 Hey, this is Christian Buckley with another MVP Buzz Chat, and I'm here today with a fellow other MVP as well as Microsoft Regional Director Ahmed. Hey, good to see you. Hi, Christian. Thanks very much for having me. It's great to have you. So for folks that don't know who you are, where you are, what you do, why don't you give us your background? So my name is Ahmed Nabil. I'm a Microsoft MVP for the last eight years. I've been working mainly in the enterprise security, and then Microsoft now changed everything to cloud. So I've been named as the cloud at the center. And just recently, a couple of months, I've been also awarded the Regional Director. I'm from Egypt. I'm living now in Dubai, UE, working in an international financial institution. As of course, as information security manager, I have two girls, one boy, a cat and a dog. Excellent. Well, you're indoors. I know it's a warm time of year over there. I've been several times through Dubai. Of course, it's a great place to stop over. It's one of the most beautiful airports in the world. It's fantastic. Yeah, true. But man, it gets hot over there. Yeah, that's true. Yeah, you need to avoid the summer here. Yeah. So I'm interested to know, in your area of focus, we were just talking before we hit record about how the evolution of your MVP, so what technologies dig into that? Where did you start? What did you start working with? How did you become an MVP? So that's a funny story. I didn't know what's an MVP. And I've been working actively in the community, I believe in giving back to the community and sharing what I'm doing. Actually, when I started my blog, I was using this blog as a kind of like my own history to write whatever, any problem that they've solved or anything that passed by just, you know, of course, we all suffer from some pain. So I was using this mainly as my own register to remember things, remember the problems. And then I started publishing a lot of things. And then someone from Microsoft approached me and told me about the MVP. And at the beginning of the MVP, maybe it's another certificate or something. And then I realized it's not about this. It's about, again, the community and the activities. And that's how I came into the MVP. And this is a good thing because, I mean, Microsoft people are looking for the talents are looking for the people who are really giving to the community. I used to write a lot of blogs and answer a lot of questions on tech ads back at the days. So I started mainly with anything related to enterprise security, crossing everything, active directory, all system center applications, even the virtualizations. That day is eight, nine years ago, maybe 10 years ago, it was mainly on-premise. And then everything switched to the cloud. And my main focus now is the cloud security of the cloud architecture and how the cloud technology can help us and impact our lives and how to secure it. Because this is a big buzz there with the cloud and security. Yep. I love that as part of your origin story that like the idea of capturing in the blog. It's funny, I just had a conversation this morning. I do have a weekly AMA style panel where we go through and we use office hours, we answer questions, we pull off a Facebook and tech community. And we were talking about getting more viewers on there. And we had, I think at the one point, we had 14 people on the live stream. And so, and there are over once the recording is published, it actually gets hundreds of visits to the live streams and the videos out on YouTube. But how we get more people on it. And I said, you know, it's not really been entirely the goal. People go and they find the snippets here and there. But I use my blog the same way. And the office hours kind of the same way. We try to reach back out to the people who ask the questions. Maybe we just help one person. But it helps us learn. We're talking through these different things. Every week, we're learning about stuff. And so, I use my blog the exact same way. It's whether there's five people reading it or 5,000 people reading it, you know, that article I think. No, I mean, this is, I mean, this is the actual reward. This is the best rewarding thing. When someone just sent you a comment that's your blog or maybe your answers or questions or something really helped them and saved them a lot of hours. That's, that's actually the real reward from every program that you feel that you've done something, someone else who really needed help. Right? Well, that's the, that's the secret of it. People, I'm sure you get, you hear from people all the time, like, what can I do to become an MVP? I don't know, what's, what's your version of that question? Because we all get that all the time. Yeah, that's true. Actually, so I'm getting this question every time. And since I'm living here in the Middle East. So I mean, recently, me and a couple of also friends, other MVPs and RDS, we created even a video in Arabic targeting our Middle East people and community to let them understand what's MVP and what you need to become an MVP. And people think that it's kind of maybe a simple thing or simply something you pass and maybe do a session or write a blog. But actually, it's more the commitment. It's more a