S2: Ep 4 | The evolution of SharePoint as a platform, with Mark Kashman

Mark Kashman spent over a decade inside Microsoft working on SharePoint, from the early days of SharePoint 2007 to becoming the first product manager for SharePoint Online. Now as an independent consultant, he shares insights that only come from being on the engineering side of one of the world's most widely used platforms. 

In this conversation, Mark breaks down the evolution of SharePoint from a document storage system requiring a "SharePoint PhD" to the modern collaboration platform that now powers Microsoft Teams, Lists, Loop, and countless other applications. He explains why SharePoint succeeded by being both an application and a platform, and how this flexibility creates both opportunities and challenges for organizations. 

The discussion covers the reality of intranet ownership, from governance planning to the never-ending nature of digital workplace evolution. Mark shares surprising use cases he's encountered, from managing 500 delivery trucks with Funko Pop shipments to massive enterprise deployments with pixel-perfect branding requirements. 

We explore the future of digital workplaces in an AI-driven world, examining how Copilot and similar tools will complement rather than replace traditional intranet experiences. Mark explains the crucial difference between pull-based AI interactions and the push-based communication that organizations still need for announcements, training, and company-wide initiatives. 

What is Fresh Perspectives: Living in the reality of SharePoint intranets?

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.

Welcome to another episode of Fresh Perspectives.

We have a very special guest today that we're gonna introduce in just a second.

I am David Bowman, product director.

And I'm Jarbas Horst, senior product manager for Fresh.

And we're joined today by Mark Kashman.

Mark, I feel like I don't really need to introduce you because I think most people in this industry already know who you are.

Long time Microsoftian, Microsofty. I'm never quite sure how to how to describe that.

I think you can just say softy.

Softy. There we go. Okay. Okay. That has a different meaning in in, in today. We can go with it for today.

Tell us, Mark. Who are you?

Yeah. So just like you said, I've got a history with Microsoft. I'm now moved into working as my own on, the Kashbox LLC, and the Kashbox is maybe what it doesn't sound like because what is a Kashbox?

But basically promoting and getting the word out and helping people understand all things SharePoint, Microsoft three sixty five, Teams, lists, loop.

But I've transitioned into being a consultant. I'm a principal Microsoft three sixty five consultant out in the world working with a lot of customers and doing a lot of what I used to do within the community and still very much within your realm, focusing on what you can do with SharePoint, with the intranet, obviously, all the other things that SharePoint can do. So there's a lot of relevance, hopefully, being on your show. And if people know me, yes, I'm the same Mark, just a little bit in a new method of being in the community. If you don't know who I am, just think this guy has something to do with SharePoint. And if I like or I'm interested in SharePoint, maybe this is worth tuning into.

Amazing. Thank you. And, you know, Mark, I think probably the the sort of common theme between the three of us today, is the number of years total, that we've been, working with SharePoint.

Some of us closer to it than others, obviously.

What was your first impression? What when did SharePoint sort of first become a thing for you?

Yeah. I started working with SharePoint two thousand seven, so to start with the version.

I had just joined, Microsoft in a in a capacity of actually being closer to the product. So I've been working a lot with field sellers. Some of them were SharePoint TSPs. Those are technology solution professionals.

So I'd heard about this thing, but I hadn't really touched it in a way.

But in the two thousand seven era, I started to lean in on it, and I got brought on to be the first product manager for SharePoint online, which translated in kind of a funny way. I didn't have to actually struggle, personally with having to spin up a SharePoint VM to do demos because I just got to load up a browser and run it directly from the cloud. So, for me, it was really exciting. I had a steep learning curve just like everybody else getting into SharePoint, but joining the, at the time, the business productivity online suite, BPOS Yes. Pre Office three sixty five, pre Microsoft three sixty five. But I really got to get my feet wet with just about anything because the focus for me was to build those demos when people would come over to the booth or we would launch a new feature.

You know, I got to work on how would that look when we would put it in a press release or up on stage for the keynote.

And everything since then has been getting closer to the product. So that was a little over a decade, total as far as getting in with the marketing team, moving over to, the engineering side of things and getting a little bit closer to the features and, you know, what it is the customers were wanting. So there's a lot of, you know, feedback loop and growth of the product and a lot of change, of course, as you know, especially within the Internet, you know, going from classic publishing to now, you know, hosting, you know, thousands, if not millions of sites across all the customers, and all the work that you do in the Internet space. So, it's been quite a journey.

And my one little last trivia thing is I was on a team for just a short while that built a special solution on top of SharePoint. So I got to work on a very small team of people who were really deep, effectively consultants, but they were developing a solution on top of SharePoint. So it was really fun to see it from, you know, your perspective of building on top of SharePoint as a platform. So there's a lot of a lot of a lot of ways into SharePoint, and that was my way in.

Yeah. And, you know, kind of being so close to it on the inside there, did you, you know, give us a sense of what it was like kind of seeing this thing evolving, growing, the take up that it was having.

What's that like to be a kind of part of, part of the team that's, that's creating this, you know, what is now this huge product used by, you know, millions of people across the world?

Yeah. So SharePoint, I think, is always has its roots in, being more than one thing.

And, obviously, it has a good customer base that's always grown. The capabilities have always grown or graduated.

And I think the element of how different features or different you know, even things that started as an acquisition that were brought into the SharePoint server, as they grew, one thing that I think really sets the SharePoint team apart is they see the value in in how the product grows, how the customers use it, and, of course, how partners use it and expand it. So they're looking at it from a lot of different angles. And, you know, being on the inside and being close to the engineering team, I really got to see how their decision making was to not try to be so narrow and focused, but to be a broad platform, which often leads to the question, is this an application or is it a platform?

Yeah. And confidently, I would say and from per your question, I saw it. It is its own thing. It is an application.

You can do things directly with SharePoint and SharePoint by itself. But there's also things that it contributes and now significantly as an underpinning content service. That's the platform.

You know that well because you build on top of the platform. Yeah. And customers, you know, purchase third party products or build their own customizations, and there's a lot of ways to extend SharePoint.

