Wes Hackett, CTO, & Paul Schaeflein, Technical Architect at Addin365 - Solving New Challenges Every Day

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:03) Hello, my friends. Today we're talking to Wes and Paul, the CTO and the technical architect of Addin365. And we discuss why providing clear career roadmaps and being radically transparent are key for retaining top talent, how Addin365 helps businesses get the most out of the Microsoft suite, and how difficult and rewarding it is to be confronted with new challenges every day. All of this right here, right now on the Modern CTO podcast.

(Paul at 00:00:38) Here we go.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:39) This is the Modern CTO podcast.

(Paul at 00:00:50) You grew up in the right time because was it 10 years ago? Podcasts wasn't a thing.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:54) Yeah, no, it's actually two of the—

(Paul at 00:00:57) Three of us remember.

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:01) Well, that's like a funny thing. They say a lot of people in my generation are working jobs that didn't exist when we were born. But my girlfriend actually works at a library, and she says that when she was born, people were saying that job wouldn't exist when she grew up. But anyway, can we, let's get some introductions from you guys. Paul, can you tell me a little bit about your introduction to tech and a little bit of your career?

(Paul at 00:01:33) Sure. So my introduction to tech was actually in high school. We had these things called mainframe computers, and I got the bug and have been chasing it ever since and ended up in the Microsoft ecosystem a couple decades ago and have been there since then. And so at my heart, I'm a programmer. I'm technically, or officially, the lead technical architect at Addin365, and trying to capture the requirements from users and from the sales department and translate that into working code.

(Paul at 00:02:07) And I host a podcast called the Microsoft 365 Developer Podcast, in which I get to pretend to be stupid and ask questions of guests from Microsoft and external folks about technology, which then piques my interest and kinda loop that back into what our product is because we can get a pulse of what's going on. It's great. And as part of that, Microsoft's given me the MVP award for 11 times, so I'm proud of that. And thanks to Microsoft for that, and I'm very excited to be on here and chat tech and stuff with you.

(Joel Beasley at 00:02:42) That's awesome, man. I gotta say it's probably a bit more challenging when you gotta pretend to be stupid than asking the question.

(Paul at 00:02:50) No, no, no, not at all. Not at all. I get this role just fine.

(Joel Beasley at 00:02:57) Well, so you mentioned in there you, your high school had mainframe computers?

(Paul at 00:03:00) It was called an IBM System 36, which was the precursor to the AS/400, which was the language. The language in that was the precursor to PowerShell. See that, all of us. So yeah, there was a—it wasn't a mainframe. It was what they call a midrange computer, but yeah, it had the dumb terminals, green, amber. It was a big deal when you got an amber screen instead of a green one. So yeah, that was the day.

(Paul at 00:03:19) So yeah, that's that was the day.

(Joel Beasley at 00:03:22) That's really cool. Yeah, it sounds like a pretty fortunate setup you were able to fall into that. Cool. So Wes, how'd you get started, man? What's your story?

(Wes at 00:03:33) Well, so at university, I studied human computer interaction design, which today would probably be called user experience design. Out of uni, I joined a pharmaceutical company just as they merged two big pharmas together. I was involved in a really interesting project with .NET 1.0 Beta. So I was writing ASP.NET web services to take analytical computation molecular structures from scientific equipment and store it into a big Oracle database and then expose that to a Delphi front end. So as a new grad, that was mind-blowing because there was all these different new things. And because we were using .NET Beta, there was no internet guidance out there. It was basically all still preview and Microsoft's engineering team were doing that.

(Wes at 00:04:14) And then I did that for a couple of years, then went to work for News International in a data, CRM, data warehousing division of their organization. Did some really interesting projects. Did Royal Air Force recruitment, which is the armed forces in the UK. Some stuff for the actual newspapers themselves, stuff for the government agencies. So they did a really wide sort of sweep of marketing, direct marketing, mail shots. I think my favorite project at that time was the Royal Air Force wanted to encourage youngsters to start becoming interested in being engineers because they got lots of people that wanted to be pilots, but they actually need a lot of engineers. So they ran a program where you could register and give your address and then you would get a very glossy A3 sheet of paper which was the satellite image of your house, which back then there wasn't the idea of looking at a smartphone to see Google Maps, Street View, or anything like that. That just didn't exist. It was a brand new concept at the time.

(Wes at 00:05:23) So that was really cool because these were going out to 14, 15, 16-year-olds, and obviously it was a really smart thing to compute where they were and the longitude, latitude and stuff. And then I sort of in 2005 heard of this little thing called SharePoint, and the rest is, as they say, history. I got into a number of SharePoint projects, then was working for an implementation partner for a number of years, did some interesting projects there. Then cloud came along. And at the time, there's a huge resistance to cloud. You know, people still wanting to do $10 million projects on-premises with 80 servers and VMs galore. And there was a lot of people in the organization that were employed in those roles. And therefore, the org was very resistant to that Office 365 motion as well. But I was lucky. I got to work on some really exciting cutting-edge projects in 365 when it first came out.

(Wes at 00:06:23) And I've been doing that ever since. And then in 2015, I started Addin365 with my business partner Susie Dean. She's our CEO. And our vision for the business was really to simplify Office 365 experiences for employees because there's lots of tech in it. There's lots of bells and whistles and little knobs and dials that get turned, and technologists can go down into the weeds, but an average business employee, they need something quite easy to use. So we started the business to kind of fill gaps in the offering.

