Hello everybody, nice to meet you. I will quickly myself and Benjamin, but before this presentation
may be just a fun fact. We just, the situation is quite obvious today, we have to imagine
how we could take the opportunity to find a solution, to disfight, which has been in for
few years. So what do we speak from? I'm the director of the strategy of Twig, the AI, which
is an open source workplace developed by Gina Gohar and Samuel. I'm leading the last
suite project for the French government, so that's a digital workspace, we're trying
to give to our state agents about 3 million agents.
So I think it's better here. So mail and it's not here that I will learn you some
mail is still at the core of a workplace because the mail is still the main vector to interact
with the outside of an organization. So it's still very, very, very important, but the mail integration
is still not satisfying. Of course, when you speak, you imagine about integration, regarding mail,
you think about contacts, agenda, but you have also to consider files and those files today are
in a drive. So you want to be able to pick and to deposit an attachment from or into your drive
where the notifications, because when you are in a video, you don't expect your mail to send you
pop-ups on your screen that will be shared with everybody that you are sharing the video.
It's about AI, you expect your mail to use some platform AI tools, for instance, a kind of copilot
to help you produce new content for your mail, but it's about navigation, you expect to have
something more integrated, integrated through the whole workplace and not only through the mail.
And this integration should be at the core of our preoccupation today, I think, because there's
an historical opportunity to kick out Microsoft. First, this geopolitical situation that is so
abuse today, I don't know how to limit the vehicle. So the geopolitical situation, but also
maturity of free and open source services, which has been never been so important and relevant.
The problem of those services is that we cannot completely compete against Microsoft because
open solutions are still silos. You have good drive, you have good calendars, you have good solutions
for video, but creating a workplace is not about adding an SSO over few good silos.
And I think that the structure of the open source ecosystem is by design in charge of developing
good verticals, good silos, and we lack transversality. So to kick Microsoft, SSO over a bunch of
services and not enough, and we need to provide a smart platform experience.
So what do we mean by this smart platform experience? Let's go into an example of what we did
between twake and the suite. To imagine what we could do as a standard to make it easy, to orchestrate
different services into a coherent workplace. So we'll try to make a demo without demo effect.
So here we have a drive, a completely classical drive with the recent sharing,
all you can navigate through your documents. And in the other end, you have another application,
Docs, which is part of the suite, which is a notion killer, an application in which you can easily
add some rich context, with some alert, this is another, but this application is not taking
application as its own way to classify your documents or notes. It's a own way to share your notes.
Whereas it's precisely the role of a drive, and here you see that we made this integration,
so that in the drive we can create documents and notes, which is the same as the one that you have
into Docs, but with the file integration, so for instance, in this note, I can modify the sharing
rights, I can add a date, an expiration date, to today, and I can enter this note, but this
note integrated into the platform. So it means that if, for instance, I change the title,
this title is modified also, I will, it will be easier to be seen like that. You see that in the
drive, the title is updated. You have a platform level description of the data of the metadata of each
object, so that when there's an event into the Doc, this event is spread across the platform,
so that it can be taken into account everywhere. So here it was about the title of the note,
but if I click on share, here it's not the sharing system of Docs which is displayed,
but it's the platform sharing system which is displayed, so that you can see that you have exactly
the same parameters as in the drive. So the drive is no, the way to classify and share your notes,
even if at the beginning, those two applications were designed completely separately.
And we go even further by adding this contextual bar, so that you know that this document is part of
this folder where you have other documents, that you can also navigate through very quickly,
or even activate some features, such as Rina, Amy, movie, or doing whatever you want in
interior classification system. So you no longer have two different applications, you have a platform
which helps the services to provide an integrated service.
Another important point is that you can see that the top bar here is at the platform level,
so that you can navigate through the whole platform, having access to your user account
parameters, and you can also access to other last few apps, because I was showing Docs,
but also a video and grist, so that you have this ease of interaction across all the services.
So this was a brief quick overview of what could be done, but you will see that the scope
of what we need to orchestrate to provide a platform experience is quite broad,
because of course, the idea is not to develop some specific code for each integration,
but to have a standard that would normalize how different services could interact.
So there's quite a lot of interesting subjects, functional and technical,
authentication, user management, common settings, navigation, application packaging,
platform level, data and metadata management, shareings,
inter-applications, features, AI, vault for end-to-end, and mobile and desktop experience.
