2019 predictions for the digital workplace and office 365 · workplace and office 365 compiled by...

2019 Predictions for the Digital

Workplace and Office 365

Compiled by www.sharethepoint.com

As we welcome in 2019, our thoughts go to strategy, planning and

new ways of working in our current workplace. As everyone aims for productivity gains and cost savings,technology always plays a large part.

What is in store?

We asked a few of our favouritepeople - many who present at

our events, are top of their game in the Office 365

world, and who embraceDigital Transformation.

Predictions may be too

strong a word –educated guesses perhaps –

and not necessarilycorrect,

but something to ponder over your morning coffee ....

2

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Predictions from the experts

Compiled by

Table of contents

5Compiled by

Title Page

Benjamin Niaulin 6

Brendon Ford 7

Darrell Webster 8

Dave Paylor 9

Debbie Ireland 10

Heather Newman 11

Joel Olsen 12

John Robson 13

Justine Cormack 14

Lee Stevens 15

Leon Bro 16

Loryan Strant 17

Marc Anderson 18

Nick Horton 19

Patrick Quimonet 20

Steve Knutson 21

Tracy van der Schyff 22

Predictions:

Bio:



The writing is on the wall - direction is set. The challenge will be for organisations and more specifically IT to adapt their way of thinking and working, to a new cloud world. One that scales, one that is multi-product.

A new mindset for ITWe said going to the cloud would change things, and yet it felt like the move wasn’t much of a big deal – or so we thought. There is a gap we can observe. With our data, we can see that most organisations that moved to the cloud still work with their previous model from On-Premises. What does that mean? Well, they are still using Classic SharePoint with a traditional top down physical sub site structure. They are disabling self-service or Office 365 Groups and are weary of any new changes. Some may have enabled Modern SharePoint, but once again are using the same model.

In 2015, Satya Nadella said that every company is now a software

company. And today, we’re seeing this happening. It’s an exciting time to be in IT, but it means changing mindsets, frameworks, measures and governance to enable this transformation. My recommendation? Start pretending you’re a product team and not an IT team. As if you are responsible for developing a product in the market, getting it sold, adopted, used, and everything else that comes with it. Why? Because now you are responsible for a service you provide, and they are your customers. If they don’t like the service you provide, it’s easy for them to find something else, not “buy your product”. Historically we called this Shadow IT.

Get Started by:• Reading up on Jobs to be Done framework• Deploy in small increments, measure, adapt• Forget about mega 3-year projects, you can have a vision and a

strategy, but you should be able to iterate constantly• Measure. If you can’t track that what is and isn’t working, how

can you improve it.• Don’t launch products, launch solutions• Embrace the Microsoft Teams buzz as an enabler

Rebirth of Governance discussions

Everything I mentioned above will lead us to renew the hot topic of governance, this time in a bigger world that is Office 365 - My bet is these topics will only start to grow later in the year when discussions on deploying Microsoft Teams or Office 365 Groups will develop into a new mindset at work and inevitably… control. Though the word governance might be replaced by something else like controlling content sprawl or automated-governance or Security and Compliance.

Benjamin Niaulin

Contact me via LinkedIn

Benjamin is Product Manager at Sharegate, a product company providing SharePoint migration, reporting, and security management in Microsoft's Office 365.

He has been a Keynote Speaker at some of the largest Office 365 events focused on collaboration and digital transformation.

Awarded by Microsoft as an MVP, Benjamin is also and part of the trusted Microsoft Regional Director Program.

Company: ShareGate

6 2019 Predictions for the Digital Workplace and Office 365

https://ca.linkedin.com/in/bniaulin

Predictions:

Bio:



AI will continue to be hyped with regards to the digital workplace in 2019 but I predict that the difference this year will be that we see major vendors like Microsoft and Google building on past success and getting true momentum.

We can expect to see deeper integration of Microsoft AI services in the Office 365 suite of products. In addition Bots will start to deliver value to productivity workers vs being an interesting idea for a CIO to demo.

A key area where Bots could help productivity workers is with regards to discovery and management of digital assets in the enterprise. I would personally love a digital assistant to help me manage the mess I have created in One Drive!

Lets not talk about the mess in Teams yet.

Brendon Ford


Chief Operating OfficerBrendon is responsible for the operational performance of the three Provoke subsidiaries.

With deep technical knowledge, his focus is on selecting the technology we bring to market, and how it is delivered to customers.

Company: Provoke


https://www.linkedin.com/in/brendonford

Predictions:

Bio:



Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella restated the company’s mission to help everyone on the planet to achieve more, underpinning it with a focus on tech intensity. He said that organisations need to adopt best-in-class technology fast, building their own technology and technical capability.

