Jeff Teper: The vision's the same vision, which is to help Teams collaborate better and then share that knowledge across their organization and build the tailored solutions they have without, you know, spending months writing custom code all from scratch. Tom Arbuthnot: Yeah. Jeff Teper: AI is a productivity tool in the mix to help those Teams build better solutions, publish better content. 

Discover information faster. and so we're, we're very excited about that for, a product that started out saying. Can we let anybody, even if they're not a developer, build an internet site? 

Tom Arbuthnot: Welcome back to the Teams Insider Podcast for a special SharePoint 25th anniversary episode. We talk to Jeff Teper, who is President of Microsoft 365 Collaborative Apps and Platforms about the whole SharePoint journey right from the start. Some of the exciting developments that are coming in the future too. 

We talk about the challenges of moving from a server-based product to a massive scale SaaS product in Microsoft 365, and we get his thoughts on SharePoint as a foundation for AI and agents. Really great conversation. Thanks very much to Jeff for taking the time to jump on the pod and also many thanks to Neat to are the sponsor of this podcast. 

Really appreciate all their support of the community on with the show. Hi, everybody, welcome to the show. A really exciting one and a really timely one. a, a big birthday for SharePoint, 25 years. and very excited to have Jeff Teper. Jeff, maybe just your role is more, way more than SharePoint these days. 

Maybe you could just start by giving everybody, your role and your current responsibilities. Jeff Teper: Yeah. And thanks Tom for having me, and thanks everybody who wants to listen to us talk about SharePoint, past, present, and future. I, it's very humbling the role we've had in the community. I am the President of the Microsoft 365 Collaborative Apps and Platforms. 

So that includes, SharePoint and OneDrive and Teams and Engage and Planner. we build the collaboration tools that help people work together and, of course agents are joining those Teams as well. And that's obviously our big focus. Tom Arbuthnot: Awesome. I'm really excited to go through some of the, the, the history of the 25 years. 

It 25 puts you in a kind of rare sphere of some of the really big brands in Microsoft. You know, the Excel Word, PowerPoint. but I think SharePoint is arguably the first kind of. As a service product before as a service was a, a thing, you know, it was obviously initially kind of an internet story, but can you take us back to that kind of very beginning because, it was humble beginnings to like a Yeah. 

A massive product. Now Jeff Teper: the, the whole history is kind of interesting and we take too long, but I'll go through it really quickly. Tom Arbuthnot: Yeah. Jeff Teper: There was. One branch of stuff that I was on, which was, I was actually a PM in the MSN Team. We turned some of our servers into a product we sold to other organizations for Intranets and internet sites called Site Server. I ran the Site Server, standard edition publishing knowledge management features. Satya actually ran the commerce features, Satya flopped as a product. and so we rebooted focused on. Intranet and knowledge management. There was another branch of SharePoint that evolved out of, say, the front page server extensions and the office Team, office Team buys front page. and so those two projects evolve along. And, and you know, my, my thing was Tahoe and PKM, they, the other branch in office, I think was called the office Server Extensions. we hit on the idea of. SharePoint portal and Team. And then in version two, they actually built on top of each other. so that was sort of the history of how we got going. 

There was really a huge need. Office needed a server. Microsoft needed an intranet and portal product. We could have done them as two or three different products. We could have done a document management server and an intranet server. A collab server, but we did one, family SharePoint. it was both a app and you could customize it, and that was really a hit. 

We fell a need. The version two was a much better product than version one. People started jumping on the bandwagon. version three had a lot more capabilities and, you know, the community took off and then, you know, we can talk about the cloud. Tom Arbuthnot: Yeah, Jeff Teper: that sort of, the, that was the origin story. Tom Arbuthnot: Yeah, community's such a big part of it. 

I mean, like a bit of personal history. It was, WSS was, I was working at a Cisco partner doing, Cisco call manager stuff, and I, my first exposure was WSS and building an internal workflow just with SharePoint lists when I was still doing Cisco stuff. And it was, that was my first exposure to the SharePoint community, and it was such a strong. 

Community. I think partly because it's kind of a, a build anything type product. I, I mean you must have felt that as well from the early days with the community. Jeff Teper: Yeah, yeah. You know, we'd, one thing I always looked at was what were all the things that people were doing for intranets and workflow apps that they were building from scratch, and how could we give people a more out of box solution that was. 

