Pete is a VP of Technology at ThreeWill. Pete’s primary role is driving the overall technology strategy and roadmap for ThreeWill. Pete also serves as ThreeWill’s Hiring Manager and is constantly looking for new talent to join the ThreeWill Team.
Chris is a Senior Software Engineer at ThreeWill. His area of focus is consulting in the development of Microsoft .NET and SharePoint technologies. His primary role has been development lead in recent projects. Project roles have ranged from Development/Technical Lead to Development Resource.
Watch, Read, or Listen to: Application Modernization Assessments – Migrating to Microsoft 365
In this podcast, Application Modernization Assessments – Migrating to Microsoft 365, we discuss:
| Min | Topic |
| :27 | Introduction |
| 2:10 | Definitions: Modernization, Migration |
| 5:10 | Main Objective of Modernization versus Migration |
| 6:09 | Decreasing Risk |
| 10:30 | Rencore Migration Tool |
| 14:39 | Customization Assessment |
Transcript
| Danny Ryan: | It’s Tuesday, July 28th. And today I hand the reigns over to Pete Skelly to lead up the conversation with Chris Edwards about the Rencore tool set and how you can use the tool set in order to understand what you need to do to modernize your applications. I hope you enjoy.
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| Pete Skelly: | Hello everybody. My name’s Pete Skelly, VP of Technology at ThreeWill. And this morning I’m taking over the podcast. And I’m here with Chris Edwards, our senior consultant and one of our resident migration and modernization experts. Morning, Chris.
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| Chris Edwards: | Good morning. Glad to be here.
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| Pete Skelly: | Other than the network quality issues today, hopefully we’ll be able to kind of get through this and have a little chat about application modernization and kind of moving to the cloud and Microsoft 365. So you’ve just kind of give us a little sense of some of the things you’ve done modernization wise and migration wise in the past, Chris. I know some of the things you’ve done, but it might be helpful to set the stage with why we’re going to talk about modernization.
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| Chris Edwards: | Sure. So I’ve done a lot of work. We do a lot of things with Jive to SharePoint migrations, and so a lot of my recent experience has been more focused in on that. But I have done some other recent experience with customers that just really just want to optimize using their Office 365 environment. And we’ve seen folks that have actually started with their own environment, even kind of rolled out Office 365 and then found that they’ve made some mistakes and want to kind of revisit some things. So even starting out, sometimes folks just need to kind of reset, look at some of the best practices, really understand where they go wrong and what’s the best way to kind of handle that. So whether it’s dealing with migrating existing content or whether it’s we’re kind of restarting and doing things the right way, we’ve seen it all. So just to here to talk about some of those things, some of the tools that can be used to help identify the best way to move forward and be effective.
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| Pete Skelly: | Maybe it’ll be good to start out with the definition of what modernizing is to us and what migration is to us. I think Rob Horton just published a blog post, I think late last week about when to modernize your application and what is application modernization. And I think his definition, I don’t know if it’s his specifically, but it certainly captures what modernization really is, kind of moving that business critical legacy application or system, kind of updating infrastructure, architecture, feature sets, et cetera. So it’s not just kind of a lift and shift migration just to us at least. And you can kind of put your spin on it. Migration to us usually means just kind of moving one part of the system to another part. So a lot of times customers will say it’s just migrating content.
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| The difference to us, I think, is modernizing means taking the opportunity to think about how to move from large and rigid to smaller and flexible. And a lot of those things in Microsoft 365, as far as the old world of deep site hierarchies to a flattened site collection hierarchy, moving to teams, moving to kind of a little more nimble services, that really is capturing what modernization is to us. And migration typically tends to be that kind of just pick up content and move it. And then the customizations typically have to be modernized. Would you kind of agree with that? Is that what you see on a regular basis?
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| Chris Edwards: | Yeah, it’s become kind of more of the standard. I mean, it really, I think it’s more of a recent shift in the last year or so. We’ve kind of really shifted our focus, but to seeing the architecture, the things that are out there, people what people want. Going from just pure migration, taking content from one system and making it work and visible, usable in another system, that’s just one piece of the puzzle, right? It’s a much bigger thing. We talk about modernization. Migration and transformation is all part of that, but definitely taking the best of what was there in the past and bringing it up to, like the term says, modernization, bringing it into the modern world, right? Making it shine, making the content shine, making things work, taking advantage of all the Office 365 features that are out there and doing it in a way that’s best practices so you don’t shoot yourself in the foot, right? There’s rules you have to follow, and you want to make sure that you’re leveraging your investment in that platform effectively and really bringing something valuable to the enterprise.
