Podcasts

With more than 30 years of experience covering Microsoft, Directions on Microsoft provides unique perspectives about the shifts in Microsoft technologies, roadmaps and licensing policies that matter most to enterprise-size companies. Twice each month industry veteran Mary Jo Foley interviews a different Directions analyst for informed insights and advice to help you derive full value from your Microsoft investments.

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April 28, 2023 . Season – 2 · Episode – 7 · Duration – 18m 48s Microsoft EA Negotiation Podcast Series – Project Management In this first installment of a multi-episode series covering Enterprise Agreements (EAs), Mary Jo Foley talks with Direction on Microsoft consultant Gus Volpe about EA negotiation project management — why it's key to the EA negotiation process; the pillars of an effective EA project plan; and the top EA project management pitfalls to avoid.

April 16, 2023 . Season – 2 · Episode – 6 · Duration – 54m 5s Generative AI: Where Customers Need to Look Before They Leap Generative AI is taking off in the enterprise, but there are many legal, governance, compliance, and privacy issues that customers need to consider first. Mary Jo Foley talks to Directions analyst Michael Cherry about some of the big-picture issues that organizations need to tackle before putting these new AI technologies into production.

March 13, 2023 . Season – 2 · Episode – 5 · Duration – 21m 58s Teams or Outlook? Why Not Both People forget, but Teams isn't Microsoft's only collaboration solution: Exchange combined with Outlook is by far Microsoft’s most mature and popular collaboration platform. In this episode, Mary Jo Foley talks with Directions' Rob Helm and Jim Gaynor about where Teams and Outlook overlap, integrate and compete — and what it means for customers planning their collaboration strategies.

March 2, 2023 . Season – 2 · Episode – 4 · Duration – 21m 36s Microsoft Licensing for Non-Microsoft Clouds Microsoft licensing rules are written to favor customers that use Azure and penalize customers who run their Microsoft software on competitors’ cloud platforms, especially AWS, Google, and Alibaba. In this podcast, Mary Jo Foley and analyst Wes Miller discuss the extra licensing costs Microsoft customers face when they use non-Microsoft clouds to run their Microsoft workloads – including recent and upcoming rule changes that further increase the pressure to use Azure.