 Everybody, this is Christian Buckley doing another MVP buzz chat, and I'm talking today with Nico. Hello. Hello, Christian. Thank you for having me. It's great to have. It's always... We were just chatting about it. It's always exciting to talk to people that are in the same space that have the SharePoint background. And so you've been doing it for a long time and finally got your MVP. So congratulations. Thank you very much. I'm very happy to be an MVP, freshly new. Well, for folks that don't know you, who are you, where are you, and what do you do? Okay. So I'm Nico DeClaire. I'm a Belgian M365 developer who mainly started in SharePoint, SharePoint on-prem, developing in SharePoint. But then I evolved more into an M365 developer, mainly everything online. And since a couple of months, I started as a managing partner. That means that I manage a company together with my partner in Grand Class Lawyers. And we are managing a freshly new company who started from NUSTS, it's a Belgian company. And together with another Belgian company, August, we are doing a joint venture about a new company that's just starting now. And we do everything about M365 from Power Platform to Governance and even GoPilot now because that's very hot right now. Because everybody's asking about GoPilot right now. Hey, look, that's a big deal. Having started a couple of companies, I mean, one, great timing to become an MVP because it certainly is a huge marketing and a networking boon to any new company. Any company. Definitely. Definitely. It's sometimes frustrating with an existing and older company where they don't understand the value of having an MVP on board and they kind of push back like, hey, you're spending all this time doing community stuff instead of doing things for us. And they don't recognize that there's tremendous value in being part of this community. So anyway, congratulations. Thank you. Thank you very much. But speaking about networking, when I started my journey in the community, then you notice that your networking is growing little by little because you get to know so many people who you work with at the open source project or when you go to events and stuff. So networking is always important. Yeah, you never, well, so I've long been a networking guy, like networking, like actual social networking technology been involved since the late 90s. My philosophy is that especially like via LinkedIn, if there's anybody that has relevant within the Microsoft 365 ecosystem, I'm 100% happy to connect with those folks. Anybody else that comes in with questionable, they're either selling some product or service. They're not clear of what they are their profile. And unless there's a story that goes along with that, like people will reach out and be like, hey, I'd love to connect. I saw you speak. I read this article. There's something to connect us like happy to connect with those people. Or you say they just did in the profiles as I'm an MVP or I'm a SharePoint analyst or a developer, you know, in this space, happy to connect with those people when it's ambiguous. I'm a bit wary of those folks. Definitely. I can only say that it's very important networking. So what was your path to becoming an MVP? So you've been doing, you've been working in this space for a long time. And so when did you start pursuing this or is this something that just kind of came about organically? Well, I've always been very eager to share my knowledge with others, but I was always searching how can I do that. I always had something like, yeah, I like to share my knowledge, but blogging, I don't know if that's interested all other people. But a couple of years ago, I spoke to Elio Strife from Belgium also, who is a very famous person, very famous MVP. And he said, I started blogging once just to archive everything to myself. And I was like, yeah, that's a very good point of view. I will use it and I will also start to blog. And at the same events where I spoke to Elio, I spoke to maintainers of the CLI for Microsoft 365. It's an open source CLI tool from PMP. And they told about the CLI for Microsoft and I said, okay, that's cool. So I took a look at their repository at Hittock and I was like, okay, that's very cool. I want to make contributions to this open source product. So I started just contributing and I enjoyed every moment, every contribution I enjoyed very much. And I learned also a lot of new things like, for example, unit testing. I know that it existed, but they didn't use it very much. But then at the CLI for Microsoft 365, it's something that's really necessary. You have to write your unit test. So I had to learn such thing. So as far as getting into the program itself, did you have somebody at Microsoft submit your name? Was it a fellow MVP or? It was a fellow MVP. It was Adam Wojcik who came to me and he was like, I think you will be a great MVP and are you okay for me to help you to become an MVP and to guide you into the process? And I was like, okay, yeah, certainly. And now you're drinking from the fire hose. You're starting to get all of the invitations to all of the dozens of