Category Archives: My 2 Cents

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Delivering More Usable Power Apps

When folks start digging in with Power Apps (at least in my experience) they want to accomplish something business-related – trying to add functionality that was missing in their daily activity, their processes, their interactions with others, etc. Power Apps is great at that.

What early Power Apps makers (non-IT) don’t usually consider at first is branding, design, or accessibility. They build something that makes sense for them alone. The scope is one person or one team – which is completely fine – rather than a wider organizational view. For many projects that might be the end of it: “Boom, it works. Process improved”.

In some cases, those relatively small, “home-grown”, simple solutions gain a broader adoption (it gets more popular than originally intended…) – which can bring with it additional considerations… One of those “now more important” topics is UX/design.

As the size and capabilities of an organization increase, app makers often have more policies to follow and resources available. Branding standards and corporate color templates seem to be the first elements that get added. Designers are part the mix. As more resources become available within the org, there can be a variety of UX/design roles that include researchers, designers, and more. These folks can bring creativity and experience to the table that notably improve the look, feel, and functionality of apps.

If they are available in your organization, learn what resources are available and when to get these folks involved.

Investments in design and UX can potentially yield solutions with higher usability and user adoption rates. The same usability goals and techniques that apply to Power Apps also work with other apps and interfaces – this includes custom development as well as dashboards and cards in Teams and Power BI…

In an organization with established development ecosystem, processes and standards are likely being leveraged. Folks know what teams and resources are available. The quickly growing non-IT Power Platform maker population however might not be aware of these resources if they’re not looped-in with the established development org.
As a Power Apps enabled organization, strive to:

  • Learn the differences between the roles: UX, UI, designers (and others)
  • Understand the value UX folks bring to app development
  • Learn when to engage, how to best engage, and what to expect when engaging UX folks

With the popularity of Microsoft’s Power Platform and Power Apps, we’ve added lots of new folks to the maker community. These makers have new (or new to them) tools that enable them to build impactful business solutions but usually don’t have experience satisfying user experience needs of their users. The more you can integrate the UX expertise that’s available out there, the better the organization will be served by these dynamic app-generating efforts.

Note: This quick post was intended to make PA folks aware of UX resources… It’s a far cry from digging in to all the details, benefits, nuances, etc. that you’ll run into if you have the opportunity to work with that crowd. There can be a lot, but there’s also a lot of potential benefit for your users and more. Let me know what your experience is!

References:

More Coming… (Getting input from UX folks…)

Hey UX experts, let me know what other references and links I should add here!

  • What are some good resources for understanding the different roles?
  • What are good resources for understanding why, when and how to effectively engage the different roles?
  • Are there research articles that support effectiveness of UX when applied to the dev process?
people throwing pins

YOU get Copilot and YOU get Copilot…!

There was much rejoicing. Microsoft recently announced expanded availability of Copilot to individuals and organizations. Pretty good news that many of us will be digging into.

Aside from the technical topics (how to use it, how to enable it, etc.), there are logistical reasons this new announcement is good for individuals and orgs. With the new licensing and availability, we can jump in with a more measured approach. We can move forward with the “crawl, walk, run” approach we’ve adopted rather than committing funding or confusing users before we’re ready to deploy new capabilities.

First of all, individuals are now enabled to sign up and start using Copilot via several different options immediately. This gives self-motivated folks head starts to learn what they want and need to adapt in a rapidly changing environment. They don’t need to wait for their organization to sign up, they can use personal accounts (yes, with additional cost) to get the same functionality.

For small to medium sized companies, Copilot is now available without the 300-seat minimum, which was really irritating for the SMB crowd as it left them out in the cold while larger companies could implement more easily. For large companies, they can now implement on a more reasonable adoption path – starting with fewer folks to dig in and learn, figure out best practices, create or acquire learning paths and content, and more before committing significant funding to larger employee deployment and adoption.

As with any new technology, the best approach is a balanced one – even when product marketing is screaming to go, go, go!

Good luck!

close up of hand holding text over black background

Drafts. I have a lot to not say.

