 Hey, this is Christian Buckley, doing another MVP Buzz Chat interview and I'm talking today with Daniel. Hello. Hey, Christian, how are you? I'm doing well. Why don't you introduce yourself and where you are and rub it in about your great weather compared to what we're experiencing here? Well, yes. Well, hello, everybody. First of all, thanks for having me on. I've been consuming your content and looking at what you do for quite some time. So it's I'll say an honour to be talking to you in this capacity. As you said, yes, my name is Daniel. I am coming to you currently from Melbourne, Australia in our summer. Well, we haven't really had much of a summer, but look, it's probably better than where you are at the moment. Currently, what is it? The time of recording 9.30am. It's around sort of 20-25 degrees. So we can't complain. Yeah, that's nice. Yeah, so where do you work? What do you do? Currently, I am working at Valo Solutions as a partner manager and product evangelist there. So I recently joined the Valo team for the APAC region after being involved in a number of Microsoft partners delivering solutions through Office 365, Microsoft 365 in that capacity. But now, yeah, heading up the Valo APAC team. That's very exciting. Well, and congrats again on your brand new Office Apps and Services MVP. Yeah, thanks. Thanks very much. As we were chatting just before we started recording, well, not really something that I set out to achieve. But as you know, it tends to come around if you're, I guess, making an impact and sharing a lot of information and helping people out in the community that does get recognised. And it's it's nice to be nice to be recognised. And yeah, hopefully that's that will continue. I mean, it's it's not something that you you stop doing. I've got a that you've achieved. That's the penultimate order. Just like just stop. Yeah. Yeah, that's right. If anything, it makes you want to want to do more. I mean, it's the feedback you get the comments and the things that you know, the little things that that help people along the way that we tend to and I'm sure you find it in what you do as well. We kind of tend to take things for granted a little bit how easy things for us could potentially be. But for a lot of people, it's, you know, they don't know a lot of things. And there's a lot of things to learn and know and use in in Office or Microsoft 365 that that needs to be put out there to help people. Well, it's one of my favourite things to go and do. And, you know, as you know, I mean, I've been doing like for the last year, like office hours type things. But yeah, I'm staying connected in and in hearing and trying to find answers for customer questions. Because to your point, I mean, we get kind of blind and deaf to certain kinds of issues, because we say, well, hey, we've worked through that. Or that's like a problem that we solved a couple years ago. And yet people that are brand new in the technology are just coming through that learning cycle. And they have those questions again. So what's old for us is new to someone else. And so if we can help, and then there's always, you know, no matter how well that you think you've solved the problem or Microsoft to solve the problem, you know, business changes, requirements change, and people's approach, and they bring their backgrounds to solving these collaborative problems. And they find new and interesting way to break things. Yeah, they do indeed. And it's funny. I mean, there is there's obviously some, you know, amazing features and functionality rolling out all the time with with Microsoft and, you know, Viva that the latest, obviously the latest hot topic. But, you know, a lot of times, even largest organizations are not even at that point. And they're still, you know, in terms of their adoption of platforms. And, you know, we've probably gone a little bit past, you know, just using Office 365 as with email. But, you know, while there is all the bells and whistles and everything that that is improving, whether it be employee experience or the way we communicate or meet. It's interesting to see where, in reality, where where a lot of individuals and businesses are at as well. Well, one of the things you're probably aware of, and I've been talking with people about it, so back years ago, you had the SharePoint maturity model that was developed by then a consultant, she went on Sadie Van Buren went and joined Microsoft and has since left. But you have an effort, a community effort that driven by Mark Anderson and a few others that that were developing the content around the Microsoft 365 maturity model. But the idea is that, look, everybody is using finding, you know, value and different workloads, different, you know, combinations of the technology, of course, because different businesses, different verticals have different needs. But it's it's great to go in, it's a healthy exercise to go and understand, well, you know, across these various industries, here's kind of where we are, here's a baseline for for our adoption here. And then and to see, well, if we were, you know, in a like a CMM