Customizable and people did write a lot of code to SharePoint and still do. but we were hoping to help them write less code, to solve their business problems faster. And we were never going to do every use case out of box. So you had to be customizable, extensible, and, that's where a lot of the community fell in love with the product building list based workflows. 

In fact. You probably know this. We just in the last few weeks, went to preview with a new list, sorry, new workflow customization experience. It's inside SharePoint and Teams. It builds on Power Platform, but it's got a simple UI and so we're still plugging away at making that easier and better and more consistent across Microsoft 365. 

So that's. Tom Arbuthnot: And I, I guess part, part of that success as well, there was obviously a massive, I guess a massive change or a kind of adoption going from server base to into the cloud. And, and that must have been interesting because there was so much capability on server and obviously cloud you have to be slightly different in terms of features and scale. 

Jeff Teper: Yeah, no, for sure. And that's, I think, yeah, I published on LinkedIn this, I think I called it Three Arrows. There's not a lot of products that survive. In tech 25 years through three eras. And it's because when a new tech sea change comes along, there's a set of very smart people who start from scratch trying to solve those same problems without of the right, without any of the constraints or, of that, that previous generation. 

And they optimize on the next generation. Yeah. And it's a, a bit of a drag race, if you will, between. People from the previous era, do those companies actually get what's gonna happen? And, the, the new entrant that do, they build the depth and it, it's all good for customers because that competition puts pressure in the system. 

And so we certainly went through that. We. I'm very proud that the SharePoints Conference in 20 2008, Bill Gates announced that SharePoint online would be available for organizations of all size. So we got multi-tenant SaaS as early as 2008. the market wasn't ready, the customers weren't ready. The tech we had for multi-tenancy wasn't very good at that time. and it was really a slog for several years, both. Working with customers and internally with the architecture. And in fact, I remember that 2014 SharePoint conference even then where we started to be decent at, cloud scale. a lot of customers said, we, you know. My management will never let us move to the cloud. 

And, and so it was obvious to us the cloud thing was gonna happen and happen 99%. there's no cloud on a submarine under the ocean, for example, with the Navy, but most, most people have gone at this point. And we had both external and internal challenges. And I am really, really. Grateful. The community stuck with us, but also very proud of the Team. 

You know, we have published these numbers. The SharePoint platform now supports over a billion users, you know, somewhere between five and 10 million requests per second, depending on what time and day it is, and where the time zones of the world overlap. many, many exabytes per of data. So we, we've turned this server that ran under my desk in 2001 into. 

Elastic cloud service that runs on millions of cores with exabytes of data. But that wasn't easy. It wasn't easy for our customers, it wasn't easy for our Team, and I know it wasn't always easy for our community. Tom Arbuthnot: Yeah, I mean the, the numbers are. Astronomical. And I guess not only has the scale changed, but what, what you can do SharePoint and what SharePoint for has evolved. 

So, you know, you've now got the kind of, headless embedded options. You've become the data platform for other products. Obviously on the Team side. All the data lives back in SharePoint. OneDrive usage, I imagine has exploded as well. Jeff Teper: Yeah, it's funny, the, this feature we introduced, in V two. And I remember when somebody in our Team came up with the idea, one of our original, GPMs, John Kaufman, wonderful guy. it was both our big first big failure, but also a biggest success that we had. This thing called Mysite, if you remember, where every person got their own site. They could store their stuff in it, and it would have a sort of public facing view to share stuff out and. Boy did it hate that feature. Yeah. 

Yeah. The time We want Tom Arbuthnot: everybody to have a site, we have to manage Jeff Teper: it. It's the first, you know, I, I, until then I got that people would either buy or not buy a product. But it was the first time I learned people would say, I'm gonna buy your product, but I'm gonna turn off these features. and so it's like, oh, we were so depressed. 

'cause, you know, we thought it was such a good idea. We plugged along at it and eventually, you know, other entrants came in the market like Dropbox and good for them with a simple value prop. It started to come through the side door and it said, what do you got? And we said, well, remember you told us, turn off this Mysite thing and. 

