 Hey, this is Christian Buckley with collab talk and we're here Talking about today's collab talk tweet jam. So talking about opportunities in the Microsoft ecosystem and specifically as being a partner in the Microsoft Channel and I've got Sharon with me. Hey, Sharon Hey, I'm Sharon Weaver. I'm the CEO of smarter consulting I'm an RD and an MCT and all kinds of other letters and I'm also a Microsoft partner So this is very relevant to me. Yeah, well, it's it's it's funny So I've been doing these for almost nine years now and generally July for those that aren't as familiar With the Microsoft ecosystem every July they have their partner conference and of course this was going to be my 11th year in a row of attending getting ready. I was excited to drive down to Vegas and Yeah, it was just it's a beautiful drive from where I am. It's not that far here Like five hours, maybe but beautiful parks on the way down But of course covid happened And so it all went virtual And so we'll talk about some of what we think got left out what what we're missing from having a virtual But uh, yeah, it was it we always have the the topic that's partner related in July So it's great Sharon to have you join me and let's kind of recap what we talked about online So the first first question we kick things off with so what are your key takeaways? From this year's Microsoft inspired conference and or the related announcements because there's always announcements Yeah, yeah, yeah, I mean, I think across the board, you know, it's kind of reading everybody's answers and Um across the board is just you know, everything's headed to the cloud And I think that you know, we've kind of been hanging on to some on-prem stuff and there's been a lot of Well, we're gonna have another version and we're gonna have another version And I think every single thing is more about just embracing that cloud is here. It's here to stay It's it's gotten beefy enough to be considered kind of solid under your feet So as a partner, you know, you really need to kind of embrace that and start building your business models around that idea Yeah, that's actually there's the part of every year as well. There's always announcements around various tools and messaging and resources that Microsoft makes available And it just isn't me or is it getting better Getting better the documentation. I think there's fantastic tools that are out there They especially since Microsoft a couple years ago woke up to uh, it's like oh adoption and engagement are important And training right and there's a training center and everything But they just started producing fantastic content now I think there's a lost opportunity there for partners to create a lot of that that but obviously there's Microsoft can't do everything. There's industry specific opportunities. You have to Right. Well, there's also you know, we have our deep expertise and our experience and in the uh In the channel out in various industries and with different clients and and so you want to go and Tailor that Microsoft content that make it relevant for your customers No, I definitely don't I mean, I think what they've done has been great from both a generic standpoint and it gives us somewhere to start But even like as a partner if I'm promoting something within an organization I'm going to tailor it more to what they need or if I'm training them I'm going to narrow it down and use screenshots out of their environment I'm not necessarily going to use all the Microsoft stuff anyways, but it gives me a really good place to start One thing one takeaway that I had from this They and we'll talk about this a little bit later with some of the other questions, but you know, how Incredibly difficult it is to Have an ad hoc Uh, you know a discovery of other partners We you're not walking across an expo hall and see somebody that you've not seen for five six years strike up a conversation next thing Like hey, we should partner together on something like It's much more difficult to do that kind of thing. There there were a lot of You know side rooms sidebar comments that are going conversations going on One other takeaway though is they had all the animal cams So did you participate in any of those dude? I did it and that's actually I mean one of the big things for this year I think from a thematic perspective is I'm just so slammed that I'm trying to squeeze it in You know because because guess what I didn't leave my house and go to a completely separate environment I know this is going to shock you. I still tried to do things during the event And so I ended up watching things after instead of keeping on track with everything which was a big difference And it's it's uh, yeah, it made for long days. I mean one one thing is there were a couple sessions, which I I cannot miss this I wasn't able to watch it the first one, but they uh Most of the core certainly the the keynotes but all the core topics They repeated three different times so that they had people from other time zones that were in there And of course you could go in and have the conversations and connect with people throughout You know each of those time zones So that was a nice feature but Again, I go back to like one of the the biggest benefits Of attending the inspired conference had nothing to do with the content being shared Like I would go to the keynotes and I I think in the decade Of attending that conference. I think I've gone to two sessions Other than the keynotes All those years because I spent all of my time In the expo hall in the country lounges Setting up meetings connecting with people Talking with the product teams Yeah, and we can watch things that are recorded later and get the information out of them What you can't get is that interaction with people, right? Okay, the question too this pertains specifically to satya's The the phrase that he was using in his keynote on day two But how is your tech intensity and how well are