The documents my team produces aren’t solo efforts. When I build a presentation, for example, I’ll leave placeholders for colleagues to fill in, ask people to review, and maybe work with a designer. We have great collaboration tools at Cisco with Webex Teams, and with the new approach to bring Webex Teams with you wherever you work, I can use one platform in one place without losing my train of thought…
Cisco IT’s Collaboration strategy is to mirror the Webex Teams approach to building bridges between team collaboration and other solutions for a continuous workflow. With Office 365, we continue with this theme, so you can efficiently collaborate whether you’re out and about on your phone in Webex Teams or writing a document on your laptop in Word. As “Customer Zero” for the Webex Teams and Microsoft Office 365 integration, Cisco IT is trying out different use cases to give customers the benefit of our real-world experience.
We’re introducing the Webex Teams integration into Office 365 to Cisco employees in three phases.
Phase 1 – Email and Calendar Migration
We’ve worked on enabling Cisco collaboration in Outlook for years, and this historically has been a challenge in a mixed environment, we have both Macs and PCs and we never seem to get everything working on both – today though, we have all the features on all the platforms integrated with Webex Teams. Click to Call, Click to Chat, and Presence all work in Outlook on Mac and PC and we enabled this as we migrated mailboxes to O365. We’ve also integrated Webex Teams into O365 calendar to get employees to their meetings faster. It’s all part of our continual effort to keep our everyday tools modern, user friendly, and making the collaboration experience seamless – after all, we are a global company and a lot of our teams span multiple time zones.
Phase 2 – Co-authoring and Co-editing
Say I want to edit an Office document that someone added to a Webex Teams space. Before, I’d have to download the document, open it, edit, save, and upload the new version to the space. Did I download the latest version? Not sure. We’ve made life much simpler by integrating Webex Teams with OneDrive and SharePoint Online. Now, I can add an Office document to a Webex Teams space from OneDrive using the file storage and sharing integration in Webex Teams. I have the option to grant editing rights to those who have prior access to my document or to open it up to everyone in the Webex Teams space.
Once the document is uploaded onto OneDrive, no matter where I work, it’s the same document, whether I am in Webex Teams, or using any app in the Office Suite. The experience is seamless – and I don’t even need to re-upload. Co-authoring and editing are a game-changer for us – especially when you can use these tools in our real-time video meetings. Our users are pretty excited about it, and it’s integrated right into Webex Teams. Watch this video to learn more about this experience.
Phase 3 – Social Collaboration
This final step is currently in progress. If I’m in Word editing a colleague’s document, I feel comfortable making little changes like correcting a date. But other changes require some conversation first—for example, “In paragraph 3, you said ‘service’ but I think you meant ‘architecture.’ Right?” So, we wrote an add-in to the Office 365 menu that creates a Webex Teams side panel, allowing you to chat directly from within the document. It’s handy for keeping all conversations about a document in the same place. Plus, the conversation is saved in real time in my Webex Teams, so I can stay in the loop even if I am on the go and don’t have the document open. It’s another win for collaboration, and ultimately user productivity. I’m not sure how many minutes I have spent searching emails for documents, but now I don’t have to, and neither do our employees.
Next up: Adding Collaboration to our Other Cloud Services
In integrating Webex Teams and Office 365, we built what we’re calling the Secure Digital Experience platform. In addition to collaboration, it brings together Duo Security, Advanced Malware Protection (AMP), and our eStore (so that we can make sure we don’t exceed our license count). Once we’ve finished the Office 365 rollout, we plan to connect the platform to other cloud services, including IBM Connections, Salesforce, and ServiceNow.
How did we manage this massive overhaul of tools with minimal user downtime? Migrating 118,000 mailboxes is not easy, but you can learn more about it from my colleagues Kelly Conway and Caroline Te Aika.
The platform has an interesting security angle. Since email contains confidential information, we allow access to Office 365 only from trusted devices. But who wants to wait for a VPN connection every time they check their email away from the office? You can read more about our security considerations here, in a blog by my colleague Dave Jones and myself.
Questions? Ideas? Please share in the comment box.
All great news! When will all of this be available to the Collaboration Sales Organization? Thank you!
When I added WebEx to Outlook, the Outlook calendar slowed down dramatically, making it impossible to manage my calendar. When I removed the WebEx add-in, Outlook is back to normal speed. Some technical integration issue there?
Video summary here: https://vimeo.com/343229313/4bd8cf0d72
I watched the video and it pains me to say that there's a lot of misinformation in it.
Here three examples:
Claim: "Microsoft is no longer investing in Skype for Business".
Fact: Partly true, because Microsoft are heavily investing in Microsoft Teams
Claim: "Multiple tenants are required for external communications"
Fact: Simply not true
Claim: "With Microsoft you need to invest in an E5 license for messaging, meeting and calling"
Fact: Not true. Messaging, meeting are part of O365 E3 and PSTN is enabled through an add-on call Office 365 Phone System
Rasmus my dear friend. I see the move to Microsoft has clouded your objectivity 🙂 Unfortunately, all the statements are fully correct.
Claim: "Microsoft is no longer investing in Skype for Business".
The online service description for SfB clearly states that as of Oct 2018 Teams is the primary client. At enterprise connect, the communication was – users of SfB online will need to migrate to teams, no further development on the cloud platform. SfB 2019 server is the way to go if you want to continue using SfB in the long term. Extended support contract pricing was released and accompanying EoL notice. Essentially no further development on Skype for business. If you look at the official UserVoice forums for SfB, there is no BU feedback on any posts.
Claim: "Multiple tenants are required for external communications"
100%. The super construct of Identity in MS Teams is a tenant. External communication is defined as communication with a user or channel on a tenant that is not your own. So a minimum of two tenants is required for external collaboration. This introduces the concept of guest access. Webex Teams doesn't have "guest access" because it carries the notion that the external user can do less than the user who owns the space/channel.
Claim: "With Microsoft, you need to invest in an E5 license for messaging, meeting and calling"
Whilst you are entirely correct that technically you can purchase phone system as an addon, it is priced such that it often doesn't make commercial sense to purchase a single add on capability when you can acquire 6x capability for 2x the price. So the addon is often given away for free, for the initial term.
If you want to discuss, you have my number 🙂 Always great to hear from you.