Tom Arbuthnot: Microsoft 365 is changing faster than ever. I think we all see that. I monitor the Roadmap and the Message Center very closely, both on the community side for the newsletter and the blogging and the podcast, but also with our product ChangePilot that helps manage change. Brian, who is on the Microsoft 365 Change Management Team, has been on the Message Center since 2018.

He takes us through how Microsoft are modernizing change management. There's some important changes coming up with the Frontier Program and with standard and deferred releases. Brian takes us through all of that. He talks us through the new MCPs Microsoft have for Message Center and Roadmap, and he also gives us a bit of a history, how the different Product Teams feed into Message Center, how he came into the Message Center Team, and really how it all works behind the scenes.

Many thanks to Brian for jumping on the pod and giving us such great insights, and many thanks to Landis, who are the sponsor of this podcast. Really appreciate all their support of the community. On with the show. Hey, everybody. Welcome back to the show. Really excited for this one. I've been trying to get Brian on for a little while, and there's been a lot, a lot going on in, his team and Microsoft 365 Change, and, now feels like a great, great time to be talking.

We're gonna get into, Microsoft 365 Message Center, Roadmap, change management, a little bit of behind the scenes. But first of all, Brian, thanks for doing the pod. Welcome. Could you just give us a little bit of a, a background about you and, and your role?

Brian McGough: Sure. Yeah. So no, happy to be here. And, so about me and my role.

So I've been at Microsoft for go- this is year 24, it'll be 25 in January, which is just crazy. Amazing... while I've been here, I've done everything from being a Customer Service Rep when I started on the phones, all the way up to Managing Global Teams, to, where I'm at now, which is, I manage Message Center, and I've been doing this for the last, since 2018, right?

So for the last eight years, I've, I've owned and managed, all of the, the Message Center posts for Microsoft 365. Before that, I was actually, I, I, what got me to Message Center, got me to Change, I was in Dynamics, for about a year and I was doing the, change notifications for Dynamics, which kind of introduced me to Message Center and then, which allowed me to kind of transition into where, where I am now and where I've been.

And I'll tell you, I mean, this is actually... So of all the roles I've had, over all this time, this is by far and away, my most rewarding, right? And where I get excited. You know, I'm excited every day to get up and come to work, which is so cool because every day, right- For good or bad, I impact, I have the ability to impact millions of our customers

Tom Arbuthnot: around the world.

Yeah. I, I would argue inside of Microsoft, you're up there on the most eyeballs that see the stuff that flows through you and your team because it's a- Right... Message Center is a critical surface for admins all around the world. And it, it must be fascinating that the level of, I mean, I've followed it as an MVP and, you know, we- Mm

we monitor it with ChangePilot, but, like, the level of messages that have creeped up since 2018 to now, it's, it's crazy.

Brian McGough: Oh, yeah. Yeah. No, it's, it is. It's, it's in- it's intense. I mean we started out and, you know, we maybe do, I don't know, 50 a month maybe, right? And now, we're publishing, for M365 alone, we're doing, between 225 and 250 a month.

And we always have about 80 in queue, right? So we've got, you know, things that are just in the queue that we're, we're working on as we go along. But, you know, you kind of put that into perspective of, so you've got, you're putting out 200, 250 a month. There's always about 450 to 500 live on the Message Center at any given time, right?

And so just that constant, right, things are changing as they roll in and out and-

Tom Arbuthnot: Yeah. It's not, it's not one and done either, is it? Right. Because they get updated during their life cycle, so they are live and dates are changing and more information- Yep... is getting added. And again, I feel like you can tell me, but I feel like that's got more dynamic over the years than it used to be as well.

Brian McGough: Oh, for sure. For sure. We used to be kinda one and done, right? It was, it was put it out there, and, you know, let it go. And then as we kind of grew, I would start to get, I would start to get feedback, right? Not only from folks such as yourself, but, also internal escalations, right? About, "Hey, this isn't rolled out.

Why haven't I seen this?" And I was kinda like, okay, well, we really need to do something about that, right? We need to be a bit more transparent in, in, the timing of the change. And so, went in and, you know, started learning how we could actually do that. We made some adjustments in our tooling so that we could do, you know, on-the-fly updates.

And then we built processes around it. I actually have, an individual on my team who their entire job is to follow up on every single Message Center post and ask the PMs, "Are you rolling out like you said you were? Are you launched?" Yeah. Right? Did your time shift? And, we don't even, we don't just do that for Message Center, we actually do that for the Roadmap as well.