And I think I mentioned that because that's at the root of how the SharePoint team always approached building it. Not just to make it just good enough knowing that customers and partners would extend it and bring it forward, but that there was a lot of surface area because the horizontal aspect of SharePoint is maybe SharePoint isn't for everyone, but it can be.

And, you know, taking that approach meant that people could make it what it needed to be. And in the past, it was do whatever you want with it. It's your server.

That got a little changed in the cloud. But I think they kept that, pattern to be able to see is people are gonna use SharePoint, they're gonna extend it, and we should keep building it in that way.

Yeah. Around two thousand seven, I think SharePoint was a a lot about, you know, storing documents and improving, like, the SharePoint, like, so you could, like, store documents properly with metadata. That that was around the time also when I started, building solutions, visual web parts, and those things, like, for SharePoint. So how do you think, or how do you see, like, that SharePoint has evolved, like, to become then, like, a a more than Internet collaboration hub since thousand seven, like, to now?

Yeah. I I think the biggest thing, and this is not my phrase, but I heard, you know, in the past, it used to be that you needed a SharePoint PhD. You would go to SharePoint Medical School, and you would really become an expert truly. There were even some experts that were expert experts, you know, people that knew the depths and the plumbing.

And but it really was more of a product or a tool for IT. Mhmm. And I'd say, you know, in twenty ten, the user interface got a little bit better, not quite the modern SharePoint that we know.

And in twenty thirteen, there was this element of better search, better mobile experiences, or at least mobile experiences that you could build, and, of course, the cloud started to mature. So I think the big focus was let's make it friendly for IT and even friendlier in the cloud as far as having to manage less.

But it really was the focus of of what is the end user? Do we wanna scare them? Do we wanna make it accessible, both accessible from a a beginner and then accessible from, you know, people that that leverage different accessibility type technology? So it just became friendlier to use, and it's hard to compare with some applications that start off super bubbly and friendly like lists and loop and, of course, a ton of third party and competitors that, you know, started in the cloud and really had a big focus on user experience from the get go.

But I would say the growth of being able to be more addressable and accessible to a broader audience challenged the team a lot because it really was IT or designers that were making SharePoint look pretty and be functional.

And over time, it became less of a need for the masses and for the individuals to have that that that that work was already done or if not, better and more easy to use.

Yeah. I think the, you know, one of one of the things that, kind of becomes apparent to me in in, in SharePoint is the level of flexibility and extensibility is kind of simultaneously a sort of a bit of a strength and weakness. Right? I used to have a manager refer to these things as a kind of overstrength, and that, you know, that certainly feels true sometimes of, SharePoint. You know, I guess interesting about, you know, where where do you draw the line on the level of flexibility?

Yeah. I think it's a good it's a good dial. I think it leads a lot of consultants now. I'm actually learning this firsthand even though I knew it was true. But it leads a lot of people to say, well, it depends. What do you want? How do you wanna do it?

You know, what are you really trying to accomplish?

There might be a couple of ways to do it. and I think that sometimes presents a lot of challenges, you know, what is the right way.

and some of the things that then remove some of the challenges is because, you know, you can connect it to Power Automate and do a lot of wonderful things or go full board with a third party workflow offer, you know, and some things that that are a little bit more UX oriented like what you offer to be able to go and fully skin SharePoint in a in a safe way that has been proven out, you know, gives you that flexibility. and sometimes it is just what is your need? And I would challenge not necessarily to minimize what it is that people do with SharePoint or other technologies that can be extended.

But it's the build versus buy. You know, should we? Does the project really need, you know, a couple, you know, tens of thousands of dollars spent to do, you know, a little this? Or, you know, is it something that's important across the whole company?

It's gonna be used for years. Absolutely. You know, make it what it needs to be and also make it, more tied in and more integrated into the the aspects of, you know, how you've rolled out the rest of your technology.

Yeah. Yep.

Like, there are peoples that are sometimes negative about, using SharePoint as an intranet. We like, when we go to events, when we are, like, talking to people, we get, like, mixed feedback. Some people are very happy and very satisfied with SharePoint, for an Internet. And sometimes, the type of feedback that we get can be something like, SharePoint is boring. For Internet, it's too complicated. It's hard to find, information.

How do you see, like, that, perception?

Yeah. You know, it might start similar to what we were just talking about. A lot of people either think and have a perception that SharePoint is hard, and I and I will say that is a truth because it used to be a lot harder than it is. And it is also not the tool that everybody learns right off the bat.

You join a company in whatever industry, and you'll get email. You'll get pretty good at that. You'll get into Teams or Zoom or Slack or whatever. You'll get pretty good at that because you have to.

You use it every day. And then there will be the things that are appropriate per different roles, and that could be very different. A project manager compared to a designer, very different toolset.

So there isn't always the need that everybody needs SharePoint. But I think that the onus is on the those that are managing the intranet. And that could be, you know, a very distinct role, somebody who's gonna make the Internet look nice. It's gonna be functional. It's gonna be action oriented.

And I think the big thing, if you really use it as a communications tool, you can make it active in a way that it is the place where people are gonna get news. They're gonna learn about the right policies, you know, put it in the right place, make it so that it's truthful, and it's a place a a single source of truth, I guess.

But then, you know, make it functional and dynamic so that when I maybe turn to the Internet, let's say, once a week, if that's a common pattern Yeah.

It's a worthy one time a week. Maybe I spend thirty minutes reading some news. If I have some transactional things that I need to do, it's easy to find. It's actionable.

The applications, for the lack of a better way to say it, work well. So it's not rigid. Like, yes, that is where I fill out my time card, but it's not very easy to do. Or if it's a third party system, is it integrated well?

I think there's a lot of ways that the Internet managers or people who are communicators internally can more centralize, meaning keep some things out of email even if it does get emailed to them.

But centralizing the information, making it interesting, and keeping it active, there's always something to say.

And there's the seventy thirty rule. Thirty percent of us create content. Seventy percent of us consume it. And that that differs, of course, if you have something to say, say it. But it also means that in the seventy percent mode, you have to have a lot of content that's being created, or else why would you go to the Internet?

Something that we Sorry. Obviously, you go.

You know, there are different ways, like, how an Internet starts. Right? So it could be like that's, starting from an IT project, but, people can also get a lot of value when they work closely with consultants, who have experience in the field and have, like, you know, implemented many Internet projects and then can bring that knowledge and experience, to companies and have people, like, really create a strong information architecture and a strong Internet.

