Sync Up podcast Episode – 3, November 2019 Transcript

Sync Up podcast Episode – 3 (November) “ Ignite 2019” Transcript

Running Time: 36:15 1. Show Intro [00:00:00:00] Topic of the Month – 2019 2. Guest Perspective – Lauren Khoo and Andrey Esipov [01:04] 3. News and Announcements [29:05] 4. Special Topic of the Month - [32:10] 5. Show Wrap [34:15]

TC VO Dialogue

#1 SHOW INTRO

THEME MUSIC

00:00:00:00 Ankita Kirti Greetings all, welcome to Sync Up a show about OneDrive, the intelligent files app for we are your hosts, Ankita Kirti and Jason Moore. I'm Ankita Kirti product manager on the OneDrive team

Jason Moore And I'm Jason Moore, Group Program Manager for OneDrive. This show will take you behind the scenes of OneDrive shedding light on how OneDrive connects you to all of your files in Microsoft 365 so you can share and work together from anywhere while protecting your fork from accidental loss and malicious attacks.

Ankita Kirti In each episode, we recover important subjects and information about Microsoft OneDrive, including a dedicated topic, guest interviews, news and announcements, and especially significant topic outside of the technology norm.

Jason Moore Today, our guests are Lauren Khoo and Andrey Esipov, program managers on OneDrive. We'll be talking with them about the engineering and design behind some of the main highlights that Ignite, so don't go away.

#2 TOPIC OF THE MONTH – Microsoft Ignite 2019

GUEST PERSPECTIVE – Lauren Khoo and Andrey Esipov

TRANSITION

00:01:04:00 Ankita Kirti Today's broadcast is dedicated to Microsoft Ignite, our annual customer conference. We are going to discuss highlights, announcements and dot moments for OneDrive at Ignite as well as celebrate the team's accomplishments.

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We did take you behind the scenes of those amazing feature rollouts and the work that led to those achievements,

Jason Moore So we just had an awesome week at Ignite. There has been so much going on, so many different meetings. We had a cool presentations, brand new features that have rolled out a general availability announcements and of course hopefully all of you that are listening right now have been able to follow along with the blog post, the videos and everything else that's been posted if you weren't there in person. Now there's enormous amount of stuff that came out of Ignite and we don't have time for all of that in a single episode of Sync Up, but we do want to highlight three of my very favorite features from this past week, hundred gigabyte file sizes, differential sync and request files and to talk about them today. We've invited Lauren Khoo and Andrey Esipov who are two program managers from the OneDrive team. Now before we, again, we've all been to a lot of Ignites. This is our fifth Ignite, that Microsoft has put on. I thought it'd be fun to talk a little bit about some of our favorite memories, some of the things that, kind of were favorite moments out of that. Lauren, what was your kind of favorite Ignite moment?

Lauren Khoo My favorite moment that I can reflect on actually happened at the last Ignite. So Ignite in 2018 I was at the booth talking to a lot of great people about OneDrive and someone came up to me and they said, I really enjoy the release notes that the OneDrive iOS app puts in the store each week.

Jason Moore Well that's right. Oh my gosh. For those of you who don't know, Lauren and her partner, Jack Cohen, who on our design team, actually write the iOS release notes every single time themselves. It's a real labor of love.

Lauren Khoo It really is. It's a lot of fun because we really believe that when we can put a, a bit of our own personality into our product, we are all better for it. So it is, it is and kind of extra thing that we do for fun and for delight. But it was absolutely awesome to talk to someone who enjoys those and is as seeing the fruits of our labor.

Jason Moore Yeah, that's awesome. Ankita, what about you?

Ankita Kirti Besides seeing you dress up like a wizard for Harry Potter world? I think that was the top moment. But I would say booth as well. For me, a great customer interactions, amazing feedback. It's just amazing to see, how widely the product that you're working it daily in and out has affected so many folks, across the globe who come to Ignite. So swag part is I think even more fun. And your session, Jason. Your session is a highlight.

Jason Moore Yeah. You all kind of failed at this question. This was actually a test for five years now I've given the OneDrive keynote five years. No one mentioned it. For five years. I just want to clarify. I dressed up as a professor of wizardry at Hogwarts, not as a character from the movies. And I feel like that's a really important

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distinction since members of the team, some of the people on this podcast included dressed up in the various house colors.

Lauren Khoo That's right. We made those costumes ourselves at home. Another labor of love.

