 Hey everybody, it's Christian with another MVP Buzz Chat interview. I'm talking with Amy. Hello. Hey, how are you, Christian? It's great to see you. So folks that don't know who you are, where you are, what you do, why don't you give us the rundown. Sure. Hey, I'm Amy Dolzene. I'm a office applications and services MVP going on, I think it's seven years. I can't remember. Six years, seven years, something like that. Six years, I think. Six years. I know time is folding in on itself. I am based in the Cleveland, Ohio area, and I work for Ernst & Young, or EY. I actually currently am the Americas Relationship Director for the alliance we have with Microsoft. So I'm in a completely new, completely new role. For those keeping score, that's essentially the exact same job as me. So there's two of us, we were just talking beforehand. Like if there's any of the else that are MVPs that are out there that are the alliance people for Microsoft Alliance, we want to start a support group. Yes, please. I spent the past three years in client serving, so I was helping our clients roll out Microsoft 365 and three years before that at EY, helping our EY internal people like help us roll out SharePoint and Yammer and our collaborative technologies. And prior to that, I was at a company called Lubrizol and rolling out Yammer to them and all kinds of other things. My background is certainly not in technology, but I have always had a huge passion for it. I often say practicality is my superpower because I love technology, but I love helping people find that really practical way to apply it to their everyday lives that will improve their work life in some small way. Rather than trying to see this big giant vision, like let's break it down to the practical thing you can do right now to improve your work life. It's always like the best content that's out there. I'd say a lot of the community that's been built, it's not about like Microsoft will come out and do the marketing spiel and talk about here's this gargantuan thing that we're releasing, but it's the industry folks, the MVPs, the customers that are out there, the people using it day in and day out sharing. Here's how I did this one thing, I solved this problem. That's like the best content out there. Yeah. I have this presentation that I give around how to really use that SharePoint site behind your team because people forget it's there and it's nothing that is like earth shattering. I'm not sharing like amazing technical tips. It's just if you've got this thing going, if you're working, if you're managing a project, you might benefit from this feature. If you need to record all your meetings, you might benefit from this kind of page. Just if you use Power BI or if you've got a dashboard and you need to show it to people, put it on your SharePoint site. There's like practical ways you can break down this enormously amazing vision that Microsoft has into your everyday life. One of the reasons why I love doing the productivity tips and Tom Duff and I, back when we used to do the webinars and I know we need to do some stuff again. It's been a while since I took the new job. It's me, Tom, not you. But one of the things that I love about giving those kinds of presentations, which really kind of goes back to a decade ago when I started doing a session SharePoint session called like the 10 features and 10 SharePoint features you're not using and then parentheses, but probably should. I see people's faces in this session and be like, you know, I heard of that. I heard of that. And the third thing I show, they're like, whoa, that's cool. I've never seen that before. Yeah. That's what I love about the productivity tips is that we might share 10 or 20 tips and somebody would be like, you know, I was like, I know that when I know that one, then there's that one that was like, that could change my, my productivity focus. It's fantastic. I love that. Yeah, me too. Because that's what it's, that's all about Amy. It's, it's changing people's lives for the better. Well, I like to think that, you know, we, we work hard, right? We work really hard. Someone say we save lives. I would never, I would not say that. I would say that I just try to bring a little bit of joy to my work life every day. And I like to share that joy with people. And even if it's the simplest little productivity tip, like, I don't know, when I learned, I don't know the control K tip. Like that. Oh my God. And I love sharing that. Or when I went, you know, just those kinds of things, I just like, I, I know I'm a bit of a geek. I guess that's why I'm an MVP. People think I'm a total nerd. But I nerd out on the little fun features that I find that really improve my work life. And I can't help but share them with other people so that other people could possibly benefit. I don't feel like I'm saving lives. I'm just trying to improve their day just a little bit. It's because we work really long hours. Not all of it is delightful. Let's find little ways that we can surprise and delight ourselves in these products every day that we're using cumulative effect where lives are saved. That's what I think that iterative steps. No, it's, but it's, but again, I mean, that's the important content to people have those conversations going back to like, you feeling like you're not able to connect with, with customers so much