The Hybrid Workforce Is Here

The COVID-19 pandemic forced the way people worked drastically, and it did it very suddenly. As more people are being vaccinated, offices are starting to reopen. Workers, who gained substantial flexibility by working from home, however, are now expecting some of that flexibility to continue. Employers, who up until mandated shutdowns were not enthusiastic that they could make the remote workforce work for their companies are now set up to manage them proficiently. This month we thought we would take a look at the inevitable compromise that is being reached: the hybrid workplace.

A Necessary Shift

For years, workers had been chomping at the bit to be allowed to work remotely. Some companies made it work for them, while others attempted it only to realize that it was too difficult or in some cases costly to permanently utilize the strategy. The lion’s share of companies axed the idea from the get-go. This all changed when jobs that could be done remotely were moved offsite due to health concerns surrounding the COVID-19 pandemic. Companies that for years had been denying their workforce the ability to work from home, now needed people to.

Obviously, some businesses weren’t set up for this. Others, that had invested in cloud-hosted tools as a way to control capital costs, were miles ahead. Most businesses needed to make adjustments, as did most workers. Regardless of how management viewed the work-from-home model, the sustainability of many businesses was at stake, and as a result, it was clear how the situation had to be approached. Business owners and managers needed remote workers to keep their businesses running.

Workers From Home

For many workers, there was some excitement when they were forced to work from home. Over time, however, some workers have shown fatigue. Others have prospered. Workers with children who were also home for much of the time due to the same health concerns, found it to be both a benefit and a curse. As regulations start to ease some workers, who have thrived during this period, are afraid that the good work they put in during the pandemic won’t be rewarded as their management teams bring people back to the workplace. Others just want to get out of their houses and are looking forward to the personal interaction they typically have at work. There are a lot of different situations and a lot of different perspectives.

Ultimately, given the flexibility that remote work provides, a lot of workers simply don’t want to go back to how it was before. The studies that have been conducted over the past several months make this clear. In fact, one survey found that 87 percent of workers that worked remotely over the past year would like the ability to continue to do so in some fashion after the risks subside.

The Compromise

With the lack of concert expectations from management and the workforce, the workforce of the future will likely adopt some type of hybrid model. What this means is that workers will be asked to be in the office on certain days and be able to continue to work from home on the others. This is not just because workers want to work from home. It is also because people are going to be worried about going back to work with the COVID-19 pandemic still an issue, even if they are vaccinated. It’s just an uncomfortable situation, especially as tens of millions of people outright refuse to get the vaccine. 

The hybrid model still needs to be hashed out for a lot of businesses, including who would work from where when. Do you need to schedule specific days for people to be in the office, or would it be more about who needs to collaborate or use internal resources that are more secure and more readily available from the confines of the office? Your individual business will dictate how the hybrid workplace should be structured at your company. 

The Main Benefit of the Hybrid Workplace

While it doesn’t seem like there are a lot of benefits on the surface to doing business this way, you need to understand just how expensive it is to replace workers. As mentioned above, workers will look for the situations that will benefit them, and for a business that has been operating for over a year with a completely remote workforce, allowing your employees to work from home a couple of times a week is a compromise that you have to make. Your employees want flexibility and making this move will help your retention rates and your staff’s overall happiness. Ultimately, you save from having to replace the workers that will most likely leave if you were to make them come back to the office full-time.

The post-pandemic workplace will look different, but through the use of technology, you can successfully move on from the pandemic with your staff intact. If you want to talk to one of our IT consultants about the technology that can help you successfully implement the hybrid workforce strategy in your business, give us a call today at 216-503-5150.

How to Balance Your IT’s Value Against the Cost

No matter how you look at it, technology is expensive. You’ll rarely look at your IT invoices without cringing a little on the inside. However, it’s important that you take a glance at these every once in a while to understand just what you’re getting from your technology budget. Ultimately, you want to ensure that your IT purchases are yielding a positive return on investment, and therefore, providing value for your organization.