I interpret this to mean that Microsoft will continue to deliver tools and technologies at an intense pace. They encourage their customers to align technology with their needs, actively work on adoption of technology internally and combine technologies to build and innovate.

However, we need to take care to keep the human element of tech intensity top of mind. Our people need periods of low intensity to align, absorb and adopt on a personal level. Growth occurs when there are alternating intervals of high and low intensity, and periods of recovery.

In Office 365, this year will continue to see spokes added to the hub for teamwork - Microsoft Teams. More first and third-party services will be integrated into Teams, offering multiple (and sometimes overlapping) choices of productivity tools. SharePoint is ensuring that it’s modernising endeavours provide a consistent experience of lists and libraries wherever you work - in browser, on

mobile and through Microsoft Teams. SharePoint, Yammer and Stream will deliver on informing and engaging experiences for employees, encouraging organisation-wide conversation through multiple mediums.

Flow and PowerApps will penetrate further into the citizen no-code developer population, enabling more scenarios to collect and combine information. Amidst all this, we are seeing a renewed interest user adoption from organisations and service providers.

This year when you ask yourselves how your organisation will keep up change and experience growth, take a fresh look at a community-based learning.

Darrell Webster


Darrell is an Office 365 productivity and collaboration specialist for Adopt and Embrace. He relishes the opportunity to help individuals, teams and organisations to unlock the value in Office 365. He is active in the Microsoft Technical Community and firmly believes that the Community IS the expert.

Darrell also helps to coordinate an online publication and Live show called RE:Office 365, where thought leaders share their stories, opinions and guidance regarding Office 365. His community efforts have been recognised with the Microsoft MVP award since 2013.

Company: Adopt and

Embrace


https://www.linkedin.com/in/darrellwebster

Predictions:

Bio:



When asked for 2019 predictions my mind automatically goes to flying taxis and deliveries via drones. It might be a bit tricky to match these in the Digital Workplace so I have chosen a couple of

areas which I think are more realistic.

Death of Email – OK maybe a slight exaggeration but I think 2019 will likely see email drop in priority as alternatives such as Yammer and Teams settle into maturity and increase in popularity. Email has been the go-to in communications for so long it will be a bit like a comfort blanket for many but younger workers do not have the same addiction. I suspect the impact on the workplace will actually be quite significant as time management will need to adjust, hopefully granting a level of freedom from the inbox which will likely be first scary then liberating. I also think this is a real positive for any involved in intranets as that is the local place to pull together all the communications that are no longer sent by email.

JIT Staff – one of the hot topics which has been predicted recently is a reduction in permanent staff and an increase in staff recruited for specific projects/activities Just-in-Time (JIT) has been a common manufacturing approach to getting supplies delivered just as they are needed rather than the need for extensive

warehousing but the concept could also result in a more dynamic workforce. While I do not pretend to be an expert in recruitment I am very interested in what that means for the Digital Workplace.

Getting recruits up to speed quickly will be vital with such a turnaround and ensuring they have the information and tools available to perform will mean an increasing dependency on the Digital Workplace particularly if they are also remote workers. Traditionally, permanent staff have a higher level of commitment to the corporate culture than transient staff so again this will be an opportunity for the Digital Workplace to quickly engage new staff and provide modern collaborative tools to ensure project teams are productive as quickly as possible.

Exciting times for our Digital Workplaces – but I am still fascinated by these flying taxis

Dave Paylor

Dave is a non-developer SharePoint Consultant with an extensive background in Performance Management and an obsession for presenting information in more interesting ways.

While accepting that most consider it downright weird, Dave loves to push the boundaries of SharePoint lists with XSLT and even a little bit of jQuery.

Company: Empired



https://www.linkedin.com/in/paylord

Predictions:

Bio:



Debbie Ireland


Debbie Ireland is the Managing Director of ShareThePoint Ltd , a New Zealand company which specialises in Office 365/SharePoint training and consulting.

Debbie also organises Digital Workplace Conferences in New Zealand and Australia. Debbie was awarded the Microsoft Most Valuable Professional (MVP) Award for nine years. Her focus is helping people understand the business capability and productivity gains that Office 365 and SharePoint can provide.

Company: ShareThePoint


Managing constant changeOffice 365 changes regularly (both the interfaces and functionality), meaning businesses need to revise their approach to MANAGING change. I think companies are slowly waking up to this, but it needs to be built-in to regular operational/BAU processes (and budgets!).

