- Welcome to episode 376 of the Microsoft Cloud IT Pro podcast recorded live on May 3rd, 2024. This is a show about Microsoft 365 and Azure from the perspective of it pros and end users where we discuss the topic or recent news and how it relates to you. The Microsoft 365 Community Conference was this week down in Orlando, Florida, and Ben went down there to get the scoop. So in this episode we'll be discussing some of the latest exciting developments and announcements from the conference.
From the announcement of SharePoint E-signature integration with Adobe to the newest OneDrive capabilities. There's plenty to talk about. So sit back, relax and get ready to dive into the world of Microsoft 365. You know what I found out, I didn't realize this until like yesterday or maybe it was like in the back of my head, but it didn't click the live 360 conference down in Orlando that we used to present at when there was an office in SharePoint Track.
Now there's not that, but there's like Tech Mentor that still has a bunch of Microsoft 365 content is the exact same week as Ignite in Chicago. - Well that'll be interesting for them. - I submitted to speak at it and if they accept me now I don't know what I'm gonna do. Do I say no and go to Ignite? It's - Just extra hotel points. You're fine. - Or trying to like skip on one and make half of both of 'em or I don't know.
But if you're looking at conferences, ignite and Live 360 in Orlando are the same week in November, the week before Thanksgiving. One of them in Orlando, one of them in Chicago. I will let you choose which is the nicer place to go the week before Thanksgiving. suppose it depends on if you like cold or warm. - I have one thought. Yeah, do Do you like hurricanes or snow? That's your . Those are your choices. - We don't have hurricanes anymore in November.
- No, we have them year round now. You're right. We don't have them in November. We just have 'em all the time. - Yes, I was at the Microsoft 365 Community conference last week. It was interesting. - What'd you learn? Nothing. I'm looking forward to your, your report from Boots on the Ground. I - Learned there were like, I mean there were a few. Okay, so here was the interesting thing about this. There was the key, well there were actually two keynotes.
I don't, I don't know, I don't know if I want to get into this. There was like a keynote and then a 15 minute break and then another keynote. I don't know why they just didn't make one hour and a half keynote, but I'm not scheduling. Maybe people needed a break between keynotes. Interesting thing. I actually did not learn a whole lot in the keynote itself.
But then after the keynote there were some articles that were published on the blog or during the keynote that had some things that I was like, huh, I don't remember them actually talking about this in the keynote and the keynotes. Were I okay, I'm not even gonna say. What do you think the keynotes were about Scott? Ai - Co-Pilots. Yes. Something, something ai, - All of those things.
And then there's were some other announcements last week that were like, not copilot, not ai, but they didn't make it in the keynote. So I learned some things via blog post, not necessarily via the keynotes or any of the sessions. And I will say, in all honesty, I did not go to many of the sessions.
I did the keynotes. I like popped into one or two sessions, but most of the time I was just hanging out, chatting with people, meeting people, hanging out in the community area, the Ask the experts area. And we've talked about it before. For me, the conferences are much more about the networking, the meeting people, the chatting with the product team team. 'cause Microsoft did have a big presence there. There were like 300 Microsoft employees there.
So I got to talk to people from the teams team and some of the co-pilot teams and a bunch of other friends that we have gotten to know from various conferences. - I'm jealous of the hallway track. I do miss the hallway track very much. We're gearing up for BUILD right now and kind of working our way through sessions and finding moderators and all those things. And I'm about to go through yet another cycle of being a virtual moderator. .
- Oh, I was gonna ask if you're actually gonna be there for Builder if you're a virtual build participant. - I'm a virtual participant, virtual virtual chat moderator. Scott, we have a super fun session though coming up on how to use surprise surprise, how to use object storage blob storage for your AI training needs. So kind of every cycle of AI training from storing raw data to doing any kind of inference on top of that data. Particularly like this world.
And I think it's relevant to Microsoft customers who are particularly being exposed to things like copilot because copilot is, you know, in many cases, at least in the context of M 365, it's doing a ton of things like retrieval, augmented generation or rag. Yeah. Like hey, I want to summarize this document.
