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Talking SharePoint 2016 and SharePoint Roadmap with Microsoft’s Adam Harmetz [Video Interview]

Talking SharePoint 2016 & SharePoint Roadmap In 2017 with Microsoft’s Adam Harmetz

Hi, ya’ll! Welcome back to another episode of Dux Quax as we recap all the goodness that Microsoft brought in 2016 and look forward to what’s coming on the SharePoint roadmap in 2017.

We’re very excited to bring you more exclusive interviews from Microsoft HQ in Redmond! In this episode, we catch up with Adam Harmetz, Group Program Manager for the SharePoint Team at Microsoft and discuss what happened in 2016 and what’s next on the SharePoint roadmap.

Check out the full interview below:

Remember to continue the conversation with Adam and I by tweeting #DuxQuax at @meetdux or @AdamHarmetz or by commenting on our blog below!

Top Quotes & Takeaways: Adam Harmetz Talks SharePoint 2016 and SharePoint Roadmap in 2017

  • We have mobile devices in all three platforms now, which is one of the huge things we’re really happy we accomplished this year.
  • The SharePoint community’s given a ton of feedback and we couldn’t have done it without them.

[ctt template=”1″ link=”n08jy” via=”no” ]”The #SharePoint community’s given a ton of feedback & we couldn’t have done it without them.” @AdamHarmetz about 2016 http://ctt.ec/n08jy+[/ctt]

  • With building software and the cloud, it’s  about being able to listen  quickly and react quickly.

[ctt template=”1″ link=”f40TV” via=”no” ]”With building software & the Cloud, it’s about being able to listen quickly & react quickly.” @AdamHarmetz http://ctt.ec/f40TV+[/ctt]

  • This year reinforced the idea that our job is not only to build great software and build great experiences, but then help customers adopt it, listen, and make sure we have all the signals coming back to be able to take action upon feedback.

[ctt template=”1″ link=”dqUX8″ via=”no” ]”Our job is not only to build great software but help users adopt, listen, & make sure we take action on feedback.” @AdamHarmetz #DuxQuax[/ctt]

  • Sataya’s larger mission that’s helped us focus on monthly active users, retaining users and being able to use the data to surface to have a great idea of how good of a job we’re doing. And it’s really helped and really influenced the software we build, as well as how we think about it.
  • When Sataya asked Jeff Teper  to come back to the SharePoint Team, I think that was a good statement of how important Sataya sees SharePoint in content collaboration as part of Office 365 and, obviously, Office 365 is the growth engine for the company. I do think he sees content collaboration as essential to 365 and 365 is essential to the growth of the company so it’s been great to have his support.

[ctt template=”1″ link=”I0S2f” via=”no” ]”Sataya sees #SharePoint as an important part of the Office 365 growth engine for the company.” @AdamHarmetz http://ctt.ec/I0S2f+[/ctt]

  • 2016 was definitely one of the busiest years…busier for SharePoint and for me personally, for my career as well.
  • “2016 was great. Please, Adam, don’t go off to the shiny, new object in 2017. There’s still a lot of work to do.” So the number one thing is that we’re going to finish what we started. I think we got some awesome stuff we can build off of and there’s still a lot of feedback.

[ctt template=”1″ link=”0V7aA” via=”no” ]”The number one thing in 2017 is that we’re going to finish what we started in 2016 for SharePoint.” @AdamHarmetz http://ctt.ec/0V7aA+[/ctt]

  • Publishing was the one area where we made some steps but didn’t get as far as we anticipated in 2016. And, so, in 2017 we’ll continue to make investment on all three but we want to get the water level line equal across all those so you’ll probably see an outsized investment in publishing and creating portals where a few people are broadcasting out to many.

[ctt template=”1″ link=”1K8L0″ via=”no” ]”In 2017, you will see an outsized investment in #SharePoint publishing & creating portals.” @AdamHarmetz http://ctt.ec/1K8L0+[/ctt]

  • If you have feedback about the product, sharepoint.uservoice.com is an excellent place to give that. I would also just get a file tenant Office 365 or log in your own Office 365 tenant where you tend to have first run experiences for a lot of the new UX and so that’s a great way of coming up to speed too.

