- Welcome to episode 362 of the Microsoft Cloud IT Pro Podcast recorded live on November 17th, 2023. This is a show about Microsoft 365 and Azure from the perspective of it pros and end users where we discuss a topic or recent news and how it relates to you. Finally, we have our news episode where we discuss news from Microsoft Ignite.
We do actually discuss a little of the AI news, but also some interesting news around pausing virtual machines, updates to virtual machine scale sets, web application firewalls, the new Microsoft planner as well as SharePoint Premium. Today we'll talk Scott. Today we'll - Talk, what do you wanna talk about? We'll talk Ignite conferences, stuff and things. - Okay. Ignite News, copilot ai. Next topic.
We're done with our Ignite News. You just - Summed up the entire M 365 admin session, , which I hopped into. I wanted to see if there were some new things in admin centers. What have I missed? And it was all about co-pilot. Co-pilot, not how co-pilot could help you as an admin. Not even how to get ready for co-pilot. It was just about co-pilot. - Okay. Now that we talked about Ignite News, what else should we talk about?
There was actually other stuff, so there was, maybe we should ask co-pilot what we should talk about. What was the biggest news from Ignite now that Bing Chat has been renamed to Co-Pilot . Okay. The biggest news from Microsoft Ignite 2023 was the unveiling of several new AI products and expansions, including Microsoft Co-pilot for services. The, I have no idea, how do you pronounce their new chips? The Maya MEA AI chips.
- It's not pronounced Maya, but I can't pull off the other pronunciation off the top of my head. It's been a hot minute since I looked at - It. Co-Pilot studio. Yeah. Sentinel Defender, XDR, all of the other stuff. It was a lot of co-pilot, but I will say I did happen to see some other stuff that, I'll be honest, given all of the co-pilot requirements and barriers to entry to get into someone like me, I have a little bit of co-pilot AI burnout, , and it was affecting a little - Bit of envy.
- I don't know if it's envy or just I'm tired of the marketing push for it and even the push from Microsoft to different partners, different MVPs to essentially evangelize it. But yet I can't do anything with it. Hmm. Maybe it's envy that I'm masking with disinterest or maybe it's just like flat out burnout from hearing all about all this co-pilot stuff. And I feel like, here's the other thing that I've run into is I look at things like Loop and I'm trying to think what else this happened with.
I mean copilot to a certain extent. 'cause when was Copilot first announced? Was it first announced at last year's Ignite or was it build? - I believe it's been less than a year. I think it - Was like, has it been less than a year? It was - November 21st, 22nd. 2022. So almost exactly a year, which is okay. Interesting. If you think about it. So we've been just indu, like all this news thrown out about inundated. Inundated, yes. With all these things.
And it is interesting to think about it from the perspective of when's the last time Microsoft announced something and got it to GA in less than a year, across any of its kind of modern cloud stack, be it SaaS services in M 365 or new services in M 365 Azure. I'm the proud owner of an Azure feature that's been in public preview for almost two years now. , like I might say, proud owner, not exactly the proud owner.
Some stuff's been out there kicking around for a long time and co-pilot is a rapid thing. Like it's interesting to just disconnect from did you get the news you wanted at Ignite or did you get the types of content you wanted to Ignite to just step back and say, huh, , there's some interesting velocity here. I don't know if it's the right product, right time, right fit, all those kinds of things. But the velocity in and of itself is an interesting story to me. Yeah.
- And I guess from that perspective of velocity of copilot compared to Loop is absolutely super fast. Like I think the velocity of Loop was, it was announced two years before we actually started to see some of the previews. But even then, I think after the last few ignites and some of that, I mean that velocity is still announcing something and it not coming out for almost a year afterwards to me these days feels really slow.
And I think that's part of maybe my, oh, maybe some of my burnout or the disconnect or just lacking the excitement as it's like, yay, ignite, let's go watch all the sessions. But every session you watch seems to be talking about stuff that you can't really do yet. , again, co-pilot and Loop. And there were some that were announced like I think some of the Azure or the co-pilot studio stuff maybe you can start doing stuff with. And there were some public preview things that came out.
