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 Germany . He works at Nova Capita as a business consultant . He was first awarded as MVP in 2024 . During weekends he dedicates his time to his YouTube channel , where he enjoys creating content for the Power Platform .
Nothing brings him more joy than reading comments that indicates how helpful his videos and posts have been to someone somewhere in the world . You can find links to his bio , social media etc . In the show notes for this episode . Enya , welcome to the show .
Thank you very much for having me , Mark .
It's good to have you on the show . I'm excited to hear your story today . Why don't we start off with food , family and fun . What do they mean to you ?
Food , family and fun . I love cooking , so food is , of course , one of my favorite hobbies , and family is the most important in the world , of course .
I have a little daughter now since one and a half years and which I'm enjoying very much , and uh , yeah , for fun , I uh enjoy reading books and uh going doing some sports nice , nice and the area in germany you live in , what's it most well known for ? Cologne is well known for well , some would say their beer , but that's up for discussion .
But other than that , we have a lot of history here . Cologne is one of the oldest cities in Germany , since it was . As you see , cologne comes from Colonia , which means colony , from the Romans . So all this , and we have a lovely river which goes through this whole city and one of the biggest cathedrals in the world , so that's very nice to visit as well .
Very cool , very cool . How did you… and cool people , and cool people . That's the main thing . That's the main thing . That's the main thing . How did you get into tech ? What was your journey ?
yeah , well , uh , I studied computer science , uh , with , uh , with a touch of um , of business and administration and um , then I moved into my first consultant role based on UC , so it was like first time in a full-time role .
And I went into UC Microsoft and I was doing Skype for Business and then I moved a little bit more into the user adoption part , because it was very new and people were used to using like decked phones , so picking it up and talking , and then it was that massive change for so many companies and so I was good at communicating and that's why I moved a little
bit more from technical into the communication part , so user adoption , trainings , so on and so forth , and that's where a spark for creating content also a bit started . But I haven't started creating content yet . Um , I just enjoyed talking to people and teaching them and showing them how to do stuff and so on . Yeah , and later on moved to microsoft teams .
Of course , as we all know what came later after skype for business and um , yeah , so that was like my start into tech , then later on discovered Power Platform and so on and so forth .
So tell me about that discovery of the Power Platform . How did that come about ?
Sure , during my journey in the consultant world in the um I also it was also my beginning of my career , I'm not been working so for that long at full time and I was testing here and there different roles and during that time I tried moving into a pmo role , so where I was like doing a little bit of project management , testing it out , looking how it feels
like , and so on and so forth . And we used to have in the previous company a lot of bottlenecks when it came to managing these projects . And funny , because the company was managing the projects by using PowerPoint and Excel , so that was like a lot of maintenance needed .
And we had weekly meetings PowerPoint and Excel , so that was like a lot of maintenance needed . And we had like weekly meetings where we talked about the project that were up and running and how were they going like next steps , what the issues are , and so on and so forth .
And the project managers had to update those PowerPoints every week and then the PMO manager had to put them all together and then do like a PowerPoints every week . And then the PMO manager had to put them all together and then do like a PowerPoint presentation every week , which is consuming so much time .
And then I was looking for solutions , how to make this a little bit easier , because you may say I'm a bit lazy , but that's what motivates me to find automated stuff and find solutions , and yeah . So then I figured out okay , why don't we just move into a more centralized let's call it database , which is not actually ?
We move to SharePoint , sharepoint lists , and we use that as a simple and cheap solution to centralize the data at least . And then all the information was put there by the project managers . And of course , we needed that visual part , which was PowerPoint before . And yeah , so how to visualize that data ? Let's go to Power BI .
We used to have E5 licenses and we never used Power BI , which is also like crazy and so much potential . They're missing . So , yeah , so that was the beginning SharePoint and Power BI , and to make repetitive tasks in between also automated .
I tested out Power Automate , and then the last piece was because I was enjoying it so much that I said , okay , why don't we make the front end a little bit more customizable , a little bit more prettier or easier for the users ? And then I tried playing alone with Power Apps and yeah , that's how it took off and yeah .
So later on , when I saw that , okay , that potential was very big but the company was working , was concentrating on UC stuff , right , so they were doing 99% only consultancy and implementation for Microsoft Teams and I wanted to continue my journey in the Power Platform , they didn't have that interest .
So I said , okay , I'm not sticking around to do here and there bits and then maintain something like that , I want to go into the front and consultant full-time Power Platform . And then I moved . Like that , I want to go into the front and consultant full-time platform . And then I moved to Nova Capital . So that's the journey , yeah yeah , that's incredible .