Impacts include the usual updates to training materials, need for more training and provision of support. But also crucial are the OTHER impacts associated with change - adoption is always higher when the staff are educated, understand why the change is

happening and how it benefits them . Companies also need to plan for those who reject or ignore change, hide their head in the sand or block others from embracing it.

Change to online training and support resources To cope with rapid changes and support demands, blended learning will be big. Companies will look for supported and trusted resources across a range of delivery options – in person, floor walking, online, virtual classes, and videos. Microsoft are already investing in more online resources and adoption toolkits, like this.

Development and integration of BOTS for FAQs and help mechanisms will grow – adding value to online platforms. Chat bots will become key in how companies communicate with their customers – and uptake will increase as the workforce gets younger.

More app integration and cloud services We are already seeing focused integration with Microsoft Teams; multiple apps eliminating the need for multiple windows – which makes navigation easier. I am hoping as the apps get more tightly integrated, the confusion over “when to use what” will diminish.

Online services will continue to evolve, possibly at the cost of investment in desktop applications. There is already an incredible reliance on the internet – if desktop applications become a thing of the past this will only increase – and hopefully we don’t lose all the advanced features and functionality we have come to rely on.

Less reliance on IT and admin level supportImplementing Office 365 is more about the awareness of NEW ways of working, understanding what is there and how to use the tools. In order to survive and support businesses, IT teams need to release some of the fear and control and move to more support and training roles, and I think CIO’s will align strategic plans with this.

IT teams will improve their skills to deal with multiple devices, using ALL the tools, and strategies for BYOD. End user interfaces will continue to shift towards user-driven configuration and provision – with more inline editing and less navigation away to separate settings (e.g. Site, Library, List) screens.

https://www.linkedin.com/in/debbieireland

https://support.office.com/en-us/article/training-for-the-microsoft-cloud-dbf49362-907f-4c9a-884b-4c5f0bffd908?wt.mc_id=MAC_2008792_Header_TrainingTile&ui=en-US&rs=en-NZ&ad=NZ

Predictions:

Bio:



In looking at overall trends in Digital Workspace and Office 365 from last year moving into 2019, a few predictions bubbled up for me:Announcements around Intelligent Cloud and Intelligent Edge: Julia White, CVP Microsoft Azure alluded to “something is coming” around Intelligent Cloud, Intelligent Edge, compute everywhere and how Cloud can AI help move those forward. (Listen for it on Mavens Do It Better Podcast posted earlier this month). I predict that Microsoft Build and Microsoft Ignite will have some surprise and delight moments around these platforms.The Tech Industry Comprehensive Embrace of Diversity and Inclusion in Technical Discussions: Industry events have been hosting Women in Tech lunches and diversity panels for a while, and companies are looking hard into programs. A comprehensive Diversity and Tech program at Microsoft Ignite was launched. My prediction is the blending of Diversity and Tech inside our technical sessions as part of their DNA when we build products, teams, community and each other. For more, follow - Microsoft Tech Community.Accessibility Mapping to Microsoft Teams and all Office 365 Applications: The introduction of Teams as a platform that combines workplace chat, meetings, notes, and attachments will push headset manufactures to up their game in the meetings arena. Transcripts, closed captioning, (already in many Microsoft products) and compatibility will become standard for innovation in software and hardware usability and design. Follow the Office Accessibility Center and Jenny Lay-Flurrie for more.Self-Service Learning Will Increase: With more companies

adopting a larger set of Office 365 applications and the rate of changes on the Office 365 roadmap companies are looking for ways to put training and help content directly into the hands of users. To this end, Microsoft launched Service Adoption Specialist Certification. I predict there will be more discussions, blog posts and guidance on adoption and training so IT purchasers can see their users get more out of their investments daily. The Adoption of Microsoft Teams and Multi-Tenant Management: With the announcement of the free version of Microsoft Teams, Microsoft continues to add value across all business shapes and sizes. The ability to bring and leverage almost all Office 365 apps as a “tab” inside Teams channels has helped with this push. My hopeful prediction is that the ability to switch between Teams tenants becomes more fluid. With four that manage, I have found I sometimes miss things and I want to stay in Teams and not revert to Outlook. To up level features in Office 365, vote in User Voice. Some of these predictions are hopeful, and others are what I believe will come, the rate of change in the Modern Workplace and Office 365 is certain and will continue throughout 2019 and beyond.