But I think it's, I don't get that excitement about watching it day one because I'm like, I can go read the blog post like two or three days later and I'm not gonna be missing anything because nothing they announced is like a rush and go try it anymore. Or I don't know. I'm trying to figure out like why was that excitement? I just didn't have that excitement for Ignite this year that I normally have. Or maybe it's that I miss the in-person, the big conference.
I miss what Ignite used to be and this just isn't the same. - I think you need to pick and choose your moments and your battles with stuff like this. I think I've resigned myself to the fact that the days of kind of deep technical conferences, which are the, don't get me wrong, like those are the things that I, I absolutely opine for. Like those don't necessarily exist anymore. I, I was watching did an internal watch party for at least the day two keynote from Guthrie.
'cause that one focuses on Azure and most of us were paying attention to the chat just to see what sediment was and what people were thinking. And I was kind of blown away that even some of the folks on our side were like, why are people in the chat saying that Ignite sucks and it's not a technical conference anymore? Why are people in the chat annoyed that they say they're spending thousands of dollars in a conference where they can't learn anything?
I was like, well my, I think not so naive take is many of these things and it's not just Ignite. I, I think AWS like reinvent is uh, very much getting this same kinda reputation. These big conferences that used to be about technical enablement are now really like sales motions, right? To get people going, which means they don't have to be technical and they probably shouldn't be, but they're still being pitched that way. But they are really marketing and architecture driven kinds of things.
So if you go and you're an admin, like I was trying to put myself in the seat of oh I've got a 200 person company and I'm taking $6,000 outta the budget to send my my my one loan admin off to Ignite. 'cause they're gonna learn all these great things and they're gonna gimme this great writeup when they come back about all of it.
You're probably gonna get a pretty dissing disappointing writeup and you're not gonna think there's a lot of ROI there because that person like first time going, they would've gone through the motions of Ooh, here's the book of news and I'm gonna go to this, what's new session and this what's new session? Or I'm gonna go to this round table or I'm gonna go to this keynote kind of thing. And that's where you're exposed to all the marketing and market architecture stuff.
Like you have to pick and choose your battles and and do that double click and go down a level which more and more I'm finding to be go to the keynotes and go to the What's new sessions and then everything else. Like you're not getting like a deep dive show off demo for actually how to do it. So if you don't get that out of it, like why not just go to those sessions and then wait for the docs to land and then go check out the docs and and do it yourself and and go on that way.
So I did that with a lot of stuff this year like like the co-pilot stuff. Not inherently interesting to me but there was some really cool stuff that was announced around virtual machines both in kind of scale also in availability. Like you can do things like hibernate your virtual machines now there's been a big push into zonal availability across Microsoft. So now you can do things like you can take VMs and a scale set like we talked about VMSS flex a while ago, a couple months ago.
Yep. So you can take VMs in those scale sets, you can realign them to different availability zones all without your application having to go offline. There is some nifty stuff that's out there. And I think some of like even the more interesting stuff, at least to me in my day-to-Day, it was actually announced pre Ignite in that big dump of news a couple weeks ago while they try and clear the decks before everything actually lands on that side.
- I don't know that I really want to go into the copilot stuff 'cause there's just so much there. I mean we could touch on some of it but if you did have to pick something, was there an announcement that you were interested in that interested you that you saw from Ignite? - At Ignite specifically, like I said it was some of the virtual machine stuff. There's a push into greater perf and scale on compute. So there's things like Azure Boost, I think that's all a big win.
Like being able to drive up to 200 gigabits a second from a client VM is an awesome capability. Does everybody need it? Absolutely not. At the same time, does everybody need to drive 650,000 IOPS from a single VM ? Eh, probably not. But I work with the kind of customers that do. So that's all like that is genuine tech enablement for the kinds of things that I work on over there. And admittedly I'm a little bit close to it.
Like we have a new service that we just launched in Storage Actions, which is a serverless compute offering that sits parallel to storage. Like it's its own resource provider but it's a purpose-built service for manipulating blobs objects. So blob and ad tion two at scale and customer storage accounts. So things like doing like massive set blob tier operations where in the past you would add a scripted out or go build an application and pick up one of our SDKs.
