Welcome back to the Teams Insider Podcast. This week I have a conversation with, good friend Shawn Harry. He's an independent consultant in the UC and collab space has been in the space even longer than me. We talked about on the pod, has been coming to the London User Group with us for over a decade, and always have a good conversation with him. He's never afraid to share his perspective, particularly as an independent. We get into how the market has kind of evolved from us deploying server based products to cloud based products. Some of the modern challenges of enterprises, particularly big enterprises dealing with cloud, dealing with Teams spanning over multiple kind of sub products and integrations, and how projects and operations can handle the constant change that is Microsoft Teams and Microsoft 365. Really hope you enjoy this conversation. I really enjoyed it myself and many thanks to Audiocodes for supporting this podcast. Really appreciate all their support on with the show. Hey everybody, welcome back to the pod. This is one the, no joke. We've been trying to lock down for about six months because Shawn tries to tell me that he's too busy doing doing real work to come on podcast, but, you know, we've locked him in now. Shawn Harry, I was trying to work out just before we jumped on to record when when we first crossed paths. I'm feel like it was one of the early user groups before that, I don't know. I think so one of the very early user groups was I remember winning. it's funny, I, I was doing some work with SIP gateway the other day, and I think I remember winning the VVX 500 from that phone. Yeah. And I still have it. It's in the back. That's cool. I was trying to get it to register the gateway so that would that would have been right about 2013, 2012. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, he'd been a regular at the London user group for too long for both of us to count. So I appreciate that. Yeah, I know I had hair then. Yeah. We were, we. Were all of younger. so for this pod, I'd love to have a conversation about kind of your history in our space and I you've always got decently strong opinions about what's going on, so I'm sure we'll get into some of that. but stop, start us off from the beginning, I think. Is is it exchange or was it before exchange? What was first. Was probably before exchange. So I actually started off electronics. I used to do test and repair. And then I realized quite quickly that there was no money in it. It was like jobs. So, yeah, that's when I started getting involved with exchange for five and then obviously all the subsequent versions from there, you know, 2000, 2003, SBS 2007, yada yada, all the way up to sort of 2016. But then I made quite a quick pivot into, UC, when I really started it, you probably remember. Right. So remember in exchange 2000, you had the IM component. And I remember installing I had no idea what it was. I didn't know what it was, what it did. I didn't have a clue. In fact, I was just mucking around. I used to have very extensive labs, so decided to install that and I was like, oh, this is pretty interesting. I think it was called RTC back then. Real time communicator. and it was the I think it was MSN Yeah, it was MSN client used to use for it, wasn't it? Yeah. Well, you you were ahead of me because I was first doing exchange UM. so I didn't really hit until, 2007. That was all too. Yeah, exactly. You are. Well, before you broke out from exchange. Yes. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So in the early days, it was one. So it's funny because it went sort of full circle because with five five it was monolithic. Then 2000 still the same, 2003 was still the same and 2003 was my favorite by far, and in 2007 came along, we broke out into the CAZ and hub transport. edge transport, all that stuff. and then obviously that's when UM was introduced. I think maybe it was what service pack two? I think I want to say, and then obviously that's when we were doing all the Lync and OCS sort of integration. That's when I came in because I was doing I was still on the Cisco side of the fence so I was doing call manager. Yeah. And it kept customers kept coming up being like, oh, we don't need unity anymore. We can do exchange. so I got into I didn't have any Microsoft background, but I came into exchange UM. I did a bunch of Uber and then it was like, oh, Microsoft, the getting onto something here with OCS. And that's what I kind of jumped fence. Yeah. It was it was a lot of fun, I must admit. I mean I did that similar to yourself. I did a lot of, UM integrations. into SBCs into call manager. I remember doing that as well. In fact, I've still got. So I'm looking at it right now I've got what is that seven. Yeah 7911. Still somewhat. That's connected to call manager seven. I mean I'm literally just surrounded by phone that's all. Like do is my phone's ring and I've got millions of them there in the back. So I remember it was this was in the very, very early days, like instead of, a full time communicator when I started happening with that and then I discovered Skype. So then this is before Microsoft acquired Skype. Yeah. and I used and I used to like, now I'm going to go almost on a tangent to announce that I'm got that memory lane. I used to have a little pack 2210. So you remember the PDAF and oh yeah, compact flash equipment, Wi-Fi. And I installed Skype on it, and I remember and I got my mate, I called him, I said, mate, this is obviously on my mobile. I called him a mobile system. Install this on your phone. This is a Skype client. You can do voice over IP. And I was just absolutely blown away by it. And I think this was around about 2004. And it was from then I just became a complete voice nerd. I was like, yeah, this is it. Who cares about exchange? I'm just going to take voice, rest my life. And that's pretty much it was nuts. When it was the days where we were, people were mesmerized by instant messaging in the in the business. And like, I can use this like I can use this at home. Yep. And I, I don't even need a VPN and I can make a video call outside the like. All that stuff was just like brand new to people. It's funny because I'm trying to remember with 2000 what was, Net Meeting? That was it. It was called net meeting. Remember? It used to be baked into it. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Windows 2000. Yeah. And and we used to it. I do a lot of work with that at the time. So like you said, you had the voice on video obviously on PC and then obviously OCS came along and, and you had the, it was like an OMA component. I think it was web based. If I'm a variety of something, I, I don't know, but I'm sure it was web based and that used to run on your mobile, obviously, Windows Mobile and so on. And so. Yeah. And, and obviously I've just moved on with the evolution of the product. So you obviously interlink that into Skype for business and then almost the team. So that's pretty much all I've been doing for the last. Yeah 20 plus years. And you start well you know no no no no no in these circles might be outside. But you know we all we were all the same. Yeah. I mean you've been independent in a contracting for, for a long time. Was that always the story. Did you work at any, any big shops or. No. So so no, I actually started off initially on helpdesk and then sort of gravitated into the whole sort of exchange network engineer sort of piece. And then I went off sort of independent around about 2010. I think it was in about 2009, 2010 because I did a lot of work in a public sector, sort of NHS, that kind of thing. you know, lots of exchange deployments, migration and that kind of thing. I was pretty much a subject matter expert for that. And moving them from to, you know, from five 5 to 2003, NHS dot net. And that was when 2007 thousand in like I said, I got really sort of embedded around about. Yeah when OCS really sort of debuted. Yeah. I did quite a bit with LCS as well. I'm not going to, I'm not going to mention the names of the clients I worked at, but lots of big client. You've done some really big shops, right. Like you'll you'll get the roster, which I'm sure we can't share on the pod is, is pretty impressive. Some of the number and lots of lots of finserv and legal and like, like high profile and stuff. Yeah. You won't. It's funny because I ended up doing lots of your guys deployments. Your previous place. Yeah. By the way, sign up for yours. It was always used to be deployments that either you or Justin had done. and it ended up having a sort of productionize of that kind of thing. but yeah, lots of. New across the table more than once where we knew each other person wouldn't be like, oh, we're both on this account. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Yeah. And here we are. Sort of. Yeah. Ten years later. Yeah. Still doing the same thing. awesome. Yeah. That's my that's my backstory. so cool what I like. What's the today kind of are two questions, I guess. What are you working on right now? But also, like, our world has changed so much with Teams. What's your perspective on a Teams project versus what we used to do with a Skype for Business or Lync project? Yeah, it's an interesting question. I mean, for me, it's so much still the same. But I mean, I think the thing is with Teams is so much richness there within the platform and ecosystem. Because if you think back to sort of, I guess just before the pandemic, we used to talk a lot about feature parity, right. So you obviously had Skype for Business Online was still around. and some of the thing, you know, I don't know, lock frogging, it's like a front of house. There wasn't really anything really much in, in that space. Yeah. In terms of attendant consoles, that kind of thing as an example. But and even phones, right. The phone story wasn't that great in terms of physical phones. MTRs was still sort of nascent. Yeah, we were still kind of gravitating, I guess, from SRS or LRS into, into MTRs. But now we've got a really, really mature. So now I think, I mean, I saw a post of yours the other day on LinkedIn. You know, talking about Skype for business is obviously, I think 2025. I think it's going to subscription edition. Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. Yeah, I know, and I have to think myself, well, why would you still be on Skype for business now? It is kind of really no need because every use case is completely resolved with with Teams now. So I think. Two things happened as well, because I think we spent or certainly I spent a lot of time, you know, when we moved from IP telephony to Teams, you all know where the guest Lync and OCS you spend a lot of time going feature for feature. Like you said, that comparison thing. Yeah. The pandemic was the last big thing that kind of reset the does anybody care about the orange line key that flashes this color? If this many people ring in on a Wednesday, all that stuff kind of fell away in enterprise. I felt I would just like glow much more, get the job done. Yep, yep. No, absolutely. For me, that's pretty much been the