 Hey everybody, this is Christian Buckley. This is another follow-up to a collab talk tweet jam, where we talk today about the state of Microsoft Teams. I'll let you gentlemen introduce yourselves. Mark. Yeah. I'm Mark Vale. I'm the founder of Comesverse, sponsoring this collab talk. It's awesome. I'm also a Microsoft Teams consultant similar to Tom, who's going to come up next out of the UK. I've been doing Skype and Teams implementations now in the voice space for, well, donkey shoes. Too long. Yeah. Tom, I thought principal solutions, architect and modality systems, and then like Mark says, focus solely on Microsoft Teams and been through the whole OCS link, Skype and now Teams thing. So I've been in the space quite a while. Mark mentioned he is sponsoring the sponsor today's tweet jam, and the sponsor comes versus this event that's coming up next week. I know that there's activities that are happening this week as well, and we'll push this video out live this evening. So people still have plenty of time to go and register and sign up. But yeah. So Mark, why don't you give like 20 seconds to the event? 20 seconds. There's a lot going on for 20 seconds. So we're a dedicated Microsoft Teams conference. So our sole focus is on teams and how that can transform and enable businesses and users. We're a community conference. So we merged MVP speakers and also industry speakers together into one sort of community effort. We're online next week, 6th of July to the 9th, 24 hours a day. 169 speakers, 230 odd sessions, a whole bunch of activities going on, even VR if you're into VR, we've got VR exhibition hall. It should be a great event. We've got Jeff Teeper, CVP from Microsoft doing some keynotes. Lots of Microsoft product group participation and support. So it's a place to go if you want to know and learn about teams. Yeah, it's going to be a great event. It's free. I'll provide the links and stuff with the blog posted and done in the description of the video as well. Well, let's jump in. So we just had this very active collab talk tweet jam. And as always, so the folks that aren't familiar with it. So these have been running since January of 2012, almost every single month. I think I've missed three, maybe four months out of all those years. And they are community driven out on Twitter so anybody can go and participate. Our panel, we had something like 40 people on the panel actively participating. Who knows how many others were just lurking, watching. A lot of Microsoft people tend to just sit on the sidelines and occasionally comment, but just kind of listen. So it's a great sounding board for feedback from the community. But I structure these things, that seven questions seems to be the magic number, but you guys have to agree. These things fly by so fast. Oh yeah, exactly. It's crazy. Yeah, you want to read all the answers while you're getting ready to answer your next question. It's just like an absolute fire hose following the hashtag of like, oh, that's a good idea. Yeah, I agree, I disagree. I love it. I love how open it is. You end up spinning off threads off of each question and that's really great. But I keep telling people that said, oh, I missed it. It's like, go in, it's Twitter. Like you can go and search on tweet jam responses from six years ago. It's all still out there and accessible. So anyway, we're going to walk through the questions and we're going to kind of share our thoughts about these things. And it's not going to take an hour, but we're going to go through these. So we kick. We've got Tamar Bushna on here, it can take an hour. Yeah, we're going to try not to take an hour. So the first question was, has Microsoft Teams become the hub for collaboration within your organization? And if so, how? Do you want to take that one, Tom, first? Yeah, so we're obviously massively biased because we're 150 people around the world mainly focused on Microsoft Teams. So not unsurprisingly, it's become cause of our workflow. But the how I guess is a bit more interesting. So every customer has a dedicated team. So right from the pre-sale stage, the first thing we do is create a team. Proposals go in there, pre-sales conversations go in there. If the proposal converts to a project, it goes through our project management back office, gets a bit of a more, tends to get a bit of a more formal structure, like there's a channel with the PO number for the project. There's a set of tabs around dynamics and some other bits of pieces we use internally. Files live there, conversation lives there. The only kind of thing where things go outside of the team is often customers where we still have old-scored engagement through email or something else. Like we do do guest access, but not every customer is 100% engaged in that process. And we'll talk about that later. But as far as files and data and conversations from pre-sales to delivery to managed service, that's the world for that customer. Yeah, I mean, I echo that. I mean, I'm slightly different to Tom. Tom works for MedaLty. I kind of work for myself. So I go from project to project. So I see a lot of different things. So I don't really have, I have a team of one. Then I join somebody else's team and augment that. A bit lonely. Is it a bit lonely? It is a bit lonely sometimes. I end up sending emails to myself. So a similar scenario though, it's, you know, while I bring people in, I've got part-time employees, depending on the project, a research effort or whatever that's going on. But similarly, I'm, you know, across dozens of different, you know, guest tenants. And I think in the responses, there are a lot of people that responded, you know, that indicated that Microsoft was not the only stack that they were leveraging. There are other tools that exist that are out there. People have probably heard of some of those, you know. We don't have to send them out. We don't have to talk about them. Now, but it's interesting. And I think, but that's an important dialogue to have is that I don't think it's true any longer. It's been, hasn't been true for a long time. There is no company that is like, we are 100% Microsoft stack. That's all that we do. I think if a CIO were to say that, there'd be snickering, laughing from the, you know, down below. Cause there's all these third party tools that are out there and that exist as part of the culture of the organization. Yeah, that's true everywhere. You know, we see it, we've seen it for years. You could go back to Skype for Business, link OCS and you wouldn't see a customer unless they're only very small, like single site. They would have dispersed telephony. For instance, they'd have dispersed email clients. That's not gone away. And the advantage of the cloud, making it so easy just to sign up for a free trial and okay, now my department's trialed it. Now this app has become line of business. I need it. I'll swipe my credit card or whatever. Then that becomes part of the organization. And it's hard to control that, especially with how accessible the cloud is. And even with, I had a similar discussion with a company about their views on, well, everybody's going to go to Team Voice and that's not the case. You know, there's going to be, PBX is going to be analog, there's going to be all kinds of telephony out there that we need to integrate with. And that's the same for collaboration as well. You know, there are people using Slack. You know, they'll beat around the bush. You get acquisitions, you