Like that stuff's all out in the ether and available now. And then the other interesting one is a week before announcement kind of thing, but it's something that I've been really looking for a while is they finally added rate limit rules to App gateway and the web application firewall in app gateway .
So for me, this is really cool 'cause I work in fundamentally a space where we do nothing but work on API surface with our customers all day and we try and teach 'em the API service and then we have to teach 'em perf and scale and everything that goes in it.
And you don't always have the operational controls you want as a customer there, but now like tools like that, like rate limiting in a web application firewall, well it's not ideal to have to inject like a proxy service or something that sits in the middle. It still provides a level of flexibility in application design that I think folks will appreciate.
And some of that stuff like the web application firewall thing like that was a GA announcement so it's Ooh cool, I can just take that to my customers today and and it's all ready to go and and it all works and does what it needs to do. - Nice. I definitely did not pay as close of attention to some of that type of stuff as you probably did. But I did see a couple, some of those come through. - One last really cool one that that I'll give you.
Alright, this one is like wow, I would've loved to have had this five years ago thing when I was working actively with compute customers. So it's another VMSS feature and it is attach and detach of virtual machines within virtual machine scale sets. - Oh I did see that one.
- Yes. So one of the big problems that I always had with VMSS is if you had to take a machine down, like you had to do like a scale down operation to take something out 'cause it was misbehaving your opportunity to really capture and play with that machine was limited to a certain degree. Yeah, there were things you could do, go capture logs, do memory dumps or whatever you had to do. Then you had to go through and do all that analysis.
Like I'm a firm believer in if it's running and you can capture it at the time it's running like with an actual reproducible event, you're way better off than you are having to go down those other kinds of paths. So what attach and detach does, so this is something that works with, again, virtual machine scale sets VMSS flex I believe specifically is what it does. But it lets you take a single VM and you can either move a VM or you can detach a vm.
So you attach detach from okay an existing virtual machine scale set all with no downtime. So say you had a scale set that sits out there and you need to inject like a new virtual machin as a sidecar for logging or something like that. You can just boom, go ahead and stand. You can stand up and configure that entire VM outside in isolation and then just go ahead and shift it into your scale set when it's ready.
That earlier one earlier one earlier, the earlier one earlier, you can tell my brain's really fried this week about being able to do things like detach so great that you were scaled out to five VMs in your VM scale set. One is misbehaving and you really want to see what it's doing and why it's misbehaving but obviously you don't wanna do that while it's in the scale set 'cause you need to continue to surface customer traffic and and all those kinds of things.
Great. You just go ahead and uh, pull it out of that existing skillset. Like it's super easy to do all arm API driven kind of stuff. So the rest APIs there, CLI, PowerShell, all that stuff really slick like it just works. - Yeah, the public preview of how to do this, it's like you get the VM and you get the scale set and you just update it and that's all there is to it. It's what four lines of PowerShell to add it to the skillset and then two lines to remove it from.
So yeah, it's not at all complex, hard to do anything like that. Super straightforward and simple and - Public docs are out there for it. So it's in preview today. Preview is not for production, blah blah blah, that kind of stuff. But if this is something you've been looking for, it just works.
And I think it's another interesting one because we talked in the past when we talked about VMSS flex, we talked about it as this new way to think about virtual machine scale sets and how orchestration mode could potentially impact some of the things you're doing. This is only available with VMSS flex. So I think it goes more to a little bit of that writing on the wall that like hey, there's no reason not to use VMSS flex over just straight virtual machine scale sets.
Like you get all the additive benefits of scale sets plus the flexibility of flex and sorry that one was purposeful to go ahead and be able to make these things really start to work for you. Which I think is important. There's a ton of friction in the cloud in general and there still is. So the more that these things just work the way you would expect them to, the easier life is for everybody. - Yep, a hundred percent.
So I have one Scott, this is going to go down as one of those that could end up frustrating me Going back to all the reasons I talked about before, but I think we've talked about this before in my flu frustration, frustration is a new word. It's a combination of getting me flustered and frustrated with planner and task management and that I feel like there's a million different places to do it and no uniformity. This is either going to be really good or completely fall apart.
