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Microsoft Viva Turns 2!
On the 4th of February 2021, Satya Nadella, CEO, Microsoft, announced Microsoft Viva, calling it the first employee experience platform, designed to bring tools for employee engagement, learning, wellbeing and knowledge discovery directly into the flow of people’s work. During 2020, the whole world participated in the largest at-scale remote work experiment that we’ve ever seen, and this had a dramatic impact on how we all experienced the world of work. Gone were the days of spending most of our work-week in a physical office, of being able to build serendipitous connections by the watercooler. No longer were new starters automatically guaranteed to be in the office on their first…
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Writing a Great Session Abstract
In previous posts, I’ve talked about getting started with community speaking and how to set up your sessionize profile – today, we’re going to look at how you write a great session abstract. First of all though, it’s helpful to understand why a good session abstract is important. A good session abstract should help you stand out as a speaker when responding to calls for content – it is your opportunity to effectively communicate the unique value and relevance of your proposed session to the conference organizers. A strong abstract can effectively communicate the unique perspectives, insights, and solutions that you will share during the session. It should clearly articulate…
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How to Create Your Sessionize Profile
Last week, I wrote about how to get started with community speaking, and today, we’re going to build on that, with a guide to setting up your Sessionize profile for new speakers. This is quite a long article, so use the following buttons if you want to navigate quickly to a different part of this page: Set up your profile Add your first session Examples of Profiles What is Sessionize? Sessionize is a platform that is used by event organisers around the world to run and manage calls for speakers / content. For organisers, it provide a comprehensive set of tools that make it easy to review content, to pull…
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Getting Started with Community Speaking
Within the Microsoft tech community, we have some fantastic speakers, but I’m really keen to support new speakers who are just getting started with community speaking. Over the past couple of years, I’ve been to so many events where I’ve seen lots of the same people time and time again. On the one hand, this is fantastic as I’ve made so many good friends, and every event feels like a reunion – an opportunity to reconnect, to strengthen relationships with the people I’ve already met. However, it is important that experienced speakers are able to support the development and progression of new talent – and ideally from a diverse background!…
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What is Employee Experience?
The world of work has been an incredibly stressful one for the last three years, with a huge amount of stress, pressure and flux affecting the way that we all work on a day-to-day basis, and impacting our employee experience. First, we all had to shift to working from home – for many of us, this happened almost overnight. Not all organisations were ready to make the change, and the first half of 2020 saw many companies speed up projects to deploy tools like Microsoft Teams, to enable people to be able to work from home. Teams usage absolutely sky-rocketed, and I’m sure many of you remember the struggles with…
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Zoe 365 Reflections on 2022
2022 saw big career changes The start of the new year is a good time to reflect and look back on 2022, including all the wonderful moments, the highs, the lows and everything in between. It feels like sharing my reflections on Zoe 365 is a good place to start the new calendar year. 2022 was a strange year for me, as it saw me change roles for the first time in 5 years – which wasn’t on my radar at the start of the year. I spent 5 years working for Agilisys, and during my time there I worked in multiple roles, with a huge group of absolutely fantastic…
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Learn About The Viva Explorers
Who are the Viva Explorers? 2022 was the year that the Viva Explorers were officially founded, although the story starts slightly before that. In December 2021, Lesley Crook – the founding Viva Explorer – was encouraged to set up a new blog by her boss at Cloudway, Stale Hansen, to start blogging. She called her blog the Viva Visionary, and published 12 Viva related articles throughout the month of December. She was joined now long afterwards by Sara Fennah, and then myself and a group of other early Viva evangelists and MVPs, and the Viva Explorers officially became a thing. All of the Viva Explorers are Microsoft MVPs or Regional…
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Improving Diversity Within Our Community
How do we drive more diversity within our tech community? This is a subject near and dear to my heart. Being a woman working in the tech industry, I’ve come up against my fair share of challenges throughout the years, and even now, there are many situations where I’m the only woman in a room or a meeting. Over the last 6 or 7 years, I’ve interviewed over 150 candidates for technical roles, and I can count the number of women that I interviewed during this time on both hands. So from a gender perspective, there is the issue of not having enough women who are staying the distance to…
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Welcome to Zoe 365!
Hey everyone! This is the first official post of my new blog, Zoe 365, and I just wanted to say a HUGE thank you for coming over here, I’m delighted to welcome you all here, and hope you find something useful! I figured I’ll start off by sharing a little bit about me first of all. I’m an IT professional, who has spent the lasts 16+ years of my life working with various forms of SharePoint initially, and then in more recent years, broadening out to the wider Microsoft 365 stack, with a particular focus on Microsoft Teams and Microsoft Viva. I’ve always been super interested in that intersection between…