February 2015 Content Wrap-Up

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You expect February to fly by, so no surprises here – the month flew by. I was looking forward to a quiet, nearly travel-free month, but as per usual, it quickly became jam-packed with content, webinars, sales activities, and a bit of regional travel. To kick off the month, GTconsult co-founder and COO Craig Tarr (@craig_tarr) arrived from Cape Town, South Africa with family in tow for a 2-month stay to help ramp up the Bellevue office. It was great timing, as a couple projects closed and the workload ramped up. Its been a fun month with Craig here, and we have quite a few things planned through end of March to keep him busy.

From an event perspective, I was able to present to the Vancouver SPUG (www.VanSPUG.org) for a third time, traveling north to visit the new Colligo offices, which host the monthly SPUG where I was able to share two presentations (thanks to the other speaker dropping out): Baby-Stepping Into the Cloud with Hybrid Workloads, and Delve in the Real-World. Also in February was the inaugural SPTechCon Austin event, where I again shared my Baby-Stepping into Hybrid session, but also gave a fun (and not serious at all) lightning talk on the Internet of Useless-but-Connected Things (IoUbCT) which was a big hit. People especially liked my ideas for a smart toilet seat that provides real-time analysis of…well, your business. I left SPTechCon early to get home in time to welcome my daughter back from her 18 month church mission to San Pablo, Philippines. A very exciting week in the Buckley household, to be sure.

February also saw another CollabTalk tweetjam, this time focusing on the soon-to-be-released SharePoint Server 2016 (details below), a new European SharePoint community webinar (recording link below), as well as the streaming of the second webisode of the new CollabTalk show over on ITUnity (find more details at www.itunity.com/go/collabtalk). As part of the IgniteWashington (www.IgniteWA.com) community development initiative, GTconsult also provided Office 365 solution demonstrations at the Microsoft stores in Bellevue and University Village (Seattle), and will be running sessions again in March and April (you can find more info at http://bitly.com/1vwucWG). And to round out the month, I traveled down to Utah (13.5 hours of driving, btw) to participate in my 3rd SharePoint Saturday Utah (#SPSUTAH), where I helped Chris Tomich, co-founder of Glyma (Glyma.co) present on ‘Efficiently Capturing and Delivering Knowledge in SharePoint’, and also presented Managing SharePoint On Prem vs Online: Compare and Contrast. Another fun event in Salt Lake City, and it was great to see so many good friends – but I am happy to be home and off the road (for work, anyway) through Ignite in May.

Of course, there is a lot happening between now and then. My son (2nd oldest) returns from his two-year church mission to Scottsdale, Arizona, the family is taking a vacation in Hawaii (last time we were all there, my youngest was in diapers – he is now almost 15), and my daughter (my oldest) is getting married. Of course, Ignite will be at the end of all of this family activity. What a jam-packed spring this will be!

My content themes for February largely followed the topics covered in these events: SharePoint vNext, Office 365 maturity, and the evolution of the social organization. But I’ve also been thinking a lot about the changes happening within the broader knowledge management (KM) space, and how our needs for better capture, more accurate codification (information architecture), and more robust context – which drives improved search – are only increasing:

There is some chatter in the community about the death of SharePoint and the rise of Office 365, but my view is that there is misplaced angst surrounding brands and specific features, and people are missing the point about how this evolution is improving the end user experience. While Office 365 has its strengths and weaknesses, overall I am happy with where things are going, and around the partner opportunities it brings:

Speaking of SharePoint vNext, I’m looking forward to learning more about the next on prem release at Ignite in May. Until then, there’s no shortage of rumors and speculation:

And, of course, I am thinking about, writing about, and talking about social:

February also saw some new additions to my management topics via LinkedIn and Medium. I have a backlog of content in this category – just no time to spare on finishing these posts. Hopefully there will be more time in March and April. I’d love to post something weekly. We’ll see if that happens.

And finally, I thought I’d share a few mentions of my content or outputs, the most prominent of which was a summary (and quote) by Jeffrey Schwartz over on Redmond Magazine of last month’s SharePoint vNext tweetjam. I thoroughly enjoy these events, and Jeffrey does a great job of capturing the sentiment of the group:

For the next two weeks, I am heads down on some major content deliverables and customer projects. It’s good to be busy. I’ve got many irons in the fire, and if just a couple of them strike, I’ll have more work than I’ll know what to do with. Growth is a good thing, though. GTconsult is hoping to hire a couple more folks in the next two months, and we will have some news in the coming weeks around our next move, so stay tuned!

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.