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Need to use a SharePoint intranet due to internal policies, company transitions, or legacy systems? When all the available information is overly technical or negative, where do you turn? Enter Fresh Perspectives: Living in the reality of SharePoint intranets. We provide useful, jargon-free insights and real-world examples to help you maximize the benefits of SharePoint intranets and tackle its challenges. Pro-SharePoint but realistic, we debunk misconceptions and share product management insights from Fresh Intranet.
Jarbas Horst (00:01.272)
Action! Isn't it? Well, it's fresh perspectives time, David. So welcome everyone.
David Bowman (00:07.894)
Yeah, I wasn't ready for that.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, I'm awake now.
David Bowman (00:34.094)
It's cold here. And no snow today. We did have some snow yesterday, although I always feel bad saying that when we talk to Yarmou on meetings and they're two foot deep in snow.
Jarbas Horst (00:35.822)
It's good.
Jarbas Horst (00:46.392)
who is in Finland, things are quite different but last week when I was in London, it wasn't last week, can't remember anymore, was sunshine, it was quite disappointed I have been visiting London quite often now and usually it's rainy and cloudy it was three days of sun I was like what's going on here? that's going on here, that was all that you are going to get for sun
David Bowman (01:06.872)
That was summer, it's been gone now. Yeah, Hi.
Jarbas Horst (01:13.666)
But also I'm I'm Jarvis Horst. I'm a Senior Product Manager for for fresh internet and with me have
David Bowman (01:22.51)
David Bowman, Product Director, Steel Product Director for Fresh Intranet. And today we're going to talk about the benefits of SharePoint intranets.
Jarbas Horst (01:34.304)
And are we focusing there like on on SharePoint or intranets like in the general sense, David?
David Bowman (01:41.934)
Are we calling into question the kind of abstract purpose of intranets or are we talking about SharePoint?
Jarbas Horst (01:51.746)
Well, let's start with intranets and then we go from there and then we talk also about SharePoint. But let's start with maybe a tricky question here, David. So can you imagine work for organization that doesn't have an intranet? Now imagine you are in a job interview, which will probably not happen with you. We need you here as the project director. But no.
David Bowman (01:57.774)
Okay.
David Bowman (02:17.036)
in the theoretical sense.
Jarbas Horst (02:20.064)
And someone comes and asks you like, or maybe you go there and ask like, you do you have an internet? Right. So can you imagine that situation?
David Bowman (02:27.64)
Well, and they don't have one.
Jarbas Horst (02:29.624)
and they don't have one.
David Bowman (02:31.118)
Well, you I think I think it would probably be like a red flag for me to be honest You know, I think if you if there's an organization you Can't be bothered or haven't had the wherewithal to set up even something pretty basic, right? You know a home page with some links and a bit of information about the organization I think it's probably reflective of other cultural problems in the organization because you know
Jarbas Horst (02:37.08)
Right.
David Bowman (02:57.11)
It's not hard to do. It's a relatively low investment, ultimately, in the grand scheme of things to help people kind of navigate the organization, get orientated in your onboarding. And it feels like a, I think, feels like it's probably a given these days that organizations are going to have something for that. You know, maybe if the job that, you know, if the job that I'd gone for in this theoretical sense, you know, it had been my responsibility to sort out an intranet, right? You know, maybe that would be an acceptable situation, but.
I think otherwise it would be a pretty big problem for me.
Jarbas Horst (03:28.504)
Yeah, I think the same like, you know, maybe if it's a very small organization, right? So that could be acceptable. And I'm talking like, you hear like 10 people, right? But like, even I have worked for a company like that before, right? So you have like 10 people, people have been like in this organization for long. And you know where things are, where things are located and all of that. Now, when someone new comes in that organization, like even a small one, you get like the same questions, you know, where can I find the links and documents?
David Bowman (03:35.619)
Yeah.
David Bowman (03:54.018)
Yes. Yes.
David Bowman (03:58.7)
And I think, know, even in like, you know, pre pandemic, right, when hybrid working was less of a thing, it was probably easier to get away as a small organization without having something like an intranet, right? Even like a very basic homepage. But I think now that, you know, even as an organization of 10 people, if you're trying to recruit, bring new people in, you're trying to help people to work efficiently, you're probably trying to make use of AI tools and technologies, you're to need to have a better handle on your data, right?
Jarbas Horst (04:08.482)
Mm.
