 Hey, this is Christian Buckley with another MVP Buzz Chat, and I'm talking today with Dennis. Hello. Hi, Christian. Thanks for inviting me. It's great to have you, and it's always good to have another Office Apps and Services. We can get down in the weeds, talk about the technology or whatever it is. But for folks that don't know you, who are you, where are you, and what do you do? I'm Dennis Molotsov. I live in Toronto, Canada. I'm mostly focusing on everything related to SharePoint, but I'm also doing lots of Power Apps, Power Automate, and a little bit of Azure here and there whenever a project and a client requires that. That's great. So let me ask, so I started as a SharePoint MVP as well. So when did you start working with SharePoint? It wasn't that long ago, but it's at least 11 years. I've lost count since around 2008. My first version I remember was SharePoint 2007. We call it MOS or WSS. But fun enough, later I saw older versions like SharePoint 2007 and 2003 and even 2001. So I think I worked with every version of SharePoint by now. Yeah. I think back in that era, you used to ask that question a lot, because I started three years before you, so 2005 properly, but had started seeing it back in 2004, late 2003, early 2004. But back in that time, in the 2007 and 2010 era, companies that were SharePoint organizations typically had two or three versions of SharePoint running. And for a long time, the average was two and a half versions. And so it was typical until the mid 2010s to still find not much 2003, but still a lot of 2007. It's typical because you could just enable SharePoint as a feature at one point. And in Active Directory, you would have some property that would mark a server as the one that has SharePoint. And you could do discovery to see how many SharePoints you have in your organization and sometimes you would have more than 10. And this is actually still happening. Not that you keep getting them on purpose, but there are some organizations, including the ones I worked for that have at least 10 on-premise SharePoint farms, maybe 20 if you include Dev and staging ones. Well, I think Microsoft has stopped kind of tracking how much on-prem is out there. I think that it's one thing, it's certainly accelerated the mode of the cloud and SharePoint online and kind of the other workloads. It's certainly speeding up. And we're running into now, if you're starting a company, you have born in the cloud companies and that are all the SaaS offerings and no one would think about going now starting a company, starting a business and deploying an on-prem solution like SharePoint server. But I think people would be surprised by how much on-prem there still is. There is a lot. In fact, they're working for an ISV that does migration and has products for on-prem, as well as all the cloud. We run into massive customers that still have dark accounts. So they've not yet moved entirely. They have some cloud services, but they're still largely on-prem. And those organizations typically have two or three versions of SharePoint. Yeah. And that's not because they're not trendy or they don't want to migrate, but some maybe are. I've noticed that you can't necessarily migrate everything. It's not lift and shift. So companies that commit to the cloud, even those in many cases cannot just move everything because they have years, if not decades of customizations that they invested in. And I'm still dealing with these and trying to move. And that will probably take years, if not another decade. Yeah. For everybody who's in the services, you're working for an MSP or working for a consulting company. I mean, there's a lot of money to be made in migration as a service. And just specializing in doing nothing but move. In fact, we have partners. I was just on a call last night and everybody on the call is just doing tons of these daily, dealing with migrations with customers. Yeah. I have the same experience. I have got maybe two or three requests to help with a large migration per half a year or three months. I've even developed a migration dashboard that helps to track migrations. I'm not sure if you saw it, but it's a project on GitHub. The migration dashboard is a centralized tracking SharePoint SPFX web part. And it shows every site collection in your farm. And the status that explains when it's migrated or when it will be migrated. Well, I see it now looking at it. I'll provide the link in the blog post as well. But yeah, if you go to Dennis's GitHub page and it's in the pinned, it's right there on the top on the right, the SharePoint migration dashboard. You go take a look at that and a number of other projects there. So easy to find. Fairly easy to set up. There is a tutorial that explains how to do it. The hardest part usually is to get data displayed because you know how many projects, migration projects happen. They usually don't have any tracking at all. Or if they do, you have something like an Excel file. So instead, you could generate the content for the dashboard so that you don't start from scratch. You would run a SMAT tool or SharePoint migration tool. It's a free analysis tool provided by Microsoft. It gets you that meet the data that you would then display through the dashboard. So all you have to do is just grab that output from SMAT and feed it to the dashboard. And it just shows the data that you can start tracking, which hopefully sounds easy, which it is. Well, that's what MVPs do. They make it sound all so easy. You just do this and a couple clicks later, there you go. It breaks. Well, yeah, that's well, that's very cool. So what else are you like passionate about right now? What are you actively