 Hey, this is Christian Buckley with another MVP BuzzChat interview and I'm here today with Alexander. Hey, welcome. Hi. Nice to be here. Well, why don't you introduce yourself? Who you are, where you are, what you do. Okay. Hi, everyone. My name is Alexander Alaschen and I am recently become Microsoft Business Application MVP. Brand new. That's right. Yeah. Yep. Just last week. So that's exciting. So I'm originally from Ukraine, but now live in Poland at least at this moment. So I'm really fond of dancing and coding. I actually, I have professional background in dancing. I've danced for 12 years. So it was, it was a big part of my life, but recently things changed, especially with coronavirus. So, you know, Are you ever able to mix dancing with coding? Is that, is that a thing? Not really. But you know, I would love to, you know, that's a good thing. That's a great idea for the future to think about. Yeah. Well, if they could come up with, you know, gaming and coding and kind of combine the two. Why not dancing? I, I've always said that technology through interpretive dance is something that needs to be made a reality. I'm always saying that. Yeah. All right. Yeah. So, so more. So where, where do you work? Where are you working now? Yeah. So currently I'm working at Sierra market at three shape. It's a Danish companies that specialize in intraoral and 3D dental scanning. So we are in users of the Mx 365. So my main responsibility is to make sure that everything runs smoothly and we implement all the new and shiny features that help everyone. So yeah, basically that's what I'm working with. And recently I'm mostly specialized in power as portals because we released a couple of those to the wild. And if you check out my blog, dancing with your M.com, yeah, there is a lot of blogs about power of portals recently and also some dynamic 365 things, but you know, mostly portals like last six or seven blocks, definitely. You know, there are a lot of people that were in the traditionally like the SharePoint space of some SharePoint MVPs. I think it was the last in person MVP summit. Which hopefully you'll get to participate in again someday when it starts up again. It's fantastic. And the way that they're, it used to be very closed off like you go to an MVP summit and all the SharePoint people would hang out with the SharePoint people and we weren't really aware of some of the other sessions going on for the other focus areas. And now it's much more like kind of the a la carte university model where you get I'm interested in taking that class and going to that session. And so the downside to that is that the, you have a group of friends that you're familiar with around your MVP focus area, you may never see people because they're spread out going to different things. But the comment I was going to make at the last MVP summit, there were a number of SharePoint MVPs that spent the majority of their time over in the Azure and dynamic sessions because of those of, well, the rise of power apps and a lot of what was happening over there, the business applications, but the portal development that way. In fact, remember one fellow MVP, I won't say who it is so that he doesn't feel like that people would send him a hate mail for this. But he's like, what's the point of building a portal in SharePoint anymore? Let's let you know his was to go and use this new technology. So are you building that stuff for customers or is it internally? So we are, we are building those portals for customers. So we kind of have two main focus areas for our partners and for our end customers. So and because of that, we like built completely different portals, but also we have strict CVI in our company. So that's why we heavily modify the portal. And actually, when I start working with portal, when I first tried it was dynamics portal and before perhaps portals, you know, you could still customize a lot, but some things were not just quite there yet. There's no, there was no visual editor. It was not that easy to add managed things. But at this point in time, like, especially right now, when we, when Microsoft introduced that API, which is actually great, great addition to the portal, it becomes clear that you can do almost anything. Like there is nothing holding you back. Like previously, there was a limitation, the puppy just quite shrunks him down. And right now, almost everything possible, like you can turn your portal into whatever you want. Like, you know, music app, sure, video hosting to just go away. And that thing, it makes super powerful. Of course, it means that you need to have more developer background. Like previously, you can, you know, just, OK, I added this entity form. I added this drag and drop interface, everything simple. But the API adds complexity, of course. But I think that's the way to go. Like extensive possibility, what the platform can do. So that we can do much more. I think this right now is great time to start learning portal and great time to implement portals as well. Well, I think for the case that are the, or the example that was given to me of wine, I knew some of the pains of customers that would go and try to build. Again, I come from the SharePoint side of things. So use that perspective. I've worked outside of the SharePoint space as well. But, you know, it's dominated my life for so long. But people would go and try to build, you know, external websites and SharePoint's not really designed for that experience. It's an intranet technology and really strong at that enterprise collaboration, that side of things. But for sites, especially that are very, you know, have massive product catalogs and want to make that, you know, searchable and dynamic. You want to have the ability of people to go into a storefront and purchase things and you're constantly updating descriptions and images and kind of all those, those pieces. Again, there are things that SharePoint can do very well, but from an external standpoint and to go and link it to partner sites and databases and shared data and dynamically pull these things up based on searches just wasn't tailored for that experience. And that, that was the first example that his friend and his fellow MVP went and built a customer site was for a kind of a shopping experience for a company that had thousands of products on multiple, you know, spread across multiple databases. And it was much faster to deploy, but also, you know, the performance of the site and pulling from these different data sources was much, much richer. And the fact that he was also building it and connecting into dynamics, which I'm so glad to see Microsoft making more investments in the dynamic space. It's just been, I know it's been there for a long time, but it, I know, for those of us that weren't dedicated to the dynamic space, weren't taking it very seriously for a long time because Microsoft just wasn't, didn't seem to be investing anything. There was no innovation