 Hey everybody, this is Christian Buckley with another MVP buzz chat and I'm talking today with Michelle. Hello. Hello, Christian. How are you? I'm doing well. How are things out in your part of the world? Well, why don't you start with that? Who you are, where you are, what you do. And then we'll talk about your part of the world. My name is Michelle Mendes. I'm currently a SharePoint consultant, Microsoft 365 consultant, but I have a developer background. So I started my career as a C Sharp developer. Then I became a SharePoint developer. Then after that, I become a SharePoint developer slash consultant, then ultra 65 consultant. And that's what I am at the moment. And I'm originally from Brazil. I worked in Brazil like for nine years and I moved to Ireland in 2018. I joined a company named Michelle Mendes. It's a very Irish strong Irish. And being the future. Sorry. So how long have you been in Ireland now? It's going to be four years in January, since 2018 January. What big chunk of my family heritage is from Ireland and yet I've been there once. It's a nice place to be. Otherwise, I wouldn't be here for so long. That's beautiful. Well, very cool. So you're just brand new MVP. How long have you been an MVP now? No, it's just for less than one week, I think. Yeah, brand, brand new, brand, brand new. Yeah, excellent. You've been in the community for a while. But so what was kind of your path to becoming an MVP? It's a bunch of activities. Like most of it, I think it's because of blogging and helping people on social media as well or maybe posting solutions on social media, right? But I think I started blogging a long time ago, but I became more active since the pandemic started. Actually, it became a hobby because I was bored, nothing to do. Then I started to write and I saw good feedback on my articles. And I started to see the articles getting a good reach. And I was like, yeah, that's very cool. That's very kind of, it's very grateful when you see people being thankful for the solutions you posted on the web. And sometimes I'm in Ireland and I'm Brazilian, but most of people that access my content, they're like from Australia, India, United States. So like the reach of the content is amazing to see. It's really, really, really, really amazing. Yeah, it's I'm always amazed going and looking at the stats and seeing what people are interested in. And occasionally, I'll write like the topics on my blog that are the most like just ongoing month after a month pulling the most content are usually topics that I rarely write about. And so, and I've thought about that. I don't know how much have you changed what you write about based on the traffic? Sometimes I saw like, to be honest, I analyzed the traffic to my blog with some queries that people reached my blog. And based on that, I based on that, I thought like, yeah, people are trying to find the solution, but it's not exactly what I wrote. And based on that, I created new posts, which I think it's, you know, like people were interested in that solution. And sometimes it was a simple thing to me, but for some people, maybe it wasn't very obvious, you know. So like all the time when I try to write, I didn't, I don't try to simply, you know, put large volume of posts, you know, simply to have a ton of posts. But I tried to write about stuff that I don't find well documented or someone talking about exact same solution, maybe with the different tweaks or different use case, you know, I think to me, it makes sense to create things that are like that people don't find around, you know. All right. See, that is a, well, I think that's a great strategy that is, you know, so props to you for going and doing that. I think that is, look, that might like my marketing team, like they're all about that. Like, hey, we see, you know, people are in looking at the site, they're tracking on this, we need to generate more content around these areas that people are interested in. And I don't follow that track. I mean, I write about things that I, that's why I said it's, you know, the things that are the most popular on my blog are not things that I typically write about. I don't do then go do more of those things. I, when the interest arises in me, then I'll go and write about it. But it's, you know, I think that is a great strategy for somebody, especially that, you know, wants to become an MVP is to be aware of that sensitive to, you know, hey, what are people looking for going and trying to, to do? So I guess it's a roundabout way instead of like a personally, I don't care. It's not that I don't care. It's just that I'm writing about enough things. Anyway, you know what? I'm just digging a hole for myself. But Yeah, but I think it's like, it's not, it's not only this, I think it's a combination of finding the subjects that people are interested in. You can help. And stuff like sometimes you have a random idea and it's something that could be useful for people, right? It's a combination of both, you know? Yeah, yeah. Oh, definitely. Well, I guess the other, the next question is, so you kind of develop this skill and a lot of blogging, a lot of, a lot of, it's just getting into the habits, developing healthy habits for going and doing those things. So how frequently are you writing now? I'd say like, try some, I try to do try some like for blog posts one time or two times a month. But as I said, I don't, I don't write short posts. That's my problem. Sometimes like I like to do like tutorials, very detailed