Leslie Anjan's blog

  Today, businesses are forced to maintain two types of analytical systems, data warehouses and data lakes. Data warehouses provide critical insights on business health. Data lakes can uncover important signals on customers, products, employees, and processes. Both are critical, yet operate independently of one another, which can lead to uninformed decisions. At the same time, businesses need to unlock insights from  all  their data to stay competitive and fuel innovation with purpose. Can a single cloud analytics service bridge this gap and enable the agility that businesses demand? Azure Synapse Analytics, a limitless analytics service, that brings together enterprise data warehousing and Big Data analytics. It gives you the freedom to query data on your terms, using either serverless on-demand or provisioned resources, at scale. Azure Synapse brings these two worlds together with a unified experience to ingest, prepare, manage, and serve data for immediate business int...

  If you’re in the market for a new CRM, chances are you’ve found one of the many articles online offering comparisons of the major software options. As someone who has worked with Dynamics 365 for many years, the Dynamics 365 vs Salesforce articles often come across my radar, and I’m usually left feeling disappointed by how much is missing from those “apples to apples” comparison pieces, when there is so much more in the (virtual) fruit bowl worth exploring. Where a CRM was once just a system of historical record, for sellers to (reluctantly) record what they had done, it’s time to reimagine CRM as a central and connected system for customer engagement across your organisation. It’s also important to consider the role of the CRM now that sellers work across more stakeholders and more digital tools for communication and collaboration than ever. How can it help make them more productive, rather than becoming just another tool to deal with? Instead of working through a comparison of ...

  You might already be using Power BI to create your dashboards and reports, but have you tried to create a real-time dashboard before? Typically, you need to set up a refresh schedule. What if you want to see your dashboard update live, as soon as fresh data comes in? This is where you can use a streaming dataset in Power BI, to view and act on your data in real-time. Here are some examples of times you could consider using a real-time dashboard: IoT devices: sensors, machinery. Anything with a constant flow of data you would like to view accurate information on. This is a great option for being able to detect anomalies in equipment. Collecting survey responses and viewing feedback immediately Viewing weblogs Inventory Management: monitoring stock levels Streaming datasets can be created from Power BI Service. When heading over to Power BI Service to create your streaming dataset, you have 3 types to choose from. The API option is the most...

  As a product line, Microsoft Office dates back nearly three decades, with early versions essentially combining Word, Excel, and PowerPoint into a discounted bundle. Microsoft 365 (previously known as Office 365), which has been available since 2011, differs from that old-fashioned bundle in two respects: First, it's sold as a subscription (billed monthly or yearly), rather than as a perpetual license with a fixed one-time payment. Second, it combines a suite of online services, including business-class email, cloud file storage, and secure communication tools along with the traditional desktop apps. Because it's a subscription offering, those desktop programs are updated automatically when a new version is available. If your subscription is current, you get the latest versions, with security releases monthly  and feature updates every six months, on the same calendar as Windows 10. Microsoft 365 is available in Family and Personal editions (previously known as Office 36...

  Over the past year, companies have seen a major digital shift across industries to battle the COVID-19 pandemic. Most businesses have shifted to remote work set-ups and accelerated the adoption of digital solutions. In the midst of rapid technological change, one thing is clear: only companies that are able to adapt quickly can thrive in a post-COVID environment. Technology is vital to success – or survival – in a post-COVID business environment. There are hundreds of company success stories that are a testament to this. Many of these success stories involve the use of platform messaging and chatbots to provide services and support to customers and employees 24/7. Using chatbots as website concierges In a sense, chatbots have evolved into concierges for websites. Anyone can engage with a chatbot at any time of the day to find the right departments, web pages and documents. For internal matters, human resources, finance and facilities departments can customise chatbots to help emp...

  Transcribing text from images is tedious, time-consuming and error-prone. Luckily, you don’t need to manually transcribe text anymore thanks to text recognition in AI Builder. In just a few clicks, you can extract text from an image or PDF. It works on file formats such as .PDF, .PNG and .JPEG. You can then use the extracted text in emails and other tasks, saving you a lot of time and boosting productivity. Getting Started The text integration model in Power Automate flows and Power Apps is guaranteed to save you time and reduce your manual workload, especially if you deal with a lot of handwritten notes which need to be digital. The GIF on the side shows you how to do that. Keep in mind that you will need AI Builder. If you don’t have a subscription for it, you can still try it out for free using the Power Apps Developer Plan. Go to this website and select AI Builder > Build from the left navigation menu. Click on the Text Recognition model. Using Text Recognition You can use...