got to merge those together. A lot of community stuff that's happening out in Slack. And so that's why we actually had, right at the beginning of the tweet jam, somebody from Mio. So I used leverage Mio to actually integrate conversations happening over in Slack with Microsoft team and community team. I thought that's fantastic. You'll be able to, there are solutions to go in and do that, to consolidate. Yeah, I'll say, I mean, if you look at, if you look at a product that a department is using and it works for them and you're going to go in there as an IT organization and replace that with something else that they got to learn from scratch. And then turn around and say, right, okay, we've got to migrate all that conversation and collaboration out of that platform into this platform and we can only do so much. Then that's already- Does IT serve the business or does IT control the business? And I think it's clearly served. It's a problem. So, you know, you've got to look at it and embrace it and see what you need. I would agree with 100% of that. The only counter argument I do see, I mean, with lots of pharmaceuticals, lots of financials is compliance, InfoSec, GDPR, data, data discovery. That is a compelling reason to minimize the stack. Like, you're 100% right. It's never going to be 100% workshop, but if customers are allowed to for information discovery, say, present everything you have on me, if you're using dozens of different tools, it's very hard to comply. Like, there's pockets of Dropbox, there's pockets of Box, there's pockets of WhatsApp, there's pockets of- Like, suddenly you've got to be like, oh, how could I possibly practically query all that for a customer name or a customer sensitivity label or whatever. That's the counter argument. And we're going to come back to that topic on question number three. So, yeah, something else to say. Yeah, I was going to say, when did you become a governance and compliance expert? I know, well, I thought I'd wear the other shoes. Since you guys are both on the pro-multi vendor thing. Well, no, first we talk about the art of what's possible and then we clean up. That's the bottom. Yeah, yeah. Do we ever get to the cleanup? That's the good question. Well, the second, well, I made that comment during the Twitch Jam too, and somebody said, you know, talked about these exact issues. And I said, well, that's, I'll use Microsoft terminology as former employee. You don't talk about problems, you talk about opportunities. Opportunity. I said, this is a great opportunity for consultants. So- Yeah, when there's somebody else's opportunity and Microsoft are presenting them, that's when, you know, they're a problem. Like, here's an opportunity for consultants and a Microsoft to solve. That's right. Well, so the second question was about kind of a broader question, and then we'll get into the security compliance. Has the rapid rise of Microsoft teams altered how you and your customers think about collaboration and communication? Yes, in a short answer. I've certainly seen a lot more people rely on sort of lazy chat, the persistent chat piece. We've gone from an instant messaging world to, I want an answer right now to, you know, send me a chat and I'll get back to you later. And everyone's all right with that predominantly. You know, they're using collaboration tools. They're using the office online for call three and office pro plus, you know, getting those business processes. It used to be edit locally, send it an email to, you know, to DL and then somebody would make an edit and then try and emerge all those changes together. That's streamlined the business a lot. People aren't looking at their inboxes as much as they are. And even people aren't using the telephone as much as they are these days, you know? So it's just as easy to call someone in teams to send them a chat message. You know, people are starting to sort of use their fingers rather than their mouth a lot more. That's what I'm saying. Snappy. Well, that's one of the difficult things about it. If you think about from, like I come from the SharePoint background, both of you primarily come from the UC side of things. Yeah. Yeah, from the SharePoint side of things and where everything, you know, information management, knowledge management, conversation has been one of those gaps. And from the, like the SharePoint world, like we're not capturing this critical, you know, intellectual property. The reality is that, you know, where the real work happens is in between creating and sending and storing documents. It's all of the conversations, the side meetings, none of which are being captured. So the ability to go in and what I think has changed dramatically over the last three, four years is the focus on meetings, on recording and capturing that and the text-based conversations. Both important information assets that were previously lost for a lot of organizations. Yeah, what's good about teams is you can co-author a doc review, you can make changes on the fly, you can point, you can do that in a meeting on the same document, there's no different versions. You can all make edits at the same time, you can have a conversation thread on the right. And if anybody's like me, they actually hate word comments. So having that in the channel against the document, that's invaluable. Yeah, I feel like Teams has done more for co-authoring and having documents and correct document stores and everything than we ever could with the individual tools. Like I love SharePoint, but we tried and failed with it two or three times over my 10 years of modality, fast pace, people who didn't really understand it, like people who didn't wanna check things in and set labels and stuff, but they will use at least a channel and therefore they end up putting their docs in SharePoint, therefore there is one version of the document because they don't email it anymore. So there was a lot of inherited benefit that was always in SharePoint, but just people used by default now because it's in Teams, so I think it's great. But that's the UI of Teams helps you understand that, right? You know, you can click on a customer team, you know you're probably gonna go to the design and deployment channel, you know where the documents are gonna be. Yeah. You can hard code your methodology, you can hard put your methodology into the team, into the project. That's it, I know, but if you just send me to company.sharepoint.com and say get on with it, I'm just gonna go, you know what? Yeah, that's not, I'm not even gonna entertain it. Well, that's, I think for me, in my mind, it's one of the most dramatic changes in collaboration, primarily document-based collaboration, and then communication, the meetings and chat and all that, is that, you know, it was a conscious effort on Microsoft's part to say, look, SharePoint is not a Swiss Army knife solution that can solve all problems and should be, you know, cover every workload. It is primarily a document management, a portal-based solution, and let that primary interface be through other places and teams and Yammer and even, hey, emails not going away, you know, and there are other workloads that are out there and they're just as viable and all that other stuff. So I think that separation of what SharePoint is good, but here's the SharePoint things over here. Here's how it coincides with it. It's different than what Teams provides. Yeah, there's still a reason for a SharePoint document