Kurt Shintaku's Blog

A new superpower for communicators has been introduced with Yammer for broadcasting critical messages: 

“Essential Announcements” ensure that critical announcements reach your audience across Yammer and their Outlook inbox – and even Teams.  Reach your audience (community) and measure reach & impact with Conversation Insights.

Some announcements are crucial to keeping employees up to date – whether it’s regarding safety, protocols, policies, or other priority news. In these instances, corporate communicators and leaders need ways to guarantee that messages are delivered to every employee. This feature allows Yammer community admins to set an announcement as ‘essential’ to ensure that it’s delivered via email to every member of that community, even if it is outside of their preferred notification settings.

How it works

Community admins and network admins can now choose to set a post as an ‘essential announcement’ by changing the announcement delivery options before they post, which will notify all community members by email including those members who are not setup to receive email notifications of updates in Yammer. The total number of members will also be listed at the bottom of the editing card. Admins must be using the new Yammer experience to use this feature, but members using both the classic and new Yammer will receive the notifications. Learn more about how to send announcements in Yammer here. When members receive email notifications for essential announcements, they will be able to reply directly to the announcer by email. The email would also contain a note explaining to the member that they received this email as the community admin chose to make an essential announcement.

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For those that have the Yammer Communities app for Teams installed, announcements and @mentions made in Yammer will also appear in your Microsoft Teams activity feed.

Read more here:

• BLOG: Essential announcements in Yammer are now generally available
  https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/yammer-blog/essential-announcements-in-yammer-are-now-generally-available/ba-p/2461195

The launch of Microsoft Lists and Tasks in Microsoft Teams last year added new options to an already robust catalog of Microsoft work management tools. They seemed to overlap with Microsoft To Do, Microsoft Planner, and Microsoft Project for the web, causing a lot of (understandable) confusion and questions, all of which boiled down to, “Which tool should I use?”

Today, we’re answering that question with three aptly named when-to-use guides. These one-page documents, which are linked below, focus on different work management scenarios and the Microsoft tools that enable them:

• Tracking tasks and information for individuals: To Do, Planner, and Lists
• Tracking tasks and information for teams: Planner, Lists, and Project for the web
• Managing tasks in general: To Do, Planner, and the Tasks app in Teams

Read the rest of the article and download the guides here:

• Choose the right Microsoft tool for managing your work
  https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/microsoft-365-blog/choose-the-right-microsoft-tool-for-managing-your-work/ba-p/2374115

Microsoft Viva is an employee experience platform that brings together communications, knowledge, learning, resources, and insights. Powered by Microsoft 365 and experienced primarily through Microsoft Teams, Viva fosters a culture where people and teams are empowered be their best from anywhere.

Join us Thursday, June 17th at 12 noon eastern, to learn how Microsoft Viva can take your organizational employee experience to the next level as we cover: Download the meeting invite here.

View original invite here:

• How Microsoft Viva Can Enhance Your Employee Experience – Webinar
  https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/healthcare-and-life-sciences/how-microsoft-viva-can-enhance-your-employee-experience-webinar/ba-p/2448587

On June 2^nd, we announced the acquisition of ReFirm Labs to enrich our device firmware analysis and security capabilities across devices that form the intelligent edge from servers to IoT. The addition of ReFirm Labs to Microsoft will bring both world-class expertise in firmware security and the Centrifuge platform to enhance Microsoft’s ability to analyze and help protect firmware backed by the power and speed of our cloud.

Read more here:

• Microsoft acquires ReFirm Labs to enhance IoT security | Microsoft Security Blog
  https://www.microsoft.com/security/blog/2021/06/02/microsoft-acquires-refirm-labs-to-enhance-iot-security/

For anyone looking for the datasheets for any of the Microsoft Surface device and accessory announcements made back in April, here’s links to the materials for each announced item:

• Surface Laptop 4
  https://t.co/0deA2H6Jv9
• Surface Headphones 2+ for Business
  https://t.co/CePwiS4qxR
• USB Headset
  https://t.co/4dOuJVz841
• USB-C Speaker
  https://t.co/tr7VDQJaHH
• Webcam
  https://t.co/RtmwH4tPJz
• Wireless Headset
  https://t.co/5rM290lmvw

Azure MFA admins – ever wish there was a way to migrate your users from SMS/Phone to something more secure like Push?

Microsoft has a new Preview feature called "Nudge" that can help!

You can nudge users to set up Microsoft Authenticator during sign-in. Users will go through their regular sign-in, perform multifactor authentication as usual, and then be prompted to set up Microsoft Authenticator. You can include or exclude users or groups to control who gets nudged to set up the app. This allows targeted campaigns to move users from less secure authentication methods to Microsoft Authenticator.

