Innovative Interfaces and Entrepreneurial Insights with Asif Rehmani

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.

Mark Smith: 1:05
Today's guest is from Plainfield, illinois in the United States. He's a founder and CEO of Visual SP. He was first awarded as MVP in 2007. So he has been an MVP for a heck of a long time, a lot longer than me. He has been training, consulting, mentoring and speaking at conferences on Microsoft technology since 2002. He has authored several books over the years for Wiley Publications. You can find links to his bio, social media, et cetera in the show notes for this episode. Welcome to the show, asif. Thanks very much, mark. Great to be here. Good to have you on the show, and I feel you've got some interesting stories to tell, being that you've been an MVP for so, so long and you've run your own company. How many years has your company been going?

Asif Rehmani: 1:52
By the way, just saying what you just said right now made me feel really old. The company started in 2005, but it was not Visual SP what it's called right now. It was very much about me going out there and training people in classes three-day, four-day, five-day classes. From there it morphed a few different times. The company that it is right now, which is a product company, a SaaS product, that's been there since 2012. But even then, the focus of that used to be on Microsoft SharePoint only. Then it went into SharePoint online, from on-premise to online. Then it became focused on Dynamics 365 and then Power Platform and now we support any web application. So quite some long time.

Mark Smith: 2:38
Amazing, amazing. That's as long as I've been an MVP, so I got awarded in 2012. So it gives me a feeling for the time and the distance. Food, family and fun what do they mean to you when you're not working?

Asif Rehmani: 2:52
Food, family and fun. Wow, I'll start with family first. So, as you mentioned, plainfield, illinois is where I live. It's a very small suburb, by the way, in Chicago, actually, it's by another suburb called Naperville, which is actually a city by itself. Chicagoland is where I've lived for the last 35 plus years. I live with my wife, my three kids one in college, one in high school, one in middle school and all graduating next year actually surprisingly all of them. So graduation college, high school and middle school, which again is making me feel older as I say that, but a blessing for sure.

Asif Rehmani: 3:33
In terms of food, I am from Indian descent, so there is a lot of Indian food that I eat at home. My wife is a wonderful cook, so some of the things I can put out there think about that as butter, chicken and keema Some people might recognize what that is mutton, biryani and I'm salivating just talking about that stuff. It's awesome, good stuff. But of course, I like all kinds of food Thai food, greek food, lebanese, italian, chinese, all kinds of stuff. I like American steak. I love steak.

Asif Rehmani: 4:03
In terms of fun, you know, since the beginning of this year I picked up pickleball. That's one of the only few sports that my knees can support now. I used to love playing basketball, football, volleyball, all the jumping sports, but I've kind of cut back on all of them right now. But pickleball picked up quite a bit. Table tennis I used to play a lot and I still do fair amount of competing competitions. So that's my fun. I love sports and so forth and hanging out with kids and just doing a lot of good stuff with my wife and extended family as well.

Mark Smith: 4:37
Nice Isn't pickleball like taking off in the US at the moment. It just seems to be a craze around it.

Asif Rehmani: 4:42
You know, the weird thing is, of course, you're also really really far from where I am located, so you could appreciate this that I was in 2010,. I was in Europe I can't remember exactly which city it's still escaping me, unfortunately but in 2010, I remember I was right below a bridge somewhere. I remember seeing a sport being played which looked much like tennis and I'm like what is this? This is not tennis, it's not badminton, but it's got a net and I went over. I talked to the guys over there. They're like oh, this is called pickleball. To the guys over there, they're like oh, this is called pickleball. I'm like what the heck is pickleball? And that was my first exposure to pickleball. I'd never heard of it in the United States, never came to the United States for quite some time, but the last few years it's taken off quite a bit. It's ridiculous. It's like everywhere. Were you born in India? I was born in Pakistan, came to the United States yeah, 88, 1988, and I've been here ever since.

Mark Smith: 5:35
Because in those sports you never mentioned cricket.

Asif Rehmani: 5:37
Yeah, I was still fairly young so the listeners can probably guess my age by what I'm saying right now. So I was 12 and a half almost 13 years old in 1988. Now you can do the calculations yourself. Maybe they can put in the comments how old I am. I was at that time. Before that I was in cricket field hockey, soccer, football I called it over there, but I gave up all of them because I just picked up all the American sports playing football, basketball, soccer and other things here volleyball why did you move to America?

