 This is Christian Buckley doing another MVP BuzzChat interview and I'm here this morning with Ducks. Hey Ducks, how's it going? Hey Christian, it's great. I can't wait to hit the waters. Yeah, I completely believe that you are where you say you are there, so. Hey man, look, I've got my paddle. I'm ready to go. Ready to hit the water, all right. That's right. I've got the SPF 100 out there. It looks warm and bright out there. Hey Ducks, for folks that don't know you, for those three people in the world that don't know who you are, who are you, where are you, what do you do? Hi everybody, my name is Ducks and I serve as the CMO of Abpoint and I'm also, also very grateful to be a Microsoft Regional Director and MVP. I've known Christian for a long time. I'm based out in Washington, DC. I started my career as a similar programmer and for those that doesn't know what that is, you weren't born yet, but fast forward to today. Boy, I get to work closely with a lot of organizations around the world, helping them out to figure out how to best maximize Office 365 technologies, like Teams, SharePoint, OneDrive, Planner, Project, the whole nine yards. You know, we've known each other for over 10 years now. I didn't realize that you had started as a similar programmer. What kind of stuff were you working on? Oh yeah, my degree was electrical engineering and my very first job, I worked for a small company called Siemens and I had to program these Motorola chips for a lot of their integrated circuit boards and that didn't last too long, maybe a couple of months because I realized while I know how to program, I enjoy programming, but I don't enjoy working by myself with a computer. I prefer working more with people and engaging with people. Right, and where was that based? Cause I, did you work in the telecom space? Any specific? Yeah, I was in, actually I was in Atlanta at that time and this was a part of their manufacturing business. So it's a lot of the equipment they sell to manufacturing companies. I spent a lot of time going between the logos, hot spots in the telecom industries, Atlanta, Alpharetta specifically. Yeah, yeah, yeah, it was actually in Alpharetta. It's for Siemens automation business. Yeah, I think I've been out to a bunch of those locations but yeah, well that's interesting. So some of the stuff, I guess that the main question I like to ask in these part of these interviews is I know you're out there, you do a lot of events, a lot of things that AvePoint is doing, the Shift Happens event, when is that? When that's coming up, isn't it? Yeah, Shift Happens is coming up June 22nd and shameless plug here. If you all want to join, please sign up. It's free, it's shifthappenscon.com and for every person that register and attends, we're gonna donate $5 to the World Health Organization, COVID-19 fund. So we as techies get to learn a lot but also more importantly, we want to make sure we spread the goodness to everybody else. Well, one of the things I like about what you guys do with the conference too is that there's certainly a lot of the other events and we'll kind of get into some of the other things that are coming on, I know, because you're out there actively presenting and I want to ask you about kind of your topics that you're most passionate about. One of the things that I like about what you guys do with the Shift Happens event though is you're talking about real-world business cases, the scenarios around that. So it's not just techies talking tech and here's the latest features, here's how you do those things but it's the business scenarios and that's, I know, I feel is often lost at a lot of these events. And this actually, this feedback came from a lot of our customers. Certainly, like you said, there's tons of phenomenal events. I mean, especially these days, there's a lot of great online events produced by Microsoft, the community and people learn a lot around the technology but what's been missing is the real-world stories from the trenches. So that's been the feedback the past couple of years from our customers. So we figured we'll put one together. So for this upcoming Shift Happens conference, typically we have it in person, face to face but certainly due to current situation, we're gonna have it online so it's not gonna stop it. We'll have companies like FedEx talking about how they've adopted teams. We'll have Heathrow Airport talk about how they've adopted the Power Platform. Deloitte, they're gonna talk about how they're providing Office 365 as a service. So certainly it's not Contoso talking about how everything's perfect but what's critical here is what we learn from these organizations as they move to the cloud. You can't knock the Contoso though. I mean, because they're everywhere. They do everything. And they're still around, right? I know it's between Contoso and Top Spin Toys, I believe. They're also, they just are involved in so much, yeah. Yeah, there's the other like the sports company or the outdoor company that used to be the SQL Server example. I forgot what's the name of it. Of course, for those that don't know, we're talking about the Microsoft, the generic companies that they use. Contoso though, I think there's Contoso T-shirts. I need to go get one of those that it's missing from my wardrobe. So there's a real Contoso company? No, no, no. There's just the fake Contoso company T-shirts, you know. But so for the topics that you're passionate about. So one of the things that you're known for and you've been talking about for many, many years and I'm actually getting back into and writing more and more about is the project management side of there. Because you wrote one of the most popular books in the Microsoft ecosystem around project