calls per week that you can. Yeah, you need to pick and choose. Definitely. All those emails, I get them now. You're also going to start getting people coming to you that you know in your network and say like, how did you do that? How can I follow that same process? Have you already started to give guidance to people and they started to reach out to you? Definitely. It was the day after I got nominated as an MVP. There was something came to me like, you know, I know something who wants to be and become an MVP. Can you nominate him? And I was like, okay, let's take a look at his contributions and stuff. And yeah, definitely, when I can guide someone, I will love that when I can help them. There's always been my passion to help other people to mentor them. And yeah, I remember when I was at previous companies, I always liked to share my knowledge into a really like teams and blog posts, for instance. So I really love to help people to share my knowledge and stuff. Well, there's certainly going to be even more opportunities coming through as a member of the program. What are the topics? What are the things that you're talking about, writing about, like, you know, sharing now? Like, what are you passionate about in the technology sphere? Well, definitely SPI VIX. I'm really passionate about SPI VIX when I have to choose something that I have to do on a daily basis. And SPI VIX is definitely something that I like doing. So writing web parks, extensions in SharePoint in teams, et cetera. Next to that, I'm also very passionate about OAuth 2.0, where I wrote a couple of blog posts who had quite six, as I must say. So I really like to share my knowledge about that stuff. Yeah. Besides that, just overall, entry 65 development from the teams, toolkits, to tabs, reaps, yeah. Maybe it's just in general development in entry 65. And what's the status of, like, the community in your area? So I know a lot of regions are kind of struggling with user groups and smaller events, you know, the community-based events, post-pandemic trying to build things back up again. What's kind of the state of things in your region? Well, I think it's building up again. You had something like SharePoint Saturday, which was really famous. Then it became Collette Day's Belgium. And you noticed in the pandemic during Corona that it's disliked a little bit. But step-by-step after that, it's growing again. So yeah, definitely it's going the good track. Yeah, I know that so I've actually I was able to present it a couple of the SharePoint Saturday Belgium events, so back in the early 2010s. And I'm sure I have out on, like, Facebook or something, photos that go dig up and see who's it's always interesting to look and see who's in the crowd there. But yeah, it's good to see events that are starting to come back together. And some of the larger events are reporting numbers greater than just before pandemic. So I think there's definitely a hunger for people to get back together and face-to-face. Yeah, definitely. It was at Collette Day's a couple of years ago where I spoke Elio and the maintenance of the CLI from Microsoft, so it all started there. And last year, it was at Collette Day's Belgium where I had the chance to speak for the very first time for a big audience, I must say. And now I get a chance to speak at European Collab Summits at Wiesbaden, which is a pretty bigger event with 3,500 attendees. Yep, so I'm speaking at the American version, the North American Collab Summit next in Dallas in April. Not quite as big. Just moved it from Central US out in the Ozarks to Dallas, so the numbers should jump up a bit. But it's a lot of the same people. It's, you know, audits and kind of that crowd that put together that, you know, the ECS event are all coming over and helping put together and speak at and help put together this event in Dallas. So yeah, for folks that aren't familiar too, we were just talking about formerly known as SharePoint Saturday, now the communitydays.org, which is Microsoft sponsored. There are other resources like I just mentioned, audits, and there's a bunch of the community, especially in Europe, that support the Collab Days platform. We're actually doing our event in April for Collab Days Utah. So we're using that platform that Audison team built up. I just keep, like I mentioned, Audis' name. There's a lot of people involved, but for, you know... It's really great. But there's also the AMS events, which are the, what is it, the, it's all the AMS stand forts. It's the, anyway, it's another, they do events all around Asia Pacific, as well as Europe led by Patrick out of France. But yeah, there are opportunities if you're interested in speaking. There are so many opportunities out there, just have to look around at the various calendars, but the communitydays.org calendar that Microsoft maintains, tries to look at all of those events from those. Those are like really the three major community led, you know, event brands, community days, Collab Days, and the AMS. Yeah, that's true. But when I tried to do my sharing of knowledge, I tried to do it a little bit, everything. And I