Sync Up podcast Episode 11 – M365 Community Conference Recap Speakers: Stephen Rice, Principal Product Manager, OneDrive, Microsoft Arvind Mishra, Principal Product Manager, OneDrive, Microsoft Mark Kashman Lesha Bhansali Carter Green Vishal Lodha, Principal Customer Experience Program Manager, OneDrive, Microsoft
72-minutes
[Music.]
Hello, everyone, and welcome to the Sync Up Podcast, your one-stop shop for all things OneDrive. OneDrive is the home for all of the files that you care about most, and we are here to take you behind the scenes to get the insights and the knowledge to make your experience and your users’ experience better.
As always, my name is Stephen Rice, and I’m a principal product manager here on the OneDrive Team. Our latest episode “Data on the move—Migrating to OneDrive” is now on YouTube, be sure to check it out, watch and listen to our conversation with Vishal and Yogesh. Visit the Microsoft 365 YouTube channel. And now, my co-host Arvind Mishra.
Hello, everyone. I’m Arvind, and I’m also a principal product manager on the OneDrive Team. So, we’ve got a great show for you today, but before we get started, we’ve got a word from our sponsor. So, let’s take a listen. (Music.)
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That’s right. So, check out the Microsoft 365 Community Learning YouTube channel. Today, we are talking about the Microsoft 365 Community Conference. Most of those sessions are being uploaded to the channel. So, in all seriousness, check out the channel. There’s a lot of great stuff there. (Music ends.) Before we can talk about the conference in depth, though, Arvind, I think we need to jump into our icebreaker question.
Let’s do it.
I just came – I mean, just came back, but it’s been a little bit, but I came back from Orlando, where the conference was held. I did some time before and after in Disney World, which I’ve not done since I – like, in 20 years. So, I want to know, what is your favorite theme park ride?
Ooh, that is kind of a tough one, I mean, because, like, there are so many good ones out there right now. I mean, like, obviously, all the Star Wars ones at Disneyland were pretty, pretty, pretty good.
Yeah.
I’m just trying to think. Like, you know, I guess, like, when those rides came out, they didn’t exactly blow me away, because I think I kind of spoiled it for myself and went on YouTube and watched it all. I would actually say, if I were to, like, to just go back in time and say, okay, what was the theme park ride that actually, like, just floored me, and I’d say it was probably the Spider-Man ride that was at Universal’s Island Adventures, which I understand, you didn’t get to go on or you guys didn’t go on when you were there.
No, I did not.
But that’s, like, an amazing ride. It’s, like, cartoon Spider-Man, not, like, from the movies, but cartoon Spider-Man floating around. And it’s in 3D and he lands on your cart and fights all of, like, the Sinister Six at the same time or whatever. It’s pretty good.
That sounds awesome. Is that in – in Orlando?
It’s in Orlando, yeah.
Yeah, okay. I’ll have to do that next time.
What about yours?
This is a new one for me. So like I said, I haven’t been to Disney World in 20 years or whatever. And in Epcot, they have Guardians Cosmic Rewind, and I went in, zero expectations. Don’t know what it is, don’t even know what type of ride it is, really. And it’s – it’s a roller coaster kind of Space Mountain-esque, you know, in a kind of darkish room while stuff happens around you.
But the thing that made it, like, one of my favorite rides of all time now, the individual cars swivel on the track. So, it’s not just, like, you’re going directly forward, as you go into a turn, it’ll, like, turn you sideways.
And so, the only way I can really describe it is it kind of feels like you’re drifting in a car around a racetrack, like you’re going into a tight turn and then your body shifts sideways. And it’s just – it was a delight. It was such a great ride. And, like, hats off to the designers and whoever put that together. I rode that, like, 10 times over the, like, week I was there. (Laughter.)
It sounds pretty cool. That’s pretty awesome. Did – like, I would imagine with, like, the swivel carts, they also use that to, like, focus your attention on screens and things you’re supposed to be looking at and –
Exactly, yep. There’s a particularly cool moment where it’s kind of like a toilet drain, where you kind of circle around and it’s, like, a 3D model of the moon in front of you. And so, you circle around the moon and around Earth, as you like, you know, spin down towards the planet, if you will. And yeah, just, like, mechanically, a really cool ride, a combination of, like, kind of the dark roller coaster that is Space Mountain, plus some of the more, like, modern twisting and turning. So, I enjoyed it.
[TCR 00:05:07]
That’s – I mean, I’ve been – I’ve heard of that ride. I definitely would love to go on it. Like, tell me, when you were – when you were at Disney, did you go on the Avatar ride, because I think we’re going to get that here in Los Angeles soon?
This – yeah, I did the Avatar ride. I went in with really high expectations. I mean, I’m like, this is going to take us down a rabbit hole, Arvind, but I’m going to – we’re going to do it, because this is the content and people are here for.
(Laughter.) Right.
It was fine. The – the ride, the saddle, whatever you want to call it, is really unique. It’s, like, you kind of ride it like a motorcycle, kind of leaning forward a little bit. And then there is the mechanics that, like, move against your legs to make it feel like the beast you’re riding is moving around.
It’s a 3D ride, like, you wear glasses and I just don’t care for 3D rides. There was one part that like, it kind of paused and you’re in, like, this beautiful room with, like, glowing jellyfish in the air. And it just felt so blurry through the glasses that it, like, actually was, like, giving me a headache trying to look at it.
I have the same problem with, like, the new Star Tours, for example. Like, it’s – I much prefer old Star Tours because, like, the 3D effect is cool, but it just makes me feel kind of more motion sick than it, like, actually makes me feel engaged.
Gotcha, gotcha. So, you are maybe not a 3D – 3D is not your thing for – for rides, I guess, then.
I very rarely feel like it’s high quality 3D, and as a result, yeah, I end up being kind of disappointed by it, or nauseous.
Maybe you wouldn’t like the Spider-Man ride, which was pretty awesome, I’ve got to say.
[06:38]
So, let’s talk about the conference. (Laughter.) So, one more throwback for you, Arvind.
Yes.
So, I’ve been in the middle of rewatching – did you ever watch Stargate SG1, by chance?
Yeah, yeah, I’ve seen it, not the series, but certainly the movie.
Oh, the movie, fair. Okay. But so, in the series, you know, classic ‘90s and early 2000s television show, but one of the things that I’m reminded of, like, old school syndicated television, is they do a – do clip shows. So, it’s like, oh, we’ve got to fill an episode at the end of the season. Let’s just, like, film a clip show, throw in a little bit of buffer bumpers forward and backwards, and then we’ll call it an episode.
Today, you and I are going to do our clip show, but it’s not going to be clips that people have already seen. As I said, I was at M365. I talked with a bunch of people there about what they were doing, what they were showing.
And so, you and I are going to talk about what we’re – we’re going to set up the interviews. Then we’ll use the magic of editing to go listen to those live and then come back to you and I kind of talking about it and how you how you felt about it, because you weren’t able to be there. So, this is your – your – your clip show, your window into it.
I’m living vicariously through your guys’ experiences. (Laughter.)
Next time, we’ll get you there. Next time.
Yeah, I hope – I hope so, Jason Moore. (Laughter.) In any case, yeah, well, so, it sounds, like, what our first – the first interview that we’re going to play here is Mark Kashman, who is also one of our great podcasters here at Microsoft doing The Intrazone. So, is that a good intro?
That’s the good intro. Let’s – let’s take a listen to Mark and I.
Let’s listen.
