 Hey everybody, this is Christian Buckley with another post-collab talk tweet jam interview here, and we're talking with Sharon. Hello. Hello. How are you? So we were talking today about understanding the impacts of Windows 365. Before we get into that, of course, why don't you introduce yourself, who you are, where you are, what you do? Hi. My name is Sharon Weaver. I am from Lenexa, Kansas, which is actually a suburb of Kansas City. I own a company called Smarter Consulting, where Microsoft Partner and I'm a Microsoft Regional Director and an MCT. So I play in all things M365. We just spent the last 20 minutes going through talking about other business and technical things. We can't connect without going through our checklist of this is what's upsetting us today, or hey, this is going on, or what do you think about Microsoft's new release? But speaking of new releases, this was an interesting one. Collab Talk was built around all things collaboration technology. Going slightly outside of the boundaries of just the collaboration, we're talking about Windows 365 in that release. Microsoft has been talking about this for a long time. Long time. So to actually see this move forward, so I'd love to get your thoughts around this. So let's kick things off with your input on question number one. Am I in the right one? Yes. How is hybrid work changing the fundamental role of technology at work? Yeah. I think when you think about how people felt, and we hate to admit how much COVID has really provided so much digital transformation in our space. But you can honestly look at the before times and the after times. The interesting part is that in the before times before COVID, if you said to your boss, I'd really like to work remotely because I'm going to be at XYZ and I can still get my job done. But I'm just going to do it on my computer and I'm going to stick around there an extra day and I'll be fine. Well, I don't know. I feel like you need to be in the office. I don't know if you can be at that place and still get your job done productively. Then COVID hits and everybody goes home and works remotely after this. I feel like having it in the real world has really made people understand how productive, and how happy, and how successful we can be as a remote workforce. I think that it says a lot in terms of having that ability for transport ability in terms of software and cloud usage. Yeah. I think it's a great point. We were all forced into digital transformation, not just an upgrade of the technology, but it's forced organizations to really take a hard look at, what do we actually have, where are the gaps, and what needs to be done, how do we get better at working this way? Whether or not companies think that they're going to go fully back in the office, and I think that there will always be a component or a hybrid scenario for the majority of organizations, something like this could happen again. That's where we are in the world at this point, the stage in history, but to now have a more realistic conversation about digital transformation, not just about, hey, let's get on the latest version of the platform, but really look into how can we better support people? What are we missing? What are the tools that are missing here? Right. Well, and it was really interesting. I would say from a cloud software perspective, because what we're talking about is that idea of a cloud software that we can access anywhere, any time, and it's so interesting when you think about people with digital transformation, and then there was companies that were literally making their employees pack up their desktop PCs and take them home, and then be on a VPN network to be able to access file shares and network drives and things like this versus those who had already deployed Office 365, who were like, go home and get on whatever device you have available and we'll make sure you have what you need, but I could get home immediately if we're in that situation, and I can hop on my personal laptop or my phone or something like that, and I can immediately be productive and working. So you can see the disparity in the old hardware model, having everything right there locally versus moving to this cloud approach. We've already started to answer the next question, so let's jump in and expand upon it. So in your opinion, what are the benefits of a Windows 365 Cloud PC? Yeah, the benefits are absolutely portability. So many times you're tied, and I can tell you for years and years and years, the only application that I really have to keep is my Quicken and my QuickBooks, right? Those are downloadable applications, and for years as the cloud has come in, I've got new laptops and new surfaces and new devices that I can pop on and access anything anytime, except for my Quicken, right? So I understand this disparity, but I think the idea of a portable system where no matter where you're at, no matter what device you're on, you can simply log in to whatever you have available to you if that's a library PC, if you're at your mom's house, if you're on the road and you just need to get on your phone real quick. No matter where you're at, if you have a device that you can get on and access everything in one place, it just changes the game. Right, you know how Microsoft is for a few years now talked about in the future, being able to support moving like Android apps onto Windows devices and leveraging those there. Of course VMs, virtual machines are not new, and so, but to have all of that and be able to move across and use it on a Linux or a Mac or wherever you are, be able to dial in, pull down that entire experience, not just the application that you're working on, not just the Microsoft 365 stack in logging in via browser, but having the full experience via Azure and so you have all of your favorites, all the organization, it is your desktop, it moves with you, but it also means that an organization that is deployed, especially to people that are geographically dispersed, how much easier it is to build out and support and track what those people do, what they have access to, build out that the old brick model of setting up a laptop. Now it's just basic install, make sure it has securely accesses the internet and then log in to this version of Windows. Exactly. Yeah, it's pretty cool. What are your concerns? Question number three, what are your concerns about moving to a Windows 365 model? So what are the business impacts? If