 Welcome to another MVP buzz chat and I'm talking today with Josh. Hello. Hi. Yeah. Thanks for having me along. Really good to be here. It's great to have you for folks that don't know who you are. Why don't you give us an introduction? Who you are, where you are, what you do? Yeah, perfect. Well, Josh Anglesey. I'm a system architect. I work for a Microsoft partner in the UK called Expedition. We specialize in the dynamics areas of customer engagement and then also business central. We do plenty of dealings of power platform as well as results of that. I've been working for those guys for a number of years. I've been in the business application space for a decade or so now. I really love getting involved in the product, thinking of new ideas and trying to get more enthusiastic about the community for sure. I've done plenty of things and that's how I got the award in the first place. Being in this space that long, there's been a lot of changes in the technology, obviously with the rise of the power platform. What were you working on prior to the power platform? What was your background? Yeah. Well, from a point of view, I did business studies. I never did anything to do with IT. But I had a course I did at university, allowed for a year in industry. The company that I worked for was a large UK bank, Lloyds Banking Group, and it was in the IT area. I just got given it really. After I'd finished, I'll go into that space. That's what I've learned about. I started off as a super user, IT coordinator for an end user who built in special resin products across Europe. They had a really old version of Navision 2.6, which is 1989, I think. That was my first exposure to ERP and then what later became the other names of the product. I talked to it really quickly. I really enjoyed dealing with the little projects that they had. I wanted to scale that, if I could, for myself and then progress a little bit. I joined the support team and a different Microsoft partner. That was an eye-opener because you've got loads of people on loads of different versions. You need to know all the nuances of the different versions and the quirks of that version. You don't have that and that's a little bit broken in that one. It's like a full-time job just doing that. Some of the articles on my blog historically that have done the best are exactly that, where it's a version comparison and talking about those nuances, which can be tricky. It doesn't help that every once in a while Microsoft will do an update and say, well, this feature, which had gone away and it's back again. You have to be on a week-by-week basis paying attention to what's happening across all those versions. You do it. It probably also helps you with content sometimes because you'll think, well, that part that they took away was actually quite useful for X, Y and Z. Why don't we try and repurpose that in a more modern way? I'd lean towards that quite regularly with Power Platform especially. A lot of my blog posts and more to do with, let's try and do something in business. We've put business essential data all in business essential but with the Power Platform instead so I can do it in the lowest coding possible way that's available to me. That's the kind of mantra that Microsoft are pushing out now is that you can't get it done and change your business process. Try and Power Platform first. If that isn't going to work, then you can go ahead and do the customization in business essential. You think that just makes sense and hopefully organizations have gotten, well, not hopefully, they have gotten a lot smarter about this idea that it used to be organizations would start off thinking, we'll go build this custom solution because we want it tailored for the unique things within our organization. But then every time Microsoft didn't update, solutions would break. Every time a new version came out, solutions would break. Microsoft changes its strategy around the solutions. Those things break. So it was a full-time job. That was a lot of the enterprise, the IT Pro role was fixing broken solutions within organization. Building on a platform means that in theory, that is the platform changes and evolves and new things are added, that it's a modification. It's a tuning rather than rebuilding every time. Yeah, and the development tools themselves have really stepped up their game. Used to using as your DevOps, for instance, or GitHub, then being able to push out things just as text files and then all of a sudden you don't have to do any of the code merges yourself and that kind of thing. So it's very good for version tracking and those types of things. Yes, it's very exciting space to work in. That's one of the things I really love about working with Microsoft especially that is always changing. There's always something to learn. I think initially when you join the space, that's quite a daunting thing. I was younger, so I always felt like I knew some stuff and then the rug was pulled under my feet and I had to learn new stuff. But when you kind of think about it's actually quite exciting and you can end up specializing in certain sections. Well, I think that's what kind of drew me into the IT world as well as being a guy with two marketing degrees. And I think in my 30-year career, I've had actually a marketing role one time, like a true marketing role. And I did that for about two years and now I need to have half of my time over within the technology and that I feel more comfortable in that space. But I like your story too coming from not from the technical background per se, but finding a path in. How long have you been in MVP now? You're a seasoned MVP. You've been around for a while inside the program. No, but that's exciting to say. How did you become an MVP? What was your path towards becoming an MVP? Initially, I kind of started to think into lockdown times in 2020. I had a lot more free time in the sense that part of it, the big part of my job was to go and see customers. So you'd be traveling for a number of hours. You'd be with them and then you'd go and travel home and all of that time all of a sudden just became available to me, which was really strange because I've been going maybe five years straight, just being in like a hotel a couple of nights a week or something like that. So that was really weird. I was always home as well, which was also very strange. So I just sort of felt like I could add an appetite for continuing to do a little bit with the product and I just figured, okay, well I'll start off by doing some forum work, the dynamics community forum person, a lot of entries on there over 2020 up to this point in time now. That was a big part of it. I decided to start doing a blog, which was yeah, just to kind of one, it's you might have a go at something and you think that's quite neat and interesting. Maybe someone else will like it. I'll write about it. Also, I find it's helpful. I'll probably end up forgetting exactly what I did when I was in that headspace. So if I write it down there and then I can go back to it. Sometimes I might. The other thing I ended up doing was a few virtual events that felt really accessible to me personally. I've got a young family going away now doesn't feel as easy to do but do some of the virtual events was very accessible and they're all very well organized as