 This is Christian Buckley doing another MVP buzz chat with another brand new MVP. Hey, Don, how's it going? It's going great. It's kind of busy right now. Just trying to keep up with everything. Of course. Well, that get used to that. That's it. Well, we work in the modern workplace space, the ecosystem. That's kind of the story now. It's constantly trying to keep up with what's going on. But for folks that don't know you, who you are, where you are, what you do, why don't you give us that intro? Sure. I'm Don Kirkham. I currently work for GM Financial, which is the captive financial arm for General Motors is my full-time position. I also have a small consulting company where I do side work and just about everything. I was brought on to GMF to basically lead their Office 365 effort that we were just getting started at that point. So getting everything set up. And then we're just now starting to do the major migrations. And so that's so I kind of my self title is I'm the lead collaboration architect. So we just try and put everything together. But just getting ready. We'll just we need to take a snapshot of your face now, just before the migration start and see. Yeah, fortunately, it looks like we're going to be hired some third parties to try and help us do that. We'll set it all up and they'll kind of take care of the bulk of it. So that that'll be great. I would like that. So having done some migrations in the past, I'll hand off anything anyone wants to take. So well, so we were hanging out last fall and trying to remember the month of it for the North American Collab Summit September September. It's all a blur. So I know that was those that, yes, we did an in-person event. It was a hybrid in that, which was like my first time doing that. And and the online portion of it went really well. I thought so too. But yeah, so it'll be good to see. I know that event is coming back and I'm I'm speaking at it again. So, you know, hopefully we'll see you there. But what are what are your topics? What are your passions right now? So so I'm an MVP in office development and that's a great title for what for what I really love. So I've been doing development since college. I took I was a compside major, but I took a little 20 year break to go do something else in the Air Force, which is flyer planes, which is why you see a lot of plane stuff and but came back into the IT world and have just really been concentrating on the SharePoint Azure development experience, especially for new developers, just trying to get people excited about it. You know, it's the model has changed again. I think this model is going to stick around for a while. But just trying to it's it's different. It's completely different than all the previous models we've used. So just get them excited about doing that. So I have to put my fake journalist hat on here and say, OK, so Don, tell me, how has it changed in what way? Why don't you expand on that? Sure. Well, I mean, when I started doing SharePoint two thousand and six years or so somewhere around there. So Moss 2007 was just coming out at that point. And so most of your SharePoint development was all done by putting code compiled code into the server. And so you were running your code on the SharePoint servers. Well, once we started moving to the online model, that doesn't work. Microsoft certainly not going to let us put our code on their servers. So we've changed from this code on the server model to this completely disconnected model where you build everything in the client, whether that's, you know, a blazer app or a web app or SharePoint, and then you connect to SharePoint using the APIs and the APIs have really gotten good. The rest APIs and there's the Azure API, there's a lot of different APIs you can go through the graph is is is really awesome right now. And and then you just interact with SharePoint that way. So if you need to push that and you pull data permissions, whatever you need to do, it's all done remotely. And it keeps us from messing up too much. What's going on in the Microsoft cloud? It is interesting. You look at the evolution of that. I mean, that it came with 2010 with sandbox solutions. It was like really moving this direction. And I think, you know, we have to give, you know, a shout out kudos to a bunch of former MVPs that join Microsoft that really help. I'm thinking like people like Jeremy fake that really help the development of the APIs and improve the development experience, certainly within SharePoint. Absolutely. And so so. But the but the change that the tool chain to do development, SharePoint framework development specifically is completely different. And it's kind of foreign to anyone who's been like a dot net developer for most of their career. And so so I love just just bringing people on showing them that even though it looks really complex, it's really not. It's a lot of the complexity is built around the tool chain, just how to run the tools. But the code itself is actually pretty simple. It deploys pretty simply. And, you know, you can get up and spinning in an hour easily. Yeah. Well, I know that. So you're very involved in the whole the PNP community. Absolutely. Absolutely. I absolutely love PNP. So a KMS slash M 365 PNP for anyone who's looking for a place to go. That's a great place to start for anyone that's looking, especially in the desk space. But there's there's more than just developers over there. They're the power platform is obviously growing very much. There's a whole thing about search. The Microsoft 365 CLI that's that's come out. So it's, you know, you know, PowerShell up until recently was always just a Windows thing. Now they've got you can run it on Linux or something. But the CLI was basically written to be run on any operating system and do kind of the same things you can do in PowerShell. So all of that is over there. They've got teams that are working on it. There's a team called