any. I mean, the more that we approach cloud, so we see this in our personal lives as well is like streaming is fantastic, right? I love having streaming services. I don't have to buy DVDs anymore, I don't have to carry DVDs around, I don't have to have a DVD player. I mean, think about all of the things that has changed in our world, but what happens when I want to watch a movie and I'm in a location that doesn't have great connectivity? Right? You're gonna face the same problems and I think of all of it, the biggest issue that we're going to face is connectivity and as bandwidth is more and more and more required for everybody, especially in a household. I mean, mine's no exception. I have three males in my house that game and stream constantly. My husband works from home as well. You can imagine the demands on our network that comes in. And I think that's, it has been a little atypical over the years because we're more techie than most people, but I think as the average person starts to get more and more and more cloud-based, those connectivity needs are gonna go up and up and up and up. And if you are not at a location that has great connectivity or you're unable to get to it, I mean, I right now can just log into my computer and if I'm not connected to wifi, it's no big deal for some of my things, but if my whole desktop requires me to be connected, that becomes a problem really fast. Yeah. I brought up the comment during the tweet jam. You probably remember about the licensing issue as well. I mean, especially in the short term, and I know it's a very low cost for that service, but for organizations that will, like do they need to go and buy that and duplicate the other licenses that they have for their on-prem and hybrid, their current stack? And so it could actually, organizations incur yet another cost on top of what they're already paying until they adjust, until they figure out, what do we actually need for the majority of our users? But it also means that there's a tremendous opportunity for MSPs. So I think that the partner, and I know that we've got a question later going through specifically the partner impacts, but that is it becomes easier for partners to go in and provide their own flavor of Windows 365 with their other solutions, kind of pre-program for their customers. And so again, it's easier to go in and deploy that. It also means that, well, I'll talk about that, the partner impact during that question. But that's something, those licensing costs that we don't yet know what that really will look at once it looks like, once it settles. And I made the comment of, even if it's a low cost for that, there should be some even lower cost for those organizations that have both. So for a licensed user has both of those in place. So we'll figure out what that needs to be, go for it. Question four, what are the security data sovereignty and content lifecycle implications of moving to Windows 365? I know that could be asked in three separate questions, but I was just trying to put that down as a category. Yeah, I mean, I think theoretically, this should actually be easier. The problems themselves don't change, right? We still have security issues. We still have privacy issues. We still have compliance issues. There's things we still have to deal with. I don't think those areas do not change at all. What does change is because we have more control over the software and the deployment of the software and the configuration of the software. And at a moment's notice, we can have a kill switch, right? And so the difference I believe is that we're still gonna have the same problems, but I believe that it will give IT infrastructure and operations more control in IT security, more control over those choices. So theoretically it should make it easier. Right, well, interesting. I know that, I know this is a slightly different topic, but like I have, so I use personal devices to bring your own device, BYOD, movement has been big for a long time and that's also been a huge risk. It's been a security risk, it's been others for organizations. And so while organizations, if it's an organization-owned device, they can have control over that. I, as a user, I can elect to give my company control over my device. I don't, I don't elect that. But I take certain protections. Certain steps for protections in place on my personal devices, so that I am meeting the standards that my organization has no matter where data sits. So I make sure that I follow those protocols. Be right, I think this could give organizations more control in that BYOD environment, have more flexibility, but again, have more control over, hey, here are the assets. It's a virtual machine. So if you're gonna do work-related activities, you spin that up. If it's your device, your laptop, your, whatever it is, and then I can toggle over and use just my machine and be free of those controls in my own environment. So it's just another option there for organizations to give flexibility to their end users. Yeah, absolutely. Well, and even for those companies that are, I'm gonna say this in a nice way, have more restrictive needs, whether that's by choice or by some sort of regulatory requirements. It also gives them the ability to do that because I mean, that's been one of the big heartaches for a long time for IT is, when you've got a company that's like, we don't want our users to be able to have this, this, this, do this, do this. And sometimes it is regulatory and sometimes it's just the culture of the company, but I think it gives them so much more control to dictate, like you said, what that work environment looks like versus what my personal environment looks like. And it becomes more obvious which one I'm working in. Right. So question number five, how will Windows 365 impact partner products and services? I, you know, we were just talking about this before, but I really feel like it's gonna open the door for more opportunities for partners and services. If you think of kind of the old days where there was a lot of companies that were really successful because they were hosting, right? So they would host SharePoint or they would host applications that maybe were too expensive for small companies to be able to afford or they would host entire setups because maybe a company didn't have the right IT staff to be able to manage that or they just didn't want the headache of it. And I think that has spun down drastically