 Hey everybody, welcome to another MVP Buzz Chat interview and I'm talking today with DeWayne. Hey, how's it going? Hey, thanks for having me on. I really appreciate it. So congratulations, another grand spanking new, especially at M365 apps and services MVP. So congratulations. So for folks that don't know you, who are you, where are you, and what do you do? My name is DeWayne Hyatt. I am a systems administrator for the University of Florida, specifically in the Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences, which is a mouthful. So for short, we call it IFAS. And that's the land. Microsoft loves acronyms. So that's good. So does higher education. But that's the land grant component of the University of Florida. So I specifically support our research, teaching and extension mission at a central IT level. Very cool. So in this space, do you have like a certain focus within the M365 space? Are you a SharePoint guy? Or are you a change guy? I mean, it's yeah. And in government and in education, the expectation is you have wear a lot of hats. So my primary responsibility is actually in endpoint configuration manager. So that's what I do in server management and things like that. So we're distributed throughout the entire state of Florida. We have about 85 remote sites across the entire state. And the M365 stuff came into focus a few years ago when we were looking at server refreshes and trying to think forward about what's a good solution for the infrastructure here. And a big project that we had that I led was eliminating file servers and moving data into OneDrive and Teams, which really coincided with the worldwide pandemic. And so we were already in the process of doing those migrations, which really untethered our employees from those old busted file servers, so to speak. That's a pretty common story. It's interesting to go as I've interviewed other companies to hear how many, I mean, we knew that companies were, they had moved to the cloud was already accelerating before the pandemic. And so there's some companies that said, we really feel lucky that we had kind of concluded the majority of those moves. And so the transition into a pandemic world was really light for as far as information workers. But obviously, other companies that still maintain on-prem and have hybrid environments, there's still pains around that. But well, that's interesting. Well, so I'm always interested. So somebody who's in your kind of role in education, what was your path to becoming an MVP? It was pretty kind of unique, I guess maybe. I don't see a lot of MVPs in education. And I would love to see more because I know there are a lot of people out there doing a lot of stuff. That's one of my points, because it's difficult to get visibility when you're heads down in that in some of the sectors. Government is the same way. It's just, it's really difficult. So how did you break out of that? We're in the trenches a lot, for sure. So shout out to Dan Ray, a friend of mine that I've known for a while. And me and a co-worker, Joe Gasper, have been working pretty hard to expand the community that we have for M365 Modern Workplace training. So we started a community about three years ago that was basically how we unveiled the modern workplace to our employees. And as word about that spread, we actually ended up onboarding lots of external guests who came into that community from other EDUs to come learn with us. And so that was kind of the start of it. And then we've really taken a specific passion for what's called cooperative extension, which is a part of that land grant program. And modern workplace tools are absolutely a slam dunk for that audience because they're very distributed. The majority of those 85 sites I was talking about, we have one in every county in Florida. So there's 67 extension offices and they're just kind of all over the place. And so Modern Workplace really brings them together and is a really good glue for that sector. And so we've spent a lot of time building communities and doing public training and speaking and things like that. So those are some of the things that Dan noticed, which I really appreciate. Yeah, the theme of Dan Ray has hit a couple of my recent interviews. So I mean, it helps out a lot of people. That's awesome. I was going to ask is like, so your outreach to these other entities, but is it all still within the EDU sector within Florida? Or do you expand without that if there's other people that are an EDU that are interested in learning more? Yeah, the focus now is in that extension space, but that covers any university in the country. Even actually, the extension program is really a beautiful thing. It was established in the mid 1800s. The land grant system was started. The point of land grant was to establish a research university in each state within the United States and come up with best practices and a better way to do things because think about the importance even then of agriculture. If you couldn't farm, you probably weren't going to eat. So it was kind of a big deal. The extension program came along later in the early 1900s. When the government realized we need to take what we've learned and literally extend it to the people who live in the state so that they can learn how to do it. So our extension agents are called non-formal educators. They are