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Need to use a SharePoint intranet due to internal policies, company transitions, or legacy systems? When all the available information is overly technical or negative, where do you turn? Enter Fresh Perspectives: Living in the reality of SharePoint intranets. We provide useful, jargon-free insights and real-world examples to help you maximize the benefits of SharePoint intranets and tackle its challenges. Pro-SharePoint but realistic, we debunk misconceptions and share product management insights from Fresh Intranet.
Wow. I didn't see that one coming. Hi.
Yeah. Yeah. I was loves his clicker.
David Bowman, product director for Fresh. Almost completely missed my queue there.
We have a special guest today.
Say hello.
Yeah. Hi. Hi, everyone. My name is Kripal Kavi. I am a group product manager at Microsoft, and I work on the SharePoint team.
And I lead product for a whole bunch of areas within SharePoint, specifically SharePoint experiences. So ranging from SharePoint sites, pages, the leave amplify space, connections, and more recently, SPFX as well, which is our extensibility platform for SharePoint. And we also have this internal M365 service called Notify, which I own as well. So it's a pretty broad portfolio of things.
Nice to be here.
Yeah. We're super excited for this conversation today because you're in charge of a lot of the things that we spend a lot of time thinking about, talking about, worrying about. So it's great you're able to take some time to spend with us today.
Yeah. No. Great to be here.
Awesome. Alright. So hey. Look. You know, thanks for the, introduction to your role. What's, what do you think is probably the most energizing thing that you're working on in you know, what is a very broad scope of your role? What's the what's the best bit?
Yeah. No, it's glad I can say I can also see that Jarbas got his coffee with him. So I don't feel a little alone and left by myself with a cup of coffee that I'm drinking here. So don't feel awkward. So thank you, Jarbas, for making me feel. Welcome. There you go.
So I would say as I think about my so well, there is the things that I'm working on, and there's my role itself and what's exciting about it. Maybe I'll start with just like, what's my role and why I find it extremely exciting and energizing.
When I explained my portfolio, I think like you would have noticed that I have both a blend of at scale assets, something that's more in the, I would say, in the maturing phase, so somewhere in between, and stuff that's also zero to one. So to be able to span from and again, like sites, hundreds of millions of users, Viva Connections is pretty at scale as well.
But then on the other hand, Viva Amplify is still something that we're looking to get off the ground very much in the zero to one, or the one to end phase, I should say.
Yeah. So just being able to span that, exercise different sides of my brain where on one side, like, which it's more about managing customer requests and ask and so on and so forth. And on the other side, it's a little bit more about okay, so what do we think customers want to go build? Want out of this product, right?
It's pretty much something that doesn't exist today. So I think that's pretty exciting. The second thing that I'll say is also like, again, like looking at the portfolio, my work kind of ranges from hey, like, core UX, how are people building beautiful web pages, all the way to developer facing, which is again, like, it's UX extensibility, but it is still more developer facing. Right?
So the audience is a little bit different. On one hand, you're like, we're working with creators and makers. And on the other side, it's more like, yeah, it's people who can who can code actual engineers. So being able to work and, learn on a day to day basis how to engage effectively and build for these very different kinds of customers is super engaging.
So I learn something new every day. I'm relatively new to the team. Jeff Deeper, our father of SharePoint has been here for like twenty five years, close to twenty five years at SharePoint. I've been here all at one.
So I think I learned something new every single day, not just from the people above me, but also like from our partners, our customers and the people on my team as well. So, yeah, that's what's so energizing and keeps me excited.
And, you know, that it's a really broad remit that you're responsible for there.
And, you know, I think one thing that I'm always reminded about when I'm, you know, talking to people from Microsoft, particularly from the kind of product engineering area, is the scale of the challenge. Right? You know, when you see the kind of statistics that Jeff and others talk about, you know, the usage of SharePoint, the millions of customers that are using this thing, Just, you know, it's beyond thinking about individual features. It you know, just the scale of the engineering challenge there is huge. It's so broad. How do you does that keep you awake at night worrying about those kind of things, or, you know, are you able to compartmentalize some of those challenges?
Yeah. No. I think I think, yeah, the scale of the SharePoint, I think, is one of the most underappreciated things about SharePoint. Right?
Yeah. And, again, Jeff shared this stat at the m three sixty five conference earlier this year. I think the stat, if I remember correctly, was something like two billion files uploaded per per week and two million sites created per day on SharePoint. Like, this those numbers are just, like, mind boggling.
Yeah. And that's on a per day and a per week basis. Right? So I think, thankfully, we have an excellent we call them, like, the core team that works in the core infrastructure of SharePoint where this is all they do.