So it's, we're kind of, split, we're doing split duty there, just because we're making the contact for the Message Center, so we're doing the same thing on the Roadmap, right? So we're going out and making those updates for the Roadmap as well for items that are announced in Message Center. So yeah, no, it's gotten a lot more complicated and a lot more robust from an operations perspective, to manage, Message Center and make sure we can keep it as up to date as we're, we're able to today, so.

Tom Arbuthnot: That's awesome. And what does it look like behind the scenes, as in like the, the suite from 2018 to now has got so much wider as in the number of products and like the M365 Message Center, like the naming of that, but it's also Dynamics updates, it's also some Windows updates. Like what does that look like?

Brian McGough: Yeah. So behind the scenes there are actually, one, two, three, four, there are four different teams, right? That actually post to Message Center on the regular, similar to what we do. So there's M365 - Mm-hmm... there's Dynamics and the Power Platform, and then there's Windows, and then there's, kind of Intune and Security products.

Today, Intune follows our process, and so we've kind of looped them in on, onto our operations. And so, they come through our tool sets and through our channels and we do, I end up doing the publishing for them, right? They're, they're working with their PMs and, and acting as, the authors of the posts, but we do the publishing through our channel, so it comes up in kind of the M365 bucket, though they are kind of a separate team.

Then there's another team specifically for Dynamics, which I used to be on, and helped start. And so that team, they handle all of the Dynamics and then Power Platform type, posts. And then Windows has its own, and they're a little bit different, right? In the sense that, you know, they're kind of advertising for Patch Tuesday, but they also do a lot of other kind of, promotional type stuff specifically for Windows, which is a little different than what, you know, folks are looking for in specifically in Message Center.

But we continue to, I lead an effort across kind of all of these groups and also in partnership with A- Azure, Azure, around, you know, how do we communicate, and kind of provide a one Microsoft voice, right? So that there's a consistency in our change communication. So we continue

Tom Arbuthnot: to- Yeah, and I think that's really hard when it's so many- Yeah

different product teams with different op- opinions and styles on how they communicate. And you even see it, I, I see it with the different product teams how they talk about Preview versus TAP versus Public Preview versus Insider Program and now Frontier. Like, I feel like your job or your team's job is quite a challenge to rein in.

We're like, "We wanna talk about it like this," and, "We don't wanna give a date." Well, but we need dates in Message Center.

Brian McGough: Yeah. Our admins want dates, right? So yeah, and, and the, the landscape is changing, right? With our recent announcements and, and such the, you know, we're kind of the previews and the private previews are not necessarily going away, but I think we're, we're moving to more of a you know, Frontier standard deferred type model versus-

Tom Arbuthnot: Yeah

all of these individual-... this modernizing- Yeah... approach to kind of streamline the process. And we'll, we'll dive into that in some more- Yeah... detail 'cause I really wanna nail that conversation. For sure. For sure. The, the, the other thing that I think is interesting that we've talked about before is, again, I think people, and I, I'm, I, I felt this before I got really into Message Center, people assume the same messages go out to all the tenants.

But actually- Mm-hmm... it's, it is targeted as to who gets what, and you've got your different sub Clouds and things. So c- talk us through that, 'cause it's, it's more complicated again than I would've given credit for from the outside.

Brian McGough: Yeah, for sure. And it is. It's, it is a lot more complicated, 'cause really we try to do, targeted messages as much as possible, right?

And the idea is, is we really... Message Center already gets a lot of messages, right? We're publishing 225 to 250 a month, plus whatever's live and continuing- Yeah... to be there. We see

Tom Arbuthnot: the typical tenant gets around 2,500 messages, like, on the current cadence.

Brian McGough: Yeah. Yeah. For sure. And we try, we, we, I am very cognizant of the fact that I don't want to spam folks, right?

And make more work for them to have to try and dig through. And so we do target by licensing and by, kinda Clouds. So we've got, a multitude of Clouds in a sense that we've got Production or Worldwide, which is our standard kinda tenant set. Then you've got our Gov Clouds with GCC, GCC High, and, the DoD Cloud.

And then we also- Mm-hmm... have some, Sovereign Clouds, ones that we, US SEC and US NAT, which are, are kind of solidified. And then there's a, a Cloud specifically for China, that we have, which is, we partner with 21Vianet on that. And then we're actually starting, we have, we're partnering with, two external partners on additional Clouds that we'll be rolling out in, other countries here shortly.