out in the public doing workshops, teaching people how to file their taxes or rehabilitate some soil on some farmland that they bought. It's really all over the place. And so that is replicated in every state in the US. And so we've really found a passion for helping those folks. But extension is also exist in other countries too. It's not unique to the United States. So yeah, anybody in that space we'd love to be friends with. That's very cool. Well, yeah, that's always I guess the question for if you're for people that are in roles or in industries where they're not able to get out and just do as much out in the external community, they're more likely to be able to do something that's within the sector, within the industry. And so you see and sometimes even just within a broader, well, an education system, link out, work with other education support teams and kind of pull stuff together. But the process to becoming an MVP, of course, I always call it, it's a black box, we'll be honest. It's an award that Microsoft gives, but a key part of that is they need to know who people are. I mean, that's the downside. So there's good people, smart people doing amazing things, helping other people and for the community. But if we don't know about it, how do MVPs and Microsoft people submit names to propose them for potential MVP? So I don't know if anybody since you've announced out in social stuff that you've become an MVP, have you had anybody else within your community that's reached out about, hey, how do I become an MVP? Or is this something I can pursue? Do you have any of those conversations? Yeah, not not to that point. Exactly. But because it's like I was saying earlier, it's I don't know. I mean, I'm not that prevalent in the EDU space. But of the people that I knew, I only knew two that were our MVPs in higher education. So some of the community calls that I participate in, I let people know like, hey, you are here on this community call and you've presented here before, that's a contribution to the higher education community. You should document that. And I told some of the Microsoft FTE that run those calls, like, hey, you could be nominating people. And so yeah, trying to get the word out in those higher ed circles about if you're out there teaching and helping and improving other people's lives, that's what this is about. So you could you could get this, you know? Yeah. Well, it's one of those things where so I know that the M365 is really exploding within the education sector. It was education was in broadly looking, there's always going to be those that were early adopters within it, but it's been kind of a laggard in adoption of a lot of it is because because there's been these really prevalent education platforms, these other non Microsoft platforms that are out there. And so it took a while for Microsoft to add capability and and of course, coming up with, you know, teams for EDU and a bunch of the specific solutions within that. And I'm talking about the full range from the high ed down to K through 12. And you know, so there's just there's a ton of growth, a ton of opportunity for people in the sector. So I'm, you know, excited to see somebody else in this sector, you know, becoming an MVP. Like, so I know you're brand new. Your do you have any questions about the program? Are you aware of kind of all like the the cool aspects of being an MVP? I mean, it's nice to just add it to the title. It's a good resume stuff or things out there. But yeah, you know, that's nice. But, you know, are you kind of aware of all that is Dan filled you in? I've got I've had a little bit of coaching in and I feel like as I reach out and connect with other extension agents, it is very nice to add some legitimacy, I guess to to the effort, because otherwise it would just be the way in from Florida, you know, hey, I want to talk to you about cloud stuff. And so it is nice to be able to thread that on a greeting or like you said in a job title, or display name is really nice. It helps legitimize what we're doing in the program that we've created. So I'm super stoked about that. But yeah, I've being in the edu space, a lot of the tools that I have are very similar. And so it's nice, you know, the MVP benefit is our thing, a lot of things that I'm familiar with, but there's a lot of stuff that is definitely different, you know, that I didn't know about, you know, IDs that you tag on to the end of Microsoft docs and stuff like that is is is different. And so those are things that I haven't thought about before that I'll have to start investigating and making sure I add that to my habit. Well, one of the best things about being an MVP, I mean, there's there's perks, there's get like little swag things once in a while. There's I think the absolute best part of being an MVP is the annual summit, which will hopefully get to be back in person next year again, not virtual. I mean, it's great to have the content and the access, but it's less useful. The best part is the networking that happens when we're all together in person, but is, you know, MVPs, you do have more better access to Microsoft and to the product teams, the engineering teams, and to the marketing teams, so that when you do like you'll become a, you know, a a key contact for people within your community within industry to provide feedback