 Hey everybody, it's Christian Buckley doing another MVP buzz chat and I'm talking today with Pam. Hello. Hello. How are you? It's nice to be here. Doing well. It's great to have you. And for folks that don't know you, who are you, where are you, and what do you do? My name is Pam DeGraphenried. I'm a Microsoft MVP in apps and services. And I've been working in SharePoint really since 2008. I love the Power Platform, but I still identify as a SharePoint person. And I work at Oak Ridge National Lab in Oak Ridge. Oak Ridge, Tennessee. Yeah. No, it's okay to identify as a SharePoint person because as we keep hearing 2024 is going to be another huge year for SharePoint, lots of announcements coming up. So exciting. So exciting. I think we had this period where things kind of dried up with SharePoint. There wasn't a lot going on. And so when I got awarded my MVP, I think last March was right when they started announcing like this is the new pages that are coming to SharePoints. Now we have SharePoint Premium. Like there's so much investment in SharePoint right now. They're branding center. Super excited about that. And it's a great, great time to be an MVP and be working in SharePoint again. And I know that when they did the back in 2016, when they did the San Francisco event, and I was lucky enough to have been invited down as one of the MVPs, a group of us, I think about 20 of us that were invited to be there in person with a bunch of Microsoft people and a bunch of press down inside of San Francisco. They announced kind of the refresh of SharePoint was the making SharePoint more beautiful. So the joke now is of course Microsoft is not telling us yet all of what they're planning for this year around SharePoint. So the running joke is that it's making SharePoint even more beautiful. So we just have that to, to, to expect. Right. Right. Yeah. The other joke I hear all the time is modern and we're talking about modern SharePoint and it's kind of a post-modern era. Yeah, we're in that post-modern era. 2016. That's right. What was the other name for modern? It had a, because there was a font and stuff associated with it, Metro. That's right. So we're, that was the name. I think that was the, actually the name of the font around the modern and all of that with, with Windows and with, you know, Office 365, but well, that's, that's very cool. Well, you know, so haven't, you know, come up in the space. So, you know, it's always good to hear from MVPs, especially newer MVPs, like what was that experience, you know, entering the program? What was your path to becoming an MVP? You know, my path, it's interesting. So I started working. I was already in IT, but I started working with SharePoint in 2008 and I immediately got involved in the user group and things like that. And I went to my first SharePoint class. It was taught by Asa Brahmadi, so MVP. So that was in 2008. So fast forward a couple of years later, I'm doing SharePoint designer info path forms, working in SharePoints and I was getting all of these business questions about the solutions that we built. So of course, your name is all over everything in SharePoints designer and info path. So I wrote this article about using custom help. That was a feature that used to be able to use in SharePoint and off the solid. And so we kind of reconnected and we started talking. He was running a SharePoint admin user group at that point, kind of doing like a webinar podcast roundtable thing. So I ended up getting involved with that. I worked with him for a couple of years on that. And then he was the one who started talking to me about becoming an MVP and kind of helped guide me through that process. So yeah, Asif is one of those people. I put Asif in the the the old school SharePoint people bucket. There's I was talking with like Shane Young and Andrew Connell and a few others. And I referred to both that is the old school. They're like, of course, these guys are like 10 years younger than me, too. It's just kind of funny to to name it that. But I always felt my like I was I came in as this. I called the second wave of SharePoint people like I got involved in the community. I left Microsoft in 2009, attended the SharePoint conference that fall went to a little ISV in Seattle that was highly recommended by members of the product team. Eight months later, we get acquired three and a half years later, that company gets acquired. So like just a lot of rabid activity within this the space around community. So I always looked up to that group of people, you know, seeing what they went through when they didn't have all the resources that we have. As much as I am an advocate for like SharePoint Saturday events, all the community day events, I've organized dozens of those events. The travels that I've done over the world around the world. Again, they didn't have all the pieces. They didn't have the sites they had they had like a DL, you know, just an email list that you're sharing and trying to coordinate things. They didn't have the teams. They didn't have the global efforts that we now have in place. Yeah, different world, very different worlds. You know, I've been involved in the user group forever since 2008. I mean, almost immediately I started running the user group and really getting involved and leading it in 2014. So that group has meant so much to me. But you talk about the tools that we had to set it up. I mean, it was emails and we had our own little distribution list. Sometimes we had Excel spreadsheets. We went through lots of different things. Of course, free event rights or something like that. That helped. That probably worked the best for us. But it's that getting that communication out to people and promoting things and all of that, the tools have definitely improved a lot. Yeah, well, and now you have, I mean, working with Tom Daly and the the Community Days platform is great. We're actually doing ours through the European groups that have put together the collab days. So that's why we have our collab days. Utah is how we branded ours. But you have options. There's different tools that are out there and some people might ask, why would you use collab days and not the Community Days resources? And it really is the platform that's on. You know, they share calendars. I mean, we still have our event like ours is coming up on April 19th here in Utah. It's on the Community Days calendar. We've got a page set up for that. But we're using the platform because of the mix of tools that they have. We just preferred it. It just worked for us. So you've got options. That's