Callum Moore: When people have these glitches or blips, generally they live with them. And the question I find myself asking is, is someone who's responsible for, for Teams as a product do, do I really care about those unreported moments? Do I care about those glitches or blips? And what if they're happening more often than you think?

In my eyes, these things create an opinion and a stereotype. About a product.

Tom Arbuthnot: Hi, and welcome back to the Teams Insider Podcast. This week we are talking managing Microsoft Teams at Real enterprise scale. We're talking to Callum Moore, who is a product owner for Teams at a very large organization, just under 400,000 users. And Callum also has a wealth of experience working at other professional services organizations and even on the partner side as well.

We get into managing Teams at scale, thinking about pushing out clients, how to manage change, the Message Center roadmap. How you deal with that process and what's important for users and for the business. We also to get into some of the Admin tooling that's coming into Teams Admin Center, so things like remotely collecting Teams logs and performance of the Teams client reports in the Teams Admin Center as well.

Thanks to Callu,m for sharing some really good tips on how to manage Teams and many thanks to Landis who are the sponsor of this podcast. Really appreciate all their support of everything we're doing at Empowering.Cloud. On with the show. Hi, everybody, welcome back to the podcast. Really excited to have this conversation.

Always looking for real customer perspectives on what's happening on the ground. And Callum has by, by seat count some of the most experience I've ever spoken to in terms of, uh, his role and where he's worked previously. Uh, and, and this one's gonna be all around. Just managing Teams at enterprise scale, as in clients and versions and, and issues and tracking.

Um, Microsoft has been doing a lot lately around additional reporting in Teams, Admin Center. The things that are coming up around pulling client logs from the Teams client and all that work is to deal with the. Literally hundreds of millions of users all around the world of Teams helping the admins, the, the unsung heroes of holding this stuff together, uh, with managing those environments.

So, hey Callum, welcome to the show. 

Callum Moore: Hey Tom, thanks very much for having me. Um, and No worries. I'm excited to have this 

Tom Arbuthnot: conversation. It's. Uh, maybe you can give a little bit without any specific names, a little bit of background about the, the, the environments you've worked in and the current one. Nearly 400,000 users, which is just an insane scale.

Callum Moore: Yeah, yeah. No, it is a, it is a crazy scale. So, um, yeah, I guess quick introduction about me. So again, I'm Callum Moore, um, I'm what you call an enterprise product manager, and I basically have focus on Microsoft 365 but specifically on the Microsoft Teams. Kind of the whole client, um, how it, how it looks and feels, so on and so forth.

But, uh, I basically organizations.

You could say, you could say Fine tune, uh, Microsoft 365 environment. So basically make sure that the tools not only fit their business needs, but also drive real value, um, easier, easier said than done. Um, so really. My job's about three things. Making sure Teams works is expected that people are actually using it, and that it's again, tailored, tailored to the needs of our users.

Um, I've worked within the retail and healthcare sector. Um, I've also worked within kind of, uh, UK banking as well, all of which around Microsoft 365. So roles from first, third line support. Uh, in, in, in the earlier side of my career as deep in the world of SharePoint, so on-prem and online, pretty excellent mentors that kind of allowed me to, uh, transition from, uh, SharePoint, uh, to the broader 365 stack.

Tom Arbuthnot: It's really interesting to hear how different organizations shape those, their internal, uh, product owner, service owner operations, architecture. We've all gained a lot of, uh, history from server based products. So very often I spend a lot of times talking to Enterprise. It's really interesting to see where they've ended up of like, oh, this team owned this because they were networks, and networks was phone.

And now phone is Teams phone. But the SharePoint team owned the collaboration because files are SharePoint. So SharePoint at it. And then other orgs have like, uh, like actually quite radically changed their operating model and it's like. It's all product product owners because even though they don't own a product, in sense, if they own the products roadmap, like a developer shop, would they own the product in terms of product success within their organization and keeping up with Microsoft on what their journey is.

