 Hey everybody this is Christian Buckley with another MVP Buzz Chat and I'm talking today with Susie. Hello. Hi Christian, thank you for having me today. It's great to have you. I was just talking as we were talking before we started recording. I know a couple folks from your team but I think this is the first time. I think this is the first time we've ever met. I don't know if we've done so many different events over the years. Maybe we crossed paths at one time. It is. We're like ships in the night. We've done lots of events together but not directly. Well that's the thing. I think the last event I was in Europe, not I think, the last event I attended was in Prague in December 2019 for ESPC. So that was the last time that I was across the pond. But I'll be back out in June. I'm very excited to get over to London for Tom's verse. Oh fantastic. The last one was Stateside was 2019 Ignite because we were speaking myself, Paul and Wes. So Paul Schaeff, Lionwes Hackett who are both in my team. We all had sessions at Ignite. So I think now with the Microsoft conference is all being online. Everybody I talked to says the same thing. I was last there in 2019. We just we just need to talk about it. Like it was the Thanos blip. It was the snap of the fingers. We're back now. It's five years later. But hey, so folks that don't know who you are. Who are you? Where are you? And what do you do? So my name's CZ Dean. I'm the Chief Executive and owner of Adin 365 which is Microsoft Charter Partner based out of the UK. We specialize in really the end user services in Microsoft 365. So teams, SharePoint, Power Platform. We have products and services that help organizations to get the best out of those capabilities. Well that's a big space and it's with Microsoft focusing so much. I find myself having this conversation with partners all the time because I run the global alliances for Microsoft at that point. And as we onboard partners that are mostly MSPs and we kind of talked about what do we need to know in working with Microsoft. Let me ask you that question. What do partners need to know about working with Microsoft? Like how do you keep up with the rapid pace that things are coming out? Yeah. We're lucky. We've got three Microsoft MVPs myself, Paul and where's running Adin 365. So we work really closely with Microsoft product groups to understand what's Microsoft's trajectory for a service and where do we think there are gaps? So where are clients going to need our support? And we develop our products to really plug the gaps in what Microsoft provide. And it's a good business model for us because products mean we can show clients up front what they're going to get as a fixed price point. They get it quickly. And it works well in the current climate where Microsoft services and people are in high demand and you can't necessarily get the headcount to do everything bespoke bespoke bespoke. So I think it's a win-win in terms of the model we've come to. But I think for an organization or a partner looking to partner with Microsoft, I would say think about how you're going to understand Microsoft's roadmap well, because whether you are producing products or delivering services, you need to be really aligned to that now. So where do you see the most opportunities for growth within the Microsoft stack today? What are customers asking the most about? Yeah, it's interesting because the and it's always been like this, but because since 2020, there's been a lot of world action, whether it's COVID or World War, you know, that there's what people are asking for is aligned to global events. So we're seeing a huge increase in demand around our intranet product. Well, now we call it employee experience. We have one package in particular that's about brand alignment. And that's off the charts in terms of the requests and the number of people wanting to invest in that, because hybrid work has meant the organizations are thinking about how to keep the emotional connectedness between their organization and their employees when their employees might be three, four days at home, or even they're still full time at home. So I think the pandemic now hybrid work has seen that accelerate. Whereas we sort of know the intranet products, projects traditionally have always bobbed along, haven't they? So I don't think that's anything to do with us or Microsoft. I think that's the world dictating, dictating that. And similarly, we've seen a big increase in our governance and standardization tools. So we've got a governance tool for teams. And then we've got tools for user experience standardization for SharePoint and teams. And again, we've seen those go off the charts as well. Because this is very, very recent with the Ukraine-Russia conflict. We've seen almost all of our clients that have had an operation in Russia and all Ukraine kind of going, we need to pick up this workload elsewhere around the world or we need to divest that part of the organization. How can we do that really quickly? We need technology tools that are going to support that change. So I think the world has rather than Microsoft roadmap or things we want to take to market have dictated what's hot at the moment. I think that the one exception to that is Microsoft's fever experiences and capabilities. I think that's definitely been led by Microsoft and everybody's talking about it. Everybody wants to work with it. We've got a set of products coming to market soon for the Viva Connections dashboard capability. And that really delivers against long-term business challenges around poor content findability, poor levels of personalization and of course the Viva dashboard delivers personalization, delivers productivity, delivers relevance and it's there. It's very easy to find that content. Everybody's sort of looking at that capability and seeing it as the solution to lots of long-term problems that we're all known about in the industry for a long time. Well, that's what's interesting about Viva. It's not that it's groundbreaking, per se. There's a lot of interesting things and obviously from a technology standpoint, probably the most interesting to a bunch of the nerds that have been involved in SharePoint and Teams for many, many years is on the topic side of things and some of the other products that come out of Syntex and SharePoint Syntex as well. But Connections is probably the most robust and probably I think it was the first of the Viva solutions that was available and the most robust and meets those surface, those obvious needs of that personalization of finding the right, the findability of information within the platform. The other side of that too is that it is so much about Viva is Microsoft realizing that the evolution that's happened over the last six, seven years of Microsoft realizing we can't just sell licenses. We have to sell it in a way and help customers that they're actually using, consuming the product that we're selling. And so the focus has really shifted towards adoption and engagement