MJFChat: Why IT Pros Should Love the Power Platform

We’re doing a twice-monthly interview show on Petri.com that is dedicated to covering topics of interest to our tech-professional audience. We have branded this show “MJFChat.”

In my role as Petri’s Community Magnate, I will be interviewing a variety of IT-savvy technology folks. Some of these will be Petri contributors; some will be tech-company employees; some will be IT pros. We will be tackling various subject areas in the form of 30-minute audio interviews. I will be asking the questions, the bulk of which we’re hoping will come from you, our Petri.com community of readers.

Readers can submit questions via Twitter, Instagram, Facebook and/or LinkedIn using the #AskMJF hashtag. Once the interviews are completed, we will post the audio and associated transcript in the forums for readers to digest at their leisure. (By the way, did you know MJFChats are now available in podcast form? Go here for MJF Chat on Spotify; here for Apple Podcasts on iTunes; and here for Google Play.)

Our latest MJFChat, recorded on October 13, is focused on IT Pros and the Power Platform. My special guest is self-described Power Apps Nerd with PowerApps911 Shane Young. Shane’s also a regular contributor to Petri.com. And he has his own YouTube channel where he covers the Power Platform, Microsoft 365, PowerShell and lots of other Microsoft topics.

Microsoft has put the pedal to the metal with its Power Platform set of low-code/no-code tools — which include Power BI, Power Apps and Power Automate. Shane works with a variety of customers, especially SMBs, in finding new and innovative ways to use Power Apps and Power Automate to get their jobs done. He answered a number of reader questions on this episode about the Power Platform and offered some good tips.

If you know someone you’d like to see interviewed on the MJFChat show, including yourself, just Tweet to me or drop me a line. (Let me know why you think this person would be an awesome guest and what topics you’d like to see covered.) We’ll take things from there….

Transcript:

Mary Jo Foley (00:01):
Hi, you’re listening to Petri.com’s MJF Chat show. I am Mary Jo Foley, AKA your Petri.Com community magnate. And I am here to interview tech industry experts about various topics that you, our readers and listeners want to know about. Today’s MJF Chat is going to be all about why IT Pros should love the Power Platform. And my special guest today is Shane Young, a self-described Power Apps nerd with PowerApps911. Hi Shane, thank you so much for doing this chat with me.

Shane Young (00:38):
Oh, Mary Jo, thank you very much for having me. And I was wondering, listening to you do the intro, you know, when you have to like say the MJF, does it feel weird to like call yourself MJF or is it a natural thing for you?

Mary Jo Foley (00:50):
You know, it’s like Ruth Bader Ginsburg. I’m nowhere near in her league, but it’s kind of fun to have your own acronym. So yeah, it’s pretty cool.

Shane Young (00:59):
Good to know. Anyway, thank you for having me. This is very exciting to chat with you.

Mary Jo Foley (01:02):
Yeah, me too. I’m excited. Like I was saying to you before we started the chat, I feel like whenever we do a Power Platform chat on MJF Chat, that we can’t do enough of them because so many people want more and more information, have lots of questions. So this is a very timely and perfect topic, I feel like.

Shane Young (01:21):
Yeah, the Power Platform is super popular and you know, now that we’ve kind of snuck ourselves into Teams, I think it’s going to get even more popular, which I didn’t think was possible, but I think it is.

Mary Jo Foley (01:32):
I’ve got some questions for you about that. So stay tuned on that. All right. But I want to start big right out of the gate. When I asked you to do this chat, I asked you to suggest a theme and you said, of course, why should IT Pros, love the Power Platform? So why should they? Like what’s in it for them? Why should IT Pros care specifically about the Power Platform?

