 Hey everybody. This is Christian Buckley with another MVP buzz chat. I'm talking today with Sarah. Hello. Hello. How are you? I'm doing well. So for folks that don't know you, who are you? Where are you? What do you do? So my name's Sarah. I answer to anything polite though, but officially my name's Sarah Fenner. I'm primarily a Microsoft certified trainer and newly MVP. Congratulations. I don't like brand new as well. So yes, brand new. So yes, I think I'm about two months in now. So yes, very exciting times. I focus on Microsoft Office primarily teams, I would say, mainly because that's where the work is currently. Yeah. And day to day, my day job, teaching people about all the goodness that there is inside Office 365, Microsoft 365. In fact, anything they asked me to tell them about really? That's great. Yeah. There's, you know, it's always one of those wrong assumptions that companies make is that, oh, everybody understands how to use, you know, and then whatever the product is because it's in the office suite. Just assume to do. It's like, well, like anything, the majority of people know how to, I can open a new word doc. I can type things in, but they have no idea about the million other features that are within the application. And especially now that we're talking about like the browser-based, the cloud-based versions of the products and all of the AI capabilities, there's always something new to talk about. There's always something new to talk about. I always say to people at the start of the course, as I'm eating my breakfast, I'm also reading the roadmap because there's at least two or three new things that have been launched today in this space. You know, it's always one of the things I recommend to people because a common question people ask is, you're like, how do you keep up with things? And you must be on top of everything. It's like, no, no, I'm not. There's people I rely on. But the other thing that is ingenious is the sync between teams in a planner and the roadmap or the message center update specifically. And so you know what is actually impacting your tenant. So that's a team slash planner slash roadmap. You know, that's a great tip. And I love that because you can assign those tasks in planner to whoever's responsible for it in your organization. And then you can have the conversation about it, which really is what this whole integration between planner teams is all about. But that's just a really great example of how, you know, something very simple can really improve productivity within an organization. Well, that's what I love about the productivity tip stuff. Like I'm not an MCT. I'm not a trainer going out. I've done workshops. I've presented a number of events, but I love focusing on the productivity tips. And I actually started this almost a decade ago, talking about like features in SharePoint. I started as a SharePoint MVP. And I just kind of it slowly morphed into as SharePoint on-prem into SharePoint online, and then the broader Microsoft 365 and into the office productivity. And of course, there's solutions that are in SharePoint that are also office tips and things like that. But really trying to go in and show like, Hey, here's, you know, there's cool hidden features and capabilities that are out there. And so people sit in those kinds of presentations. And they're like, you know, I know about this. I know about this. And I know about this. Whoa, what is that thing I've never heard of before? There's always something. There's always something. It's the moment. Yeah. We all want one of them. It's all about we want to dazzle people and we want a little bit of shock and awe with those. Yeah. What was your path to becoming an MVP? Kind of what did it? What did it? Well, actually COVID. But let me take a step back. Nobody talks about all the positive things about COVID. Let's hear about them according to Sarah. Okay. So I've been a trainer for over 20 years. Okay. I started off training Microsoft Office products, quite basic level and ended up working with Microsoft Project because I had experience of project management as well. And from project, I got into project server, which is SharePoint based, which leads me into SharePoint. And this was around about the time BPOS was coming out and Office 365. So there goes another thing to add to Sarah's list of courses that she delivers. That's my old team. When I was at Microsoft, I joined MMS and was there when we got rebranded as BPOS. Yeah. So I kind of heard about BPOS about three or four months before the whole Office 365 process kicked off. So for me, BPOS is very much a precursor. Of course. Yep, it was. It's kind of the old name. Well, and BPOS, for folks who don't know what that is, Business Productivity Online Services, we started as MMS or Microsoft Managed Services or Microsoft Managed Solutions, depending on how Bill Barr claims that it was called, even though it was services. Anyway, MMS evolved into BPOS, Business Productivity Online Services. Most of BPOS was actually still on-prem. It was dedicated on-prem, but it really was the precursor to Office 365 and truly the cloud solution, the cloud offer. Yeah. So my Office 365 subscription that I work in today, most of the time, is right from the very beginning. It was one of the very first trial tenants in the UK back in 2011. I've grown with the product. I always describe it as that was the blandest of vanilla at the beginning, because it was a distinction with the change from BPOS. And here's, again, this is like my kind of