yeah that the main bulk of my deployments, like I said, I mean, you know, I'm just trying to sort of think of the, you know, the customers I've, you know, had sort of really sort of niche requirements. It's not really been a lot. It's pretty much broadly speaking, everyone's got the same sort of challenge, which is kind of just get to Teams. Yeah. And all those really sort of small, you know, fight. I mean, you look at call manager for example, you've got hundreds and hundreds of features from a Teams perspective, we can pretty much do the bulk of what we need. You know, we just a handful of settings. Right. and. That was always what Microsoft advocated for. They were always like, do we really need to rebuild these 400 features? and it pans out, I think, I think there was a bit of meet in the middle, like they've definitely backfilled some stuff that evidently was enough of a customer blocker. but they haven't backfilled nearly as much as what was on an older viral call manager. And didn't need to because, again, at the collaboration experience and ironically, it's not voice centric, right? Yeah. Kind of starts with chat. It goes into collaboration, goes into documents, meetings. You know, it's not really voice centric. So like I said, you don't need all those bajillion voice features, whatever that might be. I don't know, you know, you need the basic stuff. We, you know, come to voicemail, all to attendant and call queues and so on. But we don't need all to, you know, like I said, all the features that we used to have on Avaya and Mitel etc. so pretty much I would say that the use cases are broadly speaking, the same. It's only when you get into the compliance, security, space where things might get a little bit more, complicated. And that's mostly round the regulatory sort of space. I would say you tend to sort of see within banking. but again, there's solutions for all of that, right? You know, we've got Verba’s and Numonix. You know, this, in fact, is even native capabilities within Teams as well. Right? So in terms of the all the possible I think Teams is just got so much breadth. Now why would you waste your time with on prem. Yeah. You know the world's moved on. Yeah. Yeah. And I know a couple of customers still running Skype and it's a combination of long tail on their way off and, or like some kind of, you know, air gap kind of real edge case scenario. I don't think there are that many even left. Now, Microsoft have to have a continuation story for those customers. But you're right. It's, why would you do it to yourself in in 2024? Yeah, it's just sort of poor experience, right? I mean, what, running Skype for business. Really? What for chat. And yeah, I mean, it doesn't make much sense. We don't even remember. We used to have what what was it called again? Remember the little modes Now I've got a name. But now we have Teams only in the other mixed modes. You know Skype for Business plus did it it, remember that I think it was about 4 or 5 of complete forgotten. 90 RCC type stuff for medical control. And. No, no, not not RCC. No. you know, when you was in, interop mode between Teams. Oh, the islands and and. Yeah. Yeah. That's it. Oh that was message. All of that. Exactly, exactly. So I mean for some things work there. You know it depending on what mode your in you might get a chat here. And you may get a notification there all of that nonsense goes away. It was just always about getting Teams, Teams only. It's nice and simple, you know. So, so yeah. So have you found your project Speed Up? Because we used to spend a lot of time, you know, we we do six weeks of design work about server specs and, we were just talking off, off recording about the fun of kind of you'd have to be able to at least go toe to toe in a conversation with the security team. Certificates. Identity like like, firewalls. you know, the exchange team, the ID team, like, because it's part of M365. Is that sped up in enterprise, or is there still a lot of back and forth? No. It's I would say it's sped up at all. I mean, if anything, the cloud actually introduces more different complexities, I would say, and potentially more complexity compared to on prem. I think I think what I tend to find in my space is that the breadth of m365 sometimes isn't fully understood by the various different Teams, and in how sort of Teams or even just m365, as an entire stack integrates so tightly, so it becomes like MTRs as an example is much broader discussion than just simply about, you know, the AV codec and what you might go for, what the room needs to look like, where you need ceiling mics and so on. It's all the rest of the I.T stack. Yeah. and when I start talking about conditional access or Intune or exchange, you know, the literally the they just glaze over kind of thing. It's like they wouldn't have considered half of these things. So the discussions do get quite interesting And what I tend to see, is gaps really in knowledge. I think sometimes on the supply side, and that's where I think discussions tend to get quite interesting because a lot of it is bringing people up to speed so they understand, okay, what things they need to consider, you know, from a support and an operational perspective, as well as obviously the architecture itself, because there's a lot of moving parts and you know, Microsoft might say, you know, it's just simply point and click. You know, Teams, MTRs are easy, right? And and they are conceptually. But that management itself, you know, there's a lot of moving parts. And I think that's where