Shane Young (01:54):
Well, I think there’s two different ways to look at it, you know, so, and I grew up an IT Pro right. I grew up a Windows Network, Admin, you know, reading my Network World magazine, I was thinking about that this morning for some reason. And you know, I grew into this world. And so I think when I think about my IT Pro brethren that got here, it’s two things. One is Power Platform’s, very empowering for the business users, the non IT people to just go solve their own problems. And to me, you know, I was pretty good at being, my boss called efficient, I call it lazy, right? It was, you know, I want to do as little work as possible. And I think that the Power Platform, once you light it up and, you know, put the guardrails around it a little bit, if you need to. You know, you cut your people loose and then you just go back to playing FreeCell or Solitaire and, you know, let them build their own apps. I think that’s a big piece. The second part, I have two parts to all of these things.

Shane Young (02:54):
The second part for me was it let my skills grow. I did all the infrastructure stuff for so long. I loved my infrastructure stuff, but as we moved into this cloud based world, a lot of my infrastructure skills just weren’t as important anymore, right? The ability to punch a printer in the side to get it to work, well that might still be relevant, but a lot of infrastructure things started to, you know, not be as necessary. And so the Power Platform gave me a chance, just like my Power users, I started building apps and it turned out, I fell in love with building apps with this low code, no code type of solution.

Mary Jo Foley (03:28):
So this is a good segue into my next question, because I’ve been talking to Dona Sarkar and other people on the Power Platform. And they’re like, even you, Mary Jo could build a Power App. And then I look on Twitter and I see people struggling. I see people saying, I thought it was going to be really easy, but I’m trying to use Power Apps or Power Automate, and I don’t know I’m having some issues. So my question is, is this really a platform for non-programmers like, is it fair to call it low code, no code? Or is it like a step above?

Shane Young (04:00):
Well, so I think it’s both, I think it starts as low code, no code. So, you know, when people come to me like, Hey, I want to get started with the Power Platform. I always tell them to go find like an existing spreadsheet driven process and turn that into an app. So you get all the advantages of, you know, shared data sources and people having the interface to enter stuff, and you’re just not working in Excel. And so I totally believe that any business user out there can go and learn and do that without a lot of training or a lot of headache.

Mary Jo Foley (04:30):
Okay.

Shane Young (04:30):
The problem is that a lot of people, when they see the Power Platform, like they go, they don’t want to go build that simple app. Their first app ever their entire life, right, they’re an accountant.

Shane Young (04:40):
And their first app ever is going to be a CRM system with automated invoices and billing and yeah, those people, they struggle. Right? Which I don’t blame the platform for people who get too enthusiastic. But I can tell you, you know, here at PowerApps911, we’ve got, I don’t know, 12, 14. I don’t know, we have a bunch of people all of a sudden. But, half of my employees didn’t come from an IT background, right? Like Joseph, the latest guy that joined, he was a purchasing guy, literally, you know, purchasing contracts, all that. He tripped over the Power Platform. He built some apps for his companies like the heck with it. I am quitting my job as a purchasing agent and I’m going to become a Power Apps consultant. It’s pretty cool.

Mary Jo Foley (05:23):
That is, yeah. So I guess you’re advising people, don’t be afraid to start small and kind of get your feet wet before you try to build a whole CRM system by yourself,

Shane Young (05:33):
Please, you know, you can get to the CRM system right. Mary Jo, I could get you to where you could build one, but I think your first app should just be one for you. You know, building a simple tracking of all the things that Brad or Paul did to aggravate you today.

Mary Jo Foley (05:47):
That would be a big spreadsheet though.

Shane Young (05:49):
Right? But so it’s a big spreadsheet, but it would be a nice, easy to make Power App, because you already have the patterns down, you already understand all the logic. You just make the app to make it faster for you to track that information.

Mary Jo Foley (06:00):
Okay. That’s a compelling use case. I like that. Alright. Now I’ve got a bunch of questions from Twitter because when we started promoting this chat, we get a lot of people asking things that they wanted to hear from you about. So let’s, let’s start with Joanne Charlotte who asked on Twitter. What does Shane think is better for a small business? Essential Power App, which drives all operations, client work and processes, or a lot of small apps for specific purposes? And the reason she is asking this is, she says, she goes back and forth constantly when she gets a new requirement, should I bolt it onto an existing app or should I create a brand new app?

