Tag Archives: Bing

Microsoft’s Plethora of Portals

As I was looking through Microsoft’s catalog of applications, it occurred to me just how many of their platforms are information-centric and seemed to overlap in functionality. Where should I go when I want to get stuff done, find information or produce it? Since the early days of AOL and AltaVista, we’ve seen the awesome power of a “Jump Page” as the starting point for our information journey.

Microsoft, which one do I choose?

From one software vendor’s perspective, we’ve got many options. What’s the best option for me? Seems like there should be opportunities to gain synergies between available Microsoft platforms.

Bing.com

Searching for information on the internet? News, images, encyclopedias, Wikipedia, whatever you need, and more is on the web. Microsoft Bing helps you find what you need regardless if you’re using text or an image to search for like for like information. It also serves up “relevant” information on the jump page, news mixed with advertisements. There is also a feature enabling you to add carousel “boxes”. for example, containing latest MS Word files used, synergy from Office.com

Office.com

Word, PowerPoint, Excel, Visio, Power BI… If you’ve created content or want to create content using Microsoft applications, Office.com is the one-stop-shop for all your Office apps and the content created using these applications.

SharePoint

Another portal to a universe of information around a centric theme, such as collaboration/interaction with product/project team members, an Intranet, SharePoint site with one or multiple teams. At the most fundamental level is the capability to collaborate/interact with teams, potentially leveraging Microsoft collaboration tools. Just one of many of its capabilities “out of the box” is a document management solution and the use of version control.

SharePoint can also be used for any type of Internet/web platform, i.e., a public-facing portal platform. However, SharePoint, in fact, is a sharing tool in which the authors of the website can share video presentations, shared calendars of public events, and a plethora of customized lists.

Yammer

Engaging your people is more critical than ever. Yammer connects leaders, communicators, and employees to build communities, share knowledge, and engage everyone. I’m thinking synonymous with a bulletin board. The implementation of Yammer looks like Facebook for the Enterprise.

  • Use the Home feed to stay on top of what matters, tap into the knowledge of others, and build on existing work.
  • Search for experts, conversations, and files.
  • Join communities to stay informed, connect with your coworkers, and gather ideas.
  • Join in the conversation, react, reply to, and share posts.
  • @ mention someone to loop them in.
  • Attach a file, gif, photo, or video to enhance your post.
  • Praise someone in your network to celebrate a success, or just to say thanks.
  • Create a virtual event that your community can ask a question and participate live or watch the recording afterwards.
  • Use polls to crowd source feedback and get answers fast.
  • Stay connected outside the office with the Yammer mobile app.
  • Use Yammer in Microsoft Teams, SharePoint, or Outlook.

“Yammer helps you connect and engage across your organization so that you can discuss ideas, share updates, and network with others.”

Microsoft Teams

For any team, there is a wealth of information varying from the group or single Chats, Teams, Calls, Files, and practically integration for almost all Microsoft applications and beyond. The extensibility of MS Teams seems relatively boundless, such as integrations with Wikis, SharePoint document folders, etc. From what I can tell, many organizations just use Teams for the group, or individual Chat channels are barely grazing the surface of MS Teams’ capabilities.

Setup of MS Teams, Teams “landing” page is a great place to start constructing your “living space” within MS Teams. From there, you can carve out space for all things related to the team. For example, in the “Team ABC” Team channel, you can add N number of “tabs” relating to everything from an embedded Wiki to specific SharePoint folders for the team’s product specifications. A team could even create an embedded Azure DevOps [Kanban] Board to show progress and essentially “live in” your MS Team, team channel.

Another porta;l overlap, Microsoft Teams Communities, seems to equate to Yammer.

Delve

What is Delve – Microsoft 365?

Use Delve to manage your Microsoft 365 profile and to discover and organize the information that’s likely to be most interesting to you right now – across Microsoft 365.

Delve never changes any permissions, so you’ll only see documents that you already have access to. Other people will not see your private documents. Learn more about privacy.

Delve is a content curation platform for the person it’s most relevant to…you. It gives the appearance of a user experience similar to carousels of video streaming apps. There are “Popular Documents” carousels and other carousels that are based on the most recent access. Based on how files are saved based on who can access content is how the platform gives you a treasure trove of documents you never knew you had access to or existed. It actually paints a potential compliance nightmare if people select the default document access as “…anyone within my organization…”.

Outlook.com / Best of MSN

Another portal of information focused around you: your email, your calendar, your To-Dos, and your contacts/people. It’s not just your communication with anyone, e.g., your project team members; it’s organizing your life on a smaller scale, e.g., To-Dos. You can also access other shared calendars, such as a team release schedule or a PTO schedule.

The Best of MSN is information, i.e., news around your interests, a digest of information relevant to you, delivered in an email format. Other digests of information from other sources may be curated and sent if subscribed.

Mediums to Traverse Information: AR, VR…

The visual paradigms used to query and access information may drastically influence the user’s capacity to digest the relevant information. For example, in an Augmented Reality (AR) experience, querying, identifying information, and then applying it, serving up the content in a way most conducive to a user’s experience is vital.

Users can’t just “Google It” and serve up the results like magic. The next evolution of querying information and serving up content in a medium to maximize its usability is key and is most evident when using Augmented Reality (AR). If you’re building something, instructions may be overlayed by the physical elements/parts in front of the user. Even the context of the step number would allow the virtual images to overlay the parts.

