August 2017 Content Wrap-Up

by · Published · Updated

Keynoting the Digital Workplace Conference Australia in Sydney

I thoroughly enjoyed the month of August. Lots going on, a couple cross-ocean flights of non-sleep, and long work days, but the business continues to grow, and more and more opportunities are surfacing each week. Wrapped up a couple large customer projects, generated a metric ton of content (only slight exaggeration), recorded a couple dozen videos and podcasts, and now feeling even more of a crunch with customer proposals to complete, articles to write, and post-production recordings to assemble. On top of all that, I have also confirmed 4 new research projects for my company CollabTalk in partnership with the Marriott School at BYU, and will be sharing more on those by mid-September (and will open up a call for sponsors on a couple of them).

MVP panel on SharePoint and related topics at MicrosoftAt the start of August, I made my way to Seattle for a couple days with friends and family before spending two days with a customer in Redmond, leading a marketing strategy workshop. From there, I was honored to be invited to participate as part of a SharePoint MVP panel at Microsoft, including Vlad Catrinescu (@vladcatrinescu), Andrew Connell (@andrewconnell), Jason Himmelstein (@jasehimm), Eric Overfield (@ericoverfield), and Liz Sundet (@percusn). The panel was moderated by Microsoft’s Aaron Rimmer (@aaronlrimmer), and the audience consisted of Microsoft’s SharePoint product marketing and engineering team members, as well as people from OneDrive, Teams, Skype, and other Office 365-related areas. It was a great opportunity for the product teams to ask questions and get insights directly from MVPs.

Giant selfie at SPFest SeattleFrom Microsoft campus, I made my way to downtown Seattle and the Washington Convention Center, where I participated in SharePointFest Seattle event, presenting two sessions on Microsoft Teams and Groups, and the other on internal communications best practices. I believe this was my 3rd time presenting at the SPFest Seattle event, and I’m glad to see that it continues to grow. While there are many SharePoint Saturday events that seem to be shrinking, as the scope of people’s interest expands outside of the traditional SharePoint content, events like SPFest are continuing to adapt and add relevant topics, and David, Art and team put on a good event. Planning to be back for future events.

At the mid-month mark, I was invited to present at the local IAMCP (International Association of Microsoft Channel Partners) Utah chapter. Some of you may recall that I co-founded the Seattle chapter a few years back with Jeff Shuey (@jshuey), and served as its president for over 3 years, and on its board for 2 more years before moving to Salt Lake City last year. What’s more, the Utah chapter was the result of on-camera goading by former Microsoft channel-chief John Roskill and I, who were recording a Microsoft Partner Network (MPN) panel discussion with Kevin McMillen, CEO of RyanTech Cloud Services. In the segment, I mentioned my involvement in IAMCP and how we had just recently had John speak to our chapter, and Kevin admited he was not familiar with IAMCP….which led to an on-air challenge by John to get involved. And the Utah chapter was born! It has been great to plug into the local chapter and get to know some of the other local Microsoft partners. CollabTalk sponsored the lunch at Microsoft’s Thanksgiving Point offices, and I presented on the topic of modern digital marketing. Great discussion, and lots of follow up questions that has spread into September.

Christian and Vlad by the Sydney Opera House at DWCAUThe big adventure of August, of course, was the trek to Sydney to keynote the Digital Workplace Conference Australia event (#DWCAU), also presenting a session on Microsoft Teams, Groups, and Conversation-as-a-Service (bots, connectors, and increasingly intelligent systems). DWC is a re-branding of the regional SharePoint Conference (formerly #SPCAU, and #SPCNZ in New Zealand) that is run by ShareThePoint and MVP Debbie Ireland (@debbieireland), with Microsoft’s Mark Rhodes (@mrhodes). I’ve presented at many of their events over the years, and they have been some of my favorites — and have also afforded me with the opportunity to explore a lot of New Zealand, which is one of my absolute favorite places on the planet. I’ve included links to my keynote slides below, and you can find my slides on Teams here.

Christian with Dan McPherson and Debbie Ireland at DWCAUWrapping up the month of activities, I also hosted another fun CollabTalk TweetJam, sponsored this month by KanBo (@KanBoHQ) and tyGraph (@tyGraphTweets), and focusing on “The Microsoft Teams Collaboration Revolution.” Of course, Teams is a hot topic these days, so pulling together a panel of experts was relatively easy. As always, we trended nationally on Twitter very quickly, and generated some amazing stats: we had 820 tweets with an average sentiment of 0.65, reached just over 479k user profiles, and had more than 4.21 million impressions — all in a one-hour event. If you have not participated in one of these tweetjams, they are open to the public, and anyone can join. You do not have to be on the panel to participate — but plenty of people prefer to lurk and observe, which is great, too. Be sure to follow me on Twitter at @buckleyplanet and watch the #CollabTalk hashtag for updates. You can also join the dedicated tweetjam site at http://twubs.com/CollabTalk, as well as check out the tyGraph stats in PowerBI from the past year at http://bit/ly/CollabTweets. And finally, if you’re interested in sponsoring one of the upcoming tweetjams, please drop me a line!