Well there's a retrieval step in there where the document actually has to be ingested, tokenized, sent out to the LLM and then you know, meta prompts constructed and then, ooh, I got a response back, let's put it back to the client. That kind of thing. So it turns out that, you know, like object storage is a, and this has been kind of interesting to me and, and my learning is object storage is a very big part of that.
The, the number of customers who I work with today is like for things like AZ copy is vastly different than the the cohorts of customers that I was working with a couple years ago on it. Especially like some of these like AI companies or companies who are building AI products, of which it's like the wild wild west out there. So, got it. I have no idea that you will see any stability in this space for some time.
, it seems to be like all net new, like everybody's kind of in running fast, fail fast and recover fast if you do fail mode right now. So it, it's kind of a weird time to be in tech again. - Yeah, so I guess we can watch for that at Build. I'm guessing there's gonna be more news at Build and that was kinda, I think the unfortunate thing about the Microsoft 365 community conference was that it was so close to build. 'cause what BUILD is like two weeks. Two weeks and like four days out.
And while BUILD is typically a more develop focused conference, there's always been news and we've talked about this before as well, that relates to, IT pros to the technology space in general and naturally Microsoft is going to save some of the announcements, some new stuff for build.
And with it being this close to the conference, the Microsoft 365 community conference and build really being a much larger audience, I think the two conferences being so close together resulted in maybe not as much news in this conference as maybe if they were spread out by a couple months or something - . Yeah, it's tough to balance it. Also official I I think weighing official Microsoft conference against Community C - Conference - Community.
Yep. And kind of third party tends to be part of the calculus there too. But why don't we get into some of this and, and some of the things that you discovered in your course of traveling M 365 community conference as our intrepid podcast reporter. - The first one that I found interesting again via blog article is that everybody uses e, well I won't say everybody uses E-signatures, but E-signatures are popular, right?
DocuSign, Adobe Sign, all of those bundled in with syntax now known as SharePoint Premium, maybe a few other names throughout the course of things, course of its life there is a SharePoint E-signature solution. And when it was first announced released it was only doing e-signatures with a Microsoft E-signature solution. So it was kind of a homegrown Microsoft embedded one on April 30th.
So the first day of the conference like this last Tuesday for when we're recording it, there wasn't announcement that Microsoft is going to allow you to use this SharePoint E-signature solution that's a part of SharePoint premium with both Adobe or with DocuSign.
So if you have SharePoint Premium, if you're using this e-signature solution coming, I believe it's this summer, summer of 2024, which we were talking about this a little bit before, it's the cloud summer can mean like June, July, August, maybe even now stuff doesn't hit at the same time. So you tend to get like summer fall because it'll maybe trickle out over the course of a few weeks or even a month. You'll be able to integrate this particular solution with Adobe or DocuSign.
And if you already have a paid subscription to one of these, which frankly a lot of customers that I've worked with already do, you'll be able to go connect Adobe or DocuSign into the SharePoint E-signature solution and then it's not going to be a part of that pay as you go. Where I think like Micro, if you were using the built in Microsoft E-signature, it was like a dollar 50 per signature or something like that. They do say once you connect in here and set up Adobe Sign, it's part of syntax.
You do have to have the PayGo aspect of it set up, but you don't get charged for it because you're leveraging your Adobe subscription or your DocuSign subscription. - Yeah, I was a little confused like, and I heard conflicting messaging there about the requirement for premium versus non-prem and then just PayGo and basically, hey you're already paying in this case Adobe or DocuSign for access to their solution. And the docs definitely did not clear it up for me.
- This is about the only blurb as is using the third party offering of E-signature for Microsoft is free pay as you go billing must be set up but customers will not be charged. However, customers must ensure that they have a valid license with Adobe or DocuSign.
And the other thing about this that's, I don't know if it's a little confusing, but it will cause customers to kinda have to work through how they want this to, how they wanna leverage this is like I have DocuSign now and there's a DocuSign add in already as a part of the app store for SharePoint.
So I already just go in when I set up a new site that I want e-signatures on, add the DocuSign extension and or the DocuSign add in and then any document in that site I can click into and send it out for E-signature.