(Wes at 00:06:55) So we built products in that sort of space. And like Paul, I'm a long-standing MVP. Paul's in Office Development, so he's technical and coding and stuff like that. Mine's in Office Apps and Services, which is actually the deployment and business engagement side of Office 365. So SharePoint, Teams, OneDrive, that sort of stuff. And I think memory serves me, on my eighth year this year. And yeah, we obviously, Susie, our CEO is also an MVP in the same category. So we've got a number of the world experts in the business, which also helps our customers to get some insights into what's going on and how to deploy stuff. So it's a little bit about me and how we started.

(Joel Beasley at 00:07:41) That's awesome. I just wanna touch on since you said you have a history in working in pharmaceuticals, one of your first jobs, from what you were talking about, it just reminded me of the concept of storing data in DNA. Have you followed any of that?

(Wes at 00:07:58) No, not specifically. I mean, the department I was working in was analytical and computational chemistry, and at the time it was about bringing together Company A and Company B's data compound stores, but also reevaluating the physical liquids and compound powders that both companies owned. So there was about 3.5 million little vials of something that had to go through machinery to tell people what it was. And the liquid chromatography and the NMR spectroscopy equipment would generate reams and reams of this data. And we then built a web service to ingest it straight out the instrument, transfer it into a molecular table, and then that fed a Delphi front end which would do the kind of molecule, you know, like you'd see on a Hollywood movie, the molecules moving around and stuff like that.

(Wes at 00:08:35) And that was kind of useful in the last 18 months because Addin365 had been working with most of the large pharmaceuticals you'd recognize from delivery of COVID vaccine. So we've been very fortunate to know that was all coming because we were supporting some of the technology teams in a number of the larger organizations to kind of develop that. And the sort of AZ and Pfizer offering in the UK and also the North American one through Pfizer, you know, both sets of those customers are kind of using our technologies in some form in their Office 365 environment. So having that little bit of science background for a couple of years helped in some of the workshops because you kind of know some of the very long terms that they're using and kind of grasp what's going on.

(Wes at 00:09:41) But yeah, there's a lot of smart people in pharma who know exactly what they're doing when they're doing their thing. But, you know, do reach out really quickly for help in getting the best out of technology. And it's really interesting because if you can help something quite meaningful like that through technology, it gives you a really nice warm fuzzy feeling because you're kind of like, yes, I've delivered something. And it's a tiny, tiny little speck on the overall scheme of what's gone on. But, you know, the teams that were using it were getting a smoother transfer of data and knowledge and conversation and, you know, using Teams to better effect with software that Paul's team effectively delivered. So, you know, it's a lovely, lovely sort of story, you know, internally for our organization.

(Paul at 00:10:32) I would add on to that, it's very gratifying when the tech gets out of the way, right? These scientists know a lot and they do a lot. And the last thing they want to do is figure out where do I click to do something. So being able to just get the technology out of the way so they can do what they're supposed to be doing, that that is very gratifying.

(Joel Beasley at 00:10:49) Yeah, that's awesome. So Paul, tell me, how did you meet Wes and convince him to hire you and be in charge of his tech?

(Paul at 00:10:58) So I was an independent consultant, company of one, and we were in Microsoft's, at some event. Some MVP event, no doubt. So obviously we'd known each other over the years, and I got an email that the company I was working for was stopping all vendor payments effective immediately. And I said, hey, I need to find a job. And Wes said, I have a job. And off we go. That was it. It literally was that quick. You know, right place, right time. So, but it's been great, right? And transitioning from one-man company to not a one-man company was a bit of a struggle. But fortunately, he's a quarter of the world away from me, so I can do things without affecting everyone else. But yeah, so that's how we met and got the job. And of course, our tech interests are aligned, both being in the same space, so it worked out really well.

(Joel Beasley at 00:11:49) That's awesome. So you were mentioning earlier, both of you talked a little bit about how you're enabling people to do more with Microsoft Teams. Can you expand? What exactly does Addin365 do today?

(Wes at 00:12:02) So we have two sort of primary pillars of our offerings. We have a set that's in the communication and intranet space. So we have a pair of SharePoint solutions we call Kreative and PageKit. So they're primarily there to allow a marketing and an internal communication team to really embellish SharePoint Online and the surrounding Yammer experiences with branded, beautiful, and very consumer-led experiences. Because SharePoint's gone through a revamp and it's brought the sort of consumer angle to many of the mainstay of the experience. But it's obviously the Microsoft UI. It still looks like Microsoft stuff, and many organizations, they have their own take on how they want to perceive digital estate. So Kreative and PageKit, they are this kind of marketing tools and the communications tools.

(Wes at 00:12:43) Underneath that, we've got a thing called SiteBuilder, which helps to provision employee experiences that are ready to go. So a team could stand up, for example, an employee center or a new onboarding experience with a few clicks of a button rather than the months it would take of generating the content. That's been hugely valuable, as you can imagine, in the last 18 months, you know, the speed people needed to turn around to knowledge sharing and information services. Being able to stand something up that's a really good, well thought out employee experience that they just do the last 20% in, they put their tiny little bit tweak on. That's really powerful.