writing, speaking on, talking about? Well, usually I don't have a focus on just one topic. I really like the breadth of, to kind of increase the breadth of my expertise. Let's say several years ago, I was trying to focus to learn everything about SharePoint on premises. And I remember starting with crazy things like opening, you know, central administration and trying to make sure I know every single menu item is understood. Every button I click, I wanted to know what this would do. So, and I did the same for SharePoint online, and then I did for other things. So, like Power Apps, Canvas Apps. And what it does is that I end up with a lot of useless knowledge that I never use, but I still like kind of learning what's possible to achieve. For example, you could use SharePoint, least formatting. And many people know, well, first of all, most people don't know it exists. But then you have a category of people who know it exists, but they don't know to which extent they don't realize how vastly powerful this feature is. So I'm trying to spend time learning what's possible. And then I'm just waiting for that opportunity to arise whenever there is a project or a need to use it. And when a need arises, I'm just trying to, I take lots of notes. So whenever I research something, and then I just, whenever somebody asks me for something, I know, aha, I know how to use it in SharePoint, or I know for sure it's not possible. And then I recommend something else. So this is, I don't know if it explains what my passion is, but I'm trying to learn as much as possible about the full list of features and just try to keep up to date with them. One of the ways I used to do it and still do is answering questions on SharePoint Stack Exchange. Because there are questions that you don't necessarily think about or need for your work, but that helps because the breadth, the real list of real world questions is visible not at your work because it's just a tiny circle of the entire world. You see the real problems that lots of people experience if you mingle with them and listen to what they're asking for. So I participate in a lot of, I do a lot of AMAs and if you look at my blog, I've got a group of people, there's about 15 to 20 of us, and we get together in small kind of pods and do these recordings. And a couple of things that you find out, like answering questions raw that are coming from tech community or Facebook groups or LinkedIn groups where people are posting questions is that everybody knows a little bit, but kind of to your point, we often come from different perspectives. So something which sometimes I think, hey, that's a pretty straightforward answer. And here's the information, what you're going to do. And somebody says, well, unless you're using a Mac or, hey, I had this experience with the same problem from an industry perspective. And here's how we solved it. It's fascinating to you. So you expand your knowledge that way. Same thing, you see different perspectives of the problem by going and do that research. And sometimes we get things that were like, I really liked the question and nobody is part of the group. Nobody knows the answer. We'll all go and kind of research it as well. And so and find out the answers and then come back and talk about it. But I love that process, the community learning experience, the collaborative learning experience. Yeah, me too. So whenever somebody asks the question, what I usually like is to make sure not only that one person gets the answer, but it's captured somewhere. This is why I like forums because it's just they're waiting to be discovered by a struggling Googler facing the same problem. Well, that's why into the tools. I mean, you're right. I mean, I remember message boards and back in the late ages, early 90s, and you're actually paying for Bolton board services to get access to different areas for technical learning. And then kind of the early versions of knowledge management systems and collecting that. And the tools have gotten smarter and again, more collaborative where people can vote up the best answers and you know, things like that. And I found occasionally it's rare, but found what people are voting up was a wrong answer. And going in and trying to correct that as well. It's like, it's like the running joke about Wikipedia, you know, being the centralized source of knowledge. And there's so much incorrect information that's in Wikipedia. But it's great to have those perspectives and to have input from different people. And again, usually you get more information around the topic than you would otherwise go and find from a single source. This is this is actually a fascinating topic and comment that you mentioned when some wrong answers are upvoted or maybe most of them. And I noticed a, I noticed that different sites work differently. For example, I've noticed Reddit is one of those. If you are looking for something related to SharePoint, maybe Power Apps, Power Automate, Reddit is the last place you want to go, but yet people go there in droves and most upvoted answers are wrong. In SharePoint, snack exchange, that's not the case. I see there and I'm just, I see that most upvoted answers are the good ones. Well, you do have the added benefit is where you have Microsoft people, other like, you know, certified experts in that that participate within that that skew the results. It's I mean, this is a in the broader topic. I mean, I knew a person worked with the person who was had a doctorate level degree in survey science. Fascinating getting in and looking at the the science and the sociology behind like how people answer surveys, how people participate in how they respond