Asif Rehmani: 6:12
Studies, studies. It's one of those things where a lot of people from indian descent I say indian because I'm categorizing pakistan, india, bangladesh, anything in those countries come here for opportunities for education. So my parents at that time, you know, sent me here something that not a lot of people in our community even know, that I did not live with my parents for the first few years. I came here to stay with my aunt and uncle very challenging, did not know the language, uh, did not know the culture. It was very challenging still, you know, I was just becoming a teenager at that time. You know how teenagers are. But it was all a blessing because it, uh, it really made me the man I am today, so I wouldn't change anything.

Mark Smith: 6:56
So who instilled in you the entrepreneurial spirit?

Asif Rehmani: 7:00
I was an accidental entrepreneur. The spirit well, a lot of my uncles and aunts, and even my father, have owned businesses, some larger than others, but no one has a software-specific business like I do. And I call myself an accidental entrepreneur because I was not intending to start this business either into it with the people that I was training back in 2010, 2011, where people said you need to take what you have, productize it and take your training and help many other people when you're not there in person, and that's when I started thinking about what can we do? So that's when we made a plugin for Microsoft SharePoint on-premises specifically at that time called it Visual SP and at that time it was supposed to be just. You go to what's called a help tab in the ribbon if you remember the ribbon right back in the day. You click on the help tab and you see all the context-sensitive videos and tips and things like that to help the users sensitive videos and tips and things like that to help the users.

Asif Rehmani: 8:16
I've always been very passionate about mentoring, training, helping, supporting and that was, I almost felt, an extension of what I was doing or anyway. So I was very, very happy that we got the opportunity and knowledge from our customers to start that, and that's just been evolving. And now, in 2024, I can't believe I'm saying this 2024, where have the years gone? We support any and all web applications. So still the same premise where you, as a user, as an employee, an organization, doesn't matter where you are, you can always count on the help to be there on top of any web application, like Salesforce, sharepoint, dynamics, microsoft 365, workday ServiceNow, whatever and it's always there, it's always available to you on top of the product.

Mark Smith: 9:02
Right and so correct me if I'm wrong. So basically, it gives you the help and support in context of your business process. Would that be correct, rather than, um, how you create a new sharepoint site which, if that wasn't something you need to do, you could use the inbuilt help from microsoft, but is it specific to the business processes that are built into the organization?

Asif Rehmani: 9:29
I appreciate the clarification mark. That is exactly correct. See, when our customers come to us, they don't come to us saying that, well, I don't like Microsoft training or I'm not comfortable with all the stuff that's out there. It's more about how do I support and train our users at their moment of need on the business processes that we have in place, the way we do business, and that's what they can do using our application without any code. Very quickly, within a minute, you can make a quick what's called a guided walkthrough or an announcement banner or an inline help icon to make it for your users to feel supported wherever they are.

Mark Smith: 10:07
It's so important for years when I've talked about change and adoption. You know, organizations do, let's say, a big transformation piece. They put in a big app solution, whatever it might be, and they train all their staff and they forget about the employee that starts in two weeks time Right, or the employee that starts in three months time right. They weren't at that training. They didn't get the train, the trainer, the hands-on type stuff. And the beauty of what you've done there is you've created a tool that doesn't matter. When they start in the business, how do I add a new customer? How do I reconcile an invoice, whatever it might be, in context of their business? You're providing that help.

Asif Rehmani: 10:47
That's exactly it. I mean, you've, of course, talked about some scenarios from Microsoft Business Central that we would support, or Microsoft Dynamics, customer engagement. Same thing in any of those things. I want to make a new contact, a new lead, I want to create a new invoice, or I want to understand what is the next step that we should follow as a salesperson to do the next thing. It's all available to you at your moment of need, right there, and the beauty of the whole thing is the user should not have to think how to do it, it should just be there. It's kind of like the example I give is, if you don't mind me taking a little bit of tangent, I was booking an airport. What was that? Airport Parking? I don't know if it was as simple as that. And at O'Hare Airport, chicago, o'hare, people have a love-hate relationship with that airport. I'll flow through it.

Mark Smith: 11:39
I'll flow through it. I was booking that thing, I'll stay there.

