Enabling Remote Work Weekly Roundup - March 23-27

[Eric Starker]

Check out some amazing content in our Enabling Remote Work weekly roundup!

Top Conversations

End user training for Microsoft Teams

Pavan Verma shared training resources to help users in your organization get the most out of Teams.

Things You Shouldn’t Do While Working from Home

MVP Mark Rackley shared 10 things you shouldn’t do while working from home. Other community members responded positively.

Securing Ourselves While Working From Home

Christopher Clai shared security considerations to keep in mind while working from home.

"Meeting"​ your coworkers for the first time: Three tips for your first Working-From-Home meeting

Microsoft employee Ricardo Wilkins shared three tips to think about during that first WFH team meeting.

The BIG WFH Office pictures!

MVP Simon Binder asked the community to post pictures of their work from home setup, receiving quite a few responses.

Enable Remote Work

Free edition of SquaredUp SCOM dashboards to support business continuity during COVID-19 crisis

On Wednesday, March 25, Microsoft announced a special edition of SquaredUp's web dashboards (a Microsoft partner and long-term contributor to the SCOM community) will be available completely free to all SCOM users for the next 6 months. Join the conversation in the System Center space.

Configuring Office 365 ProPlus updates for remote workers using VPN

Due to the dynamic situation with COVID-19 many IT pros are being challenged to assess ways to configure Office 365 Client to update directly from Microsoft CDN. Today, the majority of customers I engage with manage updates using Configuration Manager (ConfigMgr), predominately on-premises. The objective of this posting is how to minimize internet egress through customer VPN network for Office updates.

Microsoft Teams in Office 365 GCC High - CMMC Considerations

The Department of Defense (DoD), its agencies and organizations, and supply chain - Defense Industrial Base (DIB) - have shied away from remote working and SaaS offerings in the cloud for understandable security concerns. However, times have changed. The workforce includes several new generational bands, technology has inhibited new possibilities, and cybersecurity products/tools are far more enhanced than 10 years previously. 

Sample forms to help organizations stay connected while working remote

As organizations respond proactively against the spread of COVID-19, many are adopting remote work to protect public health. This can be a major and sudden change from the traditional way of communication and day-to-day life. From conducting meetings to keeping up team morale, there are unique challenges and qualities to virtual collaboration. We would like to provide some tips and examples of how organizations are using Microsoft Forms to help teams stay safe, productive, and engaged during this difficult time.

If remote working means Remote Desktop for your organization it might be time to look at WVD

The last few weeks have made many of us start evaluating alternatives to some of the technologies that we have relied upon for years or even decades, with a much higher number of employees working remotely until local authorities give the all clear. One of the things that I’ve been hearing from people across multiple locations is that the existing internet and VPN infrastructure they have in place is bursting at the seams, and not all have the option of increasing their internet speeds to scale up. For those of you with on-premises Remote Desktop Services it might be time to start evaluating how Windows Virtual Desktop (WVD) might be able assist.  I’ll cover a couple of different scenarios, but first it’s worth discussing some of the basics of WVD first.

Helping IT admins set up secure work from home using Microsoft Endpoint Manager

A new endpoint management blog series has been published in the Enterprise Mobility + Security Blog to help IT admins quickly enable remote work, where suddenly hundreds of people are using personal PCs and mobile devices at home or are sharing with their family.

Deploy Office 365 ProPlus to remote workers

This blog post will address the enterprise IT admin’s challenge on how to deploy Office 365 ProPlus to remote workers without saturating the company’s VPN connections. It will show you how to implement a tactical approach which allows an IT admin to stay in control and quickly relief the pain of VPN congestion by offloading content distribution to the Microsoft Content Delivery Network (CDN). Maybe you are in the process of moving off legacy versions of Office and want to keep the pace with e.g. the Office 2010 end-of-support approaching fast. There are multiple strategic solutions available (e.g. Intune and Windows Autopilot), but for now we focus on a quick fix.

Microsoft Teams - video meetings

Video conferencing in Microsoft Teams is a hot topic in the Tech Community. Check out these popular discussions from the Microsoft Teams community and feel free to weigh in with your experiences and expertise! 

Resources for Remote Workers

Have you been sent home to work? How can you use technology to stay connected & productive?

As we all are aware of the news and what is going on with COVID-19, many of you have been sent home to work for the first time ever. At Microsoft we have been working remotely for years, so this is not new to us. A group of us have come together to provide a bunch of quick tips and how to videos for working remotely. These are mostly centered around how to use Microsoft Teams to stay connected to your co-workers, friends and family as well as how to stay productive with work. 

Recording and Resources for What Do You Need Wednesday? – Open QA, Tips, Resources and more

On Wednesday 3/25/2020 the Microsoft Healthcare and Life Sciences blog held an open Q&A webcast for customers where they could ask a panel of Microsoft technical experts anything they wanted to around Microsoft 365. The idea was that with the COVID-19 impact on businesses many of our Healthcare and Life Science customers might have questions around services they were quickly bringing online in order to address the impact of suddenly needing to connect and work remotely.

Ensuring Security during COVID-19 Operations

In the cybersecurity community there is a saying “Cyber can impact physical and physical can impact Cyber”.  We normally think of this in terms of warfare, such as what happened with the Ukrainian power grid a few years back.  But as the COVID-19 crisis continues and drives more organizations to enable remote work scenarios, cybersecurity professionals need to be tightly integrated into our organization’s contingency planning to ensure we continue to protect the business.  What we don’t want to have happen is a data breach or other security incident to occur during or immediately following the crisis.

“Crisis management and remote work” :studio_microphone: The Intrazone podcast

We are committed to helping organizations everywhere stay connected and productive during this difficult time. From virus outbreaks like COVID-19 to unexpected weather emergencies, our focus goes to the importance of establishing open the lines of communication and information flow. In this episode, Chris and I highlight three solutions - across Microsoft Teams, SharePoint and Power Apps - that help everyone stay briefed on the situation and any business impacts. Through crisis management and good planning, technology can help business continuity in the move to more and more remote working.

Microsoft Teams Live Events Resources for Implementation for COVID19 Communications

Over the last two weeks with many organizations looking to facilitate the best possible experience for employees home-bound due to COVID-19 a topic that has come up time and time again is Microsoft 365 Live Events. While Live Events comes in three different flavors (see “Live events across Microsoft 365 in Yammer, Microsoft Teams, and Microsoft Stream”) Organizations looking to quickly leverage the power and scale of Live Events have been predominantly seeking my help around Microsoft Teams Live Events. By way of follow-up I have been providing these organizations with resources to help them get moving quickly.

Turn Covid-19 downtime into level-up time

Remote work isn't a new concept working with technology, be it sitting in an office in a different country than the customer, or the whole "I don't need to leave my bed to write code". If you work with Azure you should be fairly familiar with the concept of your compute power not being located in your basement.

Top 3 Live Events Questions During COVID-19 - HLS Show Me How

Over the last 3 weeks as COVID-19 has impacted numerous organizations the need to deliver large scale messaging to employees has become an increasingly requested topic for me as a Microsoft Technologist. I have been streaming using Microsoft tech since my days as a public-school teacher back in 1996 in Southern California using Microsoft Netshow so along the years I have picked up a “few” things including a lot of tips around different deliveries. Three questions seem to keep popping up during these recent meetings where folks are looking to implement executive webcasts to their employees working remote from home.

Remote Teaching Resources

We have a site https://www.microsoft.com/en-gb/education/remote-learning that brings together our resources to support customers with the move to remote learning.