2019 Predictions for the Digital Workplace and Office 365 - ShareThePoint
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2019 Predictions for the Digital Workplace and Office 365 As we welcome in 2019, our thoughts go to strategy, planning and new ways of working in our current workplace. As everyone aims for productivity gains and cost savings, technology always plays a large part. What is in store? We asked a few of our favourite people - many who present at our events, are top of their game in the Office 365 world, and who embrace Digital Transformation. Predictions may be too strong a word – educated guesses perhaps – and not necessarily correct, but something to ponder over your morning coffee .... Compiled by www.sharethepoint.com
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Table of contents
Title Page
Benjamin Niaulin 6
Brendon Ford 7
Darrell Webster 8
Dave Paylor 9
Debbie Ireland 10
Heather Newman 11
Joel Olsen 12
John Robson 13
Justine Cormack 14
Lee Stevens 15
Leon Bro 16
Loryan Strant 17
Marc Anderson 18
Nick Horton 19
Patrick Quimonet 20
Steve Knutson 21
Tracy van der Schyff 22
Compiled by 5
Predictions:
Benjamin Niaulin The writing is on the wall - direction is set. The challenge will be for
organisations and more specifically IT to adapt their way of thinking
and working, to a new cloud world. One that scales, one that is
Company: ShareGate multi-product.
A new mindset for IT
We said going to the cloud would change things, and yet it felt like
the move wasn’t much of a big deal – or so we thought.
There is a gap we can observe. With our data, we can see that most
organisations that moved to the cloud still work with their previous
model from On-Premises.
What does that mean? Well, they are still using Classic SharePoint
with a traditional top down physical sub site structure. They are
disabling self-service or Office 365 Groups and are weary of any
new changes. Some may have enabled Modern SharePoint, but
Contact me via LinkedIn once again are using the same model.
In 2015, Satya Nadella said that every company is now a software
Bio: company. And today, we’re seeing this happening. It’s an exciting
Benjamin is Product Manager at time to be in IT, but it means changing mindsets, frameworks,
Sharegate, a product company
measures and governance to enable this transformation.
providing SharePoint migration,
My recommendation? Start pretending you’re a product team and
reporting, and security
management in Microsoft's Office not an IT team. As if you are responsible for developing a product in
365. the market, getting it sold, adopted, used, and everything else that
comes with it. Why? Because now you are responsible for a service
He has been a Keynote Speaker at you provide, and they are your customers. If they don’t like the
some of the largest Office 365 service you provide, it’s easy for them to find something else, not
events focused on collaboration “buy your product”. Historically we called this Shadow IT.
and digital transformation.
Get Started by:
Awarded by Microsoft as an MVP, • Reading up on Jobs to be Done framework
Benjamin is also and part of the • Deploy in small increments, measure, adapt
trusted Microsoft Regional Director
• Forget about mega 3-year projects, you can have a vision and a
Program.
strategy, but you should be able to iterate constantly
• Measure. If you can’t track that what is and isn’t working, how
can you improve it.
• Don’t launch products, launch solutions
• Embrace the Microsoft Teams buzz as an enabler
Rebirth of Governance discussions
Everything I mentioned above will lead us to renew the hot topic of
governance, this time in a bigger world that is Office 365 - My bet is
these topics will only start to grow later in the year when
discussions on deploying Microsoft Teams or Office 365 Groups will
develop into a new mindset at work and inevitably… control.
Though the word governance might be replaced by something else
6
like controlling content sprawl or automated-governance or Security
2019 Predictions for the Digital and Compliance.
6 Workplace and Office 365
Predictions:
Brendon AI will continue to be hyped with regards to the digital workplace
Ford in 2019 but I predict that the difference this year will be that we
see major vendors like Microsoft and Google building on past
Company: Provoke success and getting true momentum.
We can expect to see deeper integration of Microsoft AI services in
the Office 365 suite of products. In addition Bots will start to
deliver value to productivity workers vs being an interesting idea
for a CIO to demo.
A key area where Bots could help productivity workers is with
regards to discovery and management of digital assets in the
enterprise. I would personally love a digital assistant to help me
manage the mess I have created in One Drive!
Contact me via LinkedIn Lets not talk about the mess in Teams yet.
Bio:
Chief Operating Officer
Brendon is responsible for the
operational performance of the
three Provoke subsidiaries.
With deep technical knowledge, his
focus is on selecting the technology
we bring to market, and how it is
delivered to customers.
7
2019 Predictions for the Digital
7 Workplace and Office 365
Predictions:
Darrell Webster
Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella restated the company’s mission to
help everyone on the planet to achieve more, underpinning it with
a focus on tech intensity. He said that organisations need to adopt
Company: Adopt and best-in-class technology fast, building their own technology and
Embrace technical capability.
