Get all the top ESPC 2023 Keynote highlights in Amsterdam from two Microsoft MVPs, Vlad Catrinescu and Gokan Ozcifci!
Watch my 60+ courses on Pluralsight
Video Summary
Here are the key points from the video:
- Exciting Keynote Highlights: The keynote at the European SharePoint Conference featured new announcements and updates, including the latest on Microsoft 365 and AI innovations.
- Microsoft Teams Updates: The new version of Microsoft Teams (Teams V2) is now live, offering faster performance and new features, including custom immersive spaces with Mesh.
- SharePoint Enhancements: SharePoint is getting new branding capabilities, allowing for custom fonts and more beautiful site designs, making it easier to match company identities without extensive custom development.
- SharePoint Premium: SharePoint Syntex has been rebranded as SharePoint Premium, integrating advanced features like data extraction and e-signatures, making it more appealing and accessible to users.
- SharePoint Embedded: A new feature called SharePoint Embedded allows third-party and first-party applications to leverage SharePoint’s repository services, enhancing data management and compliance within Microsoft 365.
For more information, read the transcript blog below, or watch the video above!
Video Transcript
Hello everyone, we’re so glad to be here in Amsterdam at the amazing European SharePoint Conference. I’m here again with my good friend Goen. Goen, how are you doing?
“Wonderful, thank you so much. How are you, Vlad?”
“I’m doing great, Goen. You’re from Europe, and I feel like I always see you in North America at all the North American events. How does it feel to have such an amazing conference in Europe and be able to connect with your local peers?”
“It’s amazing, like seeing all those industry experts, leaders, and Microsoft people coming down to one big event, talking about M365, the future of collaboration, and all the AI stuff is just simply amazing. We’ve got a lot of new stuff to share with you guys, and I’ll give it back to you to make the introduction.”
“Awesome. So, we actually just came out of the keynote not even 20 minutes ago. The keynote ended and wow, we had so many Microsoft people, it was crazy. But something that I like, especially at the European SharePoint Conference, you know when you go to a keynote, it’s always in the morning and I’m not a morning person as a lot of people now know. You get there, you wake up super early. What I love about ESPC is that they have this amazing show before every keynote, and this time we had these light suits that were dancing with some really energetic music. That really wakes you up, puts you in the mood, like I’m excited to be here, I’m excited to learn, and I’m happy to be here. I really love that. I was expecting that at the end of the show it was just Jeff Teper and all the crew just saying like, ‘Hey,’ but that wasn’t the case. No, they said they would like to have the suits as well, so I don’t think it was them, but we never know. We never saw the faces, so it might have been Jeff in that dancing suit as well. I guess we’ll never know. But then we went into the content, and what an amazing keynote it was. I’ll have to say, when I got into that keynote, I was a bit expecting them to just do Ignite all over again because that’s what happens a lot of the time at conferences, especially when you’re so close to a big conference like Ignite where Microsoft announces so many things. They don’t usually have announcements just one week later, but we actually had some cool announcements, brand new stuff today in the keynote. We’ll talk about that in a few minutes here, but I was so excited that it was not Ignite. It was different. One of the things that I loved, and Jeff is always a great speaker, but I loved how the Microsoft team adapted the keynote to this crowd. Jeff really, I mean Jeff always starts by thanking the community of course, but in the content, he said that we know that AI stuff and the new innovations are what goes in the press, but don’t worry, more than half of our team is focused on building things for today, on making SharePoint, Teams, and the whole M365 faster and more stable. So, we’re not only working on brand new shiny things, we still have more than half the team making your lives better today even if you don’t have a Copilot license. That makes me extremely happy because that shows that Jeff Teper’s team knows that they have struggles today within the actual platform. They know not everything is perfect. They work with the shiny stuff, as you said, but they face the real world and they have to make the platform better with the actual stuff of today. So, that makes me very happy.
What did we talk about today? We talked about three main things in the keynote, right? The first one, which I’m sure is no surprise to anybody, Copilot. Copilot was of course there. Then we talked about Microsoft Teams, and then we ended with, we kept the best for last, or at least you know SharePoint is dear to my heart, we kept SharePoint for last to close out the show. So, for Copilot, Goen, any highlights? What did they show?
“It was basically a recap of all what we knew, like how you could use Copilot within the collaborative apps within PowerPoint, Outlook, Excel, Word, and so on. But one thing I have to say, what really shocked me or like I was not aware of, is that you could rephrase the Copilot responses on your own tone or on your own language style of speaking. It was like, ‘Make it sound like me.’ There you go. As a non-native American, I always aim to make mistakes or as a French, it’s straightforward, you know, like it’s like, ‘Oh, go to the point.’ And by clicking on one button and saying like, ‘Hey, make it on my tone,’ that was simply amazing. So, I think I’m going to use it every single day now, just you know, the response of the Copilot, bring them into my mail or Teams channel or Teams chat. Phenomenal stuff. So, big hats off. But now, now I’m a bit scared I’m never going to know if you wrote the email or if you just had AI.”
