 This is Christian Buckley with another MVP buzz chat and I'm talking today with Sean. Hello Hey Christian, how are you? I'm doing well and for folks that don't know you, who you are, why don't you give us that breakdown? Who you are, where you are, what you do? Sure. My name is Sean McAvue. I'm from Dublin, Ireland. I'm working in a company called Ergo Group. I've worked there for 10 years. We're a Microsoft partner and most recently last month I was awarded the Microsoft MVP award. Congratulations on that. So what's kind of your focus area? The category I was awarded was office development, but I'm pretty far from a developer. I'm much more office apps and services space, but one thing that I've gravitated towards is Graph API. Since it was made available to admins, it's a no-brainer. It's all powerful. That's why. Yeah. It's interesting. So I actually get the question a lot about people that are interested in becoming MVP and kind of providing some guidance on what that process is like, the black box that it is. Microsoft gives it out to whoever they want to give it out to for different reasons, for different skill sets and things. But once you're an MVP, like you said, you're an office development MVP. However, as your career continues to grow and progress, you might find that you're doing tons of Azure stuff and you're writing more about Azure. And it might be at some point, you might switch your alliance from office development to Azure, but generally it's your Microsoft MVP first and foremost. And so it's assumed that you're going to be writing about and talking about a number of different things. So once you're in the program, you'll likely do more in a number of different areas. I was awarded mine in SharePoint. I don't do a ton with SharePoint anymore. It's still occasionally write about it and talk about it and cover it. But it's all across the Microsoft 365 stack, a lot of teams, a lot of one drive, Yammer and the main workloads. But yeah, it's change happens. Yeah. I think it's, in my experience with it so far, it's very much about the mindset, the community, the sharing more than specific technical knowledge, right? Yeah. So what was your path and we could share that? How you kind of worked yourself into that role? Yeah. So I suppose I didn't set out and like a lot of people, I didn't set out to pursue Microsoft MVP. We, for a long time, we've had MVPs within Ergo and I started posting stuff just almost to try and keep up with the pace of Microsoft 365 changing. I started writing articles. I like to write. It helps me make sense of things as well. I learn by doing things. So I test things out. I post, I write a post about them. If I can write a post, then I'm confident. I understand it. And then one of the guys sent me a mail and said, hey, you need to start looking at Microsoft MVP. I think it's a good step for you. So we had a chat about it. I didn't really change much of what I was doing or quantity of what I was doing. It was really just tips around how to reach a bigger audience with what I was doing. Yeah. That's actually a very common thread. It's like MVPs like, I say this all the time, like I continue doing what I do regardless of the MVP status. And that's a good piece of guidance for anybody in the community, whether or not they're interested in becoming an MVP. I mean, there's a lot of benefit in growing your community reach and the connections that you make may help you and your personal as well as professional career. Yeah. Yeah. 100%. So I'm a mountain now. I'm enjoying it. There's a lot to kind of to get to grips with. And there's a lot of information obviously and a lot of learning potential there. But yeah, I haven't really changed what I was doing. I'm still like doing the blog. I'm still speaking at different meetups, things like that. Well, it's just about that enjoying sharing what you do and passionate about the different products. And so what are you passionate about right now? Kind of what stands out to you? What are you most excited by? So I love making available the different functionality through Office 365 with Graph API. So a lot of my content on my blog for anyone who visits it is very much, it is using Graph API, API through Parashel because I'm not a dev and most of the people who read my blogs are not going to be devs. So they're not going to learn different languages. Parashel is easy. Most people are familiar with it and the flexibility it gives you. So approaching a migration project, previously we had things like EWS where we could do certain things to patch gaps for customers. Whereas now Graph API opens that up to the entire suite pretty much. Yeah, you know, you're probably aware of this, but over in the Graph API team, you know, there's a lot of ex-MVPs that are at Microsoft that are on that team. So Jeremy Thake and Fabian Williams and I think Jeremy brought on a couple others that are in that space. So I think it's not that there's a direct pipeline from MVP into Microsoft roles, but I think that, I mean, certainly, you know, Microsoft is smart and a couple key hires and a lot of those ex-MVPs hire other MVPs because they understand, MVPs generally understand the technology really well, you know, no matter what the role is, but also like the business application of it. They understand the customer issues of that. And it's, I'm not knocking Microsoft people, but there are, you know, a lot of people inside Microsoft that have either never been in customer facing roles in their careers or they've been inside Microsoft for so long, they've forgotten a lot of what they knew. And so having people that are community-minded and more customer-minded is it has been a good thing for Microsoft. They've done a much better job at that. And I think part of it is, you know, hiring