over the last 10 years. I mean, a lot of the places that I know that we're doing application hosting have all but kind of given up the ghost on a lot of those types of services. And I think this is one of those areas where all of the sudden now you can play in that space again. You can be part of that happening. You can help to configure. You can help to customize. You can help to train. You can, you know, you can be part of that solution in a way that we've not been able to do for a while. And there are of course, you know, there's a huge push around solutions built across the verticals, the industries that Microsoft is focusing most of their core. Their debt for the new fiscal year, FY 22, of course, as people know, Microsoft's fiscal year begins July 1st. They've kind of reduced the number of industries that they're focused on. Not they're not, they're not doing things for these other industries, but the lion's share of their focus is around those six. And they're incentivizing partners to go out and develop solutions for those things. We also see that they're pushing heavily partners to put those solutions in AppSource, in the Azure marketplace and other global marketplaces so that it becomes more transactable, you know, the solutions that are there. So as I was talking about, we mentioned earlier, partners can go and piece together their solutions. MSP, CSPs can put together like the partner solutions that they want to include for their customer base and then go out and market that way and provide customized services around those solutions and that expertise. I always use the example of like an MSP that focuses on like project management, knows that industry, knows that space, knows what customers are looking for, can provide the entire, you know, Windows and Microsoft 365 stack, partner with AppPoint add-on, governance, policies and insights, a bunch of different apps or things and then a company and one of our partners, you know, your company could go in and develop a solution specifically for healthcare or specifically for manufacturing or for the gov, you know, sector, education and utilize, pull data out of AppPoint solutions and out of Microsoft and all those things, bundle that up together and we all win in that scenario and it becomes easier for you to go and deploy that and as you make changes improvements to that to automatically provide those updates. So it streamlines so much of the experience and allows those customers where you have a lot of those creative types that like their Macs, you know, the best, let me just say that one of the best Windows experiences I ever had was on my wife's Mac with Vista. When Vista rolled out, it ran beautifully, never had problems for years on the Mac hardware. Yep. So, you know. More similar to the Mac OS. Yeah, so, but anyway, you can, you can, you know, deploy that out wherever your employees are and you don't now have to think about as much about what type of device that they're on, let them go do their creative activities on that side but then still have all the benefits of Windows and the Microsoft stack. Now, I definitely think that Microsoft is basically giving partners kind of a leg up because if you think about it, this is something that I've been spending a lot of time really learning about is the whole idea of productizing services and productizing knowledge and productizing solutions. So I can be a one-off and I can go help individual clients with a specific service or a specific solution, but if I can productize that and then I can provide it out to the masses, it's a win-win for both of us, right? My earning potential goes up and I'm now offering that solution to a broader audience that can get more value from my knowledge that's going out there. And I think by having this opportunity, Microsoft is now saying to their partners, hey, we know, we know that this is a win-win for you and the community. So let's create that bridge and let's help you get there so that we can provide this value back out and we can share that knowledge out. I'm really excited about it. Yeah, I think it was Satya in a keynote like five, six years ago said that, hey, for speaking to partners, like every partner is a software company, like every consulting company is a software company and people kind of scratch their head and work fully realizing, you're catching the vision of what that actually meant, what they could go and do, but it's exactly the way that you summarize that, that service partners can go and productize. I use that phrase all the time. Productize their services, the things that are unique about their offerings and bundle that together with the collection of the other solutions, partner solutions, like AppPoint with Microsoft and build that package that's gonna best meet the needs of their, their unique needs of their customers. Yeah. I see it as a win, as a partner win as well. Question six, where are the greatest integration gaps between Microsoft's collaboration and productivity solutions? I always like to throw in that collaboration productivity. Again, we are clab talk here. I'm talking about collaboration. I like the meme that you shared. I'm surprised you have it up because you put it post that question and it immediately came into my mind and it's the moment where the genie on Aladdin is like, the exits are here, here, here, here, here, because honestly, everywhere because from an architecture perspective. Okay, so that's where my brain thinks. My brain is it lives in architecture mode most of the time. And when you think about the app fabric as a whole and you think about the graph and you think about all the applications and you think about all the productivity and how everything kind of weaves into each other. I believe we've made progress for sure. It's so nice to go into certain products and be able to start to interact with other products. I believe that brings a lot of value, but I mean opportunities everywhere. Every application has an opportunity to more seamlessly integrate with the other applications. I really feel like teams, if they were running a race, like teams would definitely be at the front of the race. And I think that teams is really kind of a champion in that space and they're like, check it out, we can touch everything, right? Now, all of it's not necessarily smooth but I think they're definitely going a long ways to be able to pull that productivity suite into one place and work with