 Hey, this is Christian Buckley doing another MVP buzz chat, and I'm here this afternoon with Beatrice. Hey, good to see you. Hi. Thank you so much for inviting me and for having you here. Yeah, for folks that don't know you, I know we've known each other for a couple of years through all of the conferences, which we both are constantly going, well, not so much these current months going on, but I'm sure we'll see each other soon enough. Why don't you introduce yourself, who you are, where you are, what you do. Sure. So my name is Beatrice Olivaida, and this is the way you say it, so it would be Beatrice for you guys. I'm located in Portugal, so currently on a continuous basis, not leaving Portugal at all, but well, it's been sunny here, so it's pleasing. I am the CEO and founder of Bindtuning, so Bindtuning is a provider of solutions for modern workplaces and SharePoints, Office 365, and Microsoft Teams. And I've been involved in many different areas, currently very, very focused in teams, and also doing a lot of work in terms of diversity and inclusion in different areas, but very, very committed also to guarantee that we have real inclusivity in technology. And I know that you're also very involved in IAMCP as well. Right. I actually don't talk about that much with folks I talk to. I mean, that's actually how you and I connected first, like talking about IAMCP, but what's your role there? Okay, so right now I'm the president of the Portuguese chapter. I've been connected to IAMCP for a few years, so before turning president. And as a Microsoft partner, I recognize the importance and the relevance of this association. So it's been an honor, honestly, to serve IAMCP. It's been really interesting to see the connection that exists amongst partners worldwide, regardless of the chapter and the openness that you get from partners in other chapters. Well, and folks that don't know what IAMCP is, the International Association of Microsoft Channel Partners. And so I was the president of the Seattle chapter for three and a half years. And so I'm a member of the Utah chapter here. There's, of course, there's their chapters all over the world. But one of the things, in fact, I was just telling one of my clients last week, I was encouraging them to, and I think you and I have had this conversation too, but encouraging them to become members and to make connections there. I said one of the things that you just have to understand about those that are members of IAMCP, they are natural connectors. These are people that join this group because they want to partner with other Microsoft partners. They're looking for those opportunities. So whether or not you're looking for a specific partner or you're an ISV or a consulting company that's just looking to connect, this is a great place to go and get started. Yeah, very true. That is actually the true spirit of IAMCP. I believe that that is the true spirit of MS partners in global. And IAMCP is actually kind of the entity that represents these partners and that somehow gets to put partners, you know, kind of connecting to each other. And from different geographies, which is probably the most challenging part, because normally you may connect to partners that are closer to you geographically or that's somehow in terms of business kind of relate. But when you're trying to sell, you know, kind of to different countries, you're trying to become international, or you're trying to reach different business areas, going through the IAMCP channel has been proven to be very interesting. People are very open to connecting. And the content that we get from the ongoing events, either locally or in different countries, it's absolutely phenomenal. So for me, it's an honor to serve the local IAMCP. And I should clarify for those watching, it's like, we're not a pitch people for IAMCP official. No, no. But it's just something I know, because both of you and I have had these experiences where, you know, we've put deals together. I've been able to as president of the Seattle chapter, help make connections and connect other partners that I was unaffiliated with, I got nothing out of those deals, but help kind of bring people together. And so it's just, it's a great, just as you say, growing your company internationally is difficult enough. If you don't know anybody on the ground in a region that you're trying to break into, this is a great way to go and do that. Definitely. For folks that sometimes have, even when we go to events, people that have difficulty in connecting to people they don't know, being in the IAMCP community is like the icebreaker. So if you start a conversation and the other person is also a member of IAMCP, so there's an immediate connection and the conversation just flows from there. It's really been really good to be part, not only part of the community, but also right now as a president, obviously it's an enormous honor. So besides what your company does, and maybe you can give a little highlight what your company actually does, what your products are, but then I'd like to kind of understand kind of what you're out there and talking about. You gave like kind of a high level, but I'd love to hear some specifics of what your passion is. Sure. So Manjuni started eight years ago in 2012, literally by accident. So probably few people know how it started, but I was doing consulting before that and I had an accident in 2008 and for the first months after my accident, I was really kind of put to bed and I needed to do something. So I started creating themes and one of the platforms I started creating themes for was SharePoint because I was working with SharePoint literally since 2001 and it really felt like SharePoint 2007, which was the version that was out at the time, was desperately in need for a branding solution. It was really, really