 Hi, everybody. This is Christian Buckley with another MVP Buzz Chat interview. And I'm talking today with Samuel. Hello. Hey, Christian. How are you? I'm doing well. It's good to see you. And well, good to see you. I feel like it's, you know, how time is just kind of stopped. I feel like I just saw people and people that it's like, no, that was like a year and a half, two years ago. Yeah. Oh, true. So we just, we woke up from the coma and we're seeing each other, but we feel like it just happened. That's true. So why don't you introduce yourself for people to know who you are, where you are, what you do? Yeah, sure. So you already heard my name, Samuel. Samuel Zurich here. It's a little bit strange for English speaking people to hear my last name. So it's actually like Zurich without the eye. So that's a fun fact. I'm a very old MVP actually for the MVP world. It's 11 years actually became this year. I started out with SharePoint back in 2005 and somehow fell in love. And I still don't understand why because somehow, sometimes you just hate it, but sometimes you just love it more than anything else. And you know, it's kind of funny. So I got involved with, formally with SharePoint also in 2005, a client that insisted like we want this, deploy it, talk them out of it. And then I kind of caught the bug in a year later, went to work for Microsoft. But that's what I got to know you like through SharePoint Saturdays and exactly events over the last year. So exactly. So I actually came into SharePoint coincidentally. My boss came to me saying to me, Hey, Sam, we have your company. They told us we can build a change management tool on top of SharePoint forums. And I started with the SharePoint version two. So I didn't see version one in production. But from version two, I'm working with it. And I loved it many, many years. Yep. So that that was kind of it too. It was, it's funny, I saw it actually my first time I met Joe Oleson, what I visited up from California. I visited Microsoft campus and he's like, Hey, he saw that I was writing some stuff online. So you should come take a look at it. I went and I saw it in August of 2004. And he said, What do you think? And he showed me I was like from his office. I'm like, Joel, this is crap. This is garbage. Because I was working with other collaboration technologies at the time that were much more expensive and massive deployments. It was like a million dollar entry points, but beautiful software, very expensive, but much more functional. And so I that was my opinion of it, you know, but then a year later, seeing it doing the deployment, and it was version two, so that it was the 2007 version. So I guess, technically version three, version three, exactly where I started to see those those pieces and really started to understand catch the vision of where it was going. Yeah. How long time ago? Yeah, a lot of time. So yeah, so what are you, what are you passionate about right now? kind of what are you focused on? Yeah, it was always to share a point server thing in earlier times, because I was really geeky about it, wanted to know everything about it, made SharePoint conferences, etc. And this went along until teams came. And when teams was raised up, first of all, I didn't understand the story. But like with with loop right now, right? Everybody's asking, What's that little thing now? You know, they just launched groups. I understood the idea of groups. Microsoft always had the idea to have this one stop shop for the information worker being outlook. So this step of having then groups in outlook where you bind all these things together was quite a nice idea. So I just started to grasp the groups idea. And then Microsoft comes and says, Hey, now there's teams. And I was like, What the hell teams? And in India, they brought it up in in spring 2017, where they launched a private preview in December 2016. And as soon as I understood what teams really is, I said, Well, that's groups 2.0. Now really bringing that one stop shop for the end user. I loved it. We migrated everything at experts inside in summer 2017 to teams. I started to really dive into it. And since January 2018, I'm one of the teams elite 100 members that are really focused on the team's journey. And since then, the SharePoint stuff really became a back end service for teams for me. What is what is stunning, because I love SharePoint over everything. Yeah, well, it's interesting, because you look at where a lot of the SharePoint development, a lot of the experts, the MVPs were building around was essentially building like an interface on top of SharePoint and creating a workspace. And so that's the way that I explain I used to say that. So groups, I would refer to it as like a service bus. It was a way of gathering all the disparate signals and messages and things into one thing and creating kind of a unified profile ID for things. So if I'm working on Project XYZ, it's Project XYZ and all of these different applications, you know, and I could find it all together. Well, teams provided that interface that that that that hub for collaboration that we were all trying to build around SharePoint. It was that interesting turn of events where I don't know that Microsoft was necessarily promoting SharePoint as like a Swiss Army knife solution. But where they officially said like, no, SharePoint is intranets. It's like it's like it's this core technology and infrastructure of teams. But don't try to make SharePoint into a change management platform or ticketing system or kind of all those other things. Don't build other point solutions. Well of things that SharePoint isn't meant to be and use the the the the first party solutions like teams, you know, for those those use cases. That was a shift. That was a