 Hey, this is Christian Buckley with another MVP Buzz Chat, and I'm chatting this afternoon with Jennifer. Hey, how's it going? Thanks for having me. Avoiding the heatwaves and the COVIDs and all the other stuff that's going on out in the world. Staying healthy, thankfully. Thankfully everyone is healthy, so good to say. Well Jennifer, for folks that don't know who you are, where you are, what you do, why don't you give us the background? Yeah, so my name is Jennifer Mason. I work at Planet Technologies. I am the vice president of Workforce Learning and Transformation. So I do everything, end user adoption, training, learning, transforming your workforce. So if you've been following the news, if you've been paying attention, there's a lot going on right now with workforce transformation and where things are going to be in the next five to ten years and how automation is taking over and what are we going to do? And so for the past five or six years, that's really been my focus of helping people understand where we at today, where we're going and how do we get there? And, you know, focused around technology because that's where we're at. So really doing that. So we have a couple of products around that, a lot of what we call human services, which is, you know, the fancy word for consulting. Most of the services you provide are human related services. Yeah. Well, when you bundle it with a product, so you've got products plus human services together, it's not really consulting because I don't know, human services products, it's consulting plus products together equals, you know, adoption services. With humans, I know. With humans. Well, and so in hell, you've been an MVP for how long now? I just got my nine, nine year puck. Yeah. The little pucks, if people don't know every year, a little thing that goes on a thing and they call it a puck. Oh, so that's right. So I was trying to remember. For some reason, I thought you were a year before me. So you were a 2012 person as well. Yeah, I think we were the same year, maybe. Yeah, I was January 2012. I'm pretty sure I'm nine year because my husband, maybe, I don't think I'm 10 year. Maybe I'm a let, I don't, I don't know somewhere between. See, that's just the reality people. I was trying to remember, like, you know, just being, now of course, we've worked remotely for a long time. We all travel, all that kind of stuff, but I just, I have no concept of time anymore. I have zero concept of time for the last year. I have no idea what day it is, what month it is, half the time which state I'm in. I don't know what time of day it is often. I'll be like, you know, hey, it's time to lunch. And I look at my, I mean, I look at the window, well, because I'm in the basement and it's dark. I'm like, oh, and I realized I kind of missed lunch and dinner. And yeah, so I think I heard my wife yelling down to me like five hours ago or something, but yeah, and then you've also recently been, you're part of the RD program as well. Yeah, super excited about that. So I just recently got awarded the Microsoft RD. So very, very excited to kind of step into that program, see what that's all about, be part of that. And so I was really honored to be accepted into that group. And so looking forward to that, I think we've had a couple of meetings so far, and I'm already finding lots of value in it. So have you had the question of somebody out from the community said, oh, congratulations on your new Microsoft job? Or already can do it? Yes, everyone at work thought I got a new job. And so I, I guess because I had known what the title was, and I had whatever I tried to write it in a way, and I followed all the guidelines for writing it in a way, and people are like, oh, congratulations, we'll miss you. And I'm like, not going anywhere. So, so yeah, I was like, oh man, I guess people don't know what that is. Well, they don't. And it's, it's a, and again, it's, it's, I like the kind of the, the short description, it's that we are unpaid advisors for Microsoft leadership team. And there's about, I don't know what the current count is when I 223, I think this year. Oh, so it went up. So there, it went up just a little bit. It was, I think 175 or 177 two years ago when I joined. So yeah, they've increased that, which is fantastic. But what kind of, how do you interpret the difference between the MVP program and RDS? Like as, as far as what we're asked to do, and I'll let you use your own words to kind of define that. So I think the hands on and technical would be the MVP. So in MVP, I think you're going to get in your community contributions, and then your engagement with the product team is going to be very, very much hands on in the product, very deep. And then at the RD level, it's definitely more strategic and cross product. So it's not necessarily deep into one product or one area, where it may go deep into a product or area, but it's going to start at a very strategic level, and, and kind of take on that focus of it. And so those are kind of the differences I'm seeing so far and, and how they describe it as well when they talk about the differences. So that's kind of the big differences I've seen so far. Well, the one of those for people that aren't familiar with the programs too is that, you know, the MVP is an award. So it's a recognition from Microsoft for people who are going kind of above and beyond for the community. And so, and generally the, not generally, the things that those that we're doing to become an MVP are things which are above and beyond like what our day jobs are. So most of us and Jennifer and I have known each other for a long time. We co-authored the book together and, and we go through all the conferences that we used to attend. I remember those. Those events. What going out was like. Going out to dinner. I just, there's a lot of like Facebook posts of three years ago, five years ago. Look at this great picture where we ate food in restaurants, where we were actually sitting down. Yeah. But no, so it's a, it's a recognition. It's an award for what you've