Product News

Major improvements have landed in the February/March 2024 Pine release of OfficeExpert TrueDEM!

Teams 2.1 support

The release of Microsoft’s new Teams client brought with it many improvements but also many challenges. With our newly released TrueDEM agent (v1.20) and TrueDEM agent Manager (v6) we now fully support the public versions of Microsoft Teams 2.1. We used the major overhaul this required to improve on many aspects of the TrueDEM agent and agent Manager. Technically, as well as regarding the data collected and security measures made to enable this.

‘Insider Ring’ Release

The changes made to the TrueDEM Agent and Agent Manager further include optimizing its workings, enhancing operations, and bolstering security. This also means we now offer organizations ‘insider ring’ release options for releasing preview versions of the TrueDEM agent, as well as many other improvements for smooth deployment of the OfficeExpert TrueDEM agent within your organization.

Focus Your Search: Improved User Discovery

But that is not all. With this release we also looked closely at how we could improve on many other capabilities as well as the usability of our product. For instance, on the User Search page where we introduced the “Recently Visited” option in the User Search page! This feature remembers the users you recently interacted with, allowing you to quickly navigate to often used pages and building your own short list of users for review. Further improvements include having the search return only relevant results (filtering out test/system accounts that do not have the TrueDEM agent installed) or filtering down to users belonging to your organization’s Focus group of users.

Top Benefits:

• Microsoft Teams v2.1 Support: Seamlessly collect and analyze data from the latest Teams client.
• Additional security measures to bolster security.
• Enhancements aimed at reducing the number of requests sent to the cloud.
• Streamlined deployment with role support for insider ring releases.
• Improved User Search: User prioritization based on active TrueDEM agents.
• Recent search history for quick access to frequently viewed users.
• Streamlined Navigation: Intuitive links guide you to relevant information.
• Context-sensitive help for quicker troubleshooting.

Further details and a deeper dive into these and other features are available in the Pine Release Notes.

Improved insights & focus

This release is all focused on getting more insights into what is going on. Focusing in on what really should get your attention instead of having you do all the work. For this we made several improvements:

At the user level:

• Event Timeline : We added an event timeline to the User Details page highlighting when important problems and events take place. Like software updates, network changes and audio/video problems during calls. Allowing you to see at a glance when things are coinciding and making it possible to do your further research more focused.
• Connectivity Journey visualized : Also on the User Details page, we added a graphical representation of how users connect to the Microsoft Teams cloud. Showing you where the bottlenecks are.

At the organization level:

• Live Teams Call Overview : With this newly added report you now have single overview of all the calls currently going on in your organization. Showing you details about the networks they are connecting over, problems that are occuring and even giving you the ability to look at the details for a call and user as it is going on.

For Teams calls:

• New, more detailed, call list : The new call list on the User Experience page replaces the old call list and combines new features like showing if the participant was having problems or if the problem was being caused by one of the other participants audio/video or screen sharing. All while including details that were previously only shown on the call list in the User Details. Making it a very strong starting point for any call problem debugging you might need to do!
• Seeing when a user is in a call : The new Call List on the User Experience Call List tab also indicates when the user is in a call. Allowing you to click through from there immediately into that call and user’s streaming data
• Enhanced Real Time Call Data – Details page : This page has been enhanced as well with the aim of helping you find the areas and times within the call to focus on. This is done by highlighting right at the top what is going on. From showing you the problem distribution, to highlighting on the timeline when consecutive audio/video or screen sharing problems are occuring. and all that in relation to other important changes that might have taken place. Like the user moving from one WIFI network to another or changes in the codec used to broadcast audio /video.

OfficeExpert TrueDEM Manager – Insider channel

Another major change was made with the rollout of the new version 6 of the OfficeExpert TrueDEM Manager. Allowing organizations to use roles to specify which of their users should get preview updates (insider channel) of the TrueDEM agent and which should only get the GA (General Availability) versions.

Check out the link below for more information!

Ready to use insights on the status of your M365 Apps

In addition to showing you insights into the performance of key API’s of the Microsoft 365 platform, OfficeExpert TrueDEM now also shows you the impacted apps, platforms, and functionalities. This helps both local admins and helpdesk quickly understand the impact on your users!

Different plans for different needs!

We heard you! Many organizations have expressed interest in a user experience monitoring solution for Microsoft 365, specifically excluding Microsoft Teams. To address these specific needs and preferences, we have decided to offer TrueDEM in two separate ways: OfficeExpert TrueDEM M365 and OfficeExpert Advanced for Teams. This allows you to choose the solution and level of insight that best fits your needs and desires.

