 everyone. And this is Christian Buckley doing another MVP buzz chat. And I'm talking today with Derek. Hello. Hey, Christian. How are you? Great to have you. It's doing doing well here. It's a bit cold outside. Yep. For some reason. Yep. I'd like to complain about the cold, but it's going to be 75 where I live. So sorry. Remite, where are you? I'm in Scottsdale, Arizona. Oh, that's right. Yeah. Yeah. Well, at least we're the same time zone. So it's amazing. So yeah, we're about 40 degrees colder here in Utah. So yeah, not very far away even. But yeah, the strange how we miles make difference in temperature like that. And we're both desert climates too. It's you know, that's that's what's crazy. You know, the first time I went to Scottsdale, like I had been to Phoenix and have flown in and out and stuff. But I drove with my son who lived in Scottsdale and Mesa for years, drove from Utah all the way down and we went through all the parks on the way down the way back, which was awesome. I didn't realize how long you're driving downhill in Arizona. We were visiting friends of his in Payson and was it Shiloh? Shiloh. Shiloh. Yeah. Shiloh. Yeah. Yeah, that's over in the White Mountains. Yeah. And so and then like you're in the forest. And it's just incredibly beautiful in the mountains. And then you drive downhill for two hours. Yep. Words. You're literally just going like this for two hours. To the valley of the sun. Yeah. Just crazy. Same same from Flagstaff, right? If you go to Flagstaff, you're uphill the entire way. Because we live in this little bowl down here and where it gets cold. I mean, that's one thing and maybe if nothing else from this chat from people watching, they can learn something. In Arizona in the winter, it gets cold. Well, it's like Death Valley. More people die from the cold and winter than in the sun in the summer, which is insane. Yeah. It's snowed at my house every year I've lived here for 22 years. It's snowed every year. So a lot of people say, oh, it's hot all the time. No, no, no, no, no. Not at all. It actually can get quite cold. And I've had 12 inches of snow in my backyard. So Well, Derek, for folks that don't know you, who are you? Where are you? And we said where you are. And what do you do? Yeah. So I've kind of stayed consistent with one thing over my career, which is Active Directory, right? I've dabbled with group policy. So I was a group policy MVP for about eight to 10 years. I went from AD to group policy back to AD. And now they're kind of tucked me in security. So but I deal all around Active Directory group policy security for enterprises. And, you know, I have a I always tell everybody have a great job, right? Because what I get to do is go around and help everyone understand and do what they need to do so they can become champions at their organization. So I've been on the road for the last five weeks doing presentations throughout the US. And it's just a great opportunity to help the community. And that's really what I do is I help this community with good quality information that they can take directly to their computer and do for their job every single day. I don't know if you know Mike Nelson. So it is a cloud and Dave Center Management MVP as well. We were just chatting yesterday. He's a good friend. We joke around a lot. And he was talking about Azure AD. And I made the joke. I said, I think it's, I think by far of all the topics we cover in our AMAs, I said Azure AD is one of the most exciting topics ever. And then I did like the wide screen of the camera. Like really? It's exciting stuff, Derek. Yeah, I lived in first. Well, not not Azure AD, but I've lived AD and group policy and people like, how in the world do you make it exciting? I'm like, well, I just I it's exciting to me, right? Digging out the nuggets and helping people understand complex subjects. So so they can go, oh, that's how it works. Or ah, that's what I need to do. And I've had a great career. I've absolutely loved it. You know, I had a guy I always share that I had a guy that working for me that for a couple of years, whose only job was doing permissions management across early SharePoint systems and a number of other systems. But that's all that he did all day long. It was like an 1,800 person organization. And it was a full time job for that one person. And I remember having a conversation with it. I'm thinking it's like, I'm like, man, I'm so sorry, you got like the like, you got handed like the most boring stuff. And he just went in, he kind of paused. He's like, I absolutely love my job. And he just would sit there with headphones in and do other stuff and zone out. And he was like, he was an eight hour a day, day, clock in, clock out, you know, and just loved it. And Wow. Wow. That doesn't sound too fun to me. But hey, someone's got to do it. And at least he enjoyed it. Fantastic. That's how I look at the ad stuff, you know, just like yeah, I'm glad somebody does it and understands that that's out there. But Yep, yep, there's a there's a lot of room for everybody in this space. And and you can find your niche. If you want to be an IT, you certainly can find your niche. Well, Derek, you've been doing this for a long time. What was going back memory lane? What what was the I mean, I don't remember what the MVP program looked like 20 years ago. So it was that process for you to become an MVP. Yeah. So it was interesting because I kind of got a phone caller and email saying, Hey, you've been, you know, suggested you be an MVP. I'm like, I don't know who did that, right? I don't that's what it was back then. You had to actually have someone suggest that you be an MVP. And a lot of people were coming from the the user groups, right? And I didn't do any of that. I never did any of the groups back in the late 90s, early 2000s. And but what I was doing is I was on the road, right? I was doing training. I was doing consulting. I was doing a variety of things, doing a lot of writing. And so, you know, over the years, I've written, I think 16 books and, you know, started in the early 2000s and and I got invited to be