are a lot of questions related to this, and hence one of the themes for this post.

    What do your users THINK that they are buying and what are you delivering?

    This is the most important part which is also the trickiest one. To set an expectation with your users (which are your customers) on what they will receive buying the service from you. It might be that you are the only one that are allowed to provide this service within you organization, or that you are the preferred one but they could operate it them self or turn to a third party to provide this.

    None the less, making it clear for the end users on what to expect from your service is increasingly important. Especially since enabling new services is three clicks and a credit card away…

    What value are you adding to the equation?

    End-user communications

    Enter end-user communications. This is a hard area and there is a reason that organizations hire communications professionals. They might not know all about fancy IT stuff (that’s not why they were hired), but you can make sure that they know all about getting your message out there!

    From my experience by working in the end-user area, this is something that is super important but also, very often forgotten about. We tend to update something we consider as small, but it might have huge end-user impact. If we don’t successfully inform our users about this, we might cause unnecessary frustrations. Even though we need to adopt an Evergreen mindset, we need to make sure that our users know what’s going on. Keep them in the loop.

    I’m no communications expert, but I’ve seen and delivered the outcome from projects where there were a lot of end-user communications and less communication. What do you think where the most successful, in the aspect of user adoption?

    Yes, the projects where extensive end-user communications were performed.

    However, you always need to adopt amount/channels/information to whomever is the target for the change. Some information might only be needed by your support people, other information might be of more value to your end-users.

    The go-do / take away

    So, what is the takeaway from this?

    Try to define your services for your end-users possible and communicate these. A PDF hidden away on a SharePoint site will never be found, putting it on some sort of intranet site might be a better idea to clearly state to your end-users what they can expect by buying the service from you and what value you add to them.

    This is of course something that varies between businesses, but defining services is a crucial step to set the expectations right with your users.

    I would also really encourage you to reach out to your communications professionals within your business for advice and work together with them. They can really help you get you message out there, making sure that your end-users (customers) understand why things are happening and changing in the way they are. But don’t expect them to do your work for you. You will still need to put in the effort but getting their advice and/or input might change the success rate of your project.