interesting. I didn't know we had options. So yeah, I would definitely be interested in learning more about that. That's that's pretty cool. Yeah, they all have integrations. I said that they both have integrations with session eyes and other stuff. But again, 10 years ago when I the first SharePoint Saturday that I helped organize was in Northern California. So I'm born and raised in San Francisco Bay Area. And we did our SharePoint Saturday. East Bay was held in San Ramon, California, right by Pacific Bells, the old headquarters there in San Ramon. And and then we did a week later, SharePoint Saturday, Los Angeles. And it was actually Karawana, Katimo and I that were the lead organizers of that event. She was at Skechers at the time and organized that event. So pulling all that together. Then I took over later that year of the the one on Redmond at Microsoft campus and and help launch others. But again, we didn't have all those tools. So we were we built like a standalone website. We it was painful to be able to like even just share the schedule. And then the what's inevitable is all the changes, constant change of the schedules. People dropped out, sessions, titles changed, the timing of the schedule changed. And yeah, so it's great now to have the tools that automate all of that. I am so happy with Session Eyes right now. It's been so helpful in planning our community day and just kind of the call for speakers, people go, they fill it out. Like everything you need is in there and you can customize it. And, you know, I would definitely I know that there's other tools out there and other things that are available. But going from not having something like Session Eyes to having Session Eyes is just fantastic. Are you using it for your user group as well to find speakers? So I actually just set that up. I want to say like two weeks ago. So I haven't been using it. It's it's interesting because, you know, pre COVID all of our speakers almost were local and now finding local speakers is it's just a real challenge. So, you know, we've been struggling with that and getting hopefully Session Eyes really helps us with that as far as getting some promotion and some visibility. And I've definitely picked up a couple of user groups that we're looking for people to present and so. Well, I know that because Session Eyes for the longest time didn't support that. It was for events only. And of course, for folks that don't know, you can use Session Eyes for free if you're doing a free event like these community days, collab days, events. And so it's which is great. It's I mean, it's not very expensive if you're doing a paid event. But yeah, to have that they didn't support user groups and they just open that up, I think last summer, like for the first time, open that up. And so we've been using it. Same thing like finding local speakers. We're going through this right now that we're so in focused on our collab days event. We forgot to get our speaker for January. I think we're set up for February. We forgot January. And so we're scrambling again. Yes, same. Pam, are you interested in coming to talk about SharePoint or user group? I think I actually just talked for your user group a couple of months ago. Yeah, but but it's yeah, it's great to have the tools. It's changed again. It's gotten easier at the same time. It's gotten more difficult, as you say, like we're we're trying. We're doing hybrid right now. And we're we're really struggling to get people. We've got a great location, but we're struggling to get people to come in. Not just the fact that we have a blizzard happening this this week. But no, it's it's we we struggled with that. And then we get a lot of what we when we promote what we have. And so most of our speakers are remote and so we've got a huge wall. So we're there, there's food and then not that many people. We get four or five people showing up and 20, 30 people that are dialing in and which is great for finding a variety of speakers and covering different topics. But, you know, most of those people that are dialing in are not within our region either. So we're we're struggling like to reach the region. Yeah, so what's worked really well for us. And I don't know that this works for other areas. The user groups, the presentations, we've been we're going to continue to keep those virtual. Having that hybrid experience, it's just kind of weird, especially like at one point, we had people spread out all over a room. We had a virtual presenter, people online, and then, you know, someone in the back of the room has a question and we have to run to the front of the room and try to unmute it real quickly or like raise a hand. It just it's so much more natural to have those conversations on teams where you can just raise your hands or type something in chat and everybody can do it on their own independently. We've also been having like a week after is just kind of a follow up networking lunch, and so we just do that at a local restaurant that's fantastic. And we all love and we have a sponsor who buys buys appetizers enough appetizers to really you don't have to order anything if you don't want to. And we just sit around and talk. I've kind of outgrown that location because if I don't put a limit on it, you know, I can have 15, 20 people maybe show up. So I've tried to like tone down the advertising on that because I put it on LinkedIn and I was getting a lot more people. So I'm looking for a bigger place to have lunch brought in, but that come out have lunch network and talk seems to bring people out a lot easier than comes in or, you know, we're going to have a watching session for an online presentation. So we used to do that with the as I was on the board for the Puget Sound user group and I know that's moved. It's now if the group is even still meaning they were they moved over to Microsoft campus and but I was in Seattle, lived there for 12 years. But since I've been back here, I mean, we used to do that more frequently than we're doing now. And I liked what we did in Seattle. It was about a quarterly basis. So it wasn't like every month networking, but it was easier to quarterly basis to find a couple sponsors to put the bill for food and drinks. But you're right. I think we got a as good of a turnout for that event. And it was interesting, too. It was a slightly different mix of people was the Seattle user group. We always had excellent turnout for that that event. But then you see about half those people and then different people that didn't show up for the content that show up for the networking