Heather Newman


Heather is the founder and CEO of Creative Maven, a virtual marketing consulting firm that brings c-level strategy, inspiration and creativity to marketing teams, startups, enterprise businesses and individual artists. She has produced thousand of events, campaigns and experiences in the high-tech and entertainment industries.She is also the Co-Founder and Chief Marketing Officer of Content Panda, a high tech business dedicated to creating products that deliver a superior user experience that drive value to businesses. She is also a Microsoft MVP for Office Apps and Services.

Heather lives in Los Angeles, California and enjoys traveling the world speaking about Office 365, SharePoint and Diversity, Inclusion, and Belonging


Company: Creative Maven

https://twitter.com/julwhite

https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/overview/future-of-cloud/

https://www.mavensdoitbetter.com/podcast/2019/1/17/episode-21-cloud-maven-julia-white

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/ignite/diversityandtech

https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/Diversity-and-Tech/ct-p/DiversityTech

https://support.office.com/en-us/article/office-accessibility-center-resources-for-people-with-disabilities-ecab0fcf-d143-4fe8-a2ff-6cd596bddc6d

https://twitter.com/jennylayfluffy

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/roadmap?ms.url=roadmap&rtc=1&filters=

https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/Driving-Adoption-Blog/Microsoft-Releases-the-Service-Adoption-Specialist-Certification/ba-p/313202

https://products.office.com/en-us/microsoft-teams/free

https://office365.uservoice.com/

https://www.linkedin.com/in/heathernewman

http://www.creativemaven.com/

https://www.contentpanda.com/

Predictions:

Bio:



1. SharePoint 2019 will become the new base standard, but the community bloggers and speakers will get over it very quickly. It won’t feel new by June. Where usually a product is new for a couple of years. Now the on prem releases will feel dated nearly immediately. We won’t see hardly any posts unfortunately.

2. Teams will get a TON of press and become a leading workload (fastest growing) for Office 365. Microsoft Sales will CARE most about Teams and Azure. The Teams team will really dial in the MVP community and connect in solid ways.

3. Digital Workspaces will move from being buzz words to being company initiatives. Some companies will refocus intranet teams to focus on The Digital Workspace. Productivity will change based on personalised organisational insights through analytics. Analytics will be big in gaining new insights and driving the interfaces of our personalised workspaces.

4. Chat Bots will go from being a gimmick to being more common corporate projects. Today chat bots are seen as squishy

dev projects working with APIs, but we’re likely to see chat bots be more productised and with plug and play integration. I expect to see large enterprises who have sprint initiatives feeding the bots. HR and Support will find each other to support these initiatives.

5. Digital Transformation What was previously seen as stages for moving to the cloud will now be more about looking at streamlining business processes with taking advantage of investments in AI for automation.

6. The Battle of the year will be Microsoft Teams and

Slack. Microsoft’s arsenals are loaded and Skype is dead. This battle won’t end in a year. Atlassian alignment with Slack is going to cause some significant changes inside organisations.

7. Microsoft will double down on Mixed Reality. The story will really start coming together even if it sounds ahead of it’s time. Microsoft does have their work cut out. Remote assist + Teams + HoloLens… It’s ahead of it’s time, but solid. The community really doesn’t seem to understand SharePoint spaces. I think it will take a year unfortunately for the right stories to come together, but 3D/360 content viewing

is a solid investment especially if you look at 3-5 years. Engineering will start sharing more 3D/360.

8. PowerPack will be a big thing. Licensing confusion will rise, but PowerBI, PowerApps, and Flow will gain in adoption and usage in a significant way, and Microsoft will find a way to promote these products in a more streamlined way.

Joel Olsen


Joel played a pivotal role in the success of Microsoft SharePoint as the first full-time employee hired in IT to deploy and manage it at Microsoft in 2000. He would later manage the collaboration team at Microsoft which included file shares, personal storage, and the global SharePoint platform. He was a key solution architect for the first beta of SharePoint Online prior to popularOffice 365.

As a Senior Product Manager on the SharePoint team, he managed the IT audience and was the voice of the IT professional for SharePoint. Since his time at Microsoft he's been part of a few startups, designed SharePoint products, run enterprise collaboration engineering and dev teams..

Company: Konica Minolta

Business


https://www.linkedin.com/in/joel-olsen-70083042

Predictions:

Bio:



2019 will be the year of BI. At last…..The running joke amongst C-level teams from 2012 was the insistence from Gartner that Business Intelligence was the top area for technology investment. As a CFO, it was certainly a focus, as having immediate and dynamic data at your fingertips is obviously a good thing. However, what Gartner failed to realise was the flexibility of good old Excel and that most CFOs work with so many assumptions and moving parts that there was no single solution. Tools like Excel, whilst labour intensive and a pain to wrangle, are perfect to play with data and every Finance Manager I’ve admired has been a guru of extraordinary talent with a pivot table.