well. A very helpful set of people to take you along and it's just have a go at it really. Doing presentations isn't anything new to me. I have a primary role with the expedition is to do pre-sales. I'm kind of like the guy who just plays with the software. That's a great skill that's something and people can learn that. I know that it's very intimidating for people that are brand new. The fact that I can go and answer questions in the forum. I can do a blog post but to go and present and put yourself out there and potentially have people beating you up. People are nice. Honestly, I've heard horror stories. I've never experienced in all of my time anything like that personally. Certainly I've had hard questions and there's a way to if you don't know the answer. The best thing to do is not fudge it but saying that's a great question. I don't know but let me go find out if I can't find the solution. I'll go and research that. I actually do that. I like forum questions for that. I don't do as many now in that. I do a live a monthly AMA with other friends as a panel but by going in and doing that, answering forum questions, you may know part of it but it also is a great way for you to be like, you know, that's a great... I don't know the twist on that question. Let me go research that. Let me go find that out so I can share the piece that I know, the half of the answer I can provide and go and dig and more quickly find the other half of the answer and then provide that. I mean it's rewarding personally to go and do that but helps that one person and potentially others who find that thread. Yeah, of course it does and it really appeals to problem solving type skills because it might be a topic you think, oh that's really interesting. I'm glad they've asked that question because I want to know the answer and then that's usually what makes you infuse. It takes a go ahead and then get something done with it. That's why I found it Yeah for sure. So how do you kind of keep up? Because that's another popular question that comes out especially within like the power platform world of what's happening with dynamics, there's a lot coming out. It's very fast paced so what do you do to kind of keep up? Yeah, so given that we're not only looking at biannual updates, sometimes they might throw in some updates on monthly increments as well. So yeah I think using Microsoft Box is a huge thing so I will look at release notes and things of that nature but probably my favourite place is Twitter. I'll follow certain hashtags are part of a few different lists and I follow a number of different people either in who are MVPs already in those different spaces or just really avid community contributors. I find that really helpful. It's a nice community to engage with as well. You don't have to be scared to put yourself out there. People are very pleasant. As long as you ignore the politics and religious conversations which you should do in professional discussions anyway but if that stuff is pushed aside, it's a tremendous resource, a great way of finding people. I'm doing more and more. I know communities on LinkedIn have not been as popular over the last few years but hashtags and finding, just like on Twitter, finding people and topics via hashtags on LinkedIn is another great resource but I do that. Twitter is up throughout the day for the exact same reason. Yeah, definitely. I should never doubt when I come up and post on it so you want to keep in tune with things. Yeah. Again, it's a great way to drive the conversation too and just further amplify if you have, well now I'm just kind of getting into this. This is the marketing hat coming on about amplifying your message but if you're doing things, if you've answered a hard question in a forum which you've then expanded on and shared your solution and the research that you've done in a blog post, you want to spread the news and answer additional questions so it's this continuum of conversation that happens and for a lot of, some people I know there's a lot of anti-Facebook people out there but the Microsoft communities, the technology communities on Facebook are massive. Like the team's community that I spend a lot of time and I find questions that we answer in our AMAs. That one has I think like 60,000 people in it so they're pretty sizable. Yeah. I didn't know. Yeah. Yeah. So it's one of those places where in fact I was talking with a friend through our local user group who had removed Facebook app and was trying to ignore it and blames me for drawing him back in making him go look at Facebook again because of all the community activity. Okay. But well it's very, very cool. Well what else is going on? Any other events? What's the rest of your year look like? Anything else of note that we should take a look at? I'm going to be doing a number of different blog posts and it's probably going to be my main activity. I'm trying not to do as many events this year at the moment, just for now. I'm recently brought by, we had a daughter in May. She was due in August at the end of August. Oh, okay. She was very, very premature. Yeah. So this year it's been like, I mean 2020 wasn't very good either but 2021's been quite rough as well. So just enjoying being at home, having her and I think next year I'll try to look at doing some more events. We had directions really recently. It's one of the directions EMA which is one of the big ones for business center at least. I didn't get to go to that this year but hopefully next year I'll go hopefully retain my MVP and I can go as an MVP. That'd be really cool. But one thing I'd say is that commend you for that because there's no amount of I'm going to just steal somebody else's line here but there's no amount of success at work that makes up for missing out on those family times. So yeah, I saw the picture. So congrats on bringing your daughter home and hope all as well for that. But well, very cool. Well, it's been great to chat with you. We're doing really good at the moment. That's excellent and I really appreciate you taking the time to chat and get to know you. Hopefully we'll see you in person at the MVP Summit next year. I don't know yet whether Microsoft will be doing the in person. I sure hope so. That'd be cool. As you know, I mean there's no amount of and I'll just butcher that a quote even more. No amount of online events can make up for the face-to-face contact. The human connections that's made when we get together physically in the same place. So hoping to get back into the norm next year and be able to see people at the event. Yeah, we've all missed it. So it'd be nice to get back into this week of things. Yeah, definitely. Well, folks at Josh that want to find out more about you and get in touch with you. What are the best ways to reach you via social? Yeah, so social, you can get me on the handle of at Josh Anglesey. And from a blog point of view, you want to hit me up on that. To those Josh Anglesey.wordpros.com. Excellent. And I will of course, for those that are watching the video, catch us on YouTube or via social. If you go to Buckleyplanet.com, of course I'll have a blog post that they'll have all of Josh's links. So you'll be able to find his information, his MVP profile, his blog, all those things. So Josh, really appreciate your time and hope to meet you in person soon.