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.
David Bowman [00:00:14]:
Okay, so the thing that we were going to talk about today was if SharePoint is so great, why does Fresh exist or why do things like Fresh exist if we were going to try and maintain some level of independence, which obviously we don't have to because it's our thing. And we've got a new friend with us today. Hi, Maddie.
Madeleine Ryderheim [00:00:29]:
Hi.
David Bowman [00:00:29]:
All right?
Madeleine Ryderheim [00:00:30]:
Yeah, all good.
Jarbas Horst [00:00:31]:
Good.
David Bowman [00:00:32]:
So, you know, I think when we think about SharePoint as a service that we build our product on, SharePoint is a lot of things. It can be an intranet, it can be a document management system, it can be a knowledge management system. There's a, there's a lot of things that it can do. And I guess Microsoft's aim for SharePoint is that, you know, it can, it can be anything to anyone ultimately, you know, it's a, it's a content management platform. You can store anything that you like in it. You can access that in a range of different ways in SharePoint. Directly, teams, mobile, whatever it is, you can find it however you like. And I guess you know what that comes with when you think about SharePoint in the context of the rest of Microsoft 365 is, you know, the scale of the engineering challenge there pretty significant.
David Bowman [00:01:20]:
Right. You know, there's a lot going on there. A lot of services to integrate with, a lot of security, a lot of accessibility, a lot of things to think about and really only so much time jobless. Do you think that's the reason that SharePoint isn't an intranet product or do you think there are other things going on there?
Jarbas Horst [00:01:35]:
Well, it's a good point. I don't think that, you know, by default SharePoint is an Intranet. We discussed that kind of the previous episode and as we also discussed, like it requires a lot of configuration for you, like to make that become an intranet. By default you have a set of different functionalities that are not playing together to give you the Intranet experience. So then it requires then the configuration, well, the setup or maybe a third party solution that then can help you achieve that and like Make SharePoint and intranet.
David Bowman [00:02:06]:
So it's a kind of foundational service, right?
Jarbas Horst [00:02:10]:
Definitely. It gives you the baseline, isn't it? So it gives you, as we also discussed so in terms of content authoring, well, creating the content, presenting that content, it provides like things also like the metadata that you can use then like to target that content to your audience. So you have all of that. And it also goes beyond, if we looked in here, not just like at Intranet communication, you have Also the aspects of document management that's built in in SharePoint or that's part of SharePoint. So you have all of that already there. And it's maybe more like adding something that will bring all of that together, providing like a seamless experience for the end users to use.
David Bowman [00:02:49]:
Yeah. And, you know, I guess we hear quite a lot that Microsoft are democratizing it for all users. And I think, you know, it's important to keep in mind that their focus is on making things easier for end users to accomplish. That's not necessarily bypassing people that are kind of intranet managers or trying to manage an intranet solution, but it isn't necessarily aimed at, at that role. Right. It's something that's democratized for everybody. And Mandy, you're the head of Product Ops at Fresh. It's your responsibility to make sure that people like Jarbas and I are kept in line.
Madeleine Ryderheim [00:03:24]:
It's not easy.
David Bowman [00:03:26]:
No, no. Well, but I guess the key point about your role is to make sure that when we are planning, building, thinking about things that we're going to add into Fresh, that, you know, you're thinking about that foundational layer in SharePoint. Tell us a bit about, you know, your, your role, what you do and the role that you play in the, in the team.
Madeleine Ryderheim [00:03:50]:
I would say over the years that my role has changed a lot, but at the moment my role is sort of, yeah, definitely being sort of between you guys who are looking at the market, looking, talking to our clients and all of that, and you're coming up with great ideas, but then trying to figure out how my team actually can build those things. So obviously have a great team that I work with, product managers, owners, developers, and we obviously look at what's then possible in terms of how we can tie that functionality into Microsoft as the foundational layer. Not only things like permissions or where things sit in Azure or Term Store, all of those things that we don't want to talk about because it's technical and boring, but we have to think about those things and how we can make those things easy for the end user in the end. So we have this sort of grid of things that we have to do, a tick box for each. Have we considered accessibility for our features, for example, which is super important? Have we figured out the UI, how is it going to seamlessly work with both the rest of the Fresh features, but also within the Microsoft space so it doesn't stand out like a sore thumb? We really wanted to sort of integrate and look good at together with everything else.
