Podcasts about SharePoint

In today's Cloud Wars Minute, I unpack how Microsoft is empowering business users with new Copilot agents that simplify app creation and workflow automation — no coding needed.Highlights00:11 — Microsoft has launched a series of new agents for Microsoft 365 Copilot customers in the Frontier Program: App Builder and Workflows, designed to accelerate the creation of AI-driven apps and workflows. These agents make it incredibly easy for general business users to utilize natural language in order to create apps, workflows, and even additional agents.00:46 — The Workflows agent allows users to automate tasks such as email, mail apps, and calendar management across Outlook, Teams, SharePoint, Planner, and other services like Approvals. Steps of the automation are displayed in real time and follow the same Copilot conversation, making it easy to add more or edit existing workflow steps.01:24 — In a blog post, Charles Lamanna, President of Business and Industry Copilot at Microsoft, outlined a use case for these new agents: "Imagine you're preparing for a product launch with a few multi-turn interactions. Create an app for a product launch process where teams can track launch milestones, assign tasks, and view campaign progress in a dashboard."01:37 — "Send a Teams update every Monday with upcoming launch deadlines and key tasks from Planner. Post reminders for approval deadlines in Teams channels. Build an agent that answers product launch questions like: “What's the next milestone?”, “How do I submit creative assets?”, or “When is the launch event?”, using SharePoint resources and Teams conversations."02:08 — Regarding Microsoft's strategy for Copilot: step one involved integrating Copilot everywhere to ensure easy access and increasing familiarity. Step two was the launch of Copilot Studio Lite, which allows any user to build agents easily. Now, step three is focusing on finding the off-the-shelf agents available to make complex tasks such as app development and workflow automation seamless. Visit Cloud Wars for more.

