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STEPHEN ROSE: Welcome to season 2 of our enabling remote work with Microsoft Teams webcast. I'm your host, Stephen Rose, and hey, thanks for joining us today. We really appreciate it. New season, new show, new format. Let's talk about what we're going to do different in season 2. Well, the first thing is, we're no longer just enabling remote work. We're now enabling remote work with Microsoft Teams, which means we're going to focus in on Teams and all of the different questions that you folks have been asking. We're going to dedicate shows to things like, I really want to understand security better. Let's talk about device management. Or, how do I better work with external access and guests? We're going to be dedicating shows to these topics. We're going to have a mix of Microsoft experts and some real-world experts that we're going to bring in. So, I'm super excited to do things a little bit differently, and we certainly want to hear from you. If you have a great idea for a show or a guest you'd love to see or a burning topic, we encourage you to reach out to us. And we'll talk about the best ways to connect with us at the end of the show. We're also going to add some new segments. We're going to do an unboxing segment. This week, we're going to have our very, very first one. We're going to show off some cool new laptops and new Teams hardware and accessories and just cool things that you're probably going to want to check out and spend money that you don't have on. We'll have some cool high-profile guests that will occasionally check in. Again, this is really about hearing from you guys on what you really want to hear and what we can do to make the show great. So, speaking of real-world experts, this week, we are going to have some MVPs with us. For those of you that aren't familiar with the Microsoft Most Valuable Professional program, we'll dig into what that is. But first, let me go ahead and introduce my guests. My first guest is Mr. David Patrick. How are you today, David?DAVID PATRICK: Hi, Stephen. I'm doing great. I'm really excited to be here.STEPHEN ROSE: Awesome. It's great to have you. David and I worked together at the . . . he was part of our SharePoint conference preday. He was part of our Ignite. He worked in helping the Department of Defense get Windows, Office, Teams rolled out. Take a moment and tell me a little bit about yourself, David.DAVID PATRICK: Sure. So, I'm a Microsoft-certified trainer, MVP. I work over at Aberdeen Proving Ground. My main customer is the US Army, as well. We also have other customers throughout the DoD. And lately, we've been working on getting Teams rolled out, helping our customers work with SharePoint, using Office better, mixed with all those technologies. It's been really exciting. People say the government's slow, but they've been keeping me really busy over there.STEPHEN ROSE: That is awesome. Thank you. Also joining me today is Mr. David Webster. Hey, Darrell. Sorry, Darrell Webster. Hi, Darrell. How are you this morning?DARREL WEBSTER: [laughs]STEPHEN ROSE: You're the guy who got up at 4:00 a.m. to do this today because you're in New Zealand, right?DARREL WEBSTER: Go live at 4:00 a.m., got up at 2:30.STEPHEN ROSE: If anybody should be messing up names, it should be you not me. You can call me whatever you want during this webinar.DARREL WEBSTER: Thanks for having me, Stephen.STEPHEN ROSE: No, absolutely, Darrell. Tell us a little bit about yourself and what you do.DARREL WEBSTER: I'm an adoption and change architect for Datacom in New Zealand. I worked on the systems admin and technical delivery space, but I find that I fit better with helping technology have its best chance at being used. I'm working with customers of all sizes here in New Zealand and helping them particularly at the moment make the most of Teams.STEPHEN ROSE: All right. Awesome. One of the questions I got and I was getting some different comments and questions over the weekend on Twitter—for those who want to reach out, it's @StephenLRose, that's with a P H, if you want to send us a question while we're on the chat. One of the questions I got is, How do you get people to use the software? Somebody said, we rolled out Teams, and all we got was people just using it for IM. They weren't using the other features. They didn't do collab, and I kind of know why this may be, but I'm interested in hearing your thoughts on why that rollout went well, but the adoption was not successful.DARREL WEBSTER: I find that you're right. Most people will catch on to using chat for Teams because it's a natural transition from Skype for Business or other chat tools. The collaboration side of things is more of a cultural change. The best way to get people on board with us is to surround it with real work, to create your channels based on real workstreams for your team, even set up your team well before you actually invite people into it. And then, don't try and bring all your files over, but rather bring real current work so that you've got a reason to go there.STEPHEN ROSE: So, what are some of the things that you've run into as you've moved