Content Wrap-Up for February 2014

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Oh February, you were a blur of activity. From a blog and travel perspective, it was fairly tame – but don’t let the low quantity mask the depth and impact of what I have been working on. After doing some serious mileage in January, February was about developing content for a couple of the recurring themes you’ll see from me this year – and one of those themes being my topic for the SharePoint Conference last week in Las Vegas: developing your cloud strategy. The photo above with Jeff Shuey (Gimmal) and Dave Gersten (Bond Consulting Services) is from a night out in DC with members of the IAMCP-US board, talking Microsoft and partners.

And now here I am back in the home office with a couple travel-free weeks ahead of me, already feeling behind the gun as I work on presentations for SPTechCon San Francisco (3 full sessions and a lightning talk in April) and the European SharePoint Conference in Barcelona (a keynote, a regular session, and a panel event). And between now and SPTechCon, I have two work trips (Boston for Best of SPC, and then Boston again for SPSBoston + a couple days at Metalogix HQ in DC) and a family outing. Busy busy busy.

Funny that when most people think of a quieter schedule, it usually means a lot less content being produced. Not for me – quiet time equals content time. Looking forward to spending some quality time with OneNote this month.

Which is not to say that February was without its themes. A good portion of the month was devoted toward the Metalogix Best of Breed campaign, which kicked off with an Ask the Experts panel webinar that included Dave Martin from Gimmal, Don Miller from Concept Searching, Jason Masterman from Neudesic, and Sean Barger from Equilibrium and touched on the changes happening to the SharePoint space with Microsoft’s push into the cloud. Following the webinar, I conducted interviews with several of the panelists for the Best of Breed customer solution contest, with the winners announced at SPC14 in Las Vegas:

An ongoing topic for me is the move from “systems of record” to “systems of engagement,” with many organizations looking at ways to get people adopting and using the tools they deploy. Adoption is a serious issue with SharePoint (and every other ECM and collaboration tool), but often companies approach it as a technology issue (its usually not) instead of a people issue (almost always). My presentation in Boston at the Global Customer Forum was all about bridging the gaps between technology and people:

Stepping back and abstracting on that topic a bit, there’s also the issue of most organizations not understanding what it means to move toward the cloud – which was my topic at SPC. It’s something I’ve been writing and talking about for years, with much of my experience coming from more than 12 years of working with companies through this transition, going back to my E2open days where we built a SaaS-based collaboration platform (called Collaboration Manager, of all things):

Partnering with Adam Levithan from Portal Solutions, I was able to trace my roots in social back to the mid-nineties and talk Instant Messaging:

And with the completion of my Admin certification for Yammer (along with my Power User cert), I added a couple more posts to my body of work on the topic (and plan to release an ebook later this month):

At Metalogix, we have a powerful set of management tools for SharePoint, and many of my articles point directly to the topics that are relevant to that suite (without sounding like a product pitch):

One of my favorite things to write about is “Business 2.0” – which can range from leadership development to team collaboration to organizational development. Occasionally I may put the idea within a technology wrapper, as I did with an article for AIIM on a SharePoint topic that could just as easily describe any other enterprise application:

And finally, its always good to throw in something fun for the month. I have enjoyed the back-and-forth with my good friend Bradley Geldenhuys (GTconsult) as we joke about the SharePoint community through the medium of video:

I am in the process of recording yet another funny video, and am heading down to Microsoft campus tomorrow – and hope to grab a few minutes of face time with members of the SharePoint product team to make this thing go viral within the community. Watch for it.

Until then, you can follow me on Twitter at @buckleyplanet for all the latest content and relevant links.

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.