 Hey, this is Christian Buckley with another MVP Buzz Chat. And I'm here today talking with Sharon. Hello. Hello. And this is, so you're not the first RD that I've interviewed here. You know, we've had, I think you're like the 10th RD that's gone through this. I don't know. I need to compile the list. And you'll be on that. That'll be mentioned in the blog post. But Sharon, people don't know who you are, where you are, what you do, why don't you introduce yourself? Yeah. So my name is Sharon Weaver. I live in a suburb of Kansas City on the Kansas side, because I know sometimes that gets confusing. I live right on the state line of Kansas and Missouri, but I actually live on the Kansas side just outside of Kansas City. I do own my own IT consulting company called Smarter Consulting. And we primarily help people with Microsoft applications. And I have four kids and a granddaughter. And I stay pretty busy. Oh, I'm also recently, I am the digital chair for the local digital women in Kansas City board. And so I make sure all their tech stuff is all taken care of. Because you have a lot of free time, apparently. Right. Yeah. Right. Yeah, I know. Hey, I didn't realize you had four and one. We haven't talked about that. So what's the mix of boys and girls of your kids? Yeah, I have two boys and two girls. OK. We have they're 28, 23, 21, and 20. Yeah, so I've got girl three boys and then little grandson. So my yeah, my daughter is 20. She'll be she's almost 28, 26, 22, and all in 20. And like your kids are like a right about the same age as my kids. Yeah. So well, that's great. Well, so why don't you talk about the RD thing? So you've been an RD. Well, I guess officially you're an RD in what five days? Yes. Yeah. So I have my first my first new beam call. I think it's scheduled for the 30th to get on the train. But yeah, this is brand new for me. I'm pretty excited. Well, you know, so we've because you and I have already had conversations about this. And you know, but for most of the world that has no idea what an RD and the difference between an MVP and an RD. Now, obviously, this is the I'm keeping things simple with the MVP buzz chat, RD buzz chat. So it's all it's but they're very different programs. And an RD is not like a higher level MVP. They're just completely different things. Maybe you could tell the world, you know, what an RD is in your own words, my own words. Yeah, no, I'm actually really excited about this. I have run around with MVPs and RDs for years. I've spoken at a lot of places. And what was really interesting to me is that, you know, a lot of my MVP friends are very deep into the technical world. And I have a pretty solid background in technology as well, but mine is definitely more broad and more architectural. So I like to do a lot of different things. And I like to know how to do a lot of different things. But when it comes to something that really deep dives into an area, I usually seek out an expert to help me with deep diving into that area. And I think, you know, from an MVP perspective, that person that would be deep diving into that specific area is going to be more of an MVP. Where at the RD level, it's really understanding broadly what all those technologies are, what the options are, how to architect, how to make sure people are using the right things and pointing them to the right person that can help them with something specific. Yeah, and that's interesting too. It's that, I mean, RDs, you know, obviously profiles of RDs, just like MVPs, it's very different. And there are some deep, deep technical MVPs across multiple different areas, but it's a specific role. I mean, so the role of the RD, it's not just, it was Microsoft Regional Director, which it's not a great name. I don't know kind of the etymology of the name of why they came up with that, but it was the idea that you have non-paid advisors that have kind of a direct line in the way that was described to me initially, like the 200 highest level executives, leaders, managers inside of Microsoft, we are a resource there for them. So we are experts in our fields, experts in multiple areas. And my background course, collaboration technology is we've met through the SharePoint community in that side of things, marketing systems, and I've also got involved in the blockchain world. And while that's, I'm kind of the fledgling learning growing within that space, you know, I've been in technology for 30 years. So generally you look at the RDs and the field is most of us are not employees within large companies. There are certainly a few there. Most of us are owners of businesses and we've had multiple entrepreneurial experiences in different areas. And so we're providing that kind of voice, that feedback to Microsoft and leadership. And so it's like any program, you get out of it, what you put into it. I mean, I've provided feedback back to, sat at Ignite this last year, there was a kind of a round table with RDs and provided feedback in the program. And I said, you know, in some many ways, I feel underutilized. I would love to do more. I thought there'd be more outreach. And so part of it is that you have to, we're looking for opportunities to provide in-depth feedback back to Microsoft. And I do have to say that having the RD status has helped kind of set up those