Show notes
Time to turn the crank on your Syntex knowledge - now an elevated brand and loads of new innovation. Every workday, Microsoft customers add 1.6 billion documents to Microsoft 365. That content is essential to your organization -- carrying knowledge, decisions, and transactions that are vital to the flow of work. Microsoft Syntex, announced this week at Microsoft Ignite 2022, brings the power of content management and AI together to transform the way we work. We chat with Ian Story, Principal GPM on the Syntex product team and Alan Pelz-Sharpe, Founder of analyst firm, Deep Analysis, and learn the behind the scenes of this exciting new "Content AI" category and solution. Click here for this episode's corresponding blog post. Full transcript below and if you click here. Social and Info Links: Ian Story (Principal group product manager - Syntex) Twitter | LinkedIn Analyst | Alan Pelz-Sharpe (Founder | Deep Analysis) Twitter | LinkedIn | Website Mark Kashman |@mkashman [co-host] Chris McNulty |@cmcnulty2000 [co-host] Microsoft Syntex | Website | Get started today | Resources | SharePoint Facebook | @SharePoint | SharePoint Community Blog | Feedback Resources: Microsoft Ignite 2022 announcement blog, "Welcome to Microsoft Syntex – Content AI integrated in the flow of work" New Microsoft Mechanics episode: "Introducing Microsoft Syntex | Content AI" with Omar Shahine, CVP - Product management, Microsoft, and Jeremy Chapman, Director, Microsoft product marketing Microsoft Docs - The home for Microsoft documentation for end users, developers, and IT professionals. Microsoft Tech Community Home Stay on top of Office 365 changes Discover and follow other Microsoft podcasts at aka.ms/microsoft/podcasts Upcoming Events: Microsoft Ignite (Oct.12-14, 2022; virtual + SCC + six regional "spotlights") North American Cloud Summit (Branson, MO) South Coast Summit (Oct.14-15, 2022; Ageas Bowl, Southampton, UK) CollabDays New England (Oct.22 in-person Burlington, MA at the Microsoft MTC) ESPC22 (Nov.28 - Dec. 1, 2022 | in-person Copenhagen, Denmark) Follow The Intrazone at aka.ms/TheIntrazone TRANSCRIPT MARK KASHMAN: Welcome to the interzone, a show about the Microsoft 365 Intelligent Intranet. I'm Mark Kashman here with my cohost, Chris, who is exhaling with all the news that's out there, McNulty. CHRIS MCNULTY: Well, thanks, Mark. Today, we'll hear from Ian Story, who is the Principal Group Product Manager at mm, and Alan Pelz-Sharpe, Founder and Principal of the Analyst Firm, Deep Analysis. And I'll be interviewing myself, Chris McNulty. MARK KASHMAN: And you've got a mirror, right? So that during this you can be both guest, subject matter expert and cohost. CHRIS MCNULTY: For my day job, I am Director of Product Marketing for the Next-Gen Content Services Team, here at Microsoft, and so that's a fairly broad range of capabilities that includes OneDrive and SharePoint and Stream, and some parts of our newer technologies, Viva, and of course, what we're doing with Syntex. So I'm kind of playing a dual role today. MARK KASHMAN: I like it, I like asking you questions, Chris. CHRIS MCNULTY: But today, we are going to be digging into the wonderful world of content, the artist formerly known as ECM, or Content Services, what's going on in the industry as a whole, what we're observing from our customers, and how Microsoft is proposing a whole set of solutions to help you address the challenges that you may face with content in your organization, using cloud, using AI and using processing. MARK KASHMAN: Yes, and the answer to all of your challenges, the thing that you're going to hear more about today is, what is new for Syntex. We're going to get insights of what's most valuable for customers. We're going to get a breakdown in the direction and the goals of the products, two of the human-managed content, at scale, with a little help from AI. CHRIS MCNULTY: You know, if you jump back in time, not super far, but a few years back, we launched a research project, looking for ways that we could add more value to what at the time was still usually referred to as Office 365, and we recognize that the ways that people interact with content and knowledge were a gap. And so we launched a long-term research and engineering project to innovate in those spaces, and that project was – essentially had two main threads, one of which was released last year as the first module of Microsoft Viva, Viva Topics, helping you discover knowledge in your organization. But we recognized that there was still a lot more that we could be, and should be, doing for those core content experiences, which has led us to incubate a number of capabilities for Syntex, and then today, at Ignite, to unveil the next stage, which for us is Microsoft Syntex. MARK KASHMAN: You know, one way to think about it, certainly for our audience, with SharePoint in their history and their DNA, it is the pie, you know, the chart of what SharePoint is, when you get the SharePoint server and you deploy it, and you deploy it for X, Y and Z. There are six main components. One of them, like you mentioned earlier, was enterprise content management, and if I literally went around the wheel of the