and things like there was a study this research is like over 10 years old, but they were looking at like some back with when AOL was still big, but some analysis on that what they found is that if there were your two answers, and one had more clicks, more likes, more upvotes, people were predisposed to then click and add to that. And that's where you get like a wrong answer that can grow, even though the ones that I really know are there. And so that's why things like giving, you know, people who are authoritative on a topic more weight in their answers on that, you know, and in a a managed platform, you know, can change the way people react to answers and data. So yeah, it's that's that's one of those things where like democracy, pure democracy is not always a good thing for the answers, because you the crowd can be wrong. Yeah, if you if you give an amazing tool to a crowd, a crowd that doesn't know anything about this tool or technology there, then the tool won't do much, you know, it might even shoot, they might shoot themselves in the foot using that tool. But if the community is there and some communities are amazing, for example, I really like the communities on the power platform websites hosted by Microsoft. To be honest with you, the kind of technology, the website itself feels a little bit not great, but the people who see there are amazing. I asked there lots of questions myself, tried to answer lots of them, and the help you get is amazing. And also it's funny because you see, you know, people like teachers, you know, people who have their own businesses, accountants ask questions. This is usually like you would get these questions from these people sometimes on the SharePoint forums, but it was rare. When it comes to power apps, power automate, you have lots of questions from these, like I was answering some questions that a nurse asked when the pandemic was just starting. And it was just great. I don't know about the upvoting part because I don't pay attention to that part on that site, on the power platform community forum. I think they have kudos and likes, but you don't get answers kind of bubble up to the top if something is heavily liked that that's not happening. But I'm just going to say that you know, it's interesting that kind of how you phrase it, the observation that, you know, the last time where we've seen this same kind of, you know, every person out there, you know, jumping in asking questions across multiple industries, different levels of technical capability, you saw some of that. And it's kind of the, I mean, some people call it like the citizen developer world, others that call it like the maker community, you know, for online tools, but we saw some level with like InfoPath and to some degree with, you know, some of the other lightweight tools that where anybody could go in and build some simple automations, you didn't see that within the SharePoint space as much as you do now with Power Platform. And so it really is evolving and changing the makeup of who is in there sharing their experiences. It's pretty exciting that way. There are some great stories and Microsoft pulls them in for their events of, you know, somebody who there's a case study of what is it? It's the out of there's a great story set of stories of somebody who worked for the airport at within London and just was doing something non-tech related, but just had kind of a passion following along to technology, had a problem at work, said, you know, I'm going to go see if I can fix this. And now has built a career for themselves and building power apps and automating many other aspects that have been, you know, utilized across the, you know, the company. So that's you have life changing stories that are happening of non-technical people kind of finding a path into technology. That's pretty dang cool. Yeah, I agree. It sounds like these technologies, they become almost like new Excel or new access database, because that's where non-developers used to do lots of automation and maybe shadow IT. Yeah, but power apps now becomes something of a like a must have skill, not maybe this year, but the trend is going that on your resume, you would rather have as an office worker, not just Excel, but you would want to mention like I can build like a basic power app or I can use power to meet. It's also why you're seeing an increase in interest from companies around the topic of governance of power platform. And are we doing this in a safe and scalable, sustainable way? That's not going to cause problems later. So that's a very hot topic right now. And I know that ISV solutions, Microsoft is looking at solutions around that area as well, because it's growing so quickly. I love this topic too, but it's very controversial because in the past you could open, let's say an Excel file and build the visual basic formulas there, and no one would know and no one would say anything. But with Power App Automate, it's kind of the same thing, but your power app is stored in the cloud and now suddenly everyone cares. What does it do exactly? I think you shouldn't worry too much about this, but there are some concerns like DLP. Is it secure? Do you build something too large to fail? Is it an app that is used by hundreds of people? There you go. I mean, is it something that for your role, for your focus within your team, for doing your job, you're building it, which was some of the way that it was kind of sold initially of, hey, this is what you can go and do. You don't have to go through IT. You can go build this solution. But then it kind of just harkens back to the experience with SharePoint. I'll use the phrase, it infected a lot of