Automated and Manual Content Curation is a MUST for all Portals

Categories, Tags, Images, and all other associations from object A to everything else, the Meta of Existence, are essential for proper information dissemination and digestion. If you can tag any object with metadata, you can teach an AI/search engine to identify it in a relevant query. Implementing an Induction Engine, a type of Artificial Intelligence that proposes rules based on historic patterns is a must to improve query accuracy over time.

Next level, “Information applications” – Improved Living with Alzheimer’s

Next Ecosystem: Google..?

Microsoft to Release AI Digital Agent SDK Integration with Visio and Deploy to Bing Search

Build and deploy a business AI Digital Assistant with the ease of building visio diagrams, or ‘Business Process Workflows’.  In addition, advanced Visio workflows offer external integration, enabling the workflow to retrieve information from external data sources; e.g. SAP CRM; Salesforce.

As a business, Digital Agent subscriber,  Microsoft Bing  search results will contain the business’ AI Digital Assistant created using Visio.  The ‘Chat’ link will invoke the business’ custom Digital Agent.  The Agent has the ability to answer business questions, or lead the user through “complex”, workflows.  For example, the user may ask if a particular store has an item in stock, and then place the order from the search results, with a ‘small’ transaction fee to the business. The Digital Assistant may be hosted with MSFT / Bing or an external server.  Applying the Digital Assistant to search results pushes the transaction to the surface of the stack.

Bing Chat
Bing Digital Chat Agent

Leveraging their existing technologies, Microsoft will leap into the custom AI digital assistant business using Visio to design business process workflows, and Bing for promotion placement, and visibility.  Microsoft can charge the business for the Digital Agent implementation and/or usage licensing.

  • The SDK for Visio that empowers the business user to build business process workflows with ease may have a low to no cost monthly licensing as a part of MSFT’s cloud pricing model.
  • Microsoft may charge the business a “per chat interaction”  fee model, either per chat, or bundles with discounts based on volume.
  • In addition, any revenue generated from the AI Digital Assistant, may be subject to transactional fees by Microsoft.

Why not use Microsoft’s Cortana, or Google’s AI Assistant?  Using a ‘white label’ version of an AI Assistant enables the user to interact with an agent of the search listed business, and that agent has business specific knowledge.  The ‘white label’ AI digital agent is also empowered to perform any automation processes integrated into the user defined, business workflows. Examples include:

  • basic knowledge such as store hours of operation
  • more complex assistance, such as walking a [perspective] client through a process such as “How to Sweat Copper Pipes”.  Many “how to” articles and videos do exist on the Internet already through blogs or youtube.    The AI digital assistant “curator of knowledge”  may ‘recommended’ existing content, or provide their own content.
  • Proprietary information can be disclosed in a narrative using the AI digital agent, e.g.  My order number is 123456B.  What is the status of my order?
  • Actions, such as employee referrals, e.g. I spoke with Kate Smith in the store, and she was a huge help finding what I needed.  I would like to recommend her.  E.g.2. I would like to re-order my ‘favorite’ shampoo with my details on file.  Frequent patrons may reorder a ‘named’ shopping cart.

Escalation to a human agent is also a feature.  When the business process workflow dictates, the user may escalate to a human in ‘real-time’, e.g. to a person’s smartphone.

Note: As of yet, Microsoft representatives have made no comment relating to this article.

When Only Money Talks in SEO & Online Advertising

It seems to me in my last few years of experience, when you want to be heard on the Internet, you can have the best Keywords, Metadata, SEO Title, and Metadata, and your placement in the search IS only if you pay for the advertising to the company running the platform.  You actively pay for advertising, you go to the top of the list, and they tell you if you bid X you will be placed at #1 ranking. That should advance your hit rate in a calculation.  If you have a placement of 1, and a high click through rate on the search engine, that should also effect your placement in the search engine when you don’t advertise, if you have similar SEO keywords, metadata, and click through rate, because after all, the relevancy has not changed, so mathematically it should be at equilibrium.  It’s just how much you are paying that changes.  I will quote one of my favorite movies yet again, Moneyball.

Billy Beane: No! What’s the problem, Barry?
Scout Barry: We need three eight home runs, a hundred twenty R.B.I’s and forty seven…
Billy Beane: Aaahhh! The problem we’re trying to solve is that there are rich teams and there are poor teams, then there’s fifty feet of crap, and then there’s us. It’s an unfair game… We got to think differently.

 

People, we have to think differently, out of the box, if you want…full stop.  It’s like the Mofia is running the Advertising Online, muscling you, a shakedown for a payment to be heard, and if it only suits their political agenda to top off. We have two companies, with no disrespect, but it’s an oligopoly, essentially, Microsoft Ads Bing and Google Ads.  This is as close to anti-trust as possible, and although I think Google AdWords has an amazing platform, and in favor of both parties, because my mantra is all perspectives are valid, this is Ironic, in this case, it’s Microsoft who might have a case against Google in an Anti-trust suit, and I like them both.  Guess what, it’s a case for every single advertising agency, a class action law suit, which could even involve SEO Experts paid to help the advertisers.

Thanks goes to @JFGariepy, Sir J.-François Gariépy for sparking the idea.