Miro Managing Meetings and their Results?

For some time we talked about the desire for enterprises to manage meetings. Their planning, efficient operation and gathering of results.   Next steps.  The integration of needed expertise. Things like who needs to do what and when, and how that fit into the process.  And visually!   We even built such a system, mentioned here.     Especially now after the explosion of remote group interactions has been so improved.   Now the integration AI and Chat AI capabilities could further optimize meetings.    Saw several attempts, demonstrated but they were not adequate.  Could Miro be the right direction?  Investigating Miro.com and will report later.   Thoughts?    Let me know.  - Franz  

ESnet Launches Next-Generation Network to Enhance Collaborative Science

Better Networks Built for Research.

ACM TECHNEWS

ESnet Launches Next-Generation Network to Enhance Collaborative Science

By Berkeley Lab News Center, October 18, 2022

“ESnet6 represents a transformational change in the way networks are built for research, with improved capacity, resiliency, and flexibility,” said ESnet executive director Inder Monga.

The Energy Sciences Network (ESnet) has rolled out the latest generation of the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) high-performance science network, dubbed ESnet6.

ESnet links all DOE's national laboratories, DOE-funded researchers, and its scientific instruments and supercomputing centers so that data can move quickly between them.

ESnet6 features bandwidth of over 46 terabits per second, a dedicated fiber optic cable footprint spanning 15,000 miles, and network backbone links ranging from 400 gigabits per second to 1 terabit per second, among other things.

Said ESnet's Inder Monga, "ESnet6 provides the foundation for the future of the DOE mission science as we enter an age where discoveries will rely on the integration of scientific experimental facilities, supercomputers, and global science teams operating together as if they are colocated: one instrument in one location. ESnet6 interconnects all of these resources to create a holistic science discovery system."

From Berkeley Lab News Center

View Full Article     

Collaborative Metaverse, Useful thoughts?

In O'Reilly Radar

The Collaborative Metaverse

The enterprise metaverse is about better collaboration, not virtual meetings.

By Mike Loukides

October 12, 2022

Learn faster. Dig deeper. See farther.

Join the O'Reilly online learning platform. Get a free trial today and find answers on the fly, or master something new and useful.

Learn more

We want to congratulate Dylan Field on his startup Figma, which Adobe recently purchased for $20B. Dylan started his career with O’Reilly Media when he was in high school—not that long ago. With Figma, he’s made the big time.

It’s worth thinking about why Figma has been so successful, and why Adobe was willing to pay so much for it. Since the beginning, Figma has been about collaboration. Yes, it was a great design tool. Yes, it ran completely in the browser, no downloads and installation required. But more than anything else, Figma was a tool for collaboration. That was a goal from the beginning. Collaboration wasn’t an afterthought; it was baked in.

My thesis about the Metaverse is that it is, above all, about enabling collaboration. VR goggles and AR glasses? Fine, but the Metaverse will fail if it only works for those who want to wear a headset. Crypto? I strongly object to the idea that everything needs to be owned—and that every transaction needs to pay a tax to anonymous middlemen (whether they’re called miners or stakers). Finally, I think that Facebook/Meta, Microsoft, and others who say that the Metaverse is about “better meetings” are just plain headed in the wrong direction. I can tell you—anyone in this industry can tell you—that we don’t need better meetings, we need fewer meetings.

But we still need people working together, particularly as more and more of us are working remotely. So the real question facing us is: how do we minimize meetings, while enabling people to work together? Meetings are, after all, a tool for coordinating people, for transferring information in groups, for circulating ideas outside of one-to-one conversations. They’re a tool for collaboration. That’s precisely what tools like Figma are for: enabling designers to work together on a project conveniently, without conflicting with each other. They’re about demonstrating designs to managers and other stakeholders. They’re about brainstorming new ideas (with Figjam) with your team members. And they’re about doing all this without requiring people to get together in a conference room, in Zoom, or in any of the other conferencing services. The problem with those tools isn’t really the flat screen, the “Brady Bunch” design, or the absence of avatars; the problem is that you still have to interrupt some number of people and get them in the same (virtual) place at the same time, breaking whatever flow that they were in.