I interpret this to mean that Microsoft will continue to deliver tools
and technologies at an intense pace. They encourage their
customers to align technology with their needs, actively work on
adoption of technology internally and combine technologies to
build and innovate.
However, we need to take care to keep the human element of tech
Contact me via LinkedIn intensity top of mind. Our people need periods of low intensity to
align, absorb and adopt on a personal level. Growth occurs when
there are alternating intervals of high and low intensity, and
periods of recovery.
Bio:
Darrell is an Office 365 productivity
and collaboration specialist for In Office 365, this year will continue to see spokes added to the
Adopt and Embrace. He relishes the hub for teamwork - Microsoft Teams. More first and third-party
opportunity to help individuals, services will be integrated into Teams, offering multiple (and
teams and organisations to unlock sometimes overlapping) choices of productivity tools. SharePoint is
the value in Office 365. He is active ensuring that it’s modernising endeavours provide a consistent
in the Microsoft Technical experience of lists and libraries wherever you work - in browser, on
Community and firmly believes that mobile and through Microsoft Teams. SharePoint, Yammer and
the Community IS the expert. Stream will deliver on informing and engaging experiences for
employees, encouraging organisation-wide conversation through
Darrell also helps to coordinate an
multiple mediums.
online publication and Live show
called RE:Office 365, where
thought leaders share their stories, Flow and PowerApps will penetrate further into the citizen no-
opinions and guidance regarding code developer population, enabling more scenarios to collect and
Office 365. His community efforts combine information. Amidst all this, we are seeing a renewed
have been recognised with the
interest user adoption from organisations and service providers.
Microsoft MVP award since 2013.
This year when you ask yourselves how your organisation will keep
up change and experience growth, take a fresh look at a
community-based learning.
8
2019 Predictions for the Digital
8 Workplace and Office 365
Predictions:
Dave Paylor
When asked for 2019 predictions my mind automatically goes to
flying taxis and deliveries via drones. It might be a bit tricky to
Company: Empired match these in the Digital Workplace so I have chosen a couple of
areas which I think are more realistic.
Death of Email – OK maybe a slight exaggeration but I think 2019
will likely see email drop in priority as alternatives such as Yammer
and Teams settle into maturity and increase in popularity. Email
has been the go-to in communications for so long it will be a bit
like a comfort blanket for many but younger workers do not have
the same addiction. I suspect the impact on the workplace will
actually be quite significant as time management will need to
adjust, hopefully granting a level of freedom from the inbox which
will likely be first scary then liberating. I also think this is a real
Contact me via LinkedIn positive for any involved in intranets as that is the local place to
pull together all the communications that are no longer sent by
email.
Bio:
JIT Staff – one of the hot topics which has been predicted recently
Dave is a non-developer SharePoint
is a reduction in permanent staff and an increase in staff recruited
Consultant with an extensive
background in Performance
for specific projects/activities Just-in-Time (JIT) has been a
Management and an obsession for common manufacturing approach to getting supplies delivered just
presenting information in more as they are needed rather than the need for extensive
interesting ways. warehousing but the concept could also result in a more dynamic
workforce. While I do not pretend to be an expert in recruitment I
While accepting that most consider am very interested in what that means for the Digital Workplace.
it downright weird, Dave loves to
push the boundaries of SharePoint Getting recruits up to speed quickly will be vital with such a
lists with XSLT and even a little bit turnaround and ensuring they have the information and tools
of jQuery. available to perform will mean an increasing dependency on the
Digital Workplace particularly if they are also remote
workers. Traditionally, permanent staff have a higher level of
commitment to the corporate culture than transient staff so again
this will be an opportunity for the Digital Workplace to quickly
engage new staff and provide modern collaborative tools to ensure
project teams are productive as quickly as possible.
Exciting times for our Digital Workplaces – but I am still fascinated
by these flying taxis
9
2019 Predictions for the Digital
9 Workplace and Office 365
Predictions:
Debbie Ireland Managing constant change
Office 365 changes regularly (both the interfaces and functionality),
meaning businesses need to revise their approach to MANAGING
Company: ShareThePoint change. I think companies are slowly waking up to this, but it needs
to be built-in to regular operational/BAU processes (and budgets!).
Impacts include the usual updates to training materials, need for
more training and provision of support. But also crucial are the
OTHER impacts associated with change - adoption is always higher
when the staff are educated, understand why the change is
happening and how it benefits them . Companies also need to plan
for those who reject or ignore change, hide their head in the sand or
block others from embracing it.