[08:07]
(Music.) (Begin segment.)
All right, Mark, I don’t know how we’ve not done this so far, but I think this is the first, at least since we’ve revived Sync Up, like, Sync Up/Intrazone crossover.
I think if it as the Sync Zone is what we’re entering into. I hope it’s not going to be a sinkhole, but if we sync about it too much, and I think I’ve heard all of your puns on Sync Up, so I’m just regurgitating some of your good stuff. But yeah, it’s great to see you. And I love that we’re bringing the two podcast together, and I think we should make it more of a regular thing.
Yeah, I’m definitely on board with that, although if you’re going to bring better pun game, I don’t know if I can allow that. Yeah, so, we’re at Microsoft 365 Community Conference. I know you’ve been going to a bunch of sessions. I’ve been going to a bunch of sessions. How has the conference been going for you? I haven’t seen you because we’ve just been running around everywhere.
Yeah, I’d say that’s the – kind of the funny thing about conferences, is you know where somebody is going to be or I know what you’re doing here, but that we don’t see each other too often. I think we saw each other at the booth, which was – which was fun. And you were pretty inundated by people asking questions. So, that’s going to be my question to you.
But at the conference here, I’ve been racing around, starting on day one, supporting Jeff in his keynote. And all you saw that Naomi was talking about, you know, I was sort of helping her get her content ready. Off of that, then it felt like I was just racing around. I kept my head on, but I still felt like a chicken clucking everywhere, going to all the SharePoint sessions, catching up with some of the OneDrive sessions, seeing the action in the booth. We had the Ask the Experts, the round tables.
And part of my job was just to make sure everybody had what they needed, but then when I got to put on my subject matter expert hat, all the things that we’re doing around sites and pages, some of the stuff that we showed in the keynote, the demos, page design and design ideas. So, it really was still – I’m wearing my SharePoint hat, and the show here was really about all the product updates, things that maybe we’ve talked about and disclosed, but haven’t yet delivered on. So, they’re coming soon. And here’s the latest view on them.
But it was really across the whole spectrum of SharePoint, SharePoint Premium, some of the things that bleed into what Stream is up to, what Loop is up to. Dan Costenaro, who’s our PM from Loop, who’s here, he was some – giving some really great Loop demos. So, I was peering over his shoulder and learning a little bit about Loop.
Honestly, one of my favorite parts, I think, of doing conferences like this is you just – you’re hanging out at the booth. We’ve got, you know, a Copilot station, a OneDrive in SharePoint station, an app station, all this type of stuff. And then you just get, like, a mass of people come in, and they’ve all got a question. And some of them, you can answer, some, you can’t; some, you direct to other places. But it is an exhausting, but super rewarding, like, two hours.
And then I went over to the lightning stage, and we had like, you know, these quick 20-minute talks. Mark Mroz (ph) gave a great one on Stream that I was there for, just, you know, why do you stream? And he had a whole thing about how your ideas are poop emojis, and it’s – you had to be there; and, like, and then just going from that into sessions.
And I started, and I was like, oh, I want to make sure I catch, like, (inaudible), I know, an amazing talk on SharePoint content governance and SharePoint Premium, and all that type of stuff. And then I didn’t have time to make it. So, part of what I wanted to do today is like, I just want to – like, I attended the OneDrive talks. You attended a bunch of the SharePoint talks. I know you mentioned Pages.
For the Sync Up listeners that are listening to this, we don’t always get the chance to talk about SharePoint Pages and all the great stuff that you do on Intrazone. What’s the big news on Pages? What’s been going on? Like, I – I had someone come talk to me about flexible pages, and I was like, “‘Flexible’ is a cool word. I don’t know what that means.”
Great word. So, there is a ton of flexibility that’s coming to the page layout. So, imagine you’re in your old My Documents folder in your My Site that is now OneDrive. The site is abstracted away, I know, but a lot of people used to do some of what I’m going to describe. In My Site, they would create their own pages, and it’s kind of moving that direction for SharePoint. You can create the page and then put it where it needs to be. That’s kind of the part that, you know, is that you’re a creator and we want you to create.
But a lot of what we showed at the conference was from a creation experience, how can I lay out my page so that it looks beautiful? There’s some really cool Copilot integration that’s coming where, same as you would today, you start with a page template. Some people start with the best template, which is the blank template. Some people start with these heavily customized, already looking great, and then you add your content-type templates.
But now it’s kind of like a Mad Lib, where you go and create a template, and you fill in, what am I making this page for? I might even pull in a Word document that is already something that I did, like a spec document or a customer brief or something like that. And then it’ll build the page with my Word document content in the layout that the template, you know, kind of dictates. And the what-you-get is a super, super head start into what the page looks like.
But then the flexibility part, which is what you heard about, is now instead of a three-column layout which is left to right, three columns, that’s great. You can add a lot of content that way, but the flexibility comes in where we now kind of have hidden 12 columns, which means you can put an image and then overlay a text, a video, a photo, you know, a Power BI Web part, if you want.
Whatever Web part we have, you’ll be able to lay it out kind of anywhere within those 12 columns, but to the feel of it, to the end user and what we showed is it really looks like you can put it wherever you want, like you’re in a design program. And, of course, with Copilots, like you’re having your own personal Web designer.
So, mix the two together. The goal was start faster and give you the flexibility to make them look how you want them to, based on real content so that it’s easy to digest. And we take into consideration mobile views, laptop and, of course, tablet views. And so, it just all flows really nicely and gives the person who’s creating the page and then a great consumption experience.
That was a big part of what we showed in the keynote in the general session. And then they had a breakout, too, where they showed real-live code moving SharePoint around, like nobody’s ever seen.
Part of my question I wanted to ask you was something similar. I know OneDrive pretty well because, you know, we plan some of these things together. And, you know, I know what your titles and abstracts are, but what were some of the things that maybe were the – the wow moments that you and the team were excited for? And, of course, then kind of how were they received? How did people like them here?
There were two big things I think that we talked about that were really cool. One was we continue talking about Colored Folders. Carter had a session this morning about deploying the Sync client and he, you know, finally showed off Colored Folders inside of the File Explorer view, inside of Windows. Did a really cool demo where, you know, he flips the color in Web and then it shows up in File Explorer, you know, just a second or two later that syncs down. Jeff talked about it briefly in his keynote. Colored folders just always gets applause.
Yeah, on that one, it’s pretty new to see, I know that I think you’ve talked about it, but to see that completeness, I think, did it get the claps that it deserves?
I think so. One of the big, like, drum beats we’ve been going for over the past, I don’t know, six months or so has been this, you know, OneDrive is where you are. This came up in the booth quite often. People were, like, you know, “Like, love some of the improvements you made in OneDrive on the Web, but like, my people are all in Teams. They don’t go to OneDrive on the Web.”
And it’s like, that’s okay. We’ve integrated OneDrive into Teams now. It’s all there. You don’t need to worry about, like, oh, if you want this feature, you go here, if you want this feature, go there. So, having that come through was awesome.
And then, like, the other – the other big piece, so we had – Jeff gave a keynote speak – speech, you know, It was called “Age of Copilots.” And my initial response was like, wow, that’s kind of – that’s a little cheesy, right? Like, it just gives me, like, Marvel, Age of Ultron vibes, like.
(Makes noise.)
(Laughter.) Exactly. And Miceile did some live demos, which is always a little bit scary when it comes to Copilot.
15 minutes of live demo using Copilot, and it was her personal sign in that she was. It was – it was a risky demo.
