 Hey everybody, this is Christian Buckley doing another MVP buzz chat. I'm talking today with Andrew. Hello. Hello there, thanks to me. Well, for folks that don't know you, who are you, where are you, and what do you do? I'm Andrew. I'm an Enterprise Mobility MVP. I'm an Intune Graph PowerShell nerd. And I'm in the northeast of England, currently cold and windy, northeast of England. Always windy up there. Well, I know that there are a couple things. You know, Enterprise Mobility MVPs. There's a bunch of them over the last several months that have switched over to security or have become dual MVPs in security. But one of the things is that, well, you know, most of the categories of MVPs kind of, it's like a bucket that includes a lot of things. Enterprise Mobility, there's a lot of different pieces that are within that category. So what's got your central focus? I like the graph PowerShell automation side. So I spend most day buried deep inside a VS Code terminal trying to work out what this button click is doing. I click it in the GUI and how I can automate it to not have to do that again. Very cool. Well, that's like, so that's like traditionally something in the automation side that covers kind of DevOps that covers, you know, there's a lot in that space. So kind of what's your day job? Like, what kind of stuff do you do you work on? You know, client-based? Is it consulting? It's, I've just recently moved. So I've been, you know, I've worked my way up from, you know, service desktops. This happened all the way through the hard way, as they say. I've done my stint in consulting and now I'm on the product side. So I'm looking at the technical things we need to do and automating whatever we can. So I'm not, I'm not customer facing other people deal with that. Yeah, I was interviewing somebody that was an enterprise mobility MVP yesterday. We were talking about like how, you know, like the traditionally the people that I know that started in like desktop support. So back in the old old days of setting up, you know, the desktop systems and then eventually laptops for new employees running cables when the necessary kind of doing it all for IT for a company that they evolved into this similar space where two of my friends are now CTOs that started in help desk support. And one of them was a music major and then just was really good at it and moved his way up. But it's a, is that kind of like your background as well? Yeah, absolutely. I mean, desktop support you could be jack of all trades really you've got to know the window side. You've got to have an idea of the server side, the networking side, as well as you know how the cables or plug in everything you've and you've got the user facing part, which in the EUC space is kind of critical, even when you get to consulting that way you're still, you're still speaking to the users, the users are just IT people rather than, you know, the secretary to desk. But that's what I find is the difference you've got your, you know, diehards is happening to don't like talking to people and then you got your desktop people who are a bit better at explaining terminology for the users. Yeah. Well, what was what was your path to becoming an MVP because you are you when did you receive yours. Last year, July, August. Okay, so you're, you're still not a full year in the role. I'm reading your time now. Yeah, what was your what was your path to becoming an MVP. Um, when I moved into consulting, I started blogging on, you know, issues I was finding fixes I was finding and then I've always been into PowerShell scripting so as soon as you know a customer has a problem about like I think I can script that we can automate this. So, you know, I'd have a folder full of scripts from various jobs and stuff that might as well share them, you know, I'm probably not going to use them again that other people have a turn. And it kind of went from there. People love that kind of stuff. You know, there's my first company started I mean we started where we were doing kind of the same thing we you know free tools, free add ons. And we started to get a lot of traffic. It's a great way to one given stuff out for free people love that for some reason. But when you have like novel approaches to solving common problems and, and then we started finding other people with trying to solve the same problem but with a different approach, but we started sharing that stuff becoming kind of a clearing for free add ons to this platform. This is back in the IBM technology that world, not in the Microsoft space, but that whole concept. You know, I just absolutely loved that, because that's a great way, not just to become an MVP if that's something that's your goal is, you know, sharing your work, giving that stuff out there, just from a pure networking standpoint, you know, if people finding people of like minds, you know, making connections, it's fantastic way of being connected. It's the thought that someone someone's using that script that you've written, and it just gives you that kind of that warm feeling inside that you've helped other people that MVP is just just a bonus. I just like, you know, if I've written the script, it seems just a shame that I've used it and no one else can see how good it is. Yeah. Well, it's, it's, you know, it's interesting in the space. I mean, there's it's, you know, Microsoft is regularly hires, you know, people from community, a lot of MVPs that are now over in inside the fold as blue badges. But that there's, you know, and yet they're still they're constantly encouraging all of us to like submit more names find people of like mind that are out there sharing doing this kind of stuff. They've submitted many names. If you are people reaching out to you now from your