 Hey everybody, this is another post collab talk tweet jam, and we're talking today about managing the Microsoft 365 content lifecycle, and I'm joined by Mike who participated. Welcome. Thank you, Christian. Quick intro, my name is Mike Moderani. I'm a Cloud Solution Architect from Ottawa, Canada, and it is hot today here. In Canada, we get the 100-105 degrees as well, and it is hot today. I've been up there like that. Well, it's funny to tell people that I'm in mountain desert, so it's high elevation. I think the valley floor here is 4500 feet or something like that. Maybe it's higher than that, but it can be 105 and then still, it could drop below freezing at night, which is crazy. You never know what the weather is going to be like here. Well, it's a big topic. I had more than one person comment that said, any one of the seven questions this time, there's always seven questions. I said, any one of these, you could focus for an hour just on that topic. There's a lot to bake into that, and which I will likely do over the course of the year. I'll probably go grab a couple of these, and it'll be a focus of another month. But we kick things off, so it does jump a lot of ground here, but Mike, love your takeaways on this. So the first one we start with was, what is the general state of collaboration within your organization, and where do you think you are the most successful in working collaboratively? Yeah, so just quick background on my world. I've been a consultant. I'm in the consultant world, so I have been a consultant for a couple of decades. So my role typically jumps from one organization to another every 12 to 18 months. And we go in and we deploy whatever we deploy in whether we are onboarding new clients, still clients still on time and haven't done the cloud, or they have been on the cloud, they want to make things better. Yeah, with the exception with one client, I've been with them for about five years on and off. But in general sense, people still rely a lot on chats. So if you got teams chats, that's where they work the most. They have teams and team channels and they do a lot of collaboration with posts. Very little, I would say 20 to the 30%, they do the co-authentic collaboration way. Meetings is still a big part of it as well. I always try to avoid meetings because I can be more productive, talking to someone while working, but I always get invited to meetings of 15 to 20 minutes to discuss something, where I can actually dissolve that in a chat. So teams meetings have been the most useful way for collaboration, unfortunately. You know, you've seen that meme, we've all seen it was like, hey, couldn't this email could have been a teams meeting? And I've seen the exact opposite where it's like, you know what, this teams meeting could have just been a quick email, you know? Or I usually kind of trump both of those and say, you know, you could have just called me or done a quick one-on-one chat. We didn't need a meeting, you didn't need to do a lengthy email around this. But what I've, I made the comment that one thing that I think that we're doing so much better is the synchronous asynchronous collaboration. People used to get really stuck on that, you know? And so now I don't know if it's because of the pandemic, people are more patient. They realize they're not available right now. I'll send them a chat or I'll send them an email or I'll send them a meeting invite or something around that. But there's a little more kind of patience built in realizing that we're all working, especially those of us in tech. We're working longer hours, but it's a little more flexible, but we will get back to you. And so that's something that I think, certainly my organization does a lot better. Yeah, absolutely. And I definitely agree with that statement because we are working from home now almost 90%. I don't think we're gonna go back to the, even the hybrid 50-50. So the expectations are still high that we are gonna be connected all the time. If I don't get back to you within the normal business hours, I may get back to you after hours, but as long as I get back to you, that's my mindset. I'm okay. I put a timeframe in my mind. That has been actually where pre-pandemic is. If I have to respond to you within 24 hours, that's the professional way. So asynchronous synchronous is, has been working for me for a while. It's more now because I am connected, whatever I am. Being in a government town, the asynchronous synchronous did not work really well due to COVID because I had to be in the office right now because I'm working remotely. It's working great. So... Well, that's the difference. And you know, what's funny is that, so I've been working with ISVs the last 12 years. I was at Microsoft before that. I worked with IBM building collaboration technology prior to that. So I've been doing this for 20 years, over 20 years now, collaboration technology itself. And in all of that time, the majority of that time, I worked for companies or with clients that had a no work from home policy. And so this is, it's a major shift in thinking. And for a lot of organizations, I get that too. For a lot of them, the pandemic was the first time they really saw that, hey, we can actually do it this way. There are some things where it's better to be in person. Like we have a hybrid policy at ad point where people that are close to one of the offices, I think it's like two or three days a week they're in the office and the other