[ctt template=”1″ link=”5bw2q” via=”no” ]”If you have feedback about #SharePoint, UserVoice is an excellent place to give that to our team.” @adamharmetz http://ctt.ec/5bw2q+[/ctt]


More From Dux Quax: 2016 Year in Review from the Microsoft Team


Video Transcript: Dux Raymond Sy (@meetdux) and Adam Harmetz (@AdamHarmetz) Discuss SharePoint 2016 & SharePoint Roadmap

Dux Raymond Sy: Hey, everybody. Welcome to another episode of “Dux Quax” as we do 2016 year in review. Very excited…I’m here in campus…Microsoft HQ…the mother ship and with me is Adam. Adam, why don’t you introduce yourself and tell everybody what you do here at Microsoft.

Adam Harmetz: Sure. My name is Adam Harmetz. I’ve been with the company 11 years and I run the user experience and development platform team for SharePoint Engineering. So I work for Jeff Teper, the founder and father of SharePoint and the VP of SharePoint and OneDrive, right now and generally thinking about how we’re refreshing and rebooting SharePoint from the user experience as well as the available platform perspective.

SharePoint Roadmap

Image: Adam Harmetz, Group Program Manager for the SharePoint Team, Microsoft

Dux Raymond Sy: Awesome. I gotta tell you, Adam…2016…year of SharePoint. SharePoint’s back…SharePoint’s cool again. We’ve seen it from, you know, the May 4th, “May the fourth be with you,” announcement to Ignite…SharePoint’s all over the place…trended on Twitter…I mean, I can’t ask for anything more being, you know, SharePoint’s so near and dear to me. So, for you, what are the highlights this year?

Adam Harmetz: Yeah, well, thank you, first. It has been a really cool year especially to be able to…it’s just been such an honor to be able to take something knowing people…millions of people use every day and think about how to refresh it, how to, you know, bring existing customers along, how to keep it relevant. We have mobile devices in all three platforms now, which is one of the huge things we…we’re really happy we accomplished this year.

SharePoint Roadmap

Image: SharePoint Mobile User Experience via Microsoft Blog

And just seeing the community, really respond to some of the work that we’ve done…we couldn’t have done it without that. The community’s given a ton of feedback and, really, with building software and the cloud…it’s a lot about, sort of, being able to listen really quickly and react really quickly. We did move a lot of our UX to a new platform where we could do that…where we could update our UX in the cloud, learn from that and it’s…compared to the old way where we had three years, we sort of [inaudible 00:02:41], tried to get it right, did a little bit of beta…this just feels so different.

SharePoint Roadmap

Image: SharePoint modern User Experience via Microsoft Blog

And, then, also being able to bridge to on-prem as well where we just announced yesterday…at least post this recording, that [SharePoint] Feature Pack 1 will bring some of that UX back to on-prem. We’ll have more in future Feature Packs and that, sort of, really feels good because I talk with customers about that bridge strategy and about no matter where they use SharePoint, that there’s a story. So it’s another huge highlight for us.

SharePoint Roadmap

Image: New OneDrive User Experience in SharePoint Feature Pack 1 via Microsoft Blog

Dux Raymond Sy: Well, I mean, you hit on a couple of points, right? The first point is just the pace…it’s exciting, it’s different and it’s not waiting for three years. And it’s one of those…big change from, obviously, a community perspective and, I’m sure, a customer perspective as well. So speaking about customers, what’s their take? What’s their feedback? Are they overwhelmed? “Wow, this is so much stuff coming” or what’s the general sentiment and feedback from customers?

Adam Harmetz: Yeah, I mean, you know, I think we’ve definitely…obviously there’s a large customer base and you get a large number of reactions there. I think…I think, broadly speaking, we’ve tried to bring customers along. We’ve tried to do new UX on top of existing data, if that makes sense. So the doc lib experience is refreshed. You don’t have to start new. There’s not a new name. There’s not a new concept if you’re familiar with what SharePoint is. I think that’s helped a lot.

You know, as far as the job of my team, it really has shifted a lot more to helping customers through the change…doing change management, which, you know, we’ve had some learning so I think when we first rolled out doc libs we needed to adjust our messaging and show people things were coming soon. And that was a really humbling lesson for us but also just reinforced to how our job is not only to build great software and build great experiences but then help customers adopt it and listen and make sure we have all those signals coming back to be able to take…to take action upon it.

Dux Raymond Sy: Absolutely. And it’s clear…your team…Microsoft has made a lot of great investment around adoption. I mean, just with FastTrack center alone. All the resources there not only, you know, planning to how to get…move to the cloud in a hybrid environment but all the resources around how to message this, how to train people…I think those are very, very valuable. In speaking to customers I work with, they found that very useful because they can take that, tweak it to their world, and they don’t have to worry about starting over and learning a lot from the experiences of other customers as well.