everything. I think the people that are at the back of the pack are definitely Microsoft Search. I understand Microsoft Search is younger and a little bit newer and honestly has more touch points in a different way and has some more technical stuff behind it. Once again, I feel like it's getting there but I think it's got a long ways to go before it really integrates properly. And I think the big laggard unfortunately in a lot of this is Outlook. Outlook is a staple application for as much as you wanna say, oh, ditch your Outlook and go to teams. I use both every day very regularly. I've been speaking on Outlook for years. I've been speaking about Outlook integration for years and Outlook and SharePoint have some of the best integrations, some of the most seamless integration that I've ever used with Outlook. And I feel like a lot of that was taken away when the cloud solutions came in. I feel like a lot of those points of integration were kind of severed and now all of a sudden, we're like, well, let's tie it back together and a lot of that is getting remade. Now, don't take me wrong, I really do like some of the stuff that's come in but if you're asking me where are the opportunities, definitely search, definitely Outlook and frankly SharePoint as well. SharePoint is so much better than so many people give it credit for and I feel like it kind of stands alone out there and it does all these crazy things but then somehow you're like, well, I've got my internet, I've got my team sites, I've got all my content in here, now can I interact with this other thing inside of here? No. So I mean, I think there's definitely room for improvement there as well. Well, let's jump in. I know that we've gotten a little long here but question seven, the final question, what is the future of the cloud PC? So what are your predictions for the next five to 10 years? This is so funny because I wrote a blog like five or 10 years ago about the future of work and I very much envisioned the idea of, anytime, anywhere, location, independence and how I could essentially take my slim client or my thin client or something very, very small and then log in to my PC at home and be able to access all of that information and just kind of go wherever I want. I still think that's a thing. I think that what's the future that I see, especially being able to have all of these cloud apps available and having a cloud solution like that is that I can take a very small device anywhere I need to go and access things fairly quickly and easily. I'm probably, now I'm a technologist so not everybody's gonna be like this but as a technologist I like having my extra monitors, I like having my space, I like having my power, I like having my connectivity. So at home I still have a beefier setup for a lot of those reasons but I think the idea of being able to truly work anywhere, anytime, full location, independence if I'm at my mom's house and I need to do something real quick I can just log into my full setup right there if I'm at the library, if I'm on a trip and I didn't bring anything with me because I'm on vacation so who needs to work on vacation but there's an emergency. It's a SharePoint emergency and I need to log in and I need to do my stuff right? It's very, very easy for me to do this now in the future. You know, so a few, quite a few years back, well I mean so six, seven years ago was at an event in London and we were at kind of the speaker's dinner at some pub in central London somewhere and MVP Michael Null that you know well we were all as a group of us going down to an event in South Africa after this event in England and he mentioned and he's a hardcore traveler mentioned that he had a new device and it was a beefy smartphone for back then you know pretty hefty but had everything, his work, all of his presentations all within, you know on his phone and so we talked about he had the little connectors for it and everything to be able to go and do it so he did that entire trip, did presentations at two major conferences and made edits while he was traveling on the plane to his presentation there on his device, did all of that, you know a few years back, much easier that is so you're doing light things where you've created and say look I'm trying to travel light all I need to do is be able to present this in a mode have your smartphone ready to go with that device and kind of share it from that or broadcast from that or even easier than that could be that you make edits on it and it's automatically once you're synced onto Wi-Fi back up into the cloud so any edits on the airplane and that you go up to that dumb terminal at the or the event whatever laptop that they have as long as there's an internet connection pull it down at the full experience for everything that you need that are part of your desktop if the connectivity is good if the broadband as well which infamously doing a large event in a conference center in Johannesburg you cannot count on the quality of the connectivity but he had it on his device to be able to give it if that was the case. Well, and if you think about it from the IT side from the IT department side managing those accounts as well like we talked about earlier there's no more need to make custom desktop setups for all of your employees. You can spin them up an environment the way you like it and typically it's gonna be hey, I'm gonna copy the environment that I like for my template tweak it to this particular role or that particular person send them their login information and you're done. So you have that seamless login windows experience and that same and yet that same crappy multi-tenant experience. Oh, if we can get that off your data it'll make my life a little easier. I mean, I would joke about this about how like teams for multi-tenant on the mobile device is awesome. It's easy. And I've just thought about like having like a simulator on the desktop for the mobile experience and just having the app up there all the time and use teams there. But I agree. I know maybe Microsoft someday someone will step up to the plate and fix that issue. I sure hope so. Yeah, just do it Microsoft. Why do you not wanna fix that? Well, Sharon Weaver, thank you so much for your time today and for participating in the Tweet Jam. Folks that wanna find you online, how do they do that? Twitter, Sharon, you Weaver or you can go to www.smarter-consulting.com. Excellent. Well, thanks so much for your time.