We don’t need better meetings; we need better tools for collaboration so that we don’t need as many meetings. That’s what the Metaverse means for businesses. Tools like GitHub and Google’s Colab are really about collaboration, as are Google Docs and Microsoft Office 365. The Metaverse is strongly associated with gaming, and if you look at games like Overwatch and Fortnite, and you’ll see that those games are really about collaboration between online players. That’s what makes these games fun. I’ve got nothing against VR goggles, but what makes the experience special is the interaction with other players in real time. You don’t need goggles for that. ...' 

Collaborative Creativity in AI

Discovered of late.    Excerpt of article below. Some key issues outlined.

Collaborative creativity in AI

In Nature Machine Intelligence volume 4, page 733 (2022)  

The public release of ‘Stable Diffusion’, a high-quality image generation tool, sets new standards in open-source AI development and raises new questions.

Generative AI tools provide creative inspiration for artists, illustrators and writers, but also for scientists — for example, in the discovery of drugs, materials and even the design of quantum experiments. Powerful capabilities arise in particular with very large neural network models that have billions or even trillions of parameters and are trained on vast amounts of data on the internet. For example, language models such as GPT-3 from OpenAI can generate original text as if written by humans. More recently, such algorithms have been trained on text–image pairs and developed into image generation models. DALL-E (from OpenAI), Imagen (from Google) and Midjourney produce stunning images in any style, from photorealistic portraits and newspaper cartoons to medieval tapestry and much more, given text or other images as prompts.

Illustration produced with the generative AI tool Stable Diffusion. The authors of a News & Views article in this issue, about a bio-inspired robotics approach, sent us a sketch of an idea for an illustration: a robot dog looking into a mirror and seeing a real dog in the reflection. This idea was turned into a Nature-style image to accompany the News & Views article. We tested what Stable Diffusion would come up with when shown the same sketch and given text prompts, and share here one example output image.

This editorial is illustrated with an image generated with a new text-to-image generation tool known as ‘Stable Diffusion’. This model has been making a substantial impact worldwide in the last month, as it is completely open-source and free to use, unlike the aforementioned image generation models. Its public release on 22 August 2022 was accompanied with guidelines and a license that focus on responsible and ethical use and re-use of the model.

Plenty of ethical concerns come to mind with regard to generative models trained on data from the internet, which contains much harmful content and amplifies biases inherent in society. Moreover, generative algorithms could be used to produce unlawful ‘deepfakes’ that are damaging to individuals, and questions arise about copyright and undervaluing the work of professional artists. A concern that was in particular on the mind of OpenAI researchers in 2019 was the potential for malicious use of their language model (then GPT-2) in the form of the large-scale spread of misinformation. As a remedy, they released a smaller version of the model but this caused a backlash in the community. Many were unhappy with the fact that ‘hype’ was generated around GPT-2 while only few had access to the full model, making replication experiments challenging. It was argued that openness and engagement with the community would be a better way to examine any concerns and to promptly work on countermeasures when problems arise. GPT-3 is currently made available to researchers upon request, and for others there is controlled access via an API. Filters have been introduced to tackle misuse and problems with bias. DALL-E, from OpenAI, is available upon request and also has been endowed with various filters.

In an initiative to give the world a high-quality text-to-image generation large neural network model, Stable Diffusion was developed by a collaboration between several groups, including start-up stability.ai, non-profit AI platforms Eleuther AI and LAION, and researchers from the Machine Vision & Learning research group at LMU Munich. The model is built on the latent diffusion model published by the LMU group last year. In the approach, noise is added to a low-dimensional latent representation of example images, and a neural network is trained to revert this diffusion process. The de-noising process is guided by a text prompt. The algorithm was trained on a subset of the LAION-5B image database, using a cluster of 4,000 GPUs.  ...  

NSA cyber chief says Ukraine war is compelling more intelligence sharing with industry

 Cybersecurity as it evolves under global conditions. 

NSA cyber chief says Ukraine war is compelling more intelligence sharing with industry

NSA Cybersecurity Directorate Director Rob Joyce spoke Wednesday at the Trellix Cybersecurity Summit. (Pixelme Studios).

Written by AJ Vicens  OCT 19, 2022 | CYBERSCOOP

Rapidly and proactively sharing intelligence on cyberthreats with industry and critical infrastructure providers “can really make a big and decisive difference,” Rob Joyce, director of the NSA Cybersecurity Directorate, said Wednesday.

It’s one of the key lessons his agency “took away personally” from the ongoing war in Ukraine, Joyce said at the Trellix Cybersecurity Summit in Washington.

