Content Wrap-Up for January 2014

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I underwent a little experiment throughout January, pushing myself to post some kind of original content each and every day here on my personal blog, as well as continue posting to my regular location: the Metalogix blog, AIIM, TechRepublic, Wired, and others. Well, I hit the personal blogging goal, but fell short of some of my other content commitments — and so February will see fewer articles here, and more elsewhere. It's all about balance, right? Among the 44 articles authored this past month, there were a number of themes which surfaced, outlined below. I don't usually set out to write around many of these themes – they are, more or less, a result of what I am currently reading, or in response to sessions I sit through or webinars in which I participate.

In December, I participated in an AIIM.org think-tank event in Florida that focused on mobility — and not just mobility as a telephony category, but the abstracted view of mobility as the ability for an information worker to take her/his work and data and contacts and systems wherever they go. Mobility is about devices, about service offerings, and about the ability to select and use the apps that make sense to you as an individual, rather than use those tools that an IT administrator approves.

Governance continues to be a primary theme in my writing. Chalk that up to my many years in project management and business analysis roles early in my career. My de facto answer to just about every governance issue is to go back to the business requirements. I often feel like Dr. Mendell Stromm from the first Spiderman movie, wanting to take the whole thing back to formula — because mis-alignment with business requirements is usually where things go astray.

I haven't been writing much based on my notes from Harvard Business Review, but its one of the handful of magazines that I read cover-to-cover, and OneNote is full of ideas for articles. Hopefully we'll see more business and community topics in February from those notes. Not that I was without ideas…

Three or four times a month I get a request from someone for an article or whitepaper that shows the ROI of social. The reality is that there is very little out there, because it’s a difficult thing to lock down. The value of social for one organization might be completely intangible, consisting of improved team communication and feeling more connected. Its difficult to define some qualitative benefits surrounding social, and strategies for implementing and measuring can be diverse.

I'm working on my Yammer admin certification right now, and will be talking extensively about SharePoint and Yammer integration. Along the way, I've been sharing some of my thoughts on the platform, which has become part of my daily team, partner, customer, and community collaboration.

If you're planning on attending the SharePoint Conference in Las Vegas next month, hopefully you're planning on attending my session on the many SharePoint paths to the cloud. Hybrid is becoming a major topic as many organizations have realized that they are not yet ready to make the complete jump to the cloud. My #SPC14 session will walk through some of the options available as companies explore the transition.

Several of my posts ranged from productivity improvements to platform benefits to the general state of collaboration. You can categorize them under 'SharePoint Planning.'

I'm continuing to host monthly twetejams using the #CollabTalk hashtag that I launched last summer while with Axceler, and have also started publishing interviews with members of the Metalogix Product Management and Product Marketing Management teams, digging into some of the history and perspectives surrounding our products.

Of course, no month can go by without some little bit of self-promotion (well, blatant self-promotion. It inferred in just about everything else I do, right?)

And in case you missed it, I also wasted a Saturday afternoon creating a funny video around the simple task of adding a one-year "slider" to my MVP award: Instructional Video For Microsoft MVPs. Not only did I receive a couple dozen responses with ideas for a second video, my good friend Bradley Geldenhuys put together an official response (DIY MVP Award) that is definitely worth viewing. Yes, I am planning to create a response to his response.

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.