Microsoft 365 Knowledge Series: Recent Episodes

View Details

In the final episode of the series, Stephen and Paul discuss Power Apps, Power Automate, and the Microsoft Graph, and reflect on what they’ve learned since the pandemic has forced us all into a new normal of working remotely.

 Transcript:

Paul Thurrott (00:06):

Welcome back everybody to the Microsoft 365 Knowledge Series. I’m Paul Thurrott and I’m here as always with Stephen Rose, Senior Product Marketing Manager for the Modern Workplace, Teams and Platform. That is a long title.

Stephen Rose (00:18):

It’s ridiculous. I’m just the, IT Pro Teams guy, much easier.

Paul Thurrott (00:24):

This is not the penultimate episode. This is literally the final episode.

Stephen Rose (00:29):

It is.

Paul Thurrott (00:29):

Started this back in January. We’ve gone through various aspects of Microsoft 365 over the past few months. And today we’re going to hit on some parts of the Power Platform, including Power Apps, Power Automate, as well as the Microsoft Graph, and then, you know, I’d like to have a kind of a look back. Obviously the world has changed a lot, which is kind of amazing and you know, see what we’ve learned over the past.

Stephen Rose (00:53):

I think people watch these episodes in order and see our hair change. And now go back to kind of the way it was, it’s interesting.

Paul Thurrott (01:00):

A flood of COVID haircuts have occurred. That’s right. So, kind of back to normal in some ways, but not in many ways.

Stephen Rose (01:07):

Right?

Paul Thurrott (01:09):

So with regards to the Power Platform, this encompasses a bunch of Microsoft solutions. Let’s see if I can get this straight Power BI, Power Virtual Agents, Power Apps, and Power Automate. We’re going to talk about Power Apps and Power Automate largely today. You may remember Power Automate as Flow. That name has changed to kind of bring it in house with the branding. And I’m pretty excited about both of these things, actually, I have to say. And this is kind of a neat way to wrap it up because in many ways Power Apps, Power Automate, and Microsoft Graph, which we’re also going to talk about. I think of as kind of the glue of Microsoft 365.

Stephen Rose (01:46):

It is. Yeah, and if we look at Teams sort of being the new productivity platform that we’re building upon the next sort of Windows, where people will be spending most of their time, Power Automate and Power Apps, and these things really allow you to not just extend the work that you’re doing, but it really allows you to create super easy shortcuts and quick apps. These low code, no code solutions for people to be able to get more done in different ways. And the thing I always tell people is, for those who were really into InfoPath back in the day, this is sort of replaced InfoPath, because you would use InfoPath for approvals. Now, why not just use, you know, Power Apps and bring it right into Teams and do it right there. So it’s sort of replacing that void, but adding so much more to it on so many different levels and making it intelligent by bringing the Graph into it.

Paul Thurrott (02:41):

So how does this work, with Power Apps is a, I guess we described it as kind of low code, no code environment aimed literally at end-users, not just at administrative or IT Pros. People can write their own apps. And that sounds daunting, especially to anyone who has not written an app and if you ever try to do so in a formal programming environment, it is in fact daunting, but,

Stephen Rose (03:05):

Yes.

Paul Thurrott (03:06):

How does this work in the context of Power Apps? What makes this thing different or special?

Stephen Rose (03:11):

Yeah. Well actually let’s just show it. So over here, I’m going to share out, so we’ll let my browser, take a moment and all right. So here we are. We have, you know, we have a Power Apps site and I have the Power Automate site up and what’s great is you have, where do you want to start? Do you want to bring in SharePoint data, Excel, or even a simple SQL database? You can bring in a blank one, you can have some models already built and then there are great learnings. So we can go in and I can say, Hey, I want to create an app. I want to create it blank.

Stephen Rose (03:47):

You give it a name. I’m going to call it Test. And you get to pick whether this is a tablet-based app or phone, and that’s going to set up the appropriate sort of, you know, level and how it’s going to look. And the right templates are going to come up and it’ll start to do a lot of this work for you, which is great. You can see, we already have a bunch of templates that you can start with. You’re going to pick where your data source is. And then once this loads up, this becomes a really easy way to say, I, you know, work at a car dealership and I’m looking for you know, different tires so I can create a form. I can create a gallery. So let’s say I want to create a gallery with that. It’ll come up and it’ll say, okay, awesome.

Stephen Rose (04:30):

You know, maybe I want to put pictures of tires and I want to be able to search for that. So I could put in these pictures here of all of these different tires, I could say here’s the data source. And then say, I want to be able to filter this by model, by car, by date, by availability. And within a few minutes, you’re going to be dropping in all of that information. And then you publish it. It’s that simple to be able to go out and bring that in. You have a wide variety of forms that you can do. You can do text input, you can even do pen input, date, picture, you know, checkboxes, et cetera. You can choose what sort of text you want to bring in. Whether it’s a pen input. You want somebody to sign a form when you’re done.

Stephen Rose (05:11):

You can obviously bring in buttons, barcode scanners, video, Microsoft Stream. You can add audio notes to it. So you could say, Hey, I want to add this audio note to be able to go to that or even a chart that can show that level of availability. You can pick your own icons that are going to drop into there and then import components. And then we have an AI builder and this AI builder leverages Graph, which we’re going to talk about later. But with that, I can turn it into a business card reader, which basically says, when I open this app, it’s going to open up the camera, scan the business card and bring that information into the appropriate fields or form processor where I take a picture of a form. And it uses, you know OCR to be able to bring that in or an object detector where if you’re out in the field, you could perhaps take a picture of a part and it will tell you what that part is, by again, leveraging the Graph in a database of parts, or even say this part is broken.

Stephen Rose (06:09):

And if it’s broken, it can kick off a flow that says, I need to let this person know and order a new one. So there’s a really interesting variety of things that we can do, that are not incredibly difficult for folks to be able to bring together. And as you click, it’ll tell you right here, Hey, here’s the position and wrap and padding and all of that sort of stuff. So it’s pretty impressive on how simply, and I’ve been able to build a few simple apps, but you were telling me that you built one. So I’d love to, I’m gonna stop sharing here and I want you to talk about your cool app,

Paul Thurrott (06:40):

Yeah. As you’re going through the demo I was kind of jumping up and down in my seat. No, it really is exciting. And by the way, nowhere in there did you show any code. Right?

Stephen Rose (06:50):

No, I’m not a coder.

Paul Thurrott (06:50):

So, yeah, sorry.

Stephen Rose (06:53):

No, I was just going to say I’m not a coder. That is absolutely not my area.

Paul Thurrott (06:56):

So I used to be a coder and I decided to kind of get back into it on the side, just so I could speak more intelligently about that stuff. And last fall, I started working on a notepad clone and I decided I’d kind of work my way through the different Microsoft frameworks. And so I wrote versions in Windows Forums and WPF, Windows Presentation Foundation, and then in the Universal Windows Platform, UWP. And by that point I was like, look, I kind of want to move on to the next thing. I want to do something different.

Paul Thurrott (07:22):

I decided to make a cocktail app. It’s a simple app. You’d have a front page, would be a filterable list of cocktails. There’d be a second screen when you click on one where you get the picture, the name, the description, the ingredients, and the steps all in one screen. And then there’d be an edit screen where you could either input a new cocktail or edit an existing cocktail. So it sounds simple, but as it turns out, so I started working on a WPF version just to kind of work my way through what the UI would be like, but really I wanted this thing to be a mobile app. And so then I spent honestly, a couple of months working on a Xamarin Forms version of the app. And it was, you know, frankly, it was frustrating, but I say that from a developer standpoint.

Stephen Rose (08:01):

Right.

Paul Thurrott (08:02):

So you and I were talking about Power Apps recently, and I thought, you know, I need to get into this environment. Let me see, what would this look like in Power Apps? And it is the easiest thing in the world. You know, you were talking about data sources, for example, you could have SharePoint lists.

Stephen Rose (08:18):

An Excel spreadsheet, yeah.

Paul Thurrott (08:18):

Excel, SQL, whatever. I created a SharePoint list, that SharePoint list has cocktails in it. Those cocktails have a photo, a title, a description, steps, and ingredients. And okay. It’s up in SharePoint. Great. I did exactly what you just did, step through it. I made it a phone app. This thing created the UI, created the layout, created every one of those screens I just described, including things I hadn’t gotten to yet, because they’re so complex, like the ability to search and filter that list of cocktails.

Paul Thurrott (08:49):

It was literally in the span of less than 30 minutes. And a lot of that time was just me tweaking the way different fonts looked and stuff. Cause I like to do that stuff, you don’t even have to, but I just made it better looking. And that thing it’s done, it’s just done. And I didn’t write a line of code. I stepped through Wizards. You know, just like you showed, I mean, this was literally last weekend. It’s the first time I’ve looked at it. I cannot believe how easy and efficient and powerful it is. It’s incredible. Yeah. So, you know, I know a cocktail app is not exactly a work sanctioned you know, anything, but it is, I think representative of the fact that you have data in some data source and you want to bring it out to an app and it just, it literally automated everything for me. And I could tell you having written the code to do this, incredible.

Stephen Rose (09:41):

And that’s the idea is to empower people who are not developers that have a great idea, that say, look, I do this job every day and I know more about it than anybody else in the company is going to know, because I’m out in the field. Especially with Firstline workers, I’m out in the field, I’m doing this. If only I could do this easier or get to this easier or not have to go through this. So enabling people to do that. And again, you still have got DLP controls and AIP and all of that stuff going on. So you can ensure that private information like credit card numbers and things like that aren’t being shared. But by showing this to end users and showing a simple app like that and saying, look, we’re going to make an app for fun. You know, here you can do your fishing gear or whatever it is that makes you happy and do this for home.

Stephen Rose (10:24):

And then they use it often and they see that value. That’s where shortly you’re going to say, you know what, at work, if I could do this, if I could filter by this, if I could find this easier and that starts to create productivity. And we have a ton of case studies on customers who have done that and case studies are all great. But if everybody were to sit down and play with this and do what you did and do some sort of personal app, whether it’s cataloging their memories or photos or documents or book collections or movie collections, or whatever that is and bring that together, it becomes really great. And it’s something where you can hand that phone to somebody and say, here you look for what it is that you want from me or, whatever that is. And that really empowers folks and empowers you know, Power Apps and things like Power Automate and Flow. Make those littler tasks, also sort of brings those to life and does that as well, which is great.

Paul Thurrott (11:16):

Yeah. And actually, you know, you just touched on something. You know, my mind races now, when I think about Power Apps, cause the possibilities are literally endless. And anyway, most of the people listening to this are programmers probably. And I’m telling you, Microsoft, other companies have had various efforts over the year trying to bring programmability to non programming audiences. And it doesn’t always go very well. This is not that. This is an Office application. It’s very logical. It works the way you expect. You could even, you mentioned Firstline workers. I could picture someone out in the field is doing something as simple as look, I’m an insurance adjuster or claims adjuster, whatever. They have these massive forms. I just need to get to a couple of things. I could build my own app that just has those form items, those text inputs, whatever they are. It all hits the back end data you’re authenticating against your work account. It’s safe, it’s secure. And you could make your life better just by taking literally a few minutes to construct a simple form that has only the stuff you really need every single time you bring out that device. And it’s, the mind boggles at the possibilities.

Stephen Rose (12:22):

Yeah, and it works on every platform. And that’s what’s really great about this is it doesn’t matter if you’re on a Mac or an iOS or Android, it’s the same platform on the back end and it’s all web based. So you can use it for many devices. So if there’s something wrong, you can go in from your mobile phone or sit down with your laptop or sit down at a public kiosk, login securely, use MFA and make those changes to it right then and there, because it’s part of that M365 account.

Paul Thurrott (12:46):

That’s right. So you also mentioned Power Automate. Now this is the product formerly known as Flow. And I guess the things you create with Power Automate are still technically called Flows, which I like that term. I mean, it makes sense.

Stephen Rose (12:59):

Yeah.

Paul Thurrott (13:00):

But this is similar to, if this, then that I would say, right? In that you are,

Stephen Rose (13:06):

It is leveraging like that Boolean logic.

Paul Thurrott (13:10):

Yeah. So you’re building workflows and the thing that’s interesting here is again, you’re working with a bunch of data types, but you’re basically responding to certain actions and you have a great example of an automate that you made.

Stephen Rose (13:24):

Yeah.

Paul Thurrott (13:25):

Which is something I think a lot of us could use.

Stephen Rose (13:27):

I’m going to share it. So here we go. So let’s take a look.

Stephen Rose (13:32):

Alright. So we’ll go here to Power Automate and there’s a whole ton of templates, which is what I’m going to encourage folks. And you can see, we even have ones for things like Google Calendar and Dropbox, Instagram.

Paul Thurrott (13:48):

That’s right. That’s important to remember. This is not just Microsoft data sources, right? This is first and third party.

Stephen Rose (13:53):

Yep. So you can take a look here and you can see like RSS, like you can do one that says if somebody tweets me, look at that follower, if they have more than a thousand followers, go ahead and add their address to MailChimp, which is great. Or Azure, you know, Box is in here and, you know, Basecamp is there, which is great for those who are publishing on Mac or Campfire. And there’s just tons here. But what I really love is when you get here, they have things like nine templates to help your sales team. Templates to help you, you know, so when you click it, all you have to do is customize it. You can say, receive a weekly email of new Dynamics, 365 opportunities. That’s been used over 6,000 times. The one that I created was when my boss emails me, I get a push notification on my phone that says Boss email.

Stephen Rose (14:47):

Which is great, it’s super simple. And if I take a look at it and I go to edit, I created this in like five minutes. It says, when I get a new email, look at my profile, which goes into Active Directory, it says, get my manager. So it looks at who my manager is and check to see if it’s my manager. And if it is, then it does a popup. And it’s that simple to do it. If it’s no, then I add an action. If it’s yes, then I send a push notification, but that’s it. And then on my phone, it goes, Oh, Boss email bot, which is great. And I have it only when I am on the To line and not on a CC line. So I know it was sent to me or something that I need to read. What’s great is you have the flow checker so you can test it.

Stephen Rose (15:30):

And then you also can just test it to send a test message, or whatever it is that you are doing. But the amount of templates, and then again, much like, as we’ve talked about you know, here’s a whole template, get my weather forecast. Some of these are kind of bullshitty, but some of these are really great, trigger a flow when a Power BI data-driven, you know, app is done which is great. But what’s nicer, is also again with the data connectors. We have a lot of that same thing where we can take a look at connections. And once again, we’re going to see all those same data sources that we saw for, you know, earlier, are all going to be here and how we can all bring those together. So here’s Azure Blob Storage, and here’s Bing Maps and all that stuff. So all that works exactly the same way. And again, think about all of those little things from running an approval in Teams, because you can put this right into Teams and do approval workflows to if somebody out in the field and they take a picture and something’s wrong, then it immediately sends a message to the engineering team to say, Hey, there’s a problem here, but if it’s less than five, just send an email. So you can also create those workflows and these Teams as the platform to bring that to life.

Paul Thurrott (16:38):

I think the appropriate response to both these things is to just get excited by the possibilities. And you’ll see a lot of startup points in there like that. All the templates you kind of went through that Microsoft and others have made, which is really great. But then, you know, you could see how you might want to tweak one of those things, well I use this service, not this service, but this exact flow would work. I’m just going to swap out the individual services, which is really cool, now.

Stephen Rose (17:02):

And again, this is on every platform and I can’t stress that enough where, should just be a desktop app. And should I only allow my Firstline workers to use this when they’re in a VDI environment or is this going to be mobile? And you have those choices to bring that out. And it’s literally just republishing it and making sure that everything fits within the template and you’re not using a font that’s too big, type of thing. Or too small.

Paul Thurrott (17:24):

Yes. Now the underlying, I guess I’ll call it glue. Although I used that term earlier to describe all these things, is of course the, well, I shouldn’t say of course, maybe people not are not familiar with this, but it’s the Microsoft Graph. And this is a concept that Microsoft introduced three years ago, two, three years ago, at Ignite, I want to say. I mean, can you speak a little bit about the AI and intelligence that’s behind the Microsoft Graph? You know what it is? What it does?

Stephen Rose (17:50):

Yeah. Well, I mean, Azure of course, is that framework that’s powering the whole Power Platform. But then when you want to start to bring things like cognitive intelligence to that, whether that’s a bot that you want to create, which can’t be, I’m here with a customer and, excuse me, and they want to order this. What’s the current, how many days out is this? And things like that too. One of my favorites, which is when I’m done with a meeting, it pops up and says, you just showed this file in the meeting. Do you want to share this with all the attendees? And that is the graph API. It, you know, binds us and separates us. It binds the universe together.

Paul Thurrott (18:32):

Yes it does.

Stephen Rose (18:32):

Kind of an Obi Wan force thing. But what it is, is it is an API that anybody can leverage.

Stephen Rose (18:40):

And it is the intelligence platform, which a lot of this, that things that are built into Azure can add that level. So when you think about any sort of data information application, you go, this would be made better by intelligence and awareness. Intelligence saying it should look for certain people. It should look for causes and events. It should surface things up. And I really think of intelligence as this proactive assistant. And my biggest problem is when people start to talk about AI and intelligence that has this invasive, it’s going to jump into my life. It’s going to take things over. It’s looking at my data. Microsoft is storing my data and all this stuff. And that’s so far from the truth, when it’s at its most useful is being proactive. Hi, here’s your meetings today. When you take a look at My Analytics, here’s how you spent your time last week.

Stephen Rose (19:34):

And here’s some people you may want to connect with. Do you want to share that file with everybody else? Popping up and telling you that, Hey, you need, this meeting is going to start in 30 minutes and it’s in another building. Are you aware and looking at your travel time, it’s going to take you this long to get there. It’s those things that, you know, Cortana is built upon. And so many of our technologies that help you to be proactive rather than reactive. And we see then the Graph within our security features that we talked about. Well it will say, this person just logged in from Redmond. And then they logged in from Beijing a half hour later, that couldn’t happen. So using intelligence, I’m going to suspend that account, but like he was a human being though, and let you decide and figure out what’s going on.

Stephen Rose (20:15):

If this is something that you should be aware of. So the Graph API brings all of that intelligence together. And whether you’re using things like Power BI or you’re using just OneDrive, or things like that, it’ll look and say, Hey, all these OneDrive files are being overwritten quickly. Chances are you have a malware virus. So I’m going to stop that from happening. I’m going to let you know. So it is this assistive layer that people can tap into on any level.

Paul Thurrott (20:43):

Yeah. I mean, I think what makes the Graph successful is the many, many data points, right? The places where it’s getting information, everything from Teams to OneDrive to Outlook and Exchange and the security products, like you mentioned, Windows 10 notifications, even Dynamics 365 on and on it goes. But you know, for people who are, I mean, and look, this is a complex topic. I find myself sometimes overwhelmed by the Microsoft Graph. But I mean, the simple example to me in some ways is that Windows search feature in Bing, where you’re signed in with your work account and what you’re trying to find is someone with a certain expertise or what someone is working on and you know, that kind of thing. And it, again, it’s taking data from all of these different points and then bringing forth something to you that you wouldn’t typically associate with a basic web search.

Stephen Rose (21:31):

Absolutely. I’m bringing up our Graph page real quick. I don’t need to share this out, but there was a whole toolkit that looks at presence.

Paul Thurrott (21:43):

Yeah.

Stephen Rose (21:44):

So you can take a look at how you base things upon where people are at physically or their online presence. We can you know, dig into the API. But the bottom line is it gives you this rich context, who someone’s manager is. If they’re in the office, out of the office, these insights from trending documents, this is where a lot of the Hey, when I take a look at, you know, Connect and who should I be looking at and what’s going on. And the people that I work with, it’s all real time. And it goes across all of the Azure, Office 365, and even consumer services like Outlook.com and OneDrive.com. If you want to leverage that. And that’s really at the key center of this, is that ability to be able to bring all that data. When you go into Windows and you go to the bottom and you say, show me every document that has this text and it brings it right up. That’s so much more than indexing because it’s got to take a look at what you’re asking for and all of the variations of that. But again, it just powers it and sends that data back down to you

Paul Thurrott (22:46):

And to what you said earlier because people do worry about the privacy implications of AI and everything. You know, you as a Microsoft employee are not able to see every single thing about every single employee. You know, it’s permissions based, it’s based on the organization. If you have a need to know what someone is working on or what they’re doing or who they are, I mean, it could be, I don’t know how Microsoft is organized exactly. But as simple as yes, they are a person in this organization, yes, they are maybe at work or whatever. To literally this is the document they’re working on, depending on your relationship.

Stephen Rose (23:18):

And that’s exactly, yeah I can see things, obviously, within my own team, I can see anything that has been shared to a SharePoint site or a team site. I can’t see anything that’s in their personal OneDrive. And then we always say, you know, OneDrive is for your personal stuff. And then SharePoint and Teams is where you do things we’re gonna work on. So when somebody publishes that to Teams and they’re part of my group, I see that in search. And then if they’re part of our marketing organization, and that has been shared with people outside of just that team, then that can pop up, but it has to hit all variety of things and you can keep that from happening, of course. But it’s great because before I start a project and I had a customer who works for one of the largest ad agencies in the world, they said when they started using Teams and leveraging AI, before somebody would start a project, they would type in like a keyword.

Stephen Rose (24:01):

And they would start to see other people that have worked on similar projects and say, why did this fail? Why didn’t this work? I see you’re working on this, we’re doing something similar. How can we partner, he goes the amount of duplication that we have been able to reduce and the amount of opportunities for people to talk to other people within the company about what they’re working on and learning from that, has gone through the roof. Because, if somebody starts, I’m going, did you do a search? Did you look for the stuff? And they go, no, and we’re teaching people through that. And it’s really enabling us since, what is it? One out of every three projects that a company starts, fails because it’s not done properly. This really starts to reduce that right out of the gate.

Paul Thurrott (24:39):

Right. Yeah, and I think that’s, I mean, what these things that we discussed today, all share across Power Apps, Power Automate, Microsoft Graph generally is just making things more efficient and automated and proactive and just in doing so via the intelligent use of data.

Stephen Rose (24:57):

Yeah, and power BI really does that too. And I’m a person who, you know, I like a good spreadsheet and that’s great, but it’s not something you can show to somebody like in a meeting or to a large group. You go, yeah, it’s a lot of data. Once I started putting that into Power BI and I said, okay, let’s break this down by geographic region. Like when we’re looking at social media influencers and where are we seeing our biggest overnight hits on different things and who’s having the deepest conversations and what part of the world is talking about Teams more than some other part like that. All of a sudden things light up on the globe that we start to see or outliers. And that is the most important thing, is not only where those trends are, but why is there this huge spike in Reykjavik today on this?

Stephen Rose (25:40):

And then you start to dig in and go, Oh, they’re having a Teams day or whatever that is. So it allows us to better communicate and look at data in whole new ways and visualize it in whole new ways, that you can sit there and put up on a screen and everybody goes, Oh, I get it. And why is this the way? And it immediately starts conversations, other than going, hi, can you look over the spreadsheet? And everybody’s just looking at a bunch of numbers and goes, yeah, that looks nice. And even a pie chart doesn’t really do it the same way that organizing the stuff that way. And live and in real time, as the data’s coming in.

Paul Thurrott (26:14):

And this stuff is all available to anyone who’s in Microsoft 365. And that was one of, you know, when we started this show, you know, one of the themes we had was there’s a lot of value in this offering that people don’t even realize is there. And most people are familiar with the traditional Office apps, email and calendar, obviously Word Excel, et cetera. But if you go into your Office 365, or Microsoft 365 dashboard, you’ll find this stuff and more, I mean, there’s all kinds of additional tools and you’re already getting them, you know, and some of these things will make, all these things really technically, but certainly the things we’ve talked about can make your life better. They can make you more efficient and they can free up time. And just you know, just like I said, I get jumpy just thinking about it, especially Power Apps, Power Automate. I mean, it’s just amazing.

Stephen Rose (27:02):

I’m glad that you had a chance to play with this and kind of take a look at it. And that this episode got you to sort of dig into it a little bit and see the value. Are you going to show your cocktail app?

Paul Thurrott (27:12):

Yes. Yes I am, in fact,

Stephen Rose (27:13):

Alright, I’d love to see it.

Paul Thurrott (27:14):

Oh, not today on the show. I’m sorry, I apologize. So I am preparing an article, that will be on the site where I will be writing about this because it is a revelation how easy it was. And it’s like the comic book man, Simpson, who I’ve wasted my life moment, where you realize, you know, what have I been doing? Look the programming stuff is fine. It’s fun, I should say, I enjoy it. But I mean, this is so much more efficient for this kind of thing. It’s just and I mean this seriously, yes, I have programmed. I’m not a professional programmer. Anyone could do what, I just did, anyone. And that’s in many ways, the point.

Stephen Rose (27:49):

It may be great to actually set up and, you know, for those folks who are listening, try to build something and you know what, reach out to us on Twitter and let us know what you thought. Matter of fact, if you do that, I have, what do I have, I have something somewhere. Oh, here we go. Here’s what I will do. I not only have a Teams t-shirt, but look, I have,

Paul Thurrott (28:12):

Ooh.

Stephen Rose (28:12):

A Teams power brick.

Paul Thurrott (28:14):

Yeah.

Stephen Rose (28:15):

That, I’ll let you, Paul pick the winner of whoever you think sends the best one. Yes. Whoever creates the best or just most interesting or most unusual, and I’ll send them a Teams t-shirt and a cool Teams power brick to whoever that goes to, and I will do that.

Paul Thurrott (28:29):

Alright. Well, we have been doing this since January and my God has the world changed and, you know, we’ve gone through several episodes and we talked about, the Modern Desktop, collaboration, management, security, Microsoft Teams, and now Power Apps, Power Automate, and the Microsoft Graph. We’ve had some, we should mention the guests we’ve had over the weeks, let me see if I can find them. Chris Bryan, the two Chris’s I know. Chris Jackson and of course, Jeremy Chapman, who is awesome. They’re all awesome. They were all awesome. And, you know, looking back over everything we’ve discussed and of course, how things have changed. I mean, you know, it’s very interesting that, well, you know, and tragic in many ways, of course, but I mean Microsoft 365 and Microsoft Teams in particular is kind of ideally situated to this new way of doing things. And that’s a nice coincidence, I guess, but the fact that it happened while we were discussing this. I mean, because Microsoft Teams is always an episode, right? This was always something we were going to talk about. It’s a big part of Microsoft, 365, but in this new COVID world, this new normal, I mean, it becomes even more important and of course we’ve seen that. So, I mean, what do you take away from All the discussions we’ve had over these episodes? Anything?

Stephen Rose (29:47):

Yeah, I mean, there’s so much, and I don’t know what the new norm is going to be, but,

Paul Thurrott (29:52):

Yeah.

Stephen Rose (29:53):

Nothing’s going to be the same, but the great thing is, I’m super proud of the work that we’ve done as a company and the products that we’ve pushed up and how we stepped up, how we built sites in days to help people to get work done, to be able to go back and say, look, let’s just get this out the door, let’s get Teams up, you know, let’s lock down our security, or we’re going to use Team with you know, whatever this is. We’re gonna use it with Zoom, or we’re going to use it with Cisco or whatever. And for them to go in Teams to say, Hey, there is a Box link.

Stephen Rose (30:25):

There is a Zoom link. There is a Bluejeans link, and I can bring those into the product so that it wasn’t just this Microsoft thing, that it really was this great ecosystem. But people aren’t going to be able to say, Hey, we’re not going to hire you because you work in a different city.

Paul Thurrott (30:39):

Right, right.

Stephen Rose (30:39):

I think we’ve seen, you can work anywhere from any device and be able to do it well and connect. People are now showing their faces on calls and realizing the value of that. I mean, when I first started using Teams and video conferencing and even Skype for Business and all that, people never turned on their cameras. It just, wasn’t a thing you did. And now they do, because it’s a way to connect. And I think we’re going to keep doing that. Cause you realize meetings are better when people turn that on.

Stephen Rose (31:06):

We’re finding more people now that are seeing the value of saving stuff to the cloud, because now they, it’s harder to get to that ex drive. It’s harder to VPN in and wait and split tunneling is becoming, you know, IT Pros are looking at that on how do I create better bandwidth experiences? So all these things that people kept putting off have happened more quickly, but it’s going open up interesting opportunities in education. My daughter’s senior year next year is not going to be normal in any way, shape or form she’s going to be going it looks like to school two or three days a week. And then working from home some days a week.

Paul Thurrott (31:40):

Yep.

Stephen Rose (31:40):

She’s in marching band who knows how that’s going to work. Sports are not going to happen. So, movie theaters are now saying, we’re going to start to do some movies, direct out through our different services instead of going.

Stephen Rose (31:54):

The way we get food, all this stuff, you know, has all changed. And a lot of that is going to stay and some things are going to evolve, but I feel that, you know, I’m really proud that as a company we’ve placed ourselves in a really good position to enable people who want to do that, whether they have to, or they were forced, you know, whether they had to and were forced to, or just said, now’s the time. And let’s just bite the bullet to be able to move that forward. And that we’re seeing what that four generation split of people, people from, you know, the baby boomer end that never jump on to this stuff, getting pulled in pretty quickly. Like my parents who are in their seventies saying, yeah, let’s, you know, we did Father’s Day dinner remotely. I barbecued, I sent my dad some steaks and lobster with my mom there in Arizona. I wasn’t able to be there. And we did a virtual dinner last night over Teams. And it was not as great as being there,

Paul Thurrott (32:44):

It was okay.

Stephen Rose (32:44):

But it’s not something that we would have done in the past, we would have just called and said, have a great Father’s Day and that’s it. But we had a meal and a conversation and that’s a great thing. And they really love it because it helps them to feel more connected.

Paul Thurrott (32:55):

Wow, I mean, you’ve really kind of hit on it. I go back to that March comment from Jared Spataro where he said, you know, we are never going back to working the way we did. And it really struck me at the time. And it’s really interesting to see the world evolve. I’ve had the same experiences as you. My daughter’s going to college, she’s going to have the same kind of weird on/off experience and probably be home by Thanksgiving and we’ll see how that goes and everything, but kind of across the board for individuals who maybe never had the chance to work from home, now forced to work from home.

Paul Thurrott (33:26):

And some will like it a lot. Some of them are going to want to go back to the office, but from the opposite perspective, offices or companies, rather that maybe were a little suspicious of having people work from home, suddenly see the benefits. Lower costs, the productivity is not going down, like this actually makes sense. Yeah. education, obviously like we discussed, I mean, this is in conferences too. You and I are big conference goers and you know, conferencing Microsoft.

Stephen Rose (33:53):

Yeah, I think hybrid.

Paul Thurrott (33:53):

Yeah, hybrid conferences. I mean Build, I think was an interesting peek at the beginning of the future for the conferences. Cause I think there’ll be a mix of in person and remote. And again, because of what happened, it’s terrible, it’s obviously terrible. But the positive change that will come out of it could benefit all of us in the future by opening these things up more publicly to those who want to attend remotely.

Stephen Rose (34:17):

Yeah. I mean, we’re in the process of planning for Ignite right now and some of the interesting conversations that we’re having are do we go 24 hours? And do you think these are going to be odd numbers for people overseas or not? We’re going to be recording a ton of sessions. We’re going to do them live. We’re looking at a hundred to 200,000 people coming to Ignite.

Paul Thurrott (34:35):

That’s incredible.

Stephen Rose (34:35):

And the big thing that changes there is instead of it, we’re going to pick two people from the company to go and they’re going to come back and report to everybody, is now all of my team from that company can attend. And go and participate.

Paul Thurrott (34:46):

That’s amazing right, I mean, that’s hugely positive and you know, conferences are expensive, you know, no doubt about it. They’re disruptive, you know, even for the people who go. For all the goodness, you’re out of work for those number of days, you’re hard to reach or impossible to reach depending on what you’re doing.

Paul Thurrott (35:00):

I mean, again, it’s not going to be, no one view is perfect. No one way of doing things is perfect. But because this was kind of thrust on us, you kind of find this happy middle ground. And I overall think the benefits are huge. Even talked about older workers, you know what’s the divide between an older person, like myself who relies on email and a younger guy like Brad, who would be more comfortable in Teams. These are two worlds that don’t really intersect in the normal workforce, but because of the situation we find ourselves in you know, more people crossing over in both directions.

Stephen Rose (35:34):

Right.

Paul Thurrott (35:34):

And, you know, the outcome, I mean, again, nobody wanted this, for sure. But there were positive outcomes.

Stephen Rose (35:41):

Yeah, absolutely. And, you know, when we look at conferences, nothing replaces walking up to somebody and having a 20 minute conversation and certainly meeting your peers, which is one of the great things that I really love about Ignite is not just the sessions, which are great and not just the chance for me to chat with everybody, but seeing people that I’ve known for 10, 15 years start to meet other people in the industry and start to share their advice. And that matrix networking doesn’t really happen at a virtual level and that gets missed. But I would love to see us do this hybrid where yes, we’re going to have the in person, but we’re also going to do not just putting sessions online a day later and just recordings, but start to do more live more people coming in via Teams and being able to participate and having this larger thing.

Stephen Rose (36:25):

And I think we’re learning a lot from our competitors, our competitors are learning a lot from us. We’re creating brand new partnerships with companies. So I think I’m really curious to see what the next two to three years looks like with these different partnerships and how we continue to evolve platforms like Teams into something that goes beyond what it is today, where we really do find a way to sort of bring in email and separate parts of email into chat and the rest of it there. When we start to bring in intelligence, you know, we have that real time translation in PowerPoint. What happens when we bring that into Teams and whatever language your system is set for? That’s the language that shows up on your screen and translation is seamless and flawless. It’s those sorts of things that help us to really come together, allow companies to work and people to work in ways that they never could before. And that’s what excites me with the journey that we’ve taken is we’ve shown all the stuff that a lot of people just were not aware about. And if that’s where we are today, where are we going to be in two, three years as this continues to evolve in this new way of working and how we’re going to find new ways for people to connect to other people into their data and bring them insights and information in new ways.

Paul Thurrott (37:38):

You know, I’ve really enjoyed doing this. I very much am looking forward to running into you in the hotel bar at Ignite again.

Stephen Rose (37:46):

Always.

Paul Thurrott (37:47):

You know, and, but yeah, it is that kind of combination of things. This is efficient and great, and in person is important too. And I can’t wait.

Stephen Rose (37:58):

Yeah. No, me too. I miss MVP Summit this year was odd and weird without people. And there are people where the only time I ever see them is at these shows, but I have 10, 15 year long relationships where I know these people, I know their families, I chat with them on Twitter and social media, and I get to see them and hang out and they want to hang out and get a picture and all that. And I love that. And I love being able to connect with them and getting their feedback. This is what I did really well this year. This is what I need to do more of, this is where I’m not meeting their expectations. And that’s a conversation that’s very easy to have in person or have over a cocktail. That’s not quite as easy to have over social media.

Stephen Rose (38:33):

So I think it’s how do bring more of that intimacy to these platforms that we lose, the intimacy in meetings, the intimacy that we have in one-to-one conversations that doesn’t quite a hundred percent translate here, but it’s a goal. And I’m excited to see how we embrace that.

Paul Thurrott (38:50):

I mean, even in the past few months, it’s already improved honestly, and will continue to improve.

Stephen Rose (38:54):

Yeah, no, absolutely. No, this has been a great opportunity to sit and talk about these different products and services. And, you know, the stuff we talked about in February still is valid now, as it was then if not more in many ways and seeing the new releases and I’m excited about Ignite and you know what we’re going to talk about. I’m starting to get a look at some of the new things that we’re going to be telling folks.

Stephen Rose (39:14):

I think folks are gonna be very excited. And I think in working with the OneDrive engineering team for a long time, the one thing that we always looked at and I would, you know, there was an engineering, is a piece of string. If you pull it to the right to do something, what falls off the other end. But when I started working with Jeff Teper’s group, I’d say, I want to separate evolution from revolution. What are the features we need to have to be competitive? And that people have asked for through user voice and things that we need to do to make them happy. The big one being, you know, being able to support OneDrive, virtual environments, which you know, was so critical. And then the other end is revolution. What are the things that people aren’t expecting that we’re going to bring in?

Stephen Rose (39:53):

I love that they just announced a new feature where if there’s a document in Teams or in SharePoint, you can now have it download to a separate folder now in OneDrive where everything is there and it’s now synced with that. So you don’t have to go into those areas and go search for it. So it’s those sorts of things that people go, Oh, wow. I didn’t even know that I wanted that or, Personal Vault or things like that. So I think as long as we keep doing that, mixing that evolution and revolution, continue to listen to our customers, which is something that Satya has been phenomenal at and has done a really good job, as well as saying, here’s the future. It is Azure. It is AI. It is Power Apps and Power BI and Power Platform and what he’s and how he’s empowering people. I think as long as we stayed true to that, and don’t listen to our own PR and don’t get caught up in that and do that. I’m very excited to see what the next year or so is gonna capture as I close in on the next two years on my 15th year here. So

Paul Thurrott (40:49):

Wow.

Stephen Rose (40:50):

Yeah.

Paul Thurrott (40:50):

Yeah. And, you know, Ignite is going to be amazing. I mean, just based on what Microsoft pulled off with Build. Ignite is a much bigger show. I can’t wait. I wish it was in New Orleans. I wish I was going.

Stephen Rose (41:05):

I know, I really was excited to get some beignets.

Paul Thurrott (41:05):

I know, so many memories. Oh, well, anyway, we’ll get there.

Stephen Rose (41:11):

And so many memories I can’t remember that well.

Paul Thurrott (41:14):

Yes. Yes, yes, yes. Well, thank you so much, Stephen. And also Brad, Brad didn’t really get to appear.

Stephen Rose (41:21):

Yes.

Paul Thurrott (41:21):

But Brad’s been with us every day helping us out in the back and in making this happen. And thank you to all of you. This is Paul Thurrott, signing out from the Microsoft 365 Knowledge Series.

View Details

 In this blockbuster episode, Stephen and Paul are joined by Microsoft director Jeremy Chapman to discuss how organizations can effectively transition to remote work without compromising control.

Transcript:

Paul Thurrott (00:01):

Welcome back everyone to the Microsoft 365 Knowledge Series. I’m Paul Thurrott, I’m here as usual with Stephen Rose, Senior Product Marketing Manager for Modern Workplace, Teams and Platform at Microsoft. And our special guest this week is our old friend Jeremy Chapman, Director of Microsoft 365. Jeremy, how you doing?