So that's that's the role, that that role is, like, going, as you said. So that as you said, so I think that's, yeah, that's an important, path as well.

Keen, keen to get your views on, your common bit of feedback that we hear in in the market that, you know, people are having a conversation internally about, you know, we need an intranet, a digital channel, and, you know, kind of comms team looking at making investments in a in a platform. And often what's presented to them is the IT team sitting there going, well, hey, you know, we got SharePoint. SharePoint's an intranet. You know, we don't need to spend any money on this thing. It's, you know, it's all there.

And, you know, it's a that's a that's a difficult thing for a team that is typically nontechnical to hear.

Any, you know, any views from you on that or, you know, kind of pushback or challenges that that, you know, you'd be giving to people on that one?

Yeah. I I think I would start now first, you know, there I was I was in the back of my mind, I wanted to find a little spot where I could say congratulations.

And I think it's appropriate here because, in one aspect, you know, the what does the Internet look like, you know, leads people to then what does the Internet do.

And the kudo that I wanted to give to you and your team is a report that I've been sort of a part of because I provided a quote to Sam Marshall and his team a long time ago, because part of my job in in the Wayback Machine was working with a lot of Internet partners just like Fresh. So, I know that you were named as one of the Choice Awards and if that's the right way to say it. Yeah. It's in the ClearBox, report. So congratulations. Just being in there, I think, is a win because people get to really see and see all the drill down of the pros and cons of all the things.

Yes.

But to your question, I think and I'll hopefully make sense of not just giving you a kudo for the sake that you deserve it. But the what goes on top of SharePoint, I think, is what makes it real, especially when there's that level of investment.

SharePoint by itself, it is true. It is very much more of a modern intranet.

I would say if you're a small company or a company that maybe doesn't have a lot of transactional information, which probably isn't a lot, but I think it's you know, for the breadth of Microsoft, they have millions of customers. There are gonna be those that can benefit from just using SharePoint out of the box. Mhmm. Maybe wiring it up and using something like Viva connections, so it's in Teams.

And look at that. You have a portal that you can log in, and it does, you know, the basic stuff. That doesn't mean it's basic, but it but it is fairly run of the mill, SharePoint. The things that SharePoint doesn't do by itself is it doesn't do a lot of scaling when it comes to how many sites do we need.

Mhmm. What do they need to look like? Does there need to be consistency both in the look and feel and how people navigate? You know, navigation is a big part of how people get around.

There's always the scary word around governance and sort of the depths of what, Jarbas was mentioning around information architecture.

Those things need to be considered, especially when you think of how well organized are we as a company, how many different aspects of our company do we have. That's projects, products, campaigns, people, regions, roles.

And to bring that all together in a cohesive manner, is challenging. I first think, need a dedicated group or person that's going to be the governing body. How are we gonna use SharePoint?

If on top of that question follows, the what do we want it to look like? We want it to reflect our branding. Maybe we want each team to have their own space like a hub site.

And there's lots of ways to then, you know, have a very long conversation about how somebody rolls out SharePoint. But I think it can't quite get there when you start to think, what are the right outcomes? What do we want it to look like? How do we want people to interact with it? What are some of the missing pieces? I think it's also always something that over time there may be different missing pieces.

And I think the way that I've, consumed how Fresh operates is you're very close to the SharePoint platform, the SharePoint features. If it's a good feature out of the box, great. Leverage it within your solution.

If it's missing or if there's things that just aren't yet quite on the road map, you've taken on, I think, some things based on what I've read using AI in interesting ways and within search. Like, that's a great fit. Mhmm. I bet that is something that's, you know, gonna come a little bit more into the out of box experience and maybe not always be a premium SKU.

But if they're investing in fresh, they're getting a look and feel. They're getting AI within search. They're getting some new web parts. There's a lot of reasons why they would go above and beyond SharePoint.

I think that's true for any customer that starts to either, I hate to use the phrase, but lift and shift from their old to new. Yeah. Or if they're lucky, just starting fresh, literally and figuratively. Yes.

You know, I think you'll get so far with SharePoint, and maybe that's okay for a lot of customers.

Yeah.

But then above and beyond, there's gonna be a lot of, wouldn't it be nice, or I think we need, or I read about this, let's check that out. So I think there's a lot of that.

And, you know, I think the other challenge I think organizations have is that kind of, you know, what you begin with maybe, you know, single site, something very small.

Any success that that thing has creates more content, more people, more sites, more structure. Mhmm. And, you know, unless some consideration is given to how this thing is gonna start growing, you know, that provides a bit of shape and definition.

You know, I think that that is genuinely where a lot of organizations get into trouble and end up with random sites and some guy called Gavin in finance that's, you know, publishing his thoughts from the shower, turning up on the homepage of the, you know, of what should be a, you know, curated You're now imagining a very wet SharePoint page coming out of the shower and creating it and promoting it to news, and this wet news goes out.

Yes. Yes. I I think you're probably making it sound better than it would actually.

May maybe. I don't know. Gavin, you'll get back to us. How's that working for you?

Yes. Yeah. We you know, the enthusiasm is great, and I think it you know, it's partly demonstrative of just how easy SharePoint is to adapt and change and for people to pick up. You know, as we said, it kinda creates some of those charges.

when you asked about flexibility, there are a lot of things, both the base plumbing of the default tenant name. That was a big, big piece of work that the team did that I think exemplifies of course, there's gonna be change, and there's gonna be a lot of change requests that come in. But something as fundamental as we started off with test contoso dot com or whatever we wanted to call the thing, and then we're like, nope. We're locking in on Contoso Inc or Contoso Electronics or whatever.

But all the way then up the stack from that base level to be able to choose a new root site for your Internet, to be able to change URLs for, you know, different elements, to be able to associate different sites to different hubs as opposed to the evilness that was subsites.

Mhmm. There is true flexibility on how you organize and change over time.