Like, they live, breathe, making sure that the infrastructure is up and running at a high degree of reliability. So I think, thankfully, like, we can kind of, like, rely on them as we as as we focus more on the experiences side of SharePoint. But at the same time, like, I think we don't get a free pass on when we add new features, especially to the scale side of the business. Right?
Like, so if we do something wrong, the community is not shy about letting us know when we screwed up. So Jarbus and the other MVPs keep us very honest, and they're very vocal. So I think from that standpoint, I think we pay a lot of attention to making sure that what we're building is applicable and in a way addresses most of our customer needs, which is not easy to do more often than Yeah.
And amongst all of those things, is it possible to pick a favorite, right? Is there like, we're looking down the agenda for the day, for the week, the month, you're like, oh, yes, finally, I get to talk about this one thing, my kind of favorite feature.
You guys are gonna get me into trouble. I'll say my one favorite feature or my two favorite It's like picking a favorite child, right?
As long as they as long as they don't hear it, it's okay. But then once they hear it, you'll be like, oh, wait. Why didn't you pick me? But what about this? And what about this? So at the risk of breaking into jail here with my team, I think maybe let me see.
Yeah. There's one that I use fairly often and one that I think I am delighted by every single time I use it.
And that is I don't know how familiar you are with it, but it's the editorial cards feature. We launched this a little earlier this year.
And like, I'm a design class. Like, I mean, I couldn't design something to look good to save my life. So thank God I have a really good set of design partners to work with. Right?
I think we we do a pretty good job defining product, but then actually designing it and how it looks and feels, I think my my my yeah. My design partners probably wouldn't give me much credit for it. But I think, like, what I really appreciate about editorial cards is like, even like a design class like me, you can make a pretty good looking SharePoint page with them. It's fairly easy.
It's also incredibly powerful, where if you want to play around with things like the layout options, whether you want an image, whether you want a color block, whether you want to, like, set up the call to actions in, different ways, it is, I feel like we did a really good job where we made something that was super powerful, which SharePoint is traditionally known for. But this time, we also made it in a way that's super easy to approach for somebody who's new to SharePoint. It doesn't require you taking a bunch of online classes to be able to use the editorial cards feature, but you can just like jump in there, it's very intuitive. And even if you did nothing, it makes your SharePoint page look pretty good. So I would say like, I use that all the time on my news posts and like I publish a news post every week that my team consumes. And that is one of my most heavily used features. Like, yeah, I really do like it.
Yeah, as a team that spends a lot of time building, web parts, demoing web parts, looking at them, you really get a sense of that component because it's quite a simple concept.
But what you recognize as someone that is also building these features is there is a huge amount of complexity and engineering and thought creativity that's gone into a component like that to make it so simple and so easy to use.
Becomes a very complicated thing.
Yeah, no, for sure. And the easy thing for us to do is to force that complexity onto all of you, right? We're like, yeah, we just add all the bells and whistles to it, and we give you all the dials, and we'll let and our customers kind of deal with it. And yeah, the hard part is sifting through all of that complexity to come out on the other side with something that actually works really well and scales to a pretty broad set of customers and use cases, but at the same time can be used by someone who's like brand new to SharePoint.
And that's the hard part, striking that balance. And we often get it wrong, but I feel like the reason I like this so much is because, one, it makes my job easier when I'm publishing my news posts every week. But like, I feel like we struck that balance well here. And I'd love for us to capture that whatever magic in that bottle that we found and replicate that across every single feature we built.
Yeah. No. Good question. And I think I mean, when you think about m three sixty five, it's a suite. Right? And I think different elements of the suite play to their own strengths.
You said Viva in like, Viva is a bit like, it's an umbrella term. We've got Viva Connections, we've got Viva Amplify, we've got Viva Engage. So even within Viva, we have a whole host of other suites application suites. It's a suite by itself. So I would say that when I think about SharePoint, first and foremost, I think it's it started like it it all starts with the basics. Right? It's your content store, and your content can be files, your content can be pages, your content can be news posts.
So anything that's relevant from an enterprise standpoint, your content, I think, the home for it is SharePoint. That's SharePoint's job number one. That's why we got hired for in the first place, right? And then now, there are the use cases to which that content can be applied. And then the typical use cases are like comms, collab, workflow and knowledge. And when I say workflow, mean, I'm also throwing automation in there.
And so when I think about SharePoint and its role, I think it is about enabling and serving up those whatever content is stored in it and the most effective way for those use cases. So I'll take an example of Teams. Teams is obviously the real time collab tool of choice within m three sixty five. But at the same time, when you're collaborating with someone, you are collaborating on files.