David Bowman [00:05:11]:
Yeah.
Madeleine Ryderheim [00:05:12]:
And then there's a whole other long list of things that we think about to make sure that the end user's experience, whether it's the Intranet owner or the actual employee accessing the Intranet and accessing these features, that it works for them. That's the most important thing for us in the end.
David Bowman [00:05:27]:
Yeah. And that it behaves nicely on the Microsoft service of SharePoint, right?
Madeleine Ryderheim [00:05:31]:
Yeah, absolutely. And not just within the browser, but thinking about mobile Viva connections, like all of these things and how it all ties together, that's within the Microsoft ecosystem, which is a good foundation. But how do we bridge that gap, as I think you've talked about before, how do we bridge that gap? How do we make it better and fulfill the need of those wishes that our clients have?
David Bowman [00:05:57]:
So we've got that kind of foundational layer in SharePoint of sites permission security architecture, and we've created this additional set of features and functionality, I guess, kind of like level one features and functionality for display, content aggregation, UI, as well as defining the edges of the intranet and SharePoint. Because, you know, I think when you think about SharePoint as a product or service that you're running a workload like Intranet in understanding where that begins and ends is really important. Right. You know, what sites, what content, what information is the, you know, is kind of makes up the functionality in the intranet. There's probably a whole other episode to talk about those things. So, you know, that kind of level one functionality of the UI, the kind of bringing together the SharePoint bits and pieces and then we've got this kind of level 2 set of features and functionality, you know, Jarbas, some thinking about things like editorial calendar, you know, what other things have we got in the box that would kind of be at that level?
Jarbas Horst [00:06:55]:
We have many options, I think three options that I like a lot, like the functionality in the product, I really like the entire calendar is definitely one of them. Really adds better for people managing the content publishing on the Intranet. Then I think the search capabilities and the way how it has evolved is really strong. And of course the AI part, it's a current topic and it's very heavily present in Microsoft 365 with Copilot, for example. So it's definitely something our clients expect. And we definitely also have clients coming to us sometimes and they want to see the AI features we have in the product or it's kind of pop part of their list of priorities of functionalities that they want to see in their intranet. So those are kind of three Main.
David Bowman [00:07:42]:
Areas, let's dig into the features are important. It's good to understand what the features do in Jarvis. Perhaps if you could tell us a little bit about what Editorial Calendar does. But I guess the thing that I'm most interested in for this conversation today is why we built it. What was the problem that we were trying to fix. Talk to us a little bit about how we came up with Editorial Calendar.
Jarbas Horst [00:08:02]:
Definitely. But before we get there, I think when we are looking at building a solution like an Intranet solution in Microsoft 365, so there are gaps that you want to close. So there are functionalities that Microsoft bring and maybe they are not 100% from the point of view of clients. One example here, if you think of the announcements in the connections. So those announcements, they just exist within Vivo connections, but there are clients also that they want to see that Vivo connection announcements available on the Intranet. So this is a kind of closing a gap, right? And then you have the features that where we implement maybe an entire concept or a complete like new use case within the intranet. And that's for example Calendar. And now kind of getting back to this.
Jarbas Horst [00:08:51]:
So editor Canda is a functionality that's familiar in the concept of intranet. We were often of course talking to our clients and one of the discussions I had beginning of the year was last year. Now I can remember like in detail. I was interviewing a client. It was at one of our events, the Fresh Perspectives event. And I was asking them like, how do you manage your content publication? So what is the process?
David Bowman [00:09:16]:
Right.
Jarbas Horst [00:09:16]:
So we got like discussion. And then she told me, well, we are using Excel to organize all of the content we have for publishing, right. So from the draft until the publishing and then afterwards like to see how the content is performing. So they were maintaining all of that information on an Excel document, which it's a lot of manual work. And if you are, of course, if you are used to that, then you might find that it's a solution that works. But there are definitely other ways of making that happen.
David Bowman [00:09:47]:
So managing in Excel and then updating SharePoint separately. So kind of effectively kind of doing bits of the job twice.