But it was fantastic. Like, she walked through some of the basics we’ve talked about, you know, like, oh, like, hey, here’s a document. Please summarize it for me. Copilot’s awesome at that. We’ve kind of shown that off quite a bit. She showed some of, like, the – how it integrates across the suite. So, she did a – (laughter) – and this was where the live – the live aspect of it was really cool.
Micaela reports up to Lincoln DeMaris on our team. But she did a, like, hey, tell me about the top five action items that Lincoln have sent me over the last two weeks. And, you know, Copilot spits out her actual work experiences over the last couple of weeks about what’s been going on, which was really cool.
But I think the one that was the big crowd pleaser, got some applause, got a bunch of questions at the booth, is she had a folder of, you know, four or five resumes that she wanted to compare and contrast. You know, you’re hiring someone. You need to figure out just the basic information about them. And Copilot in natural language, like, hey, can you just compare these five resumes in the form of a table.
And Copilot spits out a table. You know, here are the five candidates. Here’s their, you know, varying years of experience. Here’s their different skill sets and things like that. That ability to rationalize across not just a single document, but multiple documents across the folder was really, really cool and was probably one of the highlights of that keynote for me.
[16:54]
When you see something like that and knowing that some of what you’re working on certainly in Copilot in OneDrive, do you see that and go, I know we built that, and I know we built it for that, but to see it in action and kind of what I liked about her set of demos was they really were smart scenarios. You know, Copilot is, of course, behind it, the document and documents, you know, in the right place in OneDrive, SharePoint. But then to see her query it not in a real complex prompt, but in a real business case or use case and then see it in action.
And, like, Jeff, Miceile, Naomi and Derek (ph), I believe, from Teams just did an amazing job throughout.
[17:34]
From the get go, it was pretty much designed to be a 75-minute, as much demo as possible with Jeff, you know, kind of peppering in a lot of the vision and strategy, but to see the amount of content that they landed. And, of course, I think for you and I to see how they represent, you know, a lot of the work that we, the “we,” the collective do, I think there’s a lot that summarized and put it in the right perspective.
So, I think next topic I was curious about to ask you was especially around the booth, but it might not have happened at the booth, you come here representing the OneDrive team. I’d love to know how your session went, the collaboration session. So, start maybe just by sharing, like, what – what you talked about and how it went.
But I also want to know what was the strangest thing that somebody asked you, either at the booth after your session or randomly, they said, Stephen, Stephen, I saw you on stage? And then they went and took a huge left turn and asked you something you did not expect.
[18:25]
I’ll start with the session because that’s easier. So, we did a session with Michael Pierce, one of – our designer for sharing, on a collaboration across Microsoft 365, walking through all of the sharing improvements we’ve made.
I think my favorite part of it personally is I have a section I did at the end where, you know, I talk about all the different ways you can manage sharing in Microsoft 365. And, like, oh, here’s, like, the 20 settings we have that I can talk about in OneDrive and SharePoint.
And oh, by the way, there’s also more in Microsoft Entra and Microsoft Purview. And let’s stop talking about individual settings. And let’s put it into a framework you can use to, like, actually manage sharing in a productive way. And just having folks, you know, take pictures of that slide, you know, that there’s something gratifying, like, I made that. And they understand it, and they get it.
As far as interesting booth interactions go, there was – I had a fascinating conversation with a woman. I think she worked for a nonprofit, if I remember correctly. And we started off, she was interested in governance, how to govern content inside of OneDrive and SharePoint, what tools are available, and just desperate to learn, like, I – a sponge is maybe a better analogy, like, just here to soak up as much as she could.
And we talked about that for, you know, five minutes or so, and then it turned into a completely different conversation about culture and growth mindset, and talking through, you know, her experiences. She came from an education background. So, she talked about, you know, helping people learn and adopt product, how to teach people to use product, and then, you know, segueing into, like, how does Microsoft do that? What is the growth mindset at Microsoft look like? And how do we approach product development?
And I was not expecting to have – I think I genuinely had, like, a 20-minute conversation with her about growth mindset.
You became the attendee for a little bit.
[20:01]
Yeah, definitely. It’s just not the type of conversation I expected to have, but it’s why I’m here, you know, is to have that type of connection with customers. And I’ve had a couple of people, you know, come up and be like, I need this specific feature. Like, I had someone reach out today about granular sharing settings. It’s like, I just – I have this business use case. I’m not quite sure how to set up.
I’m like, let me pull up the demo computer. Here’s the PowerShell that you will run in order to do this. And he’s like, that – that is what I came here for. Like, this has made my trip worth it. It’s super rewarding.
Okay. So, we’ve been talking for a bit. So, just to kind of, like, bring us home a little bit, I started thinking, like this is the first time we’ve done, like, the Sync Up/Intrazone crossover. I don’t know about you. I – I feel like I’ve been a shill all week, like, trying to like, oh, no, go listen to Sync Up. We – it’s really funny and we have a lot of good content. What is your shill for Intrazone, for folks who are listening here for the first time and are – not heard of it before?
[20:49]
Absolutely. So, thank you for the opportunity. So, The Intrazone is, you know, really focused on SharePoint. And then I put in the “and related technology,” because there’s the value of SharePoint powering a lot of different applications. So, Loop, Lists now things like Whiteboard and parts of Viva and, of course, our role in Teams and, you know, everything that sort of Copilot-y.
I’m working on an episode for Copilot. I feel like we’re a little downstream from the big news of Copilot, but I think it’s time. You know, there’s some real stuff coming from the SharePoint team. But it really is to put a voice to people working on the product. I often have partners on the show. How are they working with SharePoint? What are their solutions look like? And then, at times, we have customers on who are willing to share. It’s kind of like a mini-case study.
So, hopefully the idea of the podcast is for people to learn what’s new for SharePoint, what’s possible, maybe what are some things they don’t know about. And it’s kind of an ongoing conversation throughout the year.
The biggest feedback I get if somebody approaches me and says, oh, I love the podcast or, you know, hey, have you thought about doing X or Y, is they always say a nice compliment. It’s really nice to tune into The Intrazone because you often are very, you know, what is the latest? And it’s really easy to consume.
Longer form, which I think is same for your podcast, when I hear what you all do, it not only says, oh, we’ve got this cool new Sync feature, but let me tell you why. And the one correlation between our two is I actually had some of your colleagues on the show to do what I felt was a Sync Up episode, but it came through my channels to kind of ask somebody from the OneDrive, what’s better, Sync or Add to OneDrive?
And your team did a great job. And this is not a joke. I’ve actually sent that link to more people than I can tell, say, because they were asking that same question. I was like, oh, there’s actually a great podcast that answers the question, not just what to use, when, but why, because in the podcast, and I’ve heard it on your podcast, you get into the level of depth of kind of behind the scenes, not just a sneak peek, but how we built it, why we built it, and what we’re doing to make it better over time.
So, that’s, I think, the value of The Intrazone.
Thanks for taking the time, Mark. I’m – I’m glad we got to finally sit down and do this. And if you haven’t listened to The Intrazone, definitely check it out.
And if you haven’t listened to Sync Up or you’re listening to it right now, listen again and subscribe. (End segment.)
[23:13]
That was a really cool interview. Mark’s obviously a really great guy, and, you know, always like talking to him.
I love Mark.
Yeah, so good. Yeah, one of the things that really struck me was just, like, this notion that, like, we’re back, baby. Like, it’s like the whole being back at a conference, being live and the energy around that was just like, like, it really came through in that interview.