And it actually led me to create a session that, I think, just by title alone, will exemplify what you were saying, David, in the fact that sustaining an Internet from beginning to never finished Yeah. Is the reality. There are gonna be changes, whether Microsoft makes them or Fresh comes out with an update or a new feature or the customer business changes, the whatever product we cancelled or the name of that organization that this happened a ton of times when I was at Microsoft. Mhmm.

We were called, you know, whatever, Jeff Teper had named the group, and then AI came along. So he changed the name of the group. Purely internal, didn't impact anybody externally, but the names of the sites had to change. Yep.

Maybe the branding changed. You know? When the new SharePoint logo came out, everything turned teal. And, so, you know, the platform itself needed to adjust to that, And you multiply that by the millions of customers that are leveraging SharePoint.

Yeah.

All of your customers, hopefully, they have that flexibility. We chose a great design, and Fresh was able to get us there.

We changed our mind. Or, you know, the market changed and we need to change with it.

Yeah. I think that, you we're talking about flexibility. So that's the advantage of SharePoint. But then, like, in Fresh, the combination of both, like, Fresh will kind of give the consolidate experience, not just kind of filling the gaps, but kind of, you have, like, the entire package. But it's all of that is in SharePoint. So you have the flexibility that SharePoint provides, and, I think that's the build of the platform.

Yeah.

Yep. Have you, in in your in your travels, Mark, have you seen any, weird or surprising use cases for SharePoint?

You know, I've seen one that was kind of fun.

It was basically a a solution that was built within a SharePoint site as an application, and the whole notion of it was to manage the routing of trucks. So physical trucks. I believe there may be more now. But at the time, it was five hundred trucks. And within those trucks, they had, iPads, devices, and they were scanning shipment boxes.

And the whole of it was managed within a SharePoint site, leveraging a SharePoint list, multiple lists, I think, because they had a couple of scenarios, and a lot of physical scanning and barcode action.

And on top of that, there was a power automate and a and a power app. The power app is more for the administrators on the back end. But, you know, may not be silly or unique, but the fun part about it is what was inside the boxes were the bobbleheads that we all know, the Funko bobbleheads.

Right.

And it literally was how they transported in between their warehouses to get them ready for the various shipments that came in. And, so it was really fun to see how they, you know, built out this solution.

And it really was an in house built solution, and it was very oriented around, you know, the kind of the depth of plumbing of just project management, asset management. But it was fun that it crept over into the real world. Yes. Real world.

Yes.

There's then the extreme of some names I can't even remember if I can say, but just imagine you're enjoying a bubbly beverage that happens to be advertised on the NFL. Pretty big, you know, product name. Their intranet was very red and very colorful and extremely pixel oriented. They were very particular.

Mhmm.

And it was very interesting to see how from many years, same as I could say about tracking, the Microsoft intranet, when I would, at the you know, in in in the way back times, log in, it was an on prem server using classic publishing, and, you know, it was it was, a lot of work for the team to put together. And the same with this team company.

Their intranet evolved over the years, and it was extremely, very specific, very complex. And, of course, worldwide, you know, from how they used it, moving that to the cloud, that was a big project. So seeing a customer that was more focused on the look and feel And what it started out is, I think, the original challenges, you know, the feature requests that would come off of that to then, you know, over time, see that that was also capable or maybe not yet capable in the cloud, and then moving, you know, through some of those hurdles.

Yeah.

A lot of it was that master page approach, which you remember and probably brings a tear to your eye to think about working with them.

But that was kind of the crossover of if a true well designed Internet, something that the design aspect was almost the prominent reason that they had it or the main requirements, you know, landed in that space, to see that not only, you know, how they work with SharePoint, to your question, it was quite fascinating. I kinda didn't know you could do that with SharePoint, SharePoint Designer or beyond. It was probably an Adobe product or or something.

But then the evolution of being able to see that now times many, in the cloud where you see the whole being back to the ClearBox report, the examples that they give, are really, really beautiful looking sites. And I don't wanna carry this too much because I'm not trying to oversell it. But there is a notion in the community, especially, that SharePoint now in the capabilities that both by itself and what you would bring to it is something that people want to look like SharePoint to you know, it used to be, you know, make it look not like SharePoint. And, again, not my own phrase, but, I think it's very true. You know, you get a really nice looking site and functional. And then on top of that, you know, you bring, an even greater level of look and feel and consistency.

Yeah. You know, I love those kind of examples because what I often find is behind, you know, behind these kind of very, attractive, usable, useful, valuable interfaces is a a single or team of human beings that really care about this stuff. Right? You know? And their enthusiasm is evident when you're talking to them. They're, you know, showing you their Internet, talking to you about what goes into it. You know, you're kinda watching them coming alive talking about this stuff.

And it's, you know, it's really nice to, see someone that's both got the kind of care about the organization that they work in and the people they represent, but also often very excited about the technology as well.

Yeah. I would imagine your company and the position you're in gets into a lot of the, what are you trying to do with your Internet? And getting to the right outcomes and priorities. And, hopefully, you can do everything. That that would be great. But it is fun to see, especially different roles. There might be a communications manager who wants to be able to schedule and report and do all these wild things with communications.

And then you've got somebody in the IT department who needs to connect to Salesforce and have that plumb through, you know, a nice simple web part that shows you what are your sales opportunities this week.

So going through all of those conversations, I bet, leads to I'm glad to hear the the enthusiasm. Yeah.

But I think it also probably reminds you, like, yeah.

Okay. That you know, it does have to be kinda for everyone. Yeah. And it has to meet most of the requirements, if not all of them.

Yes. Yeah.

And, Mark, the do you have a favorite SharePoint feature?

Maybe, like, currently or, like, made from the past that you could share with?

Well, I'll give you two because one, unfortunately, went by the wayside, but I think it was a wonderful step pre AI, because of all the value of the Microsoft Graph.

But it was the visualization tool. So Microsoft Graph tells you who you've been working with, what you've been working on, and what you have access to. And, of course, now a lot more because of Copilot.

And on top of that, set this little nice little application that visualized all of that for you, and that application was called Microsoft Delve.

And I loved it. Loved it. Right? Great. Great. Had a really nice profile experience. Yeah.

So people could really learn about who you are, who you work with, who you work for, and what you work on. You know, this lens of if I have access to it, I can see it by the identity of somebody else that I've met or I've heard about or whatnot.

