AdviceTech Podcast #60 – Microsoft 365 – Transcript

Peita Diamantidis
Hello, and welcome to the ensemble advice tech podcast. Peita Diamantidis. And joining me here today, it’s a bit meta because we’ve got a host being a guest again, so please excuse us if there’s just lots of gibberish today, we both could talk under a foot of wet cement. But he 20 years ago, this gentleman worked in comm SEC as a client services offer, we’ve got a shared little moment of background there. since then has been an advisor, he’s run an AFSL, but now coaches and invest in financial planning businesses at the wealth Network. Thank you so much for joining me on the show. Dean Holmes. Welcome.

Dean Holmes
Thank you. Thank you. I love the clap of one. Obviously, Kieran can put in a bigger clap in post production being podcasters. That ensemble we know about Kieran, and post production.

Peita Diamantidis
Exactly. And for the listener. Look, Kieran is our Podcast Producer and the general genius behind all the little tricks that go on from the somewhat dollar and more plain thing that he gets from us is the file and then he works his magic. So please give us a big thumbs up in your head, he does a lot of hard work to make us all sound much better than I think we actually sound. So alright, so we’re gonna dive into Microsoft further today. Previously, we have have had a guest on the show, we covered Excel, you know and word specifically. But as you pointed out to me after that episode, Peter, there is so much more to Microsoft. And so I was really excited to get you on to chat through that. But as all the listeners know, we always start by getting to know you better through your use of technology. So Young man, what is your most used emoji? Do you even use emojis?

Dean Holmes
I didn’t use emojis. So the most used one is in context of most probably WhatsApp, which is the one where you stick the the thumbs up emoji on top of an existing message or post. So yes, I It’s my read receipt, essentially, of all the communication that often happens between myself and my wife and my friends is that if you’ve read it, you do a little thumbs up emoji, so you know what’s going on. So that’s probably the most used one. The one I love using the most just in terms of conversation is that little head with the explosion off the top of it. Because I just liked the idea of thought leadership and just new ideas. And so the more that I get to use that thumb, that head exploding emoji in my context anyway, that’s, that’s being surprised and excited. I have no idea what the emoji organization determined what that was actually for.

Peita Diamantidis
And that’s actually some of the danger with this stuff, right? Is people like us in our generation are using these chips. And in fact, to younger generations, they mean something entirely different.

Dean Holmes
Correct? There’s a different area for that. Yes.

Peita Diamantidis
I feel like we need to do like Gen X’s. And they’re a bit of a favor, like I look, let’s make sure that we’re not offending people on mass, because we might be quite accidentally. Certainly be actually. So then the second question relates to are these smartphones, you know, we just live with them, we can’t do without them. If you had to wipe everything, all the apps off your phone, and only got to keep three, which would you keep?

Dean Holmes
So the three that I would keep as a result of that is, though keep WhatsApp, I think that’s a great communication tool overall, in terms of video and text, something that’s amazing. I would keep YouTube but I think that’s a great source of anything’s could probably watch YouTube and get around your question and work out how to embed a smartphone by watching enough youtubes. And then the third would be at the moment, LinkedIn, I think it’s a great resource for not necessarily wasting time. That’s what YouTube is for. But actually just connecting with peers and thought leadership in terms of everything that’s going on with with your industry and or business leaders overall, I think that that’s a great resource that brings a lot of variety of different areas to one place. And so I would spend my time between those three apps.

Peita Diamantidis
I’m a bit the same with LinkedIn. And also, I’m surprised how few people use YouTube tube to answer any question they ever have. Anything like how to do this thing in Excel how to turn this thing on your wall, like there’s somebody out there is answered everything,

Dean Holmes
everything. Probably the biggest thing that people should do in that regard, is the moment you pay for the Google subscription ads are removed, and so it removes the friction around I’ve got to watch this 32nd ad before I learn how to fix my toaster, you can just quickly and easily learn how to fix the toaster. So that was the change in my journey that I do use it lots more to learn things. And by virtue of paying a small amount each month and you get a lot more for that. You then remove the ads which means you’re actually quick to getting the content overall, Peter,

Peita Diamantidis
you are and and like really good stuff. So I recently, we’re all traveling again, and I’m speaking at conferences and things like that. And so it’s like that one night trip, you know, and you just want to take the carry on. And I’ve never had a decent carry on. And so my husband for my 50s, like, let’s replace your luggage. Like, I found people that all they do is like, buy and compare all the different luggage like and they’ve literally got it there in front of them. And they’re unzipping the pockets, like everything you would possibly do in a store they’re doing in front of you. So I just said, Absolutely, I would TV’s on into the evening, and you just watch all these YouTube videos, like, honestly, I live in YouTube for that stuff. It’s just fantastic.

Dean Holmes
They will be up on YouTube later today.

Peita Diamantidis
It will be it will be exactly to that point. All right. So let’s dive into Microsoft, shall we? So like I said, you know, we dove previously into a couple of the sort of core chunky things that people use being Excel and Word. And you rightfully pointed out to me afterwards that there’s just so much there outside of that. And one of the things that I think it’s worth US diving into sort of first only because we’re hearing so much about security, and cyber and all these sort of risks is that, you know, Microsoft 365, or whichever, whichever package you your business has purchased has all this inherent security tools in it, you know, and we’re probably not taking advantage enough of those. Is that a valid comment? Yeah,

