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Need to use a SharePoint intranet due to internal policies, company transitions, or legacy systems? When all the available information is overly technical or negative, where do you turn? Enter Fresh Perspectives: Living in the reality of SharePoint intranets. We provide useful, jargon-free insights and real-world examples to help you maximize the benefits of SharePoint intranets and tackle its challenges. Pro-SharePoint but realistic, we debunk misconceptions and share product management insights from Fresh Intranet.
Jarbas Horst (0:2.581)
There we go, David. Let me put this aside here. Hi, everyone. Welcome to the new episode of Fresh Perspectives. Great to be here again talking to everyone. I'm Jarbas Horst, Senior Product Manager for Fresh Intranet. And with me, have my colleague, David.
David Bowman (0:5.698)
Hi.
David Bowman (0:21.346)
Hi, Dave Bowman, Product Director for Fresh Intranet. Hey, I can officially say this week that we are award-winning Fresh Intranet. I'm not making it up.
Jarbas Horst (0:33.621)
No, we're not, we're not. It's official. It's an owner, really great. Can we say we're thrilled or we should not use this word? Yeah, okay, we are honored then. Yeah, so as you said, David, it's a very, it's a huge award, I think for everyone kind in the intranet space. We got that from Clearbox.
David Bowman (0:44.238)
No, you can't say that.
Jarbas Horst (1:1.029)
Clearbox, the independent consultancy business who evaluates multiple intranet vendors. So for example, we won the award, there were 20 other very great vendors. Unity, StaffBase, Omnia, with very companies with big teams and um well, we managed to win this space.
From the 20 people who are evaluated 6 won the award and we were one of them which is really nice and what um clear box said about that? I think I would like to just read that aloud So fresh does a great job of sticking closely to SharePoint and Microsoft features yet provides excellent capabilities that enhance the experience it is particularly strong in use and content management and provides good support for communities as well.
We also felt the use of AI for search and information management was among the stronger examples we saw. And we look forward to seeing what comes next. So it's really nice to get this feedback um from independent analyst, right?
David Bowman (2:7.512)
Beautiful.
David Bowman (2:15.426)
Yeah. And when you start doing these things, you don't necessarily set out to win any awards, right? That's not the reason that you do this stuff, but it's really nice to get the validation from someone that we admire as much as Clearbox. And in particular, I think what was nice to hear about in that summary there is all of those meetings that we have, talking about planning features and
deciding to not build things, know, they're not always easy discussions. There's a fair amount of... Arguments is probably the wrong word. Maybe it's the right word, not sure. But yeah, you know, we have a... We spend a lot of time um working out what we're going to do and why we're going to do it.
Jarbas Horst (2:58.379)
That's true, that's true. Yeah, yeah.
David Bowman (3:2.626)
Alright, and then from speaking of people that we love.
Jarbas Horst (3:7.461)
Before going there, was sorry, now it came back. So, this feedback on the AI part, just like to uh mention that, right? So we have been working on AI for two years now, developing our strategy, the features we want to include in this solution. And yeah, so it's nice to get like an emphasis on that when we kind of get feedback from people. But yeah, maybe start again.
David Bowman (3:30.188)
Yeah, yeah. Can I do my segue again now?
uh Speaking of people that we love, um from Clearbox to Microsoft.
Jarbas Horst (3:43.004)
Yes, David. Well, you had uh the privilege, the honor of going to Las Vegas, not for the casinos, but as you said, for um one of the greatest events around Microsoft, Microsoft 365 conference. So how was the event? What is this event about?
David Bowman (4:0.120)
Yes.
Yeah, was good. had a good time. You know, I being an old man and a bit of a grumpy old man, I don't really like fun. So Vegas was basically wasted on me rather than me being wasted on Vegas. So I didn't spend a lot of time in the casinos or drinking for the main reason that it's extremely expensive and I got better things to spend my money on. But yeah, this was the Microsoft 365 Community Conference. This is vendors.
services, organization, product companies, consultants, MVPs, customers getting together in one place for a few days to kind of talk all things Microsoft. You know, a big focus on the modern work area employee experience in Microsoft 365 to hear the latest news, hear case studies, meet vendors in the expo hall, talk to Microsoft, talk to experts, MVPs like yourself.
A lot of networking, a lot of talking, a lot of conversations. And, you know, I think what I really like about this event is that, it isn't just dominated by Microsoft, you know, hitting their marketing points, right? There is, you know, there's a bit of that people want and expect that. But Microsoft really hand the stage over to people that are in the community building, working on, creating stuff.
