 Hey everybody, this is Christian Buckley doing another MVP Buzz Chat and I'm talking today with Eric. Hello. Hello Christian, how are you sir? It's great to see you. One of the, you know, I always had that kind of, like I never felt like I was one of the old timers in SharePoint. I feel like I came in the second wave and you were always part of that group of the earliest of the SharePoint MVPs. But for folks that don't know you, who are you, where are you and what do you do? Yeah, so my name is Eric Shepson and as you've indicated, I've been a SharePoint MVP for a very long time. Back when we had SharePoint MVPs, of course, we don't have those anymore in 365s or whatever we are. And so I've been around since 2007 in the MVP program, but in the SharePoint space since 2000, if you can believe that, before if you count Tahoe and whatnot, but really in production stuff since 2000. And I've been, like all of us have been around a long time, I've been all over the map, I'm primarily known as a developer and architect, but I've done everything from training to tech writing to, you know, site admin to, you know, go configure lists, jockey, you know, and everything in between. So I've been around it a long time and of course over the years that's grown into all the cloud workloads and all that stuff that we do now in 365. I don't do as much on the team side. I know some people specialize there on trying to do more and more power platform stuff just because our focus on connectors and a lot of Azure these days. I'm based here in Dallas, just north of Fort Worth, actually, not far from yourself. Now, welcome to the neighborhood. Well, not there. That's a longer story. Oh, yeah. Yeah, still in Utah. Yeah. All right. Well, you'll be here eventually. Eventually, I will. Yes, yes. That's the plan. And I spent my time between here and our office in the UK. So I like to joke all the time that my office is in for a on flight 20. We're coming back on flight 21. I'm easy to fly. Well, very nice. So I know that you're doing so also an author with techie gurus and involved in that stuff, but also doing a lot of community stuff for folks that aren't where Eric is kind of rounding up heading up the new location. But the North American Cloud and Collaboration Summit or NACS. Yeah. So great conferences, you know, Mark Rackley has been running after years in Branson, Missouri, always did a great job with that conference, a beautiful venue, good location, but a little hard to get to and a little special if you live in the West, trying to get to the center of the country is difficult usually. Like I one time I flew to Atlanta to track back to get to Missouri. Yeah, it can be challenging. So and we wanted to grow it and specifically we wanted to take it beyond just the traditional SharePoint content more into cloud content around Azure and even multi cloud around AWS and Google and Salesforce and really just be more of a cloud centric event than just the traditional 365 space. It's still our heritage and still our roots, but we needed to take it up a notch and to do that, we needed to move it. So we brought it here to the DFW area will be in the Irving Convention Center, which some people are familiar with. It's the spaceship looking thing between Dallas and Fort Worth. I know you've been there. It's an odd looking building, but very distinctive, great venue space, really convenient that area has grown up with some really nice pubs and restaurants and there's a huge music venue next door. So it's a great location to have a conference, a great time of year in early April, kind of before everything else gets going on the calendar. And so we think it'll be a great opportunity to really take it to the next level and grow, we're going to have over a thousand people there. We're partnering with Inatec who does more security and non sort of out akin to what we do sort of next door, but not the same. Certainly not in the Microsoft space. And so it'll be a great event. Women in technology will be there. So we're going to have by the time we get to day three, we'll have probably gosh, I don't know, 1200 people there. So it'd be a great event. Looking forward to it. Well, just the fact that you move from a metro that has I don't know how big Branson is hundreds of thousands to 7.5 million people just in the vicinity. Hopefully we'll see it grow. I don't know if you've got like a max, like a cap of what you can hold in that space or we do sort of the venue somewhat dictates obviously what we can do within the space, but we're looking to cap it at around 1500 people total because that's really all we can fit in the breakout rooms. Plus, you know, have nice lunches and exhibit space and all that. So we'll if we can hit those numbers great, if we need to go bigger next year, you know, we'll find a way to do that. But I think that's a nice that's a big community conference. Yes, it is a profit. Right. This this is not a, you know, compete with the big in 365 comp power platform comp type of things. This is still a community driven event. That's a lot of people. It is. It was had a conversation with somebody like having organized a lot of SharePoint Saturdays. In fact, funny note is that I was I was just