organizations early on where people would go and not ask permission. It was a shadow IT initiative in so many different companies. They would go and build things and build reporting off of it and then show it to the leadership team. It would be like, let's do more of that thing. And then suddenly something that was installed without IT oversight on a server, on a PC, below somebody's desk, the executive team is saying, make this supportable across the organization, then they're thinking about scalability. You have some similar problems with suddenly scaling up solutions. Was it architected the best way? Was it utilizing the right resources to the right people of access to it? If I go and I build a solution and then I leave the company, do I still have a backdoor access in? Does somebody else know to take it over? What needs to feed it if it's now being dependent on? I mean, there's just a lot of questions that should be answered about solutions that are used by the business, period. Yes, yes. And I connect to that. People, what's happening right now is that to be honest and you are aware of it is 99% if not more of every company that uses Power Platform. I'm not talking about Power BI, just Power Apps, Power Automate. They don't have governance. Or it's so limited that they can control all aspects of what they actually want to control. And it's not easy to start doing without a maybe an expensive tool or spending a year to develop something homegrown. That involves massive efforts. I've seen, I was in Power Platform governance teams and I know the amount of work that needs to be done. There is a CEO with StarterKit that does lots of work. Which is a great place to start. Right, the Center of Excellence StarterKit that Microsoft has, that should be the place where if you don't have a plan, if you've not thought about like StarterKit, you still at least need to install it. Although you'll deal with upgrades, which is not easy to do with this tool. And it's funny because this tool does lots of work and it's still called StarterKit. That gives you an idea how vast the governance is and what needs to be done. Imagine you get any person an ability to create a database and a server and a website. That's what a Power App is. It's not as scary, but technically in terms of features, that's what you get. Now try to stop them from doing their job. You know, I often, I referenced that back to why Lotus Notes was so pervasive and how organizations that even hated Lotus Notes and wanted to get rid of it had such a difficult time getting rid of it was because these small database driven applications that would go and that became so relied upon and so highly customized and you couldn't just go rip. It wasn't just like an exchange server and it's just email based. It was so tight into everything that these organizations did and you had to go and recreate them. So that's why having some semblance of organization of governance layer of management of these things, a review process of what is being done and having some level of oversight, you have to balance that too. You don't want to get in the way of people innovating and solving problems for others. That's why you want them to build those things, but it needs to be done around standards. There need to be guardrails up around how you go build things. Yeah, I would call it falling into a pit of success, if I recall this phrase correctly. Currently, there is no pit ready and waiting for you to fall into. So creating a nice environment governance is hard and it's proactive. You need to constantly do it. There is nothing you can turn on. You can't flip a switch to get good governance. We're governed. We're well governed now. We flipped the switch. There was a checklist. We marked it down. We're done. Yeah. Currently, it's not easy. For example, just a very practical example. When a user needs to create an app, they would go to Power Apps, click Create, and voila, they have an app. But what would actually be great, and that maybe somebody from Microsoft listens to this, maybe it would be great to be met with a screen that explains the rules, the governance, you know, ask questions, what are you trying to build? Currently, there is no way for an organization to inject their governance, their rules. Like a provisioning process. Put that in place when you create a SharePoint site, a team site or anything else. A provisioning process does not let a company could change it in any way. What happens is that you let a person create an app or solution first, and then you chase a person who created it and then explain after the fact that they used the wrong environment, or they were not, or they did it in, like, they were not supposed to, let's say, use Dataverse. And if that was an option, I think that would greatly reduce the governance, you know, headache that we currently have to deal with. But I believe even if we don't have that, you know, pit of success to fall into, the amount of good, a quick Power App or Power Automate flow can do, it outweighs some governance headaches because business needs to do their job. And they need something that works quickly. And that's what they use. And that's great. Yeah, you can deal with the governance later. But again, it's just to benefit outweighs the concerns. You can say, you know what, I'm not going to give anyone license for Power App, just to avoid the governance aftermath. So I would say, let it work, enable, give everyone license, and just let them create it, and then figure it out later. That's not because I'm saying governance is bad, is that people spend years trying to figure out the Power Platform governance, and they still can't control it