Andrey, are you ready? Jason Moore

00:04:30:00 Andrey Esipov So it's tough to single out a single moment, that I enjoyed the most out of the past two nights that I've attended. But every single time I go to Ignite, it's just amazing to be able to communicate and, talk to all the different customers and really get energized by the fact that how they use OneDrive, and how it makes them more productive at work and at home as well. So, every year we'll learn something new and it's just absolutely amazing opportunity for both us as a product team, as well as, you know, the customers to actually, interact with us, on the person's personal basis.

Ankita Kirti So Andrey, my first question to you is we, until a few days back, offered 15 GB file sites and we announced at Ignite that we would now offer a 100GB file, upload size four to all our customers and it's a huge jump hugely from where we were and what we are offering. Now. Can you take us through the journey of achieving the hundred GB file size moment?

Andrey Esipov Yeah, absolutely. Ankita, the team worked extremely hard over the past months to really completely re-architect the way we store and represent files in the cloud in order for us to actually support that increase in file size. That re-architecture of the, the of this, the service component, really allowed us to not only increase the

file size but also bring new exciting capabilities, to sync such as differential sync. So these two major improvements, really go hand in hand with each other and in a lot of ways they ultimately compliment each other because you can now store and effectively interact with very, very large files stored in your OneDrive for business or SharePoint online.

Jason Moore Now we also brought a hundred gigabyte file sizes to OneDrive consumer users as well.

Andrey Esipov Yeah, absolutely. Jason. that was our first step, in kind of moving in the direction of increasing the file size for our business users and it's been actually received extremely well. we were not expecting, many users to be actually uploading very large files, in their consumer wine drives. But we will prove wrong and we're

seeing files in the range of 50 to 80 gigs, every single day being uploaded. it's actually pretty, pretty excited and fascinating.

Awesome. That's so cool. I love that we're able to bring that both to folks at work Jason Moore as well as the folks at home so they can work with their files in whatever context in whatever purpose they have. So obviously going from something like 15

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gigabyte file sizes to a hundred gigabyte file sizes, it doesn't just happen because someone hit a switch. And you know, everyone always is kind of interested in to learn how do we do these things? What are the ways we do them? I thought it might be interesting if you could share a little bit some of the behind the scenes maybe what are some of the challenges in building a feature like this and rolling it out? As I understand we've had to really be thoughtful about that rollout process for example. Can you talk a little bit about that Andrey?

Andrey Esipov Yeah, absolutely. And I like that you mentioned that it's not just a matter of flipping the switch. We actually have to do, put it, put a lot of thought into, figuring out how a large file such as say a hundred gigabyte file, we'll actually exist in the whole, you know, OneDrive for business or SharePoint online ecosystem because now it's not just one user having a hundred gigabyte file. It's multiple users having a hundred gigabyte files. So if you'll say if you upload, a large file and 20 team site, all the users have to get that file eventually. So we didn't really have to think about the storage aspect in isolation. It's really more about how do we optimize the transfer patterns for these very large files because they are all be essentially use additional challenges. we're not uploading one megabyte anymore over the wire. It's a hundred gigabytes. So how do we do it in a, an efficient and smart way, and ensure that, it doesn't, you know, compromise the network in any way.

Jason Moore And, and I believe you told me this before, you know, we actually did a private

preview with some customers to really make sure we understood that. What, how did we kind of pick and figure on that? Like how did that help?

Andrey Esipov Yeah, absolutely. That was actually a key part in the development of this new, new, this new functionality, because we really needed to partner with a few key customers to really understand the types of files that they actually store and collaborate on. so we partnered with a few large, large customers that, store and collaborate on various types of media files, AutoCAD files as well. So we really got a sense for what types of files, folks are actually collaborating on them, would like to collaborate on in the SharePoint online, OneDrive for business ecosystem. So that actually helped us, you know, shape, shape the functionality in an inappropriate way.

Jason Moore Yeah, I can imagine that there's a lot of thought has to go into making sure that when I go and add a hundred gigabyte file to something, someone on a, you know, maybe on a ship at sea on a satellite internet connection connecting up can still be productive and successful, in despite of that incredibly large file size.

Ankita Kirti So this is also a great moment to talk about our next feature, which is differential sync because it was available for consumers for a very long time and we brought it to commercial this year. And Andrey, you mentioned some time back in the beginning of course that the large file size and differential sync were tied together. So how did this work at a high level?