Jeremy Chapman (00:20):

Good. Thanks for having me on the show.

Paul Thurrott (00:22):

Yeah. Excited to have you. Do you mind, maybe you could tell the audience a little about yourself? We have quite a history and you and Stephen have quite a history.

Jeremy Chapman (00:31):

Yes. So I came in, I started out in IT. I came from there into Microsoft in I want to say 2003, first as a partner and then I went full time in 2005. Started out in the Server and Tools engineering org, building solution accelerators. So that’s where we built out things like Business Desktop Deployment, Microsoft Deployment Toolkit, which it later became and was there for a few years. Then I went to the Windows side and did basically Windows deployment through the end of Vista and all the way through Windows 7. And that’s where I met Stephen. And then from there, after kind of getting Windows 7 deployed and pretty much all of that job done, I guess, then I moved on to Office to really think about how do we repackage Office in a way that made it more cloud-friendly, you know, work on the activation, the delivery, and that’s where Click-to-Run,

Jeremy Chapman (01:24):

And all those kind of things came from. And then based on that work, we started trying to demystify what that looked like through, what was called the Office Garage at the time. And then that later became Office Mechanics. And then we started adding other groups to it from Office 365 into the Surface Hardware Team and then Azure. And then finally the Windows Team was part of it. So now with Microsoft Mechanics, we really span the entire company and we’re, from a subscriber and follower perspective, we’ve got one of the larger followings at the company, you know, with commercial followers doing all the different aspects of deployment, management, all those things. So we create about a hundred different kind of instructional or announcement type deep-dive videos per year through Microsoft Mechanics. And that’s what my main job is at the moment at Microsoft. Really trying to make sure people know how our stuff works, how they can use it, why should they care, and really how to deploy and be successful with our products.

Paul Thurrott (02:25):

So what I got out of that is that we can blame you for Click-to-Run and more seriously, you’ve been basically involved with deployment for almost your entire career at Microsoft it seems.

Jeremy Chapman (02:38):

Yeah, that’s, that’s why it’s in my Twitter handle @deployjeremy, I’ve been doing this deployment, even before I came to Microsoft. That was my last IT Pro kind of Project was getting XP deployed out and when I was working in China for a German company, but that was kind of what got me into the solution accelerator org at Microsoft at first.

Paul Thurrott (02:58):

Okay.

Stephen Rose (02:58):

What was cool was that when Jeremy and I met, we were really going, we have all these great free tools that nobody had known about. And what we did was we rolled every one on out saying here’s how you can deploy Windows 7, here’s how I can get it to run without having to spend any money. Here’s all the really cool free tools for your 7DT and Map and Act and all these other ones. And it was great because people said, I’ve never seen Microsoft come to my town and do a whole thing and talk about free tools that are available now. What was always, here’s what you have to buy. And it was great cause he and I both felt that we had not seen a great job done with IT Pros, where it was always like buy our stuff. And then once we did, we sort of left them behind to really go back and show them how to do this, give them good guidance and show them these great tools, many of which are free that they could leverage today. So it was great. So he and I really connected on that and it really connected with the audience and it was a big change for us and how people viewed us back in 2009.

Jeremy Chapman (03:57):

Yeah. And the other thing, and I still see it today, is you know, sometimes you’ll get something that’s too difficult to deploy or too difficult to enable or configure and they’ll say, Oh, that’s what a partner is for, and then my job is done, wipe my hands clean. And I always think like if you’re the product manager or somebody who’s at Microsoft, saying, that’s your answer, then you’ve already lost. Because you need to get the people in IT actually bought into the Process and at least understand the architecture of how the product works. Yes, partners then get domain expertise and they’re Probably more efficient. But once you say like that’s the only option is to use a partner to do something, cause then what happens is you might have a bench of a dozen partners globally that know how to do something really well.

Jeremy Chapman (04:39):

And then the rest of the people that you know want to do, you know, 500 seat deployment or whatever won’t be able to even touch it. Or you won’t be able to become a partner, to get your skills deep enough to kind of qualify for that exclusive crowd of the partner that can help you. So, you know, we tried to mainstream everything from a deployment perspective and really like Stephen said on some previous episodes, move from sector-based imaging, you know, Ghost and in those types of Processes to more of a file based imaging. And I remember the early, early days of building out the WIN file format and single instance files inside of that image and having all the different SKUs and everything available. And that was actually pretty cool. And it’s kind of, I would even say to some extent, it’s kind of a predecessor to Click-to-Run in the sense that, you know, we’re delivering a set of components and we’re looking to see that that manifest of components is available on the computer. And that’s the way kind of the WIN unpacking works when you, when you expand a web image on a desk. So it’s kind of semi-close to how we would do the virtualization part within Click-to-Run. We just have to do a bit more virtualization with, you know, register keys and things and different services we need to enable as part of C to R.

Paul Thurrott (05:46):

Right. You know, this episode is kind of an interesting nexus of things and it’s great that you’re here for this because in the original episode, the first episode we talked about how in that Windows 7 Springboard timeframe you folks were talking about, at the time was the Modern Desktop, you know, Windows 7 plus Office, what was it, Office 2013, Probably.

Jeremy Chapman (06:06):

Yeah,

Stephen Rose (06:07):

2010.

Jeremy Chapman (06:07):

2010, I think.

Paul Thurrott (06:07):

Oh, right. Okay. And you know, how as we move forward now 10 years or more you know, things have shifted and the Modern Desktop such as it is, is a different place. You know, the Modern Workplace is a different place. And of course since we started the podcast series the COVID-19 pandemic happened and a lot of people are working remotely now for the first time. And this has caused a lot of angst on a number of levels. But for organizations that have to react quickly to this, getting people working remotely and then kind of retroactively securing that, which is one thing we talked about in the last episode but just making sure that people have the tools they need and so forth. And we thought maybe it would be a good idea to take a step back and think about how organizations can enable remote work and that, you know, your work on deployment over all these years is kind of uniquely suited for this conversation.

Jeremy Chapman (07:05):

Yeah, totally. I mean there are so many things and even just being in Microsoft and watching the transition, you know there was a time when we all needed VPN connectivity to get our work done to you know, apProve expenses to put things into the system, to find files through file shares and literally, I mean I can Probably count on one hand the number of times I’ve needed a VPN connection back to something, a corporate resource that I have to grab in the last month like it still happens but it’s very rare and all of our line of business apps, everything’s web-based now. All of our files have moved from file shares into you know, into SharePoint or OneDrive locations. And I think that’s kind of the main thing is moving away from that. I remember like, and I’ve listened to one of the earlier ones that you guys did, you know where the desk phone went away.

Jeremy Chapman (07:55):

Like that was an old thing, an old vestige I guess of office work. Now the file share can go away. And how do we then move into some stuff that’s more cloud native. And I think that’s the bigger kind of longterm goal is to say how do we maintain all the control that we need? Even increase it in a lot of areas, but make sure that our files are at least retrievable in our line of business apps and those kinds of things are retrievable through network connectivity that is cloud based and not having to funnel everything through a VPN. Cause I think one of the things that a lot of people have learned just in the past couple of months is if I siphon all the connection through that small straw that that pipe that is the VPN pipe, that’s got to do software updates, that’s got to do all of my web traffic.

Jeremy Chapman (08:40):

If my users want to go to you know, a video site and watch a mechanics video, whatever, all of that has to in a lot of companies go through their VPN and of course you’re going to saturate that connection to where there’s zero performance. So I think it’s been like, you know, like those old cartoons where people put their fingers on the various holes in the wall trying to say, okay, how do I get enough things going through that to where, you know, traffic that makes sense. Whether it’s Teams or video calling or other things to be on a second or split tunnel. And I think what one of the things that we learned even at Microsoft even though we’ve been on this journey for many, many years is how important it is to make sure that you’ve got a secure way to basically service your customers, your users in IT without having to get everything or make everything go through that VPN so that you’re thoughtful about it.

Jeremy Chapman (09:32):

And I think that’s part of the reason why, you know, we always harp on things like multi factor authentication. I think hopefully people respect the value of MFA at this point. But so many other things that you can do to protect files, down to the file level and you know files down to the folder level, whether it’s email, whether it’s chat, all those different things, just to make sure that you still have that same kind of control or better control than you would have had in terms of making everything happen within your perimeter.

Stephen Rose (10:01):

Yeah, and I keep hearing from IT Pros, you know, I don’t want to lose control. And then you’re like, you’re not, you’re gaining control. Once you move stuff in SharePoint, once people have stuff in OneDrive, you’re going to have more control where things like DLP and AIP and all these other things kick in. So you know, you can protect all of those endpoints. You know exactly what’s coming in, what’s coming out, how people are working. And you’re giving people that choice to be able to work from any device and not limit them to this one that you’ve locked down. So it’s also part of that switch and mentality and moving away from that. We’re going to keep it on the X drive and not let you do this. But like Jeremy was saying, the amount of bandwidth that you end up having to crack is just crazy. It’s insane.

Jeremy Chapman (10:48):

Yeah. In what I’m sharing here. And maybe you can, so one of the things that we’ve done even recently. It’s not up yet?

Stephen Rose (10:56):

I don’t see it.

Paul Thurrott (10:58):

I was afraid I lost something. I just see a gray screen. I do have problems in Skype sometimes where I just lose the video.

Stephen Rose (11:08):

There we go.

Jeremy Chapman (11:08):

There it is, okay. I’ll probably keep this on my feed. So basically one of the things that we’ve done in the last couple of months, and if you read Alex Weinert’s post from last November, I want to say, yeah, we were replacing security baselines with security defaults. Now this means that any net new tenant that’s created for Microsoft 365 is going to have MFA configured. And that’s a big deal because, you know, in terms of going from like normal single factor password authentication to MFA, we like to say it’s, and we’ve got data to prove it. It’s 99.9% plus effective on credential based attacks. And I think it’s in the high nineties on attacks overall because passwords, especially when mastered in the cloud, are things that are fairly, you know, easily targeted, hacked, you know, phishing schemes, those kinds of things to get. Brute force, password spray attacks, those types of things.

Jeremy Chapman (11:58):

So that’s a big deal. Another thing that, you know, as I mentioned our VPN, there’s a great blog here from Lucas. It’s basically going through all of our own implementation of our VPN to handle kind of COVID-19 and the increased demand that we had. And, you know, we’ve seen just in terms of payoff, connectivity success rate has gone way up, number of concurrent sessions, 200,000. I mean all of the different employees that we have, 128,000 employees that we’re managing through it. Everything that we’re doing through VPN has been, you know, we’ve been able to succeed at effectively because we’ve got the split tunnel and most of the traffic going through kind of public connectivity so we don’t have to have as much traffic going through VPN.

Jeremy Chapman (12:50):

So it’s actually, it’s quite good in that sense. The other things that we can do, you know, in terms of thinking about how we holistically protect, you know, our environment. We’ve got tools like Azure Sentinel that will help in terms of protecting or I should say monitoring any of the activities that you have across your apps. You can do things like App Proxy as part of Azure AD to really monitor the traffic. So if you do have cloud based apps, you are wanting that kind of networking security blanket that you’ve got in terms of some of the on-prem networking resources that you’re using now. These are things that you can do in order to have, again, a split tunnel, a lot of public traffic going through, but then having the same visibility into all the different connections that are happening.

Jeremy Chapman (13:40):

So this is a big deal. Let me go back to this desktop. And so, I mean these are some of the things that you can do just to make sure that you can basically survive and thrive in a world where, you know, the VPN might not have enough throughput to handle all the connections to all the different services that you’re using. So I think this is one of the main things longterm is just to make sure that you can handle, you know, public traffic and use those resources as best possible. And I’ll go into some other capabilities in a sec, but these are some main kind of longterm principles. And then we’ll drill into some of the other technologies here in the next few minutes.

Paul Thurrott (14:29):

Great. Oh, also, you know, we had talked earlier about this notion of variable trust, which I think is really interesting because it’s not just Conditional Access, which is part of it. But there’s a whole other world around there of app control SharePoint and OneDrive device-based control and so forth. I mean, can you speak a little bit to that?

Jeremy Chapman (14:51):

Yeah. So with Conditional Access, I mean, it’s kind of a family of options that you have there. On the SharePoint side for example, you can say, I want to trust certain IP ranges or I want to trust certain users or devices. And if say a device is unknown to me or it’s not considered a trusted device, we can basically start to tailor what you can do with any assets that you find through SharePoint. So for example, if I just want you to be able to view a document on a home machine but not be able to print it or download it, these are things that are now native inside of SharePoint online. So this is super pertinent from a work from home kind of perspective because there’s a lot of these you know, you probably got into the closet and found like your old laptop from years ago, maybe Stephen and I helped you deploy it to Windows 7 back in 2010. When you fire that up and basically try to connect to Office 365, it’s going to do all the different integrity checks and health checks against the system.

Jeremy Chapman (15:49):

And if for example it sees Hey this is not a managed or known device for us, you can actually tailor the experience so it’s safe for your files and your information so that you might be able to view something. If it’s a browser and the machine’s up to date and all the things that we want, but you won’t be able to actually take that file down and load it onto the machine, or print it, for example. Those are big deals. Plus if you think about Conditional Access on the device level, we can then look at things like that as well. And say, okay, this device is just not healthy enough to even log in through Azure AD. So you have to go through a number of different you know, software update passes, different things to get that machine to a state where it is actually deemed healthy.

Jeremy Chapman (16:32):

And that’s what kind of the device based Conditional Access will give you, as well as some of the other things like risk based login. If you’ve never logged in from, you know, from Russia or from North Korea and now you’re logging in, we’ll be able to see that, you know, those are the kind of things that we can check or even if it’s not those locations. So even if I’m just now in Europe, all of a sudden like, how did that happen between, you know, in the last six hours? Those are the kinds of things where we can flag it. And then we can say, okay, based on this unusual login activity, we’re gonna up you to a second factor of authentication or block you. And you know, beyond that we can even do, you know, app level Conditional Access too. To where we we can basically say which apps are the right apps to be connecting to services.

Jeremy Chapman (17:17):

So one of the things that we often show in demo is like you’ve got a Tor browser for example, and you’re connecting to services. A lot of times we’ll determine that Tor browser isn’t an app that we want to be able to connect to services so we can either block or in the same way you know, up it to a multi factor authentication. So there’s a lot of things that you can do on that side that’s really kind of tying that kind of Intune slash Azure AD capability to really assess the login, assess the situation and then on the fly determine whether or not we want to give you access to that or we deem it less risky or the risk is low enough to actually give that access. And that’s one of the things that we can do with Conditional Access. It’s a super cool bit of technology. But I don’t think everybody has it deployed at the moment. It’s something that a lot of people can really benefit from

Stephen Rose (18:04):

And this is going to be key when you have guests that are coming into your network, you’re working with vendors because now you can say with that and Azure B2B, really not have to sit there and create all these guest accounts and go through this. You can much more easily say, Hey, you’re here. This is what you can do. I’m going to take my base level for my employees and just not allow you to do these 10 things and very easily scale that up or down to give the right level of permissions without having to start, create all these secondary networks and all this. It just, it gets so, I was chatting with people during Build and my session and the things that they were doing to allow people access. I’m like, why not just do Azure B2B Conditional Access and just set this up and they’re like, I can do that? I’m like, yeah, and it will make it so much easier to make sure that people meet your requirements. For the network without having to go through a ton of extra steps.

Paul Thurrott (18:55):

Yeah, I mean I think the scenario that Jeremy had earlier where, you know, we all come home all of a sudden. Well, what do we have, you know, that we can use to work on is probably one of the more common scenarios that has occurred. And so the fact that you can trust that computer to whatever degree based on where it is with security updates and so forth and whether you know how you sign in is super important because I think a lot, a lot of people are going to run into that exact scenario. And you spoke earlier about cloud data, which I love, but also cloud for document storage is super important as well. This kind of speaks to the end of the X drive a bit that Stephen talks about. So, what’s going on with with cloud-based document access for organizations?

Stephen Rose (19:40):

Well, let me, I’ll start on that one, then I’ll let Jeremy pile on. I mean, the big thing, and again, it was a question that popped up in Build last week, so it was great, was we have great free tools like the SharePoint Migration Toolkit. The SharePoint Migration Toolkit SPMT, you can take your X drive and you can move it to SharePoint. And what’s great is you say, Hey HR, here’s your group. We’re going to move all that content over there. So things that are going to be shared by, need to be accessed by multiple people. It’s right there. You’re not going to need a VPN to have to go into it unless you’ve set it up that way, but don’t have to sit there and start mapping drives and then people’s personal data. You can use the same tool to move it into OneDrive.

Stephen Rose (20:20):

And what’s great is not only is it there, not only when you login to a new machine is that there, but like I said, I go to my iPad, I click on desktop, there’s all the files, everything’s in sync, but we also have protections. A lot of folks are not aware that we have malware protection, ransomware protection built right into OneDrive. Let me see if I can share my desktop here. So we’ll do that. Let me know when new guys can see that.

Paul Thurrott (20:46):

Yup.

Stephen Rose (20:47):

Awesome. So by going here into OneDrive and you know by clicking on settings, I’m going to pop up you know right here into my main OneDrive and I’m going to pull you down and by clicking on the little gear up in the top right hand corner, so I’ll show that. You’ll see right next to your person there that there is a gear that will pop up, there we go and if you click it, go to restore your OneDrive and this will show you every file that you have deleted, changed, anything for the past 30 days.

Stephen Rose (21:26):

So we can pick all these files, a single file and we can restore that back. And what’s great is if you got hit with ransomware on Friday at 11:00 AM, you could say, I want to go back to 10:59 on Friday. Every file, every folder, everything, will be, you know, put back to exactly that point. Most folks don’t even know that they have this.

Paul Thurrott (21:45):

Right, I mean this is cloud based file history, which is kind of like that time machine effect where you can,

Stephen Rose (21:51):

Right,

Paul Thurrott (21:51):

Like you said, go back. That’s amazing. That’s an amazing capability.

Stephen Rose (21:54):

And the fact that it’s in there is there, the fact that if you know, you for some reason, you know, if OneDrive finds that you suddenly have a ton of files that are being rewritten, it will actually stop and say, what’s going on? Is this something that you’re doing? It’ll say, are you aware you just threw away 2000 files? Or if it sees a lot of files being rewritten, our anti-malware kicks in, it will stop. It will take a look and it gets user involvement. So you have that protection and don’t need to worry about that. And that’s built in as well as Vault and other great features in there. And that goes across SharePoint, OneDrive and Teams because it’s that same backend of that.

Paul Thurrott (22:37):

Right, right.

Jeremy Chapman (22:39):

Yeah. And the things in terms of the number of controls that you have are actually amazing from an IT Pro perspective. And it’s going to take a second for my screen to pop up, I think. Based on the last attempt of sharing. But basically you have these nice sliders. There we go. So we have these nice sliders where you can actually say in terms of external sharing, you know, how permissive do you want the sharing to be in both SharePoint and OneDrive. So these are the things that we get asked about all the time. Like, okay, I trust the people that are inside of my domain, but I don’t want people sending files outside my domain to my competitors or others. And you can do things like targeting with an allow list of the domains that you want to allow sharing to happen, like with your best partners.

Jeremy Chapman (23:30):

And I can anti target for example, and say like if my, if, if I’m Contoso and my arch-rival is Fabrikam, our two favorite companies, then I can actually block any sharing to Fabrikam. So this is all real stuff that we can do, that really you know, helps in terms of how people share. And the other thing is, what are some of the defaults that you get? Cause when you click like copy link or share and you get these different sharing options, we can choose what the defaults are as part of that. So I might have a posture where I say, yeah, I want everybody that’s a full-time employee of my company to have access to that file by default. And you have to select, you know, down level that to maybe the individual person you’re sharing with or you can go the other way and say, I want it, no when somebody hits share and copy link.

Jeremy Chapman (24:14):

It’s going to start with just the explicit person I’m sharing with. And then I’ve got to up level that into other, you know, larger populations of users. So we have all of that control and this is the kind of the access controls I was talking about where you have the ability to say again manage things that are coming in. If an unmanaged device is coming in, I can do a limited web access only. This is where I set that control in the SharePoint admin center. I can automatically sign people out if somebody reports their device is stolen, I can sign them out of any active browser session so that they’ll be out of SharePoint online or OneDrive, network location, so IP ranges that I trust. And then, you know, I’ve got apps and this is going back to our Office 2010 statements earlier that don’t use modern off, I can actually block those from connecting to services here, right from the admin portal. So there’s a lot of control that you have really down to the file level to make sure that your information stays protected and all this stuff is, is really easy to kind of turn on through SharePoint admin center and also the OneDrive admin centers.

Stephen Rose (25:21):

Yeah. And if you have any DLP policies that you’ve set up for Exchange by just pushing a single button, you can now extend those out to SharePoint and to OneDrive as well. So all of that connects up and that’s really the key thing is, you’re really looking at a single pane of glass to now manage all document sharing across all those different surfaces.

Jeremy Chapman (25:40):

Right. And one of my favorite things that kind of, and we just did a show on this last week, that kind of comes out of this, is once everything’s up in the cloud and can be indexed and searched, you can actually start to enable Microsoft Search, which is kind of a derivative of Bing in something that you can use to not only find your different files, people, even floor plans. And I’ll show you what that looks like in a sec. But you can actually find everything that you, okay, come on.

Jeremy Chapman (26:12):

There we go. That’s where I want it. You can actually find information that you’re looking for across the internet as well as the intranet in one place. So let me just show you what that looks like. So I’m going to open a new tab with search and let’s say I’m looking for information about a 401k. And so if I do that, what will happen is, it will actually

Jeremy Chapman (26:36):

Search and it will find, make sure I’m in the right tenant here. There we go. It will actually find information in my tenant and it’s populating here. Got a bit of a connection issue I think at the moment, but it will actually populate both internal search results along with kind of the public web search results. There we go. And if I search for, and this is right from the address bar, if I search for, say, a colleague, our favorite demo colleague, Adele Vance. You’ll see that it will find everything in terms of her, you know, office location, those kinds of things. As well as even like stuff from Azure Active Directory, the organization that she’s in, files that I have access to and permissions to. I can see all of that information as well. And there you go. And then any upcoming appointments or you know, meetings that I have with Adele, I can actually see those here. There we go. We’ve got a Project Tailspin meeting coming up, all of that’s there and in search. So it’s actually pretty cool integrated and you still get the public search results as well.

Stephen Rose (27:44):

And we get to learn that her favorite movie is the Legend of Bagger Vance, which is terrifying, but good.

Jeremy Chapman (27:51):

That’s a great, great movie.

Paul Thurrott (27:52):

That’s how you can tell it’s a fictional character,

Stephen Rose (27:54):

Right, exactly.

Jeremy Chapman (27:56):

So, and something new that we’ve added is what we call the work vertical. So this gives you all of that work stuff in one kind of view, and then you can actually navigate through it here. One of my favorite capabilities though is you can actually have a look at, you know, if you need driving directions, like this is, this is where for us it’s always interesting at Microsoft to be able to find the various buildings that we have across Redmond. In here I’ll do a search for Millennium and Millennium is one of the harder buildings that we have to find cause it’s actually in you know, in Redmond kind of in the Redmond Proper or Whole Foods kind of area. But all of this will actually give you a map and you can use this to get directions for how to drive there.

Jeremy Chapman (28:39):

And then we can even do, if we want to do floor plans, we get the ability to even say, okay, I know somebody is at Millennium 1260. I can even see where their office is. So if I’m either in my computer, in my phone, it works if I’m signed into Bing on the phone and sorry, Edge on the phone, I can actually see exactly where that person’s office is as I’m going to look for Adele or Megan Bowen or any of these people that I search for in the, you know, directory through Microsoft Search. So these are, once again, once your files are in OneDrive and SharePoint, these are other options that kind of open up to you in terms of being able to find content more easily and kind of lower the barriers to get work done and to find what you need to find, you know, through a normal search, through the address bar even.

Stephen Rose (29:28):

That’s also going to power things, you know, similar to what we see with Exchange Online where now you can go into the Outlook mobile client to a simple search and not just find emails from people, but all of that. And now it brings that across all those different apps and devices and platforms.

Paul Thurrott (29:42):

It’s also worth pointing out that one of the many nice things about the new Microsoft Edge is that it supports work and consumer profiles.

Jeremy Chapman (29:51):

Yeah.

Paul Thurrott (29:51):

And when you’re signed into a work profile, like you are here, you get this Bing Microsoft Search experience, which is great. But even if you’re signed in, as you know, your consumer Microsoft account profile, if you hit a work website, it will auto switch profiles for you and pass through that authentication.

Stephen Rose (30:08):

And that’s relatively new. But yeah, once you realize what it’s trying to do, it figures that out intelligently. And I went from a work I was signing in to buy something personal and it switched me automatically. So again, it’s that, because it’s smart, it knows when it needs to go back and forth, which is great.

Paul Thurrott (30:29):

And that’s good for working from home because the reality is people are going to be switching back and forth, you know, between their personal and work needs as they browse.

Jeremy Chapman (30:38):

Another kind of thing, another favorite here, and this goes back to our deployment days for Windows. You can actually define acronyms. Ooh, hold on. I need to go into all, you can actually define acronyms for things that you’re searching for. Like for example, if I’m searching for MDT, and now that should, after this page loads, show up the work-related acronym. Let me try it again just to make sure. Cause I did define it for that right through search and just to show you after that loads. If it does, maybe it won’t cooperate this time, but here’s where you configure everything. So this is all done through the admin portal in Microsoft 365 and Microsoft Search. You can set up all your acronyms, bookmarks, the floor plans that we saw earlier, locations, which were the map location like for Millennium. In about a day or so, you can get all of this stuff, configured, and you’ve got that super powerful kind of search working across, you know, all of your files and all of your office locations, all your terms, all your internet, to where anybody can find what they need. So this is one of my favorite new capabilities. And it’s kind of funny when it started rolling out at Microsoft, I thought, is this just an internal thing that we can use at Microsoft? It turns out everybody can use it.

Stephen Rose (31:59):

Yeah.

Paul Thurrott (32:00):

Yeah, I think this is one of the greatest things that you folks, Microsoft have rolled out in a while. It’s just really impressive. Speaking of impressive, we should move along to Microsoft Teams. And this is something that’s kind of personal for me because my organization is in the process of switching over to Microsoft 365 and Teams and you know, it’s a new world and Teams is not just an app, it’s a platform. There’s a lot going on there. And specifically for the kind of remote work, work from home scenario. Obviously people are going to be having meetings online. They’re going to be collaborating remotely. I mean, can you folks speak a little bit to that and how that works?

Jeremy Chapman (32:40):

Yeah. So with Microsoft Teams it’s been huge in terms of the, just the amount of traffic, the amount of usage, the people that have been using Teams, especially in the last few months. It’s been crazy. I think you’ve spoken to the kind of, the different updates in terms of the user counts in the past few webcasts that you’ve done, but just the number, you know, of sheer meeting minutes that are happening at the moment. It’s unprecedented. It’s been a huge enabler and I think that, you know, whether you’re, whether you’re using it for chat, whether you’re using it for online meetings, I think the strongest part for me, especially vis-a-vis some of the other options is just the deep integration that’s there between things that are in Office 365 and Microsoft 365.

Jeremy Chapman (33:30):

And just being able to kind of hop through all of that, as well as even your line of business apps or any Power Apps or things that you’re building, all in the one kind of chrome, the one construct of Teams. So it’s a fully integrated, we used to say it’s kind of a chat-based workspace, but it’s more than that. It’s a broader collaboration app that has, you know, basically connectivity points to all the other apps that you use in the span of a day. So I’m literally living in Teams probably, you know, 10 hours a day myself in terms of just hopping through all the different meetings and files and things that I’m working on.

Stephen Rose (34:03):

Yeah. At Build last week, we saw some amazing customers and how they’ve either built low code, no code apps that they’ve gone ahead and dropped in. We’ve had end users basically say, Hey, there’s a SQL database of stuff, that I want to be able to leverage on my mobile phone and dropped it into Teams, as well as what we’re doing around firstline workers and bringing the Graph and intelligence into it. So as people start to look at it, not as this, as Jeremy said, this chat app, but look at it as a platform that we can build upon, that we can add intelligence to. You can bring in photos and have AI take a look at it and make a decision on what happens based on what it sees in that photo. It really starts to open up some interesting new ways to take a look at simple business processes and how to reduce the amount of time or manpower it takes to go through some of those. So you can really spend the time deciding how do I leverage this and use this.

Jeremy Chapman (34:57):

I was going to say, and the other thing that I’ve loved to see, especially over the last couple of years, cause we were there from the very first kind of beta timeframe, you know, the preview announcements I should say. The amount of control that you have in IT is, you know, this is one of the things I think that really sets it apart from other options is that, I mean I’m showing the admin portal here, but just in terms of managing Teams you know, you’ve got all of the Teams management, device management, you know what users can see the policies, if you don’t want the GIPHYs to be too fun. Like those kinds of things if you’re in a conservative, all of that stuff. And even things like data loss prevention, if I’m trying to chat, credit card information, those types of things, we can control all of that through all the different admin controls that we have through Teams.

Jeremy Chapman (35:49):

So what you’re seeing here is really the work of several years of, you know, listening to people, listening to IT organizations and adding, you know, very granular, very detailed control over how Teams is used, how the various experiences within it are used. And you can, the cool thing is you can differentiate policy. So I can scope it all the way down to a user or I can scope policies up to entire departments or countries or however I want to split that up. But I have, really almost infinite number of configurations, things that I can do with it and we do have a lot of great guidance to, you know, not lock it down too much, there are things that you can do that are probably overboard for a lot of the companies, but we do give you all the options to be able to set up a very secure environment across all the different things that you can do within Teams.

Stephen Rose (36:38):

Yeah.

Paul Thurrott (36:39):

Yeah. People who have been listening to this podcast are probably already tired of me comparing Teams to Outlook and this notion that Teams is the new Outlook, but in many ways, you know, Teams is the new Windows. It’s,

Stephen Rose (36:51):

Yes.

Paul Thurrott (36:51):

It’s where you run your apps, it’s where you are. It’s where you collaborate with people. It’s becoming everything.

Stephen Rose (36:58):

Yeah. Think it is a platform more than an app. And I think that’s the big difference that people are starting to figure out that more and more of my day is being spent in Teams and there are opportunities to increase that and to add depth from, you know, on an end user point of view.

Jeremy Chapman (37:16):

Right. And that’s kind of like Jeffrey Snover who’s our technical fellow now and I’m one of his biggest fans I think in terms of his PowerShell days, but like his, his move into Microsoft 365 and to Rajesh’s org, it’s huge. And he’s also thinking about it, we did a show at Ignite that was kind of, he called it the people operating system, where if you think about how Windows is constructed with its various APIs and you know, application front end services, all of these kinds of things. At a very macro level, this is kind of representing that. If you tie in, you know, underlying services like Microsoft Graph for the kind of search components, Teams, you know, and all the various pieces there. There’s a great analogy, like you said, it’s like an operating system, but at a massive scale and across all these different services. And so even when you think of the different dialogues, like the sharing dialogue or the people cards or those things. We’re sharing that across the various services in Microsoft 365 so it’s all very uniform and consistent and these are the kinds of things that you strive for in an operating system as well as you build those pieces out.

Paul Thurrott (38:23):

Right, right. So, I guess shifting gears a little bit, you know Microsoft 365 has kind of a massive suite of services that spans beyond what was available just in Office 365, also includes Windows 7 capability, sorry, Windows 10 capabilities and capabilities that used to be associated with Intune and Microsoft’s other management, Endpoint management solutions. What’s going on in that space with Microsoft 365 today?

Jeremy Chapman (38:54):

The, oh, go ahead Stephen.

Stephen Rose (38:57):

Oh, I was just going to say Endpoint Manager is really kind of our end all be all for folks there. But go ahead. You take it Jeremy.

Jeremy Chapman (39:04):

This is like where I grew up cause I started out doing even in the old days of SMS, not short message service, systems management. So even growing up in that capacity and you know, through the days of Configuration Manager and that name changed back in 2007. And you know, building out the deployment tech, now we’re at a space you know, with Microsoft Endpoint Manager where we’ve truly got the best of both worlds in terms of config manager, which is basically able to do anything. It’s got all of the, you know, supersedence and all the different app provision capabilities, operating system, deployment, you name it. On the Intune side, you know, we’ve done a lot of work, especially recently in terms of what we called co-management or it’s still called co-management.

Jeremy Chapman (39:53):

But now I can even do, attach effectively my CM database up into Intune, where I can do things like device policy you know, forced device policy check against various devices. I can do a lot of the stuff that I would do from Help Desk that I had to have, you know, console access too, for config manager. A lot of those things are available through Endpoint Manager. So what you see, and this is now, and we’ve changed the URL. It’s now endpoint.microsoft.com, is really this bringing together of, you know, Intune along with Microsoft Endpoint Configuration Manager. It’s new name, to really have all of that capability in one place. And this is where you’re going to do things, you know, not only around security policy, but even you know, for deployment.

Jeremy Chapman (40:42):

And we talk a lot about things like Autopilot for deploying out Windows devices. That’s where you’ll configure your Autopilot profiles, for example, through the portal, through Endpoint Manager. So all of those, all the devices that you’re managing that are trying to get access, and we talked about Conditional Access earlier that can be configured here as well. All of these things can be done through Endpoint Manager across different OS platforms. So, you know, we have, you know, Windows devices, and then I’ll go into enrollment. But this is where you can set up all the different policies around enrolling the device into the Intune service. Setting up Hello for Business, setting up Autopilot rules and profiles, all that can be done here in one place. And then you can even have visibility over effectively what you have on prem.

Jeremy Chapman (41:38):

And then some of the other things that we’ve done on the config manager side, and I actually have a VM running of config manager. I didn’t start up, but when you start to add things like Cloud Management Gateway and basically deploying updates from the cloud, you can actually again reduce reliance on VPN because you’re delivering not from your distribution points. You’re delivering from basically cloud distribution points, your software and app updates and app packages that you would have had to have in the past forced VPN connection on. So this is another, even another way to pay off, you know, doing things that don’t require as much connectivity back to your internal perimeter. And these technologies, again, have radically been improved and just kind of merged together in a way that gives them a lot of power and a lot of things that you can do.

Jeremy Chapman (42:29):

And now recently we’ve even added things like Shell Script support for Mac. You know, there’s the Mac deployment in general. There’s a lot more capability in terms of getting apps onto Mac. There’s built in the Edge browser packages, Office packages that you can do. So there’s a lot that you can do through the web console alone. And then when you add config manager to it, you know, you can basically do anything. And that’s what I love. And the nice thing with this is everything supports the best levels of automation. Or if I want to ship a patch out or an app out to a hundred thousand users, you can expect that that will be available on those devices as quickly as it can be done through the physics of getting those bits onto those devices. And this is the kind of power that you have in terms of whether or not you want to do policy or you know other Provisioning. All of this can happen through through the Endpoint Management suites.

Stephen Rose (43:20):

Hey Jeremy, can you go back to the devices page? So go back one, up at the top.

Jeremy Chapman (43:24):

I can I don’t have any devices enrolled in.

Stephen Rose (43:27):

It’s okay. Just go to where it says devices up one level.

Jeremy Chapman (43:30):

Oh, devices here, yeah.

Stephen Rose (43:31):

Yep.

Jeremy Chapman (43:32):

Sure.

Stephen Rose (43:35):

And what’s great is there you’ll see iOS, iPad, Mac, Android, all of that is in there as we take a look at this by platform and what you’re looking to manage too. And that’s something else too where it’s not separate or off on something else. We brought all that in to really allow you to look at your organization holistically and not oh, let me just get my PCs done. Now I’ll go look at everything else and have to look at, you know, different tools to do that. That’s the value of having that altogether. And again, going back to that single pane of glass where we can start to see for, Hey, this seems to be hitting only my Macs. I got to take a look at this. Or this is hitting Mac and Windows and it must be something at a higher level or et cetera to really help you to be proactive rather than reactive.

Jeremy Chapman (44:20):

And the other thing I love about this, and there’s this kind of shared underlying set of APIs and services that we use that are kind of spanning Azure AD. And what you can do through the Intune service, whether it’s policy management. We’ve added ADMX support even for group policy through the Intune service, which is awesome. But we’ve also added a service called the Office Cloud Policy Service, which basically does cloud policy management for Office. So if you’re familiar with this tool, which you can get to it at config.office.com. You sign in and basically you create settings files for how Office will be deployed for the Click-to-Run packages. And the Click-to-Run packages now, by the way, they include the Volume Licensing, the Perpetual Activation ones as well. So if you’re doing, whether you’re doing Microsoft 365 apps for enterprise or even a 2019 Volume License, like that’s all done here.

Jeremy Chapman (45:17):

So this is something that we actually specced a lot of this stuff out in my transition moving from Windows into Office. But you can select all of the, you know, the update channels, which products you deploy. Like this is basically the governance of what will be laid down on your computer once you actually deploy Office with the XML file that this outputs. And then the other cool thing that you can do, and this is kind of tying back into the kind of the Intune side.

Stephen Rose (45:47):

Oh, hang on, go back to the screen and scroll up. My favorite feature is that you can also have it pinned to the task bar. I love that because that was something we heard from a ton of folks. If you scroll down the over on the right, up a little bit up, it’s over on the right, a little bit, a little bit, a little bit, right there.

Jeremy Chapman (46:04):

On the right? Oh, you’re talking about the setting.

Stephen Rose (46:07):

So you can as part of the installation. Yeah, you can actually have it pinned to the task bar, which is huge. And folks were asking that, how do I immediately make folks know that that’s there, that you can now do that as part of that installation and log it and make sure that that’s happened.

Paul Thurrott (46:21):

Can we briefly kind of discuss, what’s the end user experience for this and for Endpoint? So you sign in with your work account on a Windows PC or mobile device, policy occurs. What’s the look here for Office? Is this something you get as part of that process? It’s going to be automatically deployed to the desktop when they sign in for the first time.

Jeremy Chapman (46:40):

This is when I’m doing push style deployment, I’m provisioning it out through, say Configuration Manager.

Paul Thurrott (46:48):

Okay.

Jeremy Chapman (46:48):

So this ingests the output is an XML file. And then basically I say run the ODT, the Office Deployment Tool, which is the command line interface for this. I point it to this XML file and this is basically the instruction set that says here are the packages that we want, 32, 64 bit. Do we want to omit any apps? What’s the update channel that we’re going to write to the registry? Do we want to have, you know, this is the package for example, that enables the service for Microsoft Search that we saw earlier. So I can have that actually even set my my browser or my search engine defaults. All of that’s done through the push style deployment.