times the flex time. So I now know that traveling from out of town, if I drop in, drop into an office on a Friday, I will likely find no one there. Exactly. Well, the second question, kind of building on that. So within the phases of the content management life cycle, which are create, coordinate, protect and harvest, where does your organization, or might get some of your customer organizations, where do they struggle the most and why within that life cycle? I can put them in two different categories. Definitely the create is none of them because a lot of organizations start creating content before doing some proper planning for it. So I can put them in two verticals if you wanna call them. One is the coordination and one of them is the protect and harvest at the same time. That's my experience with most of the clients I have been involved with for the past few years. The coordination is how to, yes, they have content. They wanna come up with information management policies, how to coordinate creating those policies and structuring that content with the least amount of painful time for the end user to go and tag this information. So you're saying people are still uploading multiple versions of something or not editing and sharing in the right place because that's part of that coordination as well. Correct. No, it's more if they don't have the proper license to do automations for them. So they have this massive file plan that they don't have an E5, for example. So they wanna go and plan that information management, plan the content management lifecycle in a way that I wanna go and upload content into SharePoint and I'm using Teams, but I wanna make sure that has been flagged or classified properly so I can do the harvest at the end. So I can apply the right protection and sort of the right retention policies to it. So coordination has been huge because people really don't understand what kind of licensing they can or cannot do with it. Yeah. And that's one category. The second category is the protection and the harvest of the content because they still don't understand how they wanna protect the content, whether they're gonna protect it by team-based or they wanna protect it by security classifications. So they really struggle in that point because they don't have enough knowledge on how to do it. Well, that's right. Yeah, like an organization that needs to go in and do some of that hard work to figure out, hey, us as an organization, what are we held by our industries, the standards, the regulations that are in place, the compliance, the all the rules that we need to make sure that we are enforcing. And then looking at the technology that you have in-house, how can we go? Like what do we have to do? What are the guardrails for how we collaborate and setting that up? Like for my company, like that's what we have tools that we do that. And I look at that, I realize, because I think just most people answered it the same way you did. Said creation, like we think we have a handle on that and might be spread out a bit but we're good on that process. But it was the coordination, then protection and the harvesting. So I would say my organization is the coordination and the harvesting. So you were just talking about the harvesting some of the gaps there. Yeah, and we come from a SharePoint world where we try to train the end user when you upload something to SharePoint, please tag it properly so we can do something afterwards so we can apply that life cycle to it. That's the, we have more challenges with Teams today because you can't really, if you're asking the user to collaborate, we're asking the user, we're not gonna create those multiple repositories of content in Teams and in different SharePoints to end alone or non-Teams connected then you have to find a way how to harvest and how to apply this compliance and attention to it. And that's where the struggle, this is the real struggle. This is the most struggle that organization have if they don't have any automations applied to it. And that's also why we see as consultants, as ISVs, we both see it from slightly different angles because where we hear is like customers have had a problem. I mean, this is like the governance issue all over again. It's part of the broader governance discussion. The life cycle of that content, where the process is in place, how are we handling these things? What should happen there? And then you add to it, like, oh, there's been a data breach or there's been, it's just kind of piled up because employees have left, we've restructured and we've not gone in and tried to resolve this and get things organized. And I look at it, it's like, well, therein lies the opportunity for ISVs and consultants. Yeah, and clients and organizations don't realize that governance, it was a nice word up there. Like 10 years ago, we talked about governance and said, yeah, yeah, it's really nice and fancy things that you can do, but it is a must today, especially what you've mentioned that data breach. You have to really look at the governance and do your monthly reports and have dedicated team about governance or individuals that will go and see, make sure that everything falls in place. You've got to have to have that compliance. You've got to have a dedicated people for compliance to make sure you are protected your content. Well, to add a wrinkle into the story is question three, as when we start talking about multi-tenant, multi-cloud, with so many