major shift. Totally, totally. I remember times when customers would come to me telling me, hey, can you build for us this and this and this application on top of SharePoint? But can you make sure it doesn't look like SharePoint? But that was that was the trick. That was the there was a probably I don't know if you remember, but the old Palmolive ads, which is a dishwashing soap and the ads for it would be like, you know, I don't use this fancy thing. It's like, oh, and it was this woman doing our nails like you're soaking in it right now. And the woman's hand was in this green goop the entire time. Yeah, that's correct. And so there were so many of those kind of, you know, we did this intranet and people like, yeah, that's the kind of intranet I was like, was it then there was the reveal. It was like the taste test, the blind taste test is like, oh, you're actually you're drinking SharePoint right now. Exactly. The Ferrari site we always use to show off what SharePoint can do for public intranet sites that actually, let's be honest, never was built for exactly. So but that was there was the time where SharePoint could fix all world's problems, right? Of course. Well, it is it's behind the scenes fixing the world's problems right now still. You know, I've not looked at I know that there's the last decade, it's been dominant in all of the, you know, the intranet design awards. It's like eight out of 10 are SharePoint intranets. So I don't know what the numbers look like lately. But I mean, it's been for a long time. And I know, is that something? Are you still building intranets for organizations or? We still are a bit. I recently had a chat or a presentation about do we still need intranets or is working with teams and jammer just enough? And the the essence coming out of that is actually it depends like always, right? So I I still think intranets have their play. But we really have to come away from our these really huge complex intranets that really look like a very big tree with tens of thousands of branches and subsites where nobody knows where content is anymore. So just go naked and just take the out of the box features and just put into the internet with really is of value and all the rest doing tubes. Well, that's see that's the I think that the if you understand the use cases and you just call it out of the intranet the SharePoint based intranet and teams is that workplace that that interface and office applications, jammer for the community pieces. It all fits together and then you can have your internet be the place where you can actually integrate search like my company at point we have that where you can do search across each of those different siloed informations, but from the top of the internet page. But we let those tools do what they are more performant in providing services. We don't try because I think that the danger is an are you starting to see where people are trying to force fit an intranet into teams? Yeah, it's not working. Right. Well, I mean, so how does how does like Viva connections, which essentially provides a SharePoint, you know, a team site front end into teams? Does that help? Better integrate them or does that further confuse like what am I using here? What am I doing? Yeah, that's that's quite a good question. Our answer to that until now has been we really love it. We use it for our own. We have a very, very small internet where we just show who is who and what tools are we using at experts inside. And for this, we have the Viva application and when it's not there, people already start to complain. Hey, where is our Viva connections site gone? We want it back. And I think it's a very good way to show off the internet because you will spend most of your time anyway in teams. And of course, what we always promote is if you have a product team, sorry, if you have a product team and you have an internet site about that product with some information, just add it as a tab in your team's channel so that you do not have to go and search the internet for that product, but you just have it as a tab. Right. Well, that's one of the beauties of teams around it. Well, I would be interested too with like your other kind of traditional SharePoint areas where you're seeing kind of like bleeding into the news. Again, on Viva is topics and syntax on one side and topics as part of that. Are you doing a lot? Are you showing a lot or seeing a lot of interest from customers around syntax and topics? What we see is that people have needs that are really responded by these products, but they don't know the products yet. For example, we always still have the discussion about metadata. That was our big topic, right? The enterprise content management having metadata on Oreo documents in order to automate processes and archival, etc. We still have those discussions and since a while when we start to look into the syntax story, we said, hey, the new world will add the metadata automatically by content to your data so that you can still use it for your automation purposes, but we should really come away from people having the need of adding manual metadata to files because they either don't know or they don't care or they just add something so that they have done their job and with crap metadata, you have crap processes, so it needs to go into the direction that this metadata is applied by a system like syntax and then can be aggregated with tools like topics. Actually, I had in mind the Infopedia announcement that we have a few years ago at Ignite where I was waiting for really a gear lead to get my hands on this Infopedia where I just see the idea coming back as Viva topics now. Yeah, that was, yeah, I remember that. And you know, it's funny because all this really comes back