sharing is caring, which is all about getting started, which, again, that's my passion. And so I'm really hoping to be able to participate more with them and and then just whatever other teams that I can I can kind of plug into and show that. But if anyone's not familiar with that patterns and practices, PNP is it's it's managed by Microsoft, but it's basically some Microsoft employees and a bunch of MVPs and then anybody else in the community that wants to join in all together working on this open source code to make make things better. I think so I see like like all the like they take the group photo kind of every every time they get together. And the most recent one, I think, you know, and Vesa sent it out. And I think he said it was something like three hundred and thirty people or something like that were participating just in that call. Right. They have different calls. There's multiple calls a week. They're talking about simplifying that into maybe just two types of calls every week. And but yeah, I always do the group picture and only the first 50 people in there. So you got to be really quick to get your camera on if you want to be in the picture. But you just made a great point of what we were talking about before and before we got started talking about like keeping up with things. And Microsoft, you know, and obviously the level of interest increases. It's difficult to participate in a community call of that size and and have people raising hands, asking questions. The the it's a full time job following along the chat that's happening on the side. Absolutely. You know, with all that going on into one of the the difficulties and even for my role. So I'm not a developer. I haven't participated in the PNP, although I need to because for the for the reason that there are then things that are discussed and opportunities for partners than what I'm focused on. For developers, for non developers, you hear about the things through these these channels, through these sessions. And then suddenly there will be a new group over here that's focused on this other thing. And if you weren't on that PNP call, you'd be like, hey, what is that thing? How did I not hear about this? It's so easy to get to to miss some of that activity. What's nice is that they're all recorded and so you can go back and watch them because, you know, a lot of times I just don't have time to go do it live. And so I have to go back and record them or watch the recordings. But but they're always good. And like you're saying, there's a lot of developer stuff. But there's a specific meaning. And again, if they change these, I don't know what is going to end up being title, but what vessel was talking about this morning was one of the meetings per week would be not necessarily PNP developer, JavaScript developer, that kind of focus. It would be more, I think, Microsoft people presenting things like we just had a presentation last week on the new Viva, you know, and Naomi Moneypenny came in and showed us a whole bunch of stuff. So we get a fair amount of demos. Yeah, that was the one that I saw that like, dang it, you know. Yeah, go back and watch it because it was really good. But you get a lot of the Microsoft people coming in and demo and things that are that are newly released and trying to explain that kind of stuff. So it's not all all dev stuff. But if you go to that PNP link, then you know, you can filter through and find the stuff that's that would be applicable for you. We'll have to definitely in the blog post include link out to what would you say? So somebody that's brand new to this, you said that there there are resources specifically for people that are new. You can you can do the aka.ms slash sharing dash is dash caring. But if you just go to the M365 PNP link, the aka link, all of that's on there, all the sharing you carry. And you can get to everything else from that one link. I'll do the hard work and go and find the links and put it in the blog post, but yeah, because that's always great. Because that is, you know, whether or not you're, you know, a, you know, experienced developer on this. And so it's to go and pick it up to have those that list of the various resources that you can then share out with others in your organization as well. Obviously, that is very helpful. So well, that's that's cool stuff. Well, so what's your what's your session going to be on? Are you have multiple sessions for the Collab Summit? I know it's still way, but yeah. Yeah, I'm going to do the all day workshop, probably with some help from Rob Windsor on on SharePoint Development, SharePoint Framework Development, where we go from and it's someone it's similar to what I did last year. So you start from a clean machine, you install all the tools you need, spin up that first project. And then as the day goes on, we get more and more involved in the different pieces on how to talk to SharePoint or how to talk to a non Microsoft API or, you know, different things like that. So it's a full day workshop. And then I've got two other workshops. One is kind of the first hour of or not a workshop session. Once kind of the first hour of the workshop, which is kind of the same thing, how to get your development environment set up. And then I've got another session. I'm trying to which one he picked. I have a session on code spaces, which that's kind of the new thing in SharePoint Development there in any kind of development is being able to develop on a machine that's not necessarily a machine, because it's really hard to keep your machine. Configured correctly, even with the SharePoint framework, there's multiple versions of no depending on what version of the framework you're using. And there's all these dependencies. So being able to spin up in Docker desktop Docker or in code spaces, which is in the cloud, a virtual machine that has all the tools loaded for you. And so within, you know, you just pointed to repo and