Change to online training and support resources
Contact me via LinkedIn To cope with rapid changes and support demands, blended learning
will be big. Companies will look for supported and trusted resources
across a range of delivery options – in person, floor walking, online,
Bio: virtual classes, and videos. Microsoft are already investing in more
online resources and adoption toolkits, like this.
Debbie Ireland is the Managing
Director of ShareThePoint Ltd , a Development and integration of BOTS for FAQs and help
New Zealand company which mechanisms will grow – adding value to online platforms. Chat bots
specialises in Office 365/SharePoint
will become key in how companies communicate with their
training and consulting.
customers – and uptake will increase as the workforce gets younger.
Debbie also organises Digital
Workplace Conferences in New More app integration and cloud services
Zealand and Australia. Debbie was We are already seeing focused integration with Microsoft Teams;
awarded the Microsoft Most multiple apps eliminating the need for multiple windows – which
Valuable Professional (MVP) Award makes navigation easier. I am hoping as the apps get more tightly
for nine years. Her focus is helping integrated, the confusion over “when to use what” will diminish.
people understand the business
capability and productivity gains Online services will continue to evolve, possibly at the cost of
that Office 365 and SharePoint can
investment in desktop applications. There is already an incredible
provide.
reliance on the internet – if desktop applications become a thing of
the past this will only increase – and hopefully we don’t lose all the
advanced features and functionality we have come to rely on.
Less reliance on IT and admin level support
Implementing Office 365 is more about the awareness of NEW ways
of working, understanding what is there and how to use the
tools. In order to survive and support businesses, IT teams need to
release some of the fear and control and move to more support and
training roles, and I think CIO’s will align strategic plans with this.
IT teams will improve their skills to deal with multiple devices, using
ALL the tools, and strategies for BYOD.
End user interfaces will continue to shift towards user-driven
10 configuration and provision – with more inline editing and less
2019 Predictions for the Digital
10 Workplace and Office 365 navigation away to separate settings (e.g. Site, Library, List) screens.Predictions:
Heather Newman In looking at overall trends in Digital Workspace and Office 365
from last year moving into 2019, a few predictions bubbled up for
me:
Company: Creative Maven Announcements around Intelligent Cloud and Intelligent Edge:
Julia White, CVP Microsoft Azure alluded to “something is coming”
around Intelligent Cloud, Intelligent Edge, compute everywhere
and how Cloud can AI help move those forward. (Listen for it on
Mavens Do It Better Podcast posted earlier this month). I predict
that Microsoft Build and Microsoft Ignite will have some surprise
and delight moments around these platforms.
The Tech Industry Comprehensive Embrace of Diversity and
Inclusion in Technical Discussions: Industry events have been
hosting Women in Tech lunches and diversity panels for a while,
and companies are looking hard into programs. A comprehensive
Contact me via LinkedIn Diversity and Tech program at Microsoft Ignite was launched. My
prediction is the blending of Diversity and Tech inside our technical
sessions as part of their DNA when we build products, teams,
community and each other. For more, follow - Microsoft Tech
Bio: Community.
Accessibility Mapping to Microsoft Teams and all Office 365
Heather is the founder and CEO
Applications: The introduction of Teams as a platform that
of Creative Maven, a virtual
marketing consulting firm that combines workplace chat, meetings, notes, and attachments will
brings c-level strategy, inspiration push headset manufactures to up their game in the meetings
and creativity to marketing teams, arena. Transcripts, closed captioning, (already in many Microsoft
startups, enterprise businesses and products) and compatibility will become standard for innovation in
individual artists. She has produced software and hardware usability and design. Follow the Office
thousand of events, campaigns and Accessibility Center and Jenny Lay-Flurrie for more.
experiences in the high-tech and Self-Service Learning Will Increase: With more companies
entertainment industries. adopting a larger set of Office 365 applications and the rate of
She is also the Co-Founder and changes on the Office 365 roadmap companies are looking for
Chief Marketing Officer of Content
ways to put training and help content directly into the hands of
Panda, a high tech business
users. To this end, Microsoft launched Service Adoption Specialist
dedicated to creating products that
deliver a superior user experience Certification. I predict there will be more discussions, blog posts
that drive value to businesses. She and guidance on adoption and training so IT purchasers can see
is also a Microsoft MVP for Office their users get more out of their investments daily.
