 Everybody, this is Christian Buckley doing another MVP buzz chat. I'm talking today with Craig. Hello. Hello. Hi. I'm Craig. Hello. Yeah. So for folks that don't know you, Craig, who are you? Where are you? And what do you do? So that is a good question. I'm Craig Janky. I am a, I'm in Chicago. So yeah, just outside of Chicago, about 30 miles straight west, I am a senior manager over our M3C, M365 consulting practice for WM reply. So I lead up a team of consultants and try to get business and try to build things in a SharePoint mostly. You have right now as we have connections, all of that coming together. Yeah. Craig is one of those folks that people that know Craig is, it's one of those people where a lot of people just be, you know, like assumed he was already an MVP for a long time. And like, what are you doing? Like who did you piss off at Microsoft, Craig, that to take so long? I don't know. I think when we were talking about it, previous to this on another call, I'm just not what I would call a very big self-promoter. I'm just kind of fine to do the work and, you know, the whole, if anybody notices, they notice. If they don't, they don't really care. So yeah. That's one of the, you know, it's funny, you know, and people that know me. I mean, you might be surprised to notice, like, I really struggled with that for years. I had managers, the jobs that are like, you're doing all this stuff, but it's not visible. And I'm like, what do I care if it's visible? Like, you're my manager. You know what I'm doing. I'm doing this work. And so it was something that I had to adjust to. And I just created habits to, you know, to promote that work, to make it more visible to people of the things that I was doing. And it's so it is a learned trait. Yeah. And it's something. So even now, like I got the MVP in my, like a couple of people at my work, I told them they were excited about it, right? They're like, oh, that's cool. And they bring it up all the time. I'm like, I don't know. I feel uncomfortable about it. I have no real reason why, but I do think it's funny because when I might, one of my, one of my direct reports found out, he said, yeah, I was, I posted it on LinkedIn. That's how he found out. But he's like, I'm sitting with my role with my family watching TV. And it's, oh, Craig, he became an MVP. That's awesome. And they're like, what's that mean? Yeah. So if you're not in the space, nobody knows who you are. So anyway, well, it's, and I know. And if you go out and do, like search the old videos, there's a couple of Microsoft. You're like the really corny over the top, you know, MVP things. But, but you're right. It's, it's, I mean, where it's really meaningful. If you work within, especially within the Microsoft sector. Right. And, and you're looking for expertise or you're looking for a speaker or an author or something. I mean, so you know that, hey, there's a certain caliber of person. They've got a certain amount of experience that Microsoft has recognized them for that. But most people on the street have no idea. My wife, she thought it was nice, but she understands all the, all the work that I put behind it. But yeah, she, you know, it's not, it doesn't, it doesn't like fully resonate with her. I don't think, but. Well, it's, you know, the other thing too is I've started to, it made me pay attention to the similar awards and other technologies. Yes. And a lot of SAMR and MVPs and Salesforce MVPs and, and things about that now. So, you know, looking at that, again, they're run very similar to the Microsoft program. Yeah. But yeah, so yeah, it does make you be aware. And then I, like, encouraged other people, right, to just kind of do as I say, not as I do, like you should be promoting yourself more. Like when I talked to my co-workers and things like, that's a good idea. Have you thought about presenting that or something like that? Yeah. So what, what was kind of your path? I mean, so we were joking about it. You know, we've known each other for a long time. I participated, I think in the first and second of the suburbs event. Yeah. First couple of years of that. So mine was kind of a long, long interesting path that I actually, me and Ralph Rivas, who's also an MVP, and he was the one that nominated me. We were talking about it. Oh, we've done a presentation on how you can do this. We did it at one of, oh, we did it at the Power Platform Conference in Orlando over the summer. So I couldn't go to it, but Ralph could go to it because this company would pay for the bill. So he phoned a friend in and we talked. So it was actually a hybrid presentation. It was pretty cool. But so it's, mine is long. I went to a SharePoint Saturday that was in Chicago. I want to say 2010, 2011, it was at Illinois Benedictine College. Like I had always been interested in speaking and that kind of things. And I went to all the dotnet user groups and kind of an awe of how people could just get up and do a presentation. And I never knew how it really got started or how you get started into that practice, right? Like I could write a blog or whatever, but I didn't know how you even made it into events. So I talked to a couple of the speakers there while they were presenting in between class because I didn't really move around classrooms. There was like the sessions that I wanted were all right after each other. So I talked to a few of those speakers. Reuben, you probably know him. Yeah, and- I think I was at that same event, the Chicago event. Richard Harbridge. So Richard performed them, one of them not performed. And then Reuben went after that. And so I talked to them about how they get started. And they're like, you just go over user groups and things like that and submit