Jarbas Horst (04:24.011)
Yeah.
David Bowman (04:27.438)
where is your information? Helping people to get started efficiently. think even small organizations are going to need to have something. I think if I was starting my own business and I was a team of one, having an intranet probably isn't justified. I think if you don't have an office and everybody is hybrid work in your organization, having something to rotate around feels still very important for me. Sorry, go on, Yoves.
Jarbas Horst (04:43.38)
Mm-hmm.
Jarbas Horst (04:47.489)
Yeah.
Jarbas Horst (04:51.872)
Yeah, yeah, it, no, you need to structure like your digital workplace, right? And the internet helps with that, right? It provides the foundation.
David Bowman (05:01.9)
Yeah, yeah, yes. Yeah, you know, I think we've we've we've said, you know, in in other times, right, that, you within the Advania UK business, we use fresh as our homepage and as our internet. And that, you know, that is generally the place that I go to get anything done. I don't know where our HR systems are. I've no idea what our expenses system are called, because I don't spend any time thinking about it. I go to the homepage, I click on a link. While I'm there, I may be distracted by some
Jarbas Horst (05:13.517)
Yeah.
Jarbas Horst (05:27.074)
Yes, same here.
David Bowman (05:29.378)
you know, a piece of news or other information that has been on the homepage. But, you know, I don't spend any time thinking about this stuff. You know, it's just it's an extremely useful way of finding your way around the organization.
Jarbas Horst (05:31.402)
Yes.
Jarbas Horst (05:42.818)
Yeah, look, internets can also have a bad reputation, right? So you gave a good example, right? So the way how we have our internet with a homepage, with a lot of information useful for employees, but they can also like have a bad reputation, isn't it?
David Bowman (05:57.494)
Yeah, yeah. And I think those examples generally tend to be where the internet has been in place for what, five, 10 years. It's unmanaged. Maybe the person that set it up left some time ago. Everybody moans about it, doesn't really have any ownership. Or perhaps it's some old creaky technology and there's passwords and usernames required to get into this thing and isn't necessarily accessible very quickly.
Jarbas Horst (06:07.938)
Yeah.
Jarbas Horst (06:27.074)
And that's true, well, we had a client the other day and they come to talk to us and they have an on-premise internet. So they have had that now like for, I think, 20 years. And they were saying like, no, younger workforce that come to work with us, they complain about it. Well, you know, the consumer application solutions, they are way ahead, right? So they're intuitive and...
and you know if you have like this solution imagine Facebook right Facebook when it was launched 2004 and if it would have not evolved so that's maybe the situation that some organizations have right they have had their the internet's like for 10 20 15 years and without like much progress
David Bowman (07:07.256)
Yeah, yeah, the concept of poking people on Facebook maybe feels a bit more inappropriate in today's world.
Jarbas Horst (07:15.96)
But it's not also about the technology, isn't it? Because you could also have a new internet, new solution that's not delivering as well.
David Bowman (07:28.162)
Yeah, yeah. And you know, I think the best examples of intranets that we've seen in the, you know, the history we've been doing doing intranets is that there's a great leader, a great owner, you know, an intranet manager that is, you know, they're the ones that are ultimately making a difference. You know, the technology is an important consideration at the beginning, but a great leader, owner, someone that's in tune with the business understands what people wants. It's doing a great job of curating content and
Jarbas Horst (07:39.414)
Yeah.
Jarbas Horst (07:55.736)
Yeah.
David Bowman (07:56.268)
listening to feedback and making adjustments, looking at analytics. You know, those those people really make the difference. That and a great roadmap.
Jarbas Horst (08:03.192)
Yeah, and so as a product manager, roadmap for me tends to be features. And I think you have a good example that it's beyond that, isn't it?
David Bowman (08:14.134)
Yeah, yeah, you it doesn't need to be, you know, high gloss tech stuff that's on the roadmap, right? You know, launching chatbots every few days. That's not that's not really the thing that you need to focus on. It may be adding more people into the Internet, right? A new team, a new business and organization that's been acquired, adding content, decommissioning, you know, some remote data store somewhere, bringing that content into the Internet.
Jarbas Horst (08:23.894)
Yeah.
Jarbas Horst (08:38.882)
Yes.
David Bowman (08:43.53)
making some changes the way search works, right? You know, it can be small incremental changes, but that kind of continuous iteration of the internet, I think makes a makes a big difference for people that are using it.