(Wes at 00:13:22) And then the other side is our new ways of working, our WorkHub product. And that's actually the product we started the business with. This was pre-Teams, so Teams didn't exist. There was just this thing called Office 365 Groups. And we built a whole experience which was about bringing together all the different vertical software services Microsoft delivered into this kind of working dashboard, which, you know, nowadays Teams has kind of taken over. So we've evolved that WorkHub offering into an AI-driven bot that can apply governance and allow a business employee to sort of ask for a team in a very democratized way. I mean, there's huge value in keeping democratized creation in place. And it allows people to, you know, set up security, get the best out of it. And it's also kind of got knowledge management aspects.

(Wes at 00:14:24) We've got a Content Confidence Kit as well that sits alongside that that helps you read content out of SharePoint and then drive the experience in the bot to be more intelligent so it can kind of learn from what it ingests. And all of that is fundamentally complementary to the stuff Microsoft delivered. So there's a kind of whole ecosystem of Office 365 product vendors and practitioners out there, and many of them have a take on what is already in the box. So they'll say, hey, we've got a search experience, and it will kind of be use ours or use Microsoft's. Our business philosophy is Microsoft's is really amazing, but what we want to do is simplify it for, as you know, to Paul's point, simplify it for that contextual use.

(Wes at 00:15:00) So our products sit inside that kind of ecosystem that Microsoft had created and take advantage of everything they've done and then just add the extra 20% on top to kind of allow a pharmaceutical to do it or a semiconductor manufacturer to do something very different. Same kit employed in two different ways. And we work with some really massive organizations as well. I mean, we supply Office Resources. Those things I've just talked about, we supply those to the world's largest media agencies. So 350 operating companies. It's nearly a quarter of a million people globally. One in three adverts that you see, they produce. So that kind of scale right the way down to, you know, organizations that are UK or Chicago-based, you know, a couple hundred people and they just use the bits of the software and the packages that they've got to support their business going forward.

(Wes at 00:15:50) So it's very much an additive experience to Office 365, which is when Susie and I were discussing the name of what we were going to call the company, we tried to be as literal as we could, which is why it's Addin365, because we were adding stuff to that experience and it was short. I'd been at a business that had a massive long name, and, you know, you type that at blahblahblah.com 500 times a week, it gets a bit tedious. So short name, to the point, very run-on-a-tin named business. And, you know, we've grown and enjoyed doing that over the last sort of five or six years. So that's the kind of product lines are there to help an organization simplify that IT estate.

(Joel Beasley at 00:16:51) Nice. So like, I guess to oversimplify, it's like a UX layer that exists on top of the Microsoft 365 ecosystem and allows some customization for each business that's using it.

(Wes at 00:17:06) Yeah, absolutely.

(Joel Beasley at 00:17:07) That's cool. A lot—

(Paul at 00:17:07) of smarts behind the scenes, which people don't want to see. But when it works, it's like, oh, that's great. Right? That's the other side of that coin.

(Joel Beasley at 00:17:16) When it works, they don't reach out to say thank you. But if the tiniest thing is off, they're extremely frustrated. So are there... You mentioned there's a lot of other companies working on where they have their own take on specific tools within Microsoft. Are you kind of the only one that's doing this layer on top? Microsoft's good. Use what they have and also use what we have to offer, which is specializing in that respect. I'm sorry if I didn't say that very well.

(Wes at 00:17:54) No, no, that's fine. I get the gist. I would say we are approaching the problem uniquely as a business. We are a product vendor, and everything we do we treat as a product. So when an organization engages with us, we also treat our professional services engagements as product lines. So there's a whole collection that an organization can kind of pick off the shelf. It's a very known quantity both from a commercial point of view and a what you get at the end of it point of view. So we can help an organization that's looking for some advisory. We can help an organization that's looking for implementation and we can help an organization that's looking for products.

(Wes at 00:18:39) So all of those are a bit like going around the supermarket and picking the meal that you want. You describe the meal, we'll help you pick the recipe, and if you want us to prepare it and put it in front of you, we can do that. Some organizations want to do the cheffing themselves, or they want to do the discovery of the recipe themselves and then have us use our products in their delivery. So it's a broad range of support we can provide a business. I think the uniqueness really comes from trying to get an organization that we're working with to get the best out of the Office 365 products rather than bring them onto our own roadmap and deliver something that Microsoft always has.

(Wes at 00:19:24) And it's a decent USP because when we talk to customers and they're looking at potentially a more competitive scenario, there are reports that some companies out there produce which go through a whole bunch of vendor rosters and they describe every feature that those particular products have. And if you go down that feature list and you put SharePoint's feature list alongside, there's a good 90% that's actually in SharePoint. It might not look the same, but search is there, people profiles are there, mobile device access is there, security is there. So what is left is a very thin veneer. And what we found is by modularizing to create those ingredients that someone can assemble for different recipes, we've been unique these last two years of being able to help an organization fill the right gap at the right time with something that's quite manageable both from a professional services point of view, rollout, and the product itself. So we can get people running. I mean, we built... There's a gas supply company in the UK and their team was two people, and they had to supply a new digital experience to the 3,000 people in the organization.