people are always looking for that. So Andrew, what was Andrew's name? Yeah, it's keeps me. Connell? What? Was it Andrew Connell? No, but also last name with a C. He no longer does SharePoint. He wrote a book, the SharePoint in six. He was with those guys. It's gonna kill me now. But I went to his presentation on, what is it called, file shares, not file shares. What's a thing, file shares, yeah. No, I know that, but it was, what are they called? Document sets. How do you have doc sets? Oh, okay. Which, it was a pretty good thing, but he gave me his Twitter. And I was, you know, I started following him on Twitter and one night in the middle of, like, I don't know. He tweeted, oh, I'm starting this user group for just kind of SharePoint people who are in the know. I was a better way of putting it. So all these people he was going to invite who were the speakers in the Chicago area. I mean, called it the SharePoint garage. And he's like, well, unfortunately, I am starting this at 11 o'clock on a Friday. So who's gonna, so I'm hoping he'll see it. And I just happened to be like checking my phone and I was like, oh, it sounds like an awesome idea. I would go. And so he invited me into that. And then actually I kind of like was sending out emails and stuff. So I kind of was like Cole ran it with him for a little while. So then I kind of got into the user group, but it was downtown Chicago. And it was in the AI building that we would have these meetings. And there was some stuff that happened and we just kind of fell off doing it. And I don't live in Chicago. I live in the suburbs 35 miles out. And I got tired of going to the city to go to all the vets. So I was like, well, maybe I can just start my own user group up here. And like we did it in the city and we didn't really, I didn't really think about it, but you don't have to ask permission to start these groups, right? Which I don't think people know. They're always, well, how did you get started? Who'd you ask? And I said, well, I went up to meetup.com and I just put in a user group. And I reached out to some people who I had emails on and Robert Bogue agreed to come out and be the keynote speaker to our first event, which I never really expected because he's still a big name. But at that time he was like the big name at SharePoint or one of the big names, right? And so he came out and presented. You know, I felt bad because it was only like about six or seven people there, but he seemed to enjoy his stuff. So I started that way. I had a user group with the Elgin SharePoint user group. And then I went to another user group meeting called the SharePoint user group and they met down his grove, which Microsoft has an office about 20 minutes away from where I live. And at that time, we were talking, I was talking to people over there and they're like, well, there's no, there hasn't been a SharePoint Saturday around in two years, anybody know about it? And I said, I'll check into it. And if I find anything out about it, I'll help you throw it. So we emailed the SharePoint Saturday people, took them a while and they said, no, if you want to have one, the other group who was there, we didn't get any response from. So we, I had a contact at Debrah University. So he let us have the event for the facility for free. So then we did our first SharePoint Saturday Chicago suburbs in 2013. And then we've just been running them annually, sometimes semi-annually it depends since then. And that's really how I got my start in between their right blogs. And then about four or five years ago, I think I was, I was working at a company that would actually pay me to go to other SharePoint Saturdays and present there. So, and that's, I get, I think that's the big hurdle for a lot of people. If you want to make that kind of commitment, if your company will pay for you, right? Which ones can you go to? So, yeah, so then, and then, so then I met Jay Leesk and we started doing like podcasts for again. So we've done some stuff together. We do a bunch of sessions. I had done enough in the Chicago that the 365 Ejicon people reached out to me about presenting at their conference or at least helping them hype their conference. So then I made it into, I guess, what we would call that circuit of conferences because they have like three or four. So still trying to break into the big ones like the Ignites or anything like that. But yeah, that's how- Well, what you'll become easier now because they give preference to MVPs. So- That will be awesome. Yeah, I'll get you on the answer there. Well, you know, it's funny because there's a lot of people like, you don't just, you know, start speaking at, you know, SharePoint sat, well, formerly SharePoint Saturdays, a lot of them are rebranding. Like we'll be naming ours in Utah. It's collab days, Utah, instead of- Yeah, ours is now M365 Chicago. Yeah. Or for the last three years. So with that change, yeah. And we also moved ours to Friday too. So there was that change. But- We did too, as well. Yeah, so with changes like that, it's been a bit disjointed. I know Microsoft has their community initiative and they're trying to centralize calendar around some of the events. So you could go to the communitydays. Is it dot org? I think it is dot org. Yeah. And do that. And there's collab days and there's other places. But no, I mean, you don't have to do a lot of traveling to get involved. Like you could just be a- No, virtual speaker. If you're a virtual speaker, involved with your user group, and if there is a local event, like reach out, no one's gonna turn down volunteers. No. You just need to show up and when you get assigned a task, do it. Oh, and I, like I said, that's a great way. But if you can't find any