Tom Arbuthnot: Yeah.

Brian McGough: And so -

Tom Arbuthnot: And that, and that, and that, that's pertinent because some of those Clouds have, like the GCC High and DoD for example, different standards. They get things at different times. They have different dates- Yeah... and, and they may not- Yeah... get something. So they, like to your point, you don't wanna send loads of messages to GCC High like, "Here's a feature.

You're not getting it." Well, like, that's, that's not that useful.

Brian McGough: Right. And that's, you know, that's something that we, we have to, we continually try to manage with the teams internally, right, as well. It's like, "Hey, we need to tell GCC High, DoD, but we need to tell them at the right time," right? Mm-hmm. So it's like, don't just post a Message Center post because you went to production, and forget about, you know, these other folks.

And so there's a lot of effort- Yeah... internally around, a Gov Cloud parity and ensuring that we're rolling very quickly from production, rolling features from production into the Gov Clouds so that we can keep that parity. 'Cause that's a big piece of feedback from our Gov Cloud customers is, like, hey- Why can't we have it, right?

Why are you starting over there? Come start with us and then go over there. Right? So. Yeah. We do a lot, we're doing a lot of work right now around, that effort to try and drive parity, and get those features into the GovCloud sooner rather than later. So.

Tom Arbuthnot: Yeah.

Brian McGough: As far as, like, the targeting, right, going back to that, yeah, we do, we, we tar- we have multiple ways that we can target.

Like I said, we can target by the, the Clouds. We target a lot by the SKUs, so, like, if, when you're looking at a Message Center post, if it says Copilot, right... Or dependent, there's two different versions of Copilot that show up today. There's Copilot Chat and then, M365 Copilot, which is the premium.

Mm-hmm. So if you, if you see something and it has the premium, product or the service in Message Center, it means folks who just have that premium are the ones that are getting that message, so not everybody else is getting that message. And similar for, you know, SharePoint or Exchange, though most folks have that because it's- Yeah, yeah

Tom Arbuthnot: key parts of the service. If you're in the E suite, you're probably getting the majority of the message, aren't you? It's those- Right. Yeah... add-ons, Teams Premium, Power BI- Exactly... Pro, those kind of things.

Brian McGough: But there's a lot that we do, that folks don't see on the regular, and there's, like, planned maintenance posts.

We do prevent fix or config changes that only impact certain tenants that have certain configurations. And so to do that, we actually target specifically by a tenant list. So we take their tenant IDs and we, we leverage that, so that we know that only those tenants are gonna get those messages. Additionally, we can do it by SKUs as well, so we can take all of E5 and just say, "Target E5," or we can take all of, F1 and just say, "Target F1."

Yeah. Right? So, we've got a couple different ways, but we really do try to, target to minimize the amount of spam, right, that folks get.

Tom Arbuthnot: Yeah, those prevent or fix are, that's a really good call-out, 'cause that's something, again, I say to people, like, if you, if you're doing nothing else, like, just watch out for those, 'cause if you got one of those, there's probably a reason- Right

you got it.

Brian McGough: Yep, for sure. Right, yeah. There's, there's definitely a reason you got it. We, you know, we've identified something that's, you know, it's gonna impact you, so make sure you take a look at it.

Tom Arbuthnot: Awesome. So. So that gives us a good backdrop as to the, the, the kind of challenge and- Sure... the scale. So, like, talk to us about the, the Modernizing Change Management, I think the program is called, and correct me if it's not that, it's not the proper name.

But, like, what are you guys looking to do to as, as change gets, I guess, faster and, and, more complicated in this AI world?

Brian McGough: Yeah. I, y- you know, it's, it's crazy how fast it happened. I mean, two years ago, like, we kinda started this journey, and it's just, like, the last, you know, in, in my space, you know, the last 12 months have just been, like, nonstop, right?

And, and it's- Yeah Really just a lot of taking feedback from our customers. I do customer escalations as well, so I sit, you know, I sit and talk to customers even though I'm just the messenger, right?

Tom Arbuthnot: Does that, I mean, does that, yeah, does that mean you take the flak for all the different teams' comms basically?

Brian McGough: Yeah. Yeah. So yeah, I'll get on and, you know, and I'll, I'll take those and, you know, I loop in the, my appropriate partners, but, at the same time, you know, we need to be there to, 'cause there's a lot of, a lot of feedback, and the feedback's good, right? Because that's what's- Yeah... driving us to make these changes.