But there is a new Microsoft planner, a unified experience bringing together to-dos tasks, plans and projects. There's AI stuff in here naturally because what would be ignite without AI stuff, but if you go past all the AI stuff, this is an effort to start trying to combine everything together in some sort of fashion. I don't know how it's gonna turn out but in November of 2023, so this month we are going to have tasks by planner in todo in teams is gonna be renamed to planner.
So not a big change there, it's just getting renamed as task by planner and to do to planner spring. The new planner app in teams is gonna be generally available. And this is another interesting aspect of this Microsoft project for the web will be renamed to planner and then later in 2024 these timeframes get vaguer and vaguer more and more vague as you go. Like we go from November to spring to just later in 2024.
So could be summer, fall, winter, we don't know the web experience of the new planner will be generally available Features one Love and Microsoft project for the web will be available and the new planner app and teams and the new planner web app, again they say they're combining everything. To me this sounds a lot like to-do may still exist but it's really a combination of bringing planner and project for the web together into this new planner.
And I get the aspect of having to do is still a separate app like to do is my task management, it's tasks assigned to me. My tasks that I add into like personal tasks or some of that todo is let's bring all my tasks together where Planner is a little bit more team task management oriented. But my biggest frustration was there was still a lot of stuff missing from planner.
Like the aspect that I couldn't just get a holistic view of all the tasks and planner or say here's the five plans that I'm the manager of. Show me all of the tasks across all of my team members for these plans.
This is where it's just me hoping that as they redo this and maybe bring some of the project management stuff from project into planner, that planner will actually get a lot better when it comes to that enterprise work management because I felt like they rolled it out and it's languished in my opinion over the last year or two. Nobody's really made a ton of updates to it.
There's been little stuff here and there but it feels like there hasn't been any real investment in it or improvement to some of these features we all are missing. Hopefully we'll see some of that. But this is gonna be again, one of those that to really see the benefit. I think it's gonna be like six months, nine months down the road it'll be one to watch. And let me tell you, any cha time I have a chance to provide some feedback on what I think should be in here.
I will absolutely do it because I mean at Microsoft 365 I would love to use Planner over Jira work management. We've talked about it. That's what I use right now is just from a pure work management perspective it has so much more functionality than Planner does. - 100% - . I'm hoping that we'll see some updates, some changes come with this, but that is one that was not necessarily AI driven outta the conference that I am going to keep an eye on because I would love to bring that in.
There are some things in planet Earth that I really like, like being able to time to a team, being able to do some of the document attachment stuff, some of that, that it just works better natively with some of the other Microsoft 365 stuff. So we, we will see this - One's hard for me. So my problem with planner isn't necessarily planner it's planner in the disparate nature of it, right? Like like there's no cohesion at all to all the various to-do services.
Like the plans that you make in plans are not the same as the like a task list in SharePoint which are not the same as your flagged items in Outlook, which are definitely not the same as project. There's varying levels of things there and that's not the worst thing in the world, right? Like right tool for the right job. The problem is there's a whole bunch of tools and it's not always clear like what the right one is And this doesn't seem to solve that problem.
Like if I read between the lines on this blog post, this is all the same services on the backend and a fancy new ui - New front end. Yeah - Like we've put a, we've put a new proxy on it but we haven't fixed the underlying problem of I flag an email and Outlook and I have a task in a SharePoint list. Like how do those two things actually come together and play?
Like in my head, if you're striving for simplification, like one path is you do it like this, you put everything in a unified UI and then you live with the disparate nature. The other thing is you make this the surface and the container for tasks and for all these different things and then those other services start to consume them.
So rather than having five disparate services pulled together under one banner, what if you had one banner that was then just consumed by those services that could that go the other way? It makes sense and I don't get the sense from this that this fixes - That problem. - At least some of my underlying frustrations there and there's a whole lot of like me personally in there, right?
Just having to flip through all these different tools throughout the day and everything else like there because there becomes a point with all this stuff, right? I think like SharePoint files and teams generally works until it doesn't work. 'cause you need to go over to SharePoint and do something and it's like this in so many places, right? You eventually hit that wall where it's like oh that doesn't do that thing. So now I guess I just go to the canonical service that actually hosts it.
