 Hey, this is Christian Baklu with another MVP Buzz Chat, and I'm glad to be talking with an Enterprise Mobility MVP today. I think you might be our first one, but Joy, hey, welcome. Hi, Christian. Thanks for welcoming to your chat show here. It's a pleasure from my side to be having a chat with you here. It's great to have you. Why don't you give people that don't know you? Why don't you give us a background and who you are, where you are and what you do? Yes, sure. So my full name is Jamaliya Basura, but I generally go by the name Joy in short. I'm from India. I have around five years of experience in this IT service sector. I am ex MSFT, but I presently work for ATOS as a senior consultant architect for digital workplace solutions. So basically my day to day job is like engaging with clients helping them in their transformation to the modern workplace. And like I primarily specialize with Microsoft Intune as the endpoint management solution and with a little bit of engagement in the Azure AD identity and access management part. So that's all about me. Yeah, on the mobility side, again, it's, it's, it's funny. I do a show with other MVPs and we do kind of Q&A answering questions for the community. And I'd say every week there's one or two questions that are in and around Intune. Yeah, because the, I would say the product development team at Microsoft, they are so fast in bringing out new features. And even while working on new features, something sometimes breaks up the previous features that were previously working and things like that. And there is a lot of things there around Intune, like SCCM, you know, it's on premises thing like you have control over the environment over the infrastructure. Intune being fully managed from cloud, you do not have any insight into the backend what it is doing. And in there like what you have is a portal where you just configure things and apply the policies. But what I generally feel is like, it's good to have a knowledge of the portal like how you configure the policies. But it's also equally important to know that how those policies are actually getting delivered to the endpoints and how it is actually working in order to like have a clear understanding of how the product is working. Otherwise, like this type of questions. And these are like general like to be honest, these questions are not invalid or something like that. These are genuine questions which comes up like sometimes like BitLocker is not working. I have deployed in point encryption protection policies from Intune but it is not working. But then at the end of the day, what have you done from the troubleshooting steps have you checked the BitLocker API events and things like that. So these are the things that many people are not aware of like where to look for and what to look for, which basically I try to help with my blogs and the engagements that I do so. That's an important point, because a lot of people I know when the, a lot of the shift from on-prem solutions to the cloud was happening, a lot of IT pros that were concerned about what's happening to my job. And is this, you know, is this all just this knowledge and all the training and all my experience, you know, is it all for nothing now it this these third parties these cloud vendors that own that activity. But to your point, you need to have people that understand how those services are actually running. It might evolve and change that role, but you still need to have that knowledge internally. Yeah, and definitely like when people. Yeah, I also see in my organizations where I work like people who used to work with SCCM and things like that or who are like highly experienced like eight years or 10 years of experience with SCCM like what is going to happen with it. Is it going away? Will Intune take its place and then I have to learn Intune. SCCM is not going away. SCCM is here to stay and it will be there. But at the same time, like if you are comfortable with SCCM you have been working with that, then Intune is also a same product from the Microsoft that is aimed to help you get a better modern workplace experience. So, like, I believe it's fair enough if you can invest some amount of time in learning it, rather than pushing it away like it's a new tool. Why do I need to learn it. Right. Well, I think it also helps for for organizations kind of go back to an earlier comment you made about, you know, adjusting to the to the cloud and how, you know, different it isn't and the volume of features, because we're experiencing that across every workload. You know, coming out of Microsoft, you know, especially in the modern workplace side of things, which is encompasses kind of all of Microsoft 365 and all of the, you know, side products. Yeah, but with all of that is to, I think people are, again, a little bit biased we work in technology and so we're a little more, you know, kind of in tune with, you know, not trying to use the product name but we're, we're, we're up to date on on the software development lifecycle and when we see new features that are released and we get excited about it. But just to do to almost kind of, you know, take a kind of a steady approach to that to be aware that hey there needs to be time for you know bugs to be figured out that there could be to your point depending on how a features being rolled out to be this example over and over again, you hear about a feature that's gone generally available GA, and yet it's not yet on your tenant, or there's something on your tenant but you're getting weird behavior that other people are not experiencing, because it might be acting in combination with other features other products that are on your tenant that are not on somebody else's tenant. So that whole idea like we're getting innovation rapidly, but needs to be tempered with this. I think the reality of, hey, but then it takes time for these things to, to be, you know, that that dog food experience. I know Microsoft is a both both of us former employees that phrase of dog fooding our own technology or own is great. There's only so many scenarios you're able to flush out and it's inevitable. Well that greatly reduces the number of bugs and issues that that the general populace experiences. That's why Microsoft does rings they do that internal dog. Then they do that fast ring for companies as they give us the raw, the, you know, the latest version and understanding