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Below are the questions and answers from the August 2022 Meetup Session.
Q. Tell us a bit about yourself? – City, family, hobbies, job title
A. I live with my wife, Christine, in a lovely village 10 miles West of Kingston upon Hull in beautiful Yorkshire. That's 200 miles due north of London and about halfway up England. Our daughter is in the final year of a biotechnology PhD in Sheffield, which is very cool.
Hobbies encompass skiing, classic cars, a narrowboat on the English canals, D&D, technology (of course) and science (especially physics). I also play guitar rather well, cook more than passably and am well into sustainable technology.
I own two companies, one is a medtech and the other is a small Microsoft practice. I'm also an entrepreneur in residence at the University Of Hull. I'm trying to retire, not very successfully.
Q. Tell us something about yourself that not many people know about you?
A. I own an Aston Martin and a classic Triumph GT6, but everyone who knows me will know that. Less well known is that I am distantly related to Tolkien.
Q. What does a typical workday look like for you?
A. I mostly only work Monday and Tuesday each week. Monday starts with a 9am Teams call with everyone in my Kinata medtech business; we are all remote workers and use Teams extensively.
I generally then have a meeting on governance and compliance, mostly to continue to raise our Purview score.
The rest of the day is email, meetings and Kinata projects.
Tuesday is my Novia Works day, progressing some client projects, a session with a partner that licenses Origin, my Teams solution, and working on the Maturity Model for Microsoft 365.
Wednesday through Friday is me-time. This often means more MVP stuff, meeting with other entrepreneurs and doing things for the university.
Q. 1st job out of college
A. I did summer jobs for my Dad's business, but my first real job was as a high school physics teacher.
Q. Your 1st version of SharePoint that you experienced and what year
A. I actually precede SharePoint. We adopted Office Server when I worked in Florida. I got to grips with designing and selling SharePoint 2001 when I joined ioko in 2004
Q. Last challenging project and why? (this should relate to your demo)
A. Every project is challenging. I'm currently building a full intranet solution for a mid-sized recruitment company using Teams as the front end. Upskilling the staff, breaking old habits, building good new ones and incorporating some of their specific needs is 'interesting'.
Q. What is the biggest mistake that your feel holds back your clients from the results they want (this should relate to your demo)
A. Mostly it's not embracing change, combined with not understanding the importance of 'pay it forward '
Q. Describe a SharePoint train wreck project, and what did you learn?
A. I founded Cloud2, my first company, because the highly talented IT company I worked for had a SharePoint project failure rate of about 25%. When I looked at the data I found they were pretty good, the norm was more like 50%. I figured I could do better, so designed the first 'in the box' SharePoint intranet. We still had some trainwrecks, often because clients wouldn't stick to the architecture, preferring to use deeply nested folders, or would focus on pretty at the expense of useful. Grrr...
Q. Your favorite M365 feature/tool and why
A. OneNote. It's my memory. There are loads of things I use extensively in M365, but I couldn't operate personally or professionally without OneNote.
Q. Where do you think Microsoft is going with M365.. Be totally honest
A. I'm fascinated by the introduction of the Viva stuff. It's about business management rather than technology solutions and is a departure for Microsoft. The branding/suite cohesion is a mess, if course; I expect to see it spin out into separate platforms rather than just be munged together under the heading of Employee Experience.
I am impressed how committed Microsoft are to their vision. It's a very different and much healthier business than during the Ballmer era.
Q. What are the 3 cool features of the demo?
What is the sizzle?
Lots of quick, easily implemented practices that anyone can adopt.
Q. Where do you want to be in 5 years?
A. Safely retired, enjoying my boat, touring Europe in the Aston and finally getting the bhang of Django Reinhardt style soloing
Q. What's your blind spot in your Microsoft knowledge? Pitfalls
A. I don't code. Not since Assembler on the Motorola 68000 chip. I know a lot if things but I have no depth (so people tell me 😂)
Q. Where do you source your knowledge? - Twitter- who do you follow, site urls
A. The MVP firehouse. Specific blogs (Marc Anderson, João Ferreira blog, Peter Veenstra blog. Twitter, of course. Filtered news feeds (Google news). Frequent Bing searches (yes I'm the one who uses Bing).
Q. In your mind, if there was 1 song that could describe Sharepoint, what would it be?
A. Louis Armstrong, What a wonderful world. (Frank Zappa, Penguin in Bondage was a contender)
Q. Where can people find you?
A. Twitter: @simonjhudson
Linkedin: linkedin.com/in/simonjhudson/
Blog: noviaworks.co.uk
MVP: https://mvp.microsoft.com/en-us/PublicProfile/5004811?fullName=Simon%20%20Hudson
Community Docs: docs.microsoft.com/en-us/mic...
M365 North Meetup: meetup.com/m365-nort...
Sessionize: https://sessionize.com/simon-hudson/
Credly https://www.credly.com/users/simon-hudson.6939771c/badges
Run.events https://my.run.events/simon-hudson
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