I went looking for a post I knew I had started jotting down but hadn’t finished only to find a LOT of drafts from the past year and more. A bunch of half-finished thoughts, captured ideas, or the beginnings of things I wanted to get out there. Uff-da. So many thoughts and threads to pull on. But there’s a lot going on and changing. The world of technology, people, and the connection between the two has no shortage of issues to address. We’ll continue to have a lot of work to do to improve across the board.

A lot of the concepts I started writing are still valid and hopefully useful to someone. Many are early exercises for me to organize thoughts and pull together enough information to craft a complete story for eventual posting or a conference session. There’s going to be more about AI – it’s touching pretty much everything in the tech space. We’re still going to be talking about building and maintaining communities. There’s plenty to talk about with specific tech (Microsoft, Lists, Power Platform, and more…). And I’m still digging into concepts around learning, skilling-up, sharing solutions and business value, and more.

There’s so much content out there now. It’s noisy. EVERYONE has something to say. It’s harder to find the content that you need, when you need it, from the people you need to hear it from.

I need to do better at following through, completing thoughts, or… something. Every post doesn’t need to be a full accounting. I tend to want to cover as many of the what-ifs as I can which makes posts loooonger than they need to be. I’ll try to do better.

Friday thoughts over coffee and a blog site.
Happy New Year!

black and red typewriter

Storytelling: Internal Team Value and Impact

Around the time I was publishing my most recent article on storytelling, an acquaintance of mine was submitting a LinkedIn post with a request for examples of internal promotion stories.

I glommed on to a few details she shared in the conversation thread:

Sell the value of your team

The first was where she was “wondering how an internal team’s story can be told so that others can tell it again and sell that team’s services”. My immediate thought (as a technology consultant) was SharePoint team sites or pages. Something our community has preached for years – having a SharePoint site or page for each team so they could easily, clearly, and publicly (internal) share what their team does, who they are, how to reach them, and potentially share current and ongoing success stories. It’s not necessarily having the story to pass on as much as it is having an easy place to point folks to see the story themselves (make it part of their team’s marketing, links in email signatures, etc.).

(Edit/Note: I realize her “how” is more about how to construct a story effectively than it was about logistics or technology… I will cover more on the story writing in the follow-up post.)

As internal team functional sites shift from the SharePoint experience to the Teams experience (on the surface, SharePoint is still the engine behind Teams), teams still need (IMO) a company-facing surface to tell their story, hence the separate page or site.

The ongoing success stories part has a bit more wiggle room. There are a number of ways to facilitate this with technology. A while back it might have been done within that SharePoint site with a list, web parts, etc. For a while it might have been telling stories via Yammer. Now it might involve Viva as part of the story gathering, promotion, and distribution efforts – maybe with some Power Automate to facilitate an approval process, etc. Lots of options.

Regardless of the technology however, the organization needs to train itself to *capture* those successes and tell those stories effectively. While implementing technology can be fairly straightforward, changing the mindset, priorities, and culture are a LOT harder. (More on this in another post…)

Share the impact of your team

The second quote also struck a chord: Wanting to make the case that “clients of the storytellers … wouldn’t go without UX again”. “UX” is a specific example here, but the concept can apply to all sorts of services. The “can’t do without” subject approach is super compelling in a “what we offer” from our services sort of way. It’s so important to not just tell what your team does and how it does it, but that others – your customers (even if internally) – had such a great experience working with you that they would make it a point of not going it alone in the future when they’re doing something similar.

e.g., Why would I write my own training docs if I could work with the training team that does it every day and has built a team around writing and training. It might be a secondary (or even strong) skill for my team, but it’s their team’s primary focus. They are better at this than we are. They can apply branding and consistency where that might be an extra effort for us. We can focus on *our* primary goal of delivering this platform, product, feature, whatever…

Technology Bias and Action

My bias is towards using a technology solution as at least part of a solution – when it fits – and usually something that’s part of the Microsoft stack as that’s been my area of operation for many years. Some of these approaches could likely be implemented with other products as well depending on what your organization is invested in.

The rest of the solution will be people focused. It could be in policies, practices, habits, or company culture.