conversations. Actually had an executive at Microsoft say that, hey, look, I took your phone call because you were RD, I'm glad, I'm glad I did. That's so cool. And, but I said, honestly, I was like so busy, but I saw, hey, it's one of our RDs because there's less than 200 of us in the world. Right. And it was great. Yeah, and less, there's like 15, 16 women in the world. Just to put this in perspective, there's 160 some odd RDs. There's last time I counted, I think 16 women worldwide and only like five in the US are women. Yep. So it's kind of, it's a big deal. It is a big deal. And if you're wondering who we are, you can go to rd.microsoft.com and you can look at the list and all of our pretty pictures and stuff are up there. And I know that I keep checking yours is not up there yet, but I guess as of, have you filled out all the profile provided? I haven't, I haven't gotten a link for that yet. So I'll come soon as part of the rollout. No, I am, I really think this is a cool thing. What's really interesting is that, you're right, I spent my whole career, like I started in web dev and graphics and SharePoint. And then I moved up into process management and product management. And what was really interesting is I started going into these companies and I was connecting the technology groups with the business groups. And that's, that was my favorite thing to do was really to help the business groups solve problems using technology. And as I've kind of grown up at first, I was doing it one company and then I was doing it for multiple companies. And then I was doing it for a city and then I was doing it for more and more and more. And now I think what's really cool is I get to go back and I get to help these companies which is what I do already. It's what I do as part of my business. I go in and I offer recommendations, I do assessments, I help them have roadmap guidance, things like that and basically say, okay, here's what we're trying to accomplish and here's where we want to go now from a technology stack perspective, where are we headed and what do we need to be doing and how should we spending our money. And so it's neat to be able to see the connection of what are the people really using versus what is Microsoft trying to accomplish and bridge that gap. Right. That's always the difficult question. I think that there are a lot of MVPs who feel like they have to tow the party line in every case. And to some degree, yes. I mean, it's like where you have to share your constructive feedback to Microsoft in a respectful way. I mean, it has to be constructive. Certainly, there are people in the community and MVPs have done this and sometimes RDS have done this where they have not provided their feedback in a constructive way. And it's more on the destructive side and it doesn't help anybody. But we should never be afraid to provide our feedback. And we were just talking about before we started recording about performance issues with Microsoft Teams, specifically around the video and audio capabilities. Like it's a known thing. I think if we said it was fantastic and it was perfect, everybody would know that we're full of it. Right. We can't get better, right? If we don't know what's wrong, we can't get better. I don't think it's about not saying what's wrong. It's about identifying what you can do and maybe looking at solutions to make it better. Right. And well, I don't wanna dig into talking about break fix issues with technology platforms. But what are the topics that you are out and passionate about speaking on? Because I know you do a ton of events. You help organize events. You're very active coming up through the SharePoint Saturday world as well as user groups and other things that you've talked about. So what are the topics that are top of mind with you? Yeah. So yeah, I do run SharePoint Saturday Kansas City. I've done that for seven years, I believe. And we'll probably do another one. And I also have a Kansas City user group around Office 365. When do you usually do your SPS event? What time of year? Fall. Actually, we write about the time that everything kind of slowed down was the time we would have been booking our venue. So we're actually revisiting options right now. Usually in the October timeframe is really good for us. So yeah, you'll see something come out before too long about that. Well, you've got the new community resources that are coming online and people will hear about this stuff soon, so I won't go in-depth around that. But ours is usually here in Utah. We've rebranded ours to Microsoft 365 Friday, moved it to Friday, but it's the SPS model for those that are familiar with it. But ours is usually the first weekend or second weekend of February. With this new resource, we're thinking about doing something this fall online for the region. I think it gives you way more opportunity to do things more often if you really want to also. So I would say the big topics that I really kind of end up talking about, first of all, what's really funny, and I actually saw a post about this the other day, I do a lot of basics. So I do a ton of intro sessions. When I started doing things, and I teach, so I'm adjunct at the local community college, back to the spare time thing. I do that because I enjoy it, but I- You certainly don't do it for