level, like fives levels there, we're at number two in in our information management. What does it mean to move to three and to four? And likewise in our collaboration in our, so if you think of it like workloads like our SharePoint usage, our Teams usage, our OneDrive usage, and there's no right or wrong answers. But what's great to see about that kind of model is just based on, you know, the averages of other users out there, what else could we be doing? And it might be that, hey, level three, we never need to move to four or five, level three is right where we need to be, it's meeting our needs. But I go into that, it's just part of, you know, operational improvement of going through and, you know, continually looking and reviewing and what can we do to get our people collaborating more and in better ways and better leveraging the content we have? Yeah, absolutely, absolutely. And it'll be interesting, yeah, look, interesting to see where, you know, this whole employee experience model or applications or modules or whatever you want to call it, how that's, how that gets taken up as well. Obviously, it's, you know, employee experiences is a big thing in the adoption side of it. But, you know, it'll be interesting to see. Yeah, I'd be interested in your perspective. I don't know if there's an official like company line on that, but given that you have a lot of the, you know, the internet and the box providers, but yet like Valo that have gone and have been focused all about the employee experience. I mean, that's really where that whole category of solutions started was that the out of the box SharePoint experience was not sufficient. Your organizations were not adopting that. And so make it, you know, good looking on the front end and functional for what organizations, collaborative organizations need and are using, and you added on, you did all these things. So something for Microsoft to go and approach with their, you know, experience, employee experience platform approach. I mean, so what kind of what's, what's the official position? Yeah, well, I mean, it's still, still fairly, fairly vague in a lot of the detailed information that what Microsoft is big in a new release. And well, look, it looks, it looks very nice. And all the marketing is, is, is very good. But obviously, you know, with, I, I guess, internet and a box type of solutions or that type of thing. I mean, obviously, connections is going to be one that is going to be fairly close to that type of thing. So it'll be interesting to see how, you know, what gaps are there and how, you know, companies like Valo can can extend on that type of functionality or, you know, I guess, we saw a fairly similar situation when SharePoint Modern came out as well. I mean, the brand was bang new modern. I mean, there's still, there's still a space for, for extending and improving and adding functionality and that type of thing as well. So I think it's going to open up a lot of opportunities as well by, by being able to, to either extend or combine or, or integrate with. Yeah. It's, well, and not meaning to put you on the spot at you about that, because it's, it's true for every ISV in every category. My, as you know, I mean, Microsoft will go and, and make a big buzz and talk about the broader space where they're, what they're talking about might be limited capability, a subset of that, of what the partner is doing. And then, of course, it causes a lot of, you know, customers or prospects out there to be like, well, wait a second, isn't this the exact same thing of what your, you ISV are doing and, and they're just certain realities is that there's one you have to cut through the marketing. And this is true with every OEM is not just a Microsoft thing. And, and really truly understand what your business requirements are, where you were focused there. The second thing is anything new takes time to be fully realized in the first place. It's not like you're adding a feature to an existing product when you're, you know, launching an entirely new product or product area. And so there's work that needs to be done. And that shouldn't stop your movement forward if you're about to buy a solution. And then there's an announcement made that's like a year, year and a half of, until it gets to the place where, you know, could, could even possibly reach, you know, that, that level. But, yeah, it's an interesting space. I personally, I just think it's exciting that the maturity of the platform of Microsoft 365 itself is getting to the point where we're no longer talking about turning servers on, you know, back in the on-prem days and just keeping the lights on, on the service where we can now really focus in and we've got a lot, most of the core functionality fairly robust where we can now talk about what are we actually doing with the technology that we've been deploying? How are people using it? How can we use it better? How can we be looking at the data around how we're collaborating and improve the way that we're working together? I mean, that, that's just an entirely new thing. That's very exciting. It is. And I think