(Wes at 00:20:40) We rolled out a number of our professional services projects, products, and they bought our intranet side of our product SKUs. And effectively, we were able to stand them up that new employee experience in a matter of weeks where they just had to engage in two hours here, three hours there with a particular department to get their final take on what that content should look like. So again, that kind of acceleration... They were like, we need to do this now. It's really critical. We're not in offices anymore.

(Wes at 00:21:08) We've all been told to work remotely. Help. And it was like, okay, well we'll take these recipes. That's your desired outcome. This is how we can get you through the gate.

(Wes at 00:21:17) And a lot of organizations are really looking for that now. So I do find in a sales motion at the moment that our offering is quite unique compared with certainly many of the people they're also looking at. They tend to be much more traditionally focused on delivering a sort of scrum-led process or they're starting from blank pages and they're just asking what do you want. Which I think nobody in the consulting team in our business would ever ask what you want. We would bring you some suggestions and go, well, we've heard what you said. This is some of the things you could do.

(Wes at 00:21:54) Which one sounds good? So it's a different way of looking at the same problem space, but it helps because you can see something tangible. So a customer can kind of understand, oh, it might look like A or it might look like B. Kind of like A. Let's go with A. If we need to change it, we'll change it.

(Joel Beasley at 00:22:11) Yeah. That makes sense.

(Paul at 00:22:12) Yeah. So in his analogy, right, what he didn't mention is even if it's a prepackaged meal, sometimes you're adding a little salt or spicing it up a little bit to suit your taste. And sometimes these packages, what Microsoft delivers, while it looks great, maybe it's not exactly what you want. But that bit that you can just put your twist on it, season it up the way you want, is very compelling to, I would expect, most IT professionals. Being able to make your customers happy, give them what they ask for instead of close to what they ask for. Right? So again, technology needs to get out of the way.

(Joel Beasley at 00:22:42) Yeah. Yeah. That makes sense. Well, Paul, I have a question for you. I know Microsoft pushes out new technical releases and updates all the time. What's it like reacting to those on the support side? I imagine that's a big challenge.

(Paul at 00:23:02) It is. It could be very tiring. Yes. Right? So just a little note. At one point... Wes probably didn't want me to share this, but at one point, I put code in there that says, is there something that I did wrong? Or maybe I called out to Microsoft and something went wrong on the other end of the internet, right? Because we needed to know, did something happen in our code, or did something happen in the service that we're consuming? And so we embrace it, and that's a philosophy that Wes has espoused from the beginning. Beta or new code doesn't bother us. Let's just go in with our eyes open and communicate with our customers.

(Paul at 00:23:38) There's this new capability. I had a meeting earlier this morning about new capability, and he's already like, well, I'll believe it when I see it. But we know that it's new, and it's worthwhile, and we'll see what works and kick the tires. And if customers want this capability and they're willing to say, okay, we'll try it. If it doesn't work, we can fall back. But as a technologist, that's the thing. I want to learn something new. I want to try something new. I don't want to show up every day and do the same.

(Paul at 00:24:04) I personally would never make it in a job on an assembly line because I can't do the same thing over and over again. And I find a lot of developers I talk to over the years are the same way. We want to see the new thing. We want to try the new bits. We want to learn new stuff. And so on one hand, it can be hard supporting it. But on the other hand, approaching it with the right mindset, you'll find that a lot of other people want new stuff too, right, even end users. Maybe they'll complain because you moved my button from left to right. But once they get moving along, sometimes it's okay. So it's not going to change.

(Paul at 00:24:37) Microsoft isn't going to slow down. We've moved to this new cloud world, and so let's embrace it. Let's understand it, talk about it, and enjoy it.

(Joel Beasley at 00:24:45) Yeah. Doing the same thing over and over again, that's what AI is for. You're a person.

(Wes at 00:24:50) I had thought of that.

(Paul at 00:24:51) But I'm going to borrow that line for sure.

(Joel Beasley at 00:24:56) I know earlier one of you mentioned that you lean on AI for some of your product. What does that look like? What's the implementation there?

(Wes at 00:25:05) So we've got a bot-based experience which uses AI. So in our Work Hub products, the Teams bot uses natural language understanding, uses text analysis, a lot of the cognitive services that Microsoft deliver to be more intelligent and react to requests from the employee in a contextual fashion. So a lot of the examples that Microsoft will show of AI being deployed in conversational UI are quite simplistic. They're, you know, build a fill in a holiday request and it will magically send it somewhere and that kind of stuff. But when you actually get into the weeds of designing conversational UI, it is an entire discipline.

(Wes at 00:25:54) There's a lot of whiteboard time, virtual or physical. There's huge nomenclature and challenges in terms of if you're supporting a global business that has multiple English speaking varieties, let alone translation. So our kind of AI layers are multifaceted. We've got not only natural language for a number of languages, but we've got intent-driven contextualization of the experience when somebody's in a team versus a one-to-one chat. It will behave differently because we believe the context is different.

(Wes at 00:26:30) If you're talking out loud, we equate using a Teams channel to being in a room. So if you're talking out loud there, the bot needs to behave as if it was sat in the room, in a meeting room with you and be more conversational. If you're in IM chat, it can be a bit more friendly and the tone changes of how you can respond to the employee that's using it. The other side is in the Content Confidence Kit. We're leveraging a lot of engineering underpinnings Microsoft have had in SharePoint for a very long time.