the money. No, no, for sure. And so I was teaching these classes, and I just really, really loved the look on people's faces. I'd have 20, 30 people come in who were like, hey, I just got a voted to be the SharePoint person in my organization, they missed a meeting or something. And so now they are the SharePoint person, and they're like, I have no idea what to do. And so we would spend a couple of hours, eight hours, two days, whatever it was. And when they got done, they were just like, oh my God, this is so great. I'm able to do these things. I feel good about it. And what happened is I started speaking, but I started talking about more technical things, and I didn't see the same look on people's faces. They were just like, okay, great. I got more info. I didn't see that kind of thank you for helping me. And so I went back and I started looking at all of the different places I was speaking and really realized that there were not a ton of kind of 101 level presentations that really brought people into the fold in terms of, hey, I know you wanna know about this and you know enough to ask the question, but not enough to go to the next level topic. And so I really started actually spending time to dial back my presentations to a very, very basic level. And it's really funny because every time I present, I'll get feedback and I'll be like, was that basic enough? And I actually have had to take several presentations and dial them down to get them to be that kind of 101 level. And those are my biggest attended sessions is those 101 levels. And then on top of that, I every once in a while get to sneak in because those are usually the ones that are picked before I get to do anything else, but I also like to talk about some soft skills. So I'm a six-ing with Black Belt. So I really like to talk about process management, business process solutions, automating, so like automation, best practices around automation in general, anytime you can automate something, it's totally worth your time. And then I also, I've been using Power BI since before it was Power BI. And so I do get to talk about Power BI quite a bit as well. Was it before it was Power BI? Well, so back when it was like Power Maps. So like a mama spreadsheet and a papa spreadsheet loved each other. I mean, what was it before? Yeah, so like Power Maps and the Power Pivot stuff that's inside of Excel all kind of grew up to move out on its own and create its own home in Power BI. Yeah, I just, I mean, I remember all of those other pieces in the products that you mentioned. I'm just trying to remember if there was some other analytics tool that just kind of got rebranded or created. I know, Excel, right, yeah, yeah. It's just funny, yeah. It's all the hidden features in Excel that nobody, nobody uses let alone and even knows how to turn on for the most part. You know, I used to be an Excel expert and that was back when it had its own proprietary language and everything and it moved everything over to and just lost me. That was back in, what was that, 92? Oh wow, yeah. I am too certified in expert Excel. I tell people that's the level of nerd I'm at is I am certified in expert Excel. Wow. It's like knowing Klingon, you know. Pretty much. Or Dothraki. Yeah, that's right. I guess Dothraki is the new Klingon. It's cool. They didn't formulas. It's all math and statistics. I guess that's a question that it's, I think it's an important question to discuss. Is it better to know Klingon or Dothraki? Which has a more practical use in modern life? Klingon, for sure. It's not as cool. I mean, the kids are more into Dothraki, but you know. I think you go to an fComicon type events and your Klingon's gonna be worth its weight in gold at some point. Okay. All right. Yeah, that's good to know. Oh, you get to, sci-fi like is a whole other topic. I could talk about sci-fi all day. There's got, well, we should have that conversation. So who are your favorite authors? Oh, geez. I'm not as- Harry Brooks for sure. Like Brooks is a classic. I think I've read pretty much everything. Yeah, see, I'm a kind of a huge fan of Orsa Scott card. And I know that it realizes a lot. There's a lot of fantasy as well as sci-fi. It's more fantasy. And so Tolkien, of course, C.S. Lewis is kind of the classics. Yeah, all the classics. I loved as a teenager, a Stephen R. Donaldson, to the Tom's Covenant Chronicles. I've not read that. I absolutely loved those. Yeah, the first six. I've not read the most recent stuff that he went and revisited, but yeah, they're a bit, it's kind of like, if you've ever read, I can't remember her name, the author, but Clan of the Cave Bear. Oh, that is, so number one all-time favorite author ever is, it's A-U-L, A-U-E-L. Yeah, yeah. So that's, it's funny. So my grandmother, my father's mother, was a huge fan of those books. And when she passed- I own everything on one of them, any hard copy. I've got first edition hard cover of every single one of them. Yes. So in fact, they're back, I think they're right there. No, it's really funny because people are like, seriously, Clan of the Cave Bear, I'm like, that is some of the best writing you will ever find in your entire life. Yeah, it's difficult for people to kind of get into it though. It's longer. That was the comment I was gonna make about Stephen R. Donaldson