Stephen Rose (47:34):

Sort of like the old MPC scripts but just so much easier to do and not having to write it all out.

Jeremy Chapman (47:38):

Right, right. And you don’t have to, before you had to kind of author all of this stuff in an XML file with notepad, you know, like if you didn’t, there were some gooey tools that we’d built that were like on GitHub and stuff, but this is much easier.

Jeremy Chapman (47:52):

And you actually, you can see we were able to save different deployment files. But I think to your other question as the user, so let’s say a user has got admin rights and they sign into Office 365 and I open up the Microsoft 365 Apps for Enterprise package for them to self install. Well basically I can go in and actually set up policies for those machines that connect as well. So let me go into policy management. I was trying to, let me open up the policy first. But basically this will do things like give you the ability to configure whether or not the machine can run macros or do any of the you know, we can actually set policy of the behavior of the computer when they’re signed in. So here, let me try this one more time. I think that this control didn’t turn on, which it should have. Let me just create a new policy. I’ll cancel that

Jeremy Chapman (49:07):

And then this is where you can define who will get set. And then if I search for users, we’ll just add a security group. And now here are those policies that you can do. But you’ll see there’s literally hundreds of policies that we can set. So the cool thing is if I’m logged in with my domain credentials for Microsoft 365, that will actually snap the device to the policies that are configurable through this tool. So once I deploy these out and I’ve targeted them to my right security group. You can see, for example, some of the things that we can do. If I search for, let me just search for macro, I’ll search for macro and you’ll see that, you know, block macros, set VBA, macro controls, all these things that I can do directly from policy management. And this sits up in the cloud, again, as a package that gets kind of pushed down to the client endpoint. And then it’s going to snap to what you, how you want it to behave effectively as an IT admin. And again, that machine doesn’t have to be domain joined. It doesn’t need to be enrolled even into Intune or have any management affinity. It’s literally because I’ve signed in, I’ve brokered that connection and that trust with Azure AD, these policies that you

Jeremy Chapman (50:28):

Define here will get pushed down to that machine. So you can actually protect an unmanaged computer who’s using effectively your managed set of software, which is your Microsoft 365 Apps for Enterprise.

Paul Thurrott (50:39):

Yeah. So this combines with what we talked about earlier, this notion that someone’s pulling a laptop out of a closet, getting it up to date.

Stephen Rose (50:45):

Right.

Paul Thurrott (50:45):

And at that point, because they’ve signed in with their work account, they can get this automatically deployed.

Jeremy Chapman (50:51):

Exactly.

Paul Thurrott (50:52):

To the system. Yeah. That’s fantastic. Well, we need to address the last big topic which is something that just came up recently at Build, was the discussion around virtual Windows Virtual Desktop. This notion of Windows hosted in Azure.

Stephen Rose (51:12):

Yeah.

Paul Thurrott (51:13):

How does this change things?

Stephen Rose (51:14):

I’m a huge fan of this and this is something where even last year at Ignite in our booth, we were showing off plugging an Android phone into a USBC hub with a keyboard, mouse, monitor, ethernet and running a full version of Windows 10 in the cloud through that and using it like a fully functional PC. What’s great is our customers that are E3, E5 from Microsoft 365 Licensed automatically get this. And what’s awesome is you really have two kind of key ways you can use this. Either a, you can push out to somebody a full Windows 10 desktop using the same deployment tools that you use today. And what’s great is they’re going to get that Windows 10 and it’s going to have those apps. You can run it through the browser, you can run it through the, you know, through Remote Desktop app on any platform.

Stephen Rose (52:05):

I’ve been using it on my Mac with the new keyboard and mouse setup and you now have this self-contained Windows instanced that you can’t drag and drop things through a local desktop. So for those who want this, either, a, great experience or want a secure experience, you have that. Or you can push out just specific apps. This is awesome if you’re using two apps, two different versions of the same app, you’re going to go to a new one. You can say, Hey, you can continue to use app version one until July 1st. Here’s the new one, take the training, start to use it, and that version will go away. Plus we’ve also extended support for Windows 7, by leveraging Windows Virtual Desktop, which means if you have apps that only run in Windows 7, it was the only thing holding you back from migrating to Windows 10. You can continue to use those in a supported manner as you start to build those out as either, you know, a new app or a cloud-based app, et cetera. So for customers that were spending a lot of money on third party, it’s now included, you’re just using Azure as a way of hosting an app and you have that amazing level of control.

Paul Thurrott (53:16):

It’s rather incredible. I mean for people who have been around for a while, like me, unfortunately, you’ll remember the Microsoft Desktop Optimization Pack, had two forms of virtualization, was the application virtualization, mentioned.

Stephen Rose (53:29):

APP-V and MED-V.

Paul Thurrott (53:30):

Exactly. So this is a combination of those capabilities, right? App and desktop virtualization but delivered through the cloud. That’s incredible.

Jeremy Chapman (53:41):

Yeah. So, and then the other thing is just the ease of provisioning. So once you wire in effectively or directory service against Windows Virtual Desktop, you can start to create your host pools, which are those VMs that you can assign to multiple people. One of the things that’s unique here is we have multi-session, kind of a Windows 10 Enterprise multi-session support. So you can have multiple users logged into client operating systems. You don’t have to use a server for that capability. Which is nice cause you know what I mean, like tradeoffs in terms of usability and you know, you can do all of your management here from one place in terms of assigning the different compute, assigning the users, the apps. I’ve actually got an app here of a legacy app that’s a beautiful looking old Contoso Invoicing app. But you’ll see that, you know, because of this I can do things like run if I want to, like you said, a down level version of Windows or an app that maybe I don’t trust or want to have provisioned running on people’s devices.

Jeremy Chapman (54:40):

But I want to have that on a very locked down kind of sandboxed Windows environment that’s fully contained. So now I’m actually launching this app, you know, the first sign into this VM is going to take a second cause it’s actually kind of spinning everything up. But then once I’m in, it’s literally just cutting out that window of the app that’s running in that version of Windows. So this is actually in a VM and it behaves like it’s running locally. The only evidence you can see here is this glyph that’s on the start menu icon, that it’s a virtual app. So all of this stuff works and it’s great for testing and it’s great for compatibility reasons. Great for having just more control over where some of these apps run so that you have full visibility into what’s on that operating system.

Stephen Rose (55:24):

And now you’ve got cross-platform compatibility instantly as well.

Paul Thurrott (55:28):

So this is something you’re running directly from the browser. It’s not necessarily in this case, I should say.

Jeremy Chapman (55:37):

It’s running RDP. It’s basically a link that’s, you know, it’s here in my start menu.

Paul Thurrott (55:40):

Okay, I was going to say it. Okay. I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I thought you clicked the link on the webpage.

Jeremy Chapman (55:44):

You can do, there’s basically, if you go to aka.ms/wvdweb and I don’t have all my credits memorized, but you can actually go in through an HTML 5 browser. Do the same thing, the app window or the full desktop from a browser as well, and not have to have the remote desktop plant configured on the machine.

Stephen Rose (56:05):

Right. But the whole goal is that, you know, for end-users, they don’t care how it works. It just has to work. And this is one of those where they see the icon, they click it, it works like they expect, they don’t even realize it’s not a locally connected app, as long as they, you know, the only time they’re gonna realize it is if they’re on a laptop with no internet and they got to launch, it will say sorry. And that’s about the only time. But no matter whether it’s through a browser, you could be on a Mac and have it through Windows Virtual Desktop or have it run the same way where they click that app and it runs out. So that’s what’s great is it’s this seamless experience for end-users where they don’t even realize it. And that’s awesome.

Paul Thurrott (56:41):

Honestly, just having, sorry.

Stephen Rose (56:43):

No, no, that’s it.

Paul Thurrott (56:44):

I mean, just having the app that you want, this is what’s going to delight people. They’ll see it come up and say, Oh yes, thank you. You know, they don’t really care where it’s coming from.

Jeremy Chapman (56:52):

Exactly

Stephen Rose (56:52):

No, they don’t. And that’s the whole great thing is now it’s also secure. You can also add additional things saying, look, I don’t want any files being saved locally from this. So if you’ve got a sales guy who’s using some, you know, sales app like Goldmine or Act or even an old version, if they’re running it this way, when they go to export it, it’s not going to show them the local C drive. They won’t be able to get to it. So now you’ve also ensured that the content will stay within the app itself and not be downloaded locally or a database can’t be exported, things like that. So you start to get levels of control as you do this. And like I said, I could do this from a mobile phone, plug it into a hub and then use it just like a PC without it being any different.

Stephen Rose (57:34):

And we brought AutoCAD from this because it’s the cloud that’s providing all the processing power. It’s not the phone, the phone’s just redrawing. So as long as it has a decent graphics capability, it’ll work great.

Paul Thurrott (57:46):

We are living in the future.

Stephen Rose (57:47):

We are, where’s my jet pack?

Paul Thurrott (57:51):

Exactly, flying cars, we were promised.

Stephen Rose (57:54):

We were promised that will be, you know, I was told 1977, the world will go metric and except for needing, you know, Coca Cola, we don’t use anything in that. I was terrified that somebody would need a hectoliter of blood. I wouldn’t know how much that is. And they would die. That was life in 1977 so I realized a hectoliter of blood it’s a lot of blood.

Paul Thurrott (58:13):

I think we were all handed the rulers, you know, with those measurements and said, you gotta learn this. Yeah.

Stephen Rose (58:24):

That’s it and we were supposed to have jet packs. The jet packs is still not here and we have not gone metric. The rest of the world has, just not us.

Jeremy Chapman (58:28):

I’m actually a fan of metrics.

Paul Thurrott (58:30):

We should be fans of anything that is 10 based, right?

Stephen Rose (58:36):

Yes.

Jeremy Chapman (58:36):

Yeah, exactly.

Stephen Rose (58:37):

That’s how many fingers and toes we have, most of us.

Jeremy Chapman (58:39):

How many hands is a horse tall?

Paul Thurrott (58:42):

Yes. Well there is the notion of a finger of alcohol, which I always questioned, you mean a finger width or a finger length?

Paul Thurrott (58:54):

So we covered a lot of ground today. And Jeremy, it’s really good to catch up with you. I have a very long lasting memory of you convincing me to wear a parachute outfit or a skydivers outfit for a bit that we did that I will never forget. So thank you for that.

Jeremy Chapman (59:09):

I remember, that was for Click-to-Run. We wanted to show that you can install Office in the 90 seconds or so of free fall from a plane without internet connectivity. That was the whole point of that one.

Paul Thurrott (59:19):

I did draw the line at jumping out of the plane, [inaudible] I’ll always have that, so thank you. And Stephen, obviously, always, always a pleasure. Thank you guys so much and thank everyone for tuning in to this latest episode of the Microsoft 365 Knowledge Series.

View Details

This week, we are taking a look at the security features offered within the Microsoft 365 suite and how you can take advantage of them for your operations. Joining Paul Thurrott and Stephen Rose this week is Chris Jackson – Principal Architect, Commercial Endpoint Customer Experience Engineering

 Transcript:

Paul Thurrott (00:06):

Hello and welcome to episode five of the Microsoft 365 Knowledge Series. I’m Paul Thurrott and I’m here as always with Stephen Rose, the Senior Product Marketing Manager for Microsoft 365, but also this week with Chris Jackson. Chris, I have to talk to you about your, your title. Chris is a Principal Architect, Commercial EndPoint Customer Experience Engineering, but also is the Chief Awesomeologist, Cybersecurity, Windows and Browser Enthusiasts. Please explain, sir.

Chris Jackson (00:37):

So, there’s a session I did at Build, was also done for a number of internal sessions called Amplify Your Awesome, cause one of the things I like to do in my spare time is study people who’ve had this really enormous success in their lives and in their careers. I’ve had them talk about it. So we actually did a series of talks using a format that I completely ripped off, which is, you know, 20 slides auto-advancing every 15 seconds. So it’s five minutes in and out and you’re done. Stephen you actually did that for me once.

Stephen Rose (01:04):

I did, I did your first one.

Chris Jackson (01:06):

So it really was, you know, Hey, I really want to study what other people are doing. So you know, much like, you know, you do not yourself have to be made of urine to be a urologist. I do not personally have to be awesome to be an awesomeologist. But instead, I just studied people who are awesome, so.

Paul Thurrott (01:23):

That’s good.

Stephen Rose (01:24):

I will say this, it is the hardest presentation I’ve ever done because with only 15 seconds per slide and it auto advances, by slide two, you have to be deep into your story and what you’re talking about. Super engaging. I did it like four times and then ripped it apart the night before and completely redid it, but really enjoyed it. But it is, it’s a neat concept.

Paul Thurrott (01:48):

I mean, I’ve spent an hour and 40 minutes on slide two, so I’m not sure how that would work exactly. But so, well, okay, so Chris is obviously a subject expert in security. And we did cover security a bit in episode three, but this week we thought we’d take a deeper look at the Microsoft 365 Security story specifically because of what’s happening in the world, right? So a lot of people, IT pros have as Stephen was telling me earlier, have done in a matter of days what they had planned to do in months. And now it’s time to kind of take a step back and say, look, we gotta make sure we’re doing this securely. Not just the devices, obviously Windows 10, PCs and mobile devices of all kinds, the BYOD thing factors in here. But also the data on those devices.

And Chris, you weren’t here for this and this will probably not be particularly exciting for you, but we did, the stuff that we talked about before in brief, we looked at some of the security controls across Microsoft 365, Exchange Online Protection, the Intune, Selective Wipe, App Protection, Windows Defender Exploit Guard, the browser protections in Edge, and of course the Security and Compliance center in Microsoft 365 Secure Score and so forth. So that was a big part of the conversation that we had last time, but I thought maybe this time we could look at security a little more holistically, but also across everything that Microsoft 365 has to offer and what IT pros should be doing now given the situation. To kind of take a step back, like I said, and maybe reevaluate their security stance with everyone working remotely and maybe this being the new normal.

Paul Thurrott (03:31):

So where do you guys want to start? Just, you want to bring it right through the products, we can go Windows, Edge that way. Or how do you want to look at this?

Stephen Rose (03:42):

Yeah, I think let’s start with personal productivity. So desktops and maybe browser and you know, some of the Windows security features and then go bigger. What do you think, Chris?

Chris Jackson (03:53):

No, I think that makes sense. Yeah. I mean if we kind of take-off and you mentioned, you know, a couple of like, you know, point solutions that, like Exploit Guard, like, show me what’s on there. App guard, you may have talked about before. And I’m, going to kind of, you know, boil that up a little bit and really think about you know, what are the key scenarios and what’s some of the guidance that we have around how do we get there, right? Because the number one scenario that I’m hearing from absolutely everyone is, Holy cow I had a perimeter-based security paradigm. I depended on everything coming through. We have forced VPN. And even at Microsoft, we saw a 3x increase in the number of people coming through VPN because, you know, if you think our devs are coming in with a device, that is not what’s happening.

Chris Jackson (04:45):

So even we, you know, sort of had this like, Hey I think the VPN appliances are almost on fire at the moment. And how do we scale that up? And we have a split tunnel put up. So what really it comes down to is I’m taking the fast road to zero trust. And most people are kind of starting it off with baby steps of, you know, Hey, step one, let’s look at, you know, how do I at least put some selective things outside of my VPN tunnel, so that, you know, the updating and things like that. As we think more holistically about how do I get to the point eventually, when I only have to use the ability to tunnel in to gain access to the things that need to be inside and otherwise I have that zero trust posture.

Paul Thurrott (05:32):

Yeah. I think Microsoft 365 as an org actually posted something recently about VPN in this new age, and some of the concerns are obviously with VPN you might have concerns with performance and reliability and so forth, but do you think that this current situation is going to drive more people and more organizations, I should say, to put more of their infrastructure in the cloud and outside of that local infrastructure that you’re trying to protect there? I mean, do you think this is going to be a big driver in change at that level?

Chris Jackson (06:10):

Go ahead Stephen.

Stephen Rose (06:11):

No, no, real quick. I was just going to say, I think we’ve seen three or four really interesting things happen recently. Number one is WVD has absolutely exploded, Windows Virtual Desktop and I’ve seen a lot of folks where they said, we don’t, the amount of time and effort for us to lock all this down is going to be almost impossible. So we’re just going to put this into Windows Virtual Desktop. What’s great is if you’re E3 or E5, you’re already licensed for it. They put it in there and then they pushed out those Virtual Desktops out to users. What’s great is, especially if they didn’t have a work laptop that they were able to bring home, they could use BYOD, but again, all the processing power is happening on the back end in the clouds. What’s great is you could have a five or seven year old device and still be able, as long as you have a good connection, be able to have a really, really great experience.

Stephen Rose (06:59):

Number two,

Paul Thurrott (07:00):

And this is Azure hosted. In other words, this is the Azure host.

Stephen Rose (07:04):

Right, yep. Or to take a few specific apps and host those in Windows Virtual Desktop and just push out the apps to users where they want it to secure it, where they want to to wrap it or put a boundary around it. And that’s one of the first things that we saw. And then the second was finish moving some apps to the cloud and leveraging the browser. But I think there’s some really important things to keep in mind as we look at browser security. And for that, I’m going to throw that back to Chris cause that’s more his area of speciality.

Chris Jackson (07:35):

Oh sure. And in the context of the browser, well, before we even get to security, I want to talk about productivity is, you know, particularly in a case of BYOD, how many people at home today are honestly running Internet Explorer? How many people at work are? Right? And you’ll notice

Paul Thurrott (07:54):

Are we allowed to say those words?

Stephen Rose (07:57):

We can, but only for a moment. There has to be some language [inaudible]

Paul Thurrott (08:01):

Some [inaudible] collecting that needs to occur suddenly.

Chris Jackson (08:04):

Well, it’s just where, you know, things have been built. It’s the same thing as trying to bad mouth, you know, VB 6, right? VB 6 still powers such an enormous percentage of all the things that are running. And they work, right? It’s like, yeah, I could invest in redoing the same thing. I call that being on the treadmill, right? Where at the end I’m tired, money’s gone away, you know, but I’ve not actually gone anywhere. I’m standing in exactly the same spot. So I understand why an organization would do this, but now you’ve got this mismatch. So the ability to start targeting my users at home and say, Hey, I can give you the new Microsoft Edge and configure IE mode so that all of the sites that we have internally that need IE, will just work, just launch this browser.

Chris Jackson (08:43):

And all of it comes to be like magic instead of, you know, what we used to have to do is have every single user remember which app needs which browser. And that also from a security perspective ensures that IE is only used for those sites that truly need it. That you’re not, you know, actually just sort of using IE all the time. In fact, when you start thinking about how we go through this process, right? The initial, you know, get it all configured, make sure it’s working, but you can set a policy that says, Hey, if you’re in IE and you go to something that’s not on the site list, kick me back out. And now I start to really reduce that surface area of, Hey, you know, where am I going to put something in where it can have this binary extensibility where it doesn’t have the same advanced security features.

Chris Jackson (09:27):

I will use it for the sites that need it, but only the sites that need it. And then we can then start building on top of that to say, all right, well with this foundation of my legacy stuff works, my new stuff works. All of that’s good. Now I can start looking at, you know, Hey, I get all of the security features that come with having a Chromium based browser, which builds on top of a lot of Windows security features. Ironically enough, initially came out in the wildly popular Windows Vista release. But you know, that you know, really formed the foundation of this, the security sandbox that builds there and then have the accessibility of an even stronger sandbox, which is, you know, what we call a Krypton container. Externally, it’s called Defender Application Guard. Which in essence puts it into its own micro VM.

Chris Jackson (10:19):

And the hyper-v boundary is one of the very best security boundaries that you have on Windows. You know, I like to say that a hyper-v boundary is the thing that makes Azure a viable commercial product. And now you may or may not have determined, but you know, it seems we’re a little bit bullish on the cloud. We’re kind of silent about that. Don’t talk about it too much, but believe it or not, we do believe in the cloud. And so if you’re going to be behind the technology getting behind the one that is all about the thing that makes Azure possible that’s a good bet to place.

Stephen Rose (10:52):

Yeah. And that sandboxing is really critical because that’s going to do a few things for end users. Number one, if the browser locks up and crashes, it doesn’t take everything else down with it. So that’s really great because you can immediately continue to work and when you relaunch it, it’ll probably reopen those Windows. But from a security standpoint, what’s really critical there is if you get any malicious actors that come in, they’re within that sandbox. They’re not going to get at the critical data. We’ve already solved that issue. You know with Windows 8 and Windows 10, from the moment you hit power until the operating system loads. There’s no gaps. But the big gap was always once the operating system loaded what was going on with the browser. So by now separating that out, providing that secure container and now also being able to, in one of my favorite features in Chromium Edge is the ability to take a website and save it as an application, which is great.

Stephen Rose (11:46):

So now you’re taking this thing where you don’t have a dedicated app for it, and whether it’s Facebook, whatever it is that you’re using, you can save that now as an application, pin it, leverage it that way and do it, but be able to do it securely. So you may have apps that you haven’t built as a Windows app, but that is a webpage app that you can now push out. And it looks just like an application to your end users and removes a lot of that confusion. So there’s a lot of value there in making it easier for end users, which is, you know, my big focus and for Chris what we’re doing on the background to make sure it’s that secure environment so that administrators don’t need to you know, lose sleep.

Paul Thurrott (12:29):

So just to be clear the policy based IE mode that Chris was referring to earlier is one of the things that IT pros can do today after the fact. Now people are already working from home they’re hitting their internal sites with a browser and so forth. But this is something you can now whitelist and blacklist, I presume, sites to or at least determine which part of the browser they’re going to use. In other words, this is something that you can do retroactively to ensure that your users are hitting the right sites with the right browser, essentially. Right? Right. browser engine, I guess.

Chris Jackson (13:03):

Correct. Yeah, it’s a configuration file. So, you know, through either group policy or through Intune or any other management tool, you have, you in essence define an XML file. We have a tool for creating it so you can, you know, you don’t have to manually edit XML. Although you certainly can. But, you create this file and then you just set the policy and say, Hey, here’s where you go get the file. Then, you know, we go and fetch it and we use that to determine what’s in and what’s out and can make it really seamless. And unlike what we used to do in the older version of Edge, the legacy version where it’ll actually pop a whole different window. So you had this pretty disruptive user experience where all of a sudden it’s like I navigate somewhere, boom, a whole nother window pops up. Now, you know, you navigate somewhere and you can’t even tell. Like a lot of times you actually have to sort of right click and look at the menu and go, Oh, that’s the IE pop up menu and not the Edge one, to even tell the difference or be like, Hey, is this Silverlight? What, like, what’s going on in here?

Paul Thurrott (13:59):

We don’t talk about that either.

Stephen Rose (14:01):

Oh God.

Paul Thurrott (14:05):

But yes, I mean this is the dream. You know, back in the day there were, when IE was an ongoing concern. There were problems moving from version to version and that you, a lot of companies would buy third party solutions that would help them run a specific version of Java and Activex and the IE rendering engine and so forth. And now this is all just by upgrading now to Edge, you essentially get this capability to use a single browser and the user doesn’t even have to worry about it. It’s just happens automatically.

Chris Jackson (14:32):

Well to that point, it’s sort of interesting, and this is kind of, you know, a little bit of a tangent, but it’s actually that was the most common request we got every single time and we’d been solving it through something we call document modes. So if you look at how IE works today, there’s actually like 14 different ways it could potentially render a webpage depending upon, you know, all the markup and the declarations and the headers and so forth that determine that. So, but it was so hard to configure that most people didn’t always get it right and they’d say, just give me the whole browser side by side. What we kind of did with the last version of Edge and it turns out everyone hates it, they don’t want to have to track which browser to use for which one that you know, the new experience, which is, you know, kind of going back to what we did before, but in a slightly different way, that basically sort of draws a line between this is the perpetually updating one and then here’s the old stuff that you can keep around as long as you need it.

Chris Jackson (15:24):

Right. And we will constrain that security surface area and that compatibility surface area for you.

Paul Thurrott (15:30):

Right.

Stephen Rose (15:32):

Let me just add this. One of the other great features about Chromium that I also really love is you can also use Chrome extensions. So you can go out to the Google marketplace, you can take those extensions and bring those in. And there are some really good IT pro extensions that are doing a variety of things that I thought, wow, this would be great if we could use it with the browser. So it really gets rid of even as an IT pro like, well I have to have Chrome cause I’m running these two extensions, which are important to map, you know, how much usage is going through my VPN or what my portfolio is doing today. And you can now have those. So it’s hard to do that.

Chris Jackson (16:06):

Well let’s take that and riff it. That’s kind of another point to think about is, security baselines, which is something a lot of people are starting to look at now, which is, Hey, suddenly I’m managing a whole bunch of new devices. Maybe I’ll start with this. And the extensions reminded me of that specifically because if you look at the security base ends, we have security baselines through Edge 81, which is the current stable release we have now. And one of the things we put into the baseline is, don’t use extensions. Right? We will actually, you know, do a block list for a star, right? All of them are block listed because it’d be, you know, and you have this great flexibility of control. And I mentioned this because yeah, if I deal with extensions, extensions are to some extent a voluntary man in the middle attack.

Chris Jackson (16:52):

I’m going to trust this piece of software to intercept all of my HTML and do whatever it wants to with it and hopefully it will do no evil in the process. So we have a vetting process and there’s sort of a processes all around that. But you know, I wanted to talk about baselines because it’s important to be careful, particularly if you’re going after a BYOD, the baselines are designed to get you 90% of the way there. Like, Hey, if you want to be really, really secure, this is what, you know, the US Department of Defense starts with, this is what major banks start with. And so they’re going to weigh things potentially differently than what you might. So you might want to have this productivity feature that someone else who’s trying to protect something that launches missiles at other countries wouldn’t tolerate.

Chris Jackson (17:41):

And there are differences between what you would set. And so, you know, we have the ability, you know, we have a full experience in Intune where you can control it. We have the GPO bay signs to take this as a starting point and think through. And in fact, one of the things we’ve been working on recently is a framework we call SecCon or the security configuration framework, which says, you know, tries to partition out, you know, here are all of the policies that we have, determine how much you want to harden your device. Right we kind of did SecCon one and two and three that, you know, three is a full implementation of the baselines, but one is like, Hey, this is something I can do in the next 30 days to tangibly increase the security of my devices without sacrificing a lot around the ability to get work done. Without sacrificing the user experience as much, this is the low impact settings. The moderate impacts things, then you get into the high impact settings of you can’t have extensions, you can’t be an administrator, you can’t be, there’s all these different things. So as we’re moving quickly, I think it’s important to also move smartly and take advantage of the work that, you know, the security researchers are doing behind the scenes to not only set the baselines but help you tune them to be appropriate for the security sensitivity of the device you’re applying them to.

Paul Thurrott (18:59):

So just a couple of questions on what you just said. So when you, refer to devices in the context of Microsoft 365, we’re talking about the gamut of devices that are manageable. Windows 10, PCs, obviously Mac’s, I presume through MDM and Android and iOS devices, right?

Chris Jackson (19:15):

Yes. So far we have baselines for Windows 10 and that’s one of the things we’ve gotten a lot of feedback on, which is, Hey, keep going. So,

Paul Thurrott (19:24):

Yeah, that’s what I was wondering.

Chris Jackson (19:26):

We have introduced one for the app protection policies. So the APP framework is based upon the work we did with SecCon which says, Hey, here’s three levels you can go through. Right? The more you want to protect the app, the kind of tighter you can twist the knobs.

Paul Thurrott (19:42):

I’m sorry. Yeah. So I mean, what does this interface look like? One of the things that Stephen and I talked about previously was this notion of the Secure Score. And it’s almost like a gamification of the settings that you can configure through the security and compliance center. You know, here’s a bunch of things. If you turn this on, you know, your score goes up, et cetera, and it might inspire some IT pros just to kind of go through the list to try to get that score as high as possible. Is this, these security baselines, is that part of this interface? Is that how you interact with it?

Chris Jackson (20:14):

Oh, so the, the two of them are very complimentary. So, the security baselines are designed to give you a starting point. Whereas Secure Score, you know, takes into account information. In fact, we even expose this as well through TBM in Defender ATP, we’re able to expose the configurations compared to the baselines and we’ll actually show you like, Hey, you know, a recommendation would be to apply this setting. So what I see people having the most success with is figure out the right starting point based on the sensitivity of the device and the potential impact of the organization and set it here to the starting point. And then over time what the Secure Score will give you, is that context aware, here’s what people are attacking you with, you should prioritize this. Cause what we want to pivot from is the way people used to do their security settings.

Chris Jackson (21:04):

And the way I describe it is when we’d release a new version of the OS, like, you know, Windows 7 would come out. We had a giant Excel sheet with all of the settings. So if you’ve ever seen the movie, The Jerk with Steve Martin, was like, the new phone books are here, the new phone books here, it’s the new group policies are here, the new group policies are here. And they would call a meeting and those meetings could last for weeks of reading through one by one and trying to decide what’s the best answer to this in the absence of no data.

Paul Thurrott (21:29):

Which of these are actually important.

Chris Jackson (21:31):

Right? And that’s what we want to try and fix is a, give you a smart starting point that is a well known and proven solution that’s on millions of devices and then evolve it based on the data of what’s happening in your organization.

Paul Thurrott (21:49):

All right, so security baselines are Windows specific. Is there anything else going on in Windows that IT pros and admins need to think about now with people working from home and so forth? Anything else?

Stephen Rose (22:02):

I think the split tunneling that Chris brought up earlier is incredibly important. And I’ve seen some really great blog posts on that, Jeremy Chapman has done some really good stuff around that. I think that’s one of the first things is a, what do we need to do? Number two, what can we get off the network? What doesn’t need to be on the network? But I think the third is BYOD that a lot of folks did not bring home their work laptops or it’s not suitable for how they’re working or they’re now working from an iPad. So I think taking a look at MDM, how you’re having things locked down. And one of the interesting things was I was chatting with a customer the other day who said we had to get with HR because we were going to increase how we were managing devices on MDM, which included when we got back to normalcy, a complete wipe of those devices.

Stephen Rose (22:51):

And HR said, you can’t do that. Somebody had a baby, their first baby pictures are on there, you wipe it without them being aware of that, we’re going to get sued. So, and we’re like, well why are you even doing this? Why isn’t it selective wipe? So I think it’s as you’re moving forward, people tend to go with this all or nothing approach and just sort of meat hammer it in there rather than go, what really makes the most sense for what we’re doing and how we’re doing it and what are the granular controls? I always say to people if you have like, you know back, if you have an equalizer, you can’t turn everything up to 10 cause it’s just fuzz. You have to figure out where to turn those things up. Companies like Disney are not tracking where people are going on.

Stephen Rose (23:35):

They don’t limit where people go on browser, on websites via the browser. They say creativity could be anywhere and inspiration could be anywhere and we don’t want to limit where you’re going. There’s some interesting arguments around that. But again, my point is, it’s a great time to go back and take a look at policies that you built five years ago when people were still on Windows 7 and working out of the office and weren’t working off a mobile device and weren’t working off their phone and retake a look at those on what makes good sense now and there is no better time to do it than now because if you do something wrong, people are going to let you know pretty quickly on that. And if you’re doing something right, you know, people are gonna say, Hey, this is working much better. And I think a lot of things that we’re talking about across browser, across virtualization, across leveraging Secure Score, putting MFA into place, if you haven’t done it already, things like that. This is really the time to be doing those things if you haven’t fully invested in that now.

Chris Jackson (24:31):

I’m actually going to hit the other angle. That’s a really good point, Stephen, is when we think about, you know, the, the BYOD I think the other area where people are now suddenly starting to have to face the music is, you know, not just the completely unmanaged devices, but the devices that are historically managed that perhaps they were a bit looser on before, you know, great example is what are you doing to administer, you know, your critical systems and services, right? And servers and so forth. Right. And the concept of you know, the privilege access workstations, been around for a while. But if we’re honest, a lot of people were like, yeah, eventually we should probably do something like that. But suddenly we’re in a much higher risk environment where, Hey, just whatever laptop you walked out with, that’s what you’re using to connect in and administer our security services.

Chris Jackson (25:22):

You know, so I think getting the administrative experience and securing privileged access as a concept is something that we’re also struggling with. So I think we also need to hit the other side of the spectrum which is, you know, that thing which needs to be even more secure. So to even start off with the ability to do a conditional access rule based upon device risk, to say, Hey, if you’re going to connect into, you know, the administer you know, Azure AD or administer Defender ATP you should have a device that is not registering as potentially infected with malware at a minimum and then,

Paul Thurrott (25:59):

Sounds so reasonable when you say it that way.

Chris Jackson (26:01):

… start evolving from there, then saying, all right, Hey, you know, maybe I want to kind of go down the path of, you know, Hey, where are devices in general going, right.

Chris Jackson (26:12):

And I kind of view several significant epics in terms of, you know, compatibility and security configuration. First there was the, you know, just let it all roam epic, which really was the first 20 years of our evolution. And then starting around,

Stephen Rose (26:25):

Let it roam, sorry.

Chris Jackson (26:26):

And Stephen croons. But the next era really began in the era of Windows Vista, which is starting to move towards non admin, which historically we never took very serious. We talked about it, but we didn’t really do it. We never really lived that. And you know, a lot of people made that part of their business justification for moving to Win 7. So I think there’s at least completing that, particularly for administrators scenarios and then getting into what I consider to be the emerging ethic, which is the app control epic, which is, you know, Hey, I’m no longer going to trust all software by default.

Chris Jackson (27:03):

I’m going to pivot and I’m going to start trusting by exception when you’ve earned that trust. And really leading out in that, which I think will eventually hit all of my devices. But I need to start today with, Hey, if you’re a domain admin, you’re you know, a global admin in the cloud, you’re going to have some additional constraints placed on you. And I need to really accelerate my zero trust journey, at least for you. Perhaps I can’t do it for everyone. And I know that a lot of you know IT projects that are internally facing are paused or slowed at the moment. And that makes sense. But that scenario is a real important one to continue to keep, you know, higher on the priority list.

Stephen Rose (27:45):

Yeah. And I think a good double click on that is version control as well. We have so many companies where they’re using nine different versions of either allowing users, or on the server we’ll have nine different versions of Acrobat or things along that line. Using this time to go, we’re going to move to this version because it’s tested. Maybe it isn’t the newest or it is the newest, but it’s the best. But also starting to reduce duplicity of applications and overlap of applications. It’s going to make your job easier and it’s going to make it simpler for end users. And just saying, look, we’re not going to allow box and Dropbox and OneDrive. We’re moving all to OneDrive and here’s why. And here is the adoption and the training materials to do it. Becomes a really important thing. And people are going to say, well, you’re slowing me down.

Stephen Rose (28:29):

And you’re like, yeah, but we’re not, we don’t know what’s going outside the company. And if we’re going to put in policies to be able to you know, do document labeling, to be able to track content, to be able to basically encrypt content as it leaves the company and to get the most out of this platform. It is getting it into the cloud to leverage that which not only makes it more intelligent, it makes it more secure. So starting to take a look at some of those and where can we remove this duplicity? This is a really great time to be doing that. And by default it will help you and put you in a good position to do a lot of what Chris is talking about here.

Chris Jackson (29:06):

Yeah. Well then our TBM product as well, you know, focuses specifically on that scenario, which is to help you prioritize because of course you could, you know, service everything all the time. If we ignore the fact that even the most tightly managed organizations that I’ve worked with that are of any significant size have a software asset inventory of roughly 2,500 apps. You know, try keeping track of all of those, it’s difficult. And that’s a well managed org. I mean the worst I’ve seen so far and this is not a record worth aspiring to, but 225,000 unique applications in the environment. And so, you know, that’s one of the challenges we each sought to solve in TBM, which is Hey, let’s focus on the, you know, the older versions of applications you have, that have vulnerabilities, prioritized if there’s an exploit in the wild, prioritized even more if there’s an exploit that’s running in your environment, just to help you build that to do list. Cause that’s really what everyone needs some help with is, you know, yes, there’s always something I could be doing. Patching could always, always get better, but how do I do it? What do I do first?

Paul Thurrott (30:19):

Yeah. What’s the biggest bang for your buck? What’s the priority? I was going to, it’s funny that you launched into this because I was literally thinking, you know, what’s the low hanging fruit here? How do you, you know, where’s the starting point? It seems like this is the starting point.

Stephen Rose (30:32):

And what’s interesting is, and Chris did this, god back at Tech Ed, I think New Orleans was the first time he brought this and I thought this is a really great way of looking at it is he’s like, make a pie chart. List all your apps and list all the ones that are used daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, yearly, bi yearly. What’s interesting is when you get down to the apps that affect the most amount of people on a daily basis, you end up getting down to an incredibly small percentage of apps, 2 – 3% of the total apps in the company.

Stephen Rose (31:03):

Those are the ones that you start with. Those are the ones that are going to affect the most people and give you the biggest bang for the buck. There may be this incredibly difficult app that you know, you can’t shim and you can’t get to work or you have to virtualize. But if it’s only being used by 20 people once a year, why are you prioritizing that over something that 80% of your staff uses every single day? So by going out and and leveraging our tools to help you catalog what everybody’s using and then coming back and using that level of logic, which was one of the rare times that Chris has said something that made sense to me. It was great to be able to do that.

Paul Thurrott (31:36):

Just seeing if we’re paying attention, I see.

Stephen Rose (31:40):

No, no, but it was brilliant. I remember you doing that knocking down and watching the light bulb for all these IT pros who are looking at it as this mountain of things they had to do to move to Windows 7 at the time. It’s the same with all these apps and it really makes a lot of sense. So there you go. Giving you some kudos.

Chris Jackson (31:58):

It”s a taxonomy that I’ve had a lot of success, you know, cause as you know, right. I’ve been working in app compat and security and modernization, all that for a long time. And that taxonomy of, you know, it’s four parts basically managed, supported, unsupported and banned, right? Figure out what you want to do, right? Not everything needs to be tightly managed. The fact that someone’s running something somewhere does not constitute a permanent commitment for you to support that version of that app from now until the end of time. So that may fall into the either, you know, supported if you want to take phone calls about it or unsupported, you know what you’re okay running it. Just don’t call me if you have a problem. And then banned will be the ones that you want to actively try and keep from running.

