Episode 392 – Building Confidence In Your Microsoft Copilot Deployment with AvePoint CTO John Peluso
January 3, 2025 • 31 mins
Welcome to Episode 392 of the Microsoft Cloud IT Pro Podcast. In this episode, Ben interviews AvePoint CTO John Peluso. Listen in as they discuss Copilot in Microsoft 365 and how to govern and gain insights on your Copilot usage in your organization.
Copilot in Microsoft 365 is becoming a critical tool to supporting modern work. As Microsoft continues to iterate and improve on Microsoft Copilot, partners such as AvePoint help to augment the administration and analytics of Copilot adoption in your organization. While Copilot enables your workforce with the tools to their jobs, Microsoft and AvePoint also provide the tools for administrators to empower their workforce quickly in a safe way. Another part of the puzzle of administering Copilot is how do you measure AI adoption in your organization, benchmark your organization against similar organizations, and understand the activity levels and adoption of Copilot?
Listen in to hear about how AI tools like Copilot and AI in general can be governed in Microsoft 365 and how you can gain insights into how to approach analyzing Copilot adoption in your organization.
Like what you hear and want to support the show? Check out our membership options.
Show Notes
AvePoint Introduces First-to-Market Benchmarking Data for Microsoft 365 Copilot
IT Strategies for Copilot Administration
Ignite 2024 - What's new for Microsoft 365 and Copilot admins
Ignite 2024: Why nearly 70% of the Fortune 500 now use Microsoft 365 Copilot
Microsoft Ignite 2024: Top Microsoft 365 Copilot Updates
About the sponsors
Would you like to become the irreplaceable Microsoft 365 resource for your organization? Let us know!
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:03):
Welcome to episode
392 of the Microsoft Cloud IT Pro podcast,
recorded live from Microsoft Ignite 2024.
This is a show about Microsoft Microsoft 365
and Azure from the perspective of IT pros
and end users, where we discuss the topic
or recent news and how it relates to
you. In this episode,
Ben sits down for an interview with AvePoint
(00:25):
CTO, John Peluso, to discuss planning for Microsoft
3 65 Copilot. They discuss how to govern
and gain insights on your data, but also
how to measure Copilot usage within your organization.
It's Ben again. We're sitting here at Microsoft
Ignite for another interview. And this time, we
have JP
(00:45):
from
AvePoint. So AvePoint's been in we were just
talking. AvePoint's been in the business of Microsoft
365 SharePoint forever. Like, I used AvePoint back
in the day, migrating SharePoint 2,003 to 2,007,
that type of stuff. So
yeah. But, JP, why don't you introduce yourself,
and then we'll dive into a little bit
of a discussion here just about Microsoft 365
(01:07):
and Yeah. Sounds good. Kind of even what
you're seeing in that space. So Sure thing.
So, yeah, I'm John Paluso, JP,
internally here at Outpoint because we got about
9 Johns in the product team. Okay. So
joined Outpoint about 14 years ago and have
spent most of that time in a product
leadership role, one form or another. And currently,
I'm the CTO. So still working very much
(01:27):
with our customers, partners, and working on the
leading the product strategy team, but working more
broadly across the organization, which is really interesting
because so much of technology right now is
changing both how we do business internally and
how we bring innovation to customers. Right? Because
you guys have started doing way more than
SharePoint migrations now. Yeah.
(01:48):
That's true. Yeah. Yeah. And I mean, a
blessing and curse. Right? And people say, oh,
you're the backup company. Yeah. We kinda do
in 20 years, we're doing a little more.
Yeah. Yeah. And as the product or landscape
changes like you said, it's crazy. It's one
thing I've I would say I love and
hate about Microsoft 365 is I feel like
every day I wake up and something's moved,
something's different, something works differently. As a as
(02:10):
a product builder, it's really sort of been
interesting to watch how the changes in,
you know, not just SaaS software in general,
but even something as central to an organization
as Microsoft 365. You say it, right, you
wake up, there's a button that's in a
different spot. Right? It used to be you'd
get killed for doing that. Right? Yep. Oh,
I need 8 months of testing with my
users. Right. It's like, well, people are a
(02:30):
little more resilient now. Yes. And now you
don't even, like, you can go look at
one tenant and it's one spot and another
tenant that's somewhere else. When's the change coming?
What's going on? Soon.
When will then be now? Right? Soon. Yeah.
I was doing I've I've been practicing a
lab this week and we were going through
the lab instructions, like testing it. And one
person was like, oh, we need to go
click here and here. And I'm like, no,
(02:51):
it says click here and here. And we're
like, okay, we'll just write it one way.
I didn't imagine. Have to explain it 2
ways. Yeah. That's another one. Right? Documentation is
used to be have all your documentation in
place. Now it's like, what am I doing?
Which which wave am I documenting? Right. So
one of the big themes of Ignite, I
know this is gonna be a shocker, has
been Co pilot. Stop it. Really? Right. I
(03:11):
can't believe it. Who knew? Yeah. The 3
pillars of the keynote were Co pilot, Co
pilot, and Co pilot. That's good. Don't forget
the third one because it's very important to
the first. Well, and then they threw security
in there too. Yeah. At the end, which
was
good. So I'm I am kinda curious to
talk to you. I know
Copilot,
security,
compliance,
all of that is a big topic. Yeah.
(03:32):
And
you as a software provider, obviously,
writing
products to work with Microsoft 365, but even
aside from that, because of that, I guess,
you get to work with a lot of
different customers and you see a lot of
different things in Microsoft 365,
how they might be preparing
from a security standpoint, from a compliance standpoint
Yeah. From a governance standpoint. What are some
(03:55):
of those,
maybe like, hot topics or trends that you're
seeing where people
what people should be thinking about maybe as
they're preparing for Copilot?
Yeah. I think it is interesting and, you
know, for perspective, you mentioned, you know, AvePoint
started building, you know, admin tools and utilities.
Right? Backup, migration, things like that. Yep. And
early on about, you know, 5 years in,
what we realized is that we had a
(04:16):
lot of customers that were using our tools
more in a strategic way to
enable governance and security practices.
So that kind of started us on that
trajectory and so it's been a big focus
area of mine for the last, 10 or
12 years. And so,
there is this cyclical wave
of, you know, I think everybody on the
(04:36):
floor here had the number of times I
heard reference to the Delve, the d word.
Right? But it's the same sort of wave
we saw with Delve of, hey, wait a
minute. There's all this data out there and
I'm not sure I want it being
surfaced and shown to people, you know, because
I don't really know if it's and then
we saw it again with with teams with
the rapid, you know, ability for people to
(04:57):
just sort of self serve and get whatever
they want whenever they want it. The the
reigns of IT was tougher and tougher to
sort of choke.
I mean,
securely manage. I didn't say Nope. Choke. I
didn't say Yep. Choke. I didn't secure manage.
And so, Copilot is is just bringing those
key concerns. So so mostly what we're seeing
in the market, and we've gone through this
ourselves with our own Copilot journey, Microsoft Copilot
journey Okay.
(05:18):
Is, you know, those things that you kinda
know you should be doing anyway. There's always
a little bit of a shameful, guilty look
on people's face when we have this conversation
because they know they should be doing it.
Yep. Looking after data quality, sprawl, data life
cycle, and, you know, the security and data
ownership, all of these things are coming back
to the fore. And I think, you know,
you listen to Microsoft Keynotes, we'll hear more,
today and tomorrow
(05:39):
about, the focus there. So there's this dual
focus of trying to transform the business. Right?