of that, it is so easy to do your own thing. But, oh, Andrew Clark was the person I was trying to get. Oh, okay. Yeah. Yeah, so. But see, that's true too. It could be a user group, like within your company, if you allow external people in, but to get together, do something in the lunchtime, it can be even more casual where it's people, where you don't, maybe you don't have speakers initially, but you're getting together at a restaurant where everybody's getting together and just talking, and it's more of a networking type thing. Yes. Really. And that was really the one that I was telling you, I went to, it was in Donner's Grove. That was, it was called Share, it was more of a Share Pint group. So we just kind of went in round table. So if there was enough people, 10 people at a table, and there was really 10 people we would add another table and just have some beers and we'd have like a topic. Almost, I want to take this from ToastBassers, a topic tender who would say, okay, we're going to talk about this topic. We're going to talk about it for this long. So here's the networking table. Here's the admin table. Here's the developer table. And this is the user group, the power users table. So that was pretty cool. Yeah. And then you got to, I think one of the biggest benefits of it and why I started to get into, so I knew like programming and that kind of stuff. But when I got into SharePoint, it didn't know a lot, right? It was a big change for me or, and then the job I got in it was like, I was expecting to join a SharePoint team and then I was the SharePoint person, there was no team. So it's like, okay, I got to know everything and I don't know how to do that. But now when I started doing the user group and the networking type of occupation and even the SharePoint Saturday stuff and Twitter, right? Just following the right people on Twitter, it was like, I've got people I can ask questions, those resources that you don't normally get. So that's when I, when I talk to like my newer employees or kids coming out of college, I'm like, you don't understand how important networking can be to the success of your career. Just in who you meet, who you can ask questions, job opportunities and if nothing else, right? Just I already said, if it's SharePoint, my wife doesn't know much about it. Most of my family doesn't understand what I do. So if I want to have somebody to celebrate things that I've done with or if I've got questions or things that are just irritating me, like I'm better off talking to you because you understand it, you've been there, right? Or somebody who's in the field going to talk to my brother who's a pharmacist, you know, he gets customer service, but he doesn't get technical. But the same way if he started talking to me about drugs, I'm like, I just know I take two a day. You know, I have to say on that note that it was such a great day when a few years back where my wife, her company rolled out Office 365 and she had some questions. And for like half a day, I refused to help her at all. I was like, no, no, like you didn't care about what I did. You didn't like listening to my stories about stuff or talking to you about tech. Now you come to me for help, like, no. It was an hour ago I was downstairs showing my wife how to open a file in Teams so that it opens in the app. And then I had to prove to her that having it side by side screen that the app could be here, we could still open the file in the browser and that if you update one it will automatically update the other. She didn't, she was like, she had no trust that if she opened it up in the app that, because she would open it up in the browser and then she would click it on open an app and then it pops that little thing on it. You can tell her you could shut the browser but she's like, I'm so worried that it's not saving back. I'm like, look, it's like, you know, it's fine. It's well, I think that it's, there's some legitimate trust issues because of years past one drive issues. Yes. But yeah, but it generally works the way it's supposed to these days. Yeah, so that's it. I mean, I'm not to disparage my wife. She's awesome at, she's an advertising and she's awesome at PowerPoint. And like, if I need a PowerPoint presentation that she can do 100 page deck in like two hours where I can do two slides in two hours. Yeah. There's the people that, so my wife is a designer. So she, her presentations are amazing looking. You know, and when I go for help then she does the, well, how much does that pay, you know? So yeah, we have a great relationship that way. So keep things separate. Well, Craig, so what kind of stuff, what are your topics? What are you passionate about like focused on these days? I wish I knew. Lately it has been Viva. So I got my MVP in business applications, so PowerPoint. And that was not PowerPoint, power apps, power automate. Yeah, and that was a long, I was trying to get into that, that field, right? And I've been doing a lot with that, especially when they deprecated SharePoint designer workflows that I helped a lot of customers like move all those to power automate and create some apps and some pretty cool apps around that, still doing that a little bit. I like to do that. I was, a lot of my presentations around that were more on the governance of that and best practices and things like that. And some are on Dataverse and getting started with Dataverse and creating teams for that. But what I've fallen into with this job that I've been at about nine months is we do a lot of internet stuff. So it's, well, I like to say, yeah, internet, so SharePoint online, but not SharePoint online as we used to think about it is like, oh, we're going, we created internet using SharePoint. Now