customers over, whether it's during deployment, postdeployment, etc. What are some of the things that you've run into that you go, "Man, if somebody would have told me this, it would have made my life much better"? So, here's your chance to tell us and make somebody else's life much better.DARREL WEBSTER: I know that one of the first ways to get across to Teams is not necessarily to risk the whole thing. In fact, if we were to try and address Teams—I know, I've got to get the pocket knife out—if we had to address Teams and have everything open and say, "Here you go. Here's the whole tool." It's overwhelming. So, the best way to get it across is to stick with the familiar. Everyone knows what a knife is, but what the heck is this tool? I find that with the transition to chat and meetings and calls, one key thing is to plan for people to have to re-create things like their external contacts to make sure that you've got ahead with federation and cushioning that blow. There is a few different things that are different in the experience with chat.STEPHEN ROSE: David, I'm going to switch over to you for a moment here. Let's ask you the same question. How did you deal with getting folks to exactly see, understand which tools they could use, how they work, and then train them to use some of these new pieces within it? Again, you're working with government, which is very different, because you often have to work with GCC or government cloud, and they have a reputation of being slow to change.DAVID PATRICK: I think you hit the nail on the head when you mentioned train. You can't have enough training—constant, continuous training. We formed these groups called “champions” with Microsoft's help. We're bringing people together from each of our customers. I'm one of 10 folks. Each of us has a customer of anywhere from 1,000 to 5,000 people. And we band together as champions. What that means is that we're getting together, we're sharing ideas, we're sharing issues that we've encountered and different ways to solve them. That's been really powerful. We use Teams to meet . . . So, as Darrell said before, we're eating our own dog food. We're using Teams, we're learning about Team for ourselves, and then we're turning around and we're passing that back out to our customers.STEPHEN ROSE: So, tell me more about the Champions Program and what you guys do. Because I know we have one at Microsoft, and I know that you leverage that, but you also made it your own. So, how did you do this? Again, what could somebody take away from that?DAVID PATRICK: Yeah, like you said, we kind of copied what Microsoft was already doing. Why not leverage what success they've already had. We reached out to people. Some people were “voluntold,” like myself. I mean, it's part of my job. But other people that can be champions were people that are just sort of power use, that are already tech savvy and they might be the budget analyst or the procurement analyst, whatever. They're not necessarily a tech person, but we invite them to be part of the Champions Program. And then, they can amongst their folks share that knowledge, those tips and tricks, those issues to watch out for. We have formal teams called the CVR Champions. We have said, we invite certain folks. Some people try, it's not for them, and they go. We have a nickname for those people. We call them “the chumps.” We have some champions, then we have some chumps. It's chumps to champions. People who are naysayers, and then we convert.STEPHEN ROSE: Got it. You guys were using Sametime for IM, which is very different than Teams IM. I'd use Sametime in the past, and I'm familiar with it. So, that was a big, big shift for them. How long did it take to start to get a majority of people on board until that ball got rolling?DAVID PATRICK: We're still working on it. We still have some pockets of folks out there that are hanging on to Sametime. It's expensive, number 1. It does chat great, but what about everything else? So, that's what we're using to leverage people to jump on Teams and saying, "Fine, you can chat, you could have chatted before. We didn't change anything there. But did you know that now you can upload files? Now you can collaborate on those files?" That's been a real game-changer for us for our adoption.STEPHEN ROSE: Cool. I'm going to head back to Darrell. Darrell, I know we talked a little bit about the shift from hybrid to remote workers and on premise. How did that go for you? The whole thing, I know, is really to get people connected, and then to allow them to come back securely when you guys get to that point, which you guys are still a ways to go on that. How are you managing that? How did you manage that as you look to help people along with that?DARREL WEBSTER: The switch from hybrid and into using Teams. It is about trying to show that there are similar experiences within the tool. If you do have both tools, like in our case and other customers' cases we help them with it's Skype for Business and Teams. While you've got both in the environment, you're going to be fighting an uphill battle. Why would I go and use another chat tool when I'm quite comfortable using Skype