 Hey everybody, this is Christian Buckley with another post tweet jam collect to clap talk tweet jam post-tweet chip interview Adam. Hello Hey, how's it going Christian? And thanks so much for participating. It's always interesting get a lot of people that like sign on Yes, I want to participate and other people like I just don't know if I could make it and then it's like the day of we do This one hour online event and then conversation and there's Half the people that said they would be there aren't Stuff happens, you know, yeah, and then all these other people that either didn't respond or weren't sure they show up But every time I mean I get so much out of the dialogue that flies by on Twitter It's just a great research of content. Well, why don't you introduce yourself who you are where you are what you do? Yeah, sure Adam ball based out of the Denver area co-founder of a few things. I feel like it's like The problem maybe I have a problem, but a co-founder of cloud revolution Is the day job co-founder of comms v next the community driven Microsoft teams you see conference Happening that happens here in Denver as well. And then also co-founder of the Colorado UC user group Have been doing that for actually 10 years now. So I'm super proud of that And it's great to be here just like you said Christian. I get so much out of these sweet jams I see so much and I get so many different viewpoints of things I know we'll talk about it here in a few minutes, but I love the different different Mindset changes that I get out of the tweet jams. Well, it's interesting too in this topic So the topic was staying productive in a multi-tenant multi-cloud world. I mean just in the title there You really have two very different areas and you had people that were participating there were very much about the Front and individual personal or team productivity like that focus that world So the Microsoft 365 and productivity suite and then you have more of the partner centric organization centric infrastructure centric Multi-cloud discussion that side of it and I intentionally wanted to like talk about this broad topic because it would go in different directions Yeah, absolutely and actually a couple of things that came up to me as because like you said I kind of came at it from from that B2b world right and somebody I don't even know who it was brought up the point where it's like Hey, well you also have acquisitions and things you have multi-tenant in an acquisition Oh, yeah, and I and it kind of made me pause and re-evaluate some of my answers even so another good example of That mindset change. Well, there's and it will get into it and some of these We have the benefit here of talking about this and going through the seven questions that were posted because it's always seven questions It just happens to be the magic number for that one hour kind of kids going But we also then can kind of add in as if they were our original thoughts what others may have stated Yeah, I'm gonna take that one Me now so we started off the first question What is what was the primary productivity? Productivity issues and users and you personally Experience when working across multiple tenants and or multiple cloud environments. Yeah and for me This one is is all about identity, right? So having to jump from identity to identity even if it's in guest access So I go from my tenant to somebody else's tenant it in and the issue is is that it makes me pause Right, which maybe is a good thing. We maybe we all need to take a breath have a sip of coffee or what have you? but but when you change It disrupts the workflow, right like having to go. Oh, I'm not in that tenant and You know, it's funny is is yeah It might only take you a few seconds But it takes you out of that world and then takes you into a new world and your your thought process is broken You have to regain that thought control of what you're trying to accomplish And then you have to get back to that other process and so that for me that identity process is the is the piece That's the biggest problem. Well, that's one of the reasons why I mean it doesn't solve it because cause other concerns But of like Microsoft Teams being so powerful in that it you know is bringing where a lot of that multitasking or the separation of the conversation from the work activities And where teams brought those things together so you could have a contextual Conversation about this thing this document that we're working on together this profile this a website This this dashboard that we're both reviewing and talking to at the same time Having it all in one place now then the problem is you brought up is it's and well and teams is a great example of this This actually when teams launched And this really where you and I got to know each other was because so many of the unified communication crowd that were Skype people and Really that you see the telephony world, which is it just a very different world I worked in telecom for the first third of my my careers like I understand a lot of that all Came over into teams You know that that part of things moved over and and so we got to know each other So you and Jonathan McKinney and some great conversations But suddenly if people knew that we're getting now invited into dozens now You know could be hundreds for some people of teams and channels And there's just this constant flurry of notifications and like I commented I hear a ding somewhere in my desktop Like what was that which application which which thing do I have open where that's alerting me or is it my phone or Or now is it my watch, you know person