Analyzing the Costs
While most users will understand cost in its literal term, it’s critical that you consider the other factors that make up cost. By definition, cost is what you give up in order to attain something else. Cost primarily focuses on what you’re giving up instead of what you get, so it tends to look at concepts such as pricing or other manners of investment. Cost can also include factors other than monetary value, including time, effort, or other resources. Analyzing cost can help you optimize the way that your assets are applied, thus reducing the amount of waste and ensuring the desired outcome for your organization. That being said, the cost of an item is only half the battle.

Analyzing Value
If cost is what you give up in order to receive something, then value is what you get out of something. Value can be inherently based on financial gain, but many times value is actually the total yield versus the total investment. One of the best examples is starting off communications with a new client, as one good action could create a considerably more valuable relationship with them as time goes on.

An example where we can see the difference between cost and value for technology would be purchasing a new workstation. It’s one thing to look at the price tag, but this doesn’t give you the whole picture. Your old workstation hasn’t cost you much financially because you paid it off a long time ago, whereas a new computer is of considerable cost. However, your old workstation might suffer from issues related to outdated operating systems or components, making it a difficult piece of technology to work with from. The value in this case is saved time and enhanced productivity.

Calculating Your IT’s Value
If you ever need to calculate how much a certain action or decision will cost your company in terms of value, you can try to compare it mathematically. After all, numbers don’t lie. This helps you keep track of what you’ve invested, as well as how much you’re getting in return for your investment. To determine the value of something, you can use a simple “x=y” equation. In this case, the invested cost is “x,” while the result (the value) is “y.”

Now, let’s try out an example. You need to determine if your business’ technology investment actually equals productivity. In this case, you can use a simple ratio method. Let’s say you invest $25 into a workstation and increase productivity by 10% when investing an extra $30 will improve efficiency by 17%. If investing $31 only raises productivity by 16%, instead of investing more in something else, you just narrow down the cost until you have achieved the maximum value per dollar.

Need help planning your IT costs, value, and strategy? Download The 3 Essential Tech Systems You Must Have in Place To Grow & Protect Your Business” workbook here.

Small Business, Big Data: How to Make the Most of Data Analytics

Data has always been important, but more recent trends have placed emphasis on using it to make important, educated decisions regarding the future of your organization. This month, we want to take a concentrated look at the data revolution and how your data has become a commodity. Just how much value is there in an individual’s data, and what does this mean for the future of computing?

What is Big Data?
The modern-day data revolution is often referred to as big data. Big data is much more than just the data itself; rather, it’s the analysis of this data that matters. If you keep track of how your data changes over time, you’ll be able to better adapt your business practices to meet the changing needs of the industry. These changes mean that businesses are going to have to take an analytical approach to improve operations, and data is the key to unlocking this untapped potential. By taking advantage of big data, you’ll be able to get the most out of your budget and workforce, as well.

Small organizations are finally starting to understand data analytics and why they are so important, even if their needs are somewhat simpler than large corporations. Small businesses just simply don’t have the assets to implement strategies as effectively as a large company, or they just don’t have the processes put in place to properly analyze and quantify the data. Even if they are using similar solutions as larger enterprises, it all comes down to whether they know what they are getting out of the solution. There are two questions that need to be asked before you commit to big data, and they are the following:

• Why haven’t more small businesses implemented big data initiatives?
• What would it take to get your company’s data to work with you?

Small Businesses with Big Data
Small businesses have traditionally been major proponents of new technologies, and the reason for this is that they often need them to stay competitive. Thanks to innovations in data analytics, smaller organizations are looking at alternative ways to ensure that their technology efforts aren’t wasted on solutions that don’t offer value. Instead of investing in technology solutions just because it’s a major hit in their industry, they are instead looking at services that provide more practical and customized use for their particular organization.

By taking advantage of the right technology, small companies can implement solutions at a moment’s notice. Since they are flexible enough to make decisions on the fly, they don’t have to worry about stepping on anyone’s toes because they didn’t go through the proper channels to implement a new solution. This type of agility allows small businesses to look at data and make decisions much more quickly and efficiently. It just goes to show that you don’t have to be a large organization or enterprise to effectively listen to the what the data tells you.

