 Hey everybody, this is Christian Buckley with another MVP Buzz Chat, and I'm here today with Matthias. Welcome. Thank you, Chris. Well, why don't you introduce yourself? Who you are, where you are, what you do? Oh, that's a quick story. My name is Matthias, and I am currently sitting in Denmark. That's Scandinavian. I'm working at a company called Micor. I've been there for like one year. I've been a consultant for 16 years, I believe, ever since I got out of school, so I don't know how to be hired in as an internal guy. Well, that's all changed anyway, so it doesn't matter. Really, so yeah, so consultancy has been my whole life, right? So I'm really keen on helping people. That's my DNA. I really like that, seeing different offices, seeing different customers, seeing different, you know, everyone has their own way of doing stuff. So yeah, but my daily work is like doing in-tune stuff, and we shouldn't say in-tune, it's Microsoft Endpoint Manager, right? But yeah, I've been doing a lot of config manager ever since. I've been doing a lot of automation, MSI packaging. That was actually what I started with in 2004, and the Windows installer is actually from 2000 when the Microsoft Office package 2000 came out, right? So in that time, it was actually kind of hard to create MSI packages. Now we have all these tools, and they do all this automated stuff for you, and I mean, the tool is like, or the technology is like 20 years old now. I know there's a lot of changes that are happened in that space within Microsoft as well. Oh yeah, and now we introduce all this kind of virtualization stuff, MSI, UX, UVP apps, et cetera, right? From the store. And yeah, things are transitioning towards other and newer stuff. That's the ecosystem, right? Well, as we started talking about, I know that everybody's always interested, and I'm sure being a brand new MVP, you'll get this question a lot is like, how do you become an MVP? So what is your story? What was your path into an MVP? Hmm, yeah, always my path. I didn't get or go for the MVP at all. I just like to share knowledge. That's actually just part of my DNA. So I've been doing a lot of LinkedIn posting, Twitter posting, et cetera, and that's considered micro blogging, right? So once I shifted company from the one where I were a partner for 13 years, I started blogging and something that has been what I actually wanted to do, but didn't have the time. So now I came into a brand new company. They didn't have like all the history. I didn't have all the history because I was like number four in the other company. So I had a lot of history and we grew to like 250 people. So I had a lot of responsible that I wasn't hired to do actually. So of course that took up all my time. So now I actually had no like strings attached. So I could do whatever I really like to do. So starting blogging once I came to my core and yeah, I kind of liked to analyze stuff in depth and then actually explain to people why are you going to use this piece of technology? Because many people actually don't know anything about the technology, right? The fundamentals. Everybody likes to go out and say, oh, you're going to do this and this and this, but what are the real fundamentals behind? That's a real difference. I mean, because clearly you have with most any technical solution, there's going to be plenty of, Microsoft is no different. Any OEM, any development firm, your product company, is going to walk you through like the how to go and deploy, how to go and configure, and then specific scenarios around that. So a lot of that guidance on how to go through steps one through 10 to do that are provided. But what's often missing are a lot of the scenarios into industries, into different user types, the why behind it. What's the business value that's driving it? And so that's, I mean, there's still a lot of value in talking about the how and demonstrating how to go and do this. But a lot of what I do over in a completely different space, I'm coming from the SharePoint and Microsoft Teams world and productivity collaboration side of things. I find myself so much of every presentation also includes a chunk of information about why, why you would use this or why you wouldn't use it, why you would remain in your on your old system or your old process and having a justification for moving across. Understanding the why is important, especially if you're trying to push that change to your organization. Yeah, because why should I buy this? Why should I put this into my organization? Why should I buy you as a consultant to come here and spend our money, right? That's not the goal. The why is that you need to manage your devices and we've been hit by COVID and then we've all worked home. And okay, so how how are we going to approach this? We have a VPN solution. Okay. Yeah. And that was like for 10% of the work and not 100% of our workers. So how are we going to approach that? We need to push patch management every month to our devices. We need to on a certain level patch management third party applications. We need some kind of compliance in regards to having users using our infrastructure, etc. So how are you going to do that? How are you going to leverage that? And I mean, Microsoft released the interim for like 10 years ago, but but it hasn't really been out there for real. It started to be a standard, but but haven't it has been config manager mostly. And and what we see now because of the licensing and and and people opening up to this cloud tool is like, okay, so soon we see 5050 actually. And I believe it was 2022 we are looking into where the graph was like 5050 on on this on the config manager part and the interim part. So so COVID has actually been driving IT for the last one and a half year. So why should you buy these cloud licenses? You should do that if you are able to leverage anything in