(Wes at 00:27:01) So things like managed metadata, taxonomy, content type definitions. These are all real nerdy, techy bits underneath the bonnet. They've been down there for a long, long time. Microsoft have revamped a lot of marketing around stuff they already had. So SharePoint Syntex, we were working on a number of programs with Microsoft over the last year. And that's a really smart piece of kit because it can allow you to do document processing. And if you've got loads of invoices, you can actually train the model to extract information from the invoice and send it to wherever you want it to go. So we take a similar approach with SharePoint content. We don't quite do the same thing as the Syntex stuff. There's no real overlap.

(Wes at 00:27:44) One is a trained model learned extraction. Ours is more a suggestive interface of, like, we can see this. Maybe you should do that. So it's proving to be, in the right parts of businesses, very, very powerful. It's not a tool that... That particular part of the tool is not used by everyone every day. The question and knowledge management experience definitely is, but things like the Content Confidence Kit tend to be creators, the people generating the knowledge that are using them, which is a smaller subset of your organization normally. The conversational side is used by lots of people daily. And we had to break new ground. I mean, we built a globally distributed bot, multi-tenant bot platform on the Microsoft stack, which at the time we did it was not really something they had any examples of doing or, you know, Azure.

(Wes at 00:28:43) You were basically assembling all the parts from Azure. And this is what Paul was talking about. You know, we don't fear the unknown. We don't fear, like, nobody's done this before with these bits of jigsaw puzzle. And in fact, if we were to bring up Azure DevOps, our repo list, there's as many that now say ZZ retired as there are that are ZZ live kind of thing.

(Wes at 00:29:07) So as a business, we are evergreen just like the platform. We are not scared of going, well, we invested this time and energy building that product. That product got superseded by Teams. That product should get retired. The product line, just like a car evolves, you know, the next version of the vehicle comes out, the next version of our stuff comes out.

(Wes at 00:29:27) It's under the same product line, uses the same name, but fundamentally might have moved from being a SharePoint web part to a Teams bot. So we've moved the cheese on the user quite a lot. And that's good. And Paul and I were joking just before we started the recording about the technology he was talking about. I said, oh, you know, it all sounds great but have they thought about how we'll use it? Probably not. Which means kicking the tires, there's going to be some rough edges and we're going to be able to feed that back. And we have that really privileged position of being able to do that with a lot of the product team. You know, we both invest a huge amount of time in feeding back and being involved with product engineering groups and product marketing groups at Microsoft.

(Wes at 00:30:12) So it's going to help them tailor both the thing they're building and potentially the way they're talking about it. And that's a, you know, it's a bidirectional benefit because they get insights into what our customer base is doing and how they could build something to help, and we get insights into what they're doing and where the white space is for us to help an employee fill a gap in the offering.

(Joel Beasley at 00:30:37) I know the UK has been somewhat progressive in passing legislation that requires more explainability in AI, especially when it's decisions that impact humans. Is that correct so far?

(Wes at 00:30:54) Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. You have to be... Like I say, it's a complex discipline because you have to... I mean in Europe, there's the GDPR and obviously the UK have got their own varieties of legislation as well.

(Wes at 00:31:09) So even, you know, writing the legalese in the terms and conditions of a product can be a big job because you need to cater for a global audience. And Microsoft won't just give you one, which would be nice. You know, their legal team is four times bigger than anybody else's probably. It'd be nice if they could just say, hey, any vendor building on our solutions, that's what you need to write. But they do give you a huge amount of guidance in terms of trust and where data should sit. And again, you know, thinking about any listener on this show is going to be sitting there going, well, okay. This is great. They're putting stuff in my environment that does all these cool things. Where's my data?

(Wes at 00:31:56) How do I control stuff? Where is my stuff? Because if you go off box, you've got all the risks of going off box. You are allowing another service to interact with your data and host it. So again, adhering to legislation actually makes that technical design decision just as important because we don't hold any customer data. Because we're in the platform.

(Wes at 00:32:21) The data is in the platform with the customer's tenant. So our stuff is an experience and it sits inside that overall experience. And that makes it easy for technical teams to have the conversation of like, where's our stuff? It's like, well, it's wherever you had it ten minutes ago. It's exactly the same place.

(Wes at 00:32:37) We're not taking it and putting it over here on a different moon where you've got no control over it. It's still on your planet doing your thing. So that kind of AI piece and trust is mega important to consider at design time. And Paul and I have noodled many an hour away working out there might be a simple and easy way, we'll put it in our database. But the answer always ends up being it should be in the customer's tenant. And we always engineer to be it's in the customer's tenant. So it's a discipline you get into with an engineering group really quickly which is, you know, be good citizens, don't do silly things.

(Wes at 00:33:21) And if you ever have any kind of interaction with, say for example, Germany as an entity, you know, they have even stricter regulations and rules about what can and can't be done. And they have a concept of a workers' council that protect employee privacy, protect tracking and stuff like that. So that goes even harder in favor of the individual employee right to not be tracked, not be discovered, not be able to be appraised of performance on some things. And sometimes that can be a real juxtaposition against AI because AI is trying to say, hey, I understand you, Wes. You've done this with Paul and this with Adam and you've been doing these things.

