Kevin McDonnell: Welcome to the Copilot Connection.
Zoe Wilson: Way to share with you all the news insights and capabilities of the Microsoft Copilot ecosystem from across the entire Microsoft stack. Zoe Wilson and I'm the Global Digital Workplace Consultant Leader at Kyndryl a Regional Director and an MVP for Copilot
Kevin McDonnell: I'm Kevin MacDonald. I'm an MVP for Copilot and Copilot Extensibility UK Lead for Copilot and Agents at Avanade. ⁓ we'll be releasing episodes as podcasts and on YouTube with insights from experts in the community and Microsoft on what the different area of Copilot and Agents mean, the impact they can make to you and your organisation and what you need to do to prepare for them. And for once, ⁓ finally remembered to change that intro, Zoe.
Zoe Wilson: only taken what, how many months? ⁓
Kevin McDonnell: Oh, literally, I've been wanting change, I think, for about a year. yeah. All I need to sort down now is move my camera so I don't look like I have a hat on there and then we're sorted.
Zoe Wilson: Yeah, the lampshade hat is always a highlight. So it's been quite a busy week in, oh well, a busy couple of weeks in the world of copilot and agents. So this week we will dig into some of the big announcements that we've seen in the last few weeks with copilot wave three. There have also been a whole heap of reorgs at Microsoft. And if we've got time, we'll get into a little bit of SharePoint at 25 as well.
Kevin McDonnell: you you Sorry, I've got a question for you Zoe. How much time have you had to really dig into these announcements?
Zoe Wilson: little, ⁓ a ⁓ amount. I think I've got an advantage in that some of it, you know, I get visibility of through work, helps. But it's been... For me personally, it's been a horrendous time because I've got a lot of issues going on with family health outside work. know that there's lots of people heading this weekend to MVP Summit and for the first time in a few years, I won't be attending in person because I need to be around for my family at home. So considering things I'm having to deal with, I've had more time than I would have expected actually to dig into them, but probably ⁓ not much time as I needed. ⁓
Kevin McDonnell: Hmm. Okay. Yeah, and I feel the same, not so much, well, it's always fun on the personal side, but work-wise it's just been ridiculously busy. it feels, the reason I'm kind of mostly bringing it up is it feels like that transition from talking about co-pilot and talking about agents has really moved to people getting moving with them and taking action from that. I still have a lot of talking about agents and things like that, but the reality of it's getting through the deliveries, The engagement with clients for me has been through the roof, which is good news, but tiring news slightly.
Zoe Wilson: Yeah, and obviously you're losing the next week because she will be in Redmond, you, with the rest of our MVP friends.
Kevin McDonnell: Yes, very much looking forward to it. I always feel a bit funny talking about the MVP Summit, especially knowing ⁓ the majority of our audience ⁓ MVPs on ⁓ so was like, these bloody MVPs talking about things they can't talk about, showing off all the fun they're having and things like that. my advice, if not, just keep an eye on the posts that come after the MVP Summit. It is all NDA and people won't release exactly what, but... look at the themes that people start talking about because that's the kind of thing that's going to be big. We know agents is going to be big. I think what we're talking about today is going to be a massive theme from there. I always before was an MVP just seeing what the blog of mood, how that shifted kind of gives you a little bit of a view on that. Hopefully most MVPs are stupid enough to ⁓ post too much around that. But you'll see the mood music and I don't think Microsoft's against that. They want people to start thinking ahead, even if it's not very specific things there.
Zoe Wilson: Yeah, I'd agree with that. And, ⁓ know, even though I won't be there in person, I will still be joining as much as I can virtually. And again, recognising that lots of it is under NDE, I will least be able to start to make decisions about the direction of travel ⁓ for my of my business in a way is kind of going in the right direction from Microsoft perspective.
Kevin McDonnell: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, we cut through the marketing. But moving on quickly from that. ⁓
Zoe Wilson: Yeah. so before we get on to kind the things we the things we've got going on outside of MVP Summit, ⁓ I do want to take a second to say a huge happy birthday, Kevin. I know you yesterday that your actual birthday, your number of years under end year, but a huge happy birthday from me and hopefully all of our listeners will join me in wishing you a happy birthday for yesterday as well.
Kevin McDonnell: Hahaha Yes. Thank you very much. It's one of the things I love about the tech community is the number of messages and things I got from all around the world in all different areas. Gives me a lovely smile. I wish I'd had more time to spend with my family. If I'm honest, I probably should have taken the day off, but knowing I was being off for MVP Summit, I thought, no, it's a waste of time. So instead, I had back to back meetings, a very rushed Chinese takeaway, and then off for parents evening. So, yeah, middle aged birthdays. I can't live with them, can't live without them.
Zoe Wilson: Yeah, well at least you'll be able to celebrate in Seattle, although again, recognising that's not with your family and you do share your birthday with a couple of other MVPs as well, don't you?
Kevin McDonnell: That is true, yes, I think was Mark Christie's birthday which I know he loves being talked about a and loves publicity from there. So happy birthday to Mark and also Luke Murray as well. I think noted in of the chats there's a lot of parents who their summer holidays and we'll just leave that there for everyone.
Zoe Wilson: Yeah, so a big happy birthday to all of you and then if we look at some of the events that we're involved in and the things that we've got going on, is an exciting event happening next month isn't there, Kevin? ⁓
Kevin McDonnell: Yeah, really... Sorry, you really threw me, said next month. Oh my God, it is next month, isn't it? That's terrifying. We've really got to write that. But yes, honoured, humbled and honoured, there we go, that Daniel Roeriger invited you and I to jointly keynote with Donna Sarker the CocoCo keynote, as we're calling it. And I'm struggling not to say that in a normal way. but it's the Copilot Community Conference. It's online only, it's all virtual, no in person, so you can join wherever you are, completely free of charge on that, and you can register them there. So Zoe and I are kicking off that. We've got some amazing other speakers. I love the way they're doing it. They kind of got tracks based on different topics and then they've got different speakers. I can't see if it's listed here actually. Yeah, here we go. They're looking at different personas of those tracks. So from users to admins to change makers to developers. So you can kind of join and learn about Copilot from that different ⁓ stream of focus within there and look through the different speakers for that. ⁓ Just remembering, I think, is the call for speakers still open for that as well? I can't see it listed there.
Zoe Wilson: I'm not sure
Kevin McDonnell: Might have closed now. So do check. I'll try put in the notes if that is still open as well. But that might have closed now. I'd love to go back and have look at that one. But yeah, be a really good event. it's funny. It feels like we moved a lot away from virtual events ⁓ post kind of Covid, if one went back to in person. But I feel they're kind of trickling back in a little bit more now.
Zoe Wilson: Yeah.
Kevin McDonnell: especially as people are busier and love that opportunity to open it up to people, people with families, people who can't travel so much to not forget about that and put these events on and also make them available afterwards. So even if you can't attend at the time, I'm pretty sure I'm just checking there that those sessions would be available on that. But join live, ask questions of the speakers is the best way to get from there.
Zoe Wilson: Yeah, I mean, I think it's good to have a balance between in-person and virtual. think ⁓ having the ability for people to be able to speak or attend virtually is way more, I know there's a huge amount of value in in-person connections, but being able to still get access to information virtually is way more inclusive. So I hope we see a little bit more of this, but. Like you said, very honoured to be co-hosting the keynote and how fantastic to be listed as keynote speakers alongside Donna as well.
Kevin McDonnell: Yeah, yeah, I hope we can complete. So I should say that's two different sessions. So you and I speaking together and Donna speaking together as well. So we hope that will do that and trying to think about what what copilot means to people and probably a little bit of what we're talking about today as well. But before we get on to that.
Zoe Wilson: Yeah and then ⁓ there's ⁓ another event in the UK happening, is it June Kevin, Experts Live UK?
Kevin McDonnell: And it's June 11th and 12th, so we have Experts Live UK. We're two days of the event. The first day will be more workshop focused. So I'm running that. might need to speak to some more of the workshop coordinators for that one. We've got six, five, probably six streams. Having a few discussions on the right people for that to get moving. And we've picked our speakers now. So hopefully we will start to announce the final speakers. We've announced some. We've got Reshmi and Lee Ford speaking on Copilot and Agents. I love those two very, very much looking forward to ⁓ hearing from them on that one. So the second day is your more traditional conference style. We've got some deep dive sessions and some lightning talks. So there's a bit of everything on there. I will say. It was horrific choosing people that, but choosing from across, and I know we'll talk about your own conference organizing in a minute, but choosing from across the Microsoft stack and trying to make sure you have that balance, make sure we've got a diverse balance. I know Louisa Fries was speaking on LinkedIn about getting diverse balance. We've tried very hard to get a ⁓ good number of male and female speakers into the session. Do I think we've done a good enough job? I'd like it to be better on there, but it is a big challenge and something we're trying to make sure we've got the right messaging around that as well. But I think we've done okay on that as well. I never think we're perfect. I think we can always do better ⁓ from that as well. But it'll be a really good session. So yeah, do sign up for that one.
Zoe Wilson: video. ⁓ challenging, isn't it? I mean, ⁓ of the ways that we've tried to ⁓ some newer speakers to get involved with Scottish Summit ⁓ through running ⁓ abstract guidance webinars for people. ⁓ So the first one we held early in March when the call for speakers opened, we've got a second one which is basically a repeat of the first. So if anybody listening joined the first, you don't need to join the second unless you have specific questions that you've not been able to get answered. But the call for speakers for Scottish Summit is open until the end of April. I think the webinars on something like the 14, the details are on the Scottish Summit LinkedIn page. And essentially what what we're trying to do is to give people guidance, both in terms of what we're looking for from an organizing committee perspective, but also helping people understand how to write a good session abstract. And I don't know whether you saw this with Experts Live, Kevin, I'm assuming you did because it's been a trend for a few years now. The amount of very poor session abstracts that are submitted still continues to be fairly mind blowing. people who are submitting sessions with like one or two sentences that are vaguely describing a topic, but it's not clear what problem they're trying to address, what they've learned, what they'll show, what the attendees will take away. So, you know, we're hoping to kind of get in front of this a little bit by giving people guidance and selfishly hoping to make our job as organizers less painful. I think we'll have a different problem, I think.
Kevin McDonnell: you I actually disagree, it's harder because you've got more ones and you've got to choose from better looking sessions.
Zoe Wilson: It's harder to make the decisions but it's less frustrating.
