December 2023 Content Wrap-Up

by Christian Buckley · Published January 1, 2024 · Updated January 2, 2024

Happy New Year! I can’t believe how quickly 2023 flew by, and I am genuinely excited about what is ahead of us in 2024. Let’s jump into the December wrap-up, and then talk about some of what is coming…

I returned home from ESPC23 in Amsterdam on December 1st and, after a couple of days to recover from 8 events in just over 3 months, I plotted out my content plans for the month. No more planned event travels for me until February, giving me some much-needed rest as I came home with a big and spent most of the next week sleeping and doing what work I could between cold medicine injections (for a cold that just doesn’t seem to want to go away).

As for content activities, 4 main online events took place in December: speaking at the Microsoft User Group Utah (#MUGUT) on the 5th, moderating the first TekkiGurus webinar on the 13th, co-hosting Episode 0 of a new governance-focused live stream show (also for TekkiGurus), and hosting the end-of-year CollabTalk TweetJam. I’ll talk about each of these below.

Other than that, my days were filled with the usual channel activities: online chats, pinging people on social, and a few phone calls. Most people pushed off conversations until January, but such is the life of someone who works in the channel. As for the rest of the month, after enjoying Christmas with my wife and 3 boys (and their families) here in Utah, my wife and I traveled to Minnesota for 4 days with my daughter and her family, returning home late on the 31st.

Overall, a quiet month with minor travel. As for January, I’ll be co-hosting a Jan 17th live stream along with Ragnar Heil for our new show, Guardians of M365 Governance. This will officially be our Episode 1, with guests David Drever and Joanne Klein. I will also be moderating a webinar on Janu 24th with Shari Oswald called “3 Cs of Microsoft Teams: Communication, Collaboration and Content.” More webinars and great content are expected in Q1 for TekkiGurus, as well as a new blog post on the Rencore blog any day now.

The other massive project is to migrate my blog to a new site (moving it off of Azure, finally) and improve its overall performance, and possibly change up the look and feel. The #1 priority is performance, so look for major improvements soon.

And with that, here’s the content I generated in December:

Interviews

As I often posit, my favorite community activity is interviewing and highlighting the work of others. I’ve landed on a comfortable pace with my #MVPMonday interview schedule with the #MVPbuzzChat series, and surprisingly have not had a problem in maintaining a similar pace with CollabTalk Podcast episodes every Thursday. With the ESPC23 Inspire Award for Best Podcast and some renewed promotions, the numbers have continued to climb for the podcast, with a couple months of content already recorded and more guests booked. In 2024, I plan to relaunch the CollabTalk.com site to host the podcast, while MVP interviews and summary posts will remain here on buckleyplanet.com.

TekkiTalk With Vesa Juvonen: SharePoint and Tekkigurus [TekkiGurus]
CollabTalk Podcast | Episode 105 with Brian Gerstner [blog | podcast]
CollabTalk Podcast | Episode 106 with Joel Stevenson [blog | podcast]
CollabTalk Podcast | Episode 107 with Norm Young [blog | podcast]
CollabTalk Podcast | Episode 108 with Sean McDonough and Geoff Varosky [blog | podcast]
#MVPbuzzChat with David McCarter [blog | YouTube | podcast]
#MVPbuzzChat with Andrew Connell [blog | YouTube | podcast]
#MVPbuzzChat with Shane Young [blog | YouTube | podcast]

Speaking, Hosting, Moderating, and Streaming

Between Rencore, CollabTalk, and TekkiGurus webinars and content, You’ll see more of my smiling face on promotions for upcoming shows, so get ready. Included here are my MUGUT session on “Five Ways to Jumpstart Internal Comms with AI” (which is always fun with the home team) and my ESPC23 session “Technology Evangelism 101,” delivered on the Inspire stage in the expo hall. There’s also a follow-up on in-person community based on a few discussions I had in Amsterdam, and elsewhere over the year.