As for content in August, things have been insanely busy. Many projects underway, more content lined up for September, so be sure to watch my social feeds. I do quite a bit of fractional-CMO activity behind the scenes, and this list is really only the public-facing content. I am getting back to a normal level of output of my own content, but much of what you see here is for current customers. One of the larger content efforts completed in August was a 25-page ebook for Colligo, co-authored with Colligo CEO Barry Jinks (@bjinks), which I am very proud of. Look for a couple more guest posts from me on the topic of ‘Digital Workplace Heroes’ in support of this great resource for developing advocacy within your organization as you begin to move forward with your digital workplace strategy:

One of the more visible projects has been my efforts with AvePoint to expand on this spring’s CollabTalk research into Hybrid SharePoint. In August, we launched the first wave of articles and videos around the top concerns that customers have around hybrid SharePoint. At the center of each of these posts is a video with Microsoft senior technical product manager, Bill Baer (@williambaer), discussing each area of concern, and how Microsoft addresses customer questions for each. The associated blog posts include an overview of each topic, Microsoft’s official positioning, how AvePoint can help, and community resources and best practices that are available to customers. I’m adding 4 more videos and posts to this series, and then will be publishing two more waves in this series, which we’re calling ‘Connected Systems.’

Christian with Adam Cogan at DWCAU

While in Sydney for the Digital Workplace Conference Australia, I was interviewed by Microsoft Regional Director and chief architect at SSW, Adam Cogan (@adamcogan), where we discussed some of my background, how I got into SharePoint and the broader collaboration technology space, and my thoughts on where Microsoft is heading.

  • The Rise of the Digital Workplace Champion – #DWCAU Keynote (SlideShare) http://bit.ly/2w88qcV 
  • Effective Engagement and Collaboration with Christian Buckley and Adam Cogan – Digital Workplace Conference, Sydney 2017 (SSW) http://bit.ly/2eGG8j9
  • Effective Engagement and Collaboration with Christian Buckley and Adam Cogan – DWC Conference 2017 (YouTube) http://bit.ly/2xbbZnv
  • Live from #DWCAU expo hall in Sydney (Facebook) http://bit.ly/2j4F25N
  • Digital Workplace Conference Australia speaker promo (Facebook) http://bit.ly/2gHmp3D

If you missed the August #CollabTalk TweetJam, sponsored by KanBo and tyGraph, you can find the supporting blog post with list of panelists and questions covered, as well as a full tweet-by-tweet capture of the Twitter-based community discussion. Or, if you prefer something curated and short, take a look at the great Twitter ‘Moment’ put together by fellow MVP Noah Sparks (@noahsparks).

I decided to join Tracy van der Schyff (@tracyvds) in her somewhat-insane quest to write 365 blog posts in 365 days on Microsoft 365. I’m a little bit behind on this effort as of today — not that I don’t have a couple dozen partially-completed articles lined up, but customer work always takes precedent over personal content. But it’s not a blog post per day, but 365 posts in the next year. So some days you may see 2 posts (or more), and other days (usually travel days or when I’m onsite with a client) you won’t see any. Yes, I know how to sched

Microsoft 365 in 365 blog series

ule my posts, but to me, the timing of the publish is less important to having it live and then promoting it through social channels and feeds. But here is my start in this adventure to write about various topics within the Microsoft 365 world, which includes Office 365, Windows 10, and other security and mobility solutions:

There is a lot happening in September, with Microsoft Ignite taking place in Orlando, Florida. I have been invited by Microsoft to be one of 10 MVP community reporters, and will have a blog post on my participation (and how to get involved) within the next few days. I’m also participating in 3 webinars this month, including a fun session with Tom Duff (@duffbert) in which we’ll be going head-to-head to share our favorite Office 365 productivity tips (Register for Office 365 Productivity Tips “Grudge Match”), and then let the audience members vote on their favorite solutions.

More on my September activities and event schedule for the remainder of 2017 coming in future posts! Thanks for reading. Now…back to work.

Tags:

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.