Kevin McDonnell: Yes, yeah, no, that is absolutely true. And I think the challenge that we and I think Scotty Summit will be doing the same is we do blind selection. So we don't know the names of people, they're taken out of the evaluations. And when you suddenly got like 10 different submissions on a very similar topic, trying to work out which one you think stands out is very hard. And then you bring the names back into it. look at it and you're like, oh, goodness I haven't chosen so and so ⁓ well that's their fault on there so huge apologies I know I know we've spoken to some people for experts live that haven't been selected there was a bit of surprise but we try and hold to to that first decision on there and the blind ones that come through so it's it's hard it's horrible especially when you're friends with a lot of these people
Zoe Wilson: Yeah. It is certainly is challenging. So Scottish Summit, the conference itself isn't until October, but obviously with Colf speakers open, there's a huge amount of activity and planning underway at the moment. ⁓ We're just about to announce our workshop speakers along with registration and ticketing links for both the conference, the workshops and the post-conference evening event as well. So watch this space for more detail and for anyone listening, if you missed the keynote speaker announcement, we're absolutely delighted that Martin Woodward, who's a VP of Developer Relations for GitHub, ⁓ as well as having a broader role, I think, generally across Microsoft AI. He's going to come and do the keynote for us. So big boost to Phil following Scott Hanselman, but I've seen him speak at events before. I think he's going to be absolutely fantastic. And when you look at all of the vibe coding.
Kevin McDonnell: think it'd be great and also I think the timing of that with GitHub at the moment and we had April Yoho on Copilot Fireside Chat recently didn't we? It just it feels like what people will be learning from GitHub will apply to everyone soon as well so really looking forward to that one.
Zoe Wilson: Yeah. Yeah.
Kevin McDonnell: Right, we probably should talk about Copilot a bit today as well.
Zoe Wilson: A a little.
Kevin McDonnell: Yes, yeah, keep that connection to Copilot. You see what I did there? That was good. ⁓ OK, so announcements. think that the one... kind of funny. going to talk about Copilot. We're to go into the detail of what was announced. But to me, the most important one was actually the kind of announcement that through. And it was kind a...
Zoe Wilson: Bye.
Kevin McDonnell: It was almost a couple of announcements, wasn't it, that one after the other on So just bring up screen. I think the first one we heard come through was that Rajesh Jha, ⁓ who looks experience and devices at Microsoft, is retiring ⁓ from that. he's, ⁓ I guess, of currently, yes, still currently on there because he's transitioning out on July the 1st. So he reports into Satchar. ⁓ and a lot of the things that people in the co-pilot worlds will understand will be in that space. So he is going to be stepping down and there's not going to be a direct replacement on there. So instead Perry Clark, Charles LaManna, Pavin Davaluri and Ryan Roslansky ⁓ as executive vice presidents will become direct reports to SACHA. Now, when I saw this, my first thought was, is this a battle to be the next Satcher? Have they just opened up these five people? My next thought is, well, hang on, what's happened to... ⁓ my gosh, I've forgotten his name. Deep Mind ⁓ person who looks after the copilot consumer side. Mustafa. Thank you, Mustafa Suleyman. From there, what's happened to him with that?
Zoe Wilson: Bye. Mustafa.
Kevin McDonnell: as well. I think there was another link, which I've just realized I haven't opened up here, that talked a bit. This is what came out a little bit later, that actually there would be a kind of co-pilot team. I think, actually don't think Pavan was part of that, was it? So it's Perry Clark, Charles LaManna, Ryan Roslansky and Mustafa Suleyman will own co-pilot. And that's the retail... Sorry, go on.
Zoe Wilson: Yeah, so it's a new, essentially. I was going to say essentially they're creating a new co-pilot leadership team, aren't they? And rather than having consumer co-pilot sitting separate, they're bringing Mustafa and there was another guy whose name I can't remember. They're bringing them together with the people here who were kind of sitting on top of co-pilot and essentially will create this new co-pilot LT who will all report directly to Satya.
Kevin McDonnell: Yeah. ⁓ Sorry, Zoe, just in case people don't live in a corporate world, LT, we mean leadership team there. Just in case. Yeah, you're annoying me that I can't remember his name either. Was it Joseph?
Zoe Wilson: Yes, yeah, yeah. Hahaha Yeah, ⁓ so while you try to find that link, other thing that I don't think you called out from that first article was the grandfather of SharePoint, Mr Jeff Teper himself, ⁓ also being promoted, hasn't he? ⁓
Kevin McDonnell: Huge congratulations to Geoff Teaper, who's promoted to EVP as well, so executive vice president from there. It interestingly didn't actually say, I will share that link again. I really to stop shuffling windows and looking off to one side. It didn't actually say in what his role would be, ⁓ which was intriguing. So it... mentioned. Yeah, both Jeff Teaper, ⁓ and Sumit Shahan and Kurt Konigsbauer promoted to president as well. So kind of Jeff promoted to the same tier within Microsoft as Charles, Pavan, Perry and Ryan, but not saying where he fits within that team. intrigued some, I'm sure there will be many of us digging the MVP Summit to try and get more detail on that. I think huge respect to Kurt Konigsbauer as well. ⁓ Seeing as he owned Viva to get promoted while owning Viva I think is quite an accomplishment in this day and age. So I thought that was an impressive move as well.
Zoe Wilson: Yeah, fantastic. It is great to see people succeed. I think like you, Kevin, one of the things I really want to see is how do all of these announcements actually translate into an org chart? And we were talking to one of our friends who works inside Microsoft who said even for them, it's probably going to be weeks until they can actually see what this looks like. So good to see that the corporate machine works in terms of making things kind of crystal clear for people. ⁓ Hopefully you can use being in person in Redmond next week to just try and get a little bit more clarity on what people are doing and what their focus is.
Kevin McDonnell: Yeah, what it means on there. I think Jacob Andreu is going to be a person leading the copilot experience. That's a person whose name we couldn't remember. And it's interesting. Why couldn't remember? He's fairly new to Microsoft. I think it was about 18 months he's been there and came over into most of the Suleiman's world. He also comes, I think, from a more VC background. Looking looking on LinkedIn at him. Yeah.
Zoe Wilson: Bye. Yeah, was very product. Yeah, it was very kind of like niche, niche products, manager product development type roles for a lot of organisations I've never heard of to be honest. And I think the fact that he's worked for Mustafa on the consumer side is probably one of the reasons why he's not really come onto our radar in the enterprise world that we work in.
Kevin McDonnell: So very interesting. Mmm. Yeah, absolutely. it and I think this big thing about bringing together these areas, ⁓ you know, we're kind of seeing similar announcements, but I think we'll see that focus ⁓ on items coming to the consumer and the commercial co-pilot start to align even more from that, ⁓ which would be fantastic. And I think that word align is the one that excites me most of those who are kind of close with Microsoft. we see many different areas kind of pushing ahead and... Can I say this without getting in trouble? I'm going to say it anyway. Not always talking to each other and having that alignment. So it's often... I love the phase shipping the org chart. You can often see some decisions that come through based on your knowledge of where things sit in the org chart. I don't think that's a great thing. As a consumer, whether on the enterprise or consumer side, I've got to my name right there. You want to kind of just have a product. You want a product that works. You don't want to have to understand too much where these different things sit. So I hope this will drive more of that alignment and understanding and teams working together in a more structured way ⁓ from that. So it'd be fascinating to see.
Zoe Wilson: Yeah, I mean I think for those who can see the screen, think the last two paragraphs are kind of super interesting because it just explicitly says that you've got Ryan Perry in La Mano who will lead M365 apps and the Copilot platform.
Kevin McDonnell: Mm.
Zoe Wilson: I'm together along with Jacob and Mustafa, they'll make up the co-pilot LTE and that the org boundaries will simply reflect system architecture and product shape such that we can deliver more coherent and competitive experiences that continue to evolve with model capabilities. So like you said, just really focused on breaking down some of those org boundaries that have led to some of the silo decisions. when you look at the
Kevin McDonnell: Yeah.
Zoe Wilson: first mover advantage that Microsoft had initially with with their partnership with OpenAI. ⁓ think the complexity of their org has actually slowed down their ability to be able to really innovate and integrate everything together in a way that they need to. ⁓ I'm to see what this actually means from a product perspective.
Kevin McDonnell: Absolutely. Yeah, and it's kind of fascinating. Fascinating, fascinating. ⁓ know, Ryan Ruslansky was linked in Charles LaManna was BizApps yet they're being talked about in that M365 apps area. I do apologize if you on the off chance you have to be listening, Perry. I can't remember which world Perry was in, but I'm pretty sure it wasn't that traditional M365. So it feels like the change there. And that's what I'm also intrigued to see where Jeff. rolls up into this world. So maybe we'll see that start to come out soon, certainly by that July the 1st as it comes through as well. And also interesting to see when Mustafa plays into this as well.
Zoe Wilson: Yay. Yeah, so maybe I mean we've got the public dates for Microsoft Build now haven't we, which is the start of June, so maybe by then we'll start to see again the next wave of announcements and ⁓ yeah, just how some of this is going to play out. I just had a quick look on LinkedIn in the background. Perry is the president of Microsoft 365 Core.
Kevin McDonnell: Mmm. ⁓ okay. Interesting. So that's... Don't say anything rude, Kev. That's the kind of infraside, so thinking kind of exchange the bass central to it and configuration there, I'm guessing, rather than the kind of user experience front end that most people would see then. I'm guessing.
Zoe Wilson: Yeah, I mean if you look at his history, was originally in Exchange mailbox server from 2003 and then General Manager for Exchange for a long time until he became CVP in 2017 and then President.
Kevin McDonnell: Mm.
Zoe Wilson: So, you know, he's been in that Microsoft space for a very long time, like you say, typically coming through that exchange background. But again, just from an org structure perspective, I'm not quite clear these days what is actually in M365 core anymore.
Kevin McDonnell: Yeah. No, no, agree. So, hmm, yeah, interesting, interesting times on that. So what what does this mean? What has this actually come through? And I think this is where we've seen that drive ⁓ of the announcements. And if you haven't seen this phrase already, you will hear the word frontier an awful lot. at least in the short term future on there. It is all about this frontier transformation. I think it is this drive to be, to at least appear to be at the front edge of things on there. You could hear me hesitate slightly there. That Microsoft never wants to be at the bleeding edge of things. They want to take to an enterprise something a little bit more stable, but appear to be as close to that in a safe way as possible. I think this is where that frontier transformation comes into things. So we saw some big announcements of this wave three. I found it quite interesting that wave three as a phrase, it's not there in the title, it kind of is there on that first bit, but is not repeated a lot. We heard a lot about wave two last year. This is kind of acknowledging it's there, but really focusing on that frontier view of things on that. And the... This blog post has its slightly different area to where I kind of think of it. we'll start with this with copilot co-work. Whenever I talk about this, whenever I hear other people, I'm genuinely thinking about getting a swear box for every time someone says Claude in this in some way or gets the name wrong from there, because it is there is that natural Claude co-work that people are thinking about.