a browser tab? Yeah, exactly And it's that's that's the the biggest frustration is organizing the notifications and organizing keeping those things streamlined and I find like I'm Continuously going in pinning and unpinning and pinning and teams In the browsers I have You know pinned and favorites bars and all these things that I use there's kind of a science that I follow behind that to stay organized Absolutely. Yeah, you have to I mean it especially And it's harder because for us, right? We're in a much more B2B world and so I might interact with 10 different customers or Organizations, it's that really helps drive some of those productivity issues for me if I was just a Knowledge worker inside an organization like maybe I wouldn't have some of those issues But I think I don't think I'm that uncommon As far as that goes I think I've got I think other people can relate to what the challenges I face well, yeah, I think early on with some of the feedback so my Personal experience in providing the feedback this guidance back to Microsoft saying hey I think the multi-tenancy issues are getting like multi-cloud is a different conversation We're gonna get into more of that. Yeah, the multi-tenancy issue and and Microsoft just kind of said yeah Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, that's like a but you're an MVP or you're a consultant. It's different. I'm like, you know, it's not though because sales are marketing right Marketing is constantly interacting with other companies and and they're right there in that same spot So I agree. I don't think there's that much difference there Well question to kind of built off of that. I tried in fact somebody commented It's like wow, you really went dark with the first question, you know dead and I commented I said like I understand how the social networks work is that rage equals engagement So I'm I get hooked people into the conversation No, but the question to is what are your biggest successes. So really what works well when working across multiple tenants and or multiple cloud environments? Yes, I said this in the tweet jam. I don't necessarily know that this is the right thing But it's what works for me. I end up having multiple Browser profiles so that I can have them all up. So even if I'm in a guest tenant, right? So here I am in my home tenant. I will actually open my home tenant in a browser profile So I can then change between guest access without having to change my team's desktop client and again teams is a great example of where Multitenant falls down In an application really quickly because I'll point out outlook has this right? I can add all my outlook Accounts and I can interact with those really easily The mobile app is fantastic for it And so the desktop is the problem child right now And I know that Microsoft has talked for a while now that they're planning to fix that So I'm I look forward to the day when that comes about but like I said, it may not be the right way to do it But that's the way I solve that problem very Effectively for me so that I can be in all the different tenants because I have to be in the comms be next tenant right because we're constantly our events coming up here soon in the few days and so When I have to be paying attention to that because there might be something that comes up that needs immediate attention If I had to go sign out of my team's client and sign in over there It's it's just not productive. Well, I think that there's it's improved with some of the outlook integration around the notifications Again, if you're talking about in the Microsoft You know 365 stack in the solutions and there are options the most common being as just as you said Yeah, different browser profiles and I use another I've start I do that But I also use RAM box So I have multiple applications there and that does a decent job with notifications across the top But it's again. It's like having it's just another resource intensive application If you have Chrome open and RAM box and teams then you know your video quality will be crap of doing One-on-one chat, but so there's there's that one of the other things like I kept talking about it's like Oh, I want like a mobile emulator. It's like well There are tools that are out there paid and free where you can basically have a Bluetooth or a wired connection of your mobile device You know whether iPhone or or Android on your desktop and then just have the teams app up all the time. Yep. Yeah, absolutely Yeah, I mean I haven't done that, but that's an interesting thought I don't know if that would work really well for me on the day-to-day because of trying to pull up documents and stuff like that Where but for chat and collab absolutely that would work really well, you know, I'm not sure how that works I've not gone experimented You know because it was the app I was looking at it was paid to be able to enable the desktop clicking I I would still have to I could view it on screen, but I'd still have to do the controls via my Vice but just the paid version allows you to do either way and what actually happens if I click on it Does that open up naturally in the browser? Like I'm gonna go test that out, but yeah I'll look forward to hear your your thoughts on it. I'm gonna go experiment It's it's on the list that things to do to write about that's the never-ending list of course So the third question is how does the rapid rate of innovation? So updates the changes so much that's happening impact your personal and organizational Productivity on multi-tenant and multi-cloud environments Yeah, it's something I want to comment on