around, you're right, it's the core topics. There's new brand names on it. There's new announcements around it, but it's all the core search conversations that we've been having for decades around the content, but you're right, it's a lot of the automation, a lot of the AI capabilities is really about removing the tedious, the human, removing the human error of or the, you know, to your point, the majority of people when they come in, they upload content into the system. They just, they don't take the time, they don't go through and delicately, you know, it's like, where does this really belong? What is the best way to go in and define this? So as much as you can automate so that the system understands where it is, tags it appropriately, how it's being used, the projects as it's part of tags it appropriately, as much as you could take away from that and so that it really just needs to then happen for users that know that the sensitivity, the uniqueness of this content piece can add those final unique, you know, tags and things to give the nuances of the differences with that content, but the majority of the tagging has all been automated. Exactly. That's what organizations need, so that it, you can't remove 100% of the human, you know, from the process. Of course. But for the majority of the interaction and repetitive motions, like take that off my plate. I don't need to think about it. Just do that. Totally, totally. And when it comes also to that collaboration piece that I am a very, very big fan of in Teams, it's that you can put a structure to it so that you have a logical connection between third party applications between processes, between data and between conversations where you already do some tagging by choosing the right channel to write to another person that you need some content. And when I talk about why should we do chatting in Teams value over writing emails internally, I just say, hey, look, you get hundreds of emails every day. They just go into one channel and you have to add what is the context? Is it for me? Do I have to do something or is it just for information? And if you have the right rules in Teams, the sender is already doing the tagging for you by taking the right channel. And if it's for you personally, then he tax you as a person. And then you know it's for me. And if you have to do something, you just go to the three dots and make you a task list in your task list. And it's done. I really love this idea of not having to go and go through all my emails to make sure that I know if I have to do something or not. I just love that idea. Well, that's one of the things that I love, you know, the formerly the Cortana reminders now as part of, you know, you know, rolled into the Viva, but are those daily emails where it's going through and the AI is pulling out. I love that it does that so intuitively, it will identify like, Hey, yesterday, you said that you would do this follow up. And I'd be like, Yep, I did it. I followed up done. And but half the time I look at the items like, No, actually, I need to put that in my to do. I need to update a planner board. I need to, you know, a task somewhere where I need to just take note of that or go do that right now. You know, thank you for the reminder. That's every day I'm seeing those and I'm getting that value immediately from that from that new AI capability. I think if you go and look at the list of everything that was announced out of Ignite, which is just behind us now, is AI, it's all about AI, that level automation, it may be across the products that we know and new product announcements, which is very exciting to discuss. But you look at the body of announcements around that, whether it's in security, it's in collaboration, it's all AI announcements. It's it's an interesting world we're in. It's a different place than it was 10 years ago. That's true. That's true. The simplicity of the old SharePoint days. That's true. The simplicity, but also the hatred when you had to go to US, US logs for hours and hours and hours just to find your error. Now you don't have these errors anymore, but you have other things that you're fighting with. So you know, I have to ask you to, I've been wondering this too. So you practitioner in the SharePoint side and you guys consulting on this, one of the biggest, the difficult things for SharePoint to move to a SharePoint online was the sense of losing the ability to brand and the look and feel and the customization of SharePoint because for Microsoft to be able to support, you know, SharePoint online as a platform, they had to remove a lot of the, let's be honest, the ways in which organizations were breaking SharePoint. So, but it's simplified that there was an uproar around this. Like I'm not it's not going to be the same and do that. Yep. Is that an issue? Is that still an issue for customers? Not at all. Not at all. If it is an issue, it's a customer that is anyway quite a dinosaur kind of style. And mostly there, it's not a discussion whether we go SharePoint online or not SharePoint online. There is the question. Do we go online? This is the bigger question. We have a lot of discussions when they say, yes, let's go online. We can always convince them that are 100 better ways to do the solutions that they had done with custom solutions in SharePoint before. That was a big problem in the beginning. Yeah. When 10 years ago, SharePoint went online. The SharePoint online was just it was just killed by not being able to add features to it. Right. So nobody wanted it. Since we have SharePoint modern, it became better since we have also more possibilities to also develop solutions on SharePoint online with other possibilities became better. And now, to be honest, we really try to not even do custom