- Hi, I'm Charles Lamanna.
and I'm here to tell you about Collaborative Applications,
the fastest emerging, and most exciting area
for business applications.
And the reason we're so excited
about Collaborative Applications is because
of four major disruptions reshaping the business world.
No matter what department or what line of business you're in
whether it's sales, service, marketing, finance,
or more it's being changed because of these disruptions.
The first is the explosion
of data that we're all dealing with.
Whether it's digital properties, your employee experiences,
your workflows, your business applications,
data is coming from every part of your business.
And you have to bring all order and intelligence
to all of this information in order to get value
and stay competitive in this cloud and digital first world.
The second is that we need to embrace
and work through hybrid work,
as we come back from the COVID 19 pandemic.
We need to figure out that our new ways of working together
between virtual meetings, in person,
and the combination of the two,
and that's going to require us
to rethink our application experiences across the board.
The third item is that we have
to rethink and reimagine our collaboration mindset.
We have to improve
and augment our digital collaboration experiences
with technology like Microsoft Teams
and make it so that video conferencing
and applications start to blend and blur together.
This is going to require us
to reimagine not only how we work as people,
but also how we build software
and how we use technology
to embrace this collaboration first environment.
And the fourth disruption is citizen development.
Which means that everybody in the business will be able
to now build solutions using no code, low code tools.
Even if you're not a developer and not in IT,
but instead inside of the business,
like in finance or marketing,
you can go create solutions using no code, low code tools
whether you want to build an application or do an automation,
it's now possible to solve your own challenges
and your own problems,
even if you can't write any code.
This is going to make it possible
to go build a very large number of digital solutions
which just weren't attainable in the past.
And what we've done at Microsoft to respond
to these four major disruptions is introduce a new way
of building applications, Collaborative Apps.
What Collaborative Apps enable is a different way
of thinking about how you deliver work
and employee experience.
It's about making sure that business data is available
to everyone everywhere, wherever they are working
in the most natural and intelligent environment.
The second piece is this idea that communication is now
at the heart and part of any single business process
and any business application.
You need to be able to send messages,
make phone calls, do meetings, and do video conferencing,
right from inside the context of applications.
The third piece is this new idea
of business applications being multiplayer.
No longer should you work on an island alone and isolated
from the rest of your team,
but instead should be able to do realtime collaboration,
realtime coauthoring, and realtime work
with everybody else on your team.
These three pieces define
what makes something a collaborative application.
And we think that every application
over the coming years will need to embrace these patterns.
Underpinning all of this is the idea
of collaborating across developers, IT,
and business users to create amazing digital experiences
with the Power Platform, Power BI, Power Apps,
Power Automate, and Power Virtual Agent
make it so that everybody inside the organization
can collaborate and work together
to build world class digital experiences.
All of these things come together to meet all
of the disruptions that I just was talking about.
And one of the important components
of Collaborative Applications
at Microsoft is something called Context IQ.
It's a brand new, natively-integrated,
cross application experience.
It brings the information to people where they need it
and when they need it, powered by AI,
powered by what you've done in the past,
and making sure that you have everything at your fingertips
to be as productive as possible when you're working
and when you're collaborating.
And we will see across the entire Microsoft Cloud
how Contact IQ helps us reimagine
and rethink business applications and experiences.
And there's no better way to do that than
to see it in action.
I'm going to play a short video that highlights
how Collaborative Applications
and Context IQ can completely transform the sales process
for our customers.
Let's take a look.
- [Narrator] Closing any deal requires a ton
of different stakeholders all across the company,
the world, and business functions.
Finding the right people
to help close a deal is really hard.
Timing is everything.
Quickly bringing people together
and sharing context is critical.
And the new normal of hybrid work has made this even harder.
Dynamics is a Collaborative App and has got this.
Tina, a business banking relationship manager needs
to drive a deal to closure.
She looks at an opportunity record in Dynamics 365 Sales.
What's new is that she sees others active
in the same opportunity.
She's confident her team is also motivated
to close this deal.
Right from Dynamics, she starts a Microsoft Teams chat,
which automatically links the chat conversation
to the specific Dynamics record opportunity.
The conversation, history, and files are available
to everyone who sees it.
The whole team is engaged in getting so much done.
Amazing.
She asks if anyone is familiar
with trade financing in this region
but unfortunately, no.
Not knowing who can help on a deal is a huge challenge,
especially in larger organizations.
This is where AI can help.
Microsoft Graph and Dataverse data are used
to suggest people who can help.
Tina sees that bill recently closed a similar deal.
This would normally take weeks to find out.
She starts another chat with Bill.
Bill is an account manager and works a wide range of deals.
But like most of us,
he spends a lot of time collaborating from within Teams.
He sees Tina's message and even better,
the opportunity she's asking about, that is so helpful.
All of the high level details are right there.
And if he needs more information,
he can drill into the Dynamics record,
right from within Teams,
where key insights of the relationship health,
history of customer interactions,
and even who else is actively engaged
on the record are there for him to see.
He gets up to speed quickly without having to ask Tina,
which saves time for everyone.
As Bill chats with Tina,
he recalls a similar opportunity he worked on.
In Teams, Bill can easily search across people, files,
and Dynamics records.
He finds what he's looking
for without having to switch apps.
He shares it with Tina.
Again, without having to navigate a URL
or jump to a new browser window,
she now has relevant information about a similar deal
and contacts who can help her close the deal.
And since adding people to the chat is all so easy,
it connects people from across the organization.
Dynamics is a first class Collaboration App.
But collaboration is more than just chat.
Meetings, email, and calling are all integrated.
So as the team moves between communication channels,
context is still retained.
To get her questions answered quickly,
Tina starts a video call, right from Dynamics.
The context of the opportunity, previous chats,
and other related information are all available.
This is especially valuable
for the new people just joining the conversation.
Now they can make updates
to the opportunity record right in the Teams call
and capture notes collaboratively.
Dynamics automatically creates executive summaries,
call highlights, and action items to make it easy
to follow up and to retain information
that would normally be lost.
This is the power of Dynamics 365 as a Collaborative App
inside of Microsoft Teams.
- And that video shows just
how much Collaborative Applications can change
the way you work.
It makes it possible to bring the entire company together
to go drive a better sales process,
to do a better job with customer support,
or any other thing that matters for your business to run.
And if we dive deeper into one of the pillars
of what make Collaborative Applications unique,
it's this idea that business data is available
to everyone everywhere they are working.
That means that you don't have to go searching
and trying to find the right data at the right time.
But instead, it's brought to the right people,
in the right form, in the right context,
so that you can get your job done,
as opposed to spending time looking
for bits and pieces of data.
And one of the big items that we've done to enable that,
is we've made it possible to integrate and embed all
of Dynamics 365 and Dataverse data right
inside of Microsoft Teams.
This is able to be bound
and launches a integrated card based experience,
so you're able to interact with all of your data
without having to leave the application in real time.
And this is something that we've done
by deeply integrating AI and data layers
into the Microsoft Teams collaborative environment.
So you don't have to go anywhere else to get your job done
and can just stay focused at staying in the flow
of work to produce a better outcome
for your employees and your customers.
For the second major piece,
it's all about making it easy
to communicate as part of any business process.
When we look at what that means,
it means that you can bring communication tools right
into the context of Dynamics 365.
You can have an embedded contact list,
an embedded chat experience.
You can go pull up and interact
with other people inside your organization.
Just like Dynamics data and your business data
was showing up inside of Teams,
now Teams can show up inside of Dynamics.
The idea is that a user can stay where they're working
and stay in the flow
of their work without having to go switch
between all these different applications.
And that's what a modern information worker requires.
Additionally, we have call intelligence built inside
of our customer engagement offerings.
So whenever you're on the phone
or reaching out with a new lead or opportunity,
or working a case,
you're able to get realtime transcription,
realtime coaching, realtime action items, all powered by AI,
while you're working inside of Dynamics 365.
You don't have to worry
about how you'll capture that information.
And instead the apps work for you and they make sure
that you can focus on collaborating
with whoever's on the other side of that phone call,
instead of worrying about how you're going to capture notes
and action items.
This is a new AI powered way to work with other people.
Additionally, we all have to deal with meetings
and as we think about virtual meetings and hybrid meetings,
we can provide new immersive experiences,
where Dynamics data and Dataverse data shows up
right in line inside of your meeting.
So just as you're talking to somebody,
you can see information about the account
or the case that corresponds
with the other people on the meeting.
So you don't have to have other applications open.
You can stay focused in the moment
on collaborating with your customers and your coworkers.
The idea being that you just can live
in the moment with the rest of the team
without having to worry about where you're going to find data
and find the right information.
In the third piece, which is one of my favorite ones,
is that business applications are now multiplayer.
Just like how co-authoring and co-presence
completely transformed productivity applications,
like Office 365 a decade ago,
the same thing is happening for business applications.
You can now collaborate inside a modern, unified workspace
right inside of Microsoft Teams.
You can look at records,
you can look at business process flows,
you can take action and see who else is making changes
to that data while you're working inside an environment.
And again, you're not going to lots
of different applications,
but instead able to stay centered and grounded
in the moment as you work
through the processes and produce better outcomes
for your customers, your partners, and your employees.
Additionally, you can see who is on a record in real time
inside of Dynamics 365.
So you can see the little icon and avatar
in the upper right hand corner
and easily go start a chat message
or conversation or a meeting, or make a phone call.
So you can involve everybody who's working
on a particular piece of data without having to email them
or work with them out of band.
And just like we saw inside of Office 365
over the last decade,
this can completely change the way that we work together
inside of these applications.
One of the other important disruptions that I talked
about was this idea of low code, no code
and enabling collaboration across the entire company
to make amazing solutions.
And that's what Power BI,
for low-code data analytics and reporting,
Power Apps for low-code web and mobile applications,
Power Automate for low-code robotic process automation
and workflow automation,
and Power Virtual Agent for low-code chatbots make possible.
Business users who understand the business challenges
can build solutions.
IT professionals can collaborate and govern
and manage these solutions.
And even professional developers
can bring sophisticated controls.
And by doing this,
low code can truly empower everybody in the organization
to build amazing solutions to accelerate business outcomes
and to produce better experiences
for your employees and for your customers.
And this idea of one platform
for everybody in the company has never been done before.
It's a unique change in how we approach low-code
and we can see that it's really taking the world by storm.
And here at Microsoft, we have the best low-code platform
to create value for your business.
According to Gartner,
we have the number one adopted low-code platform
with Power Apps and over 50% of CIOs would select Microsoft
as their enterprise automation platform with Power Automate.
We can see that these are the trusted tools
to go solve the last mile of challenges and problems
that you face inside your organization.
And it can compliment all the great collaboration
and innovation that happens across every single discipline.
And if we look at how this has been adopted,
we can see that already,
over 500,000 organizations have adopted these tools.
And over 97% of the Fortune 500 are using Dynamic 365
or the Power Platform.
No matter the industry, no matter the country,
Power Platform and Dynamics 365 are ready
to help you embrace the trends of Collaborative Applications
and low code, no code development.
Thank you for taking the time to get this quick overview
of these concepts.
I hope you found it valuable,
and I hope you can go check out some
of the additional materials we have to learn more
about what it can do for you and your business.