Jarbas Horst (5:13.024)
Right.
Jarbas Horst (5:23.061)
Mm.
David Bowman (5:30.254)
within the Microsoft 365 ecosystem. So, you know, get a really good mix of kind of high level marketing message, but some really good kind of community orientated content in that event as well.
Jarbas Horst (5:42.241)
which is like, so this is not a Microsoft event, therefore clarity. um It's a community event with a focus, a big focus on Microsoft.
David Bowman (5:48.611)
Yeah.
David Bowman (5:51.980)
Yeah, there is a third party that runs the conference. They do a great job of kind of curating the content and managing everybody at the event. you know, clearly Microsoft have a guiding hand and are putting a pretty big investment into this thing themselves. There are a lot of people from Microsoft that go on to these events.
Jarbas Horst (6:12.459)
Yes. You have speakers then from Microsoft and also from the community. think one of our colleagues were there as well. Great session.
David Bowman (6:19.820)
Yes, shout out to Jon Jarvis.
David Bowman (6:25.102)
Yes, yeah, he did a good session on ethical hacking of Microsoft 365, a kind of live demo of hacking a tenant. you know, being someone that has a tenant, I had to sort of draw breath and realized that I'm probably not doing any of the things that he recommended in his practices in that session. So I suspect there were a lot of people in the room that had that kind of, you know, right, I better do something about this now.
Jarbas Horst (6:50.037)
Right, yes, I know the feeling. Well, talking about topics, was there one main topic? What were the things discussed at the conference?
David Bowman (7:1.164)
Yeah, so no surprise that the word copilot was said with an increasing frequency as the days ticked by. Clearly this is the kind of hero application service that Microsoft want everybody to know about, think about, and I think probably with some justifiable cause, right? People wanted to hear about it as well. Susan Hanley, who's a personal hero of mine in our session was joking that
Every time someone says the word co-pilot at that event an angel gets their wings and we are creating millions of angels this So that was a pretty accurate take but yeah, you know co-pilot was really kind of cutting through everything That was all at that then but you know kind of modern work focus so teams SharePoint power platform, you know, those those those kinds of services had a had a had a big focus at the event
Jarbas Horst (7:34.209)
You
Jarbas Horst (7:53.846)
But I assume so modern worked and also here connected to AI. And so probably how agents are uh playing a role or yeah, that will happen more and more in the future then.
David Bowman (8:0.141)
Yes.
David Bowman (8:4.780)
Yeah, you know, it's kind of shaping the experience for end users, right? You know, which applications they're using, how are they accessing it, how to line your content up, you know, what are the new themes, key concepts that vendors, consultants, specialists should be thinking about talking about to their end customers.
Jarbas Horst (8:22.623)
Mm-hmm. All right. And so if we think a bit of the keynotes that you've probably joined there, where like some highlights.
David Bowman (8:33.292)
Yeah, so Jeff Teper, who um had a very energetic start to his keynote on the first day, plus guests showcasing across Copilot, Team SharePoint and the Power Platform. We're going to talk about this in a little bit. Microsoft have this kind of concept of the frontier firm. going to come back to this. There was a kind of introducing that as a theme into the keynote.
Essentially, that is organizations that are being kind of co-pilot driven, I guess, to sort of simplify a kind of two hour keynote into a single sentence with some new functionality coming to co-pilot. know, the kind of the keynote needs to have these sort of big announcements to get people amped up for the rest of the week. And the kind of flagship announcement there is this research agent, which looks really powerful, right? You know,
The demo that they showed is a research topic, creating a marketing report of kind of kicking this thing off, leaving it, ticking through some documentation at work, identifying practices on the web to put together this report which can then be shared in multiple ways.
Jarbas Horst (9:46.024)
Which is nice, like I have played around with um deep research in Chatch-PT researcher agents, so that's not available yet. At least I haven't been able to use it yet. But like this deep research in Chatch-PT Plus um and Pro and Team versions, it's available now. that um like using reasoning and doing kind of really a deep um research on sources that it finds along the way or that you've been provided upfront, it will kind of go
read that content, literally read openly the websites, read the content there or the pages, and then come back with a detailed report summary of the findings. You can influence also how the output is provided. And the research agent goes in the same direction. think we have a big benefit here that this integrated with your organizational data.
David Bowman (10:40.493)
Yes.
Jarbas Horst (10:41.173)
web plus organizational data and that gives really kind of very good insights that you can then leverage.