Jarbas Horst (08:55.928)
Fully agree, right? We have clients like doing that right now. And we see like really good progress as not just in terms of functionalities, like in case of Fresh, right? So we have like those four releases a year that they get and they can like increase in terms of functionality, but also like getting feedback from the employees and then improving the internet accordingly. So that's really beautiful like when that happens.
David Bowman (09:21.154)
Yeah, and there's a nice segue there because I think a lot of what we're talking about is kind of the emotional side of intranets, right? And I think it's often kind of building business cases on the emotional side of intranets about what it means for new employees, the kind of narrative and stories around people getting benefits from having an intranet in place, but the kind of the facts and figures, right? So Microsoft published on their work trend index, this new performance equation. And I just thought,
Jarbas Horst (09:28.012)
Yeah.
David Bowman (09:50.03)
pulling out a couple of statistics from this report because the kind of basic principles of what they were saying here is, you know, they analyzed more than 3 million employees at more than 200 companies across different industries and looked at the stock price movement of those same companies throughout the year. And what they found was that high employee engagement correlated with stronger financial performance. And, you know, they had a couple of statistics. It's nice.
kind of equation that they created, productivity times engagement equals performance. Drawing this link between financial performance and employee engagement. And they were saying that, you on average, each additional point of engagement reported by employees correlated with a $46,000 difference in market cap per employee. And, you know, kind of, you know, there's some impressive statistics worth taking a look at this report, but, you know, basically kind of pulling out some data points to say,
Jarbas Horst (10:39.544)
Yeah.
Jarbas Horst (10:43.821)
Yeah.
David Bowman (10:48.974)
employee engagement, communications and feedback and acting on the feedback helps to generate good employee engagement which will have an impact on financial performance.
Jarbas Horst (11:00.504)
Yeah, those are really good data points that you brought there. So I think we are in alignment that we need in the internet, right? And well, I'm pretty sure that we have been in alignment since we start talking even before about that. Now, let's talk about SharePoint, right? Focus on that part now. And when we are at events, and I have the pleasure to be there with you very often, so you ask people two questions.
David Bowman (11:09.314)
Yes.
Jarbas Horst (11:30.038)
Right. So one is like, do you use SharePoint? And the other one is like, do you love SharePoint? Right. So why do you do that?
David Bowman (11:38.358)
Yeah. Well, part of it is just when you're at events and you're having those repetitive conversations over and over again, right, you're to potentially hundreds of people in the same day, you need a script to work from, right? And you need an icebreaker. And what I like about that icebreaker is that generally the answer to the first question is yes. The answer to the second question is almost never yes. Funny, funny.
Jarbas Horst (11:49.174)
Yeah.
Jarbas Horst (12:03.192)
So not everyone is obsessed about SharePoint as we are
David Bowman (12:08.43)
I need to admit that out loud, but yeah, you know, think people have a very mixed experience of SharePoint. And, generally what you what you get in response to that second question is, no, I don't love it. And the range of responses goes from, you know, I absolutely hate using it. And any time that I have to use it, I'm angry with the world generally through to, you know, I, you know, I accept this into my life. Right.
But I think what I like about the question is it's introducing the idea that people could love SharePoint, right? Because underneath that resistance to it, I would say 50 % of the people that I speak to have got an old impression of what SharePoint is like, right? And perhaps that's, even conversations I've had recently as customers using the on-premises versions of SharePoint, right? And old versions of the on-premises versions of SharePoint.
That is a tough situation if you find yourself in that position. Even people with more modern experiences, I think we were talking about this in the very first episode that we recorded, that in and of itself, it's not an intranet. It's a toolkit of stuff that somebody has got to put together. And if what you're using is a kind of out of the box, cobbled together by someone in IT as a hobby project,
Jarbas Horst (13:20.024)
Mmm, yeah.
David Bowman (13:32.138)
I can imagine that people are having a difficult experience there with search, analytics, branding, know, a lot of those things become pretty challenging. We were talking about that in that first episode.
Jarbas Horst (13:42.678)
Yeah, I heard you like I was listening your webinar with CloudyNet like a partner of ours from the US and you were saying that like there is no magic button that you can go and push that makes SharePoint an internet like functional with well with the structure that you need. So.