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| Pete Skelly: | What do you see as challenges for kind of what’s the main objective from modernization versus migration? Is migration just a simple, “Hey, let’s move this,” and modernization has a different kind of business value profile?
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| Chris Edwards: | They’ve kind of blended together at this point. I mean, I can’t talk modernization really without migration where they kind of come, they are part of the same picture. It’s just it’s a deeper conversation, right? It’s taking the time to think, “How do we do this in a way that brings migration, [inaudible 00:05:45] to do things successfully, but also takes into factor all the different technologies that are out there?” How do we do this correctly? A lot of times we have multiple teams, multiple groups now that we’ve kind of engaged on these projects to think through this stuff properly. And it’s become kind of the norm in the past year or so…
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| Pete Skelly: | Chris, one of the things that I encounter early on with customers is how different segments of the business… So executives want to know how do I manage my risk from a business perspective? You’ve got platform owners, depending on the size of the company, that are saying, “I have collaboration needs. I’ve got applications that I need to support and continue to support. And I may have SLAs.” And then there’s just the modernization effort that developers and architects have to go through. And I think one of the things we look to do is decrease people’s risk. Right? So one of the things that, as a consulting company, we really try to doing is managing risk and adding business value over time. Is that, in general, do you see that as something that we work towards, both in the migration and modernization space?
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| Chris Edwards: | Absolutely. Yeah. We definitely want to look at the various business values that can be achieved and while we’re managing that risk things around application security, that’s always a big topic, dealing with who can do what. Governance and compliance, around things like making sure that things are created in a consistent way where we’re doing things according to best practices, as well as whether it’s industry best practices or whether it’s company best practices. We want to make sure that we are kind of leveraging that. And just general business risks, just things around companies, adoption, support, general, if there’s SLAs in place that companies have to support, making sure that we know we are aware of that, and we’re designing for that as well as just a general modernization risk itself. Are we estimating things correctly? Are we planning? Are we handling things in a way that it kind of exposes all the costs involved with modernization and allows that to come into play, but also make sure we stay on target with what we’re going after. So yeah. We get it from all those different sides.
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| Pete Skelly: | Yeah. I think one of the things that we’ve heard recently and has been sort of in the news is SharePoint 2010 workflow requirements going away. And I think that’s one of the really big things as far as risk, helping folks manage that risk. That’s a great example of you may have a business critical process in that workflow, and it’s not just, you can’t migrate that. Right. You’ve got to modernize that. Kind of begs the question of what are the options for assessing and doing an assessment? If you’re going to have to modernize something like SharePoint 2010 workflows, or just workflows in general, or are you trying to upgrade and kind of move towards modern communication sites and those types. How are we doing that today? What are customers’ options today?
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| Chris Edwards: | Yeah. I mean, some of the options, there’s quite a few out there. There’s some that we kind of lean towards though as best practice. So, I mean, from a customer perspective, I mean, you could always do some custom scripting, custom PowerShell, that sort of thing. That’s, to do an effective job there and it takes a lot of work, a lot of planning, a lot of basically building tools itself. So typically lean away from that. We can always supplement with custom scripting if we have very specific things we’re going after, we typically use that. But one of the main tools we’ve had to use in the past is the SMAT tool is actually an opensource tool that’s out there. It does a scan of your farm can do that and go through it. It’s more of a SharePoint analysis tool, right? It goes through and digs down into SharePoint and produces multiple outputs, multiple files that can be used to do some deep analysis. So very, very good.
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| We also lately have been using the Rencore Migration tool. It is actually a really nice tool for being able to point to a farm and quickly give you some visual kind of representation of what your farm is made up of, what are some of the complexities, where the lift and shift opportunities versus where are the true deep dive opportunities that require planning, require modernization thought, kind of aligning with what you were talking about earlier with the workflows. How do we ferret out those types of things and say, “Okay, these things will not live forward. We have to do something about them.” Right. It’ll help find those things quickly.