Make Investments in What Matters
While it’s great to identify that you need to implement a full-scale big data solution for your organization, it doesn’t matter unless you actually do it. No matter what your business decides to implement for analytics, you’ll inevitably need to invest a considerable amount of time and capital into it. Big data can help your business know when to run promotions, how to react to consumers, and how to judge the value received from your technology investments. Numbers make things much more cut and dry and allow for a better way to measure value.

Net Activity can help your business better take advantage of technology solutions. To learn more, reach out to us at 216-503-5150.

What’s the Best Form of Authentication on Your Mobile Device?

As smartphones have become smarter, they have become filled with more and more data that needs to be kept private for the owner’s safety and security. This is why it is fortunate that there are also more ways to secure a smartphone against unauthorized use. We’ll examine the many options to devise which is the most secure.

Password
The old standby of authentication, a well-thought-out password can be an extremely effective security measure, but a password with little effort put into it can just as easily be a considerable security risk. Despite this, a password (or its cousin, the passphrase) can be the strongest security measure available for your mobile device. However, there is one major shortcoming to the password, in that it very quickly becomes tedious and inconvenient to enter each time your phone needs to be accessed.

Pattern Lock
Another option that many elect to use is the pattern lock, which allows the phone to be accessed only when the correct pattern is traced out on a three-by-three square. This natural and intuitive lock becomes a very quick way to access a phone once the user becomes accustomed to it, and if all nine dots are used in the pattern, provides close to 400,000 possible access codes. Unfortunately, the pattern lock falls short in a few ways. First, many people elect to use shapes that are easily guessed out of simplicity and convenience, and it is fairly simple for someone to simply watch one’s hand to ascertain the pattern they’re using.

PIN Number
Like a password, a PIN number is a relatively strong form of authentication, as the typical 4-digit option has over 10 thousand potential combinations. While this would admittedly be very difficult to remember, an Android device can be secured by a 16-digit PIN, boosting the number of potential codes to 10 quadrillion. However, there is a shortcoming to the PIN number, as many people may succumb to the temptation of, again, making an oversimplified PIN number that could potentially be guessed quite easily.

Fingerprint Scanner
This unlock method has quickly become the preferred method to access a mobile device, and for good reason: not only is it secure enough to be trustworthy, it’s also quite fast. However, even this method has its weaknesses. For instance, the fingerprint scanner itself isn’t always positioned in the most convenient place on the phone itself. Furthermore, gloves make this method impossible to use.

Facial Recognition/Iris Scanning/Intelligent Scan
The way things are going, it is likely that this will soon become the preferred method of authenticating your identity to access a phone. However, in their current states, these methods just aren’t quite secure enough to safely authenticate things like purchases and other financial tasks with 100 percent confidence, although things are getting better as far as that goes.

Smart Lock – Other Security Measures
Many phones now also offer security features that rely on alternative forms of authentication. On-body detection keeps the device unlocked whenever it is being carried – regardless of who is carrying it. You can also teach a device to “trust” certain places, devices, and faces. Another option is to use the Google Assistant to unlock your phone by saying “Okay Google.” However, these features don’t serve your security very well, and are primarily for the sake of convenience.

So Which is Best?
The generally accepted school of thought is that, until face and iris scanning is more widely available and some of the wrinkles are ironed out, a fingerprint scan with a PIN or password backup is the safest route to take. Regardless, any form of authentication measure is better than nothing, so you will want to ensure that you have one in place.

Want to talk about mobile and cloud computing security?  We’re here to help; contact us today at 216-503-5150.

Downtime: Why You MUST Know These Numbers to Keep Your Business Up & Running

Downtime is real and it’s costly. How costly exactly? Depending on the size of the organization, the cost per hour of downtime is anywhere from $9,000-$700,000. On average, a business will lose

around $164,000 per hour of downtime. The numbers speak for themselves.

