 Hey everybody, Christian Buckley doing another post-tweet jam interview. I'm talking to you with Eric. Hello. Hey, thank you for having me. Eric, why don't you introduce yourself before we get started here. Excellent. Happy to. Hi, everybody. My name is Eric Overfield. I am Chief Product Officer of Pixel Mill in Creos Park. Also, I'm Microsoft NDP in the, what's it called now though? Microsoft 365 apps and services? Apps and services, yes. I always get that wrong, yeah, because it used to be O35, and so ran off the tongue. I'm also a Microsoft regional director, and love doing what I can to share what I know to help anyone who's, will listen to me, hopefully achieve more success with their N65 Azure Microsoft-based deployments. Cool stuff, and I know that and Eric, you're also a long-time participant in a lot of the tweet jams, and this is a topic where we've had many a discussion around this, specifically on this topic, and this goes back to where we started talking about something similar to this was when I did as collab talk, I did that independent research looking into on-premises installs, and that was five years ago now? Yeah, yeah. A lifetime. Why do companies, why do some companies struggle with moving to the Cloud was the topic? So, let's jump right in, and your thoughts on each of these. So, what are the most common challenges for companies that have not yet moved to the Cloud? Well, I see it as like, just generally, if definitely they haven't started yet, how to get started? What am I moving? What am I supposed to do? Understanding what's even possible, the Cloud is immense, and it has Microsoft 365-like services, it has the Power Platform-like services, it has Azure, which is hundreds of different things you can do there. So, it's like, what do we do? What path do we take? What do we move? Do we move this first? Do we move that first? How do we integrate it? This is freaking me out, but just like I said at all, do we all or nothing? It's all of those. Basically though, how do I get started and where am I supposed to go from here? What's even possible? The art of the possible. Now, are you seeing a lot of your customers that are now starting to make the transition? Are they limited in some of the capabilities that they're able to perform if they're still on-prem? Are they hitting limits where they're like, hey, we need to move this direction? Oh, yeah. So, fortunately a lot of clients have already started. Basically, everyone's on teams. So, in a sense, you're in the cloud or you're somehow in the cloud, but there are still many legacy services, including ones that were built on SharePoint like 2003, that were still alive. Now, they might've been upgraded to maybe SharePoint 2010, but the application was still built in those days and they're now starting to look, what can we do? What is this whole cloud thing even gonna look like? And it's a fun conversation for them because they might have Azure, they might have AWS, they might have these different cloud services, but the people we talked to don't have the actual administrative access to it. So, some of the roadblocks are also just like internal as to, well, we don't know what cloud we're even gonna use and you can't go do your own. So, you're gonna have to do it within our system, but the admins, the system admins, the IT group that still exists within orgs, they're just like locking doors and saying, no, no, you can't do any of this stuff, but you don't understand this cloud application needs to go to the cloud, we need to move it. And so it's, I mean, if I love the job, I love trying to work through this with our clients to say, great, well, I know what we're gonna do, I know what we need. So let's go talk to your IT, let's go talk to whoever it is we need to it, to help unblock that particular thing. Another component though, another answer to that same question is going to be just that the existing on-prem system, the custom code, the solution that was built should not be lifted and shifted to the cloud. It should be completely re-architect. The premise of how to build good solution nowadays has completely changed in so many ways that often the team that built and maintained this product, they maintained this internal solution for years, they're not gonna make the transition to the cloud very well. I'm finding some of them are, some of them are, they're like the people that I just love talking to because they've been maybe working in industry for 20, 30, 40 years, but they get it and they then know they have to upscale. They're gonna have to learn the new technologies and then we can rebuild from scratch effectively the proper solution in the cloud so that it will achieve the same end user result. I think a lot of those, what you just described are your conversations with companies that when you asked them like, how did you live through survive during the pandemic and things around there? And I've heard a lot of companies that say, well, we were already moving that direction. We adopted teams right before the pandemic. And so, and some of you said, it wasn't even as painful as we thought. I mean, there are pain points for sure, but it was a much smoother transition than they thought because they had already started down that path. Yeah, absolutely. Well, I think it's kind of a flip side of that question. Yeah, so must companies move to the cloud or are there valid reasons for remaining on-prem? No, no, and yes. You don't have to go to the cloud, but I can't really find a solution where that's actually, I mean, we all are. Effectively, we're using Teams or we're using