So, what has changed? Well, Gartner get the last laugh to be fair.

Whilst they’ve been shouting about BI and Analytics for more than 6 years, they were encouraging CFOs to spend serious amounts of money on business applications to help them with this goal, and CFOs don’t like to spend on stuff that isn’t directly related to revenue in most cases. Technology has now caught up with the hype, and the Power BI offering within Office 365 actually delivers on the dreams of many CFOs.

Power BI is not a magic bullet let’s be clear, but it is a dynamic modelling tool that consumes data and provides insightful visuals and analysis. Recent iterations I think nails it. Like the first iPhone, we were just waiting for a common platform that brought disparate technologies together, and I see Power BI as a similar breakthrough. I see this toolset becoming the go-to playpen for finance teams serious about modelling trends and validating objectives with minimal effort.

There is a lot of noise around AI and the buzz words of “predictive maintenance”. Using AI coupled with Power BI is a natural place to map such dreams but from a CFO perspective, predictive

maintenance is just a flash way of saying scenario analysis. And if there’s something that gets a CFO excited, it’s the ability to rapidly change some inputs to gain some insight on likely outputs. Up to now, we’ve been limited by our own intellect on how we construct wonderful Excel sheets, and now we can change how we work. Rather than build out modelled assumptions, let’s train an AI to look back at our past data, and make predictions (without our natural bias) about what it could mean. Predictive cashflow, rather than estimated cashflow, is but one simple model that will make life easier.

And the best bit? The tool is in the browser. And for Gartner, even a broken clock eventually tells the right time. I think we will see a rapid rise in the usage of Power BI as it supplements our arsenal of tools. This will make CFOs very happy and the integration of AI will be the catalyst for better decisioning and real-time modelling based on live data. 2019 will indeed be the year of BI, at long last.

John Robson


Chief Financial OfficerAs a previous economist and investment banker, John brings experience in opening new markets and a cool head to the executive team. He provides sound financial governance, advice and direction for Provoke.

Company: Provoke


https://www.linkedin.com/in/john-robson-31b3991

Predictions:

Bio:



Some thoughts for 2019.

None are fully formed thoughts but I think for those of us in the information management profession we have a range of challenges ahead of us.

Increasingly the online/cloud based tool sets that are being used by people in their personal lives are coming into the workplace –typically via the implementation of O365.People are expecting these tools to work in the same way and have the same levels of flexibility and personalisation as they do at home.

The requirements for security and consistent work practices in a company butt up against the wish to use these tool sets as people want to.

This is particularly the case with tools like MS Teams which MS are pushing very hard to their customers without the necessary guidance on how best to apply these tools in the business environment.

Stories of deployments gone feral are common and the work to tidy up the mess is considerable and expensive both in the time to tidy up the mess, but also in the loss of benefits of these tools to the business from poor implementations.

The challenge for the IM professional is to find the right balance

between the peoples wish to be flexible and agile in their ways of working against those of the business to ensure security of information, to meet their compliance responsibilities and ensure efficient deployment and support mechanisms are in place.

Justine Cormack

For the past 11 years Justine has been the Beca Group Information

Services Manager. Responsible

for a group wide document and records management system,

Justine focuses on business requirements, development

testing and training.


Company: Beca

Predictions:

Bio:



Lee Stevens


Lee Stevens is a Digital Strategist and Founder of Brighter Days. He is a business-focused consultant who designs Digital solutions for businesses that allows their staff, suppliers and customers to engage with their brand.Lee’s early career was spent working in investment banking but he has since gained 10 years’ experience implementing SharePoint and other Digital solutions for clients like Barclays Bank, Diageo, Fulton Hogan and Ryman Healthcare.Lee is based in Christchurch, NZ, where he runs the SharePoint User Group and Digital Daze Meet-ups.

Company: Brighter Days


#1 NZ Companies Doing Nothing Sadly, like previous years, many organisations won’t do anything.They will procrastinate, over think and over complicate potential usage of Office 365 and a Digital Workplace. Inefficient business process and tools will remain; costing organisations thousands of dollars in lost time.

#2 Shared Drives will start to disappear As organisations begin to fully understand and leverage Microsoft Teams, the obvious question will be ‘why do we need a Shared Drive?’ Note: 90% of most user cases won’t need a shared drive. There will always be some instances where these have to remain.