painful to create something for SharePoint 2007 by hand and coding it. So that was kind of the ground and the basis for what ended up becoming VineTuning and we started as a branding solution, not only for SharePoints, but also for different .NET based platforms and the goal in the beginning was to provide users and not only technical users, but people in communication departments and marketing departments an easy tool so that they could kind of brand and design their internets with their solutions. And this was the starting point and well, things went on and alongside with branding, we realized that around 2014, there was a need also for added functionality. So Microsoft didn't have any web parts at the time and we decided to create a set library of web parts to provide that kind of functionality. So we ended up expanding our solution to the web parts in 2015 and we have been working in that area since that time and increasing our library, increasing our functionality and along the way, Microsoft Teams was released. So we have been working with Teams for a couple of years now and intensively, okay. So since Teams was released, I believe that it was kind of pretty clear to me that the internet is changing. What we know as the traditional internets and we used to look at SharePoint as the communication, collaboration, productivity tool, this kind of ground for working is shifting a little bit to Teams. And I believe that SharePoint will not go away and Office 365 will not go away. So we will still have probably a lot of the communication and information sharing parts within SharePoint. But I do believe that the collaboration part is shifting to Microsoft Teams. It's interesting that there are kind of two thoughts I want to get your precious, but I completely agree with you. I think Microsoft was smart about the shift of SharePoint away from that, it can be anything you want to build it into kind of solution. In fact, Jeff Teeper said, we're trying to get away from this idea of SharePoint as a Swiss Army knife and concentrate on it as that portal solution. And it still, I mean SharePoint is the number one portal solution globally. It's just tremendous, the number of installs and continues, net new installs of SharePoint as a portal continues to grow and expand. But what's interesting when Jeff came back into this role, so he was out for a couple years, went into a different role in Microsoft and kind of came back. One of the first discussions I had with him, because I was working, consulting with and then ended up full-time at one of these internet and the box vendors. And I said, what are your thoughts on with your plans to make SharePoint more beautiful? And all the other ideas that you have, because they had, this is before it is the latest version that's out there. What are your thoughts about all those companies? He said, yeah, I think that that, we're going to see that market shrink and kind of go away because we're going to create this incredible solution. And of course, what's happened since then is that it's the spaces exploded with the number of vendors and the need and out there. While at the same time, arguably SharePoint has dramatically improved on what they provide out of the box, the look and feel on that side of that. But what are your thoughts on that change? Because your company's also grown during that period. Yeah. Well, as anything in life, challenge is what drives creativity. So you can't have change, you can't have creative thinking if you're not challenged. So ISVs as providers in this world, obviously, when you have your your underlying framework evolving, that's what actually challenges you to do more. So that's what brings the conversation to a different level. And that is good. So that's what drives change, that's what drives evolution. If SharePoint was untouched, unchanged, where would we be, right? So, I mean, there will be probably no growth. And I believe that that is very positive. I see competition, I see the evolution of the framework as very, very positive aspects of this ecosystem. And that's what also makes us think differently and think, how can we still add value? How can we create new functionalities, new features? Where can we improve the platform so that to the end user, there is added value? And it's a challenge every day, obviously. It's super hard for ISVs to keep up. I'm not going to lie. Okay, so it's... Well, I mean, Microsoft is they've disrupted themselves with teams and with SharePoint and clarifying. And of course, Yammer's still in play and OneDrive in there and how do all these pieces come together? So that's kind of where you were going earlier with talking about now you're working with teams and doing things. So what's different? What is the new world of collaboration with knowledge and information management on top of that? I think that the fact that the fact that teams was built on top of SharePoint, it's actually a super positive aspect of this equation. When you look at solutions like Zoom or Slack, they're very limited to calls and meetings. And when you think of teams, you think of collaboration. So you have not only the fact that you can create the channels and the tabs, but you have the possibility to add functionality, to add applications and to integrate all that with SharePoint and with the information that you have in SharePoint. And that's where we, as a company by tuning, we have been doing our work. So we have from the beginning been looking at teams as a collaboration tool rather than just a communications tool. And we have been migrating all our web parts to Microsoft Teams apps so that you can actually build collaborative environments within the scope of the channels. And to me, that is actually that something that is making a lot of sense to our customers because we can build, you know, kind