Slack. We're using a cloud application. We're using a couple. So I just, I haven't met an organization that doesn't have something in the cloud even though if there's major work courses that aren't yet in the cloud. So, no, you don't have to, but you're really, really missing out. And, but then on the other side is the cloud of the right for everybody in every way. And, and no, and there was an interesting article that just came out. So Basecamp, which has been around for a really long time. They, one of the people that works there, I don't know them well, but I just read this article about it. His name is David Hansen. And he wrote an article about why Basecamp is actually moving back to on-prem. They found that with a stable environment that didn't need some of the cloud features of being infinitely scalable or something where they knew their growth trajectory and they were able to make, they knew what the services they were gonna need. They're actually going back to on-prem where they're gonna run their own data centers because they found great cost savings in, in, if they did it themselves. I see that, I can see that, but certain other things I would really be shocked. Like, are we really gonna go back to, to host in our own email? Oh, I sure hope not. We're not gonna have our own chat platforms and our own phone-based platforms. I mean, teams and outlook and competing service is fine. Those are all cloud-based and I just cannot see us ever wanting to have someone else to try to maintain it ourselves because the level of security needed would really, I believe, outstrip the cost of what email or teams is actually costing organizations. So kind of going back like, nah, you don't have to. There are probably some limitations. Maybe there's regulation reasons why you can't move to the cloud or you've got an on-prem system that just works beautifully for your industry. It's not a bad thing. Maybe it's worthwhile putting into a data center if you haven't done that yet and maintaining it. I don't, it's not necessarily a bad thing. I just, I don't think it's right for most organizations. I mean, even the DOD is saying, no, no, we're going to the cloud and they gave that huge Jetta contract a couple of years. Now, I think it's in turmoil and stuff, but even the government's realizing they would probably be useful for us to just go ahead and scale a bunch of our stuff out into the cloud and it's more than safe and secure. And to an earlier point you made that most organizations are probably not even aware of all the cloud services that their two members, their employees are using. I mean, that's another, that's a different conversation in itself, but now again, a lot of what we rely on, again, go and do an audit of that. I think it was, was it Gartner or Forrester? I know one of the big firms that, analyst firms that did a study and it came, it was like over 150 applications that are active within the average organization. Cloud services, cloud services, it's just crazy. Yeah. One of my clients, they're very large pharmaceutical, the amount of applications that they know about is astronomical in my opinion. I mean, it's a lot. Now it's global organization, lots of things, but it had to keep control of that. But even that, another way to like look at that question of the services, it's not even knowing what's available in the cloud. So you want to move to the cloud, understanding all Azure is really hard and they're constantly innovating, even knowing what's inside of M65 and the Power Platform. These are great power tools, but to stay on top of it is it's still impressive the amount of updates that Microsoft has been pushing over the last year alone. I think it, you know, well over a hundred improvements to Teams or something and I will quote me, but it was publicly set at Ignite. It was 450 was the number. Thank you. It was, I mean, how do you keep up with all of that? And so if you're moving to the cloud to even get caught up to where we are today, by the time you do that, they will have already added on more features. And so I get some of these concerns about it, but I think that you jump in. Effectively, you set a stake in the sand and say, okay, we're starting, we're going to move to this, wherever the state of it is, it doesn't matter, we're going and then have an internal champion who can attempt to keep up to date on the application so that it can be used to a little success. I hear you, but it's still the North Star that we're all going to be striving for. Yeah, sure. It's just interesting, just an observation of that. When Microsoft started making this shift and we talked about, people are saying, oh, it's not the rate of change of innovation in the products back when it was the old model, the on-prem model was too slow. And so, all right, now we're in this evergreen model. It's going to come faster and faster, innovation happening in the cloud first. And then it was, whoa, whoa, whoa, too much. And how can we slow down, drink less than the fire hose? It was funny too. And yet we still complain that it's not innovative fast enough, right? We're missing features that we need and it takes time. So it's a fun paradox, shall we say. So question three, what are the major and sometimes hidden costs of cloud migration? Well, one of the ones that I've seen in general, like as a major cost is often a complete rebuild is needed and that wasn't investigated beforehand. And so the idea was, oh, we'll just lift and shift this 20-year-old service that was written in like VB script. No, you got to rebuild the whole thing and that sometimes can take