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| Yeah. And there’s other tools besides the SMAT and Rencore. There’s SPDocKit. There’s the new PNP modernization scanner that’s out there. I haven’t done a whole lot of work with that one yet. I’m interested in checking that out in more detail. But so far the Rencore Migration tool is kind of my favorite one to look at it. I mean, it’s a quick visual, quick hit and visual, and also something very easy to share with other folks that may be not technical.
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| Pete Skelly: | So would you say SMAT, I think one of the things we’ve run into is using SMAT and some of the other analysis tools just requires a significant amount of post-inventory analysis, right?
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| Chris Edwards: | Oh yeah, definitely.
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| Pete Skelly: | So our kind of gravitating towards Rencore and moving towards the modernization assessment from Rencore, that enables us to, I think you used the term point and shoot and get immediate analysis and kind of helping you target, okay, let’s build a plan for this. Let’s not spend, depending on the size of the farm, two weeks, three weeks plus trying to do all of the analysis and then even with SMAT and some of the modernization things, you’ve got to kind of dive deeper and Rencore just seems to give us that kind of immediate analysis, lets us give the information to executives in a way that says, “These are the things that are going to impact you.” Platform owners, developers, et cetera. Is that what we’ve seen?
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| Chris Edwards: | Yeah. I mean, we try and take steps out of the mix that allow us to be more effective. Right. So having the SMAT tool is very valuable, very useful, but it does produce a lot of detail that it requires that extra layer, that extra step that someone has to say, “Okay, how do we interpret this detail? How do we present it to the business so that it makes sense?” What we like about the Rencore tool is that it kind of fills that gap a little closer. We can run it and we can actually show results visually and a little bit more kind of directly to the business owners. It takes that extra step, at least part of that extra step away. I mean, there’s still deep dives that we have to do, but it smooths that out a little bit. It makes us more productive.
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| Pete Skelly: | Yeah. I always think of every time I hear customers say, “Well, we just start to get into the assessment of the inventory.” I think SMAT sort of begs the question always of, “Well, yes, I know there are web parts or [inaudible 00:14:02] parts, or I know there’s workflows.” But we, given just SMAT or given even some of the other tools, outputs, we don’t get as deep as we get with Rencore. Right. So Rencore is at least going to tell us, “Hey, that, yes, you have the web parts, but you also have code that’s a risk from an application security perspective or you’re not following best practices or you’re going to have performance issues or you really need to modernize this. You’re using event receivers or timer jobs or things that just aren’t even possible and need to be redesigned and rearchitected before we move.”
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| I think for early conversations, a lot of what I end up talking about with customers is content planning versus customization planning. And content planning can be relatively easy. There’s a mapping exercise. We’re going to transform the content. And we’re kind of just, we’re migrating content. I think the customization assesses some of the real complexities trying to figure out, well, what needs to be rearchitected? How long is this going to take? What kind of business investment are you going to have to make? And what are the risks you’re going to have to manage?
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| Chris Edwards: | Absolutely. I mean, you can think of, that you want to get that information as quickly as possible because each one of those little modernization opportunities where you find a workflow that’s not going to transition over or the event receiver is not going to transition over. Those are little mini apps within themselves. They can almost turn into little mini projects in themselves to deal with. So we want to find those things quickly. We want to understand them. We want to put some boundaries around them quickly and not spend a ton of time just trying to understand what’s really there. We want to be able to get that information, share it, and actually be able to put estimates around, “Okay, what’s it going to take to move this stuff over?”
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| Is it valuable? Do you even care about this anymore? Is it valuable? Is it something, what’s the priority within itself? Okay. We may have to workflow. We may also have the script editors out there. What’s the higher priority? We can have those conversations earlier and get that stuff and really do the due diligence necessary to make sure we’re prioritizing, building a backlog going after the stuff that’s really high value for a customer. So that’s all part of modernization and migration’s big piece of it. But all of the stuff I just described is also elements of parts to it as well. So yeah.
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| Pete Skelly: | Yeah. That’s one thing I think, from a planning perspective, customers often will ask, “Well, how are we going to train users? What are we going to do for adoption and change management?” I think that’s one of the best things that comes out of an assessment for us is figuring out those kind of just a rough cut, initial roadmap to say, “Here’s your simple things that we could migrate content very quickly. Here’s the moderately complex things. We might have to write some custom code for some sort of simple app that they had in JavaScript.” But then you get into some of the more complex things. And we may have to reengineer, rearchitect and redevelop. And those take a lot of management, change management and [inaudible 00:17:16] management. From a modernization perspective, if you had to put kind of one thing and just one way to describe why we’re kind of gravitating towards Rencore to do some of these assessments, what would you say it is? What’s the top thing on your mind?