Adam Harmetz: Yeah, no, absolutely, and I think there’s more work we can and should do and will but, certainly, FastTrack has been a great resource for folks. You know, a bunch of guidance on perform tuning as well delivered this year and…Yeah, we really do focus on…I think Sataya’s larger mission that’s helped us focus on monthly active users and retaining users and being able to use the data to surface…to really have a great idea of how good of a job we’re doing. And I think it’s really helped. It’s really influenced the software we build and how we think about it and, you know, really positive stuff.

Dux Raymond Sy: I mean, with a massive organization, how much visibility, I guess, does Sataya have, in terms of the team itself, how SharePoint’s doing and how SharePoint’s evolving?

Adam Harmetz: Yeah, well…Jeff…when Sataya became CEO, Jeff left for a couple of years to run the strategy team for Sataya so…and they, you know…that’s helped a lot that he’s come back in the role, you know, and Sataya asked him personally to come back and I think that was a good statement of how important Sataya sees SharePoint in content collaboration as part of Office 365 and, obviously, Office 365 is the growth engine for the company. So, you know, we’ve had a couple reviews over the past year, you know, before we embarked on the refresher SharePoint we, you know, met with him and his SLT to ensure that was right and very recently, right before Ignite…the Friday before Ignite, as if we weren’t…have enough to do, we actually presented to him and his SLT about what…how far we’ve come over the past year. 

Dux Raymond Sy: That’s great.

Adam Harmetz: And, so, yeah, and I do think he sees content collaboration as essential to 365 and 365 is essential to the growth of the company so it’s been great to have his support. 

Dux Raymond Sy: Sounds like it’s a busy 2016 so far, huh?

Adam Harmetz: Yes, definitely one of the busy years…busier for SharePoint and for me personally…for my career as well.

Dux Raymond Sy: 2017…what’s coming ahead…any big things that customers and partners and SharePoint lovers can look forward to?

Adam Harmetz: Yeah, well, you know, I get a lot of feedback that’s…from customers and partners that said, “2016 was great. Please, Adam, don’t go off to the shiny, new object in 2017. There’s still a lot of work to do.” And, so, the number one thing is that we’re going to finish what we started. I think we got some awesome stuff we can build off of…there’s still a lot of feedback.

People have used UserVoice and given us a lot of things we can continue to improve and, so, for the most part, if you look at the modern intelligent internet that we talked about of team size publishing biz apps, like, there…there will be, hopefully, few new conceptual models and just extending on what we’ve already done with the SharePoint framework and the new, modern UX. I do think, if you look at the story arc for SharePoint, I think we made an outsized investment in team sites in 2016 and I think with the work with PowerApps and Flow and SharePoint together, we had a…great year for business apps and we’ll continue with that.

SharePoint Roadmap

Image: Homepage of https://sharepoint.uservoice.com/ 

And, then, publishing was the one area where we made some steps but didn’t get as far as, maybe, we anticipated in 2016. And, so, I think 2017…we’ll continue to make investment on all three but we want to get the water level line equal across all those so you’ll probably see an outsized investment in publishing and creating…and creating portals where a few people are broadcasting out to many. And, I think, that’ll be a theme as we complete the…modern UX of SharePoint. You know, once again, I don’t think people will see that as a…something SharePoint’s doing brand new scenario-wise but we are bringing it to a mobile world and we are infusing it with intelligence and providing a…hopefully, a refreshed and modern look and feel to it.

SharePoint Roadmap

Image: Mobile integrated User Experience with SharePoint via Microsoft Blog

Dux Raymond Sy: And, then, all these advance workloads, too, right? So, for example, you mentioned PowerApps and Flow, where it’s not just specific to SharePoint…other technologies leverage that as well in the family of Microsoft Cloud technologies. You know, yesterday the whole provisioning where Groups is created…I think those connections and interactions with the whole stack makes a great value product and, at the end of the day, helps get my job done easier, faster, sooner and better, right?

Adam Harmetz: Yeah, absolutely, I mean, SharePoint’s always had a role of being a great way of aggregating a bunch of experiences together, you know, whether there’s a website or on the mobile phone, being able to embed a Power BI report and launch a Flow from a document library. It’s a great way of experiencing, maybe, some of the emerging technologies from Microsoft as well as bringing it all together in one place.