• OfficeExpert TrueDEM M365
  TrueDEM M365 gives you direct insights into your user’s experience on service, application, platform and functionality level. It gives you the ability to see at a glance, whether for instance Outlook is impacted, what it is impacting (e.g., is mail, calendaring or presence operating less than desirable), and on which platforms (web, desktop app or mobile). Now you can see immediately what is and isn’t working, and give your users the information they need to divert and keep working.
  With TrueDEM M365, you know exactly what is going on with M365 and where problems are, both bottom up (from each user’s perspective) and top down (organization, ISP and network-wide), so that you know where to focus your troubleshooting.

• OfficeExpert Advanced for Teams
  On top of all the benefits of TrueDEM M365, OfficeExpert TrueDEM Advanced for Teams gives you all the necessary benefits to quickly and effectively troubleshoot Microsoft Teams calls, down to your user’s devices, local networks and more, including all call participants. It offers a multitude of additional reports and gives all the information you need for both troubleshooting at first sight, as well as comprehensive deep diving.
  OfficeExpert TrueDEM Advanced for Teams offers you a single glass of pane view into everything that matters for identifying and troubleshooting degraded Microsoft Teams calls and user experiences, including real time and post analysis.

For more information about our license plans visit our Plans & Features page

Enhanced call metrics

In this release we further enhanced the Microsoft Teams call metrics for you: On top of showing you the top memory/RAM- and CPU consuming processes for all your user’s calls, we now clearly indicate when potentially significant changes take place, making it easy for you to detect what was going on around the time when dips or enhancements in performance take (and took) place. This new feature goes beyond just memory and CPU monitoring. Changes can range from application updates and applied codecs, through switching of WLAN/Wi-Fi networks and BSSIDs, to the highlighting of degraded calls. All elements that can influence your users’ experience!

Next we invested a lot of time into providing you new and enhanced reports on a variety of topics like:

• Streamlined Microsoft Status report: Knowing what’s going on with the various apps and services of M365 is crucial but can be a bit confusing with Microsoft representing them as one table with all issues and informational alerts going on at the same time.
  TrueDEM brings together the advisories and incidents that matter to your organization, grouped by impacted services, and offers you an easy click through of what’s really relevant to you!
• New Reports for Outages: OfficeExpert TrueDEM now includes a ready to use post incident report to give you post analysis insights for impacted users, including impacted time per incident and user.
• Teams Version distribution: We’ve also added a report to show you all monitored devices together with the information about operating systems and Microsoft Teams versions. This report allows you to perform your own filtering and pivoting to be even more flexible in how you want to slice & dice your data.
• MTR report: Customers with OfficeExpert TrueDEM Advanced for Teams Rooms licenses can now significantly enhance the non-permanent Microsoft metrics with post analysis call metrics for all calls made on the monitored MTR devices.

Check out additional improvements in the full release notes and intermediate update notes for more information and updates!

We’re thrilled to let you know that we’ve been working hard to make TrueDEM even better! Our latest release aims to provide you with an even smoother experience and more comprehensive telemetry coverage, so you can get the most out of your Microsoft 365 environment. With this update, you’ll be able to gain even deeper insights into your system’s health and call performance. Here are just a few of the improvements we’ve made:

• The TrueDEM portal and navigation has undergone significant improvements. The homepage when opening TrueDEM has now been set to the portal and includes menus to access underlying reports and dashboards directly from the portal itself. Removing the need to use the browse folder options. The portal’s navigation has also been improved with breadcrumbs for easy navigation and a “Home” button on all Grafana dashboards & reports to easily get back. The existing folders under the Grafana Browse feature have been cleaned up with obsolete dashboards being moved to the Legacy folder.
• We expanded our coverage of the Microsoft 365 environment and included many more of the Microsoft 365 services in our impact and health monitoring. The Environment Status page which until now provided insight into your organizations experience score for Exchange, OneDrive, Teams and SharePoint has for instance been expanded to include all of the main E3 Microsoft 365 services. Including Delve, Yammer, Planner, ToDo and many others.
• For even better call quality troubleshooting, we redesigned our real time collection process and added more data points on the call quality debug and details pages. Providing you with direct insights into a user’s audio, video and screensharing activities during the call, analysis of top CPU consuming processes, and multiple new metrics for video sharing, screen sharing, and audio.

Overall, these and many other enhancements will aid you in better managing and supporting your users digital experience in Microsoft 365.

Check out the full release notes and intermediate update notes for more information and updates!