The Yammer Roast

2nd of September, 2018 / / No Comments

Taking my inspiration from Comedy Central, the Yammer Roast is a forum in which we can directly address resistances around Yammer, its role, and past failures in retrospect.
Some of my clients have tried with Yammer and concluded that for various reasons it’s failed to take hold. For some the value is clear and it’s a case of putting a compelling approach and supporting rationale to sponsors and consumers who remain sceptical. For others, they are looking for a way to make it work in their current collaboration landscape.… [Keep reading] “The Yammer Roast”

Bots: An Understanding of Time

9th of July, 2018 / / No Comments

Some modern applications must understand time, because the messages they receive contain time sensitive information. Consider a modern Service Desk solution, that may have to retrieve tickets based on a date range (the span between dates) or a duration of time.
In this blog post, I’ll explain how bots can interpret date ranges and durations, so they can respond to natural language queries provided by users, either via keyboard or microphone.
First, let’s consider  the building blocks of a bot, as depicted in the following view:

The client runs an application that sends messages to a messaging endpoint in the cloud.… [Keep reading] “Bots: An Understanding of Time”

Getting Started with Adaptive Cards and the Bot Framework

28th of June, 2018 / / No Comments

This article will provide an introduction to working with AdaptiveCards and the Bot Framework. AdaptiveCards provide bot developers with an option to create their own card templates to suit variety of different scenarios. I’ll also show you a couple of tricks with node.js that will help you design smart.
Before I run through the example, I want to point you to some great resources from adaptivecards.io which will help you build and test your own AdaptiveCards:

  • The schema explorer provides a breakdown of the constructs you can use to build your AdaptiveCards.
… [Keep reading] “Getting Started with Adaptive Cards and the Bot Framework”

Your Modern Collaboration Landscape

24th of June, 2018 / / No Comments

There are many ways people collaborate within your organisation. You may or may not enjoy the fruits of that collaboration. Does your current collaboration landscape cater for the wide variety of groups that form (organically or inorganically) to build relationships and develop your business?
Moving to the cloud is a catalyst for re-evaluating your collaboration solutions and their value. Platforms like Office 365 are underpinned by search/discovery tools that can traverse and help draw insight from the output of collaboration, including conversations and connections between people and information.… [Keep reading] “Your Modern Collaboration Landscape”

Agile Teams to High Performing Machines

17th of June, 2018 / / No Comments

Agile teams are often under scrutiny as they find their feet and as their sponsors and stakeholders realign expectations. Teams can struggle due to many reasons. I won’t list them here, you’ll find many root causes online and may have a few yourself.
Accordingly, this article is for Scrum Masters, Delivery Managers or Project Managers who may work to help turn struggling teams into high performing machines. The key to success here is measures, measures and measures. … [Keep reading] “Agile Teams to High Performing Machines”

5 Tips: Designing Better Bots

3rd of June, 2018 / / No Comments

Around about now many of you will be in discussions internally or with your partners on chatbots and their applications.
The design process for any bot distils a business process and associated outcome into a dialog. This is a series of interactions between the user and the bot where information is exchanged. The bot must deliver that outcome expediently, seeking clarifications where necessary.
I’ve been involved in many workshops with customers to elicit and evaluate business processes that could be improved through the use of bots.… [Keep reading] “5 Tips: Designing Better Bots”

Selling Adoption Services

28th of June, 2017 / / 2 Comments

It’s no secret that Partners have challenges selling change & adoption services. I’m talking specifically about Partners who will provide offerings to complement other professional services they provide, like technical delivery. Proposals are subject to scrutiny and in the absence of a value proposition, change & adoption will be one of the first things to go in a re-scoping exercise.
“It’s OK. We do change & adoption ourselves”
Organisations like Kloud deliver a range of professional services centric to our mission to ‘move organisations to the cloud’.… [Keep reading] “Selling Adoption Services”

Connecting Surface Hubs to Microsoft Operations Management Suite

27th of June, 2017 / / No Comments

At Kloud, we have Surface Hubs in our Melbourne, Adelaide and Sydney regional offices. It makes sense  to monitor them using a central service, to which monitoring and diagnostic information can be aggregated.
This blog post covers the process of connecting your Surface Hub devices to Microsoft Operations Management Suite (OMS).
Before you start:

  • You need a Surface Hub (yes, obvious I know) set up and connected to your network. It’s a good idea to setup the device account before you connect it to OMS.
… [Keep reading] “Connecting Surface Hubs to Microsoft Operations Management Suite”