Show notes
Have you heard? You can now sign into Microsoft Lists with your Microsoft account (MSA) - now in preview: lists.live.com. This is a lightweight version of the Microsoft Lists app designed for small business and individual use in conjunction with your MSA. In this episode, we talk with Miceile Barrett and Ben Truelove from the Lists engineering and design teams respectively. We discuss the innerworkings of the what, how, and why of the service and primary design elements that make it easy and powerful to track and manage information no matter what size the team - in work or life. Click here for this episode's corresponding blog post. Full transcript below and if you click here. Social and Info Links: SharePoint Facebook | @SharePoint | SharePoint Community Blog | UserVoice Mark Kashman |@mkashman [co-host] Chris McNulty |@cmcnulty2000 [co-host] Miceile Barrett - Senior product manager | LinkedIn | Twitter [guest] Ben Truelove - Principal designer | LinkedIn | Twitter [guest] #MicrosoftLists (Twitter) Resources: Sign up and try the Microsoft Lists - MSA Preview: https://lists.live.com "Try Microsoft Lists with your Microsoft account (MSA)" (Preview launch blog) Get to know the Microsoft Lists - MSA Preview (demo video) 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: CollabDays - Bletchley Park, England (Feb.23.2022) + @CollabDays_Park Enterprise Connect (Mar.21-24.2022, Orlando, FL) Teams Nation 2022 (Mar.23.2022) CollabDays - Cologne (Mar.2022 - no specific day announced yet) Document Strategy Forum (DSF) 2022 (April 4-6.2022, Chicago, IL) Microsoft 365 Conference (in-person, Apr.5-7.2022, Las Vegas, NV) AIIM 2022 (Apr.27-29, Denver, CO) SEF 2022 (planned for in-person with a few sessions delivered virtually, May.4-5.2022, Sweden) 365 EduCon (May.9-12.2022, Seattle, WA) Microsoft Lists workshop on-demand Follow The Intrazone at aka.ms/TheIntrazone TRANSCRIPT MARK KASHMAN: Welcome to the Intrazzone, a show about the Microsoft 365 Intelligent Intranet. I'm Mark Kashman, flying Han Solo this week this week, to shine a light saber light on Lists. Heck, this episode is bound to make the Kessel Run in less than 12 parsecs. It will outrun the data center ships in milliseconds flat, not those on-premises, multi-minute bulk cruisers. I'm talking about the big AI-driven cloud ships. Trust me, this episode will be fast enough for you to upload and download your lists before we even know it, just like that (snaps fingers). On today's episode, we dig into the inner workings of the Microsoft Lists - MSA Preview that Microsoft launched on January 31st, 2022. We're going to uncover the what and how and why of this service, and the design elements throughout. In a few minutes, I'll be joined by Miceile Barrett and Ben Truelove, two of my colleagues from Lists Engineering and Design teams, respectively, but first, before we meet up with Miceile and Ben, have you heard, you can now sign up for the Lists preview using your Microsoft account, which is often referred to as an MSA. This is a lightweight version of the Microsoft Lists app that's designed for small business and individual use, you guessed it, in conjunction with your MSA. You may now already have a separate login if you are already working with Microsoft Lists as a part of the Microsoft 365 business plans where you use your or ID. The good news is, you can do both, and we hope that you give this MSA preview a try. One of the big MSA Lists updates is the new top-level URL. I'm going to say it twice, so that you can type it in right now, Lists.live.com. That's Lists.live.com. Go ahead, type it into your browser now. I'll wait. I'm very excited to see what you see on the other end when that resolves to the new list experience with your MSA. Go ahead. I'll wait. (Music.) Now, we would love for you to participate. We hope that you start creating and sharing Lists with your work colleagues, partners, your soccer team, or your neighborhood volunteer groups, whatever suits your fancy, to test and try out the MSA preview to the fullest. We've designed the app off the core of Microsoft Lists, plus we introduce a lot of new experiences like a new tabbed view experience for all of your views, or that you can share by just typing in somebody's name, draw them in by typing their name, their email address into the person column, or a better way to work with images in-line and a lot more. And of course, we carry forward all of the great Microsoft Lists product experience that you may already know. Either way, you're going to find a lot of great ways to track and manage your information for work and for life. A couple of examples I've been using the new Lists app MSA experience to track who's who on my soccer team, tracking things like what position they play, and of course their email and telephone number, those kinds of things. I set up one classic example that we heard a lot of people wanted to do, either for movie clubs are book clubs, where you can track what movie or book you're going to read or watch next. Or like our friends Stormin' Norman Young in Canada, you can use it to track your