And it also had a feed element, you know, sort of the early days of the concept of a feed within the enterprise. There was always, you know, lots of feeds with all the different social feeds that we all have come and gone or stay with or whatever.

So I think this notion of Delve, you know, really sits front and center for me. I worked with a really great colleague of mine who got to kick off Delve. I got to carry Yeah. Delve marketing for a little bit when he transitioned over to engineering.

But there was just this element of, yeah. Okay. I think I understand what the graph is, but why is it important? And I think Dell not only made it really visible if you're looking at it from a technology solution, but it was also something you could turn to and discover things, which was a new muscle.

You know? Search and find? Great. To discover, even better.

So sad that it, you know, made its way in and out, but I think it really highlighted some of what we talked about. How do you make things more dynamic? How do you show people things that they haven't looked for but might be relevant to them?

So I really like Delve. The other one that I use all the time that I think is just an important feature is the element of I created a SharePoint page, and I wanna convert it to a news article.

Really simple step and maybe not the sexiest feature. But the reason why I like it so much is if I create a page in SharePoint and I send it to people directly, like or I link it in a navigation element or I put it somewhere, people still have to come across it. Whereas with news, it assumes it's gonna go beyond the site or beyond the page, you know, for a lack of a better way. And that means it goes into the news web part, maybe gets rolled up into the hub news or the news of the whole site, then it gets sent out to people. We we had the SharePoint mobile app, and there's other ways that now bubble up the news that's coming from SharePoint into the Viva connections dashboard.

Yeah.

So it just has a life of its own. If you really want something to have reach and eyeballs, converting something from a page to a news article or start as a news article from the get go. But the feature is you go and click the promote button, and you make this news from a page. I think it's a great feature and has a really great outcome for people who are trying to communicate.

This gives, like, more options like, also the option for hosting. Right? So you can boost, a news a news source. That's right.

Directly.

That's right. That's right. Pages, they're just are just sitting there in the slow lane, and then news comes along.

Let's, let's talk a bit about, intranet owners then. So, have you have you got, you know, any advice, guidance, top tips that you'd give for people that are managing intranets, and doing this into SharePoint?

Yeah. I think, you know, the biggest thing for somebody who's going to be owning the Internet is they really do have to think around the governance plan. And Yeah. There's there's there are people in places better than me to really go into the depths of that. But if you are starting to think about, you know, what is our top level portal or multiple portals, we need something for HR, for IT. We need something for, you know, our policies or our, you know, the rigor of what it is that our values as a company.

And beyond that, you know, that you wanna have a communications platform. Who will create news? How will it go out? There's gonna be top down news that's news for everyone. There's gonna be news that's gonna be bubbled up, from peers and maybe up to, different levels of management.

So putting that in place, thinking about the structure, thinking about to the what we talked about earlier, how do you wanna grow and be flexible over time, and keep that all intact with permissions. So setting the permission structure, not fun for everyone, but it is there to to be created. So creating in a way that makes sense in how you organize, who can see what, what committees or groups are gathering, you know, all those things. Yeah.

So I think there's the base level of, you know, from an IT perspective, you know, where do you start?

Then I think there's the element of how are people gonna be accessing this? What is the user experience that you want? What do you want to connect and integrate so that it brings people if they're gonna have one or three starting points to their day, they're gonna open their email or they're gonna open up their Teams or Slack, and then what? You have the option to have maybe one or two more things.

I know Microsoft is very focused on creating the Copilot experience, so you can ask the the chat experience, you know, what is the last five emails and summarize them for me. But if you have things that are gonna be more, rigorous, forms that people need to fill out, information that people need to attest to, and do certain actions, if not, you know, the broader communication that we talked about, you need to structure that in. What is that entry point and how valuable can it be? Try to make it as much as a as a single pane of glass within reason because you can't you can't pack everything in there. But if I have a sales division and it's maybe a specific sales within the United States, And maybe there's a a a Asia based sales region and maybe something in in the EMEA region.

Focusing on maybe a single sales portal, but creating multiple languages, creating, you know, different things that either appear to certain audiences or not. And that's the user experience. You know, you can do a lot of ways to dial up and dial down what it is that people see. So I think user experience is a big one, including mobile, which is now a lot easier than it used to be.

But meeting people where they are and how they work, I think, is really important. Yep. And then the other thing, kinda to talk about it again, but to talk about it through the life of a inter, intranet manager, is that that overtime challenge, when we acquire a new company or when we launch a new product or when we, you know, do something, how is our intranet gonna support being able to enable that team who's leading the charge or maybe the the centralized body, and just giving them the tools that they need. And that starts to get into the not so SharePoint things, where Microsoft, I think, did a pretty sizable investment with Microsoft Veeva.

There are a lot of elements of Viva that come into play, and I think some of them are fairly important and close to SharePoint, not just that they're powered by SharePoint in the end, but there are ways to hold different types of conversations.

Who are you talking to? What do you have to say? Is it a one to many? Is it a one to few?

And there's a lot of ways to build community that aren't oriented around a single product or a single region. Maybe it's just a an area of interest. So things like Viva Engage, come into play. How integrated that is into the SharePoint experience, I think, is important.

You can always go to Viva Engage, but you can also pull Engage into SharePoint, which if I were architecting things, I would think, what part of the page is a place where people can ask questions or they can provide, you know, bigger milestone updates?

Great if it's a SharePoint news article. Nothing wrong with that. But I think if you're trying to speak to the people that you don't know about because you're in a sizable company, engage gives you that ability because people can sign up of area for areas of interest, and they get communicated too even if they're not a part of a hierarchical approach. So, you know, some of that is in the broader sense of the communication, what is your communication plan.

And just to round everything out no matter whether it's SharePoint or something. But if it's a sizable project and you've invested in fresh or you've, you know, built out something on the back end like a Salesforce integration or you have some application that you built using lists and PowerApp. Whatever that is, especially with the Internet, is both introducing it so that people know what it is and why you're doing it, and then continuous adoption.

Training can't be more important. Show people we created this great beautiful Internet. And when you click on this button, you can do x. Remember how you used to have to do it?