library over a team as well. So yeah, and some people, well, the question came up the other day of like, how do you start your day? And for a lot of organizations, like I do day in, day out, I do everything in small business, like you, Mark, you know, independent, and so Teams is my primary interface. For most organizations, they're still a portal. They're still that homepage with the news and other things that are going on. They may do their day-to-day, their tasks, their project-level activities, all of their conversations and meetings in Teams, but they're still that portal. Well, that kind of takes us to that third question. So we're in there, we're using Teams more. People are creating Teams and channels and adding documents and everyone is so aware of where their content is going and what happens, the life cycle of that content, correct? People are spot on. Yes, question three is what is the state of administration, compliance and governance within Microsoft Teams? Use Teams, fix it later. Yeah, that definitely resonates. I think that we've been doing some pretty big projects on Teams, like tens of thousands of users and previous to this, they were wrapped up in infinity conversations about, do we allow public or private? Do we create Teams or let users create Teams? How do we do with our sensitivity labeling? COVID just swept all that aside and it was like, bang out there, get the users working and productive from home and we'll work out as we go. And I think most companies or certainly my feel is most companies are in a use it mode and now we'll work it out. So I think that's a lot of tidying up to do around control, governance, life cycle management, labels, retention, all that good stuff. Happy to hear otherwise, but my average experience is all that stuff is, yeah, we need to do that but not actively doing it. Yeah, it becomes when you've got a situation ahead of you that it's gonna impact your business and potentially shut it down. You go with a low hanging fruit, what's the, what are the key objectives I need to produce in terms of technology to enable my business to continue? That's gonna be, I need to make a phone call, I need to receive an email, I need to have a meeting, pretty much those are the three things, the course of any business. The rest of it, we'll just figure it out later but for a lot of companies that later probably will never come. And the first time that they'll remember to do it is when they get a litigation case and you have to do a query like Tom said, case everything go, oh, hang on a minute, we've not been retaining this. So they could be, you can't take it off your bull. You need to go back and clean up but also I also think that IT projects and the way that we deliver needs to change because we end up getting like Tom says, into two, three, four hours an entire day conversation about one little thing, it ends up being an argument. It suddenly becomes the most important thing in the world but really it's so insignificant that we could have probably just tick the box and moved on. So we really need, people need a plan of what teams is to them. Right now it's just a sexy app to them that does everything that they think they need. They need to figure out what it is they want out of teams to help teams use, help their organization get the best out of teams. Yeah, I mean, selfishly I'd rather is this way around though because like it's not quite the horse has bolted because most organizations know they're on a platform that have these capabilities. It means that we don't have to sell it. It's already sold, we just... Exactly, but like it's a much easier conversation to have with the compliance. Like, well, you're not gonna disable, like we see crazy stuff, like can we disable all file transfers in teams? Like, well, that's not how teams work. Well, that conversation is all largely gone now and now it's like, okay, we sort of understand what it is now because we're using it and now how can we meet in the middle ground of being compliant to our regs rather than just, it's a definite no because it has files in it, so we can't do that. The other problem with storming the teacup waiting to happen is now that you've given free reign to your end users to create teams, to share documents to do what they want, bringing guest users to go back in and say, right, okay. So, sorry, that feature that you've been using for the last four or five months, we're gonna take away from you. You know, that feature has become line of business. So how do you convince the end user that they no longer need it? You know, and trying to put an adoption program around that, it's gonna be a hard sell to turn that into a positive. That's, you know, and it's not like that problem is unique to teams and we, these are the same conversations that we had with SharePoint and other platforms. So prior to me getting into the Microsoft ecosystem, so common IT issues and it's, you have to balance that of being able to kind of front load any technology deployment, be aware of and plan around like every contingency. It's impossible to go and do that. You have to be working and doing that. The other side of it, the more locked down a system is, the less likely people will use that system. You can't do these things without considering how are people actually collaborating? What is the culture of collaboration or organization? What do people need to get their jobs done? And is IT just standing there the way? Because that's a recipe for you locking down every, every, you know, option you could turn off in teams and then your end users are going and using Slack. Yeah, I feel like the days have gone that way. We used to go in like, this is five, six, seven years ago, used to go into meetings and it'd be like, well, if IT don't provide it, it's not our problem. So if we turn everything off, then everything we give people is compliant. And if they choose not to use our thing, then it's, they're not compliant. But there's a, I've seen more and more of the reality of like, if you are willfully ignoring the fact that WhatsApp's being used, you're in WhatsApp teams, you know WhatsApp's being used. Like that's no longer a defense. Like you can't say technically on a bit of paper, it says don't use WhatsApp. If the management team use WhatsApp to talk to anybody in the company, they are implicitly kind of inferring. That's a platform of choice. So there's no argument of like, we didn't know or we didn't bless it. If managers are using it with anybody subordinate, they are blessing it by virtue of using it, I think. Yeah, absolutely. But then, you know, our, the way that we've been brought up in IT is to give the minimum amount of tools and access to order for the user to do their job of how IT think the user should do their job. It's probably- Because IT definitely knows how the business works, right? Exactly, you know, we're saviours of the world, you know? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, but I think that's a, the recognition is where we're a service is more apparent in the cloud world because the business has the budget and the power to flip and change things now. So I think it's become much more evenly balanced the power cycle there. My point being is perhaps, you know, we should embrace the technology and say have it all and we'll protect the perimeter. So we'll protect the documents leaving our tenant or our network based on whatever rules we put in place with content protection, BLPs and that type of stuff. We'll let you collaborate inside how you want but we'll audit and we'll do retention policies and make sure that we've got, you know, seven years worth of records and we'll run some adoption, you know, frameworks and sessions to make sure that you know how to use the applications and the systems properly and we'll just keep an eye on it. If we see something going south that needs people's attention, then we'll address it. But other than that, go and use the platform. I like the analogies. We don't need somebody in the pool with every individual instructed them how they can now hold your breath and now stroke. What we need is a lifeguard on the outside and see somebody drowning will jump in. You know, you've got the rules around the perimeter, no running around the pool, but otherwise they'll let people get in there have fun. Yeah, I like that analogy, that's good. I'm gonna let you know. As I said to you, as I said to Erica. That's kind of in my comments there, so. Erica told me she liked analogy that I used during the session. I said, you know, if I had a dollar for every time somebody used one of my analogies, I'd literally have dozens of dollars. So feel free to use that. So are there best prizes? Question four, are there best practices for aligning Microsoft Teams with SharePoint and other workloads? Like how do you have that conversation? This is a nicer way of saying the whole which to when question, which persists out there. Microsoft hates that that still persists, that's out there, but come on. It persists because- Did you appreciate that none of the teams people made the joke about, you know, share what? Sorry. Yeah. Yes, it's a tough conversation. Like I think as I put on my reply, like there are so many options in Microsoft M365, your Office 365. And if you look at Microsoft's kind of a job in the world, they're like, we want to provide the productivity tools for everybody. So they have to provide options because not everybody works the same. But there's definitely a job on IT to help coach and inform. And again, like you said, that the lifeguard kind of analogy, like hear your options. Here's what we think are best for these use cases. But we're a service to help with this, the idea. We're a service to help you choose and coach you along the right way not to force you down a certain road. Yeah, I think to echo that, it comes down to, I don't really like the term best practice because to me, there isn't a best practice. What's the best practice for you? Is not a best practice for me? Yeah, exactly. So you kind of got to look inside yourself and you got to ask yourself the question, what am I trying to achieve? And if you could answer that question, you can then map your answer to the appropriate technology. If that comes out to be use Teams or use SharePoint or use another program, then and it makes sense to your organization, then do it. It doesn't matter what modality you're doing or similar to your Mark Vail Consulting Limited's doing. We're doing what works for us. And that's the most important thing. But this, sorry, this point I used to make when I would present and casually get a Microsoft sales person, especially upset at me where I used to talk in the SharePoint world about people saying, look, if your older version of SharePoint is meeting your needs and you're struggling to find the benefits of moving to the latest version of that, don't move. Sometimes there's nothing wrong with that. You could have a high performing team that functions well, is communicating and is effective on old technology. Now, there are benefits to the newer technology. Both of you have had this experience where you go in and you're trying to sell people on, well, look, moving to the latest greatest version brings this added value. And when the benefits of that new outweighs the cost of moving and of change and all of the pain that comes with that, then make that move. But if it doesn't, if the benefits are not there, or if you could do an incremental third party tool, add on to the side or, you know, construct or configure the solution to meet the needs of those, or it's gonna match that new technology, don't move. Yeah, I mean, we spend a lot of time and Tom will resonate with this, we use the word sweat your assets or phrase sweat your assets a lot in telephony, right? So people wanna get seven, eight years out of a phone, for instance, but in the Microsoft world, we always tend to say, well, every three years you gotta throw it in the bin and start again. You know, we had link 2010, that was two years old and link 2013 came out. Okay, now throw that 2010 deployment away to 2013, same with 2015, now to Teams and what have you. So we're not used to that in the Microsoft world. I think the point of when you need to move from a technology that's working for you to a newer technology is when you can see the depth of that product, like in terms of support security patches or that type of thing, if that's gonna suppose a security risk to your information, then that's the point where you really need to consider moving to the next platform, whatever that may be. But until then, you know, use what you've already paid for. Yeah, I think it's fascinating now because that's absolutely how the world was for us in enterprise IT. And now where people are on the cloud, it's constantly evolving. And actually you're taking along for the journey whether you like it or not right now. So the conversation's flipped now, you're getting new features every month. You have a constant job to keep up. It's weekly, yeah, it's crazy. That in itself causes a problem, right? Because a company will come to the Lexington Medallion and whoever I work for, you know, myself will say, you know, we want Teams and we then do a design and a deployment around how Teams is at that moment in time. Now, six months down the line, there's a bunch of new features that have really come out and they're not using, all the interfere with what's been deployed, all those features can get deprecated that they depend on. And I'm not seeing anybody really, so realize that. No, there's not much pushback at all, which is surprising. Like, you know, again, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of users at Orgz signing up to E5 at the corporate level and then it comes down the chain to the group responsible for X product. And they're like, it can't do that. Well, you bought it and it does. Like, I'm here to help you make the most of it, but I can't change how it works. And we spend a lot of time in consulting, I don't know whether you guys see this too, is I'm like, I'm not here to sell you the product. You, like Microsoft build the product, I help you make the most out of it. Another funny one comes to mind, we were working with the sports team and they were like, okay, so who do we tell? We don't, we have a change from, you know, during the season, I won't name the sport. Like no change can be made, it's vitally important, you know, like this is high money stuff. And I was like, no, no, no, no, no, Microsoft will know who we are. Don't worry. I'm like, hello. Hi. Did you laugh like that, Tom? Well, I was a bit more considerate, but I was just like, you know, like, I like, you know, I'm fortunate to work with some huge seat count orgs and these were not high seat count, but high, you know, high brand, it's just like, yeah, they don't do it for anybody. So by all means ask, maybe you know