commitment to the community. So you're taking this time from your family, from your own leisure time, and giving it to the community because you should be passionate about this technology or about this product. And the second thing, it's, you need really to be especially the MVPs and this difference between MVPs and RDS. With MVPs, you need to be a little bit deep dive to the technology, very focused in specific areas of technology, which is different than the RDS. So I mean, we're trying to explain this because I mean, everyone would just approach you saying, okay, can you nominate me? Can you nominate me? And then at least, at least my answer is at least I need to see your work at least one year, what you've been doing to the community and also the feedback and what's the effects you're having in your at least your closest community. Yeah, that's the hardest part too is that when maybe these people that come and ask this are doing amazing things, but they're it's not really surfaced up to what's visible. There's always that fine line between self-promotion and just trying to raise awareness of something. I don't know how it do you differentiate between those like, how do you surface, how do you personally surface the things that you're doing around the community? So this is another thing that we have been working on it as well, which is mentoring some people. So sometimes, I mean, even without people approaching me, sometimes in one of the community or one of the events, one of the local events, meetups, conferences, you can really, really see someone has a very, very good potential to be an MPP, an enrolled MPP program. However, he's not able to promote himself. That's really where we can just step in and start helping these people. I was really happy to mentor maybe one or two in the recent year, one of them became an MPP as well, to guide them how they can promote themselves, what channels are available, what areas they need to tackle them. It's very exciting and very rewarding for me as well. Yeah. So let's say that I've approached you. I've said, hey, I've been doing a lot of things. I'm involved with my user group. I've got a blog that's been out there I've participated in a couple of these AMAs that asked me anything kind of discussions to help others out there, none of which is part of my day job. My company is not paying me to go out and do this activity. It's all above and beyond that. What are your recommendations that you would give me? So my recommendation, first of all, is that he need to focus on a specific area and he need to pick an area where he had some struggles with it. So normally what will drive you to go with this blogging things that most probably you search, you Google everything and you didn't find an answer. It's very difficult to find things that and that's why you start doing your own content. So I mean, so it's not about copying some content to making some replicas. I mean, this will not add anything. Even it will not add to your blog or site on Google or the searches. So my main focus is just tackle this thing. Think about the new ideas. Maybe it's things like AI or whatever is coming new. I mean, tackle these things. There's less content available and then think about your community. What's the community looking for? So again, it's different between, for example, Middle East, Europe or America. The challenges that we face here might differ a little bit than what's, for example, in America. So I mean, we need to be focused on our own community, our own problems, our own challenges. That's how I say it. And then start working this step by step. There are different channels, things like meetups, things like the local events. I can help someone to anonymity maybe for speaking slots in one of the meetups, one of the local events. And then it builds on this step by step. Yeah. Well, so what are, I'd be interested to know that since you, you know, with in Egypt and UAE, like what is the community like in that part of the world? Like I've had some interactions with some user groups that I've presented at SharePoint Saturday events in a few different countries. And so I've been able to, in fact, most of the times that I've been over to UAE, it's been to present to user groups and at the Microsoft facility. Been a few years now since I've traveled over there, but four or five years. But how is the community doing over there? And what's different from other parts of the world that you've interacted with? So I think the community is really here to learn. We have our own challenges. So when I travel, for example, to ignite some other conference in Europe or the States, we find, for example, that the cloud adoption is much more mature than where I'm coming from. And maybe this is because there's a lot of regulations that are stopping people. Maybe in some countries there's some problems with the infrastructure itself. So people are really eager to leverage the new technologies, to use the new technologies, things like the cloud. And then we've seen what happened during this pandemic and how the people were really cloud driven or adopted the cloud were able to survive the difficult situation with the remote working. So these are kind of problems. So people always