Dean Holmes
absolutely. So I think we’re not taking advantage of it, predominantly, because we’re not asking the questions of our service providers in terms of turning these features on, or just taking a little bit of time to explore these features, which gives you enough understanding to then be able to coach your support team, in terms of IT support. So firstly, when I look at this security and compliance, officer e6 Five speaking generally has a is a cloud infrastructure that I’m sure everyone has an idea of what that is, as a result, I’ll just say that again, just in case, although it went. So market offers 365 is the cloud infrastructure overall. And so yeah, what that what that means from my perspective is, as we know, everything is not in the cloud, it’s just in servers that you don’t own, first and foremost, and you’re renting those from Microsoft. And the thing about Microsoft 365 Overall, is that I kind of tell people that it’s like Pentagon grade security, that you don’t even understand how strong the security is straight out of the box. So for one license of aefi, e five, it’s something in the order of 50 or $55 a month, and you get as good security protection for that one license, really, that you do for 1000 licenses that are larger provider would have, you just need to know how to turn things on. And so a couple of things that we’ve been turning on recently, and exploring is what I wanted to share with you. And so the first thing that is really relevant at this point in time is there’s training built into Office 365. So if you’re in the category of email protection, anti money laundering, phishing tests, etc. There’s all this default training that you can turn on and allocate to your users. So I can today, allocate a particular training to all my office 365 users, and that goes to them via email, and then they go and have to do that training within the next 14 days, which is really interesting in terms of identifying an issue, and then training on it really, really quickly, you get the reports as to whether people have done the training or not. Right, funny side story to that was that most of my team thought it was spam. First time they got the training email, but we’ve we educated them around that and it is not spam. So doing this training is a great element, and you’re already paying for it within the within the same license fee, you don’t pay extra for these things. So doing the training is great.

Peita Diamantidis
Absolutely. And it’s all there, they’ve got expert trainers that have pulled it together. So it’s going to be you know, bouncy ball style, you know, really going to walk you through things. And the thing we always do with that stuff, when it’s like that team wide, you know, everybody’s got to go and watch this thing is we set so at the end of that two weeks, we set a catch up with the team, maybe only 15 minutes or so, where we just talk through, you know, what surprised them about the training or, or what did they learn or like, lets them discuss it. So it’s almost like you get the benefit of virtual training with lives so that you can then do that discussion and, and shared learning as well. So join those two things together.

Dean Holmes
Yeah. And you have to do that in order to get the to get the compound and group learning. Otherwise, everyone’s just in isolation thinking that everyone else knows what you know. So that’s it. So there’s a great element of training within there which which sits under security and compliance. The next level of that I find it really interesting is they have what I call a what they call sorry, attack simulation training. So what you can do within the software is you can set up a phishing email to be sent to all of your users, but it’s from you. So I can create an email from it looks like it’s from adviser logic, with a hyperlink that spells logic differently, but it’s got it all in there. And I can send that to all of the users of 365. And so it’s, it’s creating something that is really close to what hackers will do to us in the future. Yes, probably not needing to be really targeted in terms of industries at the moment. But it’s really close. If you look at a large financial planning company, you know which software they use, the hacker can target it in that particular way. So we can do attack simulation training. And then when you find the users that accidentally clicked on the link, you then are able to train those users through the training that’s provided within Office 365. So that is a good element to be learning off the back of in terms of that, that simulation training and then teaching off the back of that. So

Peita Diamantidis
I think that’s a learn by doing right like that’s

Dean Holmes
all learn by all learn by our mistakes. And so better to learn on my fake phishing email than than anyone elses. So I think that that’s a really good element of what you get within 365. Following the journey of clicking on links that you shouldn’t, they within the security and compliance settings, they have this thing called Safe links. So every time that I click on a link for in an email or in Microsoft Teams, it actually the link itself, I struggled to explain this, but the link itself goes through Microsoft before it goes to the actual link that I clicked on. So therefore, Microsoft is doing some checking of that link to make sure that it’s a legitimate link going to a source, as opposed to a spam. So it gives me an element of protection that every time we click on a link, it’s going through this safe links, and they have the same thing for documents as well, that things are checked before the user ends up opening those particular websites.

Peita Diamantidis
So it’s a bit like a bouncer, you know, it’s your bouncer, that’s just going to check everybody out. Absolutely. So

Dean Holmes
I have this element of of checking along the way. And so if you’ve ever received an email recently, from a larger corporate, you might have seen when they hit reply, there’s this giant yellow, sort of highlighted text where it says, this email originated from outside your organization, you do not click on any links in the email without knowing where they’re from. That is a warning. But you people get so desensitized to that warning, you would you could literally change it one week later, and and have a saying whatever you want, and no one would read it, because they’re already programmed to look past that, it’s not an appropriate reminder, to, to have it on the emails, why that’s one step of the process, these extra things of training, testing, testing your staff, and then having built in safe links just means is that whilst the reminders are there, we know people just look straight past them. And the best example of that is that we’ve ever looked at that ability for people to read with 30, or 40, or 50% of the letters removed from all of the words, and yet, they can still read the entire sentence. So I think we needed to know the letters were there in the first place. But our brain is smart enough to read that entire paragraph without looking at all of those letters. And so the same example applies for this. If you’ve if you’ve put a message in front of everyone every single day, their brain just ignores it, because it’s

Peita Diamantidis
Yeah, well, I think you Brian, you’ve already read it once. Why would I read it again? I read it again. Dude, that’s inefficient. Like, it’s crazy. And it makes a lot of sense, security so interesting in those sort of things, because you’re right, it’s almost like we need a different path every time to sort of force us to use our brains, you know, to force us to think,

