 Hey everybody, it's Christian Buckley doing another MVP buzz chat and I'm talking today with Maddie. Hello. Hello. How are you? I'm doing well and for folks that don't know you, who are you, where are you and what do you do? Okay. So my name is Mattipakran. I'm from Finland. So it's December. It's very dark here. So dark, more stiff. It led me on. I'm a fourth year Microsoft MVP, Microsoft 365 apps and services. Working as a modern workplace lead, I guess might title a little bit changed on a small company called Tahto Group in Finland. Working with small and medium sized enterprises and nonprofit organizations. So doing a lot of things around Microsoft 365, helping customers to migrate to the product, use the product, improve creating internets. Doing a lot of stuff around Microsoft 365, security, device management, whatever is there. What do you see with your deployments? I'm always interested to know, since we work in this similar space, where do you see the biggest gaps with customers you're talking to? Do they have trouble with adoption or they have trouble with governance compliance and security? Where do you see the greatest need is or the most asks for help? Yeah, I would say the security and compliance side is one of their missing. And we are in Finland, kind of in a Northern Europe and everybody thinks that we are in this kind of safe place. We're not. So there's a lot of things happening around security space, but they still need someone to translate whatever is happening. What is new? How should I do this? How should I manage my devices? How should I manage my data? Those kind of things. And then the adoption side, of course, as well. Still, we have been seeing teams over five years or over six years now already. Like six years now. Yeah. And I think still a lot of users don't know how to use teams, for example. And they still struggle. I have teams, but I have SharePoint. I have OneDrive. So they don't really know what to use when. And trying to clarify that with customers as well. You have seen that some Microsoft senior leaders there, they even expressed that their frustration was like, why is that question still out there? The which tool to use when I'm like, you know, and then after this, it was kind of a banner year for Microsoft creating new logos for products, like all these different things, all the co-pilots, all the Viva stuff, like all of that out there, which kind of increased the number of times I hear the, well, which tool am I supposed to use when for each of those? Yeah, exactly. But that's the opportunity for the MVPs to write about, talk about. So what kind of stuff? Like, what are your topics? What are you writing about? What are you speaking on right now? Well, of course, teams is one of my interests. All the collaborations tools I have been working with, collaboration tools, 15 years maybe SharePoint started on 2003, actually was the first version. Also writing a book about SharePoint currently. Oh, wow. Hopefully, getting it done on January. Not making any promises, but let's put it out there. So I would say not writing books. It's the most work you could do for the least amount of money. It's a big effort. So I, yeah, yeah, probably, yeah, I respect you for, for, for venturing down that path. Yeah, it was more of a learning experience. So learning to write for technical English and because it's my, not my native language, so learning experience. What? Yeah, no, no, that's, that's great. So who's your publisher? Who are you doing that through? Packed. Okay. Excellent. So we'll watch for that for sure. Yeah. I guess it's out there already, but not making any promises on the launch date. But the book is not out yet. Yeah. Yeah, I'm sure they're doing some promotion out there of that. So yeah, well, excellent. Well, what, so let's talk about your, your journey to becoming an MVP. Like what, what was that like? How did you find out about the program? How did you get involved? Yeah, I had a couple of Finnish, Finnish friends and the Finnish community, a couple of people there. And, and then I, I had a good mentor. So Vesku was my mentor actually and kicking me in the butt. We work at the same company. So, so I get good mentoring about how to become an MVP and started writing blogs, started kind of speaking at the events and also started hosting the Finnish teams community. We are having a five year celebration on April. So we have been actually having quite good community inside Finland around, around teams. That's great. Not so many speakers. I think we have the same familiar faces already all the time speaking but still, well, so I always tell people that are interested in, you know, going down that path and maybe, you know, working on becoming an MVP is like one of the easiest things to do to get speaking, you know, experience is reaching out to various user groups and saying, Hey, I'd love to speak on these topics. And if you get picked up, it's relatively easy to do in the virtual world. Yeah, nowadays it's so, so simple. And there is a lot of those user groups. And I guess all the user groups are missing new speakers. All the familiar faces are actually there all the time. So yeah, so that's kind of a problem when on the user groups. Yeah, there's a lot of opportunities just just to look for and look at and follow the community. So well, having gone through and helped, this is another great topic is you're starting the user group. What advice do you have for people that because there's a lot of, you know, look, there's a lot of virtual user groups you can go and join that are regional or, you know, around the world. I mean, I've got friends that are down in South Africa. Occasionally, I'll join a user group down there, you know, their end of day, my start of my day. But if you don't have a group meeting in person locally, what's your advice for starting up? What should people keep in mind if they're looking to start up a user group? Yeah, that's a tough one, because we actually started. We had the first local event. We have food and everything gathering, opportunity, sauna and everything. So we had a lot of happening around that and got a lot of people there. And but I guess it was the teams were so new, so brand new. And everybody said, hey, we should go to team. So it was a lot of interest around that. And of course, bringing in customers and try to get them to speak and join in. So but any good tips? No, just just maybe just. Trial and error. Yeah. Yeah. Just do it. Yeah. And see, does it fly or not or not? So and maybe we actually had a. SharePoint community in Finland, it have been. I guess you see the road and I started that that community. Yeah, I've actually I came over. I presented to the user group in Helsinki years ago. Yeah, I traveled over, did a number of events and swung by. And then we had a SharePoint afterwards. There's a pub is kind of down around the corner from where the user group met. But yeah, I think that was the one that you see started. Yeah. And we actually started as a side group there. So so. So already had some some kind of a base base of base of community users there. So yeah, well, that that is that's another way to start a user group. Like if like here where I live and we have our what used to be