David Bowman (10:48.364)
Yeah, as you say, if you're doing this in chat GPT today with deep research, you're in the position where you've got to upload a load of content from work that you're working on. Not a recommended thing to do, by the way. And if our security people are listening, I'm definitely not doing this. So you have the ability in this one to integrate that work and web experience. So there's a huge benefit for organizations that are trying to automate.
Jarbas Horst (10:57.440)
Yeah.
not recommend thing to do, yeah.
Jarbas Horst (11:5.237)
No.
David Bowman (11:17.388)
and produce this level of research using the combination of both those things.
Jarbas Horst (11:18.965)
Yeah, and like those, they're just out of curiosity for people if they haven't used that yet. So, a research can take minutes, so it's not something that goes quickly. So, yeah, like one of the examples I had, I think was like 25 minutes reading, I think, content from 14 different sources to then generate kind of the outcome. It's quite impressive.
David Bowman (11:29.902)
You know.
David Bowman (11:38.914)
Yes. Yeah. Yes, yeah. In the demo she kind of, you know, kicked this process off, did some demos on some other things and came back to see the outcome from this. you the expectation is this is kind of an agent that's been set off on an activity. It's going to go and do it, right? It's not going to give you the kind of, you know, live rundown. It's giving you some feedback as to where it's got up to you, so you don't think that it's completely stalled or anything, but...
Jarbas Horst (12:2.357)
Yes.
David Bowman (12:5.692)
Yeah, you know, I think the idea is that you're going to go and do something else while this is finishing its task
Jarbas Horst (12:10.869)
I'm like quite interested in this topic. And, you know, if we just take the insights and knowledge we have from deep research in Chattatupiti. So the question I have is, because this is kind of an expensive task, right? So to have an agent running for so long, will that be kind of limitations when it comes to the research agent? Like, can you just run 10 per day as a user or, I don't know, like 100 as an organization? uh Will that maybe be an extra cost?
this agent so yeah things that we will learn did they say something about that
David Bowman (12:40.984)
Yeah. Good questions. you know, Microsoft's not up for talking about any of the additional costs in the keynote. That's for sure. So, yeah, you know, that looks exciting. There was an additional feature for notebooks as well, which is a kind of, you know, if people are using chat GPT projects, it's a kind of comparative to that sort of a function. And again, the demo there is, you know, in the copilot app.
Jarbas Horst (12:51.835)
Yeah, yes.
David Bowman (13:9.294)
create a notebook, give it a title, give it a description and then it's producing some internal work-based content that you might want to add into the notebook that you can use for reference within your notebook then.
Jarbas Horst (13:20.321)
Right. from what I understood, like, so this notebook allows you like to ask questions and draft content from information available in a copilot notebook. Like, so you can kind of use copilot. Let me kind of rephrase this. You have kind of in the notebook, you can create pages that will contain kind of your notes. You can also upload reference content there or additional information and have that stored in a notebook.
Then you can use ScopePilot on top of that to ask then questions based on information you have on the notebook or maybe also like to draft content based on that information.
David Bowman (13:57.858)
Yes, it's essentially it's everything that I've wanted one note to be.
Jarbas Horst (14:3.119)
Now it's there, finally.
David Bowman (14:4.990)
It's there, just not necessarily in OneNote. And there was a demo of the image creation capabilities coming to Copilot as well. So again, I've been uh playing around with ChatGBT for creating images for PowerPoint presentations or for other content that I'm creating. So a of comparable experience within Copilot with the added benefit that this thing can...
connect to the brand center as well. So you've got things like your color palette, your fonts, other reference material within the brand center can be used in the images that you're creating.
Jarbas Horst (14:41.825)
So then you can kind of generate the images that are aligned with your corporate branding.
David Bowman (14:47.372)
Yes, yes. Rather than a bit of trial and error in the um chat GPT equivalent to try and create something that's in your brand, right? So it felt like a much more fluid and connected to work experience doing it in Copart.
Jarbas Horst (15:5.183)
Yes, well, always when you are operating within Co-Pilot, you have the benefits of enterprise, the protection, you are connected to your organizational data. So those are kind of big benefits of using Co-Pilot.
David Bowman (15:19.350)
Yeah, and then, know, the kind of the remainder of the announcements from the keynote, we're to come back to talk a little bit about SharePoint in a second. Bit of a focus on Teams for the new chats, channels, Teams conversations experience that I'm still adjusting to and apparently lots of other people are still adjusting to. The Teams live translations thing that, you know, look that looked pretty cool. You know, again, a kind of demo of
a Spanish speaker on a Teams call speaking in the native language and the Teams live translation giving you an audio translation in the kind of in the in well in English in that demo in that person's voice tone of voice accent.