for Business? Once you do draw that line in the sand, you prepared people for that change, and you've showed them that here's the similarities, here's the differences, then it's a much easier job to also help them see the value of the collaborative side of Teams.STEPHEN ROSE: Yeah, absolutely. David, the same question for you. How did you best help folks to move from the on premise and to remote and start to look at that differently? Because they're already freaked out by all the change and you're adding more to it.DAVID PATRICK: Yeah, you know, it's sad to say but the silver lining of the situation that we're in with the pandemic is that it was a forcing function. Folks that used to be in the building were now at home, and a lot of our tools didn't work. So, we had to switch to the cloud. We had to use . . . we kind of fast-tracked Office 365 adoption and also had to fast-track the training. It's kind of nice because now that people were forced into it, they were more acceptive to say, "Well, I better sign up and learn how to do this," because the benefit is now they're working from home and maybe they'll get working from home even after this is all over. People are really excited about moving to the cloud.STEPHEN ROSE: How's collaboration working for you? Oh, hang on. We've just got a question in. What incentives were successful to encourage champions to participate? Let's ask that one first.DAVID PATRICK: So, that's a good one.STEPHEN ROSE: How did you drive them?DAVID PATRICK: Exactly. It's funny that we have a couple of things that we kicked around. Being at the government, you can't really do like a day off. There is this thing called “59 minutes.” It’s like an hour off that some people can get but contractors can’t. So, that was kicked around. It's crazy to say this, but you know what people love? They love badges. They love their badges. So we gamify it. "Hey, you've got this many points. You've got a gold badge. You participated in this many conversations, you got a silver badge." That whole badge thing and how many points and, "Oh, I've been around. I'm a level 9," whatever. They love that. That's really been the best incentive.STEPHEN ROSE: How do you track that? What tools are you using to track their usage on Teams? Is it Workplace Analytics? My Analytics? Is it just people going in and filling out a survey form? How are you doing it?DAVID PATRICK: We already had something in place in SharePoint using the old school community 10-site template. We just built on that, and now we're using the Teams. It is a little tricky because we're not quite hybrid. We still have on premises, and we now we're using the cloud. We have some manual or not quite manual, but we have some processes that look at the metrics in the cloud, and then move that and put that back in where we already had that whole gamification in SharePoint.STEPHEN ROSE: That's awesome. Darrell, I'm going to pass it back to you again. Same question to you. How did you get people to jump on board? What has been the biggest “aha” moment for them?DARREL WEBSTER: Funny enough, one of the biggest rewards as a champion is actually to get early access and to have a voice at the table. A number of the champions we have in our program wanted to go in to represent their people and the way that they work. And that's really what they bring is their expertise with how they work and their interest in Teams. Aside from that and getting additional help and really listening to them and letting them shape the way that we deliver the product, I look to help them tell their story. I like to sit alongside them and help write how they're using their product and even certain . . . record videos like this to get the voice out there.STEPHEN ROSE: We've just got another question in. How do you manage or control confidential data files being uploaded in Teams or SharePoint? And I do want to point out that Teams does encrypt all of our data, both at rest and in motion, but I'll let you answer that one, and then I'm going to have Dave answer the same question.DARREL WEBSTER: It's all about the way that you're using Teams, as well. Teams for us is about work in progress, and it's not about exposing everything to everyone. Now, you know that Teams allows every team member to see the content, but we also make use of private channels, where appropriate. It's thinking, what is this item . . .STEPHEN ROSE: Take a moment to talk about private channels, because not everybody is familiar with that as that's a newer feature.DARREL WEBSTER: Yeah, well Teams in itself is about providing collaboration for the full team, but there is sometimes a need within the team to have a small pocket for conversations and files that is separate to the rest of the team. This does create . . . for the technical people, it's a separate site collection. It's got its little boundaries. Your conversations are in a separate place.STEPHEN ROSE: Awesome. David, same question for you. Again, working with a government agency, I'm sure there's a whole different level there. Absolutely.DAVID PATRICK: We do . . . a lot of it's training. A lot of it is this has been certified for this level. They have