come and ask, for example, about the security, about the data, about how can they move to the cloud? How can they transform their own digital transformation? How they can transform their own on-premises and old servers and old data and move the cloud in a secure way? This is the main challenge you've been seeing in the last maybe a couple of years. But honestly, when we do, for example, I participate as well in one of the SharePoint Saturdays in Egypt. I serve one of them with my SharePoint MVP friends. And these kind of meetups or local events, we never expect maybe people to attend or maybe a few bunch of handful of people will attend. But really, when just specific topics, we're going to find a lot of people coming, a lot of people asking a lot of questions, which is really, really interesting. That has been, obviously, my original MVP was in SharePoint. Now, I'm Office Apps and Services. So I talked a lot about your teams. We answer questions about exchange, kind of all the office suite kind of everything around there. But a lot of my experience around community is around in and around the SharePoint Saturday kind of movement. And a lot of people that are outside of the SharePoint space may not be aware of this phenomenon that just went global and it's still going where it was pre-COVID, still going strong. A lot of those events. But one of the things that I really like about what the community is, is kind of what you just said, is that you might have speakers. Here's a great example. I was approached with providing a keynote virtually for a SharePoint Saturday in Ahmedabad, India, which is over on the western side of the country. I've been over to, I've been there in person. I used to have a development team as based out of Ahmedabad. And so I thought, this is fantastic. So the keynote's going, you're presenting, and I realized I look in the audience. There's two of my friends from the east coast of the US sitting in the audience, you know. And so you have, and that's actually a fairly common thing where the call for speakers go out and you might be traveling over to the US. And I imagine, like, you look around and say, hey, what other, what events are going on? Anything that I could participate since I'm going to be in the city at the time. I think that way as well. When I'm traveling remotely or around the world, as I look and see, is there anything going on in a youth groups meeting and events that I can attend as an attendee or potentially speak? And so you have... Yeah, whenever we go to Ignite or the MPV summit, we usually see if there's maybe some SharePoint Saturday or some kind of sequel thing or something happening that we can even help if nothing is speaking. But I mean, it's all about the community. I mean, and how you can give to these communities and help people. So yeah, that's true. That's a great way though for community, for folks that aren't active in those SharePoint Saturdays, but even your youth groups, a lot of these events that are going on is, but getting involved is, it's a great opportunity to start kind of rubbing elbows, the phrase goes, with experts around the world. Most of us that are in the community, MVPs and RDs, I would say most. Every MVP or RD I've ever met, they are some of the most social people, meaning they're willing to connect, to give you their contact information, to get in touch, to help answer questions. And if they don't know the answer, to point you to somebody who probably does know the answer to the question. But you have to take that step and reach out. Yeah, that's true. So the good thing about, especially now maybe when I became an RD, I think that was one of the main reasons I became RD is now is that I became more diversified, this kind of cross-function things. So I'm more into the architecture of things now, the focus of the cloud and secured architecture. Because now I've been exposed to a lot of technologies on different verticals. And my main aim now is to help the people to leverage this so they can boost their business by leveraging the right technologies. I've passed by a lot of companies, a lot of people where they might have the technology and they're not able to get all out of this technology. You know, it's just joining all the buttons with this technology and get all out of it. So maybe that's my next challenge would be helping people for this journey, for the digital administration journey. Well, and that's a great distinction between the RD and the MVP programs. It's not like, hey, there's an MVP program and I'll graduate up to the RD. They're completely different things. In general, MVPs as you point out are very focused on specific products and feature sets within those products. Whereas an RD is expected to be an expert in a number of different technologies and competing technology. But most of us RDs are also business owners or senior folks within these companies that are actively engaged with customers to help them along that journey and providing them advice. It has been, I think, a great experience just in the connections again. Yeah, that's true. I mean, the back, I don't want to seem a little bit old, but 15, 20 years back, I mean, we were more like a cost center for any organization. Now, people