Forward looking, move faster. At the same time,
you've really gotta sort of shore up the
foundation of security and data quality. So that's
been the the mission a lot of companies
we see are on. Okay. Yeah. And it's
interesting you bring up Dell Yeah. Because
I just had a conversation with another client
(06:00):
the other day and they were like, we
turned on Dell then all of a sudden
people started seeing things they shouldn't. So we
turned it off and we've what? Dell was
We're secure now. We turned off Right. The
interface to the data that they shouldn't have
access to. 8 years ago or something like,
yeah. Dell's been off for 8 years now.
Yeah. That that was not the way to
solve the problem by the way. Right. Because
now CoPilot's coming up Exactly. For them and
they're like, now we wanna use CoPilot,
(06:22):
but everybody has the same concerns about Yeah.
Delve. But our solution was
we just turned it off. Yeah. Yeah. And
and one of the, I mean it's crazy
that one of the It's not crazy. It
does make sense. And again, we Like I
said, everything that I'm talking to you about,
we went through internally. So it's, it's the,
you know, the shoemaker's kids
Yeah. A little bit situation, but, yeah, I
(06:42):
mean, one of the, if you look at
some of the, the suggestions out there, one
of the suggestions is, you know, oh, if
you're concerned about Co pilot surfacing information from
these sensitive repositories, you know, turn off discovery,
which basically is the old school, just accept
them from the search index. Yeah. Which, think
about everything that's gonna break when you do
that. Right? This is my most important content
that I now can't find my way back
(07:03):
to when I want to.
So, the the problem is, you know, the
the kicking the can down the the road
problem, it's it's been really interesting to see
so many customers, big and small, finally in
that, okay, we have to deal with this
problem now, you know, and and dealing with
it in a forward looking way because if
you do it right, it's not just cleaning
up, it's really setting a good foundation for
the future. So I think I think the
(07:25):
the the AI, Gen AI is driving this,
whether it's Dell or whether it's Microsoft's copilots
or copilots that, you know, lowercasec copilots Yep.
That companies you're trying to build. I had
a question yesterday from a customer about, I
have 5 of my 500 SharePoint sites
that have really good information that I wanna,
you know, make available. They're giant libraries and,
(07:46):
you know, SharePoint agents with where you're going
now. Right? What a great tool for surfacing
useful information there, but I can't account for
this other 400 and, you know, 95 areas.
So there's there's a lot of a lot
of focus on it now which I think
is good. Right. And if you've seen this
is another one that I've come up is
everybody comes in and they're like, they're worried
(08:06):
about security and Copilot. They're like, now Copilot's
gonna start surfacing all this on other information.
And helping people through that understanding of Copilot's
not creating a security issue, but Copilot's just
surfacing bad practices
quicker. Yeah. Totally us accountable. Right. Then maybe
the typical SharePoint search would. SharePoint search, it
(08:26):
took a while to sort through 100 of
thousands of results. Copilot's like, here's a whole
bunch of stuff. Yeah. Early on in the
in the, this sort of whole market motion
that we've been And it was really cool
for us, by the way, because all of
these problems are problems that we've been addressing
and, you know, really targeting innovation at for
many years. And we used to chase people
down the road saying, you should care about
this. You should care. Right? And now people
(08:47):
are coming to the table going, oh, my
God. I got a problem. We're going, okay.
Let's have a chat. But, yeah, I think
I think it is definitely interesting, and
there's this dual nature of really
not only having to figure out a plan
to clean up, you understand that, but also
on the other side, right, of the Copilot
equation is a lot of customers are wondering
(09:08):
what does good actually look like. They're being
asked to, you know, people we're talking to
have to go account for, hey, we're spending
all this money on licenses, are we getting
back a return?
And so there is a lot of sort
of disruption right now, I think, in in
co pilot, deployments of what does good actually
look like? Right? What are we trying to
prove that we're doing? We did, like I
said, we were early in and there's pretty
(09:30):
broad understanding that we're saving 2 to 3
hours a week on on average, people that
have Copilot licenses. Yep. And we brought that
back to the business and said, hey, let's
talk about expanding this pilot. And they said,
okay, but what's the business getting
for those 2 hours? Because because, you know,
because the hourly rate justifies it, but but
I'm not sure the business impact. So that's
(09:52):
another area that I think we're talking a
lot of customers about as well. It's how
do you
understand and measure that business impact? Yeah. And
that is a conversation I've had with others
to to your point. It's like, okay, great.
Everybody's getting 2 or 3 hours back. What
are they doing with those 2 or 3
hours? No. They're watching YouTube.
Break conversation they have. Right? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Are they watching YouTube? Are they taking longer
(10:12):
breaks? Are they working shorter hours? Yeah. Then
you're not gonna get that ROI. It's like
they get back 2 or 3 hours. Are
they moving the business forward Yeah. Or doing
activities that are driving Yeah. Business value in
the time they're getting back. I think that
is the key. Right? We do need to
figure that out because, you know, our our,
you know, my, you know, assume positive intent.
(10:34):
Right? Yep. So,
I would like to believe and I do
believe that when folks save that time, they
just spend less time on low quality work
and more time on high quality work. Right?
Yeah. But,
whether my
optimistic belief is
accurate or not, doesn't really matter when you
go into the CFO's office for more money
for licenses at, you know, $360
(10:54):
per user per year. So you really do
need that measurable kind of, impact analysis, I
think, in a way that's more than anecdotal.
Yeah. So as you've worked with customers,
have you have you guys figured out a
way, like, how do you measure that? Or
like you said, your own experience when you
go say, we need to roll this out
and your
(11:15):
CFO comes back and says, well, show me
what they're doing with those Yeah. 2 to
3 hours. Yeah. Is that something you guys
have been able to kind of wrap your
heads around or quantify somehow or come up
with some strategies? Yeah. I mean, I think
we're not it's not our, you know, it's
certainly not our playbook. It's a pretty well
established playbook. But it it works top down
and bottom up is the way to do
it. Right? You need good executive sponsorship, not
(11:37):
not specifically for Microsoft Co pilot per se
or the other, you know, Co pilots that
are 98 Co pilots that are out there.
Yeah. But just for Gen AI and and,
you know, this new wave of AI in
in general, it needs a top down mandate,
I think, to help people start to think
differently. And then the bottom up is to
to, you know, first there'll be this exploratory
period where people are figuring it out. The
(11:57):
more you can enable them, there's no end
of resources. It's been interesting to see how
much, investment Microsoft's been put in there in
in enablement.
But you gotta hit it from both sides
and what we see is there there's a
short period of of figuring it out and
and simple things, meeting summarizations,
following meetings, some of that stuff like that.
But what you start to see if you
were watching at the departmental level, in the
(12:19):
team level, you start to see pockets where
it's happening. Okay. Right? And that's where you
really want to dig in and find out,
that's where I invest. It's not a, do
I invest in the company
broad. Right? It's I invest in the success
that I see and the success begets success.
So that's what we see is is, you
know, mandates from the top that work,
but then a really sort of,
(12:41):
not overly structured, but a, but a well
structured and monitored strategy of finding the success
in the organization and replicating it. Got it.
So with that success,
have
either again, you guys internally as you've talked
to different customers
found different areas of Copilot where you tend
to get success? I know you noticed meeting
(13:01):
summaries and I feel like that one is
Far and away. One way It does. I
feel like that one blows everything away. Are
there any others that you kinda have seen
too? So, yeah. We And and we're studying
this. We're actually, you know, internally for sure.