done the year previous, whereas RD is very, it's different. It's, you know, it's, you know, just over 200 people that are advisors that are selected. And it's a, it's a much more detailed interview process and selection process for that. And we are a resource we're providing guidance to sometimes where we, we join together to write content and things for white papers for internal use only for Microsoft executives. It's kind of a hotline where we say, Hey, we've identified this issue. We have this concern of the way that Microsoft is, you know, the wording in a new ad campaign or product changes that made and how it impacts our business because almost all of us are business owners or, or, you know, senior people within partners in the ecosystem. And so to provide that direct feedback to Microsoft, it's a great opportunity to do that. But it's a, it, it, while it's great to be recognized and be selected, you know, it's, that's the, look at the primary difference. It's not an award. It's a, like we're, we're doing stuff. We're required to participate and then not get paid for it. An honor. It's an honor. That's right. But, well, so how long have you been with Plant now? Five years. I just hit my five year mark on July 1st. So it's exciting stuff. I love it. It's a great, a great company. I, I have been a blast out there. Love the people love the job, love everything I get to do. So it doesn't even feel like work. So it's fantastic. So another one of the planet is one of those companies where, again, a lot of familiar faces, I don't know how many MVPs that you have working there now. Right. Now it's just me. So a lot of our MVPs have transitioned over to Microsoft. So a couple of them have left and gone off to Microsoft. And we have a lot of transition, just with different things. So the MVPs that we had, the majority of them transitioned. I think they're all at Microsoft right now. And then we had MCMs. And then they got rid of that program. And so, well, they still own that title. And they still have the title. And yes, and they should, because they're still brilliant. And people don't know what that is. MCMs are the Microsoft certified masters. And yeah, these were the folks that, you know, I always liked the way I described the MCMs. When you see Microsoft training material, like for the developer and admin guides for SharePoint, for example, the MCMs are usually like the people that help write those materials. It's the people that Microsoft turns to to ask questions about how their technologies actually being implemented and used. Yeah, brilliant, brilliant people. So yeah, I can't even imagine. I couldn't have sat for that. Well, it's a, I remember with a few of them, because my former team, when I was at Microsoft, were did a lot of that training. So people like Mike Watson and Bill Baer. And, you know, that did a lot of that. So I got to meet some of those MCMs before I really understood what it was. But what's the stuff that, what are kind of the popular topics? What are the things that you're known for that you're passionate about in the Microsoft stack? So in the Microsoft stack, I am pretty much anything without syntax and semicolons. So most of my sessions, I tell people that I'm allergic to syntax and semicolons. So that's kind of my thing. So anything you can do with SharePoint out of the box is where you'll find me speaking. As of lately, it's been a lot about user adoption and productivity and really aligning everyday business solutions with how do I make life better inside of tools? How can I improve productivity? So how can I, you know, spend five minutes learning something in Outlook that's going to save me 10 minutes a day? And how do I get that productivity? And then how does that actually translate to saving a business money? And how does that translate to improving the quality of people, like your, your everyday life quality, work quality, life quality? So I'm spending a lot of time doing with adoption and different things there. And so that kind of aligns with it, because I get to help people identify, you know, what's in it for me when I'm using this technology. So those are kind of my biggest, my biggest known points, the one who's allergic to syntax and semicolon. Well, I like, that's, well, that's that short, that's a good elevator pitch for it. But it is, you know, and I'm sure you have the kind of the same recollection of the history, like, you know, 10 years ago, starting to go to a lot of the SharePoint events. And we'd see each other at events, you know, all over the US, certainly, but other events around the world. And it was very dev and admin centric. And there was just a handful of us that were end user power user focused. And, and that that group has, has expanded. But so is the opportunity, because as you see, you know, obviously, we don't just work with SharePoint, it's across Microsoft 365. And I find myself talking as much about the office apps as I do about teams and SharePoint, and OneDrive and Hammer, you know, and it's, it's all cross workload stuff. And it's, you know, scenarios, but it's, as you see the broader adoption, and as Microsoft 365, Office 365 have taken off, just exploded globally. The people that are showing up to these events that we had before the current era, were more business union or users power users. Totally. Yeah. And it's neat. I mean, it's everything now. I mean, one of the last sessions I was doing with my team, we were out there, it was, you know, working remotely post COVID. And we had a whole session we were doing. And it was talking about how now when you're in meetings, you have this new thing that's called a hybrid meeting. And you have to be able to have some people that are going to all be in a room together, and you're going to have some people that are going to be remote. So how do you share a whiteboard now? You can't share the whiteboard that's in the room, because people are going to feel left out. And how do you watch people's faces if they're wearing a face mask, because you're sitting in a room together. And