you or your customers weathering the current global economic climate? Yeah, so luckily one of my anchor clients. Um, we spent uh the bulk of 2019 migrating them from on-prem to 100 virtual in office 365 um And what's really interesting about them compared to some of the other clients that I have is that We had completely migrated them and in january we're doing training and we were kind of just tying up some loose ends And when covet hit And they were forced out of the building. They shut down everything. They sent everybody home Within a few days We were all Back to being fully productive in that group because they were already using teams on a regular basis They were already using office 365 on a regular basis. And so they had already put in that equity To make all of that happen As opposed to other people that I feel You know in in that change were kind of they moved out and then they went Oh Here's all of the things that were not connected and were not moved over that we need to think about And they were spending a lot of time kind of playing catch up Yeah, it's it's it's it's hard. So in tech intensity as well Satya described that as being kind of the evolution of business transformation I think you're right It forced a lot of companies Forced their hands to say hey, what does this actually look like? We've never experienced it to this degree What's missing? What's lacking from this? And so I'm sure you had a lot of policies been being written kind of in real time And and people realizing You know and those of us that work remotely for years Are realized that you know how reliant we are on bandwidth and all those other issues There's a sun spot and it goes down. I mean I went down Just before the tweet jam this morning lost my internet connection. Oh no I've got gig speeds here. I'm like everything just dropped out and like what's going on is freaking out was only down for Two three minutes, but it was enough to be interrupted things and You know, it's enough to uh, knowing I've got a full day kind of kind of freaked me out there for a second But uh, as far as that transformation, I think that the level the intensity that satya talked about In most organizations, it's increased because They've Again, they had to they had to react to this and figure out Hey, we're gonna be we may be doing this for a lot longer than we had a planned We need to put in the right policies make sure that we have the right technology Uh, and and so it's uh, you know people have been turning the burners up going at Faster speeds and even people who are not working remotely are really Starting to pay attention. I've got clients that are back in the office that are just like We need to get this solved because we've got stuff to do and we've got we've got people that need to go home We've got clients that are at home and and so they're they're I think feeling that That need for that as well. And so I think you know, we look at tech intensity I think it's at kind of a really high level right now Yeah, you know, I used to joke that uh, you know, again, I'm working remotely but with everybody else working remotely You know that there's the meetings have been spread out But it's like um, I Generally, I'm online. I'm on a first call sometimes like seven in the morning Generally by eight a.m. Some days it's solid I'm until like three or four in the afternoon just solid back to back to back solid Meetings and I was I say to my wife is like and she's like, you know, what does your day look like? I said, well, I've got like seven meetings After which I have to then get to work Right, right. That's it's it's difficult to uh to do that. You have to be Uh, it's kind of like with productivity where you have to be uh more selective about those things and what do we really need to accomplish And uh schedule shorter meetings. I think that's one important lesson That's been learned. We definitely do that. We short we schedule shorter meetings I you know, it's really funny because I've been working from home for a long time as well I've been very virtual for a long time and one of my big things is I always kind of ran through lunch You know, I'd grab a snack and I keep working through lunch and um with everything kind of changed the way it has I'm taking a lunch break every day Because I have to Stop staring at a screen for a certain amount of time Or my head's gonna explode So I stop at lunchtime and I literally leave my office and I go outside and I eat my food and I sit And on my deck and I relax for a little while And then I come back in and I have never taken a proper lunch probably in almost 10 years Yeah, so I just ate 30 minutes ago. It being almost 4 p.m But yeah, I I always say that it's a win if I'm able to shower before 1 p.m So it kind of rolls into question three So have your operations and or priorities changed if at all during the current global economic climate So does it change the way that you guys operate? Yeah, it's kind of turned us on our heads, right? I mean like because normally I spend a very large amount of time traveling and speaking in events and speaking at conferences Um, I do on-site training You know, and I spend a lot of I go to a lot of even local events. So if you think about user groups or committee meetings or Any of those types of things, right? We're so used to kind of running to all these different places and seeing different people and the travel that's involved with that And that all just kind of stopped and even though we have some virtual events and we have some virtual Connections, it's it's nowhere near the same. We're not getting the same Reach that we were getting that way before we're not building the same connections. We're not meeting people in different markets the way that we were People are not kind of coming out for a couple of hours and and having coffee or or grabbing lunch with us or things like that anymore And so we're having to definitely be a lot more