SaaS applications and storage options available to organizations, is the goal still a single repository or one version of the truth? Is that still the goal? Do you talk to customers about that? I always push it to a single repository or a single SaaS application. So stay within Microsoft 365 because it makes things much easier for you. So I'm the person who was responsible for killing a lot of other document management system, just migrated to SharePoint back in the days and I still do the same thing. But I have a mixed clients, Government of Canada, for example, they have adopted open text long time ago for the IDLMS. So I work with them to do a mix of both. Open text still for a lot of government departments have the documents there with some connection or integration between N365 as well. But for me, if I have the choice, I always preach about the single repository because you can do better compliance, less cost, less training. Yeah, the hard part with that is that I don't remember if it was Gartner or Forrester or another smaller analyst for came out, did a study that said that they see like an average of over 150 SaaS applications per enterprise customer. And so the, cause I agree with you, that's part of the ongoing battle for an IT team is being aware of what your people are doing and where your intellectual property sits across all these different tools. I'm not one of these people that says, no, you cannot go and download that tool. I'd rather have a culture in the organization that they feel comfortable saying, hey, look, I'm gonna go use this marketing tool. Here's why I'm using it. So you can have the conversation. Is it a training issue that they're not, hey, we offer that capability. Is it not, were you not aware? Does it not meet your requirements? Let's at least have a conversation. And if you're gonna put intellectual property out there, that's part of that, under the banner of governance. We need to be aware of this, but let's have a conversation. Exactly. Yeah, that's the wrinkles. There's so much that's happening so quickly out in the cloud. How do you maintain that single repository with so much going on other than just having a culture where people speak up and bring these things to you? Yeah, and all depends on the culture of the organization. Some have more strict policies that they're not allowed. Then they block all of these SaaS applications, the Dropbox and others in the box. And that's fine. And the employees will get used to it. And some other organizations don't. Get used to it. You mean get used to going around IT and doing it without telling them? Pretty much, yes. Using their own personal devices. Yeah, and other organizations, they use Microsoft Cloud App Security to say, okay, well, we understand that now Microsoft 365 may not answer all your needs for whatever reasons, and then we have many, many reasons, probably to go into Dropbox. Maybe because you want to exchange that kind of non-IP based content. So, but we're going to still manage that for you through Cloud App Security. So there are some flexibility in M365. You want to go out of M365 content services. But from my point of view, why learn multiple applications? Why worry about security of multiple applications? Well, and yeah, the only, I completely agree. And again, I understand the IT side of that. I think organizations need to be careful if they find they discover that employees are going around that process. That should be, it's like a learning moment. It's a teaching moment. But also to find out like, well, what is missing? Because it may be, again, an educational, a training issue. It could be that IT is not being responsive to the needs of people that need to get work done. So there's a lot of conversation that should happen around that. All right, so the fourth one, I'm interested in your answer this, the fourth question, are you leveraging the latest content services? So syntax, Viva topics, et cetera. And if so, how are they impacting your overall content management strategies? And if not using them, why not? So syntax a little bit, not on a wide scale, nothing yet on Viva topics, and both are, or Viva topics at least, on the Viva product scale perspective, it's just licensing, it just costs related. A syntax, I think that was the top answer too. Like most people said that first, those additional costs. Now there is a cost also for syntax, and some organizations, I have used syntax, deploy syntax for them, and it's working really great. It solved a lot of issues of manual tagging or classification. So the document understanding, I've only done the document understanding side of it, and it was awesome. One client that I cannot mention, but they had, it's an educational institution, they have received, they received all the time applications from all over the world. And there are scanned applications into images. So the quality, the quality of those images, or PDF and not OCR, were poorly done. And syntax. I was gonna ask whether you were OCRing and whether they were doing that other stuff, cause that, yeah, that, I mean, the OCR has been around for a long time, and the quality has never been that great. Exactly. I think it's been, it's okay, but yeah. syntax did an amazing job. So we've created multiple models and deployed it to the same point, multiple SharePoint sites and document libraries, and it's saved them thousands of hours of doing things manually. So it works really, really well. You