#3 Rapid DeploymentsEarly this year, Nielsen reported, that the average Intranet deployment takes 14 Months. Really? In 2019? This average time will reduce again this year. My guess that is NZ and Australia will be half this. (12 Weeks is our record so far. 10 of those weeks were the business deciding things!) Large organisations are already starting to go with the impressive

‘out of the box’ features in Office 365, such as Communication Sites as well as larger ‘pre-built’ solutions, that offer an ‘Intranet in a box’ and accelerators. Why would you build something ‘from scratch’ these days? My tip here: Deliver high value, low effort items; little and often.

#4 Extensions for Microsoft Teams will start to appear Microsoft Teams offers a completely new way of working for organisations but probably provides around 80% of what the business needs in most cases. With a little bit of extra work, you can get this to 95%.

By building extensions for Microsoft Teams and SharePoint organisations will start to WANT to use the Office 365 platform as they can see a direct business problem it helps solve. These will be both functional extensions (example creating a Project Register, Project Teams Templates etc.) and Technical extensions (Deployment, Management tools etc.).

#5 User Adoption, User Adoption, User Adoption

What do we use? When? Why? How?

With the smorgasbord of applications that are available in Office 365, it is vital that you ensure users can both see the value in using new tools and knowing how to use them. At the same time, failure to manage change will mean that users go back to their horrible old ways of working and annoyingly lose faith in the Office 365 platform. A little tip: Make sure you have help (and budget) in managing this change from those that have been there before. Guessing is a luxury you do not have.

https://www.linkedin.com/in/digitalstrategynz

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Bio:



30% of companies will ditch their primary Digital Workplace vendor out of frustration over a lack of leadership, poor advice and snake oil solutions. This is not much of a prediction because it happens every year, but somehow the IT industry will not reform itself again in 2019.

An effective digital workplace requires a mixture of diverse technologies. For example OS, network security and custom applications. Getting all these things working in unison seems beyond the capability of many IT departments and as a consequence, 50% of companies will give a worse user experience than at the start of the year.

The skills shortage will continue to impact the industry. Taking advantage of the opportunities that O365 presents requires people to have business and technical experience along with great interpersonal skills, but this sort of person is rare. This will see wage inflation at the top end and an increase in people in roles for which

they are not suited. There will be significant churn as people look for other roles to advance their careers.

Artificial intelligence will not make a significant impact on the IT industry this year or even next year, but look out 2021. PowerApps and flow will make a big impact this year. The ease with which solutions can be but together will see the rise of the “Citizen Developer” but IT departments will struggle implementing governance that allows the flexibility end users want, without seeing the consequences of unmanaged growth

There will be a rise in black operations, essentially businesses going off and buying their own cloud based solutions because they are frustrated with their own IT department.

Phones like the Samsung S9 can plug directly into a monitor and function like a desktop computer. This will make a massive difference to how we think of the digital workplace, but not in 2019. It will take a couple more years before we see real uptake. There will be increased demand for workers to work remotely and

on their own devices as employees struggle with traffic, increasingly busy lives and the rise of the gig economyMicrosoft will increase the cost of it’s O365 subscriptions (again)Power BI will continue to gain in popularity

Finally, Microsoft is going to increase it’s focus on Customer Experience with Dynamics CRM seeing some exciting updates throughout the year. The trickle down impact of this for the Digital workplace is that some IT departments will start thinking about end employee experience and change their internal engagement model

Leon Bro

Leon is a career contractor with over 20 years of diverse international experience, mostly on the SharePoint platform. He started as his career as developer with ASP then Java before moving into management then on to consulting.

His passion for SharePoint grew from his time in management where it became clear that balancing user demand with budgets needed something more than custom code and killer methodology. To this end, Leon now spends his time advising clients how to use “Out Of The Box O365” to meet evolving business need.

Leon’s other life is as an amateur farmer and semi-professional Beekeeper. He also tells us he brews a mean whiskey.

Company: Independat



https://www.linkedin.com/in/leonbro

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Bio:



Office 365

2019 will be the year that the juggernaut that is Office 365 starts making strides in its new course. While the early days of Office 365 were primarily infrastructure and core functionality (I.e. Exchange, SharePoint, Skype for Business), the last few years have been an explosion of apps and services (e.g. Planner, Sway, StaffHub, Flow, PowerApps, Stream, etc.).

I see 2018 as having been the year of convergence and retooling, as Microsoft Teams took the centre stage and SharePoint finally became more ‘modern’.

In 2019 I see Microsoft getting down to business as the platform further consolidates, connects, and converges. Features that have been talked about will appear, and allow organisations to modernise without experiencing change whiplash.