of really custom and crafted environments for specific teams. Even internally, I mean, we do things like if we go to a conference, we manage all the assets of the team underneath. There is actually it's SharePoint, right? And we're managing all the assets in SharePoint. But our kind of front end to what's there is Teams. And we collaborate in Teams. For example, our entire partner channel works in Microsoft Teams. So we have all our partners as external users, and they are managing all their assets. And we provide all the new communication, training, all the marketing assets. Everything is provided within Teams. And our web parts have been facilitating this kind of environment. And since they're very simple to use, it makes them accessible to any type of end user. So we're not just talking about the IT guy, that is or the IT department that is creating a SharePoint site. And eventually, that is something a little bit more complex. But within Teams, with the kind of applications that we make available and eventually other vendors make available, it's super simple. Even for an HR department person, a marketing person, in the scope of their daily work, when they are creating a new team or a new channel, it's not hard. So it's really intuitive. And the experience is very good to add functionality that allows them to collaborate with the rest of the team. And I think that this is very disruptive to the way things were done until now, until Teams. I'm a super fan of Microsoft Teams, really a strong advocate. So we're investing a lot. And not only in the fact that we provide the functionality and we have migrated all the SharePoint functionality to Teams, but also from the fact that we decided to create accelerators to these team creations. So for over a year now, we are providing templates for Microsoft Teams. And these templates are kind of packaged solutions. And they have been thought of and created on sort of an industry basis. So we try to understand the requirements and what different industries, different personas need. And how can we put that in the form of a template so that any user can just, you know, hit a button and in the click of a button, you have a fully working team that you can start working right away. And that's how we, I mean, that's how we see technology. It has to be simple, accessible, easy to use, you know, at the reach of anyone. Well, it's exciting to see, I know there's a, there have been, you know, there's been a couple, I know product solutions for building around your templates and do that, but there's, I know a couple of SIs that have gone and really focused on creating kind of this, this, you know, automated provisioning solutions specifically for teams and creating templates for their customers as one-offs, but not going and then selling those as a product company, but just providing it as kind of a, as you put it, an accelerator for their customers that they're providing these services for. Yeah, one of the things I just thinking about while you're talking about, you know, the, the change of the technology and how teams moves us forward, it's, there was a shift in the SharePoint community and let me know if you've recognized this as well, but attending all the events that we do, SharePoint Saturdays all over the world, kind of all these other larger conferences, you know, when I got involved back in 2005 and, and really started, you know, going out into the community and speaking in 2009, there's been this shift away from development and IT pro centric heavily towards dev and IT pro topics, towards more power user and business users, non-technical topics. And a lot of the technology has moved that direction as well. Of course, the maturity of the technology has gotten to a place where, you know, we have these more, you know, finesse products and solutions that are on top of it. But, you know, so it's the, you know, we're having to worry less around keeping the servers up and running, making sure the lights are on and focusing more and more on, okay, what are our users really trying to achieve with the technology? So it's become more and more business, you know, scenario focused. And, and so the topics have trended that way. A lot of the capabilities have, have trended that way. Teams is, you know, while there is, you can go in and build and customize solutions, you can still go and do that. There are plenty of companies who are slow to adopt some of the new out of the box package solutions because they feel they need these, you know, heavily designed and customized solutions. And they're finding out that more and more of what they used to have to go and build they can do out of the box. But it's gotten them to, to even kind of expand their thinking about their, their solutions that they're providing and what their needs are. Human nature is that we, we interpret technology through our lens of understanding. If you go and you ask somebody, hey, what are your requirements for this? They're going to likely in all likelihood give you their requirements based on what they understand they can do with their current technology today. When you expand their thinking of what's possible with the technology, suddenly they start, and it's usually it's this iterative process as they learn a little bit more and they go, oh, I never thought about this before. Well, what we could really do and how we could really optimize this process, this workflow is, you know, is this way. It's, it's exciting to see people and it actually speeds up that process of innovation and how we collaborate. People are, it's really opened people's eyes about what's possible. I think that, you know, Microsoft realized that in a very, very meaningful way. So the fact that they recognize the importance of the citizen developer and that they're providing amazing tools so that