Content Wrap-Up for October

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I ran into someone last month who told me, with a straight face, “Your content has really changed since Axceler was acquired by Metalogix.” I thought that was funny, because its largely untrue. I’ve been doing these monthly content summary articles for a few months now, and the themes I’ve been writing on have been fairly consistent all year – but I’d love to hear your opinions. Clearly, Metalogix has products that Axceler did not have, and that will expand the range of content I generate, but for the most part I will continue to write and present on topics that are relevant to CxOs and senior IT leadership around collaboration, governance, productivity, and business analysis topics.

For example, I spent part of the month building up to a migration-related tweetjam that included 8 SharePoint MVPs and a host of other experts, which was a lot of fun. If you missed the 1-hour event, you can read my recap or scroll through the #CollabTalk tweets in the links below:

Another recurring theme for me is helping people to understand the differences between Yammer and SharePoint social. I’m even giving a keynote at the European SharePoint Conference in Barcelona next year, and have invited Mark Kashman from Microsoft to join me for the session. I had a great response to my WPC session on Yammer and SharePoint 2013, and so I created an updated post for Microsoft’s DigitalWPC.com website, which is the home of the Microsoft Partner Network:

As we all know, Microsoft’s sales messaging is making a hard push toward Yammer, which has left many SharePoint shops wondering what is going on. I have a couple similar titles coming out in November, but wanted to get this messaging started: 

From a governance perspective, social tools are grossly underwhelming – and this continues to be a major sticking point for many CIOs who want to adopt more social tools, but simply cannot yet because of the high risk of data / IP loss.

I had a backlog of partially-completed blog posts on a product/project management best practices theme, all of them sitting in OneNote. I finally sat down and finished them while on the road. About half of these were completed in my hotel room in Madrid while in the country for the Iberian SharePoint Conference on October 10th:

Having been in the knowledge management / collaboration space since the late 1990’s, I am fascinated by the evolution of the underlying technologies, and like to occasionally share some future-looking topics on where the space is going, and how companies can more successfully harness this capability:

At the end of September, I also signed on the be a judge for a contest sponsored by Harmon.ie that is taking a look at mishaps within the bring-your-own-device and cloud-based storage world. Risk mitigation is a recurring theme with me:

Of course, I am often going back to productivity / usability topics around SharePoint. some of my most popular sessions are business user-focused topics on how to get the most out of SharePoint. The first link is a session I shared in Madrid:

Every so often I do a pure community-building post, and this time it’s a message that starting a local SharePoint event should not be so scary

And then, of course, Metalogix had some big news last month with the acquisition of Idera’s SharePoint business – which was less than two months after the Axceler acquisition. As always, I’ll generate a couple blog posts whenever there is news, and use them to do a little bit of self-promotion:

In November, I am on the road for 10 days between two trips, but really keeping travel to a minimum as I prepare my 2014 strategy and get a bunch of content ready. Most of my abstracts are being shelved at the end of the year so that I can focus on entirely new content, which I am excited about. And with new abstracts/presentations will come lots n lots of new content. It’s going to be a jam-packed Q4 of content, so just giving you fair warning. I’ll be writing much more for external sites than I have the past couple months. You should see more regular contributions to CMSWire, Wired, B2C, TechRepublic, and other portals.

Look for me in Chicago, Kansas City, and Phoenix in November, and then in DC and Ft. Lauderdale in December. That’s it – quiet compared to what is coming in Q1. Looking forward to it.

Christian Buckley

Christian is a Microsoft Regional Director and M365 Apps & Services MVP, and an award-winning product marketer and technology evangelist, based in Silicon Slopes (Lehi), Utah. He is a startup advisor and investor, and an independent consultant providing fractional marketing and channel development services for Microsoft partners. He hosts the weekly #CollabTalk Podcast, weekly #ProjectFailureFiles series, monthly Guardians of M365 Governance (#GoM365gov) series, and the Microsoft 365 Ask-Me-Anything (#M365AMA) series.