know, one of my first early jobs, I worked for EDS in the early 90s. Those that don't remember EDS, it was Ross Perot's company, consulting company. I worked for EDS MediCal in Rancho Cordova, California. And I helped, so I was an analyst and technical writer. I helped move like the first wave into usually like doc to help, like moving all of the paper-based. Literally, there was a storage facility with forklifts, with boxes filled with binders and paper. And part of my job was occasionally to go and swap out pages, updates in binders at this facility on the other side of town. Yeah, that was early 90s. But the fact that we, in moving so much of that to digital, I just, I made this comment during the tweet jam. It's like, man, I wish that I had had technology like this 20 plus years ago when I was in that document management world daily. Yeah, absolutely. And it saves a lot of time. So it's automatically classifying the content, automatically adding some retention policies to it as well. So that's working great. But again, the adoption of syntax has not been widely done with all the organization from a cost perspective, especially when you go into large organizations because it's quite a bit of money to just add a $5 per user per person, per person per month on the monthly bill. I mean, this is one of those things. It's kind of like search. When, you know, Microsoft acquired fast search and initially it was, you know, a separate offering and then you had the premium and then more and more of it got integrated in. I mean, as you're feeling it, we're just gonna see this deeper, deeper integrated into what people have already paid for and it won't be, there'll be additional capabilities and not just these expensive premium services. I would love to see this. It could be going that way as well because I'm pretty sure the product team want more adoption from it. Because there is a workaround that I've seen organization do that. And that workaround only works for small to medium business where they have a dedicated people to upload content and say, we're a small team here. So we're gonna license only 10 people or 50. It depends on the organization and you are responsible for uploading the content so that you can get properly document, understanding and process properly. And the rest of the users are just consumers. Right. It'll be interesting to see how that flushes out. And of course, Viva continues to expand with other pillars with ally.io acquisition now being Viva goals. We didn't really get into that today but that fits into the broader story. But question number five, with so many programs this kind of gets to that costing issue. With so many programs, plans and subscriptions changing frequently with multiple features varying security and access rights. How does license management impact content management strategies? So that kind of you just kind of spoke to that. Big, it's huge, there's two aspects to it. One is a lot of organizations will purchase the license and they don't know what, what do they get with it? So they don't know, oh yeah, maybe if I have an E5 I don't know that I can have an auto apply of retention policy to it. I don't know that. Yes, I can create that content lifecycle management and do this harvest of content and without really having to do much of manual work. But if they don't have that and they are educated with this complex licensing model we have at Microsoft and we have different skews. It's not about E1, E3 and E5 or business plans. You can purchase, I don't know, you can purchase small sub skews as well. And it gets really, really complicated. It takes someone with a PhD I think to understand the whole licensing model. Yeah, there are partners that specialize in just that folks that has a lot to it. I think that's long been a complaint is that when a customer shows up at Ignite or goes to build or something and they get all excited about what's being shared and Microsoft moves very quickly, the fine print runs by off-screen very quickly of whether, hey, am I able to do this with my existing licensing or am I gonna have to go and reinvest or double down to be able to get these cool features that are really selling me on the core capability. Which is always the hard part. Like I go back to like syntax. Syntax is really delivering on a lot of kind of the future that like the vision, the promise of what SharePoint and M365 was to deliver on, but now it's this additional service. That's why I would love to see it eventually just become part of the core solution. Exactly, it will solve a lot of problems. And it happens to me all the time I would be solutionate or showcase in a solution and then I get hit with, oh yeah, we have an E1 or an E3, I'm like, but whatever I thought to you about is not, you can do half of it. And the last you're gonna have to do manual. And this is where the actual, the mood changes a bit. It's like, oh, you were, everyone's excited about what I'm presenting and then they don't have the license and I'm like, okay, we're gonna have to scale it back. So it has a huge impact on content management lifecycle because if you don't have the tools or if you're not licensed for the tools it's gonna cost you a lot more. Some organization will opt in. I will live with it. I will deal with it later on, which is not the right way from an application side. It's the right way from a cost side. You know, it's funny just as fellow MVPs and the space, when we go do sessions at