David Bowman (14:00.908)
Yeah, yeah, you can you can do some stuff to it to to to improve it. But you know, generally what you're going to need is a good chunk of experience and expertise. You know, there's a reason that there is a thriving market out there for internet products, because, you know, people want to spend time on the stuff that's going to add most value to employees. They don't want to spend time working out the right way to deploy content types into SharePoint.
Jarbas Horst (14:25.304)
Yeah, no, that's true. By the way, when was your first interaction with SharePoint?
David Bowman (14:31.886)
So CMS 2002, when I joined the content and code business and my main role in life was making sure that we were running good quality development projects to build websites for public sector organizations. I think it may have been like Westminster Council was my first experience at SharePoint. Probably not one to be revisited.
Jarbas Horst (14:53.749)
So...
I was still at school David at that time. My first interaction with SharePoint was in 2010. It was in 2007 version. We were doing development on top of 2007. The internet were in SharePoint 2010.
David Bowman (14:58.958)
We can end the exercise there.
David Bowman (15:09.506)
Right.
Yeah. Yeah.
Yeah, well, and that was the way, right? Until quite recently, you know, to turn it into something useful, you had to do quite a lot of development work up front.
Jarbas Horst (15:23.344)
Yeah, yes, yes, like, um, definitely and well the good news like it has evolved like significantly, right? I mean, that's that's impressive and we were talking before like this episode here like we don't need to go and look like, you know 20 15 10 years ago like just from 2014, uh, sorry 2024 2023, um how much it has changed? Um, you gave like some good examples where you can repeat them here
David Bowman (15:30.893)
Yes.
David Bowman (15:43.128)
Yes.
David Bowman (15:51.534)
Yeah, so you know, if you look at the product, the potential for the product this time next year, right in 2026, that you've got the flexible layouts, making SharePoint pages work a bit more like something like WordPress, for example. You've got the AI functionality, creating agents on the fly in SharePoint, out of the box in content in listen libraries, the brand center, fonts.
Jarbas Horst (16:05.526)
Yeah, it is.
David Bowman (16:18.254)
And that is literally just in a 24 month period. So if your last experiences with SharePoint were 2016 to 2020 even, this is a product that has evolved rapidly in a short space of time.
Jarbas Horst (16:35.832)
Yeah, yeah, so like really like the the best year months so much has happened in terms of page So many improvements that have they apply there like new web parts new functionalities as you mentioned the experience has really evolved and I mean SharePoint is is looking less like SharePoint as it evolves right of course solutions like I was also helped like improve that but the out-of-the-box experience especially like in this time in terms of
David Bowman (16:56.259)
Yeah.
Jarbas Horst (17:05.74)
page. That's really, it's beautiful, I think.
David Bowman (17:08.312)
Yeah, yes, yeah. Well, you I think the sort of the guts of what we were gonna talk about today was really kind of five key reasons that we think people should be revisiting SharePoint. And I think, you the first of those is probably a pretty obvious one and link back to that question that I asked people at the events, right? Is that people are already using this thing in, you know, in whatever guise the organization has it for better or worse.
Jarbas Horst (17:29.922)
Yes.
David Bowman (17:35.768)
People are experiencing SharePoint in most organizations now.
Jarbas Horst (17:40.14)
Yeah, that's all true.
David Bowman (17:42.092)
And that's going to be SharePoint directly or possibly Microsoft Teams, right? You know, you're collaborating with your colleagues, you're running projects. You know, you'll be using SharePoint files, folders, the system.
Jarbas Horst (17:58.262)
Yeah, maybe people are not aware about that. like, so under each Microsoft Teams team, you have like a SharePoint site where like all of the documents that you upload, for example, into a channel, they will then be stored at the end of the day in the SharePoint that lives inside, like under the Teams. So you are using that, like, as I said, either directly or indirectly. And that's the fact, like for many organizations out there, right?
David Bowman (18:26.988)
Yeah. I think also increasingly we're seeing this kind of, you know, a drive for people being asked, either asked by their IT departments to come back and revisit SharePoint because their data lives somewhere else, right? You know, they've got a third party internet product. The data is in some third party software as a service, cloud hosted infrastructure. And the IT folks are trying to progress the strategy for consolidating IT systems.
Jarbas Horst (18:28.802)
Damn it.
Jarbas Horst (18:45.218)
Mm-hmm.
Jarbas Horst (18:55.638)
Yeah.