And that's really only helpful to you even if you know the canonical services there, which I don't think many users do. Like it's not always clear the other way to hop out for - That. Yeah and I think that's to where I'm waiting to see what happens with planner because I'm with you. Like we should just get rid of the ability to do task lists and SharePoint and if you want a task list and SharePoint put in planner, like why do we need boards and a SharePoint list?
Why do we need, and I get different tools for different people, they all like different things but it does create a lot of confusion. And to your point about Outlook, that's been one of my biggest gripes with Planner for years is like you said, you can flag one in Outlook, flag an email and Outlook and it goes to do, but it doesn't help me give that task to somebody else that needs to handle that thing.
That came in via my email and there was, I don't know if it was un user voice, I found it in tight community like two and a half years ago. Someone asked for, Hey can we add an Outlook email to a planner task? Like we need an add-in And this is one thing that Jira - Does be Simple thing, right? - Add to planner. And it was like there was a response from Microsoft that said we're working on it two and a half years ago and here we are again. Fingers crossed that maybe they fix some of that.
And this is giving it new life. If it's similar to what you said and it's just a new UI on top of three different services and there's no really new functionality like adding tasks from Outlook or some of that, then I'm gonna be disappointed. I - Don't know but uh, like just reading and - Right and I don't either - From what I know of the way things work and reading between the lines and reading that blog posts like that seems like a new coat of paint.
Maybe not lipstick on a pig but it's you, you're masking over some of the, some of the underlying things that exist there, which could actually be like the more problematic area. Like just that bigger rock that you wanna go up and turn over and and see what you can make happen. I don't know on - That side. Yes I - Don't. I got another one just while we got a little bit of time. - Do you feel overwhelmed by trying to manage your Office 365 environment?
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You're gonna have to help me out here and deal with the stupidity. That is Scott sometimes. So SharePoint premium was announced. - Oh we're jumping down to this one, - We're gonna do this one 'cause you have a limited amount of time which means you can't rant and I can get you worked up before your next meeting . So SharePoint Premium, what the heck is SharePoint Premium? 'cause SharePoint's already a premium product. I already pay money for it. Good - Question. I don't know .
- Oh I thought you were gonna be ready for, it's your show. These are your notes, your links come on. - No I am not ready for this. So, well I threw 'em out here. Here's the best I can figure is it's SharePoint copilot if you want my general overall honest opinion on SharePoint premium.
I have not read this but this deals a lot more from what I understand with the culmination of what they actually announced back in May at the SharePoint conference where it was starting to tie in some of the being able to use AI to help with . This is where it all gets weird to be able to help with the content in SharePoint. So you've talked about like you write your newsletters in SharePoint, right?
Mm-Hmm . And you were excited about the whole functionality of now I can write those newsletters in SharePoint, send 'em out as emails. All of that I think based on my understanding is some of this SharePoint premium stuff is now you can leverage AI to help you write those newsletters to help you format 'em to help you bring content together, bring those types of things into SharePoint, not to be confused with what you are gonna be able to do in co-pilot.
Some of the, I don't know if it's in here, I need to look through this article 'cause this is a long article. Make sure the right information is shared sensitive information doesn't accidentally overshared and exposed in search or co-pilot. So there's a little bit of this go by SharePoint premium to help you get ready for co-pilot because SharePoint premium is also gonna extend some of the traditional IT controls around governance, auto tagging.
I saw some, this just gets weird Scott 'cause then I saw some stuff about co-pilot for topics. But topics is technically still a SharePoint ish feature but I don't know that SharePoint premium gives you co-pilot and topics or if co-pilot and topics is Microsoft 365 co-pilot. The lines blurred here for me some in terms of what exactly this is. I think there's some security stuff in here.
I think there's some additional insights around how people interact with your content, what people are viewing with your content, some of that type of stuff too. But it's interesting then 'cause as you go down in this article where they talk about SharePoint premium, they start talking about Microsoft 365 backup and archive. And this may just be, see this says introducing SharePoint premium, the future of AI powered content management. So that kinda sums it up. It's AI powered.