Chris Jackson (32:45):

But that taxonomy helps to really simplify as you think about how do I evolve my processes to service and manage software better over time. Maybe even starting with Windows. That’s one of the projects we’ve got running right now with our servicing team inside of Windows is they recently did some work with Microsoft IT internally, where they went from, Hey, you know, in seven days, which is our goal to get everyone updated. You know, we were about 40% updated across the entire company and with a few changes in policies, we got to the point where within seven days, in fact I think it’s even less than seven days, we’re in excess of 95% patched and obviously some variation because a lot of people have multiple machines. They don’t always turn off. Like I know I’ve not been firing up my laptops very much because I don’t have to cause I haven’t left my house.

Chris Jackson (33:35):

And so I’d much rather have this over the big monitor spread that I have done here with the desktop. So those are not being serviced really well. So 95% in our context is actually pretty darn good. So figuring out how do I, you know, to Stephen’s point start with the low hanging fruit and then evolve the processes and then use data to help me figure out and then think about in root cause, why is this hard and how could I make it easy? What would this be like if it were easy?

Paul Thurrott (34:05):

This is very much like the organizational version of I think what we’re all kind of doing on a personal level during this pandemic, which is kind of re-evaluating things and looking at what’s essential, and trying to, you know, hit those targets that make the most sense. And I feel like for the discussion we’re having here today in organizations that have Microsoft 365, that there will be, you know, permanent workflow changes or permanent changes just to the way that we do things as a result and that you know, as bad as this is, it is terrible. The current situation, there’s a silver lining to it in some ways. I mean we might emerge on the other side. More efficient, more secure. I don’t want to say more managed, it’s more like more correctly managed maybe or you know, just in a better position.

Stephen Rose (34:58):

And like I said, I think I mentioned this in one of the previous episodes, I was doing an interview with the CIO from Dentsu Aegis. And he said, we can no longer in good confidence say you have to be here to do this job, that we can’t hire somebody who works in a completely different country as long as they’re willing to abide by time zones. And when we have meetings, we can’t do that. And the thought of, I want to go work from home three days a week to do my job, to take care of my kids and do that better. We can’t say no, you can’t be productive and you can’t be efficient and doing that. So I agree it’s going to be very, very hard for companies who had that 2012 attitude of you have to be here in the office to be productive and get work done.

Paul Thurrott (35:38):

Right.

Stephen Rose (35:38):

Yes, there was something to be said about meeting in person. I had an interesting conversation on someone about Inspire, was Inspire going to become permanently online. And I’m like, no, there is a lot to be said about walking up to a booth and building relationships and chatting with your peers and chatting with our engineers. But you can still have great impact that way. And I think it’s a balance of both. Showing up in meetings is important so people see your face and things happen organically, but it doesn’t remove any value that you can do in being on a Teams meeting and calling in. And now that people are more used to that and being more respectful of this, the window panes and how people are talking and moving things back and forth and doing that, which is a learned skill set, it’s going to get a lot easier.

Paul Thurrott (36:21):

Yeah, I agree. So Chris, we can’t leave this without discussing your office. You have what appears to be a lot of stereo equipment and is that a model or a Lego Millennium Falcon? I’m looking at it.

Chris Jackson (36:34):

It is a Lego millennium Falcon. Of course that is the ultimate collector’s edition, which is gigantic and it is down here because I am not allowed to keep that anywhere else in my house.

Paul Thurrott (36:46):

So it sounds like you have a pragmatic spouse.

Chris Jackson (36:48):

In fact that’s what the entire room is all about is, these are all the things that I am not allowed to put anywhere else. In the back is all of the the music gear. So what I like to say, I’m a guitarist and what I like to say is that what I lack in talent I make up for in volume, which is why I have a full sized Marshall stack in my basement.

Paul Thurrott (37:09):

Sure.

Chris Jackson (37:09):

You know, drum kit gets stuck down here and sort of all of the other, you know, toys I have, I have my original Commodore 64, which is where the journey all began off in the corner. You can’t see it from where you are, but it’s something that’s where I can see it, and sort of, just always reminds me of where I came from. So.

Paul Thurrott (37:26):

Oh, you know, you could take a page from the Kiss playbook and get empty stacks and it would make it look like you have a wall of Marshalls.

Chris Jackson (37:34):

So they actually do that at music stores and I was trying to, they have like a corkboard they can hang things on and I really, I couldn’t figure out where you could buy them.

Paul Thurrott (37:43):

Yeah. Oh, okay. This must be pretty cheap if you can find them.

Stephen Rose (37:45):

Yeah, go to eBay.

Chris Jackson (37:47):

I didn’t want them that bad, but I did look on eBay at the time and didn’t find them, you know. But yeah, that’s the last thing that that my wife wants me doing is searching for more ways to just make my basement room look ridiculous and awesome.

Stephen Rose (38:02):

So Chris, let me ask you this. Three takeaways. What are three things that IT pros when they finish watching this episode should sit down and go do immediately,

Paul Thurrott (38:11):

Right.

Chris Jackson (38:13):

Ooh, that’s a good

Stephen Rose (38:14):

Sorry, did I think away your line Paul?

Chris Jackson (38:16):

No, that’s good stuff. And please put them in order of priority.

Chris Jackson (38:23):

The question you’re not prepared for, based on the conversation that roamed in directions that none of us ever really planned. No, I think the first one is absolutely, positively leverage all of the knowledge that we have and have been sharing on what people have already tried and knows that works. There are all kinds, and we didn’t get into any of the stories here, but there are all kinds of well known consequences of security lockdowns if you’re suddenly doing it in a hurry, you can avoid a lot of pain by sort of taking a starting point and leveraging that knowledge. So I would say look for those starting points that we are trying to share as much as possible. This is my second podcast today. Cause we really are aggressively trying to solve all these challenges for folks.

Chris Jackson (39:10):

So look at the knowledge that’s already out there and leverage what people are already doing. Number one. Number two, I would say be mindful of the two ends of the spectrum. That conversation we had a short while ago. Understand what you need to do for any BYOD you’re introducing, any, you know, suddenly portable devices and how you’re replacing your perimeter security, but also be sensitive to your high security scenarios. If you treat everything as important, then you’re really treating nothing as important. So make sure you gain a balance between the two of those. And then the third one is, I think you can, and Stephen talked about a bunch of reasons, but I think it’s really timely that we have the new release of Microsoft Edge, just came out on January 15th. Because I do think that enables a whole bunch of new scenarios. Potentially, you know, it gives the opportunity to add a bunch of value to make it easier for people to be productive. And I would absolutely investigate doing that. Even if it’s slowed down. And again, we’ve talked to a lot of folks, said I’m slowing it down for my, you know, mainstream devices. But as an enabler for devices that weren’t previously productivity devices for the masses before, that can significantly improve their experience, as well as the security overall of what they’re doing.

Stephen Rose (40:24):

Yeah. Plus it works on mobile. I mean, you’ve got it working on iOS and Android, which means they can use on every device. I’ll tell you the one thing not to do, I had somebody ping me on Twitter saying they were going to go to longterm servicing branch to help make security easier, which I’m like, longterm servicing branch is great if you don’t have people who are using Office, information workers, if it’s, you know, and they’re like, Oh, well everybody uses that. I’m like, then again, you’re doing that baby with the bathwater. You’re going to an extreme, which is not going to solve your issue. So LTSB is not the solution there.

Chris Jackson (40:55):

Well, we also add significant security. Look at like ASR rules or tech surface production rules. Those get added, you know, a lot of times we’re releasing, there’s new ones that are coming in. So figuring out how to evolve your security. Now, most of the time we put it in a, you know, either a, we’ll just turn on by default. If it’s just likely to not have an impact, a or b, we’ll have an audit workflow where you can enable them at a time that makes sense to you if there’s the risk of impact. But it’s always changing. The threat landscape is not stagnant and that’s a really important thing to keep in mind is just because you know, you want to avoid moving really, really fast, attackers are very happy to move fast and are very agile. We just need to stay up with them.

Stephen Rose (41:38):

Yeah.

Paul Thurrott (41:41):

So before we head out, I wanted to just quickly discuss some of the news that’s occurred with Microsoft 365 over the past three or four weeks. We have been recording these episodes roughly one month apart. And as you might imagine with this COVID pandemic and everything a lot has happened in the world of Microsoft 365. The biggest news is that Microsoft announced consumer versions of Microsoft 365 that will replace the Office 365 Personal and Home offerings that we see today. So those will become Microsoft 365 Personal and Microsoft 365 Family. They’re adding some additional features. They’re not particularly interesting or I should say pertinent to the broader world of Microsoft 365. But it is kind of an interesting branding thing.

Paul Thurrott (42:26):

And there were also rebranding all of the Office 365 offerings for small businesses as well. And so things like Office 365 Business and Business Premium and also Pro Plus are becoming Microsoft 365 branded sometime in, I think in the next 30 days. So that will be happening soon. A bunch of consumer features coming to Teams as well as a version of teams for consumers, which is kind of interesting. And this speaks to the mixing of our work and home lives, especially now, but you know, in all times of course people might want to do things like be able to see their, what their kids are up to while they’re working, etc. And those things are coming, that’s for much later in the year. But it is something that Microsoft’s working on. Also Microsoft provided a more precise timeline on some of the new Teams features that they announced back in March.

Paul Thurrott (43:16):

And this is actually kind of interesting. You might remember some of these, the custom backgrounds, raised hand, and meeting participant report, and realtime noise suppression. Most of those features are actually going to come very soon to Teams sometime in the next 30 days. The only one that will be a little bit later in the year is the real time noise suppression feature. You might remember the video where the guy crunched up the potato chip bag. And then actually, some of this happened just right on as we were about to record this show. Microsoft announced Yammer integration with Teams. It’s coming soon and kind of a nine pain, what I call a Brady bunch of features. They could have nine people on the screen at once in a Team meeting. Which should be pretty interesting. And I think it’s just good to highlight with all the Zoom security issues that are happening out in the world right now.

Paul Thurrott (44:04):

You should use an online meeting provider you can trust. I would say that Microsoft is more trustworthy than some at this point, but that’s up to you of course. I also want to highlight the work that Microsoft continues to do on it’s Microsoft 365 blog. If you’re not looking at it, you should. They come out with posts almost every single day these days. They’ve done some great posts that are security-related recently, for example, security for IT pros and then security for Teams, I should say security and privacy for Teams specifically in two separate posts. They’ve talked about the efforts they make to thwart cybercriminals who are trying to take advantage of the COVID situation by sending out phishing attacks via email, which is unbelievable. How they pivoted a lot of Microsoft employees to promote work.

Paul Thurrott (44:49):

And also just some, you know, just general tips and tricks, you know, working from home with kids and so forth. Stephen mentioned earlier, Inspire and Inspire is Microsoft’s partner show. And we know that Microsoft won’t be having any in-person events through at least the middle of 2021. And so it’s possible that Inspire 2021 could happen in person, but this year’s Inspire like Ignite is not going to happen. It will to be some sort of a digital event. We don’t really know what form that’s going to take, but just as an aside, Mary Jo Foley and I have recorded, or we’ve done a live recording of a post keynote segment with Channel 9 at Microsoft Build for the past few years. We’re actually gonna do it again this year and this will be the first major digital event that Microsoft will be holding, will be Build, which occurs in May.

Paul Thurrott (45:39):

And so we’ll see what form that takes. We’ve kind of agreed to the, you know, to the schedule and when we’re going to do it and so forth. I assume that means this will in fact be a live keynote. I guess we’ll see how that happens. But you know, even with all of the terribleness that’s happening in the world and the changes things like this are still going forward just in a different form. And I think that’s, that’s kind of interesting. Well, we are out of time, unfortunately. We still have a few more things we could discuss, but like Chris, we all actually have other podcasts and webinars to do today. So we’ll have to cut this one here, but thank you both so much. Chris, thank you for joining us. And Stephen, thank you, as always.

Stephen Rose (46:20):

Always.

Chris Jackson (46:20):

Thanks for having me.

View Details

This week, we are going to look exclusively at Microsoft Teams, the chat-based workspace that has evolved in just three years to become a hub for teamwork for tens of millions of people. Joining Paul Thurrott and Steven Rose this week is Christopher Bryan, Product Marketing Manager – Microsoft Teams.

You can learn more about Microsoft 365, here.

Transcript of the podcast:

Paul Thurrott (00:00):

Hello and welcome back to the Microsoft 365 Knowledge Series. I’m Paul Thurrott. Once again, I’m joined by Stephen Rose, Senior Product Marketing Manager for Microsoft 365, but this time around we’re also joined by Chris Bryan, the Product Marketing Manager for Microsoft Teams. Hello Chris.

Chris Bryan (0:16):

Thank you.

Paul Thurrott (00:16):

Thank you for joining us. You know, this is an interesting coincidence, over a month ago we had kind of plotted out what we would be talking about for this fourth episode, Microsoft Teams. And of course, the way the world has changed in the time since has made that all the more important that that’s what we’re talking about. So we thought we’d have Chris join us to get a subject expert in here and kind of help you know, broaden out the conversation a little bit. Obviously we need to address the COVID-19 pandemic and the fact that the new normal is we’re working from home when possible.

Paul Thurrott (00:38):

I know in my own neighborhood, we see lots of families out, you know, everyday walking and you know, the world has changed and will probably continue to change. I just want to, if I could, I don’t know that this was made public, but Microsoft made a video with the Microsoft CEO, Satya Nadella and Jared Spataro talking about how this pandemic has impacted Microsoft and its customers.

And two things really struck me in this conversation. One was the fact that Nadella said that he was basically living in Microsoft Teams. And I assume most of Microsoft is these days as well. But then Jared Spataro said, you know, we’re never going to go back to working the way that we did before the pandemic, which I thought was really interesting. I mean, can you two maybe talk a little bit about the changes that you’ve seen, especially at Microsoft?

Stephen Rose (01:30):

Well, I think, you know, first we’re working from home. You can see myself and Christopher in our home offices and it’s been great to be able to do exactly what we tell our customers all the time, which is, Hey, you can flip on Teams.

You can work remotely, you can be just as productive as you can from the office. I think the most interesting thing for us is the human component, that it’s not just the collaboration, but it’s also we’ve set up a chat twice a week to just sit with the team, how you doing? How are you fairing? You know, it’s an interesting time. So it’s also making sure that the water cooler conversation that happens normally organically can happen inside of Teams and that that has to be set up. So I think that’s probably the first part. I think the second thing is just been so many customers saying, Hey, we need to do this.

Stephen Rose (02:35):

And I think to speak to Jared’s comment for all these companies that said, yeah, our people can’t work from home. They have to be here, which is such a 2010 kind of thing where you can only be productive. I know it sounds, you know, it’s like I’m talking like a hundred years ago, but in 2010 that was it. You had to be in the office to be productive.

I think we’ve shown you can work from anywhere on any device, on any platform and be productive and get the work you need to get done each day without being in the office. So I think it’s going to get a lot of companies to rethink their policies on where people can work from and how they can work. And I think that’s going to be probably one of the longest. Beyond just the technology is just how that affects companies. Chris, what are you seeing?

Chris Bryan (03:20):

Yeah, just to expand on that, I think the human component, as you mentioned, it’s critical. I think when we think about how people work in the office, it’s beyond just coming together in the meeting to do work. There’s also that aspect of culture and the different parts of when people come together, whether it is a sideway conversation going to lunch or just other opportunities to connect. So a lot of the changing to this remote work is how do you translate that into a virtual environment? So we see a lot of our customers are resolving Micros

oft doing things like group meditation. So we just come into a beautiful environment and we just meditate together or having visual happy hours for people to have casual conversations. They still are at their own homes enjoying a beverage, but it’s still being able to do these casual conversations, relax a little bit and connect.

Paul Thurrott (04:07):

Chris, I should have not been so socially distanced before. Maybe you could tell us a little bit about yourself too. I’m sorry I didn’t ask you that earlier.

Chris Bryan (04:17):

No, no worries. Sure, so my name is Christopher Bryan. I actually am originally from Panama, so you probably can pick up my accent from my speaking. I’ve been with Microsoft for almost about eight years now. I’ve been in the Teams, team for a while, probably almost two years. And my focus within the Teams product is all about our IT Pros. So when we think about security, manageability, compliance that’s my area that are areas of expertise.

Paul Thurrott (04:46):

Okay, great. Thanks. And we’re going to go through some of the features and functionality of Teams. We’re going to talk more broadly about working remotely in the ways in which Team enables that kind of collaboration. And also of course about some of the steps that people can take, the best practices to secure their remote workers to make sure that everything is happening in a secure fashion.

But there was some big news last week about Microsoft Teams, which, you know, we will get to. It might be advisable to kind of go over the history Teams really briefly. I don’t know about you guys, but when they said, Microsoft said, when you said that Teams was three years old, my first two reactions were, wait, it hasn’t been around forever and then wait, hold on a second, it’s been three years really?

Paul Thurrott (05:31):

You know, you kind of lose track of that. And I also find it very interesting cause you and I, Stephen had talked about this, that when Teams debuted in March 2017, it was described as a chat-based workspace, which of course it was.

And then it’s evolved dramatically since then. It’s gone out to, many different markets, education, every enterprise or first-line work or features, et cetera, healthcare, which is particularly important today. But now it’s described as a hub for collaboration. And this speaks to that notion that I had that in many ways Teams might be positioned for this new generation of work to become the new Outlook, you know, where it becomes kind of this broader all-encompassing tool.

Stephen Rose (06:15):

Yeah. And, and even, you know, as Satya said, it’s really kind of our new Windows in many ways that this is the first thing you turn on during the day and you know, and then it stays on. It continues to run across all those platforms because it’s more than just chat. I mean, we’ve got all the file-sharing knowledge. One of the things that I always say to customers is they’re like, well, why should we look at Teams?

And I go, well, if you bring a new person onto a project and you’re using Outlook but you’re not using Teams and other things, how easy is it for them to get up to speed on this project? And I say it takes 30 minutes. It takes one minute to add somebody to the Team’s group and 29 minutes for them to read through the chat, look at the files, watch the videos, be able to search those videos. So for the specific things that they’re looking for and get up to speed, rather than, I’m going to send you a hundred emails, I’m going to send you to five shares, I’m going to send you this document that was written by somebody who left the company a year ago and this should be everything you need to get up to speed, which is insane if you think about it that way. And that’s one of the things that I’ve always shared with customers. Chris, what about yourself?

Chris Bryan (07:24):

Yeah, no, I think the key advantage of Teams is because it brings everything together in one place. It helps customers and users ultimately to reduce the context switching. So instead of having to jump around to multiple applications, being able to see everything in one place, and to your point, having all of the modalities, whether you’re willing to call, whether you need to chat, whether you need to actually use an application, whether it’s native Microsoft application or a third party, everything is right there for you. So I think that has significantly changed the way a user approach productivity on a day to day basis

Paul Thurrott (08:00):

To give you an idea of the scale that is occurring here. I think Microsoft Teams back in November had about 20 million daily active users and in the week before Microsoft was going to make this announcement last week they had contacted the press and they had said, well, there are 32 million daily active users, which is obviously an incredible jump. But then one week later, and that was the crucial week where everything kind of changed. The usage jumped to 44 million active users. And we’ll talk some more about the numbers and the news from last week.

But I mean this is probably going to continue. I mean we have more and more people coming online. Not just the businesses but, educational institutions as well. I mean, what are the core areas of functionality that these companies and educational institutions need to look at and where do you see the biggest gains or the biggest benefits of working in Teams while we’re remote as we are now?

Stephen Rose (09:01):

First of all, you pick that one.

Chris Bryan (09:02):

Yeah, sure. So I think there’s a couple of things. First of all, meetings, it’s a big area for us. When we think about the difference between being in a virtual environment and being in an office, that face to face interaction through video is critical. So a lot of those type of connections are being leveraged now to video. That’s one.

When we think about in the education sector, being able to move a lot of those in place in classes. So like face to face classes online in a virtual environment. That’s another way when Teams comes into play being able to deliver online courses it’s critical vulnerabilities, one to be able to still deliver their promises to their students even in these tough places. I think beyond that calling and chats of course are a big part of like a day to day basis. That’s something that we saw when people were already in their offices and they continued to move into a virtual environment and leveraging those as well.

Paul Thurrott (10:01):

Right.

Stephen Rose (10:02):

I think the other thing to add to that is also that folks are realizing how many partnerships we have and how many different applications also click in and work from Salesforce to, you know, there are hundreds that we have. So that going, Oh, I didn’t know that I could just make a tab and have this application here. I don’t need to switch between these additional apps.

So it’s not just that it works within the Microsoft ecosystem, that it works with a wide variety of applications and products that customers use every single day. And that becomes another thing too where it becomes this pain. And, you know, we had talked about that four generations of workers and as we start to look at those newer levels of workers that are not using as much email, this is so natural and it’s like, Oh, this is exactly what I’m looking for. So it’s also bringing that into play as well.

Paul Thurrott (10:53):

Yeah, you know, meetings just kind of the, in many ways the core part of Teams, and this is an area where we have some videos we can kind of step through. The interesting thing about this is that meetings actually become more accessible when you do them through Teams because of all the excellent features.

Live captioning, in line translation, transcript searching later after the fact, where you want to go back and find something that was said. I mean it’s getting to the point where this almost speaks to Mr. Spataro’s emphasis on the fact that things are going to change forever. I mean in many ways I think what we’re going to discover during this time is that some of these features are still going to be valuable when we’re able to go back and be in the room at the same time as well. That we might want to still be using Teams in some capacity. So do you think it makes sense for us to maybe step through a couple of these?

Stephen Rose (11:43):

Yeah, let’s do it.

Paul Thurrott (11:43):

Okay. So the first one that we have is a feature that I believe is coming soon. It’s the chat pop out functionality.

Stephen Rose (11:52):

Yeah. So what we have here is that ability that if you’re chatting with someone that you can take that single chat, pop that out, you can then, if you need to close the window, move to other things and have that sitting on top, which has been a feature that folks have been asking for, for quite a while. And it really helps that way. If you’re engaged in three chats, you’re not having to switch between that. But you can have those open and multitask with it. It’s simple, but it’s a fan favorite. And something that folks have been asking for.

Paul Thurrott (12:16):

Right? I think it just speaks to the maturity of the application as we move forward, as well, similar features in email applications and so forth. And then we might have shown this one before. I think it’s really important the live captioning capability. And this is the on the fly AI assisted stuff here with Stephen.

Stephen Rose (12:34):

With me. Yeah. So you know, that ability as we talk about diversity and inclusion is great. Not only is it grabbing this and you can see it, but for folks where English is a second language where reading is easier than listening or really focusing, looking for specific things, this is really great to be able to do this. And I’m excited about where this feature is going to go.

And then that transcript that you’re looking at you know, that transcription becomes a transcript that’s also searchable and that’s great when you’re going, I’m just looking to see when they mentioned this within an hour long meeting, you’re able to get right to that point. Or, again, if you’re getting back up to speed to go to the parts that are important.

Paul Thurrott (13:13):

It’s so crucial whether you were in the meeting or not, you know, after the fact to go back and see that.

Stephen Rose (13:20):

And reading and hearing also increases retention. So you have an aspect there as well. And that’s been long proven.

Paul Thurrott (13:26):

Okay. And actually we do have a video for a transcript search. So maybe we could look, that’s a little out of order here, but maybe we could look at that as well.

Stephen Rose (13:33):

Yeah. So after you know, in any meeting, once it’s recorded and uploaded to Stream, you can type in any term and it will show you every time it shows up within the video. And then by simply clicking that, the phrase, it will take you right to that moment in the video.

Paul Thurrott (13:49):

This is so powerful. What it reminds me of is the feature that debuted in OneNote years ago where you could take notes and record the audio of a meeting and it would synchronize the notes that you took with the audio, which is super helpful because most people can’t type everything that’s said, but you can at least get to that point and figure out where something is, which is incredible. There’s also an inline translation feature as well, which we have a video for.

Stephen Rose (14:17):

Chris. How many languages do we currently support now with this?

Chris Bryan (14:19):

I believe it’s 53.

Stephen Rose (14:22):

Okay. And again, it’s the same thing supporting that diversity and inclusion that just allows you to be able to simply just click a phrase, have it translate into your language, be able to type, not have somebody to go back and forth, so that we’re breaking down those barriers and making it much easier to work with people from a wider variety of places.

Paul Thurrott (14:42):

Yeah. Yeah. It speaks to, you know, the world getting smaller, which is ever more important, you know, given what’s happening, but also to the accessibility. And I have a son who’s deaf for example, and he relies on subtitling and things like this. This kind of functionality is just key for that audience.

Stephen Rose (14:59):

Yeah. My daughter has auditory processing. So for her to be able to read and hear is great and very interesting cause they’re starting school again today on Teams. I’m very interested to see how those features are going if they help her in some of the classes. So I think it’ll be very interesting to see how that moves forward.

Paul Thurrott (15:16):

I bet. I bet it works really well actually. And then Stephen and I had kind of joked about this last week, but Jeffrey Snover, Microsoft Fellow has been, in my words single-handedly making this whole thing bearable by posting pictures every day of his custom backgrounds, which is another feature of Teams because Jeffrey, like all of us is forced to work from home.

Stephen Rose (15:45):

Yeah, I’ve had fun picking some, some nice ones for this cause you can upload your own as well. So the one that Aya has behind her is a custom one that goes beyond. So yeah, there’s a bunch of really fun stuff that you can do, but it does work really great. I picked that office one and people said, I thought you were supposed to be working in braver.

And I said, Hey, check out the cool backgrounds, which is great. So yeah, you can have fun with it too, which is really nice. But it really does help go beyond the blur, which is awesome when, and I know so many, people go, Oh, my house was a mess, I flipped on blur. Or people are walking around, but it does allow you to do branding and some really cool stuff with that. So it’s a great feature.

Paul Thurrott (16:28):

Cool. So we talked about meetings is one of the core areas of Teams, but there are others, maybe we could speak a bit to the first line worker features.

Stephen Rose (16:38):

Chris, why don’t you take that, that’s all you.

Chris Bryan (16:41):

Yeah, sure. For a first line worker. There’s a lot of capabilities that Teams brings to a table when it comes to making sure that their needs are met. I think one of the most powerful features that we released in the last couple of years is the Shift application.

So when we think about historically how first line workers work, they typically had probably a printed piece of paper with their schedule, they find their name and they will come back to the store when their shift is. But there’s a lot of problems with that. So if you need to change your shift, does that mean, you have to go physically in the store or call someone to read the schedule to you? And that’s when the Shift app streamlines a lot of that specific processes.

So now first-line worker empowered to control their schedules, being able to connect better with the rest of the employees in the store, being able to contact their managers easier. And also giving a of capabilities for managers to connect with their first line worker to guide them into what they need to do in the shift. Assign them tasks, send communications, whether it’s to one specific person or the entire team. In the specific shift. So that has revolutionized the way that Teams has empowered first line workers.

Stephen Rose (17:53):

Two of my favorite features in that, one is you can actually give the ability for employees to be able to trade shifts with each other. So you can actually go in and say, hi, I have this shift. Would you like it, see who’s available. The other one that I really like is from mobile.

You can also do a location feature. So if you have a driver who’s out, they can actually go up and they can say, Hey, how long til you get to your next stop? They can actually hit location, that will send them a quick map of exactly where that person is and locations that they could go, okay, I see that you’re here. Yeah, this would be great if you could do a stopover here, or et cetera. It can really help. So it’s little things like that, that really set it apart, but give it that, oh that’s a great time saver for a lot of people in many different ways.

Paul Thurrott (18:39):

And just so we’re clear from Microsoft’s perspective, a first line worker within an organization is the person who is literally out on the front line dealing with a customer or a customer situation. So it could be a retail worker, obviously a healthcare worker these days. Someone who is, I don’t want to say furthest removed from the center, but they literally in many cases are out in, in either retail locations or restaurants or in hospitals and that kind of thing. So these are the people who are interacting out at the edge of the organization, I guess.

Stephen Rose (19:12):

Very often a desk-less worker.

Paul Thurrott (19:15):

Yes. Right. So they’re not gonna have a computer typically or standard type of computer. They might have a mobile device, in many cases or yeah, mobile device of some kinds. So, okay, great. Go ahead Chris. I’m sorry.

Chris Bryan (19:30):

Yeah, no, sorry. I was gonna say, so Paul, to to your point, I think when you think of first line workers, they’re definitely a mobile first worker. So a lot of the capabilities that we’re talking about being enabled by Team, have been optimized to use in the phone. So to give you another example of that is we announced a capability called walkie talkie. So that has been historically used in most of first-line working scenarios where you have a walkie talkie that is a separate device from your phone or any other tablet that you may have as a first line worker.

And that specific device is meant to connect you with the rest of just specific store, cause there is a specific boundary on radio. Now in Teams we bring in that functionality by enabling to work from your own mobile device. So instead of having two separate devices, it just comes into one device and instead to be limited by the radio. Given the technology that typical walkie talkies use now because it uses internet, you can connect not only to one specific store but multiple stores and be able to troubleshoot specific things, maybe requests from a customer about the availability of a product at scale now.

Paul Thurrott (20:39):

Right. So in other words, these clients are connected to the cloud, they can use cellular or wifi or whatever type of connective they have. The physical distance doesn’t matter in the same way that you know we’re probably 2,500 miles apart and we’re communicating and it gives you that walkie talkie style functionality. But through the Teams app itself.

Stephen Rose (20:58):

And I think the key thing for folks who are playing with this or trying to use this is when they’re using, you know, Teams on mobile, like that, I can hit that little hamburger button down at the bottom because some really cool stuff pops up and will happen when you do that. A lot of folks don’t realize that we have all these great apps that happen.

So that little three button that says more hit that and that’s where you’ll see a lot of the shifts and you know, to do, and organization and things that I use all the time and a lot of people don’t realize that that’s down there. It was a swipe up and now it’s turning into the hamburger button to make that even better and to support even more. So check that piece out if you haven’t already.

Paul Thurrott (21:41):

Yeah. And the first line worker experience is kind of a broader set of features aimed at that audience that exists in Microsoft 365 and today we’re just talking about the the Teams specific features. And then also there are, and I think you spoke about this briefly at the top of the show, but there are, there’s this notion of policies and settings and things that IT pros can do to lock down Microsoft Teams, which is a sudden need, just as the need for Teams in more and more places and with more and more people is a sudden need, unfortunately. What are some of the capabilities there? I mean, and maybe we should get into some of the the best practices as well for IT pros.

Chris Bryan (22:21):

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. So the great thing about Teams is that the same way that you used to manage some of the other M365 applications that mainly by Teams. So if we think about like a security and compliance perspective, the same admin portals that you use, the security admin portal, compliance admin portal, that can be Teams can be managed from there.

But when we think about the core experience, we have designed a Microsoft Teams admin center that brings together all the controls that you need. They’re going to be here. You’re going to find settings that apply to the entire organization, we also have policies that allow you to customize the Teams experience to specific types of workers, their specific needs. Just to give you an example you have org wide settings with org wide settings.

Chris Bryan (23:06):

You can tailor things like, do you want to have the ability to federate with other tenants? Do you want to have the ability to allow guest access into your organization? So for those of us who may have not heard of guest access, that’s the ability of bringing someone who is outside the organization into the Teams environment so they can collaborate with you in channels, documents.

So have that reach collaboration still in a secure environment that you have control over. And you don’t have to worry about the potential new insets of a external person having too much data or control over your environment. We locked that down. You have the controls you need so you feel secure and you feel confident and enable them to your users.

Chris Bryan (23:49):

So couple of other things to mention. When we think about core functionality of Teams, we think about meetings, we think about applications, we think about Teams and channels. All of that also come with settings and policies. Just to give you a couple of examples, last Ignite we released private channels, which is one of the great capabilities that we bring into the product.

Being able to have focus, collaboration within the Teams, ecosystem. You have as an admin, the ability to decide who can create private channels in your organization. Whether you want to lock it to specific people, maybe like department support staff or do you want to enable it for everyone? Whether you want to create specific meeting policies to allow people to decide who should be able to control the screen, who should be your participant.

Chris Bryan (24:39):

Those are also controlled that you have as an IT admin too. And finally from an application perspective, cause as we mentioned before, Stephen you mentioned that themes also brings third party applications into the frame. As an admin you have the ability to decide what applications are available to your users. Do you want to enable them to everyone or just specific people in the organization?

As well as being able to access our app catalog so you can confidently understand what are the specific details of the application. So you know, whether you want enable them or not, if they meet the compliance requirements of your organization some of the stuff there, those are a couple of the features for us to discuss. I do have a lot more, but maybe we can start there.

Paul Thurrott (25:27):

Well, I mean I think that’s part of the challenge, right? So, first of all, we’re dealing with just the, human need to interact both personally and at work, but at work particularly, we have to secure that as well. And that those capabilities are available. Microsoft, for whatever it’s worth has done a really neat job over the past, I would say two, three weeks, a month of just starting to really document this stuff. Not that it wasn’t documented before, but just blogging about it because, it is new to so many people now. There’s just a whole, I’m sure they were in many organizations the notion, we have Teams and you know, we use it in some capacity, but now it’s very central to what we’re doing and that needs, not just to use it but to secure it is sudden, you know, unfortunately, and is something we need to figure out.

Stephen Rose (26:20):

Yeah, no, I had one or two customers that said, Hey, you know, a year ago, year and a half ago, we rolled out Teams and everybody’s just using it for chat. And it was a lot of it because they still had X drives and things like that and they really hadn’t planned out how they were going to move folks over or haven’t trained.

And we have so many great resources to help IT pros, to help end-users, to drive campaigns, to help people understand the functionality and why this change is good. So hopefully IT pros are also taking a look at all that content and we’ll provide some links for that where they can go out and say, Hey, here’s a great cheat sheet. Here are five things that you may not know about the product that it can do. Encouraging people to do that and leaving the product not to lock down so that people may say, Hey, you know what?

Stephen Rose (27:06):

I know that you don’t think that this is important, but this is a really great feature for us and here’s what we’re able to do with it. And to really not try to overly control end users, but to create a partnership to let them do things and also best practices because there is a lot of potential for Teams, sprawl, so really who can create those Teams.

This is how we as a company are doing it. If you’re going to create a team, it should be under these circumstances. If not, this is something within the team. So it’s also really sitting down chatting with your different users on how they want to do it and then bringing that together and that really sits firmly in the role of IT. So it’s a really critical thing to be able to do.

Paul Thurrott (27:43):

Yeah, that notion of Team sprawl is something we had seen before with the self service IT and SharePoint. I mean it’s kind of a thing that happens again and again. But I think, you know, in the making lemonade sense with what is going on in the world, I mean, one of the, you try to look at some of the positive outcomes.

If, you know, it’s unfortunate that this happened, but you know, the conversation around Teams say last November, it might’ve been, well, Teams is a tool in your arsenal. It’s one of the many ways that your organization can use to communicate and collaborate. And there are old-timers that like to use Outlook and email, et cetera, et cetera. You know, in some ways this is driving more of a central solution because of the need to work remotely. And I think people who may have been resistant to it in the past can suddenly see the, the advantage to it.

Stephen Rose (28:34):

We’ve also seen companies do some great things with Power Apps and Flow to start to automate the product and things like that too. And that’s another thing is that once you get through this, go back and take a look and say, Hey, how can we start to automate processes set up rules?

We’ve had some great case studies on customers who have built really simple Power Apps to be able to search databases and be able to know, Hey, this is where that part is, with a low code or no code solution. So that also becomes that double click, as you start to dig in deeper that you can also bring that functionality into the product.

Paul Thurrott (29:07):

There’s also probably some learnings that are coming out of this situation where because we are suddenly now working, we can kind of talk theory, you know, but confronted by the fact, well we are literally now working from home. There are gonna be spikes in usage at certain times of the day. There’s going to be certain situations that maybe weren’t immediately obvious, but now that we’re living it, you know, you can kind of see. So you know, again, the COVID pandemic has maybe really brought home the fact that this is something we need to pay attention to.

We need to manage it. We need to observe how it changes the rules and we need to adapt with it accordingly. Just like as Teams is as well. So we talked about some of the, we talked about a lot of the meetings stuff, but there are other features in Teams obviously that are useful when you’re working remotely. Real-time collaboration features. For example, did you want to speak about any of that functionality?

Chris Bryan (30:09):

Yeah, sure. So I think when we think about collaboration specifically we think document creation or having to create deliverables. Teams offers that integration with the rest of the M3655 that allows customers to within the framework of things being able to go out there and document real-time being able to comment in specific lines.

So everyone has a sense what needs to change, how do we get this to the finish line? I think that’s one of the great advantages that we have when you think about Teams bringing the power of M365 and older applications into the same frame and the thing is evolution of work. It may start as a chat, it can move into a document so you can collaborate, maybe there’s the specific situation into a document or a specific missing data point that you need to clarify and immediately you can escalate into a call and solve everything seamlessly when you just jump and progress throughout the product functionality. To be able to bridge that gap and get your work done.

Paul Thurrott (31:08):

Approaching work is, I’ve done kind of in reverse of the way most normal people work in that I’ve been working remotely for a long time and it is rarer for me to be in a room with other people and going back and forth. One of the things I have noticed is that when you do that, things tend to happen because you can, sometimes you can work remotely and you can interact over chat or whatever.

Email and things kind of happen slowly. But sometimes you get the room and there’s a whiteboard and you’re drawing things and people are working visually and it tends to kind of come together, but those capabilities are still available in Teams. That’s one of the nice things about Microsoft 365, those capabilities don’t necessarily go away. You might not be in the same room, but you can whiteboard literally using a Microsoft whiteboard application and you could do that collaboratively in real time.

Stephen Rose (31:57):

I think one of the other things, and this is I think something we talked about earlier was in my previous role with OneDrive, I worked very closely with engineering and it was my first time doing so. And I would send an email and get an answer back a day later and then I’d have a question on that and it would take three, four days to get a resolution. And then they go, look, we’re on Teams, we do everything via chat, so don’t send us emails.

We look at emails last, because it was a much younger worker, different type of group, different type of way that they chose to collaborate and work together. So I’d find one, I’d send them a text, Hey, I have a question on this. I’d get an answer quickly. They would bring someone else in on the chat. That issue would be resolved and it was very much about let’s have a chat, resolve that issue and then move on to whatever’s next.

Stephen Rose (32:42):

And it was great because within a few minutes I was not only getting the answer but connected to the right people. They would say, Hey, here’s a doc that has everything you’re looking for. And all of us were able to move on to what’s next. And it took me a little while to go, wow, this is better and this is really a new norm. And when you think about it, you know you’re going to have more and more and more of those experiences as you start to move forward.