intentional About every single thing that we do we we've put together, you know, a better marketing strategy and a better branding strategy We a better communication plan. We've got way more touch points than we had before Um, yeah, it's it's definitely completely changed the way that we interact and interface with not just our Leads of potential clients, but our our day-to-day clients as well Like i'm constantly making sure that i'm touching and talking to them and you know catching up with everybody somewhere That's an important distinction too is that you know and asking your partners and and your customers You know, is this enough? Are you getting the information that you need? Like I you know, we were on site You know at least once a week before and i've not seen you in three months four months What else could we be doing and and that's an important aspect? I think of of of all this internally as well as you know externally With your partners having that conversation on a regular basis of what could we be doing differently? How can we improve on this? Because I still believe that there's a lot of people that are just like We're almost through this and it's it's almost back to it normal. It's like I don't think so It's going to be changed dramatically. If not just permanently, you know across the board um, and so we need to uh, so you need to be Communicating about hey, this is what else can we do? I think it will go a long way and that of course the priority is for your business As you mentioned Not being able to go out and drive leads that way you have to get creative And it means that through the traditionally, you know, virtual ways of reaching out connecting with people But so are all of your competitors because that's all that they can do And so it makes it very crowded and noisy um, I mean going and running Increasing your spend your ad spend on facebook and linkedin or twitter or whatever wherever you're doing that You've got to be get a bit more creative Well on our top of that i'll tell you another kind of thing that happened that I really didn't even realize was happening But we identified in one of our last meetings that our target our target audience changed and we didn't even know that had happened So we simply converted what we had been doing in person to more of an online presence and more of a communication presence And what ended up happening is we started getting a really large influx of small medium-sized businesses Whereas before I had been pretty heavily medium to large-sized businesses All of a sudden all these little small medium-sized businesses started coming out of the woodwork and saying I need help too I mean of course they're using the same stuff. They they need the same help right? Yeah So yeah, it was really interesting seeing that that kind of pulled some additional Audience out of of that stuff as opposed to more the group. I was used to working with on a regular basis So I mean it's not it's a great thing. Just definitely different. Yep well question four kind of touches on The the primary themes of of the event in the the keynotes and and gavriela talked about it satya talked about it Question four is microsoft partners. How are you focusing on remote work? Business continuity And or cloud migration. So those are kind of the four big categories. I know so two two people They're in the collaboration space and I made this point this morning as well It's why it would be nice to have the diversity of the azure people on and kind of other areas within the microsoft ecosystem but the collaboration folks like We do we've been doing all four of those things our entire careers right are people doing stuff other than that Like I didn't you is is there another option? I mean I kind of feel like as a microsoft partner and if you're not already in that space and you're not already doing that I'm surprised first of all and there's a lot of catch-up That's going to have to happen and I think if you want to get into that space Just like everybody else did you're going to spend a lot of time on training and a lot of time on reading And a lot of time on researching to really understand, you know, kind of what's out there and also just diving in right it so a lot of this is just I download things and I turn things on and I start clicking buttons and then I go Watch the video to make sure that I know what's happening And I've gotten comfortable with a lot of those types of things because we've been using them for so long And now I feel like it's kind of our job and our obligation to now help people kind of come over and say Hey, we've been doing this for a while. It's good. It's safe. We know how it works. Let me help you get over here too Right, but you know, I made a comment. So on the cloud migration side of that because that's one where I I think that I think with all four of these categories, of course, there could be some people that feel Their hand was kind of forced. They need to go and react to this the cloud migration is something that Honestly, I don't remember the last time I ran into a company that was on prem only It's been a couple years since I've run into one and I'm sure they exist that they're out there Yeah, and hybrid, uh, you know There's going to be hybrids going to be around for a long time Um, you have a lot of the born in the cloud, you know, uh providers, but I think that more and more What's kind of this kind of fits in with business continuity as well as the migration Where I think this is again forced a lot of companies to go and look at every aspect of their business And say where are we falling down? And so there might have been areas where I'll just use a generic example like in you know, the the larger organization with an hr team and the support that they provided A lot of this stuff, you know, and they work very closely in person together And the the vendors that they use and the services that they provide to the company