interpretation of it, but a big part of it was Microsoft realizing we can't continue doing the dedicated on-prem calling it truly a cloud solution, but we also need to productize it. It needs to be more packaged. We can't have every single deployment being a unique flower, a snowflake that's out there, because we can't support that as a service. So we need to, I would say call it, we need to make it generic, but they need like what can we, what's repeatable, what's supportable, what's scalable, and then we'll add features, add complexity later. So that's what happened. It went from, if you wanted highly customized, you had to do on-prem, but if 60% of the features, 70% of the features were good enough and get the cloud-based, and then it very, of course, rapidly expanded when Microsoft kind of made the call, they said, we will innovate in the cloud first. Yes. And that's where news features will be developed going forward, because they had to draw a line in the sand at some point. Exactly. And for someone like me, that's been absolutely fantastic, because my skills and knowledge and expertise have grown as that service has grown. So I've gone from being an office trainer, training the basic office suite, which is enough of a challenge in its own right to what I call myself a born-in-the-cloud admin. I've never done on-prem, I've never spun up a server, I've never managed an on-prem server, networks. What are networks? You know, there's a cable I plug into the back of my computer and the world is connected. Okay, I'm exaggerating a little bit, I know a little bit more than that, but realistically, that's my kind of knowledge level in those areas. And I've been doing that for a long time, and I'm freelance trainer, I've been quite successful with that. My diary is never empty, which is always good. And then COVID hit, and my diary emptied. But it presented me with an opportunity to get involved in more of the community groups and to spend more time on the blog post. I wasn't spending four hours at the end of every day traveling to get to the next training course. And that meant I've been able to really kind of make my waves, if you like, in the community and bring my knowledge out to the wider audience and really give that commitment and contribution that you need as an MVP. So the change in lifestyle has given me that opportunity. And I like to think it's really just allowed me to shine a light on what I can do, my knowledge, my expertise, and that kind of underlying support that a lot of trainers actually give to their delegates, the people who come on their courses. I spend most of my evenings answering people who've been on a course as they come up with queries and questions afterwards, which again is another really valid contribution to make to the tech community. But until you're doing other things as well, you don't really see that as being valuable as an MVP. So that's how I got here, really. How much do you think is going to change in that world? I mean, as things start to open back up again, I can't see it going 100% back to that model. Because one thing that's happened over the last, it's really five, six, seven years, is that the technology to support doing online classes and synchronous and asynchronous communication, collaboration, the chat-based things. There are some things about teams that are very frustrating. I'll be honest around that, like any technology. But there are some things that are just amazing. I mean, every day, I have interactions with, so I'm completely remote. I've worked, I'm about to have my one-year anniversary with my company, but I've been working from home for the last decade, working for various ISAs. Since I left Microsoft in 2009, I've worked from home that entire time. And it was hard to work with remote teams. For years, my company was in Boston, then it was in Washington, D.C. Now my company's based out of New Jersey and the D.C. area, and of course there's people all over the world that I have a global role. But the thing that was different, the thing that was difficult previously is that I might be the lead on a project. I'm the person driving that, but there would be conversations. They would forget the people that were remote and all this progress, all this stuff and decisions made. And I'm like, whoa, whoa, wait a second, like why am I just hearing about this now? Why was I not part of that, well, we went and had a meeting or we went out to lunch and we made a decision around this. That's part of what I think will change. I always, sorry, how I compare this to people, like I commuted for over a year on a motorcycle to work. It was a short commute, very little time on the freeway, which riding a motorcycle on a freeway in California was a scary ordeal. But I did that. What ended my time community on my motorcycle was it was parked, and someone hit it, parked in the parking lot, crushed it, destroyed my bike, and I went and bought a car after that. But what I learned was that experience in riding the bike, I then ever since, I have become more like my heightened awareness of motorcycles on the freeway around me, on the roads. I see them, I'm looking for them, and I know like I need to give this a little extra clearance to this person. That's what I believe will happen and will change. I have to believe this is true, but that people will become more aware and sensitive to coworkers that need to participate that are not at location. Yeah, exactly. We're seeing this as we're starting to get hybrid events and hybrid meetings