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| Chris Edwards: | It’s just the immediate, you basically can point to the environment, to the farm and basically get immediate results that are kind of demonstratable to the business. You don’t have to do the extra layer of digging. We will obviously to do that, but it’s immediately valuable and it can be shared. That’s why.
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| Pete Skelly: | Yeah. I think, to wrap up some of the things that I think Rob’s blog post captures really nicely is if your application’s still valuable or if your intranet, so to speak, is still valuable, taking the time to do the assessment, figuring out, “Well, what can I do to kind of make the transition for my users very smooth and how do I manage the risk associated with some of my business critical applications?” And risk comes in not just while we’re moving it, right? You’ve got adoption and change management. Like I said, you’ve got code quality. If you’re going from on premises to the cloud, you’ve got concerns about injection attacks, you’ve got different attack surfaces.
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| So coming up with ways to handle all of that, to me, it boils down to risk management. I think that’s one of the biggest things from a modernization assessment across the board is why they are so valuable. And then they come up with really clear plans on how to make sure that customers maintain value for the investments they’ve made, whether that’s converting something, whether that’s a simple migration, whatever the case may be.
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| Wanted to keep it kind of short and sweet. Thanks for joining me today, Chris.
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| Chris Edwards: | Absolutely.
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| Pete Skelly: | And have a great week, everyone.
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| Danny Ryan | Thank you for listening to the Work Together Better Podcast. We’re available on SoundCloud, iTunes, Stitcher, and TuneIn. If you’re looking for a partner to help you craft a modern digital workplace in the Microsoft Cloud, please come by and see us ThreeWill.com. That’s the number three spelled out W-I-L-L.com. Thank you and have a great day.
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| Bruce Harple: | Pardon me?
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| Danny Ryan: | What’s number three.
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| Bruce Harple: | That would be Power BI. Right? BI being business intelligence, so that is the analytics and insights component here. Right? So if I build an app that’s collecting data of some kind, I could put Power BI on top of that data, slice it and dice it, and get different views into that, so I can share with others. Right?
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| And then the fourth element or piece of this is Power Virtual Agents. Right? So this is all about creating chat bots, right? Chat bots being little code snippets that can go out and do certain things, so you’re behind the scenes. Right? So those are the four elements of the platform, right, the Power platform. And again, what I focused on is, is power app.
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| Danny Ryan: | You forgot the last, the fifth one, which is Power Builder, right? Now, does that bring back … This is where we connect, right?
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| Bruce Harple: | There you go.
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| [crosstalk 00:06:14].
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| Danny Ryan: | Power Builder was one of those things that was one of those initial tools that was out there. So everything’s power. I was taking my notes here and it’s like power this, power this. Where’s Power Builder?
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| Bruce Harple: | Yeah, that was one of the first client server-based application development platforms. Right? Wow.
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| Danny Ryan: | Yep. Did that jog some memories out?
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| Bruce Harple: | Yeah, but not good memories, Danny.
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| Danny Ryan: | Yep. So go ahead. Sorry. I just had to ask. It just seemed like the next things to add.
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| Bruce Harple: | Yeah, so what I thought I’d do, Danny is maybe just walk through 50,000 foot-level what in Power Apps, right? And then I started tinkering with a little application, and I thought I could at least show a little bit of what I got and what it took to get to where I am.
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| Danny Ryan: | Cool, so this is like a little line of business application that you ended up, you’re building probably something that we can try out within ThreeWill?
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| Bruce Harple: | Yeah, yeah. So actually it’s an employee engagement survey, so it’s a way for us at the end of the year to have a survey where we can assess what our employees think about ThreeWill and areas that we can improve upon, and just their careers and-
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| Danny Ryan: | Nice.
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| Bruce Harple: | So, yeah. And I got a few questions out there now, but a lot more work to be done on it. But I thought that way it’s something that we could potentially use internally.
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| Danny Ryan: | Very nice.