the cloud, if you're allowed to as a customer and and you should do that because you have all these workers working from everywhere. So so I mean, you have so many good tools in one toolbox to actually leverage in a nice interface and and if you're doing iOS or Mac OS or Windows or whatever, the interface look at same and and I'm actually educating school or the IT guys of the school and they said, oh, this is so much more easy than the other MDM system that I had. So I'm I really like to teach that. And that is why you should you should buy such a solution. So that's much of my work that like, yeah, right there. Yeah, how much do you see with Microsoft talking so much about the hybrid workspace? And so that obviously has driven a lot of change of strategy for organizations that are thinking about that. And there are some that are that really believe like, oh, yeah, we're going to kind of go back to more of the way that it was. And others like, no, this is like, this is the we were, I would argue that we were moving this direction even before COVID, where it just just with the bring your own device, you know, push where people want to have flexibility, they want to have, you know, these personal devices that they'd be able to use for their for their work. So organizations were already thinking about some of these problems. It's not just now that everybody's working from home, that certainly accelerated it for a lot of organizations. So what's is anything really kind of changed? Is it just that it accelerated or something changed in the way that they're thinking about managing their devices? Yeah, I believe something have changed. I believe that the future companies actually having it like a settlement in the agreement that you can work from home to three days a week. Because right now I'm sitting at a customer four days a week. And I work with one guy from from the States, I work with one from from Philippines and two guys from from India. And the rest is from Denmark. So, so, okay, should I go to the office to go into a meeting room and to why why is that? Is that just for the boss to like, okay, he's actually not sitting at his desk. And now he's not working. Now he's going to grab coffee again. Why not set the expectations and if the goals are like you said, you said an expectation and then your workers will succeed, I believe most will. So I believe that in the future we will have much more working from home. Yeah. And I don't know if it's true, but I heard that Twitter took down their their offices. I don't know. There's a lot a lot of companies. And so I'm born in the race in San Francisco, Bay Area, and did several startups. I escaped the state over 20 years ago. But I just was done in the early 2000s. And with the commute, I was commuting an hour and a half, two hours each way every single day. And so I've been working, I've told this story a few times. But so I've worked in collaboration technology most of my career, since going back into the late 90s, specifically around collaboration technology. And most of the companies that I worked for had policies against working from home. Here we were creating technology to give teams the flexibility to plug in and connect and work securely wherever they were globally. And yet these companies, including Microsoft, the teams I worked on, were very down on, I was at Microsoft for three and a half years, very, very down on people working remotely. And so it's been interesting to see that evolution, see that change, as the technology certainly has caught up the ability for more and more people to do this. Broadband, of course, having to be there. But you need to do it in a secure and well managed way, well governed way. You can't just open up wide and hope that people go and do that's where you have, you know, intellectual property lost, you have, you have problems. And so it's great to see that we're, you know, getting to where more and more organizations are realizing that they don't need to, to your point, like, have your goals, have your commitments, have data driven performance of people's roles, and what they need to accomplish, be very clear on what people need to do, but then get out of the way and let them do it. Everybody can work within that model. It's not for everybody, but not every role is for everybody. Exactly. Some people just perform better in an office setting surrounded by people, that, that side of things, and, and they, they might, they might be high performing in that office, and yet struggle working on their own, you know, even with all of the web meetings. Exactly. And, and I mean, if you are in a store and you need to put up groceries on, on, on, on, on, you can't really work from home, right? But if you're sitting in IT or communication, or I'm not working in a, in a project where you could sit in a room and bring storms. I mean, come on, we should sit at home. It's, it's a waste of time to, to drive to the city, to drive to the city, right? And spend one and a half hour drive one way and, and then back in stress to, to get the kids from school. I have three kids. So I am busy when I go off work, right? So having these extra hours that I could actually block, or I could actually have this meeting with you, or it means a lot in my everyday and, and, and in, in the setup that I am in for, for these four days a week, it's, it's like, okay, so every day at 12 or one o'clock, we have a daily meeting, everybody meets and we say hi and what is your assignments, etc. And of course, we have, we have the scrum master. So, so we actually are agile and, and, and working after, after such principles. And I believe it really works. And, and everybody can work, even though we have COVID, etc. So it makes a lot of sense that I think you nailed it right there. It's having that communication, and then having that accountability. I mean, that