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00:09:50:00 Andrey Esipov Exactly. So fundamentally differential sync now in needles, you to sync only parts of the file that changed instead of re-uploading or re downloading the entire file. And that ultimately reduces both upload and download times. But it also saves on consume bandwidth required to get the file in sync. Interesting bit of information

that we're seeing on average so far a on a daily basis that we are transferring less than 1% of the original file sizes when an edit is made to a file. So that ultimately really translates into more than 99% savings zoomed bandwidth to get the file edit synced up still the cloud and from the cloud.

Jason Moore So this impacts like someone's corporate network or their schools network a ton.

Yeah, absolutely. And then differential thing really makes collaborating on those Andrey Esipov extremely large files. Viable.

Ankita Kirti Did, like organizations with whom you worked on a hundred GB file size, did work with them to test, differential sync as well, like those huge media files are huge AutoCAD files that you were talking about?

Andrey Esipov Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. We also partnered with some customers. and they definitely help us pilot differential sync. It was slightly different customers, but there were a few that absolutely piloted large files as in differential sync and we got some great feedback that actually informed a lot of the decisions that went

into designing.

Jason Moore That's interesting. Informed. Can you tell us anything? I would love to hear a little bit about what were some of the things that maybe we didn't, we didn't realize

up front or, it wasn't obvious to us, but we learned through the process of building this and impacted the product design?

Andrey Esipov In order for us to perform differential sync, we actually had to introduce an additional processing step, which carries a nonzero cost behind it. So we really had to find a way to prioritize efficiency of uploads and downloads. so there's always a trade-off between, you know, the time it takes for us to figure out what

actually changes in the file and then uploading that change to the cloud and sinking it down to all the devices. So while working with some of the customers, we actually realized that a certain smaller files didn't necessarily benefit from differential sync. It was much easier to just upload the entire file even after the edit was made versus us actually trying to compute the difference and then upload it. So for that scenario we actually optimized the time to upload and

download the file versus saving the bandwidth.

That's a really interesting kind of tradeoff. So you, you basically were able to Jason Moore measure and understand that certain changes to certain kinds of files weren't worth doing differential sync on just cause it was so much faster and a better experience to just move that file up and skip that step. And that introduces an

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interest in kind of conversation probably folks aren't super aware of. Could you take, you know, two seconds and explain the hashing we do on files? Like how do we know a file has changed in a file is different from a file in the cloud?

Andrey Esipov Yeah, exactly. So on the high level, we first decide what actually changed on the file when it was edited locally. Then we compute that hash or the hash of the file difference with the same hash of the file in the cloud. And so we reconcile the differences, figure out what changed and we upload just, just the Delta, right? There's always, you know, an intricate dance between the client and the service and we're always comparing, what the state of the file is on the local device to the state of the file in the cloud. and then try to reconcile by uploading just a differences or downloading just the differences.

Ankita Kirti So all of that was really cool. Andrey, I remember sometime back we were having a conversation where you mentioned, that you had to work with different teams across the stack to make a differential thing possibility and seamless. could you talk to some of those initiatives that had to be taken by the team?

Andrey Esipov Yeah, absolutely. Even though no differential sync appears to be a client centric feature, it definitely was not. And that required investments across the entire OneDrive and SharePoint online ecosystem to actually make it happen. And like I alluded to before, we had to really re architect the entire way. We actually store in represent files in the service in order to support those efficient sync patterns and differential sync being one of them. So it's, it was absolutely a very, very close and deep partnership across all the various teams, within OneDrive and SharePoint.

Ankita Kirti So, you had also mentioned, earlier that you use different algorithms depending on different vial size and file types. Any new Windows that you would want to talk about, regarding this?

Andrey Esipov Absolutely. As we were developing the functionality, we noticed that certain patterns started to emerge. One of them for example, is we realized that edits made two different file types results in different size of near the delta that we had to sync up and down. So we actually devised different algorithms for computing the Delta for different file types. and then actually, you know, over the coming, coming months and years, I'm sure we're going to be introducing more and more and more specialized algorithms to handle different file types more efficiently. but for example, edits made to zip files are very different to, you know, edits made to a Photoshop document. So computing the difference also has to be different. So that's why we introduced different algorithms for hindering different, different file types. So right now we have, we have a handful and we'll probably introduce more as we continue, you know, investing in the feature.