Dean Holmes
like brushing teeth with the left hand if you’re right, exactly. Good luck. Tonight, I encourage everyone to try it and see see how their brain has to work to doing something so simple, with the opposite hand. Salute to the next thing in terms of this security and compliance. Just to keep on this keep on this theme is that Microsoft had built a security score. So everyone loves to keep score in terms of literally anything. And so Microsoft has built a score for your tenant. So just to clarify what that means your tenant is is the unchangeable name that you choose when you sign up for 365. So I specifically say unchangeable because it’s really important. And then it’s the one decision that you make when you start to use Office 365 That you cannot change. And so the website URL for us is wealth network dot SharePoint. If I spelt wealth network wrong the first time, it’s a permanent thing that can’t be changed without me changing tenants, canceling and moving. So just a slight aside, but it’s really relevant. So when you get a security score for your tenant, then it’s looking at your entire licenses in terms of your particular things. So the wealth network for us. So we’ve got a few financial planning businesses all within there. And so I get a security score out of 100, to show me where I’m currently sitting in terms of the score. And then it gives me a list of things to do to increase that score. Okay, so gamifying, it adding multi factor authentication, which is a, which is a necessary thing, it’s not even optional, it should be necessary, gets me to points. So I go from 50 to 52, by making sure I’ve got MFA across all all users, and you can go through a series of this, I was looking on my list before today, there’s like 30, new things that I can do to improve my score. So the score goes up when I do those things, but when when Microsoft in their in their Propellerheads, work out new things, my score is going to go down until I input those as well. So a score is a great way and a great target to say, Guess what, we’ve actually gone into our settings of office 365. Today, I’ve looked at my I’ve gone to the defender section, which is the security and compliance. And I’ve looked at my score, and it’s 57 out of 100. And you go great. Now you have a goal of every single month, we want to get that score moving up, not down. And and Microsoft will give you a list of activities that you can do to make that a reality. So we don’t even we don’t have to do a lot of thinking or executing as part of that. And this is the element of what could you screenshot and send to your IT company is you could literally just send going guys, there’s 10 things on this list that I think are really important. Microsoft think they’re important. They’re telling me, why haven’t we got them in place on our tenant? Yeah, most of the time that the your IT support at that point in time will go, they will say something to the tune of I didn’t know you wanted those on. And the reality is, is I didn’t know like, we’re not the specialist in it. But this happens to small businesses, we don’t know what to ask. And so if you can go to the Security and Compliance scoreboard, you get to see a list of 10 things, then you know what to ask for it. I think I should have these 10 things are thing and then next month, you do exactly the same thing.

Peita Diamantidis
So you’ve clearly been catch her on this for some time? What sort of shedule? Would you have like a new habit somebody could put aside 15 minutes would be once a month, once a fortnight? How often would you recommend for say, a principal to do that, to sort of get into that habit of keeping an eye on it?

Dean Holmes
Look, I think it would be if you were to do a monthly activity of understanding your score, first and foremost, and then creating a thing to do a thing to do weekly or someone else to do weekly in order to improve? I think you think about the hours of that we’re currently investing in improving our understanding of this technology. Yes, it’s not enough as principles to then be able to instruct other people. So yeah, it’s very hard for you to say to it or anyone in your even if you’ve got an internal IT, can you make us more secure? Please? It’s it’s an impossible question to answer without a list of things to do. And so it’s spending a little bit of time, even if you type in security and compliance Microsoft or the defender into YouTube, and just watch a video produced by Microsoft about their products that would improve your knowledge in how to do these things. So you don’t even have there’s plenty of people that will record videos that don’t even work at Microsoft about Microsoft products, which which are all quite good as well. But if you just stayed within the Microsoft community and watch the videos that they produced, you’re going to be well ahead of the competition in regards in regards. And look

Peita Diamantidis
that’s a if you’re a Microsoft Office, literally like you use Microsoft in the office, that’s a YouTube channel to subscribe to like that’s one there’s one

Dean Holmes
for each, there’s one for each product, but at least you start with the top one and work down from there is really, really valuable. So these security goals Scores are great, Peter just in terms of that focus, but secondly, that list of things that you that you need to know is great from there. So my next thing Yeah, is have you ever

Peita Diamantidis
lost your laptop? I haven’t but I’ve had the moment where I thought I had pretty scary

Dean Holmes
it is or horrifyingly scary. A friend of mine lost her laptop and she works for a global investment company. And she had someone from America call to about the fact that she lost her laptop because they know everything, where it is and where it’s located. So the the thing about this is that we often have things on our laptops that we probably shouldn’t. Yeah. Okay, on. So on your desktop, if everyone’s looking at this, now, I got a few things on my desktop, if I’m completely honest. And so we all have stuff on our desktop. And Now mine’s a physical either desktop machine, not a laptop, so it’s harder for me to lose it. It’s just down here next to my knee, and it doesn’t go anywhere. But the interesting thing about the additional thing that Microsoft offers is this thing that’s called Intune, which is, essentially allows you to know, and control all of the machines that are in your world, so that you can access and delete things remotely. Okay, yeah, this idea and the question for your it and working out is, if I lost my mobile phone, can you remote wipe that so my corporate information is not lost? Now, this leads into another interesting thing, if you only use one mobile phone is that your employer most likely has enrolled your personal phone into Intune. With your with your knowledge, but not your understanding. Right? And that means I can wipe that phone remotely, if you told them it’s lost, and you lose all your photos. Yeah. Okay, which is what most people would be worried about if they heard that I was going to wipe their phone remotely. And so a couple of things to unpack in relation to that Peter is, firstly, the idea of business and personal, I think is increasing. So the idea of having two devices, I think, is on the on the rise for these types of reasons that your employer controls more things on, frankly, they think it’s their device, you think it’s your device. So that’s an interesting difference. But you can opt, you have to opt into these things as part of your employment. And so from from a business owners perspective, this means that we can control assets that we own, ie, digital assets, and physical computers, laptops, and mobile phones and things like that, and do things with it if we needed to, to protect company data, Yeah, seems like all