Then, you know, to give it a consistent name, we aligned across the consumer and business parts of the company and, and name that feature of my, instead of SharePoint, Mysite OneDrive. and it's totally fine that if 99% of the OneDrive users have no idea about the Mysite history, but it's the exact same thing. and over the last four or five years, we did a conversions product project to move. Over a billion OneDrive accounts onto the SharePoint platform. We had to do a herculean amount of engineering work to make SharePoint, cheaper to run even more elastic. but here we are. there's over a billion micro sites for a feature that slapped when it released because it wouldn't let Tom Arbuthnot: us, it, it's amazing how you can be, right feature, wrong time or wrong feature, right time, whatever it is that the things have to align, don't Jeff Teper: they? 

Exactly. Exactly, Tom Arbuthnot: so, so talking of alignment, i, I, I could reminisce with you on the past for much, much longer, but I wanted to hear your thoughts on now, and I guess it's, it's, it feels like a really great match. The idea that AI is obviously the thing in the industry at the moment and really impacting and AI needs the, the data, the context. 

And now we've got the corporate data in SharePoint and in OneDrive. how early did you kind of see those worlds coming together? Jeff Teper: I think they're sort of, pre and post large language models. You remember, and I just posted on Twitter this morning, the first slide when we created the Team, the publishing and knowledge management Team in 2000, sorry, 1998. 

Oh my God. PKM knowledge management, and we wanted algorithms. To help people organize information. We didn't want to just make people assign metadata to things. We knew that people didn't like to do that sort of thing. Even though that some people's favorite features the product, and still to this day, we have nice metadata views. 

That's, Tom Arbuthnot: I think, I think it's a fa, it's a favorite feature of very, a very specific person. But then trying to get an enterprise to do it at scale was always quite the challenge. Jeff Teper: It's like using a CRM system. You know, salespeople don't come into work and say, I really want to fill out a CRM system all day long. so we did use some algorithms. Even the first version, we, we worked with Microsoft Research, Susan Dumais, Eric Horvitz on an algorithm called Support Vector Machines, which was a machine learning algorithm to categorize content. Didn't work very well, needed a lot of training data that, you know, again, you know, people weren't gonna do. 

We worked on some, search algorithms. We eventually bought a really great company. Called FAST outta Norway. People might remember that Team still power some of the SharePoint and Copilot features. but we introduced something called Delve, that was, basically better search algorithms, to build views and feeds. 

So we'd been working at this problem for a while, but, None of it was any good until the LLMs came along. I mean, the LLMs are such a leap that when you talk about things like search indices, they at the bottom are very simple set of algorithms for counting the relative number words and documents. The LLMs sort of deeply understand content a lot better. they're very, very expensive to run. and so when we, Satya, we knew the LLMs were coming because they predated Chat GPT, but you know, we'd seen LLMs with a million parameters, 10 million parameters, a hundred million parameters. But I, you know, I remember when Satya brought some of us in a room, the open AI folks, and they did some demos of what would be GPT-4 and he said, okay, all of you go use this cool tech to do something interesting. 

And so. the Microsoft 365 Team came up with Copilot, where we basically said, let's take the data in SharePoint and Teams and Outlook and marry it to the LLM and see what we can do. And it's, it's magical. I mean, it's in 2026, it's now almost taken for granted. But when you first saw this stuff in 23, 24. 

You couldn't believe it would work. 'cause you'd been hearing about AI for 50 years. Not, I hadn't been around that long, but people had been talking about AI for that long. Yeah. And so it was really these billion plus parameter language models that started to do the tricks that would let us build the features we were building. 

And then sort of fast forwarding a little bit, The next leap beyond the base language model are these reasoning models where if given more time to think they can do interesting things, they can write code, they can organize your content for you. And so we, the things we're gonna, I'm not sure when you're dropping this, but when on March 2nd, 2000, 26, when we have our 25th event, we're gonna show a bunch of new UX and AI capabilities. 

Some of which are only possible because of this very last round in the models where you give them time to think and basically write the SharePoint things to build a website or organize grovel through all the content and write all, organize all the metadata. And it's, as they say in, in AI, it's zero shot. 

The thing we did in 2001. This. Auto categorization. I think I remember you needed 50 training documents for the tagging to work, and so nobody was gonna do that. Yeah. we thought they might, but nobody did it. And so now it's all zero shot, where it'll go through and, and it'll rip through all your documents and, and get the product and customer columns in the SharePoint list. 

Correct. for the most part, so. You know, I, we've had this vision for a while. It was really when the large language models came out and the reasoning helped them think that we could build the kinds of things we, in the whole industry is building right now. Tom Arbuthnot: Yeah. We, it is funny 'cause it, it seems like forever in no time to me at the same time, like from the kind of GPT-4 to now. 