They're just used to being that in-house in-person You know capability and to go and move a lot of those other Operating systems in and to make sure the the the business is able to run smoothly and people are paid on time They get the benefit questions and You know, it's uh, it's just it is a very different way of of working. This isn't just a Hey everybody, we're going to be working remotely for a couple weeks. We'll kind of take your laptops Oh, you don't have laptops some of you Take your PCs. We actually had a client who literally was checking PCs out Yeah, a few companies that have done that where I know other companies that have said, hey Here's dollars go and buy whatever you need that's missing from your home office And so somebody went bought a new camera and a mic and light setup with the money that was uh, that was expended so that And you're thinking about You're thinking about like vpn loads for the business and you know Can what we have support the amount of users that are trying to access things and and yeah And I think a lot of this kind of getting to that That whole digital transformation, which we've been talking about for years is more than just It's cool that we have cloud stuff. It's How does this encapsulate all of the needs that we have and and it's not an overnight type of thing It's there's a lot of different areas that have to be considered and tested and trained and governed more than anything Yep Well, it's it's uh, I know that Again for the stuff that I do the stuff that you do and for your clients Again, we touch on all those different areas. I mean remote work It's just the nature of the technology that we're experts on that we've been working with for decades But helping train people on what that actually means the business continuity is I mean, that's that's a It always had this conversation around backup And in archiving and people think oh, I did backup the disk He's like was the difference between having a backup Strategy in place or plan in place versus business continuity, which is literally, you know Hey, we've got the tape backups or whatever now what yeah What actually happens and do you have slas in place with your clients? Like what if you're out for two days? What how long does it take to restore those services? And how does that you imagine and what happens to the stuff that's happening while you're getting the backup restored If it takes four or five six days and there's still work happening, right? It's it's just it's a very different plan It's it's funny. It makes me Think back to conversation when I was You know part of the early office 365 team and my good friend Mike Watson You know, it was uh one of the engineers on the team and we were sitting and talking and I asked it I said Do we have a plan for for backup and for uh, uh, business continuity? And he uh, he said, you know, I don't think I've seen one and we both went and looked he's like We should write that Yeah, it's just uh, I'm just like I came in that was about a year into the team being in place And I was amazed that that didn't exist. But yeah That's why they hired people like me to do that. But uh, but the next question was How can companies better leverage technology innovation to drive business and societal outcomes for good? Yeah, that was kind of a loaded question. There was that's a really beefy question. That's like How can we solve world peace using technology? I only use technology for evil. You know that Sharon. We've talked about it That's that's my goal You know You know, I mean technology is kind of like money, right? Um good people do good things within a bad people do bad things with it I mean, that's really what boils down to it technology is just a tool that people use to do things and to solve problems And so I mean, I think number one you have to identify like what is it? We're trying to accomplish What's the pain point? What are we trying to solve and how are we going to try to solve it? The technology itself does not do anything the technology simply Helps us to you know more efficiently solve an existing problem in a way that makes sense, right? Right, so I think to do good things you have to have good goals and you have to say, okay What is it that we're trying to accomplish and how are we going to use our technology to get to that end goal? And I know one of the big topics right now is ADA compliance. Um, and what's really interesting is um I went to school and in my web design class. We had a blind guy. Yeah in web design Um, which was a really neat experience because I got to learn not only, you know How he used the tools to you know consume the material, but he was also designing with it as well Which was a really interesting concept And then I had a quadriplegic in my cohort for my bachelor's degree program Um, and that I uh partnered with several times on different projects and What's really interesting is that made a humongous mark on me Like I really learned a lot from that experience and then when I started training on SharePoint I started teaching people about the ADA compliance features that are in all of Microsoft products And how to use those to make sure that what you're doing Is not only solving the business problem, but is also accessible to the people around you Um, so it's just a big platform in mind if you want to really be able to make good in the world You know, don't just think about the the problem you're trying to solve But make sure that you are thinking about the problem holistically, right? I think there there are so many opportunities It um, so, you know Tracy vanerskiff and I have talked about Uh, for those that don't Tracy. She's she's awesome. Um her company the guid stuff crazy awesome She's out of the uh, uh, Johannesburg, South Africa area, but she's really into motorcycles So we've talked about we're just trying to find like get the timing right We were hoping to do it this year than this covid thing happened