home projects. That's a real one out there. Stormin_30 on Twitter. Maybe you want to create an ongoing list of gifts for friends, families or coworkers. Or this is one of my favorites that I came across on Twitter after we announced this by one of our friends and colleagues out there Simon Hudson. He created a quote "I got issues" list that helps him track and manage all of his worries and woes, so they're not worrying or woe-ing him anymore. It's real. I saw it on Twitter. Anyway, it is time to liberate yourself from coordination chaos. It is time to clear your brain space and get organized. In short, it's time to hear more about and then try the Microsoft Lists - MSA Preview. The best place to start beyond this episode is at the preview launch blog. And I've got a short aka.ms link to share, so you can go right to the blog. Just type in aka.ms/mslists/blog/msapreview. All right, enough of the preamble. Let's get to what you are really here for, to hear more about the Microsoft Lists - MSA Preview from my engineering and design colleagues, Miceile Barrett and Ben Truelove, aka, some of our best list experts here at Microsoft. And remember, as Han says, "It is not wise to up a Wookie," especially when they're injecting JSON to customize and format a choice column. Good choice to stick around. Let us not upset Chewie #botharmsintact. Okay, enough of the silliness. Let's hop into the audible Let us not upset, Chewy, hashtag both arms intact. Okay, enough of the silliness. Let's hop into the audible Millennium Falcon. And here we go with audible Miceile and Ben. (Music.) So you've heard me talk a little bit about this thing we call the Lists MSA preview, but that's not as exciting as really hearing it from the people at Microsoft who are making it, the product, designing it, thinking about all the use cases. I would like to welcome to the show, to the Intrazone, Miceile Barrett and Ben Truelove. Ben, Miceile, welcome to the Intrazone. BEN TRUELOVE: Thanks, Mark. MICEILE BARRETT: Thanks, Mark. MARK KASHMAN: So nice to have you here and so nice to have you here in this special time. I bet that you both are buzzing. This is the – the week of launch, just for everybody listening. First starting with Miceile, can you give our audience a refresher of what you focus on, here at Microsoft? MICEILE BARRETT: Absolutely. You're right this week has been crazy with the launch. But like Mark said, my name is Miceile Barrett. And I am a Product Manager on the Lists app. I started at Microsoft in 2016 and actually joined the SharePoint team, where I worked on what were then called SharePoint Lists and Files. So it's been a really awesome journey for me seeing the product evolve and grow. And I'm super excited to be on the podcast, especially during this week, when we're getting all of your feedback coming in. MARK KASHMAN: What is this thing you called SharePoint Lists? I don't know what that means. MICEILE BARRETT: We don't – we don't want to talk about them anymore. MARK KASHMAN: That's right. Lists are lists now. All right, Ben, similar question. Can you share what your focus is, here at Microsoft? BEN TRUELOVE: I am a designer here at Microsoft. I've been here since 1997. And we focus on the user experience. So anytime that the software is in contact with a human and helps out humans, that is what we do is we make those experiences better from either the visuals to how it behaves and the basic flow of information and tasks. MARK KASHMAN: Nice. So UX is your area, just in case we say the short, shorter version of UX, user experience. And really the design of Lists, what people interact with, for the most part, and of course, a lot of other things as they're interacting with Lists in other applications. So a lot of great work I know that you both are doing and have done. This conversation, as we've already said at the front of the show, is all about this launch, this recent Microsoft Lists - MSA Preview, and our audience doesn't really have a lot of detail on what that means. They may know what Microsoft Lists are, they may have worked with SharePoint Lists 10 or 15 years ago. They might have, you know, right before Ben joined Microsoft, been using Windows 95, but we're going to really focus on this MSA preview. So Miceile, I'll throw it to you because I know you've been working probably the most on this of anybody on this call, as far as the end to end of what is this thing? Can you give us your 101 of what is this Microsoft Lists - MSA Preview? MICEILE BARRETT: Absolutely. And Microsoft Lists - MSA Preview is quite a mouthful. So I kind of want to take it word by word here. So Microsoft Lists was an app that launched in 2020. And you could access the full power of Lists directly through your Azure Active Directory or your corporate account. And we saw a lot of value that our customers were getting from that product. And so over the last two years, we spent time trying to build something that anyone could use to get that value. And so like I mentioned, in that launch in 2020, it was really focused on enterprises and existing people inside of the Microsoft 