Peita Diamantidis
sorts of things, you know, and it could be, like, you know, people working from home and something happens to the house, I mean, you just don’t know, you can’t predict this stuff until after it’s happened. But the thing got to

Dean Holmes
improve in terms of, it’s not foolproof in terms of, you have this program, and therefore all of your data is safe, because I’m gonna get on to SharePoint versus OneDrive in a in a second. But it gives an extra layer of protection. So things that are on my desktop right now, if someone took the harddrive and put it into another computer, they could pretty well see what’s on my desktop, but they can’t see what’s in the cloud. Now, the moment that computer opened and connected to the internet, Intune can remote wipe it things like your mobile phone is actually always connected to the internet, through 5g so you can remote wipe your mobile phone and things like that. So yeah, it has implications because fine, my iPhone doesn’t work if you just remote wiped it and things like that. So it’s got to be thought through. But I think being aware of this protection that business owners can have around the assets that are probably bought and paid for and maintain is really important.

Peita Diamantidis
And it’s you’re absolutely right. And it’s sometimes it’s the smallest thing that can help. I mean, even the little tags, so Apple have got their tags that you can you can put on your luggage and things like that, and people go oh, really, you know, I mean, if your luggage is lost, it’s lost. Well, I’ve had a friend who went to the UK, after just after locked down when it was still all very pear shaped and they had a whole lot of problems with their baggage handlers, I think so it was just like it was a good chance your luggage was gonna get lost like it was just Heathrow was a disaster, right. And so and she was one of those people that awful feeling, you know, when you’re standing at the carousel, and there’s just enough, everybody else has got their bags, and you’re on your own, like it’s just horrendous. But she had one of those tags, and she could actually show the guard security and go, I can tell you where it is. And he literally went in open the door into all the crazy baggage area saw it had fallen off one of the things and grabbed it for you. And I’d like these little things that can just empower you to take action. That’s what all this is doing is it makes you respond to a situation. Right? Correct.

Dean Holmes
So that’s, that’s a, that’s another good feature to think about in terms of the little tiles or the little iPhone, things to find define your assets. And, and this is an important thing to for everyone to remember is that you’re using company assets and so yeah, and you’re employed so there’ll be this whole thing about going well, I don’t want my employer to know where I am, but you’re actually holding a employers asset in your hand handling line personnel information. So there is an element where your employees should know where you are in those kinds of things. Which brings me on to knucks. Another really interesting about security and compliance is that you can lock down your office 365 tenant, so it can only be accessed by computers that are in Australia. Right? So that’s an interesting element as well. Yeah. Okay. If someone from the UK was trying to log into my office 365, right, now, they wouldn’t be able to do it. Yeah, so provides a level of security on top of any normal security, there’s a location based rules that you can set, which is quite interesting. It’s not Russian hackers are frankly, going to be able to get around that. So it’s not once again, the the only solution that you need to put in place, but it’s just these building these brick walls have different levels of protections. Yeah, for sure.

Peita Diamantidis
So then, like a number of those things, it sounds like though, you know, you’ve got to invest the time to either turn them on, or be aware of them, or be checking them or setting them up, you know, there’s a lot of layers there, of what you’ve got to lean into. And I agree, you know, one place to start could just be watching Microsoft YouTube videos on this stuff, like just start to understand is clearly a starting point. But there’s so much more to Microsoft. So you mentioned SharePoint versus OneDrive. I feel like as somebody who isn’t a Microsoft person anymore, right? We’re not in Microsoft. But I feel like SharePoint and OneDrive are one of one of those things that everybody knows the name of, and they sort of have a vague sense of what they do, but they really don’t fully understand them. Would you agree that’s the case, because that’s what it sounds like from the outside.

Dean Holmes
I think lots of people use the names interchangeably as they can. So happy to have to share a couple of our learnings in relation to this. So we’ve used SharePoint for probably like seven years in terms of the storage of our data. And so the SharePoint does a couple of things. So SharePoint, if you go back to old corporate was like the intranet and everyone went, you went, Oh, check it on SharePoint, because there was an internal web page that people went to go to, to read a process or something like that. And it is that today as well. The difference is that looks like the internet. So if you went to someone in the 2000s, and they’re like, oh, yeah, I’ve got SharePoint, it’s a process library. It looks ugly, and looking ugly means people don’t read. So we’ve learned we’ve learned that as we build Instagram. So the reality is that we need SharePoint is an intranet or process library. We’ve got one internally, and it’s as beautiful as a website. It’s only accessible by people that are within our tenancy, okay, that have Office 365 licenses. So that locks down the information as well. So one log on, which I’ll keep will kind of keep comparing to how many different log ons Peter has. Yeah, all of her tech stack. Yeah, for sure. Point has one log on, which means that you’re accessing your intranet. The second part of what SharePoint is it is a document storage. Location, exactly that in very similar circumstance to as to what Google Drive is. Dropbox, and OneDrive. Yeah. Okay. So in terms of, I’ve got a Word document, and I want to save it somewhere in the cloud, I have a lot of different choices, I can save it in SharePoint, which is very easy to do. I can save it in OneDrive, which is easy to save it in Dropbox, and I can save it in Google Drive. Okay, we’ll stop talking about Google Drive. But we’ll look at the other three examples. So why do I want to save it into SharePoint is when it’s saved into SharePoint? In my view, there’s only one file which is in the cloud, right? Okay, there’s one version and it’s there, you have ridiculously long version control from that file in that if you’ve got a Word document been working on for the last three years, you can go back to almost every single version over the last three years. We just had to decrease hours from down to 300 versions, because we were taking up too much space on the on the on the server. Yeah. And spaces you pay for space at the end of the day on all of them. But so that was an interesting thing. So a SharePoint has a lot of version controls. It’s in the cloud. There’s only one version. It’s not on machine. It’s not on local machines. Yeah. Okay. The other thing that you can do with SharePoint that you can’t do with OneDrive is you can create metadata attached to the file to be able to do interesting things over time. So what I mean by that, so everyone knows and understands Instagram, and hashtags. So if I want to look at sunsets, I just go and look at hashtag sunsets and Instagram will serve me up a ridiculous amount of sunset. In the same vein, you can attach hashtag driver’s license To every driver’s license you saved in SharePoint. And then you can just ask SharePoint to show you the driver’s license of of your entire client book. Okay? Okay. So whilst these features are there, not everyone uses it to the maximum. But you can see over time, you how this could be more powerful than just naming files in your traditional way of date, comma, what it is comma surname. So instead of having that in all one thing, what we’ve got now is we’ve got the date separated from the, the, what the document is, from the client name from the document type. And so those things become searchable and manageable over time, through SharePoint.

