Only a week has passed and we’re already on our second episode of Season 4. In the run-up to TEC (The Experts Conference) next month we’re joined on the show by Microsoft MVP and Practical 365 Editor, Tony Redmond.
We discuss his two sessions at TEC including his debate with Microsoft’s Greg Taylor on whether on-premises is dead yet, and his session on Microsoft 365 Copilot.
Tony’s view is that while Greg might have said in his Practical 365 interview that on-premises isn’t dead, the evidence is in the investments Microsoft makes in on-premises; and Microsoft is making very incremental improvements. And similar to Greg’s view – there are customers who will always find it difficult to move to the cloud; and whilst 12 years ago you could compare Office 365 with on-premises, the cloud version of the software is now so much more capable.
We chatted about skills – and I asked Tony if he were to make a risky bet for where you should focus your learning skills next, what would it be?
“(The Graph PowerShell SDK) is a really good thing for any tenant administrator to have knowledge of because it just because it’s based on the graph, it opens up everything that the graph has but, in a PowerShell way, which is a lot easier than writing graph API requests”
Tony Redmond
We then discuss Copilots. Although Tony does a lot of PowerShell coding, he’s not yet embraced GitHub Copilot and unfortunately, I couldn’t convince him to give it a try.
We then talk at length about Microsoft 365 Copilot, and I asked what to expect from Tony’s session:
I plan to talk about the in and outs around and about of Microsoft 365 copilot at tech. Yeah, it’s it’s risky in one way because we don’t have generally available software, but there’s been enough clues given by Microsoft.
Enough enough information that is available to be discussed without violating NDA’s, where you can start talking about the basics.
I mean, the the basics of generative AI are well known, so if you go and you apply the basics of generative AI in in a way that leverages the information that’s stored in and Microsoft 365, and Exchange, and SharePoint, and Teams and so forth, so you can figure out pretty quickly what’s likely to be good and and what’s likely to bad in Microsoft 365 Copilot.
The session is not intended to talk about a feature blow by blow, [or] a description of what Microsoft 365 Copilot will do and how it will revolutionise the world of working and how that $30 per user per month is an absolutely, totally justified bargain. I won’t talk about that kind of stuff at all.
Well, I want to talk about is to try and get people to think about how the Copilot ecosystem is built.
Because you’ve got to understand the basic technology to be able to understand how it’s likely to work in your environment.
Tony Redmond
It certainly sounds like Tony’s session will be useful – and take a listen to the show as we discussed Copilot in more detail.
We’ll be back next week for another guest on the show – so join us soon for the Practical 365 Podcast, Season 4 Episode 3.
