Prep for CollabTalk Webisode 11 on ITUnity
After years of extensive travel for work, I think I’m finally experiencing this “jet lag” thing. Which is actually working out nicely, since I have a bunch of early morning activities happening this week. For example, tomorrow is our 11th webisode of CollabTalk on ITUnity (register here), and we’re changing things up a bit. The topics this month include: commentary on last week’s European SharePoint Conference in Stockholm, with keynotes by Microsoft CVP Jeff Teper, as well as Seth Patton and Bill Baer. We’re also going to discuss the Office 365 Admin UI and Delve people experiences, and give some demos as we discuss. What will not be changing is the banter between the four of us, which is what makes the show unique…and fun. If you’ve never watched the live show, register now for the monthly reminders, and to know when the recordings become available. We currently have about 1,000 people registered for our show updates, which is exciting. My goal is to work with ITUnity to make the recordings available either through Channel 9 or YouTube in the coming weeks, so watch for that announcement.
So what was shared at ESPC last week? David Roe provided a summary over on CMSWire of what some of the vendors announced, including a mention of my company, Beezy, and our award as Best Office 365 Solution. But the best summary of Teper’s keynote and what was announced comes from my good friend Benjamin Niaulin (@bniaulin) at Sharegate, who provided some great perspective on Microsoft’s renewed focus on SharePoint going into 2016, including the drive to make SharePoint a “modernized content collaboration platform” with connected experiences across both OneDrive for Business and SharePoint. Teper walked through a dozen or more slides and discussed each of the areas where Microsoft would be making investments in the coming 12 to 18 months, and Bill Baer (@williambaer) hinted at a few of the new experiences coming to Office 365 during his demo. If you were unable to attend or watch the keynote live stream (which took place in the middle of the night for those in the US), Ben’s blog post has a ton of photos from the keynotes.
On the topic of the Admin UI, we plan to show the evolving administration experience and talk about what is changing in SharePoint 2016, and where Microsoft is making investments. Ben covered some of the areas in his post, but it’s always useful to see the screen themselves and talk about what is there today, what is still missing, and what we know is coming (that we can discuss outside of NDAs, of course). The same goes for the Delve people experiences, including the vNext of the MySites experience, as well as the revamped “authoring canvas” or blog experience, and how the changing UX will be reflected for on-prem customers.
I hope everyone can make it to the show tomorrow. Once again, you can register here. The live show runs from 10 to 11am PST, and the recording should be posted within a day or so. As always, we will be live tweeting the event and monitoring attendee comments and questions, making the session as interactive as possible. If you have any feedback, please let us know. See you online!
