What content is best (or not best) for the Portfolio
Transcript:
Welcome everyone to the Expedience User Group. I’m Jason Anderson. For any of you that may not have met me, when I put this photo on this slide this morning, I realized I was wearing that same shirt again, and I was so afraid that everyone would think I only have that shirt. So I put the green one on. I hope that’s cool. I’ve got my contact details there as well, but always happy to have discussions. Likewise, regarding this topic or related whatever, related or unrelated expedience and proposal topics, please always feel free to reach out to me and everyone here at Expedience.
So today’s topic is going to be a fun one. It’s a different version of our user group meetings. We’re trying to have more focused, we’re calling kind of a micro user group. It’s very topical. This presentation shouldn’t go more than 15 or 25 minutes in that range, depending on Q&A and how things may want to dig in deeper or what have you. But I want to make sure that everyone in this session or these sessions always feels invited to participate. And so if you’ve got a topic that’s of interest to you, or if you’d like yourself to share something, we’ve yet to have a customer take us up on this, but we’re always excited about the idea of kind of developing a sharing community where people are able to share how this is an approach that we’ve taken to maximize subject matter expert involvement or engagement, or how we’ve overcome some challenge or some use. And it doesn’t have to be really specific to Expedience. It can be certainly related to proposals in general. So please always feel invited to reach out to whomever you’re comfortable reaching out to in the services team or Diane or myself or whomever to say, hey, I’ve got an idea and would love to present. Likewise, if there are others at your team or in your organization you’d like to have invited to these meetings, please feel free to forward the invites or let us know and we’ll put them on our invitee list for future webinars and discussions.
Throughout this discussion today, if you have comments or questions or ideas that you’d like to share, please feel free to do so just as they come to you. You don’t have to wait until the end. Just add them to the Q&A panel at the bottom of the Zoom thingy, the Zoom panel, whatever you’d call that little thing down there. I’ll just get to as many of them as I can. I don’t think there’ll be that many that I can’t get to them. But should there be more than I can get to, we can certainly chat afterwards, or if you have a topic that’s super deep, and we need to chat about afterwards, we will. We’ll absolutely be able to do so. If by e-mail or Zoom, or whatever might be helpful. I’ve already mentioned, but I had this bullet so I wouldn’t forget to say that this recording will be sent automatically to everyone that’s registered. So in future webinars, if you’re not able to attend, always register that way. If it’s that topic, you can always go through the recording thereafter.
So as I mentioned, today’s a micro topic. It’s around Portfolio content and specifically around content that does or doesn’t go in the proposal in the Expedience Portfolio. I want to think about what you might do with content that I’m just calling out troubled content because it doesn’t fit well in the Portfolio. How do we handle that content and talk about the challenges that might be associated with some of those other ideas. Then like I said, in the Q&A, it should be a very focused topic. I also should say, maybe this is a good spot to say so, that I am, and many of you that know me and have worked with others, especially in our customer success and our services group, I’m not the deepest, smartest person to work with on these topics for sure, but I’m the most willing to jump in front of the camera and do these presentations. So I’m certainly capable of talking to these. So if you have questions, go deeper than me, or if you’d like to just always feel invited to know that you can reach out to us broadly to share challenges or concerns or questions, what have you, with Portfolio content or maybe new things that you’re confronted with.
So to Portfolio or not to Portfolio, that’s the question. I thought, how do I get this thing started in a stupid way? And this was my stupid way. Because the bottom line is this: there are certain things that work really, really well in a content library and other things that don’t. So what content works best for a content library, any content library, but specifically our Portfolio? These are your most commonly used elements. It’s the smaller, bite-sized, topical chunks of content. It’s not typically all of our resumes as a record in the content library. It’s that resume or that individual, or that bio, or that individual chunk of content that has its own little borders and bounding boxes around it. You’ll see this makes more sense, I think, as I talk about strategies for dealing with that other content. But where we’re trying to control formatting and consistency and accuracy, because the strategy that I’ll share with you about how to deal with the non-Portfolio content sometimes presents challenges in this way. There are other steps involved with consuming that content that can create inconsistencies. So if you have and as you have items like these, boilerplate content with placeholders or answers to specific questions or that bio or that resume, or again, that sort of bounded topical element, these work really, really well in the Portfolio. They’re consistently branded and styled using the style palette, hopefully more frequently than not, and how those styles apply to those records. So there are a lot of controls in place, right? The curated records that are nicely staged and prepared for the use in that next proposal document.
