Sort Your SharePoint Out

Alex Graves:

Hi everybody great to have you with us today for our webinar about sort your SharePoint out. A really hot topic at the moment that many people are interested about. Multiple reasons, with new things coming down the pipeline from Microsoft, with new technology advancing, and also I think it’s just time where we’re starting to really think about how we engage with our employees with great experiences.

So, I’m really pleased today that Carly and I are able to share this session with you. So, for those of you that don’t know me I’m Alex Graves and I’m the Chief Visionary Officer at Silicon Reef. We’re a Microsoft 365 partner and really looking forward to telling you all about how SharePoint can be sorted out and how we can really help you do it. And I’ll hand over to Carly to introduce herself.

Carly Murray:

Thanks Alex. Hi everybody I’m Carly Murray. I head up the Internal Comms side of the business at The Surgery, so a creative comms agency. And we work in very close partnership with Alex and all the guys at Silicon Reef. They are our go-to trusted partner for all things Office 365 related. So I’m going to be representing the internal comms community today. I’m going to be posing your burning questions to Alex, so please do post your questions throughout.

Are you ready to be in the hot seat Alex?

Alex Graves:

I think I’m ready to be in the hot seat, yeah. We were joking before it feels a little bit like Mastermind and I should have one of those spinning black chairs, and I’ve got 60 seconds to answer. But, yeah I’m ready for a hot seat session.
So as Carly said use the Q&A. You’ve got the Q&A option at the top. People are going to be monitoring that. And also, rather than putting it into the chat just please just use the Q&A so we can actually make sure we get to all of the questions that are asked.

Also, one of the things that we would encourage is if you agree with something that we say or if you love it, please use the reactions because I really like to get a bit of two-way feedback as we’re doing this. So please use reactions as we’re going.

So yeah, Carly let’s go.

Carly Murray:

So, I’ve got an easy question to kickstart you off with. Have you seen Stacy Solomon Sort Your Life Out?

Alex Graves:

No, I know who Stacy Solomon is. She’s the singer lady, right? But I don’t know what her sorting her life out is.

Carly Murray:

Yeah. So, it’s a UK program. I’ll explain it to those who haven’t seen it. I absolutely love it. So, Stacy Solomon and her team, they’ll help families out who’ve got in a real mess with their house. You know, there’s like stuff everywhere, it’s just built up over years. You can’t move in the house, and it’s really impacting their lives. There’s always a bit of an emotional story, because there’ll be a reason why they’ve got themselves into a bit of a state. Then Stacy Solomon and her team clear out the whole house. The family have to get rid of 50% of their belongings before 50% can come back in. But when it comes back in the house, obviously Stacy Solomon and her team, they can create lots of lovely storage, and there’s a box for everything, a place for everything, everything’s got a label. It’s just amazing, and there’s such a look of relief and satisfaction on that family’s face when they come back into the house and realize that they can start living their lives properly again.

So my question to you Alex, is can you help our audience sort their SharePoint out?

Alex Graves:

SharePoint, yes. Sort your house out, I’m not the best practical guy at doing that sort of thing. I do love a good tidy and a good sort, but storage and all those sorts of things? Yeah, get somebody into do that.
But with SharePoint, absolutely I can help with that – the building blocks and structure of reorganizing it’s a really good principle. So, some of the things that we’ll cover today are about how you can present your content. What I’m not going to be covering though is things around tagging, labelling, the backend side of things where you do the organization. I’ll probably more talk about the presentation bit. The bit that people, when they look into your house after Stacy Solomon’s been in – “Oh wow look at that, wow look around me it’s amazing”. Meanwhile everything is shoved in a back room somewhere that you can’t actually see. But the presentation piece is what we’ll talk about today.

Carly Murray:

Yeah, great, perfect. Should we kick start with the poll then? See where our audience is at?

