Microsoft’s message to its customers: get to the cloud, be transparent [#SPC14]

Microsoft is trying to do for our work experience what Google did for our web experience — it wants to be the gateway to your work life and how you work. The Redmond-based company’s aim is to transform the way people work. That’s the big theme at this year’s SharePoint conference.

The way it wants to do this is to get companies to the cloud through Office 365, where pretty much all of the company’s cloud services are now integrated. Companies collaborate a fair amount on different platforms sometimes, and although they work together, they don’t work as a network, says Bjørn Olstad, CTO of FAST. The idea it seems is to create a sort of “hive mind” within companies where teams and groups work in perfect cohesion (in the cloud, of course).

For Yammer founder and now CTO Adam Pisoni, it’s about bringing the revolution we’ve already had in our web experiences to enterprise.

“If we think about how humans find information: we put information online so [that] it was easily accessible. Then we created curated directories like Yahoo but it wasn’t really until companies like Google and Bing underlaid all that information with a graph of human signals that it actually became more useful. The fact is when [you] are surfing the internet you are benefitting the web. In the same way when we link between documents, the activity of just doing what we do makes the information more useful,” he reckons.

For him and the Microsoft Enterprise social unit, bringing this revolution to enterprise is key to changing the way people work and increasing productivity. This shift in thinking and behaviour can all be done via the cloud and through machine learning and features like Office Graph will make companies much more efficient.

The idea for features like the Office Graph is to improve enterprise social and search, making it more about people and creating more relevant content and discussions. Rather than aggregating across the entire company, according to Microsoft, working in this way focuses on what certain individuals need and want.

What Office Graph seems to really offer is transparency and for Microsoft this is part of the future of how businesses should work.

“We want to get more companies to work more openly,” says Jeff Teper, CVP of Microsoft Office. “This openness is coming and it will happen in stages.”

The idea of working more openly and being transparent about projects and products, Teper argues, is necessary for companies to get out of their comfort zones and really get different perspectives. He does however concede that in some companies this might be a little more difficult when you have competing brands.

“We give you the tools to make sure that security in your organisation is preserved,” he says. “But there are many places where that is not necessary. Most companies are not accounting firms with audit teams. The information most companies have should be open and we are working on evangelising that openness, even if it make users and IT people uncomfortable. We won’t do it for them.”

Microsoft is currently implementing these core principles within its own organisation, almost creating a flat management structure where everyone can contribute and understands the company’s frame of thought.

The groups feature on Office Graph is open by default but users are prompted to make it private if necessary. Many of the new features the tech giant is rolling out for Office 365 work around this same fabric of collaboration, cloud-based work and transparency.