is that it's, some people are just like, they don't care for it. Look, I'll tell you that he wrote, I guess three trilogies of the same character, the three periods. The first three, it's very Lord of the Rings-esque. The second trilogy is nothing like the Lord of the Rings, like the same world a thousand years later, hundreds of years later, and it's messed up. Stuff has happened. But it's, I think you would really, if you like, you know, if you kind of like Tolkien meets Clan of the Cave Bear, Stephen R. Donaldson. Okay, yeah, definitely have to look that one up. That's, I am, so we used to have at the height of our book fanaticism. We had over a thousand books in our library. Here, physical books, not even joking. We counted over a thousand. And I sold off probably about eight or 900 just to kind of, you know, clear out. We were like, okay, this is kind of ridiculous. Got down to about a hundred books and I got a Kindle for my birthday a few years ago. And we've only kept only a couple of shelves of our favorite, favorite, favorite books and everything else has gone to the Kindle. And I just take that Kindle with me everywhere. It's so awesome. And then you burn the physical copies, you got rid of them, you purged. I sold them on half.com. See, so we, so this is actually the second time that we've lived in Utah. We were here for a year. We didn't think we were gonna, I was consulting and we said, we bought a huge house, I mean, big house down in Alpine, Utah. Anyway, we finished off this basement. The basement alone was, when I say huge house, the basement was 2,600 square feet. Oh, wow. So we finished it off, but there's this one giant utility room. And I thought, well, this could be like a windowless gym or, and then we went with my dream, I did three walls of floor-to-ceiling bookshelves. And I wanted just to carpet it and I wanted, because my wife didn't care, like, what do you ever do? I just want a little circular pedestal table, a comfy chair, a recliner with a light, a standing light. And that's it. It's like you go in there and just read. And I just thought this is a dream of mine. So we actually started to, we'd never had quite that many, but we started to, my wife and I, of doing just neighborhood flea market and garage sales and just started to find books and buy books. So we do little Saturday trips, just the two of us and go look for stuff. It was the beginning of that. And then I ended up going to work for Microsoft and sold the house and moved it over. So... I lost your library. Yeah, so it's still a dream of mine to have that. But the, yeah, having the, this is again, the closest I can get right now. And I don't have all my books. That's right. So these are, that whole bookcase is all books from classes that I've taught. Oh. That's, those aren't even reading books. Those are, every single shelf is all books. Sure. And they're reading books for somebody. Yeah. Not fiction, technical, technical guides primarily. I have a few crates of those. We've got the Costco shelves with the C2 bins in the garage that are filled with books. And every year or so my wife is like, are you going to get rid of these? Nope. Like they've been in the garage for years. I don't, eventually I'll have shelves. It'll happen. Yeah. We'll get rid of the two thirds of our garage that's filled with kid crap, which I'm sure you guys, We're down to once, we have one toy box that's still in our living room that I still question. A couple of small toys. And then we have a bookshelf that has some puzzles and some books and things like that. I still, I'm the oldest of seven. So we, I still have lots of nieces and nephews. Our youngest, we have nieces and nephews that go all the way from 21 all the way down to the most recent one is a couple of months old. And I think that we have like, between Jonathan and I think we have like 10 nieces and nephews. So, That's a small family. Right. There's always somebody coming over. There's always somebody. I should say that Sharon. I'm the second oldest of 10. And I can't tell you how many nieces and nephews I have cause I don't know. Yeah. I'm actually pretty surprised that we don't have more nieces and nephews, you know, with as many siblings as we have. It's just, it's worked out this way. But we still definitely have little kids kind of wandering in and out on a regular basis. So we've slowly like pared down the extra kids stuff. We also did foster care for six years. And so we were always like keeping different things like, you know, it's for different age groups and different sizes and whatnot because inevitably we would get a kid that we didn't have stuff for. And so we just kind of in our garage had random stuff. And after we stopped doing foster care, we've slowly kind of paired that back as well and given away a lot of it. And so now we're down to just a few things which is it's been really nice. Yeah, it's funny. It's like, well, we have two of our four are married and so we, you know, dream of getting rid of all of the rest of their stuff. In fact, I'm flying up to Minnesota to drive back with my daughter and my son-in-law and grandson. They're coming out next month for his brother's getting married and they're taking a bunch of crap with them back. So I'm looking forward to that. Oh, no, no, no. I was, I called