happening in that space. The last three, four years especially, it's just exploded. Yeah, so some things are still kind of old, I would say. For example, you know, in portal, the main library for UI is bootstrap, still version three, when the actual is five. So there is still some old things, but yeah, it's increased so much. And, you know, constantly new features, like when I just started like five years ago in dynamic space, dynamics portals will just an add-on. And, you know, you cannot find anything in the release notes or stuff like that about it. It was kind of hidden. And if you don't know about it or don't work with it, it was obscure, but right now, you know, it's part of the release notes, everybody talking about it, everybody trying it at least because the main advantage is that you can do things so fast. Like, I know how much time could in proper development of the website takes. My wife is a front-end developer. So, you know, how much time she spends on developing things. And, you know, it takes some time to deploy, test, go through all of these. And this local platform, because PowerSportals is still local with some Pringles of, you know, some pro development things, it just makes our life so much easier and faster to go from a prototype to real things that, you know, it's definitely something that you need to try. Yeah. So, what would you recommend people go to find out more? I'm sure you have this conversation. And as a new MVP, you'll get this more and more. Well, people will say they'll want that recommendation. That's one of the most common things that I hear about SharePoint, Microsoft Teams, and the other, the collaboration workloads that people say, where do I go and get started? What are your recommendations? So, it's always good to have kind of a, well, you know, here's two or three things to go and do immediately. So, kind of, what's your suggestion? Where do you point people? Well, you know, a couple of years ago, I would say it would be hard to point somewhere to learn about this. But right now, there is Microsoft Learn. It's actually ideal place to start. They have a lot of courses that you can take and, you know, it's free. And they cover PowerSportals pretty good, like they cover all basics and what you can do. And after that, if you want to try something more advanced, I would advise check out websites of my fellow MVPs, Victor Dantas or Nick Dolman for more complex and more interesting stuff and myself included. Yeah, as there is a lot of PowerSportals things. So, yeah, it's, it's pretty good time. There is always, you know, some sessions in different conferences in external virtual and in upcoming Scottish Summit 2021, there is, you know, a dedicated track for PowerSportals. So you definitely, if you're interested in PowerSportal, don't miss Scottish Summit 2021. There will be a lot of things. And I will present this as well, talk about benefits and dangers of API, because it's not just a good addition, but, you know, it's, it has some downsides and minuses that you need to be aware of just to be prepared for the things to come. So, yeah, just, just go and take courses, because right now is ideal time for learning, especially when we go online with everything. Well, word of advice too, is if you see a session in an event, maybe you're not able to participate in or where you do go to and see, you know, Microsoft Learn, and there's some, you know, MVPs or Microsoft people that are participating in that and you'd like to learn more, like one, follow the individuals, because a lot of times I know we, I do this, I'm sure you do this, is that we'll go and present it to conference, but we'll have the same or similar content that's just available out on YouTube. So if you go follow our profiles, one of the other things I recommend to those that are watching and not to speak and volunteer your time, but, you know, with so few in-person or really no in-person events that are happening right now, a lot of MVPs, especially are happy to talk to you about speaking to your user group. So if you'd like to do more in-depth and say, hey, we'd love you to come speak on this topic, a lot of MVPs are more than happy to, you know, figure out a time that works and come and present to your user group. So, you know, a lot of different ways. I think the secret to the community aspect of the MVP community is don't be shy, ask questions, reach out and connect with MVPs because we're usually, the reason we're MVPs is because we're happy to, you know, share our time and what we know and if it can be scheduled, we're usually more than happy to do it. So, you know, do you have anything coming up, any events, anything that you want to promote? So the biggest one I just promote is Scottish Summit 2021. That's the biggest one I will be participating in. I don't know actually what will come next. Maybe something will pop up soon. Right now, my schedule is free. So, yeah. There you go. If you have a user group, you know, Alexander just said he's got free time. Yeah. Well, that's great. Well, folks that are interested in getting in touch with you, finding out more, what's the, what are the best ways that people can reach you? Yeah. So the easiest way to reach me is actually LinkedIn. You can just type my name and surname or easily my allies dancing with CRM. And my profile pop up. I am usually responding quite fast on the LinkedIn, make a day or two. You also can reach out to me on Twitter. I have an open profile, again, dancing with CRM. You can follow me and pop and ask questions. And I usually respond quite fast. And also, if you have questions, there is, of course, Microsoft Power Apps forums. You can ask questions there. And there's quite a lot of people who respond fast, me included. So just ask questions. Don't be shy. You know, you cannot know everything. There is too many things to learn. So you don't, don't hesitate to ask even the simplest questions or the ones that you think silly, you know, just ask. It won't be no harm in it. And I just wanted to throw out there too, that if you end up merging the floor mat thing that comes with Dance Dance Revolution and merging that with Dynamics and doing anything around that, that at least you'd have a thank you note to me in the, you know, in the Kickstarter for that program. So I definitely would do it. I wouldn't have a, I wouldn't say that go and build, you know, like anything that is essential to like safety via dancing and coding. Like I wouldn't want to rely on like flight control for my local airport with code that was built with DDR and dynamic software. But, you know, maybe someday. Yeah. Well, hey, well, I really appreciate your time. It's great connecting with you, getting to know you and, and we'll have the blog and the podcast out and we'll have to connect soon. Hopefully see each other someday at one of the MVP summits. I hope so as well. It was a pleasure to meet you and be here. Right. We'll talk to you soon.