The Intrazone by Microsoft

It's time to go beyond what Microsoft Viva is, and move into implementation, deployment, and adoption. We've got a terrific "knowledge roundtable" discussion with four Microsoft MVPs: Dux Raymond Sy about Viva Connections, Susan Hanley about Viva Topics, Asif Rehmani about Viva Learning, and Robert Mulsow on Viva Insights. This episode is filled with great tips, tricks, and challenges when configuring and rolling it out Viva for your company and colleagues.

GitHub is the collaborative developer community, a place to share and review code, then deploy it to any operating system, any cloud and any device. On this episode, we speak with Martin Woodward, one of the original members who onboarded Microsoft to the open-source world, and Tetsuya Kawahara, a Microsoft MVP expert in Microsoft Lists customization (JSON). We learn how they use GitHub to share their knowledge, connect with other developers, and create the world’s most important technologies.

Get ready to boost your July 2021 memory bank! Lots of great SharePoint and related tech releases this past month: News boost, collapsible page sections, edit pages and news in Teams, custom list templates, suggested attachments in Planner, SharePoint Server Subscription Edition (preview), 'post on-behalf' in Yammer, and more. We also hear from Nancy Handa, our SharePoint program manager focused on pages and news innovations - including work that brings them to life in Microsoft Teams.

Did you know Microsoft Lists could do that? In this episode, we hope you’ll find a few useful, hidden gems to jumpstart your information tracking in Microsoft 365. Maybe you’re just getting started or have been at it for a while. Regardless, Lists can help you and your team across numerous scenarios - tracking issues, managing assets, supporting an internal event. Lists are simple to create and highly customizable based on whatever you want to track, organize and automate. Listen and learn as you go.

June 2021 brought great new offerings: SharePoint Auto News Digest updates, SharePoint admin center updates (dashboard and new site information columns), Microsoft Lists - @mentions in comments, Power Apps can now display images from Microsoft Lists, Delete from within page details, Headspace mindfulness content comes to Microsoft Viva Insights, and more. We also hear from Rk Menon, program manager on the SharePoint team focused on the SharePoint admin center experience and capabilities in Microsoft 365.

Chris and Mark talk with Thomas Trombley (Senior program manager - Windows Servicing and Delivery) and Jason Howard (Senior program manager - Windows, Developers, and Experiences (WDX)) about how the Windows desktop and ecosystem supports modern work in the context of Microsoft 365. We dig into helping customers plan for hybrid work, best practices for systems and services for IT to tune and optimize, and how to get into and remain in a good run state for managing it all from "the chip to the cloud."

Get ready to take your diagramming skills to the next level! In this episode, Chris and I talk with Mukul Kumar (Senior product manager) and Nishant Kumar (Product manager) from the Visio team at Microsoft. They have exciting news that’s ‘goodness at no cost’ to a lot of people in Microsoft 365. We'll dig into this and all things Visio – its place in the world of productivity, use cases for beginners to experts, web to desktop, and more.

May 2021 brought some great new offerings: Yammer conversation highlights, Immersive Reader for SharePoint documents, content migration from Dropbox and Google Workspace into Microsoft 365, Microsoft Lists: Export to CSV, Microsoft Lists: Updated sharing experience, Microsoft Lists: Turn comments on/off, and more. We also hear from Yogesh Ratnaparkhi about the migration of content into Microsoft 365, including third-party cloud providers like Box, Dropbox and Google Workspace into Microsoft 365.

It’s time to turn content into knowledge with the help of AI. Chris and Mark talk with CJ Tan (principal PM manager | Microsoft) about her role on the Project Cortex team focused on Viva Topics. We dig into knowledge roles, deployment practices, common scenarios, and top of mind for 'What's next?’ We don't think that AI is the only substitute for IA (Information Architecture). People, metadata and AI interact better together. CJ walks us through how it all works from pilot to broad-scale use and adoptio

April 2021 brought great new offerings: Immersive Reader: SharePoint pages, Events Web Part: Audience Targeting, site templates, Microsoft Lists for iOS: iPad support, Manage Microsoft Lists for iOS using InTune APP, Microsoft Lists: Visualize data with Power BI, OneDrive sync 64-bit for Windows, and more. Nicole Woon, program manager on SharePoint to discusses site templates, from the SharePoint Look Book into Microsoft 365, and insights into what you can expect next for templatizing your intranet.

In this partner episode, we focus on the needs of a growing company, New Belgium Brewing, faced with numerous challenges. They desperately wanted to move away from paper-based processes. With their portfolio of beers growing, and a second brewing facility coming online, they needed help from partner KnowledgeLake to optimize digitize invoices, improve employee time and efficiency while maintaining environmental stewardship, making world class beer, and having fun.

Chris and Mark talk with Sam Crewdson (senior program manager, Microsoft) about his role managing Microsoft Web (MSW) on SharePoint. MSW is Microsoft's internal company portal, built for its 163,000 full-time employees. We discuss MSW over time - from on-premises to the cloud, from classic to modern, establishing it as a home site, and now its role within Microsoft Viva Connections inside of Microsoft Teams. Lots of learning and insight from over the years across UX, innovation and consistent user feedback.

March 2021 brought some great new offerings: Microsoft Viva Connections, SharePoint app bar, Focus mode for SharePoint pages and news, images in SharePoint Events web part, SharePoint page analytics, Integrate menu for Microsoft Lists, Graph-based people picker for Person columns, Box migration into Microsoft 365, guest access in Yammer, and more. We also hear from Melissa Torres, principal program manager, about the new SharePoint app bar, what it is and its new role in Microsoft Viva Connections.

We talk with some of the people that built SharePoint and shaped it into what it is today. We’ll hear from SharePoint’s captain, Jeff Teper, taking us back to the days before SharePoint had a name: Project Tahoe. Other guests include some of the earliest members of the team: Lauren Antonoff, Rob Lefferts, Adam Harmetz, Bjørn Olstad, and community leaders Adis Jugo and Spencer Harbar – the duo behind SharePoint’s 20th Birthday Party event. Loads of fun and stories, plus a song or two.

You've gotten a Microsoft 365 account and joined the Microsoft Teams league. Now it's time to build your employee adoption drafting plan. We talk with Stephanie Donahue and Dux Raymond Sy, two Microsoft MVP experts in deployment strategies, workplace visions, governance, content plans, and churning out happy, productive employees. Start designing your Fantasy Productivity (Microsoft) Teams today with insights on how Microsoft Teams can help you be successful from pilot to production.