back to Microsoft. And while Microsoft has gotten a lot better at listening to everyone to customers and partners and, you know, they're there. I think one of the key things now is that they're, you know, most employees have a measurement that's in part of their annual commitments of community involvement, which is great to see that. But it's a lot of that is focused. A lot of the guidance that Microsoft provides is like, you know, befriend your local MVPs and provide that feedback. The big step there is that we need to provide the feedback. Microsoft doesn't benefit, doesn't improve if the complaints or the suggestions, the feedback never gets to them. And so that's something that's a key part of being an MVP. So anybody listening, if you know Dwayne, you know, yeah, if you have questions or complaints, like funnel them through Dwayne, it's a great way to do that. Well, it's very cool. So what other stuff are you doing in the community? So you're, you're, you're still running that user group? Are you doing any other speaking, any other events yet? Are you plugged into that world? One of our, one of our favorite things, my co-worker, Joe Gasper, who runs a lot of this stuff with me, we've had a podcast. We're approaching our two-year anniversary of that podcast. And it's been a lot of fun. We've been able to start getting better at having guests on and in the flow of how that works. And it's been a great learning experience, both with just how to produce one and, you know, how to buy the right microphone, you know, that kind of stuff. So that's been a lot of fun. It still has the land grant extension kind of undertone to it of, you know, that audience that we're serving. But I think that the content is probably relevant to anybody. So we've done things like recapping some of the announcements from Ignite to doing a deep dive into SharePoint or debating is Microsoft List going to kill Microsoft Planner, you know, like all that, all those things that are kind of out there that we find interesting. We'd like to talk about it on our podcast. So we've been doing that for almost two years now. Very cool. Well, yeah. Well, as a marketer, I'll tell you that probably the smartest thing you can do there to differentiate. Like it's good to serve your core audience there. But if you were to expand and do something like, you know, M365 for EDU podcast, maybe there's some of those that exist. There's plenty of room for others in that space. But if you just took that perspective, then, you know, you, you'd probably reach a, your larger audience there and market it out to all the EDU sector. But yeah, that's kind of advice for everybody. It's like, if you're, if you can be industry specific, even multi industry, like I work for a vendor for an ISV that we're a multi cloud. So we're not just Microsoft ecosystem or other ecosystems, but across multiple areas within the Microsoft ecosystem. And so, you know, it's, but it's good to be have a focus and to package, you know, and market yourself to that and build that audience. And it will then, it should grow organically beyond that as people find that good content that's relevant. That's my favorite thing about it really is the organic growth. The, the people who come to our community who say, I heard about this from so and so at my university. And, you know, we, we try to make sure that what we're doing is valuable to them and, you know, produce things in such a way that they can easily consume it and easily understand it. You know, we really wholeheartedly believe in the meet your users where they are mentality. And I don't want to come into a meeting with a bunch of agricultural agents and start talking about PowerShell modules and stuff for SharePoint, you know, like I need, I want to make sure that they come away from that feeling refreshed and really ultimately learning something that's going to make their digital life a little bit easier. So that's been a big part of our goal. Well, I'm telling you, you know, as exciting as PowerShell and SharePoint are, you know, that this is not for everybody, but yeah, yeah. Well, Duane, really appreciate you taking the time getting to know you. Hopefully I'll be out in your neck of the woods a couple of times this year for some of that. So looking forward to get back out there as travel start to pick up again. But for folks that want to find out more about you, what are the best ways to reach you? My LinkedIn is probably the best way to make a personal connection to me. Our podcast and newsletter is on there. So the podcast is called The Shift Show, which has a namesake from somebody you might know from the Shift Happens podcast. We love ducks. He's a great guy and we got to be on his show a couple of years ago. But The Shift Show was something that we started internally to kind of have some fun with our users and tell them like, this is really going to change things for you. So it literally is a shift in mentality. So we use that type of word play as much as we possibly can. But if you search the hashtag Shift Show on any podcast platform, you should be able to find it. Very cool. Of course, we'll have the links out on YouTube and on the blog post as well. And so Duane, hey, great to meet you. Thanks again for your time and hope to see you soon. Absolutely. Seeing people in real life again is so great, isn't it?