Asif Rehmani: 11:42
You know what I mean. But when I was booking this thing this is years ago I remember still very, very succinctly that the subtotal it gave me for the booking was $65 or something similar to that. And then I see the total at the end step and it said 85 or something ridiculous. I'm like what's going on? It's 20 bucks more, but there was a small inline help icon where I hovered over it and it gave me all the different fees that it needed to collect because of the city, because of the airport, and I'm like I have to pay it. I didn't like it, but they kept my business because they had that information there, without saying well, you just got to pay some extra $20 for no reason, and because of that I was able to go through that process.

Asif Rehmani: 12:25
I converted as a customer. Same thing, it should be that easy within our intranet, within our Dynamics applications, sharepoint applications and within our intranet, within our dynamics applications, sharepoint applications and workday service. Now, whatever, it should just be intuitive. You could put a small inline help icon that's pulsating, or put up a banner that comes up at the right moment of need or a guided walkthrough. That's the impetus of all that stuff. Just make it easier for the users to have to think about it.

Asif Rehmani: 12:48
They just get support when they need it.

Mark Smith: 12:50
It goes back to the old adage. Don't make me think it should be intuitive, right?

Asif Rehmani: 12:55
there's a book about that as well, which I have, and it makes.

Mark Smith: 12:58
Yeah, it's like it's just that simple craig kirk, kirk, the guy auth that, yeah, I, I remember reading it way back in my uh, you know I came into this via web design and it was a big part of web design thinking. Um, because you know, back then there were so many bad web designs that you had to like what is going on here.

Asif Rehmani: 13:18
Um, tell us about the books you wrote I have to sigh before I say them, because all of them are paperweights now, because I wrote them on technologies which don't exist anymore, unfortunately. So the first one was microsoft sharepoint designer 2007. That was right, and I, when I became, I became an MVP right around that. Sharepoint Designer 2007 was the first one. Sharepoint Designer 2010 was the second one. Sharepoint Designer 2013 was the third one.

Asif Rehmani: 13:45
There was another one where 22 MVPs got together and wrote a book Real Life Experience. I can't even remember the name, but that was also around the same time that came out. I had a chapter in there regarding business processes, regarding SharePoint designer and stuff like that. And then there's one standalone book that I wrote for power users, I believe also for SharePoint 2013. It's been so long I can't remember some of the names, but it was a thin book. I made it into a regular paperback. And also a really cool thing which many people commented on at that time where, if you get it on Kindle, you can actually have embedded videos directly in there. And at that time we're talking about a decade ago it was pretty cool. You could just flip into the content. You see an embedded video, you click on it, it starts playing.

Mark Smith: 14:41
It was very, very cool, cool. Many people told me so uh, yeah, those were the folks I'm gonna tangent all over the place. Embedded video uh, what's your screen recording software of choice for your company yeah, well, there's two different ones.

Asif Rehmani: 14:50
This is actually my personal choices. Camtasia is what I've used for decades now, literally, and then recently I've been using Microsoft I'm sorry, not Microsoft. I've been using Loom quite a bit. There's also Microsoft Stream. I was just about to say that. But, just to be honest and straightforward, I do not use the stream recorder. It's good, but I don't need it. So I don't need it, so I don't use it. I have other tools that I've paid for and use that. So Loom, camtasia, are my tools of choice. Adobe Acrobat long time ago. Play with it a little bit, but not Acrobat Adobe, I'm sorry, what was it called? Yeah, I'm talking about that. There's another Adobe product I can't remember Anyway.

Mark Smith: 15:34
Yeah.

Asif Rehmani: 15:34
Used that a long time ago but it was too complex, Didn't make sense. I'm a simple kind of guy.

Mark Smith: 15:38
I do remember there was an education training material type tool that Adobe used to have. That was used a lot. It's interesting. I've stopped using Camtasia and I use Microsoft Clipchamp for everything now Much lower footprint. Microsoft Clipchamp for everything now Much lower footprint. It's hyper-modernized. Microsoft bought Clipchamp from an Australian company about the last two years, three years, and man, I've done hundreds of hours of content now in it and, yeah, it's brilliant. It's brilliant in that as an MVP, you get a full license to it. But I love the screen recording functionality Brilliant.