And you, like you say, reasoning was a, really big step forward where we were like. Going back and forth. And more recently we've had much, bigger premise models and, bigger context windows. And that's really exciting. I guess in the SharePoint context, 'cause you can, when we come into things like ag agentic, we can put more into the Jeff Teper: Yeah. 

Tom Arbuthnot: Agent context. And I, I feel like SharePoint and your products are a lot of the foundation of that enterprise knowledge. Jeff Teper: Yeah. And you see a mirror of this in the coding world with GitHub, you know, GitHub. GitHub in, SharePoint are kind of twins. GitHub is the thing for coders where people write their code, store it, and so forth. 

And the models sort of plotted along. GitHub Copilot was very cool, auto complete, and then the models got better. And now GitHub, Copilot with either the anthropic models or the open AI models. Can generate whole apps. And you know, we have this thing called GitHub Copilot, CLI, we're on the command line. 

You can pick whatever model you want and works over your repo and does all this magic stuff. And so that's a mirror of what's going on in the SharePoint universe. Whereas the same models from last, late last year, just like they can write code, they can, we've taught them how to design a SharePoint site, a list. 

Categorize documents in addition to doing, you know, answering questions about documents and preparing documents and so forth. So it's, it is, it's exciting. and it is, it's sort of weird that, you know, to have things that we tried a year ago that didn't work and now they definitely work. Tom Arbuthnot: Yeah, yeah. 

It, it's in like Absolutely. That feels true. Like, like, and, and it's. If you kind of plot where it's gone in the last few years and you consider it's going to potentially keep going in that direction. I think there's, there's two things there. One, I mean, even if the capabilities didn't get any better than they are today, there's a an amazing amount of value to unlock. 

But also I think, I'm not a coder, I'm a more IT Pro side, but like when I see what a, what I can do, not being a coder now, and B, what coders could do. I feel like knowledge work is somewhere between like. 18 and 24 months behind that, like we're just starting to understand the concepts that coders are now all using AI and as you say, they can build faster, they can move quicker. 

I'm really excited to see that coming into the knowledge work sphere. Jeff Teper: Yeah. And that's sort of, it's, I think the vision I was going back as part of prepping for this event, and you'll see us as we go live with it. The vision's the same vision, which is to help Teams collaborate better and then share that knowledge across their organization and build the tailored solutions they have without, you know, spending months writing custom code all from scratch. 

Tom Arbuthnot: Yeah. Jeff Teper: AI is a productivity tool in the mix to help those Teams build better solutions, publish better content. Discover information faster. and so we're, we're very excited about that for, a product that started out saying, can we let anybody, even if they're not a developer, build an intranet site? 

I mean, now is the, the question. And now of course, you know. Tom Arbuthnot: Yeah, yeah. A a few lines of vision or what I'm, I'm excited about is the idea that the. LLMs can actually, help you design. So you might say, I want this, but actually you, you can have the LM come back to you and say, well, how about this? Have you used at this, this, that, like, pull the information out of you and create, create your vision. 

Jeff Teper: Yeah. And a big part of this that we haven't talked about yet, and we knew it would be an advantage coming from Microsoft, but we didn't appreciate the depth that we would invest based on the customer feedback, the security and compliance and governance. Oh my gosh. The amount of. Feedback requests and happiness, you know, as we've done data loss prevention, classification, labeling, and protection, information barriers, you know, so we have, if somebody wants a highly sensitive document library to encrypt all the documents on egress. 

And yet still have Copilot be able to reason over those when they're in the secure cloud. You know, that's, that was a phenomenal amount of work and so. When people sometimes say, Hey, you can vibe code a website. I'd say, yeah, but not one with all the level of security and compliance and access control and authorization encryption and data loss prevention and la la la, la you know, auditing, eDiscovery and so forth that, that we have. 

And so we're trying to bring people that easy building, easy collaboration, but on a secure compliant foundation because we've learned in the last 25 years. Security and compliance stuff is required. If you don't have it, nothing will be used. Tom Arbuthnot: Have you seen the adoption of those features get a big kind of shot in the arm because of the LLM? 