What does it take to keep a family business thriving for generations? In this episode of Unstoppable Mindset, I talk with Jan Southern, a seasoned business advisor who helps family-owned companies build long-term success through structure, trust, and clarity. We explore why so many family firms lose their way by the third generation—and what can be done right now to change that story. Jan shares how documenting processes, empowering people, and aligning goals can turn complexity into confidence. We unpack her “Three Ps” framework—People, Process, and Product—and discuss how strong leadership, accountability, and smart AI adoption keep growth steady and sustainable. If you've ever wondered what separates businesses that fade from those that flourish, this conversation will show you how to turn structure into freedom and process into legacy. Highlights: 00:10 – Why unexpected stories reveal how real businesses grow. 01:39 – How early life in Liberal, Kansas shaped a strong work ethic. 07:51 – What a 10,000 sq ft HQ build-out teaches about operations. 09:35 – How a trading floor was rebuilt in 36 hours and why speed matters. 11:21 – Why acquisitions fail without tribal knowledge and culture continuity. 13:19 – What Ferguson Alliance does for mid-market family businesses. 14:08 – Why many family firms don't make it to the third generation. 17:33 – How the 3 Ps—people, process, product—create durable growth. 20:49 – Why empowerment and clear decision rights prevent costly delays. 33:02 – The step-by-step process mapping approach that builds buy-in. 36:41 – Who should sponsor change and how to align managers. 49:36 – Why process docs and succession planning start on day one. 56:21 – Realistic timelines: six weeks to ninety days and beyond. 58:19 – How referrals expand projects across departments. About the Guest: With over 40 years of experience in the realm of business optimization and cost-effective strategies, Jan is a seasoned professional dedicated to revolutionizing company efficiency. From collaborating with large corporations encompassing over 1,000 employees to small 2-person offices, Jan's expertise lies in meticulously analyzing financials, processes, policies and procedures to drive enhanced performance. Since joining Ferguson Alliance in 2024, Jan has become a Certified Exit Planning Advisor and is currently in the process of certification in Artificial Intelligence Consulting and Implementation, adding to her ability to quickly provide businesses with an assessment and tools that will enhance their prosperity in today's competitive landscape. Jan's forte lies in crafting solutions that align with each client's vision, bolstering their bottom line and staffing dynamics. Adept in setting policies that align with company objectives, Jan is renowned for transforming challenges into opportunities for growth and longevity. With a knack for unraveling inefficiencies and analyzing net income, Jan is a go-to expert for family-owned businesses looking to extend their legacy into future generations. Ways to connect with Jan: Email address : Jan@Ferguson-Alliance.com Phone: 713 851 2229 LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/jansouthern cepa Website: https://ferguson alliance.com About the Host: Michael Hingson is a New York Times best-selling author, international lecturer, and Chief Vision Officer for accessiBe. Michael, blind since birth, survived the 9/11 attacks with the help of his guide dog Roselle. This story is the subject of his best-selling book, Thunder Dog. Michael gives over 100 presentations around the world each year speaking to influential groups such as Exxon Mobile, AT&T, Federal Express, Scripps College, Rutgers University, Children's Hospital, and the American Red Cross just to name a few. He is Ambassador for the National Braille Literacy Campaign for the National Federation of the Blind and also serves as Ambassador for the American Humane Association's 2012 Hero Dog Awards. https://michaelhingson.com https://www.facebook.com/michael.hingson.author.speaker/ https://twitter.com/mhingson https://www.youtube.com/user/mhingson https://www.linkedin.com/in/michaelhingson/ accessiBe Links https://accessibe.com/ https://www.youtube.com/c/accessiBe https://www.linkedin.com/company/accessibe/mycompany/ https://www.facebook.com/accessibe/ Thanks for listening! Thanks so much for listening to our podcast! If you enjoyed this episode and think that others could benefit from listening, please share it using the social media buttons on this page. Do you have some feedback or questions about this episode? Leave a comment in the section below! Subscribe to the podcast If you would like to get automatic updates of new podcast episodes, you can subscribe to the podcast on Apple Podcasts or Stitcher. You can subscribe in your favorite podcast app. You can also support our podcast through our tip jar https://tips.pinecast.com/jar/unstoppable-mindset . Leave us an Apple Podcasts review Ratings and reviews from our listeners are extremely valuable to us and greatly appreciated. They help our podcast rank higher on Apple Podcasts, which exposes our show to more awesome listeners like you. If you have a minute, please leave an honest review on Apple Podcasts. Transcription Notes: Michael Hingson ** 00:00 Access Cast and accessiBe Initiative presents Unstoppable Mindset. The podcast where inclusion, diversity and the unexpected meet. Hi, I'm Michael Hingson, Chief Vision Officer for accessiBe and the author of the number one New York Times bestselling book, Thunder dog, the story of a blind man, his guide dog and the triumph of trust. Thanks for joining me on my podcast as we explore our own blinding fears of inclusion unacceptance and our resistance to change. We will discover the idea that no matter the situation, or the people we encounter, our own fears, and prejudices often are our strongest barriers to moving forward. The unstoppable mindset podcast is sponsored by accessiBe, that's a c c e s s i capital B e. Visit www.accessibe.com to learn how you can make your website accessible for persons with disabilities. And to help make the internet fully inclusive by the year 2025. Glad you dropped by we're happy to meet you and to have you here with us.   Michael Hingson ** 01:20 Well, hi everyone. I want to welcome you to unstoppable mindset where inclusion, diversity and the unexpected meet. But the neat thing about it is we don't usually deal with inclusion or diversity. We deal with everything, but that because people come on this podcast to tell their own stories, and that's what we get to do today with Jan southern not necessarily anything profound about inclusion or diversity, but certainly the unexpected. And I'm sure we're going to figure out how that happens and what's unexpected about whatever I got to tell you. Before we started, we were just sitting here telling a few puns back and forth. Oh, well, we could always do that, Jan, well, welcome to unstoppable mindset. We're glad you're here. Thank you so much. Glad to be here. Any puns before we start?   Jan Southern ** 02:09 No, I think we've had enough of those. I think we did it   Michael Hingson ** 02:11 in, huh? Yes. Well, cool. Well, I want to thank you for being here. Jan has been very actively involved in a lot of things dealing with business and helping people and companies of all sizes, companies of all sizes. I don't know about people of all sizes, but companies of all sizes in terms of becoming more effective and being well, I'll just use the term resilient, but we'll get into that. But right now, let's talk about the early Jan. Tell us about Jan growing up and all that sort of stuff that's always fun to start with.   Jan Southern ** 02:50 Yes, I grew up in Liberal Kansas, which is a small town just north of the Oklahoma border and a little bit east of New Mexico kind of down in that little Four Corners area. And I grew up in the time when we could leave our house in the morning on the weekends and come home just before dusk at night, and our parents didn't panic, you know. So it was a good it was a good time growing up. I i lived right across the street from the junior high and high school, so I had a hugely long walk to work, I mean,   Michael Hingson ** 03:28 to school,   Jan Southern ** 03:30 yeah, and so, you know, was a, was a cheerleader in high school, and went to college, then at Oklahoma State, and graduated from there, and here I am in the work world. I've been working since I was about 20 years old, and I'd hate to tell you how many years that's been.   Michael Hingson ** 03:51 You can if you want. I won't tell   03:55 nobody will know.   Michael Hingson ** 03:57 Good point. Well, I know it's been a long time I read your bio, so I know, but that's okay. Well, so when you What did you major in in college psychology? Ah, okay. And did you find a bachelor's degree or just bachelor's   Jan Southern ** 04:16 I did not. I got an Mrs. Degree and had two wonderful children and grew up, they've grown up and to become very fine young men with kids of their own. So I have four grandchildren and one great grandchild, so   Michael Hingson ** 04:33 Wowie Zowie, yeah, that's pretty cool. So when you left college after graduating, what did you do?   Jan Southern ** 04:40 I first went to work in a bank. My ex husband was in pharmacy school at Oklahoma, State University of Oklahoma, and so I went to work in a bank. I was the working wife while he went to pharmacy school. And went to work in a bank, and years later, became a bank consultant. So we we lived in Norman, Oklahoma until he was out of school and and as I began having children during our marriage, I went to work for a pediatrician, which was very convenient when you're trying to take care of kids when they're young.   Michael Hingson ** 05:23 Yeah, and what did you What did you do for a pediatrician?   Jan Southern ** 05:27 I was, I was her receptionist, and typed medical charts, so I learned a lot about medicine. Was very she was head of of pediatrics at a local hospital, and also taught at the university. And so I got a great education and health and well being of kids. It was, it was a great job.   Michael Hingson ** 05:51 My my sister in law had her first child while still in high school, and ended up having to go to work. She went to work for Kaiser Permanente as a medical transcriber, but she really worked her way up. She went to college, got a nursing degree, and so on, and she became a nurse. And eventually, when she Well, she didn't retire, but her last job on the medical side was she managed seven wards, and also had been very involved in the critical care unit. Was a nurse in the CCU for a number of years. Then she was tasked. She went to the profit making side of Kaiser, as it were, and she was tasked with bringing paperless charts into Kaiser. She was the nurse involved in the team that did that. So she came a long way from being a medical transcriber.   Jan Southern ** 06:51 Well, she came a long way from being a single mom in high school. That's a great story of success.   Michael Hingson ** 06:56 Well, and she wasn't totally a single mom. She she and the guy did marry, but eventually they they did divorce because he wasn't as committed as he should be to one person, if it were,   Speaker 1 ** 07:10 that's a familiar story. And he also drank and eventually died of cirrhosis of the liver. Oh, that's too bad. Yeah, that's always sad, but, you know, but, but she coped, and her her kids cope. So it works out okay. So you went to work for a pediatrician, and then what did you do?   Jan Southern ** 07:31 Well, after my husband, after he graduated, was transferred to Dallas, and I went to work for a company gardener, Denver company at the time, they've been since purchased by another company. And was because of my experience in banking prior to the pediatrician, I went to work in their corporate cash management division, and I really enjoyed that I was in their corporate cash management for their worldwide division, and was there for about four years, and really enjoyed it. One of my most exciting things was they were moving their headquarters from Quincy, Illinois down to Dallas. And so I had been hired. But since they were not yet in Dallas, I worked with a gentleman who was in charge of putting together their corporate offices. And so we made all the arrangements. As far as we had a got a 10,000 square foot blank space when we started. And our job was to get every desk, every chair, every pen and pencil. And so when somebody moved from Quincy, Illinois, they moved in and they had their desk all set up. Their cuticles were cubicles were ready to go and and they were they could hit the ground running day one, so that,   Michael Hingson ** 09:02 so you, you clearly really got into dealing with organization, I would would say, then, wouldn't, didn't you?   Jan Southern ** 09:11 Yes, yes, that was my, probably my first exposure to to the corporate world and learning exactly how things could be more efficient, more cost effective. And I really enjoyed working for that company.   Michael Hingson ** 09:30 I remember, after September 11, we worked to provide the technology that we were selling, but we provided technology to Wall Street firms so they could recover their data and get set up again to be able to open the stock exchange and all the trading floors on the 17th of September. So the next Monday. And it was amazing, one of the companies was, I think it was Morgan Stanley. Finally and they had to go find new office space, because their office space in the World Trade Center was, needless to say, gone. They found a building in Jersey City that had a floor, they said, about the size of a football field, and from Friday night to Sunday afternoon, they said it took about 36 hours. They brought in computers, including IBM, taking computers from some of their own people, and just bringing them into to Morgan Stanley and other things, including some of the technology that we provided. And within 36 hours, they had completely reconstructed a trading floor. That's amazing. It was, it was absolutely amazing to see that. And you know, for everyone, it was pretty crazy, but Wall Street opened on the 17th and and continued to survive.   Jan Southern ** 10:57 That's a great story.   Michael Hingson ** 10:59 So what did you do? So you did this, this work with the 10,000 square foot space and other things like that. And then what?   Jan Southern ** 11:08 Well, once, once everyone moved into the space in Dallas. Then I began my work in their in their corporate cash management area. And from there, my next job was working in a bank when my my husband, then was transferred back to Tulsa, Oklahoma, and I went back to work in banking. And from that bank, I was there about three to four years, and I was hired then by John Floyd as a as a consultant for banks and credit unions, and I was with that company for 42 years. My gosh, I know that's unusual these days, but I really enjoyed what I did. We did re engineering work and cost effectiveness and banks and credit unions for those 42 years. And so that was where I really cut my teeth on process improvement and continuous improvement, and still in that industry. But their company was bought by a an equity firm. And of course, when that happens, they like to make changes and and bring in their own folks. So those of us who had been there since day one were no longer there.   Michael Hingson ** 12:26 When did that happen?   Jan Southern ** 12:27 That was in 2022   Michael Hingson ** 12:32 so it's interesting that companies do that they always want to bring in their own people. And at least from my perspective, it seems to me that they forget that they lose all the tribal knowledge that people who have been working there have that made the company successful   Jan Southern ** 12:51 Absolutely. So I guess they're still doing well, and they've done well for themselves afterwards, and but, you know, they do, they lose all the knowledge, they lose all of the continuity with the clients. And it's sad that they do that, but that's very, very common.   Michael Hingson ** 13:13 Yeah, I know I worked for a company that was bought by Xerox, and all the company wanted was our technology. All Xerox wanted was the technology. And they lost all of the knowledge that all the people with sales experience and other kinds of experiences brought, because they terminated all of us when the company was fully in the Xerox realm of influence.   Jan Southern ** 13:39 So you know what I went through? Yeah.   Michael Hingson ** 13:42 Well, what did you do after you left that company? After you left John Floyd,   Jan Southern ** 13:47 I left John Floyd, I was under a I was under a non compete, so I kind of knocked around for a couple of years. I was of age where I could have retired, but I wasn't ready to. So then I found Ferguson Alliance, and I'm now a business advisor for family owned businesses, and so I've been with Ferguson just over a year, and doing the same type of work that I did before. In addition to that, I have become a certified Exit Planning advisor, so that I can do that type of work as well. So that's that's my story in a nutshell. As far as employment,   Michael Hingson ** 14:26 what is Ferguson Alliance?   Jan Southern ** 14:29 Ferguson Alliance, we are business advisors for family owned businesses. And the perception is that a family owned business is going to be a small business, but there are over 500,000 family owned businesses in the United States. Our market is the middle market, from maybe 50 employees up to 1000 20 million in revenues, up to, you know, the sky's the limit, and so we do. Do a lot of work as far as whatever can help a family owned business become more prosperous and survive into future generations. It's a sad statistic that most family owned businesses don't survive into the third generation.   Michael Hingson ** 15:16 Why is that?   Jan Southern ** 15:19 I think because they the first the first generation works themselves, their fingers to the bone to get their their business off the ground, and they get successful, and their offspring often enjoy, if you will, the fruits of the labors of their parents and so many of them, once they've gone to college, they don't have an interest in joining the firm, and so they go on and succeed on their own. And then their children, of course, follow the same course from from their work. And so that's really, I think, the primary reason, and also the the founders of the businesses have a tendency to let that happen, I think. And so our coaching programs try to avoid that and help them to bring in the second and third generations so that they can, you know, they can carry on a legacy of their parents or the founders.   Michael Hingson ** 16:28 So what do you do, and what kinds of initiatives do you take to extend the longevity of a family owned business then,   Jan Southern ** 16:39 well, the first thing is that that Rob, who's our founder of our family owned business, does a lot of executive coaching and helps the helps the people who are within the business, be it the founder or being at their second or third generations, and he'll help with coaching them as to how to, hey, get past the family dynamics. Everybody has their own business dynamics. And then you add on top of that, the family dynamics, in addition to just the normal everyday succession of a business. And so we help them to go through those types of challenges, if you will. They're not always a challenge, but sometimes, if there are challenges, Rob's coaching will take them through that and help them to develop a succession plan that also includes a document that says that that governance plan as to how their family business will be governed, in addition to just a simple succession plan, and my role in a lot of that is to make sure that their business is ready to prosper too. You know that their their assessment of as far as whether they're profitable, whether they are their processes are in place, etc, but one of the primary things that we do is to help them make certain that that if they don't want to survive into future generations, that we help them to prepare to either pass it along to a family member or pass it along to someone who's a non family member, right?   Michael Hingson ** 18:34 So I've heard you mentioned the 3p that are involved in extending longevity. Tell me about that. What are the three P's?   Jan Southern ** 18:41 Well, the first p is your people. You know, if you don't take care of your people, be they family members or non family members, then you're not going to be very successful. So making certain that you have a system in place, have a culture in place that takes care of your people. To us, is very key. Once you make sure that your people are in a culture of continuous improvement and have good, solid foundation. In that regard, you need to make sure that your processes are good. That's the second P that that you have to have your processes all documented, that you've authorized your people to make decisions that they don't always have to go to somebody else. If you're a person in the company and you recognize that something's broken, then you need to have empowerment so that your people can make decisions and not always have to get permission from someone else to make certain that those processes continuously are approved improved. That's how to you. Could have became so successful is they installed a product. They called it, I say, a product. They installed a culture. They called it kaizen. And so Kaizen was simply just continuous improvement, where, if you were doing a process and you ask yourself, why did I do it this way? Isn't there a better way? Then, you know, you're empowered to find a better way and to make sure that that that you can make that decision, as long as it fits in with the culture of the company. Then the third P is product. You know, you've got to have a product that people want. I know that you've seen a lot of companies fail because they're pushing a product that nobody wants. And so you make certain that your products are good, your products are good, high quality, and that you can deliver them in the way that you promise. And so those are really the 3p I'd like to go back to process and just kind of one of the things, as you know, we had some horrendous flooding here in Texas recently, and one of the things that happened during that, and not that it was a cause of it, but just one of the things that exacerbated the situation, is someone called to say, Please, we need help. There's flooding going on. It was one of their first responders had recognized that there was a tragic situation unfolding, and when he called into their system to give alerts, someone says, Well, I'm going to have to get approval from my supervisor, with the approval didn't come in time. So what's behind that? We don't know, but that's just a critical point as to why you should empower your people to make decisions when, when it's necessary.   Michael Hingson ** 21:56 I'm sure, in its own way, there was some of that with all the big fires out here in California back in January, although part of the problem with those is that aircraft couldn't fly for 36 hours because the winds were so heavy that there was just no way that the aircraft could fly. But you got to wonder along the way, since they are talking about the fact that the electric companies Southern California, Edison had a fair amount to do with probably a lot a number of the fires igniting and so on, one can only wonder what might have happened if somebody had made different decisions to better prepare and do things like coating the wires so that if they touch, they wouldn't spark and so on that they didn't do. And, you know, I don't know, but one can only wonder.   Jan Southern ** 22:53 It's hard to know, you know, and in our situation, would it have made any difference had that person been able to make a decision on her own? Yeah, I was moving so rapidly, it might not have made any any difference at all, but you just have to wonder, like you said,   Michael Hingson ** 23:10 yeah, there's no way to, at this point, really know and understand, but nevertheless, it is hopefully something that people learn about for the future, I heard that they're now starting to coat wires, and so hopefully that will prevent a lot, prevent a lot of the sparking and so on. I'd always thought about they ought to put everything underground, but coating wire. If they can do that and do it effectively, would probably work as well. And that's, I would think, a lot cheaper than trying to put the whole power grid underground.   Jan Southern ** 23:51 I would think so we did when I was with my prior company. We did a project where they were burying, they were putting everything underground, and Burlington Vermont, and it was incredible what it takes to do that. I mean, you just, we on the outside, just don't realize, you know, there's a room that's like 10 by six underground that carries all of their equipment and things necessary to do that. And I never realized how, how costly and how difficult it was to bury everything. We just have the impression that, well, they just bury this stuff underground, and that's all. That's all it takes. But it's a huge, huge undertaking in order to do that   Michael Hingson ** 24:36 well. And it's not just the equipment, it's all the wires, and that's hundreds and of miles and 1000s of miles of cable that has to be buried underground, and that gets to be a real challenge.   Jan Southern ** 24:47 Oh, exactly, exactly. So another story about cables. We were working in West Texas one time on a project, and we're watching them stretch the. Wiring. They were doing some internet provisioning for West Texas, which was woefully short on in that regard, and they were stringing the wire using helicopters. It was fascinating, and the only reason we saw that is it was along the roadways when we were traveling from West Texas, back into San Antonio, where flights were coming in and out of so that was interesting to watch.   Michael Hingson ** 25:28 Yeah, yeah. People get pretty creative. Well, you know, thinking back a little bit, John Floyd must have been doing something right to keep you around for 42 years.   Jan Southern ** 25:40 Yes, they did. They were a fabulous country company and still going strong. I think he opened in 1981 it's called advantage. Now, it's not John Floyd, but Right, that was a family owned business. That's where I got to cut my teeth on the dynamics of a family owned business and how they should work and how and his niece is one of the people that's still with the company. Whether, now that they're owned by someone else, whether she'll be able to remain as they go into different elements, is, is another question. But yeah, they were, they were great.   Michael Hingson ** 26:20 How many companies, going back to the things we were talking about earlier, how many companies when they're when they buy out another company, or they're bought out by another company, how many of those companies generally do succeed and continue to grow? Do you have any statistics, or do more tend not to than do? Or   Jan Southern ** 26:40 I think that more tend to survive. They tend to survive, though, with a different culture, I guess you would say they they don't retain the culture that they had before. I don't have any firm statistics on that, because we don't really deal with that that much, but I don't they tend to survive with it, with a the culture of the newer company, if they fold them in, yeah.   Michael Hingson ** 27:15 Well, and the reality is to be fair, evolution always takes place. So the John Floyd and say, 2022 wasn't the same as the John Floyd company in 1981   Jan Southern ** 27:31 not at all. No, exactly, not at all.   Michael Hingson ** 27:34 So it did evolve, and it did grow. And so hopefully, when that company was absorbed elsewhere and with other companies, they they do something to continue to be successful, and I but I think that's good. I know that with Xerox, when it bought Kurzweil, who I worked for, they were also growing a lot and so on. The only thing is that their stock started to drop. I think that there were a number of things. They became less visionary, I think is probably the best way to put it, and they had more competition from other companies developing and providing copiers and other things like that. But they just became less visionary. And so the result was that they didn't grow as much as probably they should have.   Jan Southern ** 28:28 I think that happens a lot. Sometimes, if you don't have a culture of continuous improvement and continuous innovation, which maybe they didn't, I'm not that familiar with how they move forward, then you get left behind. You know, I'm I'm in the process right now, becoming certified in artificial intelligent in my old age. And the point that's made, not by the company necessarily that I'm studying with, but by many others, is there's going to be two different kinds of companies in the future. There's going to be those who have adopted AI and those who used to be in business. And I think that's probably fair.   Michael Hingson ** 29:13 I think it is. And I also we talked with a person on this podcast about a year ago, or not quite a year ago, but, but he said, AI will not replace anyone's jobs. People will replace people's jobs with AI, but they shouldn't. They shouldn't eliminate anyone from the workforce. And we ended up having this discussion about autonomous vehicles. And the example that he gave is, right now we have companies that are shippers, and they drive product across the country, and what will happen to the drivers when the driving process becomes autonomous and you have self driving vehicles, driving. Across country. And his point was, what they should do, what people should consider doing is not eliminating the drivers, but while the machine is doing the driving, find and give additional or other tasks to the drivers to do so they can continue to be contributors and become more efficient and help the company become more efficient, because now you've got people to do other things than what they were used to doing, but there are other things that AI won't be able to do. And I thought that was pretty fascinating,   Jan Southern ** 30:34 exactly. Well, my my nephew is a long haul truck driver. He owns a company, and you know, nothing the AI will never be able to observe everything that's going on around the trucking and and you know, there's also the some of the things that that driver can do is those observations, plus they're Going to need people who are going to program those trucks as they are making their way across the country, and so I'm totally in agreement with what your friend said, or your you know, your guests had to say that many other things,   Michael Hingson ** 31:15 yeah, and it isn't necessarily even relating to driving, but there are certainly other things that they could be doing to continue to be efficient and effective, and no matter how good the autonomous driving capabilities are, it only takes that one time when for whatever reason, the intelligence can't do it, that it's good To have a driver available to to to to help. And I do believe that we're going to see the time when autonomous vehicles will be able to do a great job, and they will be able to observe most of all that stuff that goes on around them. But there's going to be that one time and that that happens. I mean, even with drivers in a vehicle, there's that one time when maybe something happens and a driver can't continue. So what happens? Well, the vehicle crashes, or there's another person to take over. That's why we have at least two pilots and airplanes and so on. So right, exactly aspects of it,   Jan Southern ** 32:21 I think so I can remember when I was in grade school, they showed us a film as to what someone's vision of the country was, and part of that was autonomous driving, you know. And so it was, it was interesting that we're living in a time where we're beginning to see that, yeah,   Michael Hingson ** 32:41 we're on the cusp, and it's going to come. It's not going to happen overnight, but it will happen, and we're going to find that vehicles will be able to drive themselves. But there's still much more to it than that, and we shouldn't be in too big of a hurry, although some so called profit making. People may decide that's not true, to their eventual chagrin, but we shouldn't be too quick to replace people with technology totally   Jan Southern ** 33:14 Exactly. We have cars in I think it's Domino's Pizza. I'm not sure which pizza company, but they have autonomous cars driving, and they're cooking the pizza in the back oven of the car while, you know, while it's driving to your location, yeah, but there's somebody in the car who gets out of the car and brings the pizza to my door.   Michael Hingson ** 33:41 There's been some discussion about having drones fly the pizza to you. Well, you know, we'll see,   Jan Southern ** 33:50 right? We'll see how that goes. Yeah,   Michael Hingson ** 33:53 I haven't heard that. That one is really, pardon the pun, flown well yet. But, you know, we'll see. So when you start a process, improvement process program, what are some of the first steps that you initiate to bring that about? Well, the first   Jan Southern ** 34:11 thing that we do, once we've got agreement with their leadership, then we have a meeting with the people who will be involved, who will be impacted, and we tell them all about what's happening, what's going to happen, and make certain that they're in full understanding. And you know, the first thing that you ever hear when you're saying that you're going to be doing a re engineering or process improvement is they think, Oh, you're just going to come in and tell me to reduce my staff, and that's the way I'm going to be more successful. We don't look at it that way at all. We look at it in that you need to be right. Have your staff being the right size, and so in in many cases, in my past. I we've added staff. We've told them, you're under staffed, but the first thing we do is hold that meeting, make certain that they're all in agreement with what's going to happen, explain to them how it's going to happen, and then the next step is that once management has decided who our counterparts will be within the company. Who's going to be working with us to introduce us to their staff members is we sit down with their staff members and we ask them questions. You know, what do you do? How do you do it? What do you Did someone bring it to you. Are you second in line or next in line for some task? And then once you finish with it, what happens to it? Do you give someone else? Is a report produced? Etc. And so once we've answered all of those questions, we do a little a mapping of the process. And once you map that process, then you take it back to the people who actually perform the process, and you ask them, Did I get this right? I heard you say, this? Is this a true depiction of what's happening? And so we make sure that they don't do four steps. And they told us steps number one and three, so that then, once we've mapped that out, that gives us an idea of two of how can things be combined? Can they be combined? Should you be doing what you're doing here? Is there a more efficient or cost effective way of doing it? And we make our recommendations based on that for each process that we're reviewing. Sometimes there's one or two good processes in an area that we're looking at. Sometimes there are hundreds. And so that's that's the basic process. And then once they've said yes, that is correct, then we make our recommendations. We take it back to their management, and hopefully they will include the people who actually are performing the actions. And we make our recommendations to make changes if, if, if it's correct, maybe they don't need to make any changes. Maybe everything is is very, very perfect the way it is. But in most cases, they brought us in because it's not and they've recognized it's not. So then once they've said, yes, we want to do this, then we help them to implement.   Michael Hingson ** 37:44 Who usually starts this process, that is, who brings you in?   Jan Southern ** 37:48 Generally, it is going to be, depending upon the size of the company, but in most cases, it's going to be the CEO. Sometimes it's the Chief Operating Officer. Sometimes in a very large company, it may be a department manager, you know, someone who has the authority to bring us in. But generally, I would say that probably 90% of our projects, it's at the C   Michael Hingson ** 38:19 level office. So then, based on everything that you're you're discussing, probably that also means that there has to be some time taken to convince management below the CEO or CEO or a department head. You've got to convince the rest of management that this is going to be a good thing and that you have their best interest at heart.   Jan Southern ** 38:43 That is correct, and that's primarily the reason that we have for our initial meeting. We ask whoever is the contract signer to attend that meeting and be a part of the discussion to help to ward off any objections, and then to really bring these people along if they are objecting. And for that very reason, even though they may still be objecting, we involve them in the implementation, so an implementation of a of a recommendation has to improve, has to include the validation. So we don't do the work, but we sit alongside the people who are doing the implementation and guide them through the process, and then it's really up to them to report back. Is it working as intended? If it's not, what needs to be changed, what might improve, what we thought would be a good recommendation, and we work with them to make certain that everything works for them. Right? And by the end of that, if they've been the tester, they've been the one who's approved steps along the way, we generally find that they're on board because they're the it's now. They're now the owners of the process. And when they have ownership on something that they've implemented. It's amazing how much more resilient they they think that the process becomes, and now it's their process and not ours.   Michael Hingson ** 40:32 Do you find most often that when you're working with a number of people in a company that most of them realize that there need to be some changes, or something needs to be improved to make the whole company work better. Or do you find sometimes there's just great resistance, and people say no, there's just no way anything is bad.   Jan Southern ** 40:53 Here we find that 90% of the time, and I'm just pulling that percentage out of the air, I would say they know, they know it needs to be changed. And the ones typically, not always, but typically, the ones where you find the greatest resistance are the ones who know it's broken, but they just don't want to change. You know, there are some people who don't want to change no matter what, or they feel threatened that. They feel like that a new and improved process might take their place. You know, might replace them. And that's typically not the case. It's typically not the case at all, that they're not replaced by it. Their process is improved, and they find that they can be much more productive. But the the ones who are like I call them the great resistors, usually don't survive the process either. They are. They generally let themselves go,   Michael Hingson ** 42:01 if you will, more ego than working for the company.   Jan Southern ** 42:05 Yes, exactly, you know, it's kind of like my mom, you know, and it they own the process as it was. We used to laugh and call this person Louise, you know, Louise has said, Well, we've always done it that way. You know, that's probably the best reason 20 years in not to continue to do it same way.   Michael Hingson ** 42:34 We talked earlier about John Floyd and evolution. And that makes perfect sense. Exactly what's one of the most important things that you have to do to prepare to become involved in preparing for a process, improvement project? I think   Jan Southern ** 42:52 the most important thing there's two very important things. One is to understand their culture, to know how their culture is today, so that you know kind of which direction you need to take them, if they're not in a continuous improvement environment, then you need to lead them in that direction if they're already there and they just don't understand what needs to be done. There's two different scenarios, but the first thing you need to do is understand the culture. The second thing that you need to do, other than the culture, is understand their their business. You need to know what they do. Of course, you can't know from the outside how they do it, but you need to know that, for instance, if it's an we're working with a company that cleans oil tanks and removes toxins and foul lines from oil and gas industry. And so if you don't understand at all what they do, it's hard to help them through the processes that they need to go through. And so just learning, in general, what their technology, what their business is about. If you walk in there and haven't done that, you're just blowing smoke. In my mind, you know, I do a lot of research on the technologies that they use, or their company in general. I look at their website, I you know, look at their LinkedIn, their social media and so. And then we request information from them in advance of doing a project, so that we know what their org structure looks like. And I think those things are critical before you walk in the door to really understand their business in general.   Michael Hingson ** 44:53 Yeah, and that, by doing that, you also tend to. To gain a lot of credibility, because you come in and demonstrate that you do understand what they're doing, and people respond well to that, I would think   Jan Southern ** 45:10 they do. You know, one of our most interesting projects in my past was the electric company that I mentioned. There was an electric company in Burlington, Vermont that did their own electric generation. We've never looked at anything like that. We're a bank consultant, and so we learned all about how they generated energy with wood chips and the, you know, the different things. And, you know, there were many days that I was out watching the wood chips fall out of a train and into their buckets, where they then transferred them to a yard where they moved the stuff around all the time. So, you know, it was, it's very interesting what you learn along the way. But I had done my homework, and I knew kind of what they did and not how they did it in individual aspects of their own processes, but I understood their industry. And so it was, you do walk in with some credibility, otherwise they're looking at you like, well, what does this person know about my job?   Michael Hingson ** 46:20 And at the same time, have you ever been involved in a situation where you did learn about the company you you went in with some knowledge, you started working with the company, and you made a suggestion about changing a process or doing something that no one had thought of, and it just clicked, and everybody loved it when they thought about it,   Jan Southern ** 46:42 yes, yes, exactly. And probably that electric company was one of those such things. You know, when they hired us, they they told us. We said, We don't know anything about your business. And they said, Good, we don't want you to come in with any preconceived ideas. And so some of the recommendations we made to them. They were, it's kind of like an aha moment. You know, they look at you like, Oh my gosh. I've never thought of that, you know, the same I would say in in banking and in family businesses, you know, they just, they've never thought about doing things in a certain way.   Michael Hingson ** 47:20 Can you tell us a story about one of those times?   Jan Southern ** 47:24 Yes, I would say that if you're, if you're talking about, let's talk about something in the banking industry, where they are. I was working in a bank, and you, you go in, and this was in the days before we had all of the ways to store things electronically. And so they were having a difficult time in keeping all of their documents and in place and knowing when to, you know, put them in a destruction pile and when not to. And so I would say that they had an aha moment when I said, Okay, let's do this. Let's get a bunch of the little colored dots, and you have big dots and small dots. And I said, everything that you put away for 1990 for instance, then you put on a purple dot. And then for January, you have 12 different colors of the little dots that you put in the middle of them. And you can use those things to determine that everything that has a purple dot and little yellow.in the middle of that one, you know that that needs to be destructed. I think in that case, it was seven years, seven years from now, you know that you need to pull that one off the shelf and put it into the pile to be destructed. And they said, we've never thought of anything. It was like I had told him that, you know, the world was going to be struck, to be gone, to begin tomorrow. Yeah, it was so simple to me, but it was something that they had never, ever thought of, and it solved. They had something like five warehouses of stuff, most of which needed to have been destroyed years before, yeah,   Michael Hingson ** 49:21 but still they weren't sure what, and so you gave them a mechanism to do that,   Jan Southern ** 49:27 right? Of course, that's all gone out the window today. You don't have to do all that manual stuff anymore. You're just, you know, I'd say another example of that was people who were when we began the system of digitizing the files, especially loan files in a bank. And this would hold true today as well, in that once you start on a project to digitize the files, there's a tendency to take the old. Files first and digitize those. Well, when you do that, before you get to the end of it, if you have a large project, you don't need those files anymore. So you know, our recommendation is start with your latest. You know, anything that needs to be archived, start with the newest, because by the time that you finish your project, some of those old files you won't even need to digitize, just shred them. Yeah, you know, it's, it's just little simple things like that that can make all the difference.   Michael Hingson ** 50:32 When should a family business start documenting processes? I think I know that's what I thought you'd say,   Jan Southern ** 50:40 yes, yes, that is something that is near and dear to my heart. Is that I would even recommend that you maybe do it before you open your doors, if potential is there, so that the day you open your business, you need to start with your documenting your processes, and you need to start on your succession planning. You know, those are the days that once you really start working, you're not going to have time. You know, you're going to be busy working every day. You're you're going to be busy servicing your customers, and that always gets pushed to the back when you start to document something, and so that's the time do it when you first open your doors.   Michael Hingson ** 51:29 So when we talk about processes, maybe it's a fair question to ask, maybe not. But what are we really talking about when we talk about processes and documenting processes? What are the processes?   Jan Southern ** 51:41 Well, the processes are the things that you do every day. Let's take as an example, just when you set up your your files within your SharePoint, or within your computer, if you don't use SharePoint, your Google files, how you set those up, a process could also be during your accounting, what's the process that you go through to get a invoice approved? You know, when the invoice comes in from the vendor, what do you do with it? You know, who has to approve it? Are there dollar amounts that you have to have approvals for? Or can some people just take in a smaller invoice and pay it without any any approvals? We like to see there be a process where it's approved before you get the invoice from the customer, where it's been approved at the time of the order. And that way it can be processed more more quickly on the backside, to just make sure that it says what the purchase order if you use purchase orders or see what your agreement was. So it's the it's the workflow. There's something that triggers an action, and then, once gets triggered, then what takes place? What's next, what's the next steps? And you just go through each one of the things that has to happen for that invoice to get paid, and the check or wire transfer, or or whatever you use as a payment methodology for it to go out the door. And so, you know what you what you do is you start, there's something that triggers it, and then there's a goal for the end, and then you fill in in the center,   Michael Hingson ** 53:38 and it's, it's, it's a fascinating I hate to use the word process to to listen to all of this, but it makes perfect sense that you should be documenting right from the outset about everything that you do, because it also means that you're establishing a plan so that everyone knows exactly what the expectations are and exactly what it is that needs to be done every step of the way,   Jan Southern ** 54:07 right and and one of the primary reasons for that is we can't anticipate life. You know, maybe our favorite person, Louise, is the only one who's ever done, let's say, you know, payroll processing, or something of that sort. And if something happens and Louise isn't able to come in tomorrow, who's going to do it? You know, without a map, a road map, as to the steps that need to be taken, how's that going to take place? And so that's that's really the critical importance. And when you're writing those processes and procedures, you need to make them so that anybody can walk in off the street, if necessary, and do what Louise was doing and have it done. Properly.   Michael Hingson ** 55:00 Of course, as we know, Louise is just a big complainer anyway. That's right, you said, yeah. Well, once you've made recommendations, and let's say they're put in place, then what do you do to continue supporting a business?   Jan Southern ** 55:20 We check in with them periodically, whatever is appropriate for them and and for the procedures that are there, we make sure that it's working for them, that they're being as prosperous as they want to be, and that our recommendations are working for them. Hopefully they'll allow us to come back in and and most do, and make sure that what we recommended is right and in is working for them, and if so, we make little tweaks with their approvals. And maybe new technology has come in, maybe they've installed a new system. And so then we help them to incorporate our prior recommendations into whatever new they have. And so we try to support them on an ongoing basis, if they're willing to do that, which we have many clients. I think Rob has clients he's been with for ever, since he opened his doors 15 years ago. So   Michael Hingson ** 56:19 of course, the other side of that is, I would assume sometimes you work with companies, you've helped them deal with processes and so on, and then you come back in and you know about technology that that they don't know. And I would assume then that you suggest that, and hopefully they see the value of listening to your wisdom.   Jan Southern ** 56:41 Absolutely, we find that a lot. We also if they've discovered a technology on their own, but need help with recommendations, as far as implementation, we can help them through that as well, and that's one of the reasons I'm taking this class in AI to be able to help our customers move into a realm where it's much more easily implemented if, if they already have the steps that we've put into place, you can feed that into an AI model, and it can make adjustments to what they're doing or make suggestions.   Michael Hingson ** 57:19 Is there any kind of a rule of thumb to to answer this question, how long does it take for a project to to be completed?   Jan Southern ** 57:26 You know, it takes, in all fairness, regardless of the size of the company, I would say that they need to allow six weeks minimum. That's for a small company with a small project, it can take as long as a year or two years, depending upon the number of departments and the number of people that you have to talk to about their processes. But to let's just take an example of a one, one single department in a company is looking at doing one of these processes, then they need to allow at least six weeks to for discovery, for mapping, for their people to become accustomed to the new processes and to make sure that the implementation has been tested and is working and and they're satisfied with everything that that is taking place. Six weeks is a very, very minimum, probably 90 days is a more fair assessment as to how long they should allow for everything to take place.   Michael Hingson ** 58:39 Do you find that, if you are successful with, say, a larger company, when you go in and work with one department and you're able to demonstrate success improvements, or whatever it is that that you define as being successful, that then other departments want to use your services as well?   Jan Southern ** 59:00 Yes, yes, we do. That's a very good point. Is that once you've helped them to help themselves, if you will, once you've helped them through that process, then they recognize the value of that, and we'll move on to another division or another department to do the same thing.   Michael Hingson ** 59:21 Word of mouth counts for a lot,   Jan Southern ** 59:24 doesn't it? Though, I'd say 90% of our business at Ferguson and company comes through referrals. They refer either through a center of influence or a current client who's been very satisfied with the work that we've done for them, and they tell their friends and networking people that you know. Here's somebody that you should use if you're considering this type of a project.   Michael Hingson ** 59:48 Well, if people want to reach out to you and maybe explore using your services in Ferguson services, how do they do that?   Jan Southern ** 59:55 They contact they can. If they want to contact me directly, it's Jan. J, a n, at Ferguson dash alliance.com and that's F, E, R, G, U, S, O, N, Dash alliance.com and they can go to our website, which is the same, which is Ferguson dash alliance.com One thing that's very, very good about our our website is, there's a page that's called resources, and there's a lot of free advice, if you will. There's a lot of materials there that are available to family owned businesses, specifically, but any business could probably benefit from that. And so those are free for you to be able to access and look at, and there's a lot of blog information, free eBook out there, and so that's the best way to reach Ferguson Alliance.   Michael Hingson ** 1:00:52 Well, cool. Well, I hope people will take all of this to heart. You certainly offered a lot of interesting and I would say, very relevant ideas and thoughts about dealing with processes and the importance of having processes. For several years at a company, my wife was in charge of document control and and not only doc control, but also keeping things secure. Of course, having the sense of humor that I have, I pointed out nobody else around the company knew how to read Braille, so what they should really do is put all the documents in Braille, then they'd be protected, but nobody. I was very disappointed. Good idea   Speaker 2 ** 1:01:36 that is good idea that'll keep them safe from everybody. Yeah.   Michael Hingson ** 1:01:39 Well, I want to thank you for being here, and I want to thank to thank all of you for listening today. We've been doing this an hour. How much fun. It is fun. Well, I appreciate it, and love to hear from all of you about today's episode. Please feel free to reach out to me. You can email me at Michael H i@accessibe.com or go to our podcast page. Michael hingson, M, I, C, H, A, E, L, H, I N, G, s, O, n.com/podcast, but wherever you're listening, please give us a five star rating. We value your thoughts and your opinions, and I hope that you'll tell other people about the podcasts as well. This has been an interesting one, and we try to make them all kind of fun and interesting, so please tell others about it. And if anyone out there listening knows of anyone who ought to be a guest, Jan, including you, then please feel free to introduce us to anyone who you think ought to be a guest on unstoppable mindset. Because I believe everyone has a story to tell, and I want to get as many people to have the opportunity to tell their stories as we can. So I hope that you'll all do that and give us reviews and and stick with us. But Jan, again, I want to thank you for being here. This has been a lot of fun.   Jan Southern ** 1:02:51 It has been a lot of fun, and I certainly thank you for inviting me.   Michael Hingson ** 1:03:00 You have been listening to the Unstoppable Mindset podcast. Thanks for dropping by. I hope that you'll join us again next week, and in future weeks for upcoming episodes. To subscribe to our podcast and to learn about upcoming episodes, please visit www dot Michael hingson.com slash podcast. Michael Hingson is spelled m i c h a e l h i n g s o n. While you're on the site., please use the form there to recommend people who we ought to interview in upcoming editions of the show. And also, we ask you and urge you to invite your friends to join us in the future. If you know of any one or any organization needing a speaker for an event, please email me at speaker at Michael hingson.com. I appreciate it very much. To learn more about the concept of blinded by fear, please visit www dot Michael hingson.com forward slash blinded by fear and while you're there, feel free to pick up a copy of my free eBook entitled blinded by fear. The unstoppable mindset podcast is provided by access cast an initiative of accessiBe and is sponsored by accessiBe. Please visit www.accessibe.com . AccessiBe is spelled a c c e s s i b e. There you can learn all about how you can make your website inclusive for all persons with disabilities and how you can help make the internet fully inclusive by 2025. Thanks again for Listening. Please come back and visit us again next week.