somebody I don't, but it's part of the new world you're signing up to. And I think you're right, Mark. People don't necessarily automatically appreciate that. Yeah. That it's, that's a big, that's a big topic right there. That's a nice tweet, Tom. Sorry. Yeah. Yeah. So question number five, in your opinion, what are the hits and misses in Microsoft's overall collaboration strategy? Hits and misses. I think that's a good one. I have to think of this. You got one, Tom. Yeah. I was just pulling up my tweet actually, because I have a different opinion when you asked me. Like the number one hit for me just a high level is the mobile experience, like Skype and generally Microsoft didn't really nail mobile in the past, like the iOS Android experience for teams is pretty second to none. I think I would even go as far as to say the mobile team are ahead of the desktop team in terms of features, experience, like that they really know it. That's so important in this day and age. Plus multiple workloads. Yeah, they've done a great job. Yeah. Yeah. And embracing iOS and Android, like fully-footed, not just teams, but a whole of Microsoft. Like this is the new reality. Like we're not winning on mobile. We'd have to go where the users are. So Mac, you know, Mac clients. So that's a real big hit for me. I think the agility of the teams team, like building on a cloud way, Microsoft is changing fast. It's a blessing and a curse with all these feature changes and stuff. But net-net, there is zero chance Microsoft would have been competitive in this last six months around the world changing if it was Skype servers running in Office 365 or on-prem, like the cloud providers would have just absolutely smashed it. So for me, what's happened around the world has kind of massively been indicated the fact they said stop, we need a reset. We need to build cloud first. Yeah, any other hits before we go to Mrs, guys? I had a really good one and then we're done talking. I think the biggest hit for teams is they've made companies use Office 365 for its intended purpose. So before teams, people, there were a lot of people, even big SIs who saw Office 365 as exchange migrations. You know, it's just like exchange online. That's Office 365. It's not. And Teams is the app that makes everybody use all the tools of Office 365 how it should have been used for then unifies it into... That was a fantastic one, actually. You're right, because there was so much pressure to buckle and do a UC client. Like, we just want meetings. Just to me, they've stayed really firm on, no, we're a collab stack play and really pushed hard against the market. Certain customers saying, I just want to go from Skype to Teams to UC. And that, again, is born out speaker strategy, I think. And I'll just add onto it, because that's kind of a different take on my point earlier of SharePoint is the focus on portals, everything else that Microsoft Teams as that hub for teamwork was the right message to drive that. They've been consistent. So, yeah. You should just be saying, from Office 365 to Teams 365. There you go. I think that's what, we're probably gonna be there in 18 to 24 months. So, yeah. Should tweet that out. Let's see if Lori or Karawana slip up and be like, oh yeah, that's the plan. Yeah, yeah, yeah. All right, so question six. Where are you? We didn't do any misses. We just did the right stuff. That's right, that's right. So there's a miss right there on my part. Okay. We wouldn't be doing our jobs if we went a little critical, right? The misses. Yeah. Go ahead and you got Christian, what have you got? Well, I think the number one response from everybody on there is the tenant switching and not having thought through. And let me just say that early on, that feedback when Teams launched, that day one that was an issue that there were a number of us that brought up. And as MVPs and regional directors kept bringing this to the, trying to bring this to the attention of the teams, of the engineering team, the product team. And they kind of pushed back and said, well, it's not our primary scenario. I said, the people that use this product the most and that are most vocal and that are selling this to customers are telling you this is a major problem. And so you need to think about this. Who are the movers and shakers, the people pushing the product? If they're telling you this is a major issue, you need to prioritize this higher. So I know that they're working on it and it's gotten, the experience has gotten better and the mobile experience for moving between tenants has greatly improved. In fact, improved quicker than the browser or the desktop. Yeah, again, the mobile team doing a great job there. You're right. Switching on mobile is really snappy. Well, the mobile app, you can be signed into multiple accounts, get notifications from lots of different tenants on one app. So there must be something with iOS and Android that Windows 10 can't do. Yeah, maybe Microsoft's just waiting for us to go completely mobile and then we're like, see, problem solved. Oh yeah, they'll release a surface phone that'll be like 25 inches screen, like, you know, carry that in your pocket on your bed, on your, like a page. But yeah, and I think I'd agree with that. That's the biggest miss of tenant switching, but I understand why it's that way. And that's just because of way Office 365 is built as your ID authentication. That's the main reason. You can both technically understand something and not like it. That's definitely where I sit. Like there's obvious reasons why they're doing it that way, the security model, the tenant model, a lot of benefits we gain on the back end, but it's a user experience challenge for sure. Yeah, I mean, there are a few nuances, like with meeting experiences, if you're a guest in a tenant and you're trying to invite them into a meeting using our participants, that's not cool right now. Well, and that's my other biggest issue. And it's really just come up more because of the quarantine. And we've tried to focus so much on what we're doing. I would love to be able to run all of the community activities, all of the online things that I'm doing using Teams. And we've been beaten up like we do weekly office hours and we were live streaming to social channels. You cannot live stream to social channels straight from Teams. You've got to use a bunch of different components. Well, we were using Zoom. And for webinars, I use Zoom. And there's a lot of other webinar functionality that does not exist within Teams of why I'm a paid Zoom user for webinars. And I find myself again and again, reminding people, well, Teams is an enterprise application, an enterprise solution. And it works beautifully for those scenarios where the vast majority of people that you're working with, collaborative meeting with are within your organization. And then you bring in some outside folks, some guest users. But for a webinar, everybody's external. And then I want to have things like Q&A and a chat and polling. And I don't know. I'd like to know who joined my webinar, who they were and data around that experience. On that point, it's going back to what we said before, is that Teams is a collaborative play. It's all about making your business work together. Zoom is just a VC app that somebody's just split up some servers, made it easy. Easy data. You can use it for VC. Now, all of a sudden, people now have started to compare two different products. And it's like