So that, that’s another thing you know, in real world, which I think people are going to start to see is chat is so much more efficient than email in many ways. You know, my favorite line ever was a gen Z said, look, you know emails, how you tell me that there’s donuts in the break room, not how you tell me about anything important. I get it now. I understand.

Paul Thurrott (33:26):

Email is increasingly the telegram of the communication role today. And the other thing is maybe this isn’t true everywhere, but to me there’s a, there’s a formality to email that doesn’t exist as much in the chat-based, in the chats essentially. So I think that’s valuable too, for just getting things along, you know. And also there’s an interruption capability in chat, which is positive.

I don’t mean that in a negative way where you just have a quick question, need a quick answer. Someone could be out in the world doing whatever they’re doing, they can answer it and move on with their thing. Whereas email, it feels like more of a process, you know, something you have to kind of sit down and really consider. Did I reply to all? Did I, you know, there’s a lot of stuff you need to worry about. And I hope, you know, again, I’m always looking for something positive to come out of something terrible, but if this pushes more people into these kinds of chat-based scenarios, I hope it triggers a surge of usage and people that might previously not even consider.

Stephen Rose (34:32):

Oh I agree. Yeah. I think we’re going to find a lot of folks, you know, leveraging these platforms and also saying, Hey, this doesn’t work as well, so this we should really keep the process organic. This is something new, which we realized we’re now able to do that we couldn’t before. So I don’t think that Teams is the end all be all for everything. But I think certainly in many areas it’s going to allow people to do things that they couldn’t either do before or do quite as easily or simply going, Oh, that’s really easy. I just dropped that into Teams. I invite four people. I say, Hey, everybody comment or do this.

And this is much easier than sending out an email where I don’t know who’s looked at it or who has seen it or they don’t know where to find things or they’re searching their email looking for 20 different things. We’re going to just keep this all here and everything related to that is right there. And that makes that much easier. Like, you know, with Chris and I said, Hey, here’s all the videos that I’ve shared with Paul. I dropped them into our chat. They were all right there. He could see everything. They’re stored in files, so if he wants to go through them online, offline, they’re all there. And that’s much better than trying to send an email with that and figuring out what’s what. So yeah, and I would see more of that.

Paul Thurrott (35:37):

In a traditional office situation that that instance where you’re working on something and someone pops into your doorframe and says, Hey, whatever the quick question is, and then they move on. The reason they’re doing that is because they don’t, well A, they want to move around, but they want to not have that formal email. Will I ever hear back? I just need the answer now. It’s quick. It’s not, you know, intrusive and you know, Teams, it gives you that capability remotely, which is, you know, super important these days.

Stephen Rose (36:05):

They’re great.

New Speaker (36:06):

So, excuse me, you folks had a ton of news last week and this speaks to the new innovations that are coming in the product. And I think this is another important part of Teams that it’s always evolving, always improving. And some of this stuff is really, really neat. I mentioned earlier the 44 million daily active users.

Paul Thurrott (36:25):

Some of the other numbers that came out of the news announced last week was that 93 of the fortune 100 are using Teams and 20 customers are using Teams across over 100,000 users each. In fact, I think one of them was Accenture, maybe it was over 200,000. It was, there was some big, some big numbers there. But some really cool features happening. These are not, I don’t know what the timeframe is. I don’t think you folks are saying exactly, but let’s say, in the coming weeks and months we’ll see those new features is that accurate and okay to say.

Chris Bryan (36:58):

Yes.

Paul Thurrott (36:58):

Okay. So the coolest one to me, a lot of these are awesome, but the coolest one, and we do have a video for this is the real-time noise suppression feature, which is a you’ll see in the video soon has someone crunching a potato chip bag.

Paul Thurrott (37:32):

Right. Which is amazing. And look, we’re working from home. They’re going to vacuum going in the background. There’s going to be kids running around. Hopefully, you’re not going to be playing video games, but we talked about that. It’s a possibility. You know, things that, you know, this is crucial in any situation. But it is a well-timed.

Stephen Rose (37:52):

Especially good where we have a worker, let’s say at a construction site or something like that where there’s a ton of noise going on that you can hear that. And not hear that person, you know, easily or in a manufacturing floor, in a hospital where there’s a lot of noise going on. And that’s the thing also is, you know, we’re so about getting people to turn on their cameras and companies are too, because that drives more engagement. You can’t really be multitasking effectively when your camera’s on. It’s going to be pretty obvious.

And this is another thing to make that even easier for everybody to be able to do that and connect even in those noisier environments, especially as we look at those first line workers scenarios and make that a better experience for everybody so you don’t have to rely upon hopefully hearing what that person said, the transcription’s better, everything will be better for folks. So it’s cool, Chris, did you want to add any of the cool science behind that cause there was some kind of neat stuff that we announced that helps to power some of that.

Chris Bryan (38:50):

Yeah. Yeah. So essentially what’s happening is over time Teams will understand what is your language signal. So like your actual speech and it is being able to separate that from every other background noise. So it’s not gonna necessarily always going to understand oh, this is your dog.

It just understands that this is just noise. It’s going to be able to separate out you speech and be able to block anything but your speech. So when we think about the evolution of the product is with background learning, customized backgrounds, we allow you to focus on your image and your video. And now with this real time noise suppression, we’re gonna be focusing on your speech. So you will be able to do more focused meetings or time.

Paul Thurrott (39:31):

Nice. Really nice. I’m always impressed by how many of the great features in Teams, make the product more accessible. There’s the new one is raise hand and this is a way for remote workers to just kind of send a visual signal rather than just blurt out an interruption when they have something to say. Literally the virtual version of someone in the back of the classroom raising their hand, you know?

Chris Bryan (39:56):

Yeah, absolutely. I think you know, myself, I’m always a remote worker. So this feature is actually something that is super useful when we think about having these huge meetings.

Maybe there are some people in the rooms, there are some people that are online being able to raise that hand and get your voice in. If it’s a little bit of a, maybe like a heated conversation, very passionate people in the room, sometimes it’s hard to get in a word. With this feature that allows you to send a visual reminder and people in the room can see that, stop, allow you time to chime in and being able to be heard.

Paul Thurrott (40:33):

Hopefully you haven’t been feeling that pain with Stephen and I, we do like to talk, try to be inclusive.

Chris Bryan (40:40):

I’ll raise my hand in that case.

Paul Thurrott (40:40):

Yeah, you can raise your hand. I had never heard of RealWear, but RealWear is an Android-based AR headset. So similar kind of an Android version of HoloLens I guess. And aimed at first-line workers. So another great first line worker who these are people that are out at a remote location working on something and they need someone back at the office, an expert perhaps to see what they’re seeing and then integrate, or interact with them. I’m sorry, in real-time.

And Teams now supports RealWear as well, or will soon I should say. That’s, you know, another, just, and I think this speaks to the extensibility aspect of Microsoft Teams where it’s not just things that Microsoft provides internally, but it works with other products and services as well.

Chris Bryan (41:31):

Yeah, absolutely. I think specifically for that integration, for those listening to see, if you guys haven’t seen the video, it’s a great video in our last blog but essentially it’s integrated to a hard hat. First-line workers can go up and maybe they’re fixing a pipe, maybe they’re fixing a vacuum system. What this allows them to do is to do their work without having to worry about having any device in their hands.

And they’d be able to track with Teams through voice and be able to do as Paul mentioned, call someone back in the office, show them what they’re seeing, get instructions on how to fix it but also maybe take pictures for like the records and being able to do all of that without having to break their workflow of having to maybe go down, pick up a camera, take a picture. All of that is streamlined with Teams and this integration with RealWear.

Stephen Rose (42:27):

Think about inspections and how much that would help if you were able to basically record exactly what you’re seeing, what you didn’t know. Yes, we did do a thorough inspection and I looked at this, it was here. So even from a legal standpoint, it opens up some really interesting opportunities for our customers.

Paul Thurrott (42:43):

Right. Even a basic safety standpoint, if it’s something where, you know, there is a first-line worker on hand, but the expert who knows about the electrical system or whatever it might be, which of these wires is going to electrocute me if I touch it. You know, it’s helpful to have that kind of interaction with an expert on the backend.

Stephen Rose (43:02):

Yeah.

Paul Thurrott (43:02):

So Chris, are there any other of these new features that really stand out for you as somebody? Do you have any personal favorites, because there is a long list obviously of features that are coming.

Chris Bryan (43:11):

There is a long list. It’s hard, it’s like picking what is your favorite child? I think a couple of ones that are my favorites. I think the booking app is very powerful, especially when we think about industry scenarios for those who are new to the booking app, essentially it’s the ability to schedule, manage and conduct online meetings with people who are outside your organization.

Think about if you are a medical professional, being able to schedule meetings through the booking app to streamline the process of like scheduling your patients. The patients receive a personalized email from with branding and is able to join the meeting. And if you need to manage your schedule, you can do that too. From organization, you can actually see everyone in your staff, maybe you have multiple doctors on call, you’re able to see who is doing which meeting, being able to see who’s available for a specific timeframe, all of that within Teams. So again, I think it’s a great value add for our customers.

Paul Thurrott (44:18):

I can’t help but think that this, you know, is a replacement for something in Outlook and you know, I often see, you know, I always, I dunno for some reason I always think of Teams as the new Outlook. We talked about pop-up chats obviously. What about offline and low bandwidth support? I mean obviously being able to handle poor network conditions is critical. But how is Teams gonna work offline? What does it mean to be able to use Teams offline?

Chris Bryan (44:47):

Yeah, sure. So, and I think this is an interesting time for us to be able to deliver this capability, especially with a lot of people had to move to remote work and then perhaps none were prepared for the level of bandwidth they will need to be working from home. But essentially, there’s two aspects, that’s being able to use Teams offline. So being able to, even if you don’t have connectivity, being able to read your chats, being able to access things you had recently accessed, being able to maybe write a message, but if it’s not, you’re not connected yet, you’re being able to send it when you’re back connected. And then there’s an aspect of low bandwidth. So being able to use Teams in very low bandwidth scenarios where you perhaps, you were trying to send a chat out and instead of having to wait until having activity, being able to just queue it up, as soon as you have bandwidth, you will fire up. So there’s a lot of optimizations where we have done in that space. We’ll be able to give you access to the data that you have in Teams and understand that you still need to communicate. So as soon as Teams has a queue of that and the right level of bandwidth, being able to fire that out.

Paul Thurrott (45:56):

Okay, cool. Yeah, we’re also starting to see Teams obviously, and Teams is intended to subsume a lot of the capabilities of Skype for business. And what used to be, you know, the office communication server, et cetera, et cetera. So we have new devices coming online soon. But also what I would say is a really interesting capability, which is a Microsoft 365 Business Voice, which is what for smaller businesses gives them the capability to transform Teams into a complete phone system, which is, yikes. That’s very interesting. So how does, what’s going on there?

Chris Bryan (46:38):

Well, I think from a Teams perspective is we understand that different types of businesses have different needs. And I think the SMB space is one of the ones that we want to make sure it’s empowered with everything that they need. And being able to provide them with this service is to augment the portfolio of capabilities they have. To include things like telephone systems. So your point, I think it is giving those customers that option to augment Teams and start thinking about Teams so they help for everything they need and avoid having to maybe outsource or use different applications or different services to have everything to be able to function.

Paul Thurrott (47:19):

Right.

Chris Bryan (47:20):

Yeah. Stephen do you have any perspective on that.

Stephen Rose (47:23):

I think as we take a look at help desk and things like this, this is going to really dramatically help in the cost savings when small businesses take a look at what they’re spending on telco today and maintaining those expensive phones. I haven’t had a phone on my desk in years and the ability to get away from that, that your iPhone and your Android tablet and your laptop are also your business phone and can really go anywhere opens up a lot of opportunities and especially for emergency responders and things like that, it’s just huge the opportunities that it brings forward and allow them to communicate on different devices in different ways, in different environments. With that standard-ness that you tend to only get in the past from a landline system, at an incredibly affordable cost that these companies couldn’t do before. Also doing redundancy and backup. If something happens to your office, you can simply hit a button and now your whole call centers working from home. And I know living in California for many years, that was always a fear is what happens if an earthquake hits, we’re out of business. Well, no you’re not because you could have the folks that were East of it or still service. They turn on, they’re immediately up and running in minutes and the business doesn’t need to start rewiring itself in many ways. So it opens up some great opportunities for folks.

Paul Thurrott (48:43):

Yeah, we used to, enterprises would integrate with or have their own PBX’s or integrate with PBX and then eventually it’s virtual PBX. And then, and now it’s being brought down to the smallest businesses, which is really cool. Before we go, I wanted to highlight the work that Microsoft has done on the Microsoft 365 blog. I would, I guess I would tell people just to search for that phrase cause it’s kind of hard to describe the URL to get to it. But again, you know, over the past, let’s say two to four weeks there’s been an incredible amount of content about not just working specifically with Microsoft tools but about working remotely about the IT issues that Chris raised. And it’s an incredible resource. I mean, is there anything else you folks want to highlight before we call it a day here?

Stephen Rose (49:32):

I think, you know, I did a piece on adoption a few weeks ago and I have another one coming out on some really great features. I think it’s just checking out the stuff there and seeing the great work that our different teams have done and also hearing about how our customers, and I think that’s been the big thing for us is Hey, here are how customers are now working remotely. Here’s some of the great things that they’re doing to enable their workforce. Because it’s great for us to say, Hey, our product does this. But it’s another thing to hear from all of our customers when they say, Hey, this has really made a difference from your peers in healthcare and manufacturing and retail, et cetera. You know, education, health and life science, et cetera. Hearing from them really becomes the proof in the pudding and what they have to say. And I really encourage folks to check that out, to learn about the new functionality and how people are using this to see, you know, what functionality you may want to take a look at, that can really change the way that you do business. Chris?

Chris Bryan (50:26):

Yeah. So a couple of resources I think our Microsoft community blog for Teams that’s where we post the latest and greatest. Every month at least we put what’s great, what has been released over the last couple of months. A couple of, another one is we have a Mechanic Series. So if you are new to Teams and you want to see from security and compliance to adoption to if you were migrating from Skype you can find that mechanic series at aka.ms/microsoftteams for it. And finally our technical documentation is a great place to get up to speed with deployment resources, understanding technology. So if you go to aka.ms/successwithteams you will find a plethora of resources including a guidance for IT to support remote workers. So if you find yourself for the first time in this specific place, that is a great place to get up to speed with what should you think about, adoption of Teams for remote workers, what do you need to do to involve departments? So I highly encourage people to check it out.

Paul Thurrott (51:35):

Nice. And then the Mechanic Series that you referenced, is that a video series, right?

Stephen Rose (51:39):

That’s Jeremy Chapman’s video series. Yeah.

Paul Thurrott (51:41):

So that’s, yeah. So there’s something there for everybody, depending on how you want to learn or how you want to find out more about Teams. So video, blogs, et cetera. So lots of good stuff there. That’s great guys. Thank you so much. Obviously in this critical time. This is the right tool for the time and it’s great to speak with both of you. I hope everybody stays safe and we’ll be back next time with some more Microsoft 365 information.

Stephen Rose (52:12):

Thanks, Paul.

Chris Bryan (52:13):

Thank you.

View Details

This week, we look at the management capabilities available in Microsoft 365, which provide a unified interface for managing users, devices, apps, and services plus security features aimed at safeguarding data at every level.

Paul Thurrott (00:16): Welcome back to the Microsoft 365 Knowledge Series. I’m Paul Thurrott. I’m here with Stephen Rose, the Senior Product Marketing Manager for Microsoft 365.

Stephen Rose (00:42): Morning,

Paul Thurrott (00:43): Good morning. So we, over the past couple of episodes, I feel like we haven’t talked in a while, but yeah, we’ve kinda hit on the basics. I would say the core parts of Microsoft 365 which of course are mostly Office 365 related. But this week we’re going to take a look at the management and security capabilities that are available, set of interfaces that Microsoft provides for managing users, devices, apps, services, plus obviously security. But before we get to that you just penned an interesting blog post. I was wondering if you wanted to discuss that a little bit. This is the five steps for boosting digital transformation with Microsoft 365.

Stephen Rose (01:21): Yeah. One of the things that I heard from a lot of folks from the podcast that we did, I just did one with Mary Jo a few weeks ago, and some others was, Hey, this is great. We’re already on it. But the thing that we’re missing is how do we drive adoption? A lot of people going, Hey, we’re using teams, but we’re just using the IM portion of it and things along that line. So I put together mostly free resources.

There’s one paid resource, which is the My Analytics piece, but really things that you can do from, Hey, you’re going to build yourself a portal to different tools, to different training places. And I’m going to continue to do that as well as chat with some customers on what they’re doing. So, really try to help folks over that hump and get them, not just a bunch of, Hey, here’s what other companies are doing, but really here’s tools, here’s resources, here’s what the lessons learned from other folks, not just that they’re using Microsoft 365. That’s great. How are they finding success and what that did? So this is the first in a series that I’ll continue to work on on the Microsoft 365 blog.

Paul Thurrott (02:25): Yeah. This was surprising to me because I hadn’t actually heard of a few of these, I’m embarrassed to say. And yeah, some great resources. I mean there’s some neat stuff in there, I had heard of, for example, the productivity score stuff and we’ll talk about some of the other similar portals that you folks built into Microsoft 365. But yeah, there is some really, really nice resources there. And the digital transformation, of course, is the term that you folks at Microsoft are using to describe this transition to, you know, from the kind of old school on on-prem infrastructure of the past to the cloud based and hybrid infrastructure that we see from Microsoft 365

Stephen Rose (03:03): Yeah, I think at the core, customers are looking to retain great talent and the younger generation we talked about this, they want to be able to work from anywhere on any device. You know, which means we have to better manage and secure those devices. But we also need to give people the resources that they need to be productive. And one of the things we talk about is Workplace Analytics. Tons of people get the My Analytics email, but they have no clue that there’s a whole suite that will tell you when, and you can’t look at individuals, but you can look at groups, whether it be sales or marketing or by you know, product or et cetera that says, Hey, 40% of your meetings were unproductive. Because in marketing, they were multitasking.

They were doing email while they were in a meeting and not doing this because it looks at the login and says, Hey, you’re writing a bunch of emails in the middle of a meeting and not one note. So you’re multitasking. Or these meetings went way too long and this isn’t productive or just not enough time for people to get things done in the middle of their day, focused on. So it’s great to bring that, especially HR and other folks really love that feature because it helps them to really look at what’s the effect when a executive sends out an email on Friday at five and how much work over the weekend and after hours are people going to have to do. And it can be really eye opening for a lot of companies.

Paul Thurrott (04:20): Yeah, it’s astonishing. And the deep dive you can do into all of these areas is incredible. If you haven’t looked through the the admin interface, which again, we’ll talk about a little bit more later, but the example you have in your blog post is really neat. Just the percent of time that people spend collaborating on documents, how much or what percentage of the users actually have content in the cloud, et cetera, et cetera. You can just dive into every little analytical piece you could imagine. And that’s a big part of the, the central theme really of this show when you think about it, which is that a lot has changed since Windows 7 and Office 2010.

And you and I were discussing offline, I was joking with him that I had a dream about this. I didn’t want to get too embarrassing here, but, it’s very possible and probable that you and I met as part of the Microsoft springboard activities back in the Windows 7 timeframe, which was basically the effort then, which is similar to what’s happening now, where Microsoft wants to get people on a more modern desktop, which at that time was Windows 7 and Office 2010, which of course now we’re trying to get people off of.

Stephen Rose (05:23): We did, as I said earlier, we just did way too good a job there. And now,

Paul Thurrott (05:26): Yes.

Stephen Rose (05:27): Everybody’s like, Hey, but we listened to you. I’m like, yeah, but not back in 2010 when I had this conversation.

Paul Thurrott (05:34): Well, I think, you know, one of the big changes since then is that back then you, or Microsoft had to basically come out and obviously this best practices they provide, they talk to some of their big customers, see what the issues are having with, you had said something to the effect of that is some large percentage of deployments had stalled two thirds of the way through and you know, how do you get around that?

But today there were all these tools available, most of them for free in this blog post for example, where businesses themselves can go and look at this and figure out the best path forward. And that has changed I think a lot too. This is so much more data that’s actionable today.

Stephen Rose (06:10): Oh yeah. My whole thing was you could use MDT to build a stick with Windows 7 on it and you could do an offline deployment in 30 minutes or less and bring that stuff over and using all free tools. And when I showed this to people, they’d be like, wait a minute, you’re Microsoft, you’re talking about free tools. I’m like, yeah, this MDT thing that I was working on with Jeremy Chapman and Michael Niehaus is incredible. And I put the image on it, I slide it in, I reboot, I go answer a few questions and boom, 30 minutes later.

And that was very fast then here is a brand new ready to go Windows 7 laptop with all your data migrated over. And people were just blown away by that. And now we’ve come so much further with management and you know, autopilot and so many other things where we can do this so much more quickly and efficiently. But the whole idea was if you’re ghosting, you’re spending months you know, out of the year, updating those images and updating the software and doing that. And that just doesn’t make sense. And that was really the goal was to get people off of ghost to this more modern desktop.

Paul Thurrott (07:13): Plus, I mean those images were not just machine specific, they were model specific. It was just a huge amount of difficulty.

Stephen Rose (07:20): Sid ghosting. And sid replacement and all that fun stuff.

Paul Thurrott (07:25): Who doesn’t miss those days? So

Stephen Rose (07:31): You youngins, look what you don’t have to deal with, back in my day.

Paul Thurrott (07:37): Flip a switch In a web-based console and it just goes out to the world. I don’t know. It’s easy. So what’s available? So from a management perspective, I have what I consider to be the smallest possible, I guess it’s technically Office 365 but Microsoft 365 install in the world, right? One person, one user. But I use it to keep up to date on this stuff and obviously there’s a full suite of management capabilities for users and applications and services.

A lot of people may not realize this, but you get a free version of AAD with even the least expensive version of Office 365 so you can manage your users from the cloud as well. And then if you have a, once you move up to Microsoft, 365, specifically Microsoft 365 Business, you get additional active directory features there as well. Like settings or I’m sorry, enterprise state roaming, which is essentially the settings sync capabilities. So what else is going on? From a management perspective in Microsoft 365.

Stephen Rose (08:39):

I think Intune is probably one of the biggest, and I remember back when that was, you know, Windows Intune long before Microsoft Intune, we came out with that back in the Windows 7 days and really just worked to augment that. And really it does three key things. It supports that mobile ecosystem. So whether it’s iOS or Android or Windows or Mac, you now have that single endpoint management solution so that you can deploy and provision, policy, updates, app delivery, you name it can all be done through that. And because it’s cloud based, it’s really, you know, it’s scalable, which is awesome. So we can leverage, you know, the cloud for things like baselines and insights that help us to really understand what’s going on with these devices. And we can now, and this is really the key thing because this goes back to our conversation that look, people are moving away from securing the device to securing the data.

Stephen Rose (09:38): It will safeguard the data when you don’t manage devices used by employees or partners when they access work files. Or we can get even more granular with the Office 365 data on those devices itself. So it’s more than just a way to deploy apps. It’s more than just a way to manage. It really is becoming kind of, the core of our kind of security tools that can be used.

And yes, you can be using Mobile Iron or AirWatch or one of those, we plug in with those systems. They’re partners of ours, but that’s really sort of at the core before we start to get into things like, you know, sentinels and DLP and all the rest of the great stuff that’s really at the highest level to just go, I need to manage all these devices and ensure that they’re secure when they connect to any of our resources.

Paul Thurrott (10:27): Right, right. Yeah, I covered Intune from the very beginning. I remember it was kind of a side tool in the beginning next to the, the, the heavy Microsoft management infrastructure with a system center and so forth. And, today, like you said, I mean the ability to just basically deploy policy out to mobile devices wherever they are in the world, all the user has to do is you know, they bring their own device perhaps or they got it from a company. It doesn’t really matter.

But just by signing in to their Microsoft 365 account, those policies are all applied down and you get that separation of data, you get that data protection. We’re going to look at some of those specifically in a little while. And it’s just, it’s basically instant. It’s rather incredible.

Stephen Rose (11:12): And it’s so important because, and this is something too where we found that companies were not meeting with their HR departments before turning this on. And you’re saying, well, why? Well, if I bring my iPad, I need to know that, Hey, you’re going to manage this device, but you’re also not going to get rid of all my pictures. My first pictures of my kid or whatever that is. And that really became the key thing as we saw MDM and ADM grow, which is, it’s okay for you to manage this. But if I have these apps open, I can’t open these.

And people said, well, that doesn’t really work because it did in the beginning, but now we have more and more consumer apps that we use in business. So then it became, well now it’s not about having two different apps are open or specific versions like with app blocker, which still in some cases may be the key thing, but it’s more what data can I use? What can stay on the device? What can’t, if the device gets lost, what can I wipe? What can I, sorry, it’s earlier. What can I better manage and sort of bring that together. And that’s really the key is you know, to be able to bring those two sides together, keep the hot side hot and cold side hold personal and business on the same device but not allow those to mix when you need them to.

Paul Thurrott (12:23): Yup. Yeah. And that’s true across mobile. That’s true across Windows 10 PCs as well. You know, all the settings you can make automatically deploy Office applications if that’s what you want, configure how the updates are going to work across all of those things. Configure security obviously, like we said.

Stephen Rose (12:39): Yep.

Paul Thurrott (12:39): So speaking of security and that’s really kind of the big part here. I would say the big change between the past and the present is that now we’re working toward being proactive with security. And a lot of what you just said about you know, setting up data protection on a device is related to that. Just ensuring that by virtue of the fact that they’re signing in, your policies will be applied and proactively we’re going to be able to control how users are able to access the data that we have inside the organization.

Stephen Rose (13:09): Yeah. And there’s a lot of different tools that we do to do that. You know, I think a great way to look at is we have tools like secure score at the highest level that say how are we doing as a company and how do we compare to other companies. Then when you start to go down the line, then we get into things like categorization, threat protection, Sentinel, working its way down to Defender, and then we have individual policies like data categorization and DLP and things like that, that are going to limit what we can do within documents and how we share that information.

So it’s definitely a multilayered approach, which was great because they, small business of 10 people can say, we just want to put in these three pieces. We just want to make sure that we’re not going to get hit by malware or ransomware or something like that. So we’re going to turn on OneDrive for the, you know, the folder move, which gives us now the ransomware protection and we want to make sure that every device has all the latest updates when they connect, all the way up to far more advanced security policies. So it’s very scalable even for smaller businesses. And I think that’s really the key thing is, was not to get overwhelmed by all these pieces, but go, we get to pick and choose which parts of these we need.

Paul Thurrott (14:18): Well, I mean we should talk about a bunch of that stuff. I mean, so for example, the Microsoft Security Center is the new console for basically monitoring all of these security activities. And you mentioned the security score. I did, the secure score, excuse me, last week. I look at this for my organization. I’m not doing very well. So, but what’s interesting about it, but of course I’m not, because a lot of this is best practices made real where you can act on those best practices and enable policies that will change the security stance of your organization.

So my current score is about 38%, it’s terrible, but, what’s interesting about this is there’s kind of a gamification aspect to it where you can go into individual policies and see what they are. So one of the ones that I did enable and I think that bumped my score from 37 to 38% was to get rid of, or to disable legacy sign ins. Right. Which was something that was common with Office 2013 and probably before then. But you have that ability to kind of go through that list. You probably won’t, I won’t be able to do it in one day, but over some period of time and evaluate the different policies that you can enable and improve that score, which is fun on one level. But really what that’s about is improving the security stance of your organization.

Stephen Rose (15:40): Yeah. It’s basically like a credit score and it will go through and say, Hey, you turn on MFA, you’re going to get 50 points just for doing that because we should get rid of the password. Passwords are bad. We’ve done everything we can between Windows Hello and biometrics and everything else to try to do that. But this way when somebody’s logging in from a device that’s not trusted or we don’t know, they’re going to have to go to their phone and use either finger or face to go ahead and log into this and we want to do this. And once you do, your score goes up. It compares you to other companies within certain size ranges and things along that line.

And we’re looking to get even more granular with industry and things like that in the future. But it does put together that organizational posture. It shows you all the possible improvements. It doesn’t matter your license, it’s free to everybody, which is great and it helps you to understand what are the best practices, how you can improve your score, and then how you attack, how you can address those attack surfaces along with their status. And that’s really sort of the key thing.

Paul Thurrott (16:44): There’s also this notion of Microsoft threat protection. And I’m not, I think this may require certain levels of Microsoft 365?

Stephen Rose (16:53): It does. Yeah. I think it’s E5 to get the Microsoft security threat protection, but that provides a view of the organization’s overall threat landscape. So administrators can see threats and attacks and then take actions. And what’s nice with this is some are automated, some are not. So for example, you can set up a process that says, if you know Paul logs in from this location, great, it knows that it checks that out. If 10 minutes later, all of a sudden you’re logging in from Beijing, it goes, wait a minute, you can’t log in from the East coast and then from Beijing, there’s no flight that fast to get you there in 20 minutes.

This seems odd. Or Hey, you just got an exe file, I’m going to lock that out and I’m not going to allow it and, but I’m going to let you as an administrator know and you can choose what to do next.

Stephen Rose (17:44): So some things are going absolutely. If you get any sort, you know, executable or any sort of script in an email, automatically don’t allow that to happen. And if I start to see a series of things where it says, you know what, these four people got executables. Then they got a bunch of scripts the next day and this I am either going to do better education with those users on where are you going and what are you doing.

Paul Thurrott (18:06): Right.

Stephe (18:08): Or change my policies because we’re encountering some new threats, but it takes you from being reactive. I have a virus, I have ransomware, I have a threat, et cetera, to being proactive saying, Hey, there’s a bunch of weird things that are all separate, but when you put them together, show a trend that you should be aware of and there is a point where you need to get involved and make decisions on this user or this group’s behalf that go beyond automated what I can do and what’s nice is when you click on something it actually tells you, this is what this is, this is the virus, this is how it works, or whatever that is. Here’s how you remediate that and actually walks you through step by step. So whether you are junior or a very, very senior IT person, it will really help you to know exactly what you need to do to get to the best posture and place that you can get to.

Paul Thurrott (18:59): Nice. So we have a video demo, I believe, of Microsoft Threat Protection.

Stephen Rose (19:05): So here we see there was a suspicious PowerShell. It tells you that it’s running, it tells you who got that, it then comes up, it says, yep, here’s when it happened. Here’s the risk level that we’re at and here’s what’s been generated. So I can take a look at the investigation, it will tell me what’s running. It tells me what’s been automatically remediated, which is great.

And at the bottom it shows me this has been remediated. So I’ve already done conditional access and I’ve done this and I’m doing it, but here’s what you need to do to go ahead and fix that and remediate that out. So it walks you through all those different steps.

Paul Thurrott (19:40): You know, one of the conversations we almost have to have about this kind of thing, you said Microsoft 365 is so comprehensive. I mean there’s so much actionable data in there and then so many things you can do, I mean, is there any conversation around integration with third parties? I mean, is Microsoft everything for everybody or, how does one decide which direction to go there?

Stephen Rose (20:05): Yeah, I think there’s some different things. So first of all, any of the data inside a security center can be exported out from logs all the way down. So if you’re a Jira person, you can bring it all into JIra and Jira actually goes into Teams, which is great. So I’ve seen a lot of companies who set up all of their IT on that. We also have Azure Sentinel, which is cloud-native security information and event manager. And what that does is it uses AI to help analyze all these large bits of data that come across the enterprise and it aggregates it. It takes a look at things like users and application service and devices that are running on-prem and in the cloud, brings that all together. It’s got built in collectors. And then that can be brought out into formats like CES, CF, or a SIS log if you want.

Stephen Rose (20:56): But what’s also nice beyond that is it also works with things like Amazon Cloud and it works with Barracuda and F5 and all these other ones. So there’s a pretty wide variety of things that you can do. The advantage is to have that single pane of glass that shows you that proactive reactive, but you can absolutely take all this data, bring it into your third party solutions, export it, and take a look at it from there. So it’s not that you have to use our stuff, but for many folks, they already have it and it may be worthwhile for them to take a look at it.

Paul Thurrott (21:28): Right, right. Okay, that makes sense. I mean, that’s Microsoft in a nutshell right there. They’re basically, I mean, it works with everybody.

Stephen Rose (21:37): And I was just going to say best of breed was very much how many people looked at things and that was the old way. It’s got to have the best of everything. But the problem with best of breed is it’s like ticking a car. If you get the best of breed of anything and you put it into a car, it’s going to look weird and it’s going to have a lot of drawbacks.

You’re not going to get by having these things integrated natively and lots of little gaps. So that’s really sort of the key thing here is it’s not, you have to throw out all your stuff, but you may find that by integrating more of our pieces and saving yourself some money using less of some of the other ones that are now duplicative, you’re going to get that,

Paul Thurrott (22:13): I guess on the flip side, for those organizations that have made investments in Symantec or Barracuda or whatever, they can still move forward with Microsoft 365 knowing that that stuff is going to integrate. And if in the future they want to just use the integrated Microsoft solution, they can, but they can continue using whichever solutions they prefer.

So, that’s all good. Yeah. So we mentioned secure score. Actually, we do have a video for that as well. We should’ve done that earlier. But secure score is that way that you can basically take a look at your security stance, I’ll call it, and you can improve that stance by making policy changes.

Stephen Rose (22:51): Yeah. Yeah. So here we can see this company, you know, has a secure score 227. It has recommended actions. So if we go down, we can see, Hey, if you turn on Intune, you’re going to gain so many points. If you turn on MFA, you’re going to gain 30 points and 50, if you do for Azure AD privilege rolls, tells you it’s not completed.

It tells you what you’re going to benefit and how that comes in. And then as you make these changes around identity, data, device and apps and infrastructure, that will show you that impact and what’s now working better and what isn’t. And watch that score go up and down as you play with those things. So it’s.

Paul Thurrott (23:30): I really enjoy the secure score. Yeah, and it’s, it’s neat because it’s not just advice. You can click here to make it happen and you go to the exact admin interface, you have to go there, whether it’s Azure or Microsoft 365, whatever. I just think it’s a great, it’s a neat tool.

Stephen Rose (23:44): And it’s free. It’s free.

Paul; Thurrott (23:44): Yeah. Yeah. And a lot of it, I mean I had hundreds of items I could have enabled to improve my score. You know, I’m a, what we would call a lightly managed organization for sure. But a lot of those things seemed like they were kind of no brainers. Like like the MFA thing. I mean, obviously, you know, they were obvious.

Stephen Rose (24:06): Some are these really deep dive things that most administrators don’t think about or aren’t aware of. And it’s going to give you awareness of, Oh yeah, that’s right I can do that. And you may have to do it with the third party product if you own one and it won’t raise your score because we can’t always track all those products, some we can some we can’t, but it will at least tell you, Hey, these are the gaps and if you want me to automate it, I can do it. But if not, you’re going to have to do that manually. But at least it tells you.

Paul Thurrott (24:30): Yeah, I mean honestly, in a way it’s a really friendly front end to some of the, you know, the understandable complexity that has to occur just by virtue of all of the things that you can configure inside of Microsoft 365. And so I think for a lot of administrators or IT pros who look at that dashboard, they’re going to say, yeah, I didn’t even know that existed or I didn’t know where it existed.

Obviously we need to enable that feature. So I’m quite taken with this. I just think it’s neat, but there is a lot more obviously to security in Microsoft 365 including some things that have been around for quite some time, like exchange online protection, right? That’s available across all of the Microsoft 365 skews, including Office 365. But Microsoft 365 builds on that with advanced threat protection.

Stephen Rose (25:19): Well we have advanced threat protection. Which is a big part of that. Absolutely. And what that’s going to do is, Oh, we have advanced threat protection and advanced data protection. So two different things. The advanced threat protection is exactly that. It is, here are things that we are seeing as potential threats. You know, how to, let’s take a step back. It gives you a view of your organizations overall threat landscape. So administrators can spot these new threats and attacks. It can figure out the actions that need to take. And again, as we said earlier, whether it’s automated, manually triggered or some sort of combination of that. So it’s keeping track of all this stuff.

Paul Thurrott (25:59): Yeah. And that speaks to the proactive bit. I mean in some cases it’s obvious what needs to happen. Just make that happen. You don’t have to go to, you know, the administrators should be alerted that it happened, but they shouldn’t have to flip a switch and say, yes, make this happen. So we do have a video here, this is for anti, phishing and safe links, which is part of Office 365 advanced threat protection on mobile.

Stephen Rose (26:21): Yup. So here we see there was an email and it’s saying, Hey, this is somebody, it’s a similar, but it’s not the same address. So you should be aware that this could be a risk. And by using the Microsoft browser, as soon as you click it, it goes, Hey, not a good site. This is, it’s not going to where you think it’s going to go. And that becomes a key piece of that. And that’s something that’s again, happening in the background, but all we can do is we can just turn that on and start to make that much easier for folks. And then we can also extend out, like I said, DLP or conditional access and things like that as we want to build upon that.

Paul Thurrott (26:56): Yeah. And again, just by virtue of the fact that you signed into your Microsoft 365 account on the mobile device, those policies and what comes down to that stuff happens automatically. So it’s awesome. It’s just automatic goodness.

Stephen Rose (27:09): Yeah and it keeps people who just click things without thinking about it, give them a moment of pause. They’re probably still gonna say yes, go ahead. But at least they’re warning and maybe, maybe they might read it and go, no. And the big browser saying, Nope, probably don’t want to go here. It’s a good way to ensure that people go, Oh no, that doesn’t look right. I’m going to go backwards.

Paul Thurrott (27:26): Right, right. And yeah, that’s interesting because, you know, with app protection, which you get to in a moment for data or data protection I should say, you want that stuff to be automatic. You don’t want the, the person to say, eh, you know. And so, you know, we’ll look at that in one moment, but you and I have spoken about Intune selective wipe in the past, but I think it bears repeating. One of the fears that people might have signing in to their corporate account on a personal mobile device is that they’ll leave the company or something, they’ll lose the phone perhaps, and your personal data’s going to get wiped out. But of course, that’s not how that works anyway.