anyone can actually start building solutions. Mainly, for example, PowerApp. So, you know, kind of putting this power in the hands of people is super important. Not only because you get different scale, so we're talking about not limiting the development ability to a limited set of people, but you're kind of expanding that to a much higher level and a much higher larger group of people, but also because you're putting that power in the hands of people that have the business knowledge on a way deeper level of, you know, of engagement and knowledge and experience than developers. So, I mean, as a developer, you can be very engaged in what you're doing with a customer or you can try to learn about a certain industry, but you will never know more than the people that actually work in that industry on a daily basis. So those users are the ones that actually know, you know, the real pain points, how to build the solution, why to build this feature and not that feature. So what matters to them and what can solve the biggest pain points and the ones that will solve the largest number of problems. So I totally agree with you. I think that it's been a very interesting shift, very interesting. And honestly, I think that it totally makes sense. I love every time Satya, you know, goes to one event and he has those super inspiring keynotes where he brings in people that are just, I mean, you know, not developers coming from different backgrounds and suddenly you realize what they can do in technology. To me, it's inspiring. I think that it has to inspire us all, not threatening at all, because for us that live in this technology world, I mean, we will be creating the basis for everything, right? But creating the tools for others to build these meaningful solutions. I think that that's what will give us the ability to build something at scale. And the fact that we are, that we're focusing on templates, and we have been doing a lot of work in these past months, I can tell you that, and since we're talking about scale, I think that the past months have taught us that they're kind of two very important things. So first, you need to be able to scale, to scale your solutions, and then you need to also be able to be agile enough to respond in the fastest time possible. So these are the kind of the two factors that determine the success of any solution. And during these past months, what we realized with the teams that we're creating for Microsoft Teams is that we were able to respond to very specific business issues that suddenly arise from coronavirus. So we're talking about something that came like out of nowhere, right? So no one was expecting it. Businesses were right, we're coming as definitely not right. And we started creating solutions very fast as issues were appearing. So I can tell you, for example, that the first template that we created during this kind of three months period, starting in early March, maybe, the first one was to address coronavirus directly and to help companies kind of set up their preparedness plan internally. So we did a template for Microsoft Teams that would allow companies to put up all their policies, all their information, guidance to their employees, everything in a very easily and deployable package. And note that the way that we're doing templates, we're not only doing our solutions. So we also put the ability in the hands of our customers to build their own templates, which is way different. So it's not just fine tuning templates. It's also okay, you can grab one of fine tuning templates, you can then customize it, change it, and you can make it your own. And I believe this is where the true value comes from because those are the templates that are meaningful for companies. Then as time went by, we started realizing that employees were having a lot of issues in terms of wellness in general. So I'm talking about isolation, about, you know, kind of inactivity and physical issues. I had people complaining, oh, my back hurts, my neck hurts, you know. And all these wellness issues, we decided to address them with a Microsoft Teams template. So we created a template that is easily deployable by any people manager at any level. And they can deploy one of those templates to their team. And it's kind of packed up with a bunch of information and not only information, but also places so that the entire team can collaborate and act as a group, as a supporting group inside the company. Because we feel that personal contact more than ever is crucial at this time. We also created templates for the healthcare market. We are right now. So next week, we will be launching templates for the educational markets, the educational sector. So we see that although schools are kind of coming back to kind of a semi normality, the truth is that in the planning of the upcoming year, we already know that some schools will start still fully remote. Other schools will start sort of in hybrid scenarios where they will have part of the classes being provided in person and others remotely. So we're trying to address all these issues and providing solutions that are built in on top of Microsoft Teams. So I think that's a very interesting way. I mean, you're hitting all the hot topics. And I think too, as you're talking about the very forward thinking about the rest of the mental health, the mental wellness programs, that's one of those things where we don't even understand yet what that impact is going to be. We're not going to know for a while. And so I think companies need to be very forward thinking and start planning for that because it's going to be difficult to, if we go back to some semblance of what it was within our organizations, what that's going to look like and the reality of second waves and other issues and those kinds of things. But yeah, there's a lot going on. I've