the the main bulk of the challenge are. So yeah, I spend a lot of time having to sort of not KT but sort of drill knowledge into people, into various different Teams. And that can be compliance. So that could be security as well and really get into the nuts and bolts of that as well. You know, it's not sort of high level stuff. It's really sort of low level, you know, nitty gritty, detailed stuff that, yeah, level 500 more. Yeah. I mean, that's interesting, isn't it? Because like enterprise IT was very, siloed and towered. So this team looked after this thing, this said. And they've been forced to come together. And you're right, I think that the the knowledge and the culture is lacking where it's like, yeah, like what that team that own SharePoint do is going to impact your work. I know what you're doing impacts theirs and you're both controlled by, AD and identity and neither. But like that, it's a whole new world. The other thing is the and you touched on there the pace of change is like, you know, I talk about jumping, jumping on a treadmill like you like you don't control it anymore. I don't think enterprises often get that either. They're like, well, we'll just we'll just not do updates then. No not really. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. I mean, obviously with evergreen you don't have that choice. You know, this is you know, again, you don't want to be in a scenario whereby you end up with some kind of major incident because, you know, you missed a, you know, a message or whatever in the message center or something. And that can happen. There's lots of stuff coming down the pipe for phones for MTRs you know, updates that Microsoft are making, obviously, that are quite impactful. And it's really staying in front of that because even though obviously the cloud needs less well, actually it's argument. It's not versus the cloud needs more watering and feeding than on prem right. Isn't it funny? I think I think Microsoft is largely sold to the kind of C-suite this is a giant cloud. We look after. Credit card is off we go. And the reality is actually that you need the same amount of people doing different things. They're not they're not deploying the service anymore, but now they're managing policies and change and and that invest nicely. Yeah. Exactly. It's it's all it's all of that. So like you said it's the change management is the business change. It's the adoption. It's the training. It's the updating of documentation artifacts and all that is one big giant engine. And you know, it's almost like the in Microsofts credit, you know, they provide the message center, which has a lot of that information. But, you know, I what I tend to see is that a lot of organizations don't really have the product management or SME knowledge or even the time frankly speaking because if there's any closing tickets, I find so even deal an address with that. So when it comes to that water and feeding, half the time it almost, you know, kind of a few steps behind because they're dealing with MIs because of some change that Microsoft has made. It's definitely not as simple as what were the cloud provider, you know, we do all the updates and it's all hunky dory is absolutely not that. So I thought it would be good to see the. And I think MTR is probably a good example. You know we've got the rings obviously in the in the Pro portal was an example. and that covers obviously you know, updates for you know, the Teams app as, as well as you know, peripherals and other things and plugged in and so on. But that whole story, I think, needs to come together more fluidly because organizations have change management. and they've got to try and sort of shoehorn that. And historically, that's always been a, a difficult thing to do in the pre sort of when I say pre, I mean as in prior to the pro portal or prior to the rings that we come, you know, that was always a difficult thing to do, you know, with the Teams admin center and Intune and so on. And so and it's building that whole workflow so that, you know, those operations Teams, wherever they are, because they might not necessarily be on prem. They can certainly be off shore. They need all the relevant tooling. They need maybe remote access and so on and so on. And obviously the pro portal now has that, you know, vendors can include that in their tools as well, but they need all the relevant tools that they can go in and do all of that management, you know, and it's not it's not an easy job. It does require a lot of knowledge in all these different areas as well as, you know, necessary sort of integrations into the different technologies or the different groups to make sure that we can bring all of this together. So it's definitely a challenge. I'm absolutely seeing that there in the field. Yeah, MTR is particularly interesting, isn't it, because you've got people, a lot of people AV space page you got people in the IT space. but all those other workloads can trip you up the security, you know, the identity that you have and you've got no visibility of that. And then you touched on it as well. If you've got multiple OEMs in play now, you've got different cycles of patching and firmware, OEM tooling. It gets decently complex pretty quickly. Yeah, absolutely. And what I tend to see is that your traditional AV integrator is a great at AV, but don't know anything about IT. And then conversely, your IT guys don't know anything about AV. bringing those two worlds together. So they understand, you know, well because getting the you know, the simplification