What causes downtime? Network outages and human error account for 50% and 45% of downtime, respectively. Meanwhile, natural disasters account for just 10 percent of downtime.

When you look at the cause of downtime by data volume, the #1 culprit is, once again, human error, at 58%. As it turns out, businesses should be warier of their own employees and less of natural disasters. Obviously, hurricanes, catastrophic fires and earthquakes get most of the attention, but be warned: the bigger threat to your data is inside of your company, not the great outdoors.

So, what’s at stake for your business?

Well here is some food for thought…

• 5 quintillion bytes of data are generated daily.
• 90% of the total data in existence was created within the past few years, a significant portion of which has been generated by small businesses.

So, when you consider all the servers, desktops, and laptops that the typical small business manages, it adds up to a lot of data to protect.

Yet nearly 75% of SMBs operate without a disaster recovery plan and only 25% are “extremely confident” that they can restore data if it was compromised. What’s more, only 50% of SMBs back up less than 60% of their data.

The remaining 40%? No protection for it whatsoever.

 How much does this cost? Over the past few years, 35% of SMBs lost as much as $500K due to downtime. An unlucky 3% lost over $1 million. Whenever systems go down, businesses must scramble to retrieve important data. According to IDG, it takes around 7 hours to resume normal operations after a data loss incident, with 18% of IT managers saying that it takes 11 to 24 hours, or even longer.

The Aberdeen Group found comparable numbers when comparing best-in-class companies with “average” and “laggards” in the matter of downtime and recovery. Multiply even the average amount of time it takes to recover from a downtime event (5.18 hours) by the average cost of downtime, and you’ve got a large bill to pay by any standard.

Small wonder that 40% of all businesses close their doors permanently after a disaster, according to the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA). Similar statistics from the U.S. Small Business Administration (SBA) indicate that more than 90% of businesses fail within two years after being struck by a disaster.

So what are SMBs doing to protect themselves? Over 60% of them still ship tapes to a storage facility or another office, a surprising number, considering the technology is over four decades old and the storage and retrieval processes are extremely cumbersome. Meanwhile, nearly 20% are already using some sort of cloud-based data backup.

LOCAL OR CLOUD BACKUP? THE ANSWER LIES IN BETWEEN

Using local backup for business continuity works well for quick restores. Because the data is right there, it’s fast and easy to restore back to its original location and keep the business humming. But what happens if the power goes out? If the device fails? Or if it is stolen or destroyed in a natural or man-made disaster? You might think the cloud looks more attractive for all these reasons. But cloud-only backup is risky because you can’t control the bandwidth. Restores tend to be difficult and time-consuming. After all, the cloud can fail, too.

How does a hybrid-cloud solution work? Your data is first copied and stored on a local device. That way, if something happens, you can do a fast and easy restore from that device. But then your data is also replicated in the cloud. So, if anything happens to that device, you’ve got off-site cloud copies of your data—without having to worry about moving copies of your data off-site physically.

DATA BACKUP VS BUSINESS CONTINUITY: WHAT’S THE DIFFERENCE?

Data backup answers the questions: is my data safe? Can I get it back in case of a failure?

Business continuity, on the other hand, involves thinking about the business at a higher-level and asks: how quickly can I get my business operating again in case of system failure?

Thinking about data backup is a good first step. Business continuity is equally important to consider as it ensures your organization is able to get back up and running in a timely matter if disaster strikes. For example, if your server dies, you wouldn’t be able to quickly get back to work if you only had file-level backup. Your server would need to be replaced, software and data re-installed, and the whole system would need to be configured with your settings and preferences. This process could take days. Can your business afford to lose that time?

How Much Downtime Can You Tolerate?

Downtime comes in all shapes and sizes. Whether it’s from a catastrophic storm or fire, a data center outage, ransomware, DDoS attack, internet outage or even a careless mistake. No one is totally safe, and it isn’t a question of if, but instead when it will strike.