my kids and after they move out, I'm like, there's a box with your name on it in the garage. And if you don't pick it up within 30 days, it's going in the trash. I love that concept. If they're out, they're out. Well, so what else is going on in their season? This is, I feel like the sports analogy is like, we have a shortened season here. What else is going on? Kind of what are your plans and how are you making plans during this season? I was gonna say this is like the most confusing time ever because ordinarily I'm a planner and I plan years. Like, I mean, my whole calendar is booked out, you know, as far in advance as humanly possible and people will call and say, hey, can you? And I'm like, well, let me look at my calendar. And they're like, oh, no, it's fine. It's in six months. And I'm like, oh no, I still need to look at my calendar. And for the first time in a long time, I mean, on the good side, and I've heard this said a lot of times on the good side, I've really had a lot more bandwidth for work, like actual, like good old fashioned, like working with people and making things and doing things just because we're not traveling so much. On the other hand, I'm definitely got some cabin fever going on. And I might've been, I'm ready to go do something, you know, outside of my house would be nice. But no, as far as planning, I mean, I think at this point, everything I'm planning for is virtual. I'm trying really hard to get things organized. But at the same time, I feel like there's a level where you can overcommit yourself really easily already. And in a virtual world, it's like makes that three times as easy because all I have to do is put it on my calendar to do an event or do whatever. And you don't really think about, you know, a lot of times you go to a physical event and we'll have some of the travel time and maybe some time before the whatever we're doing to sit and kind of tweak our deck or get ready or whatever. And when you put it on your calendar, you don't have that same time because you're just looking at it as a block of time, not a larger block of time. And so I have to be really careful to not overcommit to virtual type of stuff. But at the same time, still get to do some things. I'm really hoping that things can be under control enough to be able to do some stuff in the near future. But I'm still, you know, keeping my eye on stuff and staying safe and being cautious but optimistic. Yeah, you know, it's difficult. I've backed out of a couple events just because, you know, one that ended up getting canceled anyway and another one that it might happen. Like I'd love to tell Rackley that I'm gonna come out and participate in the North America CLABS Summit. That's a long ways for you. It is. It's a couple hours for you as well. And it's not, you know, look, it's not my target constituency, the, you know, customer base like it. And so it doesn't bring drive any business to me to be out there other than I think I'll see, you know, of my five active clients right now, I think I'll see two or three of them there. But then again, they're on the phone and I'm talking with them almost every day anyway. It definitely changes your priorities and the way that you look at things, if you say, I'm gonna be cautious about travel, all of a sudden it just absolutely changes the way you think about what you're going to do. Right. For sure. Yeah, exactly. And now I just, you know, just I did my first time out of the house this week, you know, went to the chiropractor this morning and had my masks at the ready and all that kind of thing. But I just was thinking about that. Like, I've not, except for walking the dogs, I've not gone anywhere this entire week. It's just, it's weird time that we live in right now. Yeah, we have days where like how many days? Like I try really hard to leave the house at least once a day. I use a lot of good excuses, like going to the post office or going to the grocery store. There's a Starbucks up the street for me and it's a drive-thru and they do a great job of everything being very sanitary. And so I'm not gonna lie, I definitely go up to Starbucks probably more than I want to admit. But yeah, I know we, but it's really weird for people like us who are traveling constantly to other places to all of a sudden be like the furthest I've gone from my house in the last three months to 30 minutes from where I live, all of a sudden that completely changes everything. And what's really interesting is, so I'm speaking at Comsverse, which is an international conference. And I was really excited because in April I was gonna go to London and get to speak at Comsverse. And through a few little mishaps, they've gotten it rescheduled and we're gonna do a completely virtual conference the first week of July or the second week of July, right after 4th of July. And it's really been fun to participate in that because we're very virtual and we're talking to people from around the globe, but at the same time it's sitting at my desk. I'm not in London and I thought that'd be kind of cool. Yeah, it's Comsverse is, and this will be live before it is, they're actually the sponsors of this month's collab talk tweet jam. Oh, that's great. Oh yeah, that's great. And their numbers are growing rapidly for that event as well. They're a great