And then and then we're working on this
as well because we've, you know, we've got
products in market that try to help customers
create this sort of success ladder. So we're
always looking for, like, what are those, those
(13:23):
use cases that are the phase 1, what
are the phase 2? So certainly meeting summarization,
which of course brings the privacy and security
people out of the woodwork. It's, wait a
minute, how are we handling all these transcripts?
Right? So that's a that's a given. We
see less and and some Microsoft's announcing quite
a bit here
about the in app
copilots and and really working Okay. To really
(13:45):
rev them and improve them. We don't see
so much the content generation being a tier
one use case in
outside of content teams.
Okay. Heavy use in content teams. Rank and
file, not really. It's more for like help
me understand this document. It's summarization.
It's extracting key points.
We,
(14:06):
as you can imagine, coming up to Ignite
internally, we had quite a bit of analysis
about what is happening, what are the announcements,
ourselves, customers, partners, right, what is happening?
And it used to be that, how am
I presenting this information? What format is it
in? Do it, you know, what is consumable
by audience A and B was a big
concern for us. We've
basically changed that mindset now, because we can
(14:27):
write really detailed analysis documents and not worry
about the presentation,
because it takes 2 minutes to have Copilot
spin that information for 5 different audiences. So
those are the the the kind of use
cases that once you start to dig in
a little bit,
really have a transformative general effect. Right? We're
not talking about, you know, building specific Copilots
to, you know, do business process,
(14:50):
you know, and things like that. So I
think there's a lot of low hanging fruit.
Yeah. And summarization seems to be across all
of the places where Copilot lives. Summarization
and re reinterpreting
content is is really where we see a
lot of value.
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It's interesting you say that. Scott and I
were playing with it. So we got you
get the book of news Yeah. From in
now. Right? And it's we printed it off.
We went into our browser and said print
(16:15):
this off in PDF form. Yeah. And you
get, like, a 90 page PDF document.
And we actually threw it into OneDrive and
then went to Copilot Yeah. And said, go
look at the book of news, give us
the top 5 Microsoft 365 announcements. Yeah. Give
us the top 5 Copilot announcements. Yeah. Give
us the top 5. So that's interesting because
because because reading that book of news, again,
this is this is just a different way
(16:36):
that you're and this goes to the broader
perspective, like, it's a it's a micro of
the macro, which is having to think differently
about your data when you're in a in
a Gen AI world. So the book the
book of news, what is it? It's a
bunch of bulleted list announcements. There's very little
this is more important than that. So Copilot
has a tough time understanding,
(16:58):
you know, what's more important than not. Right.
And I think that comes into that point
too. Like, how do you, do you want
to write your documents if people are gonna
summarize them or write your announcements if people
are gonna summarize them with that? Because we
had that discussion. We're like, how is Copilot
determining
Yeah. What's more important? Is it just picking
the top 5 that it comes across? Yeah.
(17:18):
And we were we got different results in
terms of what the top Yeah. Five were.
So it was kind of a Yeah. Because
it's it's it's tough to
to diagnose. One of the things that that
I think, you know, it goes into the
overall, this needs to be part of a
copilot program is, you know, this thing is
wickedly smart, but this myth that it understands
exactly what you want at all times Yes.
(17:40):
Is a total myth. Right? It's like any
other language, you have to learn the, kind
of the rules of it. And so, looking
at that book of news, it's one thing
to say summarize the book, it's another thing
to summarize the book and then go search
recent headlines in the industry and find the
things that are going to have the most
impact.
Right? That is a completely different world, but
Copilot is, you know, in general, you know,
(18:01):
the the technology behind Copilot can do those
things. It's just that, you know, we have
to start thinking about directing it properly. Yeah.
And I think that's where a lot of
learning will come in with people is, to
your point of all different sides, are people
creating content differently,
so that it gets consumed,
learning how are people
prompting co pilots and prompting Gen AI,
(18:22):
because that may dictate how you create the
content. Like, there's so many different steps Yeah.
In that process that
is fascinating. And I think one of the
best ways for companies to do it, if
they haven't started yet, even in a in
a small way,
building your own co pilots, you know, and
really understanding
things like system prompts and the the impact
they can have on on response quality,
(18:44):
that's another muscle.
But that muscle, you know, we have, for
a while now, been developing
internally facing and customer facing gen a knowledge
bots, basically.
And, you know, the way you shape system
prompts, the different kinds of assistance you can
create help give
a little bit more depth of knowledge,
I think, for the organization.
So that it's not all just sort of
(19:05):
black box new stuff. I don't understand how
it works. And so that helps with the
enablement as well. Okay. So I know we've
talked about a lot of different things so
far. We talked about some of the security,
the governance, preparing for it.
And I would say another aspect of it
is maintaining. Once you get to a certain
point Yeah. You don't wanna then start
(19:25):
digressing Yeah. Because you got everything
set up, you got everything
in a good spot, but now you go
create 400 more SharePoint sites that just don't
put the Do you wanna clean a garage
once every year? Or do you wanna come
up with a garage maintenance practice? Yes. Exactly.
So some of that, some of the Copilot
adoption. And I know, again, you've been working
with a lot of customers, you've been coming
(19:45):
out with some products.
What are some of those things that
AvePoint specifically
can do to help customers
as they
prepare, maybe as they measure ROI, as they
wanna come up with a maintenance plan Yeah.
For their Microsoft 365 environment? That's a it's
a great question and and,
early on I think we've we've we've been
(20:06):
guilty in the past of sort of being
ridiculously
specific,
you know, in the way that we try
to shape, you know, strategy,
that we're recommending to customers. And we, when
it came to Copilot, we really kind of
took a a simplistic approach that has worked
really well, and it was like a 3
step framework. And step 1 is
understand and optimize the data footprint that you
(20:27):
have. Okay. Because everything else you try to
do is more difficult the more data you
have. And if you're carrying all this baggage
of unneeded data,
understanding the security of it, the ownership of
it, all get very, very difficult.
So number 1 is is developing tools and
capabilities to allow customers to do that, and
then helping them with the business practice of
it. Okay. Still in a very clean up
model. Right? Step 2 is to do the
(20:49):
exact same thing, but with your permissions and
access.
And so, we've been sort of investing and
rolling out lots of of tools around that.
One of the latest things we announced this
week was an expansion where
we're bringing sort of over sharing and risk
analysis down to the the data owner themselves
in a really simple way, where you can
understand, wow, I'm about to, you know, we're
about to do a co pilot launch and
(21:10):
I have all this overexposed content in my
OneDrive. Right? I didn't even know. It's been
years. I'm just using and sharing and everyone
in the org links and I have no
idea. Right? So all of that. So so
that's also cleaning up, but that top of
that pyramid, if this is a 3 step
process,
really is implementing those go forward practices,
of
good data hygiene from a, you know, quality
(21:31):
and life cycle perspective. And so we've got
a lot of stuff that helps them there.
Good practices around,
understanding
and enforcing data ownership and putting some teeth
into that. You can have it, but you
have to do these things and be accountable.
So now we don't have a fear that
no one has looked at the permissions because
we just go to the poor report and
find out when the last time they were
reviewed and who did it. Right?
(21:52):
So that those are the the data and
security go forward practices. And then the last
and most important one, and this was a
big announcement of, is more than just the
getting ready, how are we continuing to move
the business forward and that's where we've introduced
a bunch of
benchmark reporting in our Copilot adoption,
insights that we've we rolled out late last
year or earlier this year, And
(22:14):
what that does is, in the absence of
knowing exactly what good looks like for your
org,
knowing how close you are to the shore
Yep. Is a good start. Right? So so
this allows organizations to, opt in to anonymize
summary data
that will go into
the larger data
collection
and then be able to spit back out.