Like everybody? I felt like Delve was an early one of that. Like, oh, self discoverable. We need to be more secure. But like, it must have, I'm sure you must have seen an increase now because of LLM use, proliferating. Jeff Teper: Oh yeah. Yeah. I mean, we. We learned a lot from Delve Delve was, I would say, in my career, the product that perhaps even more than Mysite, because Mysite eventually made its way through. once the competition, once it was clear there was gonna be competitors putting pressure on it to unlock personal, cloud storage, you know, Delve was the one that I. Felt had the most potential that we, we got the most blow back on because we respected security. But in the end it said they didn't trust their own security. Tom Arbuthnot: well, and you, you've respected the security that it had configured or not? Jeff Teper: Yeah, well they, what they would say is, look, we. If the user's storing this stuff on a SharePoint site and another user has access to the SharePoint site, you can't show that to people. even if it supports the s 'cause we don't trust the first person to set the permissions. 

Right. and, you know, that, that was fair. I think one th you know, there's a couple things. One is just users and organizations have just gotten a little bit more savvy about. Their information, governance and lifecycle. People send out mails, Hey, is this Team or this SharePoint site still valid? You have to attest to the permissions and so forth. 

Tom Arbuthnot: Mm-hmm. Jeff Teper: But we had a huge breakthrough a few years ago when we released something called SharePoint Advance Management. and. Pre LLM, we had a product called SharePoint, Premium. You might remember that. and SharePoint Advanced Management was the biggest hit in that. actually sales of that were remarkable. And that, you know, that's the lesson for me. If, if the easiest thing for me to go build and sell a lot of is more security stuff. So anyway, we build SharePoint advance Management that reports on your permissions and analyzes over sharing. And, you know, people really liked it and used it. and then Copilot comes along and we're gonna sell Copilot, and we decide to basically give everybody who's bought. 

A couple hundred license if Copilot SharePoint advance management for free. Tom Arbuthnot: Yeah. I think that was a big unlock I saw in the field. Yeah. 'cause it was like a real blocker through adoption that people were scared about what data was accessible and what wasn't. Jeff Teper: And so SharePoint Advance Management usage is growing gangbusters. 

I mean, I look, we look at the data every, every day, but we review it and a meeting with say Shaman who runs that Team, and. It, you know, it's unbelievable. It's it, you talk about building product that fits, it fits a need, and you know, in of itself, our SharePoint Admin stuff will also be more LLM powered, so it can ask questions and so forth. 

But if we'd had SharePoint Advance Management, when we did Delve, Delve would've had a little bit better reception because we needed to give it the confidence that the permissions were right, not just that they were gonna be respected. Yeah. and so the other thing that's come along, of course, over the top is, labels that. 

If it doesn't trust the acyles, they can just stamp a label on these hundred SharePoint sites or Top Secret and then excluded from Copilot. and, so I think between, CLP and Sam, we have the tools that it needs, to make AI work. And that's really unique. I mean, I, I mean, for those of people who know me, know I. 

We compete with some amazing companies, but this is why you should use Copilot as opposed to the other AI's because we, have a symbiotic relationship with all the security and compliance capabilities in Microsoft 365. Tom Arbuthnot: is that from Delve? Is that kind of a challenge internally because things are moving so incredibly fast and obviously different shops and different products and different Teams can. 

Throw things up in beta and be like, we can do this. And you have to go, yeah, I've got four 50 million users and et cetera, vice. I've gotta think slightly more carefully about how I throw features out. Jeff Teper: This is, this is so hard. You know, it's interesting, and where this has actually come up a lot is Teams, because you, we've added a lot of features to Teams in, in the last five years. Some net new, some integration with Microsoft 365 and Copilot. And some, very frankly, people said, Hey, Slack has this thing, why don't you have it too? Yeah. And and we've been a little predisposed to roll those out as quickly as possible. 'cause we have a set of customers and potential customers and say, Hey, you, you. I want to see all my chats and channels in one place and organize how I, how I, how I want as an end user. I can do those and other platforms. I need it in your system. 

And so we rolled that out last year, customizable sections and Teams and we got a lot of blowback from it that, How do I turn this off? I don't want my, I my, I don't trust my end users to customize their own environment and you know, there we had a really principled discussion that there will be major features like Copilot, where it has the power to say, I'm turning that on when I'm ready. 

But things that were customization of the end user experience. We decided that we're not gonna have like some year long off by default. wait and see. Kind of experience where you just think it's gonna frustrate hundreds of millions of users. So we have occasionally made calls in, I would say 90% of the time on those calls we're right. 