Jarbas Horst (16:5.818)
In real time. Yeah, that's impressive. I'm curious when that comes.
David Bowman (16:7.021)
Yeah.
Very cool. Yes, yes. So, you know, again, more ways for the multilingual fresh team to embarrass me in the fact that I'm the only person that doesn't really speak any other languages.
Jarbas Horst (16:23.729)
They speak English very well, it's positive. Well, on the keynote, did they talk about agent to agent? So did they mention this topic there?
David Bowman (16:25.570)
Thank you, thank you. I've been practicing it for many years.
David Bowman (16:39.010)
Yeah, copilot agents as a kind of persistent themes. was more in the, I guess, in the second keynote, which was on the beginning of the last day, where there was kind of talk about this frontier firm and what does this mean for us all?
Jarbas Horst (16:55.766)
Mm-hmm.
Right. That's interesting. I I have seen some new announcements around this topic, which is a bit more technical. um But again, maybe just emphasize, I'll mention that here quickly. It's like the aspect of having an agent-to-agent protocol, something that's available in Microsoft, and that will allow you the great agents that can talk to each other. So that could be a scenario of having a business travel agent that orchestrates the request.
um with multiple agents, right? So one agent being kind of the policy agent that is connected to the data share point, then the approval agent probably using a power automate. And then you have kind of the airline agent and let's say a hotel agent. So you have kind of the one main agent coordinating the work and communicating with other agents to get kind of the task done.
David Bowman (17:53.752)
Yeah, so this is the kind of connecting fabric between all of these agents.
Jarbas Horst (17:57.726)
It is, yes. I think it will really mean a huge productivity gain for users when we have that in place. Another thing that's more technical is the ability to have the agent communicating with third-part systems, like systems outside of your um organization, which could be maybe kind of integrating with Confluence. Service now and like those different tools that we have the technical thing there's like MCP model context protocol that will then make that communication possible in real time and allowing you also like to perform tasks on the third part system so not just read information but also perform a task that directly for example sending an email from the agent kind of operating in Microsoft 365 but then maybe sending an email
let's say using Google mail, for example, kind of.
David Bowman (18:57.934)
transparently to the human being.
Jarbas Horst (19:1.503)
Yeah, so I think um great possibilities that will be coming soon, that will unlock new ways how we experience work, I think.
David Bowman (19:12.270)
Yes, all right. Let's talk a little bit about SharePoint then, because this had quite a big focus at the Microsoft 365 Community Conference with a big headline number. I think it was slide number two or three in Jeff Teeper's keynote session talking about how Microsoft has gone over the one billion user mark. He missed the old
Austin Powers movie reference in the keynote. think everybody else was doing it for him on that slide. But you know, it's such an impressive number.
Jarbas Horst (19:44.180)
You
Jarbas Horst (19:52.858)
That was his chance to use that.But that's daily or is that monthly?
David Bowman (19:54.892)
Yeah.
David Bowman (19:59.576)
Well, it was flagged as 1 billion active users. 1 billion users in SharePoint. Yeah.
Jarbas Horst (20:3.337)
Right. Well, which, you know, even if it's monthly, that is, that's a lot.
David Bowman (20:10.542)
Yeah, it's a big number. I think like SharePoint or not, it's hard to knock that statistic. This is a product, a service that is everywhere. It's inescapable now. Whether you want to accept it or not, is in most organizations.
Jarbas Horst (20:16.415)
or not.
Jarbas Horst (20:27.659)
Yes.
Jarbas Horst (20:33.505)
We had a webinar the other day where we talked about SharePoint in the middle and then a lot of other solutions using SharePoint as the foundation if we think of teams and so on. So everything connected.
David Bowman (20:47.820)
Yes. Yeah. Yeah. That kind of backbone of Microsoft 365.
David Bowman (20:56.962)
Alright, two main themes for SharePoint at the conference then. um And I guess two slightly kind of strange um categories for SharePoint. On one side we had a lot of sessions of content focusing on beautiful SharePoint. Focusing on things like flexible layouts. We've talked a bit about the additional power that they bring.
The editorial cards web part, again, a great addition for adding high impact features. Being able to use France, the brand center, this is a kind of really for the first time ever of being able to create these attractive SharePoint pages. Feels a bit like kind of web publishing engine instead of what people might think about SharePoint.
Jarbas Horst (21:44.863)
right.
Jarbas Horst (21:51.042)
Which is good that you say that because that's kind of aligning with one of our predictions at the beginning of the year. All right, SharePoint goes web publishing and actually the amount of features in this space, well, it keeps coming. The Editor Cards, for example, is one of the new additions here.