SharePoint Roadmap

And I think 365 allows us to do it, Groups, in particular, in a decently, loosely coupled way, right? There’s no…SharePoint is a great way for creating a website but, you know…probably, sort of, have a snippet of a conversation preview and then go to Outlook to see the full conversation if it’s an Outlook conversation. I think that’s a…that’s a good strategy and it seems to be resonating really well.

Dux Raymond Sy: Yes, absolutely. And, again, just working and talking with customers, again, the pace and the possibilities just open a whole new opportunity now for innovation at the business level…now organizational level, right?

Adam Harmetz: Yeah, that’s what we’re hoping for. We’re eagerly collecting as many case studies and examples of the modern UX as we can and learning from that.

Dux Raymond Sy: So, if folks are interested to learn more about some of these technologies and case studies and use cases, what’s the best place for people to go and check out?

Adam Harmetz: Yeah, well, assume if you have feedback about the product…sharepoint.uservoice.com is an excellent place to give that. You know, I would say just get a file tenant Office 365 or log in your own Office 365 tenant where you tend to have first run experiences for a lot of the new UX and so that’s a great way of coming up to speed too. You mentioned FastTrack…there’s a bunch of great training available from there as well. And those are, you know, great resources.

[Uservoice screenshot]

Dux Raymond Sy: And in the tech community…the Microsoft tech community is a phenomenal place where you can interact with, you know, the whole world pretty much, and engage in great conversations and stories and use cases.

Adam Harmetz: Yeah, we monitor that and respond to the questions that we see based upon that as well. So, yeah, definitely those are great resources.

Dux Raymond Sy: Awesome, Now, Adam, this has been great. Thank you for your time but before I let you go, I gotta ask you a question.

Adam Harmetz: Sure.

Dux Raymond Sy: If you’re at SharePoint with…no, let me…let me rewind this. If you’re a Microsoft product, other than SharePoint…you can’t be biased…what would you be and why?

Adam Harmetz: Sure. Good question. You know, I have to choose PowerApps and Flow. One of the things about PowerApps and Flow…and I know you said I couldn’t choose SharePoint, but PowerApps and Flow remind me of the early days of SharePoint. I think SharePoint’s always had this role. And one of the reasons I’ve been working on the product for 11 years is it helps somebody and their team be a hero…using technology to be a hero because it allows them to, you know, without code, to be able to automate some processes or surprise other team members about how technology can actually help solve a problem. And not a surface level problem, not something they do every day, but really, like, what a power user [crosstalk] technology and help others and…

SharePoint Roadmap

Image: Building a PowerApp from a modern SharePoint list via Microsoft Blog.

SharePoint Roadmap

Image: Set up a new Flow from SharePoint via Microsoft Blog.

Dux Raymond Sy: Absolutely…without relying on IT or heavy [crosstalk], yeah.

Adam Harmetz: Yeah, yeah…what we’re doing with PowerApps and Flow and, of course, connecting to SharePoint so it really reminds me of the early success of SharePoint and what got such a big fan base and community and…together and so that’ll be my choice.

Dux Raymond Sy: Absolutely. So, here’s an idea…marketing idea. Maybe we have, like, a…these cape swag, like, cape swag giveaways that say “PowerApps” or something.

Adam Harmetz: Yeah, there we go.

Dux Raymond Sy: But I think the Windows team is already doing something like that.

Adam Harmetz: Yes.

Dux Raymond Sy: All right. Awesome. Adam, thank you so much. I appreciate your time. And, folks, thanks again for watching…until the next episode. Thank you. Goodbye.

Adam Harmetz: Thank you.

Dux Raymond Sy
Dux Raymond Syhttp://dux.sy
With over 20 years of business and technology experience, Dux has driven organizational transformations worldwide with his ability to simplify complex ideas and deliver relevant solutions. He serves as the Chief Brand Officer of AvePoint who has authored the LinkedIn Learning course How to Build Your Personal Brand, the book SharePoint for Project Management, as well as numerous whitepapers and articles. As a public speaker, Dux has delivered engaging, interactive presentations to more than 25,000 people at leading industry events around the world. He also hosts the modern workplace podcast #shifthappens that focuses on how leading organizations navigated their business transformation journey. Dux advocates tirelessly for inclusion, using technology for good, and philanthropic initiatives. Connect with him: http://dux.sy

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