Blending Vocation and Innovation: Paul Stork's Path from SharePoint Specialist to Power Platform Pro and Pastoral Insights

Mark Smith: 0:37
Welcome to the MVP show. My intention is that you listen to the stories of these MVP guests and are inspired to become an MVP and bring value to the world through your skills. If you have not checked it out already, I do a YouTube series called how to Become an MVP. The link is in the show notes. With that, let's get on with the show. Today's guest is from the United States. He is the owner and principal architect of Don't P-P-Panic Consulting. He was awarded his MVP 16 years ago, so he's been in the ecosystem a long time. He's the author of several books and a frequent contributor to the Microsoft Power Platform forums. He's currently one of only triple super users of the Microsoft Power Platform forums, where he answers questions and troubleshoots issues in Power Apps, power Automate and Power Virtual Agents. You can find links to his bio and social media in the show notes for this episode. Welcome to the show, paul. Thank you, mark. It's good to be here, good to have you on the show. As I was saying before, not many people can claim 15 plus years as an MVP.

Paul Stork : 1:54
Yeah, it's been a while. I keep at it. It's one of those things. I have been a trainer for many years. It's just part of the DNA to try to help people out and learn new things. Have continued with that Finally got noticed by Microsoft 16 years ago, started out in the SharePoint space, went from there to Office Apps and Services when SharePoint went online as of this year. Now I'm in business apps because the last few years I've been doing almost everything in the Power Platform, mostly as it deals with the people who are struggling to use it on the Office 365 seeded license rather than going out and buying per app or per user license premium licenses. I still do a lot of Office 365 and SharePoint, but it all tends to be tinged now from the Power Platform product side of the fence.

Mark Smith: 3:01
Wow, there's a lot to unpack there Before we do. Just tell us about food, family and fun. What do they mean to you? What do you do when you're not doing the day job? Also, where are the US you're located?

Paul Stork : 3:13
I am, my wife and I live here in Minneapolis, Minnesota. We moved here smack dab in the middle of the pandemic. I don't recommend ever trying to do that. We bought our current house over the phone because you weren't allowed to travel in the States back in those days to go look at new houses Moved up here while the pandemic was raging. Because my daughter is a pediatric intensive care doctor and she finished her fellowship and settled in Minneapolis in the middle of the pandemic, we decided to follow and help out with the grandkids. I should start out. People usually ask about the name of the company. Don't Papanic Software Most people? The first thing they do is oh, are you a Douglas Adams fan? Is this named after the book in Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy? Although I am a Douglas Adams fan, it has absolutely nothing to do with the title on that book. My wife and I got married back in the 70s. We were both in the women's liberation movement. Her maiden name was Papanic. We both took that as a middle name when we got married and that's where the name of the company comes from. What do I do for fun? I've got a strange story because I am both. I'm a dual career person. I have been in the IT industry for 30 plus years and I've been a Lutheran parish pastor for 40 plus years. So I still do both. I'm serving a church part time right now, 15 hours a week, starting to slow down into retirement. The problem my wife says is yeah, you're retiring from two careers. So half time from two careers is still kind of full time employment and that pretty much takes up my time. I don't do a whole lot else between the church and learning new things on the Power Platform forums. It's gotten a little bit easier because I'm not chasing projects anymore. My version of retirement has been I don't do sales and marketing anymore. People come looking for me for help. I help out. But I don't go work full 40 hour a week projects anymore. I go solve problems for people. I do mentoring calls mostly where I've got a few people that will call me up and go. I've hit a rough spot here and I can't figure out how to do this. Can we set up an hour long teams meeting and sit down and go through it and you show me how to do it and that's what I get paid for.

Mark Smith: 5:58
So Well, wow, is it how interesting. I love the whole background to your name and the name of the company. My wife would absolutely love that as well. So, perb, sorry, how did you get into IT to start with?

Paul Stork : 6:13
So also an interesting story. I am old enough that I predate the personal computer. Strangely enough, I was in the first computer programming class in the state of Maryland and offered to high school students. So they brought an IBM keep punch machine into our math room and we would create decks in Fortran four and then every Thursday afternoon we'd climb on a bus, go over to one of the local colleges where they'd rented main frame time and we'd run our decks. So it has been a hobby of mine since I was in high school which we won't mention how far back that was and as I said, then I went to school to become a Lutheran pastor. I did that full time for 10 years in the wilds of Northern Wisconsin and after about eight years of that came to the conclusion that I was not cut out for small town rural ministry. I was a big city boy and being out in the country where what the pastor is expected to do is go down to the local watering hole and just sit and drink coffee all day and talk to people about most anything that comes up, maybe the church, but probably not I just was totally bored, felt like I wasn't doing anything. So after 10 years of it. I switched careers and made church work my hobby and took my hobby, which was computer programming at those days, and made that my occupation.