The Ponemon Institute surveyed over 700 IT professionals regarding costs due to network downtime. According to their research they found business lose $22,000 on average for every minute their network is down. This is not even included any server failures, simply people cannot do work. The top three most severe consequences as a result of a network outage are productivity loss, reputation loss and then lost revenue.

When talking about business continuity, we think in terms of Recovery Time Objective (RTO), and Recovery Point Objective (RPO).

RTO: The Recovery Time Objective is the duration of time within which a business must be restored after a disruption to avoid unacceptable consequences.

RPO: The Recovery Point Objective is the maximum tolerable period of time in which data might be lost due to a disaster.

By calculating your desired RTO, you have determined the maximum time that you can be without your data before your business is at risk. Alternatively, by specifying the RPO, you know how often you need to perform backups. You may have an RTO of a day, and an RPO of an hour depending on what your business requires. But calculating these numbers will help you understand what type of data backup solution you need.

Once you determine your RPO and RTO, it’s time to calculate how much downtime and lost data will actually cost you. Simply add up the average per-hour wage, the per-hour overhead, and the per-hour revenue numbers and you have how much a data loss will cost you.

We’ve put together a simple worksheet to get started on these calculations. This is just a beginning, so be sure to work with your IT provider to get a clear handle on the specific numbers for your business.

Given that budget constraints can be a challenge for many businesses, obtaining these costs provides a financial validation to justify the purchase and maintenance of a business continuity solution.

When downtime occurs, an organization can lose a lot in terms of sales and customers, not to mention the costs involved in fixing the machines.  A good Business Continuity plan is the first defense against a data loss disaster threatening your business.

To learn more, Download our latest eBook 4 Business Continuity Essentials.

Spring Cleaning Your Business and Its Technology

Spring seems to be the natural time, after what are commonly dreary winter months, to revitalize and refresh your environment – why shouldn’t your business be included? Not only does it help your operations, a clean environment also has many direct benefits for your employees. Let’s review the effects of keeping your business, and its technology, in order.

Why You Want to Keep Your Technology Clean, Inside and Out
If your business is like most, you rely on technology to help manage things. While your particular operations may use different solutions than one in another industry will, your technology is an essential piece of your business. Therefore, you need to make sure that it can meet two criteria.

First, it needs to remain in proper working order, and secondly, it needs to be organized so that the resources you rely on it for are easy to access and utilize.

In order for these criteria to be met, your office technology needs some attention to both its physical components, and the information those components give you the ability to store, access, and edit. Furthermore, an unkempt technology strategy can have some detrimental effects to your overall productivity and even your general success as a business.

Benefits of Digital Office Organization
First, consider the state of your digital file storage. Is it organized properly, with documents and resources saved in the correct folders, with proper labelling and an intuitive, hierarchical system? If not, it will do you quite a bit of good to take the time and organize these files so that they can be found for reference more easily in the future.

This is because this organization will enable you and your employees to find the things you need more easily, which means you and your employees will therefore be able to find them more quickly. This creates time savings that, while apparently insignificant when considered individually, can add up to be fairly significant after all. Secondly, taking the time to establish a filing system will also give you the opportunity to audit your old materials as you organize them into it. Perhaps some of them are due to be revisited and updated, and others are outdated to the point where they can be archived away or deleted safely. Going through your materials and making this call can easily save you some headaches in the future and help build beneficial habits for the future.

If part of your clutter problem is due to your reliance on physical files that are stored in bulky filing cabinets around the office, you might consider adopting a digital file storage solution and starting off with this hierarchical system in place. Not only does this make sense from a financial standpoint (fewer paper files means less paper and ink to buy), it is also environmentally responsible and allows you greater control over who in your organization has access to particular files.

Organizing Your Inbox
We’ve all learned the hard way how easy it is for a mess to pile up, and few places make that piling up more visible than your email inbox. While you know that there are certainly important messages mixed and buried in there, there’s also going to be plenty of conversations that you were privy to, but not really involved in, or situations that have long since been resolved and no longer require your attention.