Peita Diamantidis
And just to clarify that point, because I think, and this could be a our Gen thing rather than the younger Gen, but for lots of people, the way they think about saving files is very, you know, folder, subfolder sub folder sub like, that’s the old school way, right? And, and they could only work that way, which meant really a document could only live in, in one group or one, you know, one grouping, whereas what tags or hashtags or whatever, like any of these things let you do is, it can be the one document, but it can be live live in 47 different groups. And that’s really powerful that overlapping, where you can tag it with all sorts of things. Tagging is one of the most underused, but most powerful things you can have, whether it’s documents or your CRM, or any of these things, it just lets things live in multiple groups. And so it’s a really clever way to make things accessible.

Dean Holmes
Indeed, and so SharePoint has that. So that’s the element. So SharePoint will have the traditional folder structure of client name, click on fact find click on bank statements. And there the bank statement will be, but the moment you do hashtag bank statement, and the client name, you can search for that in a different way and have different views and filters over the over the top of it. So nice. There’s that element in terms of SharePoint. The other things in relation to SharePoint is you can still share folders with third parties, you can share files with third parties, and you can control the security and access of those files. Which is a similarity as we go down. The if I contrast that to OneDrive and drop boxes to kind of competitors, the danger, my danger with OneDrive is a you don’t have all that extra features. Yep. And the second thing with OneDrive is that, whilst this can be turned off, most people sync it with their computer. And so therefore, it’s on their explorer, on their laptops. Yeah. So the, if you go into Windows Explorer, you got that thing on the left, or whatever, the Apple ones thing, you got all your files there on the left, if you’ve got one drive on there, most likely things are syncing with your physical computer at home. And so what that means is that you have two copies of the file, one in the cloud one on your computer. Now, it’s often a criticism in the past that you had syncing issues. I think that’s a criticism of the past, and it doesn’t really happen anymore. But what the issue is, at the moment, you lose that laptop, those files that were syncing on your machine are actually on your machine. And so taking a harddrive out and putting it into another laptop, all of those files will be seen. And so the feature needs to be turned off so that you’re not accessing files that are saved on your computer. You’re simply seeing them through Explorer, if you want to. Yeah, but the better thing is to see them through your browser. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. And it is an interesting, stronger way to access all of these files.

Peita Diamantidis
Yeah. And it’s, it is something that’s going to take time for the staff to get out of the habit of you know, they’ll like the fact that that’s, you know, it’s local, and I feel like it’s easy and, and Isn’t this better? And, and, like you say, syncing needs to be a problem. To be honest, it can still be a problem in terms of using data, like your upload or downloads depending on where you’re at. And you’ll find Why is everything slowed down? It’s like, it’s because it’s sinking, like, correct some, or somebody’s moved a whole folder, you know, in the set up, and suddenly, everybody’s sinking a whole lot of data and things like that. So it’s messy. It’s just a messy setup.

Dean Holmes
And let’s talk about your data, because you mentioned downloads that remind me of an interesting thing of your downloads folder. So the reality is that if everyone went to their Downloads folder today, they would have a lot of content in there that they shouldn’t. So a few years ago, we used to make we used to get a screenshot on Friday of all of our staffs computers, which was the desktop and the downloads folder to make sure that they were empty. Okay. Yeah, we created that policy for our staff. Go to the managing director is you gotta look at his Downloads folder. He’s not complying. So there is an element of getting everyone to comply. I understand the skill set of computers have moved on that You can actually write a script definitely for Windows, this is beyond my paygrade. But you can write scripts to delete your deleted items every single Friday. And if you didn’t save it or move it to that, you got to get into the habit of moving stuff out of your deleted items and deleting it overall. So yeah, yeah. So that’s the, the syncing, I think is the issue. And then the second issue between it when we go over to our friends at Dropbox, is that, whilst they, whilst they can have as good a product as Microsoft, why pay for two? Yeah, this is the element that I’m getting to why pay for two? Why have to log ons? Why have your data in two different locations?