quite a while, which can translate to be expensive because it's a mission critical application that all of your 300 facilities around the country, around the world, whatever are using, this is how they run their specific facility day-in-day out and you're going to move it to the cloud. Oh, it's not a lift and shift, it could be really big. And so oftentimes these builds are just, they're big and it's a major cost because sometimes like move into the cloud where we all basically move down to D5, you had to move your OneDrive and you had to move your email. Those are big costs just to the migration but they're pretty standard. There were tools to help you, it was easy to do but it's these larger workloads that I find that are more time-consuming and expensive than originally realized. And it's just something to think through. We're going to do this, we're going to get off-prem. When's our deadline? When do we need it done by? What's our budget to do it? Is that reasonable? And then go ahead and potentially change the budget to match what's actually going to be needed once some analysis has gone into it. I'm sure there's more but that to me is one of the big ones that I see that sort of makes people go, oh, whoops, maybe I need to rethink that through. I think we saw again early days of people saying, hey, well I have this, I have SharePoint deployed and configured this way. I can just move that, it's like you can and then how does that run? What is, how does that perform and what does that cost? And just crazy numbers around that. And so it's like, you know, moving to the cloud, there may be again a product of the same name, a platform of the same name, but it doesn't mean that they work the same and there could be other advanced features which you're not able to take advantage of in on-prem which may reduce the cost of some of those customizations. Some of the way that you've configured that. Yeah, big time on SharePoint there because so many people did actually customize their SharePoint infrastructure. They added in custom code, it was allowed. You could do that. And moving to the cloud to me is gonna be for most SharePoint invitations, it's still the right move because you're getting such better, quicker feature sets than the SharePoint on-prem model. The SharePoint on-prem model is still great for what it can do and it can still be a really good on-prem file system collaboration area that can create pages. I mean, there's still the value prop that SharePoint absolutely fills in my opinion, but in the cloud you're able to do so much more. It's gonna be key to pieces of Viva, et cetera. So you now need to migrate your solutions and that's where you can't lift and shift. The idea, the thought process, the way that was working is not lift and shiftable. You have to rebuild it. I'm sure the cloud can do it, but you might need new talent is an unfortunate way to say it to be able to help with that migration because the way we did it 10 years ago, it isn't gonna, it doesn't translate very well unless you get up-skilled, which is people learning, right? It's really about where I wanna help any developer is you need to up-skill yourself into the cloud because it's a different way of thinking. Yep. Yeah. Well, question four is a hybrid approach the right path for most organizations moving to the cloud or does it just add complexity? Yeah, so I look at this as hybrid is to me, the fallback position. So can we migrate to the cloud straight up? Yes, no. Yes, great. Wonderful. No, okay. Why? That's where hybrid would come in, in my opinion. So no, I think it's a necessity for many and quite a few orgs that I work with still have a hybrid implementation. Either they have aspects of SharePoint, they still have access of custom servers that are doing custom solutions. Maybe their AD is still on-prem and still owned. And so yeah, I think that hybrid is a necessity for most but I would prefer it to be a fallback. Like what could we do to do the migration? And if we can't, okay, hybrid's gonna be the answer. Some systems are just straight up not good to move to the cloud maybe or for the org, they don't have the funding, they don't have the resources. It's working just fine. You've got modern SharePoint or modern enough SharePoint on-prem and you've got an application that you recently built four years ago and you still want to get your ROI out of it. I mean, if you're kind of hybrid already then I'd say why just why not leave it? If funding is that case, then you can still maybe get three, five years out of it. There was a fun story I recently, I've had a sort of discussion around that that I had where a client is looking to move on-prem to the cloud, this is SharePoint and we were looking at the limits of pages. And so you can have up to, we have the classic 5,000 page limit but realistically it's a 30 million I think like list limit, which is where the pages all come from. And the question is, well, will your solution migrate fine up to 30 million and they're like, well, let's see, we've got like 10,000 now we're gonna add maybe 300 a year. I think we'll be okay with 30 million and so how long are all of us going to be not retired before these solutions need to be rebuilt anyhow. And so to me, hybrid is a way for some applications to get that ROI out. Next question kind of shifting focus here, talking about when it comes to cloud adoption, what are the major challenges and why? Yeah, security is like this big thing that keeps coming back to me that people don't feel secure to the cloud, which I think is kind of funny. Which is interesting is that, so