MVPs who understand, hey, let's tap into and better leverage the MVP community. Yeah, I think the key is that a lot of those ex-MVPs and current MVPs will have had that face-to-face meeting with a customer where they've had to tell the customer, okay, we can't actually do what you need to do because there's no out-of-the-box solution for that. Whereas what Microsoft are offering now is there's not an out-of-the-box solution, but here's a set of tools that you can use if you know how to fill these gaps. So what are some of the primary customer scenarios? What are the common things, patterns that you're seeing and customers that are asking for help? Like what are the types of things they're asking for? One thing we're doing with a lot of customers now is governance around things like Microsoft Teams. So obviously Teams grows exponentially once you allow it loose. A lot of our customers are very security-orientated and what they like to automate as well. They don't have time necessarily for the overhead. And as an MSP, we don't necessarily want to take on that overhead of creating Teams for people. So we have a few customers that are using their custom solution we've built where we will provision a team from a catalog of Teams, but also apply sensitivity labels, apply domain whitelist, all that kind of structure from a catalog. So the customer knows how many Teams they have, what's in them, that kind of stuff. Yeah, I know that there are quite a few ISVs and consultancies that have developed provisioning platforms to do exactly that. So that you have common patterns within your organization, common structure, permission structures in place and being able to kind of take the guesswork out of that for end users. The most important part with end users is when it comes to this security in Microsoft 365 is when users are using it out of the box, it's really easy to use, it's really intuitive and there's a lot of work that's gone into that. If you apply a layer of security on top of that, then you're making your end user's job harder. And if you start doing that, then you kind of lose the end user's confidence. So you need to give them an easy way to do their job. And how important is the search for your customer? Because that's one of the things, and I've written articles about, I'm sure you've written similar things around the sprawl that happens. And sprawl can be a good thing. It's actually a sign that people are using, they're adopting, they're doing more. But then the need for good search becomes even greater. And so is that a problem area that you see for customers? Yeah, it's particularly a problem area in those customers that have over the last two years natively adopted teams internally. And it's kind of grown without these manual or without this structure on it. So I think it's kind of hard with users because they don't trust search yet, I find. Like a lot of users or a lot of organizations I spoke to about search, they kind of dismissed it because they don't know the improvements that have gone in. And then once you bring them in, you take them through the power that's under the hood there and even their configurable options within M365 search, or even the being home screen, the power that's in there, I use it all the time for my work documents. But they don't realize the fact there maybe because it's just been so busy the last couple of years with letting everybody work remotely. But once they see it, yeah, I think it really adds value. It's one of those things where, so I've actually switched my primary email to the cloud version of Outlook for some of the, you know, there's a lot of the cloud, you know, first features. And so using Outlook in a browser, which is open on my other screen, but using my office.com as that search launch page as well, for exactly that reason. So I'm, because usually when I'm searching for something, like the first place I'm looking is through my own assets. It's not just a generic, it's not a Bing or a Google search out there. What I'm looking for, I have to say, and I know it's improved a lot, but there are certain things when I'm looking for what I know is external content. I will usually attempt to find it if I can find it via Bing. But yeah, we don't have to get into, I'm not an expert on search and explain how they've tuned their, they've tuned their algorithms. But there's something to be said about when searching for specific things out externally. I find myself still going and using the Google search for a lot of those things. Yeah. So I've got Bing as my home page. Yep. But when I search in the top bar, it's Google. Yeah. Well, that's how I differentiate. If I open a new tab, I can search internally through Bing. But like it's better than it was. But yeah, maybe it's just a syntax difference. Like people need to get used to Bing. Yeah, I'm not sure. Yeah, I know. Well, it's one of those things where don't know how to address it. Well, I get harassed, for example, for, you know, I'm still a paid Zoom user. I use it for interviews for recording the video. And I don't use it for webinars. I don't use it for any other purposes other than interviews. People are like, why are you doing that? It's like, well, because when you care about the quality of the videos being recorded, Teams is just not up to par. It's not the primary scenario. When I'm doing internal meetings, like team meetings and multiple people in there and sharing different assets and being able to work within the channels, within the teams itself and all of those activities, I mean, Teams is fantastic. When I'm trying to do one-on-one interview or interview a couple different people or a client, I will use my paid Zoom just because the quality of the video. It's one of those areas of Microsoft, if you're paying