External Sharing on #TheIntrazone Podcast

Back in August while attending and presenting sessions at SharePointFest Seattle, I was able to slip away from the conference to record an interview for #TheIntrazone Podcast, which is hosted by Microsoft’s Mark Kashman (@mkashman) and Chris McNulty (@cmcnulty2000) on the topic of external sharing. I’ve written a few articles on the topic, am wrapping up an ebook on the topic, and co-presented a session at SPFest with Mark called “Options for Building a Modern Extranet” which touched on many of the areas discussed in the podcast. If you have not had a chance to listen to the podcast, you can find it here:

One of the more salient points I made during the interview is how Microsoft has been investing in the sharing experience across all of the Office applications and throughout Microsoft 365 — which is fantastic to see, and greatly improves the overall user experience. Streamlining the UI for sharing across SharePoint, OneDrive, Word, PowerPoint, and the other workloads., means that we finally have consistent controls for these common tasks. These sharing features are not simply “nice to have” but are essential to adoption and engagement. As I mentioned in my session, sharing is also a primary driver of productivity:

• Interaction with content adds context and metadata (albeit much of this through conversation, which can be lost if not properly captured and tracked)
• Metadata drives the search experience, as well as content and task aggregation, which in turn powers many of the latest AI and machine-learning-based features in Microsoft 365
• All of this activity, conversation, and content creation expands your corporate intelligence through the Microsoft Graph
• It also extends your discovery capability, making it easier to surface the right content at the right time
• As we become more productive, our systems and data also become more productive as they continue to learn and improve
• Sharing is a key aspect of the “social fabric” that technology can help provide to support our team and corporate culture
• More productivity = more intellectual property creation, which has a direct impact on your company’s bottom line

The topic of external sharing is a bit more complex than most of the internal (intranet-focused) sharing capabilities, as there are compliance, security, and governance concerns that likely come into play when collaborating with someone outside of your organization. I touch on some of these things in the podcast, but have covered them in more depth in recent interviews and presentation with another fellow MVP, Peter Carson (@carsonpeter), CEO of Extranet User Manager, who is a subject-matter expert on the topic. Peter and I discussed some of these topics during an interview recorded in Las Vegas during #MSInspire last July:

 

Thank you again to Chris and Mark for including me in #TheIntrazone, and I look forward to sharing more details about the forthcoming external sharing ebook in early 2020!