Alex Graves:

Go for it, yeah. So Emma and Amanda, would you mind kickstarting a poll to tell us a little bit about where people are with their SharePoint journey and how they feel about it? And then I’ll tell you a little bit more about how I think SharePoint can be a bit of, I’ll use the same house analogy I guess, as a Lego house or a set of building blocks.

Carly Murray:

I like the Lego analogy.

Alex Graves:

If you could take a moment to hit that poll, please. Start to have a look at some of the results that’re coming in.
Okay so just while you’re doing that, and again, I guess Carly, want me tell you a little bit about why I think it’s kind of a bit like Lego? Actually, I think it was the first thing we were going to cover off.

Carly Murray:

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Definitely.

Alex Graves:

So, I have a son who absolutely adores Lego. And one of the things that he loves to do, and again back to the Stacy Solomon thing, it’s like tip everything out, see what’s going on. I remember when I was a kid, I used to get all my Lego blocks, chuck them out on the floor and then see what I could make.

And I think Lego and SharePoint, they can actually be seen as quite similar. Because they’re a set of building blocks that you have, a set of instructions that you can follow, like a framework and a guideline. But really, you can be as creative as you want to be, and you can take it in different angles that you want to try and build. And I think SharePoint is like Lego because you start with a foundation. And if you think about that building a house with different rooms, and you’re laying up your different bricks, and you lay it all out and you want to add one section here, one section there, but it’s always adaptable. You can take it apart, adapt to new things, you can get more Lego bricks from your pile and add them in as well. And I also think another reason probably why it’s quite like Lego is because you know, Lego through the years. It’s gone from the basic blocks, but now you’ve got the Technic Lego. A bit more advanced for people that want to do a bit more, and you’ve got the ability to add on those extra layers to really make it more suitable for your age as you’re growing up.

In a Lego analogy, but also for your organization as it matures. You can start to think about beyond that basic level, now we’re moving into a maturity phase where our organizational needs have changed. We need to think about how we can layer different bricks in to start meeting the needs of our people. And actually, the Lego brick analogy is really good because you can start to say we can take it to basic – that’s really quick and easy. But then let’s evolve it. How do we build upon those blocks?

And one of the things, if I just take it back to the now more SharePoint analogy, is the things that make up the page. You’ve got layout of content on a page. You have a page within a site and you can have columns, you can have rows, you can have different web parts, and the web parts are the elements and the blocks that make up the content presentation on the page. How you present that really impacts the audience and what they consume, how they engage with it, and then the ability to keep a structure like Lego. A nice framework is a really important aspect to that, to then be able to amend them and layer up. But also, to make sure it’s a consistent flow as you’re going through your different pages. It feels like a good flow with a nice navigation on the top. So in the SharePoint world, you use your pages and you use your web parts to present content that makes sense to your audience.

Carly Murray:

Yeah, yeah. Makes sense to me, does it make sense to our audience? Are they going to find it easy to put their building blocks together? Or is it going to be one of those big complex ones with a 7- page manual on how you put it together?

Alex Graves:

I do love a challenge. There’s always a Christmas challenge in our house to build a Lego house at Christmas. A Christmas house. So yeah, look forward to that one.

I guess one of the things I also wanted to address was why we did this webinar, and the whole concept of the sort your SharePoint out. Because historically, people have felt pain with it. And I guess Carly, I would like to know a little bit more about your experience. Because you’re wearing the internal comms hat here, you’re putting me in the hot seat and saying “is SharePoint really as bad as everybody thinks it is”. And I’d like to know a little bit more about your experience, Carly, when it comes to intranets and what you’ve heard over the years, and what you’re hearing today as well.

Carly Murray:

Yeah. So, I do a lot of internal communication audits. We look at how well communication channels are working, or not, among other things. Intranets is always a hot topic. Even if you’ve got a good intranet, people will have lots to say about it. Which is, they can see the opportunity that it can do more. Could we do this with the intranet, could we do that? They’ve always got lots of ideas and suggestions. Which is great because it’s valuable and they can see the opportunity to make it more valuable.