Yeah. The last conference I did pre-COVID, like, or before this conference, even, was Microsoft 365 Community Conference in 2018. So, for me especially, like, I technically did, like, Ignite, but that wasn’t an in-person conference. That was, like, we prerecorded a video. The thing that struck me was, yeah, like, just the amount of energy in the booths, in the sessions, like people coming up and just talking about how much they love the product, or they’ve got this issue, and they want to learn.
You got my favorite experiences by far are the people who come up with, like, a list of questions on their phone. And you can tell, like, they’d gone around to everyone in their company, taking the list of things that people wanted to know. And they just come to the conference, talk to people and check them off, one by one.
Like, like, I had a guy come and talk to me about governing external sharing and not knowing how to do that. I’m like, “Oh, yeah, like, let me help you. Here are the settings we have. Here’s what you want to think about.” He’s like, “Oh, that’s perfect.” Checks it off, is on his list and goes on to the next person.
(Laughter.) But a very diligent, like, conference attendee I mean. I – like, if it was me, I’d be like – like, ah, did I – did I pull myself away from the bar to, like, actually show up and ask some questions. (Laughter.)
The real challenge for folks, I think, is trying to collect all the swag. Like, the first day, they dumped a giant box of SharePoint socks. Like, there must have been, like, a thousand pairs. And we ran out by –
And they went in, like, two seconds.
Yeah, like, and you’d have people, like, you – we’d have a crowd of people around the booth. And people would, like, reach over two or three people’s shoulders to try and grab a pair. And it was just amazing.
[25:04]
I could – I could imagine I mean, I’ve been a swag hound in past conferences as well. (Laughter.) But like, you know, I thought it was really cool, how you guys mentioned, you know, like, the last conference, you know, maybe there was about 2,000 people. This conference, I think, like – I think the organizers made a conscious decision to make it all live. And as a result, there was so many people, so many more people than there was at the – at the last couple of – couple of ones, which contributed to – to that sort of excitement.
But one thing that Mark talked about that, like, made me think, oh, yeah, I totally remember that from, like, the different conferences was, you know, just around, like, you go in, maybe you’re working at the booth. You were not an expert by any stretch, like, on a particular area, like, any particular area. And you just hope that someone’s not going to ask you a question that you’re like, well, I can’t answer.
But by the end of this conference, by the time you’ve heard other experts, like, answer these questions that you don’t know, you suddenly become like an expert on all things OneDrive is or SharePoint.
Yeah. Mark is – I’m just going to keep praising Mark, because I have nothing but good things to say about him. He was, like, the king of exactly that. Like, I tried to – like, there are things I know and there are things I don’t. And I tend to tell people, like, I’m sorry, I don’t know the answer to this one. Like, maybe this person over here will help you, or if you can come back later, you know, we’ll try and get someone for you.
Mark just knows so much. Like, people can be like, hey, I’ve got this question about Stream. Mark’s like, yep, I’ve got you. What do you want to know? Just amazing.
What a great way to, like, grow, grow your own expertise as well. But yeah. Mark – Mark, of course, is an expert. Let me ask you this. Like, you guys were effectively bringing in, like, Intrazone and Sync Up together. Was it like Voltron? Was it like, you know, the sum of the two somehow was better than, you know, each individually?
Honestly, it – it was a little bit. (Laughter.) You and I – I have loved all of the guests that we’ve had on the show, but, you know, there are some people that are, like, very natural in podcasts and other people that you got to kind of coax and talk to a little bit.
Mark is, like, just instant on, like, in podcast mode. Like, you can tell in the interview, like, there wasn’t, like, Mark and I spent time prepping or talking about what we’re going to talk about. We were just kind of riffing as we were going. And there were times where it’s like, oh, Mark, I wanted to talk about this up. Like, I want to talk about Copilot, and you want to talk about something else instead. But it was just such a natural conversation.
And yeah, like, Mark, I think is going to play that’s – the same interview on his podcast. You guys should go check out Intrazone, because they’ve got a bunch of cool stuff there too. But I just love that after, you know, this is – we’re coming up on about a year of the new Sync Up and crossing over with The Intrazone, it’s like, you know, that’s the two giants meeting. It’s – it’s the Avengers showing up. It’s like, oh, Captain America is in the Thor movie. What? (Laughter.) I don’t know.
No, it’s like Deadpool and Wolverine.
There you go. That’s a much better topical example.
More time, yeah, I expect so. Look, speaking of – speaking of Copilot, though, I mean, that was something that Mark mentioned, right? And I mean, there’s a lot of excitement at the show around Copilot, right?
Yeah. Here’s my dirty secret. So, Jeff’s keynote, Jeff Teper, keynote for the entire session was called “The Age of Copilots.” And I saw the title at the conference because I wasn’t involved in it. And I was like, man, that’s kind of cliche, like, especially Age of Copilots gives me, like, Age of Ultron vibes.
Which is not a great Avengers film, for that matter.
Exactly. I’ll use some slightly PG-13 language, but like, I’ll be damned. But, like, when Jeff and, like, Miceile got on stage and showed off the Copilot stuff that has happened, like, I’ve seen some of it, but there was a lot I hadn’t seen. And it – it came through and, like, the audience was excited about it, too. Just some of the scenarios and features people talked about, Copilot in Teams and Outlook, in OneDrive. I mean, it really was the age of Copilots, you know?
And the questions I got at the booth were not, hey, why should I buy Copilot? A lot of it was, I have bought Copilot. How do I get the most out of it? How do I enable it? How do I govern it? It was really, really cool.
[28:57]
And super exciting. I mean, I think, like, one of the things I think about a lot is just that, you know, you and I, and all of us at work on the OneDrive Team or M365 or whatever, like, we have access to all of these features. And we get to use them, you know, way ahead of when they’re actually going to get used.
But then, like, when we go turn around and actually show them for the first time externally, even though it might be something we’ve used every day for the last, like, you know, six months or something, it’s just great to see that excitement from the audience, like, as we’re seeing it for the first time.
Yeah, and especially in a lot of cases, you and I see very, like, specific instances of Copilot, an AI usage pop up. And when the story, when you back out a bit, there’s something magical happening there. (Laughter.) Like, that sounds cliche. It sounds like a cheesy keynote you would go and see by Jeff Teper called “The Age of Copilot.” But you, like, watch it happen, and you’re like, wow, that – I get it. I get where we’re going.
And like, if there’s one follow up from this podcast that I would recommend, like, Microsoft 365 Community Channel, Jeff Tepper’s keynote, “The Age of Copilots, like, go and check it out, because if you’re not convinced Copilot can add something to your business. I genuinely think that – that hour and a half talk, or whatever it is, makes the case for it.
For sure. The hype is real.
Exactly.
All right. So, for interview two, you talked with Lesha, who’s a member of our OneDrive Web Team, right?
Yeah.
So, let’s take a listen.
[30:23]
(Music.) (Begin segment.)
I’m here now once again with Lesha, who has been on the podcast before. You’ve just walked off the stage for the – I mean, there was the OneDrive general session, the future is now. How did it go? Tell me about it.
Well, the session was great. We – we also had a morning session. It was at 8am, and we had our first attendee enter the conference room at 7:30 in the morning. He kind of got behind the scenes, and we also gave him a Sync Up beanie because he was, like, the first attendee.