and stuff like that, you know? Well, that's a skill in itself. I think you have to be very intentional with your writing to break it up into smaller pieces around there. But well, so I guess that because the next question I was going to ask was whether you think you'll maintain it once the things kind of open up like of that level of activity? Or do you think you'll find it you're like slipping back into non writing habits? Yeah, I don't think so. Like I think, I don't think I would lose the habit because I think it's good for myself in the end, like not only because of becoming an MVP or with this as a target, right? I think to me as a professional to improve, keep, keep my writing skills constant. I think it's, it's good for me. It's good for everybody. And I, and I kind of, I, as I said, I started liking it. Why stop? You know, why just stop? I think, you know, I did a presentation to a bunch of MBA students back in the late 90s on kind of recommendations for people that were interested. It was a part of a marketing class. And they were asking about, you know, people who had had I have a marketing degree. I have a master's in the marketing MBA, but with the marketing focus. But I'd been in tech my entire career. And so they were interested in people that had marketing backgrounds, but were in tech kind of what was that path? What were there? And I said the number one thing to work on is no matter what your background is to develop those writing skills. And I know that there are some people that are just naturally not good at spelling and, and grammar. There are tools that are out there. You can always pay somebody to go in there and clean up your content or partner with somebody and do that. But writing more, documenting your path. And it doesn't have like you're, you're focusing, you're writing these longer, kind of walk through tutorial type content, like more detailed content. It doesn't always have to be like those posts do great. But just getting into and developing those habits and writing more, it's a great skill. Yeah. I try to do it even with my LinkedIn or Twitter posts as well. You see like most of the posts I do, even if it's sharing some news, I try to kind of summarize it with my own words, you know, instead of simply copying and pasting content and sharing it. And like, obviously, I try to find to post as well stuff that I find meaningful because otherwise it doesn't make sense to me to simply be sharing everything, you know. Yeah. Well, what kind of stuff are you writing about now? Like, what are you passionate about? Well, I like to, my main passion is automating everything I can, you know, when most of the stuff I'm writing at the moment is I'm writing more about like writing about creating solutions to automate stuff in Microsoft 365. It could be either planning, SharePoints, Teams, using Power Automate. And I'm diving into as well the least formatting area because even though it's not something that I kind of work that much with it, I find it useful in its culture to work with it, right? And you see good results quickly. Yep. Well, I just created two new lists today, sitting here playing with it. Basically, my day is building out populating two lists before I invite internal and external people. Yeah. I mean, scenarios like that, walking through your practical where you kind of explore it, and you could even write about like, you know, hey, as I'm investigating this and the best way to accomplish this, like, I want to put like a form on the front end of that, I want to actually have, you know, potentially create like a Power App on the front of it. So to help automate the process for generated list, you know, data, I want to make it as easy as possible for people then to go and consume that, but they can always just jump to the list. You know, but to walk through that process, like what I actually, what did I mean, there's a blog post in my experience with the list and that I with my intended audience, you might be leveraging the exact same template, you know, the list template, yet going a completely different direction. And there's two, you know, completely different blog posts where we're writing essentially about the same thing, you know, but I mean, there's opportunity with the different backgrounds and different audiences to, because that's, I think that is, you know, we are our, our own self editors, we usually stop ourselves from a lot of creative ideas, you know, we self edit. And I think we're, we're much more critical of our own content of ourselves as we're creating things. And I've heard plenty of people say this, it's like, well, you know, there's other articles that pretty much talked about the same thing. It's like, yeah, but they don't have your experience. They don't have your audience. They don't have your sense of humor, the stories that you would attach to that. So there's a lot more than just the instructional checklist of things to go and do. It's the rest of the context around it. That's a value. Yeah, I think so. Yeah, sometimes I think we are kind of too harsh with ourselves, you know, in terms of criticizing our work. And sometimes even a slight change in an approach can make a difference for people. And we don't realize it, right? Yeah, for example, there was just a, yeah, sorry, it was just a case I was talking to a guy today on Twitter, like he created an article very similar to one I built in the past for a different use case and with a different approach. So like he used look