And sometimes once you have collaborated on or you've had a meeting and you wanna publish that meeting to a publicly discoverable location, you want that content sitting somewhere. Right? And I think so when you think about SharePoint, we wanna make it super easy for people to be able to store, access, and collaborate on their files on SharePoint. And at the same time, once they're done with meetings, make it super easy to turn that I'll make pick at least an example of a feature that we're working on.
Turn that meeting recording into a news post without having a whole bunch of work that needs to get done behind the scenes so that people who weren't there at that meeting can get caught up without having to watch a one hour long transcript.
So it's things like that that I think, like, when I think about SharePoint's role, I think SharePoint like, if you had to ask me how would I describe SharePoint and how it fits with an n three sixty five, I think about it as the underlying fabric of n three sixty five, where all of these solutions are built on top of, like, whether it's Viva, a lot of the Viva pieces, Teams, Loop, and, like, even Copilot. Right? Like, the number one cited source for Copilot is SharePoint.
So the ability for us to be able to do that, and I think, like, that's our job, number one, is to be the content store for highly relevant information across your across your enterprise.
Yeah.
And Yeah.
Yeah. Yeah.
And, yeah, you know, I think I think that kind of, making content flexible, maybe I'm not quite describing that right, as a sort of main superpower of SharePoint feels really important, right? You know, because there are so many ways of being able to access and look at the content that's in SharePoint that making sure that it is as flexible as possible is.
Exactly. Exactly. Right? Like, I I tend to think of SharePoint as the swiss army knife, which is it's an which is both it's both an app and a platform very much.
Yeah. And on one end, we use it for core comms use cases, Internet publishing. And on the other hand, we use it for more complex workflow and business process automations. Right?
Like, whether it's even things like vacation policy, expense filings, or even something that's a little bit more complicated than that, like, like, legal contract management.
So I think from that angle, like, has to be able to serve both jobs. And again, like, similarly, we have out of the box, like, we have a strong set of out of the box features. But at the same time, I think we support partners like you who build on the out of the box offer that we have to make it that much more tailored for a certain set of customers who for whom for whose set of use cases the out of like, of the box doesn't work well enough. So we have to be able to serve you as well in order to be able to build on top of SharePoint to effectively serve our collective customers.
Everyone is a customer.
Yeah. Hundred percent.
Hundred percent. Is there is there one thing, you know, particularly that you think that SharePoint is doing really well that people don't necessarily notice?
Yeah, no, I think, so there are a couple of things I will say. And I think the one I can think of is just how we have to manage the kind of scale that we do. Yeah. I mean, I kind of mentioned this task a little earlier, right?
And I think this is one of those things, we don't get credit if you get it right. But you get dinged really badly if you get it wrong. Right? So nobody gives us credit for, great.
Like, you guys were up and running, right? But oh my God, like the ICMs we get, like the incidents that we get if we have some outage somewhere, even if it's for a small, even if it's in some, yeah, anyway, some, I would say, far less use side of SharePoint, right? So like I would say, that is something that I think goes completely underappreciated, which is the actual work that it takes to keep a service of this scale operating at the level of reliability that we do.
The second thing I'll also say is like just the surface area of SharePoint.
I mean, I know we've gone from the on prem world to SharePoint online now and so on and so forth. And then now we're in modern SharePoint, which is like the new look and feel for SharePoint itself. But I think when you think about, like, the tendrils in terms of like how we attach to Power Automate or Azure workflow in the old world. And, of course, like, the core Internet use cases and then standing up SP effects, like, just the even in my world alone, just the breadth of what SharePoint needs to do is, I think, I never appreciate it. And then when you tack on everything else that has like that's done on SharePoint, I think it's just, yeah, it's not easy to build something that's this flexible and this broad in terms of its applicability.
Yeah. Yeah. I think we've talked previously about SharePoint search and just kind of thinking through the amount of support that the team there have to provide across know, not just people that are using it out of the box, but people that have used the configuration options, additional customizations, the, you know, PMP templates that, you know, there is there is so much surface area you've got to support in each feature that, you know, it it as as someone that, you know, has some sympathy for a lot of the for a lot of those challenges, but not necessarily at that scale. When you see people complaining about a sort of, you know, what is a minor thing that's happening in SharePoint, yes, it's very annoying. But, you know, look, the the scale that this team we're operating at is huge. It's, you know, it's inevitable that things are gonna go wrong.
Yeah. No. For sure. I agree. I will say, though, David, that I I guess scale is not an excuse of mediocrity.
