This past week, we had the pleasure of learning about some super exciting changes coming to digital employee experience management (DEEM) with Workspace ONE Intelligence. With that said, I decided we needed to take a good look at DEEM. It’s no secret that DEEM is quickly becoming the big buzzword of 2021. With COVID, we are laser-focused on the user experience.

Today, we will hit a quick overview of DEEM in Workspace ONE Intelligence, discuss some of its features, and preview some of the new features that will be coming soon. I know this is the perfect follow-up to my last article on WS1 Intelligence and can’t wait to show you how cool the DEEM features can be.

What is DEEM Anyways?

The big question is obviously “What is this DEEM thing?” I like to think of DEEM as the true spirit of Workspace ONE Intelligence. DEEM as a principal is the idea of gathering analytics to evaluate your digital workspace. Typically, you use an agent of some sort or embed something in your application to collect telemetry data.

DEEM can be taken a few steps further by enhancing your users’ experience by identifying areas that hurt your user experience. In some cases, DEEM may help lead you to fixing issues in your digital employee experience. One of the first times I remember seeing something similar to this was Office 365 telemetry. You can see that nice little product below:

We need all of the information we can get to build great experiences for our users. One of the challenges with remote work is we are fairly limited with the data we can collect so anything we can get to help us is huge. Let’s talk about how VMware does DEEM in Workspace ONE.

How VMware Workspace ONE’s DEEM Solution Works

As mentioned in their documentation, the Workspace ONE Hub comes with a telemetry agent that sends data up to Intelligence to power DEEM. On top of that, you can also embed DEEM into internal mobile apps powered by the WS1 SDK to gather data for DEEM on mobile.

Some of the telemetry you can gather on PC are:

• Organization Experience Score
• User Experience Score
• Desktop Apps Experience Score
• Mobile Apps Experience Score (For Intelligence SDK apps)
• Device Health
• Application Performance and Stability
• OS Crashes
• Login, and Logout
• Boot and Shutdown events and duration
• Windows Services Status
• Windows Performance Monitor Data

It’s super exciting to see how some of this comes together. Let’s check out a nice demo on DEEM in Workspace ONE.

Workspace ONE Intelligence Health Scoring

One of the things that really pops is the WS1 Intelligence Health information. You can see below in the dashboard a nice inventory around how many apps are healthy, device health, etc. With all of the telemetry that comes into play, the dashboard rolls that up together into a nice little dashboard that is C-level friendly.

The real brilliance of DEEM when implemented correctly is its simplicity. The main idea behind DEEM for me is that its “Set it and Forget it!” You will still want to leverage some of the fun stuff with it, but no idea to sweat that now:

Now that you have an idea around the basics, let’s cover a cool little demo that shows you how to set the baselines of your health scores and a nice short demo about health:

Application Telemetry in Workspace ONE DEEM

The area that people will be most excited about is application telemetry. One of my favorite parts is they collect data on application hangs and crashes like this:

You can easily search for any application and access the telemetry data inside of Workspace ONE Intelligence. I also love as you drill-down into the telemetry data you can start to connect the dots:

One last thing that I wanted to show was how the telemetry data collects the application error codes to further provide you with more intelligence to troubleshoot issues that come up:

Now that we covered all of that, let’s check out a short demo about App Telemetry inside of DEEM and how cool it can be:

New Workspace ONE DEEM Announcements at VMworld 2021

I hope everyone is excited about DEEM now! Let’s hit on some of the new features that are coming courtesy of the VMware EUC Blog.

The first thing that I am excited about is “Employee Sentiment.” This feature powered by the Hub will send these mini-surveys to users that will be incorporated into the DEEM score to provide a more accurate account of things:

• Guided Root Cause Analysis and Remediation
• Intelligence Integration with the Edge
• Horizon Integration with Workspace ONE Intelligence

Final Thoughts

So, let’s admit it. DEEM is…. pretty, pretty, pretty, pretty good.

I’ve been critical of the pricing on Workspace ONE Intelligence, but I have to admit they are building a compelling suite of services. DEEM is something we would often have to pay for like Nexthink or AppDynamics. This sort of intelligence can be invaluable especially coupled with automations. Just think of a situation where a user’s Outlook has been flagged as being unhealthy and being able to execute scripts when it happens.

One way that solutions become compelling is through seamless integration and becoming smarter through automations. The maturity of a product that you have watched since its inception is a beautiful thing. I think inevitably the success of DEEM will hinge on VMware’s ability to support the platform and learn from the supportability mistakes of other new products. I hope that will happen because Intelligence is brimming with potential.