You used to have to go three or four clicks down and over to this other site and log in again. We've fixed the authentication. We've created this button so that you can do the x thing. And I think if you tell people that and give appropriate training and kinda knock on the door a couple of times a year Yeah.

You're gonna have a lot of success because people are gonna be aware. They're gonna know. And then there's that, you know, part of the adoption plan, which might be the executive support. Get people that you know, people are gonna tune into for sure because they're the leaders of the company or they're important in a certain launch or a certain campaign.

And, you know, have them carry a little bit of that water. Hey. We've got a great new Internet. I'm gonna be posting some of my monthly news articles here. I hope you subscribe or whatever the action is. But getting the executive support as part of the adoption plan, I I think is really important too.

Yeah. We did a, we did an interview with, Abby Webster from, TD Bank.

And she was talking about the kind of, you know, what's been a fairly, extensive rollout of an intranet that, you know, her view is it's probably never gonna be finished. It'll just be something that will keep keep on evolving. And, you know, she was she was saying that the the thing that they have had to keep in mind and keep reminding themselves about is, you know, the team that are building this are doing an important job, but they're not the center of it. Right?

Yeah. You know, it's the people that are gonna be using this thing that you gotta be keeping in mind constantly, checking in with them, communicating with them. You know, it's so easy to kind of be seduced by all this kind of lights and laser show of an implementation project. Yeah.

But people that matter most are the ones that are gonna be at the other side of it.

Yeah. That's a that's a big one.

I think the ability to just go like this for a second Yeah.

Take it in. You're gonna be doing what? Oh, I didn't think about that. Yeah.

You know, that gets back to the what are your requirements? But if your requirement is to make this useful for the employee, check-in with them, ask them. You know, they may be lots of different levels of what they're doing and how they're using it, or or they didn't even know that they had the opportunity to have a say. Give them a channel to provide feedback both before you get started, before you're gonna roll out, and then always, like we've been talking about, that that never finished part is, how's it going?

If it's not going very well, better change it or your investment's gonna, you know, lose its value.

Let's then talk quickly about, storytelling.

Sometime ago, you wrote the, like, the service that SharePoint built, which says story, that kind of shows, like, how SharePoint is the foundation for many of, like, the service that we experience nowadays. And I think that's a very nice example of storytelling, illustrating, the importance of SharePoint. Like, how like, for for our audience, like, you don't communicate this. How important do you see storytelling when you are communicating with people?

Yeah. I I think it's really important. And just to put a a little bit more of a visual on what you mentioned, it was a really fun project for me. So thank you for for bringing it up.

But it was basically, in the form of a story told to children about SharePoint. That that was the notion, and it was built off of the house that Jack built, which was the original story. And the parody was SharePoint has really built this house, Microsoft three sixty five, when you really get under the cover. So if the question that I got, just as the one of the SharePoint marketers at the time, you know, what is SharePoint these days? Or the harder question, is SharePoint dead?

For me, I could answer it, you know, in a lot of different ways. I could, you know, just write, you know, no. We've got great investments. We've got thousands of employees and developers and designers, and the we, you know, is the Microsoft at the time.

But the better part of the answer is to to not get defensive about the response and to really lead with the value of, hey. I'm on this SharePoint journey, and I really enjoy what it is that the team has built. And some of the things you might not know is the brand of SharePoint has become a little less important because there are other primary brands that are what a lot of people see at the time, Office three sixty five or Microsoft three sixty five. In the way back, really, it was Office or BPOS or whatever the element was.

SharePoint was always a part of it. And the story that was really fun, I, wrote with, Sue Hanley, who you probably know really well, and I hope your audience knows. When we say information architecture, you better think of Sue Hanley. And Rebecca Jackson, who in her own right is a great, a UX and a big great trainer in the experience, realm, but she's also a great illustrator.

So, she volunteered to do some of the all of the drawings.

So, I hope maybe we can put a link in your show notes or get it out there just so people can see it. But to your question, the telling of the story, what is SharePoint? This was one of the ways of answering it that kinda came up, up in our minds, and it really was the value of, okay, there's SharePoint. Like we mentioned earlier, it's an application and a platform.

If you go into the platform realm and you just keep your blinders on of how does Microsoft use it as a platform. Well, it's part of Microsoft Teams. When you go into a channel and you click the files tab, that's SharePoint.

When they rolled out Microsoft Lists and Microsoft Loop, it's all stored in SharePoint. There is no, application without SharePoint. And then you go into things like Whiteboard. Whiteboard is stored in SharePoint special container called SharePoint embedded, but it's SharePoint.

And you go into the search x aspects, and you go into Microsoft Stream. Originally, it started in Azure, Azure Media Services.

Now, effectively, Azure Media Services or a improved media experience is now in SharePoint. So guess what? Microsoft Stream videos throughout the Internet. I bet you do a lot of work with videos, powered by Stream, effectively powered by SharePoint. So the list goes on and on, and that story evolved by talking about all the things, both past and present. There are some things in there that are now no longer because Delve is in there.

But just painted a picture that there was this house, Microsoft three sixty five, and a lot of it was built by SharePoint and continues to be truly run by the SharePoint content services engine or platform, however you wanna look at it.

and to the extent of the last thing, for the work that you do, the third party ecosystem, the realm of opportunity for you to have a product that then can be built on top of SharePoint Yeah.

To then be an even more beautiful and functional house that Jack built. Yeah. Not too bad.

Yeah. And then, kind of, I guess, extending, continuing that a little bit further, and doing a bit of, crystal ball gazing, right, into the future of digital workplace and, digital employee experience and intranets. You know, something, I guess, that we're hearing more and more from customers is along the lines of, you know, what do we need an intranet for, Dave? Copilot is gonna be the, you know, it's gonna be the silver bullet to all of history's, intranet problems.

And, you know, I guess, you know, we see that there's kind of a couple of responses to this that, you know, yeah, in some ways, right, prompt based interfaces certainly, you know, appear to be taking over.

And maybe for, you know, a a subset of the audience in organizations, it is gonna be the way that they'll be interacting with content. You know, I guess in that in that model, the shape and definition of an intranet, I think, makes it easier to answer the questions that people are likely to be answering. Mhmm.

You know, what are your what are your views on, on this topic?