“It’s going to be a mix. Anyways, they’re going to put stuff in AI and then copy-paste it to me on Facebook. I’m a bit scared about that. But other than that, on Copilot, I think there was nothing really new. We saw some of the same videos about Copilot in Excel, Copilot in PowerPoint, Copilot in Word and Outlook and everything, and of course Copilot in Teams. We had the M365 chat, which is Copilot that allows it to really ask it any question wherever in M365. But then it got a bit more exciting with Teams. So, at Ignite last week, there were quite a few announcements about Teams, and I was there in the Teams expert booth, so I had to learn all of them by heart. The biggest announcement, the new version of Teams, so Teams V2 is now live, not only on the Windows client but also on the web. As somebody that uses Teams on the web a lot because I have so many tenants, I’m so happy. The first thing I did was go there, click the button, and switch to the new Teams. So, that was super exciting. Teams, again, two times faster, which brings us to the point that Jeff was making. We still have people working on making the existing Teams better for everybody. Then I think there’s some Mesh stuff you really like.”
“Yes, so being able to create rooms and build those immersive spaces where you can just invite people, collaborate, talk to them is simply amazing. But what’s even better is that they announced that soon, early 2024, we could have custom immersive spaces, so we can build with Copilot rooms, spaces like we wish them to be. There was a video, pretty amazing, where people could just talk to Copilot and say, ‘Make me that room cozy,’ or ‘Bring this to the early 50s,’ and your room would be looking like that. So, that’s pretty amazing, to be honest.”
“Are you looking forward to making Mesh look like your childhood in your early 50s?”
“50s? Like, 50s? But I did not know about Copilot in Mesh last week. I knew about Mesh. By the way, for everybody, it’s in public preview right now. Mesh will be GA in January 2024, so Mesh as a whole really, really soon. But I did not know about Copilot in Mesh, and that will make it so much more fun to design a space that people love. And talking about Teams, we also had some cool numbers, by the way. 320 million monthly active users of Teams. That’s a lot of people. That’s a big jump, and Teams just keeps growing and growing and growing. So, it’s amazing to see more companies be on Teams, and hopefully, we’re going to have to work with Slack less and less as we move people to Microsoft Teams.”
“I guess you’re making reference to some tweet conversations from…”
“That’s top. Never mind, never mind, never mind. Then we went to SharePoint.”
“Okay, so SharePoint. SharePoint, our love. Then we talked about SharePoint, and for me, and I mean this conference now, it’s called ESPC. It used to be called the European SharePoint Conference. I think even when I did the introduction, I said we’re at the European SharePoint Conference instead of the new name, which is just ESPC. I guess old habits are a bit tough to change, but it’s still SharePoint in my heart. But wow, I’m so looking forward to all the stuff in SharePoint. The brand center, so we’re going to be able, as a client, you’re going to be able to add your own custom fonts in SharePoint. So, we know that SharePoint is your intranet, and you want it to match your custom identity, but for so many years, if you wanted it to truly look good, to truly follow your brand, you needed to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars to developers that all they do is break stuff, right? Developers, not going to comment on that. But you had to pay a lot of money to make custom solutions for things as simple as a custom font. But now those are coming out of the box, and not only that, but also the ability to create truly beautiful sites. I mean, modern SharePoint made sites way more beautiful, but what we’ve seen in the keynote with the different layers that you can add stuff, the different ways we can position things, I can’t wait to try it. It almost feels like a public website builder, like a Wix or something, but enterprise-ready in SharePoint. So, really looking forward to that.”
“I’m disappointed you didn’t tell SharePoint Server 2010, where we did build those phenomenal, you know, Ferrari SharePoint sites. I was going to make a joke about SharePoint on-prem. You know how Microsoft said, talking about numbers, by the way, 2.3 billion documents daily uploaded to SharePoint. That’s a lot of documents. And remember the book we wrote a couple of years ago on how to increase SharePoint performance? I’m sure the farms we built following that book could handle 2.3 billion documents a day, right? Not going to commence either. We should try it. We should rebuild a SharePoint farm and see how many documents we can upload in a day and have it not break. But 2.3 billion documents in a day is just crazy, tremendous, to be honest. It feels almost impossible to manage and handle, and Microsoft can do it without any downtime. It feels normal. Those numbers feel normal, and that’s where it actually gets tricky. That’s where you see that Jeff Steeper’s team is doing an amazing job. It feels like normal. Yeah, 2.3 billion documents standing there, just this many zeros. If only I had a dollar for each document per day, I’d be really happy. A penny, a penny, a penny. I’ll take a penny as well. I’ll be happy with that.