Mark Smith: 7:53
Wow, wow, so interesting. Tell me about the journey from SharePoint coming to market to SharePoint Infopath. That became a real core system for organizations. Sure, then we're seeing the transition. Infopath wasn't mobile friendly and we see PowerApps come into play. And you talked about seeded license under M365 and then people wanting to extend. I was just talking to a university a couple of weeks ago and they're like we need to go beyond the seeded licenses. Well, they didn't want to go beyond the seeded licenses. They like the seed, but they wanted to do more. I'm like well, you've squeezed that lemon as hard as you've could squeeze it. You've got all the juice out. You've got 4,000 people operating on it. Now it's now time to put the big boy's shorts on and look at premium licensing, because what you want to do and where you want to go, you need to take that direction. Tell me about that for you. You mentioned 2009,. You came to New Zealand and it was to a SharePoint conference. It was in Wellington. I remember being at that event. That was pre-me being an MVP, but it started my journey, definitely to thinking that way. You're a speaker at that event. Tell me a bit about those stories, the SharePoint story, and to bring us up to you. Obviously, deepen PowerApps, power Automate and Power Virtual Agents. Tell us about the journey.

Paul Stork : 9:25
As I said before, I started out as a trainer fairly early in my career, had reached a spot as a network engineer where my boss told me you've reached the top of the ladder and you need to go into management now. I said, well, can I keep my hands on the technology? They said no, this was for a bank. They said you're either a manager or you're a tech. You can't be both. You have to find a way to leverage your talents across more people. I left that job and became a trainer to leverage my talents across multiple people instead of going into management. I was one of the people on staff who liked picking up new technologies just for the fun of it. That was back in the days when CRM had first been purchased by Microsoft, when Systems Management Server was just coming out in version 1.0, and nobody else on staff wanted to learn how to do those. I learned how to do them. What they all had in common that fit my background was that I'd always been a jack-of-all-trades person. I did development in C-Sharp and C++. I did network architecture. As an engineer, I did end-user computing because I was responsible for going out and training people on how to use the systems. It came naturally to me for the products like SMS and CRM and eventually SharePoint that are both user IT Pro. They provide an infrastructure, but then the back end of that infrastructure is more often than not some kind of a database, a SQL database that needs to be maintained. There's always this programming component in the middle. If you're going to be able to train on that stuff SMS does not last a week training without somebody breaking something. You got to figure out how to go in and repair the database or rewrite the batch files or the programs so that you can get them back on track. Sharepoint was the same thing. It's a back-end data store with front-end purpose for users and there's a whole lot of development in between that people get involved in when they want to do customization of it. I've always straddled the fence between the IT Pro and the developer world and came up with SMS from the very beginning and then morphed over into SharePoint because it also was web-based program with a back-end database, very much like SMS in many ways, just with a different purpose, and have stayed with that for my whole career. About four years ago I guess, when the Power Platform was first coming out, power Apps and Power Automate in particular, was asked to teach a couple of classes on it and fell in love with it. It was a great platform to play around with and a whole new thing to learn, and it was included in the SharePoint space. In terms of licensing, there was all possibilities about what you could do to leverage it against SharePoint. I guess part of it has been over the last couple of years. One of the things that I tend to see happening is I've checked and more than 50 percent of the user base for the Power Platform are not premium users. They're all Office 365 users that get it as part of the package and yet more often than not, they get treated as second-class citizens. They're the stepchild that. Those are the bugs that gets fixed last and those are the features that it get expanded last. Being a bit of a crusader from my other career, I tend to levitate towards that direction and try to find ways to do things to work around things. I've always worked with that. I've got a database background, so I really hated it when they went to the spot where they made SQL a premium connector instead of a standard connector. That was not a fun day and we lobbied heavily against that as MVPs, but it is the way it is, and so now you have to find ways to do things in SharePoint, where SharePoint is not, and never is going to be, a fully relational database. But the cost-benefit analysis when you talk about moving to Dataverse or to SQL Server just isn't there for a lot of customers. So you have to find ways to show them the workarounds and the things that you can do within the product to still achieve your goals, when what you really ought to be doing is in SQL or Dataverse as a back-end. But you just can't afford it.

Mark Smith: 14:26
Yeah, that's definitely interesting in that. You can see, microsoft's idea was that by ceding the licenses, a lot of people get exposed. I think that happened. Then those individuals want to go beyond that and, of course, the ceding was never intended just to be a freebie. Right, it was always intended for Microsoft to be an on-ramp. It was the gateway to premium licensing and people doing more. I think that the ceding has been so good as you say, over 50 percent are still on-seeded licenses. It has probably been too good, as in from not getting people onto something that pays Microsoft rather than Microsoft giving it away for free.