And now AI getting into everything is like more than a full-time job just to keep up with what they're doing. That obviously impacts your organization and your users. 

Callum Moore: Yeah. Yeah, definitely. And you kind of hit the nail on the head there with, uh, AI coming into the picture because it's definitely changed how, well, not only we as product managers think about, um, experiences and features that are landing, but as you say, kind of organization structures.

Out there, there's an AI first strategy in a lot of places, so mm-hmm. Yeah, you, you can definitely expect, um, shifts in, in, in, in either responsibilities or just what people are doing around you to, to, to, to match that strategy. 

Tom Arbuthnot: How is it, is it like, I, I guess not. Is it challenging? How challenging is it, is probably the right question to like, have.

All these different workloads, such a big environment, Microsoft moving so fast, how do you keep up with. Well, what's going on in security and compliance around recording and transcription impacts Teams. I feel like Teams is often the, the workload between a lot of these things in terms of the files, the recording, it's the surface for a lot of people for AI as well.

So it's in all those conversations, 

Callum Moore: every organization's different. Sometimes you don't have a big team of. Say product managers or, or, or, or SMEs available to be able to do such a thing. So what you're looking for is more bite-size information. Um, and, and, and again, that in my eyes, that's where the, uh, the Message Center comes in.

Roadmap. Yep. Bit of a sneak peek. Right. Bit of a, an inkling as, as to what's going on Message Center. It's that, okay, this is landing and, and, and this is what you might, you need to do. 

Tom Arbuthnot: Yeah. And, and that's a, like dealing with, uh, the, the messaging to, so we track all that and have done for a couple of years now.

Like it has got, uh, like, it feels like we've got busier, but we have literally got busy. Like more items are coming through than ever before and Copilot. Being injected into all these tools has upped the items because Copilot is a new workload, but also it's like, oh, the Copilot in Word is doing this, Copilot in PowerPoint is doing that.

So there's, there's definitely literally statistically a significant increase in number of Message Center items in the last 12 months versus the previous 12 months. 

Callum Moore: Yeah. Yeah, there has, and, and I, I have a, I guess a bit of a tip, uh, that I can share on that. So, um, if you are looking at the roadmap, in my eyes, it's, it's, it's really easy to pay attention to those big ticket items because again, let's say, let, let's say you are just one individual or maybe two, or.

You, you, let's face it, you just don't have the capacity to, to, to learn about all of these nice little features, but mm-hmm. Um, what I can say is learning about some of the more client base features, things like. Uh, slash commands or keyboard shortcuts. Those improvements, uh, what I've found anyway are just as important and appreciated as some of those really big ticket items.

So an example of big ticket item is that new chat channel experience. That's, that, that's, that's, that's, that's landing, 

Tom Arbuthnot: yeah. That's really interesting actually, because like we do, I think with the IT pro ops side. We land more towards, this is the most significant change, so therefore it's getting by mind share.

But actually from a usability point of view, Microsoft changing something that feels smaller but helps in your case like thousands, hundreds of thousands of users work better. The benefit is actually to the business can often be on feature changes that help those users do more rather than a great big new feature that they may or may not use.

Callum Moore: Yeah, exactly. I, I, if you can promote features that help people do their job better, I, that's a pretty good outcome. And, uh, you could even take it a step further and like, uh, I dunno, create yourself like a Viva engage community or a storyline and, and, and, and publish features that way. Mm-hmm. Like, not everyone has to receive targeted comms for these types of features.

Just create that safe space for people to. Kind of learn at their own will. If, if, if you like. And, and, and if, again, back on the timing piece, if you don't have time to start carefully crafting these comms or you don't have a service adoption team who can help you here, I mean, not a top tip here. If you've got yourself a Copilot license, just give it, give, give it a prompt, um, give it some information.

Uh, ask, ask, ask Copilot to kind of give you a. A, uh, a social media style, uh, post, uh, about a feature and, and you'll be pretty surprised with what it comes back with. 