that we're going to discover a whole new batch of bugs and issues and provide that feedback back to Microsoft. This is definitely true, like, because we are both ex MSFTs. We all know that MSIT or MSFT is the largest customer of Microsoft for its cloud products. So Microsoft has got a fantastic amount of volume or a pupil to test on before they actually test it and they actually plan the releases very well, like even if a new feature is rolling out, it will not roll out to all the tenants worldwide at the same time. It's in a phased manner and that is why we see that, okay, February week of 18. There is some new feature releases. So it's not there in my tenant as well because it's still under the roll out plan. So things like that it happens and that is why you have the insider preview tenants and all those things where you can actually go out and check out earlier than before it makes the availability in the normal tenants there. Yeah, and obviously, like, say, for example, it is not like, say today there is a policy that is not working, which is not. Well, I will say it's not a configuration issue. It's not an endpoint issue or a device specific issue, but it's a issue of Microsoft service does not means that the entire in tune service in hold worldwide will have that issue. So it can be a tenant specific issues and we have seen that where there are some bugs related to that particular tenant, which the backend team fixes out so things things like that this happens in the cloud side and yeah. Yeah, and it's just something that you need to, again, set your expectations your your it organization, it may change where some of the, you know, the ownership of the platform, you know, lives but to be clear on what are the SLAs that your organization does in place, understand enough about the service to have a better idea of what's happening. And so as you get that information back from Microsoft of what might be happening in your tenant that you can relate back to your end users, something better than. Definitely well with customer. Yeah, it never works well in the service industry you know like today if I am going to raise a ticket with Microsoft premium support then I would want to fast resolution but being on that side also I know that we have to go through the process we have to collect the logs we have to diagnose those because you come and tell me today that hi I'm facing this issue. I may not have a quick solution to give to you but maybe some some of the issues will have a solution some of the issues may not because those requests are deeper analysis and the diagnosis of what is happening because say for today if I am I speak to you as a Microsoft support now from the past experience so even like if if I have to troubleshoot a issue of yours in your environment. I need to have some prior knowledge of your environment. Because without that then I won't be able to help you up and and getting those details from the other side is sometimes a pain. Because also there are a lot of stakeholders that you need to involve in the calls because not everything is under your control or you would as an admin like even if I am I talk as an admin I may not have access to the conditional access portal because that is a feature of identity and access management but if the Microsoft support person asks me then I have to get someone from the identity team involved in the call we have to schedule another and this is how the delay goes on but obviously at the end of the day everyone is just trying to do their job and get it fixed but it's it's the patients that you need to show when a problem comes up because there is a great team out there which is there to help out and even like most of the times you can just when even like us like when we face issues before reaching out to support or anything else we would be first going out and checking out the community like if there is already something mentioned in there or if someone has already worked on some things so that I get some notes on there or things like that. So there is a great bunch of people out there who are ready to help if you know how to get the help. Well and that's well yeah there's again that's good training I think in general of you know for any employee to help them to understand what is the best way to make a request and if you're experiencing technical issues like what to go and be aware of what to document what to go and do. It's why you know as IT professionals we're always frustrated and we share frustration when we dial in to support and they walk us through like if you try turning it off and on and kind of questions and walk you through like you know is it on like what browser version of all the basic things with like look I've gone past all those things like yeah but unless I know I go through the steps it's all we've done is we've moved that conversation which used to happen with internal it over to you're working with Microsoft to resolve it but you still have to collect that information. You still definitely steps in that process one of the benefits while maybe it may feel like and likely it is like longer on that that activity to turn around time and work go through Microsoft. The benefit however of using a cloud service and working with Microsoft said like this is is on the back end when you start identifying issues Microsoft is able to go you're not just alone as you and IT department with your deployment on prem. They're actually able to go so yeah we're seeing dozens of companies that are experiencing this and here's what we've determined here's what's worked for these other organizations. So you're often able to get for those larger issues that are the software solution based you know based problems. You know more data and a faster response to those kinds of issues versus going and trying to do it on your own. So most of the most of the critical issues related to cloud because the enormous amount of data that Microsoft collects from his services. The telemetry like I don't believe any any other service actually collects this amount of telemetry that Microsoft collects and even before like a service will make a hit Microsoft will have a alert that something is wrong. And that is why there are like you get those service health checkups in the portals where you say that something is going for a periodic maintenance or something is going down then the team is working on there. But still