(Wes at 00:34:05) This is what I think you should get from Chris. And you're like, I don't know Chris. How can, what, how is that working? And that can be really scary for situations where people think privacy, because they're like, well, I don't know Chris. Therefore, how am I getting presented stuff that Chris has done? Surely that means they're tracking me behind the scenes. And, you know, AI could get a bad reputation really quickly if communicators aren't brought in early into a project to roll out the messages around, okay, we're launching this great new Teams bot and it does this for you. What it doesn't do is X, Y, and Z as well. So, you know, keeping the AI on rails is really, really important.

(Joel Beasley at 00:34:44) Yeah. That makes sense. It's all about just being completely open and transparent with what you're doing. That's what keeps people happy.

(Paul at 00:34:53) Yep. And that highlights the importance of a technology partner. Right? We partner with Microsoft because they have cognitive services in their Azure offering that will do things. Well, those same services are what their products are using. And so having a conversation with a customer about what we're doing, well, it's the same thing that's already being done to your data. Right? But again, we're flavoring it a different way. We're seasoning it to your needs as opposed to what Microsoft thinks works for every company on the planet. So that's, yeah, I'm very happy with the partnership in that regard because I know if there's a service that's deployed in Azure, most likely I can use it. You know, maybe it costs more, or I need to talk about that. But those concerns that you bring up, most of them have already been at least thought through at the beginning with Microsoft. And now, look at their terms of use and see how it fits. So it's very helpful.

(Joel Beasley at 00:35:42) So what are some issues and challenges that your customers face that you guys are good at helping out with?

(Wes at 00:35:50) Big challenges around gaining control. So in the last two years, 18 months, obviously because of the situations organizations found themselves in, they turned a lot of stuff on really quickly. They deployed technologies and threw them over the fence, normally sliding the bar and running. What they are now looking at is, what does control mean? How are they going to think about that? And governance is a word that gets used as well. But I like to think of this as more like helping an employee rather than governing the employee's behavior, because we're all adults. We're all clever enough to know what's good and what's bad and how to do our jobs well. What you can find is kind of that moment recently where an organization looks at its Office 365, its Teams estate, and it goes, it's a mess. I don't know why I'm thinking it's a mess, but it must be a mess because we didn't govern it from day one. And they're kind of going, oh, how do we get control of this?

We worked with a, or are working with, a global semiconductor manufacturer, and their starting position was, we need to get some kind of control over Teams because we're really scared about the security of our IP. You know, we are an absolutely important part of a supply chain to many other industries. You know, we all know the semiconductor shortage at the moment. So they're like, we need to protect our IP and how do we get the best out of Teams. So they came and engaged with us. We did some professional services with them, this thing called Success Definition that is a short activity that kind of puts some lassos around some high-value targets. And then we use the bot to help them structure their Teams estate proactively and retrospectively, to kind of use that AI layer to go, okay, well, this is a team that is in marketing, and therefore it can work with external guests and can do some clever things. This is a team that is right down in the engineering level and is doing a design of a wing mirror camera for an automotive manufacturer, that is super sensitive IP, and you know, all the controls get put on. But the experience the employee got was, I want a team, I want to call it this, go. And our staff takes care of all of the smarts of putting the governance and controls around that, gives them the team back a few minutes later and says, there you go, off you go. It's well-structured and, as to Paul's point, gets out of the way really quickly. So that's a big focus for many at the moment.

And then on the published content side, the overall motion we're seeing is that many organizations are now repositioning marketing and brand quite heavily. There's a big motion of, you know, brand is much more optimistic than it was 12 months ago. There's a lot more optimism in both commercial and the well-being spaces. So there's a lot of organizations revamping. They're effectively what they would have done in a physical office of painting the walls and putting new carpet and tables in, they're doing it on their digital estate. They're going, right, well, we've got this intranet. We've got this massive document library of policies. We don't like that anymore. We think that we can do better. And they're using our Creative Page Kit and Content Confidence Kits to kind of revamp that experience, to kind of bring it up to what their employee experience desires now. So those two things are moving in kind of equal seesaw for us. We've got half the projects in collaboration space, half the projects in the kind of publishing space. So that's where most people that we're working with seem to be.

(Joel Beasley at 00:39:43) That's cool. You're pulling on a common thread that I keep hearing from really smart, successful companies about making things frictionless. Because we've done a couple episodes with a company called Auth0 recently, which they deal with identity, auth, authorization. And their whole thing is making it frictionless for implementing secure sign-in processes on the back end. And how you're talking about, like, if you're not implementing governance on your Teams and it runs and it kind of gets away from you, the bigger and bigger that problem grows, I feel like the less likely a company can be to act, because it's like, wow, this is going to be a project to take care of it. But yeah, when you're making it more frictionless to do so, it's just like, yeah, just let us handle it. We'll give it back to you. It'll be nice and orderly, ready to go, problem solved. It's much more likely for people to act on that, and that's good for them and good for you guys. So, yeah, that's—

(Paul at 00:40:48) You know, and if you tie that back to the pace of change we chatted about earlier. Right? So you can imagine someone who's running multiple projects, and they've started with the Wild West and done whatever they thought worked, but it didn't work. They do something different the second time, and the tenth time, something different. And finally, the IT department has some guidelines and some rails that, this kind of seems how we want the company to work. And then this project person goes through and does this a few times. Now, oh, I go back to that old site. Well, that one's different. I don't remember what I did. Can we fix that? So it'll help that being open to these changes, as rapid change is going to work eventually because the whole organization is going to say, oh, this works better. Let's fix the old stuff. And so they may bring stuff that's out of compliance to you because it's friction for them to work with. So there's a lot of benefit there all the way around.