Tom Arbuthnot: Oh, that's a really good tip. 'cause you can also, you can do it as simply as that. You can get more advanced with that. You can give it a, a history of previous comms and how you like to communicate.

You can say like, we, you know, we want less, less emotive language or more emotive language that you can really tune it up to give you a first pass of like, pretty consistent copy for your organization. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Oh, I love that idea. That's great. So let, let's, let's talk about the, um, like the ops-y troubleshooting side of it, because I know you talked to Microsoft quite a bit about this.

You're fortunate to have some, some conversations going on there. Things like, uh, client version management, client logs, troubleshooting, like how's that evolved over time and what have you seen there? 

Callum Moore: Teams is a bit of a beast, and especially now it's so reliant on real time web content. So you've got this introduction of WebView too, ever since Teams was redesigned.

Mm. And it, it's definitely central to how people work. So, so when it breaks people, people notice, um, and not every issue gets reported. So sometimes, yeah. And that web 

Tom Arbuthnot: view thing is really interesting, isn't it? Because. Some, sometimes in it, we think about clients and client versions and we're like, um, you know, in, in the Skype for Business stage, you upgraded the client.

The client was an EXE, all the code was local and something changed. Whereas with the web type format, features can. Roll out, come back, be stage like, like they can go to, to, the thing I spend a lot of time talking to enterprises is features might not roll out to all your users at the same time because Microsoft rollout this massive scale.

So it's a, it's quite agile compared to the old days of client server models. 

Callum Moore: Oh, it definitely is. And dare I say it, it's, it's, it, it's, it's a huge improvement. Um, but again, when, when, when people have these glitches or, or blitz, um, generally they live with them. And the question I find myself asking is, uh, as, as someone who's responsible for, for Teams as a product, mm-hmm.

Do you, do I really care about those unreported moments? Do I care about those glitches or blips? And what if they're happening more often than you think? So in my eyes, the, these things create an opinion and a stereotype about a product. So end user could be, I dunno, they could be chatting to their work colleague and, and Teams comes up as a conversation point and, and, and, and the respond to a question around performance.

And yeah, Teams is good, but sometimes it fouls me whilst I'm on a call. That's a bad experience. Yeah, because you've, you've remember that that's, that's been planted in your, in your mind, in your brain. 

Tom Arbuthnot: And that's the challenge with all stuff as well, isn't it? Like it can work. Nine times out of 10. And the one time is what sticks in your head?

Like when things just work, you don't think about them. The friction's not there. You're only conscious of these things when you hit friction. 

Callum Moore: Yeah. If, if only the, if anything's just worked. Just, um, so, uh, yeah. Really the, the challenge until now has been visibility of those blips, those glitches. Mm-hmm. And, and, and, and, and again, that's where visibility matters now.

So. One tool that's been recent, very recently introduced actually is, uh, the new client health dashboards in the Teams Admin Center. So it's, it's one single dashboard with many components and it basically helps you track version compliance. You can track, uh, client crashes and launch failures too. And all of those things are common in what I would describe as.

Well, if they go wrong, a, a poor user experience. Uh, so the, the beauty of those insights is that, and I've not managed to find a really good way of being able to kind of get all of that information in one single nice, digestible view. 

Tom Arbuthnot: Yeah. And 

Callum Moore: I've not actually found a really nice way without. Asking my operations team to spend hours and hours and hours of, of, of kind of their time to actually figure out, well, what, why are these crashes happening?

Well, we don't have access to Microsoft's secret framework of, of, of correlation IDs. 

Tom Arbuthnot: Yeah. If that exists. Yeah. There isn't, there isn't much. Yeah. There isn't much logging client side that you can do much about. So I've seen people use. Third party agents on their desktops, you know, a Nexthink type scenario or whatever it may be, to grab events and activity, which is one thing, but then correlating them and understanding the versions of things and, and obviously what Microsoft had, to your point earlier, they know what the backend is running at the time as well as the front end.