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Artificial intelligence has moved fast, but trust has not kept pace. In this episode, Nam Nguyen, co-founder and COO of TruthSystems.ai, joins Greg Lambert and Marlene Gebauer to unpack what it means to build “trust infrastructure” for AI in law. Nguyen's background is unusually cross-wired—linguistics, computer science, and applied AI research at Stanford Law—giving him a clear view of both the language and logic behind responsible machine reasoning. From his early work in Vietnam to collaborations at Stanford with Dr. Megan Ma, Nguyen has focused on a central question: who ensures that the systems shaping legal work remain safe, compliant, and accountable?Nguyen explains that TruthSystems emerged from this question as a company focused on operationalizing trust, not theorizing about it. Rather than publishing white papers on AI ethics, his team builds the guardrails law firms need now. Their platform, Charter, acts as a governance layer that can monitor, restrict, and guide AI use across firm environments in real time. Whether a lawyer is drafting in ChatGPT, experimenting with CoCounsel, or testing Copilot, Charter helps firms enforce both client restrictions and internal policies before a breach or misstep occurs. It's an attempt to turn trust from a static policy on a SharePoint site into a living, automated practice.A core principle of Nguyen's work is that AI should be both the subject and the infrastructure of governance. In other words, AI deserves oversight but is also uniquely suited to implement it. Because large language models excel at interpreting text and managing unstructured data, they can help detect compliance or ethical risks as they happen. TruthSystems' vision is to make governance continuous and adaptive, embedding it directly into lawyers' daily workflows. The aim is not to slow innovation, but to make it sustainable and auditable.The conversation also tackles the myth of “hallucination-free” systems. Nguyen is candid about the limitations of retrieval-augmented generation, noting that both retrieval and generation introduce their own failure modes. He argues that most models have been trained to sound confident rather than be accurate, penalizing expressions of uncertainty. TruthSystems takes the opposite approach, favoring smaller, predictable models that reward contradiction-spotting and verification. His critique offers a reminder that speed and safety in AI rarely coexist by accident—they must be engineered together.Finally, Nguyen discusses TruthSystems' recent $4 million seed round, led by Gradient Ventures and Lightspeed, which will fund the expansion of their real-time visibility tools and firm partnerships. He envisions a future where firms treat governance not as red tape but as a differentiator, using data on AI use to assure clients and regulators alike. As he puts it, compliance will no longer be the blocker to innovation—it will be the proof of trust at scale.Listen on mobile platforms:  ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Apple Podcasts⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ |  ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Spotify⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ | ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠YouTube⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠[Special Thanks to ⁠Legal Technology Hub⁠ for their sponsoring this episode.] ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Email: geekinreviewpodcast@gmail.comMusic: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Jerry David DeCicca⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Transcript:

When a major Amazon cloud outage brings everything from smart mattresses to Snapchat grinding to a halt, what does it reveal about our digital fragility—and are we trusting the cloud a little too much? A Single Point of Failure Triggered the Amazon Outage Affecting Million Pluralistic: The mad king's digital killswitch (20 Oct 2025) Trump and Xi will 'consummate' TikTok deal on Thursday, treasury secretary says 3,000 YouTube Videos Exposed as Malware Traps in Massive Ghost Network Operation Can YouTube Replace 'Traditional' TV? All the implications of F1's game-changing TV move Foreign hackers breached a US nuclear weapons plant via SharePoint flaws Browser Promising Privacy Protection Contains Malware-Like Features, Routes Traffic Through China iCloud data helps crack NBA and mob poker scheme Rubbish IT systems cost the US at least $40bn during Covid: study Counter-Strike cosmetics economy loses nearly $2 billion in value overnight GM to introduce eyes-off, hands-off driving system in 2028 WordPress co-founder files countersuit against WP Engine over trademark violations a16z-Backed Startup Sells Thousands of 'Synthetic Influencers' to Manipulate Social Media as a Service Bill Gates-Backed 345 MWe Advanced Nuclear Reactor Secures Crucial US Approval Programmer Gets Doom Running On a Space Satellite Host: Leo Laporte Guests: Richard Campbell and Doc Rock Download or subscribe to This Week in Tech at https://twit.tv/shows/this-week-in-tech Join Club TWiT for Ad-Free Podcasts! Support what you love and get ad-free shows, a members-only Discord, and behind-the-scenes access. Join today: https://twit.tv/clubtwit Sponsors: deel.com/twit zapier.com/twit helixsleep.com/twit expressvpn.com/twit zscaler.com/security

When a major Amazon cloud outage brings everything from smart mattresses to Snapchat grinding to a halt, what does it reveal about our digital fragility—and are we trusting the cloud a little too much? A Single Point of Failure Triggered the Amazon Outage Affecting Million Pluralistic: The mad king's digital killswitch (20 Oct 2025) Trump and Xi will 'consummate' TikTok deal on Thursday, treasury secretary says 3,000 YouTube Videos Exposed as Malware Traps in Massive Ghost Network Operation Can YouTube Replace 'Traditional' TV? All the implications of F1's game-changing TV move Foreign hackers breached a US nuclear weapons plant via SharePoint flaws Browser Promising Privacy Protection Contains Malware-Like Features, Routes Traffic Through China iCloud data helps crack NBA and mob poker scheme Rubbish IT systems cost the US at least $40bn during Covid: study Counter-Strike cosmetics economy loses nearly $2 billion in value overnight GM to introduce eyes-off, hands-off driving system in 2028 WordPress co-founder files countersuit against WP Engine over trademark violations a16z-Backed Startup Sells Thousands of 'Synthetic Influencers' to Manipulate Social Media as a Service Bill Gates-Backed 345 MWe Advanced Nuclear Reactor Secures Crucial US Approval Programmer Gets Doom Running On a Space Satellite Host: Leo Laporte Guests: Richard Campbell and Doc Rock Download or subscribe to This Week in Tech at https://twit.tv/shows/this-week-in-tech Join Club TWiT for Ad-Free Podcasts! Support what you love and get ad-free shows, a members-only Discord, and behind-the-scenes access. Join today: https://twit.tv/clubtwit Sponsors: deel.com/twit zapier.com/twit helixsleep.com/twit expressvpn.com/twit zscaler.com/security

When a major Amazon cloud outage brings everything from smart mattresses to Snapchat grinding to a halt, what does it reveal about our digital fragility—and are we trusting the cloud a little too much? A Single Point of Failure Triggered the Amazon Outage Affecting Million Pluralistic: The mad king's digital killswitch (20 Oct 2025) Trump and Xi will 'consummate' TikTok deal on Thursday, treasury secretary says 3,000 YouTube Videos Exposed as Malware Traps in Massive Ghost Network Operation Can YouTube Replace 'Traditional' TV? All the implications of F1's game-changing TV move Foreign hackers breached a US nuclear weapons plant via SharePoint flaws Browser Promising Privacy Protection Contains Malware-Like Features, Routes Traffic Through China iCloud data helps crack NBA and mob poker scheme Rubbish IT systems cost the US at least $40bn during Covid: study Counter-Strike cosmetics economy loses nearly $2 billion in value overnight GM to introduce eyes-off, hands-off driving system in 2028 WordPress co-founder files countersuit against WP Engine over trademark violations a16z-Backed Startup Sells Thousands of 'Synthetic Influencers' to Manipulate Social Media as a Service Bill Gates-Backed 345 MWe Advanced Nuclear Reactor Secures Crucial US Approval Programmer Gets Doom Running On a Space Satellite Host: Leo Laporte Guests: Richard Campbell and Doc Rock Download or subscribe to This Week in Tech at https://twit.tv/shows/this-week-in-tech Join Club TWiT for Ad-Free Podcasts! Support what you love and get ad-free shows, a members-only Discord, and behind-the-scenes access. Join today: https://twit.tv/clubtwit Sponsors: deel.com/twit zapier.com/twit helixsleep.com/twit expressvpn.com/twit zscaler.com/security

When a major Amazon cloud outage brings everything from smart mattresses to Snapchat grinding to a halt, what does it reveal about our digital fragility—and are we trusting the cloud a little too much? A Single Point of Failure Triggered the Amazon Outage Affecting Million Pluralistic: The mad king's digital killswitch (20 Oct 2025) Trump and Xi will 'consummate' TikTok deal on Thursday, treasury secretary says 3,000 YouTube Videos Exposed as Malware Traps in Massive Ghost Network Operation Can YouTube Replace 'Traditional' TV? All the implications of F1's game-changing TV move Foreign hackers breached a US nuclear weapons plant via SharePoint flaws Browser Promising Privacy Protection Contains Malware-Like Features, Routes Traffic Through China iCloud data helps crack NBA and mob poker scheme Rubbish IT systems cost the US at least $40bn during Covid: study Counter-Strike cosmetics economy loses nearly $2 billion in value overnight GM to introduce eyes-off, hands-off driving system in 2028 WordPress co-founder files countersuit against WP Engine over trademark violations a16z-Backed Startup Sells Thousands of 'Synthetic Influencers' to Manipulate Social Media as a Service Bill Gates-Backed 345 MWe Advanced Nuclear Reactor Secures Crucial US Approval Programmer Gets Doom Running On a Space Satellite Host: Leo Laporte Guests: Richard Campbell and Doc Rock Download or subscribe to This Week in Tech at https://twit.tv/shows/this-week-in-tech Join Club TWiT for Ad-Free Podcasts! Support what you love and get ad-free shows, a members-only Discord, and behind-the-scenes access. Join today: https://twit.tv/clubtwit Sponsors: deel.com/twit zapier.com/twit helixsleep.com/twit expressvpn.com/twit zscaler.com/security

The SharePoint document library toolbars are changing and you will want to prepare your org for where buttons have moved and how it works now. Teams adds searching for images, but it's not what you think. And Windows 11 and Copilot are getting back together, with integration means Copilot is even more helpful on your desktop. But when are these features coming to Windows 11 for businesses and enterprises? 0:00 Welcome 2:06 Introducing Image Search in Microsoft Teams - MC1174858 7:55 Microsoft Copilot Studio: Copy an agent from the lite experience into the full experience - MC1176363 11:10 Updated SharePoint document library user experience - MC1179157 19:59 GPT-5 becomes the default Copilot model - MC1176368 23:45 Power Automate - Information about 'Retry with AI vision' functionality in Power Automate for desktop - MC1177141 26:50 How Windows 11 and AI are transforming the future of work - MC1177767

When a major Amazon cloud outage brings everything from smart mattresses to Snapchat grinding to a halt, what does it reveal about our digital fragility—and are we trusting the cloud a little too much? A Single Point of Failure Triggered the Amazon Outage Affecting Million Pluralistic: The mad king's digital killswitch (20 Oct 2025) Trump and Xi will 'consummate' TikTok deal on Thursday, treasury secretary says 3,000 YouTube Videos Exposed as Malware Traps in Massive Ghost Network Operation Can YouTube Replace 'Traditional' TV? All the implications of F1's game-changing TV move Foreign hackers breached a US nuclear weapons plant via SharePoint flaws Browser Promising Privacy Protection Contains Malware-Like Features, Routes Traffic Through China iCloud data helps crack NBA and mob poker scheme Rubbish IT systems cost the US at least $40bn during Covid: study Counter-Strike cosmetics economy loses nearly $2 billion in value overnight GM to introduce eyes-off, hands-off driving system in 2028 WordPress co-founder files countersuit against WP Engine over trademark violations a16z-Backed Startup Sells Thousands of 'Synthetic Influencers' to Manipulate Social Media as a Service Bill Gates-Backed 345 MWe Advanced Nuclear Reactor Secures Crucial US Approval Programmer Gets Doom Running On a Space Satellite Host: Leo Laporte Guests: Richard Campbell and Doc Rock Download or subscribe to This Week in Tech at https://twit.tv/shows/this-week-in-tech Join Club TWiT for Ad-Free Podcasts! Support what you love and get ad-free shows, a members-only Discord, and behind-the-scenes access. Join today: https://twit.tv/clubtwit Sponsors: deel.com/twit zapier.com/twit helixsleep.com/twit expressvpn.com/twit zscaler.com/security

When a major Amazon cloud outage brings everything from smart mattresses to Snapchat grinding to a halt, what does it reveal about our digital fragility—and are we trusting the cloud a little too much? A Single Point of Failure Triggered the Amazon Outage Affecting Million Pluralistic: The mad king's digital killswitch (20 Oct 2025) Trump and Xi will 'consummate' TikTok deal on Thursday, treasury secretary says 3,000 YouTube Videos Exposed as Malware Traps in Massive Ghost Network Operation Can YouTube Replace 'Traditional' TV? All the implications of F1's game-changing TV move Foreign hackers breached a US nuclear weapons plant via SharePoint flaws Browser Promising Privacy Protection Contains Malware-Like Features, Routes Traffic Through China iCloud data helps crack NBA and mob poker scheme Rubbish IT systems cost the US at least $40bn during Covid: study Counter-Strike cosmetics economy loses nearly $2 billion in value overnight GM to introduce eyes-off, hands-off driving system in 2028 WordPress co-founder files countersuit against WP Engine over trademark violations a16z-Backed Startup Sells Thousands of 'Synthetic Influencers' to Manipulate Social Media as a Service Bill Gates-Backed 345 MWe Advanced Nuclear Reactor Secures Crucial US Approval Programmer Gets Doom Running On a Space Satellite Host: Leo Laporte Guests: Richard Campbell and Doc Rock Download or subscribe to This Week in Tech at https://twit.tv/shows/this-week-in-tech Join Club TWiT for Ad-Free Podcasts! Support what you love and get ad-free shows, a members-only Discord, and behind-the-scenes access. Join today: https://twit.tv/clubtwit Sponsors: deel.com/twit zapier.com/twit helixsleep.com/twit expressvpn.com/twit zscaler.com/security

A foreign threat actor breached a key U.S. nuclear weapons manufacturing site. The cyberattack on Jaguar Land Rover is the most financially damaging cyber incident in UK history. A new report from Microsoft' warns that AI is reshaping cybersecurity at an unprecedented pace. The ToolShell vulnerability fuels Chinese cyber operations across four continents. Fake browser updates are spreading RansomHub, LockBit, and data-stealing malware. Hackers deface LA Metro bus stop displays. A Spyware developer is warned by Apple of a mercenary spyware attack. Pwn2Own payouts proceed. Ben Yelin from University of Maryland Center for Cyber Health and Hazard Strategies on a Federal Whistle Blower from the SSA. When the cloud goes down, beds heat up.  Remember to leave us a 5-star rating and review in your favorite podcast app. Miss an episode? Sign-up for our daily intelligence roundup, Daily Briefing, and you'll never miss a beat. And be sure to follow CyberWire Daily on LinkedIn. CyberWire Guest Today we are joined by Ben Yelin from University of Maryland Center for Cyber Health and Hazard Strategies on a Federal Whistle Blower from the SSA. If you enjoyed Ben's conversation, be sure to check out more from him over on the Caveat Podcast. 2025 Microsoft Digital Defense Report To learn more about the 2025 Microsoft Digital Defense Report, join our partners on The Microsoft Threat Intelligence Podcast. On today's episode, host Sherrod DeGrippo is joined by Chloé Messdaghi and Crane Hassold to unpack the key findings of the 2025 Microsoft Digital Defense Report; a comprehensive look at how the cyber threat landscape is accelerating through AI, automation, and industrialized criminal networks. You can listen to new episodes of The Microsoft Threat Intelligence Podcast every other Wednesday on your favorite podcast app. Selected Reading Foreign hackers breached a US nuclear weapons plant via SharePoint flaws (CSO Online) JLR hack is costliest cyber attack in UK history, say analysts (BBC) Microsoft 2025 digital defense report flags rising AI-driven threats, forces rethink of traditional defenses (Industrial Cyber) The New Frontlines of Cybersecurity: Lessons from the 2025 Digital Defense Report (The Microsoft Threat Intelligence Podcast)   Sharepoint ToolShell attacks targeted orgs across four continents (Bleeping Computer) SocGholish Malware Using Compromised Sites to gDeliver Ransomware (Hackread) LA Metro digital signs taken over by hackers (KTLA) Apple alerts exploit developer that his iPhone was targeted with government spyware (TechCrunch) Hackers Earn Over $520,000 on First Day of Pwn2Own Ireland 2025 (SecurityWeek) AWS crash causes $2,000 Smart Beds to overheat and get stuck upright (Dexerto) Share your feedback. What do you think about CyberWire Daily? Please take a few minutes to share your thoughts with us by completing our brief listener survey. Thank you for helping us continue to improve our show. Want to hear your company in the show? N2K CyberWire helps you reach the industry's most influential leaders and operators, while building visibility, authority, and connectivity across the cybersecurity community. Learn more at sponsor.thecyberwire.com. The CyberWire is a production of N2K Networks, your source for strategic workforce intelligence. © N2K Networks, Inc. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In this episode of Cybersecurity Today, your host Jim Love discusses Microsoft's latest findings on how ransomware and extortion account for over half of all cyber attacks globally, highlighting the shift toward financially driven crimes. Learn about the breach at the Kansas City National Security Campus due to a SharePoint vulnerability and how Anthropic's new open-source sandbox aims to make AI coding safer. Additionally, discover how AI tools can help spot scams as Jim shares his personal experience and practical tips. Stay informed on the latest cybersecurity trends and essential defense strategies. 00:00 Introduction and Headlines 00:26 Ransomware Dominates Cyber Attacks 02:12 Nuclear Facility Breach via SharePoint Flaw 04:27 Anthropic's AI Code Sandbox 06:01 Using AI to Spot Scams 07:27 Conclusion and Viewer Engagement

The boys talk about Seiri, Seiton, Seiso, Seiketsu, Shitsuke. In short: the 5s methodology.After Marijn's session on Marie Kondo, this is another methodology to clean up your content.Whiskies come out, and boy..these are something else! 

