April 2021 Content Wrap-Up

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I’ve had a number of conversations with people these past few weeks about the handful of in-person events starting to pop up on the calendar later this year. For example, coming to Orlando in early June is the Microsoft 365 Collaboration Conference, formerly known as the SharePoint Conference and housed for 2 years in Las Vegas. I’m still on the fence on this one — specifically, I’m just not sure that the masses are ready to turn up en masse. We’ll see how it goes with in-person attendance. For the North American Collaboration Summit in August, I’m planning to attend again this year (as I did last year) and fully expect the numbers to grow as more and more of Americans are vaccinated, and the masks come off. Speaking off masks off, I went to my local theater this afternoon with my son Preston to see the new Mortal Kombat movie (it beat my expectations, btw) and was surprised to find all employees and most customers mask-free. It was weird to see, but just part of getting back to normal. Still had spacing between seats (1 empty seat between parties instead of the previous 3) and social distancing in all lines, but overall it felt like we were back to normal.

April’s Content Wrap-Up includes two events — AvePoint’s #ShiftHappens Conference, and the M365 Virtual Marathon event. For the former, I participated in two sessions: first, I led a panel session with Melinda Morales (@trulymelinda) and Richard Vine (@viney001) from Dyson to talk about their accelerated digital transformation due to the pandemic, and how the M365 Maturity Model can be used to help organizations assess and build a strategy regardless of where they are today. It was a great conversation, and I plan to do a follow up podcast interview with both Melinda and Richard in the coming weeks to further explore the topic. For the latter session, I joined tyGraph’s Ed Senez (@edsenez) to talk about measuring Microsoft Teams adoption, with Ed sharing some great insights from his customer deployments. Be sure to check out the on-demand recordings below. And for M365VM, I put together a collection of 20 of my favorite M365 Productivity Tips, with some new items and some oldies-but-goodies from my webinars with Tom Duff (@duffbert). The recording should be shared publicly soon, and I’ll share the link as soon as I see it go live.

Other than that, just a really busy month with work. Still waiting on the SEC for AvePoint’s public merger, still playing catch-up with email, and enjoying the ride. Here’s what I contributed to the content gods in April:

May be a cartoon of 2 people, screen and text that says 'APRIL TH 11:00 AM EST Join us Live today, Microsoft 365 Compliance Host CHRISTIAN Guest BUCKLEY AvePoint AvePoint avept.it/o365hours Microsoft OFFICE HOURS 365 ** Live every other Wed! ERICA TOELLE Microsoft 8:00 AM PST 11:00 AM EST f 100 @avepoint #0365hours'Office Hours

To clarify, I am participating in two flavors of Office Hours: the weekly Microsoft Community Office Hours runs every Monday morning at 8am Pacific, and includes a cast of Microsoft MVPs and community members sitting around and chatting for 90 minutes via #CollabTalk live stream, attempting to answer questions posted to several online community sites. These recordings are posted to the buckleyPLANET blog and CollabTalk YouTube page. And then there is the Office 365 Hours interviews every 1st and 3rd Wednesday morning, also at 8am Pacific. These are 1-on-1 interviews hosted by me with various guests and a single topic of discussion. For example, my last session with former MVP-turned-Microsoftie Erica Toelle (@ericatoelle) discussing M365 compliance. Both a ton of fun, both sponsored by AvePoint, and tyGraph sponsoring the Monday shows. Be sure to check them out!

Guest appearance on Microsoft's Hello World showTweetJam, and TweetJam Promotions

For the April #CollabTalk TweetJam, we focused on one of the most common (and constant) questions I hear as an MVP: “Which M365 tool should I use, and when?” As always, it was a hearty discussion with some great online interactions. We attempted to run a Clubhouse discussion simultaneously, but didn’t get many people in the room, so we closed it early. Besides, I like to think of myself as a multitasker, but trying to run a fast-paced tweetjam while also leading a discussion room was a bit much.Should have learned my lesson from Ignite 2019 when I attempted to run 5 tweetjams in 5 days WHILE doing in-person interviews, one of which was Julia White. The phrase “keep it simple, stupid” comes to mind. But the Microsoft team that runs the daily Hello World show were nice enough to include me in their lineup, with my MVP/RD lead Christian Talavera (@cmtalavera) interviewing me about the #CollabTalk tweetjam history, and how people can get involved. Check it out!

May be an image of 1 person and textAvePoint Channel Expansion + Sessions

As mentioned above, here are the two sessions that I participated in with the #ShiftHappens Conference. I also submitted a video to a partner conference that AvePoint is running under the #AvePointPitchPerfect hashtag. It’s my pitch to partners about why you should work with AvePoint.

  • #ShiftHappens​ 2021 – Application of the M365 Maturity Model Following Rapid Adoption [YouTube]
  • #ShitHappens​ 2021 – 7 Essential Ways to Measure Microsoft Teams Adoption [YouTube]
  • My submission to the #AvePointPitchPerfect contest [LinkedIn]

May be an image of 1 person and text that says 'Microsoft 365 COLLABORATION CONFERENCE Microsoft Teams Microsoft SharePoint Microsoft Power Platform June 8-10, 2021 WALT DISNEY WORLD SWAN AND DOLPHIN Join us in person or virtually for a very special hybrid event! M365Conf.com @M365CONF #M365CONF20 CHRISTIAN BUCKLEY MICROSOFT RD+MVP, MICROSOFT GTM DIRECTOR AVEPOINT Formerly SharePoint CONFERENCE & Microsoft 365 SAVE $50 with discount code BUCKLEY'Blatant Self-Promotion

And wrapping up this month’s content is a healthy dose of self-promotion, including upcoming

  • Speaking at Upcoming Events [buckleyPLANET]
  • European SharePoint, Office 365 & Azure Conference [ESPC21]
  • Microsoft 365 Collaboration Conference, June 8-10 [Registration]
  • 20 M365 Productivity Tips That You’ve Probably Never Used (But Should) [Slideshare]
  • Promoting Alan1 (again) [buckleyPLANET]
  • Alan1 – Love | Trust [YouTube]
  • Alan1 – No Words (No Memory) [YouTube]
  • Alan1 – (She Is) Luminous [YouTube]
  • Opened a BitClout account [BitClout]
  • March 2021 Content Wrap-Up [buckleyPLANET]

That’s it for April. But don’t worry, lot’s more planned for May. In fact, I tweeted out my plans for the month as follows:

tweet for May 2021

 

Oh yeah, and I made some new stickers:

May be an image of Jeff Teper and text that says 'WFH #Microsoft #SharePoint the Living #Shar rePointLife Pants Optional'

 

 

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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.