up columns, but I used calculated columns to do the trick. It's a, it's a trick using list formatting and SharePoint pages. But at the end, we both achieved the same results. It's not that I'm right, he's wrong, but it's just different. Maybe for one case, the look up works fine. For other case, the calculated column works better, you know? So I think it's just different points of view, you know? Well, there's a blog post right there, you know, calculated versus look up and why you might use one of the other and, you know, multiple scenarios there. I'm sure that content, there's an article like that out there, you know, but go and research like that. But again, I'm sure there's a good blog post. It's a nice idea for a new one, yeah. Oh, there you go. It's all yours. It's not my world. So well, very cool. Well, so what else have, what else are you interested in? I mean, there's a, you have Ignite behind us now, you know, anything that kind of stands out to you? Well, I honestly, like my main work in terms of what I do at my job is related to collaboration and automating that, like using any tool that I have, like it could be using Azure Functions, using Azure Logic Apps, or even using SPFX to create custom content, but everything tied to all 365. But actually, there's a, there's a field that kind of interests me a lot. I haven't had the chance to work with that like properly. It's like using AI in our work. It could be, for example, SharePoint Syntax, or even the forms processing tools that Power Platform has. I think it's, it's like, it's very powerful. It's very interesting, like amazing what this can do and how can it, how it can improve people's jobs by, you know, detecting things automatically, extracting information and classifying things automatically. That's to me, that's amazing. And that's kind of one of my targets for learning soon, you know. I know that there's just a, it's usually, you know, when an idea like that, like going and learning more about AI from different roles is, is looking at like all of the universities, you know, Ivy League, big name schools, as well as local that are developing certificate programs and other kind of, you know, walkthroughs at different skill levels as well. That's one of those areas where I think you could be a business user, you can be an IT pro and admin type role or a developer. There are AI courseware certificate programs and other classes that you go and take, you know, focused on each of those different areas. That's a great thing just to have knowledge about because if you go and look at, so like, so Mark Cashman did a great summary of the Jeff Teeper keynote, the session where he had like 20 different people that were part of the session, we're going through and talking about all the announcements. If you go and look at the fall 2021 Microsoft Ignite, Jeff Teeper session, you'll be able to find this, but Mark Cashman kind of summarized it. And you look at that list in each of the areas, OneDrive, SharePoint, Teams, lists, you know, each of those, about half of it were AI based features. So much that's happening there. It's good to have a fundamental understanding of how these things work. Again, you don't need to be going in coding solutions for that, you know, but at least to have a knowledge about what's happening, it helps you to better pay attention to the new releases, the new features and announcements. And I think even for the company, we work for like this could be a differential point of selling, you know, if everybody has like big knowledge on this, you know, and I don't see and I don't see that many companies working with it, you know, I see like, well, like, say my company's doing a lot of stuff with it. But yeah, it's, it's, we see it as hugely important to, we're an ISV. And so, you know, anything that we do in that space, I mean, Microsoft very interested in paying attention. So you want Microsoft's attention, that's a good way to get attention. As a product company or services company, if you go in and can tout some great case studies, customer examples of building productivity around AI for your customers, Microsoft loves that. It's a good tip, good tip. Yeah, we're always looking at, you know, how can we, so I manage the global alliance from Microsoft to my company AppPoint. And so these are the things that I'm constantly thinking about, you know, what else I kind of have my, my finger on the pulse of, of all the Microsoft interactions globally and projects that are happening out of, you know, all of our locations, just so that I can talk up the company to Microsoft in that respect. But anyway, yeah, it's, it's an interesting, interesting space that there's a lot going on. Yeah, there's a, so how do you kind of keep up? Like what is, what are your kind of tools of the trade to stay plugged in? I follow the good people on Twitter and LinkedIn. I use Microsoft Learners. Let's call out the bad ones. Who are the ones that you avoid out? No, I mean, any, any kind of standouts of who you follow or? Well, everybody, basically everybody connected to the Microsoft 365 P&P and related people because I think it's like, if we watch, even though I kind of rarely join the calls live, but I always watch the recordings as I can, you know, and following the blog posts, following the GitHub solutions, what people are doing, you know, sometimes you simply take a look at other people's code and you'll learn from it. Yep. So that's my goal. Normally I could follow people on