 Hey everybody, this is Christian Buckley doing another MVP buzz chat. I'm talking today with Marius. Hello. Hello. How are you? I'm doing well. I was thinking I was going to complain about the winter storm that's hitting here. Yeah, yeah, but that's hitting here hard. So for folks that don't know you, who are you, where are you, and what do you do? Yeah, so my name is Marius Sorbak in Malum. I'm located in, well, a tiny town called Brumundal in Norway, along with another Marius MVP in the same tiny town in Norway. Oh, that's convenient. Yeah, absolutely. So yeah, I'm a principal cloud engineer in Amesto 42, focused on identity, security and building managed services. So it's a small company where I'm also a partner. Yeah, I'm the host of the cloud first podcast with this other Marius, just so to make sure that we are mixed together. Is it called like Marius squared or anything? Yeah, it should be. It's very cool. So how long have you been an MVP now? For a whole month. Yeah, so long time. So I'd like to ask you, I want you to go in the way back machine to prior to being MVP. What was your path to becoming an MVP? Like, what was that journey like for you? Yeah, so I've always been very interested in, well, first of all, podcasting I always found very enjoyable as well as essentially just finding, like digging deep into, for example, Azure AD looking into what's behind or what's under the hood here and really investigating and finding out how things really work because, well, you can read the documentation and understand what things do, but not necessarily understand what they really do. And yeah, so my blog has been very focused on that area. And yeah, I've been blogging for a long time. I've always been very wide when it comes to like the, let's call it the contribution area. So both like security, some more of overdue the Microsoft 365 side and a lot of Azure stuff. Yeah, all things Microsoft cloud essential. That could be confusing for people that it's like, look, I'm doing a lot like out in the community. But if you're, and I just talked about this in a previous in an interview not too long ago, a couple of days ago, is that it to become an MVP, it has to be very focused. Yes. That's essentially why I haven't been an MVP before, to be honest. I have been what's it called nominated, but I've been too broad essentially. And yeah, so a few or too few contributions in every single topic, but many, but still, yeah. So, but right now I've been more focused on security for a good while. So yeah. Well, that's that. Yeah. I know that there are some people that as I was talking before we started recording that were enterprise mobility MVPs and then they became they moved over to security. Because that could be that it was traditionally, because I think security is a new focus area. Yes. It was within other. Yes. So essentially identity and access has moved to over to security, right? Because that was primarily put under well enterprise mobility, but not identity when it came to Azure. And I think that was sort of the difficult part there. Well, I think that's why why you sometimes have MVPs who may do a lot of they, they could be like a M three, six, five development MVP, but then start doing more and more with Azure and identity. And so they start as they, because for folks that don't know MVPs is we track our contributions of things that we do that are not for our work for our job, but for peer for community. But you identify like, which category, which topic area each fall in. So sometimes just more and more of them seem to be stacking up in that if in this case the identity security space, Microsoft could switch your MVP over to that other area, which I think is happening. Yeah. Or you can find yourself a dual MVP. Suddenly. Yeah, absolutely. And these days, when you do anything, it's all within it. Then it's almost identity related in some way. Well, it's always that. Yeah. So at least some portion. So what are kind of the, what are the hot topics that you're, you're talking about? What do you dig it into like through the podcast, your blog right now or presenting out in community activities? Yeah. So right now it's a lot of focus on, on while security monitoring with like Sentinel. There's a lot of talk going around external identities and how you handle your well guest accounts or customers or that's a topic that covers many different areas. Yeah. Absolutely. Right. And yeah, I'm looking more and more into decentralized identities as well, which is becoming more and more interesting right now. The customers and let's call them the sort of the providers of the data and the consumers and it's sort of a chicken and egg problem when it comes to adopting decentralized identities because no one really cares about adding support for decentralized identities when there are no providers of well, your identities. So, but I'm sure this will become much more. Well, actively used in the coming three or four years or something. Yeah. So in your do your content, do you cover like customer scenarios? Do you talk more about kind of the pure product and kind of delve into the minutiae of the technology or? Yeah. More of the technology focus. Absolutely. Yeah. The real deep dive scene to, for example, the way I write blog post is often I want to find out how let's say privileged identity management works. Then I look at the API's. I look at the Azure portal. I see what does it really do behind the scenes like looking at the different API calls that actually do because sometimes then you can find some hidden features not documented anywhere. Perhaps nothing you should rely on in production, but still gives you more insight into how things really behave and potential future for products, for example, where you see that okay, so they made some stuff in the API doesn't really make sense when it comes to the Azure portal and what you see as like a regular admin. But yeah, you can essentially from that, I guess sort of say that well, within a year or two, I guess this is sort of the direction they're going. They're adding some of these features potentially. And yeah, so it's essentially just digging into those things that are my blog posts. Well, you know what's in this coming from a non engineer, but I've been in it for over 