attention, please improve. I don't want to pay for another third-party tool. Improve the quality of the video. Yeah, anyway. I think it kind of goes back to that user experience. For example, there are other tools out there that do a better job than some of the more or fill a gap that Microsoft 365 has and maybe has no intention of stepping into. But when you look at things like MCAS, you can actually provide this stuff to your users in a secure manner if you put in a little bit of groundwork, right? Yeah. Well, that's actually one of the reasons that I love on this topic, Teams in general, that if you have those other line of business applications, other kind of best of breed solutions out there, even if Microsoft has something in place, it's a quick way, easy way to kind of centralize those essential tools into a project into a team so that you at least have it all organized in one place. Yeah. At a very minimum, you can centralize your identity, your source of identity, to Azure AD. Right. And then you're providing already, it's a win, right? Yep. Well, that's great. I mean, there's a lot. I know that's one of those things too where I think is misunderstood about MVPs. We're not a bunch of sycophants that just drink the Kool-Aid on everything Microsoft. I mean, we need to get our work done. We have our jobs to do. There are tools that we love that are non-Microsoft technologies, and Microsoft trusts that we are utilizing kind of the best of breed solutions out there and providing feedback. And I think that's one of the differences. So we have, and as you will see in the various MVP threads and kind of behind the scenes conversations that happen, there's plenty of talk comparing Microsoft solutions to other solutions that are out there, and it's an opportunity to provide feedback. It's just how you provide the feedback. Some will go in and be the over-the-top troll-like negative and just beat up on Microsoft for things that they disagree with versus the be constructive and talk about user experiences, talk about differences, feature differences, and be more helpful in the guidance and the feedback to Microsoft. I think that's kind of what the code of conduct is all about. Yeah. I like, well, my experience so far, and again, I'm only kind of a month in now, but nobody, well, very few people say, this is bad changing. People come with solutions or suggestions. And it's that mentality, I think, really benefits the community. I love that philosophy is like, don't complain unless you have an idea of how it should be. I mean, there's nothing wrong with sometimes if you're like, hey, look, this is broken. I don't know what to do, but I go back to kind of my UX experience and development. If you've ever worked with a design company or the consultant building an interface and so it's like, well, what did you expect to happen here? So even if you don't know the answer, you can at least share, and I will go in and do like, I'm a, you know, I'm still like an MS paint guy where I'll grab a screenshot and then I'll go and do a mockup of like, this is what I think this should look like, this is what it should do. And, you know, and you can be very helpful in that way. And nobody then throws a fit that you're complaining that something is broken or you're not happy with the, you know, the out of the box experience. It's much more about like, this is closer to the scenarios and what you're trying to use this solution. So yeah, try to be helpful. It's it's what it's like, yeah, everybody's mother ever said, you know, if you don't have something nice to say, don't say it. Sort of true. Yeah. Yeah, I think a lot of people in the community, not just within the MVP community, but in the kind of Microsoft community, like you're there, almost everyone is a problem solver, right? By definition, but if that's their role. So they they're gonna start team and a lot of smart people there. So just a lot of brainpower working on making these suggestions as well. Well, that's, yeah, that is one of the things that I love the most about being an MVP is just being surrounded by, you know, the brain share, you know, the just really bright, capable people that are, I love just kind of reaching out and saying, hey, don't don't know the answer to this. What do you think? And getting all the feedback and getting different perspectives. It's fantastic. So hopefully, we'll be back in person next year with the annual MVP summit. And if it if it happens, I really highly recommend you make your way over to that if you can do it. Yeah, I'm looking, hopefully it does happen. I'm looking forward to it. Yeah. Well, awesome. Well, Sean, really appreciate your time today. People that want to find out more about you, what are the best ways to reach you? Which social channels do you most are you most active? Yes. So mostly share on Twitter and LinkedIn. So Sean underscore McAvue on LinkedIn, Sean McAvue, Sean underscore McAvue on Twitter and SeanMcAvue.net will be my blog and all my contact details are on there as well. Awesome. Again, I will have a blog post with the summary of all the links to all the various sites in your blog out on BuckleyPlanet.com so you can find it there as well as out on YouTube. So, well, Sean, really appreciate your time. Hopefully, we'll get a chance to meet up in person next year. Yeah. Yeah. I don't get over to that part of the world very often. I think it was three years ago. It's been three years since I was over in that part of the world. Too long. Yeah, about ignite 20. Was that 17, 2018? What was it 2019? What was the last one? The last ignite that was in person was 2019. Yeah. I remember. Three years. Yeah. I was at the last one. Yeah. Okay. Well, hopefully we'll see it one soon, but thanks a lot for your time today. Yeah. Thanks a lot.