impact levels, and you're allowed to put certain documents in certain places. And that's true for our on premises as well as for the cloud. We can't be having people pull up any, you know . . . I like to call the government #cloudcosts. We go through constant training to certify and know where we're allowed to put things. Now, we are looking into, you know, with the whole data loss prevention and there's a bunch of tools built into the cloud where we can do some automated searching, make sure no one putting out any we call it “PII,” personally identifiable information. Things like Social Security numbers. There's a whole set of tools. One of the neat things about being MVP as Darrell alluded to is that we get early access to some of this information. So, I've been training up on that, even though we haven't implemented yet at the day job, I've been training up on this stuff, and I've been talking to the CEOs and CIOs and saying, "Listen, we have these capabilities, so we can make it more of that forcing function. We can turn this on, and that way, if someone does slip up and put something off they shouldn't have, an alarm will go off, an email will go out." We're excited about those capabilities.STEPHEN ROSE: That's using DLP or AIP or a combination of those. You bring up a great point, actually, a perfect segue. You talked about being an MVP, you get early access. One of the questions we got is, "Hey, how do I become an MVP?" And I thought, that is a perfect segment to a conversation that I had earlier this week. Let's go ahead and let's roll that interview. So, we've just spent the last 10 minutes chatting with two MVPs, I thought it'd be great to take a break for a minute and talk about what is an MVP, and how do I become one. I, myself, was a previous MVP. So, here's my cool MVP award that we can see. I was a networking MVP, and it was just one of the best parts of my life and helped me to get my job at Microsoft. Allie, thanks for joining us. How are you?ALLIE WIECZOREK: I am good. How are you? Thanks for having me.STEPHEN ROSE: I am doing great. Tell us who you are and what your connection is to the MVP Program.ALLIE WIECZOREK: Sure. I'm Allie Wieczorek. I joined Microsoft just about a year ago and interned there the year before. I've always been focused on the MVP Program, but I'm actually a product marketing manager on the Microsoft 365 side. So, I mostly focus on getting MVPs engaged with our product teams and making sure they have that full modern work, Microsoft Office 365 story.STEPHEN ROSE: Cool! So, Microsoft MVPs are Microsoft's most valuable professionals. They are our real-world experts. These are the people who are working in our tech community forums. They're the ones who are blogging. They're speaking. They're doing events. How does somebody become an MVP? What is that process, and how do they stay an MVP because I know that's a yearly renewal? Every year, you get evaluated, and you go through a renewal process. Walk us through a little bit about that.ALLIE WIECZOREK: Sure. It's always been seen as this black box of how do you become an MVP, and probably the best thing to do is look up other MVPs who write lots of blogs and stuff about how they became them. It is by nomination only, so you have to be nominated either by a current MVP or a Microsoft employee. Then, from that point on, you get evaluated just based on your contributions, which can be blog articles or speaking at events or planning events or helping out in Microsoft Tech Community and getting people's questions answered. There's a lot of different things we look at, but yeah, we're looking for technical expertise, and then just that value for community and sharing your knowledge with other people for free.STEPHEN ROSE: And it's worldwide. How many current MVPs do we have? I don't even know what the current number is. Do you know?ALLIE WIECZOREK: Don't ask me exact number, I could get it. We usually have about 3,000.STEPHEN ROSE: Yeah, it's quite a few and they're from almost every country around the world, so we're always looking for that. So, if somebody says, I want to become an MVP, and I've had at least once a week somebody reach out, like, "I want to become an MVP at some point." What types of things should we be doing? I know one of the first things we say is, "Hey, get in the Tech Community, and go on every day and answer a few questions." And we are looking at the volume and the quality of your answers. We're looking at speakers and bloggers. What are some of the things that people can do to start to get noticed as part of that first step. Or, what do you look for?ALLIE WIECZOREK: Yeah, I think Microsoft Tech Community is a really good place to start just because it's also where you go for the most up-to-date news from our product teams. Those are the blogs you should be reading. You should be on the bleeding edge, as we say, of what our technologies are doing. So, that's really helpful, and you can see the kinds of questions that people are answering. If you see anyone on the Tech Community with a green ring around them, they're already an MVP. So, look at the kinds of answers that they're providing, and