so it's how do you use the technology to overcome some of those challenges that has nothing to do with, you know, really anything technology, it has everything to do with whatever things we're facing in life right now. And so that's end users. And so there can be as many end user consultants as there need to be, because there's more end users than there ever are developers or admins. So I say the more the merrier. So the more you could do with SharePoint out of the box, it's fantastic. So SharePoint Office 365 teams, I mean, we're getting to a point where you're just using Microsoft 365. Am I using teams? Am I using planar? Am I using SharePoint page? Who knows who cares? What are you using? It doesn't it doesn't matter what it is half the time the user couldn't tell you what they're using. Just use it. It's really easy just use it. So how do you think I think a great point that hey, this stuff is changing. What do you think the I mean, we've seen huge numbers of course, you know, you and I, MVP's and RDS are very interested in looking at the monthly active users and the other stats that come out from Microsoft. A lot of end users, they don't care about that. They're caring more about what is the actual change that we're experiencing? I mean, what are your predictions of what this is going to look like six months from now, 12 months from now? Not the disease part, the COVID world of that. But the impact, let's say that there is a, you know, we there's a magic shot everybody gets and the COVID's no longer an issue. What's been the impact and what will business and the normal office workers role and activities look like? Well, I think it's jump starting us into the future, right? And so the future was going to change us anyway, automation is coming. There's going to be things that we're used to doing now that we're not going to be doing the same way in two to three years. And humans just in nature were adverse to change. We're not naturally going to go towards change. So there's going to be these huge change efforts. We're going to have to bring up entire workforces to be able to do things differently. And that's just the nature of what was coming. If you're following trends, that was going to come by 2023, everything was going to be different. And then COVID comes and everyone has to sit in their house for three months. Jennifer, it was the burning of the ships. We can't go back. Yeah, it's like everything's changed. And now when you deal with people when change, it's almost like, yep. So there's a wall of change in the technology and having to do things different. I mean, my parents who would never ever do anything online, I mean, they're going to go to the store to buy everything, we'll shop on Amazon now. And they'll order groceries remotely and they'll do all of these things that they wouldn't typically do because the change forced them to behave differently. So I think with that, it's forced people to behave differently. I was reading a study this week that says only 5% of people that are working from home are working home distraction free. That means 95% of people are distracted and that can be the distractions included children, husbands and dogs and dogs and cats, animals. And I'm like, okay, yep, everybody's distracted. So now we have to learn how to work distracted. So we have to learn how to use technology differently. How am I going to work when my kids are running in and saying something doesn't work? I need to do something for school. How am I going to just work differently? So we've all had to learn to work differently. So now when we come back to the work environment, I think we're going to be bringing that with us. I don't think anyone's going to come back in and expect it to be different. I think we're going to expect it to be a little bit different or we're not going to expect it to be the same. So I think we can use that as these change agents. We can use that as a chance to make things easier for people and really throw that technology in there. And we've seen something that I think has been amazing is we've seen Microsoft rise to the challenge and roll things out in terms of features inside of teams to make things easier at a rate that I didn't even think was possible. I don't think some of those teams engineers have slept since COVID came to roll out some of these features to make it easier like the feature for vacuums. I'm pretty sure that probably got put in the first time executives were on the phone and somebody was vacuuming and said, why don't we have a feature that clears that out? That back growing noise, the AI that dampens those other sounds is fantastic. I think because we've all experienced, I have two little dogs. And so I'm doing a lot of recordings and I'm always just like watching, especially one, the Chihuahua, you know, like, what's he going to do to make sure that it's quiet? Because otherwise there's, you'll see me, it might be you talking and he goes off and I hit mute as quick as possible. You get that little in there and all grimace, you know, like, he snuck in, he just had to be on camera. But yeah, there's great features like that. I mean, the together mode, which I know a lot of people say, it's very gimmicky and stuff. Like I've started to use it for larger meetings. It is really nice so that you're not having to focus around, but just kind of see everybody in context. There is something in the brain that looks at that view differently than the boxes. So it's crazy how that works. What other things do you think that other techniques or other changes that you think you'll see in your own work habits? I think work from home. I think a lot of companies, even my husband's recently within the last two years had been looking for a job. And so he had been in the job hunt. And so we had been looking around and there were a lot of companies in, especially like North Dallas, that needed a button to chair. And if you didn't have a button to chair, you weren't working. And now I'm like, is that going to stay the same? Look at how much money you can