it's throwing the Viva Connection wrapper on it, putting it in teams and thinking about that frontline worker experience and what kind of cards you can use, adaptive cards you can use or the Viva cards that you can use to present that information. It really kind of becomes that full internet that I think we've been looking for for years where it doesn't matter if you access it through the browser or you can access it through teams. And then the mobile experience, we've been doing some really cool things with frontline worker apps to let people who wouldn't normally be able to or normally you wouldn't think as teams users can now use teams. Like we have a pretty cool app that we developed for Disney for, it's based in teams. So they only have to have teams on their phone but now they can use that for the resort people who are cleaning the rooms and things like that. So right now we're piloting it in a couple of rooms but they can go and do like a checklist, they can take pictures of things that they see along the way on the rooms and all that kind of information and that can be stored in teams and then we can run some workflows and stuff like that. So I've been doing a mix of that. We're still doing, we still as just Office 365 if somebody needs an app, like we've done some room booking apps, we've done some project management apps where what I call a project managing app but an app to measure projects. I have a manufacturing company that if anybody wants to submit, hey, I need this part fixed or if I need this, I have an idea that I think would help this manufacturer process go better. They can submit it through the app and then if it gets taken on as a project then we can assign people to that project. We can add our documents to it. So it all lives in teams. It's pretty cool. So I've been doing that. And then talking, I was one of the first people to go through the Viva Insights training. So it'll workplace analytics and I've still had my hand really well into that. So I do a lot of my talks around Viva Insights and how workplace analytics or now workplace insights, they're finally rebranding that work. And then the whole, just using the whole Viva Suite in general, me and Jay Lee have been doing a workshop actually kind of partnering with a couple other MVPs, Mark Rackley and Stephanie Donahue, where we will do, this is an overview of how a Viva, although it's getting really big. So it's getting hard to squeeze into that half day. And then they do, so me and Jay will do that. This is what Viva is, is why you should care about it. And then they'll do more like, this is how you use it in the wild, right? These are the use cases for it that we've actually implemented. Yeah, it's gonna be interesting to see it because there's now eight experiences and they're gonna be adding more. They've said they're gonna add more. And I think we've heard whispers of some things and some of the things we've heard may not be standalone, Viva, again, I always, experiences have to do the air quotes or modules or whatever you wanna call it. Right. Some products within the Viva brand, some of the things that they're talking about could end up just being features, subsets of the existing ones, but they've already said, hey, there's more coming. So yeah. Well, I think it's gonna be an interesting mix because they have connections, insights, topics, learnings, goals is the big one that people are excited about. And those are pretty much intended for everybody, right? And then you have sales, which is bringing dynamic CRM right into teams, which is more aimed for role-based, right? So if you're a customer service rep, if you're a sales rep or somebody that deals with that, then you're going to want that, but not necessarily everybody in the organization who's an office worker is going to need that. So I picture more of those. I just don't know what those were. Well, exactly, because it amplifies a great example. It's internal comms. It's like internal marketing and comms people. Yeah, so I think you're gonna see more along the lines that are like HR solutions. There could be eventually like, specifically like industry-focused like manufacturing. It could be something where it taps into the other sides of like the ERP side of Dynamics. And I mean, yeah, there's a lot that could happen with that. Well, yeah, and then that gets interesting because I didn't, until you mentioned it, I never really thought about it, but because I just think of Dynamics 365, I hate to say this, but I just think of Dynamics 365 as a CRM system, but there are a lot of modules to that now. And I really only knew about that when I was studying for like the power platform architect role and started to think about the sales module and the customer service module and the field services module and the marketing module and all of that. So they have customer service modules. So they have all of these modules that you can now tap into, especially if you're building a power app and need to get at that data, right? So yeah, they're gonna, I imagine as you said, bring more of that into the view suite. Now the question always gets, and this is where we run into roadblocks as consultants, how do you pay for all of that? Cause they don't just give away cheap. Right. Well, that's always like the first question is people say, well, how much are you talking about this to Microsoft? What are the, what license model like is it free? Do I need to require E5? Is it additional cost on top of E5? Like what is that? So yeah, that's- Even at $9 a person that gets pretty hefty cause, oh yeah, we were talking about it. For some company, $9 a person was gonna end up being it's seven, I wanna say almost 700,000 a year more. And then