management. But what are the topics that you're actively speaking on, presenting on these days? Yeah, so project management is still near and dear to me. In fact, I think two weeks ago, maybe a week ago I spoke online for the Microsoft Project User Group. I also spoke at a local PMI chapter online. So that's still near and dear to me because that's my background. Shortly after I left Siemens, I got to work in the realm of project management. And as you mentioned, I got to write the book SharePoint for project management. But past that, one, a couple key areas that really I talk to customers about and also I present about first and foremost in how do you practically migrate to the cloud? So I know a lot of people may be thinking, oh, companies are all in the cloud, they've migrated, not quite, especially we're seeing a lot of large organizations like government organization. It's exciting to see a lot of government agencies moving to the Microsoft Cloud. So I provide a lot of guidance around that, how to do it in a compliant way. The second area I spend a lot of time with customers and also the community on is this idea of what does practical governance look like? I know you talk a lot about that, you write a lot about that. And I think there's a common misunderstanding around governance. People think about governance as just how do you provision these workspaces? Well, that's an element of it. There's really three core areas of governance. One is how do you provision a lot of these workspaces in Office 365 via Teams or SharePoint or Yammer? But second, once it's provisioned, how do you manage and enforce policies? That's part of governance. And not a lot of people think about or talk about that. And then the last part which is equally as important is this idea of how do you govern information lifecycle? What happens to the container such as Teams or SharePoint when you're not using it? Does it just sit there? Does it sprawl? Does it mushroom all over the place? So those are the three key area of governance that I talk a lot about. I share examples and I provide guidance to customers. So that I would say is one of the most hottest topic in the past six to 12 months that I've been focusing on. You know, I hear that question a lot. I know you're doing office hours. There's a lot of us. We're doing community office hours and just doing kind of an AMA style answering questions, live stream out on the web. And one of the more common questions we get a lot of questions almost every week. We do ours twice every Monday around those governance questions. And it's, I think that, of course, historically, both of us working in the SharePoint space for a long time and there was a lot of talk around SharePoint sprawl. And I think those of us that talked a lot, wrote a lot, spoke a lot on governance when Teams was released, what, four years ago now? Yeah, about four. Three years, it was. Announced like three and a half, four years, almost four years. Correct, correct. It's October. I remember October 2016 or 2017, something like that. But it was, you know, I think when I saw that I was excited about the features but instantly I thought about, I saw the way that the architecture of the layout and leveraging Exchange and SharePoint, the first thing I thought of was the sprawl problems all over again. And some of that is, of course, been realized. It was true, but then again, the community was a lot smarter about it. We had seen this, we knew what questions, what to expect, the user behaviors around using this technology. So it has been these kinds of questions have been at the kind of the forefront of the expansion, the adoption of Teams. I would say in a very brutally frank way, I think Teams compared to SharePoint with regards to sprawl, I think can be much, much more complex and dangerous. Not, no, dangerous, sorry, dangerous is the wrong word, but could be exponentially be more challenging. And the reason why I say it is SharePoint at that time, right? I mean, we don't let people create their own site collections. That's a no-no. Right. Now, I'm not saying Teams is bad. Teams, no doubt, is great. Teams is what SharePoint should have been 10, 15 years ago. But what a lot of people don't realize, Teams is a front end to a lot of other technologies where data can live. SharePoint being one of them. You've got one note, you've got Outlook calendars, you've got Planner. And those different containers can have data in it. So now the question becomes, okay, I'm working on a project. Let's go to a project management example. I create a team. I run my project in a team. I put my task in Planner, our notes in OneNote, conversation is in Teams conversation, some of the documents in SharePoint. Okay, project is done. I'm being a mindful project manager. I'm gonna delete it or have a process to archive it. But then there are things around regulations and compliance which may not have existed 10 years ago. Sarbanes-Oxley compliance, HIPAA related, where maybe some records management retention policy. So as a project manager, what do I do? I will remember every single switch and every single knob I have to turn and make sure this one piece of content needs to live forever, everything else I can chuck, right? So that's why I say it's more complex. Then this one piece of content may not just necessarily be in the SharePoint library of your teams, that piece of content you may have drag and drop into one though, right? You could have had conversations, you could have had conversations about it in one-on-one chats, in threaded conversations in Teams. It may have been a discussion that was in a private community over in Yammer. That's right. It could have been a conversation that's attached to the