Zoe Wilson: Hahaha
Kevin McDonnell: I think it will take a little bit of time for people to get used to this, but very interesting quite how aligned they've made that name ⁓ from there and the capability of that and that acknowledgement.
Zoe Wilson: Well, is, yeah, I mean, it is essentially, leveraging the model that powers Cloud Cowork, aren't they? So whilst branded Copilot and it's in the Copilot ecosystem and will have the benefit of ⁓ the compliance and the grounding on org data and things like that. And for some people... ⁓ who are maybe concerned about the risk of letting this loose on their devices without that, you know, this is really positive, I think. But the reason is co-work is because essentially it is Claude co-work under the hood.
Kevin McDonnell: Yeah, well, it has the model under there, absolutely. And I think the Claude's or the anthropic models have been game changing to a lot of what the capabilities can do, especially about taking action. And I think that's what this shift is. We're really seeing now that shift from knowledge to taking action. And I think we've got it little bit further down that will come to a minute, but. For me, this is finally doing a lot of things that people kind of assumed that Copilot would do in the first place. The best example I can think of this is PowerPoint, where with the Claude or the Anthropic models, just because I know I'm a pedant and if I get it wrong there'll be all the pedants going after me afterwards, the Anthropic models have made a huge change to what can be done with PowerPoint on there. But... Then some of these demos, I'm going to run this for those watching on the screen but without the sound on there. In fact, let me make that a little bit bigger so people can see that this Frontier Agent that is currently in private preview, so you can't try this yet unless you have the right engagement with Microsoft ⁓ on there. If you have, let us know. want to hear stories. ⁓ But... The one that's got me most excited, this one isn't quite there, but this is about preparing for your customer meeting and it will pull in the different folders, help create some of your content. You'll see to the right, it is building a plan and then executing that. The demo that we saw from the live LinkedIn, which was a little bit of a car crash of videos restarting and confusing everyone from there, but seeing Charles LaManna actually reorganise his calendar and saying it's busy and just get it sorted. so excited about that. just want ⁓ Copilot Cowork just to go in and sort my calendar and tell me here's all the things where you've promised to do five things at the same time maybe you need to think about that a little bit more. ⁓ To me that whatever this will cost that will be worth it.
Zoe Wilson: You Yeah, I mean it's interesting isn't it because I, one of the benefits I get with my role is I have an exec assistant so when it comes to sorting out diary clashes and availability and you know being able to make sure I've got prep time ahead of important meetings and things like that I have a human who does that for me. I am very looking forward to this being available because I I'm interested to see how helpful the sort my diary out is going to be compared to an actual person.
Kevin McDonnell: I could hear the hesitation there and they're just... I think you're similar to me, it's like, oh this feels horrible. This feels like doing people out of a job from that, but I think it is going to be that interesting view to see what will be the difference there.
Zoe Wilson: Yeah and I don't think, you know, when I think about what my EA does for me, think that because a lot of the people I work with are at a similar level, they also have EAs as well and whilst this will be able to help my calendar, it's not going to be able to do the human thing of, you know, talking to either the other individuals who need to be in a meeting or to the other assistants and doing the group prioritisation and things like that but for quick changes, being able to make sure that, ⁓ you know, if I'm using co-work to plan something or to do a piece of work it's also kind of blocking out time and making diary changes as well is super exciting and for those people whose tenants are in frontier so that you've got the public preview for co-pilot available this will start becoming available next month in April. One of the things that I've seen with organizations is there is still concern about the data processing because my understanding is that this is still going to the US Anthropic data centers for processing. So for those of us in the UK or the EU or other places with kind of strong data protection and governance guidelines, ⁓ we may have to wait a little longer.
Kevin McDonnell: Yes, very good call out on that one. I do believe, though, that there's going to be ways that you can turn it on for some people and not others. So, you know, for large global organizations where you're happy that their data is in the US, probably because they're based in the US, you can enable it for them and not others. So it'll be very interesting ⁓ on that one. And I think linked to that, we've also seen this transition of what was agent mode has now become ⁓ editing copilot. mean it's kind of not really a rebrand and rename, it's kind of saying that this new functionality that we tried out as agent mode is now the core part of copilot within which I think is good. I kind of like that. Yes they've given it name of editing copilot but I think that's ⁓ way of describing what it does but now it's just you can do that stuff in copilot you haven't got to go somewhere else for there although I should say now it's ⁓ generally available in Excel and Word and PowerPoint and Outlook starting to roll out over the coming months so it's not all there directly straight away going back to the early busy comment I haven't had a chance to play around with this yet but would very much want to and see the difference it makes with this
Zoe Wilson: Yeah, so just while we talk about our co-pilot in Excel and Word, I know there was something that we forgot to put in the list of topics, which was the recent message center updates. So this is information that's in the public domain. being pushed out via the message center.
Kevin McDonnell: I was smiling thinking the same thing. Yeah.
Zoe Wilson: Microsoft are making changes to the way that Copilot chat, the basic or freemium version will up in the Office Apps for organizations. I've just you a link to a post Kevin by Tom Abuthnot, who's done a very good LinkedIn post. You bring that up because there are differences in how this will depending on whether an organization has.
Kevin McDonnell: just searching for that.
Zoe Wilson: less than 2000 M365 licences or more than 2000.
Kevin McDonnell: Be honest, did you have to look up the post to remember which way round it was?
Zoe Wilson: I remembered, but I just thought it would be helpful to have the actual detail to structure this.
Kevin McDonnell: Okay, good, Yeah. So I think the important one is for tenants with over 2000 users, you won't have the ⁓ included Copilot chat within your Word, Excel and PowerPoint and OneNote. You will still within Outlook. You will still within the Copilot app, which is both the kind of web, the local app and Teams. But you won't within those kind of traditional office apps. from there. I, I, it's always tricky when Microsoft takes things away, when there's not really an obvious reason why, but I don't see this as big thing. I'd love to know the analytics of how many people actually used, actually use that copilot chat intentionally and how many tried to do things with their copilot file and realise it wasn't doing that because it was a standalone copilot chat and they got confused. So I'm, I'm a little mixed on this. I know some people and I have heard some clients being very irate. I think generally where, especially if they've just updated loaded training material and now they've got to go and change it again. I've heard questions. What if I have 1,995 licenses? Does that mean when I had five more, suddenly the whole thing's going to change? What's the experience like with that? So I think good questions. ⁓
Zoe Wilson: Yeah. ⁓
Kevin McDonnell: think there's better things to be arguing about if I'm brutally honest. know some people in chat who are going to listen to this are going to kind go after me next week but ⁓ it's a shame. I don't think it's the end of world.
Zoe Wilson: Yeah, I mean. Well I think the... I'm not a full cynic but you know there's obviously a cynical side to me shall we say, the cynical side looks at some of the other announcements that came out of wave 3 with regards to new licensing. and wonders if this is, know, for big organizations where they have a lot of people using that capability in the basic copilot chats, whether this is an opportunity to kind of nudge them along that path to either premium copilot license or to some of the new licensing that was announced a couple of weeks ago.
Kevin McDonnell: Yeah, I kind of agree, kind of agree, but you know, if you were on a thousand licenses, you've now got less of a reason to get a thousand more at the same time. I, yeah, it's not ideal, but. We'll see what happens in six months with some of these things. I think it is one of those things. I think to a lot of admins, to a lot of people who are just seeing consistent change and getting fed up with it, I hear the noise there. I got to move on before I upset too many people by telling them to calm down. So there's a nice block in here. I don't think we'll go into about agents in chat. A lot talking about multi... multi-model intelligence so ⁓ I'm hesitating because I can't remember where I saw some news on this so I'm not going to mention something there but you can see we're getting a lot more of that clawed in there. I bring back what you were saying earlier with the anthropic models just to be very cautious around where your data is going and making sure you're turning those things on normally. I think this trend of not just having open AI will continue so that's going to be interesting. I think the big announcement for those who looking at the screen, I'm showing Agent 365, wasn't a big announcement really. I was a little disappointed we didn't really get any new functionality come out from that to what was announced at Ignite. But we did hear when it's going to be generally available and the price. And the price to me was one thing, so it's going to be generally available from May the 1st. I think the thing that caught most people by surprise is that this will be a per user per month license. So for those who turned on the public preview, you enable Agent 365 with a per agent license that you enabled. And we kind of suspected there'll be something because you've got those security elements on there. And Agent 365 is all about managing your agents. But then you charge per user. So... I'm going to try this one and see how much trouble I get in. Zoe, how do you decide who gets Agent 365 license?
Zoe Wilson: ⁓ So people obviously start with people who have an M365 co-pilot license and then people who are actually collaborating with using agents, people who are building agents.
Kevin McDonnell: Thank you for not swearing.
Zoe Wilson: If like with agent 365, if you've got it turned on and people are building agents, there's a very basic level of visibility and governance that you get. But for you to be able to start to manage that rigorously and properly for users to make sure that they're able to collaborate safely, then you need to give them a license. I believe that this is basically per user. So it's not doing licensing for autonomous agents that are really independently and I think we've talked a little bit about what a licensing model might look like for agent 365 on multiple prior episodes because obviously it's quite a few months now since they first announced agent 365 at ignite.
Kevin McDonnell: Yeah.
Zoe Wilson: And one of the things that I think we flagged right from the start is that there's a lot of complexity to this in a similar way to the way that the power platform licensing has ended up very messy. You've got per user licensing. I can see kind of per agent licensing for autonomous. There's probably some form of consumption licensing that will come. And it feels like at the moment, all they've done is work through, okay, from a user perspective, what is that? What does that first bit look like? And we'll need to figure that out afterwards. And we've already seen a bit chatter online from people who've turned on the preview like you said, who have then applied per agent licensing that's included in the preview to agents and I think there's been a bit of a kind of their mind breaks a little bit because they're like why is this per user when you know currently I'm licensing an agent?
