November 2023 Content Wrap-Up

I’m sitting here in my hotel at ESPC23 in Amsterdam after a whirlwind week of sessions, interviews, booth time, and networking, followed by a riverboat tour of the canals and modern art and lights around the city and an overly-fancy dinner with good friends. Love this event, and always great to get back over to see familiar faces in the EMEA community. Best community in tech! And this on the heels of a jam-packed month, with my 8th event in just over 2 months.

I started off the month at 365 EduCon in Chicago with a session on M365 governance and a lot of time in the booth talking with partners and attendees. After a few days home, I was off to Minneapolis for the M365 Twin Cities event where I was simply an attendee, but had some great conversations with partners followed by dinner with more good friends. From MN I traveled to Orlando for Live!360 where I was joined by Ragnar Heil (@ragnarh). It has been many years since I attended this event, and I was pleasantly surprised by the size and response of the audience. They beat their attendee expectations (around 1100-1200) and our booth was constantly swamped.

In between my travels, I was able to be a guest on the .NET on AWS Podcast with former-MVP Brandon Minnick, who I also highlighted on #MVPbuzzChat this month. For what is usually a technical show to talk about all-things .NET, Brandon invited me on to talk about building and growing technical communities, which is something I’ve done throughout my career and am always happy to talk about. Great chat, definitely check it out!

After a few days home and a wonderful Thanksgiving dinner with 3 of my 4 kids and their families, it was off to #ESPC23 in Amsterdam. I had one session on the newly-minted Inspire Stage in the expo hall where I talked about Technology Enagelism 101. The rest of the week was all about time in the Rencore booth, helping organize and run the Community Reporters, and conducting TekkiGurus interviews. An incredibly busy event. I need to rest for a week after all of this. No more events or work-related travels until mid-January.

One major surprise at ESPC was winning the ESPC Inspire Award for Best Podcast, beating out Marijn and Steve’s Office 365 Distilled and Scott Hanselman’s Hanselminutes Podcast, who I thought would win. Very grateful to the ESPC judges and to this community for supporting my podcast, which continues to grow month after month, and is one of my favorite things to produce each week. Btw, I have some updates to the podcast which I’ll write about next week.

For now, I should wrap up and get some sleep, as I need to get back up and to the airport in about 5 hours.

Oh yeah, and here I am on the road YET AGAIN for my wedding anniversary. Today my wife and I celebrate our 33rd anniversary. Don’t worry, plans are already in place to make it up to her for being gone again. Thankfully ESPC24 is being pushed out a week, so I’ll actually be home for our anniversary next year….as far as I know.

Here is my content from November:

Community Interviews

I thoroughly enjoy these interview series. My podcast is already booked out through end of January, there is a constant stream of new MVPs for my Monday posts, and I’ll be doing much more for TekkiGurus, so keep watching this space!

• CollabTalk Podcast | Episode 100 with Sean McDonough and Geoff Varosky [blog | podcast]
• CollabTalk Podcast | Episode 101 with Kirsty Dawe [blog | podcast]
• CollabTalk Podcast | Episode 102 with Rob May [blog | podcast]
• CollabTalk Podcast | Episode 103 with Norm Young [blog | podcast]
• CollabTalk Podcast | Episode 104 with Gabriel Cowan [blog | podcast]
• #MVPbuzzChat with Eric Shupps [blog | podcast | video]
• #MVPbuzzChat with Melanie Hohertz [blog | podcast | video]
• #MVPbuzzChat with Tanya Henderson [blog | podcast | video]
• #MVPbuzzChat with Brandon Minnick [blog | podcast | video]
• TekkiTalk with Ragnar Heil: Microsoft 365 Governance [TekkiGurus]
• TekkiTalk with Ruven Gotz and Michelle Caldwell: Business Drivers and Strategy of Employee Experience [TekkiGurus]
• TekkiTalk with Karuana Gatimu: About Microsoft Teams Adoption and Community [TekkiGurus]
• TekkiTalk With Gokan Ozcifci: Microsoft Syntex [TekkiGurus]

Focusing More and More on AI

As the world shifts toward AI and prompt-based computing, which is where we use natural language and iterative, refining prompts to communicate with our tools and systems, I am writing more on the topic but also interviewing AI experts from inside and outside of the Microsoft ecosystem. In fact, that’s where a lot of the CollabTalk Podcast is now focused, with executives and experts from across many different industries, sharing how they are leveraging the latest in AI technology. Be sure to check out my interviews with Rob May and Gabriel Cowan as examples.

• 3 Essential Steps to Prepare Your Organization for Microsoft Copilot [blog]
• The Turbulence at OpenAI [blog | reworked mention]
• From Clippy to ChatGPT: AI Advances in Productivity [blog | original post]
• I asked ChatGPT to respond to an O365 licensing question in the style of Duran Duran [Facebook]

Answering community Questions on #M365AMA

This month the team answered 13 questions from the community. If you’ve not watched this series, our goal is not to necessarily walk through and explain the steps to solve the problems (which we almost always do) but to explore the questions, discuss different paths, and share some of our personal experiences. And we have fun with the series.

• What is the best way to create an employee directory? #M365AMA [blog | video]
• Why can’t I upload to a specific teams chat? #M365AMA [blog | video]
• What are the best practices for creating unique permissions? #M365AMA [blog | video]
• Can I print or export notes from a Teams meeting? #M365AMA [blog | video]
• Can I get Exchange Online and Office without an E3? #M365AMA [blog | video]
• Are guests with a Teams license treated differently than one without? #M365AMA [blog | video]
• Can I schedule Intune reports to be sent to end users? #M365AMA [blog | video]
• Are there best practices to auto-expand Exchange archives? #M365AMA [blog | video]
• How do I improve performance on a long Word document? #M365AMA [blog | video]
• What happens to PST files when I move to Outlook online? #M365AMA [blog | video]
• What is the best method to bulk upgrade users from E3 to E5? #M365AMA [blog | video]
• Why do I get a “bad gateway” error when updating files? #M365AMA [blog | video]
• Can I disable MFA on a single account? #M365AMA [blog | video]

Other Articles

Occasionally a topic slips through that is not part of a series or some other planned content strategy. I read something, talk to someone, or hear about something that gives me an idea for a blog post. Here are a couple of examples.

• Crafting Websites That Resonate Across Generations [blog]
• Strengthening Power Platform Governance [blog]

Blatant Self-Promotion

Tooting my own horn. Did I mention that I won Best Podcast at ESPC23??

• .NET on AWS Podcast with Brandon Minnick [Twitch]
• Technology Evangelism 101 presentation from ESPC23 [OneDrive]
• ESPC23 Inspire Award – Best Podcast [ESPC website]
• The Future of the CollabTalk TweetJams [blog]
• October 2023 Content Wrap-Up [blog]

Music

Oh yeah, and I added one more music-related post. More in December.

• Earliest Music Influences [blog]

AND that is a wrap. Heading home in a few hours on a direct flight from Amsterdam to Salt Lake City. Expecting snow at both ends. Planning to sleep through the next couple of days and try to resolve this cold that keeps sticking around (no, its not covid). Looking forward to being off the road for a few weeks. Ciao!