And eventually, yeah, the whole place was full. We had some people standing, which was great. We got a bunch of claps for Colored Folders, of course, in File Explorer. We’ve already had that in Web, but we’re bringing that soon to File Explorer. Then we also got a couple of claps for our @ shortcut feature, which we’ve simplified and integrated with our Favorites command, and that makes it super easy for users to organize their content within their OneDrive the way they like.
Of course, Copilot, we’re in the age of Copilot. That’s the theme of the conference. Copilot got a whole bunch of claps, especially the feature that, like, lets you compare different resumes and create, like, a table on different attributes. So, overall great. We also had some trivia in our session, and I think I’m going to leave a question for the audience here, which is what is the color that’s most used for Colored Folders outside of the default yellow color?
I want to say was it blue? I think I’m going to go with blue. Maybe green.
That’s what most of our audience guessed. They – they thought, like, it was blue or green, but it’s actually red. And the second most used is green. And then the third most used is blue. Surprising, red, but I see it. Like, you know, when you want to create, like, urgency around something, you put the red color on it.
Yeah, that’s awesome. So, we showed Copilot, we showed the color, kind of Colored Folders features. We had, like, the four broad themes for the OneDrive general session. Can you tell me kind of what were the broad themes and then key features we walked through?
[32:50]
Yeah, absolutely. We had three themes, which the first one was “Accelerate your productivity and teamwork,” and that was just focused on, like, you as an individual, how can, like, you access your files, your colleagues’ files, files that are stored in document libraries from OneDrive. And there, we showcased how you can create files with our new Create experience, which, like, shows you templates so that you can quickly get started with, like, professional looking documents.
Then we moved on to, like, Search, which is one of the most popular ways that users find their files. And we’re bringing all of the rich, like, filtering, date filter, file type filters, scoping everything to Search, which I think it’s something that I worked on. So, I think, like, users are going to be super excited about it, especially our end users.
And the other one, which also, I think, was something that a lot of our customers have been asking for is the Media View, which lets you look at all your media assets, whether that’s images, videos across your OneDrive and document libraries from one place, which I think is really cool. And it also looks really nice when you go to the view to see, like, all your images in one place.
I want to call it something, and I want to hear your impressions of it. So, one of the things that impressed me with your session as you were running through all these features is you ran through them all in a single live demo, in an actual production environment. How did that feel, doing a live demo in front of a packed audience with standing room only?
Absolutely nerve-racking. We were really worried that, like, the Wi-Fi or something is, like, not going to work in the room and then everything’s going to freeze. But luckily, I think the demo gods were just in my favor. I think the demo went really smoothly. There were a couple of hiccups, but I don’t think the audience, like, really noticed it. Maybe I did, because I was doing it.
Yeah, I think personally, I, like, just sort of behind the scenes, it was, like, very exciting to run through features that maybe, like, someone else on the team has worked on. But I got to, like, learn a lot more about that feature just because I was practicing my demo, which I think was really cool.
I have one more thing to add, which I didn’t mention in one of the themes that we had, which was the way we’ve built the OneDrive experience, we want to make sure that, you know, if you’re a Teams power user or an Outlook user, we are bringing OneDrive to those apps as a metaverse app. So, you can just get to OneDrive if you’re, like, trying to write an e-mail and trying to find that file at the same time. Like, you don’t have to go switch, you know, your tab and, like, open a new tab and open OneDrive in it. You can just get to it from Outlook, and same goes for Teams. And we do see a lot of our users using OneDrive from Teams and Outlook.
So, the way we’ve built it, no matter where you are, OneDrive is there for you. And you can, depending on how you like to work, you can just get to OneDrive.
Yeah, I’ll say at the booth, that – that theme and idea played really well, because I’d have people come and be like, “Hey, you know, I – my users just don’t use OneDrive Web. They don’t get to take advantage of, you know, the new Search experience or the new Media View or things like that.” And I’d be like, “It’s okay. Do they use Teams?” And they’re like, “Yeah, they love Teams.” I’m like, “Yep, OneDrive is there. Same experience.” Just awesome.
Well, thanks for taking the time to talk. I know you’ve got to run back to the conference, plenty of other customers to talk to. And enjoy the rest of your day.
Thank you for having me. (End segment.) (Music.)
[36:20]
So, that was Lesha. So, as you heard, Lesha, Liz and Irfan, all of whom have been on the podcast before, they deliver the kind of OneDrive keynote, if you will, walking through all of the goodness of OD3, Colored Folders, Copilot. Like, basically, if you’ve been listening to Sync Up for the past six months, everything we’ve talked about was distilled into this one session.
And again, it was just awesome. Like, seeing it all back to back, OneDrive, it’s really improved in the last year. With all the work we put into it, it is transformative, transformative.
Transformational, I think, is – is what it is.
Close enough. (Laughter.)
Yeah. No, I mean, I – I’d agree. I think at this point, like, I – I use OneDrive Web almost exclusively because of all the features that – that Lesha and team presented. I use OneDrive Web almost exclusively to – to sort of navigate my – my files versus, like, using the Explorer. No negatives to the Explorer. I just like OneDrive Web’s, you know, new (inaudible) a lot better.
But I was actually surprised on – on Colored Folders, like, because I – I feel like I try to use a lot of color folders, but like, Lesha’s answer about what was most popular, I’m clearly in the minority here, like, with the popular colors.
I mean, I’m going to assume you use blue is your most common folder color.
I like blue. I like a little purple. I like a little green. Like, I like – I like the cooler color, I would say.
Okay. I’m in the same boat. Like, anything OneDrive related becomes a blue folder. But yeah, and just for the record, the audience was stumped by that as well. Like, they all also were voting greens and blues, and red was like – no one even guessed that one, which was fascinating.
It’s so angry.
Exactly.
I also thought, like, just in a brief moment of honesty, just, like, what it – like, I think the audience, when you guys go to a conference like this and you see the demoers and the presenters just put – put their stuff together, there is a lot of, like, nerve-racking-ness – I don’t know if that’s a word – that goes behind the scenes because, like, sometimes we’re doing, you know, these live demos. Sometimes we’re doing videos, and like, there’s so much that can go wrong. And I thought Lesha’s comment on that was – was really, I don’t know, honest, you know?
I’ll say, since I was in the front row, maybe second or front row, I don’t know, I was at the – at the very front of that session. And just for the record, that room was packed. Like, I don’t know how the conference organizers decided who – what rooms were and what sessions. We counted. There were 280 chairs in the room, and they had 300 people, 300 and, like, 20 people signed up. Like, it was standing room only in there.
And then Lesha gets up there, and I think she did something, like, 10 minutes of straight live demo inside of OneDrive –
How scary.
– showing off all the experiences, going from one to one. And I mean, we’ve had her on the podcast. She’s aced it before, and she aced it there. Like, it was – I don’t know, there’s something magical about a live demo, that just seeing the product working and doing its thing.
It is magical. It is also extremely scary, is what I would say as the – as having been a demoer in – in that kind of forum before.
Oh, yeah.
That was a super tight interview and it sounded like it was a super tight presentation. But your third interview with Carter, I mean, sync is always a popular, popular topic. And I know Carter is super knowledgeable, so let’s take a listen to that. (Music.) (Begin segment.)
[39:39]
So, I’m sitting here with Carter Green. You just walked off the stage of your talk, “OneDrive Sync Deployment,” but, yeah. So, Carter, welcome to the Sync Up podcast. I know you’ve never been here before. Hopefully, this will go easy on you. How did your session go?