00:15:10:00 Jason Moore That's super cool. One of the things that I always love to talk to folks about is the different kinds of files they use and how they use them. So I'm actually really

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curious to see what we'll learn from people both from their verbatim experiences on that as well as from, you know, how they're using the system over time. And you're saying we're going to continue to introduce more improvements to differential sync as the system learns about these kinds of behavioral differences.

Andrey Esipov Yeah, absolutely. And we learned so many fascinating things already, from, you know, the limited time that differential sync was available to, to our user, specifically consumer users. But we did notice that on average, most of files, that are being edited are under the 50 megabyte kind of a ballpark in the consumer space. But through our kind of initial dogfooding efforts in the OneDrive for business and SharePoint space, we're seeing that files, that are larger than one gig in size are getting edited more and more and more frequently. And that's probably an indicator that, you know, our users have more trust in the sync client handling those files effectively. So they're doing it more. so that's one of the interesting gonna experiments and hypothesis that we're trying, trying to prove whether, you know, differential sync actually makes no interaction with large files, a lot more pleasant, a lot more efficient, a lot more effective.

Ankita Kirti I would also like to point out to the listeners that if you want to see the cool differential sync demo, we had on one of our webinars I think in the month of September, which is syncing up with a OneDrive and he'd done a very cool demo that we got instant feedback on as to how great it was where we showed that a big file was edited and only part of it, changed. So that was very good and people can still check it out. The recording is available on aka.ms/onedrivewebinar. The link in the show notes for that. Learning about differential sync was very interesting and I would surely really want to learn more and I'm pretty sure our listeners are also willing to learn more about it. But in the interest of time we'd have to move on to a next exciting feature, which is request files. Lauren, what was the biggest motivation to building this feature in the first place?

Lauren Khoo Great question. This has been a longstanding request from many of our users with over 2,700 votes on UserVoice. It's our third most voted for asking the sharing and collaboration space. And then in reading through the initial request and all of the upvotes and all of the comments, it became very clear to us that many people need to collect files from other people. I think we can definitely all think of the scenario where we want to collect files from someone or from a bunch of people and we'll have to go through all the different emails that we get. Go to all the different links, download all the files and it's a really a pain where, it's just a lot of manual work to go do that on your own. So with the request files feature, we made that really easy and that you can already use OneDrive’s amazing sharing capabilities to help you get that done. So we learned about those scenarios, like a, a manager collecting feedback and having all those files go to a single location or a financial rep collecting documents from a client. All scenarios where you want that convenience of getting all the files in a single place, but you don't necessarily want your uploaders to be able to see or edit or view, the content that's been uploaded or even know who else might be submitting files.

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Ankita Kirti That's great. And I would also like to point out that 100 GB was also one of the important UserVoice features. So I just loved the fact when we go back to our partners and our request doesn't say that we yes, we worked on what all you were asking.

Jason Moore Yeah. If you've been listening for a while, you probably heard last podcast, the last episode when Catherine Feldman from the team talked about how she uses UserVoice to triage and focus different efforts around features we build. And it's definitely near and dear to the team. For those of you that are listening that would never checked it out, you can go to OneDrive.UserVoice.com and go up vote, add new features. You know, tell us about the things that you really care about seeing us do. We've spent a lot of time using that as a way to hear directly from you and the stuff that you care about.

Jason Moore So, awesome that this came out of this UserVoice requests and the feedback that we've heard from people. I totally resonates me with the scenarios that you're using. Lauren there, I think it might be interesting to dive a little bit deeper into kind of the development of this feature because we've been talking about this for a little while. We've been working on it. I mean, I know we showed it, for the first sneak peak at the SharePoint conference in May. can you tell us a little bit about more, it's gone into building request files.

00:19:40:00 Lauren Khoo Absolutely. So as I mentioned, talking a lot to customers and users and real people who have this need and have gone through the manual collection before. so that was definitely a big part of our planning process at the beginning. I think one of the challenges we really needed to work through and we had, we spent a lot of time here on the team kind of working through it. And discussing is how do we want to position this feature in our user experience. As I mentioned in OneDrive and SharePoint already has a rich offering of different kinds of sharing links and it raised the question, our request files and a new kind of sharing link. traditionally we only have sharing links that give recipients the ability to view or edit the content that you've shared with them. But in the case of request files, you're giving someone the ability to do a certain action on a folder, but they can't actually see anything.