(22:35):
You can come in and say, how how
am I doing? So all of our Copilot
adoption reports now are gonna have these benchmark.
Here's your score. Here's your peers of your
size in your industry.
And that has, you know, we had a
lot of questions about whether people would be
open to that and what the response would
be. It's been overwhelmingly positive because I think
people wanna know
how am I doing? Where do I? Yeah.
Right. Well, and I think of So similar
(22:57):
to like Microsoft's
secure score and compliance score. Right? So they
give you Yeah. Here's your score, here's organizations
in a similar place. You're Yeah. Here, everybody.
I'm more talking with my hands on a
podcast. Yeah. Right. No. I got you. I
got you. We can hear the rough Right.
And there's a We can hear my hands
moving in the air. Yeah. But being able
to compare again to organizations of similar size.
The key there, I think, is
(23:18):
data at a summary level like that, like
a security score,
you know, is useful if you believe the
data. Right? Yep. And so that's why we're
working really hard in these reports is to
make sure that the the data is understandable.
Where does this come from? What it means?
We have a a predictor. We have an
algorithm of probable copilot adopters.
Oh, interesting.
(23:39):
So it's it's specifics like that, that people
can say, oh, hey, wait a minute. Right?
I I this is not a Copilot problem.
We're not really leveraging Microsoft 365
broadly in a way that is progressive and,
you know, transformative. So maybe we need to
actually look broader than just Copilot right now.
Got it. So it's the devil's in the
details. Okay. So one of those reports, almost
like you had talked about earlier with finding
(24:01):
those pockets of people that are really starting
to use it, some of your reports will
help whether it's admins or whoever wants to
see these reports, this particular department or this
particular segment of people Exactly. Are really starting
to gain traction with Copilot and use it
as some of those Exactly. Reports. And so
we're we're shifting from a Copilot readiness messaging
(24:21):
to a messaging
around confidence.
Right? That's how that's a word that we'll
we'll Okay. Really be using because I think
it just summarizes what we're talking about. Confidence
that we're doing the right things, confidence we're
achieving our goals, but also confidence that we're
doing it in a way where we're meeting
our obligations from a security and, you know,
governance team. Got it. So the data ownership
reports, I'm curious about this one because I
(24:43):
haven't had a chance to look at this
Yeah. Yet, where
Do some of these reports then give
individual content owners, whether it's their OneDrive or
maybe content that they have
created or modified,
where then owners are able to go see,
here's all of my files across That's right.
The entire
organization
(25:03):
that I should taking some of that
The risk here's my risk. Right? Right. What
can I do about it? Taking some of
that action off of IT. Yeah. I know
I do consulting. A lot of companies are
like, we wanna co pilot
readiness assessment, and we wanna understand where our
risks are. And I'm like, I don't understand
your data. I can look through it as
an admin, but I don't necessarily know, should
(25:24):
this file be shared with these people?
That's gonna be on the
person that created the content or shared it
originally,
where it sounds like some of your reports.
Yeah. I could just go in and say,
here's all your content. Go figure it out
yourself. Exactly. Because you understand your own content.
Exactly. Right. And we and it was very
timely. We have a a broad we're, you
(25:44):
know,
relatively smallish, you know, in number size, we're
about 3,000, 35 100 people soaking wet, but
we're global. And we have global customer advisory
councils and things like that. It was really
astounding earlier this year to do the the
road show and talk to all customers as
all of these concerns are coming up. And
to a to a person, they came back
(26:04):
and said,
I have an idea that something might be
wrong over there. Right? I think there might
be a problem over here, but I don't
have the authority or the knowledge to do
something about it. Right? Because I don't know
the content. Right? So
slapping an encryption label on something has a
business impact. Right? Deleting a file I think
isn't needed anymore has a business impact. Yep.
(26:26):
So, so that's what we're really focused on
in bringing those kind of visibility
down to the owners of data. Okay. For
a long time we've done, like, periodic
recertifications and attestations. That's been a practice we've
helped customers do for a long time. What's
new is people started coming to us and
saying, can they run this on demand? Right?
Users are asking
to enter this sort of process. And we
(26:47):
say, what if we did one better? Right?
And then
the information was always there. Got it. Always
there and available to you. Not everybody, you
know, will will take it up. So you
do still need more governed processes of Yep.
Ability and things. But, you know, one of
the first things we said in our in
our Copilot
pilot
was go clean up your OneDrive.
And when you hear yourself say that to
(27:09):
a user that, you know, doesn't understand SharePoint
permissions, doesn't understand sharing links versus Right. Like,
where do I go to do that? Right?
Right. Having a destination to send them
to give put some teeth behind that kind
of directive. Because I feel like Microsoft does.
They they tell everybody how to share. Oh,
yeah. They don't tell anybody how to unshare.
(27:29):
Yeah. And and even with that, I mean,
I think if we look at some of
the innovations they're bringing,
you know, really powerful things like, you know,
restricting site policies, so you can basically put
a firewall over a whole site. Yep. That's
cool. Right?
In SharePoint has been a, you know, a
holy grail people have been looking for. However,
the problem exists at the file level.
(27:51):
So we do have to eventually get there.
Right? And that's where, you know, owners of
those files can know. That's a problem. That's
not a problem. Right? They know that very
efficiently. So Let's just let them make those
decisions. So,
in the product, like, you would generate that
report for the owner. Do you actually let
them then, like, slap sensitivity on it or
delete permissions right from the reports? We have
a monitor internally. I don't show you something
(28:13):
if I can't help you fix it. Okay.
Because, you know, I'm not looking to get
anybody fired. Right? Right. So here's a look
at the big problem you have. Right. Hi.
Good luck. Go go try to figure out
how to fix it though. No. No. No.
And so we do 2 things. Number 1,
absolutely. We give them the ability to understand
what's going on there. They can view
audit history. They can view activities. They can
revoke sharing. They can change permissions.
(28:34):
But what we also try to do is
is provide a little guidance. So not only
do we say, here's a file that's shared
with a 1000 people, and, hey, I think
it's sensitive.
We also allow the organization to set up,
sort of a risk matrix,
where they can say red, yellow, green. Right?
High, medium, low risk.
And so we push that down to the
users and say, here are all your high
(28:55):
risk stuff and risk now defined by that
organization and their process. Okay. So that helps
them focus as well. Because just showing them
information without context, sometimes a little overwhelming. Right.
Yeah. Very cool. Well, I know we're running
up on time. You have a deadline here.
Anything else
you want to share with people
in the podcast show notes we can we'll
(29:16):
get from you Yeah. Social media, websites, links
that we can do. Me spelling out the
w w w Right. This is how you
go spell everything. Right. Exactly. Anything else you
want people to know?
Yeah. I think I think, you know, one
of the things that that AvePoint, we've been
in the, you know, in this space, as
you said, for over 20 years now.
That's crazy to say that.
(29:36):
Wow. But, yeah, SharePoint 2,001,
God bless. Yeah. Right. Oh, man. But Yeah.
So so all of this time, one of
the things that I think is the is
has been really beneficial to us
is really
understanding
through you know, my my team especially spends
all their time gathering feedback, gathering feedback, understanding
feedback. Yes, from our field, but mostly from
(29:57):
our customers.
So I would encourage you to, you know,
yes, we have solutions, but first and foremost,
we've really been digging into this. So, you
know,
I would encourage customers reach out, take a
look at some of the, you know, publicly
available information. We're trying to put some thought
leadership. We've been long term sort of community
people as well. So this is not, you
know, this is more than just a product
thing. We're really trying to help people figure
(30:20):
this out.