Sure. So for us, right, like, think, yeah, the reality is, we have a financial set of resources that we have to choose to deploy where, right? Yeah. And at the same time, sometimes, unfortunately, as much as we would like to fix every single broken window across the house, we have to pick and choose the ones that really matter the most, right, where the draft is the worst, I should say.
So, and yeah, no, I think like this is where we really lean on partners like you, our MVP community, our customers to tell us, hey, like, okay. So what are the things that really do need fixing so we can help prioritize our what are the set of resources that we have?
So Yeah. Yeah. Well and, you know, full credit for being as responsive as as as you guys are, really.
Yeah. That'll be great.
Yeah. No, that's a good question. I think yeah. I'll never think about that a little bit.
I would say, like, I think inside, I want to say both. But I think if I had to pick one between the two, I would say like revolution for sure. One hundred percent.
In some ways, I think SharePoint is just going to turn twenty five. And the last twenty five years have been great, but the next twenty five years are going to be nothing like the last twenty five in terms of like the landscape, competitive landscape, people work, user interaction models. So I think like whether we like it or not, AI just changing how we work on a day to day basis. It's not changing this changing how we work in terms of decades or even years.
It's like weeks and months. Like just the other day, was having this conversation, I was having my conversation with my brother-in-law where he was remarking, he had to go to this other CRM tool, and he had to create the report the old school way. And he was like, he was just like, Oh, man, like, I'm so used to just calling up an AI assistant and asking it for the right answer. And I could see that he was visibly annoyed that he had to go and create this report manually and pull the data and munch it, right?
And this is, again, this is just a matter of months in terms of how much of a shift that has been and how users use tech today. So people's habits are changing. So I think in some ways, it's existential for SharePoint to change as well, like, in some ways. And otherwise, we just get left behind.
And I think like we're like, if you take a look at us and our investments, you'll see that we are we are we are well on that journey. Like, AI forward offering, things like the knowledge agents, which we just spoke about in September that helps site managers and site owners manage their sites more effectively, keep content up to date on SharePoint, which is one of the biggest challenges. So we're looking at leaning in on AI to make all of those tasks a lot easier.
But at the same time, it's also like the reason I struggled a little bit with evolution versus revolution is sometimes, like people hear the word revolution and it's like, okay, like, yeah, like it's burn the boats, right? Like it's this there's only forward, there is nothing behind. And I think it's not so much that where we have to also invest in the code, which is why you've seen us do things like the improvements, the pages that we have made, just generally like page authoring and things like that, where we have to continue to invest in the core. We'll continue to invest in SPFX. You like, you I don't know whether you got this or not, but we just for the first time ever in SPFX's history, like, published our roadmap, like a public roadmap going I think like the next six to eight months. And now we're going to hold ourselves or we'll enable you to hold us accountable to making sure that we are doing right by the SPFX community.
So I think like investing in the core gives us the license to go chase the future. And I don't think we get to do that without bringing our customers, partners and everybody else who's taken a big bet on SharePoint over the past twenty five years along. So anyway, so but if I step back and think about just the degree of change and the scale of change that's happening across, like, the different elements and dimensions, it definitely feels more revolutionary than evolutionary. But at the same time, we are going to bring our customers along customers and partners along that journey.
Right? So yeah. Yes. That's how I think about it.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah. No. For sure. And again, this we just crossed the surface. September was the first release of this.
There'll be more to share. Come ESPC, come in three sixty five conference the next year. I don't know what promised, but we're working on a lot more things that I think will be pretty exciting for the community.
Nice. And, you know, you know, I guess we get we certainly get a sense that AI Copilot is certainly changing the way that, you know, you and team are thinking about SharePoint and the future of SharePoint.
And, you know, we talk a lot, in our team and with customers as well about this idea that, the user interface, the user experience, right, of, you know, you open a web browser and there is a user interface that's waiting for you and you got navigation search and components. You know, do you think that, that still has a place in the digital employee experience? Or are we gonna see a, you know, a sort of switch to prompt based text based interfaces replacing that?
Yeah. Well, I wish I had a crystal ball, and I could tell you exactly how things are playing out because people are a lot smarter than me are still trying to figure this out. But I have my point of view, my itty bitty data point of one.
And I think a hundred percent there has to be a place for both. I think there are some things that are great through a conversational natural language interface, and there are some things that UX is great at. So one hundred percent, I think, like when you think about people looking for certain things or looking for a specific answer about something, I think natural language is awesome. And it gives you exactly what you're looking for, assuming the LLM has been tuned well and is grounded in the right set of sources.