might be, well, just go and create a resource account. Yeah, it's straightforward thing. But one minute there's policies that need to be attached to that. You know there's an identity here as well. We need to make sure that maybe certain conditional access policies are excluded. We may need to do some additional level of locking down and so on. And so it's that whole it's that whole thing end to end that needs to be considered. So and in fact, even the automation, you know, the provisioning as well, that's been a challenge. I've certainly been involved in that. And that's not straightforward, especially if you don't have IDAM tooling. So so yeah, I the irony is I think with the cloud it's even more work for us. Right. that's what I'm certainly seeing anyway. Certainly when we start looking at things like Defender and Purview and how all the components that we work with within Teams sort of bleed into those spaces too, as well, because there's definitely tight integrations around, you know, things like guest controls and so on. So even sensitive have you. Got have you got any examples of anybody you'd say has done it or is doing it well? And what was their architecture to deal with that? to be honest with, you no, no, I feel like. It's very telling, isn't it, that there's nobody you can point to. It's like. It's like, well, such a different way of working. Well, I think the reason for that is because there's so many different ways to skin this cat. Right? Like you said, every customer deployment is quite different, you know, depending on what vendors they're working with. You know, what capabilities are available to them, what skills they have in-house as well, what vendors they might be working with, you know, to partner, and so on. So it varies from one to the next. But the other thing is this is still quite nascent, you know, MTRs in terms of, you know, a capability, if I want to call it that, it's still to me and it's still fairly new. Phones are quite straightforward. Right. It's just voice. Yeah. It's just it's a straightforward workload. Like we know that we walk up to it. We push a button, we make a phone call straight forward. But with with Teams there's a lot more moving parts compared to say, you know, some other vendors. I'm not gonna mention other vendors. But again, with Teams, obviously you. Can mention them and say. Okay, well, hey, there you go. So Zoom, you know, WebEx, etcetera. You know, I don't want to say this story simply because the challenge is that they have a different, but it's pretty much one throat to choke. I mean, to a degree. I think it is simpler by definition that they don't do everything so like that. Yeah, exactly. You know. It's that one word. Like like like the identity story is not going to trip up their rooms because it doesn't know that there isn't a massive identity product there that's trying to do something completely different to what the Teams team are doing. And that's the blessing, the curse of Microsoft. It's amazing blessing that you have this stack play that one. vendor can bring so much capability for a certain price point, but it definitely, does bring in some complexity. To be fair. Yeah, absolutely. Exactly. I mean, even like phones and Intune in this example, I mean, it's been sort of a, you know, a bone of contention for years, right? You know, there's been various different advices that have to come out so people understand how to manage that. And now obviously for some of these phones Intune, you know, it's going away, you know for some of the legacy sort of models. So you know and again there's only so much you could do with Intune for phones anyway. So yeah. And it's also it's working with the new team to make sure that they don't put something in place that could potentially break phones. And I've seen that happen before, you know, in our space, you know, with Android device administrator obviously going away and so on. So yeah, it keeps me busy. Definitely. Yeah. It's something I'm having a lot of conversations with about like, Commsverse which. Yeah, you didn't bother to come to, to my talk, but thanks for that. But like I did, I did a whole session on, What a Teams product owner or service owner is and what the responsibility of that team is. It kind of trying to make the case that there isnt architecture project and ops anymore? Like, it's a, it's a continuum. and I still see people trying to do projects like that. They're like, oh, architects made the decision, project deployed. It could like ops. It's oh, wait a minute, like the products. I don't like the products changing as you're deploying. Like it's so yeah. Yeah. Yep yep yep. Completely agree. That's a really, really good analogy and way of describing it is absolutely that. And that's exactly what I'm seeing in the field. And it doesn't matter how much I mean, I, I have to do a lot of evangelizing to sort of LTA, you know, leadership, that kind of thing. and I think the penny is dropping, but it's difficult because the way organizations are structured doesn't allow themselves to be leant towards. That's it. Right. You can talk to any individual and they're like, yeah. And then they're like, yeah, politics, architecture, history, budgets mean these are our towers, you know. Exactly. Yeah. And it's practically how do you bring that together as well? Because like you said, it's that pipeline is really streamlined and it's almost like you kind of need a, a permanent sort of consultancy in-house to sort of handle all of that. and that's obviously, you