Mark Smith: 16:26
It'll give you prompts about how you can even improve how you're doing like with AI. And then the captioning is just on point. They're using AI to do the captioning. It's really tight. So before I put anything to YouTube, I won't rely on YouTube captioning. I'll do it in there. It gives me the STR files or whatever they are for closed captioning. I get my wife to run through it and correct all my um mistakes or my kiwi isms from coming from new zealand and um, and then upload that with the youtube clip and it's on point. It's uh, you know, accurate. It's brilliant. Um, there's still some features that I wish it had, um, but you know it is a solid, robust tool I've been using for some time now and yeah, yeah, it's as I say, since I've had it on, I've not opened Camtasia once, which is still on my computer.

Mark Smith: 17:20
And I tell you I still do use the TechSmith product which is their Snagit. I still use that. I like the way you can overlay, put arrows. I just used it in the last hour to send off instructions. But the other one you had their Loom. I was on Loom from day one and I still pay for a full subscription of that. I just find it, particularly working with contractors, it's so much easier for me. Rather than type a whole bunch of me, I just do a recording, pop it out and I've shown them on screen what I'm meaning, et cetera. Really solid, solid tool.

Asif Rehmani: 17:52
We are on the same wavelength. The only thing I'll add over here is that another reason for Camtasia that I still keep on using is we're paying for it, and one of those things where you're paying for a product, you feel like, well, I might as well use it every year. I'm paying for it, but I appreciate the tip feel like well, I might as well use it every year.

Mark Smith: 18:09
I'm paying for it, but I appreciate the tip, I'm gonna dive deeper into it. I've never paid for it because, once again, it was an mvp benefit. Right, camtasia was always anymore.

Asif Rehmani: 18:15
Used to yeah not anymore.

Mark Smith: 18:16
Exactly exactly and I mean when they took those benefits away is when all these modern ways, these new modern tools that have come out, you know um, but yeah, it's interesting. It's interesting, it's interesting. Tell me the great things that you've noticed and then, off air, we will discuss anything else, love it.

Asif Rehmani: 18:39
Politically correct question. Okay, in the beginning, 2007, when I first became an MVP, there were a lot of benefits, a lot of benefits in terms of hotel private room that you get, you know, lots of expenses covered. You get a huge benefit to spend on the store. There were, I think, 70, 80, not more than that, maybe even less MVPs in my discipline, which was Microsoft SharePoint at that time, on-premises in 2007. It was very tight-knit. It was a really tight relationship with the MVP lead as well. Everything has expanded, some for the better, some we'll talk about offline, but you know, the program has grown so much. So many times. I can't, I don't even know the account exactly of mvps. They're out there and I've gone from being a microsoft sharepoint on-premises mvp to online, to microsoft 365 and now I'm in microsoft dynamics slash business applications mvp. That's where iitated towards. So I've been in a bunch of different technologies. At one point I was a Microsoft Viva MVP as well. I don't think that's the case anymore. Yeah, that was for a couple of years.

Mark Smith: 19:59
Microsoft Viva. The Viva products seem to have taken some unusual directions or features, particularly things like like topics. I think it is in sharepoint. They seem to be disappearing viva topics and it's gone topics is gone yeah, and I and I can kind of see, in the age of purview and the ability to auto metadata, auto tag etc. Like why do you need people to manually do that?

Asif Rehmani: 20:26
It was very time-consuming a huge human-intensive process which never really caught on, to be honest. Otherwise, the premise behind Topics was awesome. So, to cap what I was saying recently, I've had to miss one or two MVP summits here and there, but I used to go pretty regularly before. It's still a very valuable event to go to Really enjoy it. The main reason I'm sure if you go and I go and others we go to meet and talk to the community, talk to the product team and that by itself is the main value from the Microsoft MEP program to be able to give your opinion, your thoughts about what's working, what's not working.

Asif Rehmani: 21:13
I've noticed that the product team, especially the last few years, have been very receptive to the MVPs. At one point there was a little bit of a lag, I think in some days, but now it's been a lot better. And then, of course, the networking with MVPs around the world. I mean we've got MVPs from everywhere coming in one location. You know it's almost like a pilgrimage that we all make once a year, so wonderful to be able to do that.

Mark Smith: 21:41
Totally agree, SF. It's been great hearing your story. Thank you so much for coming on the podcast.

Asif Rehmani: 21:47
My pleasure, Mark. Thanks so much for coming on the podcast. My pleasure, Mark. Thanks so much for having me.

Mark Smith: 21:57
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 nz365guy. Thanks again and see you next time. Thank you.