Awesome. Sounds good. Well, thanks a lot, JP.
Yeah. It was a pleasure. Do you go
by John or JP or both? Or I
will answer to anything. Anything?
You will answer to anything. Alright. And probably,
if you're not talking to me but you
speak sternly, I will also respond. You'll also
Okay. Sounds good. Well, thanks. We appreciate it.
Appreciate you sitting down with us and Yeah.
(30:40):
Thanks for the opportunity. It was great to
great to have a chat.
If you enjoyed the podcast, go leave us
a 5 star rating in iTunes. It helps
to get the word out so more IT
pros can learn about Office 365 and Azure.
If you have any questions you want us
to address on the show, or feedback about
the show, feel free to reach out via
(31:00):
our website, Twitter, or Facebook.
Thanks again for listening, and have a great
day.
Welcome to episode
392 of the Microsoft Cloud IT Pro podcast,
recorded live from Microsoft Ignite 2024.
This is a show about Microsoft Microsoft 365
and Azure from the perspective of IT pros
and end users, where we discuss the topic
or recent news and how it relates to
you. In this episode,
Ben sits down for an interview with AvePoint
(00:25):
CTO, John Peluso, to discuss planning for Microsoft
3 65 Copilot. They discuss how to govern
and gain insights on your data, but also
how to measure Copilot usage within your organization.
It's Ben again. We're sitting here at Microsoft
Ignite for another interview. And this time, we
have JP
(00:45):
from
AvePoint. So AvePoint's been in we were just
talking. AvePoint's been in the business of Microsoft
365 SharePoint forever. Like, I used AvePoint back
in the day, migrating SharePoint 2,003 to 2,007,
that type of stuff. So
yeah. But, JP, why don't you introduce yourself,
and then we'll dive into a little bit
of a discussion here just about Microsoft 365
(01:07):
and Yeah. Sounds good. Kind of even what
you're seeing in that space. So Sure thing.
So, yeah, I'm John Paluso, JP,
internally here at Outpoint because we got about
9 Johns in the product team. Okay. So
joined Outpoint about 14 years ago and have
spent most of that time in a product
leadership role, one form or another. And currently,
I'm the CTO. So still working very much
(01:27):
with our customers, partners, and working on the
leading the product strategy team, but working more
broadly across the organization, which is really interesting
because so much of technology right now is
changing both how we do business internally and
how we bring innovation to customers. Right? Because
you guys have started doing way more than
SharePoint migrations now. Yeah.
(01:48):
That's true. Yeah. Yeah. And I mean, a
blessing and curse. Right? And people say, oh,
you're the backup company. Yeah. We kinda do
in 20 years, we're doing a little more.
Yeah. Yeah. And as the product or landscape
changes like you said, it's crazy. It's one
thing I've I would say I love and
hate about Microsoft 365 is I feel like
every day I wake up and something's moved,
something's different, something works differently. As a as
(02:10):
a product builder, it's really sort of been
interesting to watch how the changes in,
you know, not just SaaS software in general,
but even something as central to an organization
as Microsoft 365. You say it, right, you
wake up, there's a button that's in a
different spot. Right? It used to be you'd
get killed for doing that. Right? Yep. Oh,
I need 8 months of testing with my
users. Right. It's like, well, people are a
(02:30):
little more resilient now. Yes. And now you
don't even, like, you can go look at
one tenant and it's one spot and another
tenant that's somewhere else. When's the change coming?
What's going on? Soon.
When will then be now? Right? Soon. Yeah.
I was doing I've I've been practicing a
lab this week and we were going through
the lab instructions, like testing it. And one
person was like, oh, we need to go
click here and here. And I'm like, no,
(02:51):
it says click here and here. And we're
like, okay, we'll just write it one way.
I didn't imagine. Have to explain it 2
ways. Yeah. That's another one. Right? Documentation is
used to be have all your documentation in
place. Now it's like, what am I doing?
Which which wave am I documenting? Right. So
one of the big themes of Ignite, I
know this is gonna be a shocker, has
been Co pilot. Stop it. Really? Right. I
(03:11):
can't believe it. Who knew? Yeah. The 3
pillars of the keynote were Co pilot, Co
pilot, and Co pilot. That's good. Don't forget
the third one because it's very important to
the first. Well, and then they threw security
in there too. Yeah. At the end, which
was
good. So I'm I am kinda curious to
talk to you. I know
Copilot,
security,
compliance,
all of that is a big topic. Yeah.
(03:32):
And
you as a software provider, obviously,
writing
products to work with Microsoft 365, but even
aside from that, because of that, I guess,
you get to work with a lot of
different customers and you see a lot of
different things in Microsoft 365,
how they might be preparing
from a security standpoint, from a compliance standpoint
Yeah. From a governance standpoint. What are some
(03:55):
of those,
maybe like, hot topics or trends that you're
seeing where people
what people should be thinking about maybe as
they're preparing for Copilot?
Yeah. I think it is interesting and, you
know, for perspective, you mentioned, you know, AvePoint
started building, you know, admin tools and utilities.
Right? Backup, migration, things like that. Yep. And
early on about, you know, 5 years in,
what we realized is that we had a
(04:16):
lot of customers that were using our tools
more in a strategic way to
enable governance and security practices.
So that kind of started us on that
trajectory and so it's been a big focus
area of mine for the last, 10 or
12 years. And so,
there is this cyclical wave
of, you know, I think everybody on the
(04:36):
floor here had the number of times I
heard reference to the Delve, the d word.
Right? But it's the same sort of wave
we saw with Delve of, hey, wait a
minute. There's all this data out there and
I'm not sure I want it being
surfaced and shown to people, you know, because
I don't really know if it's and then
we saw it again with with teams with
the rapid, you know, ability for people to
(04:57):
just sort of self serve and get whatever
they want whenever they want it. The the
reigns of IT was tougher and tougher to
sort of choke.
I mean,
securely manage. I didn't say Nope. Choke. I
didn't say Yep. Choke. I didn't secure manage.
And so, Copilot is is just bringing those
key concerns. So so mostly what we're seeing
in the market, and we've gone through this
ourselves with our own Copilot journey, Microsoft Copilot
journey Okay.
(05:18):
Is, you know, those things that you kinda
know you should be doing anyway. There's always
a little bit of a shameful, guilty look
on people's face when we have this conversation
because they know they should be doing it.
Yep. Looking after data quality, sprawl, data life
cycle, and, you know, the security and data
ownership, all of these things are coming back
to the fore. And I think, you know,
you listen to Microsoft Keynotes, we'll hear more,
today and tomorrow
(05:39):
about, the focus there. So there's this dual
focus of trying to transform the business. Right?
Forward looking, move faster. At the same time,
you've really gotta sort of shore up the
foundation of security and data quality. So that's
been the the mission a lot of companies
we see are on. Okay. Yeah. And it's
interesting you bring up Dell Yeah. Because
I just had a conversation with another client
(06:00):
the other day and they were like, we
turned on Dell then all of a sudden
people started seeing things they shouldn't. So we
turned it off and we've what? Dell was
We're secure now. We turned off Right. The
interface to the data that they shouldn't have
access to. 8 years ago or something like,
yeah. Dell's been off for 8 years now.
Yeah. That that was not the way to
solve the problem by the way. Right. Because
now CoPilot's coming up Exactly. For them and
they're like, now we wanna use CoPilot,
(06:22):
but everybody has the same concerns about Yeah.