apples and pears. We want to try and get the apple to look like the pear and have the same features as the pear, but still be an apple. Yeah. You're exactly. Yeah. We would use the apples versus oranges, but pears, apples versus cumquats, it all works. But yet, no, you're exactly right. That's why I said that it's kind of accelerated and made, surfaced a lot of those kinds of issues. Or if you even call it an issue, I mean, teams. Look, there's some, we can talk about performance issues with teams, live events, and meetings, and video quality, and things that they did because they saw, I don't even know what the number is, like 750% growth over the last quarter. I mean, just crazy numbers. And so they had to throttle some features, like video quality took a hit just to make sure that servers were performing and we could still have meetings and adjustments will be made. We'll get back to our 4K quality in real time while we're gaming on the same system. That's what multiple browsers are for, people. Work here, game here. But it's difficult to compare those things, but at the same time is I need to have reliable, high quality webinar video content. And I'm just, I'm not able yet to do today what I can do on other platforms. Yeah, and then that's the maturity of the conversation you said about different tools for different use cases, like teams never built the podcast webinar use case. They're definitely, if you look at the roadmap, they're starting to invest in some of these features because of the competitive threat of Zoom. But exactly to your point, it's funny, people try and, I don't know if you guys get this, people try and goad you into a religious war of like, teams can't do this, teams can't do that. We're like, nope, can't, like, seven quid or whatever, if you want to use two. Like, I'm not here to convert you. I'm just here to make the most of what you've, by the way, you're all already paid for this. So if you want to use it, but yeah, it's like, it's a mature conversation about right use case. I think it'll be interesting to see over there, this market moves fast, how well Microsoft do it in absorbing more and more of those features. And does that dilute the experience? Because there are too many options or does it suit everybody? It's a real tightrope. Here's a question that's like off-piece, but what do you reckon the end goal is for teams? What's the end play? Where do you see it? I don't think there is a defined end goal other than do what people need to be productive. So I don't think there is like a some book in Microsoft or some Word document or something, the old PowerPoint that has the plan that in five years it'll be this. I think it's on. It's more like a soap opera. They're writing. Yeah, exactly. Now look it. Well, people really like that character Tom. Let's really build him up and let's kill off one. What's the viewership? What's the viewership? Yeah, I mean, you see that in some of the changes of direction that have been made, you know, like it's an agile cloud platform. So yeah, I think the only thing I will say is obviously Microsoft appreciate to your point earlier, it's dragging people into the Office 365 stack. I think that whatever shape or form it evolves to, it's going to be about getting people into the stack play. Yeah. And then they've got your graph and they know everything about you. Right. Yeah. That's right. I just thought you just have to be concerned if they pick up that tag line that they decided to do some variant of don't be evil. When they say that, you know that they've gone into the dark side and that's a clear sign. Well, so let's jump over. So what number six, where are you and your customers making investments in Microsoft Teams, such as automation, adoptions, et cetera, and why? I'm seeing my customers now really in place telephony. A lot of the companies that I've worked with the last couple of years have really been focusing on trying to get Teams into the organization just on a chat and meetings first type experience. And it's like, right, okay, but we're going to wait till telephony gets a bit more mature. And we're seeing the features of direct routing, the features of the Teams telephony stack, really maturing now and people are starting to take it seriously. We're on a 15, 16,000 seat direct routing migration from Skype into Teams right now. And they love it. They can't wait to get that feature into Teams. There's still that challenge around collaboration. No one really knows how it should work. It would be great if we could just turn that off because then we can get people into Teams quickly with all the core workloads and then they can slowly turn a club on at a pace that's manageable for them in my opinion. Yeah, so that's a tough one, that turn collab off thing because I think Microsoft have prepared to wait out the telephony market to keep the collab. Like if they win telephony and lose collab, they've lost because telephony goes mobile eventually or whatever shape or form that is on an infinite scale. But I would echo what you're saying actually in terms of what we're seeing in the market. Like telephony is definitely on the up because again, everybody agile working, remote working, whatever you want to call it, suddenly all those IP phones are gathering dust in offices and they need a soft phone. So that's definitely a thing. Unfortunately, user adoption, adoption change management has taken a big hit. I think you said this Christian in tweets actually, whenever budgets get strained, that's one of the first things to go. But also people have to use it largely again at the moment because their corpse have jumped to it. So I don't need to pay somebody to coach and cajole my users in doing it. If they don't do it, we can't get working. I'm not seeing the level of investment I would like to see in InfoSec, governance, security, labeling, retention, all that kind of stuff. That's what I'd like to see. It's not coming mass market yet, but I think that needs to- Well, I don't think that the messaging is that strong around a lot of that capability too. A lot of customers just kind of, they go to the defaults and- Yeah, they think they bought it. I was in a conversation where I was like, we're E5, so we're compliant. I'm like, no, that's not how compliance works. Yeah. Well, it's just nature of humanity, right? We don't like difficult conversations. And if it's something- That statement makes me very uncomfortable, Mark. So- So- Yeah, never, you're spot on. Especially when you start talking about when you're looking at usage patterns and how people are using the platform. It's amazing how quick with an adoption of a technology, how passionate people get, how quickly they get passionate about and defensive about their use of that technology. Yeah, no, and what I'm seeing with the customer right now in terms of what's hot and what's not, they're looking for teams to fix some internal processes and that can be like teams provisioning that could be related governance. It could be collecting, how do we collect surveys and post to a team and all that type of stuff. And it's like, well, you can use forms, you're licensed for it. You can use Power BI and they go, oh, no, no, no, I want to buy a tool that just does that for me. And I'm like, well, you've already bought it. You just need to know how to use it. And it's like, oh, no, no, it's too hard. So I think there's a lot from a project level that stole that resistance and