different events, SharePoint Saturdays, community days, things like that around the world. Years ago I made the decision I'm gonna stop presenting on doing like the differences between on-prem and cloud. I'm only gonna talk about SharePoint online. I'm only gonna be talking about office cloud enabled capabilities. I'm not, you know, people say, is this available on-prem? Like, I don't know. You'd have to go look it up. Like I'm gonna stop paying attention to that and just focus on that. So I get the lion's share of what's new and what Microsoft wants the mainstream to be utilizing there. So some respects, I just think that we're, as partners, we're constantly, it makes sense for us to upfront to say, what I'm gonna show you is premium licensing. You know, these are E-fives and higher. You know, we always joke about E-7s and E-9s. Like in the metaverse, if I have an E-7 or E-9, do my avatars have legs? I think you have to pay premium to get legs on your avatars. But yeah, for the most part, yeah, it just makes sense to be open so you don't dash people's dreams when you show them the new stuff. Yeah, yeah. And it is unfortunate that we have to do that sometimes that this is, you set the expectations. I fall into that not setting expectations sometimes. Just go and to get really excited about showcasing the great features and then say, yeah, by the way, you don't have that kind of features and then the mood changes. Right, you're surprised? Yeah. So question six, why did companies struggle with user adoption? This is one of those that we can talk an hour about this. And what are the primary barriers to implementing a successful adoption strategy? Yeah, that, you know what, this is gonna be, I'm sure, later this summer, this will be a dedicated topic. Exactly. Yeah, there's so many to talk about this one here. The user adoption is huge, mainly in my world, because the lack of understanding of the platform. People or users don't really know the full potential of what they're working with. Especially if they are new to the cloud, they really don't know how to use it, how everything works together. They still get confused of between what is Teams and SharePoint and OneDrive and how that works with Exchange and Outlook. So training is a big thing. Whether you are newly onboarded to the cloud and you haven't used it or you are halfway there, or you're fully in the cloud, but there's a lot of new features coming up, Viva is one of them, right? Yeah. Put the cost aside. Let's say an organization has licensed for Viva. And if you don't, if you don't really run some sessions or training sessions or workshops or put videos, or however you change management and training methodology is all about. If you're not given awareness to the users, to users really won't use it much. Yeah. That's one of the things that I've seen there is lack of knowledge. If they don't know it, they're gonna hear it. Yeah. Well, it's, and I think, and I'm sure you agree with this too, is that you need to have a plan. Whether you are a consultant, a partner that's working with a customer or the customer organization itself, have a plan for this. And it's like you do with software testing. It's not just enough, or even in ongoing operations where you're regularly going and doing testing in is it performing the way that we think? Are the metrics that we're relying on weekly, monthly, quarterly, are they still true? Do we need to tweak those things? You need to take that same strategy with your adoption and looking, okay, where are we on this? I brought up the fact, go through business school and there's something you go and you learn about and I used to know the calculation on my HP12C, which is like the opportunity cost and the cost of not taking advantage of an opportunity. And the collaboration I look at it this way, people don't understand what it means. Like if we have 100 people in our company, simple model here, 100 people in the company, but only 25 of the 100 are actively collaborating, sharing intellectual property, discussing things actively. Maybe you've got another 10, 15 that are passive within that, but you have a minority that are participating. What would the value be of 80% of your employees collaborating, the quality of output, the volume of output, the ideas that are not being shared because they're not actively participating in the program. So there's this qualitative benefit, but also a quantitative benefit to more collaboration. It's hard sometimes to define that, but that's what adoption does. We intuitively understand that if more people are active and collaborating, it's the rising tide floats all boats. If we're all doing more than all the boats are operating at a higher level, and that's what happens when you have an active, proactive adoption strategy in the organization, you're constantly fine tuning. How can we improve on this and get the numbers up? You said something really, really important here that the more active or more active user in collaboration and the higher percentage, you're gonna get great results. And this is, I see all the time as a consultant, I've done hundreds and hundreds of projects. And I always run into situations where I say, yeah, I've never thought about it this way because we're collaborating with more people. We're a different organization, different individuals we're bringing different ideas. So that's 100% true what you said. That's one of the reasons why I run these tweet jams because I