Delve. But our solution was
we just turned it off. Yeah. Yeah. And
and one of the, I mean it's crazy
that one of the It's not crazy. It
does make sense. And again, we Like I
said, everything that I'm talking to you about,
we went through internally. So it's, it's the,
you know, the shoemaker's kids
Yeah. A little bit situation, but, yeah, I
(06:42):
mean, one of the, if you look at
some of the, the suggestions out there, one
of the suggestions is, you know, oh, if
you're concerned about Co pilot surfacing information from
these sensitive repositories, you know, turn off discovery,
which basically is the old school, just accept
them from the search index. Yeah. Which, think
about everything that's gonna break when you do
that. Right? This is my most important content
that I now can't find my way back
(07:03):
to when I want to.
So, the the problem is, you know, the
the kicking the can down the the road
problem, it's it's been really interesting to see
so many customers, big and small, finally in
that, okay, we have to deal with this
problem now, you know, and and dealing with
it in a forward looking way because if
you do it right, it's not just cleaning
up, it's really setting a good foundation for
the future. So I think I think the
(07:25):
the the AI, Gen AI is driving this,
whether it's Dell or whether it's Microsoft's copilots
or copilots that, you know, lowercasec copilots Yep.
That companies you're trying to build. I had
a question yesterday from a customer about, I
have 5 of my 500 SharePoint sites
that have really good information that I wanna,
you know, make available. They're giant libraries and,
(07:46):
you know, SharePoint agents with where you're going
now. Right? What a great tool for surfacing
useful information there, but I can't account for
this other 400 and, you know, 95 areas.
So there's there's a lot of a lot
of focus on it now which I think
is good. Right. And if you've seen this
is another one that I've come up is
everybody comes in and they're like, they're worried
(08:06):
about security and Copilot. They're like, now Copilot's
gonna start surfacing all this on other information.
And helping people through that understanding of Copilot's
not creating a security issue, but Copilot's just
surfacing bad practices
quicker. Yeah. Totally us accountable. Right. Then maybe
the typical SharePoint search would. SharePoint search, it
(08:26):
took a while to sort through 100 of
thousands of results. Copilot's like, here's a whole
bunch of stuff. Yeah. Early on in the
in the, this sort of whole market motion
that we've been And it was really cool
for us, by the way, because all of
these problems are problems that we've been addressing
and, you know, really targeting innovation at for
many years. And we used to chase people
down the road saying, you should care about
this. You should care. Right? And now people
(08:47):
are coming to the table going, oh, my
God. I got a problem. We're going, okay.
Let's have a chat. But, yeah, I think
I think it is definitely interesting, and
there's this dual nature of really
not only having to figure out a plan
to clean up, you understand that, but also
on the other side, right, of the Copilot
equation is a lot of customers are wondering
(09:08):
what does good actually look like. They're being
asked to, you know, people we're talking to
have to go account for, hey, we're spending
all this money on licenses, are we getting
back a return?
And so there is a lot of sort
of disruption right now, I think, in in
co pilot, deployments of what does good actually
look like? Right? What are we trying to
prove that we're doing? We did, like I
said, we were early in and there's pretty
(09:30):
broad understanding that we're saving 2 to 3
hours a week on on average, people that
have Copilot licenses. Yep. And we brought that
back to the business and said, hey, let's
talk about expanding this pilot. And they said,
okay, but what's the business getting
for those 2 hours? Because because, you know,
because the hourly rate justifies it, but but
I'm not sure the business impact. So that's
(09:52):
another area that I think we're talking a
lot of customers about as well. It's how
do you
understand and measure that business impact? Yeah. And
that is a conversation I've had with others
to to your point. It's like, okay, great.
Everybody's getting 2 or 3 hours back. What
are they doing with those 2 or 3
hours? No. They're watching YouTube.
Break conversation they have. Right? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Are they watching YouTube? Are they taking longer
(10:12):
breaks? Are they working shorter hours? Yeah. Then
you're not gonna get that ROI. It's like
they get back 2 or 3 hours. Are
they moving the business forward Yeah. Or doing
activities that are driving Yeah. Business value in
the time they're getting back. I think that
is the key. Right? We do need to
figure that out because, you know, our our,
you know, my, you know, assume positive intent.
(10:34):
Right? Yep. So,
I would like to believe and I do
believe that when folks save that time, they
just spend less time on low quality work
and more time on high quality work. Right?
Yeah. But,
whether my
optimistic belief is
accurate or not, doesn't really matter when you
go into the CFO's office for more money
for licenses at, you know, $360
(10:54):
per user per year. So you really do
need that measurable kind of, impact analysis, I
think, in a way that's more than anecdotal.
Yeah. So as you've worked with customers,
have you have you guys figured out a
way, like, how do you measure that? Or
like you said, your own experience when you
go say, we need to roll this out
and your
(11:15):
CFO comes back and says, well, show me
what they're doing with those Yeah. 2 to
3 hours. Yeah. Is that something you guys
have been able to kind of wrap your
heads around or quantify somehow or come up
with some strategies? Yeah. I mean, I think
we're not it's not our, you know, it's
certainly not our playbook. It's a pretty well
established playbook. But it it works top down
and bottom up is the way to do
it. Right? You need good executive sponsorship, not
(11:37):
not specifically for Microsoft Co pilot per se
or the other, you know, Co pilots that
are 98 Co pilots that are out there.
Yeah. But just for Gen AI and and,
you know, this new wave of AI in
in general, it needs a top down mandate,
I think, to help people start to think
differently. And then the bottom up is to
to, you know, first there'll be this exploratory
period where people are figuring it out. The
(11:57):
more you can enable them, there's no end
of resources. It's been interesting to see how
much, investment Microsoft's been put in there in
in enablement.
But you gotta hit it from both sides
and what we see is there there's a
short period of of figuring it out and
and simple things, meeting summarizations,
following meetings, some of that stuff like that.
But what you start to see if you
were watching at the departmental level, in the
(12:19):
team level, you start to see pockets where
it's happening. Okay. Right? And that's where you
really want to dig in and find out,
that's where I invest. It's not a, do
I invest in the company
broad. Right? It's I invest in the success
that I see and the success begets success.
So that's what we see is is, you
know, mandates from the top that work,
but then a really sort of,
(12:41):
not overly structured, but a, but a well
structured and monitored strategy of finding the success
in the organization and replicating it. Got it.
So with that success,
have
either again, you guys internally as you've talked
to different customers
found different areas of Copilot where you tend
to get success? I know you noticed meeting
(13:01):
summaries and I feel like that one is
Far and away. One way It does. I
feel like that one blows everything away. Are
there any others that you kinda have seen
too? So, yeah. We And and we're studying
this. We're actually, you know, internally for sure.
And then and then we're working on this
as well because we've, you know, we've got
products in market that try to help customers
create this sort of success ladder. So we're
always looking for, like, what are those, those
(13:23):
use cases that are the phase 1, what
are the phase 2? So certainly meeting summarization,
which of course brings the privacy and security
people out of the woodwork. It's, wait a
minute, how are we handling all these transcripts?
Right? So that's a that's a given. We
see less and and some Microsoft's announcing quite
a bit here
about the in app
copilots and and really working Okay. To really
(13:45):
rev them and improve them. We don't see
so much the content generation being a tier
one use case in
outside of content teams.
Okay. Heavy use in content teams. Rank and
file, not really. It's more for like help
me understand this document. It's summarization.
It's extracting key points.
We,
(14:06):
as you can imagine, coming up to Ignite
internally, we had quite a bit of analysis
about what is happening, what are the announcements,
ourselves, customers, partners, right, what is happening?