an active directory MVP. And I think at the time, there were less than 50 of us. I mean, it was a really small group. And and it was just for me, it was kind of a wow, I this this is amazing. I didn't even think about it before. And, you know, 20, 20 years later, you know, I should have 20 MVPs. But two years, two different years, I was so busy, you know, I didn't have time to fill out the paperwork, you know, and that's a lot of people don't understand is when you're an MVP, every year, you have to go and you have to submit everything you did for the year. Now, of course, you could do it throughout the year, but no one does that, right? Let's wait for the last time. So I mean, I literally would end up with seven to 10 pages. And I just say I'm done. I had to stop because I wasn't done. But I write blogs, articles, I present so much. Like, I don't remember, you know, I said, I just start putting these things down. And two years, I was just too busy. And I couldn't, I couldn't fill out the paperwork. But I always have to like to ask this, like, so what do you do to keep track of your because look, and I'm sure you're the same way. Most of us, it's difficult to, it's like to ring your own bell to collect, like, how do you surface that? So how do you, how do you collect the activities that you, how do you track that? We know that we both put them all in in the month before the due date into the end of the fiscal. Yeah. So so I do it in a variety of ways, right? Some of the things that helps me remind me, believe it or not, is I'll go through my airline itinerary. So I'll go through all my flights. I'll go, Oh, I was there. So I did this. I was there. I did this. I also do some of the same events every year. So that will actually catapult my brain thinking, Oh, I did this. Oh, and I did this. For example, last year, I did B sides in Seattle. And that was the first time I'd done B sides. So that also sticks out in my mind because it's new and unique. As far as articles and blogs, well, I have a folder called 2022 blogs, and I just go through the dates and I, you know, pull them up, copy, paste, you know, what is it about, you know, all those things. So because of the way that I store data and the ritualistic aspect of travel, it actually helps me put that information in. But some of the things that really become a real pain is when I was doing work for a dedicated article company. So I was I was hired to do an article or blog every two weeks. Well, that's 100 plus in a year. And by the you're typing and you're like, Okay, you're at like 40 and you're like, Can I just say I wrote 100 done? And but you can't it's a lot of work. But you can't you I mean, so the problem with that is that it's hard to convey the weight and the topics that you cover by doing that because you have the ability to go in there and you can just put in one entry and say, Here's my blog. I did, you know, 100 entries this past year. And here's the URL. But that's putting that effort on the reviews, the review committee, right? So they have to go to now. Right. And mine's not the only one there. So they have to they have to filter my name, you know, that's, that's a lot of work. And, you know, then they have to filter through that. So I try my darned us to get them the details that they need to review that. What are your ideas of quality over quantity of commitment? So I always joke that I had this argument with with a good friend of fellow MVP about this, where he said, you're like focusing trying to focus on fewer but higher quality. I said, Well, that's interesting. I'm trying to do higher number of high quality. Yeah, that's what I think. That's what I think I don't and I don't look at volume. I can't look at volume because I probably want to do double what I do. And I just don't have the time. And so, you know, right now, a lot of my efforts, believe it or not, are on LinkedIn. And I use LinkedIn as a great platform for sharing information that I find for sharing information on taking a post to the next level. Like I did that twice this morning, where I'm like, Hey, this is a great start. However, here's five additional bullet points you got to consider just to kind of push that narrative forward. But you know, I still blog, I still write articles, still do prolific speaking videos and all that other stuff. But you know, for me, every single post should be quality and quality to me is in this community giving them something to do. It's not just a high level 10,000 foot view. Hey, implement zero trust. Okay, wait a minute. Okay, zero trust, you can't go buy a tool. So when you say implement zero trust, what do you mean? And, you know, it seems like this past week, zero trust is back on the radar. And I try to give them details. Okay, zero trust incorporates XYZ. So this is important because of ABC, you know, trying to give the community some meat. Instead of just, you know, hey, this is important, you know, we see a trend of zero trust in 2023. I don't even know what that means. I have no idea what that means. And it was funny at after RSA this year. Someone actually posted that almost every vendor said they did zero trust on their booth. And it's like, you can't do zero trust you. There is no tool to do zero trust, you know, we help with zero trust. But we anyway, I digress know that I was so I was at an event in Orlando two weeks ago. And it's funny, they had kind of the subject areas of each of this different sponsors, we're the exhibitors. And we had two cards up above our booth that said collaboration and security. As I was walking around, look at who else is here. Everybody around us had something else and security or just security. And so so then you need to ask this like, okay, when when it reminds me of the movie, the Incredibles with the bad guy can't remember what his name was like when everybody's special. Nobody special. Yep. Yep. Absolutely. And so they were to sing event. Yeah. Yeah. So then so then I so I asked the guys the two people the booth right next to us that had collaboration security like, what do you guys do? Absolutely nothing to do with