run into a number of partners and there's several MVPs who have been very busy. Business has increased and a lot of it has been doing kind of what you're doing. I think in the power platform, for example, helping develop these customized applications to do some similar things for meet the custom needs of these organizations. But developing apps that are designed for the specific needs of an organization. And as you said, it's a lot of the people that are designing these are not developers. These are business people who understand on the ground the issues, the nuances of their particular industry of what they need for that solution. And they find that they're able to go and build very robust, powerful capabilities without having that engineering background. I just was talking with Ducks over at AvePoint last week. It was talking about a couple of his clients and these are people that are, you know, operations out in the field talked about somebody working there at the airport in London and saw a problem, went to resolve it. I mean, that's the kind of stuff. It's exciting to see that people are able to leverage this technology. I have a similar take to you as well. It's like, look, I don't need to go and have my name on the creation of these products, these solutions. I mean, a lot of us that are very involved in the community, I mean, I'm happy to share. Here's my experience. It's exciting to see other people that are able to learn from the community and then go and achieve more. I think that at the end of the day, that's what matters to us. So we're not building software for ourselves. We're building software for people out there, real people, right, that every day have real issues, real problems that have to overcome a lot of things that we sometimes don't even know about. And if the software we create, if the solutions that we envision can help solve those issues, that's what matters. So it's not about putting your name on a solution. It's about how many people can you actually help. And I believe that that's what truly makes a difference these days, participating, helping, being there for the others. And even as a business, even as a business, in times like this, what matters the most is how can you ensure that your customers will be in business a year from now? How can you ensure that schools will still have, you know, their system in place a year from now to continue to provide education to our students? So there's all sorts of entities out there that need assistance. And that's what we're here for. Yeah, no, I think that is a great perspective. But honestly, something I do with my kids that are in college now is get them thinking about, like, whatever you go into, you have to think with that perspective. How is this going to meet a need? It's not just, hey, I'm interested in the passion about this topic and go get a degree and figure out how to apply that later. You need to be thinking about that. We all need to be thinking about that. How does this help where we are in a rapidly changing world? And whatever our passions are, technology, science, whatever that is, services, but to constantly looking at how can we add value back? How can we help others? Because I'm a big believer in that, is what is it? A rising tide floats all boats or some version of that, you know, that basically we, you know, the idea that we all work together and everybody rises with that. But well, I was just going to say that still in that in that perspective, let me just add a final note. And I told you that I deeply care about inclusion and thinking about a world where everyone is not only welcome, but fills part of it and where we're all the same. And having that in mind, in the past over half a year, I've been doing a lot of work and putting my team to work on a tool for people with disability, so different types of disabilities. And I believe that sometimes we kind of, you know, overlook that issue. We talk about it, but we don't really and deeply think about it when creating software. And Microsoft actually has been doing a great job for that matter, so a lot of functionality has been incorporated in Microsoft technologies in the past, in the past probably year and a half. We're trying to add a little more to that. So we will also be coming up with a solution for that, that I deeply hope that it can help a lot of people. I see that sometimes we also think about people with disability. When we have, when we talk about this, we only think about people with deep problems and deep disabilities. And that's not always true. There are wide things like being dyslexic or, you know, being color-blinded. And that can be very limiting in your day-to-day job. I truly want to be able to say that the software we create includes everyone. And with this, I think we... Yeah, I really appreciate your time. I know we went a little bit longer than we had scheduled. Oh, I'm sorry. No, no. It's been great. I always love the conversation. When it's going, good conversation, it's fine. We don't put a forced stop on the end of it. But people want to find out more and get in touch with you. What's the best way to reach you? Where can they find you? Well, they can easily look for me in LinkedIn. So probably my name is not the easiest to write down. But if you look for me in BindTuning, you will have all my contacts, okay? So bindtuning.com and you will find me there either LinkedIn or Twitter. So be a Trish Olivaera. You can find my name. You can find my name in the BindTuning website. And then from there, it's easy. Well, and hopefully I'll get to see you later this year at one of these events that I'm hoping happen. Let's see. We're all kind of holding our breath. But well, thanks so much for your time as great connecting with you. And let's catch up soon. Christian, it was an honor. Thank you. Thanks a lot.