Wasn’t August supposed to be a quiet month? Traditionally, the month of August is a sleeper month for those of us working primarily within the Microsoft ecosystem as many Microsoft employees take a good portion of the month off before going into the fall crunch-time. And yet this past month was a sprint. Maybe that’s just part of the “new normal” or work. Throw into the mix that I became a grandfather last month, and you could say that the month will remain a historical milestone for me. The month included the typical activities: an Office 365 Productivity Tips webinar with Tom Duff (@duffbert) and a #CollabTalk TweetJam, a slew of social posts, several MVP and Microsoft employee interviews, and a handful of articles on the blog. Add to that a couple guest speaker webinars for the Utah SPUG Virtual User Group, and three sessions at SharePointFest Seattle (#SPFestSea), and, as you can see — it was a jam-packed month. More of the same happening in September as I travel back out to Seattle for a Microsoft Teams activity, another O365 Productivity Tips webinar, another tweetjam, more interviews, more webinars, and more articles.

Interviews

I’ve been able to get the interview pre and post-production down to a science, but will always struggle to get people onto the calendar. If you are a Microsoft or Adobe MVP and would like to participate in this series, please DM me for details and let’s get you scheduled. My goal is to record & publish at least one per week, but I’d love to do more. You can find the complete list of MVP interviews on the top nav of my blog.

• #MVPbuzzChat with John White [buckleyPLANET | Soundcloud]
• #MsftBuzzChat with Mark Kashman [buckleyPLANET | Soundcloud]
• #MVPbuzzChat with Jeff Willinger [YouTube | Soundcloud]
• #MVPbuzzChat with Matt Wade [YouTube | Soundcloud]
• #MVPbuzzChat with Ragnar Heil [YouTube | Soundcloud]
• #MVPbuzzChat with Melissa Hubbard [YouTube | Soundcloud]
• #MsftBuzzChat with Jon Maunder [YouTube | Soundcloud]

Office 365 Productivity Tips

Tom and I continue to bring together 10 new team and individual productivity tips each month. You can find the related blog post, slides, and video recording here. It is still on my to do list to create a searchable database via Power BI on my website, making it that much easier to find tips. For now, simply click on the top nav of my blog to get a link list of all of our sessions. Each blog post includes a quick link list so that you can jump to the desired tip instead of having to wade through the entire recording.

• Office 365 Productivity Tips “August Altercation” [buckleyPLANET | YouTube | SlideShare]

August 2019 #CollabTalk TweetJam

In last month’s #CollabTalk tweetjam held on August 28th, our topic was “Process Automation in the Intelligent Workplace” with a huge panel and some solid numbers from our Power BI analytics. Sponsored once again by our friends at tyGraph, the one-hour event included 292 tweets, 2.33 million impressions, reaching almost 107k profiles. Not bad for a single hour event! If you missed the event, you can see every single tweet shared by scrolling to the final tab in Power BI. Of course, you can also do a search on Twitter. Have fun with that. 🙂

• Building a Responsive, Proactive, and Predictive Organization [buckleyPLANET]
• tyGraph stats from August 2019 #CollabTalk TweetJam [Power BI]
• Preparing for today’s tweetjam on “Process Automation in the Intelligent Workplace” [Facebook]

Articles

Yes, I still occasionally write articles. Most of my writing these days is for clients, but I am slowly adding to the buckleyPLANET library of content once again, so keep watching this space:

• Hiding Teams (Office 365 Groups) from Outlook [buckleyPLANET]
• Productivity at the Core of Cultural Change [buckleyPLANET]
• Supporting Diversity and Inclusion within the Channel [buckleyPLANET]
• Speaking at SharePointFest Seattle 2019 [buckleyPLANET]
• Why Digital Transformation Projects Fail [buckleyPLANET]

Webinars + Sessions

As mentioned above, I hosted two #UTSPUG / #MUGUT webinars this past month, with recordings available below. Additionally, you can find two of my 3 session slides below. I did not upload my 20 Favorite Office 365 Productivity Tips slides to SlideShare, as they are duplicates of content shared in the O365 Productivity Tips series with Tom. If you attended SPFest, you can find the slides in the attendee portal. Otherwise, you’ll have to dig through the various recordings to find what was shared. Sorry, Charlie. I’m also including a link here to a quick survey I did in support of my extranets sessions, and which is still open for those who would like to share their input (4 questions) on external sharing.

• New Video Upload : Unstructured vs Structured Extranets in Office 365 [buckleyPLANET | YouTube]
• New Video Upload : Automating your Approval Processes with Microsoft Flow [buckleyPLANET | YouTube]
• Extending your Information Architecture to Microsoft Teams [SlideShare]
• Options for Building a Modern Extranet [SlideShare]
• External Sharing Survey for #SPFestSea [Microsoft Forms]

I’m always happy to add my voice to the work of others — in August, Paul Keijzers (@KBworks) reached out to me about participating in his article “4 of the biggest Microsoft Influencers about failures 90% of the companies make with the modern workplace” for which I answered several questions. Thanks again for the invite, Paul!

And finally, I was included in a list out on the interwebs: Unified Comms Influencers: The Top 50 for 2019 Revealed [Mio Dispatch]. Always great to be included in these kinds of lists as they help expand my readers/followers, so if that’s how you found this blog, welcome!

That’s it for my summary. As I mentioned above, lots of the same planned for September. It appears that I’ll have at least 2 road trips each month to close out this year, including speaking at Ignite in Orlando in November, and the European SharePoint, Office 365, and Azure Conference (#ESPC) in Prague in December. Looking forward to seeing you there!