But when they talk about backup and archive, that is not SharePoint premium. That's starting to get into the pay-as-you-go services and stuff for Microsoft Syntex. So this article is a little deceiving and that some of the things mentioned here, no it's not necessarily Syntex is getting - Rolled into premium. Okay, I have a different take than you. So and maybe this is based on past life kinds of things.
So if I'm reading between the lines on this one, this is Microsoft making a little bit of a play to actually turn SharePoint after how many years into a proper document management service or a content management service. So if you think about, I don't know if you've ever done customer work on top of things like OpenText or laser fee or Highland like OnBase, anything like that.
Like every organization I've worked in that has those tools, they also have SharePoint and it's been always just a major pain. A major contentious thing.
So I look at a lot of the things that are coming in here like built-in document viewers, native e-signatures and signing better metadata and movement and security controls, stuff like that is all playing around in the content service platform space where there's already some big kind of players and I wonder if Microsoft can finally make it work. 'cause every job that I had, like when I used to, I I used, I worked in a couple law firms.
Every single law firm I worked in had some form of Laserfiche going on. Like I learned to love to hate it kind of thing. 'cause you had to, and again those organizations also had SharePoint and full on Office stack and all the things that come with them. There's a whole world of stuff out there that isn't done in SharePoint 'cause Microsoft was never interested in it. And some of this stuff is they've finally run out of other things to build.
So now they can go after some of the established stuff. - I kinda get that. But they also talk about SharePoint premium. I put this in the Discord chat too. Our advanced content management and experience platform for next evolution of syntax. Okay I that's where it's coming from. The syntax SharePoint Premium brings AI automation added security to content experience processing and governance.
SharePoint premium will be transitioning services already part of syntax including SharePoint Advance Management to join SharePoint services. So I get all of this, this is all coming. So that's where you're getting it from is that's all gonna be in SharePoint premium. Then my next question is, is given this is another sku, are you gonna have to pay for SharePoint premium or is SharePoint Premium the umbrella that all of these services sit under?
Because the next link that you'll see down is the, essentially all of this stuff that we're talking about is transitioning to a pay-as-you-go services and it's still labeled pay-as-you-go services and pricing for syntax. So pre-built document processing has a price per transaction structure.
Freeform document processing has a price per transaction, unstructured document processing, content assembly, image tagging, taxonomy tagging, e-signatures, typical character recognition, OCR, Microsoft 365 archive and Microsoft 365 backup are all priced based on transactions or in the case of backup and archive are based on the amount of storage you're consuming. So is premium just a skew you light up and tie a credit card to so that all of this stuff is what SharePoint Premium is?
- Good question one. Has the office team ever really rationalized licensing in a way that that makes sense? I don't know that they have ever done some of those things. So licensing aside, it's funny if you go so to to your point like that quote of SharePoint Premium is an advanced content management experience platform. It brings AI automation added security to your content experiences, processing and governance.
Great. The rest of it's all about just transitioning right from existing services. So if I go and read like OnBase from Highland Highland's OnBase platform automates your processes, manages your important business content and works with your other applications to provide users with a complete view of the right information when and where they need it. OnBase gives you visibility into the statuses of processes, documents and information and automates and supports retention requirements.
This allows you to transform your internal processes and customer experience, reduce your opt uh, operating costs and minimize risk. Sounds pretty darn familiar. like basically one for one, they're coming over to this space so they're, they're finally trying to bolt office into a proper content platform. I'm gonna get my popcorn out for this one 'cause it'll get interesting really fast. - So now I'm even more confused 'cause you keep reading in the article under availability.
If you're following along and you want to go read this availability, we're bringing SharePoint, I'm reading these a little bit out of order but it's all under availability. We're bringing SharePoint premium to broad availability in the first half of 2024. So next seven months, both SharePoint premium seat licenses. So there is gonna be a seat license for this and Pego services. mm-Hmm can be used independently and combined to meet your business requirements.
So it sounds like there is gonna be some aspect of SharePoint premium that isn't syntax or is there some of those syntax like topics for instance I think technically falls under syntax but I thought they transitioned all of syntax out of uh, per user model into a PEGO model. They have not but now it sounds isn't it all out of Pego yet? Nope. Are you sure? - Yep. Positive. So , this is another sneaky one.