Ultimately Microsoft Teams will continue being the fan favourite, bringing along the other apps and services for the ride. IT departments and organisations can’t continue to push back against the onslaught of modern teamwork offered by tools like Microsoft Teams, and so the real transformation will finally begin.

Loryan Strant


Loryan Strant is a Microsoft Office 365 MVP (8 years). Loryan has been in IT for over 20 years working across web design, network infrastructure, servers, IP telephony, with the majority spent designing productivity and communications solutions.

He has lived & breathed Office 365 for almost a decade; writing blogs, speaking at conferences, consulting to organisations, and has co-authored two books. Loryanis passionate about enabling people and organisations using technology, enabling them to become more productive.

Company:

Strant Consulting


https://www.linkedin.com/in/loryanstrant

Predictions:

Bio:



First off, I don’t hold much truck with predictions. They are educated guesses at best, and a larger portion of them are just plain wrong. Instead, I find it helpful to think about what existing trends will continue, and in which directions.

The long-term move in Office 365 from classic to modern UIs will continue, and probably accelerate. While classic isn’t going away anytime soon, the benefits of using modern on many fronts are at this point, overly compelling. The areas which are important to focus on for end users are: lists and libraries, pages, and team sites. For admins, I expect the modern UIs will start to eclipse the classic, requiring us to flip back and forth far less.

To me, Digital Workplaces are as much a state of mind as they are a technology thing. The ideas behind them build on ideas from the knowledge management revolution in the mid-90s, the collaboration movement in the ‘00s, etc. These ideas also adhere to the adopter curve, as do most large change efforts, whether they are technology based or not. Underlying the success of any digital workplace effort is the willingness and capability of the organization to adapt and change. Some organizations have already gotten there and moved on to the next improvement and innovation cycle (innovators), while others may never get there (laggards).

2019, as with every year before it, will hold many fascinating new developments, and for us as technology professionals the key message to me is: learn, learn, learn!

Marc Anderson

Marc is the Co-Founder and President of Sympraxis Consulting LLC, located in USA. Sympraxis focuses on enabling collaboration throughout the enterprise using the SharePoint application platform.

Marc has over 30 years of experience in technology professional services and software development. Over a wide-ranging career in consulting as well as line manager positions, Marc has proven himself as a problem solver and leader who can solve difficult technology problems for organisations across a wide variety of industries and organisation sizes.

Marc is the developer of the jQuery Library for SharePoint Web Services (SPServices) and The SPXSLT Codeplex Project. He is a repeat recipient of the Microsoft MVP award for SharePoint Server (2011-2015).

Company:

Sympraxis Consulting



https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technology_adoption_life_cycle

https://www.linkedin.com/in/marcanderson

Predictions:

Bio:



The digital workplace will continue to evolve at an ever growing pace, this will bring challenges with change management, training and the IT approach to managing the digital workplace. Approach to budgeting and billing will be affected, and could disrupt and / or confuse.

The key risk in this area is the speed at which people have shifting loyalties to the different SaaS products out there. You may have found one you love, but if everyone has moved on this service may no longer be available. The digital workplace is an ever evolving beast that cannot be tamed, we need to understand that things are different, hold on and ride the roller coaster of change.

Re Office 365, this is a great tool for traditional businesses, it has great new services coming out all the time, but it suffers from not being traditional enough, and not changing as quickly as others. I love Office 365, it does make people’s life easier but also confuses – “which tool should I use in my enterprise? Oh, the feature I want has disappeared”. Planner is great but development slows down, then speeds up! At times MS are too concerned about breaking their traditional revenue models, where Office 365 tools could do a better job and make everyone happier! (Project v planner & Power BI v SQL Enterprise – these are two examples).

NickHorton

Nick Horton is the Group ICT Manager at PF Olsen. Nick has

previously worked in IT in

London and more recently as IT Operations Manager at Scion.

With the increased role of ICT in

professional services and

innovation in mobile and cloud computing, Nick will play a key

role in ensuring PF Olsen fully leverages technology to deliver

the best possible forestry,

harvesting and logistics solutions to clients. .


Company: PF Olsen

Predictions:

Bio:



After three years of huge announcements and improvements in Office 365 in general and SharePoint in particular, I strongly believe SharePoint future is brighter than ever!

With the very successful introduction of Teams and the ubiquitous use of SharePoint as THE content service in Office 365, Microsoft has found a good mix between a strong set of features provided by SharePoint and an easy to use interface for collaboration provided by Teams.