(Wes at 00:41:42) We've also seen a big swing in silos being broken down, because two years ago, an organization was very divisional, departmental, hierarchical, and it was kind of lots of vertical slices. If you were designing things, it was always you were engaged with marketing, or you were engaged with IT, or you were engaged with whatever name you want to pick. It was org chart engagement. Whereas what hybrid working and this reimagination of what an organization needs to get done versus what it originally thought it needed to get done has led to these horizontal slices. And the thing that really gets me excited with a customer at a whiteboard is when they start talking to me about task and activity-centric stuff. So if I'm doing an information architecture design with a customer and they start going, right, well, you know what? We don't recognize security as being a slice of IT, a slice of facilities, and a slice of HR. What we recognize it is a context of security. Therefore, an employee needs to experience that context, and it happens to be contributed to from multiple departments. They go to a task-based 90-degree pivot is kind of how we usually do it.

That for me is really exciting, because a lot of the technology benefits really sing and really come alive when you start as an organization reimagining yourselves as horizontal slices. Because Teams as a collaborative environment, you know, channels themselves are well-suited to topic area A and topic area B. Put tools in that are around topic A and tools in that are around topic B, but holistically, that team now has all the toolset they need to run. But that's always a horizontal theme. You might have designers, you might have creative directors, you might have technologists, you might have PMs. They're all in that space working, and it's that cross-discipline experience that I think is really showing organizations that have adapted to the new spaces that they find, versus ones that are being a bit more lethargic of accepting that change. And it will be interesting to see how it plays out in the long run. But right now, super exciting when you see a horizontal company when they're trying to break down that cross-silo working into something more cohesive.

(Joel Beasley at 00:44:07) So one thing I'm pretty interested to get your guys' take on is the current kind of labor shortage that's going on in tech and how a lot of people are going out and looking for, there's like mass resignations looking for new jobs. I mean, my brother, who's a software developer, just went out and got a new job to advance his career. And so while it's great for the engineers, it obviously presents huge challenges for these organizations. So what, how can IT teams in particular, what can they be doing to help companies work through this?

(Wes at 00:44:51) So there's two facets that spring to mind. Firstly is what they can do to retain their own internal talent, because there's lots of things there. And I'll happily share some insights from our own business. We approach the problem space of career progression in a very open way in Addin365. A consultant, for example, has a 24-month plan with a very clear, you know, you do this activity and it's signed off as you know how to do it, then there's a pay rise at the 12-month review point. So they can actually see how much they're going to be earning come pay review time as they go through the year. And that's super powerful, because it's kind of like, for those that are really storming ahead and learning loads of stuff, they can see they're going to get a big increase, and you know, that keeps some part of them motivated. It's not the only facet that kind of matters. So there's ways you think about, you know, your own talent.

Also a big believer in bringing on talent into the organization. We recently took on a graduate from UCL. He got his master's in artificial intelligence. He's joined our team to kind of bolster up the AI part of the platform. So it's kind of, you know, where we joked at the head of the call around, you know, some jobs not necessarily having existed five years ago and new ones coming in. As team leads, recognizing that you don't know everything and that's good, and you bring in smarter people below you that do know those things and they can actually educate you, and then you can share your years of knowledge with them. So kind of like that open flat structure and the way that career progression works. And other things like, you know, just this idea of senior this and lead that. Again, we've adopted a very flat, you've got a job title and the only reason you've got a job title is because you have to have an employment contract. But that's the role you're doing. Seniority doesn't come into it. You know, Paul's seniority versus one of the other guys' seniority, one of the other girls' seniority. In certain topics, it will switch around, right? Somebody will know way more about that topic than this person will. And that's good. It means we've got a balance and we've got a kind of inclusive team, it's got a diverse range of skills.

So then it comes back to the other half, which is customers. You know, what are they doing? What are they thinking about? Well, massive focus at the moment on employee digital experience and employee experience all up. You know, we saw big studies last year, Deloitte, Microsoft, LinkedIn, all coming up with scary numbers like 46% of people are looking for new jobs. 80% of people think that, you know, the quality of their laptop will determine whether they want to work for the company anymore. But they are actually reasonably sensible commentary, because if you have a laptop that doesn't really give you a decent webcam, you aren't going to be able to enjoy a Teams call very often or a Zoom call very often. So these are material things that can improve somebody's employee experience. And then you've got the way that HR and people services and well-being stuff is being woven into the daily activities.