So if you go to the adoption hub, so you go to SharePoint premium [email protected] Yep. The overview of SharePoint premium link that leans you directly on the overview of Microsoft Syntax article straight up like you're just going there and then you can dive into syntax stuff from there. Where lysing for syntax is both pay as you go per user licensing and then the per use stuff as well that comes in it.
So one would think just from the way it's all wired up today, the syntax documentation just gets rebranded. Like they do a mass rename , they call it SharePoint premium and then they pull archive and back up underneath those and then hopefully customers have access to those as pego services without the need to consume some type of like per user license and SharePoint premium as well.
But that clarity is not there - But that doesn't so 'cause it talks about SharePoint premium becoming probably available next year, which means there's certain stuff that's obviously not there yet. - Backup and archive aren't there today. You - Think those are the only two nor - Are some of the content services stuff, right?
If they actually wanna make a play as a content services platform, having things like a built-in content viewer critical like that doesn't exist for all forms of content in SharePoint today. Having things like e-signatures and like verified metadata movement, all that stuff doesn't exist in SharePoint today. That's the stuff that's to come and and be bolted in. But Synt syntax is there. You can go do syntax. - Syntax is there right - Now.
You can go do M 365 backup archive like that stuff's all kicking out in preview. That's all out there as well. Actually E-signatures are there too 'cause you can do e-signatures in in syntax. - E-signature is there too. Yeah, - So there's a good portion of it that already does exist, - Right? Well 'cause that's under availability before it says we'll bring all of this broadly available. The first half of 2024 it says you can start using SharePoint premium today.
Like you can start using SharePoint premium today and we're bringing SharePoint premium to broad availability in the first half of 2024 are both under availability. So it's like sort of there but not really there and lead it up to you. And then it does lists like content processing - More to come - . Yeah. Is there content assembly, OCR E-signature, all the pego stuff. You can also purchase governance for the SharePoint advanced management.
Then it lists services under the syntax brand that are moving to the premium brand in 2024. So maybe that's some of it is, it's broadly available in the first half of 2024 when syntax gets officially renamed to premium. And that article you sent does break it out as all those pego things at the top under syntax.
And then it does have some other features listed that maybe these are under premium that aren't PayGo like annotations content query, which is metadata based queries on SharePoint document libraries. I thought that was search but you can do it with search. You've been able to do it in search based on content queries with metadata since 2007 Days of SharePoint. - Nevermind that it's new now. - I mean it's been content query forever, right?
SharePoint search it used literally was called like you could go create content query rules in your SharePoint search in SharePoint 2007 but that's neither here nor there. - Listen, you're dating yourself now. Yeah I - Am. Margin and extract PDFs, processing rules, simple rule driven actions and document libraries based on metadata. Okay, let's go create a flow and power automate that processes my content based on metadata. Maybe it gets made simpler, I don't know.
But that's just new skin on features that already exist. Solution accelerators, site templates, solution accelerators, new term SharePoint site templates for Microsoft syntax are pre-built, ready to deploy and customizable use these templates otherwise known as solution accelerators. Tending appliance like I don't know, I don't, it's so con I'm confused.
How's that? I have read the articles a little bit but there's a lot of stuff in here that, oh I don't know all the SharePoint premium stuff other than maybe merge and extract PDFs. Sounds like stuff that you can already do. Maybe annotations and then all the other stuff Sounds like pego stuff that's already there under syntax. We've come - Full circle. We started at Ignite is a marketing and architecture conference and we have come all the way back around to marketing and architecture - .
Yes. Which by the way e-signatures and SharePoint maybe it's nice 'cause it's built in and it's only pay per go but that seems really expensive to me. Did you see the price on that? - I would encourage you to go look at the pricing for some of the other products in this space that do similar things and tell me if you think they're cheap. It's been a hot minute since I've worked on a Highland but it like was not cheap 10 years ago.