Jarbas Horst [00:09:55]:
Exactly. So of course then all of the work, all of the creation work happens in SharePoint, like creating the news post and you have many people work on that scheduling when that will get published, but then at the same time then also going back to the Excel document and maintain that information there as well. So it will be inside thing. It's a lot of extra work that's required and we took that as a motivation point like to. Or like a challenge, something that seems that needs an improvement. And we start investigating options. How can that be implemented in a way that will be more beneficial for the end user? And we came up with the idea of Data Calendar, but based on some investigation we did on the market. And well, the way how that works is quite nice.
Jarbas Horst [00:10:39]:
So we, first of all, we do a discovery work, we look at the options, what are functionalities that would, that clients would benefit from. When we ended up, when we had like all of that information, we create the concept that we then presented to a series of clients, including this one person I talked to and a few other people as well. And that helps us, we like validate is, are we going in the right direction? Are we building something here that really makes sense for the clients? Is that something that they can see them using? The feedback was amazing. We really got like very positive feedback in all of discussions. We had some ideas like for improvements. And of course we ended up then.
David Bowman [00:11:18]:
And just, just, just on, just on those ideas for improvement. Maddie, is that, is that requirements gathering? You know, is that, you know, your team kind of processing a massive Excel spreadsheet of requirements that we gather from a customer? You know, are we, you know, is there, is there a danger that you're just kind of building everything that everybody wants? Talk to us a bit about that, how that kind of distillation works.
Madeleine Ryderheim [00:11:41]:
Yeah, so after all of the client voice and backwards and forwards in that design process, then what we tend to do is decide on what the MVP is, because it's important to sort of get something out there so we can design and build something that will work and be good. But then we make sure that we capture all of those additional requirements and then it becomes its own feature roadmap to make sure that we then listen to feedback. So once it's out there in the space and people are starting to use it, what was the feedback and the things that we didn't do and that we might still want to do, but there's going to be things that we don't want to do or that actually wasn't a good idea or presumably that.
David Bowman [00:12:25]:
We can't do because we're in the.
Madeleine Ryderheim [00:12:26]:
All things that we can't do. I mean, there's a lot of things actually that we end up with because of the Microsoft Foundation. There is actually a limitation sometimes to what we can and cannot do. So there's Editorial Calendar especially, which is one of my favorite features as well since we launched it just A short while ago this year. I'm using it myself now to schedule things when I'm working in one of our portals that we're using it for. So that is brilliant. But, yeah, we're definitely looking at trying to build what makes sense and what can be used, and that creates a lot of value, but maybe not all of the bells and whistles, because as it goes out there and as our clients start using it, that's when we're going to get the actual valuable, more feedback and for things that we can put into it in the future.
David Bowman [00:13:16]:
Yeah, I think the challenge for me often when we're out having conversations with customers about how they're using it is that you're talking about something in theory at that stage. And the theory of an idea is very different from the kind of practical reality. Right. When someone's got their hands on it and they're using it and they're clicking through it, the things that they thought they wanted suddenly become less important and, you know, other things start to become a much higher priority. So, you know, that process has been important for me, particularly for being influenced by how people feel about it, their reactions, the things that they want it to do, rather than the exact articulated requirement that we get in those conversations.
Madeleine Ryderheim [00:13:52]:
Yeah. And I would say that also if we think about how you guys come with requirements to us. I mean, you have this grand idea of things, and you and me, David, over the years, you've had all sorts of ideas, and here's what we want to do, and we're like, okay, that's going to take six months to build. So it's like bringing it down to a level where I'm like, okay, let's build this thing and see if it works and if it doesn't work, and not be afraid of later on actually deprecating things if it doesn't work. And it's like listening both to the market as you guys do a lot, and we do as well, thinking about how. Yeah. What makes sense and then realizing what we continue on building on and where the successes are and where they're not, but where the need is still.
David Bowman [00:14:34]:
Yeah. And just going back to something that you said, which I think is an important point there about the MVP and in this context, my war on acronyms, Minimum Viable Product rather than Most Value Professional, as we talked about a couple of episodes ago. Yes, the Minimum Viable product. I'm not a big fan of this, of this expression. I like Optimum Lovable product.
Jarbas Horst [00:14:54]:
Right.
Madeleine Ryderheim [00:14:55]:
Yeah.
David Bowman [00:14:55]:
Enough impact, enough wow factor. But, you know, Something that isn't going to take months to deliver. Right. You know, a kind of cake slice of functionality going over to customers. Because what we really want is feedback, reactions, thoughts.