development at all and only very limited if we have to because there is so much you can do out of the box already and different methods how you achieve the same goals as you did earlier by developing solutions that you just have so much more to do and possibilities that in most cases we do it codeless. And when organizations want to do something that's kind of beyond the out of the box experience, I mean, I find that the community driven SPFX stuff, the SharePoint framework discussions and activities and what they support and doing like they're they're so out in front of the curve and being aware of, you know, a new solutions and third party slew integrations and all that with that, you really can find what you need supported through that or through this, these community SPFX, you know, totally, totally. We have one, one customer, he jumped very early on SharePoint online with a custom solution that we built back then as a SharePoint hosted application doing client management for for their company. And we just recently now switched it. And it is now an Azure application with a database, having API calls into the SharePoint library transferring files, having SharePoint there where it's really strong with file management and stuff like that, metadata and stuff, but having all the logic to have the database to have the user management that they need, et cetera, all in its own application on the Azure side. And now we have the perfect match of both worlds. We have an application. It's blazing fast. It does everything it needs. It has a relational database behind it and not this broken SharePoint lists kind of trying to make a database out of it. And on the other side, we have to SharePoint cool stuff like having a SharePoint library where we can push files in, fill in metadata and while you open it, it finally fills your forms in the documents. And you have a fixed solution that is completely combining the good things of both worlds. Yeah, you know, just I'm smiling because I just just made me think of, I think there's somebody on my team that's writing a blog post right now called SharePoint is not a database, which I think, you know, but I think it's that's a great example of a lot of the work, the partner work that's been done over the last few years is it been around exactly, it's not, you know, a move to the cloud is not simply a taking something on-prem and the lift and shift over to the cloud. People tried that. And honestly, it's very expensive to run in Azure in the cloud. You know, no matter what the cloud environment is, what you built on-prem, it's not performant for the cloud. You need to go in and relook at all those solutions. And that's true for moving across, you know, InfoPath solutions. It's not just a matter of what's fine, a new way of building the InfoPath solution. Like, well, what is, what are those key workloads that you're integrated in? Is that the best cloud architecture for the solution or should we really we optimize it for the cloud? Totally. Yeah, there's a lot of, well, I'm sure you guys are busy every, every old SharePoint, like long time SharePoint MVP and consultant that I know that I've talked with, you're talking about like over the last couple of years, like how are things been? People feel slammed. They're so busy. There's so much, you know, that's been going on and a lot of it has been this, this kind of work. It doesn't look to be slowing down. So. That's true. And what you said, I would sign every single world with blood. It's not a lift and shift. It's, it's, it changed. It was a lift and shift maybe five years ago. Because it was SharePoint Classic. We went to SharePoint Online Classic with which a few of the things that was it. We were transferring site collections from A to B. Today, it's a complete transformation because if you do it one on one, then you have same shit on a different system. It doesn't match at all because you cannot really cleanly migrate the SharePoint server classic site to a modern site and you shouldn't even do it because you should also think about is this the right solution for the future? Exactly what you said. And I have a lot of discussions with customers where I say, hey, we even invented a method. We were working together with the Raincore guys on solutions like this, where we said, how can we analyze a SharePoint on-prem server and find out the sites that you better go directly to teams without even touching the SharePoint site and just migrating the content because many people just used file share on SharePoint like a file share. They had maybe a calendar and a task list. That's not the SharePoint use case anymore. Right. Yep. Well, there's a look. We go in a much longer discussion just around the realities of moving to the cloud and within the Microsoft ecosystem. There's a lot around that. But for I know that we're just over time here, but I really appreciate you participating in the MVP Buzz Chat interview series. Samuel, people want to find out more about you, get in contact with you, reach out to you, find out more about your company. What are the best ways to reach you? Well, actually, I'm reachable on any platform, be it LinkedIn, be it Facebook. You can Snapchat me. You can signal me. You can find me on any platform, actually, just type in. Samuel SharePoint MVP. That's enough. You don't even have to know my last name and we will find a lot of resources of me. And thank you very much for having me. It's been great to talk to you and catch up. So hopefully we'll see you sooner rather than later at one of these events as things start opening up. But I promise I'm going to come to that side of the pond as well, at least a couple of times next year. So hopefully we'll see you soon. I hope so too. Thank you. Bye bye.