know, comes, comes at a cost because generally with architects, you know, people are dipping in and out of that function. You know, it tends to be more sort of reactive. Someone needs a solution for X. You just go on to design and then you step away and then it goes into engineering and they get on with it. And conceptually that works in the old days, but in a new World doesn't really work that well. It's like I'm seeing a couple of customers shift to having a legit m365 service owner or product owner. They haven't quite broken down the full tower yet, but at least they have someone who's thinking about like strategy and architecture ops and project and AI and in a coherent way. I think that's the only way to really be successful. Is, I mean, most of the places, that I've worked in where there is product management, you tend to see a better level of maturity in terms of their overall governance. you know, and definitely better success. I mean, I almost see product management as almost a bit of an adjunct to architecture anyway. because again, it, you know, they, they very they have to be tied into strategy. They've got to understand obviously what's coming down the pipe, they've got to know that platform and they've got to work very tightly with, with architecture anyway. So it's a very responsible position, definitely. But it's a key position in terms of making sure that you stay ahead of the game and that you're working very closely with your service delivery managers as well as operations, to let them know what's coming down the pipe. I think if. That's the case. Educate the business side of the business, that there's a job to be done there as well, because again, there's like a perception of we bought Microsoft 365. It's their service. Why do we need a product manage it and it's like it's not product managing the features the product product managing the change, the deployment, the adoption, the the security risk, the governance like that. It's a very if you can get the time, there's a really easy case to be made, which is like do we agree or not agree? Someone needs to consider these changes. Do we agree or not agree? We're spending x millions. We should probably maximize this investment. But yeah, it just seems to me again friction is against us a little bit. Yeah, yeah it's an interesting one. I mean I'm not sure Microsoft are suitably incentivized to address that I guess. Well I suppose it's more of an internal. I don't think they want to point out there's a lot to be done. Right. Because it's not in Microsofts interest to be like, this is more complicated than it sounds. but except on the flip side, I think they do want to address it in the sense of they don't win unless the customer gets the maximum out the stack. Like if the customer persistently says this is really hard to manage. Change is a pain. This is hard work. They're not going to, they're not going to go up to the premium. licence they're not going to add extra capabilities, they're not going to maximize E5. So I think they do and they don't at the certainly in the sales cycle they're not going to customers are being like by the way where we're not saving you any operational money here. We're taking this to the cloud. But you still need all these operations. It's not a great story, but they definitely when people have got it there like you, your operational IT, you need to work in a new way to drive value out of this investment. Yeah. But I guess I think the challenge is just maturely how do you make that happen? I mean, obviously there's the sales pitch, sales pitch, but there's the marketing, I suppose, sort of element of that, you know, CSM is wanting to upsell. And again, it's good reasons for customer to want to go from E3 to E5 as an example. but how do you materially make that into something real within an organization? That's a lot of cultural change that has to come from the top down. So it's a lot of fundamental changes to an organization to make that happen, and it has to be a desire for it. And unfortunately, with productivity and collaboration, everyone really takes it for granted. Right? Yeah. You see. It. It's just like IT right. You know, so it's like it's not not a line business. No. I think unfortunately it's a security risk and governance really that can make things change because they have a more visible impact to the business. So like like like we didn't have the right policies for GDPR or we let some data sit or not sit in the right place that the business gets the the monetary risk or the reputational risk there. I think more yeah, even that's still, still a challenge. But I think that's, that's the thing that more is going to drive us to change is like we need a holistic view. Yeah, yeah, it can do. I've definitely seen that in my experience. yeah. Organisé again, it's it comes back to, I guess, risk profile. And like you said, if there's a penalty for that from a regulatory point of view, so then you have to do something about it. But I get I guess the point I'm making is just driving that cultural change to get to. I don't want to say it in nirvana but at least something bad in the current state, which is obviously we're managing these in the cloud, you know, how do we do this in a sensible and efficient manner that that works for the entire organization? Awesome. So last question. and we have to do another one because we've already spanned through like, 25 minutes in no time. which yeah. What what would you like? You're doing lots of big projects. If you could control what Microsoft was doing, what