Office 365 Distilled

The challenge was to identify the best announcements for Microsoft365 from #MSIgnite ’s Book of news. This website showing all the key announcements for Q4 2020 release was too gorgeous to resist talking about… especially with Cortana the ‘Mistress of Microsoft 365’ being Steve and Marijn’s top choice for discussion.

On a serious note the boys talk about the cool news from Ignite 's Book of News website that defines Microsoft’s coming releases for SharePoint, Office Apps for Enterprise, and of course MS Teams… with Marijn on board what else would you expect.

Show Notes

Amongst the items talked about before the guys do a little Swedish are:

Whisky@Ease is a new podcast channel from the boys reversed from Office365 with 80% Whisky and 20% tech.  Just for those that value the lifestyle of Work hard - Play hard

Marijn comes up with an EPIC tag line for Whisky@ease… longer than War and Peace when Steve shares the more accurate line of 

www.WhiskyAtEase.com
Chilled, Unfiltered and Aged

Marijn finds that when he talks like an 8-year-old his audience understands more as he struggles with the guilt of his daughter failing a school project about his job

Microsoft Book of News gets the #Office365Distilled treatment as Steve and Marijn pick out their best items in terms of importance and usefulness… top of the list for both is Cortana

We come up with a new Cortana tag line… Hey, Cortana fix my Shit! and then try and work out if Cortana might ever be jealous because we went to Alexa first!!

Steve as always forgets the name of the guy who demonstrated Cortana slicing-and-dicing data through voice commands (Joe Belfiore).  Part of the journey that got Cortana to the point where we are today.

Dear Jeff letter appears again trying to understand why Just because I am living in Belgium and speaking English I cannot get Cortana, but I can if I happened to be in the UK?

Cortana is congratulated on becoming of age and is now a Mother of all AI… 

Cortana is a MILF (Master Information Life Force) !!

Steve selects an item where Excel can now connect to PowerBi data enabling all the cool Pivot tools and queries to be applied to a BI data set for all those people who create macros and the family of tactical tools that focus the migration team when the files need to move

Bookings get a kick in the right direction as it moves to Enterprise acceptance and goes beyond booking a hair appointment. 

The conversation turns to the places that Microsoft store new applications with Blob stores, Common Data set Model… 

Marijn gets greedy with all the new features that are announced in the Book of News around MS Teams.  “ Marijn you were told to choose 3 “

The conversation’s around the ‘Home’ site for SharePoint and if this is the Intranet home or if there are two start locations… In-reality the starting point depends on where you want to go.  Will the Home App be the real front door and work seamlessly in MS Teams we shall see.

Marijn is looking at all the options for the together mode including the Gentlemen’s club Together room.

Productivity Score mode enables the ability to measure the success of your adoption programs, updates, are training courses changing people… are your people adapting the challenges of Remote working 

New Stream brings a few questions on what we can expect this quarter and the SPO templates that will host the videos and the web parts that will play the videos… lots of new, exciting stuff to look forward to.

Will Syntex be used or will it fade away because existing applications like Financial and procurement systems are already doing it…  we shall see how the business reacts when we can demonstrate it…

Marijn sneaks in two items, not in the Book of News like how Project Oakdale will bring MS teams with its own ‘baby’ PowerApps and Off-line list storage…

And again, we keep asking where Outlook Spaces have gone to after the tease last year… Dear Jeff… you’re a big tease!! 

Creators & Guests

Host
Marijn Somers
Microsoft MVP. Freelance Microsoft 365 expert focusing on user adoption and governance. Trainer. Licensed watchmaker.
Host
Steve Dalby
Podcaster "Office365Distilled" Driving Collaboration Business Goals, Speaking about Governance, Whiskey taster and imbiber all round father and good guy.

What is Office 365 Distilled?

This podcast is presented by Marijn and Steve; two experienced Microsoft 365 and SharePoint consultants. In each podcast you will get a smile or two with a chunk of interesting and practical help in Microsoft 365. Then you get introduced you to what we hope is a Whisky you have not tasted before.