10% of the time we're wrong. I, we will say, me at culpa will, Tom Arbuthnot: I would say when, when you, when, when you are wrong, you can, the sustained feedback and you probably, things change, right? Jeff Teper: But. Sometimes I think we've been right and not everybody has agreed with us. and there's still, you know, I I would say one of the things we learned in the cloud transition, Team ships every two weeks. office used to ship every two and a half years. And, when I took over Teams from Brian McDonald who retired, you know, we still had a lot of IT. People who asked us. Can't you let me deploy Teams every six months or every year? And you know, we said, look, we're just gonna be one. Tell us the concerns you have about usability, change management, app compatibility. 

We're gonna address all those just like the rest of the industry. But you know, that won't serve our customers well and it's not gonna serve you well 'cause we're not gonna be competitive. We'll fall behind, et cetera. but we knew we'd have to earn, you know, it was a tense situation with some of these customers, but we would have to earn the trust. 

And you know, we ship now Teams every two weeks and. I can't, not to say we've not made a mistake in the last year we've made some, but I can't tell you the last customer. It's been a couple years since that customer said, I wish it went back to the old days where I could deploy. Your software every two or three years. 

Tom Arbuthnot: Yeah. And in comparison to the other problem, which is like lots of things of like, well, this other products has X, Y, and Z features, and Teams are still stuck with, you know, the, the subsets. Like, yeah, if you want to be competitive, you've got to be moving. Jeff Teper: Yeah. And the other thing is we would say, look for us, we can't make infinite permutations of our software in the wild, secure, reliable, and performant, and make sure they interrupt. 

It was that period where we transitioned with to the cloud and we had to make, you know, decade old versions of office work with new versions of office that supported real time co-op. But the old versions that didn't, you know, that was a slog and it wasn't. When you got the old client and the new client talking together, we made it work in a least common denominator way, but it was not a good, it was not a thing. 

That made end users super happy. so anyway, not to say we're cavalier about this. There are definitely things where we introduce a major new UX. Like one of the things we just did last year was introduced threads in Teams channels, in addition to the post reply model. We had that thing in preview for three months. 

We told customers about it three months before that. We did a lot of change management and I'm really proud. We, for the most part have mainly heard. Thank you for getting that out. Not, oh my gosh, you moved the cheese on our end users. Tom Arbuthnot: Yeah, I think, I think it's a, it's a tough challenge when you've just got that many active users that I, I think by definition with that user base. 

You can't, nobody is ev always gonna be happy. Like there's some percentage that are always gonna want to do different things. Yeah. So, I guess that's the constant tension. But yeah, I appreciate, obviously I'm very close to Teams, how fast that has moved, Jeff Teper: but that said. We have a big, big, let's go back to SharePoint. 

Big set of new end user updates for SharePoint and how the user experience. Yeah, the, yeah, Tom Arbuthnot: talk, talk us, talk us through some of that. 'cause, like, like this will be dropping after the kind of, the, the 25th birthday later that week. So the news will be out. Jeff Teper: So I think we're doing three things. One is we've taken a fresh look at the design language of Teams of SharePoint to make it simpler and lighter. you see this neat thing where that SharePoint. Chrome is in the background, but your site elevates above it. It's really slick. I'm super proud of the design Team. you have control of your branding and look and feel, and you have more layout capabilities than ever. We have this fun thing called flexible layout that's unconstrained by columns and so forth. 

It's all amazing. so we have a new design system. Second is we changed the information architecture of the product. I think it's very coherent. There's five things on the left. One is whatever you want your intranet home to be. we had a thing for a while called Veva Connections. We had what your could be your home site. 

You pick if you're, if you work at Kentoso or Coca-Cola or Microsoft, the first thing you see in SharePoint is Kentoso and the Kentoso landing page, Tom Arbuthnot: which is what every internal comm Team wants, right? They're, Jeff Teper: they're them, they're not SharePoint and, and it's branded how you want and it brings in the dashboard out a box capabilities we did with Veeva Connections. 

But no more. Hey, what's SharePoint? What's Veeva? What's my intranet? Your intranet's there. It's got your name in the suite, nab, and it's the great thing. Then there's the three SharePoint peaches pieces, which are discover, let me do 'em in the, in the logical order as opposed to the UX order. build, build a site list doc, library or agent publish, publish content and schedule it to be distributed on multiple channels, sort of like what we had with Veeva Amplify and then discover. 

