 Hey everybody, this is Christian Buckley with another MVP Buzz Chat and I'm talking today with Sharon. Hello. Hello, how are you? I'm doing well. For folks that don't know who you are, want to give us who you are, where you are, what you do. Okay, so I'm Sharon Sumner, Business Applications MVP. My passion is Power Apps, but I actually come from SharePoint, so I know of you from many years back. There's a lot of us out there. We've kind of gone different directions, but yes. Yeah, so I come from probably 2007 on SharePoint, so I've been doing SharePoint. I think we measure it in decades here. So yeah, really come from that. But now as an MVP, I'm running the Cambridge Power Platform Music Group over here in Cambridge in the UK. Excellent. I always like to ask this for people that were involved with SharePoint way back then. Do you feel like getting involved in 2007 that you were like a latecomer into the SharePoint space? Do you still think of yourself that way? Because that's about the era I started. I got involved. And it was, well, I mean, still 2003 was going on, but getting ready in Microsoft was showcasing 2007. And so that period, but I still feel like I was a late bloomer in the SharePoint space. Yeah, I guess you're right, because kind of when we started in 2007, although I really think of 2007 as the first real version, right? You know, workflows, content types, all that kind of magic came in that version. So, and it kind of got to be a really exciting product rather than just something that may be interesting. But even then, back in 2007, you're right, there was still, you know, like the pros that have been in it, et cetera, were already there for like a decade. So, you know, you've got, you've still had, back then you still had like massively seasoned experts. So, yeah, I do feel a bit like an newcomer. But it's been a fantastic journey, huh? And, you know, I've put it out there many times, I do love SharePoint, do love it. Some days I love it and hate it, but most days I love it. Well, and so what was your path into the power platform? And I guess it kind of, it was the evolution of SharePoint, right? So, SharePoint workflows, you kind of had to evolve or die, right? So, you either became hardcore and you carried on playing on-prem, you also do that. Or you get into the new toys. And the new toys were really exciting. And when I started looking at the power platform, you know, I think I watched some early Microsoft Learn stuff with Audrey Gordon and John LaVec. And those two people just made it sound so exciting. So, off I went to play with it and, you know, never looked back. But essentially, you know, it's the workflow replacement. So, my heart is in business process automation. And to do that, and to do that well moving forward, Power Apps is the place to be, right? Yeah, that was one of those things too. I remember when they announced what they were doing this direction in a power platform. And at the MVP summit, I don't remember what year it was, but it was when it was still, the way that they used to do the MVP summits, which is for those that aren't familiar, it's an annual event and all the MVPs would gather back when we used to gather for events. But on Microsoft campus, and all the SharePoint people were together for like that full week and do deep dives in different areas of the product. And I remember sitting over, we were in, you know, so in like split between two rooms. And this room was like jam packed and they made kind of the announcements of like the future of automation and what was happening with InfoPath and where the direction Microsoft is going to go. But it was still, it was SharePoint people, I think that was the last year where we were kind of segregated like all, you know, we were together for the entire week. I think it was the year after that, where at that summit, where like half the crowd was gone, because they kind of opened up all the topics across the campus. And so there was a number of people that were going to Azure sessions, and to the dynamic sessions, which is where a lot of the power platform type topics were being held. And so I actually didn't see people. I saw two people that had been there every year, old-timers in the MVP role. I saw them at the airport as we were all leaving. Like I did. You know, I've actually, I've never attended an in-person one. So kind of looking forward to that, that's on the bucket list. Just got to stay in MVP for that long, basically. But you know, it's one of those things that, so I've spent the last decade, I would say, growing the organization. So I'm also CEO of my own Microsoft Go partner. And that takes up a lot of time. So it's only sort of in the last couple of years, I've been able to up the commitment to the community. It's always been there, right? So I've always been, you know, involved in charities and charitable and giving back to communities. The tech community, I think, really took off with the advent. You know, we already had SharePoint, SharePoint Saturdays, right? But then come the power platform, we got into a whole bunch of new community members, the reach just got bigger and bigger. And so I think it just got really fantastic and exciting at that point to be involved. And so that's really when I started kind of speaking more and starting up the user group. Because there was a bigger audience to talk to. I think in the early days, we were just kind of like a hardcore contingent of SharePoint people, right? Always everybody at the same event. To be fair, SharePoint Saturday, and a lot of that community was spun off of the SQL Saturday, which is also a massive contingency that's out there. And so what's wonderful about this is that there are still, I mean, there's still SQL Saturday