Thanks, Stephen. It’s great to be on the podcast. I loved my session. It was early in the morning, so I was a little bit worried about that, but we covered loads of new things that we are delivering from the Sync client. We talked about OneDrive and sort of the – the possibility of having multiple clients, but really our customers and the audience was fully focused on deploying the Sync client within Windows and Mac OS.
We talked about syncing up sort of configuring the OneDrive client to be able to arrive at our ideal state. We also talked about the things that were coming, either the things that we shipped in the past six months and then got a lot of excitement over the things that were coming over the next six months. So, a lot of energy from the room.
Overall, I’ve just had a really good conference talking to people, a variety of sync questions. We’ve had some migration questions. We’ve had some Colored Folders questions, as well as the new offline mode questions. And so, all of it being a sync-powered experience, whether we are powering the experience in File Explorer or in the Web, a lot of presence at Sync. So, we’re happy.
Let me just say I was really impressed. So, not only did you have the coveted 8am slot on the last day of the conference, it was also the first session after, like, the Universal Studios attendee party event the night before. So, there was a lot of dizzy faces. People were tired. How did you engage them? How did you get them involved?
Yeah, we were worried about this. An 8am session the morning after a late night party for the – for the whole con – conference, being able to capture that audience and get them engaged, we had to wake them up.
And so, one, thank you for the Sync Up swag. That helped. Two, I actually ran a poll at the very first to see how many people rode the most rollercoasters, and I luckily found out that nobody beat me riding the most rollercoasters. And so, I was tied with multiple people in the room, and we all sort of suffered through that together, but we were happy.
We initially started off sort of polling the crowd and trying to get them to engage with us, and we kept their attention throughout the whole talk. So, we’re happy about that.
How many rollercoasters did you ride last night, Carter?
I rode five. It might have been four, but I’m pretty sure I rode five. After the third one, we did the Veloci-coaster twice in a row in, like, 10 minutes. And after that one, my stomach started to get tight. We don’t have to go into descriptions of what happened after that, but I pulled it together. And I was healthy through the whole night. I just had to sleep and hydrate a lot this – this morning.
Sounds like the go to start. So, you mentioned deploying Sync, huge topic, a couple of announcements. I know we showed off Colored Folders in Web, of course, which has been super exciting. Did I see Colored Folders maybe in Windows as well?
[43:10]
Yes, you did. We are excited to announce that Colored Folders will be coming to file – the OneDrive folder within File Explorer later this summer. And so, those folders that you have set in the cloud, they will come down and sync down to your OneDrive folder and File Explorer. And you’ll be able to change your folders to red, green and purple and all of the other colors, and they will go up to the cloud as well.
I know that is a much-loved feature. So just to kind of close this out, any other kind of big announcements or things we talked about that you think are worth sharing with the audience?
I think the two biggest ones for us, other than Colored Folders, will be we announced, and released and had a blog post this past month on the new offline mode, being able to see the Sync-powered files on demand states, as well as having a complete offline mode and performance improvements for the website. That’s number one.
Our number two big thing is talking about our Sync Health report exports, Sync Health reports export functionality that is coming through Microsoft Graph Data Connect, being able to look at your Sync deployment across your workspace and then being able to see who within my workspace has errors, how’s their KFM rollout going, and are people in a healthy state? Are they on an old client, new client?
And then the export functionality is actually being able to take all that data and putting it into a single JSON file. And then you could join that against your own company’s data sets or things and be able to arrive at more personal insights, but actionable for your own company. So being able to have that announced today and being able to – to talk with customers about it, we’ve had a great week with it.
Awesome. Well, thanks for taking the time to talk, Carter. I know you’ve got to get – run back to the booth and all sorts of other exciting things, talk to customers. Thanks again and enjoy the rest of your conference.
Thank you. (End segment.) (Music.)
[45:08]
As we talked about a little bit, Carter had the unenviable job. So, just to kind of spread out the conference a little bit, Tuesday, sessions, keynote; Wednesday, more sessions. But Wednesday afternoon and night was the Universal Studios night. So, they closed the park to only attendees. People go in, ride as many rides as they can for, like, two hours, go back to the hotel, maybe have a few drinks, fall asleep. And Carter’s session is bright and early, 8am the day after. (Laughter.)
And honestly, my favorite thing is Carter and Kayla (ph). They both kind of deliver the session. They came in ready. Like, Carter was like, no, I’m here to wake you up and convince you that you should be at the 8am discussion on Sync for OneDrive. He got them engaged. He talked about their favorite rides. You know, I think Carter said he – I think he was tied for most rollercoasters rode, ridden –
(Crosstalk/inaudible) the survey? Yeah –
– the previous night at, like, yeah, something like 5 or 6?
So, some of the things he talked about, like, obviously, like, bringing Color Folders to Explorer, that’s going to be a crowd pleaser at all times, right?
[46:17]
Oh yeah. This is one of my favorite things about the conference sometimes, too, is people were asking that question. “Colored Folders in File Explorer, is that happening?” from, like, the moment the conference started. There are so many times where it is like, yeah, you know, that’s a great idea. Maybe if you come to the session at 8am on Thursday, you’ll get to find out. This is one of Jason’s favorite features. I know he actually wrote the code. He didn’t. He wrote no code.
He wrote some tough code, yes. (Laughter.)
But some test code. But it was super popular. We talked – they talked about Nucleus, which of course, we’ve talked about here on the podcast.
With (Andre?), yeah.
Yeah. Carter did a live Nucleus demo, which was pretty cool, where he, like, turned the Internet off on his machine, on – on his demo machine and then showed what you could do with it, which was just excellent.
Yeah, doing a live code demo, it’s just, you know, for the audience to know, offline mode is slowly rolling out because, like, we’re making sure that it’s, you know, the presentation, like, the – that all the technology works and they’re, you know – we’re making sure we ironed out all the bugs.
And so, like, the code is slowly rolling out, and he did, like, a live code demo in front of, you know, 100 people or however many people. So, that – I would imagine that would have been very scary for him.
Exactly, yeah. He did a great job. Every – every minute of it. We’ve shown offline mode a couple times. We’ve shown it at Office Hours. We’ve – we’ve talked about on the podcast. I do think there was something magical about seeing it live, because it’s – it’s a hard thing to explain. Like, why would I – what does offline mean? How do you – how do you – like, what does offline mode look like? And it’s hard to show offline on a Teams call. And this was one of those cases where I was like, oh, this is – I get it. It makes sense to me now.
It makes a lot of sense. It makes a lot of sense. Again, for any of the folks that are out there like me, where the number – their number one, you know, OneDrive service is OneDrive Web, like, it’s going to make a huge, huge difference for – for folks like you and me. The other thing that he also talked about was the Sync Health reports. And I guess that got a pretty good response from the audience.
Yeah, I mean, this is one of those admin reporting, especially at a conference like this, always a massive, like, place of interest. Admins want to know what’s going on in their organization, and this was no exception.
Like, they showed off Sync Health reports, which has been one of those most common requested features, talked about export and how you can kind of get those results into your own machine and stuff like that, so you can crunch the data and all that kind of goodness. It was awesome, yeah.
I know, so exciting. Definitely not a feature that I would use since I’m mostly an end user, but I understand why it would be super important. So, for the fourth interview, you spoke with our – our good buddy, Vishal, who we just recently had on our Sync Up podcast here. How did that go?
Well, let’s take a listen and find out. (Music.) (Begin segment.)