network and saying, Hey, how did you do this? How do I become an MVP? I've had more people reach out. Yes. And I noticed that as soon as you get the MVP pad, people come to you for help a lot more as well, which is, which is always nice. Not like my, my knowledge has changed in the past year, but I'm always happy to help people. So more than Mary. They used to hand out. This is a while back, but they used to hand out like Microsoft support cards like business card things with like a free hour of tech support or something. They gave that out to new MVPs at least the first couple of years that I was in the system. But yeah, I haven't seen that in a while. Haven't heard about that in a while. And that was the idea. So what happens is if you're wearing any of your branded garb, you're sitting on an airplane, inevitably somebody's asses like, Oh, yeah, you work for Microsoft like no, no, no. I'm, you know, I'm a partner with and I'm a Microsoft MVP. So I'm an expert in some and then they start asking you about something. How do you face that printer? It's only unrelated to your area of focus. Yeah. Absolutely. I don't have that ability though, because it probably does fall into my area of focus. Well, that's a lot of the problems that we'll see. That's the thing. I mean, people would then say go into issues that they're having. Now I hear more about questions about Azure. I'm like, God, I'm not the guy, but here's three names of people that you should go check out that will respond to you. But that is, you know, that is a benefit though. I mean, you see somebody who's an MVP and even if it's not their area, I mean, you and I are, we're connecting with other people, other MVPs and, you know, we are more likely to be able to know somebody who might know that answer and refer to them. So it's a tight community where everyone kind of knows each other. I mean, I've only been a year yet and I already feel like I know half the enterprise mobility ones and loads outside that. Well, it's always one of the hardest things for somebody coming approaching, you know, is dropping the fear to move past it, ask the questions. That's the hardest for humans to do that, to reach out when you have questions. But, you know, MVPs are some of the most social beings within the ecosystem. So, you know, we're usually happy to help out. And I'm, I honestly, people, it's like, don't apologize, come up, ask a question. If I'm busy, like, I'll let you know, it's like, hey, I don't, I don't have time respond right now. Or, you know, if I don't respond to the email right away, it's because I'm working on other stuff. But eventually I will respond to that. But for some of the people that know me know how to catch me, I'm not going to give out that information how to, you know, funny enough, I don't respond to, to text messages. Like I've been texting you, my wife will tell me that I'm like, Oh, really? Oh yeah, 32 texts. Oh, you know, I'm on the same. Yeah, you know, you'll get replied probably within 24 hours. Send me a text. It could be three, four days. Yep. Well, it's now, you know, through, you know, chat within the monitor, but yeah, I'm in front of the monitors all day. The phone is charging over to the side, you know, I'm old fashioned that way. I like to use my phone to make calls. Yeah, I don't understand the whole. Stare at your phone in public areas stuff. Yeah. Well, people who walk around on speakerphone. It's literally a phone put up to your ear. Yeah. Well, so what other what, what topics are kind of hot topics for you right now with everything that Microsoft is constantly pushing out there what are kind of your big topics that you're speaking about and writing about right now. My, my big thing at the moment is, is kind of infrastructure as a code. So the recent ones been pushing our apps through win get with a like a pipeline approach at work I'm trying to automate into deployments using a pipeline and then, you know, push out upgrades across customers using that method so you don't have to sit in a gooey and copy paste settings. That's that's that's my area of interest. There's been a lot of talk on drivers this week, but I'll let Walter patch you with that. Well, that's not my world at all. So I mean, this is all, you know, learning here about this stuff. It's funny as I go and I again have been or been around I've been in it my entire career 32 years and you know, sitting and listening to people talk about it. It takes a few moments to register I go back and I just remember all my buddies that we're doing the help desk support of all of the, you know, the hundreds of people within our, our company, and kind of what they're going into kind of equating it to that. But yeah, before the flashbacks hit. That's right. Yeah. Yeah, the, it's, yeah, it's just, well, that's just like, just remember people coming up and asking questions for an MVP and asking for, you know, questions about Azure problems that they're having I more likely to be able to answer questions around, you know, why one drive is not syncing and that stuff, but get in and ask questions about SharePoint about teams about the collaboration technology is like, hey, I'll talk your ear off. But when you get in to start talking about driver updates and about automating in tune deployments like Excellent. That sounds great. See, it's the opposite for me because voice has always been that I've never got anywhere in the year. So since people talk about teams voice and stuff, I just going to know that No, that's true for a lot of us too. There's two kinds of, you know, teams, they're like teams, MVPs, there's people that are on the collaborate collaboration side, and then there's unified communications, the telephony side of things, which is a whole different skill