“Over time, I’ve changed my view about what it is to protect sources and methods,” Joyce said, noting that in his 30-plus years at NSA “it’s in our DNA” to protect sources and methods to ensure the ability to “know secrets into the future.”

But “what we know is often not sensitive, it is how we know it,” Joyce said. “We can make available the insights about what we know without putting at risk how we know it. That’s really an inflection point that lets us get to more prolific, more extensive and more closely sharing for operational outcomes.”

Joyce added that “it doesn’t do anybody any good if we know a thing and don’t do something. Doing is really the focus in the cybersecurity area. And if you’ve got secrets and understanding and you don’t operationalize those, they don’t count.”

Joyce pointed to what he called the “maturation” of the NSA’s Cybersecurity Collaboration Center as the venue for “working with industry to operationalize those ideas.” Information is shared with technology providers, major infrastructure providers and others, “who can then take action at scale.”

A recent example of such information sharing came earlier this month when the NSA, the FBI and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency released a joint advisory warning of state-aligned hackers using Impacket, an open-source toolkit to aid in network compromise, and a custom data exfiltration tool known as CovalentStealer against an unnamed defense industrial base entity.

More broadly, the U.S. government has been more aggressive about sharing intelligence about Russian plans, both in the days before the Feb. 24 invasion and since, as part of an effort to disrupt Russian attacks on Ukraine.

“When we set up that protection, protecting us protects you,” he said.  .... ' 

Thoughts on Collaborative Intelligence

We have better tools, yes, but how well do they get to innovative solutions?  

How Collaborative Intelligence Can Boost Business Innovation, April 14, 2022

Ineffective meetings cost businesses $541 billion a year globally in lost productivity and employee time, according to Doodle’s 2019 State of the Meeting report. And according to Gallup’s State of the Global Workplace report, as much as 85% of employee time may be wasted on inefficient collaboration.

But the real costs of such disconnection go even deeper than money.

In a disconnected organization, innovation grinds to a halt. Individuals’ and teams’ great insights get trapped in silos. Employees feel stifled—unheard and disengaged. And with record numbers of knowledge workers quitting their jobs in the “Great Resignation,” the risks of disconnection are more urgent than ever.

Simply put: your organization can’t afford to have a disconnected workforce.

Building a company culture in which everyone is connected to their teams and has a shared sense of purpose is fundamental for collaboration and innovation. Building such a culture requires adopting collaborative intelligence (CI), a new systematic approach that connects teams to unlock their genius—taking insights and ideas from possibility to reality.

The Five Principles of Collaborative Intelligence

In the spirit of making collaboration intentional and purposeful, CI is comprised of three main components. First, there are collaboration spaces, both physical and online, where teams can connect. Second, there is collaboration design, the practice of introducing intentionality and technology to help teams connect and innovate. And finally, collaboration insights let organizations measure and improve their collaboration and innovation. Together, these yield a culture of collaboration where everyone feels connected and confident in delivering great work.

Collaborative intelligence is based on five principles:

People are greater together than apart.

Working in teams magnifies individuals’ power and value by coordinating a wider range of experience and expertise to tackle challenges and break down barriers to innovation and progress..... ' 

Autodesk Aquires The Wild

 Worked with Autodesk in the enterprise when they were helping us maintain machine and device blueprints for key processes.   Now they are going beyond.

Autodesk Acquires Enterprise Collab Platform The Wild

It follows The Wild’s acquisition of IrisVR last year.

BY PETER GRAHAM, MARCH 24, 2022

While all the focus might be on virtual reality (VR) gaming, the enterprise side of the industry is a hotbed of advancing tech and ever-evolving workflows. Another nod to that fact arrives today with the reveal that AEC (architecture, engineering, construction) software specialist Autodesk has acquired immersive collaboration The Wild.

The Wild

Thanks to its own acquisition of IrisVR in 2021, The Wild is also heavily involved in the AEC sector, allowing Autodesk to gain an even stronger foothold as businesses look towards XR to help deliver projects in a world becoming more attuned to remote working practices. Integrating with tools such as Revit, SketchUp, and BIM 360, The Wild’s cross-platform ecosystem integrates with Meta Quest, HP Reverb, Pico Neo, HTC Vive, PC and even AR (on iOS devices) to make it easily accessible to all co-workers.

Between The Wild and IrisVR, both platforms serve over 700 customers worldwide which Autodesk will now be able to build upon. No acquisition sum has been revealed and there’s been no mention of how this will impact the current teams going forward.