coming up. Several of us have fallen back into our old ways, chatting in the corner of the meeting room and forgetting that's a challenge for the people who are joining the meeting remotely. But from a training perspective, the technology, it does the job. Why would you spend, why would you go and travel to a city and stay in a hotel for four nights to attend a training course when you can sit at home and do it? For the experience. If you've got a good trainer and you're willing to participate yourself, training is a two-way process. As long as both the learner and the trainer are willing to put in the extra energy, then it works just as well. You do need more energy. You really, really do. It's so easy to fall asleep at the end of a virtual call. There's skills. People have that skills that they can be very engaging even if it's online. If you're doing like a training session, if you're going in there and you're walking through, hey, I'm learning how to use a PowerPoint. You're instructing me. We're doing things on that kind of guidance. That's something like it's very purposeful. A conference is different. The value of the conference, like going to one of the marquee events on Microsoft Ignite, for example, the value of that event is not the session content. I can go watch that. I could watch the recording of it afterwards. It's all of the people interactions. Yes. That's what we've been missing for two years in that activity. How much of an impact that is to training? Yeah, that's what I was going to say. I think it's actually had a bigger impact on conferences than it has on training. I think with training, you can be just as effective without the in-person. It can have sufficient impact. It's very individual. We all learn differently. That's the harder part of it. In terms of going forward, I have bookings in my diary through to next November, and they're all virtual. I'm not really being asked to go back into the classroom. You talked about hybrid. What about a hybrid model where you might have the entire session live streamed close circuit to people or prerecorded? Are you thinking about those or being asked for those kinds of scenarios? A lot of the bigger learning providers do quite like to do the hybrid. As a trainer, I'm afraid to say it's my least favorite model because I've got the worst of both worlds as well as the best of both worlds. I've got people in front of me who are claiming my attention, and it's much harder to give the attention and the energy to the online attendees, therefore. For me personally, I much prefer one or the other as a training event. As a conference, that's a very different kettle of fish. I went to comms first earlier this year, and that was a hybrid event. Now, I was attending in person, but I've gone back and watched quite a few of the sessions as the recordings, and I can see the value of those for the people who didn't want to attend in person. I don't feel I missed content by watching the recordings. It would have been better had I been able to virtually attend live because I would have been able to ask the questions. That's where the hybrid event really comes in. I've helped this in August as well as in September last year. Strange enough, we did this in-person event September last year because we thought here in the US it was starting to open up again. It kind of reversed course with Delta, but we did those. The feedback that we received from the people that were virtual because there was like three times a number of people watching than there were participating, but we did it all in teams and what made the difference. When you're presenting it up in front, you can't then be required to be monitoring questions that are happening. That doesn't work. Having somebody, a moderator, in the room, that was the magic for us. There is somebody that was there in person monitoring all the discussion. When questions were asked online, that person raised their hand and asked the question on behalf. That was fantastic. The feedback we got was fantastic. That was a conference. Yes. That's one of the reasons why as a training course we tend to limit the numbers because then as a trainer, we've got the ability to focus on the number of people that we're dealing with. When you go to a conference, you've got a much bigger number of people. You've also got a much shorter timeframe as a speaker to present your session. Exactly as you said, that's where the moderator really becomes invaluable. One place that I've been watching more closely, talking about teams and you're doing a lot with teams, one of the areas where there's a huge number of people, tens of thousands of people, within Facebook groups around teams. In fact, there are teams groups and then there are teams, there's two that I'm a member of, teams for education. I don't know the difference between two, I think just who started them, but one of them has like 60,000 members in it. It's great to go in and just look at what kind of questions people are asking. To be honest, half the questions asked, they just need to scroll a bit or search within that and they'll find the answers there. They're fairly common. Come on one of my training courses. There you go. That's right. It's a great way just to, but that's what we do with an AMA that we run. We go through and we look at those kinds of questions and it's always great going back to what we were talking about, like keeping up with the roadmap. Sometimes I'll see a question and be like, what are they talking about? Oh, that's