If you’ve created a beast – and I think the most commonly used term that I’ve heard over the years to describe an intranet is the beast. If you’ve created a beast then you’ll just hear that loud and clear when you talk to your people about the intranet. And it gets in the way of their day-to-day work lives. If you ask people actually, how do you ideally, in an ideal world, how do you want to find out what’s going on in the business? Of course, things like face to face and line manager, talking to line managers, that’s always going to come out in the top positions. But typically, an intranet will come out maybe third, fourth, fifth, sixth place. So, people definitely see an intranet, and they want it in the mix of things of ways that they can find out what’s happening in the business. They want to be able to self- serve and find information quickly and easily.

And if you don’t have an intranet and you talk to your people, then what will come out is frustrations that they’re having around not being able to self-serve and find information that they need to be able to do their jobs. And they’ll talk about “can we have a central hub or a one-stop shop or a one source of, one source of truth?” So, an intranet is seen as basic hygiene factor. It’s an expectation.

And I really feel that if you want people to go there and use that and stay there, that it’s got to look good. Even if it’s really well organized but doesn’t look good, people aren’t going to want to hang around. You’re going to put people off from the get-go.

So I put a poll out recently on LinkedIn to find out whether people felt like SharePoint could look as good as an external brand site, right. And why not? Maybe it’s a little bit stretched too far, but why can’t your internal look as good as your external shop window? And 42% said absolutely not. No way Carly. So my question to you, Alex, is can SharePoint look perhaps better than a lot of people think it can?

Alex Graves:

I feel like the Stacy Solomon show thing now where I’m being put in the spotlight. But yeah, it can genuinely look a lot better. And I think if I go back to some of the pain points that I’ve heard, probably over the last decade, where SharePoint has suffered. Because what was known as classic SharePoint, back in the day, it was just really basic blocks that really didn’t have a lot of presentation options. And you had to do your best with your corporate imagery just to try and make it work. But nowadays, I’m really pleased to say that in modern SharePoint, as it’s now known, not only has the interface, and again across multiple devices as well not just your desktop, improved – but it’s also much easier to manage.

So what I’m going to do, is I’m just going to show you an example.

Carly Murray:

You’re going to show us an example that looks good.

Alex Graves:

I’ll show you an example that, actually here we go. So, I’ll show you on the left hand side, this is what you’re used to when you think about SharePoint as a set of building blocks. You’ve got your top section where your content goes, you have a right hand panel perhaps with some key information and some dashboard information of links to things. This is just a SharePoint template that Microsoft provide you with the basic set of building blocks.

Then on this right hand side, it’s something a little bit perhaps cleaner. I’ve tried to keep the brand similar, we’ve tried to keep the same colours between the demos here to try and make sure it looks like you’re working within a corporate organization with a brand and a theme. But actually, you’re using those more accentuating colours of perhaps the yellow, the different types of teal and using your imagery to highlight content and to really make it feel part of the organization brand.

I think one of the things that you said, can it look like a website? Absolutely it can do. Because, if you look at some organizations’ websites it really reflects the brand and who they are as an organization. It attracts talent, it attracts people saying “oh yeah, that looks great. I feel like I can be attached to that organization.” In this hybrid world we’re in now, you should think about that. If you’re not going into an office as regularly as you used to, being able to feel part of the organization, reflect the brand. I’m in an office today that’s attached to a brewery company and everywhere you go around here – I’m in a room now, behind me on the wall there’s pictures of rice and hops and things like that. Why can’t your intranet reflect that and feel like you’re part of the organization too?

So I’d love to get some reactions too from you guys – thumbs up and hearts and anything like that. Whether you think it should do that, and is it a piece that’s missing from your intranet today?

Carly Murray:

Can I pose you a couple of questions then Alex, from our audience? So question from Miranda, is this example all built with out of the box functionality?

Alex Graves:

So, left hand side yes. Right hand side, no. So right hand side is using some enhanced functionality. That’s again, when I think about let’s go back to Lego basic building blocks, left hand side. Bit more mature as an organization, Lego Technic perhaps on the right hand side. making it feel a little bit more like your organization. Extending from the foundations that Lego provides you.