“Our acquisition of The Wild reflects the rapid transformation taking place in the building industry, from the complexity of projects to the geographic diversity of teams who design, construct, and operate them,” said Andrew Anagnost, CEO and president, Autodesk in a statement. “XR is a must-have business imperative for today and an important part of Autodesk’s Forge platform vision.” .... ' 

Adversarial Collaboration

In the Edge:

Adversarial Collaboration: In the Edge

Intro below. worth reading. Ultimately robotics and AI need to be able to do this.   - FAD 

[EDITOR'S NOTE: In marking this year's 25th anniversary of Edge, we are presenting original lectures from eminent scientists and other thinkers in th­e empirical world who are changing the way we think about science and our place­­ in the world.]

"People don't change their minds."    —Daniel Kahneman 

DANIEL KAHNEMAN is the Eugene Higgins Professor of Psychology Emeritus, Princeton University, author of Thinking, Fast and Slow, and co-author (with Cass R. Sunstein and Olivier Sibony) of Noise. He is the winner of the 2013 Presidential Medal of Honor, and the recipient of the 2002 Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences. Daniel Kahneman’s Edge Bio Page

Introduction  By John Brockman

Daniel Kahneman, while known for his work with Amos Tversky in the 1970s on judgment and decision-making, hopes that part of his scientific legacy will be the practice of adversarial collaboration, which he initiated in 2001.

Introduced as "a substitute for the format of critique-reply-rejoinder in which debates are currently conducted in the social sciences," Kahneman championed adversarial collaboration as "a good-faith effort to conduct debates by carrying out joint research."

He notes that the flowering of adversarial collaborations in various scientific disciplines is an indication that we are at the beginnings of a radical change in the way that science is done in psychology and other disciplines. "And," he says, "it's a major improvement."  ....'  ... 

MS Teams with Colaborative Apps

 Makes good sense.   Especially apps that aid in bringing in multiple opinions, decision and task oriented views.  See some of the work we did in this space, well before the focus now being seen with apps like Teams and Zoom.  See 'Business Sphere' tag.

Microsoft wants Teams to be your go-to for collaborative apps  in Engadget

What if Teams could be the Windows for real-time apps?

You may not have noticed, but Microsoft Teams is slowing evolving from a Slack-like workplace chat app to a collaborative platform of its own. In addition to just talking with your coworkers, you can also install apps within Teams to manage Asana projects, or build a custom app that's specifically tuned to your company's needs. At Build 2021, Microsoft is making a bigger push to make Teams a platform for collaborative apps.  ... " 

Collaborating Robotic Teams

 Continuing to look at this space,   now that robotics is getting more advanced, the potential expands.  We examined some very early warehouse management approaches.  Mentioned previously:  

Helping Robots Collaborate to Get the Job Done, By MIT News

An algorithm developed by researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), the University of Pennsylvania, and the University of California, San Diego aims to foster cooperation between information-gathering robot teams.

The algorithm balances data collection and energy expenditure to avoid having robots perform maneuvers that waste energy to gain only a small amount of data.

Using the researchers' Distributed Local Search approach, each robot proposes a potential trajectory for itself as part of the team, and the algorithm accepts or rejects them based whether it will increase the likelihood of achieving the team's objective function.

A test involving a simulated team of 10 robots showed that the algorithm required more computation time, but guaranteed their mission would be completed successfully.

 .... Massachusetts Institute of Technology researchers have developed an algorithm that coordinates the performance of robot teams for missions like mapping or search-and-rescue in complex, unpredictable environments.

From MIT News

Perspective Brain Hack

Good thought, but not always.

Perspective Taking: A Brain Hack That Can Help You Make Better Decisions

Mar 22, 2021 Opinion North America

Supports K@W's Innovation Content

In business and in life, many of our interactions benefit from perspective taking, or our ability to put ourselves in someone else’s shoes. In a unique corporate partnership with SEB, a leading Swedish corporate bank, The Wharton Neuroscience Initiative, explores the neural basis of perspective taking and its effects on collaboration and business outcomes. In this piece, Wharton marketing professor and neuroscientist Michael Platt, Vera Ludwig, Elizabeth Johnson and Per Hugander shed light on the neural basis of perspective taking and why it may lead to more innovation and better business outcomes. 