So kind of every place that doesn’t fit well in the Portfolio and some examples of these, but also some elements. So templates, or full graphics libraries, or full documents, past performances, or complete proposals, or things that are large and unique attachments, large either in number of pages or in size, right? Sometimes some of our customers are delivered ultimate resolution images. And we think about Word and Word’s ability to deal with these enormous size files, these enormous size graphics, those can be problematic, right? And just to stack a bunch of those up into a Portfolio can be problematic for Word as well. And so this is a scenario where we need to come up with another strategy to deal with those types of things. If you have content that’s managed by another team, or organized by another group, I think a lot of times I’ll hear customers or prospective customers share with me the challenge of having marketing hand them completed slicks or documentation, etc. And that it’s managed by marketing, and they create them as PDFs and we don’t have control over those PDFs. Bringing them into a Portfolio and then managing that disconnect between having content that’s kind of echoed here, if you will, in the Portfolio, but managed elsewhere, that can be a real challenge as well, that Portfolio may or may not make sense to deal with it. And anything non-Word content, I mentioned PDFs, and that’s a good example, but as you get PowerPoints or other non-Word stuff, it starts to break down the idea of having it inside of Word. The whole idea of the Portfolio is having content libraries and content at our fingertips directly in Word.
Examples here: complete proposal documents. It’s a very common question. I get a very common request that I hear of customers to say, this is great. We have a content library, but we have these full proposals that we still need to go harvest from as there were things that were so unique, that don’t make sense necessarily to add them to the Portfolio and manage them as part of our curated content library management process. But those completed proposal documents are a good example of these things that don’t make sense to go in the Portfolio, past performance documents or detailed write-ups, marketing slicks, like I mentioned, technical documentation, PowerPoint slide decks. These are just ideas and examples, but hopefully to illustrate the idea where you have, again, it’s not just a topic now, right? It’s all of the ins and the outs of the how to use this product line that your company might manufacture or produce or sell or what have you. That’s not topical as much as it’s comprehensive. And those comprehensive documents, that end-to-end write-up for that old customer, again, you wouldn’t want that in the content library. You’d want to have that in a separate place. So that becomes the question, what is that separate place? What can be done with this content? How do we handle it? How might you manage this content?
And there are a number of different strategies, actually more strategies that can be so unique and precise that I would invite you that if you really suffer with this in one way or the other, with one of these examples that I’ve shared or others, please reach out to us and let’s have a discussion about your challenge and see if we can come up with some good strategies together about an approach that might be effective. Certainly linking to outside sources. Sometimes customers will store those links in the content library. There are ideas around sort of a blended model where we can use our tools or other approaches to help you again park content in locations and serve and deal with that content. I want to dig into one example right now right now because I think it’s cool. I think it’s interesting. I think it might be interesting to the group. And it’s kind of new, right? So it’s leveraging Copilot. I want to talk about Copilot agents specifically, and that’s the bottom orange button I will show you. I want to show you this in a second. These Copilot agents are an ability to use, if your organization licenses—let me start there. If your organization licenses Copilot and you have access to Copilot, then what you can do is create a Copilot agent. We’ve even got helpful information about how to set up marketing—I’m sorry, Copilot agents, I don’t know why marketing came to mind, but Copilot agents. I’ve got some on our website. That’s probably why I had that word marketing in my brain—on our website. We’ve got a little walkthrough video teaching you how to do that in the Copilot resources section of our website. You can find it or reach out to me and I’ll shoot you the video of how to create one of those.
You can create a Copilot agent, which is a way to make Copilot focus on a specific area—a folder of SharePoint or even a subfolder of SharePoint—to say, “Hey Copilot, I’m going to ask you to do some things for us, but don’t go looking everywhere. Go look in just this location.” It goes a little deeper than that. You can give these agents some rules and expectations and some how-tos as far as how to help you access and serve that content back to you. It becomes a very effective way of dealing with this other kind of content. We could imagine going back to the example of marketing creating these slicks that we need access to and put them as appendices at the end of our proposal documents. If we created a SharePoint folder that marketing stacks those slicks in, that folder then can be accessed and searched and leveraged by Copilot, and that’s what I’m going to show you right now here in a second as well.
