Another SPTechCon for the History Books

I’m sitting at Logan Airport in Boston, on my way home from another successful SPTechCon Boston event. Always lots of fun, great to see so many friends and acquaintances, wish I had had time to go visit a few more of my former co-workers. But alas, time was short and I am on my way back home to Seattle for a day of rest (sort of) before a long family weekend.

My schedule felt lighter than usual, with only 2 regular sessions, a Lightning Talk, and participation in the Stump the Experts panel. And, of course, I was in the Beezy booth between all of these activities, providing demos and talking social collaboration. You can see my view from the panel in the photos above. These things are always a lot of fun, where the audience asks (mostly) short questions and the panel tries to answer them quickly and with humor (mostly). I sat between Andrew Connell and Todd Klindt, as you can see, and had a blast.

Also a standard of the Boston event is the mid-week Boston SPUG participation, where members of the community are able to join the event expo hall at the end of the day, and then have an on-site SPUG event with many of the speakers. Such a great idea for supporting the community, and also giving the speakers yet another platform. Love this. Wish more events would do something like this. And because of the BASPUG participation, I got the chance to see a number of my local friends who were not attending the conference. Always love that. Some additional photos from the week:

In case you missed my sessions, both were repeats from the Austin event – but as with most speakers, I made some updates and tweaks for this event. My first session was an updated version of a presentation that I’ve been doing since the 2010 release: The 10 Best Office 365 Features You’ve Never Used (But Should) which is kind of a click-bait title in that it’s not all O365 content, per se, but a blend of productivity capabilities in O365 and the Office suite. It’s a list of cool features that you may already know about and use, but most folks walk away with a few new things to try out. This session is always a crowd-pleaser:

My other session follows the theme of some of the content I’ve been writing over the past several months about improving the user experience (UX) by making pro9ductivity a core aspect of your design and planning.  So this one was not so much about SharePoint as it was about guidance on design and implementation, and harkens back to my project management and business analysis days, and was entitled Productivity Hacking for Team Collaboration, and was first presented last fall over at UnityConnect. Check it out here: