[MUSIC]
>> Hi. My name is Nicole Herskowitz,
and I'm the Business Lead for Microsoft Teams.
Today I'm joined by Rajesh Jha.
We're going to talk about Microsoft 365,
technologies,
how work is evolving,
and the impact that's having
on application development.
Hi, Rajesh. How are you doing today?
>> Thank you for having me, Nicole.
>> Well, so much has
happened over the last 18 months.
It's fundamentally changed the way we work,
the way we live, the way we learn.
What have you observed?
What are your key learnings?
>> Yeah. Like we all know it's been
just an amazingly exceptional 12 months.
The first, I think, as we all know,
this is the year where everything moved to the Cloud.
People think work moved remote,
but actually where it moved to was the Cloud.
We saw that firsthand.
As you know, we now have
over 145 million daily active users of Teams,
so we are proud of the fact that we
were able to step up and help
our customers and our users to really
use Teams to do collaboration,
stay connected, and move
forward to the Office and Teams.
But, Nicole I think
2021 is going to be different from
both 2020 and 2019.
People, employees, they want flexibility.
At the same time,
we got to learn a new way of hybrid work,
so we have a lot ahead of us.
>> There really are these new
realities of hybrid work.
>> Absolutely.
>> What are you seeing?
How's Microsoft, how are customers,
how are partners, like, building applications,
are they doing anything different that you're seeing?
>> Yeah. We've talked about that a bunch, and we think of
it as basically three different eras
of application development, if I may.
The first era, of course,
was GUI, the democratization of computing,
moving to graphical user interfaces,
Windows, the Mac, Win32 apps.
Then I would say the next big
era that changed the way
applications are developed was with web and mobile,
and that was about being able to work anywhere.
The focus was still
quite a bit on individual productivity.
Now during the pandemic,
what's really come to the fore is team productivity,
enabling a group of people to work together.
We think this is the era of collaborative apps,
where collaborations are the center,
whether it be synchronous in
the context of a video meeting,
whether it be asynchronous
with documents and chat.
With Teams, we feel we've got this user interface,
the shell for collaborative apps that
really is about group productivity, sync and async.
That's how we think about it.
Really the application developers both inside of
Microsoft and to the ISVs
who we actually work very closely with,
we see the same thing.
Collaboration is going to have to be
the core of new applications.
>> Interesting, this new concept.
Collaborative apps, this new app model.
It sounds like Teams plays this really critical role.
Can you tell me a little bit more about what is
a collaborative app and what is the benefit?
Why should developers care?
>> Yeah. When we
started Teams about a couple of years ago,
maybe three years ago now,
we did want to focus
on putting Teams first, hence the name.
It was about group productivity,
but we knew that collaboration was sync and async,
sometimes in the context of a document,
sometimes a shared dashboard,
sometimes people needed to come together.
At the heart what is it about?
It's not about a single application,
it's about the way of work,
and Teams is a new way of work,
it brings all the app tools because of its platform.
It brings meetings modality, chat modality,
documents, third-party applications,
custom-built apps all together.
But within collaborative apps,
at its core, it's about collaboration,
but it doesn't have to just be in Teams.
Office itself - and yesterday,
Jeff Teper showed how we are able to
bring interactive components powered by
fluid right inside of Teams with
the same components can be in
other Canvases such as Outlook or Office.
We think collaborative apps is about people,
it's about groups, it's about
group productivity. Teams
of course is custom-built for that,
but it extends more
broadly to the other applications as well.
>> It really sounds like the power of
Teams plus the broader Office applications
really provides this user experience or
this layer for exposing these collaborative apps?
>> That's exactly right.
>> Now, there must be more. Is the Microsoft Cloud
playing a bigger role here?
What really are the various technologies that
developers can tap into
to build these collaborative apps?
>> You just take any
classic application developers stack.
We've talked about the user interface
right now, the shell.
Teams being the shell, and interaction
coming in the context of
the work that people are doing in the flow.
Think of that as a UI layer or the experienced layer,
whether it would be in Teams,
whether it would be in Office,
or in some other Canvas.
Then the application logic -
with Teams, you can plug in
your own Cloud logic using any past service,
whether it's in Azure Platform services
or any other Cloud platform services,
or you could also reuse the rich platform,
the low code platform that we have at Power Platform.
You can write your logic
using any of that middle tier.
Then at the data tier,
we think there are two really important concepts.
One is the Microsoft Graph.
The Microsoft Graph is
the customer's most important database.
It's where people, their relationships,
the meetings, the documents,
what's shared with whom,
what's trending in our organization,
that's all captured in the Microsoft Graph.
Now, around Microsoft Graph,
we've augmented that with some rich services.
Yesterday, we talked about
the Azure Communication Service that
allows the interop of
Microsoft Graph by our Teams with
any other custom build
collaborative app that people go build.
Fluid Framework is another service
that sits on top of
the Microsoft Graph search connectors.
There's a bunch of stuff in Microsoft Graph.
Then the other database that's really important
also for our customers is the Microsoft Dataverse.
This is where structured business
process schemas live together.
At the highest tier,
you've got Microsoft Teams and
Office with collaboration at the center.
Then you have your business logic,
whether it would be in Power Platform or
any Azure past service.
Then you've got your databases
that you could augment.
You could bring your own schemas into these databases
or you could connect your middle tiers
here on databases.
Then of course, as we also talked
about how we build professional developer tools,
VS Code and VS and GitHub,
we invested to make
these great development environments
to build these collaborative apps.
>> Now, that sounds fantastic
and I assume at the core,
there is also at the bottom a foundational layer with
identity and security and all of those good things?
>> Yeah, you're right. At the end of the day,
customers expect enterprise-grade security
and compliance, and it starts with
identity and tying into
that all the security and the compliance policies.
I'm very excited about the kind of applications that
we've seen our customers starting to build,
as we starting to build,
and how we ourselves are starting to build
new applications in E+D or in Office.
>> I was wondering, is this collaborative apps thing
just a concept?
Are there any real apps?
Is Microsoft bedding into
this concept of collaborative apps?
Do you have any examples to share?
>> Yeah, let's start with some of
the work that we are
excited to be doing with ServiceNow.
We're doing something similar with Adobe
and Workday and many other ISVs.
But ServiceNow in Microsoft Teams,
what we're doing there is,
imagine that you have a service incident.
When a service incident gets created,
connection back to the Microsoft Graph to find
the relevant people to come in and
work in the context of that incident.
Then collaboration again at
the core to resolve the service incident.
With the APIs, you're able
to immediately move into real-time,
and with Teams meetings extensibility,
all the right artifacts of
the ServiceNow ticket shows
up in the context of the meeting.
The chat captures all the async collaboration,
so post-meeting,
if somebody else were to hop on to that incident,
the full context is available,
whether you're inside of
Teams or whether you're inside of ServiceNow.
This is what I meant by collaboration at the center.
It is less about where the user is,
it's about the user being followed with
all the relevant artifacts
and being connected to their teamwork.
Another interesting one is Ernst & Young.
They've built a bunch of
these collaborative applications in Microsoft Teams,
they've used Power Platform for their logic,
they're using these applications both for
internal use as well as customer-facing
for the entire life cycle of the engagement.
At Microsoft, we are starting to
build our new applications,
with collaboration the core.
For example, take Microsoft Viva.
It's about employee wellness,
and productivity, and knowledge,
and skilling, and learning.
We are building this using
the Microsoft Teams extensibility,
the graph extensibility,
the ability to take all this content,
put that into the Microsoft Graph so it shows up in
the right place in Microsoft Teams. Super exciting.
>> That's really amazing.
It's exciting to see our ecosystem,
whether it's ISVs,
line of business apps being created that
are these collaborative apps, and even Microsoft.
>> That's right.
>> Thanks for sharing those examples.
Now, I'm still just thinking,
why should developers care?
What's in it for them?
Why Microsoft stack should
they bet on for building these collaborative apps?
What's the value proposition for developers?
>> I am excited about
what we can offer developers here.
First and foremost, an audience,
145 million engaged daily users in Teams alone.
If you build these collaborative apps,
you get to be where the users are.
The second is, when you
write these collaborative apps,
when you build the Microsoft Teams,
you can write once and run on any platform.
Whether it be on the desktop,
on Windows or Mac,
whether it would be on the Web or even on mobile,
because Teams, the platform of how it
brings different applications and
modality is cross-platform.
Then finally and ultimately,
the opportunity here is
the economic opportunity to serve
customers in this new evolving world.
2021 is the start of the new way of hybrid work,
and the only way hybrid work is going to really play
out and drive productivity
is by putting collaboration at the center
and enabling Teams to
drive the right business outcomes.
>> Rajesh, thank you so much for your time today,
and thank you everyone who joined us
during this talk and enjoy the rest of Build.