A look back at the Modern Workplace 2019 conference at the Microsoft France campus
On December 9 and 10, Jalios was present at the Modern Workplace conference organized by the aOS community. This event dedicated to Office 365, Teams and SharePoint users was an opportunity to meet Microsoft experts, but also the players in the Microsoft ecosystem, of which Jalios is a part. Our on-site team was delighted to present the Jalios Digital Workplace and how it meets the needs of Office 365 users.
Youssef Koutari, Account Manager France and Africa at Jalios, and Jean-Michel Lambert, Pre-Sales Manager at Jalios (in French).
First of all Youssef, thank you for this very refreshing linkedin post. What was the atmosphere at this conference?
Youssef : I found the event very "cool" for a conference of this scale. It was sold out with nearly 900 participants and an impressive panel of partners. We were able to meet quite a few people, whether they were Jalios customers such as Business France, publishers such as Jalios, consulting firms such as Devoteam or companies with expertise in backup such as Carbonite, the discussions were very enriching. This really proves the diversity of Microsoft's ecosystem, and for me, who joined Jalios less than a year ago, I was delighted to attend this conference.
Jean-Michel: I liked the "sharing of best practices" atmosphere found at user club-type events, such as those that Jalios can organize with its JClub. Microsoft France's premises lend themselves well to this and it's another approach and another atmosphere compared to the fairs we also attend, which are more editor-oriented and can sometimes be a bit too technical. On the other hand, there has been a lot of talk about Teams, especially at the level of presentations: we feel that the tool is growing and is used more and more. This is also reflected in Microsoft's strategy: most of the announced evolutions are based on Teams.
What was your message to the participants of this conference?
Jean-Michel: I think it was important to redefine the vision of the Digital Workplace according to Jalios: an environment which consists of making users' daily lives easier, and this daily life includes the Microsoft suite, whether for email, calendar, but also collaborative tools which are now being pushed by Microsoft such as Teams, Yammer, SharePoint, etc. The debate is not so much about "Jalios' advantages over Office 365", as we are sometimes asked, but rather to see how they complement each other. I tried to stress this point during my presentation, because it is a problem of historical market perception and comparative studies unfortunately too often continue to oppose complementary solutions.
Youssef: With the Jalios Digital Workplace, it's not just a question of facilitating access to Office 365 with a dashboard. Jalios also seeks to make it easier to use by enabling more advanced interactions between Office 365 and Jalios, and to enrich these uses by opening the Digital Workplace to everything that neither Office 365 nor Jalios offers as standard. This is the case, for example, for all users' business applications or more advanced functionalities such as Jalios Learning.
To what extent did this conference address the concerns about Office 365 of the people you meet in customer meetings today?
Youssef: Today, in customer meetings, we meet a lot of organizations that are historical Microsoft customers and are migrating to Office 365. They realize that the Office 365 suite alone is not enough to meet their ambition of providing their users with a "single point of access".
When they are not yet Jalios customers, they see the "unifying" value proposition of Jalios. This is the case, for example, of Indigo, which has chosen to use Jalios for the entire Intranet communications and Digital Workplace aspect and to rely on Office 365 Teams to implement collaborative working within the organization.
Others, who are already Jalios customers, want to be reassured that they will be able to keep both simple for users. This is the case of MAIF, which has chosen to use Jalios for its Digital Workplace and its long-term business communities, and to rely on Microsoft for more instantaneous project collaboration with Teams, and for CSR with Yammer.
Jean-Michel: In both cases, we can see that these organizations need support, and the presence of consulting players was entirely relevant. With the migration to the cloud, the issue of data security and reversibility also comes up regularly.
For Jalios, which has long responded to the needs of customers who want an on-premise solution, we obviously also offer a cloud solution, but we leave it up to our customers to go at their own pace, so they can compose a hybrid environment. They can thus choose the Jalios on-premise offer, coupled with an Office 365 in the cloud, or conversely choose the Jalios cloud offer, coupled with a hosted exchange server.
It seems that Microsoft has made more than 2500 evolutions over 2019: how does the ecosystem react to all these evolutions proposed by Microsoft?
Jean-Michel: 2500 Microsoft evolutions over 2019, this is indeed the figure put forward by Agilsi Conseil, also present at the conference. This seems enormous, but is still reasonable considering the size of a publisher like Microsoft. It is above all the very high rate of availability of the evolutions, and that the cloud also allows advantageously, which can sometimes pose a problem. It is a question of being aware of these evolutions on the one hand, and on the other hand of adapting the uses to the new functionalities. The Modern Workplace conference also provides an opportunity to discuss this issue.
Internally at Jalios, this is a daily challenge for R&D. Fortunately, as an identified potential player in the Microsoft ecosystem, we have privileged access to Microsoft architects, which sometimes allows us to anticipate and react to these changes.
For customers, they sometimes need more stability at the product level to allow time for their users to adopt the solution and associated uses. The players in the consulting industry clearly have a role to play here. With the Digital Workplace, Jalios also contributes to stabilizing and "smoothing" the environment: we provide contextualized integration of Office 365 functionalities, and simplified integration with the uses that users make of it in their different roles. Users are thus not left on their own when faced with changes impacted by Microsoft.
Thank you Youssef, thank you Jean-Michel, and see you soon then!