follow their lead. But honestly, we are looking for more interesting and diverse and really varied capabilities and skills. If you're not a writer, think about organizing conferences or speaking, starting a podcast, there's so many different ways that you can contribute. It's just about getting your information out there. Twitter is a really good tool for that. Our MVPs are all over Twitter—#MVPbuzz—and you'll get retweets, and you'll get likes, and that's another way to get noticed, too.STEPHEN ROSE: Awesome! I know we have the MVP page, where they can look up MVPs within their country, things like that. Talk for a moment about the page and how they learn about other MVPs in their areas so that they can connect with them saying, "Hey, I'd like to become an MVP. How did you do it?" Especially within their own country or their own language.ALLIE WIECZOREK: Absolutely. It's just mvp.. And from there, you can learn about the program, and then there's also a field to search for MVPs. You can search by country and by award category. Most of them also share links to their LinkedIn profile or Twitter, and some share their personal emails, as well, through there. It is optional to share that information, so they might not all, but you can usually find them on Twitter, anyway.STEPHEN ROSE: I have yet to find an MVP who was not absolutely happy to talk with someone who wanted to become one and talk about their contributions and what they did. And with Ignite coming up, it's a great time because we look to our MVPs. If we have speaking opportunities. I know every year, I've hired MVPs in our booth to work representing our product, where they get a free pass to the conference and get to go to all the sessions and all that other good stuff. And, I know, also, I'll connect them with Engineering, where Engineering will have a question on a feature and I'll go, "Look, let's get 10 of our MVPs on a call," and we'll do that. We really listen to them. So, it's an amazing opportunity not just to promote your skill set if you are a freelancer and things like that, to be able to find work and to network, but also for you to give us feedback based on your experiences so we could help to tailor the product and evolve the product because we're always looking for that combination of evolution and revolution. And it really helps keep us grounded and get folks like you and folks like our MVPs on the webcast. Awesome.ALLIE WIECZOREK: MVPs are really crucial to product feedback. I just wanted to say that. I think it's a really kind of exclusive opportunity. Every MVP signs an NDA. So they get to hear about news really early and see features really early. Our engineers really rely on them—and even Marketing—to see, Is this messaging right, or is this feature working for you, or what would you add or what would you take away, or what do you think is more important on our road map? What are we not seeing? The product teams just value the MVP feedback so much because they're so technical. And then, the MVPs also get this exciting, exclusive glimpse into Microsoft's headquarters.STEPHEN ROSE: Plus, the MVP Summit every year, where up until this past year, they come up here and they get a week's worth of sitting with our engineering team, our marketing teams. They get first looks at all the cool stuff that's going to be coming and a lot of “What do you guys think?” and “What are we missing?” We really look especially at that week as an amazing touchpoint. I remember the first time I came to Seattle for an MVP Summit, I was just blown away by sitting with engineers, going, "Hi, tell us what we're doing wrong." I'm like, "How long do we got?" They're like, "We got 3 hours." We filled that full time and then some and they're like, "Really? That's amazing. How are you doing that?" Like I said, without the MVP Program, I've been here at Microsoft for 12 years, I wouldn't have this role. So, I'm incredibly appreciative of everything that it offers. Do you have a favorite MVP story that you like to share, and then we'll get back to our MVP interviews?ALLIE WIECZOREK: Favorite story? Putting me on the spot. I don't know. One thing that I thought was really interesting—one of the first stories I heard was two of our MVPs, Adam Deltinger and Chris Hoard, who actually both started out on Tech Community and met each other through Tech Community, and both became MVPs, and then met for the first time at Ignite, I believe, or maybe Teams Airlift. It was this really cute story about how they built their friendship, but also their community activity and their expertise the same way. And then, they actually got to meet in person when they both became MVPs. Unfortunately, they didn't . . .STEPHEN ROSE: Did music play? Was like everything went to like a slow-motion blur? Was it like a meme-worthy moment?ALLIE WIECZOREK: You need to ask them. I’m sure—you know what? I'm sure someone somewhere has a recording with some romantic music behind it.STEPHEN ROSE: That's a riot. It's great. I remember getting interviewed by a lot of our community reporters 2 years ago or last year and the great stuff that we did. It's absolutely awesome. So, keep up the great