Lauren Khoo And so working through that challenge of do we position this folder now as shared, how do we show you that someone has the ability to do these things to this folder that you've created, but at the same time show you that they can't necessarily see the content inside? so that was a challenge that we had to work through, and talk through a lot with customers as well. for this first iteration, we actually leaned very heavily into our existing sharing links, that work for anyone so that we could have, request file links that anyone who gets a link can upload files to that link. And so that was a big challenge for us to kind of work through our development process.

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Jason Moore That's awesome, Lauren. So as part of this, you've worked with a number of partners to kind of get their feedback in this process, to make sure we're really building something they love and they're going to use. What did you learn out about it there? Was there anything that surprised or change some of the design as we were going in order to get it to the release?

Lauren Khoo Definitely. So I think one of the things that comes to mind most when we think about what we learned from talking to some of our partners about our initial plans here were about those management requirements for this feature. Again, these are a requests, filings or links that would work for anyone to be able to upload content into a particular users folder. And figuring out exactly how does that need to manage? Is it different from how we manage existing sharing links that work for anyone? And figuring out how should we think about that and how does that affect how we show request files in our UI and how do we show when there is a request link on a folder, how do you show that against all the other sharing links that may or may not be on that folder? So those are challenges that we definitely worked through and got a lot of input from customers about would they use this feature and if so, how do they need it to be managed?

Jason Moore That's awesome. And I love thinking through, you know, both how is the kind of end experience for any of us using it as well as the administrative experience for someone who's responsible for managing OneDrive or a SharePoint and being able to control and process all of that data thoughtfully. That makes a ton of sense.

Ankita Kirti Speaking of end experience, Lauren, what would be some of the usage scenarios of request files if we had to talk to different folks and make them understand as to the usage cases where they can actually implement and take advantage of request files? What would be some of those scenarios?

00:22:50:00 Lauren Khoo We learned a lot about some different scenarios that people had. I think one in particular that stands out for me is the one I mentioned a little bit earlier about financial reps who regularly as part of their day to day work need to collect files from all sorts of people and they want that easily managed, and happening without much manual work from them. and so one of the things we learned is the way some users are planning to use this feature is to put actually the request file link and embed it in their email signature so that anyone that they are working with on email always has this link ready to be able to say, Hey, I need to send this person files. I'll just click the link that's in all these emails I get from this person and now I have this easy way to securely upload a bunch of files. and as a result, the collector, all those, all that content goes to the same place and it even notifies them when they have new files. And so that's definitely something, I think a pro tip that we could recommend if you're collecting files regularly from mail, consider making one of those links in your email signature so that anytime someone needs to securely send you a file, they have those links right there.

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Ankita Kirti So say a marketing individual who's working with different vendors and they want quotations on a campaign so they can use request files to gather the quotations from different Windows. Right. And you not be able to see who was uploading what.

Lauren Khoo Yeah, absolutely. I think of that too in maybe one of the initial scenarios we thought of what about a teacher say collecting homework from the students. Really easy to be able to click this link, upload these files. You can't see what other people are uploading. You can't even see that other people have uploaded.

And so this feature is great for those scenarios where really only the requester needs to see the content that's coming in.

And I believe some of the folks that we work with and partnered with in Jason Moore validating these scenarios were actual bank, to your financial point and really thinking through how they would leverage it and use it in the same ways. That's awesome.

And they user is not only fixed to someone collecting information from multiple sources. It can also be say an HR needing your resume and other documents from Ankita Kirti an external candidate and just sending them out request via link and the

recipient or the person that they are going to hire can just add in their documents, right?

Yeah, definitely. I think recruiters, needing to collect resume from all sorts of Lauren Khoo people really easily. It was another scenario that's a great point that we kind of thought about and figured that request files could help in that situation.

Ankita Kirti I love this episode.

Jason Moore I'm glad you do. Wait more than others?

Ankita Kirti So, apart from request files and differential sync that you guys are so passionate about because you've been leading those features. What are the other favorite OneDrive features for you Andrey?

Andrey Esipov I love vault. Yeah. This is by far my favorite of the new features that were just released.. Yeah, I put a lot of documents in there.

Ankita Kirti That's awesome.