Skills…

Often neglected in these storytelling examples are the tools, skills, knowledge, and/or experience that were necessary to build and deliver the successful effort. Personally, I think it’s relevant but that’s because of the context I’m thinking in – specifically around roles, technology skills, upskilling and skill gap filling. Important, I think, but only urgent at the time you actually need those skills or solutions to replicate something or build something of your own.

Other Tagging

The skills or roles mentioned above could from one perspective be a form of tagging for your content. One taxonomy used to tag or assign context to the story. There are others though. Depending on what makes sense in your organization there might be other keywords to categorize a story. Ultimately, you want folks to find the content when they’re looking for it. Tags of any sort will help with search, with AI-based targeting, or even manually browsing. It’s important to capture tags when you’re able and have the systems configured to filter and return results on them.

Summary

These are just a few examples of the value of storytelling within an organization. There are countless others, but the value only comes by capturing, curating, and sharing them. Otherwise, the wins go uncelebrated and the gains in reproducing them or learning from their lessons are lost.

Writing and telling stories (well) is worth the time investment.
(Just don’t admit that to my high school English teachers…)

Storytelling and Context

Storytelling has been around a long time. From cave drawings, oral histories, and ancient texts to newspapers, television, and social media. It’s relevant in so many ways because the context works in our lives, in business, in community, and more. It’s been around for so long in various forms because it’s effective – because people identify with it and understand the context.

Just the other day my wife shared a book recommendation: Weekend Language: Presenting with More Stories and Less PowerPoint. And there is a LOT of storytelling chatter out there in a variety of contexts: in business, for startups, when talking about communication essentials, and more. For books alone, see the headline image above for just a few examples I pulled off my shelf.

When putting together new presentations and slide decks, we often gather a bunch of facts and info on the list of what we want to cover. But then we step back to look at how we can tell a story with all the information. We want the content to tell a story because the information makes more sense in a context (one or more). It must include context to be relevant. It needs a person, a subject, for folks to relate to how and why the information and data is relevant to them. Don’t just tell us about a new feature. Tell us who will find that new thing valuable and why it’s important to our organization. Presentation content sticks better when attendees understand what good comes from using these new nuggets of knowledge and what risks they take on by ignoring the info.

Storytelling examples in community

There are all sorts of ways that storytelling shows up in our businesses and communities. Here are a few that stand out for me when I think about contexts I often encounter:

Internal organizational example sharing. These often occur at internal user group, lunch and learn sessions, and the like. The context here is easy because it’s folks at the same company typically using similar tools and software. They’re giving a quick 10-minute ‘ish blurb on something they’ve done, built, used, or what have you and why it was successful for them. In that context there are often others that can identify with that success and extend the solution for their own department or group. It’s an easy win, an easy way to multiply ROI, and boosts morale within the org when folks see the value others bring to the table. When I’ve seen and done it myself, it usually generates excitement when folks see an example and immediately want to use it on their team. Great stuff.

The other example I see in the conference event setting is case studies. These are very often some of the most popular and well-attended sessions. It’s commonly the story of how one organization configured, used, and/or built solutions with a particular set of tools. They tell the story of who identified the problem, methods they tried, tools and what they did to skill up to use them, maybe some stumbles along the way, and then what they finally built or used and why it was a success for them. They tell it in a way that other orgs can relate, in ways other teams can understand how to extend their success to deliver success for others. What a wonderful way to build communities between organizations as well.

Startups and skills

Storytelling is rampant throughout the startup world. There are personalities, apps and services, books, and more all talking about it or pitching ways they can help you be a better storyteller. Again, it makes sense. Pitching products is often telling stories about common problems folks face and showing how their product addresses those challenges. Telling those stories effectively is critical.

Not everyone has the innate skills to tell stories well. Sometimes it seems like a natural skill that someone has. Sometimes it’s a learned skill. For a while, we saw a rush of “evangelist” roles within the technical community. These were folks that had storytelling skills and were advocating for specific tools and approaches to business issues. While that role title seems to have waned, we’re now seeing roles like “Digital Storyteller”. Organizations have identified the need for storytelling, in a variety of contexts, that show the need for skills creating content and conveying stories.