However, while these messages may not currently seem important, there is always a chance that they will be at some point in the future. It is better to take messages like these and, similarly to your business data and files, create a filing system to organize them in a place where they won’t pile up and potentially bury pertinent emails.

Another strategy to consider: If your preferred email solution offers it, is to have messages that meet predetermined criteria automatically sent to a relevant folder. Perhaps emails with a certain word or phrase in the subject line are moved to one folder, while emails from a few particular contacts are sent to another. As a result, you know where you can find these emails later to refer back to them, and it helps keep your inbox from becoming too formidable.

Optimizing Your Desktop and Browser
There are plenty of ways that your computer’s desktop can become a clogged mess, and an equal amount of ways that the same can happen to your browser. Fortunately, the same strategy that applies to your filing system and your email can also apply to the stuff you have cluttering your desktop.

How much of it should actually be stored in the shared company resources? These documents should be the first to take care of, transferring them over to the appropriate file location. Once you’ve done that, you can create another folder hierarchy that cleans up your desktop and organizes the cluttered materials into a logical and navigable system that makes sense to you.

The same goes for the shortcuts and extensions that you have saved in your browser of choice. Try running an audit of your installed extensions and uninstall any that you don’t really use. The same goes for your bookmarks, which can themselves be arranged into a hierarchical system or removed.

Even your computer’s start-up process can be optimized, as we’ve discussed on our blog. Have IT help you audit the programs that your computer runs during start up and remove any that simply don’t matter, if appropriate.

Cleaning Your Computer
Of course, a big part of keeping your technology clean means maintaining your workstations and servers, removing dangerous dust buildup and making them generally look nice.

As you might imagine, it isn’t as though you can just turn on a vacuum and give your computer a once-over. In fact, this is exactly what you shouldn’t do. Your workstation, whether you’re working with a desktop or laptop, is filled with fragile components that can easily be damaged by the static build-up a vacuum produces. Instead, you should use simple tools that will allow you to gently cleanse the exterior as needed, such as a can of compressed air to remove dust from your keyboard. There are specialty wipes available for purchase that are made specifically for electronics that are effective for a quick wipe-down as well. As a precaution, make sure that your device is powered down during the cleaning process, and that it is only powered up when completely dry.

When cleaning your monitor, you should avoid using liquid as much as you can, electing instead to use a microfiber cloth to wipe the screen down very gently.

You may also want to request that IT occasionally crack open your device and do a bit of tidying up on the inside as well, removing the dust that will collect on the inside and trap in heat.

Cable Management
Few things look as overwhelming as cables that are left to just splay everywhere. Not only does this make it easier for dust and debris to collect around your crucial components, it simply looks awful, sloppy, and entirely unimpressive. Some basic cable management can quickly make a mass of cords and wires more discrete and more aesthetically pleasing, while also reducing a safety hazard in the office.

Tidying the Office
Of course, the phrase ‘spring cleaning’ is largely associated with giving your environment a good, refreshing clean, and less about tending to technology needs. This is also a very important activity, as it provides assorted benefits that will be discussed below.

So, in addition to seeing to your technology, go through the office and tidy up as you would any other place of business. Clean the floors, sanitize the bathrooms, and fix up the employee break room (including the fridge). This may also be a good opportunity to consider redecorating and giving your office a refreshed new look to match its newly cleaned state.

Why a Clean Office is Better
At the beginning of this article, it was referenced that there were assorted benefits to having a tidy and organized office. These benefits range from providing a better workplace for your employees to staying compliant with various regulations.

First, a clean workplace means that your employees are able to enjoy greater productivity than they would in one that is filled with clutter and chaos, and morale is higher in a clean workplace than in one that is dusty, grimy, and unattended. Stress has been shown to be reduced, and morale is markedly higher, as is an employee’s ability to focus on their tasks. Additionally, a clean workplace is one with fewer germs, which means that employees will have an easier time staying healthy and coming in to work.