Madeleine Ryderheim [00:15:07]:
Yeah.
David Bowman [00:15:07]:
Getting things in front of people that are going to be using them on a day to day basis has been a. Has been, has been really important for us.
Madeleine Ryderheim [00:15:12]:
Yeah.
Jarbas Horst [00:15:13]:
Like adding to this like before even we go there now. So before we implement the functionality then we have all of this validation process that happens, which is like the client voice workshop where we're interviewing clients, validating our ideas with them. Even before that we have all the discovery work that happens and this really helps us like let's say kill the bad ideas, Remove them from the roadmap before we enter the process. Yes, enter the process of implementation.
Madeleine Ryderheim [00:15:38]:
Yeah, yeah. And one of the things, considering how much we've done this over the years, and especially with these like ideas, it is also funny how you sometimes take an idea, present it and then it's like, ah, maybe, you know, you get sort of in terms of the value of it and then. But we keep it on a shelf. Right. I never let go of anything. So I have my little shelf of things that we decided to not do. It was all of a sudden you're very important, they're not important. But then like a year or two later and then you bring it back to life.
Madeleine Ryderheim [00:16:08]:
And then obviously because the product itself has evolved, the views of other things have evolved and then you bring it into the product and then you're like, oh, wow, that turned out so much better than if we would have built it two years ago. So that is another thing. I love it.
David Bowman [00:16:23]:
That's the Maddie shelf of David's half considered ideas. Is it?
Madeleine Ryderheim [00:16:26]:
Yes, exactly. You're like spare of the moment, sort of, oh, we should do this. And we're like maybe not the highest priority now, but then when you bring it back and because I would say both us as a team, Microsoft as the foundation, the product, fresh as a product, everything evolves. So you just like when you find those right times to then bring this thing to life, that is what brings me pure joy. Pure joy.
David Bowman [00:16:51]:
Well, and you know, it's nice to see kind of things that we were kind of considering 12, 18 months ago making their way into a product in a slightly different way as well.
Madeleine Ryderheim [00:16:59]:
Yeah, exactly.
David Bowman [00:17:00]:
You know, I think that kind of recycling old ideas is. We found a lot of value in that.
Madeleine Ryderheim [00:17:04]:
Absolutely right.
David Bowman [00:17:06]:
We've got off on a tangent. Editorial calendar Jarbas. We are kind of aware that there are lots of other things that we could do to this. What do you think the future is for editorial Calendar?
Jarbas Horst [00:17:15]:
Maybe like I'm not sure if I've explained it properly before. So the idea here was of course to bring because the way how it works in SharePoint so you are creating your content like in multiple site collections in multiple places. Maybe you might be using even like using Viva Amplify, which is a very good option. Also like to work on a campaign creating multiple articles relate that campaign and the editor calendar brings all of this content into one overview. A calendar view that people then like managing the publishing of the content. The content creation can then use to visualize that in this one central place. There are a lot of like different options for narrowing down the right data want to see. So it's a really like very visual element that really helps people organize their content and like also shows different stages that the content has like from draft board to approval and then like of course scheduled and published.
Jarbas Horst [00:18:04]:
Really like an awesome feature. Now when it comes like to looking in the future here the things that we want to bring there AI again here. So is is one element that can become part of the editorial calendar. We are looking here at adding a piece of functionality that would help people where AI would help people understand what is the best time in the day or like in the week to publish a specific piece of content about a specific topic so that AI would then come up with the suggestion for that. Another element that we learned during the discovery work was being able to block a day. So let's say you have an important SEO announcement, a new company was acquired, or there are some other important announcements that should be made on that specific day or maybe on a specific slot so that you can block that so that anyone else will be able to publish something on that time and that would give you more control of the things that go out so you can then gain more attention of your employees when you're publishing something that's really of importance. So those are kind of elements. Yeah.
David Bowman [00:19:07]:
Nice. Good. All right, well look, let's segue then onto the AI features in fresh now. You know, I think we into last year we spent a lot of time talking about AI in the beginning from the point that generative AI was becoming a kind of concept that was clearly taken off a lot of marketing a lot of noise about it. And you know we were. We were sort of faced with some options knowing that Microsoft had bought into OpenAI and we were expecting there to be a product announcement from Microsoft which became copilot you know, we were anticipating that there would be something being launched from Microsoft, so we were sort of hedging our bets a bit in the beginning of what was going to be useful for us to put into Fresh. And, you know, probably the easiest thing for us to do at the time would have been to have launched a chatbot. Right.