I got into my first, working for the first cloud base, it was always a dedicated private cloud solution back in 2001. And when I was talking with customers back then, all of the, everybody I spoke with was concerned about moving their data out there and losing control, but security was the number one topic. In 2001, here we are 2022, still the number one concern there. Because it's not mine anymore. I can't lock the door. I'm trusting that you locked it for me. And I'm arguing as the third independent outsider that Microsoft has such a need to make sure the door is not just locked, but it is barricaded. Because if anyone were to get through their system, they've now lost billions of dollars of revenue instantly. So I think it's funny, but I'm still hearing it all the time. And the other one that's close to that to me is close to that is data location. And I guess I've, since I'm in the States, I am a lot of my class in the States, it's normally like, I don't really care. Our data's here. It is, it's the US jurisdiction takes effect. But I mean, part of my company is in Canada. And when I talk to some Canadian customers, they don't want data in the US because the US laws can be a little stringent. If the data comes to the United States, they can subpoena it. And that just gets creepy and weird for a lot of things. So, and definitely you look at the other clouds in Germany and China and elsewhere. I mean, where the data is located is a huge concern to a lot of people. They don't even want it out of their state. I mean, they really want it locked down because they don't want to have to deal with any of those things. So, I'm sure there's more. I mean, there's just legacy systems like how do you migrate it? But those are two big ones to me that the challenges that people run into is security and just like location of data. Yeah, and I think you're kind of what we've talked about in the upskilling of personnel as well to make sure that people are up to date on the latest and how to take advantage of that capability. I mean, that's another thing that impacts the adoption. If organizations just aren't ready, they don't have the personnel to go and do that. They don't have the budget to go and hire on the outside to do that. That could be a concern as well that could slow down adoption. Yeah, yeah. And then there's just the, you know, the other aspect that they around adoption is just that, you know, people tend to do the things that they know that they're used to. And so any kind of change, especially moving systems to the cloud, it's just, it's a cultural change. Where you're going to your files. Yeah, yeah, it's just different. And so it just takes time and you can't just say, okay, hey, we've now moved everyone to this new system. There's some new features and other things, but it's basically the same. You'll hear some Q&A that we've provided some FAQs. Here's where you go for stuff. Good luck. Like, no. We like things to be they are. I don't want you to optimize them for me. They were, I would have been good and happy if that kitchen utensil had been in that drawer for the next 20 years. Yes, but it's better when it's over here. And yeah, no, I totally get it. Change is scary. It is. I just like my job done. I know where that click is. You know, I go click, click, click and I'm done. You've told me to go, wait, what? So here's something I'm sure you run into a lot with your clients, but how should companies approach customizations and personalization when planning a move to the cloud? Oh yeah. So common. Reassess everything. This is a big deal. And moving, especially because when you are on-prem, and let's just take SharePoint, but there's so many things you can do around Outlook or within how you did Link and all that, moving on into Teams and stuff. But this is the time to reassess the way you're doing things and why you were doing it. What was the purpose and the value of that customization or that personalization? Now, personalization to me is important, but the customization is a little bit more like, well, was that customization really required? Did Microsoft already release a tool to help you do that so that you don't have to rebuild it and maintain some extra service that only gives you that little bit? On the personalization, it's really important to me that solutions are built around people, especially now when we're seeing a bigger push around employee experience or employee engagement and ensuring that the solutions, the digital solutions that we provide within our organizations meet the needs of the jobs of our team members, right? And so these systems and solutions should be personalized. Well, within things such as SharePoint and Teams and others, Yammer, they can be personalized so that they provide an experience that's somewhat unique a tailor to each individual user. So you have to figure that out though. What you were doing before may not be the right way. You got to do a reassessment of where are you? What's available? What is it that you're trying to do? Ideally, you're talking to someone who's been doing this before internally or externally. I mean, I don't wanna say the only way is with consultants, but certainly having an expert or someone who's been playing with it, if it's all internal, being able to give that internal champion or that internal leader, the time and the expectation they've got the time to go and play with the tool, to go to sessions, to listen to videos, to upskill, to then build POCs so that they can say, hey, these are the things that Microsoft said we can do. We can build personalization. Here's a