pie, we could see that what used to be SharePoint Social grew up and became what is now managed and owned by Yammer, that social aspect of community. Search went to Microsoft Search. BI investments went to Power BI, and on and on, around the corner, but Content Management, ECM, always had its foothold in SharePoint, and it still does, but it really now is manifesting in SharePoint Syntex, now Microsoft Syntex, just like you said. So it really is a huge investment, a huge evolution, but also to address everything that people were doing or trying to do with ECM, but now in this modern era, to be able to do it at scale, and to do it with less of the tactical work and doing more of the – the business value that the people can own. CHRIS MCNULTY: Yeah, scale is really one of the things that we're mindful of. And so one of the signals that we've looked at, looking at some of the analyst research is that the world is on track to have 130 billion terabytes of unstructured files and videos and documents, and all the rest, in just 3 years. And to kind of tear that down into just the Microsoft side of that, every day, on average, our customers add 1.6 billion new documents to M365, and then tomorrow, we wake up and we do another billion-six. And that kind of scale, even inside of a single organization, is just mind-boggling. When we think about some of the innovations that we brought to market, and our colleagues have brought to market, around automation, certainly, the Power Platform is a great way to have a structured process around data and experience and reporting, and it's really powerful, but when it comes back to the content that people use, you know, to capture – I don't know, notes about a podcast or recordings or decisions or contracts or proposals, all of these things are the lifeblood of organizations, and they flow in and out of an organization with people who live outside. If there is one automation tool people are using to try to make sense of it, it might be Outlook, but fundamentally, it's just too much for people to keep track of. MARK KASHMAN: And I heard one of our colleagues, Karuana, in a pre-Ignite call, literally just describe her inbox as she's got her hands thrown up for the next week or two, but if it were in a more structured way, or just in a way that wasn't such a disconnected-type information sharing, if it was a little bit more structured for her and teams, and take that to the next level for the things that really need to be archived and distributed and shared in the right way, with the right automated process behind it, I can hear, even in her voice – you know, to do that in something like Outlook would – it is and would be a nightmare for a lot of people, especially at the scale that you just described. And knowing some of our tools that help automate, obviously the AI behind it, I know one other important component which you've been driving from a partner program perspective, but with this evolution to Microsoft Syntex, and all of the tendrils that kind of make the art of the possible even more possible, how would you describe the ecosystem in this era of Syntex? CHRIS MCNULTY: I think it's waking up. You know, I don't want to rob too much from things I expect we're going to talk to Alan about, because we've done some prep work with him as well, but it's been a very interesting time. Like things have been relatively quiet for a number of years, and we've seen kind of a huge growth rate pop in content management across the cloud. And a lot of that growth is happening beyond that core set of services for content sharing and collaboration in – well, business processes, in search, in areas like e-signature, which is one of the things that we're readying for Syntex. And one of our hypotheses is that we have all of this cloud power that's out there, and content management sits sort of right next to both business process and productivity. And at its worst, what people used to describe ECM as, ECM is the most expensive place to put documents that nobody ever looks at ever again. So you can build all the workflows you'd like, but it's not meaningful, unless you keep a human element in it. And so how do we take all of this scale and all of this power, and frankly, all of this AI, and make it accessible to people through the apps they use every day? You know, one of the things that we took forward from Microsoft Viva is the importance of not taking a rip-and-replace approach to the platform, of not standing up something that is completely brand new with a whole new set of experiences, which is why Viva is based on and delivered through Teams and the rest of M365. And we take a similar approach. It definitely has a strong heritage, coming from SharePoint, for how it interacts with content, but making sure that we have rich experiences that you can get to, through Word, through Outlook, and through the rest of the apps that you use every day in M365. MARK KASHMAN: And that's important because, first, with the IT hat who might be reviewing "how do I put this in place … what does it run on … are there any security measures I need to be aware of that are new, that aren't what I'm used to with SharePoint, Exchange