You can follow, you can do follow on inquiry, you can go back and forth on it. So I think conversational interfaces are great for that. But if you think about the consumption of content, I think humans, we still like, are an inherently like visual species, right? Like, we like pictures more than words.
That's just what we gravitate to. And I think like, again, like, not to get like overly geeky, but I mean, if you think about it, like the optic nerve is essentially like the extension of, it's an extension of our brain. So I think like visuals really matter, UX really matters. And there are some cases that conversational UI, sorry, the conversational interface will work really well.
There are some cases where I think UX is absolutely important. So that's slider where we go. And you'll see us do both too. And I'll give you a great example of that, right?
So one, like we the AI forward page authoring experience, what we call is like Copilot for pages. But at the same time, we've also invested in like the FAQ web part, which we think is much more, which is not just question and answers, or it's not purely reliant on the conversational interface, but also requires the Q and A to actually show up in a much more easily consumable format on the page itself, right?
Yeah.
So when I think about the investments that we make, we will do things that are conversational forward, but at the same time, I think also invest heavily in making sure that the UX is great. And you'll see more from this in the coming months on investments in the UX side as well.
I think that frequently asked questions is a great example of putting AI to work, right? That it's not necessarily the end user doesn't need to ask this thing questions or come up with prompts. The AI is doing the work to stop an administrator having to lay out what can be quite a boring task.
Yeah. Totally. I think, again, like, just to use another example outside of SharePoint land, right, like, just us trying to talk to you for a second. I don't know whether you got OpenAI's Dev Days announcement from, a day or two ago.
And they launched these things called, like, apps within ChatGPT, which is a little different from a GPT itself, but and they gave the example, like, like, of a couple of apps. And I think there was one use case where I felt like I looked at it and it's like, oh, yeah, I would totally use that, where I think it was Coursera or one of the other MOOCs where you could consume the like, we could consume the course online, you could pause it, you could ask a question right there in chat, and then you can consume and then you can then you can continue. But there were some others where I'm like, I'm not quite sure I would actually use it like that.
Like, they used, I think, some another web offering platform where they were like, hey, like, create a web page to do go do this, right, for my company. And I'm like, people actually don't work like that in in the real world. Like, if they if you're if you're creating a web page to stand up to represent your company or your team or your organization, you're not just going to complete the entire workflow in a chat interface. You may start there, get a starting point to work with, but then ultimately, you're going be dropped into UX where you can fine tune it, tune it to exactly what you want, make that it's pixel perfect before it goes out the door.
So I think, yeah, so again, like in a very real way, I think there is a lot of room for both chat and natural language and traditional UX based interface. But of course, like, it's a slider and it's gonna move back and forth.
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Coming to intranets as a sort of specific area in in SharePoint, know, obviously, view is that there's a huge amount of power in the SharePoint intranet specific features.
You know, do you have any views on what organizations should be thinking about in order to make their intranets in SharePoint more successful, achieve greater outcomes. Any thoughts on this topic?
Yeah. Well, I'd love to hear your perspectives as well. Right? Like, because I think it'll help us kind of inform how we think about the product. But I'll share my quick two cents, I think.
One, like in terms of what makes an Internet successful, I think it's the recency of content. Like one of the big thing that challenges that in that Internet's face is and which is why we're also investing in features to help our customers and partners address that is content of the Internet can get stale and out of there pretty quickly. So how do you keep content up to date? How do you ensure that the relevant content is surfaced to the user at the right point in time, whether it's through search or whether it's even through, like, navigational through navigational paradigm, getting that right, I think, is kind of critical.
So it takes an investment right now from customers who live in the world on Internet in order to be able to get that right. But we're looking to make that a lot easier. Yeah. I think the second thing to think about is internet kind of like serves multiple jobs to be done.
And the best way to think about, I think like when I see really successful intranets at customers, they are not single purposed. Like, they are not and what I mean by that is, it's not an intranet that is only used to get news and communications out, or it's not an internet that is only used in order to light up the key resources that an employee needs to get certain things done. So it's a combination of that. And that's what keeps users coming back to using the internet makes that an ongoing habit, right?
Like because I may and it also makes the internet a lot more valuable to a wide variety of users as opposed to just one. So this is an example, again, like the and that's kind of the thinking that we had in mind when we initially stood up connections, right? We didn't have a story on mobile, so we needed a story on mobile and connections was our answer. But when we built connections, we didn't make it only about comms.
We didn't make it only about news. We didn't make it only about task and resource access, like task completion and resource access. We made it about all of it, because we feel like and that's the way we think like we can make connections. And in general, like Internet's valuable to users across a broad set of customers and a broad set of users within a customer whom we choose to use the internet in slightly different ways.