real quick before we get in here because multi-tenant is super easy to focus in on Multi-cloud to me Me meant something completely different than I think what you might have intended right when I think about multi-cloud I think about you know, where where is my service living, right? So is it Azure? Is it? You know somebody else's cloud is it we can say the names here No, that's exactly what I meant. Yeah on a Google, you know IBM whatever it is Yeah, yeah, and that's not necessarily my world So so I'll end up staying a little bit more focused on that multi-tenant side of things But wanted to call that out But in both cases I think the rapid rate of innovation creates one specific pain point Which is user adoption and user education around it because if I don't know what's going on And all of a sudden something changes and it happens so frequently Where it's like what I was doing yesterday worked and now what I'm doing doesn't work why not and It just leads to that frustration of am I going crazy am I going? You know and don't answer that question because the answer is probably yes At the end of the day, but I think that's the biggest thing for user frustration, right like They they're already frustrated because they can't get their job done and now you throw rapid change into it And it's just adding to that stress level for for the average worker, you know one thing It's it has made people I know certainly you know with some of the problems again going back to in teams because I know that You know it's it's the kind of the central hub that you and I both that work from yeah But you know that you can apply this to any enterprise application. It's like that where there's rapid change but I've become more familiar with some of the behaviors of the application of the platform to when change is happening like if I know for example teams is Something where I host I have regular calls and occasionally and I'll go in and and record like I go to hit record and Sometimes it'll say record. You'll record to turn it on. It'll be great out. Yeah, my meeting nothing's changed I'm in the right tenant kind of all the things that you go through in your mind Like why am I in logged in as a guest tenant somewhere that I think sort of differently other times? Like it's missing entirely what I've learned from that is like all right. There's a partially deployed system update There's something that's impacted our tenant around that and I know just to come back a couple hours later It'll be in place There's it and that's exactly it but the end user doesn't care about that right like as an end user I don't care. I just need it to work now But one thing I will say is this that that it's a double-edged sword So I want to call that out in the fact that while you have that frustration. I Having worked in this OCS link Skype days where you had to wait six months for a feature to come, right? I get a lot more self-satisfaction when that feature shows up in two weeks instead of six months and so You got to take the good with the bad in that of that But it and I made this comment I feel like the message center is like you know when you know if we go to Ikea and you open up the box It's like I don't need the instructions. Nobody reads the message center. I love that Microsoft gives us the message center Thank you, but nobody reads it at the end of the day. I know they're I'll probably get a lot of comments saying Yeah, exactly but but at the same point in time, you know, we publish the message center updates right into our own teams Channel to try to bring awareness to that so that people know hey this change But again, people just don't don't it's like asking for a man asking for directions. It just doesn't happen So, you know, so it's in this my best practice for that is that I see the messages I get the alerts out there I triage them and I look at the ones that I there's the ones that are obvious like don't know what that is Don't care, you know Like delete kind of those messages and then other ones where like hey I need to look at this later or those that I'll read but I do make sure that I scan through those Yeah, and then of course I also am a big fan of like Darrell Webster and Daniel Glenn and the set the message center updates that they do Yep Answers regarding 365 group and and and so kind of see if there's something miss You know did I miss something and in as the last couple months like I've been on top of like I see their video Come out a day or two later. I'm like I already read already know Yeah covering my only other issue on that on the message center is is and I know Lauren Strant has made this comment too is that You get email blasted as an admin Consistently about major changes and you look at it and you're like how many users are actually using that that that got Blasted out as a major change and so there's this balance between alerting and noise and so I think Microsoft can do a little bit better job there just a little bit and That would help a lot with Getting people to pay more attention to the message center I think there was that talk about do we send this out as a digest and let people kind of expand out on those Versus the one-offs around each one of those things and yeah, yeah, that's yeah that again This is where it's great to complain about this kind of stuff now. Let's go two three years back We didn't have this stuff. This is fantastic So I'd rather I'd rather be inundated with information and then have to go through that filtering mechanism Then not have the info Absolutely, I think it like said it's that double-edged sword. So With the