documents themselves as part of that, all those different places. And it's still one of the problems. There's no archive button in Teams that then goes and captures all of those, that footprint of those items. Even if everything that you're doing, your Yammer, the SharePoint team site, the Teams activities are all tied to that Office 365 group. It's all related, it's all part of that, in scope of that project. But there's no easy button that then pulls all that in together and then applies policies to that. And short of that easy button, this goes back to your point around upfront, right? Look, you can't boil the ocean, but upfront have some semblance of what's your strategy around being able to practically govern, at least as you get started with this, your Office 365 environment around, once you provision it, when people are using it, and then once you're done using it, right? Well, so what is the, people like to have consumable short lists, like Ducks, tell me what to go and do, what's the right approach for this? You mean you talked about it with kind of your three areas of governance. I mean, you need to think about the provisioning process. Sure. And there are a lot of organizations which will rush out and lock down that provisioning process, which then halts a lot of the purpose, right? Yeah. Right, yeah. What's the point of that? Sure. What's the guidance that you give people? Yeah, so some practical things, right? So let me go through those three pillars and let me give you some quick hits here. So when you think about provisioning, you gotta go back and think about the maturity of your organization. If you leave cell service on, which is perfectly fine, you gotta trust that your organization's mature enough that when they do a cell service provisioning, you won't wake up one day and suddenly you have 100,000 teams sitting there. But if not, the answer is not also the other end of the spectrum where you lock everything down and go back to the olden days of everything I need, I had to ask IT, dear IT, I bought you three rounds of Guinness last night, can you give me a team, right? Doesn't work. So you gotta find that middle ground. The good news is Microsoft recently released a Request A Teams app. So you can have that somewhat of a request middle ground process within Teams. So it's out there, you can find it. So that's one option. The other option is, if you have Azure AD Premium, you can actually limit who could do self-service. So let's say your model can be okay, now that we've trained the HR team, we're gonna enable self-service provisioning only for HR. However, in order to do that, you gotta have Azure AD Premium One license. That's a separate license that you have to buy for the organization. And then the third option is around that too is, look, we talked about self-service everything, middle ground with things like Azure ADP One or Request A Teams app. If you want it to be much more specific, right? You wanna say HR can do self-service, marketing cannot, accounting cannot, executives can't, if you want to go down that path where it's not a one size fits all, either you write PowerShell scripts yourself or you look for third party solutions, that's out there and certainly that's the business we're in. So those are some of the options of provisioning. And then the second piece, once you provision, right, how do you enforce some of the policies? And when I say enforce, how do you make sure people don't randomly upload documents that they're not supposed to or create subsites off of the SharePoint site collection? So you can look into advanced things like what the Office 365 Compliance Center offers. Think about retention policies, labeling and also if you want to extend it further, you can look at AIP, Azure Information Protection. So you could do things like auto classification and auto tagging, which is already available. And then the last part, once it's not being used anymore, you wanna make sure sprawl does not happen to govern your information lifecycle. Then you look at capabilities around expirations because in case you don't know, as a part of Azure ADP one, you can put a default expiration for teams if it's not being used. So you can say, okay, if any team's not being used for 30 days, ask the owner if they want it and if they don't, get rid of it. So you can take advantage of these capabilities. So the good news is a lot of these capabilities are there is just that it's not configured or turned on. And rightfully so, because every organization is different, right? Right, well, and another key part of that too is understanding what your organizational requirements are. Most of us here, we work in industries, we're in a space where there are, you may not be aware of what they are, but there are likely rules in place. Like this is how we must archive our data. These are the policies that must be in place for us to be compliant, to be secure. And so you need to understand what those things are as you go through. Look at all the things that Microsoft 365 can do and kind of pick and choose the ones that you understand. Go and understand what the requirements are to build in part of that. And whether you can do it out of the box, whether you need to do additional scripting to enable that or need to go and employ a third party tool will be determined by what those requirements are. And as Christian mentioned, I've spoken at length about this, I've written blogs about it, just either go look for it, go online or go to our blog, apppoint.com slash blog to search governance. You'll find a lot of detailed information around this. Yep, a lot of tools, a lot of stuff that's out there. Well, it's very cool. So the other question I like to ask is, other