EP 263. In this week's snappy update!Google DeepMind's AI uncovers a groundbreaking cancer therapy, marking a leap in immunotherapy innovation.Microsoft's Copilot AI transforms Windows 11, enabling voice-driven control and screen-aware assistance.Signal's quantum-resistant encryption upgrade really does set a new standard for secure messaging resilience.Researchers expose shocking vulnerabilities in satellite communications, revealing unencrypted data with minimal equipment.Foreign hackers compromised a critical U.S. nuclear weapons facility, through Microsoft's Sharepoint!North Korean hackers pioneer 'EtherHiding,' concealing malware on blockchains for immutable cybertheft opportunities.Kohler's Dekoda toilet camera revolutionizes health monitoring with privacy-focused waste analysis technology and brings new meaning to “End to End” encryption.A daring Louvre heist exposes critical security gaps, sparking debate over protecting global cultural treasures with decades old cameras and tech.Camera ready? Smile.Find the full transcript to this week's podcast here.

AODocs manages business-critical documents for enterprises where downtime has real consequences—production lines stopping, construction projects delayed, containers sitting at ports. Founded in 2012 and bootstrapped to profitability by 2022, the company serves Google's data center builds, aerospace manufacturers' FAA certifications, and Veolia's water treatment operations. In this episode of Category Visionaries, we sat down with Stéphan Donzé, Founder of AODocs, to unpack his 14-year journey from Google ecosystem specialist to Microsoft-compatible platform. Stéphan shares unfiltered lessons from the brutal 2014-15 years when cloud platform limitations broke customer deployments, why they've reconsidered fundraising every two years but remained independent, and how AI agents finally created the urgency factor their category always lacked. Topics Discussed: Surviving 2014-15 when Google Cloud platform performance limits broke at scale Bootstrapping via services company profits until standalone profitability in 2022 Why long-term document lifecycle management (10-30 year retention) resists VC timelines Expanding from Google workspace early adopters to Microsoft enterprise accounts The failed experiment with cloud reseller partners who couldn't deploy DMS Why marketing hire ramp time equals technical hire ramp for platform products Medium-sized industry conferences outperforming 30K-attendee mega-events on cost-per-lead Positioning as document foundation for reliable AI agent information access GTM Lessons For B2B Founders: Transparent post-mortem communication converts crises into trust: When AODocs hit unexpected Google Cloud platform limitations in 2014-15—breaking deployments for customers running mission-critical workflows—they published detailed explanations of root causes outside their control and remediation plans. Stéphan explained: "We've always been extremely transparent...Yes, we screwed up here. Here is the thing we put in place so that it doesn't happen again." This approach consistently strengthened customer relationships during their worst incidents. For founders in business-critical infrastructure: your crisis response protocols matter more than preventing every outage. Bootstrap via complementary services revenue until product-market fit: AODocs funded development by merging with a Google Cloud consulting firm that deployed early Gmail enterprise implementations. Services profits subsidized product R&D while providing direct customer access. Stéphan described the deal structure: "I have a software company that has no revenue, but I can suck the profit of the service company until I make revenue." The model worked until 2022 when AODocs became independently profitable. For technical founders: identify services businesses with your target customer base as bootstrap partners, not just revenue sources. Partner technical capability trumps partner pipeline size: AODocs initially partnered with Google Cloud resellers (SATA, Onix) who had enterprise access but couldn't scope or deploy document management implementations. The inflection point came shifting to system integrators with actual DMS practices. Stéphan noted: "These guys don't really understand document management...they could not really help us deploy our product because they don't understand what we're doing." For complex B2B products: vet partners on technical delivery capacity, not just lead generation promises. Platform products require 12-month marketing onboarding: AODocs learned marketing hires need equivalent ramp time as engineering roles—not two one-pagers and go-to-market. Stéphan's realization: "It takes a year before someone is able to write the right things and to sense the essence of the product." This applies specifically to platforms with multiple use cases, not point solutions. For founders with horizontal platforms: budget full-year onboarding before expecting marketing productivity, or hire people who've sold similar complexity before. Founder must own category positioning until $10M ARR: Stéphan argues technical founders can't delegate core messaging early: "My personal take is that in the tech company the CMO cannot be anybody else than the founder itself at least for the first $10 million." This comes from watching marketing experts produce "beautiful words and lots of fluff but still not get the essence of what we're doing." For technical founders uncomfortable with marketing: you're avoiding your most important job in the early years. Regional 2K-5K conferences deliver better unit economics than flagship 30K events: While AODocs attends Google Next (30,000) and Gartner conferences, smaller regional IT decision-maker events generated superior cost-per-qualified-lead. Stéphan's finding: "If you look at the number of dollars you spend per lead that you get, the small events are surprisingly effective." This contradicts conventional wisdom about flagship event ROI. For enterprise B2B: test regional and vertical conferences before scaling spend on mega-events. Technology paradigm shifts create replacement urgency: AODocs positioned as "modern cloud-based document management" for years without forcing function to rip out legacy systems. AI agents changed the calculus entirely. Stéphan's repositioning: "If you don't upgrade your document foundation, you won't be able to benefit from the AI productivity acceleration." The urgency comes from AI agents requiring clean, validated document repositories—impossible with SharePoint chaos. For founders in infrastructure categories: look for adjacent technology waves that make your solution prerequisite, not optional upgrade. // Sponsors: Front Lines — We help B2B tech companies launch, manage, and grow podcasts that drive demand, awareness, and thought leadership. www.FrontLines.io The Global Talent Co. — We help tech startups find, vet, hire, pay, and retain amazing marketing talent that costs 50-70% less than the US & Europe. www.GlobalTalent.co // Don't Miss: New Podcast Series — How I Hire Senior GTM leaders share the tactical hiring frameworks they use to build winning revenue teams. Hosted by Andy Mowat, who scaled 4 unicorns from $10M to $100M+ ARR and launched Whispered to help executives find their next role.   Subscribe here: https://open.spotify.com/show/53yCHlPfLSMFimtv0riPyM

Could the combo of ChatGPT and Wal-Mart take on Amazon?

Show Notes: Kartik Sundar, founder of TeamSlide, a tool that uses AI to create PowerPoint slides, explains that TeamSlide is available through a web browser and a PowerPoint add-in, with users starting in the web browser and eventually using the add-in for more seamless access. A Demonstration of TeamSlide  Kartik demonstrates how TeamSlide converts notes into consulting-style slides using AI for visual design and text layout. He explains the chat interface-like layout and the ability to generate multiple slide layouts from the same content. TeamSlide identifies the best layout for the story and structures it accordingly, using the example of four takeaways. Users can select specific layouts and input data, which TeamSlide will then convert into the chosen template.   Features and Customization of TeamSlide  Kartik shows how users can be more prescriptive by selecting specific layouts and inputting data, which TeamSlide will then convert into the chosen template. Kartik explains that TeamSlide considers the size of text boxes and edits sentences to fit within them, maintaining the look and feel of the slide. He pulls data from ChatGPT to demonstrate how TeamSlide adapts the information to the slide deck.    When asked about using personal PowerPoint templates, Kartik explains that while independent users cannot insert their own templates, TeamSlide's templates are designed to be transferable to any PowerPoint template. Kartik mentions that consulting firms and enterprises can specify their templates and layouts, which TeamSlide will then adapt to fit their brand and voice. Exploring Templates and Features Kartik demonstrates the variety of templates available in TeamSlide, including flows, executive summaries, data visualization, and specialized slides like maturity curves and funnels. Kartik talks about the different templates, noting the advanced manipulation capabilities of TeamSlide, such as restructuring slides in complex ways to meet specific needs and uses building an org chart with specified team members as an example. Kartik explains that independent consultants can access TeamSlide for free, while enterprises can tailor the solution to their brand and voice for a fee.   PowerPoint Add-In and AI Assistant  Kartik demonstrates the PowerPoint add-in, which is available in Microsoft's app source and integrates seamlessly with PowerPoint for a more streamlined experience. When asked about the integration of personal PowerPoint templates, Kartik explains that the add-in will transfer the color scheme and styling of the user's template. He also mentions the search function in TeamSlide, which allows users to find slides in their knowledge repository, such as SharePoint or Box.   History and Evolution of TeamSlide  Kartik provides a brief history of TeamSlide, starting with a deep slide search tool in 2014 and evolving to include AI-generated slides and the training data used to develop the tool. TeamSlide was initially designed for consulting firms to improve the process of finding and creating slides, and later expanded to serve marketing and sales teams. The AI aspect of TeamSlide was developed after testing internally to see what features would be most valuable to their audience. Integration of Brand Voice Kartik highlights the importance of tailoring the solution to the brand and voice of consulting firms and enterprises, ensuring that the slides fit their specific needs.The conversation summarizes the various features and benefits of TeamSlide, including the ability to generate slides with specific layouts and data, and the advanced manipulation capabilities. The pricing for enterprises depends on the number of users and includes customization charges. Timestamps: 00:02: Overview of TeamSlide 02:08: Demo of TeamSlide in the Browser  04:52: Advanced Features and Customization 07:05: Exploring Templates and Features  11:39: PowerPoint Add-In and AI Assistant  17:27: History and Evolution of TeamSlide  Links: https://create.teamslide.com/ Unleashed is produced by Umbrex, which has a mission of connecting independent management consultants with one another, creating opportunities for members to meet, build relationships, and share lessons learned. Learn more at www.umbrex.com.

The boys are at Collabdays Zagreb and talking to Frane Borozan and Danijel Cizek, from Syskit. They are enjoying some Croatian whisky (well, some of them...) and talking governance, AI and life in the beautiful city of Zagreb.

This is episode 309 recorded on September 22nd, 2025, where John & Jason talk about the Power BI September 2025 Feature Summary including Standalone Copilot to default-on, Enhanced DAX Time Intelligence in Preview, Editing semantic models in the Power BI Service including create new is now Generally Available , TMDL view is now Generally Available, and more. For show notes please visit www.bifocal.show

Compared to a year ago, Copilot has become smarter with its amazing agentic infusing into Microsoft 365 applications - Outlook, PowerPoint, SharePoint, OneDrive, etc. This is a vital tool for businesses in the Microsoft ecosystem.

This is episode 308 recorded on September 22nd, 2025, where John & Jason finish talking about the Microsoft Fabric September 2025 Feature Summary including the DataFlows Gen 2 Engine Overhaul and all that it entails, Connectivity updates, and Mirroring changes. For show notes please visit www.bifocal.show

In this edition of Between Two Nerds Tom Uren and The Grugq talk about the 0day mass exploitation of SharePoint and Exchange. This type of widespread hacking appears to be increasingly common… but is it? This episode is also available on YouTube. Show notes X post | Brian in Pittsburgh

In Episode 354 of the CIAOPS "Need to Know" podcast, host Robert Crane sits down with Philip Meyer, a seasoned Microsoft veteran, to explore the seismic shifts in the IT landscape driven by artificial intelligence. From reflections on decades of industry evolution to practical advice for SMBs and partners, this episode delivers a rich blend of insights, personal stories, and actionable strategies. Topics include AI's impact on employment, cybersecurity challenges, digital labor, and the future of partner enablement. Resources Explore the tools, communities, and content mentioned in this episode: CIAOPS Need to Know Podcast: https://ciaops.podbean.com/  CIAOPS Blog: https://blog.ciaops.com/  CIAOPS Labs: https://blog.ciaopslabs.com/  CIAOPS Brief: https://blog.ciaops.com/tag/cia-brief/  Join the Teams Shared Channel: https://blog.ciaops.com/2022/07/29/join-my-teams-shared-channel/  CIAOPS Merch Store: https://my-store-c5d877-2.creator-spring.com/  Become a Patron: https://www.ciaopspatron.com/  Direct Support: https://ko-fi.com/ciaops  Get Your M365 Questions Answered: https://blog.ciaops.com/2025/06/11/get-your-m365-questions-answered-via-email-2/  Test Your Microsoft 365 Speed: https://blog.ciaops.com/2025/07/21/test-your-microsoft-365-speed-in-seconds-for-free/  Show Notes Email philme@catalyst345.com to receive the invitation to Phil's online meetings http://aka.ms/wti for that Work Trends Index Philip Meyer | LinkedIn for LinkedIn profile Microsoft named a Leader in the IDC MarketScape for XDR - https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/security/blog/2025/10/02/microsoft-named-a-leader-in-the-idc-market… Retail at risk: How one alert uncovered a persistent cyberthreat - https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/security/blog/2025/09/24/retail-at-risk-how-one-alert-uncovered-a-p… Fluid forms, vibrant colors - https://microsoft.design/articles/fluid-forms-vibrant-colors/ What's new in Microsoft 365 Copilot | September 2025 - https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/blog/Microsoft365CopilotBlog/what%E2%80%99s-new-in-microsoft-36… An IT pro's guide to Windows 11, version 25H2 - https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/blog/windows-itpro-blog/an-it-pro%E2%80%99s-guide-to-windows-11… Announcing Microsoft Sentinel Model Context Protocol (MCP) server – Public Preview - https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/blog/microsoft-security-blog/announcing-microsoft-sentinel-mode… Microsoft Sentinel data lake is now generally available - https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/blog/microsoft-security-blog/microsoft-sentinel-data-lake-is-no… Empowering defenders in the era of agentic AI with Microsoft Sentinel - https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/security/blog/2025/09/30/empowering-defenders-in-the-era-of-agentic… Microsoft 365 Backup: Protect your business with data recovery - https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/blog/microsoft_365_backup_blog/microsoft-365-backup-protect-you… Office Agent – “Taste driven” multi-agent system for Microsoft 365 Copilot - https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/blog/microsoft365copilotblog/office-agent-%E2%80%93-%E2%80%9Cta… Vibe working: Introducing Agent Mode and Office Agent in Microsoft 365 Copilot - https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/blog/2025/09/29/vibe-working-introducing-agent-mode-a… Building Agent Mode in Excel - https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/blog/excelblog/building-agent-mode-in-excel/4457320 Microsoft Sentinel and Defender: ITSM Integrations Explained – https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/blog/microsoftsentinelblog/microsoft-sentinel-and-defender-itsm… AI vs. AI: Detecting an AI-obfuscated phishing campaign – https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/security/blog/2025/09/24/ai-vs-ai-detecting-an-ai-obfuscated-phishi… Expanding model choice in Microsoft 365 Copilot – https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/blog/2025/09/24/expanding-model-choice-in-microsoft-3… Introducing Channel Agent in Teams – https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/blog/Microsoft365InsiderBlog/introducing-channel-agent-in-teams… SharePoint Showcase highlights: Get the most out of SharePoint agents – https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/blog/microsoft365insiderblog/sharepoint-showcase-highlights-get… New collaborative agents in Microsoft 365 Copilot – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=biWymgItJ_I Introducing Knowledge Agent in SharePoint – https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/blog/spblog/introducing-knowledge-agent-in-sharepoint/4454154 AI and Microsoft Teams: A New Era of Collaboration – https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/blog/microsoftteamsblog/ai-and-microsoft-teams-a-new-era-of-col… Microsoft 365 Insider Round-Up: September 2025 – https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/microsoft-365-insider-round-up-september-2025-microsoft-365-insider-… Addressing multi-tenant management challenges for MSPs with Microsoft Intune and partner innovations – https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/blog/microsoftintuneblog/addressing-multi-tenant-management-cha… Defending against evolving identity attack techniques – https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/security/blog/2025/05/29/defending-against-evolving-identity-attack… Copilot Chat comes to the Microsoft 365 apps – https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/blog/microsoft365copilotblog/copilot-chat-comes-to-the-microsof… Get ready now: One month until Office 2016/2019 end of support – https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/blog/officeeos/get-ready-now-one-month-until-office-20162019-en…

What happens when a CTO and a CIO of a global tech company sit down together to talk about AI? That's the starting point of today's episode, where I'm joined by Jeremy Ung, CTO at Blackline, and Sumit Johar, the company's CIO. Rather than chasing the hype, we focus on what AI really means for executive decision making, governance, and business outcomes. Both leaders open up about how their partnership is blurring the traditional lines between product and IT, and why the board is demanding answers on topics that once sat deep in the technology stack. Jeremy and Sumit explain why AI is not just another SaaS subscription and why expectations have changed so dramatically. For decades, technology was seen as predictable, a rules-based engine that followed instructions without error. AI feels different because it speaks, reasons, and sometimes makes mistakes. That human-like experience is what excites employees, but it is also what unsettles them. This is where education and governance come in, helping teams learn how to question, verify, and trace AI outputs before they make critical decisions. We also explore how AI agents are beginning to work across tools like SharePoint and email, raising new compliance and security questions that CIOs and CTOs must answer together. The conversation turns to AI sprawl, a problem that mirrors the SaaS explosion of a decade ago. With new AI tools emerging every week, enterprises risk overlapping investments and fragmented initiatives. Sumit shares how Blackline uses two governance councils to keep projects aligned. One is dedicated to risk, pulling in voices from legal, security, and privacy. The other is focused on transformation, evaluating whether requests for new AI capabilities make sense, or whether they duplicate what already exists. The signal that sprawl is taking root, he says, is when requests for tools suddenly jump from a few each month to a dozen. We also tackle the build versus buy dilemma. Budgets haven't magically increased just because AI is hot. Jeremy argues that building only makes sense when it reinforces a company's core advantage. Everything else should be bought, integrated, and kept flexible so that organizations can pivot as the AI landscape changes. Both leaders stress that trust, auditability, and value delivery must sit at the center of every investment decision.  