what we do zero. Yep. Yep. The buzz word. Yeah. And yeah, so it's it's a you have to get past that top level. The analyst view that 50,000 foot level of, hey, here's what we're doing. And really dig into that. You know, one of the things that I always love doing and I recommend to people that don't write a lot. I write a lot. I probably write more than I'm speaking. I used to do a lot of in person events. Pandemic, of course, I'm doing trying to do a mix of online. And now in person is starting back up again. I'm on the road this weekend, heading out of the country to another event that I'm excited about. But I my advice for people is outline, because one of the other mistakes I think people make in writing in and providing that value to dig into the detail is they try to then put everything into that one post and doing volume and that look, there's an art to volume as well is by taking that and saying that it's all right to write blog posts that are six to 800 words long that every one of them doesn't have to be 2500 word white paper. Ask, you know, article detail article. If you get over 1000, you should start asking the question of can I break this up into a series? Is there a logical split? Yeah, right a long piece or something against long pieces. But look at like you're going to are people going to sit and read for 15 minutes? Or is it better to break it up into three five minute articles? Yeah, I have a very distinct opinion on this. You know, the whole TLDR was created for a reason. Now, if you don't know what TLDR is and you're watching this, you're probably are writing things that are too long, because it stands for too long didn't read. And here's what I do. You know, I'm on my phone and I'm scrolling. And if the first sentence catches my eye, I scroll to see how long it is. And if it's too long, I don't read it. Yeah. So along with what Christian is saying, less is more. Okay. Even if in a single blog, you can flush out every detail. I'm just going to give you a tip. Okay, as a writer, a new writer, leave something out. Not that you're saying what you're writing is exhaustive. What you can say is, Hey, here are some of the key points of what I'm talking about. And if you leave out a key point, the world will engage with that post and say, you forgot this. Yeah, good. We want people to engage. We want people to engage. It's not, you don't have to be 100% precise in in whatnot. You want, it's a community. You want people to commune and give their input to flush out the rest of it, right? And so I do that quite a bit. There's a great advice from a polished speaker, a professional speaker. I saw this was in the early 2000s. And I've heard it other other times, but it really had an impact on me. This, this guy just was an amazing, entertaining speaker. But one of the things that he would say is like, if you're just starting out is, and this is works for written word as well, is tell people what you're going to tell them, tell them, give them the content. And then at the end, tell them what you've told them. Yep. And I, like, I just, I was thinking about this this week. I did a blog post like a week ago, where I, I didn't edit out, I had my outline, and I left in the bullets, like three or four bullets of here's the what I'm going to cover. Then I had the body of it. And then I had my summary paragraph of what I explained in there. And it's, it's like a foundational, it's things like college writing 101. Yep. Yeah. In my opinion, it ends. And, you know, I've been speaking since 95, you know, in the public. And, you know, a couple of tips that I would give anybody wanting to start is just what Christian said, okay, tell them what you're going to tell them, tell them, tell them what you told them. Okay. And do that throughout your presentation. So what I think about is a moving window, right? I have a moving window that is kind of going back and back and forth to kind of keep them engaged in the story. So I will honestly all the time say, All right, this is what I've gone over so far. We've done this, we've done this, we've done now we're going to do this. And then I'll move on and say, Okay, remember, we just did this and now we're here. And that, and that's a really good one. The other is the rule of three. Okay. The rule of three is great for writing and for speaking, right? So wherever you're in a topic, having three bullets under it, right? So if you're going to create a article or presentation, have three major concepts and three minor concepts, and that's your structure. It's a great way to organize things. Now, it can be four, it can be two, but it shouldn't be one, and it shouldn't be 10, you know, because people lose traction, they lose where you are. So if you keep it in buckets of three, it's really easy to keep track. It's also easy to summarize. Yeah, you know, my first book that I co-authored, so I've done six, so not your 16, 18, whatever it is, you know, but it's, you know, the first book that I wrote, it was actually a compilation of articles that my co-author and I had written for a number of different places. And we got to a point where we realized just doing one off articles, blog posts, this was before the word blog existed in the late 90s. We were, so I was a co founder of a startup in 98 and so we started writing these articles and somebody in a while said, hey, you should do is a guy's doing a series, like we're jumping around on topics that are all the same subject matter. But it was visual modeling. It was, you know, we wrote about UML, we wrote about software configuration management practices, that kind of stuff. And we then started to piece that together and we then went back and said, if we were going to write a series or an e-book or a series of e-books or a full book, what other topics are missing? And so we fit what we had already written into this outline and we filled out the rest of the outline. The benefit there is that we knew weeks, months in advance, what we were going to write about because we had that outline and we added new things in as we thought about them. But we did that. But then