SharePoint has also been very smoothly updated from the old publishing interface to the modern experience. SharePoint publishing was powerful but complex and not easily accessible to end users, whereas Modern interface provide a natively responsive design solution with a very accessible user interface: the power of SharePoint for creating beautiful and powerful sites can now be accessible to the masses!

So, my main prediction for 2019 is that SharePoint will be more ubiquitous than ever in Office 365. At the same time, it will be used everywhere, and every time content storage is needed in Office 365 and also, we will see more and more Intranet sites based on SharePoint modern experience.

Patrick Guimonet


Patrick has a 20+ years’ experience as Enterprise Solutions Architect. He has also a successful track record of technical expertise for Office 365, SharePoint, SQL Server and before Oracle RDBMS. He is a former Microsoft employee in France. In 2011, he has created his own company Abalon (http://www.abalon-consulting.com), a consulting and engineering company, dedicated to provide technical and functional solutions for Microsoft collaboration platform

Company: Abalon


https://www.linkedin.com/in/patrickguimonet

Predictions:

Bio:



2019 will be the year of the cloud for most of our clients. The only requests we are getting for on-premises SharePoint implementations are to support legacy technologies.

We are also seeing a strong focus on implementing out of the box features only and taking a lot of phased approach rather than a big bang implementation. Security and working “safely” will be front of mind for IT, with Microsoft Information Protection and Multi-Factor Authentication being hot topics.

Another major activity will be the mass migration of content from local networks to the cloud. This will in-part be driven by the end of support for Windows 7 and need to retire older Windows Servers. I think this will have a flow on to the use of Microsoft Teams in many of our clients, especially in areas where collaboration can bring big wins.

Steve Knutson


Steve is the Managing Director of Stratos Technology Partners, a SharePoint and Software Development company based in Christchurch with clients across New Zealand and Australia. Steve is a Microsoft MVP for Office Servers and Services.

Steve started out in the IT industry before the World Wide Web gained popularity. Since then he has held a range of technical roles and worked on projects for a wide range of business, local government and charitable organisations.

Steve has a Computer Science degree from Massey University and is a Microsoft Certified Systems Engineer and Microsoft Certified Technology Specialist for SQL Server.

Company: Stratos

Technology Partners


https://www.linkedin.com/in/steveknutsonnz

Predictions:

Bio:



ConsumptionIn 2018 the new buzzword became "Consumption", which of course, added even more focus on User Adoption. Companies are finally realising the power end users have, when they simply refuse to use systems. We need to understand though, that the “refusal” implies more than them just being stubborn. It goes along with shame of not feeling adequate, confusion about purpose and being overwhelmed with options.

In 2019 I envision the following:

• Companies will start to realise that at least 90% of their employees need training for the apps & services in Microsoft / Office 365.

• Soft Skills and Digital Literacy will move into the spotlight as more and more managers realise that these are prerequisite skills and require the same importance as technical skills.

• Microsoft will continue to grow the support and training network for in place, when you need it training.

• User adoption will receive an even greater weight in projects as consumption becomes a real measurement.

• The Digital Workplace also cuts the chains we previously had to physical locations, which means there’ll be an influx of remote workers in the industry.

• No longer does all apps & services, serve all. Microsoft will continue to add more apps, update features and increase the pool of tools we can use in our daily lives. Which worsens the “too many choices” scenario, but at the same time will add more focus on supplying the skills to employees to make the right decisions.

• Microsoft Teams will continue to gain strength as the preferred communication tool which will calm the chaos in Outlook.

• The rise of the Citizen Developer will put more pressure on Microsoft to make Flow & PowerApps more ‘user-friendly’ for the masses as these can no longer be tools only used by ‘technology orientated’ users.

• We will definitely see more AI, Machine Learning & Intelligent Communications as users are starting to trust this infiltrated, transparent addition to transformative technology.

Overall, I am positive that 2019 will continue to deliver opportunities & tools for employees to continue working in a coherent and productive way, but also allow them to improve and innovate in their own environments.

Tracy Van der Schyff


Microsoft 365 Coach & Catalyst facilitating the evolution of human capabilities: Tracy’s passion is to empower people and therefore training and change management lie close to her heart. Her Mission is to positively impact WHAT and HOW people create, as she believes that what we design / create, designs / creates us back (Ontological Design). It is about enabling others to serve themselves better, expand their possibilities, increase their capacity to learn, act more effectively and better design their future.

Company: The Guid Stuff


https://www.linkedin.com/in/tracy-van-der-schyff-6470a543/

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