Kevin McDonnell: misunderstanding. Yeah. Yeah. And why am I licensing all these people when they could be using agents? They might not be... I think we'll hear more of this story if I'm honest. I don't know more details on that, but I think there's more to this that we will start to see soon as well that will help this make a bit of sense. I also think that organisations would have got... that many people would have got confused about a per-agent licence. I think that would have been harder for people to digest, whereas with renewals coming up a per user per month license is a little bit easier to understand. So this will give a bit more of a transition to thinking about this frontier way of working ⁓ from that as well. So I do find it a little confusing but I kind of... it will continue to evolve the story, I'm pretty sure. And I think Microsoft has tried to make it simpler by then saying, well actually, do know what's easier? People have been clamouring for an E7 for a long time. Here we go, here is now your frontier suite, the E7, which is your E5, plus all the Entra goodies. So the Entra suite on there, which gives you a ⁓ lot more identity and access management on top of what you get with E5. Plus you've got M365 Copilot. Plus you've got Agent 365. So rather than complexity of when do I bring in all those different things, there is a simple, easy way of doing that. At a price, I'm not going to duck away because I know many people are going, why on would I pay that much money? And if you're thinking that, it's not for you. Don't worry about it. That is a separate conversation to be had. But at a discount, you can now get all those things in one go. So I actually quite like this. I understand that I've certainly heard a fair bit of noise in some of the chats of, is Microsoft trying to get more money in things like this? It's all been there. The only new thing is Agent 365. Now they're giving away to get everything in one simple package at a cost.
Zoe Wilson: Yeah and I think obviously we've been in this space for quite a while where Like you said, people have been talking about the concept of an E7 for a while. think there was a little bit of a pushback where clients were maybe feeling that they were having to pay increasing prices when they weren't necessarily using everything that was bundled together. So what we saw was kind of a maximization of E5 value and then a number of add-on SKUs with things like Viva and Entra like we have mentioned here and then Power Platform kind of add-on licensing and all of these other bits and pieces. And then obviously, as a premium license and it feels like that pendulum has swung now in the other direction where customers must be saying to Microsoft you need to make this simpler for us and we need a way to get, you know, we need an easier way to kind of procure and understand what we're buying where we've got all of this relevant stuff bundled together. For me, I would have liked to have seen Teams Premium be added into this. I'm not sure what they'll do necessarily with Teams Premium and Viva. We've had many conversations. Well, they don't really call the products Viva anymore, do they? ⁓
Kevin McDonnell: Yeah, that's a show. Is FIFA still around Zoe? Sorry. Yes, it is. Well, yeah, on and off. The license is still there. I think that's the important thing to say.
Zoe Wilson: Yay. Yeah, you can still buy the Beaver Suite SKU. The Beaver Insights dashboard, obviously you get the Copilot dashboard included within the Copilot license. Connections wasn't chargeable anyway. ⁓
Kevin McDonnell: if you have 50 licenses isn't it? ⁓
Zoe Wilson: Yeah, some of the premium products have already been sunset. You know, let's not talk about Viva Girls because I don't want you crying. Topics, obviously that, you know, that was a good one that's gone as well. So, so Viva, I can kind of understand not being here. I would have liked them to roll some of the Teams premium stuff in here because I think Teams premiums are really confusing thing to position with a client because there's, it's just like such a mishmash of features. And there are some things that are really complimentary here where I
Kevin McDonnell: Too late. You
Zoe Wilson: would have liked to have seen it but ultimately I think this brings together a lot of things that are kind of very valuable together in an easier way to purchase.
Kevin McDonnell: Yeah, I think the other thing would be interesting. So obviously we have M365 Copilot business. I might have that name slightly wrong, but it's got Copilot and business in there somewhere. Whether we'll see an E7 version of that, which is for smaller orgs to have a slightly lower cost to this ⁓ on there. That's the other thing I'd love to see because, you know, most SMC orgs are going to look at this and go... from that so I would like to see a way of having that and I would ask all customers not to try and do this sneaky thing of breaking your org down into different areas and trying to pretend that they're different tenants and then bring multi-tenant together because you're just making work and then then you complain that things don't work on there so I think that's the other thing I'd like to see is a slightly smaller option that will be expensive but slightly less and I'm sure there will be discounts that are available and things like this for for orgs at size so it interesting I think it's it's lovely well not lovely it's the wrong word I think it's funny to see for all the years that people have been saying we're gonna get E7 we're gonna get E7 that finally hits there ⁓ so we just gotta wait for people to start talking about E9 and asking for that but hopefully not too soon
Zoe Wilson: Yeah, I do think the timing is interesting as well because if we think about the Microsoft Fiscal Year, we're just at the end of their third quarter. The license will become generally available. So both Agent 365 and E7 will become generally available on the 1st of May, which essentially gives two months before the end of the Microsoft Fiscal. So I'll be really interested to see how the premium co-pilot numbers tick up as we get to the... the investor call at the end of the full FY.
Kevin McDonnell: Yeah, and yes, always interesting for Microsoft nerds like us around that time of year. The only other announcement, I'm not going to spend too long on this one, which is a little bit of a shame, but SharePoint at 25 ⁓ on there. I love this announcement. The reason is, if I'm honest, the content included in there is nice. I like it a lot of... agentic and copilot work. So having that kind of copilot, co-work like experience to build sites where it will build a plan and then execute it, to make changes to page in natural language, a lot more visual changes. I'm trying to see where I can fit in, not too much in there. A lot of visual changes to the way pages will work, a lot on the left hand side rail that I think just make things a little bit easier. So as an announcement, There's lots of small, nice things in here that I like. Yes to all the MVPs that I know complaining about things not quite working when you're developing this. What's this going to mean to the traditional information architecture? Lots of valid stuff like that. I'm going to completely ignore because we're running out of time. But what I really like about this announcement is just that little bit of nostalgia. 25 years of SharePoint on there. I presented this at work a few days ago. And I started off by ⁓ putting a picture of me when I just started on SharePoint. So back in 2004, I slightly depressed that number of people are laughing, but I was like, look at me before SharePoint. I had hair. I didn't need glasses. ⁓ I was able to go out drinking in the evening on there. I didn't have kids.
Zoe Wilson: Hahaha!
Kevin McDonnell: So if I just look at what SharePoint has meant to me in my career, it has been that foundation to driving so many good things that have happened in there. And so I've loved seeing some nostalgic things. Think about the pain we used to have of running on-premise farms and things like that and making those happen. The fun and games of completely editing your SharePoint front ends on that. I think Zoe on Twitter, you're still SharePoint Zoe. as far as I know if that's still active.
Zoe Wilson: I am, yes. So I've had that handle. I mean, I don't really use Twitter anymore. It's a bit of a cesspool, isn't it? But I've still got the handle. And no, no, no. And I consider changing it because my personal blog is Zoe365 and I did think about, and I know some people have had kind of very recognizable... ⁓
Kevin McDonnell: Not because of the SharePoint Zoe bit, but for the other content,
Zoe Wilson: Twitter handles and then they've updated it when they've done a bit of a rebrand. But for me, I always felt it was kind of nostalgic keeping that. And as you were talking, I realized it was probably around 2004, 2005 that I actually started working with SharePoint as well. So I think SharePoint has a lot to answer for with both of us.
Kevin McDonnell: for me, people always ask, know, why SharePoint? Why have you been there for so long? I got into SharePoint because I'd done bits of development. I was just learning that. I started off in ⁓ as ⁓ Was that summer internship? No, that was as a graduate ⁓ in investment bank in the UK. ⁓ And I started doing a bit of my own development, moved into a team where I could do a bit of dev. ⁓ then suddenly I saw SharePoint where people could help themselves. ⁓ That's what I've loved about SharePoint. It's kind of followed through onto the Power Platform world and even copilot. What I love about this technology is making it easier for people to do things themselves. So it's kind of stuck as a fundamental. I know many of you who've worked with SharePoint over the years has gone, easier? Are you mad? But it's still easier than the XML and XSL that I started with around the time I was looking at SharePoint. yeah. Thank you. Thank you, SharePoint.
Zoe Wilson: Yeah. Yeah, for me it was, yeah, for me, you know, at that point I was working in the north of England. I looked quite young for my age, there weren't a huge amount of women working in IT and, you know, I kind of started in service desk, did a lot of sysadmin L3 type support. And I really loved about SharePoint was two things. One, it allowed me ⁓ an opportunity to get out of the male dominated IT department and go and talk to people across the business and to start to understand their business problems and how technology can be applied to it. And that lesson is something that has stayed with me then throughout my entire career. And then like you, think just the fact that it is a business enabler, know, all of these technologies that we work with are there to enable people to drive business outcomes more effectively. And it's just been
Kevin McDonnell: So true.
Zoe Wilson: at times, know, let's not talk about on-prem ⁓ and, know, being responsible for a team that maintained and supported a highly custom dev SharePoint on-prem instance that was used as a public facing website for ⁓ important organizations. That was just nightmare, an ⁓ absolute nightmare ⁓ you know, to deal with...
Kevin McDonnell: you Really?
Zoe Wilson: patching patching cycles for something that was so highly customized on an old version of SharePoint incredibly painful but pain aside it has been an enormously ⁓ yeah it's been enormously rewarding and you know I wouldn't have met like I wouldn't have met you Kevin and all of the people across tech community I wouldn't be in the role that I am now if it wasn't for this. ⁓
Kevin McDonnell: And respect for people still doing that. Yeah, and I know Jeff Teeper always says the best community in tech, but I agree. I think it's got spun off into different worlds, but number of people in that who started off in the world's SharePoint, it's been fantastic. ⁓
Zoe Wilson: Yeah, and for anybody who's stuck with us this long, SharePoint is a valid data source in the right circumstance.
Kevin McDonnell: Chris. Good to see you.
Zoe Wilson: Yeah, ending on a deliberately provocative note. And I think with that, Kevin, we've to the end of this episode. So that's left to say to you and to everybody else who's traveling to Seattle for MVP Summit is have a fantastic time. Hopefully you don't miss me too much.
Kevin McDonnell: Yeah. No, no, I'm looking at my calendar. I'm going to be far too busy to miss anyone until I get on that plane on way back, by which time I hope to sleep a little bit. But no, be good. Right. Hopefully see you soon. And I hope everyone enjoyed today. If you did, please tell your friends, tell your colleagues, even tell your parents, get them to subscribe to Copilot Connection. Just click that little button, whether it's YouTube or your podcast app and share it with everyone that you know. But otherwise, thank you very much and goodbye.
Zoe Wilson: Yeah, awesome. Thanks for listening everyone, goodbye, see you next time.