set. I wish I had some of those skills. I actually have a conversation with like I just found out that there's integration with one of the major mobile phone carriers in the US and I'm not sure if it's global, but with integration of teams I just saw the announcement. And I'm like, I want to find out I want to be able to answer those questions but I spent the first half of my career in telecom world so working for the phone company. So not doing telephony stuff doing it stuff, but Close enough. Yeah, but I'd like to be able to answer some of those questions. But of course now that we have chat GPT. You don't need to answer just there, right? Yeah. Whether they're right or not, that doesn't matter. That's always been true about search, you know. Well, it's funny you've got Clippy behind you that just it makes me think it's it's a it really is kind of the Clippy 2.0. Yeah, they should really put Clippy on it. I think so too. When somebody just needs to go and take the initiative and create the app that's the Clippy interface into that GPT. I'm surprised somebody hasn't done it yet. See the problem is now that that previously we've done customer calls quickly Googling things quietly and how the customers chat GPT and querying what you're telling them and it's it's going to get a whole lot of. Yeah, well that is to your earlier point too is whether it's accurate or not. I know if you've done that I'm like I've gone and I found things where it's providing. Oh, and here's the documentation wrong broken links wrong links. It's very repetitive. It's like generic. It's like how is it building these. I guess it's learning, but I have found a lot of wrong answers. It guesses and then makes it sound right. And you type it gives you a power shock and you type it doesn't exist. Yeah, but it's a real. Well it's I'm what I like about it is that you know it is a great way to to unblock you if you're stuck on things but you can't rely on 100% that what it says it's more of looking through so I look at as a is a great. You know tool, but ultimately you still have to go through and pick out the things that are correct or that are useful. Yeah, you've got to know what to ask and then you've got to be able to understand what it's fitting out to be able to pick out, you know the bit that you stuck on as an idea generator as a way to point you in different directions. It is a great tool. Yeah, I'm sure I use it. I use it the other day to help me with a bit of rejects because that's that's like black magic that stuff. That's it. Yeah, because that's pretty tricky mess things. It wasn't bad. It put me in it didn't fix it, but it put me well on the right direction. Well, that's fantastic. I mean that's that's what you want. I mean, you can hear people using it to create like power automate, you know, complete, you know, flows, and which is interesting. I mean, like anything you've got to test it and see if it is actually giving you back what you wanted within that. But if it can speed up a lot of that process and get smarter over time then what a what an incredible tool. Exactly. Exactly. It's helping us do our job better than rather than doing our job for us. Yeah. Very cool. So what kind of stuff do you do in the community? Are you very active in user group? Are you doing a lot of events? We've got there's a large engine group. I'm a contributor for events of trying to but obviously it's quite a niche, niche area. Here you see most people just go, that's not as attractive as security or DevOps or something. Yeah. Nobody wants to learn how to build windows, let's be honest. But I'm working on that front. I don't know. If you find the right event, you know, for that, I bet that's the kind of sleeper topic that you go in there and find that you've got the standing room only session on that topic. You know, when I started out, so I've been for almost 12 years at MVP, when I started out as a SharePoint MVP, and I was one of the only people out there talking about the topic of governance. So not just building it, but how are we actually managing what we're building and what, what is the governance, you know, the oversight of the things that we're building and what does that look like. And, and I'd be like the only governance topic on the agenda for an entire conference, and you'd get, you know, 20, 30 people in some rooms that I'd have 150 people in that room. So, you know, there's a lot of hunger for that content. So sometimes being the outlier, that's how you make change happen. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. I'm on the wrong side of the pond, which probably doesn't help either. Yeah. I think it sounds like in person events are coming back with the fury over here in the US but starting to see them slowly pick up. Yeah, they're getting there over here but I don't quite the speed that you've got over there. Yeah. See, there's a huge event that's happening Microsoft focused event happening in Las Vegas in May and a lot of questions of whether the numbers will the people will turn out for that in the numbers again if, you know, love to get back to normal. Yeah, whatever that is but well Andrew is great connecting with you and getting to know you for folks that want to reach out and connect with you what are the best ways to reach you via in social. LinkedIn. That's the main place for our high out. I'm on Masters as well but finding me might be tricky. So, so start with LinkedIn and take it from there. Okay. All the links from my website as well to all my various social media. And of course I'll have all of your links that are out on the blog post to point people in your direction as well. And well Andrew is really great talking to you. And we'll hope to see you at an event in the future. Fingers crossed. Yes.