Shane Young (06:44):
Fabulous question. I love this one as the first one. Thank you for like easing me into this. I think that that’s a great one and a lot of people struggle with it and I am a firm believer in building lots of small apps and the main reason for that now I think back to like one of the first apps I built for a customer, I don’t know, three years ago, we kind of went through the whole process, what we’re going to build, what we’re going to do. And they’re like, well, what’s your training plan for the app? I said, ma’am, if I build you an app that needs training class, I failed you. Right. I don’t want people to build apps that are like, well it was Bandersnatch movies, you know, pick your direction type of thing. Apps you can use, Apps I refer to as the Hulk smash mentality, right?

Shane Young (07:28):
You open it up. It’s like, enter my time, Hulk smass, how many hours did I work? 12, Hulk smash. Right? Like there’s no decisions because a lot of the times these first apps are for non technical people who, you know, have a higher turnover. You’re not after training them. You want them to be able to open the app and be like, all right, I get this, you know, I want to get paid. I got to press this button, enter time, put in my numbers and hit save. So I am a big fan of let’s build apps that are focused on the person, the scenario, the business case. And then we can connect all of those with some type of management app if we need to. But don’t try to build one app to rule them all.

Mary Jo Foley (08:08):
Yep. Bite size snack apps, right? That’s the way to go.

Shane Young (08:11):
Yeah, right. Back to your example, maybe you’ve got one app for tracking all the things you don’t like about Brad and all the things that you don’t like about Paul. Right. You can have two apps for that. And then you could build like a Power BI dashboard to correlate the data on top. But now you’ve got, you know, different tracking mechanisms for each

Mary Jo Foley (08:26):
Nice, good analogy. I like that. All right, another question from Twitter, Juan Gonzalez said he would like your opinion of the best way to manage the lifecycle of Teams apps. So he said, do you have a standard way of handling things like, when to review app changes and with whom before publishing an app for all? Like, how do you think about the whole idea of life cycle management when it comes to these?

Shane Young (08:53):
So guessing Juan is a more of a dev type of background, type of person.

Mary Jo Foley (09:00):
Yep, obviously, asking about life cycle, right?

Shane Young (09:02):
Yeah. Right. ALM, application life cycle management is one of those words that developers love and the rest of us just can’t stand. So I’ll be honest, most of the apps that I work on do not have an ALM story. They do not have any type of life cycle planning, maintenance schedules, any type of review cycles. And I think, you know, so obviously as a Pro Dev, you say, Oh, that’s terrible. You make terrible apps. That’s probably fair. But I think what it really is, it’s back to, most of the apps that we’re putting together, they’re more like replacements for spreadsheets, right? They’re simple business processes that are very agile, very let’s do this thing. Let’s make it awesome. And let’s move on and build another small app to do a thing. Instead of trying to build that massive app that does require a sign off from five different people, you know, requires governance and it’s driving the entire business.

Shane Young (09:59):
You can build those apps in Power Apps, but the bulk of the work, bulk of the apps in the world that are being created today are in that just agile, Oh, I don’t like what this does. Well, I’m just going to add a button today type of space. If you really did have to do Iife cycle management, I think Power Apps does have a lot of governance content out there. There is the COE, the Center of Excellence toolkit, can kind of help you get started in that path as well. There are ways to start managing this stuff, but I’ll just be honest, 95% of the apps that we’re involved with and we’ve built thousands at this point, are just not doing it. For better or for worse we’re just not doing it.

Mary Jo Foley (10:38):
That’s good. Okay. All right, here comes what might or might not be a trick question. Kent Weir on Twitter asked you SharePoint or a CDS. Okay, so CDS for people listening who don’t know is the Common Data Service and I’d add CDS or Project Oakdale? Or are we calling it Dataflex? Who knows? So let’s talk about how you think about all the options people have when they’re looking at storing things like entities, right?

Shane Young (11:13):
Yeah. so that is a, that’s a tough question. Glad we didn’t lead with this one.

Mary Jo Foley (11:19):
I know when I saw this question, I was like, wow, that’s a big question, actually.