Apps and Services. The Adoption of Microsoft Teams and Multi-Tenant
Management: With the announcement of the free version of
Microsoft Teams, Microsoft continues to add value across all
Heather lives in Los Angeles,
business shapes and sizes. The ability to bring and leverage almost
California and enjoys traveling the
world speaking about Office 365, all Office 365 apps as a “tab” inside Teams channels has helped
SharePoint and Diversity, Inclusion, with this push. My hopeful prediction is that the ability to switch
and Belonging between Teams tenants becomes more fluid. With four that
manage, I have found I sometimes miss things and I want to stay in
Teams and not revert to Outlook. To up level features in Office
365, vote in User Voice.
Some of these predictions are hopeful, and others are what I
believe will come, the rate of change in the Modern Workplace
11
and Office 365 is certain and will continue throughout 2019 and
2019 Predictions for the Digital beyond.
11 Workplace and Office 365Predictions:
Joel Olsen 1. SharePoint 2019 will become the new base standard, but the
community bloggers and speakers will get over it very
quickly. It won’t feel new by June. Where usually a product is
Company: Konica Minolta new for a couple of years. Now the on prem releases will feel
Business dated nearly immediately. We won’t see hardly any posts
unfortunately.
2. Teams will get a TON of press and become a leading workload
(fastest growing) for Office 365. Microsoft Sales will CARE
most about Teams and Azure. The Teams team will really dial
in the MVP community and connect in solid ways.
3. Digital Workspaces will move from being buzz words to being
company initiatives. Some companies will refocus intranet
teams to focus on The Digital Workspace. Productivity will
Contact me via LinkedIn
change based on personalised organisational insights through
analytics. Analytics will be big in gaining new insights and
driving the interfaces of our personalised workspaces.
Bio:
4. Chat Bots will go from being a gimmick to being more common
Joel played a pivotal role in the
success of Microsoft SharePoint as corporate projects. Today chat bots are seen as squishy
the first full-time employee hired in dev projects working with APIs, but we’re likely to see chat
IT to deploy and manage it at bots be more productised and with plug and play integration. I
Microsoft in 2000. He would later expect to see large enterprises who have sprint initiatives
manage the collaboration team at feeding the bots. HR and Support will find each other to
Microsoft which included file support these initiatives.
shares, personal storage, and the
global SharePoint platform. He was 5. Digital Transformation What was previously seen as stages for
a key solution architect for the moving to the cloud will now be more about looking
first beta of SharePoint Online prior at streamlining business processes with taking advantage of
to popular Office 365. investments in AI for automation.
As a Senior Product Manager on 6. The Battle of the year will be Microsoft Teams and
the SharePoint team, he managed
Slack. Microsoft’s arsenals are loaded and Skype is dead. This
the IT audience and was the voice
of the IT professional for battle won’t end in a year. Atlassian alignment with Slack is
SharePoint. Since his time at going to cause some significant changes inside organisations.
Microsoft he's been part of a few
startups, designed SharePoint 7. Microsoft will double down on Mixed Reality. The story will
products, run enterprise really start coming together even if it sounds ahead of it’s
collaboration engineering and dev time. Microsoft does have their work cut out. Remote assist +
teams.. Teams + HoloLens… It’s ahead of it’s time, but solid. The
community really doesn’t seem to understand
SharePoint spaces. I think it will take a year unfortunately for
the right stories to come together, but 3D/360 content viewing
is a solid investment especially if you look at 3-5
years. Engineering will start sharing more 3D/360.
8. PowerPack will be a big thing. Licensing confusion will rise, but
12
PowerBI, PowerApps, and Flow will gain in adoption and usage
2019 Predictions for the Digital in a significant way, and Microsoft will find a way to promote
12 Workplace and Office 365
these products in a more streamlined way.Predictions:
John Robson 2019 will be the year of BI. At last…..
The running joke amongst C-level teams from 2012 was the
insistence from Gartner that Business Intelligence was the top area
Company: Provoke for technology investment. As a CFO, it was certainly a focus, as
having immediate and dynamic data at your fingertips is obviously a
good thing. However, what Gartner failed to realise was the
flexibility of good old Excel and that most CFOs work with so many
assumptions and moving parts that there was no single solution.
Tools like Excel, whilst labour intensive and a pain to wrangle, are
perfect to play with data and every Finance Manager I’ve admired
has been a guru of extraordinary talent with a pivot table.
So, what has changed? Well, Gartner get the last laugh to be fair.
Whilst they’ve been shouting about BI and Analytics for more than
Contact me via LinkedIn 6 years, they were encouraging CFOs to spend serious amounts of
money on business applications to help them with this goal, and
CFOs don’t like to spend on stuff that isn’t directly related to
revenue in most cases. Technology has now caught up with the
Bio: hype, and the Power BI offering within Office 365 actually delivers
on the dreams of many CFOs.