I’ll just show you one more example actually of something that can be done quite quickly. So we did a 7-day transformation with an organization. That was that before state on the left, and that after state on the right. Again, Miranda’s question, the right hand side is using a little bit more of the tech Lego Technic. So the Lego Technic on the right to enhance and take it to the advanced level. Basic on the left hand side.

Carly Murray:

Cool. Another quick question from Miranda. Do you need to be using SharePoint for document management in order for a SharePoint intranet to work?

Alex Graves:

Yeah, because you’ve got to have content. The content lives in SharePoint document management. Again, thinking about – perhaps we’ll come to governance a bit later on Carly – but thinking about where things sit in the organizational structure. You’re, and again to use the classic term, when you’re thinking about intranet it’s the single source of truth or a one-stop-shop or a hub, that’s where that content should be surfaced. All that key content that’s relevant for all of your people. So yeah, you need to have your documents that are relevant to all of the organization. Again, intranet should be available to everybody and then again you think about your content governance structure, about where things live. You need to make sure that content is accessible and surfaced with the right level of access, open to everybody in your organization to surface it through your intranet content.

Carly Murray:

Okay and then we’ve got a question from Kelly. So what are the cons of using SharePoint as an intranet versus the majority of intranet providers?

Alex Graves:

Yeah, so the cons with SharePoint are it’s very locked into the Microsoft ecosystem. So I’m assuming that many of you today who are on the call, you already have a SharePoint intranet, or exploring the opportunity that SharePoint can give you. I think again, think is this a con or perhaps it’s not so much a con? But the license that Microsoft provides you with the basic foundation, it gives you the entry level foundation and they want you to try and do more. So Viva Connections, for example, it gives you the opportunity to pull your intranet homepage into Teams. But if you’re a bit more of a complex organization, perhaps with multiple entities within it, you need to then buy a premium license. To be able to create multiple entry points for your organization with the personalization to perhaps a brand or multiple brands within an organization. So it’s a bit of an actual con perhaps, the fact that you have to then upgrade. You have to pay a little bit more, rather than taking the entry level approach with buying something off the shelf which is already ready to go that’s perhaps not a Microsoft product.

Carly Murray:

Okay thank you. Another question. They’re coming in thick and fast Alex. From Swami, another pros and cons question. So, if we think about custom development then it’s good to use custom components instead of out of the box components.

Alex Graves:

Yeah, so custom components – and again I’m not going to get technical for the guys on the on the call. Built in the right way, they can be accessible on your SharePoint pages but also work across mobile devices and Teams as well. The great thing as well, is with SharePoint you can do things like pull Power Apps, which are your way of creating business applications. You can surface them through SharePoint pages as well. Something called the SPFX framework, and that’s as technical as I’m going to get I promise you, these are the things that the framework needs to be built in. That’s a custom component that’s available for working on SharePoint and across Teams as well.

Carly Murray:

Okay, and then another question related to the visuals that you were just showing there Alex. So, from Rob, are the elements / web parts in the developed intranet examples as easy to update and change as the out of the box options?

Alex Graves:

Yeah. So again built well, and again think about modern SharePoint as opposed to classic SharePoint, it’s all about that simple owner interface. Being able to update your content, and again I’m not going to do a demo on how to do it today, but built in the right way. I think about that previous question, built in the right way and matching it to as sensible design decisions in what you actually need you can get components adding on that are simple and easy to upgrade. You don’t need any web development skills, like zero. You just need to able to click select content, that’s the one I want to choose, have a nice layout. And if, again thinking about perhaps building blocks, if you’ve ever been to a Lego store recently you can actually go and get your own Lego minifigures made up with your own custom t-shirts and things like that. So you can go and get them printed nowadays and I’ll continue the analogy. Because actually if what you’ve got isn’t fit for purpose, you can go and get a custom one made. You just need to go to the right people, with the right outline, who can say to you “well what are you trying to achieve? what do you need from it? what are the maintenance things you want to try and do? what are the layout opportunities?” and it can be done. It’s not prohibitively expensive either to do that now.