type things that are going on. There's a huge AI community, of course there, you have the SharePoint Saturday and there's a lot of like we rebranded, there's a lot that have rebranded like we moved ours to our annual events to Fridays. And so we're like the Microsoft 365 Friday event. But I mean, a lot of that community is still there. And now you're right. Power Platform as a community movement, it's just exploded as well. But there's just, you know, I'm a member of all of those. Keeps you busy, huh? So there's a lot that you can go in there too, because the reality is that our day jobs touch on all of those different areas. So you don't have to go and I'm only looking at these areas. Yeah, I guess, and again, heavily into the power up side of things. But at the moment, RPA has kind of got my attention. Yeah. And I think, you know, as an organization, we've got, we've got a huge, huge, huge for us, right? We're a smallish company compared to like our point. But we're focused on the power platform and the business process automation. But RPA, I think, has got a massive direction to go in. I think the next couple of years, it's going to, again, explode totally. And I think, again, it comes from that kind of SharePoint workflow data into results in making, you know, people's lives easier. It's all about the productivity and the efficiency. And that's kind of what gives me that the kick out of making those processes automated. So I kind of think RPA has got a good couple of years to come and an explosion of its own to happen as it gets more entrenched. Prior to the SharePoint space, I mean, you're still in the business process automation kind of kind of space. What was, what was your background prior to that? I was going back a bit. So before that, I was actually, I was in, dirty word, I was in search engine optimization before then. So we ran a company for about 20 years before that doing online marketing. And we were kind of, we were there at the start of the internet. God, it makes me sound old. We were there at the start of the internet where, you know, we had a hosting company and we had, you know, a website with waving palm trees, you know, back when it was cool and difficult to do. You can't, you have to go into it. You knew it was an important website when there was theme song that would automatically start playing and there's something online, you know what I mean? And that's kind of where we started out. And back then it was, again, it was still about automation. So we had a product called Broadcaster, which promoted you to all the search engines, you know. So it's always been about doing a job and automating that and kind of sitting under the hood. Now with Casper 365, we're about the automation of SharePoint sites and team sites and governance and all of that side of things. So there's a decent balance in the day job of things to be interested in around the Microsoft cloud that kind of then spurs my interest to go and like, oh, let's go and look at this topic and let's go and explore that with the community. Yeah. And that's the one thing I really like about this community. I feel like when you look at tech communities, they can seem to be really competitive. That's just not the way within MVP land, right? Anybody that's got an MVP award in my experience is just such a decent human being. And that's kind of why you're awarded it, right? Because everybody is so giving and helpful and it's a fantastic thing to be a part of. So I thoroughly enjoy kind of spending what time I can in the community. I have to say that, I mean, historically, and there have been some, I'll be kind, I'll say, some difficult personalities in this space. And I think Microsoft has really gone in and there are like standards for participating in MVP and they've gone in and enforced those. And there's some really nice people who did set some stupid things, had, you know, some breakdowns emotionally and just like frustrated something and then acted in an inappropriate way and lost their MVP and rightfully so. And so I'm glad to see Microsoft kind of setting those standards, the bar for that, because I agree that the MVPs that I know, like you can't be an MVP and hold it in and hold all the knowledge. These are some of the most, you know, being just super connectors from a standpoint and sharing what we're learning. And it's not something like, hey, look at me, while there are some people that are like that, it's much more of a, hey, I learned this thing and rather than going and saving it to my files or like sharing it with the world, that's just part of the way that we think. No, I think you're spot on. I mean, it used to be in tech, you know, in the early days for me, everybody was kind of hoarding, you know, mine, not like that anymore. Everybody wants to help everybody to the next step. And I always say, you know, I don't consider, from a business point of view, I don't think you can do anything truly inspirational while you encumber yourself with the thought of competition, right? There are lots of companies out there that need the help of lots of Microsoft partners. So if you, if you bother yourself with what everybody else is doing, you're never going to truly innovate yourself. So I always feel like that's exactly the same in the community. Everybody wants to share the knowledge that we've learned to propel everybody a little bit faster, because if I can propel you, you're going to go on and do something and you're going to feed it back to me and we just all move together much faster. What's the fun in exploring on your own, right? I mean, I can't remember the last time I went on a trip on my own and didn't kind of phone him and say, this is really cool. Everybody wants to share it. You take, you