March 2013 SharePoint Travels

The month began with SharePoint Saturday Austin (#SPSATX) and a year-long hungering for good barbeque. For those of you keeping score, you may remember that a couple of us were unable to make the trip to last year's inaugural event due to Seattle's snowpocalypse, which shut down SeaTac airport. I hated to miss that event (for one, it was snowing in Seattle, and I was looking forward to a warmer climate for a couple days) but honestly, the chatter about the excellent food is what motivated me to participate this year. It was a fun event, great venue, and it had some of my favorite people in the SharePoint space participating as speakers and organizers. Especially enjoyed hanging out and having long chats with Benjamin Niaulin (@bniaulin) and Liam Cleary (@helloitsliam), and of course, Jason Himmelstein (@SharePointLhorn). Looking forward to the next one. Plus, I took some really good cityscapes from the plane. Love those.

From Austin, I made my way to SPTechCon in San Francisco, where I had a full schedule of 4 regular sessions and a lightning talk. For those who attended my sessions and missed my tweets with the links, as always you can find them up on my SlideShare page. But in particular I wanted to share my lightning talk slides. A little history for those who are unaware, sponsorships of the conference at a certain level includes one lightning talk at the end of the first full day of the conference. You basically have 5 minutes to get your message across, and, let's be honest, many of them can be incredibly boring. Well, they used to be boring, and the crowds who attended them were not massive compared to overall attendees (this is my recollection of these in the past). When my Director of Product Management, Gail Shlansky, and I started planning out our talk, we decided to do something silly and fun as a way to just drive people to our booth rather than bore them with a product pitch. So we compared the growth of SharePoint against the parallel success path of Sonny and Cher. It went over well, and people did, in fact, come by the booth because of our presentation. So we did it again at the next SPTechCon, adding some info about Cher's latest movie with Christina Aguilera. Since those presentations, the organizers keep asking me back – not to talk technology, per se, but to do something funny. And I enjoy mixing it up. I hope people enjoyed my latest deck, looking at the future of SharePoint governance – 50 years into the future. Anyway, here's my deck:

 

As for the remaining days in the month of March, I'll be traveling southeast to Denver for SharePointFest, then over to Columbus Ohio for the Heartland Region SharePoint Conference and Buckeye SPUG, then heading back down to San Francisco for meetings and a presentation at the Azure user group (I'm not an Azure guy, folks, but will be talking about it from a SharePoint perspective, and from a business opportunity perspective). Here are the details on each of these events:

http://www.sharepointfest.com/Denver/
SharePoint Fest Denver
March 18-20
Colorado Convention Center

BV 104 – Productivity, Gamification, and SharePoint 2013
2:50 to 3:50pm Tuesday
In this session, we'll help you understand why a focus on Productivity will improve overall SharePoint adoption, outlining some of the key productivity features in SharePoint 2013. We'll explore the topic of Gamification and how it can help improve productivity, and discuss how SharePoint can be expanded to include Gamification as a way of improving productivity.

BV 202 – The 4 Facets of SharePoint Productivity
11:30 to 12:30pm Wednesday
Enterprise platforms are increasingly looking not just at solving core work streams, but in ensuring productivity in moving between work streams. In SharePoint, this is accomplished through four primary areas: Taxonomy, Workflow, Forms, and Social. This session walks through examples of each, highlighting productivity best practices for each using out-of-the-box SharePoint capabilities.

http://www.iccsharepoint.com
Microsoft Heartland Region SharePoint Conference 2013
March 21
Columbus Convention Center

What Governance Looks Like in the Cloud
Strategy and Governance Session – 1:00pm to 2:15pm
This session reviews the changes coming to SharePoint due to Microsoft's plans for the Cloud, helping attendees to better understand the impact of the Cloud to their business. We'll discuss the rise of the hybrid SharePoint environment, and whether this model makes sense for your business, as well as how moving to the Cloud will impact your SharePoint planning, and your ability to manage SharePoint across the enterprise.

10 Best Productivity Features in SP2013 You Need to Know About
Business Value Session – 2:30pm to 3:45pm
This session walks through 10 features or solutions that are available out-of-the-box with SharePoint 2013, and which can instantly help your team to be more productive. Geared toward business users and new administrators who want to make the most of their SharePoint investments, the session will help attendees better understand their business requirements, and how SharePoint can meet these needs.

http://www.buckeyespug.com
Buckeye SharePoint User Group
March 21
Microsoft Columbus

Understanding the Disconnect Between Collaboration Tools and Business Goals
With broad adoption of SharePoint 2010, and as companies begin to investigate the SharePoint 2013 platform, governance has become a critical topic for most organizations, and yet many struggle to understand where to begin or how to align SharePoint with their business objectives. In this session, Christian will provide valuable industry data on the state of SharePoint governance, and in an interactive session, will share insights into real-world examples of governance pitfalls and successes. The goal is to leave attendees with a framework and actionable steps for aligning their governance planning with business goals.

http://www.bayazure.org/

San Francisco Bay Area Azure Developers Group
March 26
Microsoft San Francisco

Building SharePoint 2013 Solutions on Windows Azure
With the new SharePoint Server 2013 and Office 365, developers will be able to create apps for Office and SharePoint and host them on Windows Azure. There is also a powerful option to extend Office 365 solutions with Windows Azure web sites. In this presentation, Christian will discuss what changes are happening across the SharePoint and Office 365 platforms, share some insights into how his company is using Azure, and discuss where there may be technical and business opportunities for developers and businesses within the space.

In April, I'll be presenting at the Australian and New Zealand SharePoint Conferences for the 3^rd year in a row, taking place in Sydney and Auckland, respectively. Still trying to lock down some other travels, possibly heading back to Boston for a whirlwind visit to Axceler HQ, and then down to Southern California toward the end of the month. I keep telling people that I am trying to decrease my travels, spend more time with my family and on creating content – and March/April will not be the months where I am going to convince people of this. But it's true, people. Really. Maybe.