And so when we think about kind of the modernizing change, management approach that we're doing, it's really about helping admins and providing, control, clarity, and confidence, right? Are kind of the things that we're looking, to help provide. And really it's, giving a structured kind of set of release options, that allow, folks who want to go fast to just go fast, right?

And folks who, want to kind of slow down and make sure that they can, like financial institutions and such, right, where they need to, they've got compliance considerations. Give them- Yeah... the opportunity to say, "Hey, I wanna put, you know, 10 of my people over here so they can go fast and we can see what's coming.

But I'm gonna put my C-suite and everybody else over here in this deferred bucket," right? Which allows them to get it 30 days after it starts rolling out to production. And that's, it's different than what we've had before when you think about, like, targeted release, right? Targeted release is still there, and we're still, you know, features will still go into targeted release, but if we think about, how quickly, features are created today, they, I mean, they go from ideation to, to deployment in s- less than 60 days, right?

I mean, some stuff just-

Tom Arbuthnot: Yeah... it just flies. Which is amazing. And, and that's the way the whole industry's going at the moment. So there's been- Yeah... a lot of pressure on Microsoft to the customers that want these new features, want these new features, so there's a- Yeah... we need a mechanism to get them out to those customers.

And equally you've got 450 million users all over the world, some of them are, like, in the most regulated country, in the most regulated role, and- Exactly... everything has to go through this process, and this process takes more than 60 days to go through. Right. And that kind of

Brian McGough: thing. Yeah. Exactly. And so, and then, so what, what's different, like I was saying, around kinda like targeted release versus GA, kinda like how we'd had it before, is the sense that targeted release, things could change, right?

It wasn't locked down. It wasn't like 100% production code. We didn't have- Yeah... Content and resources available at the time stuff went into targeted release. And so, with this new model, people who are in the standard kind of, "Hey, give it to me when we get it," when we send out a message center post We're gonna be able to give them all the details, right?

And because we're working with our content team, and at that time, when we send out a Message Center post, you know, five days later it will start rolling out. And, but they have all of the information, and they already- Yeah... wanna go fast, so they can just go with the information-

Tom Arbuthnot: Yeah... that they have. And, and if they didn't, they would defer those users.

So, so you've- Correct... got a chance for the, the audience that want to have the first experience, be that all of the users in a lot of customers, or be that a subset in some customers. Now I'm, I'm using the GA pieces or bits, not the, as you say, targeted. Like I can learn from it, but maybe when it hits my users, it might change at GA.

Brian McGough: Yep. Yep, exactly. And so you're getting that kind of, control of when you want to be able to have folks get the changes. When we talk about clarity, really it's the, it's that one piece I said about getting, all of the documentation in place prior to or at the time of a release versus- Mm-hmm

having to wait or not having us telling you about something 30 days ahead of time, and you're like, "Well, that's great, but where's the supporting documentation? Where are the PowerShell scripts? Where's the this, that, and the other thing?" Right? And so, getting that information up front. Additionally, we're making changes inside the Message Center posts themselves, right?

We're kind of adjusting the structure. It's not a huge change, but it's, it, it's really just to kind of make it cleaner, so folks can see very quickly, hey, this is, the what and the why of things changing. This is the rollout timeline, the impact, who's impacted. Also adding in kind of the platforms - Mm-hmm

platforms and then, what's the impact, and then what admins can do. I

Tom Arbuthnot: wouldn't, I wouldn't downplay that change. It's a really positive change because when you're having to review multiple workloads, like if you're lucky enough to be in a big organization where you only review the Teams items, they have a certain style and you're fine.

If you're reviewing multiple different workloads, like how the Dynamics Teams write versus the Windows team versus, you're kind of mentally shifting each time. So that structure is really helpful.

Brian McGough: Yeah. And, and it's, it, it, you know, Tom, I gotta, I got to that point, like I've adjusted the structure a few times over the years, and so we kind of got to where we are today, just leveraging.

Again, it's a lot of feedback, right? I mean, we wouldn't be where we are if we didn't listen to what folks are telling us. 'cause, if not, we just kind of make up our own thing and say, "Hey, there you go. That's what you get." But, we really do listen to feedback, and the changes folks are seeing are because of that.

So, so yeah, the, the clarity and the, again, adding in the compliance considerations, which we did, you know, a few months ago, but customers have really liked that, right? And, and it, it provides them a direction to think about when they think about the changes and potential compliance areas, to think about.