within about two minutes, you're ready to rock and roll and start working with that repo. You have content on that stuff that's out there now. I mean, because that's that's another things that I, you know, besides obviously, you know, we want to drive people to go to this conference that you and I are both presenting at. But do you have content like that out there now? I'm trying to remember what blog posts I've done. I do have a blog post on visual studio code spaces, which was the first version of code spaces. That's been deprecated. And now it's moved over to GitHub and I'm working on a blog post on that. It's very similar. Some things I like about it, some things I think we lost when we lost Visual Studio. But and then I have several blog posts on my on my blog that are around that beginning developer experience and how to set up your toolkit and stuff like that. Well, now that you've achieved this, this major achievement within your career of becoming an MVP. And again, congratulations on that. It's always exciting when people that I know friends from the community get you earn their MVP and we can have a whole other conversation on like that, that process, the path into that. Well, why won't you? What was your path? What would you say? What was your recommendation? So I'm sure that when you become a new MVP and then people come out of the woodwork asking like, what did you do? What do you recommend? I've been thinking about this for a while. So kind of what was your pathway? Well, so I got involved with my first MVP's I met again after I retired from the military and went into it. Within a couple of years, I got introduced to SharePoint. And so I went to some SharePoint training. And from there I learned about community. I learned about user groups. And so I started going to the local user group where I met my first MVP's, you know, Eric Schupps was probably the first one I met, you know. And so over the years, you know, working with them through the user group and getting to be friends with them. Honestly, you know, it's something I determined pretty early that it's like, wow, that'd be great. I'd love to be, you know, a member of that. But what I saw was people that were one, they were technical experts in their field. And then two, they had this passion for, for sharing that with other people. And it's something that I've always had even in my military career, I was an instructor for most of it. And so I love teaching. I love sharing what I know, even though sometimes I feel like I'm way behind other people. But still, you know, somebody can always learn from, from your experiences. So I started doing that. And then probably around 2012, 2013, I kind of started wanting to speak. And so I started speaking to some, you know, like user groups or some small conferences, and then just kind of working my way up from there and doing more and more community stuff, starting my blog. The PNP program has been a huge part because I've been able to contribute to that, both sample projects and, you know, be involved with some of that. So that was nice bullets on my MVP application is part of the community effort there. And so, yeah. So it's been almost 15 years of doing this. And I know a lot of people do it a lot less. But, you know, actually, you know, with Eric as an advisor, he was always like, yeah, you just need to do a little more. You need to do a little more. So he's always pushing me to do more in the community and to share more. Yeah. So. Well, that's, I think that's a consistent trait of MVPs is that you find the vast majority. Like we'd still be doing what we're doing even without the, you know, the MVP title to it. But it really comes down to, I know one of the, one of the more difficult things for people that are thinking about it and saying, well, look, I'm not that kind of expert. I've not written a book. I'm not leading even, you know, a full day workshop or, you know, multi-day workshops around, you know, a topic. I, I provide some trading and guidance. I'm part of my local user group. But what, like, what can I go and present on? And, and I always guide my, my recommendation is like, well, write about what you know. It doesn't mean you're like the expert on that, all things around that, but share. Here's how I, here's the business problem. Here's the solution that I went and built. And a lot of times, if nothing more to get dialogue, somebody get, you know, MVPs like yourself could reach out and say, Hey, did you take a look at this, you can actually improve on this, improve your solution. But being that kind of, that interactive being open accessible and sharing of the problems that you're solving, ask the questions and leave them hanging out there for the community. I don't know the answer to this one. I've researched on there. If you know, let me know, what have you done to solve this? How would you have approached this? And, but that raises the visibility of that, the, the activity. And so, right, there, there are a lot of I mean, I say, I started, I started a blog. One, I wanted to, because I, you know, I know as part of, you know, something that I knew the MP program looked at, but I'm not right on anything I'm an expert on. I'm just writing basically down things. So I remember them and that's so many people I know of it are like, no, I just blog about stuff. So when I come on about this another two years from now, I go, Oh, wait a minute. I think I did a blog on that. I can go back and figure out how I solved it last time. And so it just kind of, so most of my blog posts are really kind of what problem did I solve this week? You know, and how do they do it? Well, I saw I'm a big believer in the whole the working out loud model. I mean, whether you buy into the social collaboration, you know, side of things or not. I mean, reality is that in the Microsoft ecosystem, we're all using teams for the most part. So teams and SharePoint that are kind