January 2016 Content Wrap-Up

by · Published · Updated

CZ5xsPtUkAEYc4v (2)

Another year kicked off with an MVP award letter from Microsoft, this one my fifth. Always an honor, and I am thrilled to remain a part of this fantastic community. Of course, I would do what I do regardless of the award…but its a nice perk. After a nice holiday with the family and a rather quiet new year celebration, January was the month I had planned to "hunker down" and work on several large content projects. Some of that happened — with an ebook in production stages, and a whitepaper going through some iterations before it is ready. Overall, not a crazy month for new content, but some big pieces that grabbed some attention, for sure. I also had a very successful webinar with the CardioLog Analytics (@cardiolog) team at Intlock, the recording of which you can find on YouTube below. As well, this month's CollabTalk Show from IT Unity is also available in its entirety on YouTube, and soon we hope to cut up each section and make all of the great CollabTalk dialog more "consumable," possibly through Microsoft's Channel 9.

January also included a visit to Vancouver, British Columbia where I met with the team at Softlanding for a Beezy (@followbeezy) presentation, as well as visits to our partners at Bonzai Intranet and Colligo, rounding out the evening with a SharePint with members of the Vancouver SPUG and SharePoint Saturday organizing committee. Always love visiting Vancouver — and plan to be back up there for a couple activities mid-month. To round out the month, I made a trip to Montreal (my first time!) to visit Benjamin Niaulin (@bniaulin) and the Sharegate team to record some videos, and share (ok, learn) marketing best practices from the SharePoint market leaders in online marketing. CZ0YDqFUsAEm0zv

In February, the event schedule heats up a bit with my 3rd webinar with the CardioLog Analytics team (Feb 16) — this time, joined by my friend and fellow MVP Jussi Mori (@jussimori) from Peaches Industries as we talk about gamification and what you can learn from it through metrics. I'm also leading a panel and providing a session for the UnityConnect Online event (Feb 8-11), co-hosting the monthly CollabTalk Show on IT Unity (Feb 17), and then hitting the road for a couple weeks. Beginning with SharePoint Saturday Utah on the 20th, I'll make my way down to Austin for SPTechCon on the 21st through 24th, followed by a MASSIVE joint presentation with Benjamin Niaulin, Mike Fitzmaurice from Nintex, and Erwin and Matthias from Rencore at the Dallas/Ft. Worth SPUG on the 25th. Following Dallas, some of us will be making a road trip up to Denver and SharePointFest to kick off March. Somewhere in there I will also be hosting another CollabTalk tweetjam, as always.

One of the core themes in January was around monitoring and measuring collaboration. As mentioned, I partnered with CardioLog on the second of three webinars touching on various aspects of SharePoint measurement, which led to a couple supporting articles:

An important topic for most organizations is how the importance of collaboration is on the rise. Companies need to understand their collaboration strategies — and the business value it can deliver through improved communication, sharing, and innovation. These aren't just platitudes, but are quantifiable activities:

At the center of the modern digital workplace is social collaboration. Employees are accustomed to working within social platforms — their online personal activities often center around social networking platforms, amking social collaboration within the enterprise not only necessary, but an expectation. As I touch on just about every month, I wrote several posts that cover the ongoing discussion on the value of social to help drive adoption, engagement, and productivity:

Over the course of any given month, I'll come across an article, a blog post, or even a tweet from somewhere in the community that will inspire an article on other SharePoint or related business topic:

And as always, January saw it's share of self-promotion posts:

I'm always happy to work with other MVPs and vendors to create their content — whether by providing a quote or short blog post, or participating in a panel event or video interview. They are all great opportunities to talk about Beezy, SharePoint and Office 365, and pontificate on the state of the industry. Some mentions from this past month include: 

I am looking forward to February, but am already planning through the fall. To kick things off this year, I'll be kicking things off end of month with a 2-week road trip. It's going to be a jam-packed spring, for sure, with several major events filling the schedule in April and May. I am looking forward to having members of the Beezy team from around the world join me at Microsoft's inaugural Envision event in New Orleans, with 8k to 10k of our business decision-maker friends. Hope to see you there!

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.