So putting that information in a more structured way so that folks can go in and, and really process it quickly. And then the, again, clarity and then the confidence aspect, there's kind of two pieces there. I think the, and that's where I like to talk about the MCP servers, right? That we've kind of put out, right?

There's, there's two- Yeah.

Tom Arbuthnot: Really excited about these.

Brian McGough: There's one which is, the MRC, which is specific today for Roadmap information, and it's not just Roadmap for M365, it's also the Roadmap for Azure, so it contains the Azure updates. And so by connecting into that- Which,

Tom Arbuthnot: which they, they handily called updates rather than Roadmap, just to keep it, you know, slightly different.

Brian McGough: Just to keep it, you know. "Hey, we're Azure." and so, yeah, so you can leverage that, right? To help get a, a good, a view of, hey, what's coming down the pipe? What are things that I'm interested in? And a way to kind of manipulate that data. And then, the second one, which is, kind of my favorite and, I th- I'm really excited about, which is the MCP for Enterprise, right?

Which, we've actually, worked with the Graph team and with the team who owns the MCP and we made some adjustments to it so that, it can actually go in and, read the data from Message Center and from Service Health Dashboard. And the beauty there, and if I know I've, folks have been demoing it a lot, and so if you haven't seen a demo, right, we'll, we're gonna try and- Yeah, we've got a

Tom Arbuthnot: webinar coming up with, yourself, Jim, and Mickey in -

Brian McGough: That's right.

Yeah...

Tom Arbuthnot: June. By the time this goes out, that'll be close, so - Okay... that, we'll be talking about that on

Brian McGough: there. Yeah. So yeah, I'm excited about that one, right? Because that's, that's just, it really gives admins, I think, an opportunity to interact with the change data and the incident data in a way that they've never been able to before.

You can have a conversation, right, against the data and unders- and get an understanding of what is the impact to your organization, because that's the grounding. It's grounded based off of your organization. And since it's using Graph, it can go look at, you know, the number of users, the users in different accounts, the users in different licensing.

What's the usage patterns for, for the products, right? All of that data that sits within Admin Center today that you have to kind of click to kind of jump back and forth to look, you can now ask questions and bring that into an interface, and then- Yeah, this

Tom Arbuthnot: is the, this is the magic of MCP, is you can put- Right

multiple sources in, so you can be thinking about the Roadmap data and the messages data, and Service Health, and you say usage, licensing. So like it's a Teams change, how many Teams users have I got? It's a, a Frontline Worker change. Okay, it's this audience. Mm-hmm. And then there's the potential, and you've done some of this in your demos, which are really cool, is like, well, theoretically now I know this is a Frontline change.

This is the person respon- sort of comms frontline. Let's draft something for them and let's give them the target based on licensing. It's these users that are impacted- Exactly... if you wanna comms this out.

Brian McGough: Yeah, exactly. And so it helps, I really feel, and I'm really looking for feedback from admins as they go in and they start to, to use it and, and - play with it.

I, I really feel that this is an opportunity to drive efficiency in kind of the day-to-day processes for admins, right? And get back time that they spend having to kind of dig and research, in order to do, focus on more important things for their organization and their goals, right? Versus kind of the, the tedium.

And so I'm really looking for feedback to, to see if that's, you know, if my expectations are correct. But that's, that's my thought, so-

Tom Arbuthnot: Yeah. On it. I think it's a, it's, it's, it's an exciting time because you can provide that connectivity and then you get to ride the benefits as, as with all the other product teams, like what's going on with the AI space, like-

Brian McGough: Mm-hmm

Tom Arbuthnot: what we can do in... And it's not, it can be in Copilot, but with MCP it can be connecting to any other AI surface as well. So it could be- Yeah... Copilot CLI, it could be in VS Code, it could be with the Anthropic models, it can be whatever you want it to be. You know? Right.

Brian McGough: It's really exciting. Yeah.

Tom Arbuthnot: And that's, I mean,

Brian McGough: I was thinking, you know, you could create, like if you-- We're gonna roll it out within the interface, like the, the Microsoft Admin Center, Agent, and there's an M365, admin Agent that, that's you can install into or load into, Copilot Desktop or whatnot.

But I'm really excited to see what admins do with it from a, just a customized Agent perspective. Mm-hmm. Because if I think about like, hey, scheduling of, you know, review my changes and see what's there and send me an update every morning or, or, you know. It, I think that there's a lot of opportunity to kind of automate and, and, help folks kind of save time and analyze change, all of that data that we're giving, right?