As if we needed another reminder of the importance of soft skills in addition to all the tech skills we’re required to have these days. 🙂

The Flip Side

Like anything else, there’s the not-great side of storytelling as well. There are plenty of folks that haven’t honed their skills quite yet. Some are still learning and will improve with time and effort. Then there are folks that took a wrong turn somewhere along the path and need to make corrections. There are the buzzword-bingo slinging folks that think they’re offering value but are really just talking, often with little substance. We run across them everywhere. In many cases folks can see right through it, but they continue to take up bandwidth all the same. Be nice, give them the constructive feedback when you can. The battle continues…

a woman holding a recognition award

Benefits of Community Contributing

To follow up my recent post, it would be remiss of me if I didn’t mention the potential benefits of doing community work. There are plenty of opportunities to benefit from being involved, contributing content, running events, etc.

Also, some folks might be motivated by these potential benefits beyond the benefits to the community. Some folks might get involved primarily for these benefits and there’s nothing wrong with that IMO. You can discuss intentions and judgements amongst yourselves. 🙂

To set or reset expectations, these are potential benefits. Nothing is guaranteed.

You’re almost certain to learn something.

Writing blog posts or preparing presentations/sessions (at least for me) requires digging fairly deeply into topics. It almost always leads to new topics, related topics, dependencies, and more. Some of them I’m able to dig into right away. Others I may need to chalk up to raising awareness of something that I’ll likely dig into later. Either way, I’ve skilled up. Sometimes I’ve skilled up a LOT. This is honestly one of my biggest drivers…

I find the skills topic interesting. I find that the more I learn, the more I want to learn. The more I want to try, the more I want to tell other folks what I’ve found. Topics might include the how-to steps, or how something impacts business needs, or so many other variations. On and on… Imagine what impact sharing that knowledge could have on your team, in your org, or in a wider community.

Connect skills with examples, share them in the context of your org or across verticals… Talk to me after class on this one. 🙂

Your brand may grow.

In today’s world of social media measurements any content you create is going to add to your footprint. If and when folks find your content, like it, comment on it, share it, etc. it’s raising your personal brand. It’s building a track record of your accomplishments, your knowledge, your skills, your experience, and more.

Similar things apply to businesses and organizations. Many will build community channels for just this purpose – building brand, marketing, etc. Again, not a bad thing.

These tend to be positive things for you as an individual and for organizations you may work for or represent.

Which leads to the next thing…

You may get recognized or awarded for your contributions.

Again, nothing is guaranteed. But you can’t win if you don’t participate. Each community has its own way of recognizing folks.

Badges seem to be all the rage again. If you’re participating in the right forums, sites, etc. you may be recognized in that way.

I’ve been lucky enough to be awarded as a Microsoft MVP (15 years this year!), which brings with it its own benefits. I don’t know who originally nominated me, but I am extremely thankful as it’s given me ways to contribute even more.

You might get new opportunities.

That might mean a new role, a new badge, recognition, or even new job opportunities. After all, you’re building your skills – both technical and social/soft skills and they’re all useful. Sharing is, by default, a social thing. It might get you recognized within your organization as an SME (subject matter expert) or “champion” – someone who has knowledge and experience in a particular area that can build community and mentor others.

Sharing knowledge in various communities more widely than you’ve done before tends to bring attention in the way of job opportunities as well. If you’re a consultant, it might drive some new business. If others need your skills it might lead to new job opportunities. There are a lot of options out there when folks know what skills (both SME topics and soft skills like speaking, writing, teaching, and more…) and experience you bring to the table.

References

Oh yea. There are also stickers. 😛

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Why I Do Community

Why? Why, why, why… It’s a good question and not one I often think about because I decided a while back that it’s worth the time and investment – at least for me. Let’s see if something resonates for you to get involved.

The “why” for me is a combination, if not a balance, of selfish reasons and a desire to contribute.

It’s Fun!