But to come over and get a bunch of people to sponsor her and microsoft jeff teeper had already said Hey, I would totally sponsor that Basically, she would ride around the western united states and go to Some of the reservations and underprivileged areas and teach kind of technology 101 One of the things that we can do. Yeah, it's it's go to some of these underserved areas And and give back directly to those communities. I mean, there's there's marketing dollars that are out there So it's not necessarily even dollars that need to be spent time needs to be spent, you know Give back our expertise on these technologies help them understand What they can do in low bandwidth areas the tools that are available for free You know the resources that are available to them. There's so many this is something else It's been kind of come out of this This this dark period that we're in All of the training resources and opportunities that are out there great content online learning programs A lot of them that will wave the fee or they've made the programs free and go to edx You could go into the some of the lynda.com content through linkedin And other resources Kind of plural site has some capabilities a lot of training companies that have these Resources out there. It's been, you know, it's a veritable cornucopia of opportunity of it And so I think we we need to do more step it up and Help people to understand that it's out there a lot of times one of the most common questions I hear is an mbp and rd is like, how do you keep up with everything? The reality is that none of us do we rely on each other And it's more it's about that community. So the more the people that we can get Plugged into the community And that we share. Hey, this is where I go for for news and updates around what's happening with technology Here's the training resources. Here's the people that I follow the blog post the podcast the video series around this And share what we've learned and what we know. I think is one of the best things we could do Maybe that's the way to answer this. I would answer this is Share more look for opportunities to share don't waste for somebody to ask Yes be proactive in your sharing Yeah, well, and I think people are always asking kind of what's next and where can I go for information? And and and what can I get? I know one of the things that we've been doing on my team is we've created We're starting to create these little short video tech tips Where we're just like, hey, here's a common problem. I had and here's how I solved it Every time I every time any of my employees come to me and say, oh my god. I have to show you this I'm like turn that into a tech tip. Yeah Yep. Well, that is we were talking about it. Like I've got a list I have a to-do list of all of those ideas It gets longer faster than I can take anything off of that I know I can't keep up with them. But yeah, absolutely. That's when you have to prioritize those things All right. Last two questions. I think a really big question It's really kind of the the the meat of where this the tweet jam today was was going So the sixth question was as Microsoft partners Where do you see the greatest opportunities for growth in the next two to three years? And I was looking for specifically, you know, like the technology areas where you really see like Some of those opportunities. So I'd love to get your your thoughts on that. Yeah I mean, I think there's kind of two answers to that, right? There's there is from the technology perspective You're going to start talking about things like the growth in teams and azure in terms of bots and AI and things like that And uh, and I think on the other side from the more soft and squishy side, um, you know, I was thinking more in terms of education um change management Support like just in general. So you think about migrations and helping the back to that tech tips thing, right? Um, I think, you know, there's the technology that has been there and is only getting better I don't I don't necessarily think that it's, you know changing in terms of there's a lot of new technology I just think we're kind of building on the stack that's been out there for a while That's really getting mature and really doing a lot of cool things and and able to do things that we want to do with it But I think now what's happening is we've We've kind of gotten past a little bit of that initial adoption hump where people are all starting to kind of dive into it And they're coming back and saying, okay, I've got it. Now. What do I do with it? You know, so it's things like training people on what they can do past the 101 stage It's understanding how they're going to use it to solve their problems It's supporting them to finish up getting from here to there or consolidating or understanding which license levels They need to be on. I probably spend half of my calls With users who are saying well, you know, what do I need to do about this? And I've got these four products and what's the right thing and how do I connect this this and this together in the Cloud and what makes sense from an architecture perspective? So I think I mean, I think the biggest opportunities are really going to be around tying the business process to the technology in the cloud And making that work as efficiently as possible and as economically as possible Um to help all of those businesses from kind of getting into sprawl of any sort Um so that they can afford what they've got and it's solving their problem and they know how to use it I think you imagine Everything you just described, you're right. It's where you can understand all those pieces Understand what your business needs understand the new technology is coming out But if you are really bad at change management Because one of the I think biggest opportunities for partners and it kind of touches kind of everything you just discussed is the Rate of change a rate of innovation new stuff that's coming