Jason Moore Ankita, I know your mind is still filled with all of the excitement of Ignite, but just as a quick recap for all of our listeners, personal vault is our feature that we just recently launched on OneDrive consumer that lets you have a secure personal folder. It's an extra additional layer of security. It does things like re lock the

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folder when you walk away from it, whether on your phone or on your PC or on the web. It requires a multifactor off in order to access it. So it can give you a little bit more peace of mind and it's a great place to put things that you might want to have with you. But you know if you gave your phone for example, to a family member to play with and look at stuff they wouldn't accidentally trip and traipse into that and delete important documents that you wanted to protect..

Ankita Kirti I would also add in my favorite feature which is PC folder backup, IT changed my last week to a new laptop 3 and oh my God, OneDrive PC folder backup was a godsend. Everything was so smooth. The transition, it was just I just logged into my device and I was working. It's amazing. Lauren, what's your favorite?

00:26:45:00 Lauren Khoo My favorite one that I use all the time at work is actually a feature that we have on the mobile apps called Meeting Note Sharing and it's this awesome feature where we integrate with your Outlook calendar. If you're signed into a wonderful business account and we know when you capture a scan and upload a scan during a meeting, we actually prompt you to easily share that with the recipients. I use that all the time. We're always in meetings. Maybe we jot things down or sketch things out on the whiteboard and it's great to be able to just as the meeting is ending, pull out my phone, snap a picture of that whiteboard and upload it to OneDrive and immediately just with a single tap I can send it to all the meeting attendees and say, Hey, here's what we worked on together. definitely use it every day and it's, it's awesome.

Jason Moore I found that to be a lifesaver, especially when I don't know everyone necessarily, that it quickly can easily make sure they still get the content and no one gets left out.

Ankita Kirti This feature is also available for PowerPoint presentations. Right? Right after you present you get a prompt, shared it with the attendees of the meeting. Both of these are really helpful.

Jason Moore Awesome. So Ignite this year is in Orlando. My question is, what's your favorite thing to do when you're not on the show floor at the conference working hard? What's kind of a great way to unwind when you're an Orlando? Lauren?

Lauren Khoo I think I really enjoy the weather in Orlando just cause as, especially now at this part of year, it's pretty cold and gloomy in Seattle, but in Orlando it's going to be sunny and so my favorite way to unwind is to go down to the pool and catch the sun. Andrey, what about you?

Andrey Esipov Yeah, I'm with Lauren. It’s a great opportunity to get some sun, you know, during cold and damp.

Ankita Kirti Harry Potter World for me is the great way to unwind. I also like all the, the gatherings that we hold for the team. That's also fun. It's a nice way to reconnect

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and after all the hard work that you've put into Ignite, it's a great way to wind down.

Jason Moore Awesome. Andrey, Lauren, thank you so much for being on the podcast today. It was great to have you on. I'm so excited about hundred gigabyte file sizes, differential sync and request files that are just awesome features, but there's so much more to talk about from Ignite and so many more things coming on with OneDrive. We have to end our time with you today. Thanks for being in the studio and talking to us.

Ankita Kirti Thanks a lot guys.

Lauren Khoo Thanks for having us.

Jason Moore Next up, news, announcements and important upcoming events. So don't go away.

#3 NEWS AND ANNOUNCEMENTS

TRANSITION

00:29:05:00 Ankita Kirti It's time to share with the listeners the latest news and announcements regarding OneDrive including feature releases and upcoming events. This past month we launched a bunch of cool features, the first being coherent file sharing experience in Outlook web app. Now it's widely known that we strive to implement consistent collaboration experience across Microsoft 365 so now you will be able to share files by easily adjusting the access controls and sharing permissions directly in the Outlook web app. Link shared will intelligently resolved to the name of the file. Users will also be able to generate sharing reports to understand how their content is being shared both inside and outside the organization. Android users will now be able to easily convert a Word, PowerPoint or Excel file to PDF and leverage our amazing markup capabilities. We are happy to announce support of cross-volume moves while backing up their important folders, allowing people to back up their important folders even when they are on a different volume than their OneDrive. And finally, per machine install of sync client is now generally available. This functionality helps installing OneDrive once on your Windows machine under program fights. Migrating to per machine is completely optional, but it can be very helpful for multi-user machines scenarios. For more information on all of these features. Do check out our blog at aka.ms/OneDrive/blog

00:30:55:00 Jason Moore Moving on to events. Let's talk about Ignite The Tour. If you are unable to attend Ignite in Orlando with us now is your chance to take advantage of all the benefits of Ignite brought to a city near you. We're bringing all of the same technical training led by Microsoft experts and your personal tech community. To find the

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city nearest you, check out the link in our show notes and you can follow a hashtag #MSIgniteTheTour.