David Bowman (18:56.238)
leveraging the investment that they're putting in Microsoft 365, perhaps new governance, regulation, legislation, that sort of stuff is driving them back into SharePoint. And what we're getting is people saying, you know, we would like to maintain parity with our existing intranet, but we've got to get the data back into Microsoft 365.
Jarbas Horst (19:18.36)
Yeah, well, I was like in terms of reducing digital friction and also like reducing costs, right? Because if we look at Microsoft 365, there are so many applications and services that that it provides. You know, if we take an example outside of of of Internet's right. But if you look at Slack and Teams and Zoom and Teams. So, you know, we're not talking about like.
the same features, but it's similar enough that it could justify kind of this consolidation that will at the end of the day, like help you reduce costs, right? And we see it, like we have similar discussions with clients as well. They have like a SaaS internet outside, well, SaaS internet, they're outside of Microsoft 365 and they want like to move to SharePoint because that's where IT is and aligning them like also here like with this strategy.
David Bowman (19:49.198)
Yeah.
David Bowman (20:00.332)
Yes.
Jarbas Horst (20:15.21)
of IT, think you have a very good point there, like when it comes to comms team aligning their roadmap with the one from IT and from the CIO. Maybe you can elaborate on that.
David Bowman (20:26.082)
Yeah. Yeah, well, I think that this point about, you know, IT people are generally quite happy about this as a strategy because there is an existing investment going in in the organization about security, identity, managing data. And, you know, I think being able to leverage the investment that the organization is putting into Microsoft 365 and SharePoint already. And, you know, that may be in some hidden ways, right? Things like people data, you know, the
Jarbas Horst (20:53.762)
Mm-hmm.
David Bowman (20:54.318)
But in tidying up the people data, it's going to be of benefit to you in using the intranet for being able to drive things like personalization with groups and all that kind of stuff. And often in organizations, there's a comms team of one person. They're doing all the work in internal comms and actually lining up your comms tech stack with the work that the IT team are doing, understanding their roadmap for Microsoft 365, what's being
Jarbas Horst (21:04.354)
Yeah.
Jarbas Horst (21:09.037)
Yeah.
David Bowman (21:23.16)
turned on, launched, licensed in the coming weeks and months, and trying to build a partnership and alignment with that group may help you stop feeling like a team of one. Being able to have a buddy or buddies in the IT department that you can work with and make sure that you're linking all of your comms initiatives to stuff that they're doing, I think may make you feel like you're part of a bigger team.
Jarbas Horst (21:47.736)
Yeah, I mean, not just that, right? I think it's a win-win for both. Like from an IT point of view, you put a lot of effort in making, let's say, Microsoft 365 secure. I mean, by design, it comes with a lot of security in itself, but there's also a lot of configuration options that you can apply additionally, which IT usually goes there and do, right? So then you already have that in place.
That's a benefit that you get when you end up with SharePoint as your intranet. That security is inherited in SharePoint. applies also to multi-factor authentication. That is there already, so you don't need to take care of that. It's beneficial in this case.
David Bowman (22:34.764)
Yeah. And I think maybe the third benefit of doing this in SharePoint is that for better or worse, right or wrong, Microsoft do have a vision for employee experience. It may not always be 100 % crystal clear what it is. It may at times seem like there's a lot of overlapping functionality in the applications that are available, but it is worth spending time
listening to how they're talking about the vision for employee experience, and then interpreting your own from that. There are a huge amount of applications and features and functionality available in Microsoft 365 that may not be immediately obvious to people. And having a good understanding of what's available there and having a good understanding of how Microsoft think that people should be using this stuff will help you build your own vision for employee, for digital employee experience on top of that.
Jarbas Horst (23:33.548)
Yeah, like giving like some more tangible examples, right? So, well, we have SharePoint where you can have your intranet, right? So your document management is happening there already. So, you know, you can extend that and have like a solid solution there with your intranet that connects everything. Then Teams where a lot of the collaboration is already happening. So then the communication SharePoint collaboration in Teams and your enterprise network, social network happening in Viva Engage.
kind of like those three examples that we see our clients also using the internet and SharePoint and Engage and Teams and the interplay between those three solutions help build the employee experience.
David Bowman (24:15.682)
Yeah, I mean, I don't think anyone's saying that those things are all easy, right? You there are some complex outcomes that have been driven there. It's not always as straightforward as bringing in some point solutions to deal with those things individually. doing it, putting that a bit of extra effort and pain in to create this experience for people means that it is happening in a much more integrated way.