out It's uh, I mean there are microsoft people that are complaining like this. This is so fast There's so much that's coming out You see that every week there's announcements as something that touches on and when you're using kind of the full stack and in different product areas across microsoft And it's a constant You know flood of changes coming in and organizations that can get good at that change management process Seeing what's new Understanding. Okay. Hey here to assess. Here's what we think the impact will be Here's our strategy for rolling this out train everybody on that I mean, there's there's tremendous opportunities for trainers for You know consultants to go in to help automate and all those kinds of things but Having people that are you know on the inside your business analyst your project managers if you've got change management specialists That can own that it's the overall governance of all of these moving parts That is going to be so critical to success going forward Well, it's it's the idea of being proactive instead of reactive You know, we've been reactive for so long in technology because you know a lot of times That's what you end up with i've had the system forever and I went through You know, whatever the last crash was and so i'm just reacting to that and i'm just continuing to keep that going Well, guess what in the you're kind of in a do-over where you've got the opportunity to set it all up right at the beginning And to be proactive. So why not take that opportunity right now and plan ahead It you know in the last question here Uh, and I was actually I know that there were uh, I know firsthand that there were a couple microsoft people That were lurking and really were interested in this question But what advice would you give to microsoft to improve their support for or interactions with partners and uh No one responded for like four minutes I know it's just like that. Yeah, and so I went with my one comment And and so i'll bring it up again and a few other people jumped in afterwards I need to go back through the log and uh, this is one of the the beauties of our sponsor for the tweet jams Of tigraph is that they provide all the the analytics around the events themselves and track the last tab in the power bi Stats that they provide and i'll provide a link that'll be in the description for the video and on the blog post as well But it has every single tweet and retweet that included the collab talk hashtag, of course So they could track it but so you could actually go back and read at your own speed Everything that anyone said during the one hour around each of those questions But my comment that I made was that um, and this is something that has come up with all of the online activities that we're doing All of these events whether you're doing a webinar yourself or you're doing a Community event where you've got multiple tracks that are going on The difficulty is that ad hoc Discovery process for peer-to-peer engagement It's really hard to do virtually and one of the things that I was waiting for from microsoft Was through the partner conference, which you've attended so you know it's the the connect tools And they've changed a little bit over the years But they've largely not really met the need of even the in-person meetings or events and And there was no mention of it no leveraging of that at all this year for the virtual microsoft inspire conference But connect allows you to go in you have as a as sales and marketing professionals as you know owners of businesses to have a profile to go in and discover other subject matter experts the product team people other vendors and partners Just around whatever you go find the thousands tens of thousands of people that are in the system And then connect to them hence the name and say reach out and say hey, are you going to be attending the event? You know can we meet in person and they had these connect tables these areas designated for these face-to-face meetings How do you replicate that online? I mean I I really was hoping for um with first with build and then especially with inspire And I've provided the feedback again, and I I don't know what I know that they're thinking of some other things for ignite um But that was sorely lacking. I think I I lost you there. You're frozen Oh, they're back He disappeared for a minute. Uh, yeah, uh, okay now. It just said uh, it's telling me now my internet connection is unstable Yeah, it's going there's so much construction right around here. So who knows what's going on sunspots or I mean It's just uh, it's probably the construction Who knows but uh, anyway, so My my where I left off. I know if you heard the end of that Was around, you know that microsoft needs to do something About connect about community. Well, it's about community and I mean so, you know, there's there's kind of the connect stuff And it's funny because I was actually in there the other day I was working with another microsoft partner and we were talking about kind of teaming up on some stuff And so we were actually and they're looking at stuff But I've been part of other software communities Outside of microsoft that have that kind of sense of here's everybody who uses this or who's everybody who's a partner of this particular tool And they've got, you know, kind of this community where everybody can kind of hang a virtual shingle out And you can see, you know Basically just search through it and you can look for, you know people who do certain things and whatnot That I think have, you know been much smaller Software companies, but have done a really good job of creating that kind of sense of community I definitely think that microsoft Has a lot of opportunity in that area in terms of providing value back to the partners Because I know as as a partner myself like I feel I was just saying Navigating the partner stuff is like navigating the licenses like, you know, it's great that the