30 years is that it's like it's doing a you're trying to find a problem doing a trace route trying to work go through a workflow going through the API's understanding the calls that are being made where things so where you start to understand like hey, it's working today, but it's slower. How can we make it faster? Let's look at the way that it's pulling together. I see it's doing round trips that it doesn't need to be doing. We can architect this differently. And you know with it's always interesting to with Microsoft today, when you get into in deep with the products, understand how they're doing some of what they're doing. It could be the reason why there's like, why isn't there this feature? Why isn't Microsoft given this? Well, the way that it's architect for these reasons, that's why. And so you do, you can better understand the impact of change inside of your organization. Absolutely. Yeah, I get all that points. It's not part of my life, my daily life. But it's, but no, I get that. I mean, I used to live in that world. But you have not been part of engineering, running engineering teams for quite a few years now, but now it's fascinating stuff, especially when you're looking at optimizing solutions, performance improvements. Yeah. And also when you, so I do a lot of like, well, call them customer engagements or whatever, but where I say, so you come with suggestions on how they can use Azure AD as like their primary identity governance platform, also with like right back to active directory on premises and things like that, which are just, it's either preview features or yeah, something like that. But then it's very necessarily to actually know where, where are things moving? So if you're implementing something now and you know this is something that will, well, it will either go away or something. Yeah. You wouldn't implement the active directory federation services today, right? So it's sort of the same thing in, in Azure AD as, as well, where there are certain features that will get a lot of more features over time. And perhaps you can, well, make a design decisions now that you're, you're actually going to use this service. So perhaps right now, you need some plumbing to, to get it to work the way you wanted to, but in six months a year or something, it will do everything out of the box. Yeah. Well, but then there still will have to be a transition and if you've done any customizations, if you've done any kind of automation, then understand how based around it may, may function the same, may use the same calls, the same APIs, but in a different way. So, you know, to go and figure out how do we move this across? Yeah. Exactly. So, so for example, one of the, one of the features that I've built is a, it's just open sourced like a writeback. It's essentially a writeback script PowerShell based that just reads groups from Azure AD, writing them to on-prem AD. So you can run that like every minute. And that means that you can use, for example, the privileged groups feature of PIM to, to elevate, let's say into domain admin in your on-prem AD. So Microsoft is now adding that to Azure AD Connect. There will be some limitations, but yeah. So that's like a two and a half year old project that's been powering a lot of great scenarios at customers. And we're just now seeing that Microsoft is coming with the same, same thing in public preview. Yeah. Well, that's, that's the thing. There's a, you can never get comfortable. Microsoft will change something. Yeah. Absolutely. I, so I work in the ISD world. And so that's why you're, you know, you're, you partner with, but you're always, you'll stay alert to what they're doing. Not that they're coming for specific ISD solutions or part, or customizations, but there's some things where, you know, in the partner world, the partner, you go create something because why isn't Microsoft filled this gap? Yeah. Well, eventually they will. Suddenly they feel it. Yeah. But you might, you might, you know, a couple of years with the product or services that you provide, be making good money doing that. Yeah. Microsoft fills the gap. Yeah. Yeah. So what's the, the community situation in your small town? Like, do you have like user groups? Are you doing online stuff? Kind of what, what's, Yeah. So it's not that far from Oslo. So it's like 90 minutes by train, which well, so it seems like a lot, but it's, it's okay. So, but, and there's a few other towns, well, nearby as well. And yeah, there are a lot of user groups, both in the Microsoft space, but also in, well, security and different topics, essentially. So great user groups close and in Oslo, there's well, it's the, it's the Norwegian capital. So, yeah. Then to several events out there over the years and seems trying to think one time in summer, everything else in the middle of the winter, which yeah, you get the conference space less expensive. So of course that's what bigger events will be, but yeah. Are things kind of getting back to normal? Are things picking up again from the community side? Are they still mostly virtual? It's mostly hybrid now. Yeah. So it's often that they are streamed and it was like a period of limited seating, but right now it feels very normal. So, yeah. There was like this a few months where everyone was going to have their event of some kind at the same time because, yeah, you had like 10 years. The rush back to, yeah. Now we were planning ours here locally and we ended up pushing ours back to next year and we had some venue issues, but we started looking around dates and there are events popping up all over the place. I said, let's just go back to our normal time a year from now and we're well past all this and we can hopefully get back to the pre-pandemic numbers for our event. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, because I'm really excited about what will happen to, well, excited is the wrong word. I'm interested in what will happen with Microsoft Ignite and things like that over time now. Yeah. My sense is that they're going to stick with that new model and for folks that don't know what we're talking about, Microsoft changed their marquee event, the IT pro focused event Ignite. They moved it to a hybrid model, but the, I mean, look, look, there's a strong feedback out there and Microsoft has heard that. Did you attend by chance? No. Okay. Only by, yeah, by computer. Yeah. So, I mean, I was, it was for me, it was, I was in a competing event, a community created event that was scheduled months in advance that was such short notice. But the difference is that there are fewer people there. So instead of it being like 15 to 20,000 people there, I think there was like three or 4,000 and most people there, very few Microsoft people went. So you didn't have the product team and engagements. No. You didn't have the massive expo hall. It was split up and different. And even most of the speakers were on screen. So you, you show up to go to this event. And this is the watch TV. Watch TV. Yeah. Right. So that was a big complaint about it. And there's reasons for that because like to get Sati to do the keynote and to broadcast around the world in the hybrid, they weren't set up to do that at the convention center in downtown Seattle. They did it back at the Microsoft studios. Like, I get that. But yeah, anyway. Yeah. So understanding is that's the model going forward. Yeah. So I'm sure they will get better at it. Or hopefully they will get better at it. They have to get better at it. Yeah. But it's, yeah, it'll be interesting to see. Like I hadn't heard anything about build. So there's three marquee events of build inspire, which is the partner conference at which. You cannot do that model with inspire with the partners. The value is the face to face. If it's all virtual, then don't hold it. Don't have it. Exactly. Yeah. Cause it's pointless. No, I agree. Yeah. But some people out there might disagree. People like just dialing in from home, but the value of going to MVP summit, which we're having, we're getting back to doing in person MVP summits now, which is fantastic. Going to ignite going to build going to inspire is the face to face. I mean, you can go and check out slides or recordings of sessions. That's easy to follow up on, but you can't replace the human to human interaction. No, I didn't, it doesn't really take all that long to get that interaction. Cause you can. So while a few years ago when I went, I had a few, or I had one question for Mark Wall, which was one of the PMs in the identity group. And just asking that, got an answer, gave him my, or I just sort of, this is me. We talked on email a few times, and then you just have immediate connection. You get the response you need. And then you have sort of, well, built that relationship stronger essentially. Yep. Very useful. Even though that took one minutes. Right. Well, that, that's what's like, I went to, I mean, here's an example of this. I went out to the first in-person, the team's airlift a couple of years back. So it was, you know, limited number of seats. So MVPs and RDS that were there. We were downtown in Bellevue, where a lot of the teams organization was, was housed. And we did this thing where it was great is that there were sessions that were going on in two main rooms and topics. You kind of pick which one you want to go back and forth. But the same time throughout the days, they had meeting rooms where you had product team members that were meeting with one or two people at a time. You had to schedule it to do a deep dive in on certain topics. So that they could actually share with people that there's a, like I went in there and here's an example. So I went in and was supposed to meet, it was supposed to be one other MVP, but he had to leave early. So it was just me with three product team people. And I've written about and talked about a lot about the chat technology in teams and elsewhere. So the various chats and the different technologies that were being used. And I was trying to understand the strategy and, and to talk about what that should look like as a single chat, underlying technology across each of the different workloads. And so it was like an hour, hour and a half conversation with me and these three product team members doing a deep dive on chat. It was, I would say it was certainly invaluable for me, but I, they took a lot of notes. So I'm thinking that I gave some value add to them around that to go in, talk about specific customers to talk about other competing solutions and do that kind of deep dive, which even if you're presenting, especially online presenting and I, if I in a chat window say, Hey, I've got some feedback on this and some experience with this thing is like, maybe somebody will follow up and there'll be an email or a call around that. It's like, it just doesn't work when you're in person. I mean, that was a fantastic example, but even going to ignite, I can go up and talk to a person. You know, as they're coming down off the stage after their session, talk for a few minutes or schedule a meeting with the event. I mean, you just cannot, it's where the world is not in a place where you can go into a VR environment and have that experience and get value out. So I think we're far, far away. Yeah. The question is, will that ever happen? I don't know. Yeah. I don't want to get into, I don't want to get hate mail from the people to the metaverse people around that, but I have my opinions as well. I believe in the human connection, but. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. But of course, well, we're used to this, right? But let's say in a few years where the IT professionals are, well, they've never met anyone, essentially. Yeah. And they used to that way of working than maybe, but I don't think sort of anyone above 30 is interested in that kind of interaction. Right. Yeah. I agree. Well, Marius, listen, I needed it to run, but really appreciate the time today. Great to meet you. And I'm sure we'll connect at some point for folks that want to find you, reach out to you, connect with you. What are the best ways to reach you? Where are you most active social? Yeah. So it's on Twitter, but you can find my handle on goodworkaround.com, which is my blog. Yeah. Well, of course, I'll have all his social links out on the blog post on buckleyplanet.com, as well as that on YouTube and on the podcast. You'll find it wherever you find this recording. You'll be able to find the contact info as well. So it was great talking to you and catching up. Yeah. Thank you. Cheers.