of our, you know, bread and butter platforms around that that we're used to doing that. But that's how you that that's collaborating with other people. I mean, that's how you refine and optimize and learn, learn from mistakes or build on something that was done really well and become even better or just get the confirmation that you didn't screw something up, you know, sometimes, but just sharing that out there. And even if you make mistakes and in how you solve the problem to find out more and learn from that. And that helps other people. It helps them to, I know it's kind of a service minded, you know, people I honestly went sometimes where I don't feel, you know, good, but like I've not felt productive today. If I can go and do service for somebody, I mean, I feel fantastic. And a lot of what we do in community is just that. You know, go and find opportunities to provide service for other people. I don't have to get value for me personally out of something for me to to help others. I don't that doesn't have to be a two way every time. But, you know, you can't help, but you benefit personally just from helping others solve those problems. So absolutely. And I that was one of the things that when I did the application of the MEP that kind of shocked me, there's there's a question on there that effectively is OK. So great, you're technical, you share your technical expertise, whatever. What do you give to the rest of your community? So you're non technical community. So they wanted to know about, you know, are you involved in a church or involved in, you know, some sort of social organization, you know, local kind of thing. And and so it kind of drives home the fact that Microsoft is interested in those things and they want their people to be those kinds of people, not just, you know, you know, the technical whizzes, you know, to beat the PNP drum that sharing is caring section. There's there's they've started things like the buddy program. So if if you're kind of struggling with something, you know, we can pair you up with someone, either one of us or someone else that wants to do this and work through their code problems or today on the meeting, the three demos that were presented were all by first time presenters. So they help you work through if you want to be a presenter, you know, but you're a little scared. We'll you know, we'll help you with that. In fact, today, one of them was a buddy. So David Warner, who's in charge of the sharing is caring program. He co-presented with the developer that was presenting her solution to just help her through that. And it went really, really well. And so that's awesome. What great stuff it's, you know, you could tell a lot about having put on a number of dozens of SharePoint Saturday events all across the Western U.S. and and spoken events around the world. One of the things for me, especially for somebody that are that are new speakers or that that come saying, hey, I'm really interested in becoming an MVP. I almost kind of, you know, like observe them participating in an event like that. And are they do they go and do their session and then they go back to their room and they're hiding out for and I understand if they're not hiding out, but they're going back because they've got work calls or they're working on finishing the demo for their next session later that afternoon, like that. But the people that go and and don't participate in the, you know, you go to an event, especially when you're out of state or out of your city and go to event and then don't participate in the community activities around that. And I'll be honest, I mean, you're less likely if I'm organizing that event to be invited back for that, because we want people that will are fully engaged. Then there's like the collab summit last year, where I'm just like, man, can't get rid of this Don guy. He's just hanging around the conversation. It's like, it's like, one of these things I need to go to sleep, you know, so. Yeah, absolutely. And I think what you find out in SharePoint Saturdays are awesome. I know they've conned down a lot on there's not doing near as many of them here, at least in the states, but the pandemic is kind of put the squash on some of that. But yeah, but yeah, but even the virtual ones, but those are those are great places to get started, because it's it's mostly local people. It's usually they're usually small. Some of them are pretty big, but if so, if you want to get your feet wet and kind of do that, and what what you find in that is that how welcoming the committed the community is not only the people you're presenting to, but your fellow speakers and the organizers and stuff. And and like I said, you got these opportunities to just hang out and afterwards and learn about each other. And, you know, all that just leads to more opportunities, you know, and that's honestly that's my biggest excitement about the MVP program is that I know there will be more opportunities for you. A lot of the the bigger conferences, if you don't have, you know, some sort of a little title behind your your name, like MVP or MCM or, you know, already something like that. It's kind of a it's a challenge to get into. It can be so many. They have so many of those that are presenting. It's like, so if you're the if you're the person picking the content going, I can have this MVP that spoke it, you know, he I know what a great expert he is in this technical field. I'm going to select him. I just am, you know. So so I'm excited about, you know, more opportunities, especially speaking opportunities conferences, you know, is hopefully in the latter half of this year, we start to see more in person stuff. We'll see. Well, that's great for people to the two other places to go and look at people that are watching that are interested in doing more. And I apologize if you hear my little dog barking out in the background. Welcome to the new way of working from home. But