Sulava keeps its employees connected and its audience engaged with Microsoft Teams Premium

Based in Finland, Sulava provides consulting and training services that help more than 700 business customers worldwide excel at digital transformation. It’s vital for the team to coordinate and communicate seamlessly so that the company can provide excellent service for clients, so Sulava relies on a variety of Microsoft technologies for its collaboration, communication, and productivity needs. 

Sulava invested in Microsoft Teams Premium to take advantage of its advanced capabilities for productivity, security, and engagement. These capabilities streamline workflows and overcome language barriers while still protecting sensitive information, all of which leads to better customer experience. “Teams Premium has been incredibly helpful across the business in different ways,” says Vesa Nopanen, Principal Consultant for Metaverse and Future Work at Sulava. “Whether it’s for our webinars, custom branding, or advanced meeting protection, it’s helped us level up our meetings in so many different scenarios.”

Recaps and information at a glance

The intelligent productivity features in Teams Premium help Sulava overcome the challenges of working together across different time zones. "Since all our clients and employees are located in different parts of both Finland and the world, it’s very essential that we can work in a flexible way, " explains Chief Future Scientist Karoliina Partanen. “We need to be able to collaborate from different locations and at different times.”

AI-generated tasks in intelligent recap keeps track of to-do items for individual participants in Sulava meetings. Used with Copilot for Microsoft 365, it enables tracking of tasks by department. Sales team members, for example, will be given a breakdown of their upcoming tasks as well as notes related to when the department was mentioned to both summarize and allow for closer scrutiny of those moments. “Copilot is especially helpful when asking for more details about a specific part of the meeting,” says Nopanen. “Like asking to explain a topic in simpler terms, or even asking what a question was that someone just asked if I accidentally missed it.” Leveraging this additional insight helps keep everyone on-task and avoids missing important details.

Intelligent recap also benefits the reality of a dynamic work environment. No matter how dedicated a scheduling team may be, there are going to be meeting overlaps. Sometimes people can only catch half of the meeting or have to leave early. Personalized timeline markers in intelligent recap help participants quickly see when they were mentioned, while topic, chapter, and speaker annotations make it easy to identify the most relevant parts of the meeting, ensuring that employee focus remains on the tasks they need to accomplish, rather than superfluous details.

“Everyone has times when they miss an important meeting,” says Partanen “But the recaps mean that we can get up to speed with every customer without missing things.”

Improving collaboration, now and into the future

While the ability to collaborate asynchronously is already being embraced at Sulava, Microsoft Mesh has introduced new options for real-time collaboration. 

“If you think about meetings today,” says Nopanen, “we’re all isolated in 2D space. One person is speaking and everyone else is listening. With Mesh, we have access to a shared virtual space wherein everyone can speak at the same time, have separate conversations if necessary.” The presence of multiple people in a shared immersive space makes even the virtual collaboration feel more like a real meeting, allowing easy pairing off and regrouping as necessary for work.  “Our experience in Mesh gives more presence and feeling of togetherness. Even working remotely, it is kind of like we are sharing the same space.”

In the Mesh immersive environment, participants share body language and gestures which may not be as easy to read in on-camera meetings and it opens the space to create new tools and workspaces that may not even be possible in physical reality. And because it ties into all of the security features available via the Microsoft stack, it allows for seamless collaboration while protecting sensitive information.

Protecting sensitive meeting data without extra effort

Sulava also uses advanced protection capabilities in Teams Premium like end-to-end meeting encryption and watermarking to protect sensitive information and meet the security needs of customers in regulated industries. “Advanced meeting protection in Teams Premium has been a game-changer for highly sensitive meetings both with customers and internally,” says Nopanen. “We can have more open conversations that include personal data, product development, or confidential financial data that we couldn’t have online in the past.”

For employees, applying these advanced capabilities is easy because they only need to select the correct IT-created template for the type of meeting they’re scheduling. The templates control watermarking, encryption, and capabilities such as who can record and present, who can bypass the lobby, and whether the meeting chat can be copied. “We found it easy to set up the templates we need to cover our meeting scenarios,” says Nopanen. “Our employees can quickly use the templates to get the protection they need without digging into all of the individual settings.”

Bringing the brand into every conversation

A visible and immediate impact from Teams Premium was the ability to add Sulava branding to the meeting experience. Customers immediately noticed and commented on the Sulava logo, which is now part of all meetings and webinars that the company hosts. 

Featuring its brand during these presentations is especially important for helping Sulava build its reputation and stay top of mind with customers. “No matter whether we’re talking with customers or partners, or even recruiting new employees, every meeting and conversation includes our brand and what we stand for,” says Nopanen. “Including the logo by default is really easy, so people in our organization can automatically include it in their meetings.”

The company is also using custom immersive spaces in Mesh to showcase their brand. “We have our custom rooftop/penthouse space we use to meet in 3D in Microsoft Mesh,” says Naponen. “We can use our Sulava spaces as a branded experience and customize it with interactive features that keep attendees engaged and active.”

Improving webinar quality, engagement, and effectiveness

As part of its customer engagement strategy, Sulava delivers frequent webinars on cloud technology to its customers and to the public. “Webinars have always been a big part of Sulava’s brand,” explains Partanen. “That’s how we are known as thought leaders.”

To help drive attendance, Teams Premium provides capabilities such as custom automated reminder emails and registration waitlists and controls. It also allows for hiding attendee names and managing what is brought onscreen to prioritize privacy, minimize distractions, and encourage more active participation.

Sulava uses Real-Time Messaging Protocol (RTMP) to add media to the company’s webinars and presentations dynamically. “With RTMP streaming capabilities, we have a very versatile, powerful meeting stage—we love it,” says Nopanen. “And our customers that have a production studio can use it to create amazing experiences.” Punching in videos as needed keeps webinars dynamic and allows for organic sharing of ideas, a useful feature for a company working hard to be a thought leader.

Live translations are also useful in expanding the reach of the company’s meetings and webinars. “When we’re doing a webinar in Finnish, I still like to advertise it to other countries and let people know that they can join in and use live captions and translations,” says Nopanen. “It’s eye-opening for people to see how good Teams Premium is at understanding Finnish and how powerful the translation capabilities are in general.”

"Most of our meetings are with customers,” explains Nopanen,. “We need the best technology available to make a great impression, whether we’re delivering training, demonstrating our work, or selling new services.”

Sulava is working to advance its existing philosophy of collaboration and cooperation by making use of all these products and features. By incorporating its successful use of features for webinars into the ways it uses platforms like Mesh, the company has a vision of smooth cooperation and development into the future. “Here at Sulava we are seeing wonderful things happening all the time in technology,” says Nopanen. “These apps are giving us the tools we need to do new kinds of work that may not even exist today.”