yeah even after that there may be tenant specific issues but then those those say if I if I say a tenant specific issue it does not mean that it is specific to the tenant it is specific to the scale unit or the MSU. So whoever other customers are there on that same MSU or the ASU unit they will be facing the same issues as well. So sometimes you may be the first sometimes you may not be the first because there is a global support out there and you do not know if any other organization is also facing the same issues or not. And obviously there are solutions there are things that Microsoft comes up with and things even if it is not a solution at that moment at least they will come up with a work around. Yeah. Yeah. No exactly. It's well I mean like anything you know collaboration that's the benefit of collaboration. Yeah. So you've got to your wider net to cast out to try and and find your examples and solutions. Yeah. So what what kind of stuff are you actively presenting on so and for those again that are watching like he brand new MVP so congratulations again to that. Thank you. So so what kind of things are you actively talking about presenting on writing about out in the community. So I actively write about. So basically like MDM takes this is my blog where I write about the endpoint management with in tune things but most of my blogs do not talk about like how to configure things because those things you can easily get out from the Microsoft docs and things like that. But mostly if you if you have seen or if you have followed my blogs or if you have followed through my video sessions that I give the training sessions over the things. I mostly talk about how things are working inside like from the endpoint perspective so you as an IT group because if I'm working with in tune today and I'm not in Microsoft I do not have the Microsoft back and to go and analyze data. So whatever I have is the endpoint to work with. So how you can better use that endpoint to get an analysis of how the policy is working and whether it is working or not. This is something I put emphasis on and like if I say so currently I'm working working on a few topics which are currently in preview like the. The temporary access temporary access pass tap for the going password live solution with Azure AD then I'm also working on some interesting things with endpoint analytics the remediation scripts that you can do. And so things like that this is this is currently what I'm focusing on and like as I said I mainly focus on in tune and how you can better learn in tune from the endpoint perspective not from the service of the portal because you have to have to understand like. If you are today in a problem what you would look for and where you would look for instead of going and asking or things like that so for today example say for example I say you are having you are facing a bit locker issue and you come to me saying that hey I have deployed this policy and it is not working it came up with the error. So I would obviously ask for what is the event that you get on the bit locker API but if you don't come up with that and I tell you OK go and bring me that that is a delay. So when you are working with a policy you should be knowing about where and what to look for for that particular policy and these are the things that I like try to put emphasis on. Yeah now again that's great advice whether it's for end users or it pros that are managing these for their organizations to understand like the core information that a support person is going to want to have to help resolve that issue things that you should be looking for. Yeah it's it's important to to understand all those components. Yeah but that's a yeah again it's it's it's really important to understand how do I you know what do I need to provide to work with support with my you know engineering or it organization if I'm you have that relationship I'm managing that with Microsoft. What's going to be the most efficient that's going to get me you know so I'm not having to go back and go find any of this you know every time I want to report issue I'm going to go in go through kind of my steps have we answered everything so that it's the most efficient. You know use of both of our times and I contact Microsoft to resolve that. Yeah definitely so like being in the support in a service based industry or being in a support in a product based company. The formula for support is same like if you have an issue and you support or you raise a ticket or submit a request for help. Then you need to provide with the details that is there and if you provide the details at the same time when you submit a request it makes life a lot easier for the support person. Yeah that's right because that's yeah you're right you remember it's you know it's as frustrated as we are with having to go through those those basic questions per person. You think they enjoy it every conversation that they have starts that way you know. But anyway yeah well that's that's really interesting stuff so well it's great well it's been great to get to know you and learn more about what you do and and of course in the in the associated blog post will help you. If you have you know links and things that are out there for the folks that are watching the video or listening to the podcast. How can they find out more about you or get in touch with you. So. So basically my website is is my name only so it's you can just type in join earlier dot com and you can get to MDM tech space and you get my all contact details from there. You can find me in Facebook you can find me over LinkedIn definitely connect with me and you can also find me over Twitter but like I won't be able to pronounce my name here all over this because it will also. We'll provide the links and stuff it'll be out there that you'll be able to see it. Yeah so so at the end just type in join earlier dot com and go to my website the blog site and you will have all the links to get connected with me there. Excellent. Well joey it's great to to meet you and congrats again on the MVP award and and we'll hopefully see you maybe next year next calendar year at the next MVP summit I think the next time in person so. Yeah definitely because yeah it's still going to be a lockdown year again in 2021. It is it is unfortunately so 2021 is a lot like 2021 so all right well well thanks a lot we'll talk to you soon. Yeah sure bye.