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Hello, everybody, and welcome to this webinar around Microsoft Teams and NHSmail. My name is Clive Star, and I'm the lead technical architect covering both NHSmail and HSCN.

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After we made the announcement on the Microsoft Teams enablement on NHSmail, we had feedback from a number of organisations primarily concerned around network overheads and how this is going to affect the network traffic

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within their organisation. So I've put together a couple of slides where we're just going to go through that in a little bit more detail. You'll see we're going to cover what's been actually enabled, the kind of use cases that Teams is designed to support,

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Network Considerations, Device Considerations, and where to find out more about the service. So in terms of what's been enabled, we've enabled Microsoft Teams,

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OneDrive, SharePoint and the Office apps online. So Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Delve as well. And to get into the service, you log into portal.office365.com

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with your NHSmail credentials. Please note this does not include the desktop versions of Office. So if you need to use the desktop versions of Office, that remains a local licence for you to use.

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So a little bit about Teams. So what is Teams? So Teams is designed as a collaboration tool from Microsoft with Office 365. It supports chats, so you're able to chat with colleagues

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not only within your organisation, but across other organisations in real time. At a touch of a button, you can instantly go, from group chat to video conferencing.

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And you can seamlessly use Teams to hold meetings with other NHSmail colleagues, regardless of the organisation they're in. You can access, share, edit documents in real time.

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So multiple users can access one Word document and make changes at the same time and catch up on all your unread messages and using some of the app mention features within.

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In terms of video conferencing, we've looked at these main use cases with our clinical safety team and also with Microsoft.

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So remote working, we feel this is probably going to be one of the most widely used services within Teams, where people can work across different organisations and different locations seamlessly.

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Virtual consultations, Microsoft are looking at releasing some virtual consultation templates for Teams, and this is expected to be available within a couple of weeks. We're then going to do some more work with our clinical safety team to make sure we've got this right supported

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and we've got the right use cases for you within that area. The dry clean ward support area. This is particularly where you've got isolation between people and need to carry on communication.

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And finally, the patient visitor support use case, where patients are in isolation and their relatives need to talk with them.

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So in terms of network bandwidth and network capabilities, first of all, I want to talk about what we've done within the central service and the central capability. So overall, you're seeing here a high level diagram.

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Of the former transition network, HSCN, and how we get onto the internet. You'll see on the left hand side of the diagram, we've got the transition network provided by BT.

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And we work with BT to make sure there's sufficient capacity to make sure the service can carry on working with additional load.

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Then on the HSCN service within HSCN, HSCN is a disaggregated network with a multiple range of network service providers. So over 20 different consumer network services.

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And HSCN then is joined together by something called the peering exchange. And this joins all of the different CNSPs together. And then you've got your internet service.

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So on HSCN, you can buy your HSCN connectivity and your internet connectivity from the same provider.

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And then that will break out to the internet through the advanced network monitoring service and the secure boundary service. Whereas the former transition network has its own internet gateway. In terms of the HSCN service.

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In terms of capacity of the service, all of these central components are operating at around about 25% of their full capacity.

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So there is sufficient headroom in there to allow a significant increase in network traffic across these devices.

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We've also worked with our providers to look at what we would need to do should we need spin up additional network capacity or capability.

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In terms of how teams work, teams flows its traffic typically on a peer to peer basis. So if there's only one to one conversations going on, the traffic would go between one network point and another.

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So if, for example, in your hospital, you've got two people having a video conference, it will just go between the two points within the local network and not actually leave the network.

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It's only when you do what we call multipoint conversations where you've got more than two people talking on teams, be it an audio conference or a video conference. And you can see here on this diagram.

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I've showed the different networks. So we've got a network traffic flow.

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So if, for example, we have a someone on the transition network and wants to go and have a multipoint video conference with someone, their traffic will go through the transition network through the transition networks internet gateway and into Office 365.

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Equally, if someone was on a HSCN provided service, they would go through their consumer network service provider through their internet provision, and then into Office 365.

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Where in the world. So if an organization has its own internet connectivity that will go through your own internet breakout and into Office 365, as shown on this diagram.

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In terms of network planning. In addition to usual web traffic, you need to make sure that you've got the following ports and IP addresses open to support the video conferencing in teams.

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There's also a range of network optimization tasks that you can undertake. So, for example, ensuring all computers. Running the team's desktop cloud.

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And then the client can resolve external DNS queries to route traffic appropriately.

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One thing that you're likely to see a need to do is to increase your not your network address translation and your port address translation pools to make sure they've got enough addresses in there to stop port exhaustion, as you're going to suddenly find lots more people going out to use this service.

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And if you're using an intrusion detection service. You should whitelist the office 365 URLs. So that they don't hinder the traffic passing through there.

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And another area you can make performance increases is to configure split tunnel VPNs. And this is to route Office 365 directly.

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Because the traffic is encrypted and your gateway components aren't going to be able to do anything with that traffic.

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I said the slides will be shared at the end of this webinar, and you'll see in there some URLs which go into this in far much more detail than I've got time to do on this webinar today. In terms of data.

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So in terms of your Internet connectivity. Typically an organization is going to have their Internet provided either by HSCN or your own Internet connection.

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If you've got your Internet provided by Hscn that runs over the same physical bearer as your HSCN traffic.

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And we designed HSCN to take this into account as we expected over time traffic on HSCN to decrease and traffic on the Internet to increase.

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So you're able to get in touch with your consumer network service provider and get them ready to perhaps increase the amount of Internet traffic you're going to have over this coming period and decrease the bandwidth allocated for HSCN traffic.

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If you've got your own Internet connection, you should look at talking to your Isp around what capacity you have there. What monitoring is in place and what options you've got for potentially increasing that traffic.