This looks like it adds a little bit different interaction where you can like open up a document and then click to go get signatures and choose if you wanna use the SharePointy signature DocuSign Adobe sign, like almost right from the file preview in SharePoint versus kinda redirecting over the DocuSign site. - I was gonna say this one uses the native file viewer, which is a far cleaner integration.
So if it in fact ends up that it doesn't require SharePoint premium or additional licensing and you end up in just a PayGo model even where you're not charged for it, that's like the ideal state of things I think. 'cause you're giving users native integration at that point without saying like, Hey you have to, you can't go to your document library, you gotta go over to this web part or this integration that I've added over here kind of thing.
Yep. So it should be far more seamless from that perspective and just kind of like, hey I'm, I'm gonna get this going and ready to go. The other interesting thing is, and I don't know how this manifests, like it wasn't very clear, I gotta kind of wait until it turns on is you can add multiple providers . So like if you go in, the way it works today is, or at least the, the kind of announcement for it is you go in and you turn on these signature providers.
So you say like, well you would think like, well maybe I'm not a SharePoint e-signature provider, but I am an Adobe, an Adobe Acrobat Sign Pro customer. So you would think like, okay great, I checked off Adobe Acrobat sign and I didn't check off DocuSign. DocuSign won't show in the list for you, but SharePoint E-signature always will, whether it's on or off. And that's a little weird too.
So like lots of like hand waving fuzziness here, what else is new, right like when new things launch I like, do you have to go in configure e-signature first, which then has all those requirements around turning on like content AI with Microsoft Syntax, doing all that stuff, wiring that up, accepting terms of service, enabling it, blah blah blah.
And then even like enabling e-signature on a a site by site or library by library by library basis and then coming back and turning in DocuSign or Acrobat sign. So it, I think it'll be good at the end of the day, especially for those customers who are already using those solutions. But the pessimist in me also says like, Ooh, there's not gonna be ever be a way for you to move that SharePoint E-signature button and you're just, you're, you're people are gonna see it all the time, right?
And it's gonna be first in the list and that's what your users are gonna click and then they're gonna get an error message or they're gonna be coming to you and saying, Hey, why doesn't the signature thing work? - So I'm also curious though, like is it not gonna work or because you've already set up like the PayGo subscription, are you gonna get billed for like will it walk 'em through the process and you end up
getting billed for the signature? That would be my, - I'm a human shrug emoji, right? I know. Not like . - That would be my big concern. Like I hope that as this rolls out you'd have the option to only have one because like you said, it either creates a bunch of confusion or a bunch of training and potentially a bunch of bills you shouldn't necessarily be charged for because users clicked on the wrong one. So I really, I hope they work that out.
But I do agree with you that this presents a lot cleaner interface, especially if you can go just turn this on and say enable it for every site. Like I said, I'm not installing an add in them every time. And I did see even like different add in models are getting deprecated in SharePoint and I did see it pop up on my DocuSign of like, Hey, this add in model is going away by such and such a date. I'd have to - Pull it up. No, that's the other thing that's coming. Yep.
At some point all that stuff breaks anyway. Yeah. - And I'm like so what's gonna be the solution if I have DocuSign and maybe this is it, maybe it's like, okay, Microsoft and DocuSign are working together. There's not gonna be an add-in like this will be the solution for e-signatures and SharePoint. Whether it's Adobe DocuSign, SharePoint, e-signature, maybe others will come down the road. 'cause I know like Fox, it also has an e-signature solution in their cloud platform.
But it was nice to see Adobe and DocuSign added again, hope it cleans up. I'm gonna go turn this on and play with it once I have it because I do use DocuSign for my e-signatures. - I think that one will get some use. It's probably, I don't know, again, the pessimist to me says it's gonna be like a user training nightmare but whatever. It's SharePoint . We'll see that's the name of the game. That's how you keep trainers in business, right?
