Remarks by Julia White, General Manager, Microsoft Office Division, in Orlando, Florida, on July 13, 2015.

JULIA WHITE:  (Applause.)  Thank you.  Now, Satya earlier spoke about the changing workplace.  And this is technology driving this, of course, but it’s also really about people’s preferences.  And I’d like to talk about that as what I call the “Millennial Effect.”

And when I say that, I don’t just mean the millennial generation.  Of course, that’s an important part of it — half of the work force, in fact, by 2020 is a millennial.  But, really, it’s about how that work style has affected all of us.

If you think about our workplace today, we’re always connected, we’re far more collaborative, and we’re always more open than we ever have historically been within the workplace.

And it’s also about work is what we do and not where we go.  As we’ve been saying, “workplace” is a little bit of a misnomer because it’s not really a place for many of us at all.

Employees also expect their apps to be tailored and proactive, exactly for the task at hand.  And expectations of responsiveness have gone up.  When I tweet to a company I’m interacting with, I expect a response immediately.  And it’s that set of expectations and mindset that is shaping the workplace.

So let’s talk a little bit about the areas of innovation where we’re driving this change in how we all can work together.

First, in communications.  And when I say communications, it’s a very broad category.  So it’s e-mail, enterprise, social, IM, voice.  And, historically, these have been pretty siloed, different kinds of communications.  And what you’re seeing the industry and us do is to break down those silos.

And we’re centered around people.  Because no matter how I’m communicating, it’s always about a set of people.  And that’s what’s so fundamental with what we’re doing with Office 365 Groups.  No matter how I’m communicating, no matter how I’m collaborating, I can get back to that group and always know what’s happening and have that sense of what’s going on with the group of people or even a broader organization.

Now, communications, this area also continues to be the place that’s leading customers to Office 365.  It continues to be the first workload people want to go to the cloud with.  And that’s why you’ve seen us invest so deeply in making a fantastic deployment experience, making it seamless with our Fast Track Deployment Center, so we can get our customers to the cloud so all of you can add your value-add services on top of it.

We also have a bunch of new investments around communications.  Exchange Server 2016 coming out.  Skype for Business Server earlier this year.  The Skype for Business Cloud PBX coming later as well.

And as Terry so articulately talked about, security is absolutely top of mind, and communications more than anywhere.  Any day you can open up a newspaper and see what happens when something is breached from a communications perspective.  And it used to be about brute force attack, but now it’s much more specific — phishing, identity theft, going after individuals.  And that’s why particularly around communications we have an incredible investment in security, advanced threat protection, encryption always, multifactor authentication.  And now we’re en route to next year being able to have bring your own key to Office 365 as well.

Getting into meetings.  We know today the majority of meetings have a virtual attendee, but yet video is rarely used inside the workplace.  We use it in our personal lives, but not at work.  Yet 55 percent of communication is nonverbal.  That means the majority of our meetings have people that are missing more than half of the context of that meeting.  It’s just unacceptable.  Video is essential, but it has to be easy, it has to be seamless.  Just like walking into a room and sitting down and meeting with someone.

And that’s why I’m so excited about the work we’ve done between Skype and Skype for Business and bringing those experiences together.  So now we have this great user experience that’s engaging, it’s fun, it’s video friendly, but yet all of the capabilities and the back-end compliance and security that you need from a Skype for Business perspective.  Really bringing the best of those both worlds together.  And as Satya talked about making it great for work and for life, and that’s the experience we’re delivering.

Beyond that, it’s about the meeting room itself.  If you look at meeting rooms, they’ve kind of been like time capsules.  They haven’t changed in decades, frankly, despite having new technology that can help.

Well, now with the Surface Hub and that Skype for Business integration, we really have the best meeting device.  It’s simple to use, it’s one touch, everything is captured digitally on my OneNote, annotated on my slides, whatever it might be.  Because we’re kind of in a world where we’re not printing things, and we need to make sure we have all the latest versions of things.  And that’s what that meeting experience is.  Before the meeting, during the meeting, after the meeting.  And that’s what we’re looking at end to end.

Into content creation, this is really where the Office core apps come, Word, PowerPoint, Excel.  And they’re fantastic individual productivity tools, but we’re busy making them more than just that.  Satya talked about teamwork being so central.  So that’s why we’re shifting the Office core apps from being very “me”-centric to very “we”-centric because co-creation is the norm.  That’s how work gets done, in teams and networks.

Whether you’re managing your pipeline opportunity in CRM and you have your shared OneNote notebook so everyone has all the information.  Or if I’m collaborating on a document and we’re iterating rapidly and we’re doing real-time co-auth.  We’ve had that in the online experience, and you saw Brian showing the desktop experience too.  So real-time co-auth in desktop as well because that’s how we work.

And so fundamental to this is cloud storage.  If you’re not saving this to the cloud, that means you’re not able to share and collaborate in the way that you could and would.  It also means you don’t have access across your devices as well.

In a world of teamwork and team selling, saving locally and collaborating via e-mail attachments is just simply outdated.  And it’s all of our collective jobs to get out to our customers with that.

And I have a great story that really pays this off.  So with Office 365 Education, we spend a lot of time with students.  Recently at a U.S. high school, we were watching this young man pound away on his laptop.  And one of the researchers leaned over and said, “Hey, when you work, do you ever save local?”  And the high school student stopped and looked and he says, “What’s that mean?”

That’s a good question.  Why would he ever do that?  He wouldn’t be able to work across his devices.  He wouldn’t be able to collaborate with his classmates.  That’s the mindset we all need.

Now, speaking of cloud storage, that gets me to my file-sharing content management.  Now, first, I want to talk about SharePoint.  There seems to have been some question about our commitment to SharePoint in the past year.  I’ve certainly seen our competitors out there creating FUD about us not being committed to SharePoint.

At the Ignite Conference a few months ago, I actually read the 423 pieces of feedback that came on the keynote.  And I saw a lot of comments that said, “I didn’t hear a lot about SharePoint.  Julia only said SharePoint a couple of times, what’s that mean?”

Today, I’m here to say, SharePoint.  SharePoint, SharePoint, SharePoint, SharePoint, SharePoint!  We are absolutely committed.  We have a fantastic SharePoint Server 2016 coming out.  Rock-solid code based on the cloud.  For the first time, we’re taking the cloud code base and delivering that with our SharePoint Server 2016.  Which means you get the great reliability, performance, scalability that we’ve learned from the cloud into the Server code base.

It also is built for hybrid.  We know that SharePoint will be in hybrid for a long time, the nature of that workload, it’s got a lot of custom apps.  But it doesn’t mean our customers don’t want to take advantage of cloud capabilities as well.  So now you can have all of your custom workflow on-premises and still be able to tap into the Office Graph in a hybrid capability.  And that’s what Server is delivering.

As well as things like data loss prevention and e-discovery.  Fantastic release.  But it’s more than just on-premises, of course.  With Office 365 and SharePoint Online, we’re doing things like fundamentally bringing the Office Graph intelligence into things like our modern portal experience.  Improving skills search with the Graph, and even making better enterprise search holistically.

Of course, the other area here is OneDrive for Business.  We know we have to win.  We’re totally committed.  In recent months, we’ve made significant progress against all aspects, from the user experience to the IT controls.  Great new look, great updated Web experience.  And we’ve answered the vast majority of those IT requested controls.  But we’re not done.

In H2, we’re releasing the biggest update since the service was released originally.  And the core of that is rock-solid sync.  Yeah, let’s get some claps for that.  Auditing, reporting and DLP.

And, of course, just like we’re doing with Skype, we’re bringing that great, friendly consumer experience from OneDrive and bringing that into the OneDrive for Business experience.  You have a wonderful user experience as well as all those controls from enterprise capability.