feature aspects. So the question number four was what are the greatest governance concerns with multi-tenant multi-cloud environments? Oh, we don't have enough time for this But the bottom line is is the data right who controls it is is really the the biggest Concern there because if and and I use this Metaphor with customers all the time. It's like your kids, right? So you can either invite people in and like you tell your kids bring your friends over and you have control And you know what's happening with your kids in the basement. You kind of know what's going on or you can say hey I Don't want you here and your kids go out and they're gonna do something somewhere else, right? And the data is the same way Do I want the data in my tenant and do I want the data and where I can control it? Or do you want people going out and taking that data elsewhere where you now have no control? So the greatest concerns is who owns the data who has it and now if if might if that data is in your tenant How do I get my controls on to the data that's over there, right? And this is it's a that's a good segue into the next question Which was you know how important our interoperability and data portability to current and future multi-tenant multi-cloud? And what it was where we start crossing over into the multi-cloud is again around you know governance and data management and ownership around those things is because as we look at from an Organizational standpoint, it's easier when you're talking about you know, ultimately everything in Microsoft 365 It lives that data lives in SharePoint and or exchange like everything that crosses through teams is in one of those two places And it even like stream everything's getting moved over so it's all the same similar back-end around that So that you can better centrally manage and create Governance policies and rules around to manage the security compliance or risk all those kinds of things When you're talking about multiple cloud multi-cloud and what that looks like Obviously, there's a lot of data that doesn't need to move in between those environments but that which does and and even if the data is not moving you still have to be consistent in The rules the security and compliance and governance rules that you place across data no matter where it is and how Are you managing that exactly a change in one place? What is that? Well, they think this is actually where the that multi-tenant viewpoint changed for me. Somebody made the comment where it's like Mergers and acquisitions all of a sudden now it's like to me that interoperability and just data portability I want to be able to take that data from that merger and bring that into mind. How do I do that? And that's and I made the comment in all of this. It's the hard part is is that we have There's very little incentive For companies to provide the way out But there's a lot of incentive for them to provide the way in and I think that's something that any customer should be asking about is What does that look like? Beyond the data controls because there is that Constant mergers and acquisition viewpoint. Well, there was a yeah We got had a little kind of a side conversation happened about migration I made the comment and everybody we've all heard this that say again that migrations are more of like a one-time project Like we're moving from a you know share point twenty ten to share point twenty nineteen or a SharePoint online Or we're moving from our data That's in e-room or out in box and we're moving that over to the Microsoft platform that that kind of thing That's a migration and what we're talking about doing is really the movement of data that move Which is more of a change management activity. That's how I respond to that and that's part of it You're right because that lock-in I remember when this transition in the late 90s was happening I came from the data warehouse world and all the front end applications on that where you had vendors that made it excruciatingly painful to move off of their platform. So to do what's right for You know for your users, you know that you you need to make sure that you have the latest greatest features and functionality that's out there and yet you could often find yourself locked into this platform with less desirable options Yeah, and I don't think anybody's doing it nefariously today. So I don't think there's like this intentional aspect It's just incentive, right? I need to get people on board to my platform. So I'll make it really easy But the way out is is more of an afterthought From that standpoint and that's a that goes to say for even within Microsoft So if I have 10 and a and 10 at b and we're merging companies Trying to get data out of 10 and a into 10 at b is difficult just because again, it's not the focus right now Yeah, but I'll tell you what the moving the data is a heck of a lot easier than everything else that moves along with that so your you know information architecture and The taxonomy that you've built things out like all of that the rest of that which gets very messy very quickly But that's I made the comment that you know, I think in the future organizations Need to be really good at change management Yes, and And if you'll those that I'm I tweeted out something. I got a bunch of likes on it It might be the most liked tweet from the tweet jam, but I said something the effect of you know organizations that Make I need to find the tweet but that that make you know change management a priority or a skill Will out innovate their competitors Absolutely, absolutely. It's it's becoming more and more and I actually