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| Bruce Harple: | So the foundational pieces of Power Apps, so one is the data sources. Right? So if you’re going to build an application, you’re typically going to have to build it with some kind of backend data store. Right? And the nice thing about Power Apps is that data store could be in Excel, which will actually be my data store for what you’ll see here in a minute. It could be SharePoint, right? So back in SharePoint lists, there’s something called a common data service, which is a more baseline relational data store.
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| And then obviously, their SQL server, right? SQL server being more something that might be more perfect for somebody that’s got higher volume. Right? And you need to take advantage of a more powerful database, imagine a system like SQL server. A lot of different backend data sources, right? And that’s key, right, and making that simple, making that connection simple. And they also have, Connector, right? So a connector is just a bridge between your app and some data source, or workflow, or dashboard. And Microsoft has like 270 plus connectors already that you can leverage.
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| So an example of a connector would be for me to store data in SharePoint, right?
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| [crosstalk 00:09:08] SharePoint. Or I can push data to outlook or pull data from outlook. I can do the same thing with YouTube, Salesforce, MailChimp. Right? So all these connectors that are already there that you can leverage, you don’t have to build a connector. Right? It’s already there for you to use.
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| Danny Ryan: | Is that using ODBC?
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| Bruce Harple: | Boy, Danny? I don’t know.
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| Danny Ryan: | [crosstalk 00:09:35] I’m just trying to bring up old technologies, Bruce.
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| Bruce Harple: | Yeah. Yeah, that’s a good one actually, right?
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| Danny Ryan: | No, but seriously it sounds like this is just-
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| [crosstalk 00:09:46] What’s that?
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| Bruce Harple: | It’s all API based, for sure
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| Danny Ryan: | Yeah, it’s sounds like this is nice for prototyping something out. You could use like an Excel, and then once you’ve got it nailed what you want to do, then you can move to SQL server, or move to a SharePoint list based on the number of people accessing it and other requirements that come into play.
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| Bruce Harple: | Yeah. No, and that’s a great point, Danny. I mean, the way it’s designed is you can change that backend data store as you need to scale. Right? And as you need to have performance requirements, you could switch the backend data store pretty easily without changing your front end. Right? Or with minimal changes to your front end, that’s the beauty of it.
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| Danny Ryan: | As ThreeWill moves to hundreds of thousands of employees, you can scale it up.
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| Bruce Harple: | Yeah. And you’ll see the app as I’m working on this employee engagement survey, the backend data stare is Excel. Right?
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| Danny Ryan: | Yeah.
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| Bruce Harple: | It’s a pretty simple survey. It doesn’t require a ton of data. That makes sense when start with that.
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| Danny Ryan: | Yep. Yep. Cool.
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| Bruce Harple: | And then the other thing, the other piece of Power Apps is there’s something called Canvas App. And canvas app is where you create the UX or user experience and Canvas, you kind of think of an artist, right? You can choose to start with a blank canvas. I’ve got a blank screen in front of me, and then you just start dropping in different UX controls on that canvas. Right? Whether it’s a text box, whether it’s a box you’re going to capture data, whether it’s a set of like a drop-down list thing, or whether it’s radio buttons, whatever it might be, you can start with a blank canvas and build it from there, and connect it to a backend data store or data source.
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| Or they have something called Model Driven apps, and that’s where you start with your data model. Right? And you kind of tell Power Apps, “I’ve got this data model, and this is what I want to use.” I want to now create the front end to interact with that backend data model, automatically bring it in and create a starting UX for you, so a lot of flexibility there.
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| Now for me, the other thing, Danny is when you go into the Power Apps, there’s all kinds of templates. Right? I mean, they have a whole library of starting templates. So for me, like when I started on this employee engagement survey, I started with a template that they had, which was great because it gave me a jump start.
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| Danny Ryan: | So they had something that was like a survey or an employee engagement survey that was a starting point for you?
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| Bruce Harple: | That’s right.
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| Danny Ryan: | Now that’s my kind of development right there.
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| Bruce Harple: | Yeah. Yeah. So maybe what we’ll do, Danny is let me-
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| Danny Ryan: | Oh, show and tell time.