Chief Financial Officer
As a previous economist and
Power BI is not a magic bullet let’s be clear, but it is a dynamic
investment banker, John brings
modelling tool that consumes data and provides insightful visuals
experience in opening new markets
and a cool head to the executive and analysis. Recent iterations I think nails it. Like the first iPhone,
team. He provides sound financial we were just waiting for a common platform that brought disparate
governance, advice and direction technologies together, and I see Power BI as a similar breakthrough.
for Provoke. I see this toolset becoming the go-to playpen for finance teams
serious about modelling trends and validating objectives with
minimal effort.
There is a lot of noise around AI and the buzz words of “predictive
maintenance”. Using AI coupled with Power BI is a natural place to
map such dreams but from a CFO perspective, predictive
maintenance is just a flash way of saying scenario analysis. And if
there’s something that gets a CFO excited, it’s the ability to rapidly
change some inputs to gain some insight on likely outputs. Up to
now, we’ve been limited by our own intellect on how we construct
wonderful Excel sheets, and now we can change how we work.
Rather than build out modelled assumptions, let’s train an AI to
look back at our past data, and make predictions (without our
natural bias) about what it could mean. Predictive cashflow, rather
than estimated cashflow, is but one simple model that will make life
easier.
And the best bit? The tool is in the browser. And for Gartner, even a
broken clock eventually tells the right time. I think we will see a
rapid rise in the usage of Power BI as it supplements our arsenal of
tools. This will make CFOs very happy and the integration of AI will
13
2019 Predictions for the Digital be the catalyst for better decisioning and real-time modelling based
13 Workplace and Office 365 on live data. 2019 will indeed be the year of BI, at long last.Predictions:
Justine Cormack Some thoughts for 2019.
None are fully formed thoughts but I think for those of us in the
Company: Beca information management profession we have a range of
challenges ahead of us.
Increasingly the online/cloud based tool sets that are being used
by people in their personal lives are coming into the workplace –
typically via the implementation of O365.
People are expecting these tools to work in the same way and
have the same levels of flexibility and personalisation as they do at
home.
The requirements for security and consistent work practices in a
company butt up against the wish to use these tool sets as people
want to.
This is particularly the case with tools like MS Teams which MS are
Bio: pushing very hard to their customers without the necessary
For the past 11 years Justine has guidance on how best to apply these tools in the business
been the Beca Group Information environment.
Services Manager. Responsible
for a group wide document and Stories of deployments gone feral are common and the work to
records management system, tidy up the mess is considerable and expensive both in the time to
Justine focuses on business tidy up the mess, but also in the loss of benefits of these tools to
requirements, development the business from poor implementations.
testing and training.
The challenge for the IM professional is to find the right balance
between the peoples wish to be flexible and agile in their ways of
working against those of the business to ensure security of
information, to meet their compliance responsibilities and ensure
efficient deployment and support mechanisms are in place.
14
2019 Predictions for the Digital
14 Workplace and Office 365Predictions:
Lee Stevens #1 NZ Companies Doing Nothing
Sadly, like previous years, many organisations won’t do anything.
They will procrastinate, over think and over complicate potential
Company: Brighter Days usage of Office 365 and a Digital Workplace. Inefficient business
process and tools will remain; costing organisations thousands of
dollars in lost time.
#2 Shared Drives will start to disappear
As organisations begin to fully understand and leverage Microsoft
Teams, the obvious question will be ‘why do we need a Shared
Drive?’ Note: 90% of most user cases won’t need a shared drive.
There will always be some instances where these have to remain.
#3 Rapid Deployments
Early this year, Nielsen reported, that the average Intranet
Contact me via LinkedIn deployment takes 14 Months. Really? In 2019? This average time
will reduce again this year. My guess that is NZ and Australia will
be half this. (12 Weeks is our record so far. 10 of those weeks
Bio: were the business deciding things!)
Lee Stevens is a Digital Large organisations are already starting to go with the impressive
Strategist and Founder of ‘out of the box’ features in Office 365, such as Communication
Brighter Days. He is a business- Sites as well as larger ‘pre-built’ solutions, that offer an ‘Intranet
focused consultant who designs in a box’ and accelerators. Why would you build something ‘from
Digital solutions for businesses scratch’ these days? My tip here: Deliver high value, low effort
that allows their staff, suppliers items; little and often.
and customers to engage with
their brand. #4 Extensions for Microsoft Teams will start to appear
Lee’s early career was spent Microsoft Teams offers a completely new way of working for
working in investment banking organisations but probably provides around 80% of what the
but he has since gained 10 business needs in most cases. With a little bit of extra work, you
years’ experience implementing can get this to 95%.