work. Is there a URL that folks should go to go check out more about the MVP Program?ALLIE WIECZOREK: I would do mvp.. I think that's the best place to start, and then #MVPbuzz on Twitter, and you'll get everything you need to know.STEPHEN ROSE: Awesome. Thanks for your time today, Allie. We appreciate it. We're going to get back to our MVPs and finish talking about all the cool stuff in Teams. Thanks again!ALLIE WIECZOREK: Sounds great, thanks. STEPHEN ROSE: All right. So, all about the MVP program, and we're with our MVPs. So, thanks again to Allie, telling us all about that. So, we've got some more questions in from the folks who are watching live. Dave, this first one's going to go out to you. Government is very fast moving, and change is coming on a regular status, 365 is mind-changing event for policy and moving so quickly. Is it scaring upper management at times? How do you keep them in focus? Satya said we have done months’ worth of change in weeks. How do you get folks to go along with that and to kind of go, "It'll be okay. Trust me," which is the ultimate thing you never want to hear from an IT pro.DAVID PATRICK: Right. I don't think upper management is scared. They've actually been fantastic. They recognize the need for change, the rapid pace of technology. Government, we actually, that's not our forte. When I first started, we were still using new SharePoint 2007, and we rolled that for a while. Training. I said it before, I'll say it again. You can't get enough training. Don't make the mistake of thinking that it's so easy. You see how it is. People needs these demos. We do these SharePoint Saturday where we're showing off in Teams fest. There's these online events where we're showing how easy the tools are. But don't let that make you forget that you still need to sit down with someone who's using that can show you some shortcuts and the tips and tricks. We did something the other day. We do this thing with tech girls and we needed break out rooms, which Teams formerly doesn't have. But a breakout room is just another meeting, so we set up five meetings and use links to switch back and forth. Teams puts one medium hold, and you can easily switch between meetings. People are like, "Wow, that's breakout rooms." I'm like, "Yeah, I know." It's just multiple meetings and Teams handles it. Through training, people learn not to be afraid of the technology. STEPHEN ROSE: Cool. And somebody asked, what are you an MVP in? Because somebody said, is there an MVP for government club, which there is not. So what is your designation?DAVID PATRICK: Right. It's technically Office Apps and Services. I consider myself a SharePoint guy, but yes, Office Apps and Services.STEPHEN ROSE: All right. We'll come back to resources in a minute, but Darrell, I got a question, so I want to bring it to you. Can private channels be used within guest-enabled teams?DARREL WEBSTER: Yes and no. Right? Yes, in terms of yes, the people within the organization can benefit from using a private channel within a team. Sadly, you can't get your guests in there at this stage. I know that there's some use cases for getting guests into a private space. The one that I can think of is sometimes you're working with multiple vendors in a project, you want to keep some of their work separate from each other. At this stage, today, not possible.STEPHEN ROSE: OK, cool. Darrell, I'll stay with you. What are some of your favorite resources or resources that folks should absolutely be aware of? And we'll list these both once we publish the video at the bottom, and we'll have some of these up on the screen. So, what are a few of your favorite ones or ones that people should absolutely go check out how they help and how they have helped you?DARREL WEBSTER: I'll start with a new one that's bringing resources together, and that's adoption.. For some time, there's been adoption resources here, there, and everywhere And a lot of valiant effort from each of the different product groups. But this brings it all together, so it's Teams and it's other products, as well. You'll find some good pointers there to some of the other ones I mentioned, as well. I do spend a lot of time at support.teams. I'm super-impressed with the efforts over the recent years of keeping those support resources up to date so they actually match the product as it's being released. That's really cool. Last one that I make a lot of use, and my customers are just lapping it up, is Microsoft 365 Learning Pathways. So, I can bring the support resources into their environment, and I can also create some custom stuff to give it some relevance around how they want to communicate for the product to be used.STEPHEN ROSE: Cool, and I'm excited to announce that we will have 13 new Teams Learning Pathways that we will have released by or around the Ignite time frame. So, we're working on those even as we speak. A guy on my team is leading that and doing an amazing job. That's our Docs team and our Lear team, but we will have 13 new dedicated Teams Learning Pathways. I'm so excited, especially one that is specifically focused on driving adoption, so that'll be awesome. David Patrick, same