By Tara Clary, Director of Marketing
A Customer Immersion Experience (CIE) is a chance for a team of folks to experience new Microsoft technology and understand how it can better serve their business and enable productivity. A dozen laptops and surface books are unloaded and programmed with specific “personalities” (Accounting Manager, CEO, Marketing Director, etc) and you get all the tools and access that role would typically have. From there, you are guided through the various platforms and encouraged to explore, ask questions, and collaborate.
As our company’s Marketing Director, I was excited to attend a CIE recently hosted for High Touch employees, so I could enjoy the same experience afforded our clients and gain first-hand CIE experience.
Hosted by High Touch’s Microsoft Guru and CIE facilitator, Ross Jordan, we got to deep-dive into the newest Microsoft tools to experience them, hands-on. Ross travels the country providing this unique experience to clients, (he’s part of an elite group of Microsoft trained facilitators certified to provide this specific experience).
What was really fun was watching my colleagues learn new efficiencies, and organically find great tricks and ways to enhance our teams’ collaboration.
Here are a few of my personal highlights:
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Co-Authoring
How many times have you had a document that gets passed around to multiple people in your organization for their “thoughts and edits?” With all the writing my team does, this happens a lot as we collaborate and craft content. Upon occasion, I’m sitting on so many edits I’m not sure where to start. With Co-Authoring, every person on the team can work in the same document at the same time, and you can see the edits each person makes in real time (plus, edits and suggestions are color coded for easy reference). This is available in all my most-used applications like Word, Excel and PowerPoint.
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Teams
If you like Slack or any other real-time messaging tool, you will love what Microsoft is bringing to the table with Teams and Yammer. It’s like a messaging app where you can chat, send attachments, and access your email, all in one place. You can also build unique groups for various conversations (I can put my Marketing team all on one, but build another one for special projects and initiatives). Your IT team will also love it because it’s secure and keeps all corporate data protected.
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Power BI
Power BI (Business Intelligence) got me pretty giddy, because I like data. With some traditional BI tools, you really just get historical analysis. Microsoft’s Power BI is real time, and easy to use with your in-house data from sources like Excel. However, it also connects to other cloud services like Salesforce – or it can connect to on-premise data. There is no limit to the data you can pull together or how you view that data. The dashboards and data insights you can create with this tool are amazing. I probably could have spent an hour just playing, it’s that cool. And even better, it’s very intuitive and user-friendly.
Those are just my highlights – and they barely scratch the surface of what the “new Microsoft” is capable of. If you want to learn more, please fill out the contact form on this page.