like a new, I didn't realize that change happened. It's a great way to get alerted. Unfortunately. I read about it six months ago. It's here. Yeah, it's finally here. Someone's using it and then you have questions. That's always, it's very discouraging to be in a support organization and when you're hearing about changes or when things break for customers, that's not a positive thing to be in. You try to stay ahead of what your customers see, but at the speed of the evergreen model, the software as a service, there's no way no human can stay on top of everything. You can't stay on top of everything. And you know, as a trainer, it's my job to teach people about these products and how to use them, how to administer them. And quite often I'll go in to start training something and go, give me a second. Oh, it's there now. I didn't know this change was coming. I promise. Did you try refreshing your screen? Now the feature's there. Yeah. Yeah, that's another, that's one of those things which I think people have adjusted to. People have adjusted to asynchronous communications as well as using the real-time tools. I love that, seeing other sales people and I'm going to call with them and they're like, let me share the screen and hey, let's co-edit on this. I'm like, yes, yes. It's great to see that. Good for you. Let's actually use these features. I know. But to see those things, but people have also become accustomed to, why don't I see that feature? Oh, my tenant must not yet have that. They're becoming more aware of what's rolling out. I always, I know you can get this with, that's why it's good to follow the message center updates of what's actually happening with your tenant. You'll get those alerts because I don't pay as much attention to the roadmap site for that reason because I don't want to go get excited about something and then wait six to 12 months until it actually gets released and lands on my tenant. I'd rather focus on the things which are happening in real time to my tenant. I like one training technique that works really well as repetition and that's why I like both because I see it, I'm prepared for it and then I get the message center post to remind me and get the detail. I quite like it twice at least. Now as an MVP, you can put the fire hose of information directly to your mouth. Oh yeah, my head's exploding. And there's a lot and for folks too, that's one of the best benefits of being an MVP is we have regular, every week there's something that's going on that you can sign up for depending on your focus area. There are teams calls, there are broader office apps and services like you and I both are those calls. I participate in project and planner discussions. One note I'm very partial to. Occasionally I'll sit in an Outlook exchange call if there's something that's coming up. There's always deep dives into this and insights into what's happening. I'm part of Microsoft Viva calls. Note to self, I've got to go and find the one note place and planner. There is when, as I say, I'm a couple of months in, there's so much information and finding out which bits you need to be in to get the information you're interested in is actually a real challenge. I spend quite a lot of time actually messaging fellow MVP saying, how do I get this bit? Where do I find that bit? And I've actually also this week just been appointed a regional lead for the MCT community. So that's going to be another one as well. Well, because you have all that free time of course. Yeah, loads of free time. You're not flying to client sites. So you've got two hands. Come on. I'm female. I can multitask. Yeah, my brain and hands can do completely different things. Of course. And then I'll switch the camera off at the end of the day and do the off camera slump as my body kind of goes. Therese, sleep is overrated though. Come on. Well, I have a 17 year old son and when he was first born he didn't sleep at all. We would get half an hour of sleep every two hours and this lasted for six, seven months. So I always say, my son thinks sleep is for wimps and his parents are not wimps. Yeah, well, you've got battle tested there. I can't do that. I always say that so I have four and the first one was a breeze and we're like the second one was a breeze. We're worried like payback is coming at some point. Well, nature saw fit to only let us have the one so it's quite good really because he wasn't a breeze. So perhaps it was the best way around. Well, Sarah, it was great talking to you, connecting with you, getting to know you and for folks that want to find out more about you and get in touch with you, what are the best ways to reach you? So I am always on LinkedIn most days, probably more active on LinkedIn than on Twitter, but I am also on Twitter. I do have quite unique names. So if you look me up, especially if you're looking for the MCT MVP connection as well, I'm really quite easy to find. And I do have also obviously the blog posts that I'm doing, but I always post that on my Twitter and LinkedIn. So that's the best place to start. Excellent. And for those that are you're finding this on the podcast or somewhere else, you can of course go to buckleyplanet.com. I'll have a search on Sarah. You'll be able to find her profile and all the links and things that are on that as well. So well, thanks so much. Well, hopefully one of these days we'll be able to to get together at a future event. So I hope I hope to be over your way in 2022. Fingers crossed. I look forward to it. Thank you for having me today.