information's all out there But the problem is it's so kind of like Silo, you know, so it's like if I want to do this thing, here's this information If I want to do this thing, there's this information and there are some things that are passed But it's kind of like following this weird windy road and you keep figuring out that other stuff is there They had you known that to begin with you would have done done this other thing first and So the problem is is you don't know what you don't know until it opens up And I think it would be really helpful if it was kind of more of a streamlined approach of You know, if you want to be a partner, here's all the different information kind of up front in one place And and while you're going here are other partners that you can't associate with or you can reach out to or you can mentor with or Whatever it is, right? Um, so that you can build that community where everybody's kind of working together towards the same goal But yeah, I definitely think the partner center's got a lot of room for improvement. Um, I think that you know training and um Just materials I I've noticed this last year the materials have got a lot better Just like we talked about for the client stuff I feel like the partner materials are much better than they were before I'm starting to see a lot of powerpoint decks that have walkthroughs of do this and then this and then this and then this and that's been really nice And there's been a lot more content a lot more other resources that are available around The soft skill stuff like they've really stepped up their game Around you see more and more around the diversity inclusion stuff like basic skills of how does that work? And I think the it's been fantastic for the in-person events Having like the linkedin booths that where they'll actually meet with you and advise you on building out your profile And uh, they'll even take a new headshot. I think they did pictures last year, didn't they? Yeah, the last couple years that that's been there, which is fantastic Um, and I also got my linkedin socks that I wear a lot. Well, and once again, how does that get replicated in a virtual event? Right. I know how do you still get those same kind of value? Was it you that made the comment about there needs to be better partner swag sent out? Yes. Yes, it was me It's for sure me See, I mean, here's the thing like I know that swag is kind of a silly topic But it's funny because I'm actually on the board of another group and we're putting together a conference for this fall And one of the things they brought up is, you know, what are some of the things that you guys think would make this better? And I'm like, I think we need to send physical swag Because I think it doesn't have to be like a ton of it But I think people really look forward to the the silliness of the little takeaways And and when you don't get anything at all, it's just like well, okay that you know I don't have anything to remember it by and and I think for some people it doesn't matter so much But I think for some people that cup or or something they use on a regular basis is a really big deal to them You know, they don't Microsoft doesn't have to just throw money at this marketing without expecting something back They could actually say hey complete this detailed partner survey And in return will mail you a partner package, you know, is it exactly We'll use it right use it to get your partners to do tasks and and you know reward them with You know little tchotchkes or things that they can give away to their clients later Right, you know, it's uh, it's funny But if you look at the cost if you've ever done that kind of Research and gone out and paid for those kinds of services to get qualified Responses to survey for example to get that, you know, and research that data It's a lot less expensive to have a detailed survey do it yourself and to send with the mailing cost and the To put all this together Less expensive to do it than to go pay for those services and have a third party Capture that data for you, but yeah, I agree. I agree Well, it's uh, I think it's uh all good feedback for for microsoft, of course You know, we're we're in the evergreen model around the partner Environment as well within the partner ecosystem So it's not like we have to wait for Inspire to happen every july before we can provide feedback to back to microsoft And they are constantly looking at adjusting their their model And uh and are doing a better job. I think microsoft across the board the last five six years Has proven that they are listening to customers and partners. I still I still argue that they'll they listen to customers first Uh partner second mvp third Like you'd think that we would have like the ear, but I they You know microsoft is so focused on the people that are actually You know paying for software Driving this right they're looking for they're looking for volume. They like I group think right if I've got enough people Think in the same thing and that's probably where we need ahead And so that's a large the largest group to the next largest group to the next largest group So I think that's just part of it statistically. Maybe we need more weight Uh, we our our votes should should uh be double or triple what the customer votes are there there you go Yeah, but uh anything we can do to to feel more special. Yes We'll share and really appreciate your time today and uh people want to find out more about you get in touch with you How do they reach you? Yeah, just go to my website www.smarter-consulting.com all the information's out there or you can uh check out my website at sharing eweaver.com And you can also find sharing out linkedin have to throw that in there as well. Yeah linkedin twitter instagram You know just find when i'm on all the socials somewhere find or track her down you know All right, well, thanks a lot sharing for your time. We'll talk to you soon. Yeah, absolutely