Yeah, completely agree. I think that sometimes the frustration we have in conversations with customers about product and platform selection is that it can feel like the easiest choice to opt for something that is a single purpose tool, right? A SaaS product that is focusing exclusively on news and comms. And, you know, that's gonna it's gonna solve one problem, but it's gonna create a bunch of others in its wake, which aren't necessarily the domain of the person that is launching the kind of comms based intranet to to resolve, likely to result in some level of user friction. But it feels like the easy option because SharePoint can look complicated, right?
Yeah, one hundred percent. And that's our fault, right? Like, it's like we need to go, one, on our end, do what we can do to make SharePoint simpler to use, and at the same time, rely on partners like you, right? Like who take all of the, I would say, like the tools we give you, and then you build on top of those tools to build an abstracted layer that's easier for consumers to consume.
And I would say that, especially if you think about an AI era, you do not want your organizational knowledge fragmented. Because that's going to make it so much more harder for you to put all of this content together into a single place in order to be able to reason over to say, hey, in my community, they said this, but my authority to source and SharePoint says this, which one's actually right? This one was post like, the community post was made two years ago, but then this one, like this news post was made like, I don't know, six months ago. Yeah, it's like, how do I do?
Even being able to reason over that, you need to have your content in one place, right? Yeah. So I think point solutions, sure. I think like, I don't want to speak ill of our competitors, but I think they're good, but up to a point, right?
But I think like, if you truly want to prepare yourselves for the AI era, you want your internet real estate, plus your content, plus all your community stuff sitting in like one single place that your models can reason over.
Yeah, good.
So I'm gonna pull myself up on my use of the word complicated there because I think, you know, often it can feel like a criticism. Right? But I think that, you know, under that complexity is you're able to create something that is very broad, very specific at times for users, can be very personalized, can be very targeted. People are trying to achieve complicated outcomes, and it does need a product that can meet that level of complexity. So it's not necessarily a criticism of SharePoint. It's just saying if you're trying to achieve a complicated outcome, the tools are naturally going to be a little bit more complicated.
Yeah, and we do our best. Like, we sweat about this every day. It's how do we make it simpler and easier to use? How do we make it simpler and easier to use? Because I think like if you think about how yeah, just like generally, like how SharePoint has to evolve when you think of, you know, in a Copilot or an AI first world.
I think simplicity is key because right now a lot of our AI like if you take a look at a lot of the AI forward apps, right, like they are maximalist or minimalist depending on how we look at it in that approach, right? Which is like if they're trying to synthesize everything down to a single prompt box. And I think there is some room for simplicity there, but at the same time, when you want to get certain things done, you need to get out of that prompt box, like I said, into like the actual UX.
And that's where I think some of, yeah, and that's where I think SharePoint can really pay to expense.
Yep.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I would say that's exactly right. I think that's one of the challenges that we face because if you ask me one of like, again, like, what is one thing about SharePoint that people frequently get wrong?
And it's no fault of theirs. It's because SharePoint is such a, I would say, it has been such a durable product in the enterprise that and it's there are not many SaaS apps out there that have lasted twenty five years and that have grown to the like, at the scale that SharePoint has over twenty five years, let alone exist.
But the flip side of that is, in a lot of cases, some of our customers are still on prem, right? To your point, the version of SharePoint that they have deployed is from three, four, six, seven, like two thousand and four through seven, right?
Even before the cloud. And so their view of the world when they see SharePoint is that. Like, don't see like, even like even customers that are on SharePoint online and some of and our latest pitch who get who get our monthly releases, Even with them, like, we have to constantly fight the battle of getting them to discover some of the newest features that we push out. Even things like flex sections, right, like our editorial cards, all of this stuff that we thought we'll that we launched with great fanfare, it's seeing great take up, but not all customers know about this.
And so when they think about SharePoint, they still tend to think about this as a very early two thousands or maybe even the two thousand and ten SharePoint versus a kind of SharePoint pay, like, what's the word SharePoint is today. Like a common reaction sometimes when I do this with customers or when I do customer conversations and kind of like show them and walk them through the demo, they'll be like, wait, you can build that with SharePoint?
Yes. And you go, yeah. And this has been on market for over a year now. And then and then, like, yeah, you can quickly see the CIO, the conference, and, like, open the laptop, fire off an email, like, right there in the customer meeting.
Right? Like, where we're kinda, like, what? It's like, okay, great. Like, we need to know more about this.