Shane Young (11:23):
Yeah. And then it’s pretty rude of Kent. I’m going to, you know, thump him in the ear next time I see him for this. So that one, you know, it depends, right. isn’t that the answer I just give and move on.

Mary Jo Foley (11:33):
Yeah. You can say that.

Shane Young (11:35):
So a lot of it comes down to, you know, SharePoint versus a CDS, the Common Data Service. The Common Data Service is a better data platform, right? It is faster. It has got more features. It’s got more security, flexibility. It’s better integrated into Power Apps or, you know when Microsoft releases new functionality. They always put it there first. CDS is definitely the better platform, if you truly can choose between the two. The challenge becomes you know, SharePoint is what we call a free or included data source. So most people get Power Apps by their Office 365 licensing. And so that means all of the Office 365 data sources like SharePoint, Exchange, Planner, To-Do, all those things are free or built into your licensing already. Whereas if you want to use an app on the Common Data Service, you’ve got to have a premium license, not only for you, the person who builds the app, but also for anyone who consumes the app. So licensing drives the answer to that question way more often than it should. And so then the curve ball that you added in the mix is, what, a month ago, Microsoft released Project Oakdale or Dataflex or CDS Lite, or MJF Database who knows what we’re really going to call this thing when it’s done.

Mary Jo Foley (12:56):
I don’t even know what to call it anymore. I’m like, are we calling it Oakdale now? Or what are we calling it now?

Shane Young (13:00):
Yeah, I think this week we’re still just calling it Oakdale. No we’re calling it Project Oakdale. I keep writing Oakdale, and then having to add the word Project in front of it so I don’t confuse anyone. But so Project Oakdale is interesting because it is now the ability inside of Teams to have a version of the Common Data Service, Common Data Service Lite, easy way to think of it. And that one does not require a premium license.

Mary Jo Foley (13:25):
Okay.

Shane Young (13:25):
So then now you’re like well wait, maybe I should build all my apps in Teams. That, it’s an interesting question. I’ll be honest. I have, I talk to someone about almost every day. People are trying to figure it out if that’s the new answer and we don’t know yet, right. Oakdale is still in preview. And so we don’t really know what the data security model’s going to look like.

Shane Young (13:48):
I think that’s the biggest holdup for a lot of people. But also, you know, if you think about, so if we just step all the way back and say, why did Microsoft do Oakdale? They really did it to, and I’m putting words in their mouth, but they wanted people to be able to build apps quickly inside of Teams. And so the idea of those apps were back to that spreadsheet idea, right? It’s just a simple little app. You’re not trying to run a business, you know, major enterprise wide system here, you just got three or four people that are trying to collaborate on a specific topic and you want to build a quick app. And so if that was their focus. And I think that was, then when you say, well, now I want to put the HR performance review app in Oakdale. Right. And you’re like, Oh, cause you know, cause CDS is a better data source. It’s faster and all these things, but remember, you know, my performance review and your performance review, those were not meant to be shared and collaborated across the team. So I think that’s where a lot of the disconnect is still happening for people, is they’re trying to figure out how far can they push Oakdale and not, you know, store my social security number where you can just get it and, you know, buy yourself a new car. So I don’t,

Mary Jo Foley (15:01):
Buy Brad another Tesla if you’d like to buy another car.

Shane Young (15:05):
Oh, well, you know, yeah, so I’m the one that got Brad on this Tesla train, so I feel bad for that.

Mary Jo Foley (15:14):
That’s a good explanation on Oakdale because I’ve been trying to figure it out myself. You know, cause I was trying to piece together a Common Data Service, Common Data Model, and then along comes Datafex, which is now Project Oakdale. And I’m like, wait, okay. I kind of had the CDM, CDS thing, sort of set in my head and now there’s this thing on top of everything else. But I think you’re right. The way to think about it is, Microsoft wants you to build apps in Teams, right? So this is the beginning of that strategy. And I totally agree with you, it’s early days and we don’t know all the pieces.