Jarbas Horst (24:40.224)
Yeah, and I think good also about Microsoft 365 is that it comes with a lot of customization and integration extensibility options.
David Bowman (24:50.348)
Yeah, I think that that extensibility is, you know, I guess the reason that we exist as a function, right? You know, the only reason that we've been able to build fresh in the first place and kind of fill any gaps in this world of intranet and create this intranet in a box experience people in SharePoint is because it is so extensible.
Jarbas Horst (24:56.865)
Yeah.
Jarbas Horst (25:08.566)
Yeah, it's like the Lego, right? I like this idea of the building blocks.
David Bowman (25:11.341)
Yeah.
David Bowman (25:15.052)
Yes, although I guess what it might feel like is that box of Lego that you've got all of the bits and pieces that you've accumulated over the years. You're emptying out on the floor and you've got hundreds or thousands of bricks in front of you and you're not entirely sure what it is that you can build.
Jarbas Horst (25:22.708)
the classic yeah all right yeah yeah
David Bowman (25:44.366)
you
David Bowman (25:57.358)
Yes. And the extensibility of fresh means that there are a collection of vendors out there that can produce those blueprints for you, right? That they're building these solutions with referenceability, with templates and just that. The extensibility of SharePoint and Microsoft 365, I think is unparalleled in the industry. I would challenge anybody to find me something that is extensible as SharePoint.
Jarbas Horst (26:27.35)
That's really good. Again, know, I mean, example, we deliver the internet in SharePoint, right? So when it comes with a lot of functionality and so on, and even that can be further extended. If we look at then the power platform, right? So you can create then power apps and integrate that in even the context of the internet, or if you want like to automate some processes and that goes beyond then that what is provided. So that could be done then with power automate. So no.
Like what has been extended can then be third extended. that's a...
David Bowman (27:01.354)
And we've got some episodes coming up with customer case studies talking to people about how they're using SharePoint and fresh and what it means in their organizations. And I think one of the things that I've really liked about having those conversations with people is uncovering those kind of hidden areas, That you've got a team in the organization that's building Power Apps specifically for business services or specific business requirements.
Being able to just directly embed those things into the intranet immediately uplifts the value of the intranet. It makes a much nicer digital experience for everyone in the organization. And at least one of those examples, the customer was saying to us that they had not realized that those skills existed in the organization previously. And suddenly, they had a kind of collaborator that they were working with in the intranet that were then able to build them some additional workflows to
Jarbas Horst (27:38.698)
It does.
David Bowman (27:58.574)
make distribution of information easier around the organization. And I just, you know, I really like that idea that there are multiple people in the organization developing their skills in Microsoft 365 that can work together.
Jarbas Horst (28:01.826)
Bye.
Jarbas Horst (28:10.776)
That's a really good point. So that's where IT also comes and can help further. So either you have a partner, like a consultant partner that can help you and build that. as you mentioned, within the organization might be maybe someone from IT who can also then help build those extensions for you that will really provide a very rich experience for your internet.
David Bowman (28:33.474)
Yeah. And it does seem like we can't ever have a conversation without mentioning AI. So in order to try not to spend too long on this today, but it feels wrong to not mention this as a benefit given the amount of investment that Microsoft are putting into copilot.
Jarbas Horst (28:54.348)
That's true. That's true. Well, I mean, the good thing is like, so Co-Pilot exists in Microsoft 365, right? So you can use that like to ask questions that will then take information about all of your data, going like from Teams to Outlook. Maybe before I go there, like like to highlight two benefits actually of Co-Pilot. I think this is, those are basic things, but they are kind of,
Amazing, So Copilot is integrated with your organizational data. So if you compare that with like, chat GPT, so that's a big difference. So chat GPT is not integrated with the documents and Teams messages and your Outlook emails. So that Copilot does it. And the second thing that's also huge is like the enterprise data protection that Copilot has.
So that means like all of the interaction that you have with Co-Pilot, the prompts you enter, the queries you send and so on, all of that is secure, right? So those are kind of basic, but like very important aspects of having AI in your platform.