That 250 a month. Yeah. Right. Items. And help analyze that, more quickly so that they can focus on, hey, what's really important for my organization and what we're doing, right? Because you could say, hey, you could, by creating your own Agent, you could ground it against stuff that's specific for your tenant, right?

You could say, "Hey, these are our top 10 goals," or, "These are the top 10 things that we have to look out for our users escalate to help desk. So let me know if any of these types of feature changes hit." Right? And so you ground it that way, and then you can start getting back this, this, curated list specific for, you know, behaviors or things that you see within your organization, even more detailed than just, like, what it can give you.

So I think, I just think there's a lot of opportunity there for folks.

Tom Arbuthnot: Nice. For sure. And you, you had this question on one of the, CAB calls, but, like, the, you've had an API for a long while- Mm-hmm... on both Roadmap, Azure have got one, and, and the Message Center and Service Health have got APIs. So what's the, why do we need MCP and API?

Brian McGough: I think it's a great question. I think that there's... 'Cause if you think about it, you've got, you've got, Planner, you've got, the API, right? Now we're talking about the MCP. You've got the Message Center space itself, right? Mm-hmm. And I think that each of those has its own use case or scenario depending on, you know, the organization type, right?

If you think about a small or more medium-sized business, they may leverage Planner as kind of their, task checking to make sure, "Hey, did we get this thing done? Did we get this thing done?"- Yeah... whereas, you know, our larger enterprises, they'll use the API, they're building in-house, systems. I mean, your system as well.

Yeah, we use the

Tom Arbuthnot: API fairly heavily. We're, we're glad it's there.

Brian McGough: Exactly, right. And it, but it, it serves a different purpose because it's about tracking. Where the MCP, I think, comes in and gives you that, not just the details about the Message Center post, but it gives you that next level and the next level down, right?

That allows you to do that research and that analysis about the change against your tenant, which then you can feed back into your processes using Planner or using the API, right?

Tom Arbuthnot: - Yeah, it's a much more friendly, MCP gives a more friendly service for- Mm-hmm... For AI, but also for users who aren't dev dev on the API side.

Like it's a, you know, you can get connected with the, with the MCP and just start as- asking questions. Again, your demo's really good on this. Right. Like just in English, like what's coming up for Teams? And I lo- Planner's important to our org, like I wanna know everything on the Roadmap for Planner- Mm-hmm

that kind of thing.

Brian McGough: Yeah. No, and that's, that's the, there's another piece there when I was, when I was working on the MCP that kinda hit me, and it's like we have, our small business, kind of reach for Message Center is, is extremely low. And it's extremely low because, you know, you think about the mom and pop pizza shop or the dentist office, right?

They don't, they don't have a person who's dedicated to, right, running their organization. Yeah. What they have is, "Hey, I got something new. Cool. It looks it does this," right? Right? They're, they're just... They're not even looking at Message Center. But with- No... with the MCP and kind of building it into, you know, having it be in Copilot and be, accessible, it kinda opens up that opportunity where they can say, you know, "Teams is acting really weird today.

Is there an issue with Teams today?" Right? And not- Mm-hmm... have to go into an admin interface, which they don't, may not understand or they may not get, and they can just say, "Hey, is there a problem with Teams today?" It can come back and say, "Oh yeah, look, we've got issues." And so it, it, I think it, there's a, I think there's an opportunity to really kinda help kind of that audience as well get more out of, you know, what they're using for M365, as well.

Yeah. So.

Tom Arbuthnot: Yeah. That is a real challenge is they are, all th- those smaller organizations are time-stretched, as we said. There's so much going on on the platform- Mm-hmm... and in our space, like making it in a, a, a way they can choose how to consume it. Like just give me the headlines or- Yeah... yeah, I'm, like we're, we're a big, you know, we're a small organization, but heavily dependent on Dynamics.

Like I can't miss- Right... Dynamics changes, that kind of thing.

Brian McGough: Right. Yeah, exactly.

Tom Arbuthnot: Awesome. So, those are kind of the three areas. Just taking it back to the kind of Frontier, Standard, Deferred. Sure. How should we think about those relative to preview, relative to, like other, other date options? Like how would it work?

And, and Frontier is sort of starting with the Copilot feature set- Mm-hmm... as I understand it.