nervousness towards adopting the entire stack and really going for it as an organization. But conversely, when you roll teams out to a user and you turn on things like Power Automate forms and they suddenly realize they can do it on their own, it becomes. Yeah, the people in the business, the people that used to be the VB guy or girl in Excel that ran the whole business on Excel, they're popping up again. And they're like, oh, Power Apps, boom, boom, boom, here's my business process. Like, hi, I see, I've built this whole thing. Like it's crazy. I think that that is, we're just at the beginning of that curve. It's pretty interesting. You know, it is interesting that they put so much emphasis around the marketing of when teams launched around bots and connectors and a lot of that kind of automation. And yes, it was still early. The Power Platform wasn't named the Power Platform and your rebranding and Microsoft Flow and Power Automate and all those kinds of things. But we're now seeing in the community that the user groups around the Power Platform are some of the fastest growing that we've ever seen. It's just exploding. And whether you call it the citizen development, you know, movement or some people referring to now the movement is maker movement within software. But it's exactly that point is once people realize that not only are the tools out there, but they're not as difficult to use as you perceive them to be. And any business user can get in there and leverage existing templates and tools that are out there, modified to meet their needs or create things from scratch. You hear again and again, like within a couple of hours, I was able to go in and build this out and we're using it. It's fantastic. And you hear that story over and over again. Yeah, drag and drops the thing. It used to be like PowerShell and, you know, leading code now it's just back to a GUI and a mouse click. That's right. Well, the last question of the Tweet Jam was if you could ask for anything, what would be your top three feature requests for Microsoft Teams? My first one would be a bit more control, admin control over notifications, being able to sort of set a default of what we think or what the organization thinks is important notification to post on to people's screens. That would be a good thing. Because right now some of the white glove services that you could do in Skype put onto the end user and it'd be nice to be able to control, wouldn't say control that, but to help an end user through an admin control to set a default, a profile, a client profile if you want to call it, you know, that gives them a better head start. Because, you know, what we don't want to see is people to launch Teams and all of a sudden they get bombarded with 1,000 notifications. Yeah, that's a good one. That'd be my first one. What's your first one, Tom? Yeah, but my first one is a UI Tweet that I have had many debates with many people at Microsoft. Reply? Hopefully they're still friends. Yeah, replies versus new threads. Like, it kills me. Every deployment I'm engaged in, the first thing that happens in... Just indent it! Come on! It feels like a very solvable problem to me and I'm sure it's more complicated than I give credit for, but like changing the UI so that accidental new threads don't happen, I think that would improve engagement in channels so much. So I am flying the flag for that changing in the UI for sure. There's a couple of people that commented in the discussion today about, it's like, you know, how does it work in Yammer? Why can't some of that learning come over into Teams? Because I think they do a better job at that. Yeah, I mean, going on, my number two would have been similar to yours, Tom, but I was going to ask for multi-threaded conversations so that if you start a conversation, Christian might reply to that conversation and then three others and then I might come in and I want to reply to Tom's first question or to Christian's question. I want that thread to go underneath that one so that you know what I'm replying to. I don't think it needs to be any deeper than two levels so like your main conversation reply and then another thread under the reply, I think that's enough. Even one less than that, the quote reply we have on mobile, like having that on desktop would also help that scenario where I want to reply to a message three up. But then, you know, then you've got to scroll through. Yeah, then it, yeah. A ton of reply to ping the conversation together. So we have it on social platforms like Facebook. It's not hard to do, you know. It's probably a few extra columns in a database table somewhere, you know. That's how it works. I love it when we're on this side of the face for like, surely you just, you know, database stuff. It's just like drop power ultimately. You're just, we're just tweaking people. Come on, something. Yeah. No, it's, you know, and I made the comment and I realized that this is more complex than what we've discussed so far. But I'd love an easy button for archiving a team. Yeah, yeah. And look, and I realized that there's a lot. So I see this question every once in a while. It was, again, in the early days of teams was asked frequently like, well, how do I, you know, if I delete a team, it's like, well, you don't want to delete a team. Here's why there's a lot of downstream impact to that. Disconnecting users, the content that exists, all the other conversations, the history, all that kind of stuff like, but I think there is a valid request for wanting to archive in one place. And obviously you have assets that are there physically, the presentation layer in teams. There's a lot of things that live in exchange, a lot of things that live within groups and within SharePoint. It's all those different places. But the ability to go and say, it's like, well, we are now we're archiving it and it would auto disconnect all the end users except for the admin backup via Azure and wherever those things, all of those other assets, it rolls all those things up. People want that. That sounds awesome. Yeah, there's definitely a nervousness to like, at the end of the lifecycle management of a team to like, get rid of it, archive, delete, whatever. Because of like, well, how do I, as the business user, how do I get it back? And can I actually get all of it back? And where do I reference it if I need to? Is that's a really good one actually? Yeah, my third one would be the ability to customize my desktop space with Teams. So right now we've got the left-hand app, but I want to be able to dock conversations maybe on the right or on the bottom and be able to have, you know, to use the real estate that Teams takes up more effectively. That's interesting. You really want Teams to be Windows, don't you? Yeah. Well, right now, you know, we've got pop-up chat, which is great, you know, be good to have them docked into, you know, into the app so that, you know, I can see, you know, like we've got the Teams meeting now where you've got one of us has a video title at the bottom. It'd be good to have conversations there that just flash up when they reply and I could be working, I could be in a meeting now or I could be on a document and just click respond. And that's part of the problem is I was excited about the, you know, the pop-out chat and have that in the side. Doesn't work. It shuts down if you switch a tenant. There's no way to monitor conversation across tenants except to have multiple tabs and