That's incredible . How did you find picking up the tools as in for the first time ? Obviously you were pioneering everything that you were doing . What was your process for kind of going okay , what else is in the toolkit , what am I going to use ? Did somebody else introduce you to it ?
How did you discover , or was it just that the licenses were sitting there in E5 and you took it from there ?
I didn't even know that . To be honest , I was not that aware of the licenses , to be honest , around the Power Platform , so I was just Googling where , where can I easily store data ? That was , I think , one of my prompts . And then it comes . Like you write also in Microsoft Tools and then it comes SharePoint .
You will get to Excel and SharePoint most of the time . So I said , okay , what's SharePoint ? Let's take a look . And then there are so many content creators out there and the one from whom I learned the most was Shane Young , and yeah , so that's how I started then doing more professional stuff .
Wow , that's amazing . And so in your current role , are you a full-time consultant then on the Power Platform ?
Exactly so now I've been in Nova Captor for over three years and I'm a full-time Power Platform developer and also a consultant .
And I'm also moving into because you know the Power Platform is so huge you cannot be an expert on all of the tools , and so I decided to move a little bit more into you will laugh now because I'm a MVP on Power Apps but I decided to move more as a tech lead for Power BI .
So I still do Power Apps and Power Automate , but one of my favorite tools is actually Power BI and yeah , so the needs in the company is for a tech lead in Power BI , because I was the only one and now we are three people and so I'm building that team up .
And so have you started using Fabric , then , as part of that Power BI mix .
We are in the beginnings of using Fabric .
The problem with Fabric is that it's not that easy to start as it is with Power BI Now , because Power BI when we present it as a tool you can just open it and your desktop is for free , and then show it how it looks like the developer and then maybe publish it in your own workspace , which is again for free , as if you want to publish it or to share
it with another one . Then that's where it starts to require a license . But with Fabric then you need a capacity and so on . It's a little bit more complicated . So now I'm working with my team to build a POC or a sandbox where we can build something in Fabric and have it as a showcase for companies .
But up until now we have not received any customers who are ready .
Also , their data is ready to move into fabric right , because it needs to work both now and so are you building , like your own , um , visualizations , chart objects , that type of thing .
You do custom builds of those um , we , we use like something like zebra bi and so on . So there are visuals like third-party visuals , which allow you to write some code and build a little bit of visualizations in there Not from ground up , like you can do as well .
Of course , I think that's a bit too technical for the moment and the requests have been almost near to zero in our case for 100% customized visuals . So we use something like that if it needs to be a bit more custom , but up until now we have been actually happy with the Summit ones .
Yeah , yeah , just a bit of interest in the German market . How much has the power platform grown in Germany ? And , just from what you know , how big is the job market in Germany ? How many people are really starting to build careers around the space , to your knowledge ?
Yeah . So I don't know exact numbers , but I see on what I see on LinkedIn , in the past two years it has grown exponentially because you see , the potential on these tools is so big that you can build solutions in such a short time and the companies have started to realize it as well .
Of course , in the foreign markets like US and so on , this has been the case for the last four or five years maybe , but here the last two years it's skyrocketing and we also see a lot of requests for trainings . So we not only develop the tools that's actually the best case for the companies also get the most profit .
But a lot of companies just require or ask us if we provide trainings for Power Automate . I had a couple of weeks ago a couple of Power Automate trainings . Copilot now is a big thing , and so on and so forth . Power Apps , power BI , dash from the Day . You know all this stuff . They're very highly in demand at the moment .
How much is co-pilot for Power BI entering the mix for you ? Are you doing lots of POCs ? Are you validating that a lot ? What are the use cases that excites you ?
At the moment it's in very , very early stages if you compare it with Copilot Studio or Copilot in 365 . So Copilot in Power BI is , for us at least , in a very early stage where we hadn't had very many opportunities to show it or to test it .
But as of excitement , I see I've seen the slides where Microsoft shows you can click , you can ask there and then you get a whole dashboard done or a whole report done .
I don't know how much that's going to work in real life because you need the perfect data , but I see potential If you have seen the whole Fabric slide where you have all those Azure bits , then you have Power BI and then you have the data activator . I don't know if you've heard of it . I mean , this whole synergy is what excites me more .
Copilot would be nice for the end user maybe to ask a question on the data , or maybe the end user was trying to build a report by themselves . Okay , help me with this DAX equation here .