Reason 1. I find contributing to the community to be fun and rewarding. We are extremely fortunate to have a community full of awesome people that are fun to be with. Consumers of our content are very appreciative and take the time to say "Thanks". 

“Thank you so much for that. It’s exactly the information I was looking for.”

– Variations from attendees at different conferences, most recently at M365 Community Days in Ottawa.

Participating allows me to share experiences – other than (and often counter to…) what product marketing puts out – with folks. It fills documentation and experience gaps, it provides practical examples that may align with a certain perspective or apply to a specific vertical, and shares discoveries that others may not have figured out yet.

Share What You’ve Learned

Let’s expand on that last thing for a minute. For me, it’s a prime example for many folks to contribute to community – through a blog post, a forum answer, a video, or some other way.

Reason 2. A scenario: Someone wants to accomplish something, finds a challenge along the way, and figures out the trick, the path, or method to overcome it. Finally, they want to share what they found so others don't have to experience that same pain. I regularly hit on this same scenario. 

Self-motivated learners navigate these paths every day. Sometimes its SMEs digging in to explore and exercise platforms. Sometimes its folks doing their jobs day after day. Community contributors go another step and share what they’ve learned with others.

We need to strike a bit of a balance here IMO. I don’t want to underplay the sharing part. It can take a significant amount of time to do effectively. Creating content (writing blog posts, producing videos, etc.) seems trivial, but often requires research time, writing time, production efforts, etc. – none of which is easy. I also don’t want to overplay the sharing part into some martyr-like effort, but it’s worthwhile to understand the efforts being made by folks and the organizations that employ them.

Stay Connected

Reason 3. Working with the community allows you to stay connected with the community. 

So many examples: Organizations using similar tech, 3rd party companies offering products and services in your market, and folks in a variety of roles working with similar products and in similar verticals. It gives you exposure to what other folks are using and running into in their jobs, from their varying perspectives.

Be an Example

Reason 4. I like to contribute to hopefully be an example for others to repeat. 

This doesn’t mean folks will choose to do the same things I’m doing, but it should demonstrate that they can – and at different scopes. Not everyone needs to speak at public conferences. They can, in many more cases actually, present internally at their organizations to others that need the info they have.

I tend to operate within product-specific and geography-specific community (M365 or Power Platform in Minnesota) – But many organizations are large enough and have technical user communities that can benefit internally from similar actions (lunch and learn sessions, internal blog posts, etc.). Imagine the improved ROI for those product licenses you’re paying for if more people know how to use the tools specifically in the context of your company…

Hey, if I can do this, you can do this. Have you learned something that others might benefit from? Talk about it! Write a blog post or submit a session.

It’s Good Exercise

No, not the physical “exercise” like working out. Though, we do get a lot of steps in attending and running events.

Reason 5. Contributing to the community is a good exercise in personal and professional skills. 

Skills that are useful in our professional and personal lives like communicating, listening, writing, (public) speaking, networking, planning, and many other things. Like many of these skills, they need practice. Practice to ramp up, maintain, and eventually mentor others.

So, if you didn’t need another reason, jump in to better yourself and grow your skills.

Retrospective

I would say my experience (in the context of the current technology community) started with combination of excitement about a technology (yep, SharePoint – a little geeky) that solved some business problems (helping people) and wanting to get more comfortable speaking in front of folks.

I like to share what I know – knowledge, experience, tips and tricks, and more – if it can help someone else. It’s the same general concept that drove me to do consulting, which is a lot of the same thing but being paid for it because you’re working specifically for someone and addressing their needs and efforts.

When I worked for a consulting company, community contributions were useful for a number of reasons. It established credibility – for me and my company – in my topic/technology area. It was good marketing getting the company name out there. It looked good from a “we care about the community” perspective as an organization. That sounds like it’s trying to make us look like something we weren’t – but we were legitimately interested in building community.

Summary

This was maybe a bit more introspective and retrospective than usual. Hopefully still useful to someone. I’m sure there are other reasons I could list, but this is already longer than intended so we’ll stop here.

Get involved. It’s fun and rewarding.

