My Final Event of the Year

I’m sitting in Heathrow airport on my way back from SharePoint Saturday UK and a couple days with the Axceler EMEA team in our London office, looking forward to 3 weeks of no travel. Much of that will be on vacation, using up the last of my available days before the clock strikes midnight on New Years. For those of us workaholics out there, the “use it or lose it” vacation day rule is a great vacation motivator. But I am looking forward to my two older kids coming home for the holidays, and having the entire family together for Christmas.

As for Nottingham and SPSUK, once again a well-run event from the UK team. While overall attendance was down from last year (probably due to the cold weather that hit the area, and proximity to the holidays), I had a full room for my session ‘Using Social Media to Optimize your Metadata’ in which I made the case for how social not only drives productivity within collaborative environments, but also creates context for content, which in turn helps improve metadata and taxonomy. It sounds wordy, but it actually makes a lot of sense. Following the event in Nottingham (and a fantastic concert I attended there with THePETEBOX), I spent two days in the office in London with my team.

I’ve been thinking a lot about writing an end-of-year “predictions” article, and plan to push out a number of articles before the end of the year, but this was my last venture out onto the road before hibernating for the holidays.

Last year I told myself I was going to attend or speak at fewer events. It didn’t work out. With SharePoint maturing and expanding as a platform, and Axceler growing by leaps and bounds (in case you haven’t heard, we’re hiring!), with customers in more than 40 countries now, the opportunities to share my experiences and perspective on enterprise collaboration is only increasing. However, I’m going to say it again, and will try to stay the course on this – I’m going to travel less in 2013. Like any new year’s resolution, we’ll see how long that lasts.

I was talking to Alison in my Boston office about the planning SharePoint Saturday in Charlotte, and whether I would be making an appearance. Unfortunately, I just can’t do it. My schedule is already booked through the end of March, and April and May are quickly filling up. My SPS plans are fairly locked down, focusing mostly on some of the west coast US events I helped get off the ground, ensuring that the local communities are up to speed and have everything they need to run them without my help. And I’m working with a few new teams, and with Microsoft, to kick off a couple new SPS locations. Looking forward to breaking some new ground.

One thing I am going to try to do more of is meeting with local user groups. I spoke at more than a dozen this year, and appreciate these opportunities to talk to community members about their unique issues and solutions. It’s great to be able to share, but I enjoy these opportunities to learn, as well. If you run a user group and would like me to come present, please drop me an email. Additionally, I’m still sending out SPUG kits to any user group that requests them – which includes some t-shirts and signed books to be raffled off at your next monthly meeting. Contact me for details.