Favorite Articles from 2013

I have my regularly scheduled recap of December content coming later this week, but thought I’d take a page from the narcissism of others (like I need their help) and provide a list of some of my favorite articles that I wrote this year, with a quick summary and comments on where my thinking may have changed on each topic.

Here are my Top 20 favorites (in no particular order), but please let me know if one of your favorites is missing, and maybe I’ll append with notes:

1. Making Community A Strategic Activity (buckleyPLANET) – there is value in community, and yes, that value can be measured. Companies need to make community involvement more of a priority, and the first step to proving that value to your leadership team is to measure it.
2. How Search Amplifies Enterprise Collaboration (B2C) – with all the talk of social and mobile, the key to successful collaboration still remains search.
3. Delivering Complexity via Cloud Will Take Time (AIIM) – the migration to the cloud will be a long road for many companies. And if you have any degree of customization, or complex compliance and governance requirements, then take a seat. We’ll be here a while.
4. The cloud: Mitigating risks as you relinquish control (TechRepublic) – another article pointing out that migration to the cloud should be done thoughtfully, and with eyes wide open about the risks and rewards.
5. Migrations Are Never as Simple As You Think (SharePointblog.co.uk) – short but sweet post on a long-running theme of mine that migrations are never as quick and simple as you would hope, but require a lot of up front planning and decisions. Migrations are “the” time for cleaning up, reorganizing, and transforming your SharePoint environment.
6. Yammer or SharePoint 2013 Social: Which Should I Use? (DigitalWPC) – based on a presentation I gave at WPC in Houston in July, this article takes on the often asked question of which tool to use.
7. The Consumerization Of IT: 7 Ways To Seize The Business Opportunity (readwrite) – my take on what the consumerization of IT really means, and where companies should be focused.
8. A Hybrid Computing Model for SharePoint (Cloud Computing Journal) – another cautionary tail for those eager to move from SharePoint on prem to SharePoint Online, with some questions to answer to help organizations better prepare.
9. Getting A Granular View Of A Product Release (buckleyPLANET) – putting my product manager hat back on and walking through a product launch strategy. I run into far too many product and marketing people that don’t have a clue about the process, and who are more focused on process than on results, and this article was a stress-reliever for me.
10. The Next Layer of Social (AIIM) – this one has been a running theme for me, which is the idea that social tools generate metadata and provide context to content, improving the overall search experience. And yet most of our social platforms are almost completely disconnected from our content platforms. What a waste.
11. The Top 5 Issues Businesses are Facing with Collaboration (B2C) – working so much with the SharePoint community, occasionally its good to break out and attend a non-SharePoint event to get some perspective. I did this a couple times this year, and it was clear that most of the problems that affect poor collaboration in SharePoint are the same issues with other platforms.
12. Klout Is The Most Interesting Company On The Planet, And Here’s Why (buckleyPLANET) – this one stirred up conversations in a number of different places, including my own product team. The premise here is that companies should show more of an interest in the influencers within their internal and external communities, and have strategies for them.
13. Making a Case for Social Collaboration Tools (Wired) – this article was a ‘shot over the bow’ of executives who are still trying to understand the business value of social collaboration.
14. A Perspective on SharePoint, Yammer, and Microsoft (buckleyPLANET) – this one caused some heartburn with the Redmond team, I think, but mostly because I don’t think everyone read the whole thing. It’s actually a very positive review, but with some tough love on the quality of marketing and messaging coming from the SharePoint product team.
15. 8 Things to Consider as SharePoint Moves to the Cloud (Digital Landfill) – this one was written for AIIM President John Mancini’s newsletter, and highlights another one of my themes as companies investigate moving to the cloud: do your homework, and know what you’re buying.
16. Freudian Personality Types And The Many Faces Of Influence (buckleyPLANET) – another articles looking at the role and importance of social influence, with some shared experiences from my time at Microsoft and in a year-long leadership development program called Pathwise.
17. Four Ways to Build Confidence in Your SharePoint Governance Strategy (CMSWire) – one of the more popular articles that stemmed from the almost year-long governance surveys I conducted while at Axceler, I gleaned some of the commonalities in feedback from participants.
18. Yammer: One Year Later (DigitalWPC) – a longer piece that I was originally going to post on my own blog, but then the Microsoft team organizing content for the Worldwide Partner Conference caught wind and asked if they could publish it.
19. Social is Not Like Facebook, It’s Like eBay (AIIM) – a short post which spawned keynotes in South Africa and the US midwest, I still really like the analogy.
20. A Cloud Platform Without Visibility is Like Driving Blind (Wired) – and one last article where it sounds like I am much more negative about the move to cloud platforms than I really am. Many years as an analyst and project manager has made me pragmatic.

You know, I’ve had a “to do” list item sitting there for a while to compile via lists a collection of every speaking engagement and every article written. The latter will be difficult, as more than half of the content I wrote for Rational and IBM back in the day have gone dark. But it would be fun to compile for the sake of posterity. Some people write in journals, I prefer to show bits of myself through writings on technology and management topics.

So this is it for my personal blog this year. More to come next year! (i.e. tomorrow).

Happy New Year, everyone!