May 2014 Content Wrap-Up

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May was the close of a fairly large content push, and June is the beginning of a new set of content themes. Well, not new new…as in a lot of new content, but not new themes or topics for me. Following new content for the SharePoint Conference in Las Vegas, a couple SharePoint Saturday events, and then SPTechCon and the European SharePoint Conference in Barcelona, a lot of the content I was pushing out had to do with these events, with some of it foundational content for events later this year. I am about to embark on a rather large content initiative at work, some of which is hinted at within the content I produced in the latter half of this month.

For those who have not been watching, the Metalogix website just got a minor update, and with it some new messaging: “Serious Tools. For Serious Collaboration.” I like the new tagline, but while the site messaging doubles-down on feature and single-product messaging, my focus continues to be around the broader themes that really do encompass the portfolio of products that we provide for SharePoint, Exchange, Office365 and Azure.

The three primary themes around which I’ll be focusing the bulk of my content in the coming months are 1) hybrid SharePoint, 2) governance, risk and compliance, and 3) change management. As you can see here, nothing I haven’t written about in the past – however, I’m actually about to kick off a research effort similar to what I’ve done in the past around governance, and it’ll touch on all three areas. I’m pretty excited about this roadmap, and will share more as it rolls out.

Regarding hybrid SharePoint deployments, I led a massive tweetjam last week, with 20 SharePoint MVPs participating, and 70 total participants with 600 tweets (and a couple hundred re-tweets) logged in an hour. Not too shabby. I’ve just scratched the surface of what I’ll be covering this year:

Always on my mind is the topic of governance. I’ll be digging into the details of what governance actually means to our customers and partners, because the word itself has become a meaningless platitude for most. So I’ll be getting more granular, talking about information management, reporting, compliance and auditing, information governance, policy creation and management, and the people-aspects of governance implementation (from corporate governance to managing team sites):

The topic of ‘change management’ is another broad term. My experience goes back to my days of running project management teams and internal IT governance v-team, and for a few years spent in the software configuration management space. As with governance, I’ll be getting a lot more granular:

After participating in a podcast panel with Laura Rogers (@wonderlaura), Joel Oleson (@joeloleson), Yaacov Cohen (@yaacovc), and analyst Dana Gardner, I jotted down some ideas about the general state of collaboration, and will share a few more thoughts this month:

A huge theme in April and May, of course, was around what it takes to make social successful – culminating in my keynote presentation with Microsoft’s Mark Kashman (@mkashman) at the European SharePoint Conference. Our slides are included below, as well as video links of our session from the community:

And as always, I occasionally share my thoughts and ideas on various business and leadership topics. I am a closet organizational leadership development junkie, and am a voracious reader of business magazines, and marketing and leadership books. I’m trying to push most of this kind of content out through LinkedIn where I’ll hit the broadest base:

I’ll have a post up this week with a summary of my upcoming travels (June and July), and hope that if you’re reading this and will be in the vicinity of one of my upcoming events, you’ll come say hello. It’s my dream to someday have all 4 people who read my blog in a room at the same time. I’m dreaming big.

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 the Director of North American Partner Management for leading ISV Rencore (https://rencore.com/), leads content strategy for TekkiGurus, and is an advisor for both revealit.TV and WellnessWits. He hosts the monthly #CollabTalk TweetJam, the weekly #CollabTalk Podcast, and the Microsoft 365 Ask-Me-Anything (#M365AMA) series.