Carly Murray:

Okay then. Should we ask the audience what pain point, if we can get a poll up, what pain points they’re experiencing?

Alex Graves:

Yeah go for it. Let’s do another poll. So, just looking at the poll results from the last poll actually. It was a bit of a 50/50 split. A 2.6 average. So on a scale of one to five of how people rated their intranet, about the middle. Some happy, some not so happy. But an overall score of 2.6 out of five stars on rating it one to five. So lots of people in the middle rather than actually edging towards feeling a positive or negative sentiment about it.

Carly Murray:

Perhaps while people are doing the poll, perhaps another question from Kelly. Actually this links in with pain points. A large part of her organization work out in the field, on the road. How easy is it to access via an app or URL? I’ve always assumed SharePoint is aligned to the business networks so I’ve always opted for cloud stored intranets.

Alex Graves:

Yeah so, it’s a good question. It’s a common question that we get with people, with frontline workers or field workers. So Microsoft are actually educating people that Microsoft Teams can be known as the company app. So if you have a license for your field workers to have Teams, using Viva Connections you can actually pull through your company intranet. With the right level of licensing from Microsoft to surface your intranet content through the Teams app. Again, that’s called Viva Connections and if you haven’t heard of Viva Connections I’d recommend you look it up. If you’ve not got it enabled in your organization, it’s effectively pulling your intranet through as a little icon or a little tab available on your Team’s mobile phone device. But also on your Teams web desktop app as well. You should really be thinking about enabling that for those frontline workers to be able to get involved.

Then also, inclusivity in terms of having conversations and things like Viva Engage, formerly known as Yammer. Again, frontline worker access and licenses for getting conversations happening with those people. To engage them in your intranet and campaign content. Community building, knowledge sharing, all of those things can happen in collaboration through Viva Engage and your Teams app as well.

Carly Murray:

Okay cool. Then in terms of pain points, I know that one that many people talk to me about is well, it’s back to the beast. Having a beast of an intranet. And it just starts to get out of control. The terrible g-word, governance. But that would be a pain point. What would be your advice on that.

Alex Graves:

Yes, so governance is always something I think you could probably run a whole session on its own around intranet governance. I think the term governance can mean different things to different people. But I think you have to have an owner. And often, that’s either internal comms, HR or IT. Or a combination or amalgamation of all three. You’ve really got to try and understand what’s it there for, what are you trying to achieve? Is it a one-stop-shop? Is it a communications portal? Is it a productivity hub where people come and land on to get that work done? Then you can jump off to go and achieve those activities and do those things.

But some simple things such as the creation of new sites and how you add new things into the mega menu. Having a formal process to approve those things into your navigation, agreeing a structure that makes sense. Not just in terms of your corporate language, but real user language of when you’re trying to find content. And sticking to it, so it actually relates to your audience in terms of what your titles of your navigation would be. Because if I’m trying to find a policy, do I go to HR? Do I go to a me section? Or about? Me at work section? Different things for different organizations, but keeping to a structure that makes sense to your business.

Also simple things like enabling personalization where it’s relevant. So making sure that your audience targeting for content is set up, and working with your IT teams to make sure that personalization is possible.

Again, governance can take out lots of different spin-off angles here. But from a design perspective, always thinking about accessibility when it comes to governance and the inclusivity of people as well.

Carly Murray:

Yeah, makes sense Alex. I’ve got a question from Jason. Does SharePoint out of the box allow connectivity to 365 to pull data. So for example, your company directory?

Alex Graves:

Yeah so, again I’ll try not to go too much into the weeds here on technical aspects around that. But any 365 data can be pulled through into your intranet. Whether you want to do things like searching for people. Again, one of the classic things that people will always ask for in terms of an intranet is a people search box. Can I find somebody really quickly through a people search box? Absolutely possible to do. A little bit of plumbing in the back end to make sure it’s all set up correctly in your corporate environment with everybody’s details. But yeah, absolutely. Anything in 365 can be pulled through to your intranet.