looking at a picture that Bill Barrett Microsoft just tweeted out of the share quilt, which my mother-in-law lovingly sewed years back of conference t-shirts and logos and things all over it. It's now hanging on the on the wall and building 34 as part of the Microsoft art collection. That's cool. Hashtag share quilt. You can find it. If you ever visit Microsoft campus, you can go and and see it and do a check in a four square, which is still a thing people. But you can check in at the at the quilt. But that up at the top of it on the front side is the SharePoint Saturday Ozarks. The first one is part of the quilt as well. So that's part of the heritage of now Nax. Yeah, 2009. Yeah. But you know, as I was talking about organizing, like the biggest that I ever personally helped organize community event was just over 2,000 people as a two day event. I know what went into that and doing events that are three to 500 people, how much work, how many months of effort. So it's it's a lot to go and do it. It's and for folks to, you know, for MVPs, and we're always, you know, listing our contributions to things that we're doing to kind of maintain our MVP or people that want to get into organizing community activities, hold some of the greatest weight and value. Microsoft recognizes that effort that it takes to organize things. It does take a lot of work. I'm also on the board of the Cloud Days Organizing Committee, which is more of a European focus. But we do have a few cloud days events here in Utah. March 1st, cloud days Utah. So yeah, that's going to be great platform. So and so between that and organizing the conference, I'll tell you, the game changer for us has been run events. If we didn't have the run event software, which grew from, you know, Addison, Mustafa and Spenson and Alex and all the guys putting together that conference. I'm talking about the European Collaboration Summit and cloud summit grew out of their needs to run that on a skeleton crew as a community event, right? And what he's done with that software is just phenomenal. I can do the work of five people with that. I need a full-time team if I didn't have it. That is something for people that are interested because the beginning of all these things, I mean, SQL Saturday and SharePoint Saturday and kind of all of these events that now you have Microsoft Community Days and you've got collab days, you know, and you've got an AMS as well in a lot of some in Europe and some in Asia. So you've got these community platforms out there, but the run events platform is the most comprehensive. It's the slickest package there. And for, so if you are thinking about in your region, putting together an event, like I ran, one of my favorite events I ever ran was in Bend, Oregon. The most we ever had was 98 attendees and speakers and sponsors on top of that. But it was a fun close-knit like group that got together. And we did that like four or five times and, you know, to have, if you're thinking about doing something like that, there is a platform, there's a resource. So you can actually leverage the run events platform for free. Yeah, and it's free to anyone who's running a community conference, you know, not free or close to free, right? Sometimes you have to charge to cover your costs. It's just nature to be. But yeah, they're really, you know, athletes in the gang come from a community background like you and I do and they really want to contribute. And it's just been a godsend for us to have this capability to put this together. So that said, it still takes, you know, a team to run it. And as you say, it's a tremendous amount of effort. It's a six month full-time effort to put on the show. There's a lot. Well, something that big as well. So, you know, happy to help, of course. And in the meantime, I know you're doing some writing too. Kind of what are your topics that you're focusing on? What are you speaking on when you're going to events right now? Yeah, we've since really the whole lockdown thing in 2020, we refocus the business or maybe I should say we sort of step back and we've done a lot of, as you know, a lot of product work in the past, you know, everything from the original software that we, Sonar, that we sold to Idear and then on to Metalogix back in the day and all the stuff we do with combined knowledge and now I point with Training Plus and whatnot. So we've always had a product development component just may wasn't necessarily under our own brand for what we were doing. But during the pandemic, we sort of refocused and said, do we want to continue to be a raw consulting company with just a, you know, some product offshoot as Idear has come up to us? Or do we really want to focus? And we took the view that we wanted to focus on becoming a product first company. So we created the Aptige brand. And from that, we focused on an area that may seem a bit esoteric but was really ahead of the curve from what we were seeing. And that was the whole idea of connectors in the cloud. And specifically focusing on cloud to cloud, connectivity and utility. There's lots of business automation platforms which is the area we traditionally been very strong in. And each of them has their own extensibility story but