April 2024 Content Wrap-Up

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I can’t believe it’s already May 1st! Greetings from Orlando where I am attending the M365 Community Conference. As per usual, the 1st post of every new month is a summary of all of the events and content from the previous month, with a few words about what is coming up in the new month. This is week 5 of weekly events before I can take a break. April was an incredibly busy month, so here we go:

NACS in DallasI kicked off the month by attending SQL Saturday Utah….on a Friday…at the Salt Lake Community College campus in Sandy, Utah…which is also where we hosted CollabDays Utah just 2 weeks later. But I digress. That same evening, I keynoted the Microsoft Copilot and Viva Days event, which was organized by the Microsoft 365 India User Group. You can find out more about my presentation on the Future of Work in the Events section below. During the second week of April, I traveled down to Dallas/Ft.Worth for the newly-moved-from-Branson-Missouri North American Cloud & Collaboration Summit…and arrived in time to see the full eclipse. I had fun with my session on Microsoft Copilot and Viva, with some great interaction with the audience.

Once back in Utah, it was all-hands-on-deck for CollabDays Utah, which was our 10th in-person event since we launched SharePoint Saturday Utah back in 2011. You can also read a little more about that history down below in the Events section. I again shared my Copilot and Viva session, and had a great conversation about the branding problems with Viva. While our numbers were below our pre-covid tally, it was a great crowd and an excellent event. We’re talking about possibly combing the SQL Saturday event with CollabDays next year, and even adding a unified communications track so that we have something for everyone. We’re going to target February again, allowing us to host another ShareSki event as in the past, so keep your eye out for updates!

In week four, I spent a couple of days volunteering for the Comms vNext event in Denver and participated in the Comms vNext Podcast where I sat down with show organizer and fellow MVP Adam Ball to talk a little bit about my own podcast and some of the collaboration trends we’ve been seeing over the past decade, with a shift toward adoption, engagement, and employee experience. Take a listen!

And finally, the last few days of the month, I traveled to Orlando, Florida for another M365 Community Conference with 3,000 of (some of) my closest friends. If you’re here at the event, you can find me in the Rencore booth….probably sweating profusely, as I’m fairly certain that the Rencore hoodies we are wearing are made out of aardvark skin (which is a Better Off Dead movie reference, people). Be sure to stop by and say hello!

And after all of that, I’m home for a few weeks. I am planning to attend PWRCON 7 TechCon365 in Seattle, but I still need to confirm details. Probably maybe.

And here’s the content I generated in April:

CollabDays Utah at SLCC in Sandy, UtahEvents stuff

Usually included with the blatant self-promotion content, I thought I’d highlight the specific event outputs here instead of down below.

  • Guardians of M365 Governance EP.4 with Sue Hanley [YouTube]
  • Preparing for CollabDays Utah [blog]
  • The Future of Work Is…Change [blog]
  • Comms vNext Podcast with Adam Ball (produced by Eric Marsi) [LinkedIn]

Podcast Interviews

It only took a year and a half, but I finally sat down with Microsoft’s Adam Harmetz to discuss the data behind the products we use and love. I’ve had some fantastic guests on the podcast over the past few years, but I’m loving these in-depth discussions on AI and collaboration lately as more and more people want to talk about the cultural impacts of these technologies…which is my greatest passion. Be sure to subscribe!

Speaker and sponsor dinner at CollabDays UtahAMA’s

I swapped out AMA’s for additional blog posts last month, but here we are back in the saddle with 14 community questions answered in April. I still have a lot of post-production to do on existing recordings, but I plan to gather more experts for new recordings — and possibly another 90-minute live stream — sometime in May. Watch for it!

  • How should I transfer sensitive content into SharePoint? #M365AMA [blog | YouTube]
  • When should I use Dataverse for Teams over Microsoft Lists? #M365AMA [blog | YouTube]
  • Why should I use Microsoft Teams instead of Zoom? #M365AMA [blog | YouTube]
  • Can I see and track the geo location of M365 users? #M365AMA [blog | YouTube]
  • How do I safely archive very large email accounts? #M365AMA [blog | YouTube]
  • How granular is the SharePoint Highlighted Content webpart? #M365AMA [blog | YouTube]
  • How can I make managing SharePoint permissions more scalable? #M365AMA [blog | YouTube]
  • Is the process to migrate from Google to M365 simple? #M365AMA [blog | YouTube]
  • Why does the new Teams restrict access to my Mac? #M365AMA [blog | YouTube]
  • Can I merge two profiles created with the same email? #M365AMA [blog | YouTube]
  • How do I delete a calendar invite that the sender cancelled? #M365AMA [blog | YouTube]
  • Can I apply a dynamic security group to a shared mailbox? #M365AMA [blog | YouTube]
  • How do I reroute mail through the right tenant post-migration? #M365AMA [blog | YouTube]
  • How do I create an app identifier for SharePoint on-prem? #M365AMA [blog | YouTube]

Blatant Self-Promotion

I can’t go a month without a little self-bell-wringing.

  • Upcoming Events for Spring 2024 [blog]
  • March 2024 Content Wrap-Up [blog]

Music

Four more weekend posts with some of my favorite bands, past and current. I have songs from all four of these artists in my daily rotation via Spotify. Enjoy these selections from their deep catalogs:

  • Blue Plate Special: Swimming [blog]
  • Blue Plate Special: Franz Ferdinand [blog]
  • Blue Plate Special: Japan [blog]
  • Blue Plate Special: M83 [blog]

And that is it for April! I’ll share some of my post-M365 conf thoughts next week, with a lot more content coming in May, so stay tuned! And for those counting, I am closing in on my latest content goal of 1,000 posts in 1,000 days, with my 3-year mark at the end of August. Thanks for reading, and if you haven’t already done so, please be sure to subscribe to my YouTube page!

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.

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