June 2014 Content Wrap-Up

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After a hectic schedule in May, June was relatively quiet – allowing me to spend a bit more time on content, and preparing for a heaving summer schedule. After spending a couple days in Washington DC to participate in the AIIM.org Executive Leadership council event, followed by SharePoint Saturday DC, I was home for a couple days before heading down to Johannesburg for the SHARE Conference and some quality time with my friends and Metalogix business partners GTconsult. Thanks again to Brad, Warren and Craig for a great week in South Africa, one of my favorite destinations. I also got to be the fan-boy for a moment, running into Constellation Research founder and SHARE event keynote Ray Wang (@rwang0), and snapped the photo above. Great meeting you in person Ray!

Within the articles produced last month, I kicked things off with a more in-depth overview of my planned travels and topics:

A recurring theme that is gaining traction for me is the topic of “hybrid” SharePoint environments. While that one word contains many different permutations, it is a topic that is appearing within more and more organizational planning sessions as companies try to figure out their strategy for moving SharePoint infrastructure into the cloud. It was the topic of my SharePoint Conference session in Las Vegas, and will be the focus of several of my keynote presentations throughout this year. In May, I led a well-attended tweetjam on the topic, from which I have been discussing in detail through an article series on ITUnity.com:

Another mainstay for me in the topic of governance – usually written from a planning / project management perspective. My intent is to make this information as actionable as possible so that readers can incorporate some of these ideas right into their collaboration planning efforts:

For June, the #CollabTalk tweetjam turned its attention to the SharePoint user experience, which I’ll be expanding on in July with an article for CMSWire (in the works now) and some additional ideas shared through my personal blog:

Of course, I don’t think I’ve gone a month in the last 5 years without writing at least one article about migrations. I have a few more ideas in the hopper as interest ramps up around SharePoint 2013, as well as the more complex move to Office 365 (because of Exchange, file share, AND SharePoint content migration requirements):

Following my SPSDC session on June 7th, I was chatting with Adam Levithan (@collabadam), Neil McNeely (@neilmcneely) and Susan Lennon (@susanlennon) about some of the differences between SharePoint on prem and online feature differences, and to help answer a question from Neil, went onto TechNet and pulled together a quick post on the topic in an attempt to make what Microsoft had published a little more “consumable.” Unfortunately, the amount of detail behind most of the links is minimal, but my opinion is that this is an improvement:

For those who have been following me for a while, you know that I am very much an active member of the partner community, having just wrapped up 3 years as president of the Seattle chapter of the International Association of Microsoft Channel Partners (IAMCP). I’m also a leadership/orgabizational development junkie, and often write on the topics of marketing, leadership, and management:

Another persistent theme in my writing is the business side of social collaboration. People still have a lot of questions about where it fits within their organizational strategy, and so I’ll keep sharing my thoughts and experiences on the topic:

I’m also planning to write more about some of the business implications of Office365 – not from a feature standpoint, but from a broader, cloud-collaboration standpoint. This shift toward the cloud is changing the way we look at collaboration:

And finally, I wanted to include an interview I did with Redmond Channel Partner’s Barb Levisay on the topic of Microsoft’s Worldwide Partner Conference, which I’ll be attending in DC this month (because I LOVE visiting DC in the heat of summer!). I thought I was one of several being interviewed, but it ended up being just me. Thanks Barb! Hope people find it helpful:

  • [Interviewed] Set Your Game Plan for the Worldwide Partner Conference (Redmond Channel Partner Magazine) http://bit.ly/1mUsTKq

GTconsult Johannesburg

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.