It does give you, as I say, search. There are some advanced searching capabilities too, which is really great. So as you think about things like case studies or customer references—whereas sometimes as I’m thinking about my own past lives, where I’m sharing with a prospective customer some previous customer’s experience—and which case study do I want to share? Sometimes it’s a lot of factors, right? What geography or what inclusions of scope in that client’s project versus this next client’s project, commonalities, language commonalities or other commonalities that this customer might prefer, right? So we could use a lot of really dynamic search criteria. When you’re using Copilot, that large language model can really handle impressive search across these records and documents. It’s also able to aggregate. My example is going to do both of those last two bullets—showing you search and showing you aggregation of that. Let me get out of PowerPoint and show you the ideas here.
The first thing I want to show you—not a really impressive view, but it’s a SharePoint, right? I’ve got a SharePoint folder specifically here. And my examples, you’ll see I’ve got a few different ones queued up for different ideas and different uses. But I want to talk about this past performance example. So in my example here, I have all of these past performance documents. I say all of these—I invented some, whatever, 10 or 15, whatever there are—but you can imagine there could be hundreds of these documents. And these documents might have lots of details that are, again, very specific to that client. So here’s my American Airlines past performance document. I drilled into one I had up already, right? That has all these details about the project and blah, blah, blah. And this might go on for page and page and page. Again, I’m working with silly, simple data just for the sake of having things that I can invent and share. But this could be a 100-page document back here. In my case, it’s a very simple document, but still a document that might not make sense to add to the Portfolio for one reason or the next. Maybe again, maybe this is managed by an outside team in this example or maybe there are other complexities here. But here’s the structure that I’ve invented.
So this is the folder in SharePoint where I’ve stacked up all of these records. And I’ve created an agent that—and I’ve got Word over here to show you that as well—I’ve got a Copilot agent that I’ve created for past performance. It’s this guy right here. And this past performance agent, like I was trying to illustrate or share the idea with them, this Copilot agent looks into just that one folder I was just showing you with just those files in that folder. So now when I ask it to do things—so I say, “Hi, I need to go find something that’s related to past performance.” In this example, I could ask a question: “Hey, tell me about American Airlines.” And again, it would query just that folder to provide just the information from those documents for American Airlines that were in that one location. The example that I’ve queued up over here—I’m kind of showing you maybe two or three things at once in a way that I hope will be sparking ideas or sharing ideas or both.
In this scenario, I have a prompt that I’ve actually incorporated into my content library, or maybe this prompt was in a template. And this particular prompt has placeholder values in it. So this is at the bottom of a proposal document that I have all this information about this prospective customer and what we’re proposing, etc., and all the resumes I’m sharing with that particular customer. Well, that opportunity—let me just launch the placeholder form, just for those of us that are from clicking that button, right? These are all of the variables and this opportunity about the countries that are in scope and the languages that are in scope for my little pretend company TechThink, right? Well, those variables I’ve incorporated into this prompt in a way that I can more easily query my past performances for this one purpose of deciding which are the best past performances to share with this next customer. That’s the idea of this illustration or example.
So I’m explaining to Copilot here that its job is to look through all those past performances and then, based on the specific criteria below, which ones should I share with this customer? And I’ve identified in this prompt—I’ve said, “Hey, there’s five key criteria,” and then prioritize these criteria in the order that if it’s these modules of technology for that other customer, that would be what I would want to share with this customer, or if they were in this industry, or if they had similar countries that were in scope or languages or contract value, etc. These are all just completely made-up, but made-up along lines that I’ve actually used in previous lives. So it’s not silliness, but just meant to be again an example of how you might stage a prompt within either your content library or within a template. That prompt could have placeholder values that it could consume from that document in a way that you can very quickly now leverage this Copilot agent for past performance systems, stacking examples.
But at the end of the line here, I’m asking Copilot, “Hey, create for me a table, summarize those last two bullets of why you might use Copilot and why you might use an agent to deal with this non-perfect-for-Portfolio content.” In this case, I’m doing something pretty complex. I’ve got a lot of variables I want to search on, and I’m asking Copilot to be smart and help me create a prioritization of which past performances I might share. And I’m also wanting to use Copilot now to aggregate. In this case, I want it not just to tell me which past performance to share, but make a table for me from all those past performances sharing that information. So let’s just do that. I’ll stop rattling on and drop this entire prompt into Copilot and ask it to go.