A little bit like what we had with Delve, where different pivots on interesting content and people and so forth. so it's interesting to talk about how the children of Veeva and Delve and Copilot all to make their way back into the SharePoint UI. And then, last but definitely not least is OneDrive because you know, one of the educational things we have to do with people is OneDrive's your modern file explorer. 

It can browse your OneDrive, but also all the document libraries that are associated with SharePoint and Teams. and so we felt you should have this file browser since the main use case. The first use case of a lot of people and SharePoint is browsing their files. Have it there. So you have your internet. 

Publish, build and Discover OneDrive. and that's a big new UI change. So we're letting people opt in for a while, because we wanna make sure in public preview we get feedback. if the feedback's really good, we will go to GA without on by default, broadly, for everybody. but we'll listen. we, but that's an example of a big enough system change. 

In the preview stage at least, we wanted to give people control and feedback and you know, we'll have a discussion. You know, it SharePoint's tricky 'cause it's both an app and a platform and there will be some people that will want it to be a headless. Yeah. Website thing where none of our Chrome ever shows up. 

I don't think that's the soul of why most people buy us. So Tom Arbuthnot: I, I love that Build gets a top level billing. 'cause I feel like that's an important part of the product. And back to this, I feel like LLMs are making knowledge workers more powerful to Yeah. Build their own solutions, be it a a a a, a fancy list, a SharePoint site, or an agent or agentic. 

So making that top level is like, oh, this is a product where I can build a solution. Jeff Teper: Yeah. So when Adam and Adam Harmetz and Denise Trabona and their Teams first show this to me, I don't know, 18 months ago, I was mad. The reason I was mad is like, oh my God, you finally got this right. I wish we had done this like 15 years ago. 

We should have had your branded intranet. Publish, build and discover. And then basically your files, all your files, it's perfect. That's the right SharePoint information architecture. and so anyway, we'll see. I only took 25 Tom Arbuthnot: years Jeff Teper: and then I, the last thing I guess to hit through all this is AI is infused with all these things that, you know, if you wanna build a site, AI is gonna help you. 

You wanna build a list, AI will help you. You wanna author a page, design a page. AI will help you. you wanna build an agent that organizes your doc library and put metadata on it. AI will help you. it's not required. SharePoint skill works without Copilot, I promise. There's no plan for anything else other than that. 

You can still build a. Webpage the old way just by adding web parts manually. that got better too. But you know, why not have the things suggest. and build a far richer site and save you time if you, if you've got rights to Copilot, so, Tom Arbuthnot: yeah. Yeah. Well, I, I feel like the, the expertise to build has been a, a bottleneck on like, doing the most, the, the best adoption cases. 

You know, in lots of businesses they'll have a business unit or they have external consultants that help. Decode from the, the, the, the business, business to it to build. But if, if LLMs and AI can unlock some of that, suddenly building the solution for your Team can live in the business, which is just really exciting to me. 

Jeff Teper: Yeah. And we're excited to see, I mean, we, every day, 2 million new SharePoint sites, we are created. hopefully this will help people create more and better sites. Tom Arbuthnot: Awesome. Jeff, thanks so much for jumping on the show and, I appreciate, oh, I suppose congrats to you and the, the whole Team and all the people that have worked on SharePoint over the 25 years. 

It's amazing to hold onto a, a brand and a philosophy for that long in a moving tech world and inside of Microsoft. Jeff Teper: Yeah, no, I thank you Tom. And thanks to all our customers, partners, especially the members of the community, you know, people in the community who've. Of their own time and evenings and weekends. 

Done events helped people out, given us feedback. Sometimes we've done a great job of addressing the feedback. Sometimes people had to push us 'cause we weren't listening as well as we could have. I could have. And you know, I, I really appreciate the spirit of trust we've built that. even if we didn't get something right the first time, we kept talking and, and I, I think this is a product the community will be proud of. 

As it as it goes into preview. and I hope everybody who's ever used SharePoint feels like they were part of building it 'cause we tried to listen to all the feedback. Tom Arbuthnot: Awesome. Well, thanks Jeff. I'll, I'll see you in a few weeks in Summit and yeah, congrats again. Jeff Teper: Okay, thanks Tom. See you.