Last, let’s get into business apps.  Now, as consumers, we’ve become accustomed to having tailored apps for every little task we’re trying to accomplish.  And that same expectation is now coming to the workplace, of course.  And that’s why Dynamics is increasingly offering solutions that are tailored for specific roles and specific professions.

And these apps are also evolving to be systems of intelligence.  And then Dynamics is delivering experiences that let you personalize the experience for your customers in CRM or run more efficient operations right through Dynamics ERP.

But it’s also about bringing those experiences in Dynamics together with Office 365.  So right within my Dynamics experience, I can do things like collaborate, file share and have seamless communications with Office 365.  And then even extending that to do Power BI with analytics.

And speaking of analytics, we’re actually now moving into a new area, organizational analytics.  This is about unlocking the insights about how you work individually, but more interestingly, how the organization works, how teams are collaborating or not collaborating.  Who are the key connectors in the organization?  How is communication flowing?

We’ve all had hypotheses about that, but now in Office 365, we have so much rich information, and you add machine learning and analytics on top of that, and the insights that you’ve never had before become present.  And this is a place where there’s incredible partner opportunity.  It’s a brand new market, frankly.  These are ideas and concepts about corporate culture that we were guessing about before, but now we actually have real insights into it.  And we’re very early in this technology area, but you can certainly expect a lot more from us here.

Now, speaking of which, it’s time to show you some of that.  So let’s take a look real quick.

So to show you this, this demo, I’m going to take the role of a sales leader in a 3-D printing company.  And I’m going to start my day here in Delve.  And I see all of the most relevant information to me.  Anything that’s trending around me based on my actions and those actions around me.

Now, powering Delve is the Office Graph and the Office Graph has all of the signals from my actions and the content from people from myself as well as all the people around me.  And that’s how it knows what’s most relevant to me right now.

And you see information from across Office 365.  But because we’ve made the Office Graph extensible, partners like yourselves and many others can integrate right into the Office Graph.  So you see I have information from Trello and Salesforce.com, so I have a holistic view of what information is most relevant and important.

And as I’m in Delve, I see that there are two sales teams I’m working with, here’s the Adventure Works team led by Richard, and he’s working on an RFP.  And Andrea here is working on another RFP.  Well, I hope they’re working together and sharing practices, but I don’t know.  In the past, I would have had to guess.  But now I can use Delve org analytics to find out a bit more about what’s happening.

So let me go into my org analytics view here.  And you see this is a preview of an experience coming a little later this year.  And you can see I have my personal information like my work-life balance or even how I’m spending my meeting time and how that compares to the company average.  A little bit like a health checker on that front.

But also I get information about my team and my company, what’s trending.  And here in my team map, I can actually get a bit more insight about the interactions happening.  So let me click in there.

And now you see my team and all these interactions.  And the thickness of the line is actually the intensity of the interactions, the frequency and intensity.  And I can see I’m connected with these folks and they’re connected here, but let me see exactly what’s going on.  I can just filter down.  In this case, I want to just see if those two sales teams are meeting and sharing best practices and I can apply that filter.

And, immediately, I see that, in fact, they’re not.  Actually, those sales teams are just relying on my team to connect, they’re not actually directly connected.  That’s a great new insight that I just got thanks to the new org analytics.

Let me go take some action on that.  I happen to have a pipeline review meeting coming later today.  And I have Andrea on.  So I’m just going to go ahead and add Richard too.

And you see here every meeting in Office 365 as we move forward automatically has the Skype link.  That means that voice call and that video call is literally one click away on every meeting I have.

All right, I got Richard added there.  This is great.  We’ll get together later today.  But, actually, my next step is to go actually meet with a customer right now.  Thanks to the integration between Cortana and CRM, I can actually just use Cortana to get ready for my upcoming sales appointments.