That’s one of the pros of keeping things in the Microsoft ecosystem. You’ve got all of those Lego bricks where they work with each other. One of the things that my son does if he ever finds any fake Lego, he chucks it away. “I don’t want any of that fake stuff. I want to just keep the actual Lego brand because it never quite fits on right.”
I think that’s bringing back that Lego analogy, because it’s all part of the same ecosystem and it works really well together.

Carly Murray:

Yeah, and then Jack. So Jack’s been lucky enough to build their SharePoint from the ground up rather than have a beast that they’ve got to try and sort out. So have you got any advice around that initial kind of content production strategy that they should have? Beyond just owners.

Alex Graves:

So I guess that question is thinking more about, how do you get more people creating content that can be surfaced? Do you think I’m right interpreting it that way?

Carly Murray:

Yeah I guess it’s the initial strategy of, if you’re starting from scratch, building that content.

Alex Graves:

So, again when you think about the intranet being a one-stop-shop or a hub and you’re starting to pull all of your key business information through, whether that’s for HR, internal comms, content around news, and key updates. Something that we see many organizations do, actually it’s happening more and more in the last two to three years, it’s a democratization of content creation.

So we’re actually encouraging people in the business to start creating content that can be surfaced up through and onto the intranet homepage. But doing it in a structured manner. I’ll actually cover off some of the new things that are coming out within Microsoft 365 which will lend itself to more people being able to create content. But in terms of applying a scale, again always make sure your governance is in check, Jack. Make sure that you’ve got a plan of where things will sit in your organizational navigation, the hierarchy, and make sure that somebody’s accountable for user flow. Because there’s nothing worse than going to an intranet and then thinking “how do I get from A to B to C to D?”, and then going back again. Because I always want to come back to the homepage, and that journey can sometimes be disjointed. That sprawl is often when you know that you’ve gone too far and you’ve gone “okay, now I don’t know where I am and how to get back to the beginning again.”

Carly Murray:

So another comment from Jack. It’s more about platforming best practice of design. So going back to the design piece. How can you really set best practice from the beginning.

Alex Graves:

So one thing that we do as an organization is we work with people on making sure the design is on brand. It feels like your organization. When you actually want to log in, you want to feel like it’s attached to your organization. But then doing things like some navigation, some tree testing for your design, for your navigation sections for your top links, or wherever it’s going to be. Making sure the important content is at the top of the page, whether that’s key announcements or sections.

We’re seeing more and more intranets having a ‘me bar’. What’s relevant to me, with my links, my tools to jump me off, jump me off to go and do things. Getting a page layout and a page structure that’s really user friendly and really thoughtful about the purpose of this intranet. Is it to get people to be productive in their day as well as engaged?
Making sure your content structure is designed from the start to make sure that you’re considering key company announcements, organizational campaigns that are going on, productivity things to help me get done.

And then thinking about is it a social place where we want people to interact and have two-way conversations? Bringing a Yammer web part.

Video. Video might be a key part of your communication strategy. Having a section where videos might be presented as well.

Carly Murray:

Can you see the poll results, Alex? In terms of what was people big pain points? I’ve still got more questions coming in for you.

Alex Graves:

Here we go. So bang on theme for this. Thank you everybody. The layout options are boring. So people think that SharePoint is just boring, and that’s the thing that I think we can address. You can’t use your company branding came in second. Sprawl, can’t control the sprawl, that came in third. It’s too complex for non-IT folk, that came in forth. It’s too hard to police off brand content came in last.

So yeah, boring SharePoint. Boring SharePoint being top of everybody’s mind.

Carly Murray:

So how is it not boring Alex?