side still working in the space and and so it's just good to to mix it up. So you reach different people and get the different interests. Yeah, we so we have the East Tennessee B.I. user group as well as the Knoxville Microsoft 365 user group. So I have been trying to bring those groups together. But one of the things they've been asking for is yes, we need a bigger space. But we need like people on different sides of the room so you can venture over to the B.I. area and talk to them. But you can also like wander back over the absent services people. Well, yeah, well, it's almost like somebody even called it. We did. We tried different. I don't want to call it games or tactics to to kind of break it up. It just it makes me think of like like teaching a large class of of kids at Sunday School where it's you break them off into groups so they can have small conversations, you give them a little assignment and then come back and report back to the group. We used to do things like that again in the Seattle user group where we would, you know, give them like problems to go and discuss and how would you approach this? And I really liked those activities because you just get very diverse responses depending on who's in the little subgroups sitting there. So again, other other ideas of getting getting people more engaged in the user group. Do you do guys do you guys do like a regular like an annual poll? Like what topics do people want to hear about? What speakers you're interested in seeing? We should. That's a great idea. That's like where we we did it year before last. So we did it twenty twenty two. I don't think we did it this last year. But yeah, it's something else I think we need to do soon. Another thing I'm trying to do is kind of generate some conversations on our LinkedIn. So I've started posting a couple of polls just every couple of weeks. Like, you know, hey, and especially to promote things like I know the Microsoft has these monthly challenges on different technologies. And, you know, I've got a couple of groups just making sure that we put those out there that people know that they're there because, again, people are looking to learn virtually like that seems to happen either at home or work, but in your own space with your own stuff. So I just want to make sure that we communicate that. And also like how interested are you in things like fabric or the AI builds or or, you know, any of the different things that are coming out. And for people who aren't you have something new that they want to learn, you know, they can go back and look the old challenges like there's the graph one that I went through and just to kind of, you know, learn about what's out there. And so so that's my goal. I'm hoping that I can build some engagement there on that LinkedIn community. Just talking about those things. Yeah, we've had we have the same thing. We've got a LinkedIn community. I was going to ask whether you also have for your user group a team. Do you have teams up and running where people can share there? Are you seeing more engagement over to LinkedIn? You're shaking your hands. I need to narrow down my platforms. Yeah. Well, I know. Oh, I know. We all have that problem. If I if I have somebody else that is, you know, interested and willing to monitor and facilitate like another platform, I would love that. I think having our own teams would be great. I have bandwidth for one. And so that's where everything is. So I know because that's part of the community days platform is you have access to that. Again, we had access. We we declined because we already had our own tenant for a user group. So we're not really using that other thing. I looked at it as something like as NBPs, one of the perks we recently received was the new co-pilot, you know, get access to co-pilot. And I was like, oh, excellent. I'm excited about that. And then it's like, oh, it's on yet another new tenant login, another space out. There's a great yet another place to go and log into and see what activities happening. I mean, fortunately, we have like the work spaces, profiles, thing and edge now, right? Because the worst part of that was when you didn't. Right. No, it's it's much better in the new team's client. It makes it much easier to shift unless you have issues with with one of your major accounts, as I do. So I have everything in the new except my primary account, which I have to use in the old. So I have two versions of Outlook running. I have two versions of teams always running or one in the browser, everything else in the thing. So yeah, I I'd love to have a smooth experience, a transition to something new. But there always seems to be something, some outlier. There's some security setting. There's something that's messing it up. But now we are using that's your question about the teams. We are using the teams for the community day. And that is more for the committee and the speakers to kind of communicate. We're not using it for just chatting and connecting with like the user group. Go, go, yeah. Well, it's again, it's nice to have options. I remember not having any of those options. We'd actually go grab a domain, create a website, go through all of that. We tried to do some integrations. We tried. We ended up, in fact, I think we still have our like it was like SharePoint, Utah, or something or other like a site, an old school website that's sitting out there has been updated in years, but still out there because that was how we got information out of speakers of sessions of that stuff prior to all of this becoming available. This is pre teams people. So teams wasn't even it wasn't a glimmer in the eye. Maybe it's a glimmer. Probably not. It was a while back. It was probably Skype at the time. Right. That's right. The old live properties, right? Well, Pam, I really, really appreciate your time and in chatting. And hopefully I'll see you a couple of times this spring, summer. There's a lot of events that are coming coming up. Hopefully get out and, you know, love to be able to participate in your event coming up in February, March as well. But for folks that want to connect with you, reach out to you. Where are you most active in social work? Can people find you? LinkedIn, LinkedIn. Yeah, Pam, digraph. I just kind of cut like my name in half because it's so long and I can be hard to find, but it's D E G R A F F and digraph. You can find me on. Excellent. Well, of course, I'll have the links out on the the podcast on the on YouTube as well as on the blog. So Pam, it's great talking to you. Great talking to you too. Thank you.