The Intrazone by Microsoft

Chris and Mark talk to Alex Bradley, senior product marketing manager and teamwork narrative lead focused on all things Modern Workplace. Alex shares how Microsoft has responded to the COVID-19 crisis to help customers adjust to a remote workforce, move to recovery, reduce costs and manage risk. And learn about Alex's webcast and podcast series, Modern Workplace, where he talks with with Jared Spataro, CVP of Microsoft 365, about what we’ve learned about remote work and staying connected.

April 2020 brought modernized MMS, file card “conversations”, stock images, audience targeting in navigation, SharePoint spaces preview, Yammer app for Teams, and more. We talk with Graham Kent, senior program manager at Microsoft, who works on intelligent file card experiences across Microsoft 365 to discuss broader design strategy for how the on-hover experience works and the breadth of content and information that is dynamically pulled into view where you are working.

In this episode, Chris and Mark chat with Benjamin Niaulin (Head of product at ShareGate) and Tejas Mehta (Principal program manager on the SharePoint team at Microsoft) all about the deployment and value of SharePoint team sites plus Microsoft Teams. They cover how people can get from classic to modern, broad scale adoption, and the importance of governance best practices.

In our fourth partner episode, we talk with Roland Reddekop (Presales Engineer | Colligo) and his customers, Jean-Francois Thibeault (VP | Ovivo) and Michel Guenette (VP of Technology | Ovivo). We talk with them about how the Colligo solution helps Ovivo achieve effective knowledge transfer between and across projects (content and people). Colligo helped Ovivo centralize content storage while making it easier for people to tag and place that content from their preferred tool – Outlook.

This past month brought a lot to SharePoint and related technologies: multi-lingual publishing, wiki-linking for pages, custom theming for the SharePoint mobile app, updated “add a tab” experience in Microsoft Teams, conditional formatting for lists and more. In this episode, we talk with Matt Mooty, senior software engineer, who works on multi-lingual support within the SharePoint-powered, intelligent intranet. We're here to help you stay informed of the now, plus a few teasers of what's to come.

We are committed to helping organizations stay connected and productive. From COVID-19 to weather emergencies, our focus is the importance of establishing open lines of communication and information flow. Chris and Mark highlight three solutions - across Microsoft Teams, SharePoint and Power Apps - that help everyone stay briefed on the situation and any business impacts. Through crisis management and good planning, technology can help keep business continuity in a move to increased remote working.

We talk with Colin Truran (Principal strategist, Quest Software) and his customer Chris Reynolds (Head of Systems and Applications Development Services, Arden & GEM Commissioning Support Unit in the UK). We discuss moving, managing and securing data in Office 365, how Quest provides solutions to their customers, spending less time on IT and more time on business innovation, allowing Arden & Gem to focus on population health management within the broader National Health Service (NHS) in the United Kingdom.

We talk with Chakkaradeep (Chaks) Chinnakonda Chandran, a senior program manager at Microsoft. His team completed the additional compliance work to enable Power Apps and Power Automate for our government cloud customers (GCC); which our commercial customers have been using for a while. We talk about both the scenarios this unlocks, plus the process of moving a feature through to the various M365 customer offerings. Also, SharePoint roadmap updates on employee engagement, teamwork, related tech and more.

We uncover the power and capabilities of Microsoft Teams as a platform. First we learn about the design and strategy of how to extend Teams at the scale of the worldwide M365 customer base from Bill Bliss, lead architect for Teams platform engineering. Then, one of our strong Microsoft MVP developers, Wictor Wilén, shares how he develops teamwork solutions for his company, Avanade. You’ll hear about bots, tabs and connectors – the basis of extending the Microsoft Teams platform offering.

Three superhero Microsoft MVPs swoop into the fantastical world of Funko, a worldwide purveyor of all things pop culture. Funko IT department lead Scott Christensen was fighting to keep up with the company’s rapid growth. They needed to refine collaboration, enhance communication and set things in motion to automate as their business grew – and still grows. The MVPs had just 3 days and it was a nail-biting race to the last very last web part! Microsoft MVPs: Sue Hanley, Laura Rogers and Benjamin Nia

In this episode, we talk with three intranet experts to unveil insights and best practices for planning, designing and implementing a new, beautiful, functional, engaging, personalized SharePoint-based intranet. Guests include Sue Hanley, Melissa Torres and Matt Wolodarsky on subjects like information architecture, the new flat world of SharePoint sites structuring, design possibilities, how to scale roll out with both executive buy-in and end user adoption – plus insights into what’s next.

This month on SharePoint Roadmap Pitstop, we talk with Nicole Woon, program manager on the SharePoint engineering team focused on the "Next Steps" experience for site users. You'll learn what you can expect to see as suggestions based on what they are doing inside SharePoint sites, including Groupify. Also in the show, SharePoint roadmap updates on employee engagement, teamwork, related tech and more.

In this episode, Chris and Mark dig into three customer stories (Mott MacDonald, HAVI and Marks & Spencer) – highlighting three common solution areas many customers face. They chat about how each customer went about tackling their solutions and how this infers the art of the possible if you face the same desired outcome. Consider this a walk-through of best practices using common components of Microsoft 365.

This month on The Intrazone Microsoft 365 Roadmap Pitstop, we talk with Kaarin Shumate, senior content developer, who focuses on the strategy and management of SharePoint help documentation, UX writing to ensure accessibility for the global IT SharePoint admin community – on-premises and in Microsoft 365. Also in the show, roadmap updates plus a few predictions of what's to come in 2020. And a special treat for all, "Up on the Cloud Top" written and performed by Mark, Eli and Sophie Kashman.

This month's Microsoft partner highlight is Agilisys, a public sector cloud specialist who helps forward thinking organizations transform services that make a difference to millions of people across the UK. We talk with Agilisys's Zoe Wilson (Modern Teamwork Practice Lead), Luke Evans (Office 365 and SharePoint architect) and Ruben Hugo (Office 365 Solution Architect). Chris and Mark talk with them about Project Cortex, their customer stories, and their favorite Microsoft Ignite 2019 announcements.