Feature
While we don’t often hear much about it, Microsoft’s OneDrive is one of the key elements of Microsoft 365. As such, it is also one of the pillars of the digital workplace by enabling sharing, collaboration and file security.
Microsoft is to improve the experience with an upgrade to the third generation of OneDrive that includes new file views, governance controls, creation tools and Copilot.
With the addition of generative AI in particular, it will now improve search, organization and extraction of information from files, and the ability to send files to exactly where they are needed.
According to Microsoft, though, this is only the beginning of the changes that are on the way for OneDrive with new file organization, access, and creation of files for OneDrive in other Microsoft apps like Teams and Outlook.
The main announcement though, is that Copilot is coming to OneDrive in December. This will effectively bring all the advantages of Copilot to managing files in One Drive.
This is no surprise as Microsoft had announced it at Build in May this year when it explained that with the addition of Copilot users will be able to access any content regardless of where it is located be that in OneDrive itself or in SharePoint.
However, this is not just an update, according to the blog post. It is more. It is a strategy statement for OneDrive and where Microsoft sees it going.
“The future of Copilot in OneDrive will help you gather, manage and transfer knowledge in less time than ever," Jason Moore wrote, adding that it will be able to anticipate what files are needed and what files to surface for any given project based on initial queries.
As it does in other apps, Copilot will also be able to generate summaries to include with the share links so coworkers have more context, while offering a view of all the new files shared as well as changes that have been made to those files.
“The future of Copilot in OneDrive will help you gather, manage and transfer knowledge in less time than ever. We are excited about the possibilities of Copilot and look forward to sharing more news in the months to come. Stay tuned to the OneDrive blog for more information,” he added.
One of the other useful additions is OneDrive in Teams. Microsoft explained that is has completely rethought its approach to working with files in Teams.
To enable that, it is also be releasing a OneDrive Teams app in December that will provide access to all files in OneDrive and SharePoint from inside Teams as well as bringing all the performance improvements, new views and feature enhancements that are being made available in OneDrive.
For Outlook, it is adding the OneDrive app in the left navigation of the new Outlook for Windows and Outlook on the web. This will make it easy to copy a sharing link and include it in an email without ever having to leave Outlook.
There are many other offerings on the way too for the workplace, but there is a possible fly in the ointment too. The introduction of a ‘For You’ panel on the Home Page of OneDrive is designed to surface all the files that Copilot thinks might be of interest to users' specific asks.
However, it is unclear how this will work and it is not beyond the realms of possibility that it will surfaces files that really shouldn’t be surfaced at all.
That said, there are significant security and governance updates with the release. However with the kind of file, sharing capabilites that will be available here, it only takes one user mistake and there will be more files out in the open that really shouldn't be there at all.
However, it is an important update with some of the new capabilities coming between now and Xmas and others on the way early next year.
Zoom Enhances Collaboration Capabilites with Docs
Otherwise, it has been a week since San Francisco-based Zoom wrapped up its Zoomtopia annual conference. As usual with events like this, the list of releases was breathtaking and the strategies were just as impressive – to a point, that is.
While the star of the show for digital workplace employees was undoubtedly Zoom Docs, which the company describes as “… a new-gen collaborative workspace with AI at its heart, designed to evolve beyond legacy, one-dimensional docs to revolutionize modern collaboration.”
However, one of the comments that really stood out from Zoomtopia this year, and which was reported by the Washington Post, was that Zoom wants to know what hybrid work is really like.
It wants to know what it should be doing to design products that suit workers that have to spend half their life at home and the other half commuting into the office. “We had to put ourselves into your shoes,” chief executive Eric Yuan said at Zoomtopia. "By doing this, we have dialed into the challenges you are facing”.
It beggars the question, of course, what has Zoom been designing since the start given that it had championed remote working when the Covid pandemic kicked in, then moved to what it describes as “structured hybrid” which requires employees who live in a 50 mile radius of an office to return two days a week. How do you design, build and execute for these workers, if you dont know what it is like?
Zoom has offered a number of answers to this in the products it has been releasing over the past three years, and Zoomtopia this year is no different, particularly with Zoom Docs.
Flagged as a flexible workspace with drag-and-drop content blocks, text, tables and images, it can be used for documentation, wikis, delegating tasks, work management and a lot more besides.
In fact it is so close to some of the other collaboration tools out there, would be hard to distinguish one from the other, except that Zoom top-loaded its Docs with AI to enable it operate quicker and more efficiently - or at least that’s what Zoom is saying.
Webinar
Sep
25
CMS Briefing: A Live Look at What’s Next in AI-Driven Platforms
Learn how leading organizations are using AI‑driven tools to publish faster, personalize smarter and stay secure.
Register
Webinar
On demand
Ready or Not: How Data-First Organizations Are Unlocking Agentforce Potential
Learn how to cut through the noise, activate Agentforce and build a Salesforce AI strategy that actually delivers.
Watch Now
Webinar
On demand
AI in Customer Service: Faster Resolutions, Happier Customers
Don’t let rising demand burn out your team. See how to build a smarter, more resilient support org.
Watch Now
Webinar
On demand
From Hype to High-Impact CX Strategies That Actually Scale
Turn buzzworthy AI and outsourcing trends into measurable CX wins with fresh 2025 data.
Watch Now
Webinar
On demand
Insights to Action Rethinking the Contact Center for Real Business Impact
Join our exclusive webinar to hear CX executives share their innovative strategies for transforming service delivery.