demo of it in practice so that we can say, is this enough of the organ? If it's not, do we need more training, et cetera? Generally though, like where I see it is, the approach is that you're gonna be probably re-architecting to the modern digital workspace by Viva. Let's just say Viva. You're moving to the cloud. That's a whole new way of working and it's gonna make us change the way that we're interacting with our digital systems. It's requiring to re-architectures, requiring to re- Do you still use the phrase, do you use the term of digital transformation? Is that turn off customers now? Because that's been, in my mind, it was always how I defined it was exactly what you've described. It's not just a, hey, there's a newer version of this workload, the software that we're using, let's upgrade it to the latest version. It just happens to be in the cloud. No, it's actually going back in looking and say, here's everything that we do and we may move and it may function two thirds of it, the same way in the cloud, but a third of it, maybe we don't need it at all. Maybe it's fundamentally changed. And so we have to go and evaluate everything and then look at, okay, what is different? Are there new ways, improved ways of doing it? And how can we leverage? Maybe we customized, we personalized, but now out of the box allows us to do 80, 90% of what we customized. So we don't need to go through all of that customization. We can get most of, is that good enough? Do we need to add to that? But that's part of that transformation activity. I just know that people grimace sometimes when you use that phrasing, but... Digital transformation, I mean, to me, kind of down to non-technical words was, can we take that piece of paper and form that we used to send around the office with signatures? Can we digitize it? I know it's a lot more detailed than that, but that's a big piece of it. And I think the pandemic, just the lockdown fixed that. A lot of digital transformation has already occurred, but then there's the digital transformation of transforming the digital solutions we have. So I just don't, it's not part of my general vocabulary. To me, it's much more around the employee experience and employee engagement with the digital workspace because to me, that's what we're doing. But it may also be, my client mix has already been doing that sort of thing. So when they come to me, they're already are, they have digital tools, they know they're gonna be digital therefore they just want them to be more effective for the end user. At the end of the day, all of us are building and delivering tools to organizations, those of us that are in this field, we're delivering digital tools to organizations where the workforce is using those tools, not because they, this was a Sue Hanley quote, people don't come to your internet with a boss at popcorn and say, I wonder what's on the internet today. Let's go look, flip through things. Like, no, that's not what they're doing. They're tempted to do their job. They just got to get their job done and they need those tools to deliver for them. And so, but they should then be personalized. I mean, going back to your question and I would prefer to see, as much as I'm a developer, I'm a nerd, I love coding. I would certainly rather see out of the box solutions be used because you're gonna be able to leverage more of the tools that Microsoft's gonna be baking into the product, i.e. baking into the license. And I think that's gonna provide just a general better ROI. And as more, as new features come out, then they'll likely just integrate right in and you're able to then trial those and yeah, hopefully that's what we see. Well, the last question here, I always like to add in something around planning and this goes back to just that part of my experience, but are there risks of starting a cloud migration without a fully developed plan in place? So what are your best practices around planning? Besides completing an Armageddon in failure and using your job, which is not as a joke, but it's not. Yeah, I mean, it could be a complete disaster, but one of the things like, I would go back to the security, if you don't think through what you're trying to do with any kind of cloud migration and you mess up. When I say that Microsoft is barricading the doors, well, they are and they're trying their best to, but it's still gonna be a username and password, multi-format medication kind of thing. So if you don't help and lock in the doors, they can't help make sure that it's completely unhackable, right? I mean, and you gotta build things right because when you build an application, you could still mess up on the way you built it, that it could be compromised and that can be just a massive problem. It's a dangerous world out there. So that's just one big thing for me on a risk besides just completing another failure. On the other side of the question, it was like, what's the best practices that I like? I prefer a measured approach. I'm not necessarily a big fan of let's take 50,000 or people and let's take 500 services and just shift them all to the cloud and go. I think that, I think it's a mistake. I think a measured approach, which kind of we get back to the hybrid, but I almost think for a lot of big orgs, that's sort of a necessity, smaller orgs, no, you can just do it. You kind of lift and shift all your stuff, shut down all your servers, you might be okay. So measured as well as building POCs, building proof of concepts, trying out these new features. When we're gonna do our shift from SharePoint on-prem into the cloud, we're gonna move