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Remember intelligent focuses on the Microsoft cloud so you can focus on your business. So is there another news announcement you wanted or do you want me to move on to some of my other ones? - Like you said like the theme is definitely the AI copilot thing. We should probably talk a little bit about OneDrive and what's gonna be changing there, which is, so this is all OneDrive for business
and not OneDrive consumer. Yeah - And we can jump into OneDrive 'cause there's definitely some, I would say some interesting things here. And there was an article that was published again as a part of the conference, some new stuff, some not new stuff where I am getting up to the top of it. It was the newest OneDrive capabilities. Again, some new, some not like colored folders was in here, which I could be a conversation in and of itself. A copilot is coming to OneDrive.
So this one will be interesting. I'm excited to get this one. This was not necessarily a new announcement. There was an announcement back in February that copilot is coming to OneDrive this summer. This was kind of a reiteration of it's coming and I did go look at the Microsoft 365 roadmap and this is listed on the Microsoft 365 roadmap as being modified. It's funny, it was last updated April one, but rollout is starting May, 2024. So we are now three days into May.
I do not have it in my environment yet, but this one should start showing up for people any day. And this kind of brings some neat functionality where it's copilot. I have yet to see how it works because I will say I have copilot can be copilot has an attitude sometimes like it's artificial intelligence with a mind of its own.
I don't know if that's kind of the goal of artificial intelligence, but my copilot sometimes appears to be thinking a little bit too much for itself when I want it to just listen to me. - We get access and you know there's all sorts of like internal training sessions on AI and how to, so like I work in, I'm a product manager in Azure so you know there's lots of things out there about like how to think about using AI in your products and everything like that.
And for me working with like SDKs and client tools for storage, like I'm keenly interested in like hey should we go build you know, new client tools or pick up some of these ML frameworks and things like that and attach them. I've been trying to do like professional development and hop into these sessions when I can. I was in one earlier today , funny enough, and the topic of hallucinations with LLMs came up and I find hallucinations to be more prevalent.
They, they seem to get more prevalent over the time. They don't seem to be getting better. Uh, and maybe it's the data that I'm feeding things or just the universe of stuff that I work with. So I'm kind of annoyed by hallucinations and I actually think they're really bad for like normal people who just take computers at face value. Like they don't question enough like is this telling me the right thing? But anyway, they were doing this session and somebody asked like are hallucinations bad?
And one of the presenters said, you know, hallucinations aren't bad. Sometimes bugs are features and just like moved on to the next topic. And I was like, yeah but that's like it's a bug bug. It's not a, it's not a feature bug - . I was playing with it with Jira today. So I finally got the Jira plugin working in my copilot, this is slight tangent here.
And I asked it, I was like show me all of my overdue tasks in Jira Cloud and put it in a table and it gave me a nice table with this was the due date, this is the status of the task. And then where it would have the task description, it said link to external content has been removed for privacy reasons. And I was like, what? I don't, I don't get that. Like these are my tasks and this is my plugin and this is not like a public conversation.
I don't know what it means that it was removed for privacy. So I asked it the same thing. I like copied and pasted my question and then put a period and said, but show me the external links. And then it just, instead of pulling my tasks, it gave me a link to an article on how to go to Jira and like write a query to pull in my overdue tasks. And I was like, I'm asking you the same question, I'm just putting some additional qualifiers on it.
But you're returning completely different results and results in one is coming from Jira, one is coming from the web, like this doesn't seem right and this, it does kind of go back to a conversation I did have when I was at Ignite and I was talking to some of developer types 'cause they know a little bit more about plugins than I do.
And there are some things and how like copilot goes and figures out, based on your question, it goes and looks at all the data sources but based on your question it like has to determine where should I pull this data from? Is it coming from the web, is it coming from SharePoint, is it coming from the Jira for cloud plugin? And they said there like there's a bunch of stuff going on in the background and like in this case it just decided it was gonna pull from the web instead of Jira.
The second time I asked the question. Mm-Hmm it's just stuff to work through. - It's a series of meta prompts and other things that are abstracted away from you. So the way I like to think about it, I hope it gets there someday.
Like I'm, I'm hoping like this ends up being the reality is you like I tend to think of things like copilot today and they're kind of like their model for meta prompting when to choose when did you retrieval versus to go out on the web or to just reach back into the trained model from the LLM and gimme a response that way is kind of similar to like a helper method or a convenience method. So like you know, if you think about like uh, PowerShell, right?
