August 2016 Content Wrap-Up

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For many months now I have been planning a road trip with my oldest son, Preston, to drive down through southern Utah and into Arizona to visit some of the areas in which he served his LDS mission. And last month I was finally able to take a day off and drive with him. It was an adventure, for sure. We spent a night in Moab and hiked up to see the famous Delicate IMG_5963Arch, we passed through Monument Valley (above) and see parts of the Grand Canyon. We also stayed a night in Snowflake, and drove through Show Low and Payson, AZ before driving down into the valley and Mesa to stay with more friends. Loved getting to spend time with my son, but it was also great to see some of these places for the first time. In fact, I purchased a intra-agency national park card, and hope to use it much more in the upcoming year.

imageAugust was the first month in a long, long time where I did not attend some kind of event. Lots of conference calls with partners and customer demos, and plenty of content – internal and external-facing. There was, of course, the webinar with Mike Oryszak from B&R Business Solutions on the topic of idea management, and my monthly CollabTalk tweetjam on the topic of the new SharePoint Framework (#SPFx). Other than that, 12 to 14 hour days of content and emails and online discussions.

I read the latest Harry Potter book. Oh, and I went fishing a couple times. Always a great way to break up the work week.

I have to say, when you’ve traveled the world as much as I have over the past 7 years, its been an adjustment to stick around the home office this much – but I have to admit that I do like being home more.

imageOf course, all of that is about to change, with Ignite coming up this month in Atlanta, the Collab365 online event in mid-October, SharePoint Saturday Redmond taking place end of October on the Microsoft campus, and then the MVP Summit (also in Redmond) followed by the European SharePoint Conference in Vienna. Basically, no break until Thanksgiving. In-between there, there will be more webinars, tweetjams, and possibly even the launch of the podcast series I’ve been talking with Noah Sparks about starting up.

As far as content goes, I had a couple major focus areas in August, the first of which was idea management. With the formal launch of Idea Campaigns this summer, we’ve out a tremendous amount of interest in our new SharePoint capabilities that, as with all Beezy features, builds off of SharePoint capabilities, enhancing and extending what is available out of the box. I was joined by Beezy partner, well-known speaker and former MVP Mike Oryszak (@next_connect) from B&R Business Solutions for a webinar on the topic, where I demonstrated the Beezy solution, and he shared some of B&R’s deployment experiences. Be sure to check out the whitepaper, or watch the on-demand recording of our session:

For last month’s CollabTalk tweetjam, I was able to put together a stellar panel of MVPs, MCMs and experts from around the community to share some of their takeaways from the new SharePoint Framework. In the blog post below, you can find the panel details and questions discussed, and in the Storify post, you can read through the tweet-by-tweet discussion. Great stuff.

As many of you know, I’ve been leading a community effort this year that is examining different aspects of collaboration planning and measurement. The ‘Measuring Collaboration Success’ initiative is in its second phase this month, with the third and final phase kicking off the week of Ignite. If you have not yet participated in the second survey, which looks specifically at the metrics that organizations use, please click on the link below and take the short survey. There’s also a podcast discussion with BA Insight’s CTO Jeff Fried (@jefffried) that is worth checking out:

Oh yes, and Beezy was included in KMWorld’s Trend-Setting Product list for 2016. Press release and the entire list below:

In typical fashion, I wrote a number of thought-leadership pieces this past month dealing with topics around planning, governance, UX design and productivity, some of which will be included within our customer nurturing programs over the coming months:

One article that stands out was a post on the rise of mobility solutions. In the post, I point to a great whitepaper written by my peer Maximo Castagno, who leads the product management efforts here at Beezy, in which he discusses the trends that are moving the enterprise toward the mobile-first model. It’s also a great lead-in to the announcement made this week about Beezy’s new messaging solution built on Office 365, called BeezyPocket. Definitely check out the post and related whitepaper, but also be sure to sign up for the BeezyPocket beta.

And finally, promotions have begun for the European SharePoint Conference in November, and with it, my keynote with Sharegate’s Benjamin Niaulin (@bniaulin). Ben and I have some fun plans for our teaser video. Looking forward to completing that.

Ok, that’s a wrap for my August activities. Things are already in full swing for September. I’m planning this month’s tweetjam from the road in Atlanta, so watch for that. Otherwise, keep watching the tweets on @buckleyplanet and other social channels, and hopefully I’ll see you at one of the upcoming events.

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.