Stephen Rose (28:05): No. And also people get this fear like, well, now they’re watching everything I’m doing. And that’s the other thing that isn’t happening. You know, when you’re inside of a business app, it’s gonna limit you to things like saying, Hey, you can’t send a credit card number, and I know we’ll talk about some of this stuff later, but it’s not going to keep you from doing that in your personal stuff.

And it’s only going to be looking at stuff when you’re in a business app connected through the network and it’s running through that data. So again, different companies have generally different policies, but by default, we’re not doing that. That’s something that is an organization by organization, is picking and choosing and they should make their end users very aware of what that policy is and how they’re doing it.

Paul Thurrott (28:46): Right, right. I don’t want to embarrass anybody, but I have a friend who works in the financial services industry who doesn’t understand why the people he works with use their work phone that they provide for personal use. And you don’t understand why someone gave you $1,000 phone and you want to use it. I mean, you know, I think, you know, he’s kind of an old school IT guy. I think from his perspective, you know, they’re like you said they’re spying on me or they’re going to wipe up my data and no, you know, that’s not how that works.

Stephen Rose (29:15): No, they’re just making sure that nothing that you’re getting on your phone is going to get into the network and crash the network and you’re not sending out something that you shouldn’t be. And if you are, that’s fine. But at least it’s wrapped in some sort of protection where if I fire you the next day, you lose access to all that stuff, no matter where it lives and can’t get to it without disrupting anybody else. And that’s at the core.

Paul Thurrott (29:36): Which is the exact right way it should happen. And if you’re on your own device, you still have your device and you still have everything that you had on it. It’s just that you no longer have access to the corporate data. Yes. So I mean it makes perfect sense. And then I think the best part of this, or the most interesting part in some ways is the data protection capabilities, especially on mobile, which is kind of what we’re talking about here. There’s lots of stuff. Information rights management goes back you know, many, many years. The ability to by policy determine whether information can be sent to or from the Microsoft apps on the phone and thus from your organization archiving, et cetera. But can you speak a little bit about the data protection capabilities on mobile.

Stephen Rose (30:15): And it’s also a good time to say that things like IRM. And do not copy and do not forward are different capabilities. Those are, you may already have those.

Paul Thurrott (30:26): Right. I’m sorry, I meant to say those are related.

Stephen Rose (30:28): Yeah, absolutely. But they’re not exactly the same. So we have at the highest level that we’re protecting people from bad actors and malicious, you know aspects we’re really looking at pre threat and what’s going on there. And choosing is information encrypted, which is different from, you know, information rights and do not copy which is being done differently. And DLP, which is also being done differently. So at this point we can be categorizing, we can be searching for specific types of information and make sure we’re not copying and sharing that. So they’re all different. And again, it’s not a one size fits all. So you may choose to use different pieces of this at different levels.

Paul Thurrott (31:08): Okay. And we do have an advanced data protection video as well. I think this is the final video.

Stephen Rose (31:15): Yeah. And what this is going to do is protect your sensitive data. It’s mitigating the risk of it getting into the wrong hands. Like here we can see somebody who’s trying to drop in a credit card number and then if they go, Oh, that’s right, I’ll, I’ll put that info into a document or something else. It’s still not going to allow that, that is now encrypted.

And those policies are both inbox and they’re customizable as we start to do that. So that’s really making sure that the stuff, if it’s marked confidential or this and that, you’re not sharing it with outside vendors and if you need to then reclassify that person and give them a guest account or require a higher level of management on that device or things along that line. And it’s not that you can’t do it, it’s just there are additional things that have to happen on both sides. Cause we’ve decided as a company, this is how data needs to flow back and forth.

Paul Thurrott (32:02): Right. Right. So the third big piece of Microsoft 365 and we really haven’t talked about this too much yet, is Windows 10, specifically Windows 10 Enterprise. A lot of the, all of, I should say all of the data protection.

Let me look back and make sure this is correct. I mean all of this stuff we just talked about is all applicable to Windows 10, of course, but as the richest client and Microsoft’s own client, there’s some additional capabilities there that are kind of interesting. Windows defender obviously is available as part of Windows 10, but Windows defender exploit guard is something that you get with with Microsoft 365.

Stephen Rose (32:41): Yeah. And that again, it’s that pre threat detection and prevention that we talked about and you’re getting Windows defender for malware. So again, it’s that wrapper around and that goes above all the things that are built into the operating system, in the chip set. When we get past BitLocker and we get past you know, the things that Intel had built into their chip sets. So we’re really looking to make it as seamless as possible. So the message pops up for the user and says, hi, we’ve detected some malware. Sit tight while we fix this. Or in OneDrive. If we see a lot of files getting rewritten very quickly, we’re going to pop up and say, Hey, we’re gonna pause this because we think there might be some malware. We’re going to check it out. Yup, we found it. Or please do this to go ahead and get rid of it or we’re going to bring you back to a restore point.

Stephen Rose (33:29):So the system has become very intelligent, so it just doesn’t give you some message going warning and people go, okay, you have my attention. Then it goes, yeah, I got your attention. You’re like, okay, well what do I do? Well, I don’t really know. So now at least we can walk folks through that and do that. And I think that was one of the things that we did get out of Windows 8 was we learned how to better because we built an operating system almost from the ground up. It wasn’t just Windows 7 plus more, that we built in some of that stuff, but leveraged what was good and made it better in Windows 10 and got rid of things like, hi, are you sure you want to install this app?

Are you really sure you want to install this app? I’m going to darken your screen and get your attention and make sure you know what you’re doing. Are you really sure? Yes, I want to install the goddamn app. Let me do it please. You know, to the point where people just turn that stuff off, which was the opposite. So it should be seamless and in the background and only coming to the attention if it’s something that is out of the ordinary and it starts to learn that and that’s really sort of at the core of our exploit guard. It’s seamless. It’s happening in the background, as well as most of these other tools so that if we, sorry, I need more caffeine.

Paul Thurrott (34:40): It is demonstrably lighter than it was when we recorded this a month ago. But anyway, I assume by the time this series winds done, we will be full summer and you know.

Stephen Rose (34:49): I think we should do the last one, sitting on our back decks, having some cocktails,

Paul Thurrott (34:54): Yeah, little umbrellas.

Stephen Rose (34:54): You know, dogs hanging out, little umbrellas, the whole thing and just do the last one, that we’ve now made it through the full season of gloom.

Paul Thurrott (35:03): I like it. So a lot more with Windows 10 obviously. We don’t talk about this from this perspective enough I think. But the new Microsoft Edge, is an interesting thing with obviously built in tracking protection and so forth. What has kind of changed there?

Stephen Rose (35:20): It’s that sandbox and you know, a, going to chromium was great. I actually installed some Chrome extensions into the browser and without a problem. That was great. I’m like, Oh Hey, this works really well.

I use Spotify a lot, so it was a way for me to do some things in Spotify in the browser I wasn’t able to do before. But everything is sandbox, which is great, which means when the browser crashes, it’s not going to pull anything else down. If you get malware, if you get an infection, something that doesn’t look right, it basically says, all right, I’m just going to close the browser, delete the sandbox, and get rid of this right there. So we’ve made it very solid while increasing speed, making it simpler to use. So again, it’s a lot of things like, Hey, you ran a safe link so it’s green.

Stephen Rose (36:03): Hey, this doesn’t look right. So it’s red at the top and now very different symbols, not just the locks. We’ve gone way beyond that. An easier way to be able to see the certificate for that site by simply just clicking and being able to see what’s there. So it’s small things to, again, very seamless to the user, but we’ve really redesigned this browser from the bottom up to be fast and secure, to really give you that best of both worlds. And I think it’s just not a great job.

It is one of the first products from Microsoft from the moment I played with one of the early betas, I went, wow, this is really going to be something. And I think they’ve done, finally got this figured out. I met with Roger Capriati over on the Windows team and I went, it is awesome. Great job. I think you guys have finally figured this one out.

Paul Thurrott (36:47): Yeah, I agree with you. Yeah, it’s felt solid since day one. You know, the first pre-release version, I mean for sure. And it’s as seamless as the old Edge in the sense that you get the authentication pass-through capabilities. So if you’re signing in with your work or school account or your MSA or whatever that stuff all pushes through. That’s the browser so.

Stephen Rose (37:07): Yeah and I’m signing in so much less, cause it’s just recognizing and going, yep, I know you have the right tokens. You’re automatically in, less of that having to go to my phone. Plus I love the fact now that I was using it on a different device than on my phone and I get back and everything is properly synced and it even said. You have some extensions and collections used on another version of the browser. Do you want to import them here? Of course, I do. Yes. Great click and it just did that and I was like, Aw, that’s awesome. That’s what I’ve been waiting for.

Paul Thurrott (37:37): Yeah.

Stephen Rose (37:37): And now we’re finally working on backing up the Outlook signature so.

Paul Thurrott (37:42): It’s come full circle. It’s funny because if you and everyone does, I mean you use other online accounts, everyone has them. It is so much more tedious to use another online account compared to the Microsoft accounts because on the Microsoft side it can be passwordless and it is just so wonderful not to have to manage that or worry about that kind of stuff.

Stephen Rose (38:07): It really is, and now that I’m using more Mac and iOS devices as well as Windows, it’s so much more seamless as I go back and forth, which I appreciated, except for the fact that on my Mac and iOS device, I sometimes have to show up my face to get in. If it’s been a while to something, which is absolutely fine, it’s an extra five, six seconds, but, it’s secure.

Paul Thurrott (38:24): Well, but re authenticating is so much easier with Microsoft because it’s still going to be passwordless. That you don’t get into a situation where you’re forced to enter your password, which you are with, I would say with Apple and with Google as well. And it already seems archaic.

Stephen Rose (38:44): It does. Yeah. It comes up on my watch and I go, okay, tap approved and there it is. And then, look at my phone, my phone sees my face and it goes, great, you’re done. Then that’s it. And I’m in, right.

Paul Thurrott (38:54): Yeah. Perfectly reasonable that you may occasionally need to re authenticate, but you can do it with a MFA without a password. Beautiful.

Stephen Rose (39:01): Yes. And that, that has made a huge difference in just I’m in speed and access and just, you know, peace of mind knowing that what I’m doing is secure.

Paul Thurrott (39:11): Yeah. Yeah. This is great. So the final Windows 10 piece I think we need to discuss is servicing which has gotten kind of a bad rap. But actually I would say this is another one of those areas where since Windows 7, anyone who’s ever had to update a Windows 7 PC will tell you the unique hell that that is. And that situation has changed dramatically on Windows 7 and of course it’s also something that you can configure as an organization.

Stephen Rose (39:40): Yeah. And on Windows 10, I mean, what we’ve done there is gotten away from, we’re going to have to rewrite the whole OS back when it was in the Windows 7 days. And now with Windows 8 and Windows 10, we made it more like Lego. We remove a small piece, we then put the new piece in and we just compile it, make sure everything goes good and we let you in. So that’s gotten much faster. What’s really amazing is I started to play with Windows 10 X and I was able to flash the device in about 60 seconds from start to finish. The OS crashed, I flashed it and I was right back on some smaller, like a Surface Go. It was absolutely amazing. So we’ve learned a lot about those pieces and how to just update smaller pieces to do that.

Stephen Rose (40:25): But it’s interesting cause you know I did the show with Mary Jo last week and she brought up the whole, you know, Windows Edge question that came up about, you know, how we were gonna with Bing and ads and stuff like that. And I said, look, that’s not my table. But what I can say is, it’s not my area. But like we did with servicing and Windows 10, we definitely listened to the customers and the customer said, we cannot be updating this every three months. We’re going to go to a longterm servicing branch if you do that. And then we stepped back and we took a look at it and said, well what if we do it every six to eight months? Well that’s a little bit better. Well then let’s do longterm servicing branch. Let’s do where we’re only once a year, you’re going to be forced to do this update.

Stephen Rose (41:10): We’ll keep it as short as possible, but we’re going to have lots more little ones that we’ll do. But most of them won’t require rebooting. So that should be okay for you. So I think we’re always listening to the customers when we get to that. And there’s a middle ground between getting the most value out of the operating system and getting these new features, which are going to make things better for end users and more secure versus not, you know, slowing people down or forcing them to do a ton of reboots or their day taking longer because of things like that. So it’s always that balancing act. But I think we’ve listened and I think we’ve done a good job around that.

Paul Thurrott (41:46): Yeah. I remember Microsoft speaking about the desire to have everyone be on the same Windows version and how that would be so great for the community, not just for Microsoft making it easier to deliver the updates, but it would be make everyone more secure because the updates would be that much more easy to deliver. But obviously in some cases longterm servicing is necessary. I mean, aside from just, you know, old school environment, we kind of don’t feel comfortable updating on this cadence. I mean, what are the situations do you think, where it makes sense.

Stephen Rose (42:17): It’s funny as soon as we say, are you using Office and they go, yes then that is not longterm servicing branch cause it should not be for people who are using Office, which means it’s going to be manufacturing. It’s probably going to be you knowhealth and life services where they’re in a hospital or something along that line. Retail, banking, things like that where there are very, very specific apps that are being run and that’s it. You’re not doing email, you’re not doing those things where it needs to be locked down to manage. But Michael Niehaus said that, you’re running Office, then you’re not an LTS.

Paul Thurrott (42:52): Yeah. That’s great.

Stephen Rose (42:55): Yeah. And it’s a good simple way to look at it.

Paul Thurrott (42:55): Yeah I would have said something. You know if you’re on a machine where you’re actually browsing around looking for apps, that’s not going to be a, but actually Office is an even better way to say it. That’s great.

Stephen Rose (43:03): Yeah, Office makes perfect sense. It’s just, Hey, then you’re an information worker and that’s not the right person. But yes, I run a piece of machinery and you know, I went out to Miller Brewing and yeah, I got to configure the line and everything works in there and I’m doing that, then that’s great, then that should be it because you’re looking at millions of dollars of disruption if something’s not working correctly or happening the wrong way. So, or people’s lives are in the balance, whether you’re an air traffic controller or a nurse. So things along that line. But yeah, it’s a simpler way to look at it.

Paul Thurrott (43:35): That’s brilliant. No, that’s going to be my takeaway from this episode. That’s beautiful. A couple of news points real quick. I try to just cover some of the things that have happened, the last time we spoke on this podcast was almost a month ago. So we’ve had another month of Microsoft, 365 updates. As you know there is a massive list every month. It’s really hard to follow.

I write about some of this stuff on my site, but you know, X look up has come to Excel, et cetera, walkie talkie features coming to Teams, which is kind of interesting. Features for FirstLine workers, live presentations in PowerPoints. It kind of goes on and on and on. But some of the things that really stuck out to me this past month, Mary Jo had a story that 25% of all Office 365 licenses are not coming from Microsoft 365. The timing on that is really interesting. That’s higher than I would have expected. One thing. So that’s great. That speaks to the,

Stephen Rose (44:29): 25% of all Office 365 licenses now come from Microsoft.

Paul Thurrott (44:33): Yes. Not completely, not out in the world, but as of now.

Stephen Rose (44:37): I think you flipped it.

Paul Thurrott (44:38): Oh, I’m sorry.

Stephen Rose (44:39): That’s okay.

Paul Thurrott (44:40): So that’s very interesting and I think that speaks to the success of Microsoft 365 today, and we don’t get a lot of hard data there that, you know, Microsoft doesn’t break that down a lot. So that was really interesting. We just did our own audience survey on Petri.com and I’m not sure if I can share the exact number right now, but I’ll just say more vaguely that the Microsoft 365 deployment rate was higher than I had expected there as well. And I think kind of mirrors this.

So that is very interesting. And when did, well I guess we’ll call it Microsoft Defender, most likely on mobile is coming as well. So the Windows defender features that Microsoft has in Windows 10 are coming to Android and iOS.

Stephen Rose (45:19): Yeah. We also pushed out that Office mobile app, which has all those really cool features of scanning and pinning together PDFs and all that. So that’s there. It also has that code share, which is really cool, where you can create a code, somebody else can easily just bump share stuff back and forth. So that was a big one. And then one of my favorite, it’s funny, I get asked all the time like, what’s my favorite feature in Office? And it makes me think as we’ve talked about some of the new [inaudible] and things, but the one that wows people every single time, and I’ll encourage folks if they haven’t done it, it works on desktop and mobile is live translation.

It is the coolest feature. I will stand in front of an office, you know, in front of an audience and I’ve done it in India, Sweden and Amsterdam where I’ve just turned on Dutch translation or Japanese translation and it does a really great job in showing that translation and it’s not one of those, you have to train it with your voice, it, listens to your voice for about five, six seconds and then it starts to pump it out.

Stephen Rose (46:21): If you’ve not played with that feature, do it, it will blow you away. It is absolutely amazing. So now live presentations, it’s adding even more cool stuff to take that to the next level.

Paul Thurrott (46:31): Nice. Yeah. I don’t speak another language fluently enough to know how well that works. But what I’ve heard many times is people who do know the second language when asked will say, yeah, that actually works. That actually did pretty well.

Stephen Rose (46:46): Yeah, as long as you’re careful not to use some really odd or unique terms like embiggen and ensmallen, when you’re talking about pinching and zooming,

Paul Thurrott (46:54): Right.

Stephen Rose (46:54): I use that. I’m going to embiggen it I’m going to ensmallen it and I go, just go say embiggen.

Paul Thurrott (47:02): If you’ve ever watched an international movie. Sometimes you’ll see those words will just kind of come through like, well whatever it is.

Stephen Rose (47:06): Yeah, yeah. But it’s great. I mean, audiences I’ll start to talk, and the audiences will be applauding and they’re like, what software did you use? I’m like, PowerPoint, like, no, no, no. For the translational like PowerPoint, that’s a great example of the power of our cloud and you can tap into that with SDKs. It’s cool.

Paul Thurrott (47:22): Actually, so a couple of things you just mentioned kind of fall into that category. The new Office app on mobile, for example, where you’re combining not just core Office apps into one app, but also additional capabilities that used to be separate like Office lens and PDF annotate and so forth. The fact that you don’t need something else to make it happen is like putting the technology where it needs to be, is I think the important part. I think that’s the cool part of this though. This just happened last night. But Edge on iOS got tracking protection. I think that’s the first time it’s come to a mobile client. And so yeah, so presumably we’ll see that on Android soon as well. And if you’re using Edge and mobile and you should be you can of course sync with the the new version of Edge now across platforms. So that’s good. And what else do we have? Well, Microsoft has lots of resources for businesses moving off of Windows 7. Of course they do.

Stephen Rose (48:18): I’m doing an AMA in April, so watch my Twitter feed for that, we’ll push that out. But we’re going to get folks from engineering. So for those of you who are saying, Hey, I want to dig in deeper into some of the stuff that we’ve been talking about, or I have some very specific questions, that’ll be a great opportunity for folks to come in and dig in and do that. So watch my Twitter feed. I’ll be announcing, I’m giving you the exclusive. I haven’t even announced it yet.

Paul Thurrott (48:46): So this is what part, this is like early April probably?

Stephen Rose (48:50): Um, yes. Hang on.

Paul Thurrott (48:52): So we’ll record at least one more episode of this podcast before this. And so maybe by next time we’ll have the exact, we can put up a link.

Stephen Rose (49:02): I’ll get it to you.

Paul Thurrott (49:02): Okay. All right.

Stephen Rose (49:04): I will hook you up right now. I just got to launch my Outlook and don’t want anything to crash or get weird while I do it. Hang on. Let’s see how quickly I can find it.

Paul Thurrott (49:28): Yeah, I don’t know. I didn’t have it in my notes.

Stephen Rose (49:30): I don’t, I could’ve swore I had it. Going to give myself 10 more seconds to look for it. And if I don’t then that’s fine.

Stephen Rose (49:43): All right, I’ll get it to you. We’ll put it here at the bottom of the screen or in the notes or something and you’ll all be able to check it out, obviously within the next time,

Paul Thurrott (49:52): I mean we still have some time obviously before then.

Stephen Rose (49:54): Yes, we do. Oh, hang on, I found it. Here we go. Life is good. So I’m launching it right now, let’s see, it is techcommunity.com\Microsoft365AMA, it will be on April 21st from 9:00 to 10:00 AM in the Microsoft 365 AMA space. So that’s where that will be. That is at AKA.ms\teamsama

Paul Thurrott (50:29): Nice. Okay. That’s easy.

Stephen Rose (50:31): Yup. So that’s pretty easy and we’ll remind folks again next month of that. But yeah, if you want to dig in deeper, we encourage you to come check that out and we’ll get people that are way smarter than me on that.

Paul Thurrott (50:40): Well, I dunno. Okay. But I mean, you know, we do what we can do here. I mean, obviously this is a high level overview, so this will be more of a deep dive, which I think is good.

Stephen Rose (50:48): Yes it will. Yeah, we’ll go 400 level for those folks who want to do it and if not, we’ll follow up with the right answer, so. We like to.

Paul Thurrott (50:53): Okay. Yeah. So just a couple of tips real quick for users. Stephen mentioned the new Office app and what’s interesting about that, one of the things that’s interesting about that is that Microsoft now has a cohesive and integrated and nearly identical interface for Office across multiple end points. So you get the Windows 10 app, which is fantastic if you haven’t seen it.

The iOS and Android app, Office.com of course, and that works for consumers or commercial users of Office and Microsoft 365 and even the Office extension from Chrome, it’s basically all the same thing. It’s a way to access your apps and your recent documents and pin documents, important documents and so forth. And then we talked about some of the admin experiences in Microsoft 365, the two URLs, the two top level URLs to remember. And these have changed a little bit over time. I always think of these things in terms of portal dot something, but now it’s admin.microsoft.com for Microsoft 365 and then Azure is the portal.azure.com and the reason you might want to go there, well one of the reasons is to to manage the Azure active directory stuff. It’s on there.

Stephen Rose (52:00): And individual ones like you can also replace that with OneDrive, SharePoint. Most of them, that admin dot blank dot com will get you to, if there’s a separate one, like there’s features in the OneDrive and SharePoint one, you don’t get in some of the others that are all at the highest level, but easier to break down by product. You can sometimes do that.

Paul Thurrott (52:20): Right. So you may be specifically responsible for security or compliance or like you said, SharePoint, whatever. Those things don’t appear in the left rail by default, but you can get down to them and then they have these specific URLs. And that’s of course where you’re going to live every day if that’s what your job is. But those things are all available online so that’s cool. Well, thank you sir. Thank you again.

Stephen Rose (52:42): Of course, thank you.

Paul Thurrott (52:42): We will be back, probably in about a month, it seems with our next episode.

Stephen Rose (52:47):What are we talking about next? The next one?

Paul Thurrott (52:49): I believe, we are talking about Microsoft Teams and the power apps.

Stephen Rose (52:52): That’s right, cause we’re coming up on the Team’s third anniversary.

Paul Thurrott (52:55): Yeah.

Stephen Rose (52:56): So yes, I think that’ll be great cause I’m looking forward to diving in more deeply into not just Teams, but also some of the third party connections and different ways folks are using it. And we’ll bring up a few tips and tricks and things like that. So that’ll be cool, looking forward to that.

Paul Thurrott (53:10): Yep. See you next month.

Stephen Rose (53:11): Absolutely. Thank you.

View Details

Subscribe: RSS | iTunes | Google Play | Spotify

Microsoft 365 Knowledge Series is a learning path about how small to enterprise-sized companies can fully utilize the Microsoft 365 solution for their organizations.

Hosted by Paul Thurrott of Thurrott.com and Stephen Rose from Microsoft, this series dives deep into the solutions offered by Microsoft 365 along with smart and unique ways your organization can take advantage of everything that the service has to offer.

In this episode, Stephen and Paul take a closer look at the core collaboration capabilities provided by new features in traditional Office applications and brand-new solutions that are unique to Office 365 and Microsoft 365.

Transcript of the conversation can be found below:

Paul Thurrott: 00:07 Hello and welcome back to the Microsoft 365 Knowledge series with Stephen Rose and Paul Thurrott. You know, you mentioned and you are correct. We never really explained who we are. Maybe we should do that first.

Stephen Rose: 00:22 Why don’t you go first Paul.

Paul Thurrott: 00:23 Oh geez. Well, I’m Paul Thurrott. I have been writing professionally about Microsoft for over 25 years. I have written about 30 books, mostly about Windows actually, in Microsoft technologies. In 1999, I was hired by the publisher Windows NT Magazine and brought on board just in time to see that thing sell-off into the sunset and become Windows 2000 Magazine. But that was a big moment for me. And I stayed there for about 15 years. And so, you know, unfortunately, that business was purchased and then purchased again. And of course, publishing changed and the print magazine went away and then we do everything on the web. And so I’ve been with Brad Sams and the team over, at BWW Media for actually for five years now. Amazing, very, very much Microsoft focused. I would say over the years.

Stephen Rose: 01:18 Wow. I’ve been in IT sort of for about 25 years. I got certified back in the NT40 days when there was still networking essentials and you had to learn IRQ’s as part of the A Plus exam. I still remember that nine is the pastor IRQ, got certified and all that. 2000 NT, owned a consulting company, was an MVP but came on board to Microsoft in 2009 to help launch the Windows 7 beta with IT pros.

Paul Thurrott: 01:51 Okay.

Stephen Rose: 01:52 Because they wanted somebody who had a marketing background and also an IT background. And it was great. So I spent five years in Windows. It’s where you and I met, and we did some keynotes and stuff together, sessions, pre days. I went from that team to the OneDrive SharePoint team where I spent a few years helping to drive files on demand and sort of the relaunch of OneDrive where it went from being a product that, could have potential greatness to finally becoming the product that it needed to be.

Paul Thurrott: 02:23 That absolutely does. Yeah.

Stephen Rose: 02:24 Launched. Windows 8, 8.1, Windows 10. And then moved over to the Microsoft 365 marketing team about eight months ago. Bringing my love of Windows and all things Windows with all the office stuff and the security and really sort of driving our storytelling, our IT Pro story, our deployment and adoption content, the great stuff that Jeremy Chapman builds and building on top of it and the great work that you and Mary Joe and everybody else does. And really helping to drive that forward and helping our customers to understand what is Microsoft 365 and how does it help us do better and what does the Graph and all these other really great questions that people have. So that’s now my daily journey.

Paul Thurrott: 03:08 I feel like I’ve known you longer than that. It’s funny.

Stephen Rose: 03:10 I think we met at some of the Tech Eds before that and had chatted about stuff and at MVP Summit and things like that. Cause I’ve known you and Ed Bott and like I said, Mary Jo for years now, so.

Paul Thurrott: 03:21 Right, right, right. Well you’ve really, you’ve kind of cherry-picked some of the better products that it was pretty good.

Stephen Rose: 03:28 I got lucky. I was in the right place at the right time pitching the right thing so.

Paul Thurrott: 03:32 You can take credit for it too. I mean.

Stephen Rose: 03:35 I can’t now. It worked out that way. But you know, it’s interesting. I think in a lot of them I took a look at where are things going, what are going to be the next big trends. And a lot of it was, you know, OneDrive was re-releasing they really need to get cred with IT pros, but I saw the potential for that product and if it was done right what it could do and then from that it was then going great, how do I go take that to the next level?

Stephen Rose: 03:59 And with what Office was doing that really seemed to be the direction. So it was just really looking at that on what are the questions that our customers are asking and based on that and IT pros what else are going to be those next things and just happen to be serendipitous when they come together. So it’s more awareness than anything else. And luck, lot of luck.

Paul Thurrott: 04:18 Do you ever miss the days when WINS was the directory services infrastructure for Windows NT or is it just.

Stephen Rose: 04:24 I miss MTFS and things like that, you know, all that sort of stuff. I miss PVCs and BDCs and you know, showing people how to turn a backup domain controller into our primary domain. You know, bringing that up, you know, knowing that if you had one 10 base TPC on your network, it would slow the whole network. I lived in Cincinnati, Ohio. I was doing consulting with FIfth Third Bank and Proctor and Gamble and we were one of the first cities in the early 90’s to get DSL. And the reason they put it there was they took a look at the most technologically advanced cities across the USA and they went to the bottom, which was like Lincoln, Nebraska.

Stephen Rose: 05:09 Alaska, and Cincinnati, Ohio.

Paul Thurrott: 05:11 It’s flat right there. And that plays a big role.

Stephen Rose: 05:15 And they want us to measure, Hey, if you’re 2,500, you know, feet from the box, you can have it, if you’re one foot over. No, if you’re below that. But I was one of the first people to get that. And it was so interesting to me because I saw us at that point going, if this really works out to the level that it has today, and this was 20 years ago, this could mean that we can move back to that sort of mainframe where you just plugin and your PC follows you. And it’s funny how that we’ve gone back to sort of that mainframe, although it’s now in the cloud, we’ve kind of come full circle back to them.

Paul Thurrott: 05:50 I didn’t intend to tell this story, but since you’ve just reminded me, I lived in Phoenix when they started rolling out cable modem for the first time in the country and it was one of the first big installs. And I swear I had several white lab, you know, the Intel bunny suit guys. I was sitting down in the street and checking everything and it was, you know, whatever. But one of the big things you could do at the time, cause Windows 95 was in beta or brand new, I guess, was you could browse the network neighborhood and you could see all of the other computers, everyone who had cable modems, and so you could print pitches to each other’s printers. And yeah, it was crazy. But again, you know, Phoenix was flat and so it’s easier to roll out that kind of infrastructure if you don’t have to worry about physical impediments, you know.

Stephen Rose: 06:33 Exactly, now I have fun just walking through hallways seeing who has Apple TV and then just pushing whatever I want to, cause nobody ever locks it down. So that’s always fun.

Paul Thurrott: 06:42 Nice, nice. Okay. That’s pretty good. Yeah. That’s the newfangled version of walking around with the cable remote and changing channels outside.

Stephen Rose: 06:48 Yes, exactly. Yeah. It’s amazing how that evolved and how even then you could sort of see where things were going, but it was a lot of it, was based on could we get that speed, could we get that bandwidth, with these sort of things. And we finally have gotten to that point where it’s available on almost every platform.

Paul Thurrott: 07:10 Now we have to talk about work, but that’s okay cause this is good stuff.

Stephen Rose: 07:15 It is.

Paul Thurrott: 07:15 We’ve done one episode, was kind of a high-level overview. The subsequent episodes we’re going to push into some of the core areas of Microsoft 365. And I don’t think any is more core than what I think of as the Office 365 tools. Right. And these are divided into familiar tools that have improved a lot over the years, which I think is a big part of the Microsoft 365 push. But also some new tools and technologies that are literally just new to this past couple of years. And won’t be familiar to a lot of people who are watching or listening to this.

Stephen Rose: 07:48 Yes.

Paul Thurrott: 07:50 And this one will be a little demo heavy. I know we had a couple of videos last time. We have a couple of, well we’ve got a lot to choose from. So many amazing capabilities. And so we’re going to have to kind of tune it out. I mentioned last episode that one of the interesting things about Microsoft 365 is how much newness there is on such a regular basis every month. You know, Microsoft has a blog post that explains all the new stuff that they released into Microsoft 365. And we can’t cover all of it. Sorry.

Stephen Rose: 08:17 It’s probably a good thing.

Paul Thurrott: 08:19 Yeah. But let’s at least look at some of the funner demos at least. So, and I mentioned also too, you know, Microsoft 365 as the poster child for Microsoft’s transition to the cloud.

Paul Thurrott: 08:33 This applies both to your company, Microsoft itself but also to its customers, right? Because as Microsoft made this transition over the past decade or so,15 years, whatever, it’s been hard to remember. I mean, so to have the customers come and we talked last time about how a lot of the blockers have eased over those years and I think that we view that cloud as inevitable. For the most part.

Stephen Rose: 08:57 Yeah, I think our customers that were most stuck. They chose the hybrid route and they’re doing it. But we’ve had a lot of customers who write in and said, this makes total sense and this is going to help us transform and let’s go all in. And it’s amazing to see some super big customers, you know, the Walmart’s of the world, folks like that just go, yup, we’re all in. And this is critical to our transformation on where we need to be and how we want to work.

Paul Thurrott: 09:22 I mentioned earlier, I’ve written 30 books about Microsoft products and technologies, most of them about Windows I would say. But the very first book I wrote was actually about an Office product. It was actually about Excel and it was Office that drew me to Microsoft back in, I’ll call it the early 1990s and not Windows, although once Windows 95 came around and Windows NT of course, that all became very interesting. But it was the quality of Office that did it. And some of those products Excel in particular, the first Office product or Word, PowerPoint, these things that have been around for 30, almost 40 years in some cases. A lot of people might think that they have not changed all that much over the years. I think we’re familiar with the ribbon switch over that occurred over, I guess that was Office 2007 and 2010 probably.

Paul Thurrott: 10:11 You know Outlook being the last, I think was the big hold out at the end there. And the notion there, which was simply that the, interface was getting a little too cluttered. Lots of toolbars.

Stephen Rose: 10:23 Yeah.

Paul Thurrott: 10:23 Lots of menus, too many commands. You know, how do we handle that density of command in the UI and also make features discoverable by people, I don’t remember the exact numbers, but of the top 10 requests for new features in Office, almost all of them, 8 or 9 or 10 of them were features that were already in Office that people just couldn’t find, you know. Yeah. So, one of the goals with the ribbon interface was to make that possible and make people be able to find functionality. So since then, what we’ve seen is capabilities that tie into the stuff we talked about before, the Microsoft Graph, the AI capabilities, all these things in the backend to make the various, I don’t want to call them legacy Office, but you know, kind of classic traditional Office applications more powerful than they’ve ever been.

Stephen Rose: 11:11 Yeah.

Paul Thurrott: 11:12 So maybe, as a kind of, I guess we’ll call it a demo for PowerPoint I chose just because this one is a super set of what’s available across some of the other apps. So there’s a feature called Ideas, which you’ll see in this video that’s also available in Excel and Word. And it’s not hard to imagine.

Stephen Rose: 11:28 Yeah, I use this all the time. And what’s great is, it is intelligence. So you know, here we are and it will say, Hey, let’s you have AI in your slides. So let’s show you some ideas or pictures that go with this. And these are ones for use that you can do. Now that we’ve dropped it in, it’s showing, Hey, here’s some templates that you could use that will help to make this look better and move it forward. And what’s great is as we change language within these, it will automatically update. It also, will look at those sentences and say, ah, here are icons that make sense based on what you’re writing. And then you can pick different versions that really help you to be extremely clear with your points. It will now also go through, and this is available in Word as well. We have our consistency checkers that will say, Hey, you’ve done words and written them different ways. You’re missing punctuation. You have this here, you have that there. But what I love is if we had, you know, typed in a city, let’s say Seattle, it would show us pictures for Seattle. If that title changes to Boston, then pictures of Boston come up, et cetera. It’s intuitive because it’s leveraging this intelligence to do it. It allows people who are not very creative with you know, PowerPoint to be able to create these really amazing professional looking slides that bring that together and then bringing that into Word and bringing that into Excel to automatically create graphs that don’t just show trends but show outliers. Again, leveraging the graph and intelligence that allows us to figure out how do we best want to present this so that people immediately looking at this, get what I need and it keeps you from putting in too much content into a slide that doesn’t really work for folks.

Paul Thurrott: 13:06 Yeah, I mean, look who exactly is a PowerPoint expert. I mean, one of the things that’s interesting about this is, you know, back in the day, one of the things that Microsoft did was say, well, we’re going to make the toolbars as they were at the time, similar across PowerPoint, Word and Excel. The idea being that you might be an Excel user. You just, you know, this product inside and out. But because the interface is similar on these other apps, it makes them easier for you to use. But of course these other apps have very specific functionality. Some people are experts in PowerPoint, are very good at designing those things. I’m not one of those people. I’ve even had meetings with folks from Microsoft as you know, depending on the team, of course they have these giant marketing teams that make beautiful slide decks and everything, but every once in a while just be a guy or a person who says, yeah, I didn’t really have time. And it’s just the stock white, you know, white background, black text and you know, we’re trying to communicate something here and it’s difficult to come up with something that looks truly professional. So I think that kind of thing, the designer feature that we just saw in PowerPoint and ideas, which I think I said is also available in Excel and Word.

Stephen Rose: 14:13 And I think the key thing that I need to talk about, you know, the change in the toolbar was to bring information just in time so that when you clicked on a picture, the picture toolbar comes up and when you click on a Excel Graph, it immediately comes up. And that was really, you know, the great thing that engineering did was if I click on something, I want to see all the toolbars that relate to that and not have to go find that and do that. And that was really at the core. And that thought of just in time information has continued to evolve. And I think if you think about that and where it’s at now, it creates a very interesting sort of straight line through all that.

Paul Thurrott: 14:49 Yeah, it’s night and day really. I mean, you know, with a little bit of mousing around, you could find back in the day a design tab perhaps, and you could say, well, I can make all my slides have consistent fonts and background colors and things like that. But the way that this works by looking at the content and suggesting things that make sense and making things consistent and then suggesting new ways to show visual data where you can choose the different layouts on a slide by slide basis. It just makes this thing accessible. This thing being a PowerPoint in this example to people who are not PowerPoint experts and really kind of are never going to be, but they still need to use the tool to communicate ideas. So.

Stephen Rose: 15:30 It also makes sure that if we have people that have handicaps or English as a second language, et cetera, that you’re also meeting the accessibility needs for those users. And it will go through as part of that tracker and say, Hey, is this the right language? You know, this font is too small. This is not going to be readable, you know, et cetera. So it’ll also go through and ensure that as you do it, you’re doing something that will be best for all audiences, not just, you know, what you have in mind. And that’s something that’s great because I don’t always think about that when I’m creating something. I’m trying to get the ideas out and that really helps us to keep that focus that we’ve made it good for everybody.

Paul Thurrott: 16:06 Right. Right. One of the other big pushes at Microsoft over the past many years, almost decade has been this push toward mobile. And of course you see the traditional Office app showing up on mobile. You see them on iPhones and iPads, you see them on Android handsets and tablets and on the web as well. And new mobile apps too, which we’ll go to eventually. But it’s interesting, you know, I was kind of surprised by this. It was back in August when Samsung announced their latest note phablets Microsoft had an app on there just called Office. That was basically an all in one app that combined the capabilities. I believe it’s Word, Excel and PowerPoint into a single app. And it’s actually if you use the Office browser add-in that Microsoft makes available, it’s very similar to that in the sense that you can see all of your recent documents. So it gives you that one view into your world and then you can view those things and edit them all from a single app. But now it is available across mobile. It’s not, just available only on the Samsung phones.