David Bowman (21:59.885)
Yes.
David Bowman (22:8.088)
Yeah. Yes. You know, I think one, and there were a few questions on this topic in one of the sessions we were talking about SharePoint that, you know, these are features that allow you to create these beautiful SharePoint pages, right? But, you know, what you can identify is that because of the way that this works, right? And this is true of any kind of web publishing system like this, that it needs you to have a pretty good eye on design. Right. You know, yes.
Jarbas Horst (22:34.131)
Hmm, yes. Because it gives you so many options,
David Bowman (22:37.874)
If you've got a marketing department that understand design, are keen on brand and can create these kind of assets for you, these are great features because you can use the resources that you've got in-house to turn something, to create something amazing. But the fact that you can create these beautiful pages means that you can also turn it into a real dog's dinner if you don't know what you're doing.
Jarbas Horst (23:5.985)
I'll give you an example of someone who can't use that, it's me. I was trying to create some nice pages. We have a feature catalog for our product and I want to include that we are supporting our flexible layouts, which is nice, right? So I thought, I'll go there, try to create something nice. Yeah, so that didn't happen. So I ended up taking an image from Microsoft, what they have there.
David Bowman (23:10.039)
Yeah.
Jarbas Horst (23:28.918)
Because you can resize, can overlap. So there are many options in the way how you can present the content. So if you don't have kind of this design eye, then yeah, you might not like achieve nice outcomes.
David Bowman (23:39.960)
Yeah, and a few questions, concerns from people about governance on this thing. You know, how do you maintain fidelity of this experience if you have lots of people creating content? People asking obvious questions about, know, where can I turn this off? How can I have this active for a few people? You know, these clearly these things are not those sort of that level of options is not available in SharePoint yet.
Jarbas Horst (23:46.131)
Yes.
Jarbas Horst (24:6.751)
No, it's not like, yeah, this aspect of governance is a current topic. Not just like for agents, that brings also a lot of discussions, but all of the UI possibilities you have. I think we talked about that like in the previous episode, at least enabling approval and what we have page templates and that's something you can do right now.
David Bowman (24:23.138)
Yes.
David Bowman (24:29.294)
Yeah, yeah. It was also nice to see Viva Amplify now has probably its rightful place within SharePoint as a kind SharePoint feature. So in one of the screenshots, one of the demos showed, you know, we're in a SharePoint site on a SharePoint page and there is an Amplify button in the toolbar. And when you click on the Amplify button, you're presented with some options of being able to send that page and its content into Teams, into Viva Engage, by Outlook.
Jarbas Horst (24:51.201)
Hmm.
David Bowman (24:58.607)
Sending a summary and a link back to the intranet as an option and or being able to publish that into other SharePoint sites as well. And I think that idea of being able to amplify a page gives Amplify a much greater purpose within SharePoint.
Jarbas Horst (25:8.470)
Yeah.
Jarbas Horst (25:14.887)
It has the meaning that the word has, right? So really working that way. And before we talked about kind of this being what boost, like there is this boost feature for news pages then. kind of amplify now maybe not replacing, but kind of going maybe in that direction of boosting the content across now really multiple channels, because boosting has like a limited area where it applies and amplify going here like across multiple channels.
David Bowman (25:16.822)
Yes, yes.
David Bowman (25:23.939)
Yes. oh
David Bowman (25:30.764)
Yeah, yeah.
Jarbas Horst (25:42.794)
And I have a few questions that kind of, I know a bit of Amplify and you have campaigns in Amplify. So I wonder whether that page that you have amplified in SharePoint kind of becomes maybe part of a campaign somehow, or is that then copied into Amplify? So at least when this feature is available, would like to give it a try.
David Bowman (26:2.338)
Yeah, either I didn't sit in the correct session, but it wasn't covered in the sessions that I sat in. It was more about his amplify as a feature of SharePoint rather than being something that is associated particularly with the campaign.
Jarbas Horst (26:17.887)
And what hasn't changed probably is that we still need the extra license to be able to use Amplify.
David Bowman (26:24.236)
Yes. Yes, yes, yes, yes, certainly. The other area of SharePoint that was being covered here was the kind of copilot SharePoint, right? So the primary things that we were talking about there were being able to create pages. We've talked about this on a previous episode as well. using prompts or a kind of prompt wizard to build a page from content, being able to update and manage sections of a page using copilot.
design ideas and this new thing called the frequently asked questions or FAC web part which was a new web part that you could feed it with some content about a new product or a new service and it will make suggestions of what your frequently asked questions section should look like synthesize answers to those questions it gives you as the human some options to be able to kind of do a pre-publish
moderation on what it's created, you know, being able to remove or add or update some of those sections. you know, again, I heard a lot of talk about this frequently asked questions web part as being something that people view as being really useful.
