The Directions on Microsoft Briefing Directions on Microsoft

Microsoft's Viva employee-experience platform is a morphing collection of brand-new and older technologies aimed at improving workers' productivity and job satisfaction. Mary Jo Foley talks with Directions analyst Joshua Trupin about Viva's capabilities (including its AI capabilities), and how its packaging, pricing, and licensing are evolving.

In this first installment of a multi-episode series covering Enterprise Agreements (EAs), Mary Jo Foley talks with Direction on Microsoft consultant Gus Volpe about EA negotiation project management -- why it's key to the EA negotiation process; the pillars of an effective EA project plan; and the top EA project management pitfalls to avoid.

Generative AI is taking off in the enterprise, but there are many legal, governance, compliance, and privacy issues that customers need to consider first. Mary Jo Foley talks to Directions analyst Michael Cherry about some of the big-picture issues that organizations need to tackle before putting these new AI technologies into production.

People forget, but Teams isn't Microsoft's only collaboration solution: Exchange combined with Outlook is by far Microsoft’s most mature and popular collaboration platform. In this episode, Mary Jo Foley talks with Directions' Rob Helm and Jim Gaynor about where Teams and Outlook overlap, integrate and compete -- and what it means for customers planning their collaboration strategies.

Microsoft licensing rules are written to favor customers that use Azure and penalize customers who run their Microsoft software on competitors’ cloud platforms, especially AWS, Google, and Alibaba. In this podcast, Mary Jo Foley and analyst Wes Miller discuss the extra licensing costs Microsoft customers face when they use non-Microsoft clouds to run their Microsoft workloads – including recent and upcoming rule changes that further increase the pressure to use Azure.

In this episode, Mary Jo Foley and Andrew Snodgrass discuss the advantages, limitations and workarounds of Azure-connected features in SQL Server 2022. They cover the activities you need to take, and other services required, for use of certain features. Final considerations before adoption are summarized as well.