Leslie Anjan's blog

  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...

The modern workplace his a data-centric world. Organisations are always increasing the amount of data they must collect, store, and analyse to inform critical business decisions and measure their organisation’s performance. As data becomes increasingly important, so do the tools needed to discover, manage, and track information in the absence of a data governance program. In the absence of a data governance program, the decisions made about key data systems are made by association staff who “own” the system. When there are different owners for systems (which is very common), the result is inconsistencies in data availability, collection, usability, integrity, and security. This instantly causes data quality problems. It also can negatively impact user experience if there is no integration or procedures to update the existing data within your environment. If you and your organisation find yourselves in such a predicament, Prometix highly recommends deploying an Azure Purview solution....