I think the thing with AI and with Copilot and things that people might be doing with SharePoint content outside of of Copilot, but leveraging aspects of AI, I think it's a very pull model.

Yeah.

So I, as an individual, I go to my prompt based interaction or maybe have some things that are automated, and it's very oriented around me programming my experience. I ask it a question, so I'm gonna get an answer. And I can probably get a a fairly accurate, if not a hundred percent accurate answer, because it was designed that way. Question, answer.

But if I have a a a story to tell or I have something to promote, I can't expect that people are gonna ask Copilot that right question. Yeah. What is this thing that Mark wants everybody to know? It's really important to the business.

And I probably have a site, and it may come up in some people's chat experience.

But it's not gonna it's not gonna come to them without me doing something, and it's not gonna be formatted in the way that I wanna take them through this new information. Anytime I see things that are out that are, maybe launches of new features and you get to see it internally, there's usually some really nice crafted experiences that people have designed so that I can just understand what is this and why was it built.

I don't think I'm gonna get that if I go into AI and I go, I'm gonna go looking for new things.

Yeah.

Because I don't know what to look for. I I I'll give the one example that wasn't AI oriented at all, but I remember when we first, we, at the time being when I was at Microsoft, launched the Surface machines. So Microsoft Surface, you know, these really nice interesting computers that I'm telling you, nobody knew about those things for a very long time until they were revealed. And internally, they built a beautiful site so that you could see them, you could understand why we were doing it, you could understand, you know, the features and the functionality.

Of course, you could get into the competitive analysis. How did this compete with Apple and Chromebooks and all this stuff? And so it really was a crafted story experience. We want you to learn about this. That's the Surface team at the time. And I don't know if people would have known, at some point in time, this is ready and it before it went to market.

Can I learn about this? It was probably pretty locked down. That's why I never heard of it. So if it was locked down, it's not gonna be in my feed even if I type in what's the super secret project we're working on to compete with Apple.

Is there anything I don't know today?

That's right. That might that might create a a fun prompt, and I might if I had, you know, the right connection to people at the time, that I might have seen a couple of things. But, I think there's that differentiator of the pull versus the push. I I know what I'm looking for, so that's a great tool.

I have access to my calendar. I have access to all the documents that I have available to me. But then there are gonna be those things that I don't have access at all, and that might be until a certain point in time. And then once I know about it, maybe I can use Copilot to understand, you know.

You you reference this site and tell me the summary of what I need to know. That's great.

Yeah.

But I think there's still a lot of things that are going to be, you need to take this training. We want you to learn about this product. There's a wonderful campaign, and we want you to maybe donate some money, you know, if you're doing a giving campaign. There are gonna be a lot of things that you can't do in chat. Or if you did do them, you you almost have to go to everybody and say, here's what we want you to put into the prompt.

Yeah.

And or, you know, do some things that are gonna go automatically out to everybody. I think I think that notion of pushing out to everybody is still going to be not something you quite get away with Yeah. Copilot.

Yes.

And that that may change. I don't really know. The crystal ball aspect of is, did I even see Copilot coming? No.

Did I see use of the graph and what we at the time called artificial intelligence? Absolutely. But, well, you know, ChatGPT changed the game and Yes. Yeah.

You know, Microsoft jumped all over it. So I think there's a lot of things that it will get better at, and they are definitely spending a lot of resources and even taking over some what was a big entryway, which I used to tout a lot and I still do because it's a it's a good place to start. It's the Microsoft three sixty five app. Now you type in, I think, m three six five dot cloud dot Microsoft, and it's now Copilot.

It used to be my sites, my news, my documents, my lots of me, me, me. And now it's a little bit of starting back to I have to put in something to get started versus kind of a casual, I don't have to even touch my keyboard and maybe I just scroll the page and learn some things. Yeah. Then I might learn what I wanna put in a prompt to do a little bit further research or deeper dive.

So I don't think it's going away either of them. I think Copilot is gonna aggressively, get better and become more prevalent, and people are gonna get better at using it, which I think is still kind of its issue right now. You know, you talk about prompt engineering. It's like, no.

just garbly goop talk to the thing, and it'll spit back some of the new things.

Yeah.

And then as you get better, you can craft things, and prompting is, of course, important. Yeah.

But it'll also evolve and become, you know, sort of these automated dynamic experiences, I think will be driven by, you know, a a button that might be the the thing that they want you to click, but it'll be driven in a in a more AI oriented way. And Yeah. That'll be interesting to see.

Yes. Yes. Lots of, lots of things to come.

A lot of possibilities. Like, like, will the Internet become maybe just a a search box, like, search bar? and that's it. So you go from there.

But, like, the the aspect here is, like, you have a lot of pulling. Right? So you it's AI pulling data, on your behalf. Right?

So given the prop, the AI goes and take that data. It will be interesting when, we have the push aspect. Right? So that AI can reach you, with personalization or, like, via a team in the organization.

So that's interesting to see how it works.

I think one feature that that exemplifies what you're saying that might be the transitional element or a pattern of it. Right now, you can do the scheduled prompts.

Mhmm.

You can, of course, build an autonomous agent to do x or y. But the result currently is it just sort of brings you into the chat experience with the information that you're querying. Yeah. I I think there's an interesting layer of presentation that maybe will evolve to not not lean on something like a newsletter, but something that's curated, maybe a little more visual, something that just leverages some element of stock imagery or some visual cues that may not necessarily have to be the official, you know, photography or the official campaign, but something that just lends itself to be a little bit more, ease of of consumption because there's a visual element.

And how it gets delivered to you, I think, is gonna be really important. But Yeah. Yeah. It'll be interesting.

I'm curious if I can flip it back on you.

Copilot is what it is today. You might be, you know, in some certain meetings where you get a little NDA that you can't talk about here. But what are you already beyond the search work that you've done with AI thinking like, okay, Copilot is a part of the Internet. How can we make it more of a part of the Internet?

Yeah. Well, you know, I guess this is something that, we spent a lot of time kind of wrestling with. We began the year with a sort of hypothetical question of, the browser's gone. Right?

Traditional UI of intranets has disappeared. People aren't using it anymore. Now what? You know, what is the intranet in that world?

What does this look like?