take photos, you share, right? And that's what experiences are for me. So I think the companies that I've worked for, I mean, I've always had friends that were worked for some of our direct competitors. And I love having those conversations where we go in and we can talk about, I mean, look, human nature is that it's great when there's a boogeyman where we all together can go attack that. But a lot of that, what that boogeyman is our gaps are, you know, our opportunities for growth and development. It's something where, look, no platform, no technology is perfect. We, you go and look at power platform and there's probably a list of 100 things that you can think of that you'd like to see it extended and expanded and build upon or improved upon. And so that's, that's kind of the boogeyman. That's the opportunity for us, even competitors to work together and say, Hey, there's a business need that's out there. Here's our approach and then bring competitors, you know, others within the community together to say, how would you approach this? How would you dance with that? Validate your ideas for going and solving that customer need. I think the Microsoft terminology is totally spot on. It's that we're all partners, right? So if we all share the workload with the same goal, which is getting the end customer to their goal, you know, there's no competition there really is that I mean, okay, you might be selling exactly the same service as someone else, but whichever one of you gets that piece of work, somebody else will need that piece of work. You know, there's no need to all be, you know, massively competitively buying for the same piece of work. In my experience, looking if you're in those markets where it's taking off in the way that it is, look at the power platform. Two years ago, nowhere near the amount of jobs that there are. I mean, it's ridiculously hard to recruit people because there are just more jobs than there are people that are in the panel platform, you know, so which I really like actually because it means you get to bring on juniors and you get to mentor and you get to actually bring people on and help them in their career. I mean, the pie is just getting bigger and we're going to need more help. We're going to need more people. And then there's then you have little things like, I don't know, multi cloud. So the ability to work across multiple, you know, environments, multiple systems. And so that's, there's going to be opportunities. There's always going to be integration, you know, interoperability, you know, needs across these solutions. And then, you know, then you also have, I think that there are also gaps in industries. There are some industries where there's been a lot of work. There's a lot of personnel. There's a lot of activity. So the maturity level of SharePoint and Teams and Power Platform are strong within those worlds, but other industries might be very weak. Yeah. And I guess, and that's kind of one of those things, isn't it? So when you, the thing I like about being a Gold Partner is that it's not our first time. Yeah, we've seen a version of these problems before. And it's the same thing. We can propel you there faster. The book that I'm writing, I've been writing for about a year is called Getting to Value Faster. And it's a fundamental belief, right? Because if we can get a client to value faster, whether that's from leveraging what we've done over here for the health sector and applying that to the finance sector, you know, all of those things, that should be our focus. That should be what we're trying to do. Organizations that we looked at partner with where I can see that they're, you know, repeating the same model, customer in customer, you know, it's not very inspiring. And kind of, I quite like being a small company in that way because we get to choose who our clients are and we get to choose who our partners are. And, you know, I've always had the ethos with my team that it's fun to come to work. So the moment we stop having fun, what are we doing, right? So for us, it's about taking on a piece of work that challenges us, or we really feel like we can massively deliver a super benefit. And I kind of got a little bit known for saying no, because if a customer comes to you with an ask and there's just no business value in it, I'm going to tell them, you know? And I think that's important. I think more of us should be doing that. But anyway, I guess. I like that. The idea too is that, you know, we're so much of what we've been doing within the collaboration ecosystem has been trying to help companies stop doing like reinventing the wheel when they're trying to go and solve these business problems. And so that concept of, you know, that time to value so much of what automation is about. That's what, you know, the SharePoint community has been about is automating these things, doing these faster, learning from the community so we're not repeating the mistakes, saying, no, this is how you go and do that. So that we don't, I mean, this is what a lot of the shift has been within the community. And there's a, I think there's a reason why so many former SharePoint people are over in the power platform world is because we've gone from being, you know, our focus being on keeping servers up and running. Like they're up and running now, you know, like we've moved past that where we can look at the next stage where we're talking about automation through provisioning, through creation of customized applications through the AI capabilities and other automation. There's, there's just so many different ways that you can extend build onto that core. The baseline is improved. We don't need to go back and resurface that. We can focus now on how do we get there faster? How