very well. And what I'm saying, you'll figure it out, just let people create their apps. Right, it goes back to that, you don't want to get in the way of people going and innovating. That's the wrong approach. Imagine you disable- There's just a cost, there's just a cost to having that success. And that is to, after the fact, going through and having some degree of oversight and review those things, that's just part of the cost. I was just going to make the joke before we move on, that I said, I prefer to stay on the higher ground of non-success, rather than create the pit of success to fall into. But anyway. But when it comes to Power Platform, you know, so. But yeah, anyway, but yeah, having some after-the-fact governance is, yeah, right now at least, that's the only way until we see, you know, Microsoft goes and innovates something, and like I mentioned, has some kind of provisioning process that you're going to create a new application, that it goes through a company, you know, organized a kind of a checklist of, you know, what is it, what category, and then, I mean, almost like, you know, a home builder going in and having to have, at certain stages, the city or county or district coming in and approving, yes, that was done correctly, okay, move to the next step. Yep, yep, I know it sounds very restrictive, but you, I argue that you need to have an ability to have it. If you don't, well, you end up with the current state where a person creates first, and then you ask them, can you please move your solution to another environment, and now it can be easily done, but not always, maybe they're created their apps as a standalone app, which is very likely, but if you first ask them questions, like what are you building, like how many people will use it, do you need to ship, I had several cases where there were organizations that allowed sharing with everyone in organization, they just disabled this ability, a person builds an app that spent weeks hoping that they would just share it with everyone only later learned that they can't, and that they would be able to eventually do it, but then they would discover that, you know, yeah, apps that share with everyone need to be moved to that specific environment, but you need to provision it, but in order to provision it, you need to get approval, you know, in a year you'll get your environment. Yeah, there's, you know, having a process, well, like one, so people have suggested, well, you can have people that are have like different levels of trust allow anybody to go in and build rudimentary things, but limit the scope, the reach of the solutions that they're able to do, but maybe you have a review process for somebody like me that's at the beginning of their journey and power platform, but people who have built multiple and correct and scalable solutions that have more experience, you give them, it's like having, you know, permissions, you have a higher level of permissions, they, you allow them more leeway in the solutions because they understand, you know, how to go and architect a scalable solution. So there's, there's ways that you can approach that with junior, mid and senior people and their capabilities based on their, exactly. And this is where it makes sense to first let person practice with this, right? But where are you practicing when you're talking about access and production system, live environments? That's what I'm talking about. You create your test apps right in the environment, in the direct production environment. But you might say, so what it doesn't do any harm true, but the person who does the review of hundreds and thousands of apps, sometimes it will be tens of thousands in a few years for some organizations, just because people clicked create several times that will add up. And now you would need to track the owners of these apps who don't maybe exist. They need to, you need to know if these apps used, et cetera, et cetera. Partially the starter kids does it for you. But large numbers make it difficult. One thing when you have a hundred apps, another case when you have 10,000 flows and 5,000 taps, that makes it extremely difficult. So if we had something like a sandbox environment for tests separately, then that also would be great. Well, no, we've gone down a path talking about this. I could talk about governance and thoughts around this. This is a topic I'm passionate about for years and years. But for Dennis, for folks that want to contact you or reach out to you or connect with you, what are the best ways to reach you? Do you have a blog to point people to? So yeah, I used to have a blog, but I don't want to advertise it because it's old and ugly. But I encourage everyone who likes LinkedIn. I like LinkedIn. Just add me on LinkedIn. My name is Dennis Palazzov. You can select search by keyword SharePoint or Microsoft 365. You'll find me very quickly. I also have a, I have GitHub and Twitter and a YouTube channel. The thing is, if you find me anywhere, you will be able to find the other resources. So if you find me on LinkedIn, you'll see my other resources. If you want to find me on, let's say, GitHub or Twitter, my hashtag is hard to pronounce, but it's Zerg00s or Zergus. Well, I'll have the links, of course, to your social, within the YouTube page, as well as on the blog post with all these other links. Yeah, probably the best places we talked about earlier. Definitely go check out his GitHub, see his pin solutions there, check out the migration dashboard. I need to go take a look at that myself. And Dennis, really appreciate your time. And thanks for joining and doing an MVP buzz chat. Thanks, Christian. What's great chatting with you.