David Bowman [00:19:48]:
And done some integration. I wasn't 100% sure about doing that. Do you think in retrospect, Jarbas, that was a good or a bad idea?
Jarbas Horst [00:19:55]:
I like the direction we took with all of the AI concept. We operate in SharePoint. Right. With fresh. So I think there are a few things we don't necessarily need, especially of course, knowing that Copilot also exists. So the concept of the chatbot entirely providing kind of a ChatGPT experience or copilot experience within SharePoint maybe doesn't feel like very correct there, because you can already achieve that. Well, with ChatGPT, for example, or with Copilot, if you buy the licenses.
David Bowman [00:20:27]:
Well, there is also the free Copilot. Right. That sits in the. In the browser. I may be using the wrong name for that thing now, but that if you want to use a ChatGPT service that is in the.
Jarbas Horst [00:20:37]:
Yes.
David Bowman [00:20:37]:
Available without a Copilot license, there are Microsoft options, aren't there?
Jarbas Horst [00:20:41]:
Exactly. And so then getting like, back to the idea of the chatbot. So we didn't want just to have another chatbot. And also like, one thing that we didn't want to have was another AI element that will generate content for you because as you mentioned, there are so many options that you can use today for that already going in, like from ChatGPT. And of course, if you have Copilot in Word, for example, then you could also benefit that within your tenant so that you have kind of the commercial data protection as well. So all of that exists already. And we thought, so let's not go that direction and focus more on specific use cases within the intranet that employees can benefit from.
David Bowman [00:21:20]:
Yeah. And Maddie, in the sort of early days of building that functionality, I think it's probably fair to say that we didn't really know what it was that we were trying to build. It was quite an experimental time, wasn't it? We had some sort of ideas about incorporating AI into search. We had a couple of other things that we were sort of trialing and, you know, I think it was a while before we settled on the functionality that we've now got in the box, wasn't it?
Madeleine Ryderheim [00:21:45]:
Yeah, it's gradually been growing over time. I Think we started with a proof of concept about this concept of an editorial assistant. So if we were really focusing on that intranet content creator scenario and how we could help with that, especially as we talked about before with content types and tagging of content and things like that, that is boring. Like how can we make that it's still important within the Intranet context. Because that's how your users.
David Bowman [00:22:14]:
It's a struggle to get content creators.
Madeleine Ryderheim [00:22:15]:
But it's a struggle. I mean it's those extra things to remember and to do. And as we were actually talking to some of the clients, I mean that. And we were starting to bring up this concept then obviously, as some of the Intranet sort of owners were saying is that I have 20 to 50 people that manages content on the Intranet and it's really hard for me to know if. Because they're managing things on their area. I don't know if they've tagged it properly or things like that. And it helped after we'd started to create some governance features and things like that. But then they were like, okay, so together with that mba, for them to be able to quickly tag or get help with this, that is going to increase productivity and actually then get them to do these things that I'm trying to get them to do.
Madeleine Ryderheim [00:23:02]:
So yeah, the early proof of concept that then we actually scrapped and we rebuilt later on. That's worth saying as well. That happens. But there was a lot of learning going on I think for everyone as soon as. I mean it was. Even the Azure OpenAI was even available. So it's like that there was a lot of learning for the team and for the clients and starting to understand what it might be and what they want. Yes.
Madeleine Ryderheim [00:23:27]:
And what they want. Because it is sort of a slow, gradual way of adopting AI. Obviously a lot of people are still not adopted it. Right. It is still sort of a scary thing. I don't know if you've talked about that in a previous episode or anything, but it's. But not yet. But you might later on.
Madeleine Ryderheim [00:23:44]:
But it's like the. For some people it's still a scary. And obviously like we have a range of different ages of people that work with SharePoint. Right. And there is going to be adoption things here and there. But I think just over time thinking about the value we can bring in some of these features. I don't know, I'll just give an example. Instead of searching for a person, like knowing the name of a person or knowing the job title of a person, so you're using like the Search functionality to find a person.