  Did you know that it’s possible to have your chatbot in Microsoft Teams send a message to a user proactively? That means, rather than waiting for the user to chat to the bot, the bot can be the first one to message them. Proactive chatbots have several useful business applications, chief among them is that they can anticipate customer needs and improve customer satisfaction. In this blog, I’ll show you how to create a proactive chatbot using Power Virtual Agents and Power Automate. Did you know that it’s possible to have your chatbot in Microsoft Teams send a message to a user proactively? That means, rather than waiting for the user to chat to the bot, the bot can be the first one to message them. Proactive chatbots have several useful business applications, chief among them is that they can anticipate customer needs and improve customer satisfaction. In this blog, I’ll show you how to create a proactive chatbot using Power Virtual Agents and Power Automate. This is the flow t...

Software-as-a-service CRM giant Salesforce has made its app for Microsoft Teams more broadly available. The Salesforce app for Teams has been available in preview since October. It replicates the Salesforce CRM app for Slack, allowing joint Teams and Salesforce customers to mention various Salesforce records in Teams channels and chats, such as opportunities, accounts, cases, contacts, and leads. Service teams can also improve coordination and response times to open cases to help keep customers happy, reduce the support loads, and cut out productivity barriers caused by switching between Teams and Salesforce. Announcing the general availability of Salesforce for Teams, Microsoft described Salesforce as part of a "new class" of "collaborative apps".  Salesforce and Microsoft compete in CRM – Microsoft Dynamics versus Sales Cloud – and analytics with Tableau and Microsoft PowerBI.  While the Slack purchase opened up a new front of competition between Salesforce and Mi...

Absolute treat for the developers, as Microsoft is integrating AI technologies with its PowerFx low-code programming language. PowerFx, an open-sourced, formula-based tool, is  built on Microsoft Excel . This integration will enable customers to use natural-language input and "programming by example" techniques when developing with PowerApps. Microsoft announced the coming new capabilities during the opening day, May 2021 developers conference. Officials said these new features will be in public preview at the end of June in certain regions. Microsoft is using GPT-3 (Generative Pre-trained Transformer 3) and the Program Synthesis Using Examples (PROSE) software development kit.  GPT-3 is a natural-language AI model  from  OpenAI, an organization with which Microsoft has been collaborating for a while . The PROSE technology comes from Microsoft Research and is already integrated into Power BI, Excel, and Visual Studio. Officials said the integration of GPT-3 in ...

It was in February 2021 Microsoft Viva was announced. Since it is a new platform and there are so many questions around this technology. I thought this will be an opportunity to let my customers and network know what this really is and go through the key components. Microsoft positions Viva as an Employee Experience Platform. This workplace analytics (Viva) is described as bringing together tools for employee communications, wellbeing, learning and knowledge discovery into one solution. Microsoft Viva is comprises of four modules: Viva Connections  – a combination of company-branded SharePoint portal (aka intranet) in a Teams app with Yammer Communities and stream video integration. Viva Insights  – Personal and Organisational productivity reporting, building on Workplace Analytics and MyAnalytics but also pulling insights from third-party platforms like HR applications, Network access, and SAP. Viva Topics  – Using AI (formally kno...

What is Microsoft Viva? Microsoft describes  Microsoft Viva as " the first employee experience platform to bring tools for employee engagement, learning, wellbeing and knowledge discovery, directly into the flow of people’s work. Viva is designed to help employees learn, grow and thrive, with new experiences that integrate with the productivity and collaboration capabilities in Microsoft 365 and Microsoft Teams. " Microsoft Viva builds on the power of Microsoft Teams and Microsoft 365 to unify the employee experience across four key areas — Engagement, Wellbeing, Learning and Knowledge — in an integrated experience that empowers people to be their best.  4 Main Pillars + Ally.io (coming soon) Pillar 1: Microsoft Viva Connections Viva Connections is a framework through which you can deliver your intranet within Microsoft Teams. Effectively this is the "Home App" in Teams. Employees can access internal communications and company resources like policies and benefits an...

In the month of November 21 Microsoft announced new broadcast capabilities enhanced live captions, as well as some of the newly certified devices with Teams capabilities, and more. Here are some details: Integrated Communication Access Realtime Translation ART captioning in meetings You can now view captions coming from a CART (Communication Access Realtime Translation) provider within the Microsoft Teams meeting window instead of a secondary window. Follow along with what is being said without having to choose between the captions and presentation. Meeting organizers and participants can enable CART captions from their meeting options.  Learn more . Content from camera Content from camera in Teams enables intelligent capture which allows you to share content from physical whiteboards and documents in a high-quality way during meetings. You can use the camera in your laptop, a secondary USB webcam, or a document camera. Just like the experience available in Microsoft Teams Rooms, t...