David Bowman (30:10.892)
And I was at an AI conference recently and a lot of the people that I was speaking to at that conference were saying that one of the reasons that they weren't progressing AI initiatives in their kind of small comms departments is that they were worrying about this point about leaking data outside the organization. A lot of the information that they're dealing with is quite sensitive. And, you know, saying to them, well, but look, you realize that you can use either the free copilot that's in the browser.
or if you have an organization licensed with Copilot, that data stays in your organization. And I was surprised that that is not a point that is well understood by people. And I think increasingly, this kind of IT departments that are switching these technologies on are not necessarily highlighting the benefits and the use cases that people can get out of these technologies. It's a real shame. And I think if I'm...
If I'm internal communications working organization that's Microsoft 365, I would really be pushing to have a license for this thing and be spending time understanding it.
Jarbas Horst (31:15.528)
And on this aspect, right, so I heard from a consultant, a colleague of ours, someone was mentioning that a client was taking, or someone was taking kind of then documents then from the internet and uploading that then in chat GPT, because then they could have similar experience as they have with co-pilot, right? But then you have this aspect, you mentioned, right? So that data is then exposed.
maybe publicly so you don't know exactly how that gets handled. It doesn't provide this enterprise the protection that Copilot provides. Now, Copilot then goes beyond just being there over all of the Microsoft 365 part. Microsoft is now also integrating it now more deeply within applications. It has been available across Word and PowerPoint and so on, but now also coming then into SharePoint, so via SharePoint agents.
And soon what we always like see is like then the, the option for creating SharePoint pages with co-pilot, right? So.
David Bowman (32:21.57)
Yeah, yeah. And again, I think back to that kind of, you know, the benefit for the internal communicator. This will make you be more strategic. Ultimately, you know, if you're running your Internet in SharePoint, you're moving your content and data into Microsoft 365. That's where your content and information is. It is immediately accessible through copilot's entire organization. you know, lining up with that strategy means that you're getting the automatic benefits of all of the work that Microsoft are doing on AI.
Jarbas Horst (32:31.606)
Yeah.
Jarbas Horst (32:40.887)
Yes.
David Bowman (32:51.062)
It's coming to SharePoint, it's in Word, it's in Outlook, it's in Teams. This is a good way of being able to say our internal comms function is now using generative AI.
Jarbas Horst (32:54.765)
Yeah.
Jarbas Horst (33:05.986)
Yeah, so you are, as you said, you are really aligned with your organization, right? So if your CIO is thinking of or adopting Co-Pilot, so know, having then your internet already, SharePoint will then add that additional benefit of having an AI already then like in your internet, Regardless whether your software vendor provides that or not. So then you would have AI already by design, right? Through Co-Pilot.
David Bowman (33:30.476)
Yes, yes. And you know, being provided by one of the biggest technology companies in the world.
Jarbas Horst (33:38.166)
Yeah, yeah, who is like really doing a lot in that area, but maybe we stop here, right? Otherwise we keep talking about AI for one another.
David Bowman (33:40.046)
Yes.
We're going to turn it into another AI episode. Let's try and wrap this up into some conclusions. I don't know why that was so difficult for me to say. We were talking at the beginning about is there value in trying to identify if there are benefits in intranets? And I think you and I are both very clearly on the side of this shouldn't even be a question for people now.
Jarbas Horst (33:47.672)
You
Jarbas Horst (34:13.688)
Yes, definitely, definitely. And I think, so when it comes to SharePoint, right? So if you have never tried it out, so maybe go there and give it a try, right? And maybe, yes, yes, it's like that. So, and especially if your organization has Microsoft 365, you're considering a new internet, well, then consider also SharePoint as the place where your internet can be.
David Bowman (34:26.156)
It's free. You'll be able to do it today.
David Bowman (34:40.332)
Yeah. Yes. And I think that the caveat to that, as we said in that first episode, the intranet, you know, SharePoint is free, right? The license is to use it. There'll already be in most organizations. It does not mean that setting it up as an intranet is free. There does need to be time, energy, additional software, effort, knowledge, expertise that's going to go into creating something that is a defined intranet, right? That's got some edges, some sides, some principles, some governance, a plan.
you know, kind of cutting out that intranet workload in SharePoint has a tangible cost to it, internal and external.
Jarbas Horst (35:18.104)
So that's it then, the call to action for everyone today. So go there, give SharePoint a try. It's not as bad as you think. Reach out if you want like a have a discussion around that.
David Bowman (35:28.718)
If you want to love SharePoint, we want to talk to you.
Jarbas Horst (35:34.264)
That's amazing. Well, let's leave it here, David. That was profound.