Follow up:

group of person sitting indoors

Community Events – Connections

Community events can be about many things. Ours (Community Days, SharePoint Saturdays, M365 days, etc.) are about education, information sharing, and networking. They’re about connections.

Connecting sponsors with attendees, their organizations, customer prospects, potential hires, and peers.

Connecting attendees with each other, with speakers, with potential employers, and with the broader community.

Connecting speakers with their audience.

Connecting product owners with current customers and prospects.

If all goes well, people walk away from the day with LinkedIn connections, X (Twitter) followers, appointments for coffee and meetups, leads to follow-up with, and more.

Sure, education and awareness are a big part too and not to undersell that part, but it is a point in time data point. Hopefully folks walk away knowing how to do something they didn’t before and learn a few keywords or directions to look to dig deeper but the connections are even more important in that they have someone to call with questions, now or in the future.

Connections. Don’t take them for granted. Make the most of your time together. Say hello to the person sitting next to you in a session. Sit with someone new at lunch. Follow up with the person in a session that asked a question for something relevant to you. Introduce yourself to a speaker. Talk to the sponsors. Give the event producers your feedback or let them know if you’ve got a topic you’d love to talk about in the future.

man showing distress

Cloud Frustration

Am I alone? Probably not.

One of the pros and cons that come with cloud-based technologies is the speed with which things change. On the pro side, it usually means we’re getting more features, more capabilities, and more potential for business value and/or productivity gains – usually at a faster pace than were released pre-cloud. On the con side, we have the challenges of keeping up: Keeping up with how to use new features, updates with how to use existing features, how to navigate changing interfaces, and the always fun deprecation of features. Finally, there are ongoing challenges to find accurate help as it’s challenging for both platform owners and training materials creators to keep up with production rollouts.

As users at all levels, we’re faced with questions – and often the same ones over and over…

  • Is something wrong with my tenant/instance?
  • Is there something wrong with my environment or configuration that doesn’t match current documentation?
  • Is something wrong with the documentation? Is documentation current?
  • Am I doing something wrong? (One could argue this should be listed first…)

At the moment, I’m working on presentation updates, screen shots, etc. and running into all sorts of weirdness, which is frustrating. I want to get behind Dataverse. I really do. Running into this stuff every time I step away and then come back, I seem to hit this. I can’t be the only one. I fear this same issue is too common for folks new to the platform which are usually my target audience. Hopefully Microsoft can clean it up a bit.

grrr…

high angle photo of robot

Quick Thoughts: Microsoft Copilot and SaaS Pricing

Microsoft made some pricing announcements today at their Inspire conference that included a $30 charge per person per month for M365 Copilot (AI) licensing. First impression? That’s pretty steep… But let’s dig in a bit.

Not everyone is going to need it (at first).

It’s pretty easy to justify when you know your value per hour and can calculate how much time you’ll save using the new features of Copilot. In many cases it’ll be easy to justify $30 a month cost when you can measure savings directly: “Hey, that thing takes 15 minutes, I do it 10 times a month”… Done.

Other use cases likely won’t be that straightforward, but we’ll see how they manifest.

With this, I’ve already seen it come up in multiple conversations and threads… Know your users and review your use cases before licensing. At this price point, most companies aren’t going to license everyone – at least right away. And there will likely be other added licenses in the mix as well. Don’t expect the Microsoft licensing topic to get any less confusing in the near future (unless maybe we can use AI to help sort out your licensing use cases… Copilot for Licensing?).

SaaS pricing is hard

A little background. SaaS pricing is a challenge. Dig in a little bit and you’ll see plenty of threads talking about how hard it is for companies (especially startups) to price their products. M365, Power Platform, and the rest of the cloud services out there ultimately are SaaS offerings (Software as a Service) – though it may be a bit of a simplification. Microsoft and other big players in the space at least had some historical product pricing to start from that (may or may not directly) lead to subscription pricing used for SaaS.