say with real estate if you just let some people work from home and how much traffic is less? I think it was a Wall Street Journal that just had an article yesterday, I believe, or maybe Sunday, about that, that a lot of people are saying, why do we need to live in the San Francisco Bay Area for tech? I'm born and raised there. I've been in a number of startups and there's not, I was about to say there's not enough money in the world to bring me back there. There always is. But realistically, no one's going to offer me what I would demand to move back. But I think one of the biggest impacts from this experience for us globally, it's an impact, is to commercial real estate. A lot of companies that have, there are all the time, there are just dozens of companies that have announced to the world, you know, we've decided we can always be remote. We don't need to ever, we're going to shut down our physical office. We don't need it. We can do this. And there's a time and a place for it. I get that. And so we'll, you know, there's a blending for it or maybe a blended workforce. So I think those are going to be some of the changes we're definitely going to see. But it's better for all of these companies that say they're going to have a zero, zero, well, I can't, like a carbon footprint, zero carbon footprint by a certain year. I bet you working from home is going to be a big part of that because that's a great way to reduce the emissions and, you know, cut the gas, expenditures and cut what you have to pay people. Let's be honest, if they're working from home and they're not commuting and they're not having to sit in traffic for hours, I mean, just think about how much happier you are. And I mean, there's other studies that talk about there's disadvantages of it too. There's no more nine to five is gone. There's no more workday. It's, it's get up, work a little bit, get the kids to school, come back and work, do dinner, then go back and work a little bit. Yeah, it's even, I mean, even more so than that because they, they say that look every, every hour of sitting in front of the screens, you then you should get up for 10 minutes and do something else. And I mean, you see adjustments and even with inspire this last month and ignite coming up, they're talking about rather than going in and seeing like a 50 to 60 minute or even, you know, for a lot of the events that we've done over the years that used to be 75 minutes of sessions with Q&A and all of that, they want those reduced down to 40, 30, 20 minute sessions. So you get these, I keep using the word vignettes of a topic and then have more conversations, more panel, more discussion, more interaction. And so that's something that I think a lot of companies to your point will bring back to say like, well, you know, even if we are physically in the office, fewer meetings or these hybrid meetings, they need to be shorter and focused. It's going to change a lot about that. And I think that's a, that's a good thing. So even if you do have to physically be there, let's focus on the core of why we need these 10 people online and the 20 people in person to go through this. Let's keep it efficient and then get back to doing our jobs. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. So I think it's neat. I think it's, it's an interesting time, something we've never lived through, but something that is, is interesting, like it's definitely going to impact, impact the future to come. We'll remember when. Right. Yeah, as we, yeah, it's, yeah, that's the word I keep using too is interesting. We live in interesting times. That's why it's, it's that, it's that Chinese curse of may you live in interesting times. So we're, we're cursed right now, I guess. I think we're old. I think that's what old people say Christian. Yeah, okay. Yeah, that's true. I bet you, I'm, I, yeah, okay. I, I, but no, I don't, as he was talking about, no, I have a, I have a grandchild now. So yeah, feel old every once in a while. So it catches up. So well, Jennifer really appreciate the time today for people want to find out more about you or get in touch with you. One of the best ways that they can reach you. So they can get me at Twitter. So at Jennifer Mason and then 0365 support.com is one of our planet websites where we have a lot of, a lot of content material. And then jennifermanmason.com is my blog. So couple of easy places to, easy places to find me. I'm not too hard to find. And you have your vlog podcast as well, the one that you do with. Oh, yeah. So every week we do the office through 65 plus. I can't believe I forget about that. I think I've created that one out of my own frustration of needing to find the updates. And so we do a, is that like an extension of what we, of what we used to do. Like cause I did the collab talk podcast and you did the pulse back for it unity. Yes, we used to do the pulse for it unity. And then we brought it back reformatted it. So I scrubbed through the roadmap every week. And I actually have a process where I, I download and save the roadmap week to week and then do a differential on it and find changes and then highlight them for you. So you know it. So we have a newsletter that we post and then we, we do a little show where we talk about what the changes are and kind of highlight them with what they're at and then show what, what environment they're to. So whether it's DOD or GCC high or GCC or just enterprise cloud. So we try to do the best weekend to keep up with, keep up with that. And so we do that every week. And so that's the office 365 volts. Is that on, is that a blog, a site, or is that on YouTube? It's just a YouTube channel. So if they search that on YouTube, they'll be able to find us pretty easy. Or if they go to any other places that we mentioned, they'll find it. Yeah. It's pretty much, I think it's, if you put type in Jennifer and SharePoint, you'll find Jennifer Mason. Yes. It's not hard. We'll really appreciate your time. It's great talking to you and catching up and we'll hopefully see you soon. Yes. Thank you so much.