So here I see the different pipeline information coming from my CRM app.  I also see the meeting, the customers who are going to be there and the other deals going on.  Right here, integrated into Cortana that simply.

But I need to get moving.  So I’m going to grab my phone, my device that I use when I’m on the road.  And because, again, Cortana is everywhere I go, if I go to Cortana here as well, you see that same card information.  I see that CRM information rendering right here.  So whether I’m on my PC or on the go, I can get access to that information.

Well, I’m on the way to the meeting.  I’m going to make the most of my time, of course, so I’m going to triage a little e-mail.  I’m going to use the new Outlook mail app on my Windows Phone.  And it’s a gorgeous new app.  The beautiful modern UI.  We have my swipe gestures.  Can swipe that way to delete, or I can swipe this way to set a flag.

Now, I know that we all have our own unique ways to triage e-mail, that’s why those swipes are fully customizable.

People have been using e-mail on their phone for a long time, but they haven’t really been terribly productive.  Now with the new Outlook app, it really can be productive everywhere you go.

Now, I see that I have this e-mail from Ben here about this 3-D printing.  And I think it seems important that I probably should check this out before I go meet with the customer.  Want to know the latest and greatest.

So it looks like there’s a new prototype.  I’m going to go ahead and click that link and find out what this is all about.

Now, when that happens, it turns out that that link had been maliciously attacked and has been changed to be a bad link.  It happened after the point that it was sent.  So even though this e-mail was filtered on the way in, the hacker came in after the fact and updated the link.  It’s a sophisticated attack that’s happening more and more.

But thanks to the new advanced threat protection in Office 365, it blocked me, protected me at the moment I was clicking, not before, just then.

So if I go back, I can go through that Bing link at the bottom instead, and you see in this case it’s actually a legitimate link.  So I’m able to go out and do that.  So I was protected just as I needed it, and I’m able to keep getting my work done.

Thanks to threat protection, everything’s still intact.  My identity hasn’t been hacked.  So I can go through with my customer presentation.  And to do that, I’m actually going to use my PowerPoint right here on my phone so I can actually get all of my work done thanks to the new Office apps right here on the phone.

And it’s the beautiful PowerPoint Office experience that you’d expect.  In this case, I’m going to do my presentation.  Let me go into presentation mode.  I’ll flip over here.

And, again, as you see with our Office mobile apps, it’s got the rich graphics, it’s got animations and transitions, everything rendered beautifully.  I can trust there’s always that great look and feel.  And I have some great enhancements, too.  I can do things like maybe I want to zoom in or maybe I want to kind of touch and hold and I can get a laser pointer.  Oops, go back in there, sorry about that.

But I can also get my laser pointer, I can highlight some things here.  Or if maybe I want to do some inking, I can just go ahead and annotate on my phone too.  Grab my pen.  Call attention to this.

So even using just my phone, on a small device, I can have a really impactful presentation as well.

And now the presentation went great, so I’m ready to head back into the office.  But I want to let the team know that everything went well.  So I’m going to go into my — oops, let me go into my CRM app here, actually, right here.  Where I can get access to all of my pipeline information as well.  I can move from one stage to the next.  So anywhere I am, I can always stay in touch with my sales team so they know exactly what’s happening.  Again, integrated OneNote, so the whole team has access to exactly what’s happening step by step.  So here into my pipeline, and you can see across the top I have my different phases.  And I can just click to the next phase and the system’s been updated and so everyone knows that things must have gone well.  So I’m getting back to the office now.

All right.  Now, I’m going to head back in the office and have that meeting to review the sales pipeline.  And I’m going to have Ben join me here on stage in my in-room meeting, as well as some people virtually as well.  And, of course, I’m going to use the beautiful Surface Hub.

Now, first, about this device for a second, it’s a stunning 84-inch, 4K, ultra high-def, 120-hertz, multitouch device.  The biggest one on the market.  It’s got built-in high-def cameras, mics, speakers, CPU, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, literally, it’s got everything.  All I need is a power cord and I’m all set.