question for you, sir.DAVID PATRICK: You mentioned Microsoft Learn, with all the Learning Pathways—that's fantastic. There's a tool out there, the SharePoint Migration Tool. People, that's great for moving to Office 365, if you need to move your stuff. But one of the best tools that we've been using, and this is one that we've been using in those tech girls workshops that I mentioned, is the Teams—I believe it's called Teams Demo. Basically, it simulates Teams in a browser. What's cool about that is, so we have our workshops that we do using Teams. It's hard to demo Teams when you're in a team, but by using that simulation tool, we can actually show the girls how to use Teams while they're actually logged in to Teams. So, that's been super beneficial to us.STEPHEN ROSE: You're working very closely with, DigiGirlz, is it? What's the group you're working with?DAVID PATRICK: DigiGirlz was Microsoft’s, and that was our inspiration. We wanted to do something similar. provided us a lot of workshops. We came up . . . we actually developed our own, which is Intro to Collaboration Using Microsoft Teams.STEPHEN ROSE: Awesome. I got one last question. Then, we have to go to our cool unboxing. I'll give this to you first, David, and then Darrell because I think this is a great question to close out. Have you worked with clients who do not want to open Teams to guests. And if you were able to convince them to open it up, how did you do it? What was your secret sauce? So David, I'll have you answer that first, and then Darrell.DAVID PATRICK: Yeah, that's great. It varies from customer to customer. Some of our groups are very, as I mentioned, cloud cautious, and they're like, "Nope. No guests." And then, we have others that are like, "No, they're our partners. We absolutely have to have guests." And so, you know, it's hit and miss. And some of them, OK, others no. And we work with it on an individual, case-by-case basis.STEPHEN ROSE: Yeah, and I've always said that don't let people connect with people from the outside or share with people from the outside, they're just going to find a way to do it, and it's going to be a way that you're not managing and controlling. So, do it and control it. I always love it when I say, "Well, do you let them use One . . .?" "No, we don't let then use OneDrive for sharing. We allow them to share things through Outlook?" "Oh yeah.” Then, you have no security. Crazy. Darrell, same question to you.DARREL WEBSTER: It's about giving, first of all, IT and the organization some comfort that it's going to be done in a safe and governed way. Do come up with some governance principles around clearly naming that this is a team and it's for external purposes. And de also found that coming up with a provisioning process, where there was some approval so that you could say, "Yes, this is a team for a purpose, and this is the reason why." and you've got to qualify with some driving instructions to show that you understand how to handle information with guests. Apart from jumping through all those hoops, it's super important to be able to collaborate with guests because yeah, you want to do it within your environment, where you have that control, as you say.STEPHEN ROSE: I know I said that'd be the last question, but we got one more that I have to ask each of you. Is Microsoft Teams admin a full-time job role? What are some of the administrative/maintenance/monitoring tasks that need to be done on a regular basis to ensure future success with Teams? Then, we have to go to our unboxing. So Darrell, I'll start with you.DARREL WEBSTER: You know, the heaviest part of the admin is probably making sure that there aren't duplicates and crazy names and things like that. If you're trying to do this manually, it could be a full-time job. Some clever orgs have created their own tool with Power Apps and Power Automate, and others are using third-party tools to try and provide a place for people to provision those tools, check to see if there's an existing team, and suggest that there's a team that they might join. That's one of the admin tasks that you might see crop up.STEPHEN ROSE: Cool. David?DAVID PATRICK: Yeah, I think it depends on the size of your team. My internal contracting company, we're small, we're under 400 people. So, it's a part-time role for me. I go in there, I clean up a few things. But at the government, we have multiple people performing that role. It's a constant, many, many full time. It really depends on the size of the team.STEPHEN ROSE: Alright. We'll come back to you guys in a minute. We're going to do an unboxing. I got a great cool new device from Poly this week. So, let's roll that unboxing. Alright. Welcome to our first unboxing segment. Today, we have been sent the Poly Calisto 5300 speaker puck. What's great about this one is it is a portable and personal speakerphone. It is both USB and Bluetooth. It connects to Maxim PCs, and it has a Microsoft Teams button built into it. Let's take a look. Let's see what we got. We have the quick-start guide. Always good. It looks super easy to set up. And our very important Certified for Microsoft Teams. Awesome, love that! So, let's pull