Zoe Wilson: Way to share with you all the news insights and capabilities of the Microsoft Copilot ecosystem from across the entire Microsoft stack. Zoe Wilson and I'm the Global Digital Workplace Consultant Leader at Kyndryl a Regional Director and an MVP for Copilot
Kevin McDonnell: I'm Kevin MacDonald. I'm an MVP for Copilot and Copilot Extensibility UK Lead for Copilot and Agents at Avanade. ⁓ we'll be releasing episodes as podcasts and on YouTube with insights from experts in the community and Microsoft on what the different area of Copilot and Agents mean, the impact they can make to you and your organisation and what you need to do to prepare for them. And for once, ⁓ finally remembered to change that intro, Zoe.
Zoe Wilson: only taken what, how many months? ⁓
Kevin McDonnell: Oh, literally, I've been wanting change, I think, for about a year. yeah. All I need to sort down now is move my camera so I don't look like I have a hat on there and then we're sorted.
Zoe Wilson: Yeah, the lampshade hat is always a highlight. So it's been quite a busy week in, oh well, a busy couple of weeks in the world of copilot and agents. So this week we will dig into some of the big announcements that we've seen in the last few weeks with copilot wave three. There have also been a whole heap of reorgs at Microsoft. And if we've got time, we'll get into a little bit of SharePoint at 25 as well.
Kevin McDonnell: you you Sorry, I've got a question for you Zoe. How much time have you had to really dig into these announcements?
Zoe Wilson: little, ⁓ a ⁓ amount. I think I've got an advantage in that some of it, you know, I get visibility of through work, helps. But it's been... For me personally, it's been a horrendous time because I've got a lot of issues going on with family health outside work. know that there's lots of people heading this weekend to MVP Summit and for the first time in a few years, I won't be attending in person because I need to be around for my family at home. So considering things I'm having to deal with, I've had more time than I would have expected actually to dig into them, but probably ⁓ not much time as I needed. ⁓
Kevin McDonnell: Hmm. Okay. Yeah, and I feel the same, not so much, well, it's always fun on the personal side, but work-wise it's just been ridiculously busy. it feels, the reason I'm kind of mostly bringing it up is it feels like that transition from talking about co-pilot and talking about agents has really moved to people getting moving with them and taking action from that. I still have a lot of talking about agents and things like that, but the reality of it's getting through the deliveries, The engagement with clients for me has been through the roof, which is good news, but tiring news slightly.
Zoe Wilson: Yeah, and obviously you're losing the next week because she will be in Redmond, you, with the rest of our MVP friends.
Kevin McDonnell: Yes, very much looking forward to it. I always feel a bit funny talking about the MVP Summit, especially knowing ⁓ the majority of our audience ⁓ MVPs on ⁓ so was like, these bloody MVPs talking about things they can't talk about, showing off all the fun they're having and things like that. my advice, if not, just keep an eye on the posts that come after the MVP Summit. It is all NDA and people won't release exactly what, but... look at the themes that people start talking about because that's the kind of thing that's going to be big. We know agents is going to be big. I think what we're talking about today is going to be a massive theme from there. I always before was an MVP just seeing what the blog of mood, how that shifted kind of gives you a little bit of a view on that. Hopefully most MVPs are stupid enough to ⁓ post too much around that. But you'll see the mood music and I don't think Microsoft's against that. They want people to start thinking ahead, even if it's not very specific things there.
Zoe Wilson: Yeah, I'd agree with that. And, ⁓ know, even though I won't be there in person, I will still be joining as much as I can virtually. And again, recognising that lots of it is under NDE, I will least be able to start to make decisions about the direction of travel ⁓ for my of my business in a way is kind of going in the right direction from Microsoft perspective.
Kevin McDonnell: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, we cut through the marketing. But moving on quickly from that. ⁓
Zoe Wilson: Yeah. so before we get on to kind the things we the things we've got going on outside of MVP Summit, ⁓ I do want to take a second to say a huge happy birthday, Kevin. I know you yesterday that your actual birthday, your number of years under end year, but a huge happy birthday from me and hopefully all of our listeners will join me in wishing you a happy birthday for yesterday as well.
Kevin McDonnell: Hahaha Yes. Thank you very much. It's one of the things I love about the tech community is the number of messages and things I got from all around the world in all different areas. Gives me a lovely smile. I wish I'd had more time to spend with my family. If I'm honest, I probably should have taken the day off, but knowing I was being off for MVP Summit, I thought, no, it's a waste of time. So instead, I had back to back meetings, a very rushed Chinese takeaway, and then off for parents evening. So, yeah, middle aged birthdays. I can't live with them, can't live without them.
Zoe Wilson: Yeah, well at least you'll be able to celebrate in Seattle, although again, recognising that's not with your family and you do share your birthday with a couple of other MVPs as well, don't you?
Kevin McDonnell: That is true, yes, I think was Mark Christie's birthday which I know he loves being talked about a and loves publicity from there. So happy birthday to Mark and also Luke Murray as well. I think noted in of the chats there's a lot of parents who their summer holidays and we'll just leave that there for everyone.
Zoe Wilson: Yeah, so a big happy birthday to all of you and then if we look at some of the events that we're involved in and the things that we've got going on, is an exciting event happening next month isn't there, Kevin? ⁓
Kevin McDonnell: Yeah, really... Sorry, you really threw me, said next month. Oh my God, it is next month, isn't it? That's terrifying. We've really got to write that. But yes, honoured, humbled and honoured, there we go, that Daniel Roeriger invited you and I to jointly keynote with Donna Sarker the CocoCo keynote, as we're calling it. And I'm struggling not to say that in a normal way. but it's the Copilot Community Conference. It's online only, it's all virtual, no in person, so you can join wherever you are, completely free of charge on that, and you can register them there. So Zoe and I are kicking off that. We've got some amazing other speakers. I love the way they're doing it. They kind of got tracks based on different topics and then they've got different speakers. I can't see if it's listed here actually. Yeah, here we go. They're looking at different personas of those tracks. So from users to admins to change makers to developers. So you can kind of join and learn about Copilot from that different ⁓ stream of focus within there and look through the different speakers for that. ⁓ Just remembering, I think, is the call for speakers still open for that as well? I can't see it listed there.
Zoe Wilson: I'm not sure
Kevin McDonnell: Might have closed now. So do check. I'll try put in the notes if that is still open as well. But that might have closed now. I'd love to go back and have look at that one. But yeah, be a really good event. it's funny. It feels like we moved a lot away from virtual events ⁓ post kind of Covid, if one went back to in person. But I feel they're kind of trickling back in a little bit more now.
Zoe Wilson: Yeah.
Kevin McDonnell: especially as people are busier and love that opportunity to open it up to people, people with families, people who can't travel so much to not forget about that and put these events on and also make them available afterwards. So even if you can't attend at the time, I'm pretty sure I'm just checking there that those sessions would be available on that. But join live, ask questions of the speakers is the best way to get from there.
Zoe Wilson: Yeah, I mean, I think it's good to have a balance between in-person and virtual. think ⁓ having the ability for people to be able to speak or attend virtually is way more, I know there's a huge amount of value in in-person connections, but being able to still get access to information virtually is way more inclusive. So I hope we see a little bit more of this, but. Like you said, very honoured to be co-hosting the keynote and how fantastic to be listed as keynote speakers alongside Donna as well.
Kevin McDonnell: Yeah, yeah, I hope we can complete. So I should say that's two different sessions. So you and I speaking together and Donna speaking together as well. So we hope that will do that and trying to think about what what copilot means to people and probably a little bit of what we're talking about today as well. But before we get on to that.
Zoe Wilson: Yeah and then ⁓ there's ⁓ another event in the UK happening, is it June Kevin, Experts Live UK?
Kevin McDonnell: And it's June 11th and 12th, so we have Experts Live UK. We're two days of the event. The first day will be more workshop focused. So I'm running that. might need to speak to some more of the workshop coordinators for that one. We've got six, five, probably six streams. Having a few discussions on the right people for that to get moving. And we've picked our speakers now. So hopefully we will start to announce the final speakers. We've announced some. We've got Reshmi and Lee Ford speaking on Copilot and Agents. I love those two very, very much looking forward to ⁓ hearing from them on that one. So the second day is your more traditional conference style. We've got some deep dive sessions and some lightning talks. So there's a bit of everything on there. I will say. It was horrific choosing people that, but choosing from across, and I know we'll talk about your own conference organizing in a minute, but choosing from across the Microsoft stack and trying to make sure you have that balance, make sure we've got a diverse balance. I know Louisa Fries was speaking on LinkedIn about getting diverse balance. We've tried very hard to get a ⁓ good number of male and female speakers into the session. Do I think we've done a good enough job? I'd like it to be better on there, but it is a big challenge and something we're trying to make sure we've got the right messaging around that as well. But I think we've done okay on that as well. I never think we're perfect. I think we can always do better ⁓ from that as well. But it'll be a really good session. So yeah, do sign up for that one.
Zoe Wilson: video. ⁓ challenging, isn't it? I mean, ⁓ of the ways that we've tried to ⁓ some newer speakers to get involved with Scottish Summit ⁓ through running ⁓ abstract guidance webinars for people. ⁓ So the first one we held early in March when the call for speakers opened, we've got a second one which is basically a repeat of the first. So if anybody listening joined the first, you don't need to join the second unless you have specific questions that you've not been able to get answered. But the call for speakers for Scottish Summit is open until the end of April. I think the webinars on something like the 14, the details are on the Scottish Summit LinkedIn page. And essentially what what we're trying to do is to give people guidance, both in terms of what we're looking for from an organizing committee perspective, but also helping people understand how to write a good session abstract. And I don't know whether you saw this with Experts Live, Kevin, I'm assuming you did because it's been a trend for a few years now. The amount of very poor session abstracts that are submitted still continues to be fairly mind blowing. people who are submitting sessions with like one or two sentences that are vaguely describing a topic, but it's not clear what problem they're trying to address, what they've learned, what they'll show, what the attendees will take away. So, you know, we're hoping to kind of get in front of this a little bit by giving people guidance and selfishly hoping to make our job as organizers less painful. I think we'll have a different problem, I think.
Kevin McDonnell: you I actually disagree, it's harder because you've got more ones and you've got to choose from better looking sessions.
Zoe Wilson: It's harder to make the decisions but it's less frustrating.
