April 2016 Content Wrap-Up

For a month that was relatively light on external content (a few internal irons also in the fire), I feel like I am still out of breath. Of course, the big news of the month for the Buckley household was the graduation and marriage of my daughter, who graduated with honors from Brigham Young University in Provo, UT with a BS in Microbiology, and two days later was married in the Salt Lake City temple. It was a very emotional week, for sure, but we’re thrilled that it all came together, and the newlyweds are doing well.

Graduation and wedding aside, it was a whirlwind month beginning with a trip to Dallas to participate in SharePoint TechFest Dallas, with a session followed by a panel with my good friends Naomi Moneypenny (@nmoneypenny), Seb Matthews (@sebmatthews), and Eric Shupps (@eshupps) moderating. This was my first time presenting at TechFest, but I hope to join more of these events in the future. While most of my content skews toward business decision-makers (BDMs) rather than IT Pros, the level of interaction with participants was fairly good. After spending a couple days with my sales team in Dallas, we then made our way over to Houston (about 5 hour drive with traffic) to attend SharePoint Saturday Houston, where once again I had a session and a panel, this time with Treb Gatte (@tgatte), Miguel Wood (@miguelwood), Virgil Carroll (@vcmonkey), with Eric Shupps once again moderating.

Wrapping up the month of non-wedding events, I returned from Utah and then turned around and traveled to Washington DC to participate in another SharePointFest event where I had a session and, as always, participated in the evening Ask the Experts activity in the main hall. Busy month, lots going on, and ramping up for an equally big May (although, no other children getting married, thankfully).

The biggest activity happening this week is the Future of SharePoint event that Microsoft is hosting down in San Francisco. Only a handful of MVPs, customers and media will be there in person, but the rest of us will be able to stream the event live. Be sure to register! I’ll be live blogging the event, and will have posts going up through Redmond Magazine, this blog, and most likely IT Unity. Can’t yet get into details of what will be shared, but you do not want to miss this event!

Next week, the major activity will be Collab365 Summit, which is coming to Microsoft campus. I plan to participate in person (since I’m just 10 miles from campus) and participate both in front and behind the cameras. Mark, John, Andy and team always do a stellar job on these online events, which is FREE to attendees so be sure to register here. Beezy (www.Beezy.net) is a proud sponsor of the event, and you’ll be seeing our logo throughout as the official social sponsor.

Following the Summit, I’ll be knocking an item off the bucket list when one of my sons (Nick) and I will be visiting China for a week. My inlaws are wrapping up their third year of teaching over there, and so we’re taking advantage of that window to stay with them in Nanjing, with plans to also see Shanghai. With all my world travels, and numerous trips over to Japan, this will be my first time to China, and I am very excited to visit!

While a quieter month for content, some of the messaging has been very targeted. Specifically, I’ve been going through all of the core functionality within the Beezy solution, highlighting some of the main features and how they impact your internal collaboration efforts. For those intimately familiar with the capabilities of SharePoint and Office 365, you understand the shortcoming of the platform and how many of these Beezy capabilities can directly impact adoption and engagement. In the coming weeks, I’ll continue writing about some of these core concepts and capabilities, as well as some related thought-leadership pieces:

• The Power of the Newsfeed (Beezy blog) http://bit.ly/1SGJNMv
• Find, Follow and Filter What Matters (Beezy blog) http://bit.ly/1Z3Pg01
• How Improving Internal Communications Can Dramatically Impact Employee Engagement (Beezy blog) http://bit.ly/1rO48pg
• Succession Planning and Collaboration Strategy (Beezy blog) http://bit.ly/1WDgZG4
• Why Employee Engagement Should Be Your Primary Objective (Beezy blog) http://bit.ly/1VRPgRE

We also officially concluded the first phase of the Measuring Collaboration Success initiative this past week (you can still participate in our first survey here, which asks about how you define success within your organization, and is completely anonymous (we’re trying to get community feedback, so this is NOT a lead gen activity). The first article is a summary of the effort written for CMSWire, followed by a couple interviews with members of the community panel:

• A Community-Driven Definition of Collaboration Success (CMSWire) http://bit.ly/1VHe00r
• Understanding and Prioritizing Collaboration with MVP Richard Harbridge (SharePoint-Community.net) http://bit.ly/1ObFKSY
• Collaboration Culture and Commitments with Expert Adam Levithan (SharePoint-Community.net) http://bit.ly/1NiED9c

In case you missed
my tweets on the topic, I visited Sharegate headquaters in Montreal back at the end of January and worked with their marketing team to create several videos, all of which were catalogued on their blog by the one and only Benjamin Niaulin (@bniaulin), the Official SharePoint Representative of YouTube. Two of the videos are of Ben and I discussing important topics (moving to the cloud, and security), and two are of just me talking in front of a whitebopard. I love the formatr, and plan to do a few of these on my own soon. But finally, there’s a hidden gem: a Beezy advertisement that "borrows" from Sharegate a tiny bit:

• Additions to Your SharePoint Video Library (BuckleyPLANET) http://bit.ly/1UsXtfh

Finally, I did manage to create a few other thought-leadership pieces, including content that I have been presenting at various events around the world:

• Why Personalization Drives Adoption and Engagement (LinkedIn) http://bit.ly/1SVaFr0
• Leveraging Networking Science to Improve Team Collaboration (SlideShare) http://bit.ly/1rO4A76
• Improving your Personal Productivity with Office and Office 365 (SlideShare) http://bit.ly/1TqQZst
• Hey SharePoint, What Flavor Are You? (buckleyPLANET) http://bit.ly/1pX1HyO

Gearing up for my busy May, and a ton of new content, so be sure to follow me on Twitter at @buckleyplanet and sign up for the Beezy newsletter for all of my updates. See you online!