So I go very quickly through each of them, DM is not to say that we have design and understood
all that should be done to the standard, but it to show you that verse very deep and interesting
subject that we could dive together, because in the end it's not just about technical,
but it's about creating an ecosystem. So authentication, that's the most classical point,
there's not much to say about authentication, whereas user management is more deep,
you want to share some user profiles across your different services, for instance, some feature flags,
some groups, some domains, some support parameters, the common settings, when you modify the
language, some display, a theme, for instance, some quota or whatever, regarding the individual,
you expect it service to be aware of these modifications. Navigation is very important,
because it's the user experience clearance, which is underneath, so of course the top bar has
shown you, but common home, from where you access all your services, the application grid,
the access to the common settings or the contacts, the way to communicate to users, the global search, etc.
Application packaging, DM is that an application that has not been even designed to be integrated
with this approach, with this standard, could be deployed into the platform. So having a kind of
package, and we made it by using some eye frames and some SSO tokens, so that an already existing
app can be very easily integrated into the platform. We need to broadcast events when
metadata, which is modified, so that all the apps can be updated, you know, during the demo,
there was this moment when I modified the title and it was spread across the old platform in a
real time. The sharing, so that you have one common sharing system across the platform, not one
per service. Interrupts, so if you imagine in the mail, in the mail you may expect to pick a file from
the drive or to join a document to your mail, but you can also want, I didn't, you could also want to have
AI tools that are platform, which are developed by the platform, and that can be provided to
all the editors, for instance, kind of copilot, but that you can leverage in any editor of your platform
into your office of humans or mail editor, end-to-end encryption in a workplace will be more
important. Managing secret for the user is very difficult, so the need for a workplace is to manage
one single secret for the user, which may be possible for the platform to unlock a vault for
all the client secrets of the different service, which need client secret, and regarding mobile
experience, you can expect the platform to provide one single app for synchronization,
authentication, for all the different mobile apps that can be connected into the workplace.
Last but not least, the governance, it's about being able to find a denominator of solutions.
That's why the expectation is to develop a consortium that can be at the beginning of an ecosystem
of independent services, and in the end to be able to provide user experience and
no further in the market, which is even higher of what Microsoft can provide.
So thank you very much for your attention. Here is the contact. We would like to organize
discussion, not only discussion, in the coming today or tomorrow, so please connect and add your name,
so that we can set up a room and have this discussion in quite quick. We have already some
very interesting people who want to participate, so I think it would be very interesting and
looking forward to to see you.
Yes, and the question is in fact most important. The idea is not to present
the result, but more trajectories that must be fed with your questions and ideas.
So do you have some questions or suggestions on how to proceed?
What can I install?
Can you repeat?
What can I download and install? What's ready?
What you can deploy an install? For no, we have just made this proof of concept with less heat,
so it's a grist and docs and video, but we want to go further so that what we did is not just
a specific code, but can be defined at a standard so that the modifications we made could be done by
any other apps, a little bit like you know WOPI, if you are aware of this where of this standard,
so that we could have an open project integrated into the high so that you could leverage
further, to activate additional content.
my year because we are discussing the same problem with the big statewide death of the
drug need. So some of this platforms we take care of, but also his coalition. We have
next long drive, or next change for polarization, or talking our things. And that the
moment we solve it on the case by case basis, because time is an issue also a bit of
activity is now all of this platform. So really looking forward to participate.
No, we are not really question, but thank you for thinking about that in a pretty much
holistic way. Okay, thank you very much.
I'll be with that. Okay. And I'm repressed to be question. Are you really aiming for something
that can be deployed? That can be downloaded and deployed by other organizations,
or are you aiming to provide basically software as a service? No, no, no, fully open source.
First standard. Sorry. Do we plan to provide only such solution, or some code that can be
deployed by anyone? Yes, definitely it's the second option. We want first to define a standard
so a specification and then an implementation, because that could be done by different people.
And maybe to answer you, because you said something very interesting, it's about the time.
And when time is limited, the short way is to do some specific code.
But we have the chance that I offended Kozyklad, which we have been merged with
Twake by Yena Gra, and Kozyklad, as it's Earth, was made to make it easy to deploy new services.
In fact, from a different angle, we add to struggle with this problem. And that's why
what I showed you is only five days of work. In fact, it was very short. It doesn't mean that
everything is at a standard level. But it means that we add the concept to make it easy.
Maybe the approach we have is the other way around that we have the same approach as you.