tried to do it step by step. So first I started with open source projects, with blogging, and then I started with community calls presenting community calls. And now I started with speaking. So I try to do a little bit. A mix of each. What would you say your primary contribution type is? Are you more of a blogger? Open source projects. Okay. Yeah. I enjoy that much, that I did a pretty number of contributions at one year. And I guess I gave the maintainers sometimes a very hard time because they always had to review the contributions I did. And at times I guess it was pretty much. So that's my main focus, open source projects, definitely. I always like to ask that question, just because some people say like, I am definitely afraid of presenting. It's like you don't have to present. There are so many other ways. I mean, as you say, just get involved in the open source and the community, the patterns and practices calls and various initiatives. You can jump on, become part of a panel that works on some of these things and makes contributions that way. You can go in and answer questions in various forums. I mean, there's a lot of ways to get involved and give back to the community. Definitely. But I'm also a bit afraid of presenting for a big crowd. You know, I'm also nervous when it started, but once it's over, I'm so glad that I did it. And that's really a great feeling to know. I shared my knowledge and I spoke to a big crowd and I conquered my field. That's a really great feeling. So definitely try it out. The vast majority of people share that fear. Yeah, it's understandable. But again, but you're right. There's a lot of ways that you can get involved it, especially if you're involved in your user group. You don't have to give a big grand, you know, a 60 minute presentation. You can get in and most user groups, like we do it. I know a lot of user groups do this where we open up at the beginning of our sessions before our primary speaker comes in. We give people a chance to spend five, 10 minutes and share something that they've built, something that they're working on, a problem they've tried to resolve. And they can share that, present that, or just talk about it. And that's a great kind of, you know, dip your toes in the pool into public speaking. Definitely. But a couple of weeks ago, I spoke to Luis Riz, who is an MVP for many years. She did a lot of presentations and I asked her, how do you go with the fear of presenting? And she said it's very beautiful. She said like, you can embrace the fear, just embrace it, the excitement. And I think that's a very good point of view. Well, there's something to be said is like, when you know the subject matter, when you can speak to it, when you're very comfortable with that, like you went and you built something, a big piece of advice I give is like, be honest about what you know and you don't know. Somebody says, well, did you try this? Be like, don't try to patch it over like that. Like, oh, I should have known that. You just say, you know, no, I didn't think of that. You're right, I need to go back and look at that. And people are much more accepting when you have some humility, you know, like you don't know all of the answers. Like, here's what I tried, here's what I'm sharing. And, you know, use it as a learning opportunity for yourself as well. But no, it's, yeah, if you go in and again, are confident that you know a lot about the topic, you can talk to that, it's really easy than to fill that time and to have a good experience. Definitely, and I think there's nobody who can always know everything. Right. There's always something new to learn. I used to joke that, I said, there's nobody that knows everything about SharePoint. I said, wow, there's actually, there's two or three people who I think do know absolutely everything. In fact, there's a, I won't name him, he gets embarrassed, but there's one MVP in the Pacific Northwest that I used to always say that like when, when the SharePoint engineering team at Microsoft has questions about SharePoint, they reach out to this MVP. And it was mostly true. He did a lot of consulting with Microsoft. But, but you're right, nobody knows everything. There's a, every MVP that I know has said, you know, I don't know at some point. So, yeah, nothing to be embarrassed about there. Well, Nico, really appreciate your time today. I always like to, of course, I'll have all of your, I'll have your MVP profile and your social profiles that out there. If people want to reach out and connect with you, where are you most active in social? Where's the best place to find you? Twitter and LinkedIn. Yep, the mainstays, the stables of social. Excellent. We'll make sure we'll get that out there. We've got your GitHub link and what's the other one on your Microsoft profile? Is that your, oh, it's the, actually it's your website as well. So we'll have all of those linked after the blog. You'll be able to find those out on bucktheplanet.com and of course through the podcast and through the YouTube profile. Nico, thanks so much for your time. Thank you. Thank you so much, Christian. Wow.