Shane Young (15:49):
Yeah. And I think that’s the hardest part, right. Is we don’t know all the pieces and we also also have to remember, Oakdale can be, so it’s the apps, but it’s also the workflows. So the Power Automate stuff is there and the Power Virtual Agent stuff. I keep trying to find time in my schedule to go build my first chat bot out there because you know, the chatbot licensing is, shall we say not inexpensive. And so this idea that I can start building and playing with chatbots without paying, you know, for my first child’s college years. It’s interesting.

Mary Jo Foley (16:22):
Yeah for sure. It’s great. You’ve touched on licensing a few times and we have a licensing question. Of course we do. Right?

Shane Young (16:31):
Always, always.

Mary Jo Foley (16:31):
Carl Knecht on Twitter said how in the bloody heck do you manage the licensing complexity of the Power Platform? And he just started going down a list of all the different things like Power BI Pro, Power BI Pro Premium, per user, Power Apps per user or per app. And I’m like, yeah, I, this is a question that comes up to me all the time. Like this thing is one of the most complex products and services from Microsoft around licensing. And that’s a high bar already, but I’m like, wow. Every time somebody asks me a Power Platform licensing question, I’m like, yeah, you gotta ask a professional about this because this is too complicated. way. So how do you even try to keep track of it?

Shane Young (17:15):
I don’t. So on the Power Apps side, I’ve got it. I’ve got it nailed down. I get the questions every three or four days and you know, I always start with, I am not a licensing expert. This is not official licensing guidance, blah, blah, blah. But I can understand how it works. And so really it comes down in the Power App side. It’s about connectors. Do you want a premium data source like CDS or SQL or Salesforce? You’ve got to have a premium license and it’s at the user level. So then it’s just a math game, right? Is it cheaper to pay per user and get these four people, you know, access to one app or are you going to have 12 apps? Because you know, that’s the model you see yourself, in that case instead of buying four per user or per app licenses, it’s cheaper to buy one per user license. And so it’s really just a math game and it’s just accepting that it’s all about the connectors.

Mary Jo Foley (18:14):
Okay. That’s good. That’s actually good advice because I get tons of these questions too. And I’m like, I don’t even know where to tell people to start to unravel this because it’s so complicated.

Shane Young (18:23):
Yeah. Yeah and the Power BI stuff I don’t understand at all. I don’t even pretend on that one. And then Power Automate seems to be pretty straightforward so far. Right? Because you can just license that one. A lot of times what happens in most companies is like one user built all the flows and that one user’s flow is run out of capacity. So you buy that user a $15 per user month license. And then there, they can basically run all the flows that they want. And so your whole business ends up getting automated, you know, through Susie’s account. But that’s what a lot of people end up doing there is just buying this, you know, one or two users, the Superflow licenses and calling it a day.

Mary Jo Foley (19:04):
That’s good. That’s good advice. Alright, speaking of Power Automate, I know one of the new hot buttons around that is something called Robotic Process Automation, RPA. Why should IT Pros care about this if you think they should?

Shane Young (19:21):
You know, so RPA I have heard is red hot in the enterprise space. You know, I’ve got friends at different style consultings and we have had exactly zero, right when we concentrate more on the SMB space. But so when I talked to them, what it’s turning out is that there’s just so many of these legacy systems, right? It’s usually AS400 type of stuff where there’s no good way to get at the data. So they’re building these RPA flows or UI flows is another name that Microsoft uses for them, from time to time where they can kind of record, you know, clicking on the screen, typing, you know, this info, this info, looking up data and in screen scraping the data back off and then shipping that back into an automated process. So I have done zero with it. I’ve had zero demand for it, but my buddies who do enterprise level consulting said that they can’t keep up right now. So, I don’t know. I don’t have a great answer for you there.

Mary Jo Foley (20:20):
I know it was a hot topic at Ignite this year and they were talking about the desktop RPA, and I’m like, you know, this is something I don’t know a lot about, but I feel like I should know more. Especially because Microsoft’s bought a company in this space and they seem to really be investing in it. So I was just curious if you’ve heard much about it or seeing much of a blip yet, from that.