According to Martin Lorentzon, co-founder of Spotify and Tradedoubler, “The value of your company is equal to the sum of the problems you are able to solve.” But how can we build this problem-solving capability into our organizations? Neuroscience suggests that one key strategy may be taking the perspective of others. Not only does this crucial skill provide us with additional information about complex situations, it also activates brain regions linked with creativity and innovation.

Indeed, many frameworks and tools for solving tough and complex problems are centered around the ability to take the perspective of others. Innovation frameworks start with taking the customer’s perspective; collaboration and negotiation frameworks are centered around understanding others’ viewpoints; and dialogue models recommend postponing judgment in order to take different perspectives for solving numerous challenges from business issues to marital problems.

When considering how often perspective taking appears in the problem-solving literature, it is surprising that so few leaders invest time and effort in developing this skill. Even though organizations frequently use the aforementioned tools and frameworks, including the well-known approach of Design Thinking, the results may be suboptimal if individuals are not skilled in perspective taking itself.... " 

The Army Studies Real Time Conversation

Considerable, interesting piece on the topic. Leads to the open question about how we converse with our robot assistants.   And leads on to other kinds of hybrid, cooperative work.   And AI to provide useful information about the meaning of statements and commands in context.    Expect lots more in this space in the coming years.

Army researchers create pioneering approach to real-time conversational AI  by The Army Research Laboratory  in Techexplore.

Spoken dialogue is the most natural way for people to interact with complex autonomous agents such as robots. Future Army operational environments will require technology that allows artificial intelligent agents to understand and carry out commands and interact with them as teammates.

Researchers from the U.S. Army Combat Capabilities Development Command, known as DEVCOM, Army Research Laboratory and the University of Southern California's Institute for Creative Technologies, a Department of Defense-sponsored University Affiliated Research Center, created an approach to flexibly interpret and respond to Soldier intent derived from spoken dialogue with autonomous systems.

This technology is currently the primary component for dialogue processing for the lab's Joint Understanding and Dialogue Interface, or JUDI, system, a prototype that enables bi-directional conversational interactions between Soldiers and autonomous systems.

"We employed a statistical classification technique for enabling conversational AI using state-of-the-art natural language understanding and dialogue management technologies," said Army researcher Dr. Felix Gervits. "The statistical language classifier enables autonomous systems to interpret the intent of a Soldier by recognizing the purpose of the communication and performing actions to realize the underlying intent."

For example, he said, if a robot receives a command to "turn 45 degrees and send a picture," it could interpret the instruction and carry out the task.

To achieve this, the researchers trained their classifier on a labeled data set of human-robot dialogue generated during a collaborative search-and-rescue task. The classifier learned a mapping of verbal commands to responses and actions, allowing it to apply this knowledge to new commands and respond appropriately....  " 

How Healthcare Changed

And have been in the middle of it.   Innovation is growing.   Good overview piece:

How Healthcare Changed in 2020

By Katherine Boyarsky | January 7, 2021 Owl Labs

In 2020, the way the world functioned changed. With stay-at-home orders leading to an explosion in telecommuting, telehealth, and virtual collaboration, healthcare had a major consideration during this transition: security. How do you keep patient data secure in a virtual world? Additionally, how do you connect Covid patients in isolation rooms with both care teams and their families? Luckily, technology found its way into every aspect of healthcare, bringing innovation into a historically traditional industry. 

One thing’s for sure, 2020 fundamentally changed the way that we offer healthcare around the world, for the better

Telehealth Protected Providers and Expanded Access

The growth in telehealth during 2020 was staggering. An already existing option in some areas with small pockets of users prior to 2020, telehealth is the ability to meet with providers for appointments using video conferencing. In March of 2020, telehealth visits were up 154% from the previous year due to COVID-19. The CDC mentions the benefits of telehealth, including “expanding access to care, reducing disease exposure for staff and patients, preserving scarce supplies of personal protective equipment, and reducing patient demand on facilities.” 

With secure apps like Teladoc, patients can meet with doctors for check ups, therapy sessions, regular visits, and more. Patients can message with providers using apps like MyChart and access their records, have a virtual visit, schedule appointments, and more. 

Telehealth provides the exciting opportunity for people to see specialists and meet with doctors in areas where they otherwise would not have access to these specialty teams and services. ... " 

OpenProject

Introduced to OpenProject.   An open source project management system.   Nicely done, their introductory blog is here,  Which attaches to many component descriptions and tutorials.  Learning to apply to a large project. 