Yes. Anyway, so would say, like, that's the biggest, I would say, misconception of SharePoint that we have to constantly fight. And again, like I said, it's nobody's fault that there's that this misconception that exists is just because SharePoint's not durable for product that's lasted for that long, and changing perception takes time and effort.
Do you, you know, what are your views on, third party solutions like Fresh? I mean, we've talked about it a little bit already in in in the in the discussion today.
You know, we hear people saying to us, well, you know, look. I've got SharePoint. It's an intranet. It's an intranet out of the box. You know, we don't always agree with that. You know, it's a it's a it's a toolkit that you need to, you know, assemble in in in some ways.
And views from you on the role of third party SharePoint intranet solutions like Fresh?
Yeah, no, great question. I think it's a little bit like I said before, a SharePoint is both an app and a platform. And for some users and for some customers, out of the box SharePoint makes sense, For the use cases that they want to achieve. But for a lot of customers, they need the extra layer of abstraction on top to really unlock value for their use cases, right?
And from our point of view, we love both, I think. And I think both are essential. And this is where partners like you all come in, like Fresh come in, right? Where you take our stock out of the box offering, and you build on it and fine tune it for customer specific use cases.
And you give the customers truly what they need so they can maximize the ROI from their SharePoint investments.
And you all know the customer so well and so intimately across all of the different use cases. At our scale, it's great to have you and partners like you on our side kind of evangelizing what SharePoint can actually go out and do. Because there is no way we can just scale to talk to each and every customer and see what their use cases and say, Ah, this is how you need to go tune SharePoint in order to achieve your use case, right? We'll never be able to do that.
We never scale. So I think the work that you all do is kind of critical in terms of being able to take the value of SharePoint and share it with customers. And I think the converse is also true, which is our partners and our MVP community are some of, push us the hardest in terms of improving our platform. Because you are at the front lines with customers, right?
Like when something doesn't work like it should, or something needs to work a certain way, like you're there on the customer call, like sitting in the customer side, like getting a year full from your, whether it's the cost person, exactly, right. And you feed that feedback back to us. And I think like the work you all do helps us and eventually build a better platform as well, right? Like something on both sides, taking the best of what SharePoint has to offer and showcasing it to our customers.
And the flip side, which is taking what customers really need and synthesizing that to us in a way that is useful so that we can actually move the platform forward. I think partners like Freshworks are super critical for us.
Yeah, great. Well, I see, look, it's good.
Yeah.
Yes. I'll do my best to not get into trouble and then you guys can keep me honest. I think let me see.
Yeah, so I think one, you'll see us lean in more on and do more on the AI front. And when you think about an AI forward world, I think simplicity is key. Like I said before, there's an approach where you can say where, hey, you take the maximalist approach where you dumb everything down to a prompt box, I don't think we're going to get there. I think the slider exists somewhere in between UX and the prompt box and the conversational interface.
But it's clear that SharePoint needs to be even simpler than it is today. So we've been on a journey of simplifying SharePoint. We'll have to continue on that journey. If anything, that journey is going to accelerate. So you'll see us like within the next three, six, nine months start to announce things that make SharePoint even simpler to use from an information architecture standpoint.
So I think that's point number one.
Two, again, like thinking on this dimension, the error of AI. Right? It's SharePoint like, SharePoint is more than just your, I would say, your content source. In some ways, is it it is the authoritative source for your enterprise.
So how do we really lean into that? And so the investments that the investments that we are making will hinge around things like making sure that content on SharePoint is much more easily machine or I'll say like LLM readable, not just files, but also things like pages, news post, the navigational, like around the site, the navigational elements around the site. So those are also incredibly like how you lay information around on your internet is also critical piece of information that can get fed back and used by LLNs and so on and so forth, right? If nothing else is to fine tune what this site should look like.
But all said and done, I think we're thinking of like the investments that you'll make, that you'll see us make are about helping surface SharePoint content in a much more LLM friendly, readable way. And conversely, also, if you think about SharePoint as the authoritative source for enterprise, How do you keep that authoritative source fresh, relevant, and up to date? Like, no pun intended.
That's right. But so the like, you you saw us start to make some of those investments with the knowledge agent, but we're just gonna double down on that because that we think that that is such a critically important use case helping us keep our customers content fresh and up to date, that that is something we'll continue to invest in. So that's like the second big thing, which is how do we make SharePoint as an authoritative source so much more powerful, both in the generation of content, keeping it up to date, and of course, being able to surface the relevant content at the right point in time and the LLM queries for it.