Madeleine Ryderheim [00:24:14]:
Now with the AI in Fresh, you can ask it, who can I talk to about a certain topic? And then the AI will return that. So that's a useful use case that is sort of easy to explain and that fits within the parameters of an intranet and for people trying to find a person.
David Bowman [00:24:33]:
I think what was different for me about the AI features in Fresh is that it wasn't being generated from a kind of clear customer requirement, you know, like Editorial Calendar where, you know, customers were managing things in Excel or in notebooks or, you know, or not at all. You know, the role of Editorial Calendar was fairly clear, whereas AI was rapidly evolving as a space anyway, the technology changing, you know, as you said, the, you know, the, as your services were still being lit up as we were building this thing, you know, we were evolving our technical knowledge and our kind of, you know, customers were evolving their needs around AI. So this was very much and was an evolution. Yeah, still is to an extent. As that technology is still growing.
Madeleine Ryderheim [00:25:17]:
Definitely we're still building on it.
Jarbas Horst [00:25:19]:
Yeah, yeah.
Madeleine Ryderheim [00:25:20]:
So I mean it's, it's. For every release there's something new is coming into this space. Not our sole focus, but it is sort of there now as a constant within. Because I don't think it's good either because as you said, David, that there is like things are happening in the market. Copilot is doing things. The actual sort of back end of what you can use to create these sort of AI services that's evolving all the time. So to focus everything we do, like drop everything else and focus just on AI won't work either because then we are being like, I don't think we would do things in the right order. So we've got some great things that have sort of been dropping for every release when it comes to AI.
Madeleine Ryderheim [00:26:03]:
And I think that that will sort of continue slowly and have it sort of have its own roadmap.
Jarbas Horst [00:26:08]:
Yeah, yeah. And it has also its own name, isn't it? We call like all of the AI capabilities within Fresh, we call that Fresh Mind. So that really helps us like with the discussion of the clients because we didn't, it's not, it's not kind of a data calendar. Right. So it's this one component, you go there and they can use it. The AI capabilities that distribute across multiple different functionalities in the product. We talked about the calendar that can have also its own AI element. But we have that with people.
Jarbas Horst [00:26:38]:
We have that. Well, finding also information in documents, updating metadata and so on. So it's available across multiple places and then we gave that a name which helps us then like explain and also like go to market with this functionality.
Madeleine Ryderheim [00:26:53]:
Yeah, I quite like that what you just said. Like it's an integrated feature that you can obviously turn on, turn off. You know it's up to every client to decide if they want it or not. But I like that it's sort of an integrated feature that pops up in different places.
David Bowman [00:27:07]:
It's not a new product line you haven't got to train anybody on.
Madeleine Ryderheim [00:27:10]:
Yeah. Rather than an isolated feature. I'm really glad we didn't build specific features that are like just on its own in a little silo. But it is like this, what you already had, you can just enable it once you've decided to have it. So I think it's good.
Jarbas Horst [00:27:26]:
As you said you are looking for a person, right. So then you are already going to a people directory to find people. Now you have an AI element that helps you find people there with the power of AI. And also it's the scope because we were talking about chatbots. So if you would have the chatbot it would be maybe like open, it would allow you like to ask anything. So in that case AI is just there to help you find people and that's its task. If you go like beyond that, it will tell you, sorry, I'm not to help you with other things.
David Bowman [00:27:57]:
So you know, the future of AI and Fresh, you know, I think we'll continue to weave it into bits and pieces of the, of the product and functionality. We're also exploring integration with Copilot. You know that feels like a, a kind of natural step for us to take given that data's in SharePoint, Microsoft 365. We are, you know as Advania as the kind of parent business of Fresh. We're seeing a lot of take up and adoption of Copilot as a service that feels like a sort of natural next step for us to take as well.
Jarbas Horst [00:28:26]:
We are constantly brainstorming like different ways how we can integrate more or do more with AI because there are more capabilities also more options that we can Explore within Azure OpenAI which is kind of the foundation for all of the things we do in FreshMind but also then of course with Copilot. So as you mentioned we are exploring right now EOPIL agent that you can then use to ask scoped questions for a given context. The context is the date on your intranet and being able to ask things like what are the latest news what tools do we have for like maybe voice, voice communication, so on. So being able to ask specific questions using a copilot agent, also copilot plugins. And we don't, I don't, I don't think we have kind of a limit of things that we can do. So we are really like very open and trying, like do as much as it makes sense.