Brian McGough: Yeah. And it's all kind of starting with the Copilot feature set, right? If you think about Frontier and you think about Standard and Deferred as well, right? We're starting with the Copilot space because that's where a lot of the quick, fast change happens. Yeah... it's also where we get a lot of, compliance, right, folks who are in the compliance space, right? Have a lot of concerns, and they need to make sure that they're tracking that stuff appropriately. So that's where we decided we would start. But I think what you're gonna see, is with across it is that we're gonna see this evolution as w- as more and more services, and products come into to be part of Frontier, Standard, Deferred, right?

I mean, that's gonna become the model - Yeah... as we move forward. You know, today and, and maybe still even in the future is, you know, you're gonna have things like, prev- previews, private previews, TAP, right? Because things like a private preview and a TAP, those are really engineering driven, and they're looking for some specific feedback on specific changes, and usually they're working with specific customers, right?

Customers who have signed up and said, "Hey, I wanna be part of this," right? "I wanna be part of- Yeah... the work that you're doing." And so, you know, we will still have kind of those opportunities, for folks, moving forward. But they're, they will be managed just like they are today. And they're not necessarily, we don't, we don't really communicate about, you know, TAP or, private previews.

Tom Arbuthnot: No, they tend to have the, we do various, they tend to have their own comms channel. Usually it's Teams these days. Yeah. So you either have a team you join, because they're not, they're not flowing them through, typically when I've seen, say, on Teams, not through the Message Center. You're having a more direct conversation at that point.

Brian McGough: Yeah. Yeah, exactly. It's, it is more of a direct conversation, and that's the point, right? Because you're really look- they're looking for that feedback kind of right away and, and make sure that, they're getting the usage that they want through that program, 'cause there's a reason folks sign up, and there's a reason why they do it, right?

They really want to get that, that feedback. So I think- Mm-hmm... those, those things will continue to exist, as we move forward. And, you know, it's, we're early, right, in this movement, but it is the direction that, you know, the organization that, has adopted, and it's, it's the direction we're going. And so - I mean, it's, we've got a lot of work still ahead of us.

We've got the-

Tom Arbuthnot: Yeah, yeah. It's, it's always a journey, isn't it? Because you've got like a- Right, yeah... bunch of products, like it, well, and there'll clearly be a period of time where we're, some workloads are running under the more traditional model, and this is the, the Frontier is the new model. But the, the logic makes sense to me, I think, and the-

Brian McGough: Mm-hmm

Tom Arbuthnot: the, the key thing about not testing preview bits, but like, like if you go Standard, like if you put IT on standard and you put the rest of the business on deferred, if you're in that extreme customer scenario where you want to test before the, the business side get it, I'm now testing GA-supported code and, and how it will actually work, and I'm seeing what's coming from my business users.

Brian McGough: Exactly. Right? And so f- and especially for folks that are in that situation where they have a, where they kind of say, "Hey, I'm gonna go deferred for my organization, but I'm gonna identify, this group of individuals who are gonna be in Standard." Right? The way that we're gonna run our deployments is whoever is specifically, called out for standard is actually gonna be at the front of the line, right?

So that we, so that we honor that 30 days for those that are in deferred, right? And we give them that opportunity to test. And so, we're actually thinking about that again, even from a deployment perspective, right? To make sure that we can honor that, with, with customers.

Tom Arbuthnot: That's nice. I mean, that's always been a, a constant feedback that I know your team have heard a lot is like everybody wants, like, it's all great telling me a date window, but when, when does it hit my tenant and when do I know about it?

Which is quite challenging at the scale of, Microsoft's Cloud platforms, but that is often the ask.

Brian McGough: It is, and, and we get that. I mean, that's kind of, Mickey, my partner, who I partner a lot on this stuff with, you know, we kind of joke that that's our, that's our great white whale, right? To try and to, to try and knock that one out.

Yeah. And we, we've, we've both tried a couple times, right, in our tenure here to try and get that to go and it, you know, it's like we get, no. But we're, we're feeling pretty good, knock on wood, right, that the direction we're going, a lot of work that we've done over the last year and a half is really about, building up capabilities internally, so stuff that's not necessarily visible for customers.

And so, we built out a new system for managing and change. We're continuing to evolve that so that all changes actually come through a single system, right? Regardless of the Engineering Team, 'cause today there's like 50 different systems that, you know, each Engineering Team has their own way of, of managing-

Tom Arbuthnot: Yeah.

Again, people wouldn't necessarily-... Their features and their deployments... Think, think about this, but like the different, like the, like This team is super agile and runs on plan for some reason. This team runs on ADO. This team is- Right... was, an acquisition and runs in a completely different... Like, like there's lots of, differences internally how the engineering d- divisions run.