Stephen Rose: 17:15 Yeah and it’s what you get if you go to Office.com, your own personal homepage. And now it’s part of, you know, Bing, if you have a business, it’ll do that. But Hey, here’s the most recent stuff I’ve worked on. Here’s my OneDrive and SharePoint stuff and all my stuff in the cloud. Here are other things that I may want to take a look at and be aware of that it’s surfacing out because the Graph has said you have meetings or things going on. And then adding in extra features, like the ability to be able to take a picture of a spreadsheet and be able to drop it in and, you know, being able to take a look at the picture to text and like that. Just bringing some of those tools. And it’s funny, I meet so many people that are nuts about Oh the Microsoft lens technology and I’m like, you know, we built that into OneDrive. You know, you can take pictures of the receipts and it uses it and it drops it in and does all that. But people were like, Oh my God, I love the camera lens app. And I’m like, it’s built in everywhere.

Paul Thurrott: 18:12 It’s really it’s a feature. Yeah. I almost mentioned this in that Outlook mobile feature where it could read your email. What you’re really seeing there is the integration of Cortana, which used to be a standalone application into Outlook. So you kind of bring the technology into where it makes the most sense. So if you’re using OneDrive app, you might want to scan something stored in OneDrive. If you’re using the Office app, in this case you might want to do the same, you know, you don’t have to get out of your workflow to go do this other task. You know, we’re going to bring the functionality and where it makes the most sense.

Stephen Rose: 18:48 Exactly. And you know, then also we talked about Teams and on our other episode, hi, I need a document. There it is. What’s in OneDrive? What’s in SharePoint, how do you want to bring that in? So it is about surfacing up that just in time information. So you’re not doing that thousand clicks to get to something which you just go f it, I’ll do it later, you know?

Paul Thurrott: 19:08 Yup. So we do have another demo video. This one is the new Office app. I brought this one in because I really liked this. And if you’re, if you’re a Windows phone fan from back in the day, you might recognize that Microsoft tried to do something very similar in that platform as well.

Stephen Rose: 19:22 Yes. And there was the Office lens app right there on that too. Yeah. So here’s things like transfer files, which you can do from peer to peer sign as a PDF. Here we are taking a picture of a Graph that we see in an article. We then just adjust, you know, the pole lines and what’s great is now we have that and we can take the picture to text and we can just drop it without ever having to go to a PC right into itself, right from the phone. And that’s really the whole thing is, Oh, that’s really good. I want to save that. And I’ll come back to that when I get to a different device, but not have these random pictures, which, it’s funny, my thing is I use it very much as a reminder tool. And the first thing I do is when I check into a hotel, I take a picture of the room number cause you don’t get keys anymore.

Stephen Rose: 20:07 You get these little credit cards and it doesn’t have a room number on it. And I have a whole folder filled with hundreds of room numbers from hotels that I’ve kept, but we’re taking that idea, if I want to be able to remember things, I want to be able to act on things. I want to be able to sign this or save it as a PDF or save it as a photo or a receipt that I want to add to a folder. But I want to be able to say, show me all my receipts from Starbucks and they all come up. So it’s bringing that in and then we’re seeing that now across all the different platforms.

Paul Thurrott: 20:38 Indeed. We also have a second mobile demo. Apparently I thought so much of mobile. I thought let’s do this twice. And this one is Outlook mobile. Let’s bring this one up if you don’t mind. Yeah, this is the natural language capabilities. Right. And again, kind of Cortana based essentially where you’re speaking your language to query data that is can be found by Outlook.

Stephen Rose: 21:10 Yeah. like I said, what’s, what’s great here is you have such a variety of things you can do. Show me all the emails from a certain time point from a certain person on the go. That’s easy to do on a laptop, but it’s not as you’re walking down a street. So being able to find, again that just in time information is really critical. And I think Outlook mobile has done some phenomenal work and has gone from a good app to a great app in the past few years and that team, huge kudos to them on everything. And they finally brought dark mode, which was one of the things I kept asking for, where’s the dark mode in Outlook. But it’s not, just means the fact that now we’ve not just built-in contacts, but it’s going to show you who have you worked with quite a bit.

Stephen Rose: 21:51 There’s all your files and all the things that you know, you’re looking for. And now the voice integration, which opens up so many opportunities for us to start to use more of the natural language AI capabilities that we’re working on. This is one app. I’m super excited to see where it’s at two, three years from now and how this could really sort of be the center of everything you’re doing is you’re sitting in your car as you’re going back and forth where you can actually really get work done without ever having to touch a device. And we’re getting very close to that and it’s interesting to see how that will come together, especially as we look at multiple languages, multiple speaking styles, depending on if it’s a personal email to your kid’s soccer coach versus something at work and it understanding those differences with the people that you communicate with.

Paul Thurrott: 22:37 Yeah, I mean you’ll see this in a personal digital assistant usage or whatever. You know, the ability to speak in plain English in my case, but in your language and not to have to adhere to whatever the tool is. You know, I was searching from an email that we had exchanged earlier and I can search for your name or for something I think might be in it, but other things can come up. I mean to be able to just speak plainly and say, look, I want this specific thing I think is a huge you know, obviously a huge case.

Stephen Rose: 23:06 Yeah. And to be able to now do that from, you know, your Windows search bar from Siri, from, you know, inside of OneDrive, things like that, to be able to sort of bring that across is really huge. And now for example, my iPhone, I have it set up, or I could say, Hey Siri, read my emails and it then launches the read my email feature in Outlook and does that for me. So those connectors going cross-platform are really, really critical for uptake. And for me, that was a really big moment when I could start to use the Siri shortcuts with that and really start to bring that to life because that was something that was missing. And I didn’t want to have to touch the device as I was driving.

Paul Thurrott: 23:44 And is that something that Microsoft Outlook did? Or is that something you did through Siri Shortcut to make that happen?

Stephen Rose: 23:51 It was automatically there. So when I looked in Siri shortcuts, it was open emails, like pick your email and do that. So I didn’t really have to do anything. I just clicked it and said, yep, I want that one. And I put it on my desktop and I can say, Hey Siri, read my email. And then it launches that shortcut and goes right into it. So yeah, we’re starting to see, especially with Apple goes, yes, people are using this and we want to make this good for business users. And you know, Android, especially Samsung, has had a very close relationship with Office, sorry,. With Office and moving things forward.

Paul Thurrott: 24:24 People don’t understand how early you had to get up for this. So.

Stephen Rose: 24:26 It’s all good. But Samsung, we had that partnership with OneDrive and with Office to make sure that it was deeply integrated and it was built in by default. So again, bringing that functionality to folks, and again, this all really comes from the Graph and all the great things that it’s bringing to the platform and how it does it.

Paul Thurrott: 24:46 Right, right. So we should talk about, let’s talk about the Graph because there are other familiar tools like the things we talked about, the core Office apps that are moving to mobile and the web and so forth. But there’s also lots of new tools Microsoft has made available. And we talked about this I think briefly last time around, but the Microsoft Graph as kind of the back end of everything that’s happening in Microsoft 365, can you maybe expand on that a little bit? Just so people understand what it is?

Stephen Rose: 25:14 Yeah, so the Graph is a developer platform and what it does is it connects multiple services and devices. I think we released it around 2015 and it’ll allow people to integrate third-party services with our products like Windows and Office and Azure and it’s really kind of four key areas. Number one is this sort of rich context, you know, is my manager in or out of the out of the office and what documents that they’ve been working on and things like that. The second is to give you insights where we’re looking at usage patterns like trending document, what is the best meeting time or who do you work with, and then to get real-time updates from that data to reschedule a meeting based on responses where I could say, Hey, share my calendar or share my availability, and it does that with everybody and says, here are 5 times that make sense for all of you to meet with. Or when somebody’s changed a file for it to then show up in my email and say, Hey, this file has been changed or modified or in Teams we’re seeing people use it for approval processes along with power apps and flow.

Stephen Rose: 26:21 But the great thing is this is available to consumers as part of Outlook.com and OneDrive.com and to our enterprise users in Azure or even a combination of both, but it’s this intelligent, It is the force of technology. It binds the galaxy together. It moves through us, but it really is, it is this area and we’re not mining the Graph for data on you. It’s you know, send your stuff up, it uses our cognitive services and then it pushes the data right back down to you and then you own that. So it’s not this super-secret spy tool that we’re using, but it is this fabric that you can start to say, Hey, how do I connect these two together and the Graph becomes that great sort of filling.

Paul Thurrott: 27:07 Even in the examples you use, this really interesting kind of overview of the types of data it grabs and how smart that is.

Paul Thurrott: 27:16 Is my manager in the office?

Stephen Rose: 27:18 Right.

Paul Thurrott: 27:18 What is he working on? You know, we did this document change. You know, these are things that can inform, that do inform the Graph and are what makes that so useful. I think I said this last time, but you know, this was the vision that Bill Gates had, you know, information at your fingertips literally, I mean, what has to be happening in the background is something that we think of maybe as a database, although that’s a bit simplistic because it’s actually potentially thousands of databases or data sources that are being intelligently parsed and bringing you the relevant information that you need when you need it.

Stephen Rose: 27:53 And affected moment to moment based on what you’re doing, but at an even higher level. And you’re absolutely correct. I think that’s exactly it is it’s also now being injected at this very easy to consume level. But think about how much time it starting to save you where Hey, things that I have to spend five minutes going to go check out are now being surfaced up to me. When you start to take a look at how many times a day, how many times a week, how many times a month? I mean, I used to teach, you know, Office classes back in my day, I was teaching MCSC and Office and I used to say to people, keyboard shortcuts save you three seconds. But if you multiply that by everything at the end of the year, you’re getting an extra week’s worth of work done because you’re using keyboard shortcuts rather than going up, hitting file copy, file paste, which is how people used to do that back in the ’90s and late 80’s. So, and it’s that same thing as how many times does that surfacing up? You should be chatting with this person or here’s your next meeting and here’s what you need to check.

Stephen Rose: 28:52 This is the guy in your organization who knows more about this topic than anybody. And it also, you know, if you kind of extrapolate it out, you can tie it into the natural language services as well. Because one of the ways you can query the Graph is just by asking questions. You know, and it gets very interesting because you know, to take advantage of a database or a database back file system like Microsoft wanted to do at one time, you kind of had to be a computer scientist just to interact with it because you had to understand how to query that thing using its language, you know, whereas now it doesn’t doesn’t work that way, which is kind of fantastic.

Stephen Rose: 29:29 It’s what we have on Star Trek, it’s what everybody wants.

Paul Thurrott: 29:32 Exactly, yeah, exactly right. The other big new tool, and we did touch on this last time, is Microsoft Teams of course. Teams just so people understand, I mean this is like I said, the most popular new Microsoft Office app I should say in many, many years. I believe the latest figure as of November was something like 20 million active daily users, I think was the number. It is a chat-based collaboration tool. Satya Nadella, like you said, has described it as the new Windows in many ways because it’s a platform and is the center of everyone’s life. I sometimes still think of it as the, the new Outlook in a way. And as it evolves and as all these things evolve, I mean, you know, Teams is both of those things. It’s kind of interesting. But you know, how do we how do we see Teams being adopted by people like us? You know, the younger folks. I mean, do you see this.

Stephen Rose: 30:28 And no, that is the big change is email usage is declining with the younger generations. It’s not how they communicate. I have a 16 year old daughter, I’ve never seen her pick up the phone and make a call. She’ll do a FaceTime, she will chat, she’ll use Instagram and she’ll use all these apps. And if you think about it, it’s a very efficient way to get things done and to have a document of what you did and to be able to go back and take a look at that. And this is the generation of folks that are coming to work and those folks that we want to retain in jobs. So you know, having chat-based over mail, mail that is great for make for one way communication but it’s not optimized for two way communication. It gets very difficult and phone calls you have to take notes.

Stephen Rose: 31:16 So chat starts to do that and we’re seeing heads of companies that are saying, you know the hierarchy that’s older going, yes we understand this and we’re going to have to change and do it. But it is hard. It is really, really hard, especially if the group of people that you work with everyday around you, is not using that or is not chat-based or working as much. It can be a big transition and that’s probably one of the hardest areas for people is they get the IM portion of it, but they don’t get, Oh now my files are all in one place, so my meetings are done here and everything is there. They’re so used to this distributed way of working because they’ve always done it that way. That starting to see that value in the scenario, which I always say is if you get somebody new that starts on your team, how quickly can you get them up to speed on your project? And you really look at how you could do that with Teams and how you’re currently doing that. It’s light years away from each other.

Paul Thurrott: 32:11 Yeah. You were talking about chatting and with kids and we were on an international trip this past year and for the first time, the kids had their phones and could potentially be out in the world and might be separate from us.

Stephen Rose: 32:25 Right.

Paul Thurrott: 32:25 And so how do we keep in touch with them in a way that makes sense? And we ended up using a chat app that they were comfortable with, right. That they use because that’s what they expected. And we just wanted to make this as seamless as possible. But I think the parallel is, you know, depending on your situation and what the, you know, the other coworkers you’re working with are like, that could be easy or hard. I suppose, but you know, I talked about the exchange administrator and how we needed to adapt. I mean, I think we collectively need to adapt as well to this kind of new way of doing things, especially when you can see how obviously it can be better in different ways. So.

Stephen Rose: 33:05 It’s going to take a while for folks to do this and we’re going to find people that are going to go, I’m not going to do it and they’re going to get moved out and they’re going to keep doing email. But the problem they’re going to run into is your emails are going to take longer and longer and longer to get answers, possibly depending on the group that you’re working with. And like I said, for me the big epiphany was working with engineering that was primarily younger folks that communicated on Snapchat and Instagram and WhatsApp and whatever else that they were using and moving in that direction. But I think that ability to be able to, again, have that just in time information to be able to go to that chat, see everything, dropping those files. And we’re starting to see it as a great way to communicate, not only with our own team, but with other teams that every time we start a new project, we invite everybody in, and now it makes it much easier.

Stephen Rose: 33:50 Where all files related to that, I’m now looking in one place, I’m not searching my own device for it. It’s all there and anybody that gets added now can see everything that’s happened up to that point or not depending on how you choose it. So there’s a good amount of control and then from a legal standpoint, you can have the holds, retention, all of those types of things. So if you need to go back, you know and see what happened in a previous project. From a legal standpoint, it’s very, very easy to track all that and see what was done and get a better sort of cover, which would be difficult to do, you know, only saying what was an email on how that would come up.

Paul Thurrott: 34:28 Right, right. The capabilities in Teams are so vast. I mean, if you’re not familiar with it, you really should take some time to check it out and see what is possible there. We could’ve chosen probably a dozen different demos of Teams, but we have one we can show. I believe this is related to a topic we talked about last time, which is the recording of meetings.

Stephen Rose: 34:53 Okay. Yeah. So here’s a meeting that has been recorded. So what’s great is if I miss that meeting, I can simply just click into it. I’m going to get a real time transcription from the meeting. So all I have to do is just hit the CC button and that will come up. Or I can search and say, where within that chat was this topic covered? And then when I hit that and bring that up, it’ll immediately take me to that point exactly in the meeting. And that’s whether I’m doing it through the Team’s Chrome or I’m doing it through the Stream Chrome. It doesn’t really make a difference. And that’s great. I can also say play this meeting at double speed. But being able to find those key points is great. Especially if you know it’s a meeting where people get distracted a lot or they’re going to cover things that you’re a small portion of it and it’s a big wrap up, it’s much easier to go through that.

Stephen Rose: 35:46 And that’s leveraging Stream and Teams. Plus you have all your calendaring in there so you’re immediately joining all your meetings, your voice. And then I’ve seen, you know help desk that has brought in things like JIRA and SAP directly into tabs, Power BI. And then you can also bring in Power Apps and Flow to start to automate those processes. So it’s a very malleable platform and I think that’s what people like about it is you can make it what you need it to be. It’s not like some of our other apps where it’s like, here it is and work within these constraints.

Paul Thurrott: 36:18 I was just thinking, you know, knowing that your meeting is going to be recorded may help to rein in some of those meetings.

Stephen Rose: 36:26 It could. Sometimes it does. I think the great thing is a lot of times people just forget, that it’s being recorded and they go off and then I go, okay times four and I skipped past their rant and then get right to the heart of it.

Paul Thurrott: 36:38 And the same way having to see ourselves recording video is so terrible. I mean, having to go back and see what you were like in a meeting. It’s like, Oh.

Stephen Rose: 36:50 I don’t want to take a look at these like 5, 10 years from now. But it is great when I’ve been traveling and I’m traveling and you know, I’m in Europe and I’m in a different time. I can go back to that Team meeting, I can see the key things, see where my action items were. Go right to that, bring that up and take those notes and move forward.

Stephen Rose: 37:08 And that’s awesome. When it’s now 10 o’clock at night.

Paul Thurrott: 37:11 If you just you want to do the 5, 10-minute overview, part that’s pertinent to you.

Stephen Rose: 37:17 Yes. Yeah, get some sleep cause it doesn’t stop when you’re traveling. So, yeah, and on every platform, whether I’m on a cell phone or a laptop, et cetera. So it’s definitely changing how people look to work and communicate and taking chat to a whole new level. The other thing though that we’ve seen is to have really successful adoption. It really has to start at the top with your C level executives saying, look, we’re going to do this, we’re going to roll it out. It’s them turning on their cameras because when the camera’s on, you’re probably going to pay attention. You’re going to be doing a lot less, you know, working on other things and multitasking. It brings a focus in and also makes it much more personable. And that’s great as you start to have more and more remote workers and things along that line.

Paul Thurrott: 38:01 Right? So this one’s more of a Windows 7 feature, but, Windows 10 feature. Sorry. But, Windows being part of Microsoft 365 and I think we’re gonna see these capabilities evolve and edge this year. But even in this first version that just came out last week, there is a feature called collections which lets you do researches that people do on the web, but then collect that information and then share it with others. And so maybe we could watch a quick demo of this. This is a kind of a key new feature in the new Microsoft Edge.

Stephen Rose: 38:36 So here we are in you know, in the Chromium browser. So we’re picking collections, which is basically groups of articles that you’ve chosen to create a topic and then save things. Now what’s really nice is when we go back to those collections, I can click on that, it’ll bring up that article and it also then allows me to change the order. If I find a good picture of things that go in, and then export that all out to Word or Excel and then share that saying, hi, here is everything I found on this topic. So rather than cutting, pasting, cutting, pasting, and dealing with all the format, it’s going to keep that all and build out the references for you at the bottom. So people can go back to those original articles. This is amazing from everybody, from students to people doing research to business to hobbyists who are, you know, trying to keep track of all those articles and keep them organized, all doing it digitally and again following you across every single platform.

Paul Thurrott: 39:29 Yeah, I mean we’ll see. Microsoft Edge was just released, its first non beta version. So I think a lot of the work that occurred last year was just kind of getting that up and running. But I expect we’re going to see a lot more of that kind of functionality occur this year as well. So again, if you haven’t looked at Edge, please do, an amazing new browser.

Stephen Rose: 39:49 Yeah, no, it’s, everybody’s been really excited about it and very happy with it. The reviews have been like, finally, it works and it makes sense. And like I said, you and I have both been using it for a while and I’ve been really happy with how quickly the development has come and also the opportunities that it opens up for our customers. If they’re using third party extensions or things that they like to do, they should be able to find that. But with that security that we promise and bring to a product that is built for not just consumers but for the enterprise as well.

Paul Thurrott: 40:19 And specifically for the Microsoft environment too. So if you’re in a Microsoft infrastructure that has all the integration, especially with your accounts and identity, which is super important.

Stephen Rose: 40:28 Syncing all your bookmarks and being for business and bringing in all that intelligence. Absolutely. Yeah. No, it’s great stuff.

Paul Thurrott: 40:35 And so one final new bit with regards to Office 365 and collaboration, I believe this was, I think this was announced at Ignite in 2018 and then it’s finally starting to occur in the real world. But I think of this as kind of an internet services based DDE or copy and paste kind of functionality. It’s called Fluid Framework I should say. I’m sorry. And it’s basically just a new way to share rich data across the internet. I mean, can you speak at all to what’s going on with Fluid Framework?

Stephen Rose: 41:07 Yeah, Fluid Framework sort of picks up the next logical step after cloud cut and paste, which is instead of using controls CV, ax it, you’re using the Windows key which allows you to do that and share that across. So in redesigning all of our apps, updating our apps to work with in a Fluid Framework, what that allows you to do is to go into an Excel spreadsheet to cut, sorry to copy and paste a portion of that Excel spreadsheet into Teams. But now create a link as if you were to do it in a second page in Excel and repeat back to it, where everything gets updated. And that’s really our goal is you should be able to take live active information from Word, PowerPoint, Excel and drop that into another application. And see that it’s building upon things like collaboration in real time that we’ve had in our Office apps for awhile.

Stephen Rose: 41:58 But now bringing that in, and that’s really exciting because now you go from having static documents that are being updated to living, breathing content that is continually changing and updating. Or you can pause it at one point and say, pause it here and now let’s see that difference in change or have two different things that bring that together. But having that, knowing if I go into a document and everything, whether it’s rules from HR, the latest sales and marketing figures to the latest products that everything is up to date in real time is huge rather than which version do I need to go to and doing comparisons and updating. And that’s probably the easiest way to take a look at what framework, what Fluid Framework is. It is exactly that, a fluidity between our frameworks allowing you to move back and forth between them.

Paul Thurrott: 42:49 Yeah, it’s very reminiscent of the mid 90’s when we were talking about compound documents and I guess it was DDE and OLE object linking and embedding and then comm. But I mean, you know, just for the 21st century, I mean, it’s extrapolated out to online services and, and web apps and so forth. Really.

Stephen Rose: 43:08 Yeah. I remember the first time I did like a linked Excel spreadsheet and it changed at one place and saw that.

Paul Thurrott: 43:13 That’s crazy. That’s crazy. Yeah. And so I think, you know, it’s, you know, between the traditional tools, I mean, we know all the core Office apps, OneDrive and SharePoint and then some of this new stuff, the Fluid Framework, a new Microsoft Edge, Teams and Microsoft Graph. I mean, this is the foundation for this new era of collaboration. And you know, again, I feel like we can’t dive into everything, there is so much new every month. And hopefully this highlight, you know, this quick overview kinda gives you an idea of some of the things we’re talking about because in many ways really is just the tip of the.

Stephen Rose: 43:51 Yeah. And you know, we’re taking a look at this. So here I am, I have on the left, I’m now dropping that in. And if I go back into my original document I can make changes there. It’s gonna show up automatically there inside of Teams and that data’s malleable. So I can, you know, funnel it and filter it in different ways in either document and be able to work with it because it is live data in both, and I can see people working in real-time and then intelligence clicking and saying, Hey, here is a chart that will help you to make this look even better. And then to be able to do real-time queries or things along that line, both in Excel formats and in real-time language, which we’ll talk about later. How I can say, great, show me how many items were delivered this month and be able just to see that data come out.

Stephen Rose: 44:39 So it’s again creating that ubiquity across platforms for users that there is one truth and that’s what folks have wanted is what is the truth, what is the real data? And being able to have that and not have to worry about those versions makes life so much easier. So for all of you people who’s never emptied your deleted bin and use your inbox as you know, a file cabinet here’s a way to start to move away from that so that you don’t have to keep 26 different versions of things inside of a folder or an email and always have that latest version.

Paul Thurrott: 45:12 So we’re getting toward the end of the show. I wanted to highlight some news quickly and then I’ve got a couple of tips and how-tos, I don’t know if you have anything you want to add there, but you know, like I said, every month Microsoft highlights everything that’s new in the Microsoft 365 ecosystem. We’re getting toward the end of the month as we’re recording this video. So there should be a new post like that soon. But looking back over the last one, I’ll just pull out a couple of the highlights I thought were kind of interesting. Sticky notes, which of course is a cross-platform way for taking quick notes is now available and Outlook on the web if you want to access it from that web interface. Microsoft had revealed, I want to say back in September, October timeframe, but whenever it was last year that they were bringing back OneNote 2016, bringing it up to date with the mobile and UWP OneNote app.

Paul Thurrott: 45:58 And so dark mode is now rolling out to that classic app, which is wonderful. So if you want to use the full fledged OneNote app, you will get dark mode support. You were talking about the Fluid Framework thing. That’s really interesting. And as I was watching that, I was thinking, you know, that’s very interesting for live data. Sometimes what you want is just a view. We want to grab a snapshot of this data and we don’t want to edit it in this other place and have it go back and you know, change the the original and XL has that feature now called Sheet View. And if you’re familiar with how databases work, it’s kind of like a view versus a table. I guess you’re literally just looking at it.

Stephen Rose: 46:38 There’s one other really great feature in Edge that I like and I don’t want to mess up the name of it, but if I get to a webpage, let’s say you know, that has a lot of data in it. There is a reading view. So I’m going to bring it up cause I want to make sure I get the name right. So, let me look here. Going to grab an article, and then.

Paul Thurrott: 47:01 Actually they call it Immersive Reader.

Stephen Rose: 47:03 Immersive Reader. That’s the one. And yeah, you’ll see it pop up in the toolbar itself and that’s really great when you go, Hey, I just need to get to the meat of this and really see what’s important and be able to do that. It’s a really great feature for getting rid of all the ads and all the popups and all the other stuff, just having text and graphics. And I love that view when I’m doing research and trying to get through a lot of data and find things.

Paul Thurrott: 47:26 And for whatever it’s worth a little goofy, if you’ve been a fan for Edge all along, I think personally that the style they used for the Immersive Reader in the new version is even better than last time. It used to have kind of a horizontal two column view, which I didn’t quite understand. Now it looks more like a natural document, I think it looks great.

Stephen Rose: 47:46 Yeah. Great.

Paul Thurrott: 47:46 Really nice. And then the final little bit of news is just the version 1909 was completed late last year, but now it’s broadly available. So if your machine is compatible you don’t have any driver blockers, you’re going to get that immediately. So that should be happening for everybody soon. Unless of course your IT is managing that in which case it will happen on their schedule. And then as far as tips and how-to’s, I just wanted to point out if you’re in Microsoft or Office 365, there is a new admin center that came out last year.

Paul Thurrott: 48:16 I believe it’s on by default for everybody now, although, I accept advanced features more quickly so I might just be seeing it because I’m doing that. But there is a switch if you want to enable it and they’ve gone to a much more modern interface for the Microsoft 365 admin center if you’re not familiar with it. That’s something definitely to look at. The other thing is Office 365, again as a part of Microsoft 365 delivers new features, which are actually called feature updates on a schedule. And I talk about every month, but, your business can decide that we want to install those things manually on our schedule or they can install them every 6 months. You can talk to your IT about that. Maybe if you’re on the 6 month schedule, you want to get these things every month you can do so. And I talked about the blog posts that Microsoft puts out every month, but also from within the admin center. If you go into health message center, you’ll actually find out what’s new in Office 365 every month. And if you’re responsible for deploying that stuff, you can determine when that goes out to your users.

Stephen Rose: 49:15 Yeah, there’s also our public roadmap, which is a really great place to take a look at, where are things at and where they’re coming out. One of my favorite tips with Edge is the ability to take a webpage and install it like an app which has been great because that way you get the updates, you can pin it to your toolbar, to your task bar, have that icon, have that right there. And that’s been really useful for a lot of internal business things that we have where I want to have quick access to it. So that’s been one of the features that I have really come to rely upon.

Paul Thurrott: 49:50 Yeah, me too. Actually, if you don’t mind could I build on that real quick? Because one thing that’s really cool about that is it can run and look like an app, right? So you, you pin it to the taskbar essentially, or if it’s an actual PWA can install it. One thing you might want to look at is if you go in the Edge browser, Edge colon, slash, slash, apps, you’ll see a list of those apps that you’ve pinned and installed. And you can right-click on each one. And one of the choices is open in full browser. If that is unchecked, that will open in its own window. It won’t be part of the browser tabs and it will look more like a native app. And so if you kind of looking for that native app experience, it’s kind of, you want to make sure that that’s not checked.

Stephen Rose: 50:31 Yeah. And you can, and you can push that out as part of your deployment. So if there are several internal apps that, let’s say you’re setting up a help desk, whether it’s a virtual workstation or a physical one, those can automatically show up on their desktop or show up in their toolbar. And then it says, Hey, here are the three apps you use every day. And again, we’re bridging that gap between a webpage, a web app, and a real app. It shouldn’t really make a difference. So it’s a much easier way to set that up and do that. And the compatibility is extremely high. And that was really critical, is that we don’t need to worry about, you know, compat mode and quirks mode and all of that stuff to really make sure that out of the box the things you need it to do, will do. Like I said, they’ve just done a fantastic job with it.

Stephen Rose: 51:13 And it’s great and there’s a bunch of really cool features. Go into the settings and take a look cause you’re gonna find a lot of really great stuff. Sync and history and bookmarks. And also if you have both a personal and a business persona, you can actually save it as two separate versions of the browser, which is wonderful. So one for personal browsing for the stuff you’re doing cause it will surface up and remind you of that and one for business if you choose to do it that way, which helps you to keep the hot side hot and the cold side cold.

Paul Thurrott: 51:40 Yeah. And I think you mentioned earlier the ability of Edge to use extensions from the Chrome web store. So if you go into the extension’s interface, you can enable that and then you can go visit the Chrome web store and if for some reason there’s an extension, you can’t find in the edge store. Anything available in Chrome will work as well.

Stephen Rose: 51:58 Yeah. And that was great cause I had one or two that I really, you know, wanted to be able to use and I’m like, wow. And it just works beautifully. I was really, really impressed at how seamless that was and a little surprised, but I was like, wow, it works as advertised. So always, always great to see when we say something works and it actually really does.

Paul Thurrott: 52:15 I couldn’t agree more. It’s one of those things you can recommend without caveat. It’s fantastic.

Stephen Rose: 52:21 It’s good stuff. Well, I’m excited for the rest of the series, the stuff we’re going to be talking about and the opportunity to do so. Security, you talked about some of those new changes. There’s some great stuff, secure score, usage score, things like that. So we’re going to get into some really exciting stuff over the next few weeks, so I appreciate the opportunity.

Paul Thurrott: 52:38 Yes, yes. Me too. Thank you so much and we will see you next time.

Stephen Rose: 52:42 Sounds good. Thanks, Paul.

Paul Thurrott: 52:44 Thank you.

View Details

Subscribe: RSS | iTunes | Google Play | Spotify

Microsoft 365 Knowledge Series is a learning path about how small to enterprise-sized companies can fully utilize the Microsoft 365 solution for their organizations.

Hosted by Paul Thurrott of Thurrott.com and Stephen Rose from Microsoft, this series dives deep into the solutions offered by Microsoft 365 along with smart and unique ways your organization can take advantage of everything that the service has to offer.

In this first episode, Stephen and Paul describe the history of Microsoft 365 and how it enables a modern desktop that replaces Windows 7 and Office 2010.

Transcript of Episode One:

Paul Thurrott: 00:00 Hello and welcome to the Microsoft 365 Knowledge series. I’m Paul Thurrott the news editor at Petri and Thurrott.com and with me is Stephen Rose, the senior product marketing manager for Microsoft 365. We thought we could maybe talk a little bit about the podcast, you know, what we’re trying to achieve here, but also about who we are and why we are conversing. So who are you, Stephen, what are you doing here?

Stephen Rose: 00:32 We’re going to talk about Microsoft 365 and what it is and what makes it up and how companies and individuals and IT can leverage the whole package to really help move themselves forward, to use that horrible quote that everybody hates digitally transform, moving forward. There are so many features in the product that people are not aware of or what it can do. And so much stuff that we’ve announced, that I believe we’re going to take some time and kind of go all through this and let people know where it’s come from and where it is and where it’s going.

Paul Thurrott: 01:08 Yeah. So this is going to be a multi-part, I guess in the context of podcasts it’s kind of like a limited series to do over time. Today is kind of an introductory episode and then we’ll dive into some of the particulars of Microsoft 365, over time. Yeah, I mean, this is good timing for a podcast about Microsoft 365 because of course Windows 7, Office 2010 are now out of support and aside for some of the corporations that are using extended support on Windows 7, you know, the rest of the world has to figure out a way forward. And of course, Microsoft has been offering that way forward now for some time. By the way, I went through my archives this weekend to see what I had written about this stuff in the past because of course, I’ve been covering Microsoft for about 25 years.

Paul Thurrott: 01:56 And you can kind of follow the progression of your company’s endeavors online. It’s very interesting to me because I, well, we both did. We lived through all of this, right?

Stephen Rose: 02:06 Yeah.

Paul Thurrott: 02:07 You know, MSN begat, Windows Live, begat, Office Live. You know, SkyDrive back in the day of course. And then Microsoft.

Stephen Rose: 02:15 And Groove before that.

Paul Thurrott: 02:16 Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. Multiple grooves in a way. And all that stuff. I mean it’s very interesting. Microsoft’s first attempt at something like Office 365 as I recall, was something called Business Productivity Online Services, I guess.

Stephen Rose: 02:31 B-POS is what we called it.

Paul Thurrott: 02:32 B-POS. Yeah, great acronym. And it’s funny because I want to say that was about 2008, you know, the big difference that I saw, just looking at it again between B-POS and what Office 365 and now Microsoft 365 has become, while pricing is one thing, actually B-POS, was fairly expensive for the day, but the bigger thing to me was you could buy the individual pieces of B-POS separately.

Paul Thurrott: 02:56 So if you just wanted Exchange Online, just wanted SharePoint online whatever the Office communication server was called at the time, cause I went through some different naming and branding over time. You could actually get that stuff separately. But as you move to Office 365 this concept of everything gets updated together, enters the picture, and I think this is one of the key advantages of Office 365 and now Microsoft 365, because there’s so much more to it. These things aren’t developed separately and Microsoft and thus the customers as well can assume that they have all of it. You know, you don’t have to develop Exchange separately from SharePoint. You can develop those things in the cloud together. I think that’s incredible.

Stephen Rose: 03:37 Yeah, because customers are like, we will talk about something like WVD Windows Virtual Desktop, and they’re like, yeah, we still have some old Windows 7 apps. And we’re like, well, why don’t you use Windows Virtual Desktop? And they’re like, well, we can’t. I’m like, no, no, it’s included. It’s part of that when you got your license, it’s in there. So you’re right. There’s a lot of features and functionality that people either aren’t aware of or think is separate that once they realize they have it, it really helps them to go, Oh, okay, then let’s sort of plan for that. We don’t need to worry about budgeting it and just how we’re going to do this, not, you know, all the backstage stuff. So, no, you’re exactly right. It’s key and it’s helped a lot of companies to move forward more easily than they expected.

Paul Thurrott: 04:22 It also kind of makes Office 365 and now Microsoft 365 kind of a no brainer, frankly. I mean, it’s such a great value and Microsoft offers so many different skews of both products, and so you can pick exactly the right license for the right users and whatever their situation is. If they want to access just the online servers, they don’t need the installable apps, or if they do, you can kind of pick and choose that way. But with Microsoft 365, you know, this is kind of an outsider’s view, but I look at it as a super set of Office 365 a natural extension to what you folks started there. And of course what it adds is the management capabilities and security and also the Windows 7 enterprise capabilities, which is really interesting.

Stephen Rose: 05:09 Yeah. Windows 10 and all that. Yeah, it just makes it easier and it also reduces the churn that IT has and trying to keep all these products updated, you know, and going, great, we’re just gonna do this at once. And then it’s just cyclical rather than piecemeal with all these different things. And it’s also easier for companies making that because they’re able to go from 20-30 different products down to 5 or 6, but now you get a much better 360 degree view, rather than getting data from all these different products telling you what people are doing and security and all that, and trying to piece that together, which is so time consuming and so difficult. And that’s one of the big values that we’ve heard from a lot of IT pros.

Paul Thurrott: 05:52 Right. The other thing that’s kind of interesting about this to me, and again, this applies both to Office 365 and Microsoft 365 is this notion of continuous updates and that these products get better over time. And that speaks to the thing you mentioned earlier where there are a lot of capabilities inside these products that I think a lot of customers simply don’t know exist, that they’re just getting as part of this offering. It’s rather incredible. And I think Office 365, in particular, paving the way for Microsoft 365 became sort of the poster child for Microsoft’s push to the cloud, both internally for the company itself, but also for its customers that once you get on this kind of a schedule it’s incredible how fast you can move things forward. And, you know, for me professionally covering Microsoft for so many years, I gotta tell you it’s a little complicated.

Paul Thurrott: 06:40 I mean every month, Kirk or somebody from the Microsoft 365 team will write a blog post. Like, here’s what we did this month and it is a crazy collection of new functionality that spans across all of the different places that Microsoft 365 touches on different hardware platforms. It’s on mobile, across Android and iOS on the web. It’s on Windows, it’s on the Mac. And then of course you have all the service side or I guess the cloud side products as well. And it is rather impressive I have to say.

Stephen Rose: 07:12 But that’s what happens when, and this was a great thing when Satya came in and I know we’ll probably talk about this later, but in getting rid of those silos and that was such a big problem was the Windows team didn’t talk to office. Office, didn’t talk to security. Everybody built their own stuff and then somehow got it to connect together and not always very well. That once we re-org’d and said, look, these folks need to work together. Engineering needs to work across the team and with each other. It was amazing to see the OneDrive and the SharePoint engineering team working with the Office team. And have them together. It’s allowed us to do so much more and to leverage that code base, but just to simplify things for customers, it’s absolutely tremendous. But a lot of credit really goes to, Satya his vision of this is absolutely ridiculous and this has got to stop. And where tools like Teams and a lot of the intelligence features are also helping us to better understand what’s happening cross org. So, yeah.

Paul Thurrott: 08:10 Right, right. You know, at a surface level, somebody sitting in front of a Windows 7 PC running Office 2010 looking at a Windows 10 PC running Office 365 Pro Plus or whatever version of Microsoft 365 you know, they look the same. They are similar. But it’s when you get below the surface where you can see what’s going on there and how much these things are evolved. And so we can talk about some of that stuff today I think. But maybe first we should just speak briefly about the different offerings, if that makes sense. I was looking over the Microsoft 365 site. It’s interesting to me because it’s always been split between what Microsoft calls business and enterprise and its slightly different capabilities. Obviously enterprises with distributed infrastructures have different needs than smaller businesses and all that. But the two basic Microsoft 365 offerings for business are in fact Office 365 skews, which kind of supports my notion of the Somerset thing which are Business Essentials and Business Premium, both of which I actually happen to use.

Paul Thurrott: 09:12 Interestingly, Business Essentials is just $5 a month, which just kind of speaks to how low cost this stuff can be.