that's, that's becoming almost the, the first thing that, that organizations start to talk about or want to talk about is, is that, that, well, first of all, that end result, but the data to, to show whether it's the adoption or, or, you know, simple example of how many less all company emails people are sending, and we're now chatting in a, in a, you know, communicating in a different way. And, you know, we're saving X amount of time trying to find stuff for, you know, topics is a, it was an interesting one for me around, you know, most, a lot of organizations have a lot of information and, and seeing how, you know, that type of functionality can potentially save people so much time in finding, finding information, but also skills and that, that side of it as well. I guess fairly, it could be, could be hard to measure, but it's, it's, you know, it's, it's an interesting area for sure. Did you have any clients that were part of the beta? Were you involved? No, no, no, I haven't, no. Neither have I, I've talked to a couple of folks that were in, when the program, yeah, in my, around the topic specifically, like it's exciting to see, you know, there's been different variations that they've just been attempted, you know, again and again over the past 20 years, that I've really been kind of looking at the space. And so I'm interested to see what the, the curation experience is like and what's actually involved to make it work. But yeah, I'm, it's a pretty exciting space. What Microsoft is doing around content services in general, it's very exciting. It is definitely. But we'll have, you know, with those other modules, you know, it'll all depend on whether there's going to be, you know, the, the uptake of that is, you know, licensing price tags, you know, topics as we see five, five bucks a user. So yeah, it'll be, be interesting to see how, how that model works. Yep. Well, what else, what else is kind of, you know, your focus these days, what are you, what are you presenting on? I know that you're, you're active like a lot of MVPs and online events that are happening. Any in-person events that are being scheduled that you're down in your neck of the woods? Not, they are being planned. So in Australia, we're obviously with the current COVID situation, we're starting to open up quite a lot now. We're, we're able to host limited in-person events. So hopefully in the next, in the coming months, there'll be, there'll be some of those, you know, been lucky enough to be able to actually go and see some of our partners in person over the last, last couple of weeks, which has been good. Although we can do all of this virtually, it's still important to see people face to face. But in terms of areas that we're, that I'm focusing on or looking at as well, you know, presenting a lot or talking a lot and whether it's videos or whatever the content is. I'm really big on, on Microsoft lists at the moment. I think they add a lot of value. And I guess making people aware of, of what they can do, what they use for, and that, that side of it. I'm a fan of the adoption guide that was just created. Yeah, that's, that's fantastic. Great resource. Yeah, it is. So those type of, those type of practical areas of 365 that I think that add a lot of value to, to those end users is something that's, that's, that's a big focus of mine. That was very cool. Well, hopefully, yeah, it was, was supposed to be down your way once last year that, that happened. But I'm hoping to, to, to get down there for once the event start back up. So it's, it's been, I was pretty regular for the last 10 years, almost at least one trip a year down that way. Those conferences, there's some of my favorites working with the East Debian team. Yeah, right. Yes. Yeah. Some of the user group activities as well. And yeah, but yeah. Yeah, I think, I think, well, Debbie's still planning on, well, potentially, hopefully, the in-person event this year. So we'll see how that plays out. Yeah, whether, whether you're allowed, whether, whether internationals, I don't know. I'm thinking that part, you know, you guys are too good at the, the contact tracing. You guys have that part down. So it might be a little bit longer before you allow internationals in, but again, we're also just, we're now planning for end of August, our first in-person, what was our SharePoint Saturday event of doing something like a hybrid version of that. So we're hoping that we, you know, things start to get back to normal later this year. So, well, Daniel, really appreciate your time. For people that want to find out more about you, get in contact. What are the best ways they can reach you? Probably LinkedIn is the main place where I'm posting a lot of content in the moment. So just jump on there, search for Daniel Anderson. You'll find me there. And also the blog as well. So SharePointFocus.com and they're two, two main, main places. Excellent. Well, hey, thanks a lot for, for connecting. And we'll, we'll let you get back to your Tuesday and I've got my next meeting rolling up as well, but we'll talk to you soon. Very good. Thanks for having me on the