Microsoft is enhancing productivity through the cloud, collaboration and compliance

From left: Dr Nitin Paranjape, Founder MaxOffice; Justin Spelhaug, Chief Marketing and Operations Officer, Microsoft Asia Pacific; and Timothy Ngui, CIO and SVP of Operations, Ghim Li Group.

A cloud-based world is changing the way we do business, says Justin Spelhaug, Chief Marketing and Operations Officer, Microsoft Asia Pacific. "The pervasiveness of cloud technology now allows access to all the line of business apps, breaks down the notion of the old firewalls and enables powerful new compute scenarios," he said. 

At the same time there is much more data available, from sensors, mobile devices, and non-traditional sources. "(If you look at) all the information that has ever been created in this world, 90% of that information has been created in the last 24 months," he said. 

According to Spelhaug, three core design principles at Microsoft are going to enable people to remain productive on their terms against a changing world:

Ubiquitous collaboration
"It means the ability to operate in a cloud environment, always on; it also means the ability to compute on the device that's right for you. We're going to support great experiences all of those devices," he said. 

Microsoft is also recognising that the millennials who are currently students and expected to dominate the workforce by 2020 collaborate quite differently. "They don't use email as a primary method of communication. They're using instant messaging, social sites. They post content to a social site, and crowdsource solutions... We're building that into our technology, into things like Yammer," he said.

Personalised insights
This is about increasing productivity through Office Graph, Spelhaug said. According to a Microsoft blog, Office Graph uses sophisticated learning techniques to map the relationships between people, content, and activity that occur across Office 365, including from email, OneDrive for Business, SharePoint Online and Yammer. 

"Through Office 365 we can understand more about... how you use mail and scheduling, meetings, network connections, and provide a pane that is most relevant to you," said Spelhaug of Delve, a tool powered by Office Graph which presents useful, personalised information. 

Another tool based on Office Graph, Clutter, intelligently presents what's most important in a user's Outlook inbox. "Clutter looks at what you mostly respond to and sifts and filters that. It's not a static filter," Spelhaug said. 

People-centric compliance
To ensure that sensitive enterprise data remains safe and that compliance requirements are followed, Microsoft is also supporting data loss prevention (DLP). 

"Last year 3 million mobile phones were stolen in the US. There's a lot of data out there that gets in the wrong hands," said Spelhaug. "DLP essentially detects when a user is entering characters that you may not want to leave the enterprise, credit card numbers for example, and notifies the compliance officer so (companies) can tune their policies over time." 

While millennials use email less often, Spelhaug said that email will continue to have a role in the enterprise. "Email is going to be more intensely personal. We're ensuring that the mail that you get is worth your responding to," he said of Clutter. "Mail and communications in general are converging with social. Delve (provides) a structured view that can be acted on in the best way possible." 

Spelhaug spoke at last week's Share-the-Point conference in Singapore, where Microsoft executives, partners and customers will take the stage in sharing their experiences and insights in driving business productivity with social and collaboration tools such as SharePoint and Yammer on Office 365.