Blameless Expands Microsoft Partnership to Deliver Faster, More Intuitive Incident Response Collaboration

At Blameless, the world’s leading software engineering teams rely on us during incident management. A key part of our offering is the ability to seamlessly integrate with a customer’s unique tech stack. As such, we value partnerships with companies like Microsoft that enhance our user experience and meet the needs of our customers. We understand how essential it is to integrate with communication tools like Microsoft Teams, because it’s the first place a user goes to start an incident. On-call teams use Blameless in the most urgent moments, so our integration with Microsoft Teams needs to be smooth. Today, we’re excited to share how we’ve expanded our partnership with Microsoft and how we plan to deliver even more value to our customers.

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In mid 2021, Blameless officially became a member of Microsoft for Startups, a partnership program designed to support up-and-coming startups. Since October 2021, when we released our integration with Microsoft Teams, we began working closely with their go-to-market (GTM) and product teams to increase the visibility of Blameless as a leading incident management solution and, of course, invested the engineering work to integrate Blameless with Microsoft Teams.

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“I really appreciated the attention to detail from the Microsoft team, as well as the dedication and passion they showed for meeting our shared goals. It was really obvious in all our interactions, and we knew that we could rely on each other.” -- Nicolas Philip, Director of Product, Blameless

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The integration between Blameless and Microsoft Teams is significant for our customers, because it enhances their main line of communication during the most pressing moments of incident response. Directly from Microsoft Teams, an on-call engineer initiates an incident, notifies stakeholders, and orchestrates rapid response, all while automatically collecting each event or “touch” that adds value to the retrospective (postmortem) for learning. A user does this while Blameless collects and computes all relevant details in the background.

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Another way Blameless and Microsoft create an efficient incident response process is by automatically attaching a Microsoft Teams video link to newly created incidents. That means engineers and other responders can hop on a group call instantly to share updates and collaborate in real-time. No need to go through the manual work of creating a new meeting link and attaching it to an incident page or group chat. It’s already there.

Introducing our latest enhancements with Microsoft Teams chat

Most recently, we expanded our integration with three new tab views within the Microsoft Teams chat interface. They are the Overview tab, the Help tab for a particular incident channel, and a Help tab for the general Blameless group channel. The Overview tab is designed to improve situational awareness for every member in the channel. The Help tabs are designed to present high level information quickly and easily. All three tabs help speed up time-to-value by communicating key data points much faster.

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While developing these new tabs, we worked with Microsoft and also collaborated with our customers to understand how best to improve their experience during incident response. One meaningful way these tabs have added value for our customers is by reducing noise and allowing engineers to stay focused on resolution. Incident management, as a whole, involves many stakeholders across the organization. While it’s important to keep everyone informed, it’s vital to keep the frontline responders to a single line of conversation that’s purely dedicated to investigating the incident and reaching a fix.

Blameless supports engineering teams throughout the software lifecycle

We’re happy that organizations using Microsoft Teams have access to the benefits Blameless provides. The Blameless platform automates critical workflows throughout the software lifecycle to reduce toil and help engineering organizations invest in their service reliability. Starting with incident response, engineers can stay ahead of issues before they negatively impact the customer experience. During response, they have everything in place to investigate quickly and communicate as swiftly as possible. As on-call teams carry out their response, Blameless collects rich data insights that inform engineering organizations on how efficient and reliable their systems and processes function. With out-of-the-box dashboards such as mean-time-to-resolve (MTTR) and popular reports like Follow Up Action Completions, users know at-a-glance how effectively they’re operating and what areas need improvement. 

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“For engineering users who are on-call responding to incidents, the Blameless integration streamlines critical workflow steps. Being on-call is high pressure and by bringing together the collaboration capabilities of Teams with the Blameless purpose-built incident management solution, every step is streamlined and all teams stay updated and clear.” -- Ben Summers, Director, Teams & Microsoft 365 Platform Marketing at Microsoft.

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Engineers rely on Blameless to collect important information during incident response that becomes educational during the retrospective (postmortem) meeting. After an incident is resolved, teams can go straight into the learning process without wasting hours trying to remember what happened and searching for critical data points. Blameless surfaces all that data, first in an incident timeline and second, in the retrospective builder part of the product. 

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Of course, most of this value Blameless provides is thanks to the help of various integrations with other critical tools. For example, Blameless connects to ticketing solutions like Jira and ServiceNow. We also work with on-call management tools like PagerDuty and OpsGenie. For monitoring, Blameless pairs with Datadog and New Relic. For video conferencing, we sync with Microsoft Teams Video or Zoom. We also update Statuspage so you externally communicate at the right moments. All of these offerings are part of what makes Blameless a leading incident management solution for forward-thinking teams.

Get started using Microsoft Teams with Blameless

For Microsoft Teams users, we’re proud to offer a seamless integration with the Blameless SRE platform, so that you can weave reliability engineering into your main line of business communications. Microsoft Teams is a highly intuitive collaboration tool that users love. Its suite of security features makes it popular among larger enterprises, and its own ecosystem of tools from chat to video makes it a strong choice for companies looking to consolidate their tech stack. 

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Blameless is a registered app in Microsoft Appsource. Click here to connect Blameless with your Microsoft account. If you don’t have an account with Blameless yet, schedule an appointment with one of our technical experts to get you started. 

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