windows open and, you know, and so that's something. So I had suggested back at the Teams airlift an idea. I said, I use Hootsuite. I would love to have a Hootsuite type interface that the API is allowed. So I could actually follow conversations from channels and I select which channel conversations and it drops it into its column view where it's real time going by. I can monitor those. If I click on one, it opens up that conversation in the Teams application. Like I would love that capability. Yeah, that's really interesting. That's like a proper power user play. Like a 65 inch screen with like 20 conversations. Oh yeah. That'd be fantastic. People are in Excel screens. What I love is that when I asked that question at the Teams airlift and that was for those that know the airlift, it was almost entirely, it was MVPs and some other invited partners with the Microsoft product team going in depth. A lot of NDA discussions happen around there but this was my idea so I can share this. And there was a pause in the comments and the guy presenting the product team members said that's a really good idea for a product. Like yeah, not a coder. Hey, it's big day for you two tomorrow, isn't it? Yeah. Big party day tomorrow. Yeah. Well, so we're just to wrap things up. So we have, so I don't know if any other parting, takeaways from the tweet jam, anything else that stood out to either of you? I guess the last thing for me is it's nice to see Microsoft engage in these things. Like it shows a real good level of community feedback and engagement. Like even when you ask questions of like, what's good about Teams, what's bad about Teams? I don't see many vendors actively engaging in those conversations. Like they'd rather stick their fingers in their ears but you see lots from Microsoft are going, yep, we hear you, we're thinking about it, we're on it, we at least acknowledge it's a problem. Like I really appreciate that and seeing them like, Consverse having Microsoft speak there directly, other community events they're speaking directly, they're engaging in online events, Deferite and Center. I think that's really great. If anybody thinks that Microsoft is not listening, they are definitely listening. I promise you that at least a dozen product team members were lurking throughout the tweet jam and listening in and taking notes. And of course, Laurie who's presenting at Consverse and one of the keynotes was there and active and when that question about what are your feature requests and she even responds like, I'm listening, I'm taking notes, I'm here. So it is great. Yeah, ultimately, if you give the user what they want, they're gonna keep you. If you don't give the user what they want and you don't listen to them, they're gonna go somewhere else. So everyone's gonna listen. If they want their product to survive, especially in this hyper competitive market, they need to listen to their users and take feedback constructively. Yes, we can all be a bit abrasive sometimes because that's frustrations. I'm not being able to do something, but to see through that and to see what the ask really is and then spit that out. Yeah, you wouldn't, you wouldn't both feedback if you didn't care. That's nice, that's mostly acknowledged. I also think that the eagerness to try and please can also lead to a negative. And we see that with announcements of different events like Ignite and what have you, where they're promising a feature and it's like gonna be delivered in Q4 next year. And it's like, right, okay, it's a year off. It's probably not even on the death bench yet. We just sort of dreamt it up before the, before the session. Scandalous, Mark, scandalous. Are you suggesting things that aren't fully baked or sometimes announced? I can't believe that. I did it with confidence, mate. Yeah, I think a great feature request would be actually a logged in experience to the Microsoft roadmap, where it would actually, it would give me the roadmap through the lens of my tenant. That would be amazing. Yeah, it's so hard for user adoption to say, like some people have got it, some people haven't. And that, those features rolled out like as a giant global service. So even people within your tenant features roll at different times sometimes. Yeah, good one. Yeah, it'd be great to be able to go in and look at from the admin experience and see, I'm reading, in fact, yesterday I was reading through the latest announcements of what's coming and it'd be awesome just to see like a little color indicator, like green. Okay, it's on my tenant. You know, let's spin it. Everybody likes a surprise, right? So surprise, you've got a new feature. I do think that they need to be a bit more sort of open with delivery time range so that you know if a feature is on track roughly when it's gonna drop and not just quarters, even to the month would be better than quarters. So you can plan for it. And have the option to defer that feature or have an option to turn that feature off by default as it's deployed into your tenant so that you can manage that through. That would be useful. So that doesn't stop Microsoft having a billion tenants all with different conflicts. They can still deploy that same standard conflict to all those tenants, but then give the customer the control of when to leverage that feature. Especially if it's mandatory and then they've got no choice, but if it's an optional feature, then just turn it off. But you do have that somewhat. I mean, I understand what you're saying. It kind of goes back, Tom, to what you were saying earlier about like, you know, it's the difference between the waterfall method and this evergreen software. But there is the ability to go in and select, I want my organization to be on a fast or slower ring. So I want to be at the front end of a new feature deployment or at the tail end of that. It's really difficult to do that on a feature by feature basis where there could be co-dependencies of features and capabilities. Yeah, it's the queue at the infinity QA matrix of every feature having an on or off button. So we do some software there. So I can see both sides of this argument. Absolutely. From an enterprise point of view, I want a button for every single feature. And then I'm like, oh, the nightmare of the development and QA of that. I have to test every test case with every feature toggled in every direction. So it's a balancing act and we'll see where it goes. Customers will push one way or the other. I wouldn't like to be a Microsoft team system admin in Microsoft because it just be, oh, it frightened me. To deploy something and take a region down, potentially, oh, no, that's somebody else's job. I'm sure there are a lot of eyes on it, Mark. Well, gentlemen, really appreciate your time today. Thanks again for participating in the tweet jam and go check out and I'll share the stats and everything as well as part of the blog post here. And for those that still have not done so, please go and register for the free online conference, the commsverse event happening July 6th through 9th. And any final plug there, Mark? Yeah, no final plug. We plugged it enough now. If you like teams, then be there. Don't like teams, it's not for you. Join a Zoom conference. Yeah. Well, thank you gentlemen and both and have a great rest of your week and we'll see you online in the pre-event events activities going on this week, but go check out commsverse.com and register today. Well, thanks, guys. Thanks a lot.