Kevin McDonnell: Yes, yeah, no, that is absolutely true. And I think the challenge that we and I think Scotty Summit will be doing the same is we do blind selection. So we don't know the names of people, they're taken out of the evaluations. And when you suddenly got like 10 different submissions on a very similar topic, trying to work out which one you think stands out is very hard. And then you bring the names back into it. look at it and you're like, oh, goodness I haven't chosen so and so ⁓ well that's their fault on there so huge apologies I know I know we've spoken to some people for experts live that haven't been selected there was a bit of surprise but we try and hold to to that first decision on there and the blind ones that come through so it's it's hard it's horrible especially when you're friends with a lot of these people
Zoe Wilson: Yeah. It is certainly is challenging. So Scottish Summit, the conference itself isn't until October, but obviously with Colf speakers open, there's a huge amount of activity and planning underway at the moment. ⁓ We're just about to announce our workshop speakers along with registration and ticketing links for both the conference, the workshops and the post-conference evening event as well. So watch this space for more detail and for anyone listening, if you missed the keynote speaker announcement, we're absolutely delighted that Martin Woodward, who's a VP of Developer Relations for GitHub, ⁓ as well as having a broader role, I think, generally across Microsoft AI. He's going to come and do the keynote for us. So big boost to Phil following Scott Hanselman, but I've seen him speak at events before. I think he's going to be absolutely fantastic. And when you look at all of the vibe coding.
Kevin McDonnell: think it'd be great and also I think the timing of that with GitHub at the moment and we had April Yoho on Copilot Fireside Chat recently didn't we? It just it feels like what people will be learning from GitHub will apply to everyone soon as well so really looking forward to that one.
Zoe Wilson: Yeah. Yeah.
Kevin McDonnell: Right, we probably should talk about Copilot a bit today as well.
Zoe Wilson: A a little.
Kevin McDonnell: Yes, yeah, keep that connection to Copilot. You see what I did there? That was good. ⁓ OK, so announcements. think that the one... kind of funny. going to talk about Copilot. We're to go into the detail of what was announced. But to me, the most important one was actually the kind of announcement that through. And it was kind a...
Zoe Wilson: Bye.
Kevin McDonnell: It was almost a couple of announcements, wasn't it, that one after the other on So just bring up screen. I think the first one we heard come through was that Rajesh Jha, ⁓ who looks experience and devices at Microsoft, is retiring ⁓ from that. he's, ⁓ I guess, of currently, yes, still currently on there because he's transitioning out on July the 1st. So he reports into Satchar. ⁓ and a lot of the things that people in the co-pilot worlds will understand will be in that space. So he is going to be stepping down and there's not going to be a direct replacement on there. So instead Perry Clark, Charles LaManna, Pavin Davaluri and Ryan Roslansky ⁓ as executive vice presidents will become direct reports to SACHA. Now, when I saw this, my first thought was, is this a battle to be the next Satcher? Have they just opened up these five people? My next thought is, well, hang on, what's happened to... ⁓ my gosh, I've forgotten his name. Deep Mind ⁓ person who looks after the copilot consumer side. Mustafa. Thank you, Mustafa Suleyman. From there, what's happened to him with that?
Zoe Wilson: Bye. Mustafa.
Kevin McDonnell: as well. I think there was another link, which I've just realized I haven't opened up here, that talked a bit. This is what came out a little bit later, that actually there would be a kind of co-pilot team. I think, actually don't think Pavan was part of that, was it? So it's Perry Clark, Charles LaManna, Ryan Roslansky and Mustafa Suleyman will own co-pilot. And that's the retail... Sorry, go on.
Zoe Wilson: Yeah, so it's a new, essentially. I was going to say essentially they're creating a new co-pilot leadership team, aren't they? And rather than having consumer co-pilot sitting separate, they're bringing Mustafa and there was another guy whose name I can't remember. They're bringing them together with the people here who were kind of sitting on top of co-pilot and essentially will create this new co-pilot LT who will all report directly to Satya.
Kevin McDonnell: Yeah. ⁓ Sorry, Zoe, just in case people don't live in a corporate world, LT, we mean leadership team there. Just in case. Yeah, you're annoying me that I can't remember his name either. Was it Joseph?
Zoe Wilson: Yes, yeah, yeah. Hahaha Yeah, ⁓ so while you try to find that link, other thing that I don't think you called out from that first article was the grandfather of SharePoint, Mr Jeff Teper himself, ⁓ also being promoted, hasn't he? ⁓
Kevin McDonnell: Huge congratulations to Geoff Teaper, who's promoted to EVP as well, so executive vice president from there. It interestingly didn't actually say, I will share that link again. I really to stop shuffling windows and looking off to one side. It didn't actually say in what his role would be, ⁓ which was intriguing. So it... mentioned. Yeah, both Jeff Teaper, ⁓ and Sumit Shahan and Kurt Konigsbauer promoted to president as well. So kind of Jeff promoted to the same tier within Microsoft as Charles, Pavan, Perry and Ryan, but not saying where he fits within that team. intrigued some, I'm sure there will be many of us digging the MVP Summit to try and get more detail on that. I think huge respect to Kurt Konigsbauer as well. ⁓ Seeing as he owned Viva to get promoted while owning Viva I think is quite an accomplishment in this day and age. So I thought that was an impressive move as well.
Zoe Wilson: Yeah, fantastic. It is great to see people succeed. I think like you, Kevin, one of the things I really want to see is how do all of these announcements actually translate into an org chart? And we were talking to one of our friends who works inside Microsoft who said even for them, it's probably going to be weeks until they can actually see what this looks like. So good to see that the corporate machine works in terms of making things kind of crystal clear for people. ⁓ Hopefully you can use being in person in Redmond next week to just try and get a little bit more clarity on what people are doing and what their focus is.
Kevin McDonnell: Yeah, what it means on there. I think Jacob Andreu is going to be a person leading the copilot experience. That's a person whose name we couldn't remember. And it's interesting. Why couldn't remember? He's fairly new to Microsoft. I think it was about 18 months he's been there and came over into most of the Suleiman's world. He also comes, I think, from a more VC background. Looking looking on LinkedIn at him. Yeah.
Zoe Wilson: Bye. Yeah, was very product. Yeah, it was very kind of like niche, niche products, manager product development type roles for a lot of organisations I've never heard of to be honest. And I think the fact that he's worked for Mustafa on the consumer side is probably one of the reasons why he's not really come onto our radar in the enterprise world that we work in.
Kevin McDonnell: So very interesting. Mmm. Yeah, absolutely. it and I think this big thing about bringing together these areas, ⁓ you know, we're kind of seeing similar announcements, but I think we'll see that focus ⁓ on items coming to the consumer and the commercial co-pilot start to align even more from that, ⁓ which would be fantastic. And I think that word align is the one that excites me most of those who are kind of close with Microsoft. we see many different areas kind of pushing ahead and... Can I say this without getting in trouble? I'm going to say it anyway. Not always talking to each other and having that alignment. So it's often... I love the phase shipping the org chart. You can often see some decisions that come through based on your knowledge of where things sit in the org chart. I don't think that's a great thing. As a consumer, whether on the enterprise or consumer side, I've got to my name right there. You want to kind of just have a product. You want a product that works. You don't want to have to understand too much where these different things sit. So I hope this will drive more of that alignment and understanding and teams working together in a more structured way ⁓ from that. So it'd be fascinating to see.
Zoe Wilson: Yeah, I mean I think for those who can see the screen, think the last two paragraphs are kind of super interesting because it just explicitly says that you've got Ryan Perry in La Mano who will lead M365 apps and the Copilot platform.
Kevin McDonnell: Mm.
Zoe Wilson: I'm together along with Jacob and Mustafa, they'll make up the co-pilot LTE and that the org boundaries will simply reflect system architecture and product shape such that we can deliver more coherent and competitive experiences that continue to evolve with model capabilities. So like you said, just really focused on breaking down some of those org boundaries that have led to some of the silo decisions. when you look at the
Kevin McDonnell: Yeah.
Zoe Wilson: first mover advantage that Microsoft had initially with with their partnership with OpenAI. ⁓ think the complexity of their org has actually slowed down their ability to be able to really innovate and integrate everything together in a way that they need to. ⁓ I'm to see what this actually means from a product perspective.
Kevin McDonnell: Absolutely. Yeah, and it's kind of fascinating. Fascinating, fascinating. ⁓ know, Ryan Ruslansky was linked in Charles LaManna was BizApps yet they're being talked about in that M365 apps area. I do apologize if you on the off chance you have to be listening, Perry. I can't remember which world Perry was in, but I'm pretty sure it wasn't that traditional M365. So it feels like the change there. And that's what I'm also intrigued to see where Jeff. rolls up into this world. So maybe we'll see that start to come out soon, certainly by that July the 1st as it comes through as well. And also interesting to see when Mustafa plays into this as well.
Zoe Wilson: Yay. Yeah, so maybe I mean we've got the public dates for Microsoft Build now haven't we, which is the start of June, so maybe by then we'll start to see again the next wave of announcements and ⁓ yeah, just how some of this is going to play out. I just had a quick look on LinkedIn in the background. Perry is the president of Microsoft 365 Core.
Kevin McDonnell: Mmm. ⁓ okay. Interesting. So that's... Don't say anything rude, Kev. That's the kind of infraside, so thinking kind of exchange the bass central to it and configuration there, I'm guessing, rather than the kind of user experience front end that most people would see then. I'm guessing.
Zoe Wilson: Yeah, I mean if you look at his history, was originally in Exchange mailbox server from 2003 and then General Manager for Exchange for a long time until he became CVP in 2017 and then President.
Kevin McDonnell: Mm.
Zoe Wilson: So, you know, he's been in that Microsoft space for a very long time, like you say, typically coming through that exchange background. But again, just from an org structure perspective, I'm not quite clear these days what is actually in M365 core anymore.
Kevin McDonnell: Yeah. No, no, agree. So, hmm, yeah, interesting, interesting times on that. So what what does this mean? What has this actually come through? And I think this is where we've seen that drive ⁓ of the announcements. And if you haven't seen this phrase already, you will hear the word frontier an awful lot. at least in the short term future on there. It is all about this frontier transformation. I think it is this drive to be, to at least appear to be at the front edge of things on there. You could hear me hesitate slightly there. That Microsoft never wants to be at the bleeding edge of things. They want to take to an enterprise something a little bit more stable, but appear to be as close to that in a safe way as possible. I think this is where that frontier transformation comes into things. So we saw some big announcements of this wave three. I found it quite interesting that wave three as a phrase, it's not there in the title, it kind of is there on that first bit, but is not repeated a lot. We heard a lot about wave two last year. This is kind of acknowledging it's there, but really focusing on that frontier view of things on that. And the... This blog post has its slightly different area to where I kind of think of it. we'll start with this with copilot co-work. Whenever I talk about this, whenever I hear other people, I'm genuinely thinking about getting a swear box for every time someone says Claude in this in some way or gets the name wrong from there, because it is there is that natural Claude co-work that people are thinking about.
