MSDW Podcast: Microsoft MVP Ed Gonzales on advocacy, user adoption, and exploration

Microsoft MVP Ed Gonzales (LinkedIn, Twitter) is not a professional developer, but his willingness to dive into new technology has helped him steadily expand his expertise from the Dynamics 365 product line to the Power Platform, Teams, and beyond.

He recently told MSDW about his journey to becoming an MVP, with his time divided between championing Microsoft tools at his day job while challenging himself with new tech in his free time. He documents his latest explorations on his blog, The Flying Polymath. For example, he has been working on an increasingly sophisticated bot that pulls in a range of Microsoft technology, a project that has improved incrementally as he has researched, tinkered, and learned from others in the community.

Show Notes

• 1:15 - More about Ed's day job, including his efforts around CRM adoption.
• 4:00 - What it's like being a CRM administrator and advocate, while also promoting Microsoft productivity tools.
• 7:00 - Creating realistic incentives and assistance from prospective users.
• 9:30 - On his efforts to gain support from management
• 12:30 - Ed's thoughts on the D365 product direction and efforts to encourage power users and makers
• 15:30 - User adoption milestones in the context of digital transformation
• 18:15 - Exploring and collaborating on the Power Platform as a non-developer through the birthday bot
• 25:00 - Applying information learned from experiments to real business cases.
• 26:00 - Where is Teams going in combination with enterprise systems?
• 32:00 - Other parts of the Microsoft tech stack that Ed is excited about