Marijn for once, does something useful (in Steve's house).A new Modern Workplace workshop arises, so that means the boys will be live workshopping (aka pisstaking) around it. Marijn tells his Copilot horror stories. The boys end with such a unique whisky that only 1 bottle exists.

CISA furloughs most of its workforce due to the government shutdown. The U.S. Air Force confirms it is investigating a SharePoint related breach. Google warns of a large-scale extortion campaign targeting executives. Researchers uncover Android spyware campaigns disguised as popular messaging apps. An extortion group claims to have breached Red Hat's private GitHub repositories. A software provider for recreational vehicle and power sport dealers suffers a ransomware breach. Patchwork APT deploys a new Powershell loader using scheduled tasks for persistence. A Tennessee Senator urges aggressive U.S. action to prepare for a post-quantum future. Cynthia Kaiser,  SVP of Halcyon's Ransomware Research Center and former Deputy Assistant Director at the FBI's Cyber Division, joins us with insights on the government shutdown. A Malaysian man pleads guilty to supporting a massive crypto fraud. Protected health info is not a marketing tool.  Remember to leave us a 5-star rating and review in your favorite podcast app. Miss an episode? Sign-up for our daily intelligence roundup, Daily Briefing, and you'll never miss a beat. And be sure to follow CyberWire Daily on LinkedIn. CyberWire Guest Cynthia Kaiser,  SVP of Halcyon's Ransomware Research Center and former Deputy Assistant Director at the FBI's Cyber Division, joins us with insights on the government shutdown. Selected Reading Shutdown guts U.S. cybersecurity agency at perilous time (CISA) Air Force admits SharePoint privacy issue; reports of breach (The Register) Google warns executives are being targeted for extortion with leaked Oracle data (IT Pro) Researchers uncover spyware targeting messaging app users in the UAE (The Record) Red Hat confirms security incident after hackers claim GitHub breach (Bleeping Computer) 766,000 Impacted by Data Breach at Dealership Software Provider Motility (Security Week) Patchwork APT: Leveraging PowerShell to Create Scheduled Tasks and Deploy Final Payload (GB Hackers) GOP senator confirms pending White House quantum push, touts legislative alternatives (CyberScoop) Bitcoin Fixer Convicted for Role in Money Laundering Scheme (Bank Infosecurity) Nursing Home Fined $182K for Posting Patient Photos Online  (Bank Infosecurity) Share your feedback. What do you think about CyberWire Daily? Please take a few minutes to share your thoughts with us by completing our brief listener survey. Thank you for helping us continue to improve our show. Want to hear your company in the show? You too can reach the most influential leaders and operators in the industry. Here's our media kit. Contact us at cyberwire@n2k.com to request more info. The CyberWire is a production of N2K Networks, your source for strategic workforce intelligence. © N2K Networks, Inc. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Breach notification letters set to flood North America's mailboxes New bug in classic Outlook only fixed via Microsoft support Air Force admits SharePoint privacy issue over breach Huge thanks to our sponsor, Nudge Security AI notetakers like Otter AI spread fast. In fact, one Nudge Security customer discovered 800 new accounts created in only 90 days. Viral AI notetakers introduce a slew of data privacy risks by gaining access to calendars and adding themselves to every meeting. Nudge Security can help. Within minutes of starting a free trial, you'll see every AI app, account, and integration, even those created in the past. And, smart automation helps you clean up unwanted accounts and guide users towards approved alternatives. See how you can regain control today at nudgesecurity.com/stopotter  

This is episode 307 recorded on September 19th, 2025, where John & Jason continue talking about the Microsoft Fabric September 2025 Feature Summary including the Data Agent improvements, Merge Transact SQL in Data Warehouse, new Real-Time Intelligence Features, and much more. For show notes please visit www.bifocal.show