[49:02]
Hey, Vishal. I’m glad I finally got a chance to catch you here at the conference. How are things going? How – how’s – how have you been enjoying everything?
Yeah, it’s been great to be here back in Orlando. You know, I’ve run into so many customers, our partners, our, you know, ISVs, you know both at the expo and on the sidelines. The energy is amazing, electrifying, really. And so much conversation, so much follow ups that’s going to happen after this conference. It’s going to keep us all really, really busy as we also take care of other things, you know, our planned work.
So, it’s just been amazing to connect with so many wide variety of, you know, stakeholders, all the way from our, you know, customers and, you know, their business partners, given transformation track here as well, our product leaders, our, you know, senior leadership team and engineering leaders as well. So, it’s just been great to have, as Jeff said, about, you know, 300+ folks from product and engineering all here together, you know, addressing a lot of these conversations.
Yeah, it’s one of my favorite things, just, like, seeing, like, the team pictures that get taken of, like, oh, man. Like, we have designers, we have engineers, not just PMS or folks like yourself. It is a whole team effort to show up, and they all love it.
Like, it’s – I – I think my favorite thing personally, I’ve got a lot of favorite things, but one of my favorite things is I love when engineers get to talk to customers directly, when they get to see like, oh, the code that I wrote, like, directly impacted this person. And they love it, and it’s their favorite feature in OneDrive. It’s a special kind of experience. Like, we don’t – I wish we could do stuff like this more.
Definitely, yeah, very, very relatable, lots of aha moments. And so, totally agree with that, Stephen.
[50:47]
I know you’ve been busy. (Laughter.) So, a couple of things I wanted to, like, hear your impressions and get your insights on. So, first up, you had an amazing customer panel where, you know, we had brought four customers up on stage – I’ll let you kind of describe it in a moment – and had them share some of their insights about, you know, using OneDrive, integrating with OneDrive, adopting OneDrive. Can you share a little more? How did that go? How did you feel about it?
Yeah, I think it went really well. Look, I think we’ve talked about this before in some forum. Like, these conferences are great for sharing learnings, you know, lots of skilling sessions here. As, you know, it’s a community conference. We are here to support all kinds of motions, including, like, what can be done to migrate customers to M365 platform successfully. What can we learn from others journey? There’s always something here in terms of commonality or, you know, pitfalls or gotchas to avoid, things like that.
So, I think the panel was great. You know, we had representation from different industry. You know, it was greatly appreciated by a lot of people I talked to, but I think the number one thing that stood out to me was every customer story or every migration journey had some uniqueness to it. They had a different set of challenges. And when we start combining these, you know, four, you know, powerhouse stories into one, it almost becomes a super set of challenges that any customer could run into and how they have been addressed.
I mean, that just reduces barrier to entry when it comes to migration into the platform and, you know, getting data ready. And given the age of, you know, Copilots, like, are we – is our – is our data set right for AI to reason over and things like that.
So, awesome to see, you know, four experts come together and amazingly moderated by Jason. He does a great job, especially with, you know, make it funny as well as informational and a lot of knowledge sharing and exchange. So, I mean, the hour flew by really fast.
And interestingly, many customers have reached out after the event to say, hey, our journey looks very similar. You know, we are kind of stuck. How can you help us, you know, connect with these experts or others who did not have a chance to participate in panel, but maybe willing to share? And that’s the beauty of this whole fabric, you know – you know, and community coming together to – to deliver the learnings for each other.
Yeah. Like, in addition to the panel you did, I know you did a lightning talk on migration, although I imagine that was similar to the kind of the Sync Up episode we did beforehand. But I know you spent a bunch of time in, like, those kind of one-on-one customer meetings.
I know we can’t always talk about, you know, the specifics of those, but for folks who don’t know, like, what are the customer meetings? What sort of insights do we get out of them? What do the customers get out of them? I’d love to learn a little bit more about that.
Yeah, I was fortunate to lead that workstream as part of Conference Organization Group. And our goal was to make sure as our customers and product and engineering get a lot of face time with each other, you know, at the sidelines of this conference. You know, we get on the calls with customers all the time. The interaction, you know, is a little different when you’re in person.
And it was such a great moment to enjoy those conversations. You know, a lot of feedback that could potentially help us with our, you know, product planning and roadmaps and things like that. You know, we’re wanting to know the insights, what’s working for our customers, what’s not, and really take that back with us and see how we can apply some of those insights into our next phase of planning work that we typically do.
And I think the one thing that stood out to me was I saw an interesting divide here. There were some customers who were present, but they really did not have any idea about the side forum that was available or made available through the, you know – with coordination from account teams. And there were some who participated in, you know, several meetings with different product leaders, product makers, engineers, designers.
And so, I think my – my goal here is to just make sure that customers know that the side meeting forum exists and, you know, they can nominate – they can be nominated by their account teams. And, you know, we have a triage process to make sure we match the agenda to the right stakeholders in the room from Microsoft side, and make sure have a very productive conversation. And bidirectional feedback is always that’s amazing out of these conversations.
[55:11]
Yeah, for sure. Any other, like, last notes or insights that are worth sharing with the audience? Like, what was your favorite thing that you learned or heard from a customer during the conference?
Yeah, one of the exact meetings we had with our president, a customer said, talked about a feature on one of the tooling we have recently released. And they are in the business of a lot of, you know, mergers, acquisitions, divestiture and things like that. And they said the tenant-to-tenant migration offering that Microsoft has released has been a game changer for them. If that was not there, they would not have been able to do so many of these, you know, transactions on time, especially mergers, acquisitions and divestitures would get tricky.
So, I think that was an interesting one I heard, for sure. Like, I knew it had an impact. We can cut the time, but the fact that customers said it was almost impossible for them to do was like, wow, above – above and beyond to my expectation. I think that was a good one.
And then I think overall, my take is, like, this is such a big opportunity for all of us, you know, to come together and, like, you kind of reminded me of career fair in college days, like, you know, you have – like, you’re able to speed connect with so many stakeholders in, like, under three days. Sometimes it takes us months to get these calls on the calendar. And so, the ability to, you know, have impromptu meetings ad hoc, you know, connections, including our broader community MVP’s as well, was just mind blowing.
The forum gave us roundtables as a more, like, a smaller group settings. That was great. And so, I think the conference has evolved into something where there’s a lot of goodness for every kind of stakeholder, irrespective of a persona. So, I think it’s becoming one of my favorite ones for sure, Stephen.
Yeah, I feel the same. I really appreciate you spending the time. I know, like I said, it’s been crazy, but enjoy the rest of your conference, Vishal. Have a good one.
Yeah, it’s going to be great. So, thanks for catching up, Stephen. (End segment.) (Music.)
[57:05]
That was Vishal. I mean, I think he’s now officially the only guest we’ve had on, back to back, just by happenstance.
Well, let me ask you this. Was he wearing a suit?
I mean, Vishal always wears a suit, Arvind. That’s ABS, always be selling.
Always be selling, ABS. I think it’s always be closing, by the way.
Whatever. This is why I don’t wear a suit, Arvind, because I don’t know these things. (Laughter.)
(Inaudible.)
Obviously, we talked about migration. Vishal, super smart dude, I think that came through clearly in our last episode. But, like, watching Vishal at a conference is like watching Superman fly around Metropolis saving people. Like, Vishal just goes from, like, customer meeting to customer meeting to talk to session, and is just nailing it. Like, and in a suit, of course, like, every step of the way.