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| Bruce Harple: | Yeah, let me share my screen here. Let me see what to do. I will share my desktop. And I’m going to go over to Chrome here. Yeah, so this is my canvas, what you’re looking at right here. You see the employee engagement survey? That’s my canvas. And so what I can do is I’m going to run what’s they’re today. So if I hit this, so this is it, right? I hit get started, it tells me a little bit about what I’ve got. I’ve got five questions. What is your practice? And you’re familiar with that, right? I mean innovation practice. Are you proud to work at ThreeWill? Well, I’d better answer definitely there.
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| This was one of the default questions, obviously. I’m not going to keep this one in our survey, but we’ve got that. Do you see yourself working here in a year? Yes. I can say, love it, love it at ThreeWill. Bam, done.
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| Danny Ryan: | Cool.
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| Bruce Harple: | Pretty simple, right? And for me, I needed to start with something simple. And even when I started this, there is a backend data store. Right? So if I click over here, so this is in my OneDrive, and this is where it’s pulling the questions. Right?
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| Danny Ryan: | Oh, that’s awesome, Bruce.
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| Bruce Harple: | Let me refresh this. Here’s the questions, and then here was the choices. Right? So for question one, I had, you remember these were my choices, right?
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| Danny Ryan: | Yeah, nice, nice.
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| Bruce Harple: | And then the responses are over here as you collect the response. And it was interesting when I … Let me go back to the app here. Where was it? Here. And when I first started this, when I picked the template, I actually didn’t know that it already had created this data store in Excel for me on the backend. And that would have been here like if I go down here on my left, this is my navigation. So there’s question one, and then if I expand that out … And I was changing stuff over here, and it wasn’t changing my questions. And I was like, “What the heck is this thing doing? Because I didn’t know-
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| Danny Ryan: | You didn’t know it was hooked up to the backend.
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| Bruce Harple: | And I finally poked around enough and said, “Oh, wait a minute, there’s a data store that’s got the question, got the choices. And then you can see if I click through the different pieces here, you can see it’s highlighting. These are all the components that are on here. Right? And then here’s my radio button. Right? So I’ve got here, and then with each one of these, if I go to the right, you can see I have different properties here.
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| Danny Ryan: | Nice.
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| Bruce Harple: | I can control some of the properties of that text box. Right? So I mean, it’s one of those things, Danny, where you definitely … And there are some good learning modules out there that Microsoft has, [inaudible 00:16:15] has. And I did a few things, but I’m kind of a just let me just get in there and poke around kind of guy.
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| Danny Ryan: | Yeah.
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| Bruce Harple: | So it helps if you’re, you’re curious and you’re willing to do that.
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| Danny Ryan: | Yep.
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| Bruce Harple: | It’s not always easy and intuitive to figure out how to … Changing things isn’t so bad, but if you wanted to add things like I added these radio buttons, and it took me a while to figure that out. Maybe if I take more training, I would have been more efficient at it, but I chose to take some training and then to dive in because I was curious and wanted to play around and get some things going.
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| Danny Ryan: | This is great. I could see how for our client, I mean because we’re typically helping folks with transforming, so getting stuff over onto Microsoft 365, and then setting up the digital workplace. And I could see this as a part of what we’re teaching for the no code, low code line of business solutions that need to be maintainable and change over time. This is a great thing because part of this is just going to be a training that power user community to be able to use these tools and take advantage of these tools.
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| Bruce Harple: | Yeah. And if you think about it, Danny, we talk about our customers today, the way customers innovate today, especially business users, the tool of choice for innovation is Excel.
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| Danny Ryan: | Yeah.
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| Bruce Harple: | Right? We describe it as the Swiss Army Knife for business, right? And think about that. If you took an Excel spreadsheet, so I chose to build a canvas path, right? But if you did a model-driven app and you had an Excel spreadsheet, and you wanted to get more of a front end on top of it, and then you want to layer BI on top of that as well to be able to present it in a more dashboard kind of way, man, I mean the platform for those kinds of business users that are having to go in and handcraft Excel to put a UX on the front of it that more than one person can use, you have to put some flow with it to put a dashboard on top of it.
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| I mean for that, there’s huge value and opportunity here, right? It’s super simple to use. I wouldn’t say that necessarily, for sure, but the potential is there for sure. I think there’s tremendous opportunity. And a Microsoft goal is to create more “solution developers”, right, through this platform. Put tools in the hands of business users to create their own line of business app.