who need to align with the business, IT and security forms need to be more aligned to the business. Business need to understand that they need to leverage us. We will enable them to achieve their own business goals. We're not just a cost center, but we are a big enabler. So again, because this COVID was something disastrous, I mean, what happened is that companies who will leverage the technologies, leverage the IT, the IT and the technology enable them to survive and live during the situation. And this is a very good example to the use of technology, of course. Yeah, you know, we used to talk about, I've been around for a while as well, and you should talk about, you know, the need for, so I started my career almost 30 years ago as a business analyst and became a, went into project management and kind of that set a big part of the course of the first half of my career in the project management world, but my roots as a business analyst and technical writer was that I was, you know, my task was to understand the business requirements, the business needs, as well as the technology, be the go-between of that. And so I used to write about that, the fact that we needed to have more people that could bridge that gap between business and the technology. And that has increasingly become the role of the traditional IT organization with a lot of these services outside of the enterprise that IT goes and says, hey, these are the different services, here's how the pieces come together, but has to be that translator for the business and to work with people to be able to properly leverage. When you hear, and I know it's a lot of marketing spiel around business transformation, what does that actually mean to go through a business transformation? But it's exactly that. It's to understand, here's where we are as a business, here's what the technology can do and then to enable that to connect those two sides together. That's the problem, but sometimes, I'm glad that you mentioned this, there's also a misconception when you think about automation versus the transformation. So people think that's okay, we're just putting a couple of softwares and some tools to our existing processes that this is a kind of transformation. No, this is kind of automation. Yes, there are some benefits, of course, but I mean, this automation, but the complete transformation means that you're completely changing, revamping all your processes. This is the retransformation. And there's some people just get this kind of misconception between automation and the transformation. Right. Well, I mean, look, you can, we just had a question this morning where somebody was asking about using some features and tools on their Windows 7 and which is now no longer being supported. And we're saying it's like, look, you can go do that. Look, the, if you've got the space, if you're hardware requirements, whatever, you know, the technology should work with 7, it's in the documentation that it supports it. However, not the best utilization of all the technology. If you really want to see all the features light up, you need to upgrade, which you upgrade, which you can do for free still from 7 to 10, move to 10 and then leverage all the benefits of that. But you're right. That's kind of a small example. Right. Well, I had the same, I have the same discussion. I was just telling the people, I mean, you are now in 2020 and you want to use a technology that had been invented like 12 years ago. I mean, how can I, I mean, there's not logic. I mean, you're trying to go and advance and transform and you're still using the old technology. I mean, give you all the bells and whistles you're looking for. And you know what will happen too? To it's the IT team will pay the price because they'll figure out a way to get those newer products to work with that old desktop. And then, you know, and then the people will be satisfied for about five minutes and then get them back up. Why can't I do this? Like, well, because we need to upgrade you to the latest. Yeah. Yeah, that's true. It's interesting times. Well, well, it's really been, it's great to get to talk to you and get to know you. And hopefully one of these days we'll get back and I'll be able to see you at one of these MVP summits or maybe an event ever in your part of the world. I'd love to get back over there. I had one trip over to that region that was, that was canceled. I was actually going to pass through on my way to India. And then COVID thing happened. But, you know, for people that want to find out hopefully, hopefully it'll be maybe ignite the tours or something like this, maybe, and there used to be one in Dubai delivered one here in Dubai before the COVID, before the pandemic in February. That's what it was. I was going to be over in India. And yeah, so we'll hopefully, you know, next year, middle of next year, that stuff will pick back up again. But for folks that want to find out more about you getting in touch, what are the best ways to get in touch with you? So they can reach me on LinkedIn, of course, Ahmed Nabeed Mahmood or my blog, it's itcalls.net. And I'll be glad to answer any question on these two channels as well. Excellent. Well, thanks a lot. Have a great rest of your afternoon.