, I doubt it's gotten any cheaper. Maybe - The advantages is that you are paying per signature request for a transaction. I've been a, I don't do a lot of e-signatures. I've been on a free plan a DocuSign for 10 years that does more than enough e-signatures for me and I've never paid for it. Well - Remember the intent here isn't to compete with DocuSign DocuSign's, its its own little beast. So this doesn't have to be DocuSign, but - For e-signature, no, but e-signature.
I mean your standard plan. I don't, I get that maybe it's some of the other stuff obviously isn't, but I feel like e-signature, you're really competing with DocuSign in Adobe. You're not, there's a bunch of other ones that are way more expensive - In this world of content platform systems. Yeah, there are other options.
They cost the same if not more and Microsoft potentially tries to eat their lunch because if you think about it for somebody like an OnBase or a Laser FE or something like that to integrate with SharePoint, they're stuck at the API surface. I'll give you like a good example. If you go to a law firm and that law firm uses Laserfiche today, all of their emails actually get ingested in there as documents in that system.
So like your email gets a document ID every single email you send every single document you write every single version of that document like they all get captured and go through this workflow and do these things. So if you think about the friction for those vendors to integrate in the office ecosystem, Microsoft definitely has an advantage here in that they can see the APIs as they're coming.
They can potentially influence the design decisions and how those APIs are built now all to their advantage for what's arguably a pretty tightly integrated system already. And yeah, you just tack these things on here. If this costs the same exact amount of money as an existing content platform and somebody builds a migration engine for it, you'd be hard pressed as a customer not to make that argument as
to like why you just wouldn't do this. Why - You just, I get that from a, if you're looking at the holistic content processing, I guess I have enough clients that aren't doing maybe the holistic content processing that are just like we need signatures on contracts - And your clients. So in that case, but your clients are not thinking about let me go buy the most premium of the premium service. They're saying I need to do signatures on the country.
- I just need to do a signature, - I need to do metadata movement in this single list over here from this thing not right. Every single document that goes into my environment needs a unique document id. Every single version needs to be versioned under that same document. And it all needs to have these set pieces of metadata that's a totally different class of business problems, regulatory kind of things that you have to go and solve for.
- So, and that's where you see Docu or SharePoint Premium is trying to wiggle their way into its more that's space or those types of customers that it might be trying to appeal to. - I think so. Like I read all this and I look at it and the way it composes, I would've personally killed for this a long time ago back when I was, but a lowly SharePoint developer.
And I worked for a couple really big law firms like top 10 in in, in the world by like size revenue, things like that as a SharePoint developer in those places. Like I would've killed for things like this and to have access to this rather than the mishmash of stuff that came along with other, the - Stuff you put together. - Content services. Yeah. Got - It. See, and I have not, I will say that is one area from a massive law firm like that.
I have not had a ton of experience so I would not be able to adequately talk to how well this works. Maybe you should come back to the SharePoint world now that you have this Scott. No - , no. Not gonna happen. I'm gonna, I'm gonna stick to my crazy world of APIs and SDKs and live that life. - Alright, well we should probably wrap this up. 'cause like you said, I do have a meeting now that you got me all worked up.
Yeah, I know. I do have some other Ignite stuff we can talk about in some future episodes. All right. There were some interesting security announcements too. We'll leave you with that. Some interesting stuff in the Microsoft Defender landscape. - XDR. Yeah, we'll come back and talk about that one. Yeah. - , you mean what happened to 365 tease everybody with that. Alright, sounds good. Well thanks Scott. Yep. Thanks Ben.
Go enjoy your weekend. We are recording this shortly before Thanksgiving, so anybody here, well you won't hear this before Thanksgiving, so enjoy your Thanksgiving. Scott, anybody in the US that hears this afterwards, I hope you enjoyed your Thanksgiving. And don't forget Thanksgiving, December holidays, all the next few months trying to continue to do our fundraiser with Girls Who Code.
So there will be a link in the show notes for that to try to top what we were able to get last year or what people donated last year to Girls Who Code. See if we can do a little better this year. Indeed. Go check that out and we will talk to you next week. Great, - Thanks Ben. - If you enjoyed the podcast, go leave us a five star rating in iTunes. It helps to get the word out so more IT Pros can learn about Office 365 and Azure.
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