that out. And, let's take a look. It comes in its own little pack. And there is our speakerphone and there is the Microsoft Teams button that we talked about. Let's talk about some of the things I really like about this unit. The first is, we have the choice between USB-C and USB-A, which I really like. You can choose which one you want when ordering, and of course, it works with Bluetooth. We do have the 360-degree speaker and microphone set up here at the bottom. It is a full-duplex speakerphone with noise cancellation. We have our power button. We have a lock here so that you can lock it to a desk if you want. Sixteen hours of battery life, which is great. We see we have our pretty standard mute button. We have our volume button. Start with our volume, a bit down, great. And, I’ll hang up. And then, with the Teams button, which will automatically launch Teams when hit, or it will automatically connect you to a Teams call if a call has started, you get the little pop-up. And off course, to click out of it, we just use the turn-off button. So, let's go ahead and plug it in and take a look at the new Poly Calisto 5300. All right. Let's take a look at this software. Things that I really like is simply by clicking here on the taskbar, I'm told how much time is remaining. I can mute the device right from here or launch the software itself. Software is pretty straightforward: time remaining; if you're connected via PC or Bluetooth, all your product information. Under Settings, you can have a voice of you when you're muted and have it come up on screen, which I really like. If you don't want it on screen, you just have an audible reminder when I start speaking or an on-screen reminder. So, I kind of like a little bit of both. Let's see, what else? Ringtones. Yes. Thank you. You can have it play a ringtone. You can choose what your different volume level is. Of course, what is going to ring—if it's your primary device or all attached audio. But here’s what I really like is you can use it as a softphone. Not only does it support Microsoft Teams but it supports a variety of different products. Media Player. You can actually if you're playing music have a pause and resume, which I really like, especially when I'm traveling because I'll use this as my speaker. And then, notifications. If you have to check and update the software. So, that is the Polly Calisto 5300-M, which is available now. It's a pretty cool speaker, so I want to thank the folks at Poly for sending it over. Excellent. And thanks again to the fine folks at Poly for sending me their device. In our next episode, I'm excited to announce that I'll be showing off the new 17-inch Dell XPS. It is a gorgeous laptop. So I'm excited to show that one off. Darrell, David, I've had a lot of people saying, how do they get ahold of you? What is the best way to reach you, either via Twitter, etc. And if you have a blog, I'll give you a chance to call that out? Darrell, I'll have you go first.DARRELL WEBSTER: Because I'm on top, right? On Twitter, it's Darrell as a Service. Now, don't write it full. You see my name here, D-A-R-R-E-L-L-A-A-S. Then, I'm also on a YouTube channel, which is Modern Workplace Scenarios. Creating a lot of content there—practical, short videos.STEPHEN ROSE: Awesome. David?DAVID PATRICK: Yeah, the best way to reach me is on Twitter. Tweet me, follow me. I tweet all the time and tell you where I'm going to be. I'm @David E as in Eric Patrick—so @DavidEPatrick, that’s my handle. And I talk about my—like I'm going to be talking at SQL Saturday in Saskatchewan coming up. We got SQL Saturday—we just did SQL Saturday Albany. We got SharePoint. All the code camps. Now, they're all virtual so everyone can attend. If you're looking for where I'm going to be next, find me on Twitter @DavidEPatrick.STEPHEN ROSE: Awesome. I want to thank you, gentlemen, for joining me today. This was absolutely great. I am @StephenLRose on Twitter, so you're welcome to follow me there. Of course, check out all the great resources that we have listed in the box right next to my big old head. One last thing, if you'd like to be featured on an upcoming segment called “Here's My Life,” something new we're going to be doing, send me a note on Twitter and tell me a little bit about who you are. If you have any valuable or prized possession that you want to share, something that represents you, and show me your tech setup. Darrell did a great job of this the other day, so you can take a look at his and I'll do mine. If we find one that's cool or really like it, we may just send you a really cool Teams T-shirt or Teams power bank, so cool stuff. Thanks again for joining us today. We will be back in 2 weeks talking about education and Teams in education and getting ready to start the new virtual school year and some cool features and some great guests that are going to talk about how to manage, use, and some of the great functionality that we have in Teams specifically for education. So, make sure to join us. Thank you again to all my guests and for everybody, have a great week and we will see you soon. ................
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