would you change or direct focus on to kind of make life easier? That's a good one. I'd like to see more focus on. I think maybe maturity of solutions like by maturity. I mean, I mean, sometimes, Microsoft will release, certain capabilities. And again, with the cloud, obviously things iterate quite quickly. We get lots and lots of new solutions, you know, or capabilities that come out quite sort of rapidly. But, they can be sometimes a little bit of an oversell, I think, in terms of what that capability can do versus expectation. And I think it's sort of bringing that that together because, you know, some things have been advertised, say, a year or two years in advance and then there's still not here yet. and I guess that some businesses that or at least that I've worked with are really relying on X feature coming down the pipe, you know, quite rapidly to meet a really important use case. And I think it's just making sure that we can sort of close that gap between expectation, you know, and reality. I think Microsoft could probably make that a little bit better because they're very heavy on the marketing now. You know, obviously in terms of, you know, pushing out these capabilities and let everyone know, you know, this is this is coming. You know, maybe copilot is example and this is all great and hunky dory, but it's trying to make that sort of more material. Well, what does this mean to me as an as an organization. What can I do with this? How is this materially going to benefit me? Because you've got to put that into layman's speak, you know, for you, for your engineers, for your admins, you know, maybe for your leadership so that they actually know, well, what does this do? Yeah. Why do I need to be excited? What what is it going to actually improve? I don't like I don't I'm not a believer in talking about things in sort of nebulous terms. to me, you've got to keep it quite empirical. As in quite real. Yeah. So, you know, show us what material is, is actually, you know, like a phone. We know what a phone is, you know, so its easy to sell the benefit of that, but, you know, with something like a, I don't know, whatever the feature might be, like I said, I'll just use copilot as an example. Why do I want to use that copilot? Copilot, for example, at the moment. Right. It's it's being pushed very hard. There's there's lots of value there. Yeah. But getting to the value and articulating the value is definitely non-trivial. Yeah. Exactly. And that's kind of what I've seen I think in, in the projects that I've been involved in. again, there's lots of great features in copilot that we do know about. And, and I guess the other thing is, you know, as techies, you know, we're on the forefront, I suppose, of that technology. And if we don't understand it, it becomes even harder for us to articulate that to people who aren't that technical anyway. Right. So I think it's important that we've got a good grasp of, okay, well, what are we actually pushing here? What problem are resolving? Because in the early days, you know, we obviously had all the flagship products, you know, SharePoint exchange, Active Directory, Lync so on. We knew what they were. We knew what they did, but we kind of almost the other way around now where we've got new technology coming out. But then we've got to try and understand well what is the use case. So it's kind of things when sort of flipped. Yeah a bit for me. Well yeah. So muchs changing across the entire stack. Being being aware of what's going on across the stack is is a full time gig as well. It absolutely is. Yeah. Staying in front of all of that literally is a full time job. I mean, like you said, the amount of change that comes, you know, through the products now its almost mind blowing. You know, you could you could be an SME in something one day and, and, you know, the day later, you it's almost kind of redundant, which is quite amazing. Right. Yeah. And that's the rate of change we see with MTRs, you know, phones and so on. Right. At least from a management point of view, you know, so much change. And it's I think maybe it's something for the CSM potentially to make sure like you know they really stay on the ball with customers, you know, to let them know that this stuff is coming, you know, and really, you know, whether it's getting on the phone or getting them on meetings, you know, regular cadences, regular updates, not just leaving it to the message center because some of this stuff is really quite important. You know, you don't want to end up with, you know, like I said, a major incident, you know, because of some change at Microsoft and might there and that maybe it's going to bolster security or improve the service because ultimately it's evergreen. Right. And you've got to keep up. Yeah. So and that's a difficult thing I think for a lot of suppliers I'm saying much less organizations. Awesome. Well, thanks for sharing mate appreciate or say I'll say on the pod, appreciate all the support over the years with the user group and stuff. yeah. And, thanks for giving us your perspective and on and telling us the journey. I'm going to I'm going to pull you back for another one. Maybe in, six months or so, and we'll see what the, the current hot topics are. Yep. Yep. No from Co if you want to find you mate what's the best thing to do. Do you want to be found? not these days. probably LinkedIn. Probably the best to find me on. I'm probably most busiest on there. So yeah, I just find my LinkedIn handle @shawnharry. Thanks Shawn. So yeah. Cool. no worries.