And, you know, I think without, you know, agents as an option, I think that world would be pretty challenging. And the idea of being able to bring together some context of an intranet, wrap it into an agent or series of agents, I think gives us quite, you know, a bunch of sort of interesting, interesting ideas being able to deliver those things in a Copilot user interface, being able to deliver those things in a browser based interface. Mhmm. You know, the, you know, I think one of the strengths of doing these sort of doing things like intranets in Microsoft three six five is content lives once.

Multiple ways of being able to get into that content. So, you know, I think we've been experimenting with, with some of these new technologies over this year. I think the thing that we're always looking for is how do you fit this into an employee's life. Right?

Whether they're frontline, desk based, office based. You know, what's the what's the optimal user journey for somebody to get into this content that they need? You know? and as you say, both that combination of things that they wanna know and things that they don't know, but the organization would like them to find out.

Yeah. It sounds like, maybe we'll see in a future ClearBox report your next level of innovation for for things that you can't talk about now, but as you're rolling out. I I think it's exciting. And the part that you said, which I would never want to go without highlighting for people is AI is great.

Copilot is great. The the conversations you can have are amazing. I on the on the consumer side, I've been leveraging Copilot just to have a a chat while I'm walking my dog, not because I I'm bored, but because, oh, you know, I can Yeah. Literally hit a button and then start talking to it.

Hands free, phone in my pocket, asking it questions, asking it for perceptions of, you know, ideas that I have.

Yeah.

The whole idea of Kashbox LLC, which is my my new consultation offering, maybe one of many things that I do. But, I was just asking, you know, how do how do I start a new business? What are some things I should consider? And it was a great twenty minute conversation with Copilot.

Yeah.

Real Bluetooth headset with my phone in my pocket. It was really cool. Yeah. But the element that I think is still crucial, and I think intranets are the home of it, is the content, the base level content, whether it's a spec article or a spec that you wrote for a product or a big news campaign that you ran for many weeks or months.

Mhmm.

Just documents in general and interactions with people.

The content is really what drives the return, the thing that is gonna get sent back after a prompt. Yeah. And if you don't have good content or you don't have a lot of content, the elements that then come back are kinda not made up, but there should be more for it to pour over based on lots of different questions it's gonna get asked.

Yeah.

And if you are creating content, even if you don't know you're creating content, you're probably creating content that's useful to your future's prompts and others.

That content, which is really a big topic of how do you make the IA important to AI Yeah. It's crucial. And there's great sessions I've seen that other people have delivered that, you know, you gotta get your house in order so that AI, on top of everything that you do in the Internet, is functional and truthful and reliable and fresh and new and all that. And that that comes to the all the things that I think that we've been talking about.

But you take the Internet out and, you know, even think if you take some of the visuals of the Internet out Yeah.

You start to really dumb down AI. Even if you don't know it, you really are.

Yeah. Yeah. Agreed. Agreed.

Yeah.

I think you need, like, Go ahead, Jarvis.

Who is this? No. Like, I think as so you need the place where you can create, generate that content. Right?

So that's, like, for the, kind of communications team. And then for the employee, you also need a place where you can validate the information that Copilot is still facing. Right? Because but otherwise, it might be just something that AI made came up with.

So you have, like, that, central place where you can go and validate the information.

But, David, you want to I was just gonna say, let's, let's wrap up with, with a couple of questions, Mark.

What is your current favorite app that you're using at the moment? What's the one thing that you can't do without?

Well, it's not it's not Microsoft three sixty five related, but it is it is a fun one. We just got a new LG TV.

Right. And it has a nice remote control, but it also has a really great mobile application. And because it's very app oriented, so we cut the cord a long time ago. And the application, previously, we were using Roku.

And Roku had a pretty good application where you can navigate your different apps and watch your TVs. But the one that's called ThinkQ is the one that's associated to the LG TVs, and it does probably anything LG. You can connect it to this app. But once you get into the TV interface, it's super clean.

It's really oriented around navigating from Netflix to HBO to, you know, some random ones that we have for documentaries and whatnot. And it's just easy to use. So, I'd have to say the ThinkQ by LG gets my my kudo for today.

Nice. Well, look. That's good on two levels, Mark. No one else has sent this as their favorite app, and I am just about to make the switch Alright.

Over to over to this, as a kind of service as well. So, it's good it's good for me that you, having a good experience.

Excellent. Well, they say life is good.

So Yes.

Yes. That's true. And if people wanna get in touch, Mark, to talk to you about anything that we've talked today, where's the best place for people to do this?

Yeah. I'd say central, if you wanna chat or see what I'm up to. LinkedIn, I'm pretty active on LinkedIn.

If you just go to LinkedIn dot com slash mark dash Kashman.

Very easy to find as long as you spell it with a k. The last name is k a s h m a n. So active in LinkedIn, still active on Twitter and Blue Sky just because it's fun, it's easy, and you can share a bunch of different kinds of things there, not just work oriented.

But, also, I have a blog that I have, maintained for a number of years, both while I was at Microsoft and now post Microsoft. It's called the Kashbox, and it's easy to find if you just go to Kashbox dot substack dot com. And the plug for Substack, the reason why I like it is if you're interested in things that I write, it actually comes to your inbox. So it's like it's like SharePoint news.

You don't have to go to it. It'll come to you, so you don't have to think like, oh, when's Mark gonna publish something amongst everything else that you wanna consume. So, my substack is pretty active. About every two to three weeks, I'm publishing an article and highlighting certain videos and bringing certain things in.

And the last thing I'll say is I'm trying to get back into the speaker realm by going to different events. I'll be at the community days or sorry, the collab days, New England. That's in the Boston area in Burlington. So I'll be speaking with Sue Hanley there.

We're co presenting two sessions. And I've started to put my, speaker requests out there, by submitting sessions, to a couple of different shows both this year and next. So, certainly, in person is always fun to chat with people to learn what they're up to, and I hope to be, at various events throughout the year.

So Okay.

Come to Europe. We'll gladly do it. Please say hi. Yeah. Yeah. Definitely.

Amazing. Thank you so much for joining us today, Mark. Really appreciate it.

Absolutely. Thanks for having me on, and, have a great rest of your day.

Cheers. Bye.