Paul Stork : 15:10
I think that was definitely the view from the Dynamics product team. I think the view from the Office Absence Services product team was Infopath was a zombie walking around and they wanted to get rid of SharePoint workflows and they really didn't have a replacement for it. Here you've got Power Apps and Power Automate. They are perfect replacements for it. They talked the Dynamics team into that ceded license. That was as good as it gets as far as the Office team was concerned, I think where things went wrong and I've said this to guys on the teams I really don't understand why it is that Dynamics didn't arrange or negotiate some revenue sharing agreement with the Office Absence Services team when they did this, so that some of that office license revenue goes into the Power Platform, because right now all the people that are using ceded licenses the Dynamics team gets absolutely nothing out of that. I mean, that's all from the goodness of their heart. God bless them. I don't blame them for sometimes not being focused on the SharePoint side of the fence, but the user's out there really need it and there aren't alternatives. It's just not in the cards for everybody to upgrade to premium licenses. It just gets to be way too expensive.

Mark Smith: 16:46
Yeah, I wonder if things would have been done slightly differently in hindsight, as in when James Phillips came in and he was coming off the big win of Power BI going gangbusters, I think he never intended that Dynamics or the underlying architecture of Dynamics was ever going to be part of the Power story. I think that he was coming in, he was building the Power Platform components before it was named that, of course. Then he was like okay, here's the BizApps team, you need to take them on Because, remember, they try to build an alternative to Dataverse. Back in the day there was V1, it lasted 12 months. It got thrown out because, hey, we've got this meta-driven platform technology. When you strip the head off Dynamics. I just wonder in hindsight, because I tell you what the confusion, even between Canvas and model-driven apps that has been created in market what people think are Power Apps is definitely created confusion in the world. Two products are called the same name.

Paul Stork : 17:57
I just fielded a question on one of the forums today about that. Somebody came on and said so I want to do role-based access controls and I've got a Dataverse database. Should I do this as a Canvas app or a model-driven app? The answer was yeah either. It has nothing to do with role-based access control. That's all on the database side of the fence. The rest of it is all user interface. Do you want to write your user interface and have complete control over on it? Go Canvas. You want something that's going to look uniform for people that are used to using Dynamics Go model-driven. There's so much misunderstanding out there about what is required and where the features are and where they aren't. I run into that nowadays as well, because one of the talks that I do at conferences is on how to create offline applications, offline canvas apps, and of course, now there's an automated offline canvas app component. If you're using Dataverse as the database but you want to use any other database or you want to use any other connectors, now you're back to the old model. If you've got to cache everything in collections and handle it, then so you still have to learn both ways. I mean, dataverse is really really nice, but it's not an end all and do all. There are too many times when you have to go delve into other things as well.

Mark Smith: 19:27
So true. Last question I have for you before we wrap up what advice do you give to aspirational MVPs? You've been in 16 odd years in the ecosystem. You've seen a lot. You've seen people come in probably with different motives for becoming an MVP. You've seen the good, bad and the ugly. What's your advice, though, to someone that says you know, I want to be an MVP? What do you say to them? What do you recommend to them?

Paul Stork : 19:54
So I normally recommend two things to MVPs To become an MVP. It is somewhat of an adage that if you set out saying I want to be an MVP, you're probably not going to make it. So the first thing that I normally recommend is find something that you are passionate about that helps the community Running a user group, speaking at conferences, writing books, writing blogs, doing videos, whatever Something that you would do and that you would keep continuing to do if you never became an MVP. For me, one of the big things is answering questions on the forums. It's probably one of the primary contributions that get noticed every year is that I'm one of the top contributors on the Power Platform forums. But you know, if my MVP wasn't, if I didn't get renewed next year, I'd still probably be one of the top contributors on the forums. And if I wasn't, it's because people might not go looking for me as much if I didn't have that MVP label after my name, but I'd still be putting in the same amount of effort. I don't do it to become an MVP. I do it because it's what I'm passionate about. So that's the first thing is find some way that you can contribute to the community where you can be passionate and then be patient, because the reality is to become an MVP. The biggest milestone that you have to hit is you've got to be noticed by somebody who talks to Microsoft. Somebody's going to nominate you. Somebody at Microsoft is going to notice your name because of something that you did or something that you said or whatever. I found and I've heard this story from other MVPs the spot at which I became an MVP was the spot when people at conferences would go wait, you're not an MVP. I thought sure you were an MVP by now. That's when somebody at Microsoft has started to notice you, and that's probably the toughest thing to do, because it's very difficult to kind of jump up and down and say, here I am, here I am, I want to be an MVP. You probably won't get it then. So be patient, find something that you're passionate at, keep at it and eventually somebody's going to notice you and you'll be an MVP.

Mark Smith: 22:28
Hey, thanks for listening. I'm your host business application MVP Mark Smith, otherwise known as the NZ365 guy. If you like the show and want to be a supporter, check out buymeacoffeecom forward slash NZ365 guy. Thanks again and see you next time.