Jarbas Horst (27:33.664)
No, okay. Yeah, like about this web part, was wondering. So you mentioned that the person still has the control of the content. Yeah, that's nice. So it's not just like m kind of co-pilot generating the FAQs and this kind of being kind of self-managed by AI, but the person is still in control. That's good. For the creating pages, I came up with a word.
David Bowman (27:41.218)
Yes, in the hands of the editor.
David Bowman (27:55.906)
Yeah, yeah, looks very cool.
Jarbas Horst (28:1.285)
You have the templates in Co-Pilot. I call that Co-Pilot enabled templates because they are bit specific. When you open the content creation from um Co-Pilot and you choose the template, it comes with a predefined prompt. You cannot go beyond that. You need to fill in the blankets with the information you want to describe the sections. You cannot really go much beyond that.
David Bowman (28:3.843)
Yeah.
David Bowman (28:18.104)
Right.
Jarbas Horst (28:28.649)
Otherwise, can create that from a free prompt where you can really describe everything you want. I tried that and I was trying to create that. That's the topic. Now, also add quick links to a part, create an image of a cat so it's a bit fun. um
David Bowman (28:31.618)
Yeah.
David Bowman (28:45.582)
Well, there you go. The SharePoint team have got a new name that they can use and a new acronym. Have you updated your CETs?
Jarbas Horst (28:58.244)
Yes, so just like for people like maybe they haven't used this feature yet, currently Copile just creates the text. So it adds text web parts to the page and then will craft the message based on your prompt on your reference documents will upload there. But it doesn't add the web parts or images. So that's not in scope of this feature yet. But it's a nice way to get started.
David Bowman (29:26.008)
Yeah, I think what was also clear is that SharePoint still has a valuable role to play in Microsoft 365, right? We talked about it. It's the content engine. It's where the content lives from a lot of the applications that sit in front of it. Teams, et cetera. So it isn't going anywhere. But you certainly get a sense that there is a renewed focus on things like governance and management of content, things like Purview as a tool application.
had a lot of coverage at the event and you can hear the words being mentioned as you're of moving around the conference a bit. So, you know, that kind of resurgence of content and information on governance, you know, is certainly back.
Jarbas Horst (30:11.905)
Yeah, well, we had a session today, a presentation where we were talking about co-pilot and the intranet and the means of friends. So we also talked like about the role of intranet and where that's kind of disappearing or not. And, you know, people saying like, you know, like we definitely need intranet, we need the homepage, we need the personalization aspect, governance, right? So especially we are talking about SharePoint. SharePoint is a place where we have a lot of documents, the policies, the guides.
David Bowman (30:39.982)
Yeah.
Jarbas Horst (30:40.457)
So that is still important to have the intranet helping control and manage all of this content. m The aspect also like having a central place where communicators can go and see the content available for publishing. um Maybe also like being able to send newsletters. So yeah, there are a lot of benefits that people see on the intranet and that kind of not going away with all of the additions that we see coming out.
David Bowman (31:8.110)
Yes, yeah, I think that, you know, over time it's front end, it's user interface role may change, but, you know, certainly as a kind of content store, SharePoint's here to stay. Hey, you know, the other thing that had quite a lot of focus and coverage at the event was Viva Engage. And, you know, I wasn't sure whether this is just something that I'm noticing. Maybe there's always this level of content about Viva Engage or if the shutdown of Workplace
Jarbas Horst (31:32.405)
Right.
David Bowman (31:38.852)
Has created a lot more interest in Viva Engage as a product and platform.
Jarbas Horst (31:45.770)
Yeah, well, I think so, right? There is probably an interest of Microsoft to improve, engage. I believe that a lot of the clients from Workplace by Meta have now are transiting to Viva Engage, and probably there is an interest of kind of mapping some of the functionalities that Workplace had and bringing that now into Engage. Kind of, yeah, I believe so.
David Bowman (32:6.050)
Yes.
David Bowman (32:11.630)
Yeah, there was a few sessions on, you really interesting from a, you know, just kind of being a Microsoft partner where Microsoft treated themselves as kind of customer zero, right? You know, it's easy to forget that this is an organization of nearly 250,000 people globally, you know, with a huge number of those are going to be managers of people as well. And like any organization, it's got to do internal communications, right? And they were talking about, you know, the challenge of
Jarbas Horst (32:33.471)
Yeah, yeah.