having that, you know, daily scrum. And, and I've done that, you know, in person, again, I've managed that way with every morning, people hated that at first. But then when they start to see how efficient we became, because we're doing that every morning, and how we were able to reprioritize dynamically, you know, you can do that so much of that remotely. It's, it's funny that you see people, I don't have one in front of me, but these mugs that, you know, like, that email could have been, you know, a team's meeting or, you know, hey, that, that, I like somebody showed me, they had a, that, that, you know, teams meeting could have been an email mug was pretty funny. Because it's true. I mean, sometimes it, you don't need to meet for everything. And sometimes the email is the right thing for that. But you can't accomplish so many of these things, and very efficiently, and letting people again, go drive and break up their schedule, so that they can take care of family, that they can do all kind of all those other things. And, and, well, it's like we were talking before we started recording, both of us have, you know, teams that are spread out around the world. And, and so it doesn't work with a nine to five schedule, yeah, or for our core functions. And so if we're having meetings that are starting well before the normal workday in our regions, and well into the evenings, like, when do I have time to go to the store or take care of other family issues or things. I don't worry about that now. I know my meetings. I know my deliverables. I go take care of the personal things as I need to within that schedule. And I just build it in the schedule, and I just don't think about it and worry about it. And no one's pressing me on what you said, you went to a doctor's appointment and in the middle of the day, you know, when it's like I had no calls, it was the best time to go and I'll be on calls as I mentioned until eight o'clock tonight. You know, so, you know, when that conversation never happens in my company. Hopefully, in fewer and fewer companies, they're having those types of conversations. Yeah, I mean, I like to go run, for example, in my lunch break. So we have like 30 minutes, so it's not much, but, you know, we can flex. So I could have 45 minutes for a running break and it gives me so much. I have back pains, etc. So I need to train. I need to take care of myself, my body, the sitting job, the office job is the world's most dangerous job, right? We have diabetes, we have blood problems, we have blood pressure problems, we have so many diseases that are connected to sitting in front of a computer daily, right? So it's really important to exercise. And I do that almost every day. And that is also one of the things working from home that are so flexible. I can do that because once the kids come home, I have to be here like we have dinner at six and yeah. And then they go to bed and yeah. And you know how it is, they scream if they don't get their schedule right. Yeah. So I mean, it's perfect, at least for my situation. I couldn't imagine that many others have the same situation. So really, it's a win-win for me, this working from home situation. Well, I think that we're, yeah, I agree. I think that we're going to see a permanent change. I'm excited to see it not only just because I work within the collaboration space and the tools, the technology that I work with, with Microsoft and with my company are becoming essential to driving a lot of this new way of working. So that's great too, but I saw the potential in the space 20 years ago is why I got into it. Well, Matias, I really appreciate your time talking today, getting to know you and more about your journey. And for people that want to find out more or connect with you, what are the best ways they can reach you through social channels? LinkedIn, Twitter. Twitter, it's mmelkelson. It's a very Danish last name, but yeah, I tweet a lot of news of the mem suite. LinkedIn, where my name is Matias Melkelson, and I do a lot of things in there. I was awarded with official contributor in a space where a Spanish guy actually created a LinkedIn forum where we have 11,000 members. And I was actually awarded that before I got the MEP. So that was one of the first real where you could say, wow, why am I awarded with this? And it was actually a price that I believe was sponsored by one e or something with the price money in $1,000 for being the top acknowledged blog posts. And I believe Damian was the one that ran away with that price, but I had two blog posts coming in the top 20 there. And that was the first step for me to be recognized. And with all my micro blogging, it was like, okay, other MEPs were like, do you want to be a MVP? I don't know. Is it good to be an MVP? You don't have those cash prizes that things were for an MVP. Obviously, there's value in being a member of the community and the accent that we get. The name MVP, it does give a lot of followers. I can tell you that I grew from, well, Adam Gross, he's also in the United States. He retweeted one of my things and said, okay, if you want to know what's going in or on in the mem workspace, go follow this dude. And I think I got 250 followers just he recognizing that, right? So, and yeah, he was one of the first actually recognizing that he wanted me to go to the MVP program. So he nominated me in February this year. And I was like, okay, what an honor. And then I filled out all these questions that Microsoft had and like, what have you been blogging? What are you doing on social medias, etc. And it's like, okay, am I going to put in every conversation I had on Facebook here? Or how do I become a MVP? And I was like, no, that's too much work. So I'm going to put in every blog post and I'm going to put in my profiles for social media. And that's it because that is a lot of work too. So