Ankita Kirti Where are you going for Ignite the Tour, Jason?

Jason Moore I am going to Singapore and I cannot wait. I'm so excited.

Ankita Kirti I'm going to Madrid and even I'm very excited. I've never been to Spain so this is going to be a blast. Yup, it's going to be awesome. So next up we often get asked how has Microsoft configured OneDrive or what would be the OneDrive product team's proposal as best practices for deployment. So last month we hosted a webinar on streamlining deployment and configuration of the OneDrive sync app at scale where we explored and demonstrated a set of deployment best practices that result in a great user experience and engagement, what we call the sink ideal state. Do check it out at aka.ms/OneDrivewebinar.

#4 SPECIAL TOPIC – Mental Health Awareness

TRANSITION

00:32:10:00 Jason Moore Last month I shared the idea of creating communities and welcoming spaces where everyone can do their best work and this month Ankita has something important that she wanted to bring up for this section of our podcast.

Ankita Kirti Yes, thank you Jason. the second week of October was recognized as Mental Health Awareness Week, so I thought we should dedicate the specialist section to talking about mental health in workplace. I feel mental illness is extremely important issue as it affects the productivity of the employee as much if not more

than physical illness.

Jason Moore Yeah, I read that according to the WHO depression and anxiety have a significant economic impact. Something like a global economy impact about a

trillion dollars a year in lost productivity. So it seems like teams, employers, everyone should really be actively working towards creating cultures that have positive mental health and that support having positive mental health.

Ankita Kirti That's true. And I really liked the fact that Microsoft has avenues and tools available for employees who need help. Small things like whenever we fill up a medical self-assessment, it consists of questions that are around mental health. It really makes the difference. But as teams too, we should create an atmosphere where talking about mental health is into taboo. Also, in my opinion, breaking the stigma around mental health and spreading awareness will be easier in a workplace. You have central communication system that you can use spread word with flyers and videos or whole seminars or workshops on stress management, anxiety, depression, improving focus and motivation or lifestyle coaching. Train your managers to recognize or have conversations around mental illness, have strict policies around bullying and harassment. And finally something

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I strongly admire about our team encouraging work life balance and flexible working hours.

Jason Moore Ankita I actually, I completely agree and I think this is one of those opportunities that we really, we can take advantage of because we all carry ourselves day in, day out, whether at work or at home. Things like mental illness affects us all. And so, you know, the notion that this is an opportunity in our workplaces to really take advantage of that or really talk about that I think is huge. And I, you know, personally in my team, I spend time on this both with individuals, but also with my managers talking about, you know, to your point how to recognize these things, how to help folks with it and how do we create an environment that regardless of whether someone identifies an issue or not, they're in a place where they can get the best support possible so they can bring their authentic selves to work and feel confident in the work that they're doing, that they're going to be supported in the organization.

Ankita Kirti That's amazing. I personally am a huge advocate of mental health and I would recommend all of your listeners to check out resources on supporting or stigma free company culture at NAMI. that is National Alliance on Mental Health. The URL would be added to show notes and related information on Mental Health America, but I would also request you to find out similar organizations in your different countries as well.

#5 RESOURCES + SHOW WRAP

THEME MUSIC

Ankita Kirti Thank you to our guests, Lauren Khoo and Andrey Esipov. To learn more about OneDrive and the latest developments, please follow our Tech Community blog at aka.ms/OneDrive/blog

Jason Moore Please do reached out to us with questions and feedback. You can reach us via Twitter @OneDrive, @JasMo and at @Ankita_Kirti21 and definitely visit our show page for links, resources, and more at Aka.ms/SyncUp. That’s S-Y-N-C-U-P.

Subscribe to the show wherever you get your podcasts and feel free to tell your friends, colleagues, or maybe everyone else around you in the coffee shop. And if you enjoyed Sync Up, write a review. It really does help new listeners learn about and find a show. We all know how important and impactful sharing can be.

Ankita Kirti Thank you for listening to Sync Up, a show about OneDrive, the intelligent files app for Microsoft 365 we are your hosts and get Katie and Jason Moore. Subscribe, engage and stay tuned for next month's episode.

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