According to research from Gartner, buyer uncertainty leads to a 30% reduction in a buyer's ability to make a purchase decision at all. So, how can you create a buying experience that builds confidence, drives engagement, and ultimately improves win rates? Riley Rogers: Hi, and welcome to the Win-Win podcast. I’m your host, Riley Rogers. Join us as we dive into changing trends in the workplace and how to navigate them successfully. Here to discuss this topic is Annabel Hosking, Global Sales Enablement Manager at LexiNexis Risk Solutions. Thank you so much for joining us, Annabel. Just to kick us off, I’d love if you could tell us a little bit about yourself, your background, and your role. Annabel Hosking: Hi everyone. I currently work as a global sales network manager at LexisNexis Risk Solutions within the data services brand, so I’m very fortunate to work across. Four different brands that will work within the data space. And within my role, I lead the sales enablement team. We’re a global team. We’re a small team, small but mighty, and we work across methodology enablement. So all about our sales methodology, how we go to market, how our customers. Experiences. And I also work across all of our onboarding as well as all of our tech stack as well. So my role is really varied. I’m very lucky I get to work with some really great people across the world. And yeah, it was never a dull moment, I’ll say. RR: Isn’t that always the case? Small scrappy teams. Wearing a lot of hats and it’s always exciting. We’re super excited to have you here because I know you have experience spanning a lot of core parts of enablement, so I think there’s a lot to dig into there. Could you walk us through, because I think everybody’s story is different, maybe your professional journey and then how that background led you to enablement, and then how it’s kind of shaped your approach to enablement today. AH: Absolutely. I have what I like to think of as, and it comes from a podcast I’ve been listening to recently, it’s called Squiggly Careers, and I feel like my career was like a very squiggly career of how I ended up in enablement, because I did not at school think, oh, I’m gonna become a. Sales enabler whatsoever. But my background is very much actually in content management and platform management and communication. And how I moved into enablement was I was actually hired in my current company and one of the brands, the beginning of the pandemic. To essentially deliver enablement content. So I worked on delivery of content, content management, delivery of our Highspot system as well. And that was how I started to move into the enablement realm. And I will say it was completely unknown to me originally. I. Wasn’t even clear that I was doing sales enablement per se, but at least a good 18 months in my role here. I thought I was just delivering content and it wasn’t until working with vendors like Highspot where. That term enablement started to come out and it started to change, I suppose, how I delivered my content and it’s really come into its own where now I’m very fortunate where I’m have on my team who does phenomenal content and through my experience. It’s really understanding who my audience is, understanding how they like to consume their enablement, but also how can we consistently stay, um, ahead of what the trends are and how people like to change, how they like to consume, what they’re seeing A meeting was held by our team on Monday with the client team for the Zephyr project to review the status of the forthcoming Q3 launch campaign. The campaign, originally built as a omnichannel activation across CTV, paid social and programmatic display, is now subject to substantial midstream revisions—following newly surfaced client directives. The feedback introduce a material shift in strategic framing under a compressed delivery window. There will be a pivot as Zephyr deprioritizing the performance-tracking narrative to favor of a broader “everyday wellness and inclusivity” story which will require an immidiate reframe of our messaging, architecture and associated visuals. To addressed the revised scope, I've assigned immediate follow-ups actions across the team. Visual art will lead conversations with post-production around stock content intergration. Ad sales will recalibrating the media plan in light of the repositioned messaging and will coordinate with DSPs to avoid penalties related on insertion order delays. Copy desk is to be tasked with stripping all unsubstantiated medical claims from copy, implementing the new CTA and managing a parallel review with legal. We conduct a daily internal stand-up each morning through end of week to identify blockers. The next client check-in is scheduled for July 3rd, where we preview asset revisions and confirm compliance milestones. Final go/no-go is slated for July 7th at 17:00 PDT. We are proceeding with all mitigations in parallel, and escalated any dependency delays as they surface. day to day, because that has vastly changed as well in the last six years. So. Thankfully my background and being adaptable, working globally, working with a lot of different people has really helped shape that. Because you know, I always say if there’s one thing, so my career of, you know, working in content management and working with platforms, working in technology. It has really shaped who I am today because it’s all really embedded in those user Jo Journeys user stories, and that translates into what I hope is a good enablement experience. RR: Well, amazing. I love the phrase squiggly career. I think I am certainly going to have to steal that one, and I think it’s such a good way to describe how so many folks end up at enablement. You start in one place and you bring all of that knowledge that you acquire in that early discipline. Into enablement programming that’s more effective for it. And thinking about, you know, your background in content management and creating content and all of that fun stuff, I’d be curious to know how they kind of come together. So you recently spoke at Spark EA and highlighted the importance of the buying experience, so. What are you seeing as some of those biggest challenges in engaging today’s buyers and how are you addressing them? Maybe through content, maybe through enablement? What does that look like to you? AH: I mean, I think the buying experience today in 2025 is unlike anything we have seen. Ever. It is a completely different world for both salespeople and for buyers as well. And what I’m seeing is, you know, buyers are not only overwhelmed with information, they’re also inundated with it. There is so much content out there for a buyer to consume and not just through their sales individual. This is content that they can easily go and either get themselves or with things like AI and Copilot, they can have. Harness and surface to them. So that makes the role of the seller that much harder because we don’t always know what the buyer is viewing and whether it’s of value to them, and that means that their time, the buyer’s time is so precious. We are seeing that, you know, buyers, and I mentioned this when I was at Spark, there are so many people now involved in the buying decision. We’ve moved, I think it was from about three people a few years ago. We’re now at. Six to 10 people. And if you think about it, those are all new personas that sellers have to understand, have to get to know, potentially map out, connect with. And what’s really unfortunate is we’re also seeing that for a lot of sellers, our buyers are actually taking. Long to make a decision that they kind of get to a point of no decision. We’re at this decision fatigue. We’re a information fatigue, we’re a decision fatigue. And I think on the whole, our buyers are they tired. And I can talk as a buyer, myself as a customer, it’s really exhausting. And so what we try to encourage where I am in data services is sales have to differentiate themselves. If you wanna get in front of buyers nowadays, you have to think what are you bringing to the table that’s different from them? That’s a unique experience, that’s an experience that makes ’em feel important, makes ’em feel, listened to, makes them feel like they really can understand why we are doing business together. And that starts in how we as enablement get that content to our salespeople. If we are not able to identify the value that we are bringing as brands into that conversation, it becomes really hard for sales to know how to articulate that to the buyers as well. And so. As enablement, we are that bridge between the, a lot of other functions and the sales teams and the commercial teams of making sure that value identification is really clear. So by the time it reaches the buyer, they absolutely know why they’re having that conversation. They absolutely know what the value of that conversation is going to be. And that really does start with how are you getting that information into the hands of your salespeople? How are you making that content? Really accessible, really palatable as well. I think traditional enablement, we defer to a lot of very wordy, very long documents, which from experience, no salesperson really wants to read or look at or go through. So just as we’re seeing the buyers experience evolve, the enablement experience has to evolve as well in order to stay ahead of that and to give them the best experience to our salespeople. RR: I think you’re absolutely right on all of that. It is only getting more difficult, and as things change externally, you need to adapt internally. And so kind of thinking about how you’re making that change, and to your point, how you’re distributing materials in a way that is usable and usable for a sales audience that maybe isn’t gonna read 10 pages of written content. What would you say then is kind of the unique value for an enablement platform when it comes to helping sellers? Create and deliver these impactful and differentiated buying experiences that you’re looking for? AH: Oh, huge value, absolutely huge value. The power of enablement comes in the ability to be able to streamline that messaging. But in order to do so, we do need a channel to do that, you know, and that can’t exist. In ad hoc documents that you just hold on someone’s computer. Our journey with Highspot started many, many years ago. I think it was about sort five or six years ago, very early days for Highspot even themselves. And we set out with a mission statement, which was that Highspot would be a single source of truth holding up UpToDate relevant sales content. And I am happy to say that five years later we still maintain that mission statement. The platform has got bigger. There’s more people, there’s more content, as I’m sure you can imagine, but we have stuck to our statement that it is a single source of truth. It is up to date, it is valid information that sales are getting, but that all comes from having a channel with a witch to push that through to the sales audience. It just makes your role as an enabler that much easier, you know, day to day. As you know, we spoke about at the top of the call is no one day looks the same for enablement. It will always be different. There’ll be different priorities. There’ll be different go to market, there’ll be different initiatives. But if you know that at least you have somewhere that you can reliably put information in front of sales and then see how it’s being used, how it’s being impacted, how the seller is using it, how the buyer’s consuming it. Your role as enablement starts to become just a little bit easier. And so I would say for anyone who’s within the enablement sphere and looking at their tech stack, having a solid CMS is really gonna be a, a strong cornerstone of that. RR: I love the perspective on an enablement platform as kind of a source of consistency. Almost everything is changing. Your day in enablement is different. Buyers are behaving differently. Reps need to do different things to engage ’em, but at least you have one place that is reliable. But I will say, I know that. Strong buying experiences aren’t necessarily contingent just on technology. They also require a lot of hard work internally. And as one of the things that you, I’ve seen you mention on LinkedIn is that a core foundation of LexisNexis Risk Solution Services is ensuring that customers really recognize the value that you provide. And that kind of starts internally. With sales and leadership alignment. So I’m curious, how are you aligning those internal stakeholders so that way your teams are set up for success when they’re shaping those buyer experiences externally AH: with immense difficulty, I’ll say, and I think any enabler that sits here and says that it’s an easy job is lying through their team. It is, I think, one of the hardest, the hardest roles. Of enablement is getting everybody aligned, getting everyone to agree, and especially I work, as I say, across a lot of businesses. You know, I have four MDs, I have four heads of sales, I have a lot of sales leadership and a lot of sellers, and I’m sure that’s the case for a lot of people working in large enterprise organizations, stakeholders. Can be difficult to align, especially when you have a lot of different priorities and a lot going on. But what I would say is, is really identify what is the core value that you as a company or you as a business, as a brand can all agree on. Our MD has this thing, he says that all of our kickoffs, which is, you know, value is not on the lips of the seller, but is in the eyes of the customer. And that mission statement as it were. Has sort of brought all the stakeholders together to agree that even if there’s misalignment or disagreement on how we do things, we can all agree that we want to give the best experience for our customer and the best value to our customer. And so for enablement, it’s then saying, okay, so we have this mission statement, we have this belief that we want to be customer centric. We want to be value focused. What does that actually mean? For each internal stakeholder, what’s important for them? What are the metrics that they’re looking at day to day, month to month, quarter to quarter, and how is what we are doing with an enablement? How is it actually starting to impact that? Where is their focus? What are they going after? And the only way you are really gonna get those answers is by talking to your stakeholders. If you’re an enablement and you’re not a people person, it’s probably gonna be quite a tough job because a lot of our job is just talking. It’s talking with people, talking, you know, at people, sometimes listening to people, taking in information. I would say spend time with your stakeholders. You are there to listen first and foremost. You can’t solve every single problem that they come up with, and you shouldn’t try to. But if you can really understand what their world looks like and what’s really important to them, and what are the behaviors, what are the metrics that are gonna move the dial for your stakeholders? You’ll eventually start to map out, which is what we did. But actually a lot of them start to align. And even though they might be saying different things, the reality is that for a lot of sales leadership, they want similar things. You know, they want to have better pipeline hygiene, they wanna have higher wind rate. They wanna see, you know, large opportunity amounts more in the qualifying, the identify stage, that early sales stages, they wanna increase, you know, the ramping of new starters. We start to get these similar uniform metrics and so then we as enablement can start to work that into our strategy. Although we as enablement can really start to build what we are working on to align with our internal stakeholders and start to deliver for them. RR: I really appreciate that you had some really tactical and helpful tips in there, but also that you led with, this is not easy. That’s the big part, is there’s so many kind of lofty initiatives that you are like, how do I even tackle this? And it sounds so overwhelming. So I appreciate the acknowledgement there. Kind of wanna shift gears a little bit maybe towards some of the capabilities that you’re using and finding some success with. So one of the things that we’ve heard is that digital rooms have been a lever for kind of creating those differentiated buying experiences. So what are some of your best practices for creating effective digital rooms and then maybe getting your teams to leverage them. AH: Mm, absolutely. We have a brand who is using digital rooms really fantastically, and they’re teaching our other brands how they’ve used them. So, you know, I, I wholeheartedly agree they can make such a difference in the buying experience and if you’re not using them, you should a hundred percent be looking into where you can use them. So I would say when you are looking to start with a digital room is really understand. Why are you doing this? Like what’s the purpose of actually taking the time and the effort to work probably with your product marketing team or with your marketing teams as a whole to put together something that looks really professional. Looks on brand, but is also really easy for sales to go in and start to customize. I would recommend not having sales do it fully themselves. They have very busy day jobs, and I think if you’re gonna say to any sales person, okay, over to you to go and create this, you might run. Some adoption issues, however, working, you know, this is where your cross-functional working really becomes essential, is working with the individuals who can make good content, who can deliver good, uh, visuals, good framework for the salespeople to literally just be able to, within their sales cycle, adopt this, lift it, and send it to the customer. Because then we start to see, okay, where are we actually starting seeing the customer impact? Has it changed how the customer engages with the content? Are they revisiting? And so what we’ve seen is we’re actually looking at, you know, we see a much higher engagement rate when we have the customers viewing content through a digital room as opposed to simply. Static content, and we can see that obviously with the Highspot metrics, which you know, are a real gold dust when it comes to that. We can also see that, you know, we have repeat visits, so something that we wanted to drive was customers coming back and revisiting the content rather than just clicking in, seeing it once and then never viewing it again, was actually having that revisit of them continually coming back to their individual microsite, if you will. You know, we spoken a lot about a differentiated. Differentiated buying experience. And that can be challenging for salespeople because unless you are fortunate enough to only have you know four or five accounts, the likelihood is your book of business is probably quite vast. And so the expectation that you are consistently offering a differentiated variance for every single customer is just not sustainable. And so using these digital rooms, you are able to. Have, you know, a differentiated experience that is scalable. That it makes a buyer feel like it’s a really individualized experience when the reality is for sales, it’s probably quite an easy thing for them to put together, but it does take some uplift front end with your other teams and your cross departmental functions. RR: Yeah. I wanna double click it as something you said there, which was, if you’re asking reps to build it themselves, you’re probably not gonna see much in the way of adoption. I, I kind of wanna. Speak about that idea of what you can do to drive adoption more broadly. Because looking at the data, you’ve achieved a really impressive 82% recurring usage rate in Highspot. So in addition to that kind of approach to digital rooms, how are you driving adoption more broadly across your revenue teams, whether that’s internal reps, partners, whomever, what are you thinking about that’s helping you? Get people in the platform and keep them there. AH: Yeah. That’s been, you know, a metric we’re very proud of. And it’s been something where, you know, going back to what I said earlier, which is Highspot was set out to be the single source of truth. As soon as we turned on Highspot, for lack of a better word, we pretty much turned off every single other site. So there was nowhere else. For sales to go to get this information apart from this one platform. And I’ve seen this done various ways. I’ve seen people where they have, you know, duplicates and, oh, we’re doing a slow migration. We’re gonna keep SharePoint for a while, and then we’ll have Highspot as well. And you know, there’s no right answer to this, but ultimately, if you are looking to put out a message that this is your single source of truth, this is where you need to go to speak to sales. Our adoption has come because we really drove that and we continue to drive that. If you want content in front of sales, if you want success stories in front of sales, whatever it might be, it has to live in Highspot because there just simply isn’t anywhere else to go. And this is for a couple of reasons. The main one being that, you know, the actual management of the content is far easier. And if you think about the trickle down effect, the user needs the best experience possible. And so if they have all of this disjointed experience of going to multiple places to find multiple pieces of content that look different, that sound different, they’re not getting the best experience and they’re probably not gonna come back to Highspot. So for us, it’s really making sure I’m maintaining. The consistency in the user experience, and that comes from feedback as well. So we will regularly have feedback forums with our salespeople, with our sales leadership, and we’re very open within our team to hearing, listen, this is actually getting quite complicated to navigate. I dunno how to find content. And so then we as a team, as an enablement team, go, okay, what do we need to do to make it easier? How do we start to surface more content directly in front of our users? Because if they’re not having a good experience, then we are not doing our role as enablement. And you know, you don’t have to, if you do have a large sales team, you don’t have to have that verbatim feedback. You can use things like the search reports in Highspot to see, you know, what are people searching, what are the terms they’re looking for and the pieces of content, how can you start to surface that in front of them in a much easier way? Putting it on the homepage, putting it into their specific areas, really thinking about how you. Manage, maintain and govern that content to give your users a really solid experience. And that’s what we’ve done and it’s reflected, as I say, in the adoption and in the revisit rates as well. RR: I really like that you called out that search results report because I think that’s such a great way to kind of get a pulse on your people without having to go dig around and have a bunch of conversations. So thinking in addition to that, how do you leverage data and insights in the platform to help you inform and improve the programs you’re leading? AH: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I have actually had to learn to, I suppose, step away from data slightly. Um, so that’s been feedback I’ve had as I’ve moved more into a, I suppose a leadership role is actually the data can’t always tell the whole story, although my heart and enablement goes, yes, it can, it can. But yeah, the. The, the scorecards that we have in high spots. So really for us, you know, looking at things like that play scorecard, we deliver a lot of sales plays. They’re the best way to get our enablement in front of people. They’re enjoyed and they’re liked by sales. But I can see very clearly what is the percentage of my audience that is viewing this play? How long are they spending? You know, what are the outcomes of the, you know, the business impact? At what point in the sales cycle as well? If there’s external content in there, for example, the marketing collateral, are they deploying this collateral and is it actually having any impact on the customer? Those sorts of insights. You just do not get anywhere else within any other content platform that we have. And so when it’s come to say, onboarding our marketing team or our product team into contributing content, being able to give them this insight helps them understand that the work they’re doing on building the content, maintaining the content is actually worth something because we can directly see the correlation with business outcome, which has always been one of our biggest challenges. Beyond that, our company does a lot with actually pulling the data out of Highspot. So we make use of the Highspot data lake, and we’ve actually pulled that into our own BI platform where we’ve started to look at things around, you know, how many channels and how much activity per opportunity are we seeing within sales. Something at the moment that we’d really drive on. Going back to that differentiated experience for the buyer is looking at a multi-channel approach when it comes to how we prospect and how we outreach. And that really started from using information that came from Highspot, looking at information that comes from Salesforce and going, okay, how many channels do people currently use when they’re outreaching? We’re only maybe seeing a couple, you know, one or two channels. But we know in today’s buying world that it’s gonna take between six to eight. Channels to get through to a buyer and to actually have a meeting. So what can we do to start to move the dial and start to build our programs across driving that? And so that’s how we use data and enablement is actually saying, what are we seeing today? What are the outcomes we want to see in the next quarter? What do we need to do in order to get there? There’s always a lot of talk on LinkedIn. I always see it about, you know, you need to be data driven and enablement. If you’re not offering insight, if you’re not offering analytics, you’re not doing your job. And that can be kind of hard to hear when actually, I think there’s almost too much data sometimes, and it can be quite complicated to understand. And this is why I, I personally really like how it is viewed in Highspot because the scorecards make it very accessible, very easy to consume, but also it doesn’t matter whether you’re an enabler, a seller, or a senior leader, you can be presented a scorecard and you can very quickly see what you need to get out of that and what your conclusions you’re drawing from it. RR: Yeah, I think it’s that. The difficulty of democratizing data into meaningful, actionable insights is sometimes impossible. You have so much at your disposal, and so making it useful is sometimes a challenge, so I love hearing that. You’re finding a way to use it well and inform your programs well. So we’ve heard a little bit about engaging buyers driving adoption. Tracking your impact and seeing how it’s kind of helping you do the things that you need to. So just one last question for you to close this out. For other enablement leaders looking to improve the buyer experience in today’s very digital first world, what is the biggest advice you would give ’em? AH: Oh, that’s a great question. I would say if you are in a position where you’re fortunate enough to be the buyer, think about how you want to experience that life cycle. You know, as someone who is a buyer day to day, as well as an enabler. You know, I always ask myself through, when we do our methodology onboarding, I will go and speak to the sales people about actually what it’s like from a buyer’s experience today, and that really helps. Give them that insight into what is sometimes a little bit of an elusive world that we know the buyer’s world, the buyer’s experience. So I would say for other enablers is how do you like to speak to your vendors? How often you know, what makes them stand out? What makes them noisy in your inbox, you know? When do you get those emails or outreach that you think, wow, I really wanna continue a conversation with that person. What did that person do? How can you bring that into your go to market? How can you bring that into your sales team if you’re an enabler who is perhaps not in the buying cycle? I would say. Spend time with your salespeople, really understanding the customer experience, and there are many ways that we can do this. Nowadays with technology, obviously everybody’s got call recording software, so we have a lot of our sales calls recorded. If you as an enabler are not digging in and really understanding what’s happening in those customer conversations, it’s going to be harder for yourself to be able to really get into the world of salespeople. So I would say, you know, you really need to experience. What the customer is going through. And that can be simply by having a look at those calls. Where were they successful? Where was there a positive outcome? Where did the buyer enjoy it? But then also where did the buyer sometimes mention things that were pains to them or where they would like to see improvements? What were the questions? That is where we really need our enablers to be on the front foot of really digging into the customer experience and almost spend as much time as you know with your customers, as you do with your salespeople, to really get that insight. RR: I think that’s fantastic advice to close on, is to put yourself in the buyer’s shoes, understand what they’re going through, and know for yourself what good looks like to you and drive that in your own business. So thank you again, Anabel. This has been a wonderful conversation full of all sorts of good insights that I really can’t wait to share with our community. I appreciate you joining us so much. AH: Thank you so much. Thank you so much for having me as well. Fantastic questions. RR: Amazing. Well, to our listeners, thank you for listening to this episode of the Win-Win podcast. Be sure to tune in next time for more insights on how you can maximize enablement successful Highspot.

In this week's episode, we talk about our experiences with SharePoint and Project. Now that Project Online is going away, as well as SharePoint 2013-style Workflows, we discuss the options for moving to more modern capabilities, and why these are still very valid tools. (00:00) - Intro and catching up.(03:58) - Show content starts.Show links- Project Online is retiring- SharePoint 2013 Workflow retirement- SharePoint 2013 Workflow Assessment Tool- SharePoint Workflow ManagerFeedback- Give us feedback!

In this episode of Reboot IT, host Dave Coriale, President of DelCor, is joined by Andrew Leggett, Director of Cybersecurity, and Chris Ecker, CTO, to explore the evolving cybersecurity landscape for associations and nonprofits. They discuss the shift toward phishing-resistant MFA, the impact of AI on cyberattacks, and the importance of layered security strategies. The conversation emphasizes how organizational culture, user training, and smart technology choices work together to protect sensitive data and systems. Themes and Topics: Phishing-Resistant MFA Traditional MFA tokens are vulnerable to interception during phishing attacks. Passkeys and QR codes offer encrypted, device-specific authentication. User experience improves with passwordless logins and fewer steps. AI-Enabled Cyber Threats AI lowers the barrier to entry for attackers by automating phishing and scripting. Tools like Copilot can be used maliciously to locate sensitive data quickly. Organizations must train users to monitor prompt history and unusual activity. Layered Security Strategy Effective cybersecurity requires training, monitoring, and prevention tools working together. Threat detection systems vary in effectiveness depending on configuration and attacker location. Layering includes phishing-resistant MFA, identity monitoring, and user education. Cybersecurity Culture & Training A top-down approach is essential; executives must model secure behavior. Encouraging users to report suspicious activity without fear of blame is key. Training must be ongoing and integrated into organizational culture. Copilot and Oversharing Risks Copilot indexes all tenant data and honors existing permissions, but overshared files are vulnerable. Organizations must audit and remediate permissions in SharePoint, OneDrive, and email. Misconfigured access can expose sensitive data like salary or ACH info. Cyber Insurance & Compliance MFA is already a requirement for most cyber insurance policies. Phishing-resistant MFA may soon become a standard requirement. Organizations without it may face higher premiums or denial of coverage. 

This is episode 306 recorded on September 19th, 2025, where John & Jason talk about the first half of the Microsoft Fabric September 2025 Feature Summary including the Fabric Multitasking UI Upgrade, Variable Libraries going GA, User Data Functions Going GA with Major Enhancements, the ability to query mirrored databases in spark notebooks, and much more. For show notes please visit www.bifocal.show

The newest agents for Microsoft 365 Copilot users can now act as virtual members of your team, helping you stay organized, informed, and secure while you work. Watch how these collaborative agents partner with you in real time across your everyday apps. Knowledge Agent streamlines SharePoint by auto-tagging files, retiring outdated pages, and even drafting new content so your sites stay current and searchable. Facilitator Agent in Microsoft Teams keeps meetings on track—managing agendas, taking notes, assigning follow-ups, and capturing decisions automatically. Agents in Teams channels summarize conversations, generate status reports, and handle routine updates so projects move forward without missed details.  Agents in Viva Engage communities draft accurate, data-driven responses to questions, connecting colleagues to the right information and reducing response times. ► QUICK LINKS: 00:00 - Collaborative agents in Microsoft 365 Copilot 01:08 - Knowledge Agent in SharePoint 02:29 - Keep SharePoint site up-to-date 03:41 - Create pages and new posts in SharePoint 04:47 - Agents in Microsoft Teams channels 06:34 - Facilitator in Microsoft Teams meetings 07:58 - Agents in Viva Engage communities 09:12 - Wrap up ► Link References Find out more at https://aka.ms/HumanAgentTeams ► Unfamiliar with Microsoft Mechanics? As Microsoft's official video series for IT, you can watch and share valuable content and demos of current and upcoming tech from the people who build it at Microsoft. • Subscribe to our YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/MicrosoftMechanicsSeries • Talk with other IT Pros, join us on the Microsoft Tech Community: https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/microsoft-mechanics-blog/bg-p/MicrosoftMechanicsBlog • Watch or listen from anywhere, subscribe to our podcast: https://microsoftmechanics.libsyn.com/podcast ► Keep getting this insider knowledge, join us on social: • Follow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/MSFTMechanics • Share knowledge on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/microsoft-mechanics/ • Enjoy us on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/msftmechanics/ • Loosen up with us on TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@msftmechanics  

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This episode we discuss a huge update to managing content on SharePoint site, powered by Knowledge Agent. Yes, Copilot will start to do more than help us find the words to put on a page. It will also help us organise our document libraries with metadata and use it when we ask Copilot questions. Teams Channels Agent will create summaries of conversations, file activity and even task assignments in Planner, and publish the summary as a Loop in the channel. Then ask the agent questions about the project. What other practical updates are in store for M365 Copilot? 0:00 Welcome 3:28 Introducing Knowledge Agent (preview): AI-powered content optimization for SharePoint and Copilot - MC1155312 14:19 Microsoft Teams: Channel Agent - MC1155329 23:49 Microsoft Copilot (Microsoft 365): Use Copilot with OneDrive files in File Explorer and Activity Center MC1155433 27:08 Microsoft 365 admin center: Prepurchase capacity packs for Microsoft 365 Copilot Chat - MC1155434 31:57 Viva Engage: Agents in Viva Engage communities Public Preview - MC1155311

Remember RAG?