the good ones all have ways to enhance the platform with some sort of external connectivity from Power Platform to Nintex to pick your platform. And so we really saw that as an opportunity that wasn't really being exploited. We created Power Tools over the pandemic and released it. We've now got over a thousand subscribers on the Power Tools platform which has been great primarily in the Power Platform space. Well, one of the big focus areas that we sort of stumbled into with Salesforce and working with customers on what their automation needs were and where they needed extensibility. Salesforce has a great automation platform but a limited extensibility story. You have to write a lot of code which is kind of true of everything else in the Salesforce world. So we just jumped in. We said, why not? It's an opportunity to learn something new. Let's see what we can do in this space we became a Salesforce partner and got listed in the app exchange which is no mean feat and started that ball rolling and it's really been an educational experience for us so much so that we're now focusing on cloud to cloud connectivity between Salesforce and other platforms starting primarily with Microsoft Power Platform but also doing stuff with Nintex and some of the other traditional players that you'd know in the space from a business automation perspective and it's all about bringing multiple clouds together and it's part of the same theme that we have for NACS which is multi-cloud. So many organizations now it's just part of what you do. You have to be multi-cloud. You can't just be one. Long gone are those days. I mean, I remember 20, 25 years ago and you would find companies that would be like we are a Microsoft shop and that's all we'll look at and that's all we'll consider and we'll figure out a way to do it through the Microsoft path. Like it doesn't exist anymore. Like every enterprise out there has multi-clouds and they're looking at how do we integrate these things together? And it was actually and I often talk about this like Satya with his first keynote. So I think it was the first still was branded as the Worldwide Partner Conference WPC before it got rebranded as Inspire where he gave his first keynote when he became CEO and he talked about it. He's like, we're gonna build the best software that's out there where we don't have the best software we're going to partner. We are going to and basically what he said was we need to look at the customer experience from beginning to end. We may only own parts of that but we need to remember the customers looking at this and we need to do everything we can to make sure that's a fluid. So a fluid process, which means integration which means opening things up and realizing that they're not gonna win every part of end to end deal with clients but do what you can to be the easiest partner to work with which Microsoft is not always. Maybe some work still needs to be done. There's opportunity there for Microsoft to improve in that. And one other thing too, for folks that aren't familiar with like the training and onboarding the community aspect is Salesforce. I'll tell you, like it is in fact, I had, oh, I don't have it behind me. I used to have, what's the little character that the because I'm signed in, I'm in Salesforce that, so I've got like- Yeah, they got the Yeah, the little Eskimo looking bigger thing. I forget his name, but so, but their process for training and community building around that it is a lesson to be learned for everybody else. Like go look at that. I look at that as the high mark of how you bring people together, how you train community. Like it's just amazing. So it's free folks, go sign up if you're, if you work with Salesforce at all or just wanna learn about it. You know, here we're Microsoft people but talking about that recognize when somebody does something right, go look at how they build the learning paths, training and help with new developers coming in, getting building skills and connecting them with experts. It's amazing. Yeah, it's the gold standard, no question. And the difference between the Microsoft Partner Program and the Salesforce Partner Program is night and day. It's, it's easy to, it's harder to get into the Salesforce Partner Program but the process is thought through into end. And to give credit where credit's due, you know, Salesforce initially had one product area to focus on where Microsoft has, right? It is much wider. Of course. That's not as true anymore but they do a phenomenal job and but there are also areas where, you know, Microsoft does a better job in places than Salesforce does. But the truth of the matter is that customers have both and when they wanna integrate them, we wanna be there making that happen. And that's done through our API infrastructure that we built and the connectors that we provide. And so that's what, because that's what we're working on, that's what I talk about out at conferences, kind of the, you know, power platform, custom connectors guy. And so there's, you know, probably a few dozen, April Dunham's another one inside of Microsoft that's well known for talking about that. And so that's the message that we're out spreading. So the writing for Techie