and of course Teams," you know, as a frontend and a backend to a lot of that. So if I – if I take on a – you know, the CISO and ITDMs, look at it, and go, "Look this is a – a benefit to the investments we've already made," over time – a lot of our content is already in the right place. It's just going to get better tagged, maybe even better used because of that tagging and the exposure through some of the discovery mechanisms, or the investments that are coming for Search. So if I take off the IT hat, I know there's another component, you know, so that people just start to wrap their heads around "what is Syntex … how do I get it … what do I need to do and what value does it bring to me?" Can you shine a little light on the commercial model that probably is evolving, but I think, if anybody on this – audience, just assume that it's new to them, what – what does that commercial model look like for Mic – Microsoft Syntax? CHRIS MCNULTY: Yeah, so one of the things you'll hear us talking about, increasingly, as we roll out new capabilities, is the pay-as-you-go model. We're mindful that there are core capabilities in Syntex, tagging documents, building new ones, electronic signature, summarization, translation, all the rest. There are some people who are hardcore content consumers and generators who need to use those capabilities every day, but for every one of then, there's 10, 20 or 50 people in the organization who might need to do that once a month, or once a year. And so, increasingly, we're shifting to a pay-as-you-go model. So all of those services and capabilities can be distributed, as I mentioned, without buying and extra seat license for anyone who might need them. All we are focused on is who are our Microsoft 365 commercial users, and then allowing those services to be available on a pay-as-you-go basis, so just as couple of cents per page to tag a document, or to get it translated, providing much more flexibility in how people get access to them and making sure that you're not paying for things that you don't need and don't use. MARK KASHMAN: I think that's going to resonate really well, both with how the technology works – like that just makes sense when you describe it, but also in that consumption space. You know, when people see the value and they do use it, that will be the cost, and if people aren't using it, then the cost isn't going to be something that just is almost like unused, the lease that you've never used to drive the car. It's when you drive the car that those costs will – will come through, for good reason. CHRIS MCNULTY: Well, there's a lot that I can say about this, but there's plenty of other people far more knowledgeable than me who can talk about our vision in this space. MARK KASHMAN: Yeah, so before we jump into today's discussion with Ian and Alan, we did want to pause and play an audio clip of Jeff Teper, who is President of Collaborative Apps and Platforms at Microsoft, which under his team includes Syntex. And from his Syntex breakout session from the Microsoft Ignite 2022 show, this audio clip gives a really nice framing to, what is Microsoft Syntex and why Microsoft went this way. AUDIO CLIP/JEFF TEPER: Hello, everyone, we're thrilled to be here with you today to share our new innovations that put people at the center with content seamlessly integrated into collaboration and workflows. My name's Jeff Teper, and I'm the President of Collaborative Apps and Platforms at Microsoft, and I'm joining you here today from Microsoft Studios. The amount of content created for collaboration in business processes is growing dramatically, and we're honored that so many of you have chosen the Microsoft Cloud as your foundation for content collaboration. You're creating over 1.6 billion new documents in Microsoft 365, every day. That's over 10 times versus just 5 years ago. And this growth will continue with increased internal and external collaboration and the digitization of work in the cloud. By industry estimates, we'll have over 130 billion terabytes of unstructured content by 2025, and organizations are already spending over $46 billion a year to store and manage that content, but all too often, critical information remains locked up in disconnected silos, or even stored as paper in warehouses. This scale creates real challenges and exciting opportunities for a better solution, one that builds on your existing investments but brings a breakthrough from new technologies, augmenting the lifecycle of content management so people can be more effective, and organizations can drive their transformations with more agility at lower costs. What's needed is a novel approach to enhance, connect, manage and build your content at scale. We call this emerging area, content AI. To harness the power of content AI, we're very excited today to introduce Microsoft Syntex. It's a comprehensive new set of capabilities that bring content AI into the flow of work. CHRIS MCNULTY: So it's always great to hear Jeff outline the whats and whys of any technology, and I'm personally especially excited to hear him frame Microsoft Syntex for us today. We hope that he…
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