And there are just so many – like, I had a couple customer meetings with him where it’s just Vishal walks in the room ahead of time. He’s like, okay, we’re meeting with Company Foo. Like, we’re meeting with Contoso, and these are the things they’re interested in. This is what they want to know. Stephen, you’re on point to answer this question. Jason, they’re going to ask you about this. Don’t say yes, you know, or whatever it is. (Laughter.)
Yes. (Laughter.)
And – and then they come in and it works exactly that way. And they’re like, man, he just – he just knows.
Yes, he does. He’s – he is always closing. I did think that, you know – you know, from our last podcast, him bringing up the tenant-to-tenant migration, you know, when he was talking about one of the favorite things they heard from his customers, I thought that was like – I felt like it was, like, tying it all back together for me, you know?
Yeah. It happened a few times, honestly. Like, obviously, if a lot of companies come and are interested in migration, Vishal close in as usual. I think the other thing he did that I really loved is we had a customer panel, and this is one of those things. And like, again, hats off to Irfan who also worked on this, and Vishal, customer panels can be mixed sometimes, because you want to have people who up there who have interesting stories, they’re good at telling it.
And he got four people up on stage, four customers, but they just walked through their experiences migrating to OneDrive, driving adoption, the challenges they faced, how they surmounted it. It’s just inspiring to hear some of these, like, major customers, you know, companies you would know talking about how they achieved success with our product. It’s inspiring.
[59:23]
Vishal is, like, one of those folks that just, like, thrives on, like, customer connection and, like, talking to customers, and listening to their problems and trying to solve their problems. And so, I could see why him being at a conference or back at conferences, especially ones that are big like this, would be, you know, just – he would just be in his element, you know?
I was going to say, this was – this isn’t specific to Vishal, but one of my favorite customer meetings that I didn’t have is we had a customer meeting scheduled, and Vishal came into the room, like, five minutes before it was about to start.
And he’s like, “Hey, they’re not coming.” And we’re like, “Oh no, what happened? Like, are they angry at us?” He’s like, “No, no, they went to Lesha’s talk. That answered every question they had about what’s coming for OneDrive. Like, they are excited about it. They think it’s awesome. They just didn’t want to waste your time.” And we were like, “Okay, success. Fantastic. Call that a win.” (Laughter.)
Excellent. Well, that is – that is awesome. Vishal, always a good guy. He’s always closing and always wearing his suit, so. (Laughter.)
Yeah.
S with that, I mean, is there anything else about the conference that you, maybe not in these interviews that you’d want to mention, Stephen?
I’ll selfishly mention, I gave a talk on collaboration and how to manage collaboration. That was really fun. Michael Pierce, our design manager for the sharing experience, was there.
Well, I should say one of favorite things about these conferences is we don’t just bring PMS, we bring our customer people. We bring our designers; we bring our engineers. And getting to connect customers to those folks is always inspiring. And like, Michael got to go up on stage and do, like – I kind of – I made fun of him a little bit, but in a good natured way.
Like, he did, like, the design voice, you know, the Steve Jobs, like, we’ve made the share dialog simpler than you can possibly believe. Look at those rounded corners, you know. (Laughter.) And, like, the PM is like, “Ah, rounded corners. Who cares about rounded corners?” But like, being able to talk about the craft that goes into making the product is always super inspiring.
[01:01:15]
Oh yeah. No, I’m fascinated. But like, there’s so much – yes, it’s hard for, you know, if you’re just an – a regular user to use OneDrive just as a tool or any – any piece of software that Microsoft produces as, like, a tool, it’s hard. You’re just trying to get your job done. And at the end of the day, you may not realize the amount of craft, the amount of, like, obsession that our designers and our engineers, for that matter, have over the thing that – that you use.
It’s definitely, like, something as someone who’s been at Microsoft in a previous stint and now, you know, back, it’s definitely something that, like, you just now see so much more prevalent across the things that we build. Everybody just cares about everything that we put in front of customers.
Yeah, it – it’s (my favorite?), bringing the engineers, too, because they care, but they don’t get to go in the customer meetings that, like, we do or designers do or the researchers do. We brought Amy, who’s one of our engineering managers, who works on kind of the activity experience. And she works with the Office teams on the Office Web experiences, just give you an idea, like very much a kind of backend focus.
And she sat in on research sessions; she attended sessions. She talked to customers at the booth, and she came up at the end of it, told me it was like, “This was like, I didn’t realize how much stuff we did and how important it was to customers.” Like, she kind of knew because we talk about it internally, but like, there’s something different when you talk to a customer and they’re like, oh, you’re the person that, you know, built and made, you know, the Web Office clients more reliable. Like, it used to be so slow, and it’s so much faster now. Thank you.
This is cliche, but like, I said, I hadn’t been to a conference in, like, four years because of COVID and conferences not happening. And like, I’m a believer again. Like, yeah, we – like, when’s the next one? How do we – how do we get more people to go to the next conference? Where – how do we show up there, talk to customers, show off all the cool things we’re doing? It’s just awesome.
[01:03:03]
And I would say, like, as they get bigger, you know, we’re going to bring more people, cooler stuff. And, like, it’s – we’re – I mean, I think we – we all – like, Microsoft always thinks about these as, like, productions and shows. And we try to – we try to bring amazing stuff for all of our customers and fans to – to see and appreciate and get to use. So, with that, I mean, we hope that these conferences just keep getting bigger and bigger. And we hope to see you at the next ones.
And so, with that, we want to thank everyone for listening and joining us today. And Stephen, before we sign off, how can people find and learn more about you?
As usual, if you want to learn about OneDrive, get the latest and greatest, check out the blog, aka.MS/OneDrive/blog, the newsletter that Arvin plugged at the beginning, aka.MS/OneDrive/join. You can find me on LinkedIn @SRice08 and Arvind @ArvindMishra1.
And as I kind of mentioned a few times, if you didn’t make it to the conference, but if this sounded interesting, check out the Microsoft 365 Community Learning Channel. They’re uploading sessions. You can catch it all, get that kind of live, but recorded experience, you know.
And that’s one of the things. Like, if you see Taylor Swift live, that’s – it’s a life event. This isn’t that, but you can watch. You know, you can watch it on Disney+. You can watch this conference on YouTube and get, you know, 60%-70% of the way there. And sometimes that’s – that’s good. That’s awesome.
I saw that Taylor Swift concert on Disney+. I thought it was pretty good. I think it would have been better if I was there live, but – but you – everyone should go out and watch these videos on our YouTube channel. (Laughter.) So, as always – as always, we love hearing from you, our listeners. You can reach us on Twitter or X at @OneDrive. And if you’ve got a question, just tag it with #SyncUp. You can visit our page for links, resources and more at aka.MS/SyncUp.
Yeah, if you’re looking for one of those things to engage or tag, like, let us know what your favorite M365 session was. If you watch the videos, we’d love to hear it. You can also send Arvind and I questions directly. You can e-mail us at [email protected]. Don’t forget to subscribe to Sync Up wherever you get your podcast.
If you enjoy Sync Up, if you find it useful, tell your friends. Word of mouth is, as always, the best way to get people engaged and help us grow the show. And if you’re curious about other Microsoft podcasts, check out aka.MS/Microsoft/podcast. And as always, a huge thanks to Lisa for making this podcast possible.
Thank you for listening to Sync Up. We’ve been your hosts, Stephen and Arvind, and we’ll catch up with you next month.
[01:06:06]
END Sync Up Podcast EP11 M365 Community Conference Recap 2