It’s always a little—I don’t say nerve-wracking, but you never know. It’s not like it’s 100% the same Copilot when I use it; it does different things on different days, which can be a little aggravating, right? Can be a little bit problematic. But by the way, if it doesn’t work—okay, it does, it’s gonna work for me. If it doesn’t, I’ve done it before earlier and I’ve got another screen; I’ll go back and if it broke for me, I’d go back and fix it and show you what it would do. So in this case, it says, “Hey Jason, based on what you’ve given me, based on those modules and those factors, here’s the table that you’ve asked me to create.” And I’ll just come for the sake of showing where this could go. I think I have a copy button right there. Here’s the copy button. So let’s go into my proposal document and drop that table in. So here’s the table that Copilot created for me. You’ll notice right away that the tables—this is real common, by the way—that the content that Copilot creates in this use case is text only. So if I had a lot of formatting and branding and graphics, etc., when I’m asking it to generate content for me, it’s generating text-only content. That content also from a branding perspective may not be consistent—well, isn’t going to be consistent—with other stuff I have in this proposal.
Here’s a scenario I just want to show you the idea that you probably are familiar with the fact that that style palette has the ability to store table designs, right? So here’s a scenario where, because this is a reoccurring need that I have, I’ve actually created some past performance kind of automation things including table formatting, right? And so here’s how Expedience and Copilot are working hand in hand to deal with this unstructured complex data where we’ve got prompts instead of Expedience that are pushing out to the Copilot agent. Copilot can be very brilliant for us and give us some information. We can pull that back in from that unstructured, unformatted way and then deal with the structuring. So now when I talk about dealing with the—I mean, it’s got some things in this, right? So Copilot in this case says, “Hey, by the way, blah, blah, blah, this was perfect for me that it’s sharing with me. And do you want me to dive deeper in these types of things that it might share?” When I’m copying and pasting and dealing with the output from Copilot, this needs to be managed. It needs to be vetted and approved and proofread. And in this case, probably for this customer, I’m going to get rid of the prompt now out of my document and say, “This is what I want to share with you.” I have—and this information may not be helpful, right? But this is now what I want to share with this particular customer.
These are previous proposals and previous customers that we’ve done work with as they’ve summarized in these past performances. If I need to get the entire documents, you’ll notice that here within—oh, I did it differently to my point a moment ago. In this case, here’s the past performances that it’s referencing right here. And if I need to go get to that document, just like I had American Airlines up a moment ago, if I click on Pacific Gas and Electric, you’ll see it’s brought me now directly to that document.
So this does sort of illustrate and kind of transition to my next slide on this slide deck back up here, I think, right back here, which are the challenges or the limitations. The use of the content isn’t always easy, regardless. This is the one example I wanted to share around stacking up this unstructured or overly structured—whether it’s old full proposals that weren’t structured in the way of kind of reuse or other content that’s organized elsewhere and super structured in a way that isn’t easy to bring it to the Portfolio. The consumption of that content isn’t always easy. There’s sometimes formatting challenges. Sometimes I don’t want the entire whole proposal for the next proposal. Obviously, I just want that one write-up on XYZ topic. So pulling apart chunks of that information becomes problematic and then inserting it or embedding it or using it again for that next proposal document creates challenges.
But there are opportunities here as well. You’ll see this. Again, I really am just enthralled by the opportunities that this tool has brought with the concept of just searching, or give me related to this XYZ topic, where I can ask a specific question of Copilot and it would give me—I wish I had different content that was more readily available. I wish I thought of this before right now, because I would have had it queued up to show you. But the idea might—I could have shown an example of old proposal documents. I’m looking for that one phrase, that one section, right? So there’s new opportunities and there are exciting opportunities, I think, with using Copilot for this specific topic of content that doesn’t work well in Portfolios.
That is my entire topic for today—just dealing with this content. Again, it’s meant to be a micro topic, very specific to this idea. It’s also meant to be an invitation, by the way, for you to know to reach out to us if we can be of help to you in thinking through your content. I just want to see if I’ve got any questions queued up right now, and I don’t know if I do. I never am sure if I’m looking at the right spot on this. I think it’s the Q&A panel right there. Yeah, this isn’t surprising to me. I don’t have anything that’s queued up for me to question. I’ll just ramble for two seconds further to give you a second. If you have any ideas you want to share or questions you want to ask, feel free to do so in that chat or that Q&A panel down below. But if not, this is also perfectly fine. Happy to give you all these minutes back. I figured this would be about a 20-minute chat altogether, but hope it’s helpful. And—well, a couple questions rolled again. Yes, absolutely. Oh, chat is disabled. We’ve gotta use the Q&A. I apologize for my directing you to that direction. You gotta do that Q&A button. I had to go hit the little dot, dot, dot on mine—that was always confusing to me—and for the Q&A pane.