SharePoint and other Digital
solutions for clients like Barclays By building extensions for Microsoft Teams and SharePoint
Bank, Diageo, Fulton Hogan and organisations will start to WANT to use the Office 365 platform as
Ryman Healthcare. they can see a direct business problem it helps solve. These will
Lee is based in Christchurch, NZ, be both functional extensions (example creating a Project
where he runs the SharePoint Register, Project Teams Templates etc.) and Technical extensions
User Group and Digital Daze (Deployment, Management tools etc.).
Meet-ups.
#5 User Adoption, User Adoption, User Adoption
What do we use? When? Why? How?
With the smorgasbord of applications that are available in Office
365, it is vital that you ensure users can both see the value in
using new tools and knowing how to use them. At the same time,
failure to manage change will mean that users go back to their
horrible old ways of working and annoyingly lose faith in the
Office 365 platform. A little tip: Make sure you have help (and
15
2019 Predictions for the Digital budget) in managing this change from those that have been there
15 Workplace and Office 365 before. Guessing is a luxury you do not have.Predictions:
Leon
30% of companies will ditch their primary Digital Workplace vendor
Bro out of frustration over a lack of leadership, poor advice and snake
oil solutions. This is not much of a prediction because it happens
Company: Independat every year, but somehow the IT industry will not reform itself again
in 2019.
An effective digital workplace requires a mixture of diverse
technologies. For example OS, network security and custom
applications. Getting all these things working in unison seems
beyond the capability of many IT departments and as a
consequence, 50% of companies will give a worse user experience
than at the start of the year.
The skills shortage will continue to impact the industry. Taking
Contact me via LinkedIn advantage of the opportunities that O365 presents requires people
to have business and technical experience along with great
interpersonal skills, but this sort of person is rare. This will see wage
inflation at the top end and an increase in people in roles for which
Bio: they are not suited. There will be significant churn as people look
Leon is a career contractor with for other roles to advance their careers.
over 20 years of diverse
international experience, mostly Artificial intelligence will not make a significant impact on the IT
on the SharePoint platform. He industry this year or even next year, but look out 2021.
started as his career as developer
PowerApps and flow will make a big impact this year. The ease with
with ASP then Java before moving
into management then on to
which solutions can be but together will see the rise of the “Citizen
consulting. Developer” but IT departments will struggle implementing
governance that allows the flexibility end users want, without
His passion for SharePoint grew seeing the consequences of unmanaged growth
from his time in management
where it became clear that There will be a rise in black operations, essentially businesses going
balancing user demand with off and buying their own cloud based solutions because they are
budgets needed something more frustrated with their own IT department.
than custom code and killer
methodology. To this end, Leon Phones like the Samsung S9 can plug directly into a monitor and
now spends his time advising
function like a desktop computer. This will make a massive
clients how to use “Out Of The Box
difference to how we think of the digital workplace, but not in 2019.
O365” to meet evolving business
need. It will take a couple more years before we see real uptake.
There will be increased demand for workers to work remotely and
Leon’s other life is as an amateur on their own devices as employees struggle with traffic, increasingly
farmer and semi- busy lives and the rise of the gig economy
professional Beekeeper. He also Microsoft will increase the cost of it’s O365 subscriptions (again)
tells us he brews a mean whiskey. Power BI will continue to gain in popularity
Finally, Microsoft is going to increase it’s focus on Customer
Experience with Dynamics CRM seeing some exciting updates
throughout the year. The trickle down impact of this for the Digital
workplace is that some IT departments will start thinking about end
16
2019 Predictions for the Digital employee experience and change their internal engagement model
16 Workplace and Office 365Predictions:
Loryan Strant Office 365
2019 will be the year that the juggernaut that is Office 365 starts
Company: making strides in its new course. While the early days of Office 365
Strant Consulting were primarily infrastructure and core functionality (I.e. Exchange,
SharePoint, Skype for Business), the last few years have been an
explosion of apps and services (e.g. Planner, Sway, StaffHub, Flow,
PowerApps, Stream, etc.).
I see 2018 as having been the year of convergence and retooling,
as Microsoft Teams took the centre stage and SharePoint finally
became more ‘modern’.
In 2019 I see Microsoft getting down to business as the platform
Contact me via LinkedIn further consolidates, connects, and converges. Features that have
been talked about will appear, and allow organisations to
modernise without experiencing change whiplash.
Bio: Ultimately Microsoft Teams will continue being the fan favourite,
Loryan Strant is a Microsoft Office bringing along the other apps and services for the ride. IT
365 MVP (8 years). Loryan has departments and organisations can’t continue to push back against
been in IT for over 20 years the onslaught of modern teamwork offered by tools like Microsoft
working across web design, Teams, and so the real transformation will finally begin.
network infrastructure, servers, IP
telephony, with the majority spent
designing productivity and
communications solutions.