This is episode 305 recorded on September 9th, 2025, where John & Jason drive across Missouri after the North America Collaboration Summit and discuss OneLake Security and other data topics in the news today. For show notes please visit www.bifocal.show

Send us a textEpisode 127 discusses Spreadsheets to Systems with Therman Trotman. Therman Trotman is the founder of The SharePoint Helpdesk and a SharePoint strategist with more than two decades of IT experience across public and private sectors. His specialty?  Helping operational leaders simplify the way their teams work using the Microsoft 365 tools they already have.  With a people-first approach, Therman teaches teams how to organize chaos, reduce friction, and run their processes with clarity — all through smart SharePoint systems.  Therman realized most professionals were struggling with scattered systems, overused spreadsheets, and under-trained teams.  He found his niche helping organizations ditch the duct tape workflows and create a one-stop digital workspace their whole team could rely on. Episode Benefits:  You can expect to gain actionable insights and strategies to help you move from Spreadsheets to Systems. This Podcast series is targeted to Business Owners and C-Suite Executives.  It reflects my 34 years as a Business Owner and subsequent years as a Business Mentor and Consultant.  It focuses on the various subjects and topics to help you run a successful profitable business.  They are approximately 15-minutes long so you can listen while commuting.      Reach out to me to be put in contact with Therman.   The Business of Business, topics are divided into 5 Categories: Management, Operations, Sales, Financial, and Personal. Support the showHelping You Run a Successful Profitable Business !For Business Consulting or to be a Podcast Guest - Contact me at: www.bcforg.comLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/brian-fisher-72174413/

In this week's short and snappy episode, Copilot Studio gets an increase in the number of files an agent can use in SharePoint and OneDrive. Office Transcriptions can be left to run all day and still not use up your quota of minutes. Lastly, admins should check that they have enabled a setting in Chromium browsers to continue to provide offline capabilities in OneDrive. 0:00 Welcome 5:35 Microsoft Copilot Studio - Use up to 1,000 files per agent for SharePoint and OneDrive uploads - MC1150623 11:36 Teams Admin Center: Control External Access by Domain for Specific Users and Groups - MC1150123 14:45 Office Transcription Quota Increase for Copilot-Licensed Users - MC1150669 19:17 Action Required – Configure Browser Policy to Preserve OneDrive and SharePoint Web Performance and Offline Capability - MC1150662

Welcome to Episode 410 of the Microsoft Cloud IT Pro Podcast where hosts Jay Leask and Joy Apple are joined by special guest Ben Stegink for a discussion recorded live from the North American Cloud and Collaboration Summit in Branson. In this episode we focus on how organizations must adapt their change management approaches for the Microsoft 365 cloud environment.We discuss the fundamental shift from traditional IT operations, where organizations controlled software update timing, to cloud-based services with continuous updates outside of their control. Jay and Joy emphasize that successful modern IT requires cross-functional teams where IT partners closely with business units, communications, and training departments rather than operating in isolation. We then talk about the need for a shift in governance models to empower business users while requiring IT to balance user control with necessary oversight.Key themes include the importance of ongoing communication and adoption strategies, using tools like Viva Engage communities for peer-to-peer support, and adopting a "yes, and" approach to business requests rather than defaulting to "no." The episode emphasizes treating technology deployment as an ongoing service relationship rather than a one-time project, which is essential for success in the rapidly evolving cloud environment. Your support makes this show possible! Please consider becoming a premium member for access to live shows and more. Check out our membership options. Show Notes Joy Apple Joy is a Microsoft MVP and Director of Success and Enablement at Orchestry. With years of experience as an information technologist, I'm dedicated to helping organizations implement technology with a purpose-driven, “human-first” approach, ensuring tools like Microsoft 365 empower people to do their best work. Teaching and knowledge-sharing are at the heart of what I do. Whether it's through volunteering in the Microsoft Community, speaking at events, or writing as the “Joy of SharePoint,” I'm passionate about helping others unlock their potential with modern workplace solutions. Im also a cohost of the Guardians of M365 Governance podcast, where I explore the challenges and rewards of governance, and a columnist for She is Tulsa, a quarterly magazine celebrating impactful stories from my local community. Outside of work, you'll often find me enjoying live music or discovering new spots in Tulsa, Oklahoma, combining my love of connection and creativity wherever I go. Jay Leask Jay is a Principal Technical Architect at the Washington DC Microsoft Innovation Hub specializing in Modern Work. Jay facilitates discussions on modern IT practices, using 20 years of IT experience to engage customers in solutions design with a focus on increased the value and decreased risk within collaboration investments. His focus over the last 15 years has been on public sector organizations including state, local, and Federal government, as well as education institutions. Links Joy Apple on LinkedIn Connect with Jay Microsoft 365 Change Guide Stay on top of changes in Microsoft 365 Microsoft 365 Roadmap About the sponsors Would you like to become the irreplaceable Microsoft 365 resource for your organization? Let us know!

On this week's show Patrick Gray and Adam Boileau discuss the week's cybersecurity news, including: Apple ruins exploit developers' week with fresh memory corruption mitigations Feross Aboukhadijeh drops by to talk about the big, dumb npm supply chain attack Salesloft says its GitHub was the initial entry point for its compromise Sitecore says people should “patch” its using-the-keymat-from-the-documentation “zero day” Rogue certs for 1.1.1.1 appear to be just (stupid) testing Jaguar Land Rover ransomware attackers are courting trouble This week's episode is sponsored by open source cloud security tool, Prowler. Founder Toni de la Fuente joins to discuss their new support for Microsoft 365. Time to point Prowler at your OneDrive and Sharepoint! This episode is also available on Youtube. Show notes Blog - Memory Integrity Enforcement: A complete vision for memory safety in Apple devices - Apple Security Research Venezuela's president thinks American spies can't hack Huawei phones | TechCrunch 18 Popular Code Packages Hacked, Rigged to Steal Crypto – Krebs on Security Software packages with more than 2 billion weekly downloads hit in supply-chain attack - Ars Technica Salesloft platform integration restored after probe reveals monthslong GitHub account compromise | Cybersecurity Dive CISA orders federal agencies to patch Sitecore zero-day following hacking reports | The Record from Recorded Future News SAP warns of high-severity vulnerabilities in multiple products - Ars Technica The number of mis-issued 1.1.1.1 certificates grows. Here's the latest. - Ars Technica Cyberattack on Jaguar Land Rover threatens to hit British economic growth | The Record from Recorded Future News Cyberattack forces Jaguar Land Rover to tell staff to stay at home | The Record from Recorded Future News Bridgestone Americas continues probe as it looks to restore operations | Cybersecurity Dive Qantas penalizes executives for July cyberattack | The Record from Recorded Future News Cyber Command, NSA to remain under single leader as officials shelve plan to end 'dual hat' | The Record from Recorded Future News GOP Cries Censorship Over Spam Filters That Work – Krebs on Security Risky Bulletin: APT report? No, just a phishing test! - Risky Business Media Post by @patrick.risky.biz — Bluesky

I sat down with Leo de Araujo, Head of Global Business Innovation at Syntax Systems, to unpack a problem every SAP team knows too well. Years of enhancements and quick fixes leave you with custom code that nobody wants to document, a maze of SharePoint folders, and hard questions whenever S/4HANA comes up. What does this program do. What breaks if we change that field. Do we have three versions of the same thing. Leo's answer is Syntax AI CodeGenie, an agentic AI solution with a built-in chatbot that finally treats documentation and code understanding as a living part of the system, not an afterthought. Here's the thing. CodeGenie automates the creation and upkeep of custom code documentation, then lets you ask plain-language questions about function and business value. Instead of hunting through 40-page PDFs, teams can ask, “Do we already upload sales orders from Excel,” or “What depends on this BAdI,” and get an instant explanation. That changes migration planning. You can see what to keep, what to retire, and where standard capabilities or new extensions make more sense, which shortens the path to S/4HANA Cloud and helps you stay on a clean core. We also talk about how this is delivered. CodeGenie runs on SAP Business Technology Platform, connects through standard APIs, and avoids intrusive add-ons. It is compatible with SAP S/4HANA, S/4HANA Cloud Private Edition through RISE with SAP, and on-premises ECC. Security comes first, with tenant isolation for each customer and no custom code shared externally or used for AI model training. The result is a setup that respects enterprise guardrails while still giving developers and architects fast answers. Clean core gets a plain explanation in this episode. Build outside the application with published APIs, keep upgrades predictable, and innovate at the edge where you can move quickly. CodeGenie gives you the visibility to make that real, surfacing what you actually run today and how it ties to outcomes, so you can design a migration roadmap that fits the business rather than guessing from stale documents. Leo also previews the Gen AI Starter Pack, launching September 9. It bundles a managed, model-flexible platform with workshops, use-case ideation, and initial builds, so teams can move from curiosity to working solutions without locking themselves into a single provider. Paired with CodeGenie and Syntax's development accelerators, the Starter Pack points toward something SAP leaders have wanted for years, a practical way to shift from in-core customizations to clean-core extensions with much less friction. If you are planning S/4HANA, balancing hybrid and multi-cloud realities, or simply tired of tribal knowledge around critical programs, this conversation is for you. We get specific about how CodeGenie works, where it saves time and cost, and how Syntax is shaping a playbook for AI that helps teams deliver results they can trust. ********* Visit the Sponsor of Tech Talks Network: Land your first job  in tech in 6 months as a Software QA Engineering Bootcamp with Careerist https://crst.co/OGCLA

This is episode 304 recorded on September 4th, 2025, where John & Jason talk the Microsoft Fabric August 2025 Feature Summary including a new Flat list view in Deployment pipelines, Bursting controls for Data Engineering workloads, new test capabilities for User Data Functions, the ability to server real-time predictions with ML model endpoints, several updates to Data Warehouse, Database tree in edit tile and AzMon data sources for RTI, the ability to use Python Notebooks to read/write to Fabric SQL Databases, Auto table creation on destination in copy job in Data Factory, and much, much more. For show notes please visit www.bifocal.show

Today we are joined by Selena Larson, co-host of Only Malware in the Building and Staff Threat Researcher and Lead Intelligence Analysis and Strategy at Proofpoint, sharing their work on "Microsoft OAuth App Impersonation Campaign Leads to MFA Phishing." Proofpoint researchers have identified campaigns where threat actors use fake Microsoft OAuth apps to impersonate services like Adobe, DocuSign, and SharePoint, stealing credentials and bypassing MFA via attacker-in-the-middle phishing kits, mainly Tycoon. These attacks redirect users to fake Microsoft login pages to capture credentials, 2FA tokens, and session cookies, targeting nearly 3,000 Microsoft 365 accounts across 900 environments in 2025. Microsoft's upcoming security changes and strengthened email, cloud, and web defenses, along with user education, are recommended to reduce these risks. The research can be found here: ⁠Microsoft OAuth App Impersonation Campaign Leads to MFA Phishing Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Today we are joined by ⁠Selena Larson⁠, co-host of ⁠Only Malware in the Building⁠ and Staff Threat Researcher and Lead Intelligence Analysis and Strategy at ⁠Proofpoint⁠, sharing their work on "Microsoft OAuth App Impersonation Campaign Leads to MFA Phishing." Proofpoint researchers have identified campaigns where threat actors use fake Microsoft OAuth apps to impersonate services like Adobe, DocuSign, and SharePoint, stealing credentials and bypassing MFA via attacker-in-the-middle phishing kits, mainly Tycoon. These attacks redirect users to fake Microsoft login pages to capture credentials, 2FA tokens, and session cookies, targeting nearly 3,000 Microsoft 365 accounts across 900 environments in 2025. Microsoft's upcoming security changes and strengthened email, cloud, and web defenses, along with user education, are recommended to reduce these risks. The research can be found here: ⁠Microsoft OAuth App Impersonation Campaign Leads to MFA Phishing Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This is episode 303 recorded on August 21st, 2025, where John & Jason talk to Mike Carlo from Power BI Tips.com about Power BI & Microsoft Fabric, how his company is doing Workloads in Fabric, a debate about Lakehouses vs Warehouses, the Power Designer & Entelexos tools, and other fun topics. For show notes please visit www.bifocal.show

The Wide World of Cyber podcast is back! In this episode host Patrick Gray chats with Alex Stamos and Chris Krebs about Microsoft's entanglement in China. Redmond has been using Chinese engineers to do everything from remotely support US DoD private cloud systems to maintain the on premise version of the SharePoint code base. It's all blown up in the press over the last month, but how did we get here? Did Microsoft make these decisions to save money? Or was it more about getting access to the Chinese market? And how can we all make the world's most important software company stop doing things like this? Tune in to the Wide World of Cyber podcast to find out! This episode is also available on Youtube. Show notes

CISA's Emergency Directive to ALL Federal agencies re: SharePoint. NVIDIA firmly says "no" to any embedded chip gimmicks. Dashlane is terminating its (totally unusable) free tier. Malicious repository libraries are becoming even more hostile. The best web filter (uBlock Origin) comes to Safari. The very popular SonicWall firewall is being compromised. >100 models of Dell Latitude and Precision laptops are in danger. The significant challenge of patching SharePoint (for example). A quick look at my DNS Benchmark progress. Does InControl prevent an important update. An venerable Sci-Fi franchise may be getting a great new series. What to do about the problem of AI "website sucking" Show Notes - https://www.grc.com/sn/SN-1038-Notes.pdf Hosts: Steve Gibson and Leo Laporte Download or subscribe to Security Now at https://twit.tv/shows/security-now. You can submit a question to Security Now at the GRC Feedback Page. For 16kbps versions, transcripts, and notes (including fixes), visit Steve's site: grc.com, also the home of the best disk maintenance and recovery utility ever written Spinrite 6. Join Club TWiT for Ad-Free Podcasts! Support what you love and get ad-free shows, a members-only Discord, and behind-the-scenes access. Join today: https://twit.tv/clubtwit Sponsors: zscaler.com/security canary.tools/twit - use code: TWIT uscloud.com go.acronis.com/twit

A follow-up to the SharePoint server patch mess. How Russia arranges to spy on other country's local embassies. "Dropbox Passwords" manager app is ending in October. Signal will leave Australia rather than help spy. YouTube deploys viewing history age-estimation heuristics. Chrome adds clever lightweight extension signing to prevent abuse. A domain registrar is coming close to losing its rights. A TP-Link router that doesn't encrypt its configuration. What is "TruAge" and might it be useful for age verification. An update on "Artemis". With U.S.-China tensions on the rise, should Chinese security companies receive weeks of advance notice of forthcoming Microsoft flaw patches? Show Notes - https://www.grc.com/sn/SN-1037-Notes.pdf Hosts: Steve Gibson and Leo Laporte Download or subscribe to Security Now at https://twit.tv/shows/security-now. You can submit a question to Security Now at the GRC Feedback Page. For 16kbps versions, transcripts, and notes (including fixes), visit Steve's site: grc.com, also the home of the best disk maintenance and recovery utility ever written Spinrite 6. Join Club TWiT for Ad-Free Podcasts! Support what you love and get ad-free shows, a members-only Discord, and behind-the-scenes access. Join today: https://twit.tv/clubtwit Sponsors: bitwarden.com/twit bigid.com/securitynow joindeleteme.com/twit promo code TWIT Melissa.com/twit threatlocker.com for Security Now