Like if you're using like Azure PowerShell and you go to log in, yep you can just say log in and it'll kind of figure out it'll sit there and PowerShell is smart enough to say like, oh let me try, you know this, lemme try OAuth first for you. Let me try blah blah. And it kind of walks down a cascading list of things until finally it hits the one that's gonna work for you. Which could end up being like device code login, right? Like hey go pop your code in over here kind of thing.
So that's just a convenience layer for you as a user. You could ultimately come in and you could say I really want to explicitly log in with device login from the start or I explicitly wanna log into this tenant ID and pull up this subscription, blah blah blah. Those kinds of things. So what you're missing with most interactions with LLMs today is the ability to kind of like refine on the convenience layer. Like the convenience layer is all supposed to be just convenience with no options.
And I wonder if that gives at some point like like do you have the ability to kind of tweak it a little bit and push it in? So some of these things like if you look at copilot in OneDrive, - Coming back to what we were gonna talk about Yeah, copilot in OneDrive, you do get - Some of that intentionality here, which I do like. So I, I've been playing around with this one. I, I know it's not in your tenant yet but you know, I've seen this one.
So, and and there's some good little like short ten second kind of clips that are in the blog posts that we'll link to. But you can do things like one of the things that they have in the Demoware on that blog post is there's a section in here where you can come in and if you have multiple documents in a library and the example that they use in their kind of quick snippet recording is they have four resumes, they have four PDFs that are sitting in the same folder.
Yep. Select all, go to the copilot button and then say you can either say summarize this so you could summarize potentially multiple documents. The other thing that you could, yeah, it's that one right there. The other thing that you can do is you can go from, so the co-pilot button does two things. One is it automatically hops into like summary mode. The other is it opens up the traditional like co-pilot prompt dialogue and then you can give it a prompt.
So in the case of like say hey I've got all these resumes, you can just tell it, tell copilot put all the data from these documents into a table for me and you don't even have to tell it columns anything like that as long as they're similar in format it, the LLMs got just enough juice unless it overly hallucinates to go back and understand like, oh hey these are similarly formatted documents. So I see these things that all look like names. I'm gonna group those into a column.
I see these things that look like skills. I'm gonna group those into a column and straight on down the line. That's been a, a kind of fun one to play with. And it's funny 'cause I saw it over here as Demoware and it's totally something that I've done in my OneDrive as we've been doing any other things lately. It's like oh I've seen that in the real world. I saw it before it was over here. That was the and and it, it does make for both good demoware and then good real world usage.
The other one that I like about having it in copilot, at least when I'm in like that like early ideation stage with things, yeah is the ability to do like quick summarizations. So I'm in kind of this model today where maybe I'm over in teams and I go to the copilot app in teams and then I say Hey can you summarize this document? But then I gotta go find the link to the document or figure out where it is and browse to it and it, it's all just painful.
So over here if you click the ellipsis on a single document you can just bring it down copilot, summarize and just go at it that way. Which is kind of nice as well. And - I think to your point about being able to kind of being able to narrow down the scope and where it's looking for things like that in OneDrive or if they eventually would bring this to like all document libraries in SharePoint where you could tell a copilot to go look at just the documents in this particular library.
Mm-hmm all the notes in this particular notebook and scope it down that way. 'cause I've had a lot of times too where I'm even working, I have a, I have a channel or different teams thus a document library for different clients and different projects and I'll be honest, sometimes I lose stuff. I'm like did I write this in one note? Did I write it in a document?
Being able to not necessarily do search 'cause copilot to be fair is oftentimes quicker and better at finding things than a native SharePoint search to be able to just go, hey copilot, no look yeah right copilot go look in this team or this channel or this library and give me a summary of the latest updates from this client or find my latest notes or summarize this document that I wrote for a client.
That would be really nice to your point with teams and you like do slashes or at mentions to go find a document when it's looking at all of your documents in your environment. Uh, doesn't always return the documents you want to or you don't always remember what the document is named. So I'm looking forward to getting this in OneNote to be able to play with it in OneNote but also maybe eventually down the road seeing it in
document libraries as well would be kind of fun. I - Actually kind of hope that it can come to the desktop as well. So more and more my interactions with data that sits in SharePoint tends to be through the desktop. Like I don't know how it goes with most of your customers but like it seems with everybody I work with like they kind of forgot that SharePoint can do lists and it can do pages and it has news and announcements and all these things. Like they don't do it right?
