The first lock-down in spring was a game changer. Home office has become normal. But also in non-lock-down times the usage of Microsoft Teams now is on a high volume. For us it has become the collaboration backbone.
Teams usage is stable no matter if lock-down
Webcast Marathon
Last week on 26th November we held a webcast marathon. We presented 6 talks for Dynamics 365 Finance and Power Platform. The webcasts were organized using Microsoft Teams Live Events. The registration pages were quickly built using Microsoft Forms and automated using Power Automate. When a new participant registered for a webcast, PA read the registration from Form, picked the corresponding .ics calendar, sent a mail to the participant with the calendar .ics as attachment and created a new record in Azure table storage.
Webcast Registration via Power Automate
It turned out that the combination of Office 365, Power Platform and Teams work great together and allows to manage a complex distributed scenario like a webcast with different speakers exclusivly in the cloud.
Lock-down results
In contrast to the very strict first lock-down in spring, the actual “hard” lock-down allows more exceptions.
Monday morning: Some stay at home but many (have to) go to work (30th November)Monday morning : First week of first lock-down in spring (16th March)
In theory we have a curfew all day. Schools and Universities are closed, many retail stores are closed, home depots are closed for B2C customers and gastronomy is limited to delivery. But since going to work, sport and shopping is allowed we don’t really feel the pressure like in spring. However, it seems to work and the numbers are dropping.
The second Corona wave hit us hard in Austria. After a very chilly summer, Corona strikes back. Compared to the first wave, testing capacities have rising up to 4x times. But even when considering a high number of unidentified cases in spring, the number of infections is much higher now and hospitals are now reaching their capacity limit.
We had a Soft-Lockdown in October with mainly restaurants closed and a pseudo-curfew from 20:00 to 06:00 but a lot of exceptions. Obviously the Soft-Lockdown came to late and had less effect, so we are now under a stricter Lockdown. Although the situation is more severe than in Spring, the restrictions are less hard now.
Notebooks are sold out
Home-Schooling and Home-Office has become a widely accepted practice. However, this results in a high demand of devices. At this moment almost all business grade laptops are sold out. No matter if you are Looking for Lenovo ThinkPads or ThinkBooks, HP Elitebooks, etc.
Webcast Marathon
Due to the pandemic our annual company event for our customers is canceled 😥 Since 10 years we are organizing an yearly event with our customers including good food, news and presentations.
Better times (2019)
This year we are presenting a day full of webcasts regarding the Microsoft Power Platform and Dynamics 365 Finance & Supply Chain. We will discuss collaboration in times of Home Office. Moreover we will present Power Apps, Power BI, Power Automate and Dynamics 365 Finance & SCM ERP projects.
Staring from 14. April shops with less than 400 m² were allowed to open up, not including restaurants or bars. Home supply and garden center were also alowed to open. Using masks is now mandatory not only for grocery stores, but for shopping and public transport.
App. 14.500 positive tested so far
The number of infections is stalling and the increase rate is stable under 5% for a long time now. The big question is how much will the infections increase the next days. With a median of 5 days plus weekend delay will see in the middle of next week. The plan is to allow sport activities like tennis, golf, etc. at 1st May and allow restaurants to open on 15. May, under the assumption that corona infections will not dramatically raise.
Remote Assist and Augmented Reality Apps
At work we are promoting remote assist apps like Dynamics 365 Remote Assist and Dynamics 365 Product Visualize for a long time. But from my experience for most people augmented reality was something between cool and useless but definitve not usefull or business enabler.
Training a remote assist app for griller mainteance (Summer 2019)
Now, with all the restrictions some folks start to understand that remote assiting tools can help them to operate their business, e.g. to provide technical support for customers from employees at their home office.
Office 365 and Teams retroperspective
More than a month has passed since the lock-down started. Thankfully we were already using remote and collaboration tools for a while now. We were using SharePoint almost 10 years from now. Long before Skype for Business and Teams was released we had Lync On-Premises but switched quickely to Skype and Teams.
In the last weeks the active Teams applications used became a little more diverse. Windows apps are still mostly used but mobile and web clients are also present. For example, I’m working with my private Laptop and have my own Office 365 Tenant, therefor I’m not using the Teams application from the company but preferr the web application.
Collaboration from different plattforms works seamless
Statistics show that chats are the most widely used way to communicate. One to one discussions are done via chats, like we’d talk to the colleagues at work. For what would be a meeting at work, calls are arranged to discuss a specific and very certain topic.
Chats substitute face to face talks
Microsoft once reported a 775 % increase in team usage sind the lock-down in most european countries. On a smaller grain size, we see a very similar increase in our usage. While Mail, SharePoint and Onedrive are not more affected than before, our Teams usage has increased by 540%.
540% increase on Teams usage at work
Apps and APIs
Some think tracing apps can help to reduce the spread of corona, by tracking contacts and informing endangered persons. At the beginning there was the proprietary Closed-Source Stopp Corona tracking app, promoted by the Red Cross and developed by Accenture. After a few weeks the PEPP-PT (Pan-European Privacy-Preserving Proximity-Tracing) approach was announced which should make apps from different venders interoperable. Last week Apple and Goolge announced to provide interoperatble APIs for the same purpose. Questions are (1) will Apple and Goole implement PEPP-PT standards or build their own proprietary solution (2) which one will the developers in europe choose? From my perspective it is not very likely that Apple and Google will give a damn about european data privacy concerns and flood the world with their solution.
Another very concerning development is that the Austrian State Printing House (Staatsdruckerei) is working an app called Restart.ID to proof a persons immunity status. The idea is to link a persons immunity state with the persons passport. This is practically the same surveillance and discrimination approach like authoritarian regimes like China have implemented. Only if you have the app installed, obeyed the rules and have a green marker you may pass the border, access the subway, etc.
I’d expect that these development will have a negative effect on the acceptance and backfire. An Austrian proprietary closed-source app like Stopp-Corona is somewhat excepted. An app based the US companies Apple and Google, which regulary parise themself on how much they know about their users and actively use this information to make profit will have much less acceptance. An app that links a persons ID, passport, medical history and vaccination state is in my oppinion not acceptable.
BTW: Climate crisis is still here
Warm weather and COVID-19 lock-down is bad combination. Last week Wolfsberg, Frantschach St. Gertraud, St. Andrä and St. Paul had to limit the usage of water. This week another district is running out of water. Neuhofen a.d. Krems announced that it running out of water, because peoples’ excessive use for swimming pools and car washing. It looks like we will not be able to go abroad this summer, and the climate crisis will came back with a blast this summer.
Repetitive cooking
After five weeks of cooking on my own, it’s time to repeat good recipies and improve others: Geschnetzeltes, Pork, Spagehtti, Noodle Gratin, Spicy meat with rice, Toast
ErpCoder 