David Bowman [00:29:18]:
Well, before Java slips fully into sales pitch, let's, let's move on to like.
Jarbas Horst [00:29:25]:
Especially, like, especially copilot thing is quite exciting. It's very new. So, and we have that going on right now. It's, it's hard not to talk about that.
David Bowman [00:29:32]:
Too exciting. Maybe there's an important point there as well, though, right.
Jarbas Horst [00:29:35]:
That.
David Bowman [00:29:36]:
Because it's an exciting area. Right. And we are technologists. We're, we're, you know, maybe I'm excluding you, Maddie, from this. We're a bunch of nerds as well that, you know, it can be very tempting to kind of disappear into the technology. Right. And I think the value of going out and talking to customers about this stuff is that, you know, sometimes we're surprised about the reaction that we get. Some of the things, you know, we're really excited about something, but we can't find that same level of excitement from a customer.
David Bowman [00:30:00]:
And that's been a really grounding experience for me, particularly to get to use as a kind of gauge of how important is this actually.
Madeleine Ryderheim [00:30:07]:
Yeah, no, I agree.
David Bowman [00:30:09]:
Okay, let's move on to search then. So, you know, I think this is again, a kind of different, A slightly different one again because many, many years ago, Maddie, we had a search component that we created, which we now affectionately term as V3 search.
Madeleine Ryderheim [00:30:24]:
Yeah.
David Bowman [00:30:25]:
And I think legacy. Yeah, well, that's one word.
Madeleine Ryderheim [00:30:28]:
Don't want to think about it again.
David Bowman [00:30:30]:
I mean, there are other words that are probably slightly less, slightly less polite to use on a permanent recording.
Madeleine Ryderheim [00:30:36]:
Not going to do that today.
David Bowman [00:30:38]:
And, you know, but I think this was, this was an area that we sort of, you know, at the, at the time, it was tough.
Jarbas Horst [00:30:43]:
Right.
David Bowman [00:30:43]:
You know, I think we, we'd identify that there was a problem that we wanted to fix. Right. You know, search in SharePoint for intranets was tough. You know, when you're using the enterprise search features at the top of the bar and you're in the intranet and you're getting presented with content results from all across Microsoft 365. And if you've got, you know, oversharing or permissions, you know, that experience is going to be pretty grim for an end user. So you know, that was the problem that we were trying to solve. And I think, you know, what we did was we set about it in a pretty ham fisted way really and we created something that you know, we put in the product. We had some, I think it's pretty fair to say, fairly negative feedback from everybody that saw it.
Madeleine Ryderheim [00:31:20]:
I think that, I mean there was some people started using it. I remember because there was. Well, I think this was back in 2020 or something.
David Bowman [00:31:28]:
Yeah, it was pre Covid for sure. Or around beginning of the pandemic.
Madeleine Ryderheim [00:31:33]:
Yeah, exactly. So I remember very clearly talking to some of our clients and this need for something that they wanted. Just a good intranet search like intranet is where we have the content that we want our employees to read and to see and you know, to find. But when they use the Microsoft search, you know, they get everything. Yeah, this was before Microsoft rolled out the verticals. But they still never really 100% worked at that point anyway. And we had, I remember a conversation.
David Bowman [00:32:01]:
Well, it didn't work for us, I guess that's.
Madeleine Ryderheim [00:32:03]:
No, exactly. It didn't work properly to sort of limit to within these like 10 site collections or whatever, you know, to find that scope. So anyway, we had some good, obviously like good web parts that the clients were liking. But it was one for pages, one for documents, one for alerts, one for events, et cetera. And they were like, okay, so can we create something on the page so I can search up here? And then all of the other web parts would listen to that one search box instead of searching in each of them. So that's how the conversation started. And then we sort of took that a bit too literal and sort of ended up building this specific, I mean new web parts, new type of search page. But it was.
Madeleine Ryderheim [00:32:50]:
And you know, but then we did so that it sort of override of the Microsoft when you searched in our sites and then it sort of worked. But you could literally have on different sites different search experiences. And it was highly configurable. So they could configure a bit too much.