It’s designed from the ground up for collaboration, to unlock the power of the group.  And this is the conference room device that’s really going to get used because it’s so simple and it’s very cost-effective, too.

So to get started in our meeting, all I have to do is one-touch join.  And I’m right into my Skype video call, of course.  And it puts me into my digital whiteboard and it’s a OneNote notebook, so it’ll go with me wherever I am, I have my notebook.

Now, hey, guys, welcome to the meeting.  You see it’s a very natural video experience.  Everyone sees what’s happening.

So today for the agenda, I of course want to do the pipeline.  But I want to give feedback about that deck that I just presented, the customer had some feedback.

But because it’s actually a virtual whiteboard, I can change my mind.  While that feedback is kind of top of mind, I’m actually going to do that first, grab that here.  And I can move things around and have full flexibility, again, because it’s a digital experience.

So let’s go ahead and pull up that PowerPoint presentation so I can give you the feedback the customer had.  And you see it’s very simple for Ben to just project up, swipe that over so it’s full screen.  But it’s not just a projection.  It’s actually a two-way experience.  So if I swipe up here, you see it actually forwards on Ben’s Surface as well, and the same if he comes back, it goes both ways.

And the same for the inking experience, too.  So maybe, you know, the customer had some feedback about this, and maybe want to change that.  You see, it actually shows up on Ben’s Surface and he can do it back.  We call that “inkback” and “touchback” that two-way, dynamic experience.

Let’s go ahead and pull up that pipeline now.  Perfect.  And here is my Power BI dashboard, of course.  All of the information I need right here at my fingertips.

In this case, I want to just check out this product gross margin and see what’s going on whatever the 3-D printers.  And with Power BI, I can drill down to all levels that I want to get at the information and keep going farther and farther.  Get that here.  Oh, maybe not.  All right, maybe not.  There we go, all right.  All right.

Now, in this case, I have product gross margin and gross revenue.  What I really wish is I had the combination of those two charts, but I don’t.  But thanks to Power BI, I can actually do that so simply.  I just grab one and drop it right on top and Power BI will actually do the work to revisualize it, combining those two data sets.  In this case, a scatter plot that makes the data make more sense.

So now I’ve got the insight that I want and I can capture that right back to my OneNote notebook.  I can just grab here.  And it drops it right back in that OneNote notebook so everyone can collaborate together and we can share that back to OneNote as well.

And I can even annotate, of course, too.  So I can say, hey, you know, check this — oops, go get my ink.  Check this out.  And I can bring it here.  A really powerful experience.  Full digital and captured so everyone can have access to it after the meeting as well.

And when I’m done, all I have to do on this device is hit “I’m done.”  And I close it out.  And all of the information is wiped off there and it’s ready for the next meeting as well.  Thanks, Ben.  (Applause.)

Now, what I showed you is where we are today and what’s coming in the very near future.  But it’s amazing to see the number of innovations that came out over the past year.  Over 400 new capabilities to Office 365 alone in the past 12 months.

And that pace of innovation is not stopping.  The next wave moving forward as we look forward to the next 12 months, we have a whole set of Office client and servers coming, a huge partner opportunity around that alone.  But, additionally, we have Skype Cloud PBX, we have CRM Machine Learning for intelligence engagement.  So we’re using Azure Machine Learning to provide proactive experiences in CRM Online and things like cross-sell recommendations for sellers.  Tons of new innovations coming, tons of partner opportunity baked into that.

And we’re delivering productivity and we’re delivering business process experiences.  The future really is about now those come together.  When intelligent business processes power productivity, not hinder that.

If you go back this morning when I showed you that GigJam demo, hopefully that gives you a sense of the potential of how we can fundamentally change the way we work.  This is where business process meets productivity.

It’s an incredibly exciting time.  Thank you so much for your time and have a great week at WPC.  (Applause.)

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