Watch Now
Webinar
On demand
Accelerating Healthcare Ops with AI
Sign up to see how your peers are putting AI to work — and making it stick.
Watch Now
“Hybrid work is hard enough, and the status quo for document creation and collaboration isn’t cutting it anymore.
"Zoom is helping our customers by bringing the definition of a ‘doc’ into 2023 — with powerful document authoring and collaboration capabilities, modern collaboration tools, and a next-gen workspace built from the ground up with AI at its heart; Zoom Docs is that solution,” Smita Hashim, chief product officer at Zoom, said in a statement.
“With Zoom Docs, teams can work faster, all while minimizing silos and being seamlessly integrated into the Zoom interface...," Hashim added.
Zoom also says the new offering is modular and integrates with third-party apps, which should go a long way to making it “a single place to work” which will also be helped by the fact that the AI element does away with any problems with content siloes.
There are a number of other workplace-focused releases too, but Docs is definitely the jewel in this year’s crown. It offers what appears to be an alternative to Google Docs except for the fact that it is firmly focused on collaboration and AI, while Google is only getting around to adding AI now.
Zoom Docs will be available in early 2024, but there will be a lot more about this between now and then.
Zoho Upgrades Cliq to Give it Rooms
The collaboration market is a tough one, and if Zoom Docs is one of the answers to the problems posed by the hybrid workplace, Zoho has another answer. The problem for Zoom – and Slack for that matters – is that with Zoho Cliq, Zoho's co-founder and chief executive Sridhar Vembu says it is coming after Slack and Zoom.
"There are only three major players in the segment. I don't consider Slack to be viable as Salesforce hasn't done much in terms of integrating new AI capabilities...And Zoom is only now working on its chat capabilities," Vembu said during its user conference event 'Zoholics' held in Bengaluru, India.
However, Vembu wasn’t just there to talk down the competition. He was also there to introduce Zoho Cliq Rooms. Zoho Cliq was launched in 2017 well before Covid and offered workers communication capabilities including instant messaging, audio, and video calls.
Cliq Rooms addresses the problems of trying to align on-site workers with remote workers. In Cliq Rooms, a blog post about the release explains, those in the physical office can convene for a traditional, face-to-face meeting within a dedicated room.
It also enables remote workers join those meeting through large television screens, which, the company says, go a long way to bridging the gap between physical and remote workers.
The plan is to provide every organization with dedicated physical meeting rooms that also have the capability into digital hubs. It has all the other functionality you would expect of a digital meeting room including audio, meeting scheduling and cameras among other things
There are many other hybrid meeting solutions out there at the moment but one of Zoho’s selling points has always been its budget pricing. While it is not clear when it will be released, or what price the new version will be, it will be part of the upcoming v5.0 release, which is “coming soon”.
OpenText To Bring Gen AI To Information Management Cloud
Meanwhile, Canada based OpenText is also entering the generative AI space with the announcement that it will introduce generative AI across its Information Management Cloud for content, IT, business networks and cybersecurity among other things.
To complement that it is also introducing a new suite of tools that will enable IT administrators manage and even create data lakes, as well as offer the possibility of analyzing structure and unstructured data.
The new Aviator LLM supports natural langue process, conservational chat and personalized content generated by the new AI
According to a statement from the company, organizations will be able to use Aviator through the OpenText Cloud application program interface and in doing so enable information flows across multiple cloud and data siloes.
IT Operations Aviator is described as an AI virtual agent for OpenText’s Smax Service Management Automation platform.
It combines LLMs with OpenText’s data security capabilities to facilitate self-service, provide faster issue resolution and improve efficiency in service management scenarios.
So far OpenText is brining Content Aviator to OpenText Core Content, OpenText Extended ECM and OpenText Documentum. It makes generating content and developing communications better by offering a chat interface to query an organizations content siloes
One other notable addition is Aviator Thrust and Thrust Studio, which consists of cloud API services and developer tools that will enable information flows throughout the entire tech stack.
Although interest in generative AI has peaked in the months since Microsoft invested heavily in OpenAI, OpenText’s Mark Barrenechea says they have been developing AI for more than ten years.
“OpenText has been developing AI capabilities for over a decade, and OpenText Aviators is an AI breakthrough for customers. OpenText Aviator will help customers massively increase productivity through new conversation interfaces leveraging Information Management data sets and language models,” he said.
While there is a lot more going on at OpenText and there was a lot more announced during its OpenText World, the whole drive this year has been AI.
“We believe the advancement of AI technology is so important, we dedicated our entire information management conference, OpenText World 2023, to the topic this week, Muhi Majzoub, chief product officer wrote in a blog about the conference.
Even its Cloud Editions (CE) upgrade was focused on AI. CE 23.4 update pulls together the collective power of both AI and information management and begins the process of embedding AI across all OpenText’s offerings.
Prophecy Raises $35 million
Finally, this week, Prophecy a Palo Alto, Calif.-based data transformation platform provide has announced that it has raised $35m in Series B funding.
The funding round was led by Insight Partners and SignalFire, with participation from J.P. Morgan, Singtel Innov8, Databricks Ventures and Dallas Venture Capital and brings the total capital raised to $67 million.
Data transformation is the process of converting data from one format to another, typically from the format of a source system into the required format of a destination system.
The company says it will use the funds to develop its platform and expand its reach in the organization.
The company was founded in 2017 and has raised $67 million to date.