Whereas you've only got, as an enterprise, you've only got visibility of the the EXE container, not necessarily all the web services that were running at that time. 

Callum Moore: Yeah. Yeah. And, and I mean, another example, I mentioned drivers, but, uh, like, uh, update, update failures as well. Uh, you, you can, you can dive into those.

You can figure out whether it's your network or whether it's potentially something external to your network that's causing the problem. So again, that level of insight would, would take you quite, quite a lot of resource time, quite a lot of knowledge as well. Yeah. Sometimes again, as if, if you're not necessarily a, an organization with lots and lots of SMEs, you, you just need that digestible view to be able to assist you.

Tom Arbuthnot: That's good to hear. That's getting you and it's nice to hear Microsoft investing time in making the Admin experience great. And it, it is for good for Microsoft too because I, I know from talking to them internally, like so many tickets and issues boil down to you're running an out of date client and like it's a, a proxy or a firewall blocking it.

So if they can help admins help the users, they don't get the support tickets. Um, 'cause we can see, oh, a particular office is having is your, a particular laptop is stuck on an old version of something and Microsoft's are getting. With this tooling, they're getting stricter on that. They've now said it's a six month window and they're gonna start flagging users saying, you're out of date.

You need to update to continue with your service thing. And so they are getting more aggressive on you need to make sure you're running current versions. 

Callum Moore: Yeah, that, that leads quite nicely onto probably another top tip of mine, if you like. Um, and, and, and that's, this Teams bootstrapper, right? So Teams bootstrapper, it's this method of deploying Teams.

Now, why is Callum talking about this, right? We, we've already deployed Teams. What? Why? Well, if, if you're not already using the Bootstrap, you might wanna kind of consider how you deploy Teams. Um, there's lots and lots of guidance online on, on what it is and, and how to use it, so I won't dive into that.

But what's important to highlight is it, it ensures that you've always got the latest Teams client installed. Okay? So it means that there's no outdated in stores. There's no surprise update when. You suddenly push out or rebuild a device and it's got like an old version and it has to update. Mm-hmm.

Generally, it's just a smoother experience for your end users and not only your end users. It Right, there's, there's reducing that overhead there, so. Um, it, it is worth noting though, that if users fall behind on updates again, they'll start to see these warning banners. So you have the bootstrapper check it out if, uh, if, if you've not already done so.

Tom Arbuthnot: That's a really good tip. Yeah. Yeah. Because if you end up on an old, old version now with your users for the first time, it's not just they're gonna have. Wobbles and experience, eventually they're gonna ignore the banner, ring up the help desk and say, oh yeah, it's been telling me three months I need to update, but now I'm actually forced to update.

Callum Moore: Yeah, and I think it helps as well linking it back to that kind of Teams client health dashboard. If, if you've just got that sense of, or a bit more of a guarantee that you've pushed out this bootstrap and it's meant to keep things up to date, that what you are seeing when you actually go into the new client health dashboard, versioning isn't going to be something hopefully basic.

Yeah. Um, they are in there.

Yes, the network, someone had a network problem and, and, and Teams been given an opportunity to, to update since. 

Tom Arbuthnot: And there's, there's two things coming that are really exciting. So, um, I'd like the sign silent test call and the grabbing the logs. Let's talk about grabbing the logs first. 'cause that's another real pain point for admins and for everybody's context.

Right now, today, if a user has an issue and you need client side logs, you basically need to either be able to remote onto that machine or. Right. PowerShell onto that machine, press some buttons, have someone local press the buttons. They might not be in time zone, they might be busy and they don't have time.

Um, is that something you're as excited about as I am? 

Callum Moore: Yeah. It's a huge step in the right direction and it goes back to just it foundational it where. People expect, people have spent time logging tickets and they expect once the ticket's logged for things to be investigated. And then the next interaction will be resolution.

And as you know in the word of Microsoft 365, that. Isn't always the case. These things have to be logged with Microsoft sometimes more often than, than, than, than you actually think. 