Project collaboration features

Powerful project management features support

project teams throughout the entire project life cycle.   ... " 

On Salesforce Buying Slack

Salesforce buying Slack.  Is this Deeper collaboration? Can see some interesting things coming out of this when combined with Salesforces' work in AI. 

Salesforce + Slack mashup signals the rise of Deep Collaboration in Venturebeat

Jake Saper, Emergence Capital  @jakesaper

News this week that Salesforce is acquiring Slack has a lot of people opining on the pros and cons of such a merger. But one thing is clear: combining the collaboration functionality of Slack with the sales productivity tooling of Salesforce represents a monumental step forward in the history of enterprise software.

My team at Emergence Capital have been students of the cloud since we invested in Salesforce in 2002. Ever since, we’ve exclusively focused on enterprise software, partnering with productivity leaders like Box and Veeva as well as collaboration leaders like Yammer and Zoom.

However, an unfortunate truth has emerged as the cloud has matured: Collaboration software is increasingly at odds with productivity. As the number of apps in both categories has exploded, there’s been a huge uptick in data loss (and frustration) as workers pivot across apps to get their work done. It’s tough to stay in flow when you’re constantly forced out of it by your tools.

The solution: Deep Collaboration

Collaboration and productivity tooling evolved separately. The move to remote or hybrid work is the catalyst we’ve needed to fuse them. We used to rely on collaboration tools for lighter weight tasks — updates, check-ins, gif sharing, etc. — and reserve deeper, more substantive collaboration for in-person meetings. The old stack (mostly) worked for that approach.

In a world where deeper collaboration is being done remotely, we need a new stack. Collaboration tooling can’t be a destination. It must be embedded in the work itself.

My team calls this stack Deep Collaboration. The term refers to software that combines productivity and collaboration functionality in one place to get a specific job done. In a Deep Collaboration future, a person doing a specific task doesn’t have to leave a single piece of software to get that job done. All the productivity and collaboration (both internal and external) features they need to accomplish a task live in the same place. .... ' 

Merging with our Tools

Will We, Can We ... Merge with our AI?

Well we did kind of merge with our calculators.   And we sure seem to be merging with our Smartphones.    And now ... ?

This is how we’ll merge with AI  in VentureBeat

Gary Grossman, Edelman

The relationship between humans and AI is something of a dance. We and AI come close together operating collaboratively, then are pushed away by the impossibility, only to stumble but return attracted by the potential. It is perhaps fitting that the dance community is beginning to embrace robots, with AI helping to create new movements and choreography, and with robots sharing the stage with human dancers.

The relationship between society and technology is yin and yang, with every massive enhancement accompanied by the potential for danger. AI, for example, offers the promise to end boring, repetitive jobs, enabling us to engage in higher level and more fulfilling tasks. It helps with any number of efficiency efforts, such as fraud detection, and it can even paint masterpiece artworks and compose symphonies. Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, hopes AI will unlock human potential and let us focus on the most interesting, most creative, most generative things.   .... '

Microsoft Teams to be Enhanced for Business Plays

Been looking for ways that the now numerous collaborative systems will really improve task and goal oriented business process.   Its still mostly the basics.  Very useful but hardly 'intelligence' in any sense.  For example a system that could analyze the essence of a  meeting and extract decisions like who agreed to do what and what support they need.  Schedule follow ups.  The below is not that, but I get the sense they are considering new things of real value.   We brainstormed some things like that in the early 00s.  Lets see it now.

Microsoft Teams gets an overhauled calling interface, CarPlay support, and more

Microsoft Teams will soon let you transfer calls easily between desktop and mobile

By Tom Warren@tomwarren in TheVerge 

Microsoft is overhauling its calling features inside Microsoft Teams today. A new calling interface will now show contacts, voicemail, and calling history in a single location. It’s designed to allow Microsoft Teams to more easily replace your desk phone, with built-in spam call protection, reverse number lookup, and the ability to merge calls.

Microsoft Teams users will also be able to transfer calls between mobile and desktop soon, allowing people to quickly move locations in the middle of an audio or video call. The Teams app will let people join without audio on an additional device, or simply transfer the call and end it automatically on other devices. Microsoft says this particular feature will be available in early 2021.  ... '

Five Nonobvious Remote Work Techniques

Very interesting piece in Queue and the Communications of the ACM, Nov 2020,  pp 108-110.  Take the problem beyond the technical and to the collaboratively social.    From experiences at Stack Overflow.  Well Worth the read.

