Category: Microsoft Community

Bringing an end to MCT Regional Lead and Teams MVP in 2025.

I haven't blogged for a long time. But it wasn't a case that I simply ran out of ideas, or gas. Rather, I needed to let it go for awhile. And what I remember distinctly about that period (around the last MVP Summit back in March) was that I had reached some sort of inflection point. For a few years previous I had so much going on in my community life over and above my corprate one, it wasn't atypical to be doing thirteen, fourteen hours days. Weekends. Holidays. This was all on top of my personal responsibilities. Being a husband. A father. Taking care of the house. The dog. The car. You name it. However, at the same time I also felt I was doing ok averaging six hours sleep a night. I continually seemed to weather what needed to be done, managing to even squeeze in an hour or so a week for something like a documentary so as not to lose complete sense of what was going on in the world. So whilst it's easy to imagine that burnout might have been inevitable given such a prolonged state of time poverty, overload, and almost-zero scope to pursue things above and beyond the demands and totality of family, work and community, thankfully - I never reached that point. Yet what did occur is that I started to seriously revaluate all the activities, events, programs and initiatives which had accumulated over the last several years. And as part of that, I began to recognise the risks of living so functionally and intensely over a long period of time. From my own experience this included one-dimensionalness, neglecting other activities such as hobbies or social relationships, difficulty remaining present, and sometimes ressentiment against the situation in which I found myself, all whilst still pushing through in the hope that things would naturally subside or 'work out'. For sure, I couldn't recall the last time I had checked in or devoted time to my own welfare. I guess things were as they were because this was never in question. And having a family, dependents, things such as your sense of self, your identity, health and happiness are incredibly important - as much for them as opposed to oneself.

12 features I would like to see land in Microsoft Teams in 2023

2022 went fast. This is the 4th year I have written this article but honestly? It feels like I wrote the last one yesterday. And here we are at the other side of the pandemic; in what still feels like turbulent times. In 2022 we've seen the Ukrainian-Russian conflict, it's terrible impact on millions of lives as well as its subsequent impact on the global economy. We've seen the growing political tension between China and the West. Natural disasters like the flood in Pakistan or more evidence of climate change - record breaking heatwaves and widespread wildfires such as the ones in Portugal or Spain over the summer. The overturning of abortion rights in Texas. Musk and Twitter. Iran. Afghanistan. It's easy to get caught up in the doom and gloom of it all. And occasionally we need to be reminded of the good things. In 2022 we are closer to fusion power than ever before. We have more people working in hybrid than ever before. As this nice article in Wired illustrates, there are numerous examples which don't always seem to grab so many headlines: in the US renewables generated more energy than nuclear and coal for the first time. There has been progress on the treatment of Alzheimer's. The successful test of the DART program to protect our planet against impact events. For people who worry about climate change, Scientific American reported that the global growth in renewables alone is estimated to have likely avoided 600 million tons in additional CO2 emissions, or slightly less than the 646 million tons of CO2 produced by Germany last year.

Teams Real Simple with Pictures: Always on Live Captions in Meetings

So recently I had the opportunity to meet up at South Coast Summit with Dona Sarkar. Dona is the Director of Tech at Microsoft Accessibility - but I have known her since back in the day when she headed up the Windows Insiders program. Now, it is true to say that me and Dona have a fair-few-things in common. Travel. Geography. Africa. Keeping things interesting. Side Hustle. Avoiding Jail. Good Food and going all in on whatever it is we are doing at the time. So, it was a real privilege that she came to our session on Metaverse for Business. And in true Dona style I ended up dropping in a load of ad-hoc accessibility scenarios into the content on the fly about two minutes prior to speaking. But that's the point right. We must, as Nietzsche once said, live dangerously! And whilst we never got the opportunity to have a real catch up - given she's always in such demand at these events I know we'll do loads more together in the future. And so, as a thank you for coming to our session I wanted to make everyone aware of the new ability in Teams for users to turn live captions on for every one of their meetings. Why? Because it's easy and it's important given that Live Captions can help significantly with users hard of hearing, where the primary language of the meeting isn't the users first language and where meetings are conducted in noisy environments, but from asking around my own organisation many people don't use them because they have to turn them on every meeting. They forget. Or they can't be bothered. It's one more action. Remove these barriers and -- whilst it's a personal view - I think that it will be used by most people in an organisation to the point that captions will be normalized and the standard for Teams Meetings. And do you know what? My wife has actually gotten me in the habit over the last few years of watching TV at home with the captions on by default. Given my age, and the number of alt-rock concerts I used to attend when I was young in the 90's, captions have really helped me too