You’re absolutely right. The question I was asked around, does the use of Copilot, like my example, require a subscription? It absolutely requires a Microsoft subscription to Copilot. The beautiful thing is this—the way Microsoft—beautiful might be an overstatement, it’s another selling thing from Microsoft, another thing for us to buy from Microsoft, how beautiful is that? But it can be done by the individual. You don’t have to make a corporate-wide decision and spend tens of billions of dollars. If it made sense for your proposal team, for example, because you have this unstructured data that’s dealt with by marketing or need to source old proposals, blah, blah, blah—for that use case, you can subscribe by the individual for just those individuals. Last I checked, it’s 30 bucks a user a month to subscribe to Copilot. But yes, for my example, you would need to have a Copilot license.
The Copilot agent in my example is another question on where was it running from. The Copilot agent in my example—I’m using Copilot for Word, right? So I’m right here inside of Word and running Copilot. You can do this in another—it didn’t have to be that way, right? I prefer it this way because in my example, I had Word content as my prompt and I want to drop it into Copilot. I wanted Copilot to do something for me and drop the results back into the Word document. In my example, I thought it was both more probable and more visually clear, easier for you to follow along at your locations. But certainly you could go to office.com, you could go online and use the Copilot online, have it then wrap that agent that you’ve created—that Copilot agent that I created here, that past performance agent that I use in this example. Let’s see, it’s still talking to past performance up here, but way up here. I don’t know where it shows me on this, but we’re still using this past performance agent that I created over here. But those agents are available any place that you access—I’m not saying any place, that’s not exactly true.
Copilot’s available in a lot of different locations and works differently in different locations. But this example I could have done on—in my case because I have the Copilot license for Word—I could do it directly within Word, or I could have gone online, used office.com, the Microsoft online location, used that version of Copilot. That agent would be present there as well. I could use that same agent, drop in that same prompt, get those same results, including the table, drop those right back into the Word document, just like I did here. It is running—okay, so you ask, is it running in Word or running in SharePoint? Copilot agent is in SharePoint. The Copilot agent is in Copilot. It’s focused on SharePoint. Golly, I’m tough with language here. It’s a tough, it’s a confusing topic. But in my example, again, where Copilot is querying is a folder in SharePoint. So I’ll make sure that’s clear because part of the question is where are you running it from? I’m accessing Copilot from Word. Copilot is looking in SharePoint and giving the answers from SharePoint.
Another question—yes, so interesting question about formatting. And this is one that I think we should probably have a chat separately and one that, again, feel free to reach out to me directly, and I can do the same. I’ll reach out to make sure that we carry on. But yes, there’s absolutely opportunities to apply formatting rules to regions. Now, my example was really honed in a specific because in my pretend environment, this proposal document had this reoccurring need to deal with past performances and to summarize past performances in tables. And I knew I had, in my pretend environment, pretend scenario, I knew I was having a reoccurring challenge with formatting that table.
And so I’m leveraging the automation capability and the styles capability of the style palette and building that out as a routine, as what we’re calling a finishing steps routine in this example. I’m doing a number of other things, by the way, where I’m even storing other examples where I might store prompts or I might update this data based on changes or other things that might be doing. But yes, absolutely, we have the capability to—whether it was use of Copilot or not, by the way—it has the ability to create style guidelines and rules and apply those to sections of documents or sections within a document.
Any questions? Those are all that I have for now. I hope this was helpful. Again, please, invitation made again at the end of this chat. If there are topics that are interesting to you or challenges that you’re suffering with or what have you, reach out, let us know and let me know. Personally, let us know collectively if you’re talking to Peggy or Sharon or Diane or whomever you might be in regular conversations with, let them know that you’d like to chat more about topic ABC or would love it if you actually wanted to present on that topic as well. I hope this is helpful, folks. Thank you so much for joining today, and I look forward to talking to you all soon.