He has lived & breathed Office 365
for almost a decade; writing blogs,
speaking at conferences,
consulting to organisations, and
has co-authored two books. Loryan
is passionate about enabling
people and organisations using
technology, enabling them to
become more productive.
17
2019 Predictions for the Digital
17 Workplace and Office 365Predictions:
Marc Anderson
First off, I don’t hold much truck with predictions. They are
educated guesses at best, and a larger portion of them are just
plain wrong. Instead, I find it helpful to think about what existing
Company: trends will continue, and in which directions.
Sympraxis Consulting
The long-term move in Office 365 from classic to modern UIs will
continue, and probably accelerate. While classic isn’t going away
anytime soon, the benefits of using modern on many fronts are at
this point, overly compelling. The areas which are important to
focus on for end users are: lists and libraries, pages, and team
sites. For admins, I expect the modern UIs will start to eclipse the
classic, requiring us to flip back and forth far less.
To me, Digital Workplaces are as much a state of mind as they are
Contact me via LinkedIn a technology thing. The ideas behind them build on ideas from the
knowledge management revolution in the mid-90s, the
collaboration movement in the ‘00s, etc. These ideas also adhere
to the adopter curve, as do most large change efforts, whether
Bio: they are technology based or not. Underlying the success of any
Marc is the Co-Founder and
digital workplace effort is the willingness and capability of the
President of Sympraxis Consulting
LLC, located in USA. Sympraxis organization to adapt and change. Some organizations have
focuses on enabling collaboration already gotten there and moved on to the next improvement and
throughout the enterprise using the innovation cycle (innovators), while others may never get there
SharePoint application platform. (laggards).
Marc has over 30 years of 2019, as with every year before it, will hold many fascinating new
experience in technology developments, and for us as technology professionals the key
professional services and software message to me is: learn, learn, learn!
development. Over a wide-ranging
career in consulting as well as line
manager positions, Marc has
proven himself as a problem solver
and leader who can solve difficult
technology problems for
organisations across a wide variety
of industries and organisation sizes.
Marc is the developer of the jQuery
Library for SharePoint Web Services
(SPServices) and The SPXSLT
Codeplex Project. He is a repeat
recipient of the Microsoft MVP
award for SharePoint Server (2011-
2015).
18
2019 Predictions for the Digital
18 Workplace and Office 365Predictions:
Nick
The digital workplace will continue to evolve at an ever growing
Horton pace, this will bring challenges with change management, training
Company: PF Olsen and the IT approach to managing the digital workplace. Approach
to budgeting and billing will be affected, and could disrupt and / or
confuse.
The key risk in this area is the speed at which people have shifting
loyalties to the different SaaS products out there. You may have
found one you love, but if everyone has moved on this service may
no longer be available. The digital workplace is an ever evolving
beast that cannot be tamed, we need to understand that things
are different, hold on and ride the roller coaster of change.
Re Office 365, this is a great tool for traditional businesses, it has
great new services coming out all the time, but it suffers from not
being traditional enough, and not changing as quickly as others. I
love Office 365, it does make people’s life easier but also confuses
Bio: – “which tool should I use in my enterprise? Oh, the feature I want
has disappeared”. Planner is great but development slows down,
Nick Horton is the Group ICT then speeds up! At times MS are too concerned about breaking
Manager at PF Olsen. Nick has their traditional revenue models, where Office 365 tools could do
previously worked in IT in a better job and make everyone happier! (Project v planner &
London and more recently as IT Power BI v SQL Enterprise – these are two examples).
Operations Manager at Scion.
With the increased role of ICT in
professional services and
innovation in mobile and cloud
computing, Nick will play a key
role in ensuring PF Olsen fully
leverages technology to deliver
the best possible forestry,
harvesting and logistics solutions
to clients. .
19
2019 Predictions for the Digital
19 Workplace and Office 365Predictions:
Patrick Guimonet After three years of huge announcements and improvements in
Office 365 in general and SharePoint in particular, I strongly believe
SharePoint future is brighter than ever!
Company: Abalon
With the very successful introduction of Teams and the ubiquitous
use of SharePoint as THE content service in Office 365, Microsoft
has found a good mix between a strong set of features provided by
SharePoint and an easy to use interface for collaboration provided
by Teams.
SharePoint has also been very smoothly updated from the old
publishing interface to the modern experience. SharePoint
publishing was powerful but complex and not easily accessible to
end users, whereas Modern interface provide a natively responsive
Contact me via LinkedIn design solution with a very accessible user interface: the power of
SharePoint for creating beautiful and powerful sites can now be
accessible to the masses!