MUGUT December, Five Ways to Jumpstart Internal Comms with AI [YouTube]
Technology Evangelism 101 [blog | OneDrive]
The Launch of “Guardians of M365 Governance” [TekkiGurus]
TekkiGurus Kicking Off First Webinar [blog]
Moderator: Webinar: Guardians of the Microsoft 365 Cloud, with Liam Cleary [TekkiGurus]

Standalone Articles

I maintain a backlog of article ideas in OneNote, and every once in a while I find the time to work on one of them. Sometimes they’re a fit for the Rencore blog or for TekkiGurus, and other times I’d prefer to publish via buckleyplanet.com. For the long-time attendees of Microsoft’s Build, Inspire, and Ignite conferences, the vast majority of people I speak with have shared their feedback that they would prefer Microsoft return to the in-person conference model and abandon the new hybrid model. I’m sure I’ll write a full post on this topic in the near future.

A Brand-Building Primer for Entrepreneurs and Business Owners [blog]
Understanding ChatGPT vs M365 Copilot vs Copilot for Edge [blog]
The Need for In-Person Community [blog]
How unified communication solutions are transforming collaboration [Verizon]

#M365AMA series

For December, the Ask-Me-Anything panel answered 12 questions from the community. More recordings are being planned for January and February, and a few new faces may be joining the mix. Additionally, we’re planning a 90-minute livestream show sometime soon (January, I think) which was the original format when we launched at the start of the pandemic. For those who remember, we started the series as a weekly livestream during the lockdown thinking we’d recording 5 or 6 episodes, but ended up recording 57 episodes before changing the format a couple of times until we landed on the current pre-recorded sessions split into separate videos + blog posts. We’re bring back the live show for fun, and may make it a quarterly thing.

Can I migrate between SharePoint sites on the same tenant? #M365AMA [blog | YouTube]
How do I log back into Authenticator after clearing my cache? #M365AMA [blog | YouTube]
Can I limit who sees a Teams Channel meeting notification? #M365AMA [blog | YouTube]
Can I turn off Delve and the ability to see Recent Files? #M365AMA [blog | YouTube]
Why does my externally shared Excel link expire? #M365AMA [blog | YouTube]
What are the best practices for setting up new M365 tenants? #M365AMA [blog | YouTube]
Can we create a website and make it visible within Teams? #M365AMA [blog | YouTube]
Why can’t external users see the Team to which they were invited? #M365AMA [blog | YouTube]
Why am I not receiving email from another O365 account? #M365AMA [blog | YouTube]
Why do I see Teams but not tenants using my personal account? #M365AMA [blog | YouTube]
Can Bookings block in-person meeting requests when working elsewhere? #M365AMA [blog | YouTube]
Can Teams aggregate chats from across multiple tenants? #M365AMA [blog | YouTube]

Quarterly CollabTalk TweetJam

Having moved the monthly tweetjams to quarterly, this was our first tweetjam since September, and the end-of-year sharing of major takeaways and 2024 predictions did not disappoint. I’m still going through community comments on Twitter and will be compiling some of my thoughts on what was shared.

Microsoft 2023 Reflections and Forecasts for 2024 [blog]

Blatant Self-Promotion

Some of my other monthly writings that were more about promoting my content that adding anything to the conversation.

Changes to #MVPbuzzChat [blog]
Launching Guardians of M365 Governance [blog]
November 2023 Content Wrap-Up [blog]

Music

And finally, my monthly music contributions to the blog. I’m especially excited to share the video link to the History of Industrial Music, one of my favorite genres, created by Trash Theory. In fact, I’m about half way through another episode on The Eurythmics, and have identified a few others that I’ll need to save and watch later. Great stuff.

My Winter Playlist [blog]
Blue Plate Special: Dead Can Dance [blog]
The History of Industrial Music [blog]

And that’s it for my December content, concluding 28 months of daily posts here on my blog + whatever else I could create for other sources. More content announcements later in Q1, so please be sure to subscribe and follow me. Thanks!