Tom Arbuthnot: Yeah, like, like, like being, being able to grab the logs without having to disrupt the user's day. Like they've already gone to the effort of raising a ticket on you.

The last thing they want is to come back and spend another 20 minutes being disrupted basically. 

Callum Moore: Exactly. Exactly. Um, so yeah, a good step in the right direction. And it'd be quite interesting to see how Microsoft evolve in that space as well. Like, will they, will they come up with a remote action for you to be able to clear the Teams cache, for example?

Um, who, who, who knows? Yeah. 

Tom Arbuthnot: Um, 

Callum Moore: yeah, because that's, I know a lot. That's for, 

Tom Arbuthnot: for those. Listen, that's a common troubleshooting step is like just actually flush the cache. Start again. Yeah. Um, could, could you do that remotely? Would be really interesting. 

Callum Moore: Yeah. And, and how do you do that in the least? I impact impactful way.

'cause like the cache, for example, has all kinds of files in bed down to kind of like personalization language, so on and so forth. 

Tom Arbuthnot: Yeah. Nice. What about, um, you mentioned network issues and like, I feel like in the Skype days, that was the number one conversation around this kind of stuff and it's definitely died down now.

The codex have got so much better. The, the connectivity has got more resilient and tried trying more things. Um, do you see a place for that silent test call media tests in, in, in Teams environments? 

Callum Moore: Yeah. So I checked out your, your, uh, LinkedIn feed, uh, a couple of days ago actually. Right. And, and, and, and stumbled across that one.

And, uh, yeah, it's almost kind of similar to that. Well, it's more of an Admin feature, like a, a make a test call, isn't it? Yeah. Uh, and, and, yeah, exactly. 

Tom Arbuthnot: It's not, it's not for the user. It's to silently have these Teams, clients run media streams and give you visibility. And if, if the user needs a client.

It'll drop that process and be absolutely normal so the user doesn't see it. But what it means is rather than deploying some third party network testing infrastructure, and guess what, you probably deploy it in the wrong place. Or you have to deploy an agent on the desktop and run a third party thing.

Um, we can now have the Teams client in a certain zone test between each other and, and hopefully catch some network issues before they hit. Calls or meetings. 

Callum Moore: I think one final concluding thing is feedback. Um, not to you, to Microsoft. It's vendor relationships are two way, and, and again, we've always said that Microsoft are evolving and, and they will continue to do so and, and interactions with the product group.

Recent and past have highlighted that, that they do want to hear from us. They really, really do. So whether it's through in-product feedback, support, tickets, or if you've got a good relationship with your account team, if something isn't working for your organization, um, shout up. 

Tom Arbuthnot: I love that advice. Like, and we, like we're, we see that in the community.

So Microsoft are very engaged with the events. We do the online stuff, and that's what I hear consistently is they've got a big job on their hands, but they want to hear it. The, the other thing I'd add to that, Callum is talking to your. Peers, like we spend a lot of time in doing customer round tables and news groups.

It's like actually spend some time with your peers and you've been through a few orgs now, so I know you do some of this like, like you are not the only one dealing with these kind of scales or these kind of problems. So share best practice and also then be able to engage back with Microsoft and say, look, I know this isn't just us asking because actually there's three other similar orgs, either similar by scale, by vertical, by use case that are, we're all saying a similar thing.

Uh, where, where is this on your radar? I think that's such a good tip, 

Callum Moore: canum. Great. Great. Well, yeah, no, thanks. Thanks very much for having me, Tom. No, I appreciate you coming on forward, been it's great perspective and, uh, been an absolutely pleasure. 

Tom Arbuthnot: Yeah, no, I really appreciate it. And uh, yeah, thanks for sharing, uh, sharing some really useful insights on that kind of scale and, uh.

We'll see what the new, new Admin tools roll out over the, uh, the, the coming months and quarters, and maybe we'll loop around again. 

Callum Moore: Yeah, for sure. Thanks. 

Tom Arbuthnot: Perfect.