Zoe Wilson: Hahaha
Kevin McDonnell: I think it will take a little bit of time for people to get used to this, but very interesting quite how aligned they've made that name ⁓ from there and the capability of that and that acknowledgement.
Zoe Wilson: Well, is, yeah, I mean, it is essentially, leveraging the model that powers Cloud Cowork, aren't they? So whilst branded Copilot and it's in the Copilot ecosystem and will have the benefit of ⁓ the compliance and the grounding on org data and things like that. And for some people... ⁓ who are maybe concerned about the risk of letting this loose on their devices without that, you know, this is really positive, I think. But the reason is co-work is because essentially it is Claude co-work under the hood.
Kevin McDonnell: Yeah, well, it has the model under there, absolutely. And I think the Claude's or the anthropic models have been game changing to a lot of what the capabilities can do, especially about taking action. And I think that's what this shift is. We're really seeing now that shift from knowledge to taking action. And I think we've got it little bit further down that will come to a minute, but. For me, this is finally doing a lot of things that people kind of assumed that Copilot would do in the first place. The best example I can think of this is PowerPoint, where with the Claude or the Anthropic models, just because I know I'm a pedant and if I get it wrong there'll be all the pedants going after me afterwards, the Anthropic models have made a huge change to what can be done with PowerPoint on there. But... Then some of these demos, I'm going to run this for those watching on the screen but without the sound on there. In fact, let me make that a little bit bigger so people can see that this Frontier Agent that is currently in private preview, so you can't try this yet unless you have the right engagement with Microsoft ⁓ on there. If you have, let us know. want to hear stories. ⁓ But... The one that's got me most excited, this one isn't quite there, but this is about preparing for your customer meeting and it will pull in the different folders, help create some of your content. You'll see to the right, it is building a plan and then executing that. The demo that we saw from the live LinkedIn, which was a little bit of a car crash of videos restarting and confusing everyone from there, but seeing Charles LaManna actually reorganise his calendar and saying it's busy and just get it sorted. so excited about that. just want ⁓ Copilot Cowork just to go in and sort my calendar and tell me here's all the things where you've promised to do five things at the same time maybe you need to think about that a little bit more. ⁓ To me that whatever this will cost that will be worth it.
Zoe Wilson: You Yeah, I mean it's interesting isn't it because I, one of the benefits I get with my role is I have an exec assistant so when it comes to sorting out diary clashes and availability and you know being able to make sure I've got prep time ahead of important meetings and things like that I have a human who does that for me. I am very looking forward to this being available because I I'm interested to see how helpful the sort my diary out is going to be compared to an actual person.
Kevin McDonnell: I could hear the hesitation there and they're just... I think you're similar to me, it's like, oh this feels horrible. This feels like doing people out of a job from that, but I think it is going to be that interesting view to see what will be the difference there.
Zoe Wilson: Yeah and I don't think, you know, when I think about what my EA does for me, think that because a lot of the people I work with are at a similar level, they also have EAs as well and whilst this will be able to help my calendar, it's not going to be able to do the human thing of, you know, talking to either the other individuals who need to be in a meeting or to the other assistants and doing the group prioritisation and things like that but for quick changes, being able to make sure that, ⁓ you know, if I'm using co-work to plan something or to do a piece of work it's also kind of blocking out time and making diary changes as well is super exciting and for those people whose tenants are in frontier so that you've got the public preview for co-pilot available this will start becoming available next month in April. One of the things that I've seen with organizations is there is still concern about the data processing because my understanding is that this is still going to the US Anthropic data centers for processing. So for those of us in the UK or the EU or other places with kind of strong data protection and governance guidelines, ⁓ we may have to wait a little longer.
Kevin McDonnell: Yes, very good call out on that one. I do believe, though, that there's going to be ways that you can turn it on for some people and not others. So, you know, for large global organizations where you're happy that their data is in the US, probably because they're based in the US, you can enable it for them and not others. So it'll be very interesting ⁓ on that one. And I think linked to that, we've also seen this transition of what was agent mode has now become ⁓ editing copilot. mean it's kind of not really a rebrand and rename, it's kind of saying that this new functionality that we tried out as agent mode is now the core part of copilot within which I think is good. I kind of like that. Yes they've given it name of editing copilot but I think that's ⁓ way of describing what it does but now it's just you can do that stuff in copilot you haven't got to go somewhere else for there although I should say now it's ⁓ generally available in Excel and Word and PowerPoint and Outlook starting to roll out over the coming months so it's not all there directly straight away going back to the early busy comment I haven't had a chance to play around with this yet but would very much want to and see the difference it makes with this
Zoe Wilson: Yeah, so just while we talk about our co-pilot in Excel and Word, I know there was something that we forgot to put in the list of topics, which was the recent message center updates. So this is information that's in the public domain. being pushed out via the message center.
Kevin McDonnell: I was smiling thinking the same thing. Yeah.
Zoe Wilson: Microsoft are making changes to the way that Copilot chat, the basic or freemium version will up in the Office Apps for organizations. I've just you a link to a post Kevin by Tom Abuthnot, who's done a very good LinkedIn post. You bring that up because there are differences in how this will depending on whether an organization has.
Kevin McDonnell: just searching for that.
Zoe Wilson: less than 2000 M365 licences or more than 2000.
Kevin McDonnell: Be honest, did you have to look up the post to remember which way round it was?
Zoe Wilson: I remembered, but I just thought it would be helpful to have the actual detail to structure this.
Kevin McDonnell: Okay, good, Yeah. So I think the important one is for tenants with over 2000 users, you won't have the ⁓ included Copilot chat within your Word, Excel and PowerPoint and OneNote. You will still within Outlook. You will still within the Copilot app, which is both the kind of web, the local app and Teams. But you won't within those kind of traditional office apps. from there. I, I, it's always tricky when Microsoft takes things away, when there's not really an obvious reason why, but I don't see this as big thing. I'd love to know the analytics of how many people actually used, actually use that copilot chat intentionally and how many tried to do things with their copilot file and realise it wasn't doing that because it was a standalone copilot chat and they got confused. So I'm, I'm a little mixed on this. I know some people and I have heard some clients being very irate. I think generally where, especially if they've just updated loaded training material and now they've got to go and change it again. I've heard questions. What if I have 1,995 licenses? Does that mean when I had five more, suddenly the whole thing's going to change? What's the experience like with that? So I think good questions. ⁓
Zoe Wilson: Yeah. ⁓
Kevin McDonnell: think there's better things to be arguing about if I'm brutally honest. know some people in chat who are going to listen to this are going to kind go after me next week but ⁓ it's a shame. I don't think it's the end of world.
Zoe Wilson: Yeah, I mean. Well I think the... I'm not a full cynic but you know there's obviously a cynical side to me shall we say, the cynical side looks at some of the other announcements that came out of wave 3 with regards to new licensing. and wonders if this is, know, for big organizations where they have a lot of people using that capability in the basic copilot chats, whether this is an opportunity to kind of nudge them along that path to either premium copilot license or to some of the new licensing that was announced a couple of weeks ago.
Kevin McDonnell: Yeah, I kind of agree, kind of agree, but you know, if you were on a thousand licenses, you've now got less of a reason to get a thousand more at the same time. I, yeah, it's not ideal, but. We'll see what happens in six months with some of these things. I think it is one of those things. I think to a lot of admins, to a lot of people who are just seeing consistent change and getting fed up with it, I hear the noise there. I got to move on before I upset too many people by telling them to calm down. So there's a nice block in here. I don't think we'll go into about agents in chat. A lot talking about multi... multi-model intelligence so ⁓ I'm hesitating because I can't remember where I saw some news on this so I'm not going to mention something there but you can see we're getting a lot more of that clawed in there. I bring back what you were saying earlier with the anthropic models just to be very cautious around where your data is going and making sure you're turning those things on normally. I think this trend of not just having open AI will continue so that's going to be interesting. I think the big announcement for those who looking at the screen, I'm showing Agent 365, wasn't a big announcement really. I was a little disappointed we didn't really get any new functionality come out from that to what was announced at Ignite. But we did hear when it's going to be generally available and the price. And the price to me was one thing, so it's going to be generally available from May the 1st. I think the thing that caught most people by surprise is that this will be a per user per month license. So for those who turned on the public preview, you enable Agent 365 with a per agent license that you enabled. And we kind of suspected there'll be something because you've got those security elements on there. And Agent 365 is all about managing your agents. But then you charge per user. So... I'm going to try this one and see how much trouble I get in. Zoe, how do you decide who gets Agent 365 license?
Zoe Wilson: ⁓ So people obviously start with people who have an M365 co-pilot license and then people who are actually collaborating with using agents, people who are building agents.
Kevin McDonnell: Thank you for not swearing.
Zoe Wilson: If like with agent 365, if you've got it turned on and people are building agents, there's a very basic level of visibility and governance that you get. But for you to be able to start to manage that rigorously and properly for users to make sure that they're able to collaborate safely, then you need to give them a license. I believe that this is basically per user. So it's not doing licensing for autonomous agents that are really independently and I think we've talked a little bit about what a licensing model might look like for agent 365 on multiple prior episodes because obviously it's quite a few months now since they first announced agent 365 at ignite.
Kevin McDonnell: Yeah.
Zoe Wilson: And one of the things that I think we flagged right from the start is that there's a lot of complexity to this in a similar way to the way that the power platform licensing has ended up very messy. You've got per user licensing. I can see kind of per agent licensing for autonomous. There's probably some form of consumption licensing that will come. And it feels like at the moment, all they've done is work through, okay, from a user perspective, what is that? What does that first bit look like? And we'll need to figure that out afterwards. And we've already seen a bit chatter online from people who've turned on the preview like you said, who have then applied per agent licensing that's included in the preview to agents and I think there's been a bit of a kind of their mind breaks a little bit because they're like why is this per user when you know currently I'm licensing an agent?