a massive workload from SharePoint on-prem into SharePoint online is proofing that out, investing five days, not 50 days, to see what does this generally look like? What will it take for us to build the Azure service to support what we're doing? Because we want it to combine with Azure bots that's gonna be talking to Lewis to be able to do language translation because we don't wanna use Power Virtual Agents. Whatever scenario you might do, you would wanna build it a little bit, see if it works. So a cost's gonna be aligned. Does it drive the solution we're looking for, et cetera, before just going all in? If you just get a spec and three months later, you come back to your end user and say, here you go, you're gonna fail, right? I mean, you gotta work with your end user, your client, whoever it is that's gonna be utilizing your system. So those are what I like. I mean, generally having a plan, of course, is good and having timelines and assets and resources you're gonna need, et cetera. But some of my other ones that I think that it would be really useful are those the measured, purposeful steps as well as looking at POCs. I'm a huge fan of proofing things out. Yeah, pilot, pilot, pilot, yeah. Pilot, yeah, it's another good one. You're not gonna be penalized for piloting, learning from that, piloting it again, learn some more, expand it. If you are, you're with the wrong org because you're not gonna get it. But with, so I'm a huge, okay, our fan right now, I'm really gonna be spending a lot of time, not only internally with EVA goals, but externally as well. Like internally, I'm gonna be my own first case study, my org is, because they're really huge. And just the idea of having things aligned with, I'm kind of coming down to it, not quite okayers, but the idea of having objectives of what are we trying to do with this migration? What are the results we're gonna be measured by to see if we're successful? And then working iteratively through to get that. And not just taking the list of requirements and saying, yeah, I could do that and three months later, six months later, coming back to you and use those and saying, here's your solution you're using. Yeah, we just ripped that out. You're gonna use this new thing now that you rang your whole, your center on. Well, you're now having to do it like this. That will be a failure, absolutely complete and utter failure. Yeah, one thing I'd always say, and I shared this during the tweet jam as well, is that it's like, back when I would build PMOs and I did that as a consultant, I did it for companies that I worked for and it's a project management organization. So I'm a huge fan of OKRs as well. Those that don't know, we're talking about objectives and key results. Thank you, yeah. So, but of using tools like that and being able to see that, hey, here are the activities that I'm working on. I understand how my activities and my peers roll up to our manager, our manager and his peers roll up to our director and VP, so that at the end of the day, when Satya Nadella comes out and says, as the company inside Microsoft says, here's what we're gonna accomplish, these three big things this year, I know as an individual contributor how my role feeds into those three pillars of what we're trying to achieve as a company. That's the grand scheme of that side of this. But I always say on planning in general is that I don't care what methodology that you have, come with the methodology, look at the best practices around each of the workloads, certainly within the Microsoft ecosystem, go to the adoption.microsoft.com, look at the templates for planning for each of the different workloads, rolling out teams, working with SharePoint, leverage what the community has done, they could steer you clear of, they'll give you the walkthrough of, here's what you should be thinking about, planning for, don't miss these items. I can't think of a single project that I've ever worked on as a project manager, we're going through a methodology. I might say not, you know, NA, NA, NA, it doesn't apply here. And then, oh, I didn't think about that or I forgot about that item, there's something on that checklist out of those best practices that will help within your planning. Oh, it's true. Yeah, well, Eric, awesome. Thank you again for participating in the Tweet Jam. Yeah. And looking forward to have you continue, whenever, as always, yourself, anybody watching, there's ever a Tweet Jam, you're like, hey, that's a topic that is really part of my world right now. I'd like to participate, jump in, it's open to everybody. Yeah, and thank you, Christian, for hosting them. I mean, you've been doing this for maybe a few months now. 11 years. I know, and the topics, it's impressive the topics you've come up with and your questions, I can't even think of one where I wasn't like, that's a really, I hate to use this phrase, it's a really good question. I think most questions are good, but like, wow, that's a really pertinent, like really insightful, and the responses have been just simply amazing. So no, thank you for doing that. I love what criticism that I get on some of the questions that I pose as people say, it's like, well, that could go any which direction. I'm like, why don't you share some of the direction? That's the point. I know, no, I think that those are some of the good ones where they're very open-ended, but they make you think. And so, no, thank you for hosting it and keeping up. And I hope to stay with us as long as you're doing it. So when my schedule allows, I really appreciate it. Great to have you. Thank you so much.