 Hey everybody, this is Christian Buckley doing another MVP Buzz Chat and I'm talking today with Yannick. Hello. Hi. So for folks that don't know you, who are you, where are you and what do you do? My name is Yannick Reinhardt. I am located in Germany. I'm a senior system engineer in the modern device management and in addition to this, I am also a technical lead for an initiative called AIOPS. The goal here is to make end-to-end analytics with help of machine learning, collecting data, analyze this data and find potential for improvement, become more proactive in notice issues in the IT environment and stuff like this. Very cool. So what's covered within the modern devices space? I mean, it's aren't everything that we touch now, modern devices? Modern devices means cloud management of endpoints. Our goal is to shift all devices from a traditional management with on-premise resources into cloud using Intune and I'm working in the special purpose area. The special purpose means everything what is not standard. This means special devices which are located in laboratories to have special requirements, special settings, which are near to productions also everything in this area. It is amazing how much that space has evolved and changed where it used to be, remember the days where you had your company-issued laptop and mobile device if they were even permitted, other specialty devices. I remember having a key fob and having to do kind of a separate to very securely log in on those devices and to where now, I mean, you can have that, the bring your own device. I realize that stuff still exists, a lot of those pieces, but you now can support like I use for my work. I use my home system, yet my company had very strict guidelines on how it should be used and how data should be managed and so they actually do a scan and review on a regular basis, part of the governance policies to make sure that the environments that I'm using to access their systems are secure. And so it's again, we've come a long way in that space. Yeah, this is right. I think with the other power of Cloud, you have really new possibilities how you can guarantee the security of your data and of your environment and this opens a lot of new possibilities and doors to bring more flexibility, but also keep the whole security. So what was your path to becoming an MVP? So I mean, how did you get started in this space and find out about the program and then get involved? Yep, I was new in this area of modern device management and what I did is I learned a lot at the beginning and my goal was to share my path, my learnings, my also discovery of functions what's offered in Intune and this was the reason why I decided to start blocking and I had a lot of fun with this blocking and over time it developed in the direction that I released every week a new blog post and also tried then different formats to also make YouTube join communities, support here, this was more or less my path but my initial goal was not to become MVP. It was only to write down what I learned to have a deeper learning with it and also share this with others. I often tell people that my blog is just an extension of my brain so I can remember the things that I've learned and the conversations that I've had and so I track things very much the same way and I'm sure you've probably said this and believe this and I've said this many, many times is that, you know, hey, even if I stopped being an MVP, I would still be doing exactly the same things. I'd be creating the content, sharing what I've learned, you know, surfacing and amplifying other people's voices out there because it's just part of the way that I work, it's part of the way that I learn and that I share that information out and that's kind of a core to being an MVP but I know a lot of people that are starting out are like asking that question of like how much do I need to do to pursue an MVP? And I don't think that there's a fixed number. Like you can't say like you said, you started doing like a weekly post. Is that the right number? Do I need to do more than that? And I don't know if you've had questions from people of what they can do. What kind of advice do you give them? I think the most important thing is to have fun with the whole thing. When you have fun by creating content to support people, then it's the best thing what you can do. Regarding the time, normally I spend the whole Saturday in creating content, answer a question from the community, also working on coding projects and stuff like this. But for sure, you also have conversations during the week and then you have to spend some time in this topic. But as already mentioned, when you have fun with this is not a big deal. It needs to be your hobby. Yeah, exactly. Just thinking of, sorry, quoting Mike Meyers thing. I am very much, as my wife reminds me, I'm like the Michael Scott type of humor where I will name drop. I think you can't be a fan of the US version of the office without quoting Michael Scott repeatedly. But don't blog angry. So yeah, it needs to be, you need to develop healthy habits that just become part of your persona. And so if you don't enjoy doing that, then that kind of time commitment is not for you. And there are some people that say it's like, look, I just don't have the time to do that kind of thing. But there's nothing wrong with just participating in the community and not pursuing becoming an MVP. That's fine. Yeah, exactly. I think when you share your experience, your knowledge with someone else, and you know you can help someone, you reach someone with your knowledge, it's the best feeling what you can have. And MVP isn't really nice achievement, but the important thing is really that you can help other people and share your knowledge. So what are your kind of your big topics right now? What are the hot topics that you're writing about? And talking about? Currently, I started a series about the Intune Suite. There was a release at first of March regarding the new features which Intune offers within this Intune Suite. And there are really nice features in. And I want to talk about each of this, yeah, new stuff within this new release. Yeah, there's, well, I'm sure like every other aspect of Microsoft technology that's a full-time job just keeping up with any one of the product lines. Yeah, this is right. I think the development, it's really amazing how fast the whole thing is. And if you think about how big the whole portfolio from Microsoft is, it's unbelievable how they develop the whole product with this speed. It's really cool. Well, that's another, you know, because it is so complex and there are so many different pieces. There's a lot of somebody that is saying, hey, I'm interested in writing about talking about what we're doing within Intune. You can take different perspectives. You can write about, you know, Intune and things that your company is doing with Azure, things that you're doing with Microsoft 365. And so you can definitely, you know, follow kind of the leading voices that are out there and bring your perspective in a differing perspective to the space. There's always room for more content like that. Exactly. I just always argue that it's not about like there is just so much content that's out there. But there are always people that are interested in hearing your perspective and your voice. So you can't be, you can't look and say, well, somebody already wrote an article that covered this feature, share your perspective because somebody may not relate to that other writer that may relate to you. Yep, this is right. I think it's always good when you explain stuff in your own words because your follower, your community, like your style, how you write blocks and if you bring this in your own style, I think you can also help some people. But in addition to this, you can also think out of the box. I think Microsoft has a really good tool stack with Azure. And also if you combine different services from Microsoft in tune with some services in Azure, you can bring out a lot of new potential and also this is something what is maybe is helpful for the community. If you provide such a solution in your posts. Well, that's one of the, my favorite things is with like for the user group is when there's somebody that is from the user group they've never presented before and they're sharing something that they did at work and it doesn't have to be finished or perfect. But saying, and here's our approach and here's what we do because one of the benefits is that other people in the audience will be like, we did something similar. You're probably going to run into this problem. Here's how we solved it. So right there, you're already crowd sourcing the solution that your development is going to help you. And then if it is finished or it is, people might just provide the feedback. That's fantastic. I haven't seen that before. We're going to go and leverage something. So that's how you start is to go and share obviously protect sensitive information when you're sharing work related projects. But if you're able to go in and anonymize that and be able to share out what you're doing at work, that is the best way to get started to write about that or to speak about that. Yeah, absolutely right. Well, very cool. Well, so for, so again, folks that want to reach out to you connect with you. What are the best ways to reach you? I'm really active and LinkedIn and on Twitter, but I'm also active on the discord community of in tune also Facebook. I'm more or less spread it through the whole networks. There's so much going on in discord. There is tons that are out there. That's like the new place for the forums and there are some fantastic Microsoft communities out on discord for people that aren't out there yet on that. Yeah, this is right. And discord provides cool possibilities to structure the different channels and chats. And this is an advantage of this medium. Well, excellent. Well, thanks so much for your time today and hopefully get to see you at an upcoming. I know MVP summit is coming up quickly, but I know not a lot of people are going to be able to make it because it's a short notice, but I will not join the MVP summit in person. I will join virtually, but I'm on vacation in the summer in U.S. Yeah. Well, awesome. Well, enjoy your time and we'll we'll let you know when this goes live and share it out. Many thanks.