May 2016 Content Wrap-Up

by · Published · Updated

image

For a month that was slow on published articles, it was jam-packed with activity. Of course, the month kicked off with the epic Future of SharePoint event held at the Village in downtown San Francisco, where I was able to represent the Beezy team and participate as Microsoft revealed their latest features and product strategy for the next year. You’ll find links to a couple imageblog posts I wrote on the topic below, as well as a post by my ceo Jordi Plana on Beezy’s position. Overall, it was an exciting event, and I was happy to have been a part of that little bit of history. It reminded me of some of the fanfare around the SP2010 release. In fact, Joel Oleson, Owen Allen, Erica Toelle and I were even chatting about doing some kind of launch party as we did back in early 2010…but alas, work schedules did not comply.

If you missed them, John White took some amazing photos of the FoS event which are available on Facebook and other locations, but my personal fave was the shot taken while we were waiting to enter the building:

image

The other major event in May was the Collab365 Summit which took place on the Microsoft campus over 3 days. It was great to see Jon, Mark, Fraser and the entire Collaboris team on site, and meet many of them in person for the first time. And then there was The Andy Talbot Experience™ which is always a hoot. Thanks again to the team for inviting me down to Building 92 where I was able to participate in several panel discussions, and sit and make faces while Mark Kashman, Chris McNulty, Benjamin Niaulin, Adam Levithan, Owen Allen and others were live on camera.

image image

And to wrap up the major events, I was also graced with the virtual presence of my good friend and fellow MVP Liam Cleary (@helloitsliam) as we shared some of our insights into the FoS event, and the perspectives from our respective companies (Beezy and Protiviti). You can find our slides below, as well as a link to our webinar recorded, now available on-demand.

Not a ton of content created as I spent part of the month helping ramp up a new Beezy marketing operations person (welcome to the team Rachel!) and then taking a much-needed vacation with my soon-to-graduate-high-school son Nicholas, which took us to Nanjing and Shanghai, China. More on that in a minute.

The main theme for this month’s content was around the Future of SharePoint event. I’m sure I’ll be writing on this topic for the next couple months as some of what Microsoft shared will trickle out into Office 365 tenants, and more becomes generally available to SharePoint 2016 on prem. If you missed my webinar with Liam, the recording is something definitely worth a look:

One of the themes we have been working on over on the Beezy blog has been to talk about the importance of the corporate newsfeed, and the increasing role that push and pull content plays within corporate comms strategy — and in the overall success of enterprise collaboration. In fact, I hve an ebook coming out on the topic later this month, so watch for that:

If you missed the Collab365 Summit live event, no worries! You’ll find a couple links from me below, but every session and panel recording is now available on demand at http://collab365.events/

Finally, some odds and ends from this past month include a podcast I recorded for the Microsoft Partner Network podcast in prep for next month’s Worldwide Partner Conference, as well as a mention from my good friend Jeff Shuey, who mentioned the podcast in a related blog post about technology evangelism.

Ok, that’s about it for external cont
ent. Quite a few things happening internally, not yet ready for consumption in the real world….but June should be back to normal as far as content output.

I thought I’d also share a few words about my trip to China. It’s been on my bucket list for many years, and I was pleased to be able to take one of my boys and see a new part of the world, staying for a week with my wife’s parents, who are wrapping up their third year of teaching at Nanjing Technology University. We walked everywhere, ate questionable food, and thoroughly enjoyed our time with the wonderful people of Nanjing. I was also able to present to two classes at the university on the evolution of collaboration technology, which I’ll highlight in a forthcoming blog post with some pictures.

image image image

Absolutely loved my time there, and hope to get back soon to see more of the country. I captured a few photos while in country, which you can find on Instagram and Facebook, but may share more here later this month.

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.