 Hey, everybody, this is Christian Buckley with another MVP Buzz Chat. And I'm talking today with Mike. Hello. Hi, Christian. Good to see you. Good to see you as well. So for folks that don't know who you are, where you are, what you do, why don't you give us that background. So my name is Mike Weaver. I'm out of London, UK, but originally from Hartford, Connecticut. I specialize a lot in merger acquisition and divestiture work, mainly in the Microsoft stack. But a lot of times bringing in all the org challenges that come along with that. So trying to live within the technical realities, but also the personnel realities of the merger acquisition work. So that's been what I've been working on for quite some time. And a lot of what I write about is that kind of org relationship piece with the technical challenges. That's an interesting space, you know, so for both of us have background in migration space. And something that I find myself saying over and over again, it's like people when they think about migration, they think about it as that like one time activity, we're upgrading from SharePoint 2010 to Microsoft 365 or, you know, like that they look at it from that project-centric view. But the reality is, like M&A is a great example of that. Organizations are constantly changing, constantly evolving. So there's always going to be and there's and there you think you know all of the platforms which where your employees have content and you do the major move and then you keep finding, oh, a bunch of Dropbox. Oh, this other business using Box. Oh, there's this other show and you're the one who broke it on Sunday night and Monday. It's not working. Correct. Well, that's the other fun thing about migration. Nobody talks about the dirty side of that. It's like, you can go out and notify everyone for six months. This is coming. This is coming. This is coming. And then you do the migration and people like, well, what happened? Why didn't you tell me? Yeah, absolutely. It's madness. And you know, it's interesting because that's what we try to do is increase that quality. And every time you have one of those disasters, it goes into your playbook of disasters and you try to make it better for the next time and tell all your friends about it. Do you have any fun war stories of any hot messes that you've worked with? I mean, I think the classic. Yeah. I mean, I think the classic is, you know, the found tenants and found issues with Azure AD integration. Right. I mean, with everything being single sign on these days, it's amazing what you can break when you move their single sign on identity from one organization to the other and, you know, all the tie ins break. So I think that's probably the normal war stories. Like you said, you know, Dropbox stops working or, you know, some major critical application. Someone took out Salesforce once because there was single sign on integration and they hadn't planned that. So it's always the added pieces. So for those at home, check your AD logs, check your app registrations and then look at everything before you start executing that weekend plan. Well, that's again, there's a process that you run through where you remove permissions and then, you know, turn off certain services and kind of test. And again, you can do all of those notifications and it's all quiet. Nobody raises an eyebrow. You turn off access to some of those services and suddenly people like, whoa, whoa, whoa, wait a second. And there are, there are legitimate, like we didn't realize that it was wired the way that it was that we, so we have to go in and make some corrections there. But yeah, it's a, I don't know that it's as messy as it used to be when there was actual physical hardware that we owned. Planes, trains and automobiles on the weekend to ship hard drives and catch planes and all those disasters. People didn't understand to like how backed up it was to get hardware to make put not just the cost of maintaining and running those, but just to acquisition process of getting the hardware and so the cost and the time that it took and then to go and build those things out. So our ops teams were constantly going in and saying, look, if, if no one speaks up and we turn off access to the services, you know, we shut the server down for 30 days and no one cries, you know, complaints, then we reclaim the hardware. Seems pretty straightforward. Yeah. And then, and, you know, you get up at an annual event or something like that that got missed. But the days have changed a lot. I mean, I used to go do those weekends where you'd rip out every switch, every cable, every device and bring in a SEAL team of 20 people for an office. And, you know, the good news is those days are over where you can do a lot more and reconfigure and a lot more options now. And like you said, I think it's a lot more known and firms fall into, I always say, the always acquire and never acquire camps. So, I mean, obviously there's some firms in the middle, but a lot of these firms that have been just doing it for 20 years over and over again. It's business as usual, just with new technology and new planning. Yep. So, what's some of the stuff that you're actively writing on and speaking on right now? What kind of topics are you passionate about? So, Teams is a big kind of, we talk about things that are tried, true and ready. Teams is the one that I'm doing a lot of focus on because of all the challenges in doing that. And so, I've been doing a lot. I was at Consverse in the UK a couple of weeks ago doing a session on, it keeps getting worse and the end was, but you can be the best and some of the ways to try to deal with that. So, that's been a lot of the focus. I do a lot on PST files too, which is just kind of something from industry that's just stayed with me over the years. So, guiding large organizations for that. It kind of rears its head every once in a while, yeah. It ruins a migration weekend every single time when you find it. So, yeah, a lot of that space. I was gonna say what we do a lot with our AMA panels that we do, there's a, like every other episode, there's