But I see more on the higher level where the user is going to use something like the data activator to gain insights and notifications and then maybe start a workflow if something happens with my report in a specific visual , like a gauge or something like that , and I see a lot of potential there to automate all those reactions .
So not only acting but also the reacting part .
You know Power BI for some time has had the Q&A type function in it where you can query and make new charting objects . Is the co-pilot functionality really just an enhancement on that at this point ?
It is more than that , of course . It is more than that because it has the potential to , because the Q&A part you needed to ask exactly the name of the column . So , for example , you have a column countries or a column country , if you write the country word in the question , then it would find it . Otherwise it was too dumb to do it . So what I see ?
Coppola is going to over overcome that issue with its artificial intelligence and then maybe go find country where it seems okay , germany is a country , then that's something that he's looking for only now . So that's , that's the difference , which I what I see , and I hope as well .
Yeah , makes sense In your content creation . Are you doing that all in English , or are you doing ?
it in German . Yeah , actually , with my naivety at the beginning , I started doing it in English and in German . So the first videos if you dig deep in my content channel , you will see that the first videos were the same , once in English and once in German .
But that was so much time which I didn't have , and I was okay , what have I committed to at the moment ?
And then at some point I said okay , I saw that the English ones were having more views and then I've switched completely to English , which was , at the end of the day , a good decision , because I've seen during my career now a lot of customers who also try during the training zones , also try to learn by themselves , by using YouTube , for example .
They also Google in English because they say in English are the most of the contents and also if you Google in Google , you will ask in English most of the contents , and also if you Google in Google , you will ask in English most of the time , especially for such cases , they don't ask in German , which is funny , but that's the reality .
Interesting , interesting . I encourage a lot of people in the community globally to do it in their native language because it helps more people in their native language , because you know it helps more people in their own community , because English tends to be well represented . But it's interesting . You notice the data showing you what's getting the most engagement .
What's been your biggest career highlight ?
My biggest career highlight actually was , I would say I would say , two , because the first one was when I discovered the Power Platform , because that changed my career completely , the direction it was taking .
At the beginning I wasn't very sure if I'm going to stick with these tools Microsoft at all , maybe , who knows but yes , that was like a turning point for me . I loved tools from the beginning .
And another moment I would say was not that far along , where I finished one of my favorite projects I'm not allowed to say the name , unfortunately , of the customer , but one of my favorite projects and it was a Power BI project with a little bit of Power Apps as well inside of Power BI , and the nice part about that was that we spent a lot of time on
the design , which is something that very few companies invest when they come to us for Power BI projects . For Power Apps it's a little bit different , because Power Apps you need to invest some time in UI and UX , but for Power BI they only want to see those numbers , which , okay , that is the point actually .
But you can do so much more if you invest a little bit more time into where you put the numbers , where you put the visualizations maybe implement like a navigation into your report . You can do so much with it , and that was exactly .
That was the perfect customer , I would say , and that was something I enjoyed really , really much , and yeah , so that's very cool .
That's very , very cool . My last question for you today is what's been the biggest , uh , technical challenge you've had to overcome with business applications or the power platform ?
I think uh , one of our latest customers , uh wanted so they have a lot of data and the data that they were receiving . So let's start from the bottom back . So they wanted to attach the repos that we were building to a data source and the data source was actually not able to talk with it over an API able to talk with it over an API .
So the only way that we could get the data was over a CSV export , which was like a recurrence every week or every day , depending on how often we did it . And that report then was going to be live , so we had to work around with our data team as well .
And then we went and fixed that by pulling the data with Azure Signups and putting that into Signups and then connecting Power BI to Signups , which was something very new for me . I understood the concept , but I never tested it again . But that was one of the biggest technical difficulties that I had to overcome .
Awesome , inge , if you were talking to somebody that says how do I become an MVP ? What's your one bit of advice you give them .
First of all , you need to create content and do stuff around for the community about the tools that you love . If you don't believe in the tools , if you don't like the tools , you don't use them enough , then I don't think that you can fake it for a long time . So you need to find the tools that you love first and then start talking about them .
It doesn't matter if they're highly on demand or not , because when I started it was on demand , but when Shane Yang started it was not that much on demand as it was when I started . So you know what I mean . So find the tools that you love , do content , write about them , speak about them and then everything else will come by itself .
This is maybe something a fun fact . This is my second try on my MVP . The first one , I did not get it . So the second one , I then got it . So stick around as well and keep going , and if the first time or the second time doesn't work , the third time will work and just keep doing your thing .
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 outmeacoffeecom forward slash nz365 guy . Thanks again and see you next time . Thank you you .