Inside the SharePoint Actors Studio

If you’re going to miss SharePoint Saturday Kansas City this weekend, you’re going to miss something that might be absolutely fantastic, or it could be a complete #fail. Thankfully, if it falls flat, I’m not going down alone – I’ll take down Ruven Gotz (@ruveng) and Michelle Caldwell (@shellecaldwell) with me 😉 More on that in a minute…

I fly out in the morning (Thursday) for one of three SharePoint Saturdays that I’ll be attending before the end of the year, closing out what has been another banner year for travel and events. Nothing close to last year’s almost 320,000 flying miles (which is just insane), but I believe I will have presented at over 35 events this year….which does not include conferences where I simply attended as a participant, a number of SPUG activities where I was there to learn, dozens of on-site customer and partner visits, and a steady stream of webinars, podcasts, and video chats. I send out an internal newsletter of sorts each month that catalogs all of my activities – more or less so that the salespeople are better aware of new content and upcoming events where I may be participating within their assigned territories – and am always amazed to look back over the months at how much has been accomplished, and to help me remember when certain activities took place.

But here is a quick snapshot of my upcoming SPS events, and what I’ll be presenting at each:

SharePoint Saturday Kansas City (#SPSKC)
November 9th, 2013
The University of Kansas Edwards Campus  – BEST Conference Center

My first session at 8:45am is an introduction to SharePoint 2013, which is great for end users who are not yet familiar with the platform and want a better understanding of its features: 10 Best Productivity Features in SP2013 You Need to Know About

My second session at 11:15am is a closer look at SharePoint 2013 social features, with a discussion around productivity and gamification. While still a beginners session, it assumes some basic understanding of SharePoint and Yammer social capabilities, but has a strong focus on finding business value in social: Productivity, Gamification, and SP2013

And at 3:30pm, Ruven, Michelle and I plan to break the keynote mold a bit, and it should not be missed. I’ll be honest here – you may not learn a whole lot about SharePoint during this keynote, but it promises to be very entertaining. [the image above, and this blog title, are subtle hints into the direction we’ll be taking things…]
Not. To. Be. Missed.

Later this month, and after participating in the MVP Summit on Microsoft campus, I’ll be heading to warmer climates:

SharePoint Saturday Phoenix (#SPSPhoenix)
November 23rd, 2013
Arizona State University Memorial Union

I’ve been invited to give the keynote, beginning at 8:15am, entitled Inside the Social Organization: Strategies for Structured and Unstructured Collaboration which will provide some great insight into extending your collaboration strategy to include mobile, social, and the cloud.

My first regular session at 10:15am will be the very popular Productivity, Gamification, and SP2013

And my second regular session at 2:20pm will be What Governance Looks Like in the Cloud, which, like many of my sessions, touches on planning best practices and risk mitigation of moving your assets from an on prem model to the cloud.

After the family chaos of another Thanksgiving holiday, I’ll be traveling to Chicago for a partner event and to South Florida for an AIIM.org event, but I’ll also be heading to DC:

SharePoint Saturday DC (#SPSDC)
December 7th, 2013
Microsoft Reston

I’m not sure yet which session I’ll be giving, but I’ll be there.

To some of you, this seems like a lot of travel. To me, this is a nice, quiet, calm way to end the year. I have a few writing projects underway, and have a few exciting initiatives I’m driving for Q1. You know, what with being acquired a couple months back, and all.

Hope to see you out on the road!