which is great to see. It's been completely consistent though hasn't it? Because if you look at SharePoint, my first project was SharePoint 2003 and as you know you needed to develop it to update content on a page and then in 2007 and you know we had things like the Teller at Red Editor to start being able to put content into pages and then you know 2010, 2013 online it's moved more and more towards regular business people being able to produce those experiences. All Microsoft have done there is continue that line of thinking correctly and kind of gone oh what are people trying to do they're trying to learn? What are people trying to aggregate content? And I think those Viva skis are representative of that and actually you know this is thinking that spans much wider doesn't it because if you think about the team's apps it's a similar vein or Tim's you know the team's industry capabilities it's Microsoft thinking about the use cases for the technology rather than just the technology underpinnings. I think you mentioned syntax and topics you know topics and for me it's I think that the thing that's interesting is that as long as I've worked in the industry the most high value workload for any organization has been getting knowledge management right and having a way of centralizing that organizational IP and what's interesting is that where the technology is very much there today whether you're thinking about people collaborating and working out loud in teams or having these hubs of know-how content whether that's around a client or a product or ways of working you know having syntax topics aggregating that information organizations still really really struggle with getting their people to produce that content or even dump that content in some scenarios so the technology is very much overtaken where businesses are and I don't know what is in the zeitgeist that blocks so many large organizations from biting the bullet and getting these things written down which you know would it would it deliver incredible business value for them both in the context of a great resignation where there is the potential for lots of IP and know how to to leave the organization but also just in terms of being more competitive in a global market certainly in the UK we're suffering huge inflation at the moment taxes have increased there is talk of another recession but yeah they don't seem to get there and we never see organizations motivate and incentivize their managers to get that information out of their people so I think whether you're looking at teams rollouts traditional intranet employee experience projects or even dynamic CRM projects getting people to actually use adopt these tools and actually upload that content and have it available to the organization they it's still the big hurdle I think well hasn't it gotten even harder than that because you know 25 years ago where most collaboration certainly when I was when I got involved in collaboration technology in the mid 90s and started working on my first portal and was chartered with gathering this information and making it findable and inside my org it was document based or spreadsheet based you know and and there was some data that was out there that would integrate in and of course but we have gotten away from using the documents documents in the same way so much of the data that I generate on a daily basis looking at my own patterns I'm using lists I'm in chats I'm in conversations it is so much more unstructured than it's ever been before which makes it even more imperative for organizations to look at these technologies and that can draw in the content from all of these different signals decipher it format that and present it back in a way that's consumable you can't just rely on people to upload the documents and the files that are relevant and are tagged correctly and have the right content within it to be able to provide what people need to know about a project at the end of that project you know it's it's just it's very different but it's always been chronically underfunded hasn't it I mean you've always had knowledge managers who are absolutely people that completely understand they need to gather content on processes ways of working and I think the reason it's generally been underfunded is because the the work involved in getting it right is cross departmental probably spanning multiple countries in a lot of instances as well and it just feels like too big a thing to get right but the wins are definitely there for the organizations that do it and we saw that with a lot of organizations we deployed to teams very early on with and where those organizations had rolled out the full use of the team service in terms of channel structures how to align that to workloads that were going on in their organization so you know WPP is the world's largest media company we did a lot of work with those those guys through an M&A period and it did really well and same with a very large pharmaceutical company that we work with as well same thing so I think you know where the effort's there the big wins can be had but certainly it's not not on it not on everybody's to-do list yeah well it's I think that it's it's one thing that you at your earlier point about you know even Microsoft and taking the time to focus more on the use cases what the well the experiences so they like using that word a lot the employee experiences rather than so we're not so focused on keeping servers up and keeping those services up and running it's a given there the servers are running it's dynamic it's it's in the cloud it's always on it's elastic and it's scalability so that is our organization grows we don't need to think about buying more hardware and adding that in as we do in the on-prem days and you know kind of all those different pieces it allows us that luxury to go in and start looking at those end-to-end experiences and saying okay where are the gaps here where are we losing information where do we not have data where or or just looking at the usage patterns and recognizing we as an organization we are more email centric still than others yes we're using teams we have SharePoint here but we're still very outlook centric so let's develop tools and integrations that are nuanced for the the collaboration style and culture of our organization which is more email centric I completely agree with that and something we do and we've done it since we started the company in 2015 we start every project with something called success definition where we're talking to the leaders of the organization not talking to them about tech we're saying what's the CEO asked you to do and we asked the CEO what's the board asked you to do and then we say right well you know the technology you're already invested in can support it in the following ways and the sorts of goals you're typically hearing from the C-suite are around M&A increased growth in certain markets product lines retaining people you typically hear from head of HR and so when you when