Like I, I don't know anybody in our entire org and like thousands and thousands of people who's sitting here like writing announcements in SharePoint and then sending out that announcement like it's the announcement still comes out as an email, right? like somebody still has to convert it into HTML and put it in an email template but then they link to the docs or you know the recordings that sit over in SharePoint stream, things like that.
So from that perspective, like for me like some of this stuff like OneDrive is almost something like I had to go to the website to play with it and that's friction 'cause I'm never on the website but I am on the desktop like I've got all these libraries synced and everything.
Like I would love to have the ability to just like right click on a OneDrive synced item on my desktop and just like the windows and and the OneDrive client are contextual and smart enough to know, oh this is a OneDrive document so I'm going to show you like the share copy link thing here that it could just have a co-pilot thing there and then just pop it up in like co-pilot in the sidebar or whatever on a Windows box. Like that would be a really cool, nice thing to have.
- That would be, I would think they could do it especially with the co-pilot button already in Windows. And like you said, you already get the context from OneDrive via the sync client. Seems like something that would be feasible from a non-developer saying just go build it - Right? How hard it be, how just - Go write some code - . - So I have another interesting one. I'm gonna skip past this one from OneDrive.
I am really curious to see how this particular functionality manifests itself and it was down like there's a whole bunch of OneDrive things, there's some templates, a media browser, uh enhanced file view or that type of stuff. But down towards the bottom of this blog post is experiencing lightning fast performance with offline mode and it starts, we are making one NU drive. - Nucleus - Is boring. Yeah.
One drive for web faster and more offline capable with the new offline mode formerly known as Nucleus, which started as offline SharePoint lists and it's SharePoint, right? A document library is just another type of list Anyways. Yep. Once this is enabled you can browse to your OneDrive files and Edge Chrome, another chromium based browsers online, offline lightning speed three times faster loading time, a bunch of stuff around offline mode.
And there's some additional articles here that we'll link to as well around particularly OneDrive adding new offline capabilities and how you work with this. Like you can actually mark files similar to the same client. Markham is like on demand or available offline, all of that I get the offline mode being nicer for like speed That makes sense, right?
Because now you're treating offline mode as a little bit more of a cache than a true offline mode where you have 'em technically offline cached on your desktop and they talk about as you're making changes then you're really just synchronizing the deltas back and forth between your offline copy in the copy that is online or conversely if it's edited online and you already have a cached version, it's just synchronizing the delta down to your desktop.
What is this gonna do to the amount of storage space my browser is going to use on my desktop is one of my questions. Like we already have issues with OneDrive filling up OneDrive space and files on demand was supposed to help that . I feel like now if I'm like syncing with OneDrive and I have offline mode enabled, are they somehow going to like compliment each other? Will my browser be able to recognize that I'm also syncing this and get some advantages there? Or do I not use a sync client?
Do I use the browser But then my browser like and as an example, I looked the other day I was going to uninstall a browser. One of my browsers was using 24 gigs of hard drive space on my computer. Mm-hmm is this gonna amplify that or how do you start to manage with offline mode in the browser files that people have in their OneDrive? That was one of my big questions.
I haven't seen much around it other than it's similar like I've seen some references to files on demand where maybe it'll start to intelligently make them offline or not offline based on usage patterns. That was one question. My other question I had with this is, and I think it answers it indirectly as I draw dug through articles was I don't know that I have it in here anymore.
Like you can block files from being downloaded using conditional access policies using the app and enforce restrictions And that blocks like the web client from downloading files, it blocks the desktop app from downloading files. It does appear that this offline mode will still restrict that where if you have downloads blocked you won't be able to take OneDrive files offline. I haven't like had a chance to go build one and make sure offline mode is on and validate that.