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And both on Hscn on the Internet. Within your local area network, you've got options of doing traffic prioritization and traffic routing to make sure the traffic is going as efficiently as possible.

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An area of concern that we've had from a number of organizations since we made the announcement on teams is around bandwidth and concerns around the amount of video traffic that's going to start going over the network.

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So Microsoft design teams from the outset to give the best audio and video experience as possible. Regardless of your network condition.

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But teams has been designed by default to be conservative on bandwidth. Yes, it will try and use all the bandwidth available.

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But when it starts experiencing congestion and it starts seeing decreased performance, it will start prioritizing the audio traffic over the video traffic.

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So it will start dropping the video framework rate down and the video resolution down as you start getting into a bandwidth constrained network where it isn't limited to just the video. And there is unlimited bandwidth.

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Then teams will obviously try and go for the highest video resolution and the highest frame rate per second. But as I said earlier, the service will start decreasing that when it starts seeing congested network.

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One of the other things that we've been asked for many organizations is what is the bandwidth requirements for teams?

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So I've put up a table there showing you what the typical bandwidth requirement is for audio calls and for the different levels of video calls.

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But it's not as simple as just calculating that out, because there's a whole range of other factors you need to take into consideration.

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So you may, for example, have something full screen or minimized, and teams will also adaptively adjust itself to deliver the best experience over the available bandwidth you've got there.

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Equally, when you're trying to plan this out, it's very difficult to know how many people at what time are going to set up a video conference or schedule a video conference. And again, I've included this.

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I've included a link there where there's much more information on the detail you can look at for this.

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In terms of what support is available, we've published a whole range of articles in the NHSmail support pages.

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So that URL there, https://support.nhs.net, you'll see when you first go on to that page, there's an introduction to teams.

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We've put a landing page there, and we've also put a video just walking users through what teams is about, what teams looks like, the different kind of interviews. We've also put a link to the different interfaces that are available to you.

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We've also included some advice for local administrators. So information I've talked about earlier about network configuration and best practice there.

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We've also included information around the different client types, how to get them, how to install them. So hopefully everyone will find that information really useful.

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We've also got a frequently asked questions section, and we're updating that regularly on a daily basis. The questions keep coming into the feedback mailbox or go into the support area. We start building up and enriching that area.

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We've also broken down the help pages into different categories. So you can see there there's categories about introduction to teams, how to set up meetings.

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So information for users, the frequently asked questions I talked about, and then how the system works for local administrators. So how do local administrators set up teams, add teams, remove teams, add users to it.

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All the guidance you'll find there. So those were the main things that I was going to talk about today. Now, some additional questions we've had into the mailbox.

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So I'm just going to work through some of the questions that different people have fed back to us today. And hopefully you'll find these of use. So we've been asked, when will teams be enabled?

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We started enabling the service to all users at the start of the week. We've now got over 500,000 users enabled. And we hope to complete the license enablement by the end of this weekend.

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How long has Teams been enabled for? So the license that we've been provided with has been enabled for three months.

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There's a lot of wider activity going on to license the platform for an indefinite period and move the service onto Office 365.

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What organizations have been enabled? Has my organization been enabled? We are sequentially enabling organizations. And as I said earlier, expect this to finish by the end of the week.

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What are the prerequisites and the minimum requirements for MS Teams? Teams has been designed to enable it to work within a browser and not all browsers support video. So Chrome, for example, supports video.

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So you need to look within that guidance pages about which browsers support video and which browsers do not. There's a there's a set of desktop clients.

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Desktop clients include those designed to work on Windows, Mac and Linux. And we also know from Microsoft that the service works on VDI.

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There's also mobile clients available and most mobile clients work on Android and iOS. Within our organization, we've already got Microsoft Teams enabled.

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Do we need to do anything differently to use the NHSmail version of Microsoft Teams?

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Now, that's going to be an organization decision of whether you want to use the NHSmail version of Teams or carry on using your own service.

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We've had feedback from some people saying they're getting error messages, but they don't have the Office 365 license enabled. And this is because the license is still being rolled out, as I said earlier. And we hope that's going to complete by the end of the weekend.

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In terms of functionality, we've had a number of questions about how do we administer teams and how do we get portal access for the administrators? In the support pages, we've included a guide to setting up teams.

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In essence, LA's initially through the NHSmail portal, set up the teams and make a number of people owners. And then those owners can from within teams then start adding in additional members.

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So how do I do that? How do I add in those additional members? In the team, you simply click on the three dots and click add member.

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Will this address the problem of silo tenancies where team memberships can only be from one organization's active directory? And will it permit guests? Within the design that we've put together for NHSmail,

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we've worked on carrying on the principle of NHSmail supports cross-organizational working.

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So when you set up a team, it's as easy to invite members from a different organization into your team as it is to people within your organization.

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For those that are on NHSmail, we've also built in a capability to support guest access. And also that service regularly requires you to check that the person still requires access.

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So a kind of attestation process to make sure you don't keep people out. Giving guests access for an unlimited period of time. We've had a number of questions around information governance.

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So in putting this service together, NHS Digital has undertaken a data protection impact assessment for the service. We've ensured that as we've set the service up, that all data is hosted within the UK.

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And any data that's put into the service will be put into the service based on your own local organization's usage of the service. And as you would expect,

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similar to NHSmail, the service has full auditing capabilities in place. So we're able to discover usage that may need further investigation.

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Those are all the questions that we've received in for now, and I'm sure we'll keep receiving more questions in. It's our intention to actually run a live webinar very shortly where people will be able to ask their own live questions.

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For now, I hope everyone has found that of much use and can't wait to do the live webinar for you all.