it's like, well, are they gonna pay for that? And then pay for us to implement it and to do the change management around it. Cause that's something that I actually like about the company that I'm at now is we are heavy into change management and all of our proposals come with almost all of them come with some kind of change management behind it. We're really good at it. Whereas other places I've worked is, well, yeah, we can do it technically, but kind of throwing it over the wall and hope it gets implemented. But that costs money and that's usually the first thing where somebody wants to cut that out of the budget. I always, you know, there's a buckliism, there's something I quote, I kind of self quote that I always do it. And I actually had it in a conversation, used it in a conversation this morning, but, well, basically the paraphrase, it's, I was looking for the exact quote, but you know, companies that are good at change management will have a distinct advantage over there, all their competitors. That is, that should be a core competency of, you know, consulting organizations and yet it isn't with a lot. Yes, no, I totally agree. And I guess you're starting to see some of that now too, or not that specifically, but change management, you gotta be good at, the other thing is you gotta be good at looking towards the future. And I think so many customers, and especially where you're seeing this little downturn, are just looking at today, right? And maybe the end of the month and if you're lucky, the end of the quarter and you're not looking at the long term. And planning that and those are the customers, those are the companies that don't do well in the long run either, right? They're good for a short burst, but now you have a downturn in marketing, what do they do? They cut everybody and they don't know how to weather the storm. Instead of seeing the opportunity, that's there to grow. Yep. Well, great. Well, Craig, really appreciate your time today. I appreciate you having me on because like I said, I'm not getting myself out there. Well, it's, hey, there's always, I'm always happy to, as we've talked about before, but always to talk about advice for that. It's about creating healthy habits. Yes. It's not. I've got it on my list of things to do, if that makes sense. I don't think of it as like, I mean, it is self-promotion, but I guess it's a marketing, it's the marketing guy in me that wants to rephrase that. That sounds very narcissistic, you know, to self-provote it. Building your brand is totally, but yeah. But you definitely want to surface that information and make it easily searchable, findable so that people can get that. You know, again, I don't care so much about the accolades is I create the content. I want people that need that content to be able to find it. Yes. Well, it is nice if they're consuming something like putting out a blog post, right? And seeing two people read it, three people. Actually, I think one of the coolest things in some of the stuff we do is like, somebody will ping you a question on a blog you wrote three or four years ago. One of my favorite things that ever happened to me was I was working at a consulting company at the time. Yeah, I don't want to name who they are, but I was working at them. We took over a project from Deloitte and so they gave us the company we took it over from gave us the documentation for Deloitte and on how to do the app and get it installed in the environment, they cited a blog post that wrote it. So I was like, look, I'm in here. Yeah. Well, you know, it's one of the thing I think I mentioned this last time we talked about, so I meant extensive one note users. So every blog, every article, everything's a one note and when it's published, I will take the published URL, put it in it and then archive that page. So when I go and research stuff, like a new topic or something, one of the first places I do is I go do search within one note, like, have I written about this topic? Because I write enough, I do enough that I don't remember everything that I wrote. It's all go searching for that. And so there's a couple of times where I've done internet searches and I've found stuff. I'm like, oh, that sounds really good. I opened up like, oh, I wrote that fiber. Oh. I've seen that. Or when I'm searching for questions, this one I hate, I had this one not. I had something come up and I couldn't figure out how to do it. And I'm like, okay, let me search for the question. And two, three years later, I had posted that same question on a blog post and nobody answered it on a support page. Like, okay, apparently nobody's figured this out yet. There was a lot of following comments to see what the result was. Yeah, yep. I run into that a lot with the AMAs that I do. I love trying to tackle those too, the unanswered questions and trying to answer it. What I'm not good at is when we've answered it and then taking a link from my video and going back and posting it there. But I gotta get better at that. But that's why those people just need to keep searching and they'll find now the content. Anyway, well, Craig, really appreciate your time. Folks that want- I appreciate you having me. What are the best ways to reach you? On LinkedIn is usually the best way to get me. So just searching Craig Janky. I am the one that works at WM Reply. I think you might hit a couple of teachers that live near me. There's also a Wally Fisherman in Appleton, Wisconsin. Or Tech Janky, T-E-C-H, J-A-H-N-K-E on Twitter are usually the best too. Or my first dot last name at Gmail if anybody wants that. So I answer emails. Those are usually the biggest ones. Excellent. Well, it's great talking to you. We'll see you soon. All right, cool. Thanks.