say every time I do one of them, somebody will bring a perspective or a customer story or something and be like, hey, I didn't consider that perspective. Like, hey, I learned something. Every time I learned something. Exactly, that's the point. All right, then the final question with many companies still struggling to navigate the Microsoft security model, what advice can you share to help overcome the challenges of managing Microsoft 365? One thing I think I've said that on the tweet jam is don't jump into implementing everything that you can do in Microsoft 365 security because there's so many things and you are gonna shoot yourself in the leg just because the users will not be used to what you're gonna implement, whatever restrictions you're gonna have, whatever new features you're gonna add to it. Just take it slowly. Take it with baby steps if you are new to MT65 or you just implemented the basics. You definitely have to implement some of the fundamentals in MT65 security. There's a whole long bunch of things that you can do and the tool can give you a really good way to do it. Like you can use the secure score in Microsoft that tells you what you should be doing. You don't have to do everything, but there are some fundamentals that you have to do like MFA and other things that you can have to actually deploy into your tenant. But take it slowly and do apply features every few months. Listen to what your content is all about. You need to understand what kind of content you have and how you're gonna share content as well. It's not only about having internal collaboration, most organizations wanna collaborate with externally as well. So you're gonna have to put some security measures around that and how to prevent security breaches, whether it's intentional or mistake. 99% is not intentional in my experience that people don't know what they're doing. They don't know they're gonna actually upload a document into a team that is shared externally. So you're gonna have to first take it slowly and start thinking about what security measures you're gonna put in place, put in some sensitivity labels, some DLP in place, learning some reports and make sure the sensitivity labels you don't overcomplicate it as well. I've seen organizations go to put like 10 sensitivity labels there, way too many because yeah, for IT it might make sense. For the end user that would be very confused which one to use. Right. You're the one thing that I actually had a tab open in the spreadsheet and I ended up not talking about it much, in fact, did I even mention it once during the tweet jam but is like a secure store, the score going in and regularly looking at and having a plan and rolling it out. Like on top of that, another resource is the Microsoft 365 maturity model and looking at and understanding. There's great data, so much of it is community driven data that's out there. If you go look up Microsoft 365 maturity matrix or maturity model, you'll be able to see that based off of kind of the CMM levels and it's a great way to go in in a number of different areas, not just from a security standpoint but from an adoption standpoint, from other aspects of the content life cycle. Like where are we? And to be honest and not, I mean the tendency is when people kind of self score themselves, self grade themselves, then they kind of give themselves a lot of benefits of the doubt, they put themselves up higher. Like be realistic about where you are in each of those areas but at least then it gives you an idea of, hey, here are other ways that we can go and improve based on what your, like just what you outlined based on what your strategies are, based on what your requirements are for your industry of what you need to put in place. So that's just another great resource that you can leverage to get a better sense of, okay, here's where we are, here's our baseline, where do we go next? Where should we focus based on industry wide or cross industry data? Exactly, like any other security implementation, like I said in the beginning, just don't take everything in M365 and say I want to do what I'll. Just look at what you have, look at other industry standards that you've mentioned and start saying, okay, I can do it now here in six months, put a roadmap for your security implementation. Today I can do this, then I'm gonna have to go and classify my content or maybe I don't wanna get some data leaks in 12 months but at least plan it properly and have some educational process along the way because users will need to understand if I upload a social security number, for example, or a credit card number, what's gonna happen? If I'm not aware as a user of the consequences of the policies that was in the back end, I'm gonna get flagged and I'm not gonna know why. Right. Well, Mike, really appreciate your inputs. Thanks again for participating and I know you're a regular on these things as well, so looking forward to your insights going forward and thanks to everybody that participates again. Every month, we've been doing this for over a decade, a monthly collab talk tweet jams, always on Twitter, use the collab talk hashtag, you'll be able to find and follow the conversation and this next month, so July of 2022, we're gonna be talking about the Microsoft partner ecosystem and how to navigate that. So should be another great topic. So, well, thanks a lot, Mike, for your time. No problem. Thanks, Christian, my pleasure. Always good talking to you.