Peita Diamantidis
Yeah, I completely agree. And look, there’s so many other things in Microsoft are the same teams and zoom. Why? Why are people paying for zoom? I

Dean Holmes
don’t I don’t know. Whilst? Yeah, I think if you’ve ever I did a post on LinkedIn A while ago, which we can find in the for the show notes. But if anyone and this was not me, but someone took the time to read the terms and conditions of zooms, updated video recording policy, and essentially it allowed for the, for the training of their AI, bot, have every single recorded phone call through zoom. So you can imagine that right now, Peter, that we had the idea for the next Uber of financial services. And we were discussing it through zoom, and zoom was listening to that, and then took our idea and actually executed on it faster. Yeah, theoretically, that’s possible within their terms and conditions. And we would have no say in changing that. So Correct. Once again, you’ve got to think about the the participation of third parties in terms of your data. Now, would Microsoft do that? I would pretty well say fundamentally, no, you’re happy to do your own research into that Microsoft, in terms of their partnership with chat GTP. And that whatever the head company is called, The they’ve signed on to sort of an AI charter. And so you can go and read that AI charter in terms of what they’re committing to and confirming that they won’t do. And things like what zoom are doing, as the example just doesn’t sit well with in terms of my values, as a company to opt into those kinds of things directly. Now, I’ve opted into lots of giving of personal data over the years. But we’ve got to start to think about this slightly differently when we’re making these bigger, bigger decisions. So yeah, absolutely. That’s the journey of SharePoint, and data, data storage overall. So I think she, I would be saying that SharePoint is the way to go overall, within within this environment.

Peita Diamantidis
And what’s interesting about this, too, is, you know, there’s always that debate all but you know, we could get these other apps and you can bundle it together. And look, I get it, I’m, you know, I’m interviewing people every week on all these new tools. But the thing is, when a provider is an expert in that thing, so Microsoft is an expert in a number of things here, and this is one of them, SharePoint is one of the things they do and invest a lot in, then why would you go elsewhere for that, you know, if you’re in the Microsoft suite that like, if that’s where you live, then it’s just not gonna make a lot of sense to go outside. When people are doing something that’s on a fringe that somebody has named the, you know, nails, you know, that’s different, that’s very different. Canva would be an interesting debate for me. So, you know, I they

Dean Holmes
are not, we’re not going to go in through this today. But Microsoft already has this thing called clip champ, which is the video editing software, they already have aI generating image software, and they already have a paint based thing that’s in the cloud that it will AI generate stuff like Canva. So whilst I think Canva is on the run, at the moment, I might have saying with all of this, Peter, as always, just wait for Microsoft to do it. And so once you can pay 20 bucks a month for Canva. Right now, there’s a good chance in six months, you’ll be going actually Microsoft can do it pretty well. And the getting ready for that world is two things. So that so we’re on the verge tonight of the global release of co pilot from Microsoft for the world. So there’s been some lucky, large companies that been trialing this for a period of time. And if you don’t know what it is quick, Google and YouTube will get you ready for it. But by the time you’re listening to that, I will be trialing copilot in all of my programs. And so that means it’s an AI engine that is within Microsoft, which is reading every email I’ve ever written, reading every spreadsheet I’ve ever written, reading every word document it’s ever been written. by my entire company since the formation of my tenants, so seven years to help not only me, but my entire team be better. And so going back to the AI charter, it’s only reviewing my data, my data is not going outside of my tenant as a result of this. But I have this AI engine built into every single program that I will be using as of tomorrow, or for the listener, as of now. And I got people ready for this fact by recently doing a video on on YouTube on LinkedIn about how I was asking, chat duty, sorry, co pilot for edge. And we’ll talk about edge in a moment. But I was asking it to read an Australian super PDS until me the fees and give me an insurance quote. Yeah, and it didn’t seem

Peita Diamantidis
interesting. Right? That’s, that’s the interesting thing. I mean, for somebody like me, so I’ve written two books for the public, right? A really simple financial literacy sort of stuff. But to be able to feed those things into a tool like this, and then say, Okay, I need 100. LinkedIn posts on that, please. Yep. Right. Like, like this is for things you’ve already done. Right? This is work, you’ve already done efforts, you’re already taken, extract, you know, and get more information. It’s just going to be incredible. When we get to Yeah,

Dean Holmes
absolutely. And we don’t know the scale of how amazing this could be. But it comes back to my point of, if you can keep everything in house, imagine how good it’s going to be. So this idea that I have a meeting with a client, which this this is not future, this exists, now you have a meeting with a client, you record it through team’s premium, which is 10 bucks, it will do recap, which is an AI generated meeting summary, and AI generated action items. So it already does that, then when you’re going to write an email to the client in Microsoft, and use type dir client name, it is about to prompt you going is do you want to write a summary of the client meeting that you just had to the client? And you say yes, and it will put the summary into your email, you can even then ask it to make it more concise, if you would like to, and it will shorten it. So yeah, this is the the message that I have around just committing to this particular technology. If we think this is going to be good, we’ve got to start to work out how we get things back into the fold, not continue to connect things that are out outside. Yeah.

Peita Diamantidis
To that end, I’m curious in something like teams, which I’m betting you guys, you sort of use a lot, then are you using things like Microsoft whiteboard as part of that, like, are you guys using tools like that in terms of, you know, draw something for a client. So

Dean Holmes
what I do now is actually I don’t use whiteboard, but I use OneNote. To draw with my only Apple product. For the listener, I was holding up my apple pen. So I run OneNote on my iPad, which I can share on the screens and things like that. And so we use that, versus whilst whiteboard is good, it doesn’t have anything else around it at the moment. Future, obviously, it could easily quickly save it into SharePoint on the client file, without me having to think about it. But again, we’ve been using teams for for a long time I was on the beta of it. And whenever that was pretty well pre pre COVID. And it’s got a lot better, because it just copied the features of all the other video conferencing things that were not covered under intellectual property. So you can do most things in teams now that you could do in the competitor products. And my view is that if it doesn’t do the one thing that you’re complaining about, that one thing is actually not as important as what you think that it is.