But other than that, for SharePoint, what else do we talk about? Goen Premium, SharePoint Premium, Syntex. Syntex was the tool that I was using for the last year. I’ve been using it, been evangelizing it, been trying to sell this to customers. And Jeff did tell us one thing: the branding. The branding was not that optimal, although all the new features we got into that, like data extraction, e-signatures, the management, the project Archimedes, all of those stuff that probably could handle all the issues we had today. Well, due to the branding, it was almost not visible. And I think they made a great job to rebrand this as SharePoint Premium. And we heard that people, when they see SharePoint, they get automatically interested. They made three main categories, basically SharePoint Syntex, just take it out and put it into SharePoint Premium. I feel a bit sad because Syntex is going away. I still have the swag. Syntex is going away, but I’m extremely happy because it’s back in SharePoint. So the SharePoint love is back, and everyone is going to try the new models, use AI Builder credits to build the data extraction models, use the queries, search e-signatures. They’ll go for M365 backup, archive all the stock we have within Syntex. It’s going to be loved typically now, not only by the Syntex lovers but tremendously by every SharePoint lover. So I’m extremely happy.
I was just thinking as you’re explaining that if you love something, let it go, and if it’s meant to be, it will come back, right? Videos in SharePoint, they left us in Office 365 Video and Stream, back in SharePoint. So many things. It was way before Microsoft Syntex. It was called SharePoint Syntex from SharePoint Syntex, Microsoft Cortex, SharePoint Syntex, Microsoft Syntex, and now back to SharePoint Premium. So, you know, kind of everybody tries to do their own thing, but they know SharePoint is home in the end, so they come back to where they belong. East, West, SharePoint best. No, East, West, SharePoint is best. There we go. We’ll take it. I love that.
And the last part of the keynote was about something, again, we mentioned at the beginning of the video. We had a brand new announcement that I was honestly not expecting, and it was published today at the same time on Tech Community, the public preview of SharePoint Embedded. Goen, can you tell us a bit? And I mean, again, we’ve learned about this 20 minutes ago, so we probably should do a more in-depth video in the future. But the first look, what is SharePoint Embedded? So SharePoint Embedded looks really like the repository as a service we have in SharePoint Syntex or Microsoft Syntex, which is now SharePoint. It’s always so confusing with all of those names, but it’s like the repository as a service where first-party and third-party people can just build applications relied on the M365 services and bring that in SharePoint. So basically, you would have a SharePoint without the SharePoint interface. You just go to your SharePoint, bring that data, and build your custom apps. So that’s what they, I think, call SharePoint Embedded, which was the repository as a service or RaaS as we have known. But again, we’ll have to double-check. We’ll have to see. I’ve quickly seen the images. It really looked like the repository service. I understood the same thing as you, like a barebone SharePoint for third-party vendors to store data while allowing companies to still use their compliance tools, security, and keeping the data most important in M365, where Copilot can use it. You can add retention labels. You can really add everything around it, third-party as well as first-party. So I can actually go within my organization, build that app, and consume data from a stack where I have no actions to do and consume that in my app. And Microsoft is using it. You mentioned first-party for Microsoft Loop and Microsoft Designer, fully built on SharePoint Embedded. So again, great to have those for us.
And that’s about it for the keynote. Something I forgot to mention, and Goen, just last minute, I love the names of the customers they showed, especially when talking about AI, when talking about SharePoint Embedded. A lot of the European customers that they showed, because let’s be honest, Europe at the beginning of the cloud were not the first ones to go in the cloud, right? And especially Germany. If we talk about Germany, they’re one of the first. They don’t really want to go to the cloud. They love their on-prem. But it’s amazing now to see how many European companies were on that list of big customers, first ones to use Copilot, first ones to use SharePoint Embedded. How did that feel for you? Well, honestly, it feels priceless seeing some names where I’ve been working before, seeing some names that are ex-industry leaders in Europe being leading products and giving insights to Microsoft. That’s priceless. You know, like always seeing those giants in the US is good, but finally some European leaders into that list. And hopefully soon we’ll get other countries from Asia, from APAC, maybe from one day from Africa, leading us projects and saying like, hey, this is the way that we should go. It’s priceless.
Awesome, Goen. I think we covered it all. Now, well, first of all, thank you so much for being on the channel again. I feel like every other week Goen is here. I’m going to have to get you some swag. And talking about swag, one of the best parts of being at an in-person conference is that we can now get swag again. So thank you very much for watching. Me and Goen will go swag hunting and maybe even do a quick video after of all the cool swag we got at ESPC. We’ll see. That would be a cool idea. So thank you very much, everyone, for watching. Make sure you like the video, subscribe to the channel to get the latest M365 news, and until next time.
