November 2018 Content Wrap-Up

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Microsoft RD and MVP participants at ESPC18

Looking back over the past month, I kicked things off in November by organizing the Global Office 365 Developer Bootcamp here in Utah, held at the Microsoft offices here in Lehi. Organized by Microsoft MVPs at various location over a two-month period, the one here in Utah was small, but we had great participation and strong feedback — and we’re thinking about making it a quarterly event in 2019! Thanks again to the Microsoft team that helped put together all of these small developer activities around the world! Also early in the month was another CollabTalk TweetJam — placed at the start of the O365 Dev Bootcampmonth due to a heavy travel schedule in the latter half of November. For this event, we focused on information architecture in Microsoft teams. It’s a topic you don’t hear a lot of people talking about because most of IA is embedded within the underlying workloads, such as SharePoint, Outlook, Microsoft Teams, Yammer, Office 365 Groups, and elsewhere. There’s a lot to unpack on the topic — there which is why I wanted to initiate the topic off within the tweetjam, capturing ideas and experiences from across the community, and from there I will be building content in the coming months, so look for that. I’m working on an eBook on the topic, and putting together a half-day workshop for the IntraTeam event in Copenhagen at the end of February 2019.

Something else new that happened this past month here locally in Utah was the launch of the CMO Roundtable, hosted at Kiln in Lehi, which is right around the corner from the local Microsoft office — and a 5 minute drive from my home. For those unfamiliar with Kiln (https://www.kilnspace.com/), it is a co-working facility with locations in Lehi and Salt Lake City which I am a member of, and which also hosts a number of startup and tech events each month, as well as a number of user groups and meetups. The reason for the Roundtable was that I wanted to get together regularly with other senior marketing leaders and have discussions around what’s changing and evolving within the digital marketing space. The soon-to-be-monthly meeting coincides with my monthly “office hours” that I kicked off a few weeks back, meeting with entrepreneurs and startups at both Kiln locations in Lehi and Salt Lake City. Whether they are a member of Kiln or not, people are finding out about the open office hours through the Kiln website and scheduling time with me to talk strategy. I had a couple of meetings this last month, and am looking forward to doing this pro bono consulting going forward. It’s a great way to meet people and network, and yes, to potentially to pick up some clients. But the driver has more to do with my passion for marketing strategy and implementation. I get a ton out of these conversations too, allowing me to share my knowledge and experience while also learning about different tools and approaches to common problems. It’s actually a strong part of my learning style — rather than read or watch videos of others doing, my preference is to talk to people, to understand the nuances of their businesses, and to hear what is working — and what is not working. My goal, of course, is to add value where I can, but also to learn from their experiences.

Panel discussion at ESPC18

The weekend before Thanksgiving here in the US, I was on a flight to Minneapolis to participate in yet another SharePoint Saturday Twin Cities event. I can’t remember how many I’ve done of these events — probably 6 to 8 over the years, but it remains one of my favorite SPS events. What’s different about this one is that my daughter is in graduate school in Minneapolis at the University in Minneapolis. So that was a great opportunity to visit with Audrey and her husband Jared.

In addition to SPSTC, I was also able to provide the virtual keynote for the first SharePoint Saturday Ahmedabad in India, which was very exciting! I received some great feedback from that session, dialing in late Friday night from my daughter’s guest bedroom, and then the next day I was able to do it all over again by participating in SPS Twin Cities. At this event, I co-presented with Tom Duff (@duffbert) on Office 365 Productivity Tips (recording and slides linked below) following our infamous head-to-head format. Always fun.

The big event for November, however, was post-Thanksgiving when I flew to Copenhagen to participate in the latest European SharePoint, Office 365, & Azure Conference, or #ESPC18. I’ve attended and presented at every ESPC event since 2011 in Berlin, and keynoted the event 3 times. This year I was also invited to help organize the community reporters, which is a lot of work — but also a blast, which included an interview with Microsoft CVP Jeff Teper. It was great to be back in Copenhagen (a lot less snow that the past two visits), and I’m looking forward to getting back there yet again in February 2019 for the IntraTeam Conference. As for my ESPC content, you can find the link to my session below as well as a number of the recordings from the conference, and I’ll share more over the next few weeks as the community reporters continue to share our thoughts and takeaways from the conference, creating additional video and blog content which you can find on the conference website below.

Here is the bulk of the content created in November:

ESPC18Selfie with Michael Greth and Mike Fitzmaurice

The biggest event of the month (and one of the biggest of the year), so of course it generated a lot of content. There is much more on its way, primarily from interviews conducted while in Copenhagen which I simply have not had time to produce via Camtasia. Watch for updates on the ESPC website and YouTube page in the coming weeks as this great content gets processed.

Virtual Keynote for SPS AhmedabadSPS Twin Cities and Ahmedabad

I am a huge advocate for SharePoint Saturday, and still try to speak at at least 5 or 6 per year, as well as help organize the event here in Utah (coming up on February 9th, 2019). Thoroughly enjoyed my session with Tom in Minneapolis, as well as the virtual keynote and AMA with Ahmedabad, India, which i visited back in 2010. It’s where you can find Gandhi’s ashram, as well as a very large and thriving tech community. I hope to get back there someday soon! Also below are the article and results of a community survey that I pushed out in support of SPS and its evolution — both in how these events are organized, as well as the topics covered. Some interesting (albeit not scientific) survey data.

CollabTalk tweetjam

I still enjoy conducting these monthly Twitter-based events. The feedback comes at a furious pace, with dozens of experts from around the world spending an hour to ask question, provide answers and experiences, and to help be get a better understand of the “pulse” of the community around some of the latest product releases and tech questions.

  • Information Architecture and Microsoft Teams [buckleyPLANET] http://bit.ly/2VmcTq6
  • About to kick off another #CollabTalk TweetJam, this month discussing Information Architecture and Microsoft Teams [Facebook] http://bit.ly/2LIDKIy
  • Post-tweetjam discussion on IA and Microsoft Teams [Periscope] http://bit.ly/2Qh8X60

Chirps

ESPC19 will be in the Czech Republic!A cool new app that I have started playing with on my iPhone (not yet on Android) is Chirp (formerly known as Lookwide), which is a micro-podcasting platform. Each recording is a max of 2 minutes long, and new features are being added every week. What I really want is the ability to compile playlists from multiple people that I follow, so that I don’t have to click on individual “chirps” to hear them, but can compile a playlist that I can listen to as I drive. I’ve created a couple dozen chirps to date, and plan to keep on using this cool little app.

  • The 6 Tenets of Productivity: 1. Clear definition of work [Chirp] http://bit.ly/2CJnCDv
  • From the 4 strategies for building your personal brand, expanding on Strategy 2: Social Media — Using Twitter for search and discovery [Chirp] http://bit.ly/2Rx8z8a

Other Content and Activities

Yes, I still author articles and blog posts that are not tied to a specific client or an event 🙂  You’ll see more of this in 2019.

Mentions

And finally, some recognition and a press release I put together for revealit.io

Looking forward to the upcoming month of December, I’ll be wrapping up several white papers and two major research projects, as well as getting ready for the end-of-year CollabTalk TweetJam on December 27th (check out our new landing page at http://tweetjam.collabtalk.com) which is always the largest tweetjam of the year. Looking forward to that — and I hope you can join us! Be sure to follow @CollabTalk and @buckleyplanet on Twitter for all of the latest updates.

 

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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.