Gurus, I got my 10 part series. Think we're up to five or six of those published now and it's all connectors busy, right? From beginning to end, from everybody who wants to just learn about them to create custom ones to publish them. The next articles coming up are all about publishing and getting them out there through the ISV program and the independent publisher program. And there's a lot, it sounds simple. Oh, they're just connected. It goes pretty deep. And there's a lot that you need to know to be effective in that area. It's a great team that's working on that behind the scenes at Microsoft. That connector's team is doing a really wonderful job in growing that community in just a couple of years to a thousand connectors in the gallery, which is a great milestone for them. They're really doing a lot of work. Like every other team they could use about, you know, twice as many people as they have, but yeah. So I'm trying to spread that message. I still touch on some of the things I'm known for enterprise content management. Of course, big, you know, Rob Bogue and I talk about that as often as we can. Has a lot of relevance these days with preparing for co-pilot and syntax and whatnot. So that's still a lot of what I talk about. Surprisingly, what I don't talk about anymore is SharePoint development. Because honestly, I just don't do it. Yeah. Well, it's, you know, there's a lot of other pieces to that pie. It's not that I don't do any. I still do some, but there's a lot of pieces to that. And as you move more into the Azure space and get to working with multiple things, you know, it's good to learn new stuff and get to other pieces of the ecosystem. Sure. Now, just we're, yeah, we come across just signed on a new author this morning that is in the, works a lot with SPFX and so is in that the developer sphere, but working very closely with SharePoint. And so it's a, yeah, it's interesting to see, again, coming from, as we both do, coming from the SharePoint MVP background, you know, the world has changed and evolved a lot. I mean, SharePoint's still there. It's at the core of so many of the solutions that we talk about and write about, you know, the community activities, but yeah, it's just become really diffused out there around the topics. It's, there's a lot, which makes it difficult to kind of sometimes to feel like, how do I keep up with everything that's going on? You can't do everything. You've got to kind of pick your areas that you want to focus on, specialize in. It used to be, and you were there back in the day, sound like a bunch of old timers, but you were there back in the day when if you were a SharePoint expert, you were expected to know everything about the platform, right? And we were the first ones to say, hey, hang on a minute here. This is, nobody knows everything, right? But there was an expectation that you had your hands around this whole beast and that is definitely not the case anymore. It's not humanly possible. It's too big. There's too many moving parts, too many interdependencies, teams and OneDrive and SharePoint and now Dynamics and Power Platform. And you have to pick an area that you can specialize in that you can go. If you want to go deep, some people are excellent generalists. I'm a terrible generalist, but some people are really good at that and you need those. Certainly, you know, business analysts and whatnot need to have that capability to jump between them, but sometimes you got to pick something and just go down the rabbit hole. Yeah. There's a lot of avenues from these days. And that's another reason for being involved in the community aspect of it. You don't have to know everything, but you can have a, you know, Rolodex, sorry, that's an old term, I know, but you can have a list of the experts that you know you can turn to when you have questions and that's one of the best parts about the communities. Like I don't know every answer, but I know somebody that probably knows the answer to that question. Yeah. And therein lies the advantage of community, right? Because as you and I both know, we have a network that spans the globe of the subject matter experts that we can reach out to. So if I want to know about search, someone has a deep search question, right? We call Agnes, you know, if they have a power platform question, they want to get started in Power Apps, we call Laura, and everybody has their area of expertise, right? If it's deep in SPFX, I'm calling Julie Turner and asking her how to do it. So there's that community that is really truly the sum of the parts is greater than, the sum of the whole is greater than the individual parts, right? Because it's our ability to reach out to the people who know things and make those connections and say, you need to know about X, you need to talk to Y. And because of that, it's still true that our community is a little different even inside of Microsoft, right? You've been to the MVP events, you know how that synergy kind of works. And we still have this sort of global neighborhood in the M365 space. We kind of all know each other for the most part and we can all reach out and work together. And I can tell you that not all communities are like that. Well, you know