than the stuff that we're out there that you're talking about, the things that App Point does, anything else that's really kind of struck you that gotten you excited about what's happening? There's so much innovation that's coming out of Redmond now and just it's like every week there's something from personal and team productivity to there's tons of stuff happening in AI and over in Azure, what else is just getting you excited about what Microsoft is doing? Yeah, I think what's really got me excited, I have to think because I can't frame the right words but this new platform, and I say new because now finally it's coming together power platform. I feel like this whole power platform movement, it reminded me when SharePoint first came out. For friends, for folks that are not familiar, our platform is made out of Power BI, our automated power apps and a common data object model where essentially non-developers can build apps easily and quickly. So for example, they even have virtual agents that you can use and deploy. These are intuitive bots that you can put on your website or your apps, it's part of power platform. So that's really got me excited because now you talk about empowering every organization, every person in the world, power platform actually can continue to expand that mission statement. Yeah, no, I agree, I don't know if this is officially true, just kind of my perception is it's one of the fastest areas of growth, certainly within the MVP community. A lot of these business apps, business intelligence experts that are kind of springing up from industry. So people that have just kind of embraced the platform, building solutions, sharing it with the community and then Microsoft is just like recognizing these experts from the man to the MVP community. And so it's been very exciting. And like you say, it's a lot of people that are not even traditional coders, engineers, they're business people that are just solving real world problems and getting excited about the platform. I mean, this is the whole citizen development movement. So as a good example, I was sharing earlier that Heathrow Airport will be speaking at our events shift happens conference and how they got started Power Platform is because of a security officer. Now, when I see security officer, imagine TSA, right? These, they pat you when you go to the airport. So, Samud Saini has been working at Heathrow Airport for over 14 years, a security officer, no IT background. And then one day he's like, so his pain point at that time was, he has a book that he carries with him with all the different languages to show passengers, you know, take off your belongings, whatever. And he said, there could be a better way of care instead of carrying this book and flashing this to, you know, passengers. So he asked his boss, can IT help us with this? Like build an app, right? And they're like, no, IT's too busy. But we have Office 365, see if you can figure something out. So he just clicked around one evening and saw this thing called PowerApps, went online and he just scanned this manual and built an app on the phone. So now they don't have to lug around this book or even when it needs to be updated because it's all in the app and they just show the passenger. And now it speaks a language, it talks, it's so powerful. As a result of that, guess what he's doing now? He's working for IT. He's one of the leaders of their power platform environment at Heathrow Airport. So that's really, really inspiring. And that's what excites me. Another story is a guy named Keith. He was a bus driver for over 18 years in London for a transportation company. Again, same thing. He came across PowerApps or his pain point was getting these buses service in, you know, whatever shop and he's trying to schedule and all that. I was like, there could be a better way. So he built a PowerApp. That's very cool. There's, you know, we're getting more and more stories out of that. I know that there's a lot of activity, a lot of growth. It's the, I mean, here are local user groups. The community here, it's one of the fastest growing areas. They probably have the biggest crowds. Well, prior to COVID at the biggest crowds. But yeah, a lot of excitement, a lot of interest because, you know, as he said with the citizen developer movement, regular people can go and deliver value to their businesses. And one of the best ways to get started, you talk about some of the bots, some of the apps that are out there is go and see what's available and add on to them, configure them, play with those, build on top of something that already exists, learn the technology and then kind of go from there and what else, think about what else you could do for your organization. Well, cool. Well, Ducks, really appreciate your time today and people want to find out more about you. How do they find out about you? Get in touch with you. Hey, thank you so much for having me, Christian. So, easy peasy, go to LinkedIn, look me up, D-U-X, Raymond Sy, or if you're on Twitter, meet Ducks, or if you're an Instagram, meet Ducks, you're on YouTube, meet Ducks. So, one place you won't find me is the FBI's most wanted list. I'm sorry. Oh well, maybe someday it will inspire to that, you know. No, no, that's not a place where I want to be at. But I'm so grateful for this opportunity, Christian. Hope all is well with you and your family during this time. Doing well, I'm not out on the river like you, but stay safe out there. Make sure you have your flotation devices. I know, it's completely realistic, Ducks, completely. Okay, okay, how about let me go to space this time? There we go. I see the Aurora Borealis, how's that? There we go. All right, Ducks, we'll talk to you soon. Take care, bye.