IAEA hosts inter-Agency summit on collaboration transformation challenges
The UN Collaboration Summit gathered UN Agencies on 30 November, hosted by IAEA in Vienna, Austria. The summit showcased best practices, applications and use of communications and collaboration tools by various UN organizations: Microsoft O365 and related services, Azure and SharePoint. It gathered architects, developers, business analysts and other professionals in the UN system that work with Microsoft SharePoint, Office 365 and related technologies. Organizations including DPKO, UNICC, IEAE, IMD, ITU, OCHA, OPCW, Microsoft, UNDP, UNOG and UN ICTD discussed a wide range of projects across United Nations agencies that make use of collaboration technologies, especially SharePoint and Office 365.
UNICC’s Akhilesh Nirapure, Cloud Architect in the Strategic Consulting unit, Clients-Projects, gave a talk on What’s New in SharePoint (SharePoint Online, SharePoint 2019 and transformation challenges). The last UN Collaboration Summits that UNICC participated in were at UNESCO in Paris in 2016 and at Microsoft in New York in 2014.
Akhilesh presented ‘What’s New Modern in SharePoint Online & SharePoint 2019 – Transformation Challenges.’ The idea was to present challenges an organization will face when migrating from on-premise SharePoint environments to SharePoint Online, and how they can benefit if they migrate/upgrade to SharePoint 2019 version. He concluded his talk with a short demo showcasing a simple use case of ‘Feedback Moderation’ by leveraging Office 365 services such Microsoft Forms, Microsoft Flow (workflow engine) and Azure – Cognitive Services (sentiment analysis and content tagging ) using an on-premise “Datagateway” with SharePoint 2019 On-premise.
IAEA hosted an expert panel session moderated by Microsoft and supported by UNICC, with the goal to support questions and interest from various attendees. This 1.5 hour session, including UNICC’s Akhilesh Nirapure, was remotely supported by Gianluca Nuzzo (CPD, Brindisi), Subhash Vinjamuri (CPS, New York), and ‘Raju’ Rajagopalan Kasthurirangan (CPD, New York). UNICC managed to find opportunities to respond to attendees’ questions representing UNICC approaches and services.
Among many others, Mehret Abebe from OCHA presented on the journey from SharePoint 2016 to Office 365, which UNICC staff worked very closely on (Akhilesh, Anthony and Marcos, CPD team) on day to day basis with Suzanne Connolly (Chief, Information Management Officer, OCHA). UNICC helped them understand modern capabilities and built a modern Intranet in SharePoint Online. OCHA acknowledged UNICC and recognized how UNICC worked well together in achieving their intended goals.
