January 2015 Content Wrap-Up

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As I happily make the transition from road warrior to managing director of a consulting and managed service practice (www.GTconsult.com), I have had a bit more time to put then pen to paper and get through the small backlog of content ideas that have been sitting in my OneNote archives. Of course, much of what I produce is in support of clients or my company marketing efforts, but thankfully I am able to take a bit more personal time to share some of my broader, more business-focused ideas through LinkedIn, Medium, and elsewhere. January was a big month for community content. Not only did we officially launch the CollabTalk web show over on ITUnity.com (part of their new Unity Vision brand), but I also launched a community interview series over on SharePoint-Community.net which I hope to add to on a weekly basis.

Which is not to say that I won’t still be traveling, no sir. I made it out to SharePoint Saturday Denver to give the keynote and a session on administration differences between on prem and online, which I’ll be expanding upon in the coming weeks through a Microsoft Virtual Academy recording, so stay tuned for that. This week I am heading north to Vancouver BC to speak at the Vancouver SPUG (www.VanSPUG.org), and then on Sunday I fly down to Austin to participate in their inaugural event in the amazing state of Texas. Really looking forward to that one! And at the end of the month, I’ll be driving south to Salt Lake City for another SPS Utah, which I helped launch a few years back. Between all of this fun, GTconsult will be partnering with IgniteWashington (not to be confused by Microsoft’s Ignite conference) to provide Office 365 on-boarding and support to small and medium-sized businesses in the Seattle region. We’ll be participating as a partner in a May event, but leading up to it, will jointly-sponsor events at the Bellevue and Seattle Microsoft stores, so stay tuned for more details.

I should also point out that GTconsult co-founder and COO Craig Tarr is moving with his family to the area for a few months to help build out the company and team, so I’ll be pimping out his time while he’s here. And Chris Tomich, dialogue mapper and SharePoint architect, as well as co-founder of Glyma, is visiting the US for a couple months from Perth, Australia, and I’ll be helping to fill his time, as well. Lots going on, for sure.

As for January content, I did manage to produce a few content pieces that were pure promotional noise, helping promote the forthcoming Ignite conference (the Microsoft event) and new about the pending release of SharePoint Server 2016, and pimping my own news and events:

As mentioned above, January saw the expansion of the CollabTalk brand with the creation of a new talk show over on ITUnity.com, with co-hosts and fellow MVPs Naomi Moneypenny, Benjamin Niaulin, and Marc Anderson. This show does not replace my monthly tweetjams, currently hosted on Twitter and using Twubs.com/CollabTalk. This is a talking heads show, and hopefully people will find it both informative and entertaining. We’re still massaging the format a bit, but essentially it’s a conversation around 3 or 4 main topics, with community questions and feedback before, during, and following. You can register for the next episode at www.ITUnity.com/go/CollabTalk

Also mentioned above, I kicked off a community interview series on SharePoint-Community.net, and plan to add one or two a week going forward. I have a few in the pipeline, so stay tuned…

One of the major themes I am focusing on these days is the changing way that we are thinking about knowledge management. Some of this content comes from the work I am doing with www.Glyma.co, but it also reflects the maturation of the SharePoint space, the move of many organizations toward the cloud, and – most importantly, in my mind – is the renewed interest in personal productivity. The topic of productivity is something Microsoft is keenly focused on, and is at the center of many of the adoption and engagement issues organizations face with their legacy SharePoint platforms. It’s time to refine your strategy, people.

Of course, I could not go a month without talking about governance, information architecture, and other core administration concepts:

One of the major themes at the upcoming Microsoft Ignite event is Hybrid. So much to say on this topic. I’m sure I’ll write more in the run up to the conference…

One of my articles that has garnered a lot of attention was my partner-centric post on Microsoft’s DigitalWPC.com, which has been rolled under the Microsoft.com partner sub site. I expanded on that original article for my friend and fellow MVP Jussi Mori over at Peaches Industries, giving more of an end user/customer perspective on the same topic, with additional links. If you’re wondering how best to provide feedback to Microsoft, you’ll want to bookmark these:

I am a voracious business book and magazine reader, and am a leadership development junkie. As such, I have strong opinion on team leadership and various other business topics, some of which find their way to the web on occasion:

And finally, I’d also like to share some of my media mentions as they pop up. Dan and Lyman and team at ITUnity will be doing a lot more promotion around my CollabTalk show (and Jennifer Roth’s new Office 365 Pulse show) so you may see my face popping up in ads and videos here and there.

February is already looking to be a jam-packed month of events and webinars and content. So much going on. It’s a great time to be involved with SharePoint and Office 365, and I’m looking forward to more community involvement., If you’re not already following me on Twitter, please do so at @buckleyplanet or drop me a line through either Facebook or LinkedIn.

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.