Lucid, provider of visual collaboration software, announces integration of its virtual whiteboard, Lucidspark, with Microsoft Teams. The Lucidspark integration with Teams will connect distributed teams by bringing collaboration right into their existing workflows.
The new integration feature will allow users to collaborate and interact with a Lucidspark board directly within a Teams meeting. By sharing it to the meeting stage. Providing the full experience of an in-person whiteboarding session without ever leaving Teams. Thereby making it easier for hybrid teams to collaborate, align and move into action.
“One of the key ways we help teams see and build the future is by providing integrations and solutions that work wherever teams work,” says Sable Petersen, senior director of product marketing for Lucid.
“Through our continued collaboration with Microsoft Teams, this new integration experience will enable our users to more effectively and seamlessly collaborate right within their existing workflows, providing seamless collaboration in today’s hybrid environment.”
Sable Petersen
“We’re pleased to continue our relationship with Lucid and improve collaboration to better enable and support today’s hybrid teams,” says Ben Summers, director, Teams Platform Marketing at Microsoft.
“This updated integration experience brings powerful solutions right to where teams already work, allowing distributed team members to innovate and drive the business forward even more efficiently.”
Ben Summers
Team members can contribute in real-time while also taking collaboration to the next level with Lucidspark features like emoji reactions, collaborator colors, notes and timers, voting sessions and automatically organizing and prioritizing ideas into action plans with intelligent data synthesis. These capabilities allow distributed and hybrid teams to stay connected while centralizing conversations and turning those into action through visual brainstorms.
The updated Lucidspark integration builds on existing features, including the ability to share boards quickly and easily within Teams. To bring everyone together and add boards directly to team channels for later reference or asynchronous collaboration.
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Check out other stories making the news in the technology ecosystem in Africa and the Middle East.
More business are moving their operations to the Cloud. Hybrid Cloud Adoption is expected to accelerate this growth at a rapid pace. Thus confirming that the future of cloud computing may well be hybrid.
Business Group Lead for Cloud and Enterprise at Microsoft Middle East Africa Multi Country Cluster covering North, West, East, Southern Africa, Levant & Pakistan, Mr. Wale Olokodana, shares on this subject matter. He addresses some of the benefits and challenges of moving your business operations to the cloud. What businesses need to do, to ensure they get the most from the cloud technology.
Companies across the Middle East/Africa are discovering hybrid solutions can solve many digital transformation challenges.
Moving to the cloud is
not unlike relocating your business to a prime piece of real estate. The
benefits are many, but the transition can be tricky. As governments and
businesses race to take advantage of cloud computing, they are navigating
current and future data regulations, as well as how to make the most of
existing IT infrastructure.
Across the Middle East
and Africa (MEA), businesses are prioritising cloud adoption. Research shows most
organisations in the Middle East are either using cloud computing services or
plan to do so in the next two years. African businesses are following closely, with
cloud adoption becoming near
pervasive.
With its improved security
and cost savings, cloud has become key for businesses looking to compete in the
digital era. But there are sometimes obstacles on the road to digitisation, and
this is where hybrid cloud is playing an invaluable role in helping businesses
digitally transform.
Hybrid cloud enables
businesses to store and process data in their on-premises private clouds and
take advantage of a public cloud provider. Hybrid cloud computing is a “best of
all possible worlds” platform, delivering all the benefits of cloud
computing—flexibility, scalability, and cost efficiencies.
Data
regulations and the cloud
One particularly
important consideration when it comes to cloud adoption is regulatory
compliance, and many of these policies are still being created across MEA.
Countries in the Gulf Cooperation
Council have begun addressing issues around data privacy at a
national level, but as it stands there is no overarching law that deals with
data protection in the region. The African Union
Convention on Cyber Security and Personal Data Protection has also recently made
an appeal for countries to start adopting stricter legal frameworks for data
protection purposes.
In Kenya, for example, The Data Protection Bill, 2019, was recently enacted and will regulate the processing of personal data and information governed by General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) . Those violating this law face a penalty notice of up to five million shillings, or in the case of an undertaking, up to two per centum of an organization’s annual turnover of the preceding financial year, whichever is higher.
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Future-proofing your IT strategy
Hybrid cloud is helping
organisations future-proof their digital strategies, allowing them to explore
the benefits of the cloud for data storage and applications, while using their
existing on-premises servers for information, other applications and data with
data residency implications.
It was for this exact reason
that Oman Data Park (ODP), a leading IT managed services provider,
deployed Microsoft Azure Stack, a hybrid cloud solution. ODP offers hosting,
security and cloud services as well as virtual data centre services, leveraging
its own data centres in Oman. But when it came to delivering on its digital
transformation promises to clients through the provision of Azure services, ODP
needed to navigate the Sultanate’s regulatory requirement to store data
locally.
Utilising
existing technology investments
Hybrid cloud is particularly
important for companies like banks, which have significant existing IT infrastructure
investments. With hybrid cloud computing, banks
can maintain their mainframe systems while simultaneously adopting new cloud
technologies. Banks are using Azure Stack to link their current systems, while
building an intelligent layer of digital services on top. The Microsoft
Azure cloud platform then supports scalable hybrid environments for moving
between on-premises and cloud computing environments seamlessly.
Sterling Bank is aimed at improving the time-to-market and improving
the service quality to its customers. The bank prioritized
cloud services, the cloud-first approach was the rationale behind the selection
of Microsoft Azure – for building, testing, deploying, and managing
applications and services through a global network of Microsoft-managed data
centers. So far, the bank has already deployed several products including Fare
Pay which is addressing transportation; Specta – a community lending solution
which gives out loans in 5 minutes; i-invest which is now a popular product in
the market that allows anybody to buy or trade a treasury bill. Another
consumer propositions that the bank introduced is OnePay – all which were
deployed via Microsoft Cloud.
Is the future
hybrid?
Innovations to cloud
computing are also making it easier to manage hybrid cloud environments.
Microsoft recently launched Azure Arc, enabling businesses
to use Azure cloud tools across different cloud and computing services. As most
organisations have IT infrastructure spread across multiple datacentres, clouds
and edge locations, the ability to run on-premise and multi-cloud environments
from one central space is a game-changer.
Not surprisingly, hybrid cloud adoption is expected to
accelerate at a rapid pace – confirming that the future of cloud computing may
well be hybrid. This is particularly the case in the Middle East which is
already outpacing the average global adoption rate.
When deploying from
the hybrid cloud, businesses have more control over their IT, improving the
latency and reliability of their services. This would make hybrid cloud a
particularly attractive option for businesses operating in the Middle East and
North Africa, which is one of the most under-represented areas in the world
when it comes to per capita Internet
connectivity.
As businesses set out
on their hybrid cloud journeys, it is important they begin with specific
business objectives in mind, considering company needs and priorities. This
will help them determine which workloads should be shifted to the cloud. Achieving
the right balance between public and private cloud usage involves several
different considerations, such as IT budget, regulatory requirements, as well
as the nature of different applications and where they are best deployed.
Partnering with a service provider that can manage and integrate your company’s different IT environments can help ensure your business optimises its hybrid cloud investment and that, ultimately, the move to becoming a digitally empowered business is much smoother.