Ensure communication and collaboration with hybrid work environment best practices

Many things have changed during the past couple of years. Organizations had to adapt new ways to connect their workplace, trying out new methods that ensured collaboration and communication seem to have come to stay. Microsoft Teams became a pillar during the remote and hybrid work era. For 5 years, Teams has allowed schools, institutions, and organizations fully depend on it to keep operations running without a problem. As businesses continue to navigate the evolving landscape, exploring hybrid work environment best practices becomes crucial for sustaining effective collaboration and communication strategies.

Microsoft has seen this as an indicator to strengthen Teams and keep its users trusting it as their main collaboration and communication tool for these upcoming years. Installing Microsoft cloud principles and taking into consideration the many variables people experience worldwide, Teams is now defining itself as a failure-free service, available all the time. 

Microsoft Cloud’s Reliability Principles for Communication and Collaboration

Designing for Resilience

With automatic detection, mitigations, producing shared libraries, and generic implementations, Teams now implements key resiliency patterns (active-active architecture, removal of single points of failures, and investing in observability). These consist of jittered backoff, caching strategies, circuit breakers, fallback patterns, bulkhead isolation and rate limiting.

No single point of failure powered by the investment of active / active redundancy for Domain Name Server (DNS), Content Delivery Network (CDN), network ingress, traffic management, and authentication / authorization resiliency. 

As we know, feedback allows us to become our better selves, therefore, observability is now allowing users to detect issues with performance metrics. Using these, Microsoft is aiming to reduce the fixing times on any type of errors.  

Granular fault Isolation

Microsoft is aiming to ensure Azure’s global coherence when managing any operations and preventing any disaster. If any failure occurs, the goal is to minimize the number of affected people through a set of deployment rings.

Some of the best practices when applying these rings are:

• Slow rollout across rings is required
• Capabilities pass through rings based on quality criteria
• Automated gates leverage to verify functionality, performance, and health
• Chaos/GameDay fault injections may be applied to a ring
• Teams are required to use percentage-based rollouts in the General ring
• Use of A/B testing to verify behavior and impact on core metrics