365 business area. And we wanted to launch something that would give that power to anyone who wants to use it. And so that's what that MSA piece is. And for those who don't know, MSA stands for Microsoft Account, and so could be something that's Outlook email, it could be something that's, you know, @gmail.com. It's really something that you've set up for your personal Microsoft account. And we're calling it a preview because we just launched it and we do have a cap on it for now. We were only letting in the first 200,000 customers that want to sign up and experience the preview. So you'll sign up today if you want to get into the preview. And I think the thing that I really want to emphasize is that this can be used by anybody, whether you want to use it for managing something related to your pet's medical history, to running your hobby, all the way to a small business that just needs to organize and track things. This free offering is something that you can use and take advantage of. And so I think that it's really awesome to see that power getting put into the hands of anyone who has a simple Microsoft account. And it's been great. Like Mark said, we launched this new offering on Monday at 8 a.m., so it's been live for just about a week. And we're seeing some really great usage adoption right now. MARK KASHMAN: I think that's important. The timestamp of the launch was January 31st, 2022, 8 a.m., all pistons firing. I think the other thing, as you were breaking down the parts that I thought was really good, you know, each word kind of leans into explaining what this is. The Microsoft account that we're leveraging is really your authentication mechanism. So if you have Outlook.com, if you're using OneDrive Consumer, or for personal or family, that's the same Microsoft account. If you have an MSA already, you don't need to get a new one. If you don't have an MSA, they're free, very easy to get. It's just another way of telling Microsoft, "I am this person, and I'd like to use that service." That service is Microsoft Lists, in that context that Microsoft Lists MSA preview I am this person. And I'd like to use that service. That service is Microsoft Lists in that context that Miceile has just walked through. So this is nothing short of a really big lift for the team. Ben, I know we're gonna get into features and whatnot with both you and Miceile, but I want to also take a step through the broader design strokes of just like Miceile said, we've been pitching Lists for a long time, whether it's the lowercase L with SharePoint, or uppercase with L with Microsoft Lists. But we've also kind of said lists are lists are lists. It's that same common platform. Can you talk about how that's carried over from a design perspective, or carried forward or, or however you might want to think about when you think of Lists in the commercial space, and now Lists with the MSA preview, how do you think about it? BEN TRUELOVE: Yeah, well, I'm going to start off a little metaphysical here, in that – so I like to say that everything is a list, and if you really get down to it, everything is a list, down DNA. The DNA of our lists of course, started off in SharePoint. But when we created the Microsoft Lists product, the one thing that we wanted to do to evolve it is to make it more open and adaptable, but still have that power, to still have that ability to organize and track things. Everyone organizes and tracks things, from a grocery list to large customer databases, for example. But we wanted to really bring that to the masses, as you would say, and make it easy for everyone to use. MARK KASHMAN: So are you saying that Lists are the DNA of life? BEN TRUELOVE: Yes. DNA is actually a list. MARK KASHMAN: I like it. I mean, I know it's one of the three core elements of SharePoint. And for our audience, who has for many years been tuned into, not just this show, but the ways of SharePoint, all up, I think that's one big statement. Before we get into the first thing, I want to ask Miceile, that's kind of product oriented, and a big decision that was made for this specific preview was the core of everything that we're talking about is founded in based on SharePoint. This is now SharePoint opening to how you both have articulated to new audiences, ones that are not maybe our enterprise or commercial customers, but a broader audience of smaller business, individuals, families, friends, all of those things. And to know that opening those doors to SharePoint, that's extremely new. That, I know, has never been something that SharePoint has really taken a foot into. MICEILE BARRETT: It is absolutely the first time anything like that has been done. It's been three days, and so far, it's good. I think you're touching on a great point there, Mark, where, you know, when you look back at Lists, and you know, 10 – 15 years ago, they were nestled inside of SharePoint. And they were really a very powerful database that not a lot of average users could come in and get a lot out of. And we've seen a lot of improvements. You know, i…
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