Of course, there are also other people that you have to impress. Any clients or customers that visit your business will have what can be honestly considered a second chance at a first impression every time they visit. A disheveled and unorganized office can quickly put them in a negative mindset that only makes your job harder. Furthermore, there are laws and regulations that require workplaces to be maintained to a certain standard for the benefit of an employee’s health and safety.

Besides, wouldn’t you feel more motivated to spend your day in a nice, clean office, using equipment and solutions that work well, rather than one that’s looks and feels busy and cluttered and is filled with grimy workstations that only slow down your progress?

What You Can Do About It
Of course, once your office is cleaned, you will want to keep it that way. That’s why it is important to establish cleanliness and order as a part of your expectations of office culture and encourage your employees to consider themselves accountable for their own area. Remind them that they represent the company just as much as the company represents them and should always present and conduct themselves accordingly.

To help you get to that point, Net Activity is here to help as well. We can apply our expertise to make many of the activities described above much easier to accomplish, speeding up your spring cleaning and helping you get back to your improved operations that much quicker. Call 216-503-5150 for more information.

Don’t Miss these 6 New Features with Microsoft Teams

Are you using Microsoft Teams to streamline communication between your employees? If you are, get ready to enjoy a more convenient workplace chat platform. Microsoft has recently announced six new features for Teams. The focus of the new set of features is allowing users to better work with apps – something Microsoft Teams accomplishes via integrations, new search and discovery features, commands, and more.

Cortana Integration

One new feature that Microsoft will bring to Teams is Cortana, Microsoft’s virtual assistant. By integrating Cortana with Teams, users can use voice commands to make calls, join an ongoing meeting, or add other users to the meeting. This feature will also work with IP phones and conference room devices. According to Microsoft, Cortana voice integrations for Teams-enabled devices will launch later this year, allowing users to easily make a call, join a meeting or add people to meetings using natural, spoken language. What’s more, these voice capabilities will extend to IP phones and conference room devices, as well.

Inline Message Translation

While most people can communicate well in English, not everyone is comfortable using the language. Inline message translation allows these people to chat in their native language and then translate their messages into English. This will not only help them verbalize their thoughts better and faster, but you’ll also be able to understand exactly what you have to do to meet their demands. Inline message translation presumably will leverage translation and transcription services in Azure to make posts readable to participants who speak different languages in chats and in channels, which is the Teams term for topic-based discussions among members of a team. With users in 181 Microsoft-defined markets around the world, the translation feature could get heavy use.

Cloud Recording and Automatic Transcripts

Have you ever forgotten or overlooked important meeting details? This new feature will allow you to record meetings, store it in the cloud, and create a transcript of it. One is cloud recording, a one-click meeting recording option that will automatically transcribe and timecode a meeting. Features include the ability to read captions, search the conversation and play back the meeting. The ability to save the entire meeting also allows users to review everything or segments of it in the future at their convenience. This is particularly useful for meetings that are highly detailed or very long.

Facial recognition, which will allow statements to be matched with the corresponding speaker, is expected to be included in the future.

Background Blur Option for Video Calls

Most people get easily distracted. But you want to minimize these distractions and have them focus on you when you have an important meeting like a business pitch. Teams’ latest feature allows you to blur your background during video calls so other people in the meeting can fully concentrate on you. The background blur will be an appealing feature for anyone calling into a meeting when they’ve got an unprofessional scene behind them or a background that they’d otherwise like to keep meeting participants from seeing.

Proximity Detection for Teams Meetings

The proximity detection feature is designed to help users find and add a Skype Room System. A feature that can make your meetings simpler is proximity detection. When you enter a room equipped with a Teams meeting room device, Proximity Detection will automatically detect your Teams-enabled meeting room laptop and prompt connection for you to join the Teams meeting room. This helps you save time finding an available room so you can immediately connect with other users.

Mobile Sharing in Meetings

Have you ever needed to join a sudden meeting but couldn’t perform as well as usual because you were on the go with only a mobile device? Mobile Sharing in Meetings solve this by allowing you to share a live video stream, photos, or your phone screen with other attendees immediately.