so one is like just go out on meetup. And so a lot of you'll look for user groups and other stuff and and, you know, apply, you know, to submit, have some abstracts on hand for things that you're comfortable about talking about and goes and submit that. So I've got titles with, you know, two or three sentences, just a short, very short abstract of what it is, kind of the target user, I.T. Pro and user, whatever that is, and like level 100, 200, 300, 400 level, depending on the technical content. And then, you know, I'll go and I'll submit those, you know, once in a while to those different events. And, you know, when I'm all you don't get selected for those, but, you know, especially your local user groups and stuff, there's always going to be those opportunities, you'll find those opportunities. The other place to go and look is like in Facebook, where there's a ton of still the communities around there is actually a call for speakers group or a community out there for the the the ecosystem. I don't know. Don, you're aware of that. I didn't know that. No, I didn't. So that's all that you can only in the they it's tightly controlled of what is posted in the format of those postings. It's all call for speakers for now almost everything is, you know, online only events on a variety of topics from around the ecosystem. So you see that kind of stuff and you might end up speaking at I've done, you know, where I'm speaking late at night or early, early in the morning in India or in New Zealand or, you know, whatever so you can find opportunities that way as well. So there's a lot of ops out there with a little bit of footwork to get yourself kind of together, not be afraid to talk. It could be very granular, like when you talked about those beginning topics, like how I solve this problem in this industry and it could be very specific. Around that very, you know, demo reliant. Here's what I built. Here's how I went about it. Here's the results of that and then open it up for, you know, Q&A. That's a great model. That's a, you know, it is in those again, kind of like the SharePoint Saturdays, a lot of them tend to be rather rather small. The first meetup I spoke at was the leads power platform group over in the UK. And I met one of the organizers of that group at Ignite, the last in person Ignite. And we got to talk and everything. He's like, well, we run this group, you know, we'll chat. And so he called me back and says, what do you want to talk on? And so I think I did code spaces, but it was probably 10 people that were in the meetup that day. And including a couple of MVPs, which initially made me a little nervous because I knew these MVPs. And I was like, well, hope I get this right. But they were, they were awesome. They were like, that's amazing. We haven't seen this yet. This is, you know, this is back when Visual Studio code spaces was still pretty new. And it's led to me, you know, keeping in touch with them too. So meetups are awesome because again, they're, everybody's just welcoming. And people, if you're scared because you think you're going to be chastised, that's just happens on Facebook. I have heard, you know, I mean, it's when I, when I started speaking within the SharePoint community. So like the end of 2009, early 2010 is really when I kind of hit my start. I got my MVP award in January of 2012. So I'm coming up on my 10 year now. And I heard, you know, horror stories of people like calling out, you know, during presentations and stuff. And the only time I've ever had something even close to that, and that's not what it was, it was actually Richard Harbridge. So if you know those that know Richard, you know, and very smart guy and very no filters to like ask questions and that kind of stuff. And so he wasn't trying to be, you know, a troll in the session. You know, he was just asking other questions and it ended up we became friends. It was great questions and actually went back and modified my presentation based to cover the questions that he had raised. I'm like, so I really appreciated it. But that's where that's where you also like make the connections. And with those other MVPs, that also helps when eventually you get recommended because one of the things that happens is that the MVP leads at Microsoft, they'll reach out to the community is like, does anybody know this Don guy? It's like, oh, yeah. Yeah, no, he's great. No. Don, hey, really appreciate your time today. People want to find out more about you and follow you. Like what are the best ways to reach you? Sure, you can find me on most of the social media Facebook. I kind of keep personal but Twitter, you know, it's just Don Kirkland. I've been self branding forever because I was just lazy to come up with some fancy micro. So it's just it's just Don Kirkland, you know. So when I say Twitter, your blog, my blog is Don Kirkland dot com, you know. And so they're LinkedIn. LinkedIn is another great place. I monitor that. I've gotten a lot of the LinkedIn thing has just blown up since the first of March when I put a little thing on there about getting MVP. So that's awesome. So that's been great. So those are probably the primaries. He can just email me. It's just Don Kirkland live dot com. If you go to my blog post, all that social stuff, all the all the connection stuff is there. So what about your phone number and home address? Do we put those out? I think that's out there somewhere in Texas. I mean, Texas, you can find me down here in Texas. So it's a small place. Well, hey, Don, really appreciate your time today. It's great to connect. And we'll we'll definitely you see at the CLABS summit. But maybe before then, probably not. I think that's going to be like my first in person. Like the first one, I think that's that I've got on my schedule. That's going to be an in person thing. Yeah. So well, cool, very cool. Well, it's great talking to you. Great talking to you, Christian. Take care.