do we deliver the outcomes that will really change your business? Yeah, I think it's interesting that you've hit actually on the reason why I started this business because I kept coming across SharePoint consultants who are out there and then the lone man on site, right? So just one SharePoint consultant can do it all. Well, they can, but that's not the bit they love, right? So you either loved search, heaven forbid, or metadata or whatever it is that was your thing taxonomy. You know, you loved a particular element of SharePoint. For me, it was the automation side of things. And so I wanted to progress and play with the automation all of my time. And so what we did when we first started, this is some 11 years ago now, was we took a bunch of SharePoint consultants and deliberately had people that like different bits and then offered that as a package, rather than trying to, you know, square playground hole a single consultant on site. And I think they kind of shift away from kind of just having one person that you know, rest everything on. And like you say, with the with the power platform, the nice thing about that is actually we've democratized into the entire organization, right? With the whole citizen developers or XL demons or whatever it is you want to call them that are thoroughly engaged with the business, just need a little bit of support from the tech. You know, it now means that there's a whole group of people in the business, little, little community of its own that you can help to grow and you can help to nurture. And that's far more powerful than having one guy sitting there doing it. When you know, you just, you basically just have done from a technology standpoint. So my favorite management book, well, one of my favorite management books, but I actually have multiple copies because I used to give one to every employee that I would hire. It's a book by Marcus Buckingham called first break all the rules. The whole the net net of it is that you build teams and and support people based on their strengths, not this idea that there's a the well rounded employee that can do everything well. Like those are rare. Those are unicorns out there in the field. There are those freaks of human nature that can do everything really well, right? You don't see them very often. But the, you know, does somebody that is really passionate, they're just fantastic at one role of that, or one area of technology, then building a team around that. So you have deep expertise in each of these areas and then leverage them as needed. I think that's the secret to management and successful teams and longevity of employees as well. They're happier within those roles. And so that that just resonates. Christian Buckingham of approval. So that really resonates with me. I think that's a smart way to go and build a technology team the same way. The thing is you don't want to, you don't want to go to work, right? So I come in every day and we sit and we have fun as a team, right? And part of the passion that they have and they need to have is the continual learning and the desire to deliver something good to a client, right? And then on top of that, you need to have your own area of expertise, exactly as you're saying there. You need to bring that passion to the table. And I love to argue with the team, you know, to tell me your opinion, you know, don't take my word for it. And I say it all the time, don't do it my way. I don't know everything. I hide you because you're cleverer than me, right? Give it back. And I really enjoy that with the team that they take part and that we do have that relationship where, you know, nobody sits on a high pedestal. I don't think that's the way anymore. I don't think that would be successful. You have to have the ability to push back to share your opinion. If you don't, if you have that fear, then that's just an unhealthy organization. I've worked at companies where I have yelled at my, my, my boss. I have reported the CEO a couple of times. I've yelled at my CEOs and been able to, and then we're fine. We'll go out to lunch. It's like, it's not, it's not an emotional like that. It's a passion about, hey, this is what actually needed. We're expressing ourselves in that side of it. Yes, I shouldn't yell as much. If you can't sound at a whiteboard and yell at me, then I don't believe you care about what you're doing. I agree. We're, we're on the same page there. Yeah. Well, Sharon, really appreciate you taking the time to, to, to talk and, and for folks that want to find out more about you, how can they get in touch with the best ways to reach you? Oh, wow. So I have a blog. It's called the Powerful Blog. I've got a YouTube channel, also called Sharon Sumner. You know, I'm on Twitter a lot and LinkedIn, fair few people connected to me there. So, you know, come and find me. Do, do ask questions and, you know, it's one of those communities, don't forget where you're allowed to ask people. If I'm busy, I would tell you that I'm busy, but I'll come back to you later. But by all means, get in touch and, you know, let's have a chat. Let's, let's have a virtual coffee and talk about what's, what's going on, what's exciting and what you're up to. That's another thing I say all the time about MVPs is like, look, you find an MVP. We're plugged in from a community wise. Like don't let shyness be the reason why you don't reach out. Connect, like you find somebody, you really like what they're saying, reach out to the worst that'll happen. As they'll say, hey, I'm busy right now. I can't get back to you, but let's talk in the future. Like every one of us will respond back to you. Absolutely. I've never had an MVP say no. Never. Well, Sharon, hey, it was great connecting and we'll talk soon.