The nature of cloud-based apps – as we’ve been talking about for as long as Microsoft has been in the cloud – is that we get regular, rapid, incremental updates. We get new features and changes basically weekly – for good or bad. (“Bad” only really for trainers and folks trying to keep up with it all…) This replaces the old 3-year-cycle of product releases from Microsoft where it was much easier to justify a price increase. You could easily put together the list of new and improved features vs. the last product (now 3 years old). Now, things move so fast it’s challenging to keep up and get a high-level view of increased value over time – it’s almost an expectation.

Stepping back a bit, as initial moves to the cloud resolved, it became fairly easy for most organizations to rationalize M365 pricing. Now, years later, not much (relatively speaking) has changed in the pricing, but much has changed with the offering and capabilities. Some organizations have moved up from one level to another, but many have also stayed with the same licensing since they first adopted M365.

Microsoft needs (or at least wants) new revenue streams (oh look, a stock price jump at the time I published this) and it’s harder to justify price increases when you’re incrementally updating your software – harder for end users to see. But incremental (smaller, but more often) updates are the norm with cloud-based software. Vendors then are forced to rebrand and offer bigger bangs to justify step ups in cost. Enter Copilot and today’s licensing announcements. Viva is in this same boat. And don’t forget the recent “Entra” branding for authentication and ID services – just wait.

Power Platform (as part of the Dynamics/D365 product group) has been working on this challenge for a while now. Initial feature offerings were heavily in the M365 integration space – leveraging tens of millions of users. They got the traction they were looking for and at the same time were building a ravenous (#PowerAddicts) community around it to pull the movement ahead even more. But they’ve been seemingly challenged to get a mass shift to newly licensed products and offerings. It does seem to be shifting, but more slowly than (I expect) they’d like. As Power Apps and its sibling products grow and Dataverse finds its space in the storage area – more folks are realizing the business value and making the move to additional licensing.

Cost of ownership

There’s more than the $X/month/user. There’s also the cost of managing and training – after you’ve spent time and money evaluating the technology. Don’t overlook that. Give plenty of time for architecture folks to review functionality, security folks to review risk, your tenant admins time to ramp up, and trainers time to produce the materials you’ll need. It wouldn’t shock me if early on we see a “you need to take this training before we’ll buy this feature for you” sort of approach.

Finally, $30 a month is a baseline. Many large enterprises are able to negotiate pricing, so keep that in mind. Sorry SMB. 🙁

Other offerings

Copilot is a consistent brand, but it’s not one single cost. There will be a collection of products across the Microsoft stack and licensing will be different and separate for each. Copilot for Business (from Microsoft-owned GitHub) is a nice example since it’s so different from M365 offerings. It’s still “Copilot” but a very different offering for developers rather than business users (though… there’s the “maker” argument for another day. 🙂 )

Bottom line is, start thinking about Copilot licensing across the stack. There will likely be additional offerings. We already know about several in the flurry of announcements.

Not everything falls under “Copilot” either. Teams Premium, while feeling like a bit of an overlap with Copilot, has its own licensing and capabilities. You may need one, or the other, or both – hence the importance of evaluating your environment and users before diving in.

Security

Microsoft is all over the security concerns. ChatGPT and others have highlighted the risk of playing with AI in the public domain and its collection of user data to learn and train itself.

Microsoft is working overtime to let folks how data is used, how their version of AI is being built, and how common components (LLM) are kept separate from organizational data (Microsoft Graph). There’s obviously going to be some risk with data in the cloud, but efforts and intention are in place. Each organization will need to evaluate the risks for themselves. As with other technologies, certain areas will be slower to adopt due to risk. We’ll keep hearing more from Microsoft and the community on this.

Recap

As the capabilities of software increase – so will the costs. This isn’t a bad thing. Microsoft and their industry peers are adding new capabilities far faster than they have in the past and many of them add great value for their users.

The challenge to us as consumers again falls into keeping up with the changes. As much as these new capabilities benefit us, we need to invest time and effort to learn how to best use them and reap the benefits.

It’s easy to get sucked into the hype. There’s a lot of cool stuff here. Just temper your expectations a bit to not get too frustrated or disappointed. We’re early in the AI application cycle. It’s going to take time to mature and polish implementation. Exciting times.

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