Peita Diamantidis
Yeah. And particularly as I would argue, for most everybody listening, they’re just not using all the other things that are possible within these tools. Anyway. So focusing on this one feature like that’s great, but why don’t let’s bother to make sure we are using the living daylights out of these tools, like make sure you’ve learned every feature possible and are constantly up to date on them. Because you’ll probably get as much bang for buck out of that, then that one thing you wish it did. Correct. And that’s the so many people out there looked at how to hack that stuff anyway. Yeah,

Dean Holmes
Indeed, indeed. Yeah. And look, the last thing that I want to circle out in terms of programs to use that I think is really beneficial is actually it’s called edge. So you and I go back a long time, Peter in terms of our technological journey, and so everyone remembers that everyone in our age remembers that Microsoft got sued, maybe in the 2000s by Netscape, I think in terms of bundling products together. So Microsoft bundled their browser which was called Oh,

Peita Diamantidis
oh goodness,

Dean Holmes
it’s all just the internet. explorer. Yeah, so Microsoft Internet Explorer with their, their windows operating system got a bit in trouble for that. So, but the future is moved forward, and now they’re bundling edge with their, with their Windows products now edge is built on top of Chrome or chromium. Right. So Chromium is open source software, which is the Chrome browser that Google wrote a program over the top of Microsoft Edge essentially, is a skinned version of Chromium. Okay? Okay, so the core operating of edge and the core operating Google Chrome is exactly the same. So all of your little plugins that work in Google, they all work in edge, it looks and feels really, really similar to to Google Chrome. The reason why you move across is that everything is sinking in your browser, then in terms of what’s going on in terms of your work tendency. So I get a, I get a data feed, like a LinkedIn scrolling feed, of all the things that are going on in my company, every constantly, actually not even every day. So documents that I have access to, I can see that people are editing meetings that have been recorded that I was invited to that I didn’t attend, I can watch the recap, meetings that I did attend, I can watch the recap, reminders from my emails. So a client sends me an email saying, oh, Dean, can you do this? I forgot about it, it’ll come up in my data feed saying did you do this? Right? All within the Edge browser? And yeah, sure, you can go on to Sydney Morning Herald website as well, it does all of the normal browsing. But from that perspective, it’s pretty powerful. The thing that they did, as a result of that as well is they created this business and personal licensing of, of edge. So you can actually have a personal account of edge and a business account of edge, and they’re kept separate. So this idea that people have one device is really common in computing. So you can go on to your personal browser, if you want to look at Facebook, and you can go on your business browser to do everything else. And it’s smart enough to learn over time, where you want to open up certain things. Right,

Peita Diamantidis
right, perfect. And so once again, it’s all happening within this ecosystem, then, you know, with the introduction of things like copilot, then all of this is just going to completely streamline the way that you know, you can all work because it’s all interconnected. And there’s absolutely, you know, delegation without even having to delegate is where we all need to head right, it’s this, you don’t have to physically sit down with somebody and hand something over, it’s all can automagically happen. That’s where this power really sits, you know, when you can really get that humming. And you’re right. If you haven’t invested the time to understand all these elements, you’re not going to be getting the real V eight superpower, you know, it’s just not going to be happening.

Dean Holmes
For the present. Everything I’ve mentioned is included in the I feel like I work for Microsoft, everything I’ve mentioned today is included in the one low price of 85 bucks a month, or $30 a month is ridiculously. I’m not gonna say cheap, it’s great value for money, what you save for and what you get, as a result, if you continue to leverage it, all of these extra things are pretty well complimentary as part of being within the Microsoft, except for co pilot that’s going to double my cost to 30 bucks a month. But I think I would be able to get $30 of value from this program within the first two hours of using it

Peita Diamantidis
100% And look, you know where he it’s actually we’re recording this on Halloween, folks. So we’re here on the eve I think it’s quite funny that this is the eve of when Hallows Eve is when they you know next gonna launch Coppola. I think that’s hysterical. But you know, and don’t worry, folks, we’re actually going to get a Microsoft certified expert to talk about copilot hopefully in the next few weeks. So trying to tee that up. Because I think it’s so so important that we get Yes, you can play with Chuck GBT, we’re all doing that. But to understand how it can impact our everyday productivity, you know, there’s stuff that we can do. It’ll be immeasurable the way it will change how you can work. So look, keep your ears, ears peeled for that one. I feel like we’ve covered a lot and is there anything else you wanted to add in? But

Dean Holmes
I actually it’s a good reminder, I’m taking the kids down the street for trick or treat in a color moment. So the Yeah, I got a great story from I was in a conference once and the question was do you like do you like explain was raised to the entire audience and one person put their hand up who happened to be sitting next to me? I said, Well, why don’t you like explain the most and he his statement was that was that he maximized his use of the software. So instead of anything else, he’s like, just going to learn how to do X plan, at the best to be the best in the world at x plan was his goal at the business level. And so it was just this realization that he loved it because he put effort into it and That’s the message I love to live to the listener is that I think you’ll, you can grow to love this. Because if you put effort into it, you’ll actually see all the variety of things that are available to you that are part of the suite already. And you’ll feel more confident in terms of security, you’ll feel that you can leverage different pieces of the software over time. And I think the combination of those two things just has you really well placed for the next phase of this technological revolution. Better to be kind of near the front, as they invent fire for the fourth time, as opposed to being at the back going. I still have, and I quote, physical files in my office in a file room. So if you’re someone that this is a huge jump, but but there is an element of working towards removing the file room from your office, and moving up into this newer technology. So that’s a long journey. But it’s an important journey, but embracing this at the front end, through improving your own understanding. And all Peter and I are asking you to do is watch YouTube, instead of Netflix, and you will actually grow your understanding of these things within a couple of weeks.

Peita Diamantidis
Absolutely. All right advice explores if you’d like to find out more about anything that we’ve chatted about, then we’ll include Dean’s LinkedIn details in the show notes. And you know, I’m sure we’d be happy to point you in the right direction. And even you know, maybe have a conversation with him about the world in that way. You never know where the right match might be for your business. Thank you so much for joining us here today and just blowing all of our minds about what’s in Microsoft and what we’re already paying for in Microsoft. So you know, let’s get some value. So thanks very much.