that. I was gonna add another layer to it. It's even something where I know that, you know, having, so I work in North America and Asia Pacific, I know that depending on the times of the day and the or night that somebody's asking the question that, okay, that person's gonna be asleep in Amia, but I know somebody that's over in Australia or in Singapore that can answer that question. So again, that it's a, that's another powerful aspect of this community. And it is something that, I know it, and you hear this, and I'm sure you hear this a lot too, from people that just at Ejicon Chicago last week and somebody who came up and recruited them to write for techie gurus and was sitting and talking about the community. And he mentioned, but it says, yeah, it says, I'm getting really deep in like a couple of topics that I'm passionate about. I'm really excited about it. I'm reading and becoming, trying to become an expert in Microsoft syntax. And I'm like, hey, that's a good area to go and build expertise in. And because we, you know, there are few experts out there. We need more knowledge that's out there. And he did the whole kind of imposter syndrome things. Like, yeah, but I don't know. I don't know everybody. I don't know the community I'm not plugged in. So I'm probably not the right person to then share my experiences. Like, no, like stop with that. Share your experiences, share what you're learning. Come and talk to the MVPs that are there, the speakers at the conferences, we're some of the most social people in the world and happy to help mentor and bring up other people. But it takes those first steps. Like people need to step up and say, hey, I'm interested in doing this and sharing what I learned. There's humility is an important part of it too. Not just the, hey, I want to be an MVP. And that's traditionally been the strength of our smaller community-run conferences from the early SharePoint Saturdays, right down to the cloud days that we have today. I mean, there are events like Bletchley Park in the UK where they specifically set aside X number of slots for people who've never spoken before, right? And we take for granted walking up on a stage in front of four, five, six, 7,000 people, whatever it is, boom, and delivering what we do. And it's just part of our comfort level because we've been doing it so long. But a room of 30 people is really intimidating to someone who's never done it before who assumes that everyone in the room knows more than they do, right? Yeah, that's why, one of the best things too is get started in your local user groups and there's still a lot of user groups. It's certainly true in Utah as well where most of our speakers are in other regions and it's virtual, we have people at the location but we've got the giant screens which is really nice and we're able to have in-person and the virtual. But whether it's in-person or virtual, one of the best things you could do is reach out and say, hey, I saw you present on that, I'm looking to get started, can we co-present on something? Like I absolutely love it when people approach me and say, I saw this and can we do something together because it's less work and I'm happy to help and develop doing that and kind of spread that work out. Yeah, and there is, sometimes we're guilty of this ourselves of maybe being a little bit too clickish, right? With our friends and people that we know but I think I can speak on behalf of the wider community that if you see us, talk to us. If we're there to interact with people in the community and if you have a question, if you need help, whether it's I have a technical problem and I can't quite figure it out and I need to brainstorm, just bounce some ideas off somebody to, hey, I'd really like to get involved in the community and volunteer and help or speak. That's what we're there for. And so I would say never be intimidated. That MVP title means come talk to me, right? That's what I'm here for. We're here to interact. And so I would hope that everybody out there who wants to participate, we'd love to grow the community and see new folks come in and get fresh new ideas, not us old timers, right? Y'all have people to get off our lawn. Let's get some new ideas and some fresh blood in. And that's a good thing that benefits everybody. Completely agree. Eric, really appreciate your time. Folks that want to get in touch with you, reach out and connect with you. Where are you most active in social work and they find you? Well, as you know, I'm not much of a social media type of creature, but I'm forced by my marketing and sales folks to be on LinkedIn. So probably LinkedIn is the best place and a little bit on Facebook. I don't do much work type stuff on Facebook, but jump on and ping me. And certainly come to a conference, right? If you see my name on the bill, come to a conference and say hi and let's make sure we have a conversation. And we'll have the links to all the stuff that we just talked about. So you can find it out of course on the YouTube page on the podcast as well as on bucktheplanet.com where this page, everything, all the info will be there so you can find Eric that way. So Eric, thanks a lot for your time. Thanks, sir. Always good to see you.