Jarbas Horst (32:38.261)
Yes.
David Bowman (32:40.834)
Building communities and communicating at that that scale. it really interesting to kind of hear Microsoft using themselves as a case study for how they're working with their own tools and just the kind of the same challenges that all other large organizations have. They aren't necessarily related to the technology. This is all about people, right? And moving people in the same direction. So that was a kind of just a really interesting new thing to hear from Microsoft.
Jarbas Horst (32:48.907)
Yeah.
Jarbas Horst (33:5.131)
Mm.
David Bowman (33:11.586)
I think the other thing that I picked up as I was kind of moving around the event is on Viva Engage. There's kind of two groups at that event, right? It's a Microsoft event, so there isn't anyone there kind of, you know, um very anti-Microsoft or anti-SharePoint or Viva Engage. But the two groups tended to be kind of those that are using Viva Engage. They like it. They're looking for what they do next. They've got kind of thriving communities that they're working with. And then the other group of
Jarbas Horst (33:26.016)
Yes.
David Bowman (33:41.144)
people that would like to be using it more than they are or would like to start using it. I just thought there was a kind of really interesting series of conversations there with that second group, right?
Jarbas Horst (33:44.608)
Right.
Jarbas Horst (33:54.618)
It's a good point. I think if you would like to start using Engage, if you have existing communities in your organization, that will be probably easy to reflect those communities in this digital format. Now, if you try to create net new communities and bring people there, that might not work well.
David Bowman (34:7.959)
Yes.
David Bowman (34:14.466)
Yeah, to kind of build those communities and improve the way that the tech works. Building up from the ground up, right? Something like communities and a technology like Viva Engage. There's a double pretty big challenge there for organizations. And I guess the feedback that I heard from people is, look, we love the idea of having an enterprise social product and platform like Viva Engage.
Jarbas Horst (34:31.775)
Yes. Yeah.
Jarbas Horst (34:40.897)
Mm-hmm.
David Bowman (34:43.254)
We don't have an organization that necessarily, and there's no saying it's a bad thing, right? But the people don't necessarily want to share their thoughts or their content or their information in that sort of a forum, right? They like the idea of it and they can see the benefit of it, but it's like, how do you get started on this, right? That's not a technology question. That is a question about organizational structure and people.
Jarbas Horst (35:6.485)
Yes, organization, yeah. Yeah. Because we are talking a lot about communities here and I am kind of wondering whether Engage will change. So it becomes, has like play a big role in communication also. Probably like we've Workplace, the shout down of Workplace, probably some kind of this feature mapping we mentioned before. So whether then we are going to see like more communication, internal communication happening in Engage.
David Bowman (35:21.452)
Yeah, yeah.
David Bowman (35:35.574)
Yeah, I wonder and you know, I've read kind of opinion pieces on LinkedIn and others about, you know, is enterprise social a internal comms tool, right? You know, is it the right platform to be using for top down communications? Is that going to squash its use and the benefit that having a kind of productive enterprise social tool, which is primarily about people talking to each other?
Jarbas Horst (35:36.501)
Maybe like to bring, yeah.
Jarbas Horst (36:4.417)
Mm-hmm.
David Bowman (36:4.558)
The moment that you change the purpose of that as being a top-down comms tool, you know, is it squashing its intended usage.
Jarbas Horst (36:9.151)
Right. that, so do people go back to teams then and start like, yeah.
David Bowman (36:13.998)
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, absolutely. So, you know, I thought there was a kind of just interesting to see, you know, a resurgence in enterprise social and in particular, Viva Engage, probably driven by Workplace.
Jarbas Horst (36:29.077)
Right, well that's interesting.
David Bowman (36:32.333)
And then you were talking bit about this at the beginning there on agents. On the final day, we had the kind of second keynote talking about um Microsoft's concept of a frontier firm, which is something from their latest work trend index report, which, you know, if you do a bring search for um work trend index, likely to be the first link that you see there, which is Microsoft's latest.
Jarbas Horst (36:54.506)
You
David Bowman (37:1.708)
findings and research on this topic, right? And what they're really talking about with a frontier firm is kind of AI first, right? Using AI optimally to drive efficiencies, to automate business process workflows, get stuff done.And there was a couple of examples they had in the second keynote of a guy that had started his company when he was 14 years old. He's now 22. He's got some, you know, a business that's worth billions of dollars. And it was hard to hear as an old man on a Thursday morning. And, you know, the second case study was then, you know, look, and here is a here was a mature organization, right, been around for many years.