And it used to be that, how am
I presenting this information? What format is it
in? Do it, you know, what is consumable
by audience A and B was a big
concern for us. We've
basically changed that mindset now, because we can
(14:27):
write really detailed analysis documents and not worry
about the presentation,
because it takes 2 minutes to have Copilot
spin that information for 5 different audiences. So
those are the the the kind of use
cases that once you start to dig in
a little bit,
really have a transformative general effect. Right? We're
not talking about, you know, building specific Copilots
to, you know, do business process,
(14:50):
you know, and things like that. So I
think there's a lot of low hanging fruit.
Yeah. And summarization seems to be across all
of the places where Copilot lives. Summarization
and re reinterpreting
content is is really where we see a
lot of value.
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It's interesting you say that. Scott and I
were playing with it. So we got you
get the book of news Yeah. From in
now. Right? And it's we printed it off.
We went into our browser and said print
(16:15):
this off in PDF form. Yeah. And you
get, like, a 90 page PDF document.
And we actually threw it into OneDrive and
then went to Copilot Yeah. And said, go
look at the book of news, give us
the top 5 Microsoft 365 announcements. Yeah. Give
us the top 5 Copilot announcements. Yeah. Give
us the top 5. So that's interesting because
because because reading that book of news, again,
this is this is just a different way
(16:36):
that you're and this goes to the broader
perspective, like, it's a it's a micro of
the macro, which is having to think differently
about your data when you're in a in
a Gen AI world. So the book the
book of news, what is it? It's a
bunch of bulleted list announcements. There's very little
this is more important than that. So Copilot
has a tough time understanding,
(16:58):
you know, what's more important than not. Right.
And I think that comes into that point
too. Like, how do you, do you want
to write your documents if people are gonna
summarize them or write your announcements if people
are gonna summarize them with that? Because we
had that discussion. We're like, how is Copilot
determining
Yeah. What's more important? Is it just picking
the top 5 that it comes across? Yeah.
(17:18):
And we were we got different results in
terms of what the top Yeah. Five were.
So it was kind of a Yeah. Because
it's it's it's tough to
to diagnose. One of the things that that
I think, you know, it goes into the
overall, this needs to be part of a
copilot program is, you know, this thing is
wickedly smart, but this myth that it understands
exactly what you want at all times Yes.
(17:40):
Is a total myth. Right? It's like any
other language, you have to learn the, kind
of the rules of it. And so, looking
at that book of news, it's one thing
to say summarize the book, it's another thing
to summarize the book and then go search
recent headlines in the industry and find the
things that are going to have the most
impact.
Right? That is a completely different world, but
Copilot is, you know, in general, you know,
(18:01):
the the technology behind Copilot can do those
things. It's just that, you know, we have
to start thinking about directing it properly. Yeah.
And I think that's where a lot of
learning will come in with people is, to
your point of all different sides, are people
creating content differently,
so that it gets consumed,
learning how are people
prompting co pilots and prompting Gen AI,
(18:22):
because that may dictate how you create the
content. Like, there's so many different steps Yeah.
In that process that
is fascinating. And I think one of the
best ways for companies to do it, if
they haven't started yet, even in a in
a small way,
building your own co pilots, you know, and
really understanding
things like system prompts and the the impact
they can have on on response quality,
(18:44):
that's another muscle.
But that muscle, you know, we have, for
a while now, been developing
internally facing and customer facing gen a knowledge
bots, basically.
And, you know, the way you shape system
prompts, the different kinds of assistance you can
create help give
a little bit more depth of knowledge,
I think, for the organization.
So that it's not all just sort of
(19:05):
black box new stuff. I don't understand how
it works. And so that helps with the
enablement as well. Okay. So I know we've
talked about a lot of different things so
far. We talked about some of the security,
the governance, preparing for it.
And I would say another aspect of it
is maintaining. Once you get to a certain
point Yeah. You don't wanna then start
(19:25):
digressing Yeah. Because you got everything
set up, you got everything
in a good spot, but now you go
create 400 more SharePoint sites that just don't
put the Do you wanna clean a garage
once every year? Or do you wanna come
up with a garage maintenance practice? Yes. Exactly.
So some of that, some of the Copilot
adoption. And I know, again, you've been working
with a lot of customers, you've been coming
(19:45):
out with some products.
What are some of those things that
AvePoint specifically
can do to help customers
as they
prepare, maybe as they measure ROI, as they
wanna come up with a maintenance plan Yeah.
For their Microsoft 365 environment? That's a it's
a great question and and,
early on I think we've we've we've been
(20:06):
guilty in the past of sort of being
ridiculously
specific,
you know, in the way that we try
to shape, you know, strategy,
that we're recommending to customers. And we, when
it came to Copilot, we really kind of
took a a simplistic approach that has worked
really well, and it was like a 3
step framework. And step 1 is
understand and optimize the data footprint that you
(20:27):
have. Okay. Because everything else you try to
do is more difficult the more data you
have. And if you're carrying all this baggage
of unneeded data,
understanding the security of it, the ownership of
it, all get very, very difficult.
So number 1 is is developing tools and
capabilities to allow customers to do that, and
then helping them with the business practice of
it. Okay. Still in a very clean up
model. Right? Step 2 is to do the
(20:49):
exact same thing, but with your permissions and
access.
And so, we've been sort of investing and
rolling out lots of of tools around that.
One of the latest things we announced this
week was an expansion where
we're bringing sort of over sharing and risk
analysis down to the the data owner themselves
in a really simple way, where you can
understand, wow, I'm about to, you know, we're
about to do a co pilot launch and
(21:10):
I have all this overexposed content in my
OneDrive. Right? I didn't even know. It's been
years. I'm just using and sharing and everyone
in the org links and I have no
idea. Right? So all of that. So so
that's also cleaning up, but that top of
that pyramid, if this is a 3 step
process,
really is implementing those go forward practices,
of
good data hygiene from a, you know, quality
(21:31):
and life cycle perspective. And so we've got
a lot of stuff that helps them there.
Good practices around,
understanding
and enforcing data ownership and putting some teeth
into that. You can have it, but you
have to do these things and be accountable.
So now we don't have a fear that
no one has looked at the permissions because
we just go to the poor report and
find out when the last time they were
reviewed and who did it. Right?
(21:52):
So that those are the the data and
security go forward practices. And then the last
and most important one, and this was a
big announcement of, is more than just the
getting ready, how are we continuing to move
the business forward and that's where we've introduced
a bunch of
benchmark reporting in our Copilot adoption,
insights that we've we rolled out late last
year or earlier this year, And
(22:14):
what that does is, in the absence of
knowing exactly what good looks like for your
org,
knowing how close you are to the shore
Yep. Is a good start. Right? So so
this allows organizations to, opt in to anonymize
summary data
that will go into
the larger data
collection
and then be able to spit back out.
(22:35):
You can come in and say, how how
am I doing? So all of our Copilot
adoption reports now are gonna have these benchmark.
Here's your score. Here's your peers of your
size in your industry.
And that has, you know, we had a
lot of questions about whether people would be
open to that and what the response would
be. It's been overwhelmingly positive because I think
people wanna know
how am I doing? Where do I? Yeah.
Right. Well, and I think of So similar
(22:57):
to like Microsoft's
secure score and compliance score. Right? So they
give you Yeah. Here's your score, here's organizations
in a similar place. You're Yeah. Here, everybody.
I'm more talking with my hands on a
podcast. Yeah. Right. No. I got you. I
got you. We can hear the rough Right.
And there's a We can hear my hands
moving in the air. Yeah. But being able
to compare again to organizations of similar size.