Bio: So, my main prediction for 2019 is that SharePoint will be more
Patrick has a 20+ years’ experience ubiquitous than ever in Office 365. At the same time, it will be
as Enterprise Solutions Architect. used everywhere, and every time content storage is needed in
He has also a successful track Office 365 and also, we will see more and more Intranet sites
record of technical expertise for based on SharePoint modern experience.
Office 365, SharePoint, SQL Server
and before Oracle RDBMS. He is a
former Microsoft employee in
France. In 2011, he has created his
own company Abalon
(http://www.abalon-
consulting.com), a consulting and
engineering company, dedicated to
provide technical and functional
solutions for Microsoft
collaboration platform
20
2019 Predictions for the Digital
20 Workplace and Office 365Predictions:
Steve Knutson 2019 will be the year of the cloud for most of our clients. The only
requests we are getting for on-premises SharePoint
implementations are to support legacy technologies.
Company: Stratos
Technology Partners We are also seeing a strong focus on implementing out of the box
features only and taking a lot of phased approach rather than a big
bang implementation. Security and working “safely” will be front
of mind for IT, with Microsoft Information Protection and Multi-
Factor Authentication being hot topics.
Another major activity will be the mass migration of content from
local networks to the cloud. This will in-part be driven by the end
of support for Windows 7 and need to retire older Windows
Servers. I think this will have a flow on to the use of Microsoft
Contact me via LinkedIn Teams in many of our clients, especially in areas where
collaboration can bring big wins.
Bio:
Steve is the Managing Director of
Stratos Technology Partners, a
SharePoint and Software
Development company based in
Christchurch with clients across
New Zealand and Australia. Steve is
a Microsoft MVP for Office Servers
and Services.
Steve started out in the IT industry
before the World Wide Web gained
popularity. Since then he has held a
range of technical roles and worked
on projects for a wide range of
business, local government and
charitable organisations.
Steve has a Computer Science
degree from Massey University and
is a Microsoft Certified Systems
Engineer and Microsoft Certified
Technology Specialist for SQL
Server.
21
2019 Predictions for the Digital
21 Workplace and Office 365Predictions:
Tracy Van der Schyff Consumption
In 2018 the new buzzword became "Consumption", which of
course, added even more focus on User Adoption. Companies are
finally realising the power end users have, when they simply refuse
Company: The Guid Stuff to use systems. We need to understand though, that the “refusal”
implies more than them just being stubborn. It goes along with
shame of not feeling adequate, confusion about purpose and
being overwhelmed with options.
In 2019 I envision the following:
• Companies will start to realise that at least 90% of their
employees need training for the apps & services in Microsoft /
Office 365.
Contact me via LinkedIn • Soft Skills and Digital Literacy will move into the spotlight as
more and more managers realise that these are prerequisite
skills and require the same importance as technical skills.
• Microsoft will continue to grow the support and training
Bio: network for in place, when you need it training.
Microsoft 365 Coach & Catalyst • User adoption will receive an even greater weight in projects as
facilitating the evolution of human consumption becomes a real measurement.
capabilities: Tracy’s passion is to • The Digital Workplace also cuts the chains we previously had to
empower people and therefore physical locations, which means there’ll be an influx of remote
training and change management workers in the industry.
lie close to her heart. Her Mission is • No longer does all apps & services, serve all. Microsoft will
to positively impact WHAT and continue to add more apps, update features and increase the
HOW people create, as she believes pool of tools we can use in our daily lives. Which worsens the
that what we design / create, “too many choices” scenario, but at the same time will add
designs / creates us back
more focus on supplying the skills to employees to make the
(Ontological Design). It is about
enabling others to serve
right decisions.
themselves better, expand their • Microsoft Teams will continue to gain strength as the preferred
possibilities, increase their capacity communication tool which will calm the chaos in Outlook.
to learn, act more effectively and • The rise of the Citizen Developer will put more pressure on
better design their future. Microsoft to make Flow & PowerApps more ‘user-friendly’ for
the masses as these can no longer be tools only used by
‘technology orientated’ users.
• We will definitely see more AI, Machine Learning & Intelligent
Communications as users are starting to trust this infiltrated,
transparent addition to transformative technology.
Overall, I am positive that 2019 will continue to deliver
opportunities & tools for employees to continue working in a
coherent and productive way, but also allow them to improve and
innovate in their own environments.
22
2019 Predictions for the Digital
22 Workplace and Office 365Online School
We are excited to announce Online, Self-Paced
learning courses and Virtual Classrooms.
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23
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