We have a lifetime, we have little money, but we try to make something that works. And by doing
something that works, we realize that maybe not everybody agrees on what we should do, and not
every software is the same to install, because like for example, in dogs, you have sub-documents
and a drive has sub-documents as well. I mean sub-folders. And so maybe you need to think of it.
But when you insert sub-documents inside the drive, there's an issue that it just doesn't work.
Like this, so you need to think how do you want to solve this? Do you want a single tree structure
that is shared? And then you go further, or should we do a graph? Like the Z&Z bar approach?
And so at the moment, we know that this works for Twake. And maybe like Open Project is here
that is doing also integration. Open Desk, Integrated Docs as well in Open Project.
And so we are sure of nothing, but we have done some proof of concepts of several things.
And so we want to have this group of people who did things, and who are ready to now think of
do we have a standard? And should we have several ways to integrate dogs in another software?
Thanks for the extent of like, there are really difficult questions with rights, with trees, and trees, and stuff like this.
So we need a group bigger than just us to think of this. And we also work with Open Desk.
So we know that it's difficult to find the way to find the time and the brains to really
think of something and make it a real standard. I don't know if it helps what I said, but
even if time is limited, to complete, we need to organize a platform experience.
Otherwise, we are isolated silos with an SSO, and we will not. So we need to devote to invest time in this need.
From the experience of integrating Open Project to into Open Desk,
I can only say that it's very important that we have these roles of the integrators.
Like, these roles can do something that we as module and component providers can not do.
Because we cannot really say, hey, other component providers, please help us integrate us with you.
So easy, it's too costly. It's much easier if we stay in our own silent and prove our own
product rather than talking to the other person. But you as the integrators, you can do a very
important thing. It's obvious that you need to integrate. And you can bring the power and the
leverage and the money and whatever the political pressure or the need to bring us together and
to work together. There's something that is new here in this ecosystem that we have these new
players, like last week, Open Desk, MindView will, they really set new, you
will say, let's think, they mean set new interests and new motivations.
And these are very important that these organizations become very stable and reliable.
Completely agree. And just, I want to voice up that stuff. It's really hard. And like,
we are two years in the making and I think we didn't crack it. We didn't crack it. So we also need
you guys. And maybe we need an event just for this, like a sprint where we go somewhere for two days
and just crack it on something as basic as menu bar. What is the Jason that we want to agree on?
Maybe it's something really pragmatic.
You read an article where she's teaching people where it's like, what is the short coming? So
after the success would move, what is the short coming? And this integration was actually
singled out as one predominant factor. And my question actually would be, if you look at what
is, you know, you said, like, okay, we need to start off in a way to, you know, not just be stuck on
Microsoft and financial energy. So first of all, what would be the benchmark for you? I mean,
there's a thing that came to my mind when I, when I listen to that, first of all, things like
these advanced systems, you might have in Outlook or a little bit of some slack and stuff like that.
So we said, also what you see is copier and also how is it related to stuff like MCP or, like,
you know, an eye-based interfaces, which help you integrate applications. So I was thinking
like really rich, you eye-based integration of these things.
Can you, yeah, I didn't, no, I can I refresh. You ask if the for us the next step is mainly
on the UX integration or also on the data side with AI and obviously both. And I will say that
the target of the workplace until now was just to make it easy to, to ease the access to the services.
Whereas with AI, the aim is to leverage the knowledge, the knowledge of all the documents of the
workplace, to augment the productivity. So it's UX is the previous train.
It's easier, it's quite urban. Yeah, and maybe the back end, talking to each other is the hard part
because you have trust involved. And like from now to June with open days, you know, so
our Dutch colleagues, we will be working on a global find. So these are stuff that it's a micro-service
that we need. And when we take each stand-alone application, that doesn't give you a global
find for your suite. So it's also, we also need some micro-services that don't make sense alone,
but that we need to define. So this will be, there will be some back end standards to people
to index your content. And there will be some front end to have to be able to serve all these search
experience on the apps. So that's everything is integrated, but we need to be very pragmatic
and use cases. Like a user wants is in an email and he wants to get a file from a drive.
What's the standard? Someone is in video in the video conferencing and they made a recording
and the video conferencing should push the recording to your drive. But before that, you need to pick
a folder in the drive where you want your video to be recorded and the video conferencing software
should not be able to read all your files. It should be given securely access to only this folder.
It's hard and we need to see it as user use cases. Like don't try to because it's infinite.
And then we can compete with any compete. We can have alternatives to this big player.