Stephen Rose: 09:18 Right.

Paul Thurrott: 09:19 And that’s the version that has the online servers and you can use the web apps and so forth. And then with Business Premium you get the installable apps and so on. But then the third step up from there of course, is Microsoft 365 Business. And that’s where things get interesting. You get the management capabilities, the additional security and the Windows 7 Enterprise functionality. And I listed this out, I guess I don’t have to read this complete list, but it is rather incredible because for that additional, for a little additional cost per user, it is an incredible amount of extra stuff. Selective wipe from Intune for example, which is a way to differentiate personal and work-related data on a mobile device with that person leaves the company or loses their phone, you can remotely selectively wipe, well actually selectively wipe is a thing you do, if they were leaving, not if they lost it cause you probably want to wipe the whole thing off.

Stephen Rose: 10:14 Yeah you probably want to wipe the whole thing, but yeah. And that was a key one, because then we had people saying, Hey, I have all the pictures of my baby on my phone. I just had a kid, I don’t want to lose that, but we want to use that device in this part of BYOD, it was how do we ensure this as well as files restore in OneDrive. So yeah, that’s a huge one. And that was one of the first ones that really gets in saying, Hey, we’re serious about mobile. And when it was, you know Windows Intune, and I was there when that got started, which then turned into Microsoft Intune. It was so new, around 2010 the idea of you were going to bring your device to work and start to use it.

Paul Thurrott: 10:50 Actually Intunes beginnings was literally, oh actually no, I’m sorry. It was PC Management at first. Right. And then they added mobile devices. That’s right. Okay.

Stephen Rose: 10:59 Yeah. AirWatch and MobileIron we had partnered with and they were looking to kind of step that up and then yeah. Moved it up within the area.

Paul Thurrott: 11:07 Yeah. And a lot of the additional capabilities of Microsoft 365 are that kind of security or retention type capability. Do not copy, do not forward with information rights management. Right. You don’t want someone to take private information in a work email and share it publicly over Gmail or Outlook.com or whatever. A lot of that kind of stuff. And so those are additional benefits. And on the enterprise side, then it really gets into areas I’m not particularly familiar with, unfortunately, but you know, advanced Ediscovery, Customer Lockbox, data governance and all that kind of stuff.

Stephen Rose: 11:41 It speaks to the shift from, you know, 2009, 2010 when Windows 7 came out. And you know, I’ve been certified since Windows NT. So NT, 2000, XP 7, those were all about securing the device. And that was really the call to action for IT pros. And then what changed with Windows 7 and now Windows 10, is we’ve gone into securing the data, doesn’t matter the device because we’re using so many devices and all the data stored in the cloud. So that shift really sort of changed the focus of IT and companies around that. So all of that stuff really speaks to them an area where we’re still doing a lot of work and still growing.

Paul Thurrott: 12:25 Oh, for sure. I mean, in fact, to me, that the Nadella era so far has been marked very much by that kind of openness to other platforms and an acknowledgement that Microsoft is going to go where the customers are and have a presence on all of those devices for sure. Yeah. And, not just for, you know, not just apps. I mean, we have an app, you know, there are. There’s a Word app on mobile for sure, but it’s also about protecting the device and protecting the data around the device.

Stephen Rose: 12:50 Right. Authenticator, all the other stuff. So, yeah, absolutely.

Paul Thurrott: 12:53 Right, right, right. So, the concept today we’re talking about is kind of the modern desktop. And I think, you know, maybe to help people understand just a couple of examples of things that have changed. This is one, actually, this is one that will cut close to the heart of what you’ve done, I recall in the early transition to the cloud. So this would be back in the B-POS days, you know, Microsoft is met with some resistance, right? With some classic kind of traditional businesses where they had built up these infrastructures, you know, they had on-prem infrastructure that people managed and took care of and now they hear that Microsoft or some third party wants to host this stuff in the cloud. I had a contentious TechEd Precon session back in the day that I will never forget where this Exchange admin stood up and said, let me get this straight.

Paul Thurrott: 13:43 You’re telling me that my last action as Exchange admin at this company is going to be to hand over this to the cloud and then I am out of a job. And you know, the answer was well, yes, but that’s a cynical way to look at it. I mean, when you work in IT, things change. I mean this is the change agent that’s always been part of your career, but it was always bothersome to me because, in the next room over, there is the developer room of course, it’s like a conga line in there because those guys are ecstatic about the cloud. You know, you mean I can move my apps to another place. Sounds great. You know, for IT it was a little bit of push and shove. But the thing that’s interesting, and this is where I think where your career kind of intersects here, especially is we sort of looked at email as the low hanging fruit back in the day. But I feel like the thing we’ve come to understand is that the low hanging fruit from moving from on-prem to hybrid to cloud and really to hybrid for a lot of companies is storage.

Stephen Rose: 14:38 Yeah.

Paul Thurrott: 14:38 You know, and that speaks to the, you know, the OneDrive, OneDrive for Business and SharePoint products and Microsoft has made.

Stephen Rose: 14:45 Yeah. I think as we take a look at thosem in the conversations I had, with so many customers was you know, what happens to an individual when their laptop crashes.

Paul Thurrott: 14:57 Right.

Stephen Rose: 14:57 And I love to talk about the scenario, especially once we got Autopilot in. Is saying, look, you know, get your x drive your q drive and move that into SharePoint. Cause that’s our files. That’s where everything lives. And let’s take your personal stuff and redirect your desktop, your MyDocs, your photos into OneDrive right now. Add Autopilot to that. And the feature we added to Windows 10 that let you upgrade from pro to enterprise. Now we could say, Hey, I just left my device in a taxi. Okay, no problem Intune. Wipe the device at next login, I go to a Best Buy, I buy a laptop right there over wifi. I type in my corporate credentials, my phone pops up.

Stephen Rose: 15:41 Bing. Yep. Is it really you? Yes, it’s me. I show it my face. And then it upgrades from pro to nterprise. It brings down all those corporate policies. It pushes out apps. And within about 15, 20 minutes, I’m going to get that first login and immediately within a few seconds, all of my files are right there on my desktop. And because we’re using Exchange online, the moment I launch email, there’s every email. I am right where I left off. And once you talk about that scenario and you talk about if that was a sales person and you’re still, God forbid ghosting or imaging devices, you know, you have to get one, you’ve got to image it, you’ve got to send it to that person. And you know, I did IT before coming to Microsoft for years. Salespeople do not back up their devices. It’s just not going to happen.

Stephen Rose: 16:32 I’ve consulted with companies saying, yeah, we gave all of our salespeople an external hard drive.

Paul Thurrott: 16:37 They’re not running full system image backups, every Friday night or whatever.

Stephen Rose: 16:42 Oh my God. Yeah. So being able to tell that story and then to add to that saying plus now that your data is in the cloud, you’re going to get all of these analytics and it’s going to get smart and it’s going to help you. It’s going to be, and the term AI has such a negative context that I really almost like to kind of look at it like assistive technology. It’s going to say, Hey, after this meeting, do you want to share this PowerPoint that you just showed with everybody in the room. Before this meeting on Monday, here are some of the emails and here’s some of the documents you shared with this person. Helping you to prepare that. Your data becomes smart. And that’s such a shift for people to take a look at, especially for those who have not updated their skillsets since Windows 7 and are still in different mindset.

Paul Thurrott: 17:32 Oh yeah, for the typical user. This is the big shift right there. I mean it is an incredible thing. Even as an individual. Just seeing how things have changed with OneDrive in particular, with files on demand for example. The ability to bring up a computer and be up and running within minutes now instead of hours or days is astonishing.

Stephen Rose: 17:50 And being able to say I can sit down at anybody’s PC on the planet, log into OneDrive, click it, finish my document, do my presentation. I don’t even have to be at my own device. And if I’ve set up, you know desktop, if I’ve set up authentication, you know, things along that line, then I can make sure that I can do it securely. And that was just unthought of 10 years ago. And it’s made it easier for IT.

Paul Thurrott: 18:14 We’re old enough. I mean, I used to walk around with a floppy disc in my front pocket, you know, that had a crucial DAT files, they were called at the time or whatever. Oh, we’ve kept a like a PST backup. A copy on a floppy, back in the day, eventually on a hard drive or whatever.

Stephen Rose: 18:33 And I remember cheetah fastback and having to use 33 discs to back something up and disc 32 would always fail the second, to last one after being an hour into this, I remember those days.

Paul Thurrott: 18:45 Plus they would never actually work anyway. It doesn’t matter if it finished. It would never, has anyone ever actually recovered a drive?

Stephen Rose: 18:52 Oh God. Yeah.

Paul Thurrott: 18:53 You know, it’s awful.

Stephen Rose: 18:55 And the iota drives, you know, I remember those days. I think I still have one of those discs laying around somewhere.

Paul Thurrott: 19:05 Yeah, my office is a computer history museum. So, you know you talked about AI briefly and it does get a bad rap or maybe is a term that people don’t like, but there is an intelligence that does occur on the back end and part of that is tied to the Microsoft graph and how that now permeates through everything that’s occurring up in Microsoft 365 and, that stuff is kind of incredible. And I think, you know, maybe not today in this episode, but the next episode and as we move forward, we’re going to see examples of that in very particular products.

Paul Thurrott: 19:41 But you know, it’s just a way to tie all of the backend information, I think has been a dream of Bill Gates and Microsoft from back in the day. This notion of, you know, information at your fingertips, literally ties into this, this idea that this data, no matter where it is and what form can be tied together and can give you insights into what you’re working on, whether it’s people that you work with who have particular skills that you want or particular assets that you might have, or you know, a particular PowerPoint or presentation that is relevant to what you’re working on and so forth. This stuff kind of permeates all the way through Microsoft 365.

Stephen Rose: 20:17 Yeah. And the graph, and I’m glad we’re going to get into that a little bit later, but what it does and what it brings, often without you even needing to know anything about developing and stuff, but just being able to connect to these services and the information that it gives you is really tremendous. And I tried it with one company and I’m like, how is this helped you to be more productive? And they said one of the great things for us is simply being able to see what everybody else is working on in the early days of Dell. We didn’t know somebody else was working on a similar project to us and then connecting with them and reducing a lot of duplicity was one of those first things that we started to see that really helped to make a big change for folks.

Paul Thurrott: 20:59 Yup. So we have a video that is tangentially related to this I guess, a Bing intelligent search video. That is very much you know, is a part of Microsoft 365 and we should take a look at that right now.

Stephen Rose: 21:18 All right.

Stephen Rose: 21:21 So here we’re using Bing search and specifically Bing for Business. So by typing in something as simple as Jason’s office, it knows, Hey, it’s probably Jason Gregory who’s in my building. I’m able to click on that and see exactly where he’s at and it’s pulling all of this from active directory, which is great. I can take a look at who’s in Building 3 named Bill, it will show me all of those choices and it will bring that together. So that’s just a simple way by just connecting to Active Directory and then having maps on a SharePoint site, the graph is going to take a look at that and go, Oh, okay, I understand what you want. And it really is about being able to type things in, in plain English. You don’t need to know Boolean modifiers anymore. It makes life much easier for people.

Paul Thurrott: 22:04 Also, searching from where you’re searching from. Right. The thing that’s interesting here is it’s not another interface. You know, if you want to find out you know, wherein, whatever building is this particular person, you don’t have to navigate through some folder structure on a NAS or whatever. It’s literally, I have a question I go to the same place where I get questions answered and now those questions are answered there as well. Really, really, really smart.

Stephen Rose: 22:30 And it’s great because I’ll need to go see somebody in a different building and I can just type them in, click it, and it’ll actually offer to give me directions. I can then send that over to my phone. I know where I’m going, how far it’s going to be, or even better, who’s beneath them and who’s above them so I can see what that relationship is. Are they part of that team? Local? Remote? Again, the way I used to have to do that was the I’d go deep into these HR SharePoint sites and searching and trying to find. And that also works from mobile, so being able to go through both platforms for that. It’s yeah, it’s definitely made a big difference.

Paul Thurrott: 23:05 A lot of companies probably doing that with paper. They’ll have a book that has the maps of the, you know, whatever the campus or a location looks like, you can find out where a particular office is, it’s fascinating. I mentioned earlier how hard it is to keep track of all the new features that are coming to Microsoft 365 each month. But that one is one that really stood out and I think a lot of people saw that and thought this is really smart. Like, that is an amazing new feature.

Stephen Rose: 23:33 Yeah. And then what’s also nice is that once you type that in, if you type in a word HR, you’re going to see all of your regular listings, but then it will say business listings as long as you’re logged in with your business account. Then you click that, and it’ll say, here’s all the SharePoint sites, here’s the people, here’s everything related to that. So it starts to pull that together for you. And it does the smart searches, it has reduced, at least for me, a ton of time that I spent going down a rabbit hole to find something I was looking for. And then finding out at the end page 404 not found, or some ridiculously out of date thing on an old platform that nobody supports anymore. So yeah,

Paul Thurrott: 24:15 You don’t have the way back machine for work, that’s too bad.

Stephen Rose: 24:18 Unfortunately we do. They’re just pages that still live in our infrastructure that people upgraded and never got rid of the old one. So yeah, that happens sadly, fairly often.

Paul Thurrott: 24:28 So also tied to the new features that have come to Office 365 or Microsoft 365 for the past several years. Are new apps, many of which are web-based apps, which is kind of interesting. But the biggest new Microsoft app, Office app, I guess I’ll call it since PowerPoint, I don’t know, maybe one OneNote maybe, I don’t know. Microsoft Teams has been an unbelievable success story. This is the chat-based collaboration tool, a web app. It’s available everywhere, you know, it’s on every platform including Linux, which is kind of interesting. I mean, how has team changed this offering? It seems like this is just an explosion in new capabilities.

Stephen Rose: 25:13 Yeah. Let’s take a step back. I think what’s interesting about Teams is we have, for the first time ever, four generations of workers working in the workplace. We have baby boomers and we have millennials, and we have gen X, and we have gen Y, and they work incredibly differently. Those folks who are over, you know, 35 or so, even 40 do everything off their desktop. They use desktop apps, that’s all that they do. And they use email because that’s what they were. They were the ones who were on phone call. I can’t ever see, you know, email replacing a phone call. Well guess what it has. What was interesting for me was when I went to go take my role with OneDrive, I had to work very closely with engineering now. So a lot of millennials and younger folks. And I realized when I would send them an email, I would send an email and I would get an answer back 24 hours later, and I would add a question back and then I would send it and wait.

Stephen Rose: 26:14 So the problem was it was taking three, four, five days sometimes to get something answered. And I started chatting with them. And this is before we even had Teams, we were using some different communication tools. And we were like, Oh no, we don’t look at email. Email’s, how we’re told there are donuts in the break room.

Paul Thurrott: 26:28 Email is where things go to die.

Stephen Rose: 26:31 Right or whether there’s donuts in the break room and things like that. Like we use a chat. So I had to get into Teams and start to use chat and it was like, oh yeah, hang on. They bring somebody else into the conversation. They would drop a file right there and boom, I was done and I could go back and take a look at that conversation. And I think that’s at the core, is this is how people want to work. So bringing in Teams, and Satya made a very bold statement saying this is sort of the new Windows, right?

Stephen Rose: 26:59 Not that you know it’s the new base OS and I get that. But this is where people are going to be spending most of their time. All your files are there, your projects are there, your chats are there, your calls are there. We’ve built-in translation services, we’ve built-in support for Stream, which brings transcription services and we have connectors to hundreds and hundreds of third party apps. So if you’re using, you know, Salesforce or SAP or any one of these that you can now bring in those apps as a tab and that becomes a huge saver for folks that are switching between 10 different apps and trying to see what’s going on. All of that is there, you know, one conversation I had was what do you do when a new person comes on board? Do you find every email and send it to them? Do you start sending them hundreds of docs and send them to shares, which was the old way of doing things? Or do you add them to your Team? They go into that group, they go through all the conversations, all the meetings, all the files. They go, okay, I get it, now I’m ready to move forward. And that’s such a huge shift. with how people work. Sorry, I’ve only had two cups. It’s early.

Paul Thurrott: 28:13 We can actually see the dawn occurring behind you, by the way.

Stephen Rose: 28:16 It is starting to get a little bit brighter, I have one of the last remaining views of Lakeville as we tear down campus and rebuild this whole portion. But it’s dramatically changed how people communicate and how they work. It also allows you to say, I have these questions. Okay, great. Now I’m done. I have my answers. It’s time to move on and not do this thing which many of us do, which is, I have 14 different things. I’m waiting on answers for and it’s like. It’s like juggling these balls up in the air.

Paul Thurrott: 28:44 It’s impossible to keep track of that stuff. And I think, you know, as the older guy who relies on email and you and I were interacting on email for this podcast, cause you can’t help it. I mean it’s just the way we are, but you lose track of things. I mean, that’s what happens. There is a question hanging out there that you may have of someone or someone has a view and it’s just, you know, life is busy and we kind of move on. But you know, it’s funny, I thought of Teams as the new Outlook because it is that place that your day revolves around. It’s the portal for your day. But I like the notion of Teams as the new Windows because really what it is, is a platform. And I think, and as you said with all of the add ons, third party and first party, it’s a portal to your day, but it’s also a portal whose capabilities are going to expand over time.

Stephen Rose: 29:33 Absolutely. And now with Firstline workers. And that was a big focus for the team, was to build that in. So now there is Schedule, which is great, where you as a manager can say, here’s the schedule. Employees can go in if you want to allow them, they can trade and shift and you can see what happens. Within that chat I can say, here’s my location. I can simply just pop that up. We’ve just added a walkie talkie feature, which a lot of customers were asking for. The ability to do, you know, which we’ll talk about with calling and blur and those sort of features. We’re finding that businesses are saying this is great but we’re special. We’re medical, we’re engineering, we’re this, so we need this and we’re building in, we’re really listening and we’re building in that functionality to allow people to leverage it the way they want.

Stephen Rose: 30:21 But the Firstline worker scenario is probably one of the most powerful and where they kind of had their own special, hand-built software that sat on a 386 with like a turbo button below somebody’s desk. You know, nobody wants to touch because the guy who built that software is dead and everybody’s terrified that it will break apart. That we can now get that out of there and start to do things that make more sense. And that worked from every platform.

Paul Thurrott: 30:48 Interesting. Actually, since you brought up the Firstline worker, maybe real quick, we should just discuss what that is. Right. Because that will vary from business to business. Based on the name and based on my understanding of the term, to me what it sounds like is the person that is the first point of contact in the company with the outside world, whether it’s a retail employee, perhaps in that type of a business or someone who’s out on a pole working on you know, the, the wires overhead or something like that. They’re literally the front line or the first line in this case of the business.

Stephen Rose: 31:19 Yeah. They’re better than the second line workers. No you’re exactly right. Everything from, you know, servers to folks working out on the pole to, you know, doctors and nurses. But it’s us folks who need to communicate together, both in real time, share information. They may or may not have a schedule, but especially as you look at folks who also work, not often from a single desk, but from a variety of locations that really brings everything with you as you start to do that.

Paul Thurrott: 31:50 Okay. We have a Teams video as well, and I believe this is for a live transcription service.

Stephen Rose: 31:58 Live transcription service. Yeah. So during a Team’s call we, of course, have blur and the cool backgrounds, but one of the new things that we’ve added is the availability of having real-time transcription. Now this is great for several reasons. A: As we look at diversity and inclusion, we want to make sure everybody can have that same experience in the meeting, which is wonderful. Number two, if people process things a little bit slower, it’s sometimes easier for them to read. But also once that meeting is saved in Stream and it’s put up, you can go into Stream and you can see that full transcription and you can search that transcription. Again, leveraging the graph and intelligence, we could go in and say, show me exactly when this product was mentioned. And you can go right, exactly to that point in time in the meeting, which means if you missed a meeting, you can go to all those really important nuggets, skip through the stuff that doesn’t pertain to you and then be able to, you know, quickly gather that, see what was up and move forward.

Stephen Rose: 32:57 Or if you, you know, you could take that transcript, pull it out, and then document that, share that, go through those notes, et cetera. So there’s a lot of great ways that you can leverage that, but it really has changed how people think about meetings and it’s also encouraging them to turn on their camera, which makes for a more intimate meeting and it raises productivity and focus.

Paul Thurrott: 33:20 Yup. Yeah. No the live transcription stuff is the dream. I mean, the accessibility angle is obvious and is excellent. But as you know, covering Microsoft all these years, and one of the things I do oftentimes is go back to the transcription of a live event that you folks might’ve had or a like an earnings call with the analysts afterwards and all that. And the ability to go and find that stuff. I mean, as a reporter or writer, I’ve often used the feature, well no, you can take your own notes and you can record the meeting you’re in, right. It will sync them up, because I left a note that says, well this is important, but I didn’t get the whole quote down and I can listen to it. But obviously the next step is having it just written out for me, which is amazing. It’s just such a crucial capability.

Stephen Rose: 34:02 Yeah. And then this will obviously, because we have like, you know, translation features now in PowerPoint, which I absolutely love if I’m doing a meeting with someone where English is a second language or even it’s not a language. I’ve done meetings with, you know, Japanese customers and they have translators in, I love walking into the room, turning that on and just starting to speak and they look at you like, you know, I just made fire come out of my fingertips.

Paul Thurrott: 34:27 Yeah, no it’s Star Trek. Yeah.

Stephen Rose: 34:29 And they’re like, well how long did it take to train that? I’m like, come up here. You stand in front of my laptop and then within about 10 seconds it immediately starts to do it for them. And the fact that we can do these, and I’ve done it, you know, last year during the Ignite Tour, I was in India, I was in Stockholm, I was in the Netherlands. And just turning that on, the audience immediately starts to clap. And I’m like, how close? And they’re like 90%, you know, there are few colloquialisms that don’t transfer over and we forget about those. But in general, it’s been absolutely amazing and it started to break down those walls of communication and in time that functionality, I’m sure we’ll come to Teams, but it’s those things that allow us to communicate more genuinely. And I think that’s really at the heart of doing business, is to be able to jump on a video call, see what people are saying, real-time translation, real-time transcription. Having that information come up for you, the things that are related, it makes it more personal. And that’s really a great takeaway from all this.

Paul Thurrott: 35:31 Yeah, that’s what makes the world smaller. You know, it’s amazing. It’s just amazing. This, I spoke earlier about my Exchange admin story. I hope that guy find a job. I think, but you know, but the attitudes have shifted over the years. I mean, there was a lot of push back I think in the early days. There was this notion that it is a huge strength for Microsoft, that they do have this hybrid capability that suddenly its competitors are scrambling to try to, you know, meet in some capacity. But, you know, Microsoft does have that history. I mean, what have you seen about from the changing positions that companies and people have had about the cloud over the years? Because obviously I think we’re at the point now where everyone sees this as inevitable. There are the regulatory reasons and legal reasons why some workloads are going to have to be, not strictly, you know, not in a public cloud for sure or not in the cloud at all. But I mean, what does that look like inside of Microsoft?

Stephen Rose: 36:24 I think, you know, personally, I always use the Germans as the bellwether for this. And I say that with all respect, but German customers, when I would go talk to them would say, no cloud, that was that, they don’t like, it, it makes us uncomfortable. We don’t like to use it, where we saw, you know, a lot of European customers, especially the French customers like that immediately jumping on because they saw that value of I can now work anywhere from any device. My data is secure. It’s more secure than it would be if I did it, because there are tons of people that are doing nothing but just making sure everything is there and it’s secure. There are new forms of encryption. We added AIP and DLP and things like that. Once we saw German customers, especially in the financial area, start to say, we want to start to move some of our stuff to the cloud that really told us that, you know, we’re doing things correctly.

Stephen Rose: 37:20 Just because they are one of the slowest to change because they are the most hesitant. So I think you know from the highest level that’s been at, but now every company is saying, A: We see it can save costs. And the thing is it’s not getting rid of jobs. It’s changing jobs. Now these folks who were Exchange admins are still managing Exchange. They’re just doing it online, but they’re also now responsible for security. I love the fact that when you’re going in and you’re doing security, let’s say for Exchange, that you can push a button and say, Oh by the way, these policies of this is who can share outside the company and who can’t, who can do this, can extend out to OneDrive and SharePoint with a single push of a button. We used to run into companies today, well we don’t allow people to share.

Stephen Rose: 38:05 You know, we don’t allow them to do that. And I’m like, okay, do you have that turned on in Outlook? And they’re like, no. And I’m like, well then you have no control over-sharing. Cause people are doing it as an attachment. Or if you don’t let people do this, they will find a way. Life finds a way and that’s the problem is then they go in and go, hh, we’re using, you know, people are using G Drive and sharing and they’re doing this and that and you know, Dropbox consumer and things along that line. So that’s the problem that companies were having by saying, we don’t want to move to that. Customers were already doing it. And we love to remind them, have you never ever used email online? You don’t have a Yahoo or a Live or a Gmail account. Like of course I’m like, that’s in the cloud.

Stephen Rose: 38:47 And they’d be like, well that’s different. I’m like, well, explain to me how that’s different. So it’s taken a long time, but we’re finally getting to the point where most customers trust it. They’ve absolutely seen the value and they’re seeing their peers do it. And that’s always the first one. That’s who’s going to be the first to step off that ledge. And we’ve seen Walmart and you know, the major credit card companies move in that direction. The major banks move in that direction. The government, you know, healthcare, all of those highly regulated industries. Once they move, then people who weren’t that regulated immediately said, Hey, if it’s good enough for them, we should really take a look at this and start to do this. But that first dealing with those highly regulated industries has been something that has been, you know, 10 years of us working on that and now we’re just seeing this flood. People can’t do it fast enough. So it’s been interesting how it’s come together.

Paul Thurrott: 39:39 Yeah, I mean I think that speaks to, you know, Microsoft going to where the customers are. You mentioned Germany for example. Germany has very strict laws around data retention, and so forth and so well we’ll put Azure data centers in your company and your country that will be run by other German companies in many cases and that’s how that has to happen. And that’s fine. So I think, you know, Microsoft meeting them there, where they needed to be is a big part of that success. But I spoke earlier about Office 365 and Microsoft 365 being kind of a no brainer. I mean as we step through some of the features that we’ve hit it on a very high level here today so far. It is, it’s just incredible. You know, the live transcription features is a good example. Like if you actually look at what is enabled by moving to the cloud, it just becomes inevitable. You know, it becomes necessary. You’ll be at a strategic disadvantage if you’re not doing it.

Stephen Rose: 40:33 Absolutely. I think one of the best real-world examples of this was I was in the car with my wife and she needed, she works for a non for profit and she needed a document. She’s like, Oh, we’ve got to go back home. I’ve got to go on my laptop and go do this. I’m like, no you don’t. And I go, go to OneDrive and she goes to OneDrive. I’m like, look in that folder. And she goes, okay. I’m like, Oh, it’s my desktop, I’m like, yes. Now take a look. There it is on your desktop. Great. Now just click it, hit share. And then at the end, she goes, Oh, is that what you do all day? I’m like, yes, that’s exactly what I do.

Paul Thurrott: 41:07 Wow.

Stephen Rose: 41:08 But it was great. She, she got it like, Oh, that’s awesome. And I’m like, yeah, you can do that from any device. Android, iOS, Mac, PC, everything is right there. Everything is secure or if you get ransomware, malware. Yeah, you’re protected. And also the lights came on for her. And I think that’s a microcosm of what we’re seeing in companies is how do we do this? Especially as millennials come in and I want to work from WeWork, I want to work from home, I want to work from a Starbucks. And companies have to say, okay, we want you to do this securely. If the data’s in the cloud, it’s literally within Microsoft 365 hitting the right switches, turning that on, making those decisions and doing that. And that was unthinkable 5 years ago. And now we’ve made it not just easier, but far more cost-effective for companies to do that and let people work the way they want to, which makes them more productive. And that’s at the core of, you know, what we’re looking to do with the modern desktop and making the cloud personal for each person and for each customer. The World’s Productivity Cloud, that’s what we call it.

Paul Thurrott: 42:16 Yeah, exactly. And I think a big key to that is the cross-platform stuff. We touched on this a little bit, but you know, back in the day, and you know, when I was starting out and you were starting out, I mean Office was something that ran on Windows and it ran on the Mac. That was pretty much the extent of that.

Stephen Rose: 42:31 Sort of.

Paul Thurrott: 42:32 Sort of ran on the Mac, right? It was, you know, Windows Best, Windows First. It was kind of attitude. But you know, these capabilities are available in apps that run on the web. And thus can run on any platform. They run on iOS and Android Teams, which is the biggest new Office app. And, forever, basically is a web app that runs everywhere. There’s even a Linux version of it. We haven’t talked about this too much yet, but Microsoft just released a new version of its Edge web browser which is based on Chromium cross-platform. So that thing runs on the Mac in addition to Windows 7, 8, X and 10. It runs an iOS and Android of course. And Microsoft has that management infrastructure to manage non Windows devices to, it’s not just Windows, PCs and Microsoft devices. It is literally Microsoft meeting you where you are. And that’s a big cultural change frankly. You know, from when I started.

Stephen Rose: 43:31 This is my iPad and that’s what’s on it. This is that way. Yeah. This is my office, my little Lego guy from the Lego folks, but that’s at the core is, Hey, this is my office. I can take it with me wherever I want, you know, whatever I need to do. And I work off my iPad quite a bit. I have a Surface Laptop that I absolutely love. This is my Surface Laptop 2. And I’ve like, you had them all, it’s great and it’s great for my heavy lifting. But when I go to a meeting I just take notes in OneNote, they’re right on my desktop. I tend to do short emails. I’m working on a plane cause it’s got LTE and everything in it. I use that device and I go back and forth and what’s great is everything is there on both ends.

Stephen Rose: 44:11 I don’t need to feel like, Oh I’ve got to go to this device because this is here. Everything’s in the cloud, everything’s stored and I can work just as well within Teams and meetings and stuff like that from my iPad as I can from my phone or any device and it’s that ubiquity of the platform and finally office for Mac getting caught up. It’s still not all the way there and I use a Mac pretty often just to make sure I stay up on it. There’s a few features in Mac Office that I would love to see come to the PC. The ability to be able to move mail to folders, just using keystrokes would be great. I haven’t seen that. I love shortcuts and things like that, but it’s getting much closer and a lot of that functionality is there and with the web versions it’s all on par and that’s really at the core as we take a look at whether you want that desktop experience, whether you want that mobile experience or cloud.

Stephen Rose: 45:05 And as we, you know we talked about the four generations, companies want to retain great talent and one of the things they have to realize is when this new generation of workers walk in, they have done everything from a browser. Their whole like, from kindergarten up, they were taught you launch office, or you launch Google docs or whatever that is and everything is done in a browser. The thought about downloading software to your device is not just abhorrent, it’s foreign to them. They’re used to I live in a world of apps on my device and I live in the browser and that’s all that I need. I don’t download software. I don’t need to do that. Companies need to understand that if they want to retain great talent and they want to keep them, is this, is that direction. It’s chat-based it’s, it’s web-based and this is where we’re going.

Paul Thurrott: 45:54 Yeah. Even Outlook on the web, which is the Microsoft 365 web email application and then the Outlook.com consumer products are both progressive web apps now, which is really interesting. There’s nothing particular there, you know, it doesn’t support offline yet or whatever. But I suspect that it probably will. I’m not asking you to confirm that, but just drop me a note. But this is that push toward, you know, again, it’s the same thing. We’re going to meet you where you are as a customer and I think that’s really important. So we have, I’m sorry.

Stephen Rose: 46:26 No, no, I was just, I was going to add one more thing to that. And I think one of the interesting things is when I was on, you know, to that point on the OneDrive team, we used user voice as a key tool to understand what customers wanted and what they wanted to see. And that’s where we heard, Hey, we want to have offline files. Hey we want, you know, folder redirection, we want cloud files and all these other things we worked on and you know, files on demand. Cause they loved the old placeholders feature, which we got rid of cause it didn’t work well and things like that. So that’s also that balance. And you know, working with engineering was absolutely fascinating because we used to put things into two areas, which was evolution and revolution. These are the evolutionary features we have to have that people are asking for like, you know, offline Outlook and all the rest and here are the revolutionary features that no one expects that we’re going to bring to the product. And it’s always trying to balance that. So yes, that’s a huge part of it. And that’s the expectation from our audiences. We’re going to find that balance and we’re going to delight them, but also meet their needs where they live.

Paul Thurrott: 47:30 Yeah, I happen to do this in the web, but the ubiquity of wonder, I mean, I could have done this from anywhere, but when I was searching, I wanted to see what I had written about B-POS back in the day. And of course, you just open up OneDrive.com and B-POS and there it is, came out in 2008 here’s an article I wrote and you know, it’s, amazing. That ability to summon this stuff up in seconds is yeah, it is amazing. So we do have one more video for this. So this is the play my email functionalities. So the mobile version of Outlook. And this one actually I guess has some audio as well.

Stephen Rose: 48:06 Yeah. So what’s happening here is you can say, you know, read my emails or you can hit a button. If you go into Outlook and you click at the top, you’ll see a little play button. And what it will do. It’s meant for folks that are either in the car commuting on a bus that you can go through, you can hear your emails, you can respond, you can move, you can flag for later, you can pick which accounts that’s going to come from if it’s business or personal. But it’s great because we’ll also say this was sent 3 hours ago, this was sent last night, this is this morning. You can prioritize that. But I love it because I can be in the car and have it sort of run through and I can hit skip and it will say this is a long email.

Stephen Rose: 48:54 It’ll take about this long to read. So it’s basically triaging for me and that’s great. So I can sort of kind of go through things before I even get into the office. And for folks who are on a bus or a train, you know that can’t pull out a device or it’s difficult to do. When I was in Chicago, I used to take the L every day and trying to hold that hand strap and do phone and you’re going to get hurt. Same in Boston on the T. So yeah, being able to do that easily, that’s really at the core. And this opens up so many more opportunities now to say, well, Hey, what time is that meeting? Let’s reschedule that. When was the last time I met with this person? As we continue to build out that functionality, we’ve talked about some of that AI, some of the companies that we’ve purchased and partnered with to help move that forward. We really want it to become a true personal assistant where you can build upon those queries and start to do it. And the read my emails is one of those first steps to be able to bring that to life.

Paul Thurrott: 49:48 And I hope we have time to get to this in the series. But one thing I’m really interested in in Microsoft 365 is this new Power Platform, right. And if there’s a product that is, it used to be called Flow, but it’s a Power Automate. Now Microsoft, I think you could folks renamed it.

Stephen Rose: 50:04 Yeah. I still call it Power Apps and Flow. Yeah. Which is too often, but yeah,

Paul Thurrott: 50:09 But this, this may seem a little scary to people who have been intimidated by things like PowerShell or programming in general. But really what it’s about is automation and you know, there are some obvious examples. Your email attachments arrive in Exchange online and they can be saved automatically to OneDrive. I know that kind of thing or somewhat important emails you, your boss, you know, your wife, whatever, no judging, whoever it is, and you want to get a push notification about that specifically. So you understand that it came in no matter where you are or what you were doing. That’s, that’s an incredible capability right there. And it’s fairly, it’s basically, well it’s not brand new, but it’s very new.

Stephen Rose: 50:53 Yeah. We’ve had it up now for about two, almost three years. But, you’re right. And I use that feature when my boss and my wife email me, funny but also we’ve also had it where it can start to take a look at rules and say, Hey, I just took a picture of something that is broken. AI will take a look at it and say, Hey, here’s what’s broken. it can say, if this has happened three times or more, send it to engineering and you can just forward it right to that engineering team. So we can integrate that into Teams. And with Power Apps, those are low code, no code. And you know, we can chat about this later, but, we’ve seen customers, as long as you have a database somewhere, you can connect it and say, Hey, just be able to show this to me in a graphical format on my phone. That’s easier to search, and easier to query. And we’ve seen some people do really amazing things with that, that know nothing about coding.

Paul Thurrott: 51:42 Yeah. And low code, no code is the dream. Obviously from a code perspective, you know, you want to do as little of that as possible. But this ties into the Microsoft graph stuff that we briefly discussed earlier. And for people who are familiar. It’s kind of a Microsoft environment or Microsoft 365 if this, then that type of functionality where it can pull from different data sources. And in this case, it’s building up the Microsoft graph. So it has an incredible range of data that it can pull from and it’s successful of course in third party and all that stuff.

Stephen Rose: 52:15 Absolutely.

Paul Thurrott: 52:17 All right. So we’re gonna try to do news and tips and tricks and things like that. And some of the different episodes we do. The news, this episode is not particularly new, but just to kind of recap because we talked about it the new Microsoft Edge is available, strongly recommend everybody check that out. It’s Windows 7, 8, X, 10 and the Mac. And of course it’s available on mobile as well. And in case we haven’t beaten it into your head yet, Windows 7 support has ended. And so it’s time to start time to start looking forward. And thinking about that migration to Microsoft 365 and the more modern desktop.

Stephen Rose: 52:57 Yeah. I love the new Edge, been playing with it for a while. Matter of fact, this morning we had an article that came, out talking about how we’re working with Google on some of the features that we haven’t had to really try to partner and standardize web browsers for our customers. And the fact that I can use Google extensions now in my browser. That’s been a really great thing for me, because there’s a few that we don’t have yet in our Window’s Store that are there and I was able to bring in and I’m like, this is what’s right.

Paul Thurrott: 53:24 Compatibility is amazing. I feel like I’ve been using the beta version since the beta version was a thing. In fact, I guess I was using the dev channel before that, but it’s one of those no look-back scenarios. It’s everything that’s right about Google Chrome without kind of the Google invasiveness, which is nice.

Stephen Rose: 53:42 Yeah.

Paul Thurrott: 53:42 Some nice Microsoft functionality that’s specific to that environment and Microsoft account integration or Azure active directory integration for Simon.

Stephen Rose: 53:53 I think it’s one of those things, it’s like with OneDrive when I came on board, they’re like, we’re basically redoing this. We’re starting again. We’re going to build it from scratch. We’re going to get rid of Groove, which is the problem, and just do this. Right. And I met with you know, Roger Capriati you know, right after the beta came out, I ran into him and he leads that team and I went, thank you. He’s like, we have to just start over again. And hopefully, people will give us that third chance. But absolutely, we think this is it. And I was like, it’s so fast. And it’s just, I kept seeing it get better and better and better with each release.

Paul Thurrott: 54:27 Yup. All right, well, I think that wraps up this first episode. I’ll be back soon with episode two. Thank you, sir.