you approach it from that what's the business trying to do angle you can very easily line up behind that Microsoft's capabilities and we also we have our own products that bring those together as well and deliver those and the great thing about that approach is that the business value is felt really really fast whereas if you're sort of looking at it in terms of rolling out a technology or a service capability you kind of miss the point because how could you ever connect that into the bigger picture if you haven't started with the bigger picture you don't understand the bigger picture so I think having that sort of use case approach you know that can be elevated even further in the way that in the way that we do so that you've really caught that strategic underpinning and of course from a product and services and a client lifetime value perspective it's really good as well because obviously they see the business value and they want to do more with the stack they're going to saying great what now that we've done that can we do more things like topics things like syntax you can do that stuff when your content's in the people are working in the platform properly you know you've got your communities rolled out in yama all those things can suddenly start to to sing for you if if you're treating it in that use case from that use case angle so I think Microsoft have really got that right and partners that are approaching it that way at getting it right as well you know there's a I've been a long time away from it so I don't remember the exact wording the phrasing for it but in business school there's a there's a I remember having many conversations and breaking out the HP 12c calculators to look at trying to put a number around the cost of lost opportunities so like you'll never it's to try and put a number around like a company not doing something not trying something I always use that phrasing when I talk about what it means you have 100 people in your organization and if only 25 of them are actively collaborating together within the tools and they could be highly efficient you could be effective you could be hitting all your numbers exceeding your numbers as a company what would it have been had 50% of the company 75% been collaborating how much better would your information be how much faster would you be time to market with product and going and trying to calculate net show that it's you know we it's a given it's intuitive to know that if everyone is collaborating if we're leveraging more of our collective brain we're going to get more output and it'll be better better quality I mean it when we do these sort of new ways of working rollouts which is exactly that kind of onboarding how are you doing things as a client team or a product team today if we lift that and we're not going to redefine your purpose but if we just use better technologies what's the ROI to the organization and it's definitely I mean you know between 30 and 50 percent of the organization you have that maximum value point and then there is a there is a there is a long tail which you know I think it's fine to get the maximum value and not necessarily touch everybody but we we have a similar model to the one you've talked about we look at cost price and value so the price is the price but the cost is the cost of doing it and also the cost of not doing it to your organization which is your point about the opportunity lost and of course the value is the ROI on the activity so the generally the bigger picture and that works really well in road mapping with clients which parts of their organization should they be doing these bigger investments in more focus more time more energy versus versus everybody else I have to say that I think the long-term pain I would love to see result is moving finance teams out of excel and into something better and because I think you could get a Nobel Peace Prize if you move people off of the cell the problem is there's excel and then there's the fact they all link the excel sheets so it's like this lethal game of trying to move these things out into apps and lists and you're kind of thinking oh my god if we turn this off or we get rid of this what's going to fall over in you know somewhere else in the organization but I actually don't I don't think there's a particularly good tool as of yet to to to deal with with what most finance teams try to do which is why they're still in excel you know it's why why I mean this is a different line of conversation but it's why Lotus Notes was so difficult to get out of organizations was because unlike financial teams and the small database driven applications that be developed on there they're so embedded they've so abused gone away from the core function of what it should have been and so they're the slowest adopters of the new technology and that just yeah they're definitely in the long tail I think the easier to shift is where you're finding innovation teams using excel they're easy to move because you're so all you actually try to do this isn't a numbers thing is it no no no it's just a way of organizing some workloads and so they're pretty easy to move away from it but again it goes back to that knowledge management doesn't it see the high value information or it's not in in one way or another well you know for the last 25 years excel has remained the number one project management tool out there I believe that we're slowly getting the loosening that grip on the project management side just because it's not any single solution I wish it were planner or project or something it's not you know MS project is one of the but it's such a there's so many different project management solutions that are out there but the kanban based a list based I think are winning people away from using excel as a project management tool and maybe that'll help loosen the grip over time but you're definitely right about that and I think that the biggest evidence of it is if you look at workplace platforms that are not as good or as well established as Microsoft's like the Google platform and they're the add-ins that are very popular there are things like Monday.com and it's effectively the Google version of planner isn't it except it's third party and the fact is they haven't what's popular there isn't an alternative version of excel or or even a traditional project management tool it's it's that kanban style of board's list strike drop um yes it's it's a it's a funny old world yeah well it's well I know that we're we're out of time here but Susie it's been great meeting it's great discussion I always like to wrap it up by asking the people want to get in touch with you find you what are the best ways to reach you yeah add in 365.com um we've got a brochure up in the top right hand corner where you can download some of our latest case studies we do a biannual uh brochure of the different projects and work we're doing so if you're interested in the sorts of things we've talked about with those end user services get in touch