Shane Young (20:40):
Yeah. Not me, but I do have some friends. I’ve got a couple of people I can introduce you to, if you wanted to interview somebody and chat RPA.

Mary Jo Foley (20:47):
Nice. Okay, cool. Very cool. Okay. Now I’m stepping back to a big picture question again. I’m curious if there’s anything you feel is missing from the Power Platform lineup that you’d like to see Microsoft add, and this could be product, services, policies, anything that comes to mind when you’re like, you know what? I love the Power Platform, but I wish it had blah.

Shane Young (21:12):
Wow. I’ve never thought about this.

Mary Jo Foley (21:15):
Sorry to throw that on you like a big like ponderous theoretical question, but.

Shane Young (21:20):
I know, you know, honestly, can I answer the opposites?

Mary Jo Foley (21:25):
Yeah. You can answer it however you want.

Shane Young (21:30):
That’s so kind of you. So as I think about it, I honestly, there’s not a thing that jumps out. There’s not anything that I said, Hey, I really just wish Power Apps had this right now. Power Apps, if it had this one thing, I would invest my whole life in it because I invested my life in it three years ago. Honestly, for me, I think it’s the opposite. I wish that they would stop for a hot minute. They would just say, Hey, you know what? We’re not going to release any new features. We’re not going to change anything for three months. And I think we would all just have this giant sigh of relief of, okay, now I can like catch up.

Mary Jo Foley (22:06):
I know, I feel like that about Microsoft 365 and Teams in general. Like every single day, I feel like I get emails about new features being added to my Microsoft 365 plan. And I’m like, hold on. I like, I don’t even know what you added last week. And now we’re adding like 25 more. Right?

Shane Young (22:23):
I mean Mary Jo, you’re exactly right. I got that email yesterday. Right? I’m the tenant admin. And there was like 25 new things. I’m like, what? No, I can’t read this email.

Mary Jo Foley (22:33):
I know. And you know what I get their argument to this is customers are happier when they’re always getting new features and having the latest stuff. But I think there’s also something to be said for a period of digestion and understanding of the features that you have.

Shane Young (22:49):
Yeah. I completely agree. A great example. So like the mixed reality stuff, they released that back in the spring, I think for Power Apps. And I did, like, I got all this, this assets together and like I started to build out like a script for a big video around it. And before I can even get that done, a new shinier thing came out. Right? So, I have all this content for that, but I don’t have the time in my day to get it out. The Power Virtual Agents, I don’t have the time to go learn that because I’m too worried about learning the other seven things.

Mary Jo Foley (23:22):
I know, do you, by the way, do you do much connecting the Power Platform to GitHub? Like have you actually tried to like, kind of do that transition?

Shane Young (23:33):
No, no.

Mary Jo Foley (23:33):
Cause that seems to be something they’re going to start pushing too. Right. Which is, okay now you’ve figured out the Power Platform. Now let’s connect this with GitHub and you can really go nuts. And I’m like, wow, that’s like a whole other can of worms there.

Shane Young (23:46):
Yeah. You know and so Microsoft’s mantra for a long time has been that the Power Platform, it’s no clips. Right. You know, you can start with that simple spreadsheet to track your, those evil guys. And you can end with custom dev writing an API and some JavaScript controls and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And I get that, that kind of, you know, it feels very inclusive, right? Everyone can get into the Power Platform story, but I’ve never written a line of C# code in my life. Right. I have no intention of ever being in a pro dev model where I need to GitHub a set of scripts. That,I don’t know, it’s such a foreign concept to me. I can’t even articulate why I’m not interested in it.

Mary Jo Foley (24:31):
Yeah. I know. I feel like you’re right. Like the idea of the Power Platform is it can appeal to everybody from somebody who never codes to somebody who’s like almost like a master coder. Right? Like you can be anywhere on the spectrum there. And so I think the GitHub thing is for the latter group of people, but I’m like, yeah, it means Power Platform is everything to everyone. And I always feel like that’s a dangerous positioning thing, right?