In addition to choosing who can be nudged, you can define how many days a user can postpone, or "snooze", the nudge. If a user taps Not now to snooze the app setup, they will be nudged again on the next MFA attempt after the snooze duration has elapsed.

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Read more about this new, free features here:

• Nudge users to set up Microsoft Authenticator app (Preview) – Azure Active Directory | Microsoft Docs
  https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/active-directory/authentication/how-to-nudge-authenticator-app

You may have noticed a new Weather icon/object in your taskbar on Windows 10 that just sort of showed up.  If you right mouse click on it, nothing special happens.  Nice ‘eh?

Wanna turn it off?

WHERE’D THIS COME FROM?
The “weather widget” came from the optional Feature Update from the 2004/Spring 2020 release of Windows 10.  If you installed the optional feature update (KB5001391), it just appears.  We made an announcement about it back in April 2021.

• Personalized content at a glance: Introducing news and interests on the Windows 10 taskbar | Windows Experience Blog
  https://blogs.windows.com/windowsexperience/2021/04/22/personalized-content-at-a-glance-introducing-news-and-interests-on-the-windows-10-taskbar/

HOW TO TURN OFF THE WEATHER & NEWS WIDGET IN WINDOWS 10
The issue is that no one knows what this thing is called (it’s official name is News & Interests widget) and it’s not entirely intuitive how to disable it.  It’s actually simple once you’ve done it.

1. Right mouse click on the taskbar.
2. Click on the “News & Interests” menu item.
3. Select “Turn off”

And that’s it.  There’s some other items in there to minimize the widget or change it’s update frequency but the reality is that, for me, it’s consuming space on my taskbar which is the most valuable real estate on my desktop so… having some widget there that I never use is not an option.

While it might feel more productive to power through back-to-back meetings, Microsoft’s latest research shows the opposite is true. Learn more in Microsoft’s Work Trend Index:

In our latest study of brain wave activity, researchers confirmed what many people sense from experience: Back-to-back virtual meetings are stressful. But the research also points to a simple remedy—short breaks.

“Our research shows breaks are important, not just to make us less exhausted by the end of the day, but to actually improve our ability to focus and engage while in those meetings,” says Michael Bohan, senior director of Microsoft’s Human Factors Engineering group, who oversaw the project.

Settings in Microsoft Outlook make it easier and automatic to carve out these essential breaks between back-to-backs—and because we know that one size does not fit all, companies have two options. Individuals can set scheduling defaults that automatically shorten meetings they schedule. And now customers have the ability to set organization-wide scheduling defaults that shorten meetings and create space for breaks for everyone at the company.

“The back-to-back meetings that have become the norm over the last 12 months just aren’t sustainable,” says Jared Spataro, CVP, Microsoft 365. “Outlook and Microsoft Teams are used by millions of people around the world, and this small change can help customers develop new cultural norms and improve wellbeing for everyone.”

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Read the key findings here:

• MICROSOFT WORKLAB: Research Proves Your Brain Needs Breaks:
  https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/worklab/work-trend-index/brain-research?ocid=usoc_TWITTER_M365_spl100002155293543

We’re excited to announce a Microsoft 365 Apps Ask Microsoft Anything (AMA) with the Office Rangers!

The AMA will take place on Thursday, June 17th, 2021 from 9:00 a.m. to 10:00 a.m. PT in the Microsoft 365 Apps AMA space.

This live hour will give you the opportunity to ask any questions you have regarding enterprise manageability, deployment and performance, as well as provide direct feedback to the Microsoft 365 Apps team. Save the date and join us on Thurs, June 17th!

Save the date and learn more here:

• Microsoft 365 Apps AMA on Thursday, June 17th https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/microsoft-365-apps-for/microsoft-365-apps-ama-on-thursday-june-17th/m-p/2413462

We recently released two resources that detail what we’re learning as we adopt a hybrid work model at Microsoft, in hopes that we can help you create the hybrid work plan that best fits your organization. At their core, these resources reflect our belief that leaders will need to come together to create a new, flexible operating model—spanning people, places, and processes—to fundamentally rewire their organization for hybrid work. 

The first resource I want to point you to is our Hybrid Workplace Flexibility Guide—which we originally created for Microsoft employees. In it, you’ll find sample team agreements, templates, and tools for hybrid work. There are also detailed plans that encompass everything from strategies to keep your people healthy, to exact roadmaps for how to help divide your people’s time between a physical or remote workplace. And there’s much more to come soon.

The second is called Hybrid Work: A Guide for Business Leaders, and it wraps up much of what we’ve learned about how to reimagine people, places, and processes for a hybrid world.

Read more about these guides here:

• How Microsoft approaches hybrid work: A new guide to help our customers – Microsoft 365 Blog
  https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/blog/2021/05/21/how-microsoft-approaches-hybrid-work-a-new-guide-to-help-our-customers/