David Bowman [00:33:08]:
Yeah, we allow it to become a.
Madeleine Ryderheim [00:33:09]:
Dog'S dinner a little bit too much like that. I think there was still. There were some clients absolutely. That used it and I think that there might still be some that are using it. But it was very quickly that we realized that this was becoming sort of a. Yeah, no, yeah, yeah.
David Bowman [00:33:25]:
And you know, I think it's, you know, recognizing that we, we'd maybe rushed a feature out because it felt like a good idea at the time.
Madeleine Ryderheim [00:33:33]:
Yeah.
David Bowman [00:33:33]:
And then retreating from that position.
Madeleine Ryderheim [00:33:36]:
Yeah.
David Bowman [00:33:36]:
You know, which was tough. And I think, you know what we, when we pulled back on the feature, I think what was obvious to us was that there was still a problem there. There was still demand for something.
Madeleine Ryderheim [00:33:46]:
Yep.
David Bowman [00:33:47]:
But you know, we took a bit of time, didn't we? I mean it was, it was probably a year before we tried again.
Madeleine Ryderheim [00:33:53]:
It was more. So it was one of those where we did it and we. Then we didn't evolve it because we realized it wasn't the best solution we could have created. And then we sort of after that it wasn't really deployed to new clients or things like that. We sort of kept it to the side but then Microsoft threw out the verticals and stuff. So we're like, oh, use that instead. But then this requirement just kept on coming and we kept saying no use Microsoft do this. Here's how Microsoft does it.
Madeleine Ryderheim [00:34:23]:
But the requirement just kept on coming and that it wasn't a good experience. We want more from it.
David Bowman [00:34:29]:
It became difficult to ignore.
Madeleine Ryderheim [00:34:30]:
Yeah. But then we took our time to design it and again like Jarvis was saying before with the customer voice and actually as we started on doing more of that, those actually planned sessions and talking to several clients to get that valuable feedback then we were able to show mock ups, get feedback. And then it was a year and a half ago where we released that first version of our new search experience. And this is, you know, love it. And it's. They love it.
David Bowman [00:35:02]:
And with a number of updates to it.
Madeleine Ryderheim [00:35:04]:
Yeah.
David Bowman [00:35:05]:
As well. You know, it has a kind of keeps going life cycle of its own now.
Madeleine Ryderheim [00:35:09]:
Same. Yeah, absolutely. Got its own roadmap.
Jarbas Horst [00:35:12]:
I like about this story here is that we launched something, we identified that at some point based on feedback and analytics that it's not working or like not being useful for clients.
David Bowman [00:35:22]:
Yeah.
Jarbas Horst [00:35:22]:
And we, we didn't stop there. Right. So we could have just continued pushing new features and like trying like to impress people with other functionalities. But instead then we moved forward, like looked at like what can we improve and then we build accordingly and deliver like the new search experience. That is definitely a much better experience than what it, what it was before.
David Bowman [00:35:42]:
Yeah, yeah. And you know, look, I think the kind of common theme between all of those things has been additional value on top of SharePoint. Right. You know, clear, no competition with existing things that are in Microsoft 365 supportive of the vision and strategy for digital employee experience for Microsoft 365 and mostly influenced by customers but also responding to trends like AI was something that shouldn't have been ignored. And I guess we've had best results where we've validated with customers. It sounds stupid to say it out loud almost, but actually putting this stuff in front of people that are going to use it and say, what do you think? What's your reaction? You know, do you like it? Would you use it? Are you excited about it? What's missing? You know, kind of pretty simple but, you know, very useful insights.
Madeleine Ryderheim [00:36:30]:
Definitely.
Jarbas Horst [00:36:30]:
Also like taking the time now like to validate your ideas, not just rushing into implementation. Yeah, I think that's, that's crucial like for success and product development.
Madeleine Ryderheim [00:36:42]:
Definitely.
David Bowman [00:36:42]:
Okay, let's leave it there for today. Thank you, Maddie, for coming and joining us and sharing your insights.
Madeleine Ryderheim [00:36:48]:
No worries.
David Bowman [00:36:49]:
Cheers, Jarbas.
Jarbas Horst [00:36:50]:
Thanks, David. Thanks, Maddie. Cheers.