And then the last thing I'll say is you'll see us continue to build AI into the fabric of SharePoint itself. So I think there's a yes, and less of as a bolt on. When I say that, I mean, yes, you can have the traditional interface with AI, which is your chat pane on the right or some left depending on which app you use, and your conversational interface there. But I think you'll see us do more things like the FAQ app that I said, that is actually AI powered, right? Where AI shows up a lot more natively across SharePoint UX as opposed to, okay, it's relegated to this chat or it's bolted on in this chat pane on top of the SharePoint platform. So I would say those are the three big things. Simplicity, making SharePoint more LLM friendly in that sense, and building AI right into the fabric of SharePoint.
Right.
Yeah. Hundred percent. Like, I know there are a whole bunch of migration tools out there, PMP, third party. So, yes.
One hundred percent. There hasn't been a better time to get on to SharePoint than now.
Agree.
Yeah. I think in the history of SharePoint. Yeah. Later. So that's at least my perspective.
So two final questions for you then. Do you have a SharePoint myth that you'd like to bust?
Any kind of common misconceptions? We've talked about a couple already.
Yeah, I would say the biggest one was one which I covered little earlier, which is SharePoint is like Starge, not nineties, like very two thousand like Internet tool, but it's a very classic two thousand UX, right? So I would say not quite like SharePoint is a lot more contemporary than people would think it is. Like when they see the kind of things that customers and partners like you are building on SharePoint, it's in some ways rude awakening. Was like, oh my god, what?
I thought it was just consumer grade tools that could do this, Microsoft SharePoint. I think that's one. I think the second one that I'll also say is, I think that SharePoint is just a source for content. Also think it is excellent, it is extremely powerful as a workflow management tool.
And again, it's complicated to use in that use case, but the use case, as you say, is complicated. So to use it in that way, I think like SharePoint can be very, very powerful in terms of like how you use lists, how you hook it up with Power Automate, like automating workflows with email teams and so on and so forth. So there's a lot that you can do with SharePoint once you really start to dig underneath the covers beyond standing up and entering a website. Would say like, those are the two big ones that come to mind.
Well, I'll give you one of each. I'll give you one within Microsoft, I'll give you one outside of Microsoft.
One within Microsoft, I've been using the Researcher Agent a lot. It is awesome. I love it. I think it is my go to resource now when I want to get smart about a complicated topic pretty quickly.
And it's like, I don't know, it saves me hours and hours every single time, like whether I want to get up to speed on something that's AI related, not AI related. Again, like I'm relatively new to SharePoint, right? So there's a whole host of history that I'm still learning on a day to day basis. Somebody will say something about SharePoint and I won't have any idea what it is.
And then I'll go ask the research agent to like come up with a two page research summary report on what this thing is within SharePoint. I'll let it go do its thing, come back in thirty minutes, and it'll have a crisp two page summary of what this is. And that would have taken me hours otherwise of kind of like sifting through documents and emails and reaching out to people to, real face to face people conversations to understand what something is. So I think that is by far one of my favorite, I would say Microsoft apps or experiences that I've really enjoyed using.
The second one I'll say is Sora two. I really enjoyed playing around with it. I don't know if you, I managed to get it in right, which is cool.
So I think it's pretty game changing in terms of the kind of content that you can create and how easy it is really to manipulate video content along with audio with Soro too. So those would be the two that I can think of right now.
Yeah. I was not lucky enough to get an invite, but the outputs are extremely impressive.
Yeah. Yeah. It's yeah. You run up against the like, you get throttled pretty quickly because it's so expensive to generate video. And then, yeah, like, after a certain point, I think, like, it just, like, after a certain while, it just, like, kinda, like, dies on me. And then I have wait for whatever conquer it is that they have to kind of, like, reset where they fill all the beans again, and then I can go and try it again. But when it works, it's pretty awesome.
Yeah. Yeah. It's a great time to be in the tech sector.
Think there is there is so much changing every single day.
It's not like the error of things changing over years or six month cycles or even quarters is gone. Like, literally Yeah.
Things are changing Year is a month.
Was it ten years as a year, year is a month.
I don't know how someone's talking about that.
Hundred percent.
Yeah. That's exactly right. Yeah. And we're in some ways, like, we're still haven't uncovered truly what like, yeah.
We're still like, we haven't tapped into the full potential of, I think, what AI can do. We still learn like, we know that the tech is great. It works really well in certain sort of use cases. But finding those use cases and translating that into customer value is, I think, the next phase of journey that we'll be on.
Anyway.
Kripal Kavi, thank you so much for joining us today. Really appreciate your time.
Yeah. No. Awesome. Jarbas, great to meet you, and hopefully, I'll run into it at one of these MVP conferences in the in the coming days. And David, great as always.