a question on PST. So, there's still a lot of, again, it used to be, I don't know the answer anymore. It used to be when you'd ask somebody, interview an organization, do some research, how many versions of SharePoint? And the average number of versions was 2.5, meaning there are a lot of companies with three different versions out there. And then you had kind of a similar pattern with email and different clients and different platforms. And I don't know what the numbers are around those things now, but I'd like to think that organizations are streamlining a lot of that. And I think just the natural to move towards the cloud helps with that alignment, that streamlining. Streamlining, yeah, so. And we've got another OS release. So, we've got another set of organizations that want to take on data centralization. So, what's old is new again. And a lot of firms finally, I should say finally, but truly embracing 100% no data on the endpoint with the Windows 11 conversion that firms are starting to play with a little bit after our release yesterday. That was always the question. I mean, I always reference like back in the, it must have been like 2014 or some time around there where I interviewed or met with the Jared Spitaro at the partner conference. And we were talking about the time. So, this was still the tail end of the bomber period. But the, so when was that 2013, 2014? Anyway, Spitaro was talking about, the big push towards the cloud. And that's when bomber was still like the cloud, the cloud we're all in. You're a fool if you're not moving to the cloud and pushing organizations through. And there's a lot of pushback. And of course, working in the migration space and dealing with customers, having this conversation about what they actually invested within those environments and why they were not just running out embracing all things cloud in the earlier days. Spitaro made the comments that I asked him, I said, how fast do you think you'll see the majority of production environments moved over to the cloud? He says, well, I say, we think like two to three years. It'll be very quick. And a year later, I met with him again and I said, do you remember the conversation? Yes, I do. I said, do you remember your answer? He says, yes, I was, I thought it would be two to three years for that. He says, the data is now showing because they spent the year interviewing customers. And they said, you know, this is going to be, we're not putting a date on it. And it's going to be a slower, you know, progress, you know, into the cloud. NetNU, it's easy for organizations that go in there, centralize to build. It just makes complete sense. But for the, especially coming from the SharePoint world, organizations that had spent the last decade investing heavily in automation and building around SharePoint, you know, that it was going to be a slower move. It was a more hybrid than it was jumping over to pure cloud. And a lot of organizations, it was really the COVID pandemic that broke that last hybrid desire. Cause for a while there was the, we put money into the sand. We put money into this investment. We put money into whatever data center. I want to get my five years out of it. And you know, suddenly, you know, with the pandemic, a lot of people, you know, they didn't want people on site anymore. They wanted to be completely removed from it and VPN restrictions and a lot of organizations. That was when they said, okay, no more hybrid, we're done. And we're seeing a lot of that push now for the final servers coming out of data centers. In the office space, app servers, I think are going to be mixed for a while. Well, it's interesting that when you try to impress upon an organization that need to go and pilot new capabilities, the tendency is to go and says, all right, we can do a pilot over on this project over here that's not really going to disturb anything. Well, the problem with that is that if you never put it in that serious scenario, real world scenario, then you're never going to really kick the tires and understand a stress test on the solution. COVID gave everybody a stress test. It made it really quick for them to see, you know, what, you know, where the gaps really were. And I've heard, I'm sure you have from a number of customers that just said, you know, we started to make this move over and Teams was a huge help there, but we had all these other pieces in place and we realized, hey, we can actually do this. And so it's, as you said, it's sped up the rest of the move of the remaining assets. So then it becomes exception management of those other pieces of moving them across. And I think to people's attitudes and I don't want to say willingness for issues, but the expectation that there would be issues because everyone was moving so fast, you kind of had a prime opportunity to push these things faster than the organization would have normally been ready for it because people were more reasonable and understanding that, you know, you had to change. So if you were creative, you could get away with a lot more, I guess, and a lot faster, but we also had to react very quickly to the organization's needs. So it's just, it's amazing how rapid that occurred, especially in the first six months to a year of that situation. Yep. Well, I have to ask you, so you went and participated in the comms verse. So very jealous of that just because, so I participated and supported the event previously in the online version of that. And we have upcoming the US version, the Denver event that's happening. How was it being back into a larger event in person? So it was really well done. So it was a larger venue with less people. So we were able to spread out and Mark Bale, who's the main organizer, did a really nice job of being conscious of that. So I mean, I think at first, especially in the UK because we had restrictions for a lot longer than in the US, it was a little odd being this close to everybody and things like that. But the event was really successful. It was great being back with people to debate issues and, you know, be with a bunch of the speakers