January 2017 Content Wrap-Up

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SnowI'm still adjusting to real winter weather, and the fact that many days I don't venture far from my basement home office. I was explaining to someone last night at a #SharePint mixer in Bellevue (I'm on the road for a couple weeks right now) that most days find me in pajamas well past lunch, and I sometimes forget to eat anything until the afternoon. That's the downside of working almost entirely online, with team members spread around the globe. As the snow melts and my early morning running routine becomes the norm once again, this schedule should change up a bit.

 

I'm out in the Seattle area for a couple weeks to meet with Microsoft folks and visit with friends. Some of you may have noticed the announcement that my now 5-year old venture CollabTalk is leading a research effort being sponsored by Microsoft and several other ISVs and SIs and media companies. Very excited to work on this and help put data around the scope and impact of hybrid SharePoint. Watch for more news on this effort as the customer survey rolls out later this month.

 

In January, I spent a good portion of my content-creation efforts for Beezy working on several items that you will start seeing rolled out in February. Of course, some of you participated in one of the Beezy webinars that I hosted — the first being a session on how to run a successful collaboration pilot, and the second a recap of my keynote with Sharegate's Benjamin Niaulin (@bniaulin) from the European SharePoint Conference, where we talked about the importance of finding the right cultural fit for collaboration. In Feb, I'll be hosting two more webinars — one on the 15th where I'll provide 10 tips for successful collaboration. Late in the month, I'll be joined by our chief product officer Maximo Castagno (@maximocastagno) to talk about the digital workplace, and how Beezy can help organizations support this future vision.

 

But at the top of my content list for January was my session for #Assembled17 which was an opportunity to present on a broader business topic, and to a non-SharePoint audience. My sessions discusses what it means to build social capital, where I share some experiences as an award-winning technology evangelist and CMO, and provide you with some actionable steps to use immediately to build your personal or company brand. In support of this session, I partnered with Chris Wright and team over at fiftyfiveandfive to create the ebook "Tap Into Social Capital to Build Your Brand" which you can find below — with no form to fill out, just a straight PDF download:

 

 

As mentioned above, I led two webinars for Beezy in January. You can find the slides to both below, as well as a YouTube recordings from both sessions:

 

 

January was also the final push for last year's 'Measuring Collaboration Success' initiative, and the 3rd of three surveys. Thank you to everyone on the panel, as well as to all of you who filled out one of our anonymous surveys this past year. I am working on the final whitepaper this week, which should be published later this month.

 

 

For the 5th anniversary of the CollabTalk tweetjam, we took on the topic of the evolution of the user group. I have been a member or organizer of many user groups over the years, and have witnessed struggles and successes. With so much of the SharePoint mindshare moving to the cloud, whether Office 365, Azure, or the wealth of other cloud-based tools and platforms that are becoming available, it's only natural that a user group focused primarily on SharePoint needs to adjust and evolve. We had a great discussion, all of which is captured on a related Storify post:

 

 

So much happening in the background in January that I was not able to write quite as much as I had hoped — but lots coming in February. I did manage to produce a couple items that will become themes in the coming months. One item that did finally appear in Jan was my article on Microsoft Teams that made the January print edition of Redmond Magazine, which was then published online on Feb 1st. Many folks are excited about this new release from Microsoft, but there are definitely things that the product team needs to improve on if they want to dominate the market. Would love your feedback on my post, so please take a look and comment online:

 

 

And finally, I wanted to share a link to a mention this past month — I made the list of top 1000 technology bloggers in the world based on Klout social score and other factors, and am currently listed at #30. One of my goals in 2017 is to increase my broader technology speaking/author footprint, so I was very happy with this ranking. Looking forward to a very productive year!

 

 

Aside from the webinars in February, I am working hard with my research team at BYU and our sponsors to collect data around the state of hyrbid SharePoint. I pushed out a press release this week (CollabTalk Launches Research Project on Hybrid SharePoint) and am in Redmond to meet with the product team and a couple of the sponsors as the team begins secondary research. Much more on this topic to come in the next week or so — and if you have in place or are planning to leverage hybrid solutions within your SharePoint environment, please keep an eye out for our forthcoming survey. We want your input!

 

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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.