Jarbas Horst (37:37.407)
Yeah.
David Bowman (37:49.494)
A lot of people, a lot of existing processes, know, aware of working, aware of doing things. You know, I'm not, I don't mean to sound like I'm trivializing the challenges of being a startup, but it's much easier to begin with AI than it is to transition an existing large enterprise to AI. And, you know, I think that they were, Microsoft are doing a good job of putting together a kind of high level roadmap, a pathway to get from one place to the other.
Jarbas Horst (37:59.072)
Yeah.
Right. Yeah.
Jarbas Horst (38:15.761)
as an established organization, right? So you have your processes in place. You have people working with that processes. So you need to change technology. You need also like to change the way how people use the technology. So there are many factors that come into play when you kind of, if you want to start with AI in a place where things are established already.
David Bowman (38:28.439)
Yes.
David Bowman (38:32.706)
Yeah. Yeah.
David Bowman (38:38.398)
Yeah. I really liked the kind of three stage process for, m I'm probably oversimplifying a pretty complicated message, but, you know, they have this kind of three stage thing where they've got, um, you know, people, individuals like you and I, um, making use of AI tools like copilot, like chat GPT, right? You know, and I think getting stuff done, asking questions, creating content, summarizing, helping you to achieve specific tasks. Right. I mean, I think that.
There are a number of people that are using the tools in that way at the moment. The second stage then is kind of human and agent teams, right? And this is a bit more of a formalized way of using the AI tools to get stuff done, right? And I guess I was thinking about this as, you know, I have chat sessions in chat GPT that are loaded up with context about marketing or recruitment, right? And I'm switching between those conversations.
And I guess I was sort of thinking, well, that does make sense, right? I am effectively managing a series of agents there to produce information for me. I can see this kind of, there is a progression from kind of casual use of generative AI chat to thinking about things in terms of me managing a team of agents.
Jarbas Horst (39:45.481)
Right, so, yeah.
Jarbas Horst (39:58.250)
Yeah, that's nice. So the first scenario is kind of, I'm like interacting with co-pilot or chat GPT and like on a casual basis. Yeah. Or maybe like we could take a picture, take a picture and upload that like as for analysis. And then the second case is like you are really creating them agents. You have observed like something has been a repetitive task or you are engaged with the AI always kind of in a specific way.
David Bowman (40:4.504)
Yeah, summarizing my meetings.
David Bowman (40:10.370)
Yeah. Yeah.
Jarbas Horst (40:26.079)
you create an agents in co-pilot or GPT is in chat GPT. And you can always go back to that agent and kind of it's there for that specific task, right? For marketing, for maybe grammar checker, which depending on how you design the agent basically.
David Bowman (40:38.786)
Yes.
Yeah, yeah. And then, know, the kind of third stage is you have an agent operated but human led, right? And the, you know, this is really where you've got agents, as you say, are automating tasks, right? They're off in the background, they're doing stuff, they're interacting with each other, they're updating systems, they're sending emails, they are reporting status back to you, they're doing research, creating reports for you. You know, you as the human being, you're directing them.
But rather than just working in one vertical, doing one specific task, they're then starting to do more interaction with each other. Business processes, workflows being automated by these agents. So this kind of a nice progression from organization exists in state number one, to state number two, to state number three. And I think that was the, I think a really nice articulation of.
Jarbas Horst (41:22.209)
Mm.
David Bowman (41:40.716)
I don't think it's difficult for organisations to be able to drop themselves on that chart and say, we're here today, here's the work that we need to do to progress to stage two or to stage three.
Jarbas Horst (41:50.105)
It's nice to be able to visualize that and to understand where you are in this journey. That's really cool. And I think this agent to agent capability that we discussed previously will also play a role in this final stage, but the third stage, where then the aspect of automation will become more realistic than with agents. And then the person managing.
David Bowman (41:52.226)
Yeah.
David Bowman (42:4.931)
Yes.
Jarbas Horst (42:15.231)
that kind of giving the task and getting kind of the report that I'm done with that and here's the outcome.
David Bowman (42:20.686)
Yes. Yeah. So, you know, that's the Microsoft 365 community conference in a slightly bigger than a nutshell.
Jarbas Horst (42:30.145)
Yeah, well, it was very insightful from what we're talking. That's great. So then we close mentioning again that we are now in an award-winning intranet. That's great. Let's leave it in here. Thank you, David, for the discussion it was great, as always. Cheers.
David Bowman (42:48.622)
Cheers, speak soon.