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| Danny Ryan: | Are you to the point where you’re looking at where this gets deployed or using some of the other stuff like Power Automate, Power BI, the virtual agent stuff?
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| Bruce Harple: | Yeah. I mean, that’s kind of next, right, is to publish this because there’s a publish step that you can go through to actually publish it. So yeah, that’s coming. Well, I want to build this out some more-
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| Danny Ryan: | Perfect.
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| Bruce Harple: | … get it published where I can get others to poke at it. And then, at the end, I might add a flow so when somebody completes a survey, a notification goes off to HR to let them know somebody has completed a survey. And then with the survey results, that’s a great opportunity to put some BI on top of that. Right? And create a little dashboard, so as a leadership team, we can slice and dice the survey content and understand what feedback they’re providing to us. Yeah that’s later on.
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| Danny Ryan: | That’s great.
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| Bruce Harple: | And for me, Danny, I’ve got to get to this point of finding the template, figuring out how to connect it to Excel, starting to change some of the questions around. I could say I didn’t invest more than a couple of hours to get where I am. Right?
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| Danny Ryan: | Nice.
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| Bruce Harple: | So yeah, from that perspective, I got pretty far in a short period of time. So if someone would sit down, focusing on this for several hours a day for a week or two, you could get a lot done. And I’m sure, like anything else, you’re going to get more efficient as you work with the tool.
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| Danny Ryan: | We have just proved you can teach an old dog new tricks. There it is, people.
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| Bruce Harple: | You can teach an old dog new tricks. He might be a little bit slow.
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| [crosstalk 00:20:40]
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| Danny Ryan: | So great, his will be like a part one of this series. And the next time we’ll get together, you’ve got what is, I guess, for your me goal for this next quarter. Is it to add on Power Automate, add on Power BI? What are the goals to get people prepped for the next one that we do of these?
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| Bruce Harple: | Well, I mean my next quarter goal was really to get a certification around this.
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| Danny Ryan: | Okay, cool.
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| Bruce Harple: | Yeah, I’ll do that, but I think I want to keep pushing this forward. Right?. I think probably I want to get this app built out a little bit more, maybe add a flow on to the end of it.
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| Danny Ryan: | Nice.
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| Bruce Harple: | Yeah, something like that. So I just want to keep working on it, chipping away at it a little bit at a time.
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| Danny Ryan: | Cool. That’s great. I love these little sort of build them up types of demos. And yeah, maybe even next time as you go through that certification, give us some pointers on that because I’m sure people would be interested in that as well, like what was the exam … What was the certification exam? Anything you learned there? So this is great. And you’ve seen other tech companies do this, which everybody needs to keep their hands dirty because if you’re so far away from ever doing development, everything sort of just looks easy.
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| And I think it’s just great that you’re continuing to … I know this is a low code, no code type of thing, but as I tell Austin, and as I tell other people at ThreeWill all the time and different people that I work with, ain’t nothing easy when you’re doing it for real, especially where you’ve got this demo, now you need to deploy it. And then what happens if you need to make changes to it? There’s always little things that you need to learn and you’re reminded of that ain’t nothing easy when you’re doing it for real.
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| So I appreciate this time with you, Bruce, look forward to getting together with you next quarter. Thanks for keeping your hands dirty. I think that’s a wonderful thing. It keeps us engaged and it’s just great to learn new things. And it’s great to see Microsoft’s direction with this as well. This is powerful stuff because-
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| Bruce Harple: | Yeah, yeah. I know it is, and I’ve enjoyed getting in. I think I just dipped my toe right at this point. I need to get up to my ankles next time.
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| Danny Ryan: | We’ve seen so many times where we help a company deploy SharePoint and the rest of Office 365, and nowadays, Microsoft 365. And we come back maybe a couple years later and we see all these applications that they’ve built themselves, and that’s good stuff. I mean, that’s real. You’re teaching them this to enable them to have this as part of what they’re doing is just, is a great thing. Even if we’re not the ones building it to give them these capabilities, I think it’s a wonderful service to provide people.
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| Bruce Harple: | Absolutely, yeah.
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| Danny Ryan: | Yep. All right. Thanks, everybody for listening, and have a wonderful day. Thanks, Bruce.
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| Bruce Harple: | Yeah, thanks, Danny. Take care. Bye-bye.
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