in the, in the new role. It's one of the things that I love about the community is exactly that sitting and talking with somebody like, well, what do you do? What do you do? It's like, what are your frustrations? Oh, have you, did you know about this feature or did you know about this? And people just again, your eyes go big and it's like, no, I'd never heard about that. Or, or, you know, I was just talking with somebody a couple of weeks ago who had that very same problem. Let me get you connected to them because they had a really interesting solution that we talked about and you guys probably connect. People love that. They're like, oh my God, how do you know so many people? I don't, I don't know. I just, they're my friends. They're people that we talk about Microsoft products with and we solve problems together and we geek out on it and we like it and you should really meet them. Once again, cumulative effect, saving lives. It's just, it's happening. One of the things which I find myself saying all the time, because I don't think there's a week that goes by that I am not pointing somebody to somebody else within the community. Somebody asked a question somewhere, but like, you should talk to this person or I might reach out to that person and say, go take a look at that post. This is what you, this is like your space, your world. That is something where what I find myself saying all the time is don't be shy to reach out, especially the MVPs. That should be the easiest connection to go and make. If you see Amy or I talking on a topic that you're interested in and we're not connected, connect with us. Absolutely. Let us know. That's what you just saw. Like, Amy, I just read your blog post on this or I saw that video. You were talking about this thing. Yeah, I know that video is five years old, but you were talking about that. What else can you tell me about that? Like, do it. Reach out. Do it. Absolutely. And that's, I think what people don't realize is we also didn't get here yesterday. Like, we took a long time to build those relationships, that cumulative effect that you just mentioned. It is about the very same things that we both did to the people that we were learning from at the time, reaching out and saying, Hey, I just read your blog post. Hey, I just read that on LinkedIn, you changed to this role. It's those little bits of outreach that build up this network of people that we've been able to collect as not just for networking, which I hate. It's about building relationships, it's about building community. And that is a thing that has taken years to get here. And we are happy, anybody out there, happy to help you along. Like, we will help you get connected to that other node that we haven't spoken to in five years, but we'll absolutely take our call because we helped each other five years ago, or we responded to something or we, you know, that kind of stuff. It's, it's meaningful. Yeah. Well, it's also, for those that aren't, you know, big users or supporters of Yammer, there's a certain, there's almost an inner circle of Yammer community people. Because again, this social collaboration technology, these are people are hyper connected already. And so there's a certain, I don't know, mentality of people that were passionate about that group of, of tools and technology, even within the collaboration space, the SharePoint community, the Microsoft 365 community, you know, pretty, pretty tight net. So like that was a lot of your activity was around the Yammer side of things. So what's the latest in your Yammer journey? What's the latest that you have to share around? Oh my gosh, I am so excited about the official communities feature that just launched. I mean, I'm so happy about it. I'm so happy that we finally have that because while I love Yammer and I love, I actually embrace the chaos that can be Yammer because it's so creative and like anybody can create a group and anybody can do anything and you can make it whatever you want it can do so many things. There are times and places when you work at organizations, maybe say the size of mine, it's pretty big, where you need the opportunity to organize that chaos and make people feel safe because not everyone is as comfortable in a chaotic Yammer environment that many of us might be or in, you know, Twitter or LinkedIn, like people are not as comfortable in social, not like social media, they're not as comfortable with it. And even within their own organization, they're especially not comfortable with it. So finding those ways to help make people feel like I'm safe here. This is the official place I can get this answer. This is officially supported by my organization. I think is just, I'm so happy about that one. That's my favorite one that's coming out. Yeah. Well, it's a, it's one of those, my experience has been that, you know, people that are even just kind of like, yeah, I kind of don't get it or stuff until they do, until they need it. And then they suddenly find out it's like, wow. I mean, I have so many examples of this of where, you know, it's like people are in there, there, there's a big discussion that's happening. And then a year or two later, somebody will ask a question and be like, you know, you got to search and see this and see all of that discussion and add to it and modify and update that. I will get, occasionally we'll