Dean Holmes
Thanks, Peita. I’ll see you next time.

Peita Diamantidis
So I’m assuming that you the listener are almost certainly a Microsoft user. Most people aren’t most businesses are. And so I’d be keen to understand how much of what Dean was covering, you’ve been aware of, you know, whether that’s something that you’ve never looked at before, maybe in your practice, somebody else is responsible for that, and you hadn’t heard much about it, you know, it absolutely would encourage you to get on the ensemble community platform and share your experiences here. Because, you know, Microsoft is this big bet we have in our toolkit that many of us are just not using well enough, it’s got some heft, it’s got some weight, and we should be utilizing it better. In terms of my thoughts here. I do think I sort of wanted to direct some, some encouragement towards any of you listening, that are employees in the business you’re in. So you’re not the principal, you’re an employee. And perhaps you think you Well, Peter, it’s not really my you know, area to worry about things like Microsoft defender and what we’re doing on those, you know, those fronts, the thing is, you know, not everybody is going to be aware of it, your principal maybe isn’t as tech savvy as you are. So I’ll give you a couple of to do, the first thing I do is find Microsoft YouTube channel and check out, you know, some videos on Microsoft defender and understand what’s there and understand how easy it can be to turn some of this stuff on and why you should, and then go to your principal and just talk to them about it and say, Hey, listen to the podcast, I’ve done a big bit of digging, hey, this could make a difference to how protected our clients are, how protected the business is, you know, is there something that I can assist with or can point you in the right direction have we all play a part here, you know, and, and the key as as Fraser Fraser Jack is highlighted for us in our cyber collective episode, you know, the human beings are what play a part in this, the human beings turn features on the can protectors, they undertake appropriate behaviors that can protect us. So you know, each of us has a role we can play to really contribute to this. So I really would encourage you to do your own digging, understand better for yourself. And invariably, you’ll learn something that can add value in your own life, let alone what you can then assist the business with. So absolutely head out and see how you go. If you would like to, you know, chat to some peers about how you might bring it up, if you’re not sure how to bring it up with your principal, then once again, head on to the community platform, the ensemble online platform and ask the question, look, I’ve done this digging, I’d love to have this chat with the principal, I’m not sure how to approach it, anybody got any suggestions? Like that’s what the platform is for, you know, we’re all here so that we can help each other tackle whatever challenges we’re facing. So I really would encourage you to ask for help, you know, and and somebody will have already been there, they’ve already gone through it. And and they might even suggest something to prepare beforehand, or, or make sure you can answer this question or you know, all that sort of thing that will just get you better ready to have that conversation. Now, as you know, there is only one skill, we need to become bionic advisors. And that is avid curiosity. And to help you build that habit, today’s curiosity corner website that I wanted to take a look at is called TripIt. You can find it@tripit.com, that’s t ri p i t.com. This is basically your travel coordinator app, right. So anytime you make a booking, it could be a flight. And of course, hopefully, more of us are doing that I literally came away from a long weekend recently myself to the beautiful witch Sundays. And so we’re going to be booking more accommodation, we’re going to be booking more flights. What TripIt lets you do is any confirmations, you get confirmation emails, you can just forward it to a TripIt address. And it’s going to sort of set up your your travel itinerary for you, it’s going to have all those details, it’s going to keep you updated. It’s going to have little alerts and reminders so that you don’t miss things, it’s going to let you know that there’s a gate change for that flight, all these sorts of things that might be across a few different apps or tools you might have, then, you know, this can be all in one place. And if you go as far as getting the pro version of the tool, then you know it’ll let you track the seats you’re in it’ll, it’ll give you a check in reminder, you know, it’ll give you point tracker, it lets you share an itinerary with certain it might be family members, or might even be you know, colleagues or somebody that you work with to make sure they know what data you’ve got, what things and it can even host you know, travel documentation, all sorts of stuff you might need on the go. So it’s just an example of giving you all have the information in one place for a specific need. And often, particularly when you travel overseas, you’re probably being careful on what data you’re using. There’s only certain apps you want to use data for, you know, all that sort of things. Then by having all of this in one place might just be a way to make that easier for you. So check it out, let me know what you think, as always, or if you’re maybe you’re an expert, and you’re like, Peter, I’ve got this nailed. Let me share with you all the ways that I use TripIt, then I would love to hear that and hear about how well it’s worked for you. And you know, hasn’t given you directions while you’re on a massive airport, anything like that, that it’s helped, I would love to hear about. Well, that’s all we’ve got for this week, folks, be sure to subscribe to the podcast. So you’ll get your advice, tech fix auto magically sent to you each Friday. And look, if you’re getting tech overwhelm, and you sort of wonder if you need to streamline rather than take on more apps in your business, then please just give your dealer group a nudge to reach out to me, as I’ve been doing some sessions and workshops around this sort of paradox of advice, tech abundance, and its potential drawbacks, you know, and perhaps how advice tech minimalism might work for you and the habits you can build to keep your advice process humming from a tip tech perspective. And I even do some sessions on how we can position our businesses to be best positioned to take position twice to take advantage of this sort of AI tsunami that’s going to be coming down the track. You know, there’s a whole lot of habits and things you can do Dean mentioned some of them that you can put in place in your business such that as these opportunities come, you’re well placed to work out if they can add value in your business in your process. So if you’re curious about any of that, then please reach out to me on LinkedIn forward slash Peita M. D. That’s PEITA, MD and we can absolutely have a chat. Otherwise, I’ll look forward to turning up in your earbuds next week. And remember advice explores Stay curious