the SharePoint user group and it's kind of morphed and changed. And there's other smaller user groups. There's other constituencies. There was for a while like an AI focused user group. I don't know that they've done anything in the last year or so. But there's a dynamics group that's pretty healthy. And, you know, there's a like there's a sequel Saturday event that's scheduled for early this next year. And, you know, that kind of stuff. But you can always go and build off of an existing if you have a if there's an impetus, if there's enough interest to go and create something. But yeah, I always tell people is like, look, even if you don't get masses showing up, but there's four or five people sitting around sharing experiences, you're going to get value out of that. Yeah. Sharing sometimes pains, painful stories. Yeah, true. As well as your wins. Yeah. Yeah. I think it's just that we are going to have kind of have a monthly event, of course, not under summertime or during the Christmas time, but still figuring out the new fresh content if you have don't have new speakers. So that that needs some effort. Yeah. But of course, Microsoft is publishing a lot of stuff which you can talk about. And of course, you can always take co-pilot and do that. Of course. And as much as we're all like, I don't know, getting a little burned out on, you know, generic co-pilot, like people are asking questions. People are interested in the topic. So yeah, sometimes it's like, pull your audience. And if, you know, even if you're seeing repeats of the topic, if that's what people want to hear about, give the people what they want. Yeah. Actually, last season was pretty good. We got a couple of tips and tricks around teams from the audience. So that was good. Yeah. Of course, those familiar faces will be speaking before, but still someone from the audience as well. Yeah, that was good. Well, that's getting the audience interaction is always the best thing. It's as a presenter. It's one of the worst things when nobody's asking questions, nobody's providing feedback, nobody's sharing stories. Nobody wants to present to a wall, you know, you want interaction. Yeah. And that's kind of a bad thing about those virtual events that you cannot actually see who is there. And people are so shy opening cameras and everything. So yeah. And and just presenting using is there someone actually listening other than maybe the host? Yeah. Well, that's why like our in-person we're doing our collab days, Utah event in April and it it's in-person only. We're not doing the virtual like this will be we did the virtual the last two times and we're like, no, we're going to do. We're going to focus on the people that are in the room. Yeah. Yeah, we have been doing some hybrids, but it's still kind of a pain to do. You need to take care of the kind of the hybrid version as well and see who is on the line and and that needs some effort. And of course, it's it's needs some more practicality. So it's not just opening a laptop and shooting it. No, in fact, for the for some people that know, there's the the European Cloud Collaboration Summit. Yeah. And there's the North American Collaboration and Cloud Summit next, which is moving from Branson, Missouri to Dallas this next year. And so I've helped run the hybrid portion. So organizing volunteers because where it worked for hybrid is where you have a dedicated person that's in the virtual room and making sure that it's good to have somebody that's managing that. But is there physically so if there's a question online, they can represent ask the question to the speaker that kind of that. That's where it works the best. I but we've I believe we've decided for this this year to not do virtual to virtual to do in person only. So yeah, I think you're going to start to see a shift in events back to yeah, only I guess fine. I already know like stream a keynote. But for the sessions, my preference is in person. Yeah, already seeing that a lot because because nowadays there isn't so many options for virtual virtual events to attend as a speaker. So yeah. Well, hey, my last question for you with all the announcements and things that are out there, like, what are you most excited about? What what what announcement was Microsoft made that you're like, hey, I'm I'm going to I'm on that. I'm going to be keeping up with that. Should I say something else? Is there another answer? Yeah, yeah, actually have been have been testing it for for a couple of weeks and and impressive. But then you need to have you need to prepare everything should be prepared. Your data should be good and and permissions, everything. So preparation work is really important. I see a lot of a lot of, for example, in my customers, there's a lot of outdated, unnecessary data available for the co-pilot to crunch on and getting bad answers. Isn't that funny? We've been saying that for years about search. And it's still true. It's even more so that for co-pilot. Yeah, archiving. That's something. Discussions with every customer. No one is archiving, really archiving, doing the things, of course, in Finland, less institution, and then you have a real archiving and separate system for kind of having. Kind of a set metadata and everything, but it's. Not so heavily in use in, for example, in small and medium size enterprises. So for folks that I've been paying attention to, Microsoft made investments in archiving and backup in archiving that they finally recognize that, you know, hey, this is essential. There's a number of the big consulting companies and, you know. You have like Gartner and Forrester that have been recommending having third party backup in addition to what's out of the box, but having more granular control over your backup and archival. But Microsoft finally went and invested in that space for native solutions as well as third party investments. That's an indicator, folks, that you need to be looking at your archiving. Yeah, and the archiving solution already looks quite good. I actually tested it and, well, still probably deleting something is also good that you don't need to have that data, but people like to spare everything over 15 years or something, right? Well, it's the because if you delete something and that and then, you know, find, hey, that had usefulness and I've already taken steps. Well, that's why having a process for the archival in staging it and how it's moved is preferable so that you don't just delete things that you might need, but again, stage that content so that you have time to decide, hey, like if it's if it's available on tape and I realize I've made a mistake, I can go back to it. Yeah, but yeah, life cycle, data life cycle, data life cycle from start to finish or the recycle bin, maybe. Yep. So well, Maddie, really appreciate your time getting to know you for folks that want to reach out to you, connect with you. Where are you most active on social? How can people find you? LinkedIn, Excel, trying on Blue Sky, but it's quite silent. But maybe LinkedIn and Excel are most active. Yeah. Well, awesome. We'll make sure to have all of your social links, of course, in the profile, add on the blog on a buck the planet and add on YouTube. So really appreciate your time. Yeah, thank you.