get a question about something that I set out in Yammer six months ago, 12 months ago, and be like, well, let me update you. Somebody will ask a question, just like jump into that thread. And it really, for a lot of people, it was the first time where they really started to understand, like the knowledge management side of it wasn't just the documents that you were capturing, was all the contextual conversation, the conversations and things around that. I know that we have that in teams now. And there was again, some confusion around, well, does Teams has these pieces? Well, we're kind of doing that, you know, in Yammer. And I think what helped there is, are the integrations with outlook with teams. And that's proven out the fact that, you know, Yammer is back again, doing one of the most the fastest growing segments, products within Microsoft 365, which is great to see. People are starting to finally, I still like the inner loop, outer loop description. I still do. I don't. I still use it. Me too. Yeah. But yeah, Daryl Webster and I, we're just talking about this. And I was like, is that, we're talking about the, you know, the in the flow of work, like I get it. And I understand that with Microsoft loop and that discussion, I said, but I still am a fan of the inner loop outer loop and describing where each of these things are. Cause I think it just fits. But that, I think people, more and more people are starting to really understand where the pieces fit together. We, my organization, AdPoint has, we have our SharePoint Internet. We have the communities out on Yammer and the daily work is all within Teams. Every day I'm in all three environments. I've already been in and out and working in those today, every single day. And it's not a question of where do I go to get the work done? I, you know, different work activities are happening in different places, depending on what's needed. That's where you go and do that. Yep. And the fact that they're all better connected now than they've ever been. Everything surfaces everywhere. I mean, that's just amazing. The thing that we've been asking for and begging for for so long. And that's the problem. That's likely the reason why Yammer is growing so fast because it's finally getting connected. Like everything is all better connected to each other. You know, and I, that, that is really great. How walk down is your current organization with like the provisioning process? Is there like a review? Is there like, you know, governance body that looks that stuff to create a new community, to create a new team? Or do you have a certain amount of flexibility in what you can create? Well, we have all kinds of controls on things. So within teams itself as a platform, I, with my security levels, I'm only allowed to create an internal, an internal team that is private. So I can't create any public or org wide teams, you know, my, my security level. So how big is, how many employees you guys have globally? Like 310,000? A little bit different than a lot of other. So we're about 2000, you know, but we even have some of those, those controls in place and they very tightly manage those that can be externally accessible. They watch that very closely. Yes, we do that. Absolutely. Like only a certain like rank in the organization is able to create an external externally facing group, like certainly facing team, you know. So for Yammer, we've, we've never opened that up to guests or anything either. It's always, always just been internal. So we still can only create internal Yammer communities. However, my Yammer communities can be public, public to EY, not public to the searchable and findable, searchable, findable. Yeah. However, in both teams and Yammer, which we now have Yammer in native mode, as I'm sure most people do now, it creates that Microsoft 365 group on the backside, you know, just like a team does create that group. We have a attestation process. So every six months you have to, as a manager or as a manager, as an owner of that community or that team, you have to attest to the fact that that team or community still is a going concern. So that you try to cut down on the sprawl. And yeah, so, so those two things are in place and they're, they're really, well, several things in place, they're really helping. The one thing that we have not yet done, which I really hope we will soon is the new, the new ability to lock down the all company group, you know, you can lock it like you like rename it and you can lock it down and you know, only certain people can post like, I'm not involved with the team that, that manages Yammer anymore at EY, but I think that's something they're considering doing and I just think that will really help as well to make this, like, finally an official group that's moderated and branded and like all that stuff. So that will help too. But our, yeah, we've got a lot of policies and procedures in place. And we, in fact, the one thing that we cannot do in our Yammer network that you were talking about, like going back several years, we only have two years of data in our Yammer communities, right? So anything beyond, anything beyond that gets deleted for retention period, retention policies and our teams network, their teams are also, we have certain retention periods on, on how long chats exist and how long conversations are. What do you call