think this ties Into item six to question six for you Is the fact that you know as it pro the it pro role changing you know those it pros who can adapt into That change management role or kind of take that business mindset to help the business improve and say Hey, I don't have to deal with the commodity aspects to me. That's the role change that needs to happen More so than anything else. I don't know how well that's happening I still see a lot of people who are stuck and are resistant But I think those are the changes that I would see if somebody was asking me I'm an it pro. What should I be doing? I'd be pushing them towards that You know it's interesting back when you remember when tech it was rebranded as ignite and so it was the Chicago event And I did a session where I did a bunch of research. So I was invited to present. So here. I was a non it pro I'm essentially a marketing guy But I went I've done, uh, you know marketing research for for a number of clients and things and independently But I did this research on and you know and polled the community and got this did this presentation They're probably 1500 people in my session talking about the of the future state like what's happening the it pro role And that was the primary You know feedback there was a lot of concern from people But the primary guidance that came from microsoft executives and other just it executives, you know out in the field that it was Changing but it was even more imperative that Companies didn't just go cut that they held on to the people that had the platform knowledge And that these other vendors solution specific things that there became more of a Almost a business analyst function to their roles They're more deeply involved not just pure technology, but they had to better understand the business But that they they are some of the most needed roles within organization. That's still the traditional it pro role Absolutely. I I do think that I like how you term that the business analysts because it knows They're right up there like so coming from the telephony world the admin assistants Have so much control because they're Locked up with their executives the it is pro is the same for the business They know all the ins and outs. They know where where a system was duct taped together to make something happen And they know how the system is supposed to flow They are they can be keys to how does the business increase productivity and process Because they know where those where the ultimately where the bodies are hidden on that so I was going to use the same phrasing but better the you than me So for the last question, I know we got just a couple minutes here says what three things can or should organizations do to optimize their multi-tenant multi-cloud environments My first one that I came up with on this was uh Define why That defined the why for for why multi-tenant multi-cloud? Um, very specifically Uh, I hear all different reasons for all that but make sure you know your why There's no judgment and and so just got to know it second thing is is it is invest in that training and user education Um, I liked a couple of people I just kind of simplified it But I liked a way a couple people said it was is people need to know where to do things and why to do it over there So which which spot? Um, and then Topic that we've talked a lot about is is uh be ready for that change management that constant communication out Um, those were my my three things No, I I think that's a great wrap up and I you know that you start with essentially I just simplify it in one word Is it plan? Yeah, I have a plan for this. Um, you know, I mean like across all of this it really is like you need to understand What the core platforms provide and what the outcomes that you're trying to deliver for your organization And just knowing that like understanding what they're capable of You know and what your organization needs out of that and then the rest of it then you build the plan out of What's the gap in between those like it's limited Features there would be products the services that are out there no matter how complex it looks they either do or they don't do Certain things you need them or you don't need those things And so you have to fill those gaps develop your plan develop your overall strategy for that How much you're integrating how much you're building what you can go and buy What third-party services that you need to provide around that It gets a bit hairy when you start talking about multicloud and again, it could be very dramatically different Applications, but your end users ultimately, that's why I think the tie-in on productivity is your end users don't care Whether you're going to microsoft for one set of solutions to amazon for another to sales force for another around that All they know is that their Operating system the environments when they log in to your whatever the primary platform Primary platform is your you know that it's consistent that it makes sense that they can get their work done Exactly, they need to get their work done. They're they're there to do their job That's all they want to do they want to get in they want to be able to do their job And then they want to be able to go do whatever else it is that they want to do They don't want to have to spend time thinking about What it what they need to be doing so Well, excellent. Well adam, I know that we're at we're at time here Thanks so much for for giving us your takeaways on today's tweet jam and and thanks for participating Oh, absolutely always look forward to it and we'll look forward to next month as well