August 2015 Content Wrap-Up

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Having just returned from Auckland, New Zealand and another stellar event by fellow MVPs Debbie Ireland (@debbieireland) and Mark Rhodes (@mrhodes) – the Digital Workplace Conference (#DWCNZ), which is the rebranded NZ SharePoint Conference – I’m now catching up on a list of tasks before hitting the road again this weekend for the Modern Workplace Summit (http://mwssummit.com/) in Oslo next week. And what better way to wrap up a busy but fantastic month of new content and great discussions about my new role and company that with a blog post summary, right? My August travel schedule was actually fairly light, with the inaugural SharePointFest Seattle event coming to town so that I didn’t need to go anywhere. I love being able to go home each night! At SPFest, I conducted a couple sessions, and then, as you can see in the photo above (taken by @jshuey, btw) was able to participate in a panel event with a number of good friends and a few other MVPs as part of the Puget Sound SPUG (http://www.psspug.org/). Thanks again to Treb Gatte (@tgatte) for moderating, and for all of you who participated on the panel: Ryan Schouten (@ShrPntKnight), Paul Stork (@pstork), Mark Rackley (@mrackley), Brian Culver @SPBrianCulver), Liam Cleary (@helloitsliam), Sarah Haase (@sarahhaase), Sue Hanley (@susanhanley), and Jason Himmelstein (@sharepointlhorn), as well as part of our audience. Great discussion, and I absolutely love the format (which is why I run my tweetjams and started the #CollabTalk show on ITUnity – because panels rock!).

On a side note, following the Auckland event I was able to hang out for a day and half with my good friend and former CEO from echoTechnology, Garry Smith, as we had ourselves a mini-adventure: beginning with the Ignite New Zealand keynote, Garry and I had an amazing dinner at Cassia in Auckland (highly recommended!), and after a good night’s sleep, we found ourselves whitewater rafting on the Kaituna Rover in Rotorua (the grade 5, 7 meter drop is the highest commercial drop in the world), enjoying food and entertainment at a Maori hangi feast with the Mitai village, visiting the Hamilton LDS Temple, and, of course, exploring the hills of Hobbiton. An amazing week in New Zealand!

The other major activity this month was a webinar with my fiend and fellow MVP Jussi Mori (@jussimori) from Peaches Industries, in which we discussed the growth of social and the necessity of gamification tools and techniques to improve adoption – the slides from which are below. The remainder of the month was spent writing content (primarily session material) and ramping up for a heavy fall travel schedule, which kicked off with this trip to #DWCNZ and continues with the Modern Workplace Summit, Congres SharePoint in Utrecht, Netherlands (just outside of Amsterdam), SharePoint Saturday Barcelona, and a week with my dev team in Barcelona, which rounds out the month of September. And then in October, it begins with the massive online event Collab365 (which follows in the footsteps of last year’s blow-out success SP24) with 24 hours of around-the-clock business and technical sessions being supported in multiple languages. If you have not yet registered for this event, be sure to sign up at www.Collab365.events and, specifically, my session entitled “Five Ways to Ensure 100% Adoption of Office365.” From there, I’ll be heading back to the Netherlands to speak once again at the Connect conference in Amsterdam, now called UnityConnect. Later in October, I’m traveling to North Carolina to keynote the SharePoint Engage Conference in Raleigh, home in time for our 6th SharePoint Saturday Redmond (registration now open) to be held once again at the Microsoft Conference Center on campus. And to wrap up the fall season, the first week in November is time for another MVP Summit on campus, followed by the European SharePoint Conference in Stockholm, where Beezy is a finalist for the Best Office 365 Solution award!

As for content, not surprisingly, much of the month was spent writing on topics around social collaboration and mobility, including my first article with SharePointProMag.com in quite some time – a couple years, I think. I didn’t mean to stay away so long…I just got busy somewhere along the way. Included below are slides from some of my more recent sessions, as well as the recording from my webinar with Jussi Mori, which is worth watching:

When you write and talk as much as I do, you’re bound to get the occasional mention from journalists or authors – which happened this last month.

  • Microsoft Announces Yammer Improvements To Come While Deprecating Some Yammer SharePoint Apps (RedmondMag.com) http://bit.ly/1gRylxz

The topic of migration has been one that I’ve written about extensively since leaving Microsoft in 2009 and joining echoTechnology, a migration-focused ISV based in Seattle which went on to be acquired by Axceler, and the rest is history. What makes these posts unique is that they’re in context to migrating from three of the largest social players in the space – two of them competitors (Jive and IBM), and the 3rd a former giant in the social sphere within SharePoint that has seemingly walked away from SharePoint (Sitrion, formerly known as NewsGator) and left many customers stranded on SP2010 and unable to move to SP2013, much less Office 365. One of the stand-out features of Beezy is our ability to migrate 100% of the capabilities of these three solutions to Office 365 + Beezy (or SharePoint on-prem). No other ISV can make that claim.

Security, administration, and governance continue to be topics that people are interested in talking about. Included here is an ebook I completed while still working with GTconsult but which became available as a free download this month – the Complete Guide to Office 365 Security, available through Datto/Backupify. This was the third ebook I write for Datto, and an excellent resource to understand the various attributes of Office 365 security, including links to instructional videos and content from Microsoft. Definitely worth the download, if I don’t say so myself.

Oh, and there’s that new release from SharePoint. Yeah, I may have heard something about that…

Aside from these monthly content recaps, I also occasionally do some self-promotion around my events, and tell you what I’ll be talking about in the coming months. I’m sure I’ll do it again later this month to round out the final quarter of my travels and topics. But I’m also trying to get better about summarizing my monthly CollabTalk tweetjams and IT Unity shows, so watch for those. Oh, and be sure to register for the latest shows with myself, Marc Anderson (@sympmarc), Naomi Moneypenny (@nmoneypenny), and Benjamin Niaulin (@bniaulin). Our shows are funny and informative, so come learn about all things SharePoint and Office 365, such as what is coming in SP2016, and hear our speculations about Yammer for Teams functionality and strategy.

Like every other SharePoint pundit out there, I enjoy speculating about where the technology may go, and often think about the future of the features – and the strategies Microsoft may employ. Due to my MVP status, I am under NDA with regard to feature roadmaps or near-term strategy, so don’t get your hopes up that I may drop some hints or something. Not. Gonna. Happen.

And just for fun, I recorded a very short (3.5 min) video with my son Nicholas for inclusion in the SPTechCon Boston Lightning Talks last month….but failed to upload the video in time. Fortunately, Dave Rubinstein was able to share the video during the keynote the next morning, and then Mark Kashman added it to his keynote the 3rd day as he talked about NextGen Portals. My pain is your entertainment Smile

While much of September will be spent on the road, I do plan on keeping this content activity going strong, so watch for my updates via Twitter (@buckleyplanet), Facebook, LinkedIn, and other channels!

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.