March 2020 Content Wrap-Up

by Christian Buckley · Published April 1, 2020 · Updated April 1, 2020

Another month has flown by…but for some reason, this one feels different. Oh yeah…the COVID-19 crisis is currently underway. Hopefully all of you are staying safe and in good spirits. As someone who has worked from home for the past decade, not much of a change for me other than the cancelling of 6 speaking events between April 1st and mid-June alone, and it sound like most other in-person events are hoping for a change before the fall, or have rescheduled/cancelled until 2021. While there have been some customer impacts, and some family impacts (my inlaws had their one-year mission to London cut short, and they’re now living with us until end of August), we’re doing great here. My biggest complaint is all of the people out walking their dogs when I want to walk my dogs. #firstworldproblems

One change I’ve made, as are many of you, is to ramp up my online activities. I’m working with a couple of my clients to schedule more webinars, and I launched a community-driven Office Hours that we’re doing twice each Monday, at 8am and 6pm Pacific for the EMEA and APAC regions, respectively. We’re running these on Zoom so that we can live stream on Facebook, and I’ll be posting the recordings (soon) to YouTube with quick links to the questions people have asked and our collective responses. These panel Q&A sessions are open to everyone, so watch my Twitter feed (@buckleyplanet) or my announcements on the Office 365 Community group page on Facebook.

And yes, I have been working on a lot of content. Here’s the latest that has gone live this past month:

Productivity Tips

Tom Duff (@duffbert) and I are back in the zone, and are planning to run our Productivity Tips webinars every month this year. Not too big of a challenge now that nobody is traveling. But these are a ton of fun to do, and following each event, i am trying to go through and write up an expanded post on each of the tips that I shared. From the list below, you can see that I am also going back through older webinar materials and posting the still-relevant productivity tips. It’s also still on my agenda to build out a searchable Power BI database of every tip we’ve shared, which Tom and I can cross-link with supporting blog posts and both Microsoft and community content. As you can see from the list below, haven’t had time to get to this yet, but it will happen eventually…

Office 365 Productivity Tips “March Madness” [buckleyPLANET, YouTube, Slideshare]
Build your own Learning Portal with Learning Pathways [buckleyPLANET]
Leveraging the New Office App [buckleyPLANET]
Adding Documents as Tabs in Microsoft Teams [buckleyPLANET]
Visualize your Data with Ideas in Excel [buckleyPLANET]
Pin Apps to the Left-Hand Rail in Microsoft Teams [buckleyPLANET]
Convert Word Documents into Webpages [buckleyPLANET]
Play My Emails in Outlook Mobile [buckleyPLANET]

TweetJam

We are 3 months into our 9th year of running these community-driven Twitter discussions, with this month’s topic covering “Developing a Strategy for Digital Literacy.” The topic came from a late 2019 discussion I had with fellow MVP Tracy Van der Schyff (@tracyvds) and I was reminded of the idea in January by another MVP, Asif Rehmani (@asifrehmani). I put it on the schedule for March, and it was a great conversation, which you can find linked below. Following the tweetjam, Tracy and I jumped on a web meeting and discussed the 7 questions covered in the tweetjam, which is available to view on the CollabTalk YouTube channel, as well as on the CollabTalk Podcast linked below in the Interviews section.

Should We Be Focusing More On Digital Literacy? [buckleyPLANET]
Community Feedback on Digital Literacy [buckleyPLANET, YouTube]

Articles focused on Microsoft

One area where I am trying to improve in my writing is to close out draft articles on my blog. I think I have my drafts down to the mid-80s now, thanks to this flurry of posts. There’s not always a pattern to the timing of these posts. I like to write about what interests me then and there, sometimes inspired by another MVPs blog post found through the social networks, and other times driven by questions I hear or read about in community forums. As always, the topics of migration, governance, and change management are always top of mind.

Microsoft’s Vision for Task Management [buckleyPLANET]
Microsoft Teams in a Hybrid Environment [buckleyPLANET]
Considerations for Cloud Governance [buckleyPLANET]
Developing a Successful Strategy for Employee Collaboration [LinkedIn]
Transitioning to a Hybrid SharePoint Environment [buckleyPLANET]
What Kind of Capacity Planning is Needed for SharePoint Online? [buckleyPLANET]
Thoughts from the Cutting Room Floor [buckleyPLANET]
Get Ready, Get Set, Cloud! [buckleyPLANET]

Webinars, and User Group Activities

In March, I spoke at one partner webinar (Zen3) on the topic of Task Management, and hosted fellow MVP Antonio Maio (@antoniomaio2) for a Utah user group webinar. And as mentioned above, I also hosted 4 Microsoft Community Office Hours session, all of which you can find from the facebook live stream recordings below. I will definitely be ramping up on this activity in April and May, continuing to run the weekly Office Hours sessions and, hopefully, lining up weekly webinars and other live streams with fellow MVPs and community experts.

Project Manager and Stakeholders Tools for Success [Zen3]
Understanding Tasks End-to-End [Slideshare]
Enhance Productivity, Compliance and Knowledge with Project Cortex [buckleyPLANET, YouTube]
Microsoft Community Q&A [buckleyPLANET]
MS Community Q&A, Episode 1 [Facebook]
MS Community Q&A, Episode 2 [Facebook]
MS Community Q&A, Episode 3 [Facebook]
MS Community Q&A, Episode 4 [Facebook]

Interviews

Things were strangely quiet on the interview front this past month. I’ve included my post-tweetjam interview with Tracy here, and I’ve been going through older #MVPbuzzChat interviews with missing blog posts, building the pages and posting them here. I think I have around 8 to 10 to go, and should have that wrapped up this month. You can find that entire interview series here.

The CollabTalk Podcast, Episode 17 | Digital Literacy with Tracy Van Der Schyff [Soundcloud]
MVPbuzzChat with Dean Swann, post-dated to May 2019 [blog]
MVPbuzzChat with Stefano Tempesta, post-dated to June 2019 [blog]
MVPbuzzChat with Agnes Molnar, post-dated to June 2019 [blog]

Client Content

I had a few client articles get posted in March, and that should also increase in April and May.

EUM guest webinar with Asif Rehmani [EUM, Slides]
Five Core Workflows That Can Be Improved With WEBCON [buckleyPLANET]
Why is External Sharing Important? [EUM]
Getting Executive Support for Workflow Automation [LinkedIn]
Redefining Change Management [WEBCON]
Model-Driven and Adaptive [WEBCON]

Unabashed Self-Promotion and other fun stuff

And finally. I’m trying to take a page from Matthew Hughes (@RealKingofVideo) and others who are working their way through this difficult time of quarantine by doing more online, sharing not just work content, but a personal perspective. Last week for #MusicFriday I pulled out two of my large cases for my vinyl collection and talked about many of the items. I’m planning to do it again this week and next. I’m also planning to capture some other FB live streams of my work space and neighborhood, hopefully providing people with a break from work with something lighter and fun.

Duran Duran Hidden Gems on #MusicFriday [buckleyPLANET]
Looking through my vinyl collection [Facebook]
Afternoon stroll with the dogs [Facebook]
February 2020 Content Wrap-Up [buckleyPLANET]

And that was my March! Lots more content coming your way in April, so keep watching this space.If you have any questions or comments, please leave me a note below or reach out to me through the various social channels. Like many of you, I am online just about all day, every day, and I welcome the interaction. Stay safe out there!