The key there, I think, is
(23:18):
data at a summary level like that, like
a security score,
you know, is useful if you believe the
data. Right? Yep. And so that's why we're
working really hard in these reports is to
make sure that the the data is understandable.
Where does this come from? What it means?
We have a a predictor. We have an
algorithm of probable copilot adopters.
Oh, interesting.
(23:39):
So it's it's specifics like that, that people
can say, oh, hey, wait a minute. Right?
I I this is not a Copilot problem.
We're not really leveraging Microsoft 365
broadly in a way that is progressive and,
you know, transformative. So maybe we need to
actually look broader than just Copilot right now.
Got it. So it's the devil's in the
details. Okay. So one of those reports, almost
like you had talked about earlier with finding
(24:01):
those pockets of people that are really starting
to use it, some of your reports will
help whether it's admins or whoever wants to
see these reports, this particular department or this
particular segment of people Exactly. Are really starting
to gain traction with Copilot and use it
as some of those Exactly. Reports. And so
we're we're shifting from a Copilot readiness messaging
(24:21):
to a messaging
around confidence.
Right? That's how that's a word that we'll
we'll Okay. Really be using because I think
it just summarizes what we're talking about. Confidence
that we're doing the right things, confidence we're
achieving our goals, but also confidence that we're
doing it in a way where we're meeting
our obligations from a security and, you know,
governance team. Got it. So the data ownership
reports, I'm curious about this one because I
(24:43):
haven't had a chance to look at this
Yeah. Yet, where
Do some of these reports then give
individual content owners, whether it's their OneDrive or
maybe content that they have
created or modified,
where then owners are able to go see,
here's all of my files across That's right.
The entire
organization
(25:03):
that I should taking some of that
The risk here's my risk. Right? Right. What
can I do about it? Taking some of
that action off of IT. Yeah. I know
I do consulting. A lot of companies are
like, we wanna co pilot
readiness assessment, and we wanna understand where our
risks are. And I'm like, I don't understand
your data. I can look through it as
an admin, but I don't necessarily know, should
(25:24):
this file be shared with these people?
That's gonna be on the
person that created the content or shared it
originally,
where it sounds like some of your reports.
Yeah. I could just go in and say,
here's all your content. Go figure it out
yourself. Exactly. Because you understand your own content.
Exactly. Right. And we and it was very
timely. We have a a broad we're, you
(25:44):
know,
relatively smallish, you know, in number size, we're
about 3,000, 35 100 people soaking wet, but
we're global. And we have global customer advisory
councils and things like that. It was really
astounding earlier this year to do the the
road show and talk to all customers as
all of these concerns are coming up. And
to a to a person, they came back
(26:04):
and said,
I have an idea that something might be
wrong over there. Right? I think there might
be a problem over here, but I don't
have the authority or the knowledge to do
something about it. Right? Because I don't know
the content. Right? So
slapping an encryption label on something has a
business impact. Right? Deleting a file I think
isn't needed anymore has a business impact. Yep.
(26:26):
So, so that's what we're really focused on
in bringing those kind of visibility
down to the owners of data. Okay. For
a long time we've done, like, periodic
recertifications and attestations. That's been a practice we've
helped customers do for a long time. What's
new is people started coming to us and
saying, can they run this on demand? Right?
Users are asking
to enter this sort of process. And we
(26:47):
say, what if we did one better? Right?
And then
the information was always there. Got it. Always
there and available to you. Not everybody, you
know, will will take it up. So you
do still need more governed processes of Yep.
Ability and things. But, you know, one of
the first things we said in our in
our Copilot
pilot
was go clean up your OneDrive.
And when you hear yourself say that to
(27:09):
a user that, you know, doesn't understand SharePoint
permissions, doesn't understand sharing links versus Right. Like,
where do I go to do that? Right?
Right. Having a destination to send them
to give put some teeth behind that kind
of directive. Because I feel like Microsoft does.
They they tell everybody how to share. Oh,
yeah. They don't tell anybody how to unshare.
(27:29):
Yeah. And and even with that, I mean,
I think if we look at some of
the innovations they're bringing,
you know, really powerful things like, you know,
restricting site policies, so you can basically put
a firewall over a whole site. Yep. That's
cool. Right?
In SharePoint has been a, you know, a
holy grail people have been looking for. However,
the problem exists at the file level.
(27:51):
So we do have to eventually get there.
Right? And that's where, you know, owners of
those files can know. That's a problem. That's
not a problem. Right? They know that very
efficiently. So Let's just let them make those
decisions. So,
in the product, like, you would generate that
report for the owner. Do you actually let
them then, like, slap sensitivity on it or
delete permissions right from the reports? We have
a monitor internally. I don't show you something
(28:13):
if I can't help you fix it. Okay.
Because, you know, I'm not looking to get
anybody fired. Right? Right. So here's a look
at the big problem you have. Right. Hi.
Good luck. Go go try to figure out
how to fix it though. No. No. No.
And so we do 2 things. Number 1,
absolutely. We give them the ability to understand
what's going on there. They can view
audit history. They can view activities. They can
revoke sharing. They can change permissions.
(28:34):
But what we also try to do is
is provide a little guidance. So not only
do we say, here's a file that's shared
with a 1000 people, and, hey, I think
it's sensitive.
We also allow the organization to set up,
sort of a risk matrix,
where they can say red, yellow, green. Right?
High, medium, low risk.
And so we push that down to the
users and say, here are all your high
(28:55):
risk stuff and risk now defined by that
organization and their process. Okay. So that helps
them focus as well. Because just showing them
information without context, sometimes a little overwhelming. Right.
Yeah. Very cool. Well, I know we're running
up on time. You have a deadline here.
Anything else
you want to share with people
in the podcast show notes we can we'll
(29:16):
get from you Yeah. Social media, websites, links
that we can do. Me spelling out the
w w w Right. This is how you
go spell everything. Right. Exactly. Anything else you
want people to know?
Yeah. I think I think, you know, one
of the things that that AvePoint, we've been
in the, you know, in this space, as
you said, for over 20 years now.
That's crazy to say that.
(29:36):
Wow. But, yeah, SharePoint 2,001,
God bless. Yeah. Right. Oh, man. But Yeah.
So so all of this time, one of
the things that I think is the is
has been really beneficial to us
is really
understanding
through you know, my my team especially spends
all their time gathering feedback, gathering feedback, understanding
feedback. Yes, from our field, but mostly from
(29:57):
our customers.
So I would encourage you to, you know,
yes, we have solutions, but first and foremost,
we've really been digging into this. So, you
know,
I would encourage customers reach out, take a
look at some of the, you know, publicly
available information. We're trying to put some thought
leadership. We've been long term sort of community
people as well. So this is not, you
know, this is more than just a product
thing. We're really trying to help people figure
(30:20):
this out.
Awesome. Sounds good. Well, thanks a lot, JP.
Yeah. It was a pleasure. Do you go
by John or JP or both? Or I
will answer to anything. Anything?
You will answer to anything. Alright. And probably,
if you're not talking to me but you
speak sternly, I will also respond. You'll also
Okay. Sounds good. Well, thanks. We appreciate it.
Appreciate you sitting down with us and Yeah.
(30:40):
Thanks for the opportunity. It was great to
great to have a chat.
If you enjoyed the podcast, go leave us
a 5 star rating in iTunes. It helps
to get the word out so more IT
pros can learn about Office 365 and Azure.
If you have any questions you want us
to address on the show, or feedback about
the show, feel free to reach out via
(31:00):
our website, Twitter, or Facebook.
Thanks again for listening, and have a great
day.
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