Five Nonobvious Remote Work Techniques   001:10 .1145/3410627

Emulating the efficiency of in-person conversations   By Thomas A. Limoncelli   This article reveals five nonobvious techniques that make remote work successful at Stack Overflow.

Remote work has been part of the engineering culture at Stack Overflow since the company began. Eighty percent of the engineering department works remotely. This enables the company to hire top engineers from around the world, not just from the New York City area. (Forty percent of the company worked remotely prior to the COVID-19 lockdown; 100 percent during the lockdown.) Even employees who do not work remotely must work in ways that are remote-friendly.

For some companies, working remotely was a new thing when the COVID-19 pandemic lockdowns began. At first the problems were technical: IT departments had to ramp up VPN (virtual private network) capacity, human resources and infosec departments had to adjust policies, and everyone struggled with microphones, cameras, and videoconferencing software.

Once those technical issues are resolved, the social issues become more apparent. How do you strike up a conversation as you used to do in the office? How do you know when it is appropriate to reach out to someone? How do you prevent loneliness and isolation?

Here are my top five favorite techniques Stack Overflow uses to make remote work successful on a social level.

Tip #1: If Anyone is Remote, We're All Remote

Meetings should be either 100 percent in-person, or 100 percent remote; no mixed meetings.

Ever been in a conference room with a bunch of people plus one person participating by phone or videoconference? It never works. The one remote participant can't hear the conversation, can't see what everyone else is seeing, and so on. He or she can't authentically participate.

At Stack Overflow we recognized this years ago and adopted a rule: If one person is remote, we're all remote. This means everyone who is physically present leaves the conference room, goes back to their desks, and we conduct the meeting using desktop videoconferencing.

During the COVID-19 lockdown your entire company may be remote, but this is a good policy to adopt when you return to the office.

This may not be an option for companies with open floor plans, however, where participants videoconferencing from their desks may disturb their neighbors. How can you make mixed meetings work? Where I've observed them working well required two ingredients: First, the conference-room design was meticulously refined and adjusted over time (this is rarer—and more expensive—than you would think); second, and the biggest determinant, was the degree to which all those in the meeting were aware of the remote participants. It requires a learned skill of being vigilant for clues that someone is having difficulty in participating and then taking corrective action. Everyone, not just the facilitator, needs to be mindful of this. ... "

Zoom Adding End-to-end Encryption

Been following this for some time.   I like Zoom, my favorite to date of the half dozen commonly in use methods I know of.     Now even free users can turn on advanced end to end encryption.   Very powerful encryption, though it must be specifically turned on.   Other vendors are adding other interesting, more text analytic  'business' functions  that are interesting,  but not aimed at the average user. 

Zoom starts rolling out end-to-end encryption

E2EE is available as a technical preview for free and paid users.    By Kris Holt, @krisholt   in Engadget

Zoom is now rolling out end-to-end encryption (E2EE) for both free and paid users, so your video chats and meetings should be much more secure. You can activate E2EE on Zoom’s latest desktop client, Android app and Zoom Rooms starting today. It’ll be available on iOS soon after Apple approves an app update.

You’ll need to manually switch on E2EE in your settings, and all meeting participants will need to do so for their calls to use that level of encryption. You’ll know E2EE is active if you spot a green shield icon in the top left of your call.  .... ' 

Future of Work by Microsoft Teams

Nice to see Microsoft Teams expanding their capabilities.   Have now used Teams now many times, like it. Now lets see more assistance built in.

Microsoft aims to enable the future of work with new Teams features and devices  By  Mike Wheatley

Microsoft Corp. is doubling down on what it says will be the “future of work” amid the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic.

At its Ignite 2020 virtual event today, it announced a host of new products and services it says will help people to become more productive, whether they’re working remotely or simply being careful to maintain social distancing upon their return to the office.

For remote workers the main focus has been on expanding the capabilities of Microsoft’s Teams collaboration app, Microsoft 365 Corporate Vice President Jared Spataro said in a blog post. For example, Teams Together Mode, which is an experience that’s meant to help participants feel closer together even when they are apart by placing them in a shared background, is getting more options, including auditoriums, conference rooms and even a virtual coffee shop.  ... "