Alex Graves:

Probably a good time for me to segue and tell you what’s going on in the Microsoft world. Where I am actually really pleased, as a bit of a SharePoint advocate myself. I’m really pleased that Microsoft have woken up and they are listening. They’re listening to your pain points of “it’s boring, it doesn’t feel like us.” Design is important for everybody.
So I’m just going to go through some of the most recent updates that have been announced. Some of these are within the last couple of weeks as well, so some of them will be fairly new to many of you. So what’s coming to make it less boring, simpler for you guys to own and navigate.

Something that’s coming down the line is a SharePoint Brand Centre. One of the things that we asked in the poll was about the brand police. Well Brand Centre would allow you to have multiple brand identities within your SharePoint environment. What you can see here in this environment, in this one at the top, there’s an actual Brand Centre where you can have a custom font, you can have custom colour themes, custom colour palettes, icons, different imagery and assets and different colour themes as well. This is coming. I’ve got a bit of a timeline slide at the end.

Then the other one I wanted to show you was actually down at the bottom here. There’s a bit of an animation going on. So Microsoft have released a product called Microsoft Designer. It’s a really simple content creation tool. What they’ve done is they’ve taken some of the features of that tool and they’ve brought it into SharePoint. So some of the things that you’ve always had to, and again many of you will feel this, where you’ve had to go “Oh I want this image, but I want it cropped this way. Oh I want it shaped slightly differently.” You have to often go and do that in a design product and then bring it in. “Oh I don’t have the skills in house so I’m going to have to go to a design agency to go and do that.”

Gone are the days where you have to do those things. Because you can do it all really simply. When I think about what a website expectations are nowadays, and I’m no website expert builder. I built one for my kids football team, and I used an online tool that just allowed me to do everything. Dragging in a web browser to be able to make it happen. The little cropping that you’re seeing of the images here, it’s coming to SharePoint. You can do these things in the browser.
So these are little things that are coming that are going to make it a lot easier to create content that’s more engaging, be on brand.

Carly Murray:

Another quick question while you’re there. Very quick question which is very relevant is from Kelly. Will Brand Centre, is it going to be a standard or will you have to upgrade for it?

Alex Graves:

My current understanding is that it’s a standard. Although Microsoft have just literally released something called SharePoint Premium. I haven’t yet seen a table of understanding that tells me what features are going to be where. I might have to take that one away and come back to confirm that. I haven’t seen anything to say it’s a premium feature for Brand Centre. So I think that’s going to be as part of the standard offering, but I will come back and validate that if I can find that source of truth.

The next thing I just wanted to show you was actually, many of you will be familiar with how you create pages, right. So creating page content is one of the most important things. If you’ve used PowerPoint recently you actually get PowerPoint telling you, “oh we’ve got some ideas about how you can lay out this content.” SharePoint is going to do the same thing. It’s going to say to you, “look, based upon the content that you’ve got on the page, how about we help you with these design ideas.” It’s actually taking some of the creativity, which not everybody is blessed with creativity. It’s actually helping you to come up with the ideas about how you can present that content and structure it with backgrounds based upon relevant content that it reads in the page. Help you with dragging in images as well. So you’ve actually got the ability to take some media and then drag it into the page and just drop it in there. And it will also recommend you some design ideas.

The other thing that was just announced, I think it was announced this week actually, about co-authoring. So you’re actually going to be able to do some co-authoring with your colleagues, the same as you would do in PowerPoint and any other office application. You can come in, you can both edit. Well, many of you can edit a page. But actually, one thing that’s always been a bit annoying about this is that not everybody is sat in an office anymore. You’re not in the same place. So how do you do this and collaborate and give feedback? You don’t want to go off into Teams and have a separate conversation, “oh I’m editing that part. what do you think about this part?” You can do comments in a section now. So you can actually add a comment about “what do you think about this” or “I don’t think this image is quite right”, and you can add it in a section on a page. The same as you would do within a Word document or a PowerPoint. So that was, again ,a really good collaborative, hybrid world first thinking. How you can actually take advantage of, improve design, improve collaboration. But also bringing in different ideas about how content could be created. I thought this was a really powerful one.