group. Yeah, and it's a free event. If you're not yet registered, go out and check out Comsverse online. And it's all about Microsoft Teams. But it's my little pitch there, throw that in for them. Yeah, it's looking at the schedule for this year. So I'm traveling, I'm on a flight one way next month to Minnesota is the first time I'll be on a plane since the first half of February, which is weird. I've been, like you, I was on a flight once or twice a month every month for the last decade. Yep. And usually after years, I was averaging like two and a half to three events per month that I was doing. And so to go to full stop, it's been weird. So my first international, if it all comes through right now, will be the European SharePoint Conference in Amsterdam in November. If the borders are open and we'll let you in. Right, that's the big, that's the question. I was supposed to do the European Collab Summit in Germany. They had to push their date back to October and it conflicted with family stuff. So I'm not able to do that one. You've got, as I mentioned, NACS happening in Branson, Missouri in... September. Is it September? Yeah, it's like the 26th. And then you have, is it in October? There's also a SharePoint Fest that's happening and... Yeah, SharePoint, I think SharePoint Fest, Seattle. Seattle, I think, and then... Yeah, and then they've got one in Dallas in December. Like they moved it from Chicago to Dallas. Yeah, they moved it back, yeah. But it's, yeah. It ignites all online. Ignites on, Inspire next month. Microsoft Inspire, the primary conference next month, all online. You have to find it for that. Online. MVP and RD summits next March will be online. So Microsoft has shut down all of their events for their entire fiscal year, which... I mean, I think it's prudent and safe. It's, you know, it is, it's the right choice. But yeah, definitely shakes things up for us to see. And I think what's really interesting, we're looking at this from a business perspective too, because I mean, like you, I've traveled, I've been virtual for many, many years. It's very normal. It's kind of like the rest of the world caught up with us. We're like, oh, this is normal, you know? Right. But at the same time, there is this element of, of the touch, you know, that, that high touch where you're meeting with people and you're seeing people and you're taking them out for coffee. That's really not there right now. And you have to kind of be creative about, you have to catch up with people more often. You have to be more specific about talking to people. You have to be more creative about how you have those relationships. It's definitely been, it's been a challenge to come up with creative ways. I just sent my team a quarantine pack that I've custom made and sent it out to them. So because I'm like, I just feel bad that, you know, like I'm, we're not going out and celebrating. We're not doing anything. And so I wanted to do something for them, just give them something or do something. So I'm, I'm finding like I'm sending more flowers and I'm sending more gifts and sending more, you know, things just because that touch is not there. Yeah. Well, I do love, you know, seeing a number of organizations that are doing this. I'm sure you're doing something similar. Again, bring it up wrackly. I was just thinking of how pate group that Mark sends like the image of all of them just doing their, you know, sitting around having, having drinks and just chatting and that kind of stuff. And user groups are doing this a lot. The, I think it's just fantastic just to block at a time where people can dial in for as long or little as they like and just see other faces and people and yeah, the virtual happy hours and not necessarily talk about a presentation or anything planned and structured. Well, especially if you can bring an adult beverage with you to the happy hour, it definitely makes for an interesting time. I'll just, hey, let's be clear though. There's nothing to stop you from except applicable laws from bringing an adult beverage to any other event at any other time, but that there may be consequences. So technically you can bring them and then what happens after? To be responsible for your behaviors, is that what you're saying? Yeah, I'm just saying it's, you've always had that power. It's like the little red shoes, you know, it was always there. Well, Sharon, people want to find out more about you getting in touch with you. What are the best ways to reach you? Yeah, so you can follow me on Twitter, Sharon Eweaver. You can find me on my blog, SharonEweaver.com. See, super simple. Or, you know, look me up on LinkedIn and just link up with me and send me a message. I just, I was just thinking make kind of smiling because I need to splice in. I just realized I'm gonna do this. I'm gonna splice in that little, are you ready weaver from UHF, the movie with weird Al Yankini? Yeah, so that just needs to be a time I have you on video. I just need to see. I love weird Al, man. That's a weird Al lyric sometimes, so that's cool. UHF is an important American film, so. For sure, for sure. Well, thanks a lot for your time today. Have a great weekend, stay safe, and hopefully we'll see you on the interwebs next week. Yeah, absolutely. All right, I'll talk to you later. All right, see ya.