Microsoft recently released the whole Viva platform, which, you know, Paul and I will smirk a little bit because some of the bits were already there. They've just been rebranded. But they've been rebranded and brought together, and I think that was the new thing. They were brought together. So the idea that learning and SharePoint and, you know, analytics on your behavior in the platform, these were all things that were partially in play. But now you've got this Viva platform, which is all about you, the employee, and what you need. So that's two big ticket items that I see as the kind of shift now, is how does an individual feel in their individual role, but also what the companies are doing for digital and making it feel like it's a place you want to work—best kit, best experience, easy to use, frictionless, you know, as you mentioned. They're going to swing the employees one way or the other. The salary and the location of where somebody works is factoring more than it ever has done, I think. But I haven't, on a personal level, seen that be the big swing of whether somebody wants to come and work with us or whether they go and work with a competitor. It tends to be, what are they going to have access to be able to do? You know, are they going to be able to bring new ideas and execute on those new ideas? Well, with our business, yes, they are. That's definitely part of our ecosystem internally. And that, you know, as Paul already articulated, is like there are types of people that that excites, and those are the people we're trying to attract. So there's a whole mosaic of things that influence.

(Joel Beasley at 00:49:46) Yeah. I mean, it sounds like a really complicated problem, not just a one-size-fits-all solution there. But definitely that one thing you mentioned early on in your answer was providing clear career paths, which I think is extremely powerful. People want, if it's unclear how you're going to advance forward at the company, of course, if someone asked their boss, hey, what does that look like, they'll probably get an answer. But, you know, they're more likely to just kind of start browsing LinkedIn for jobs and seeing, oh, this one pays more, when they don't know concretely, you know, that they're going to be getting a raise at a given time. So before we wrap up, I want to hear a little bit about the future. I want to get excited, man. So, Paul, can you tell me, like, what kind of new technologies you're working on at the company?

(Paul at 00:50:43) Yes. And we've hinted a little bit on it, but there was a call just earlier today with Microsoft. They're bringing a unifying technology. They call it adaptive cards. And anyone who knows me knows I like to say, well, you know, there's a box of eight crayons.

(Paul at 00:50:59) Well, they only give me two of them to match my skill set when it comes to that area. So you can think of it in a way that I have all this technology running. So I'm running bots, I'm running emails, I have web pages, and I need to provide information to users.

(Paul at 00:51:13) And we've talked about how different users do things different ways. So maybe someone's in an email or someone's in a bot. How do I unify that kind of delivery? Right? I don't want to spend time writing user interface four times. I do it once. That kind of unifying technology helps. Right? So you'll see that coming in. Wes's point about the Veeva product—there's all these things that are out there, but if I can unify them and get them in front of folks, that stuff. So maybe it's not new tech all the time, but it's new uses of the tech. And where can we get moving on that? Plus, there's obviously, as we talked before, the pace of change. Things are changing rapidly over and over again, and new bits out there. And the AI pieces that we've talked about—some are as basic as looking at a document and pulling out the key phrases. I mean, that doesn't sound exciting to someone whose job is machine learning. But for someone whose job is to publish content, hey, if I don't have to go through and summarize this document manually, if someone will do it for me, that's the kind of stuff. So to me, it's a little bit of new technology and a lot of, how can I assemble this and put it in front of someone and excite them?

(Joel Beasley at 00:52:19) Yeah. Being really outcome focused with it. Like you said at the beginning, man, getting the technology out of the way—I didn't think too hard on it when you first said it, but that's exactly kind of the most exciting thing you can possibly think about when you think about all the use cases of the people that are going to be enabled by that. But alright. So to wrap up here, I'm sure a lot of listeners have related with the kind of stuff you've been talking about. What should they do next if they're interested in learning more about Addin365 and what you guys are doing?

(Wes at 00:52:58) So on our website, which is www.addin365.com, we have a whole bunch of knowledge we share regularly. So we have a theme for CTO roles and technologist roles specifically where we're sharing insights in the public space, previewing stuff—Viva Connections, for example. We're doing regular webinars on that technology as well. The website's got obviously the product information and the case studies, so we've got a lot of good, detailed insights into actually how customers have used our stuff and got benefits from it. And then there's another sort of stream on the website and the social media platforms as well around communication support and marketing support. So for people that are in the business looking at how to improve that employee experience, we've got a lot of stuff that we're sharing in there. So that's a great place to start. If you're in the sort of developer area, then I highly recommend listening to Paul and Jeremy's 365 Developer Podcast. I would have to plug that one because he does that every week.

(Paul at 00:54:10) Thank you. But, you know, there's another thing on the website. You can click a button to speak with an MVP. Right? And I know it sounds trite, but, you know, there's this award, and you know, we hear things just by osmosis and dealing with the tech folks at Microsoft and other customer things. You pick up a lot of insights. And like we've had a conversation today, who'd have thought where this—you know, it goes where the conversation goes. So there's the ability to click on a button or fill out a form and chat with one of us. What? You want to talk about development with me? You want to talk about solving problems with, you know, others? We encourage you to do that. Reach out. Happy. I like to talk, obviously, and so happy to share that information. And it's a two-way street because, you know, when you talk with us, I'll be asking you questions, and maybe that informs where we're going. So that's certainly a next call to action from my point of view.

(Joel Beasley at 00:55:00) Thank you so much for listening. And if you found this episode useful, please share it with a friend or colleague who you think would get value from it. And if you have topics that you'd like to hear discussed on the podcast, either add me on LinkedIn or send me an email: [email protected]. Every time I get an email or LinkedIn message, it absolutely makes my day and inspires me to keep going.