Carly Murray:

People seem to be liking that.

Alex Graves:

Next one. If you’ve heard anything from Microsoft recently, I bet it’s been related to Copilot. Yesterday I spent a day with Microsoft and I think the word Copilot was mentioned at least 120 times.

So Copilot is coming into SharePoint, and it is going to be a really powerful content tool. I’m not here to tell you all about generative AI and what the benefits of it are. But actually, it’s going to bring some of the benefits of your large language models. Going out and picking up content and looking at how content is worded.

What you’re seeing in this animation here is that you’ve just written some text on a page and you can actually go and say “SharePoint can you help me make this section look better.” From a creativity perspective, amazing. You’ve got a tool that’s going to help you do that. It will actually come up with recommendations and you say “oh I don’t quite like that one, can you give me another variation.” That’s where Copilot is really going to come in. I’m not here to do the virtues of Copilot, but you’re seeing in this demo language, tone of voice, different ways of being able to phrase something. All of these things that are coming in as part of Copilot will be available in SharePoint.

Carly Murray:

Cool, well we’re starting to run out of time. I’ve got a few more questions. Let me see if I can get through these last few questions. From Justin, is there a simple poll widget or web part I’m not seeing? You can poll in Teams and embed a Microsoft form in SharePoint, but a poll seems to be missing.

Alex Graves:

So forms is the only way right now to do that natively. You’ve got the ability to do polls in forms and embed those, but there’s nothing else natively around a quick poll. That would be a third party add-on that you would need to use for that.

Carly Murray:

Thank you. Then a question from Ertug, how possible is it to implement a custom made application on your company SharePoint intranet page.

Alex Graves:

It’s possible. Again, I’m not the technical person here to answer those things but happy to pick that up afterwards and introduce some technical people that can help with that kind of conversation. There’s a lot of ‘it depends’ things in there, which I don’t want to go into right now. But absolutely we can have a conversation about that.

Carly Murray:

Then from Anita, our SharePoint has become a beast so in the process of restructuring. What advice would you give to create a user friendly landing page that incorporates both far location and comms on the business?

Alex Graves:

Talk to the audience. You have to talk to your people about what their pain points are with their current intranet. Why the beast has evolved into being called the beast by many people. It has to start with your people and what they genuinely need. Align it to what your business objectives are as well. We’re in this hybrid world now where we have lots of people in different areas and they want to be able to access different content really quickly to get their jobs done faster. Start there. You have to start with listening, always start with getting the ‘why’ behind ‘we need to go and do this’ before you just jump into taming the beast. Or phone Stacy Solomon.

Carly Murray:

She would do a great job. Could you imagine if we could do some sort of celebrity thing with her, I’d love to do that – sort your SharePoint out.

Okay, I think that’s all of the questions.

Alex Graves:

I just want to do one other slide, because one of the things that always happens is like ‘great Alex, you’ve showed us loads of stuff, when’s it coming?’ So I just want to finish on this slide here, just to say some of the new things that are coming for SharePoint, these have been either shipped, planned this year. So this is Microsoft timelines, so could be into early next year. Then some of the new things around Copilot, co-authoring, the Brand Centre, custom fonts, coming next year.

There’s a road map site you can go to to have a look at this information, but just wanted to make sure you got to see when this is coming. Lots of people will be excited about the possibilities, but looking at the road map of when it’s coming. So when it’s coming, it just means when it’s going to be available. When your organization adopts it, that’s a conversation you need to have with your IT guys.

Carly Murray:

Well, I think you survived the hot seat Alex. Well done.

Alex Graves:

Amazing thanks. Any other questions?

Carly Murray:

I think that’s it for now. Okay well, round of applause coming in for you Alex.

Alex Graves:

Thanks. I felt like it was a bit of a hot seat moment there and did my Stacy Solomon thing. So thank you, thanks everybody. Hope you have much success in sorting your SharePoint out.