when it came time, we literally just combined those articles and a bunch of unwritten things into the book. And then we had to work on transitions and a bunch of other things to do with that. But we had the bulk of the content and the technical content written through that series. So that's, you can be very strategic about the way that you write as well. And that will then decide, you know, the body of that work, if it's going to be a book at the end of that, or if it's just a series of articles and a series of presentations. So you can be very structured in your approach to the content you handle. Very methodical, very methodical. And, you know, but if you even take a step back from what you're saying and think about it, I mean, let's just talk about passwords, right? Passwords, you have the concepts around what is a good password? How do you implement? How do you troubleshoot? How do you bypass? How do you do this? Cool. That's a chapter. You just created a chapter, right? And what you guys most likely did was you're like, Hey, let's write about this one piece of passwords. And let's write about this one piece. And at the end, you're like, Well, all I have to do is write these two other pieces. And now I have the chapter. And so really what you did is you started by writing these point things. And then when you put them together, you're like, Oh, well, we only have a couple of things left to say because our articles cover 90% of us. And and you can do the same thing. And that's how I create content is, you know, what is missing? What what's important? What are the trends? What can I write about that's going to help someone right now? And I try to keep it lean and mean and to the point. You know, I call it action items, right? When someone is done reading or listening to me, they have an action item to go do. Yeah. And that's as a marketer. I mean, we always talk about the call to action. So marketing content, and whether it's technical or non technical, you want it's that conversion activity, you want that action, that engagement. And it might be the most common thing when people reading a blog post is you want them to read more. And that's why things like my WordPress based site, you know, suggest other topics based on the keywords, based on the usage patterns of the reader, if they've got a profile that knows who they are and is looking at hey, you've read this other stuff, here's more new content. But then if you want to them to take specific actions to go check out my ebook to register for my webinar that's coming up or look at these other articles or buy a product or hire me for my services, whatever those things are to include that, have content, look at it. It's fine to have content that doesn't point to an action. But I still do. I like to say like, an action might be, let me know your thoughts. Let's share your experiences or go run this command. Right. I mean, that's what a lot of mine are is go run this command. Go look at this setting or run this PowerShell command to pull the setting out. It has nothing to do with me. It has nothing to do with future content. The action item is actually themselves putting into action what they just read about because this industry, especially now, is related to trust. And when I say trust, or I'm going to say something that may shock a lot of people watching this just because it's written on the internet doesn't make it true. I know, I know it. I know around Christmas time and there's this guy called Santa Claus. I don't want to go into that. But, you know, you have to build the trust and you have to keep the trust. And, you know, even this morning, you know, I kind of every now and then get into a debate I don't want to, but I have to put my foot down and say what you're saying, you can't say that. And so someone was saying in a hybrid active directory environment, what you should do tomorrow is get rid of on-prem. And I'm like, okay, yeah, you can't just say that. That's like, that's just stupid. You can't just say cut it off and build better. Go. You can't. So I love that's that's what organizations that got rid of their QA departments that said, we just hey coders, write higher quality code. There you go. You don't need to test it. If why are you wasting time writing bugs in your code? I mean, come on. Just exactly. It's very similar. That's exactly right. It's exactly fire QA. You immediately open up some funds to go do something else and just force your coders to be better. I mean, the same idea. It's just not possible. Good luck with that people. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. 100% and and and you know, he responded saying that's not really what I meant. So I'm like, well, that's what you wrote just said. Yeah, that's what you wrote. And people will interpret exactly what you write. You know, don't don't force them to go to that next step. Tell them what you want them to read. That's why there's no shame in going back and editing a post. No, that's I see that the how I worded that was poorly. And yeah, I'm getting feedback and going change. So which it's harder to do in video. Like I've realized, like I just had something I did a we had an AMA discussion and we made a statement and I said, I think this and somebody corrected me and was like, no, that's the opposite. I'm like, oh, and so all you could do is go put in the note to the video. Yeah. Yeah. Oops. Yeah. Well, Derek, really appreciate your time getting to know you and enjoy that winter weather. Yeah, yeah, I will. I will. We're, you know, we're going to get out the park is because it's going to be down to about 40 tonight. Oh, 40 not die. Hello. Yeah, it's going to be I think I walk in the dog at night and it's been where we are. It's a bit windy to between the valleys. And so it's yeah, when it's 32 outside and then you walk out with the wind and with the windshield down below that. But I think it's been at night gets down into the low 20s here. Yeah. Right now it's dry, but the snow it's coming. Yep, it is. It's inevitable. Yep. Well, Derek, well, thanks a lot for your time. Thank you, Christian.