and then, okay, so let's see what happens. And then the time went by and Damian, he was asking several times, have you received anything from the MVP program? And I was in contact with Tina standoff, which is the MVP lead? Yeah, exactly here in for actually Holland and Belgium, Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Finland, maybe some more countries. And she said, she wanted to make sure that the list I've added to the to the nomination that that was it. And I was like, yeah, it is, isn't it good enough for what's happening behind the scene, right? And one day, I was going to scout a meeting. And right there, one minute over five, it says congratulations on your MVP. I was like, okay, stop sending spam. I was like, yeah, writing to to Kathy and I've heard a couple stories where people were went to spam. So they didn't they never really saw the email. And then when the package showed up, and they went back through their spam, and we're like, Oh, and found that, or asked for it to be reset, which you can do as well. Okay, deleting it, losing that email, and asking for that to be reset. But well, it's, you know, again, congratulations on that. As you know, as you know, it's the process to become an MVP. It's kind of a black box. Oh, yeah, it's different for different people. And some people do a lot of public speaking, and not a lot of blogging. Other people are all about, you know, like on the Microsoft tech community, different forums, and answering questions. Others that are usually MVPs, no matter where they come from, are involved in our local communities, and helping organize events or just volunteering for events. So, you know, especially one thing that about working from home during the last year is the number of opportunities to contribute to online activities has gone way up. And I think that's something that will I think won't drop off as much as you'd think once once we start to see in person events start up again, I still think that there we're going to have a lot more online, a lot of hybrid events. So somebody who's interested in getting involved, you know, I'd say, you know, just keep doing what you're doing for the community. There's nothing wrong with having a goal to go and become an MVP, but just realize that there's not a checklist of like, okay, I've done everything on that list. Therefore, where's the recognition? Like, no, that's it again, it's a black box. Exactly. And it also matters in which field you actually go in, because some areas is very hard. Enterprise mobility, which I am MVP in is one of the hard one, because there are so many. And you need to do something on config manager, and you need to do something on intune. It's not enough just covering one of those, because it is a large environment. Many, many, many customers have config manager, and you need to know as an MVP how to transition workloads from one system to the other system and make use of that cloud. What is the first step, for example? Oh, you can, you can, you can do tenant attach. And that is a very simple process. Going in the back end, nothing really happens on your clients, right? That could be your first step into the cloud. The other step could be co-managed, where you move one workload, or maybe you don't move anything. Then you get instant the wipe. So, so exactly, if you have a device that are stolen, I think something like that, you can wipe the device. That's the instant stuff you get from the cloud, right? And then you haven't even touched the workloads, and there are seven, right? So you have a lot of ways going into the cloud and in the tempo that you really are able to leverage as a company. And you don't even have to go full cloud. You can be in hyperstate if you want. Well, let's see how many years Microsoft are going to support that. But, but yeah, so I mean, the thing here is, if you're allowed to go into the cloud, we have a lot of tools that you can use in order to transition in your own tempo. So you don't have to get rid of all your GPOs at once. You don't have to get rid of all your login scripts at once, all your printers set up. You don't have to have the universal print going on at the first. You can do that in the tempo that you are able to do. So just take it easy. Think and analyze before you do anything. And if you are going for having an advice or two, well buy one or two, three consultant hours. It's not that expensive to get a good idea of how to start and where to start. Really, it's really good money to spend not to having done something. And then you have to break it down and start over. And maybe you ruined the boss's computer because you ended up in state that it's not supported. And now you have to- That never happens. I know. That never happens. But okay, it does. But yeah, that's great advice though. But that's actually one of the benefits of being MVP. But if people have questions about this, I mean, I would say, you know, hey, reach out to somebody like an MVP like Matias. And even though you're not doing that kind of consulting role anymore, you know others that are within the space and can provide some advice on that. And so that's a great piece of advice though. Go buy a couple hours, two, three hours of an MVP's time to walk you through and give you a baseline of what you're doing today and the different options that you have available based on your priorities. That's a great place to start. Exactly. I really appreciate your time. I need to run. But for those that, of course, watch, you can find all this out on the Buckley Planet blog and out on the collab talk page out on YouTube as well as on the collab talk podcast. And we'll tweet it out. We'll blast it out via the social channels with all of all of Matias' contact information as well. So thanks so much for your time today and let you get back to your family time this evening. Thank you.