On the road: #SPTechCon San Francisco 2014

I’m on the road once again (nothing surprising there) is San Francisco for another SPTechCon event – my favorite SharePoint event outside of Microsoft’s own conference. I had been hoping to promote my three sessions a bit earlier, but with Typepad down for the past week due to DDoS attack, my site has been down. Amazing how something as little as your blog being down can impact how you feel about your own productivity. But that’s another discussion.

I’m sitting in a session by Ruven Gotz (@ruveng) this morning, listening to him talk about the importance of social networks and how Yammer (and SharePoint) can improve the way teams communicate and work together. (The picture above is of myself and Adam Levithan sitting in the back of Ruven’s session, clearly not paying attention) To be honest, I’m here more to figure out how my own Yammer-centric session compares to what Ruven is discussing. So far it sounds like my session will be a great Part 2 for his session, dealing more with Yammer to SharePoint integration. I’m also going to discuss, at length, the soft skills necessary with making social work within the enterprise, but I’m taking notes on what Ruven covers so that my session is complementary, not overlapping.

But that is just one of my sessions. Here are my abstracts and session times for those attending SPTechCon this week:

15 Reasons You Should Still Be Using SharePoint 2010
Wednesday from 4:15pm to 5:30pm, Yosemite B
An update to the very popular ‘Top 10 SharePoint 2010 Features You’ve Never Used (But Should)’ class, this session outlines 15 features in SharePoint 2010 that you may not yet be taking advantage of in your organization. We will walk through use cases for each, and show you how to make the most out of what you have in place today – SharePoint 2010. And I’ll be giving out a few copies of my 2010 book!

The Most Mind-Blowingly Epic SharePoint song, Ever!
Wednesday night at the Lightning Talks, beginning at 5:45pm, Grand Ballroom
The Hilton was kind enough to track down an acoustic guitar for me, and I’ll be performing live on stage within my 3-minute lightning talk window. You do not want to miss this performance. Mind. Blowingly. Epic.

Making SharePoint 2013 Social and Yammer Work Together
Thursday from 9:00am to 10:15am, Franciscan CD
With Microsoft’s integration of the world’s most popular enterprise social networking platform, Yammer, into their online offerings, many organizations who also have SharePoint 2013 running on premises are wondering how the two coincide. This class will tackle the soft-skills topics of creating and supporting a social organization, but will also address the many integrations between SP2013 and Yammer, with some real-world examples of how to use them side-by-side, or make the transition to a pure-cloud model.

Tactical Governance Planning for a Hybrid Environment 
Thursday from 1:45pm to 3:00pm, Union Square 5&6 (on 4th floor)
According to both Gartner and Microsoft, within the next three to five years the majority of SharePoint environments will move to a hybrid model. With various cloud-based components and mobile offerings, IT owners are rightly concerned about how to manage all of the moving parts. This class will discuss some of the security and management risks involved in a typical hybrid environment, and will walk you through a planning strategy for mitigating these risks.

If you’ve never seen me present, my sessions are very business analysts / project management-centric, focusing heavily on planning, change management, and optimization. So even when I am talking about Yammer and social topics, I try to apply it to real-world SharePoint implementations with a holistic view into the management, governance, and security/compliance issues surrounding them. I’m a terrible product pitchman (definitely not a kool-aid drinker), because I prefer to dwell in the real-world management scenarios, but people seem to appreciate this perspective.

Looking forward to my sessions, and in learning more from other experts in the SharePoint community. Watch my Twitter feed (@buckleyplanet) for the latest news and updates.

From San Francisco, I head to Salt Lake City for the weekend to hang out with Joel Oleson, Naomi Moneypenny, and Noah Sparks for a couple days, and then I’m home for a week before departing for Barcelona and the European SharePoint Conference in early May, followed by customer visits in London and a keynote presentation to the Swiss SharePoint Club in Geneva.