them? Posts. Yeah, posts and. Well, that's how it should work, unless it should be any of the extensions should be the exception and that attestation period that, that regular review would be part of where you go in and, and validate that that needs to be the case or not. That should be the way that it works. So should, you know, so I, as we were talking about earlier, like, I'm always concerned about governance when you put too many policies, too many constraints in place that then restrict or prohibit collaboration. You don't want to do that, but it's reasonable to put a strong governance in place once those pieces are put in place. So like our, our, like I put in an IT request to create an externally facing team. There's a little more rigor around that. Like I created one, I run our AppPoint Community Champions program. I created one that's external, so I can invite those external people into it. But it will, it's tightly controlled, tightly watched. There are private channels within that for a bunch of the, the, the activity. They closely watch what content is shared within those, like all of those different things. But in a, my request was fulfilled within two hours. And I was live and able to start adding people into it and working with it. And so they've realized that I don't know what the SLA is. I think that was faster than what our internal SLA was in place. But that's the way that you, it's not, people are not against having rules, be transparent about what those things are, and then be responsive on the request. And if the answers no, explain why, be quick to respond why. Yes. Maybe they just need to modify something about their request to make it fit within this. Right. You didn't have enough people listed as your owners, or you didn't have enough of a description about how this team is different from the other team that we have already in the organization, whatever it is. But have those processes in place and make them accessible, make them available, make them, make people understand why they exist. Also helps for sure. Yeah. It's funny that I always sound like a broken record around adoption and engagement around it. And so much about what, you know, adoption, there's the training side and education part of getting people on board. But so much about adoption is just don't screw up the governance aspect of it, you know. Yep. It's, they are absolutely tied. Adoption and governance have to be tied because I think, well, both of us are parents. You realize that guard rails make kids feel safe. They can still do things. They can still do the things within your rules of your family, but there's one thing that they're out about. They know when they do something wrong. The better that, the better that you communicate that, the better your family functions. Like the popular belief that's out there, pop culture, there is, there, there are right and wrongs out that are absolutely true that are out there, but especially within, you know, your own family. Yes. So within your, within your organization, there are things you need to know your organization, what matters to them, what they need to protect, what they need to keep safe, honor those things, build your processes around them and make people understand that we didn't just put this in place to make your life hard. We did this because like in our case, we're protecting the information of the most valuable companies in the world. So we have to be careful about that. And we want to be careful about that. We want to make people feel safe in this environment too. Like your information will not leak out. We are not going to let that happen. That kind of stuff is important. I just thought, I just came up with a great idea for a smaller scale social experiment where we do make it intentionally more difficult to do all those things and, and then, you know, monitor people. So it's, it's kind of like a collaboration version of the, what is it? The escape room. That would work. That would totally work, Christian. People would love that. I'm sure I, if I'm a good, if I can read people well, then people would love that. Yes. Well, good times. Well, very cool. So thanks so much when we talked about this for a while. I know there's this belief out there that I only interview as part of MVP, BuzzChats, all the brand new MVPs, but no occasionally people that have been in the program for many years. So yeah, great to connect. And of course we need to, again, we're serious about that support group. Seriously. Yep. If you are the Microsoft Alliance manager for your company and are in a fellow MVP, even if you're not an MVP, like which, we could, it'd be great to, to sit in stories. Yeah, that's right. So it's okay that for people to cry together, I know. Well, this has been delightful. Thank you so much. Well, so Amy, people that want to get in touch with you, find out more about you. What are the best ways to find you, follow you and reach you? Sure. Well, my name's pretty unique. There aren't very many Dolzines out there. So you can find me on LinkedIn. I'll probably be the only one you find this Amy Dolzine. Amy Dolz is my Twitter handle and happy to connect anytime and either of those places. My email address, you know, is available on LinkedIn too. So reach out. Excellent. Well, thanks so much and we'll connect soon. All right. Thank you, Christian.