Oh, yeah.

Brian McGough: Yeah, no, there's a ton of different, you know, ton of differences. And so one of the things, you know, Mickey has been doing a great job and, and he'll be out on the, on the next or on that one that you mentioned earlier. Yeah, on the

Tom Arbuthnot: webinar, yeah.

Brian McGough: The webinar ear- earlier. I mean, he's, he's kind of picked that up and has been kind of working with the Engineering Teams to kind of get them to start funneling through kind of this single system.

It's, it's great because if once we kind of get that further down the road, again, knock on wood, we'll be able to give, right, that answer of when something is going to hit a tenant. Yeah. Right? Or at least get closer to the point where we're saying, "You're starting now, and you are done." Right? "You have it," right?

Some users might have it, now you have it. Yeah. And at least getting closer to that point of to give admins that understanding of when-

Tom Arbuthnot: Yeah, that would be gold for adoption 'cause we could start to bring our comms in to be like, "Good news, try this out," as opposed to currently it's, "Good news, here's a window."

Or we defer the comms quite a lot until we're really confident it's hit the users.

Brian McGough: Yeah. Yeah, so I mean, we're definitely, you know, we're definitely working on it, 'cause that would be a, that would be a huge, huge win, not only internally. I mean, it'd save me a lot of hassle 'cause of -... from an operations perspective and, and updating Message Center posts, so

Tom Arbuthnot: Yeah.

Yeah. So. Awesome. Well, thanks, Brian, for jumping on the pod. It's, it's really interesting to hear the behind-the-scenes stuff and I think, so yeah, like you say, it's quite a unique role you have, seeing all the work from all the different teams and the, and the acceleration of that work, particularly as we go into Frontier, is, really exciting.

Brian McGough: Yeah. No, it's, it's a, it's an exciting space. Like I said, I mean, I, I, I'm excited to get up and come to work every day. Like, you know, that is, that's a great place to be, right? And just knowing that if I drop the ball, I can cause some pain. If I do it right, then great, then people can continue on with their day.

And so it's, it's- Yeah,

Tom Arbuthnot: yeah...

Brian McGough: You know, definitely not focusing on dropping the ball. But I mean, it's **Tom Arbuthnot:** I know, I know you, I know you get plenty of feed- you get plenty of feedback as well, like - Yeah... DMs of like, "Why is this, why is this like this? Why is this like that?" It feels like - Yeah

I'm glad you take the chall- the, the feedback with the, the, in, in, in the way it's intended.

Brian McGough: Yeah. No, and that's, yeah, that's, I mean, yeah, there's, there's... We get some great feedback, right? 'cause folks can provide, you know, just as a reminder, folks can provide feedback on every single Message Center post, right?

Through, and it comes in, and my team reviews all that feedback that comes in. So we see it, right, and then we pass it on to the engineering teams. And if customers ask questions in that feedback, we, we, kind of hound the engineering teams to make sure that they are -

Tom Arbuthnot: Yeah, it's a reminder for folks-

answering... to really use those features. Like- Yeah... that, that is not going into a, a black hole. Like there is- No... a team that are looking at that and leveraging it, and, it's, it's... And, and volume, like volume obviously matters there. So like, like do give it 'cause it's, it will show the importance of the feedback.

Brian McGough: Exactly. Right. We have, we have, due to volume of feedback, the type of feedback, features have been changed, right? And I've, I've seen it, I've seen it happen. I've seen it where a feature rollout has stopped. I've seen it where like a, a retirement, "Hey, we're gonna retire X, Y, Z," and customers are like, "No, we use that every single day."

Right? And the Engineering Teams- Yeah... didn't understand. Like the, they didn't have that understanding, and the feedback allowed them to, to get that understanding and go, "Okay, wait, we need a, we need a different plan." Right? And so- Yeah... The feedback matters, and it does have an impact, so give it to us.

Tom Arbuthnot: Awesome. Well, Brian, thanks for jumping on the pod. Well, I know you guys have got more stuff planned in this modernizing change, so, when the time's right, we'll have to jump on again and talk about some of the, some of the up-and-coming stuff. But really excited about your MCPs, and we'll link all the docs and access to those on, on below.

So, yeah, check those out and give Brian and the team some feedback on what, what clever stuff you're doing with them.

Brian McGough: Yeah, that'd be great. Thanks for having me, Tom. Appreciate it.

Tom Arbuthnot: Awesome. Thanks a lot.