and, you know, get into the arguments, debates and war stories and sharing that kind of advice. So that was really nice and that's creativity with the digital events, which a lot of cases are recorded in advance because you kind of have to to have the good quality and ensure the speaker doesn't lose internet connection, things like that. But to get back to live communication was nice and they did a really nice job with that event. Yeah, I'd say that in, so a couple of months back, so I was able to go to an event in Branson, Missouri and it's a huge, the convention center there, which, you know, in years past, there were one or two other major events happening at the same time in this huge space. And this time it was just us. And so we were joking about, you know, having that minimum of 25 to 30 feet distance, you know, between people. So having that was not an issue. But you're right, just the fact that we had a booth and two of us sitting there and people coming up and, you know, we didn't have the huge numbers, you know, numbers of in-person were down. Again, it was, we did it actually September last year, which was, you know, which was weird, but we did it. But the online activity was up. So more people that were online, not there in person, but you just can't beat the people coming by the conversations there at the booth and questions and getting in depth into issues that they're having and getting creative on solutions and pulling other partners into the discussion. I mean, the things that you can't, you can't do virtually, it just doesn't work that way. Well, and I think we know a lot from, you know, home working studies that have been done for nearly 15, 20 years now, right? Remote working and full-time work at home. And most of the studies, you know, in summary always show that you have to have some sort of in-person together time to have the best collaboration with the teams. And I mean, there's ways to do it without, but the best is to have those check-ins in person for like you said, those things that you just can't do very well. Some of my writing I'm doing is effective hybrid meetings and hybrid communications right now to try to support that challenge of, you know, just like what we're talking about of, you know, we've either been home or in the office. Now we have this long-term meeting problem where, okay, what do you do when half of the people are in a room and half of them are remote and you've got to kind of all be on the an equal playing field to actually collaborate effectively. That's, hey, I just tell people say, welcome to the world I've lived in for more than the last decade, you know? And so a couple ideas there. So one, like I started with this job in December last year. And so a month and a half ago was my first time seeing in person a lot of people that I worked with. Now I knew I had relationships, you know, my company at point was a client prior. So I knew I've known people for most of that decade. So that helped. But I can't imagine what that would be like for somebody who is interviewed, brand new, doesn't know anybody, and then it didn't have those interactions, didn't already have those established relationships. You have to make a trip in occasionally. Even I'm like looking at at least a quarterly basis, visiting offices where the majority of my team works so I can have that, that face to face time. Even knowing a lot of these people for most of the last decade, you have to have that connection. I met a colleague last night for the first time. He started in March of 2020 and just right at the beginning of it. And he had never met anyone in the company and he trained in the London and met him at a pub the other night. It's, we're all still doing that. And I'll work better with him going forward now. Which is nice, but just like you said, it really changes things. Yeah, it's funny too, is like my college roommate and close friend for years had lost touch with him. He was actually living on a country for a couple of years, but then came back and went to work for AOL in Northern Virginia. And I'm living in Northern California since the early 90s. And he, so I was actually on the beta for AOL as a messenger. And so, early into mid 90s, it felt like I didn't see him in person for five, six years, yet we talked almost every single day. Yeah, and we had that deep relationship already, lived together for two years, and so we had that to kind of bridge the gaps, but then having the tools, it was fantastic. It was like he was right there. We were sharing things constantly. It's amazing what you can do there, but has to be augmented with that personal connection. There's no way. Absolutely. Yeah, well, very cool. Well, Mike, so folks that want to get in touch with you, find out more about you. What are the best ways to reach you and find out more? So my website is madmic.net for a merger acquisition divestiture. That's probably the best way to start. I also am a regular contributor on practical365.com. Excellent. Are you also a weird Al Jankovic fan? Oh, I don't know. Do I have to be? I could just steal up here. So I've got a good friend, Sharon Weaver. I can't say her name with her. I met her at Comsverse for the first time. Yeah, so I found her. I'm like, I don't know if we're related or not, but yes, I met her. There's just a quote from the movie from UHF, where it's not even weird Al Jankovic, but it's his movie, where Suni, the leading on the fake game show of Wheel of Fish says, are you ready, Weaver? Just that one quote that I do all the time to Sharon. And I think she knows the reference, but. I won't take your thing with her away from her. I wouldn't do that to her. Like I just say it's an important American film. I really highly recommend that you go take a look at it. It's, I think it's important. People need to see it. I will, I will do some research and report back. All right. Anyway, it was great talking to you. We'll, we'll connect soon. Hopefully we'll see you at, maybe at Summit next year. I don't know. Yeah, we'll see where it goes. Yeah. All right, we'll talk to you soon. Thanks for sharing.