March 2016 Content Wrap-Up

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One of the benefits of providing a monthly recap of my travels and content is that I am able to reflect on events and activities that already seem like they happened so long ago. I started off the month on the road, traveling from SPTechCon Austin and the Dallas/Ft. Worth SPUG west and then north, driving through Texas and New Mexico, staying the night in historic Roswell, NM, and from there driving north to Denver for SharePointFest. And Denver is where my month began…so very long ago. I brought out the big head received from the SPTechCon organizers and took shots with some of my friends and fellow speakers:

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The only other event I attended in March was SharePoint Saturday Vancouver, just a short drive north from my home in the Seattle area. Other than that, it was a month of content, internal documentation, and a couple IMG_4420webinars — including one well-attended session with Asif Rehmani from @VisualSP. On the 3rd Thursday of the month, we welcomed Tom Duff (@duffbert) and Oliver Wirkus (@owirkus) as speakers at the Puget Sound SharePoint User Group (PSSPUG.org). I did also join members of the Beezy leadership team in San Francisco for a couple days of planning, departing as most people were landing at SFO to attend Microsoft Build. We met over in Pacific Heights at a mansion owned by the CEO of BurningMan. You can see the living room in the photo below. And to wrap up the month, I hosted another CollabTalk tweetjam, with some details available below and my summary published earlier today.

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April will be a much bigger month, with SharePoint TechFest Dallas and SharePoint Saturday Houston taking place next week, and SharePointFest DC at the end of the month. But in-between I’ll be taking a few days off to travel down to Salt Lake City for my daughter Audrey’s wedding in the Salt Lake LDS temple, followed by a reception with family and friends. For those of you who don’t know the story, it’s been in the works for a year since her fiance’s tragic injury. Jared is doing much better, making progress every week, and everyone is excited that this day is rapidly approaching — which takes place 2 days after my daughter graduates from Brigham Young University with honors in microbiology. It’s going to be a big month, for sure.

In May, more travels — it’s looking like Barcelona is happening so that the folks from the US can spend time with the entire Beezy development team, followed by a fun trip with my son Nick to Nanjing and Shanghai as a high-school graduation present. And both April and May will include more CollabTalk activities, as always.

As for content this past month, the BIG announcement out of Beezy (@followbeezy) was the press release regarding availability of our Office Graph integrations for customers with cloud or hybrid environments. Some pretty cool stuff that helps users complete common tasks, and drive engagement within SharePoint. If you missed the news, take a look:

The other official announcement was for the #MeasureCollabSuccess initiative, which kicked off with a stellar panel of experts, and the first of three anonymous community surveys. This first phase is focused on understanding how organizations define "successful collaboration." The second and third phases will look at measurement and implementation, respectively. If you have not already taken the survey, please do so following the link below:

Back in January I visited Benjamin and the team at Sharegate for a couple days, and we recorded some whiteboard sessions, which Ben introduced on their blog. The following include Ben’s summary, my videos, and full transcripts:

Something I’ve been trying to do over on the Beezy blog is to talk about some of the core collaboration functionality that Beezy enables — or improves upon – for SharePoint and Office 365. As is my writing style, I generally talk about the business problem, how the technology helps solve the problem, any gaps left unsolved, and then a tiny bit of product-plug at the end. Hopefully people find this
informative:

As you all know, I talk a lot about the ongoing evolution of the SharePoint platform, and our changing business expectations. With the impending roadmap update from Microsoft on May 4th, we’re going to hear more from them on their vision for the future — but it’s a future also being shaped by partners (like Beezy) and you, the customer. Some of my thoughts on the topic:

I’m also writing about the broader topic of collaboration, and what makes it effective. SharePoint is just one enabling tool within your toolbelt, so you need to think in terms of your users, your business needs, and your ability to change as needed as these things evolve:

I feel like I’m always trying to catch up in my reading. I have a couple copies (well, 4 or 5) of HBR still sitting in a pile on my desk, in their shipping plastic, waiting for me to review and become inspired to write. One downside of not flying around the world quite as much as I used to is that plane travel was my time to catch up on reading. I miss that aspect of it. But I did manage to make some time this past month for writing about different business topics that have my interest:

March also saw a couple media mentions:

In May, more travels — it’s looking like Barcelona is happening so that the folks from the US can spend time with the entire development team, followed by a fun trip with my son Nick to Nanjing and Shanghai as a high-school graduation present. And both April and May will include more CollabTalk activities, as always.

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.