Twitter, LinkedIn, study on Microsoft Learn and follow the P&P guys. Yep. That's how, that's how I keep my base learning, you know? You know, I was thinking of the, I think of the different ways of generated content. Myself or for people in my company or, and I run our, our champions program, which is like my company's MVP program and thinking about different opportunities. One thought that I had is like, is there anybody that's doing kind of a, like a YouTube series around the, the, the P&P crowd and the various solutions that are out there interviewing the people that are, you know, that are presenting on that and digging a little bit more. There's an opportunity there. We're still in content. But yeah, but I mean, a great way to kind of dig into the community angle of what other people are doing and, and to ask questions. Yeah, that's actually, you know, there's the P&P weekly podcast that happens every week, like VISA and Waldeck, they interview like random people from the community and, you know, like you are doing with me, check the background and see what people are doing about their experiences. I think it's very cool as well. You know, it's not only because of tech, but sometimes the discussions that they have there, it's kind of about lifestyle or, you know, career style, career advice is, you know, it's, it's very good. That's great. And I was aware of their, their show. I've only caught a couple episodes of it. But yeah, I know that there's a, again, there's, there's always room for more. That's, that's, but yeah, great, great content. Yeah. What I see, like sometimes maybe, maybe a good idea would be interviewing less known people from the community, you know, because there are, there are guys that like, they are not very well known, but they do a great job. So that's like interviewing brand new MVPs. You know, hey, there you go. Yeah. No, this is, it's funny because I actually started this selfishly. I just wanted to get to know other MVPs. And funny enough, being in office apps and services MVP, I wanted to specifically get to know, I think we're the largest category. I don't know if Azure is more, I think we are the largest, but wanted to get to know, you know, all of the other MVPs and other, other areas, other focus areas and, and from around the world. And so it's been, you know, great to do that. And that's opened up other ideas and opportunities and, and things. So that's the great thing about community and participating in this out there. You never know who you're going to help. And you're never going to know the contacts that you'll make just by putting yourself out there and how they could benefit. Like, you know, now that we've met, you know, that, that who knows, and we're in, it's easier for us because we're both in office apps. So we're running in the same circles, but that we might see each other another show or, or have another idea. And I might think, you know, hey, Michelle might be a great contact. I wonder if he knows this person and we put each other in touch with, with other contacts. So it's just a great further community building activity. Yeah. And I think, I think it's great. And it's not only like related to one stack of technology as well. Right. So for example, if you interview someone connected to Azure, maybe we use like in my case, I use a bit of everything, like everything connected to Microsoft 365 in the end, but it's a bit of power platform, a bit of Azure, a bit of custom dev, a bit of configuration PowerShell. So maybe you know a guy that knows, you know, knows about PowerShell scripting and how to put that on, you know, the Azure automation blocks there. Yeah. So you can improve your stuff on the background. You know, it's, it's important to know a bit of everybody. A lot of people in that world. But I think it's also true, even outside of the Microsoft ecosystem, there's a lot of us that are in this, this space that are multi cloud people that, you know, so we know aspects of that is increasingly important as well. And so it's great to have those connections to be, it's great to do the deep dives into the primary technology in the Microsoft stack, but then to also reach out like, Hey, who else is working with and these other platforms? So yeah. How does the competitors work? And yeah, no, I think there's that there's a deeper conversation. We can go and talk for an hour just on that topic. Well, Michelle, for folks that want to find out more about you and get in touch with you, what are the best ways to reach you? Well, they can find me on Twitter or LinkedIn. My Twitter handle is Michelle Carlo. Maybe it's better if you write it down in the post. Yeah. Yeah. And my, and my, my LinkedIn, my LinkedIn profile, you can find by Michelle Mendes and much likely like it's going to be the one, the only one talking about SharePoint you find on LinkedIn. So there's not many. Where's your primary blog? My primary blog is Michelle Carlo.com. Yeah. All right. We'll have the links, of course, out in buckleyplanet.com. You can find Michelle on his contact information there. It'll also be out on YouTube and via the social channels and stuff that people find you. Well, Michelle, well, it's great getting to know you. And hopefully one of these days, when events happen again, we'll be able to hang out. I'll see you and hopefully at one of the MVP summits once we're on campus. Looking forward to it. Yeah. And thanks for the opportunity to be here. It was great meeting you. It was great meeting you. Yeah.