But that was the other thing that kind of popped up in my mind was I sure hope offline mode because I'm still kind of technically just using the browser and the cash behind the scenes still respects the block download capabilities that it's a setting in SharePoint but really what it's doing is just creating that app and force restrictions, conditional access policy. Yeah, - I haven't played with that one. That'd be interesting to see to your question about storage space.
So funny enough, it's addressed in the article that you have up, did I - Miss it? This one? - No in the support article. Uh, this one. Yeah. So if you scroll down towards the bottom there is a section in there that talks about how to save space and or how to free up space. Keep going, it's a long article. Keep going, keep going, keep going. Oh - There we go. Free up space. - Free up space on your device, which free up space on your devices.
Just go file by file and turn off on the offline mode or turn it off folder by folder. Which is similar to the way it works in the desktop client. True. I don't know, it's, it's a really weird and we were talking about this before we hit the record button. It's a bifurcated world today between the desktop client and the web versions of these things and kind of how they manifest and how they tie together. So we'll see where all this goes.
Like 'cause I think about like OneDrive and offline mode like why do I need OneDrive and offline mode if I already have OneDrive syncing right? And I've already made my file available offline off made my file available that way via offline on the desktop OneDrive app versus something else that's out there. - I'm gonna go find this article. I don't know that I will.
Maybe it was this one. This is the article so we'll link to this one on the intra zone podcast like back in 2022 'cause we, we were getting into a very good discussion on this that probably could have been an episode on the intra zone.
Mark talked to a couple of the people on the OneDrive engineering team in digging through the difference between add to one drive the shortcut and the general sync of team site document libraries and kind of what some of the differences are performance differences, why one versus the other guidance for today and going forward. This is a good discussion Scott.
I don't know that you'll like it based on our conversation earlier , But it's a good episode where they do talk about some of the differences between those and kind of what some of the future is at least a year and a half ago when they recorded that episode. But yeah, I get it that I think I'm a little worried with the offline mode of you don't get quite the same like the sync client.
I can go into OneDrive and I feel like I can see a lot quicker maybe what I have synchronized and it still like my files are still outside of, they're outside of the application. I feel like with offline mode you end up with those files kind of hidden more in the cache and you maybe don't realize that, oh my browser is taking up this space, not seeing OneDrive pop up in File Explorer finder and be like, oh that's right.
I see all these extra things I'm syncing, I'm just gonna go remove some shortcuts in my case or go unsync a few libraries, however you may do it. This just seems a little bit more maybe not as user friendly or a little bit more obfuscated in the visibility of how this offline mode might take up space on your hard drive. I - Don't know, we see where all this stuff goes. I'm very much like old man yells at cloud sometimes. Like why do I have a website when I have a desktop app?
And from that lens like I very much, I would want somebody to be opinionated about it, right? Like don't give me both. And the friction that comes with having both and having the mental overhead of having to choose which one is right at which time. Like just choose one and go with it and make that the best products that you can. And I think products like OneDrive really suffer there 'cause they try to be everything for everybody. - I'm still going back to those policies.
Like I have clients that intentionally block the sync client because they don't want people to synchronize files down to desktops. And you can do that, like you can go turn that off in a document library. I don't know that you can turn off shortcuts but there's a lot of, I don't know, this seems to like, I don't know, I don't know if it seems to bypass it.
It's what I'm gonna have to go play with a little bit more and see like if I turn off the OneDrive sync, what do I have to do to also block make available offline Or is it simply that app restrictions where it's like now I can globally do it, but that also requires Azure ad premium where blocking the sync client doesn't always, you can still download stuff but it doesn't let you like bulk take stuff offline. Like this offline mode would - We'll see play with in the future.
- Yeah, but that was another announcement from, well another announcement kind of buried in some of the other announcements that were published during the course of this last week. - Yeah, so we'll put, we'll put a bunch of links in, show notes for folks and yeah, check it out. Lots of new stuff to go and play with. Yes, - It's added to my list Scott, that has not gotten any shorter - pop one off the stack. - Yeah, with that, go enjoy your weekend.
- Sounds good. Thanks Ben. Alright, - Thank you And we'll talk to you again soon. 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. If you have any questions you want us to address on the show or feedback about the show, feel free to reach out via our website, Twitter or Facebook. Thanks again for listening and have a great day.