Kevin McDonnell: misunderstanding. Yeah. Yeah. And why am I licensing all these people when they could be using agents? They might not be... I think we'll hear more of this story if I'm honest. I don't know more details on that, but I think there's more to this that we will start to see soon as well that will help this make a bit of sense. I also think that organisations would have got... that many people would have got confused about a per-agent licence. I think that would have been harder for people to digest, whereas with renewals coming up a per user per month license is a little bit easier to understand. So this will give a bit more of a transition to thinking about this frontier way of working ⁓ from that as well. So I do find it a little confusing but I kind of... it will continue to evolve the story, I'm pretty sure. And I think Microsoft has tried to make it simpler by then saying, well actually, do know what's easier? People have been clamouring for an E7 for a long time. Here we go, here is now your frontier suite, the E7, which is your E5, plus all the Entra goodies. So the Entra suite on there, which gives you a ⁓ lot more identity and access management on top of what you get with E5. Plus you've got M365 Copilot. Plus you've got Agent 365. So rather than complexity of when do I bring in all those different things, there is a simple, easy way of doing that. At a price, I'm not going to duck away because I know many people are going, why on would I pay that much money? And if you're thinking that, it's not for you. Don't worry about it. That is a separate conversation to be had. But at a discount, you can now get all those things in one go. So I actually quite like this. I understand that I've certainly heard a fair bit of noise in some of the chats of, is Microsoft trying to get more money in things like this? It's all been there. The only new thing is Agent 365. Now they're giving away to get everything in one simple package at a cost.
Zoe Wilson: Yeah and I think obviously we've been in this space for quite a while where Like you said, people have been talking about the concept of an E7 for a while. think there was a little bit of a pushback where clients were maybe feeling that they were having to pay increasing prices when they weren't necessarily using everything that was bundled together. So what we saw was kind of a maximization of E5 value and then a number of add-on SKUs with things like Viva and Entra like we have mentioned here and then Power Platform kind of add-on licensing and all of these other bits and pieces. And then obviously, as a premium license and it feels like that pendulum has swung now in the other direction where customers must be saying to Microsoft you need to make this simpler for us and we need a way to get, you know, we need an easier way to kind of procure and understand what we're buying where we've got all of this relevant stuff bundled together. For me, I would have liked to have seen Teams Premium be added into this. I'm not sure what they'll do necessarily with Teams Premium and Viva. We've had many conversations. Well, they don't really call the products Viva anymore, do they? ⁓
Kevin McDonnell: Yeah, that's a show. Is FIFA still around Zoe? Sorry. Yes, it is. Well, yeah, on and off. The license is still there. I think that's the important thing to say.
Zoe Wilson: Yay. Yeah, you can still buy the Beaver Suite SKU. The Beaver Insights dashboard, obviously you get the Copilot dashboard included within the Copilot license. Connections wasn't chargeable anyway. ⁓
Kevin McDonnell: if you have 50 licenses isn't it? ⁓
Zoe Wilson: Yeah, some of the premium products have already been sunset. You know, let's not talk about Viva Girls because I don't want you crying. Topics, obviously that, you know, that was a good one that's gone as well. So, so Viva, I can kind of understand not being here. I would have liked them to roll some of the Teams premium stuff in here because I think Teams premiums are really confusing thing to position with a client because there's, it's just like such a mishmash of features. And there are some things that are really complimentary here where I
Kevin McDonnell: Too late. You
Zoe Wilson: would have liked to have seen it but ultimately I think this brings together a lot of things that are kind of very valuable together in an easier way to purchase.
Kevin McDonnell: Yeah, I think the other thing would be interesting. So obviously we have M365 Copilot business. I might have that name slightly wrong, but it's got Copilot and business in there somewhere. Whether we'll see an E7 version of that, which is for smaller orgs to have a slightly lower cost to this ⁓ on there. That's the other thing I'd love to see because, you know, most SMC orgs are going to look at this and go... from that so I would like to see a way of having that and I would ask all customers not to try and do this sneaky thing of breaking your org down into different areas and trying to pretend that they're different tenants and then bring multi-tenant together because you're just making work and then then you complain that things don't work on there so I think that's the other thing I'd like to see is a slightly smaller option that will be expensive but slightly less and I'm sure there will be discounts that are available and things like this for for orgs at size so it interesting I think it's it's lovely well not lovely it's the wrong word I think it's funny to see for all the years that people have been saying we're gonna get E7 we're gonna get E7 that finally hits there ⁓ so we just gotta wait for people to start talking about E9 and asking for that but hopefully not too soon
Zoe Wilson: Yeah, I do think the timing is interesting as well because if we think about the Microsoft Fiscal Year, we're just at the end of their third quarter. The license will become generally available. So both Agent 365 and E7 will become generally available on the 1st of May, which essentially gives two months before the end of the Microsoft Fiscal. So I'll be really interested to see how the premium co-pilot numbers tick up as we get to the... the investor call at the end of the full FY.
Kevin McDonnell: Yeah, and yes, always interesting for Microsoft nerds like us around that time of year. The only other announcement, I'm not going to spend too long on this one, which is a little bit of a shame, but SharePoint at 25 ⁓ on there. I love this announcement. The reason is, if I'm honest, the content included in there is nice. I like it a lot of... agentic and copilot work. So having that kind of copilot, co-work like experience to build sites where it will build a plan and then execute it, to make changes to page in natural language, a lot more visual changes. I'm trying to see where I can fit in, not too much in there. A lot of visual changes to the way pages will work, a lot on the left hand side rail that I think just make things a little bit easier. So as an announcement, There's lots of small, nice things in here that I like. Yes to all the MVPs that I know complaining about things not quite working when you're developing this. What's this going to mean to the traditional information architecture? Lots of valid stuff like that. I'm going to completely ignore because we're running out of time. But what I really like about this announcement is just that little bit of nostalgia. 25 years of SharePoint on there. I presented this at work a few days ago. And I started off by ⁓ putting a picture of me when I just started on SharePoint. So back in 2004, I slightly depressed that number of people are laughing, but I was like, look at me before SharePoint. I had hair. I didn't need glasses. ⁓ I was able to go out drinking in the evening on there. I didn't have kids.
Zoe Wilson: Hahaha!
Kevin McDonnell: So if I just look at what SharePoint has meant to me in my career, it has been that foundation to driving so many good things that have happened in there. And so I've loved seeing some nostalgic things. Think about the pain we used to have of running on-premise farms and things like that and making those happen. The fun and games of completely editing your SharePoint front ends on that. I think Zoe on Twitter, you're still SharePoint Zoe. as far as I know if that's still active.
Zoe Wilson: I am, yes. So I've had that handle. I mean, I don't really use Twitter anymore. It's a bit of a cesspool, isn't it? But I've still got the handle. And no, no, no. And I consider changing it because my personal blog is Zoe365 and I did think about, and I know some people have had kind of very recognizable... ⁓
Kevin McDonnell: Not because of the SharePoint Zoe bit, but for the other content,
Zoe Wilson: Twitter handles and then they've updated it when they've done a bit of a rebrand. But for me, I always felt it was kind of nostalgic keeping that. And as you were talking, I realized it was probably around 2004, 2005 that I actually started working with SharePoint as well. So I think SharePoint has a lot to answer for with both of us.
Kevin McDonnell: for me, people always ask, know, why SharePoint? Why have you been there for so long? I got into SharePoint because I'd done bits of development. I was just learning that. I started off in ⁓ as ⁓ Was that summer internship? No, that was as a graduate ⁓ in investment bank in the UK. ⁓ And I started doing a bit of my own development, moved into a team where I could do a bit of dev. ⁓ then suddenly I saw SharePoint where people could help themselves. ⁓ That's what I've loved about SharePoint. It's kind of followed through onto the Power Platform world and even copilot. What I love about this technology is making it easier for people to do things themselves. So it's kind of stuck as a fundamental. I know many of you who've worked with SharePoint over the years has gone, easier? Are you mad? But it's still easier than the XML and XSL that I started with around the time I was looking at SharePoint. yeah. Thank you. Thank you, SharePoint.
Zoe Wilson: Yeah. Yeah, for me it was, yeah, for me, you know, at that point I was working in the north of England. I looked quite young for my age, there weren't a huge amount of women working in IT and, you know, I kind of started in service desk, did a lot of sysadmin L3 type support. And I really loved about SharePoint was two things. One, it allowed me ⁓ an opportunity to get out of the male dominated IT department and go and talk to people across the business and to start to understand their business problems and how technology can be applied to it. And that lesson is something that has stayed with me then throughout my entire career. And then like you, think just the fact that it is a business enabler, know, all of these technologies that we work with are there to enable people to drive business outcomes more effectively. And it's just been
Kevin McDonnell: So true.
Zoe Wilson: at times, know, let's not talk about on-prem ⁓ and, know, being responsible for a team that maintained and supported a highly custom dev SharePoint on-prem instance that was used as a public facing website for ⁓ important organizations. That was just nightmare, an ⁓ absolute nightmare ⁓ you know, to deal with...
Kevin McDonnell: you Really?
Zoe Wilson: patching patching cycles for something that was so highly customized on an old version of SharePoint incredibly painful but pain aside it has been an enormously ⁓ yeah it's been enormously rewarding and you know I wouldn't have met like I wouldn't have met you Kevin and all of the people across tech community I wouldn't be in the role that I am now if it wasn't for this. ⁓
Kevin McDonnell: And respect for people still doing that. Yeah, and I know Jeff Teeper always says the best community in tech, but I agree. I think it's got spun off into different worlds, but number of people in that who started off in the world's SharePoint, it's been fantastic. ⁓
Zoe Wilson: Yeah, and for anybody who's stuck with us this long, SharePoint is a valid data source in the right circumstance.
Kevin McDonnell: Chris. Good to see you.
Zoe Wilson: Yeah, ending on a deliberately provocative note. And I think with that, Kevin, we've to the end of this episode. So that's left to say to you and to everybody else who's traveling to Seattle for MVP Summit is have a fantastic time. Hopefully you don't miss me too much.
Kevin McDonnell: Yeah. No, no, I'm looking at my calendar. I'm going to be far too busy to miss anyone until I get on that plane on way back, by which time I hope to sleep a little bit. But no, be good. Right. Hopefully see you soon. And I hope everyone enjoyed today. If you did, please tell your friends, tell your colleagues, even tell your parents, get them to subscribe to Copilot Connection. Just click that little button, whether it's YouTube or your podcast app and share it with everyone that you know. But otherwise, thank you very much and goodbye.
Zoe Wilson: Yeah, awesome. Thanks for listening everyone, goodbye, see you next time.