Shane Young (24:57):
Yes, no, I am a hundred percent with you. I think it’s a confusing, cause especially if you’re first exposure, like, you know, you’re at the water cooler and your buddy says, Hey, go build your solution in Power Platform and you accidentally Googled the wrong thing. And the first thing you see is Power Platform and GitHub, you’re like funny joke. Right?

Mary Jo Foley (25:15):
Right, right.

Shane Young (25:16):
So if you enter the wrong way, you could just figure out that the Power Platform is just too overwhelming for you. When in reality you never needed to even know that it connected to GitHub.

Mary Jo Foley (25:28):
Yeah. Maybe we need another code name for that part of the Power Platform, the pro dev part, you know, like it has its own project, something Project Julie.

Shane Young (25:38):
No Project MJF. That is my, I’m going to find a way to work that into my next video. There will be MJF in my next video.

Mary Jo Foley (25:45):
Uh-oh. Uh-oh. All right, last question for you. And then you’re off the hook and you can go build some Power Apps. All right. So people always ask me this and I’d like to ask you any favorite resources or places you recommend people keep up with. If they’re trying to digest all the new Power Platform, news and information, like what would you say if somebody says, where do I go for more information? I’m sure you have a book of this, but,

Shane Young (26:18):
So for me personally, I kind of keep up via Twitter. You know, I follow enough of the right people that I see headline here, headline there. So that’s one piece. The other place is I follow, you know, I get those crazy emails with 217 new features they dropped this week. And then, you know, for here for Petri, right? I write those monthly articles around new features in the Power Platform. I’ve written the SharePoint ones, Office 365 ones over time.

Mary Jo Foley (26:46):
Cool.

Shane Young (26:47):
And honestly, just trying to even like, there’s, just so much happens. I don’t know. I don’t have this perfect story for how anyone keeps up.

Mary Jo Foley (26:58):
Me neither. I don’t either. Cause I feel like every time I stumble into something new, I’m like, Oh, I didn’t even know this existed, a new conference or a new blog or something. I’m like, wow. I wish I knew about that.

Shane Young (27:09):
Yeah, no. Yeah. There was like, there’s this big Teams conference like last week that I was like, Oh, that sounded really cool. I would have presented in that if I’d even known it was a thing before it went live. Yeah. So I’m with you. I don’t know how, I don’t know how anyone keeps up. I mean, you have to be trying to keep up. Right. You can’t throw your hands up in the air and say, I’m just not gonna keep up. I think it’s just a matter of finding somewhere that makes sense. Whether it’s a trusted voice like yours, someone who can just, you know, get them scoop from you once a week and that’s how they keep up. Or if it’s just reading Twitter for hours on end. I don’t know.

Mary Jo Foley (27:43):
I don’t know either. I wish it was an easy one-stop shop, but I don’t think there is because Power Platform is so big and it’s growing. So I think it’s tough to say this is the definitive place to go. Right?

Shane Young (27:55):
Yes, there is not a definitive place.

Mary Jo Foley (27:59):
All right, well thank you again, Shane. This was great. And I would like you to give Chewy an extra treat for me as a token of owner appreciation.

Shane Young (28:08):
I will go get Chewy, would you like me to get a dog treat or a human food that he’s not supposed to have that he eats every day?

Mary Jo Foley (28:15):
Oh, definitely the human food.

Shane Young (28:17):
Alright. I will go upstairs and find him. He had some of my granola bar this morning. So that’s why Chewy weighs 110 pounds.

Mary Jo Foley (28:25):
At least he’s eating healthy, right?

Shane Young (28:26):
Yes. Exactly.

Mary Jo Foley (28:29):
All right.

Shane Young (28:30):
Thank you, Mary Jo.

Mary Jo Foley (28:30):
Yeah, thank you. And for everyone else listening to this right now or reading the transcript because we do post all the transcripts, I’ll be putting up more information soon on Petri.com about who my next guest is going to be. And once you see that you can submit questions directly on Twitter for our guests. In the meantime, if you know of anyone else or even yourself who might make a good guest for one of these MJF chats, please do not hesitate to drop me a note. Thank you very much.