October 2014 Content Wrap-Up

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Another month flew by at mind-blistering speed. While the volume of content that went live in October was limited, it was jam-packed with activity – including two SharePoint Saturday events taking place in Bend, Oregon on October 4th with myself and Bradley Geldenhuys (@bradgcoza) keynoting, followed by Redmond on the 11th, with Microsoft GM Julia White (above) keynoting.

Other big news in October: I switched my MVP from a SharePoint Server focus to Office 365. I’m not moving away from SharePoint – just expanding my influence more formally into the other areas I have been writing and talking about for months around moving to the cloud, and the growing importance of mobility and social. I was also able to co-present with Steve Marsh (@drstevemarsh) from Metalogix a couple times in the month, I joined a panel event hosted by my good friend Benjamin Niaulin (@bniaulin) from Sharegate, and ran a #CollabTalk tweetjam on the future of the SharePoint IT Pro role with 25 panelists (summary included below).

Add on top of all of this my new company (GTconsult) signed the lease on new office space in downtown Bellevue, and it was quite the full month of activity. And here we are already in November, with the MVP Summit happening all this week on Microsoft campus, followed by a week in Hawaii with my wife, and then SharePoint Connect 2014 in Amsterdam. Oh, and family and Thanksgiving after that. Lots going on, for sure, but, as always, I’ll make some time for new content.

In preparation for my keynote in Amsterdam, I’ve been thinking a lot about the questions around social that customers and community members are raising. Of course, hardly a month goes by that I am not talking about social, but look for an increase over the next few weeks:

One of my main clients is the Glyma team, launching over the next few weeks, and the work they are doing to improve the way that teams capture knowledge and expertise. Some pretty cool stuff around the UX space is happening within the SharePoint world, some of which bleeds over into social.

As always, I have a steady stream of broad business topics in the queue, some of them generated from my constant business magazine consumption, others based on ideas and annoyances that come from the daily grind:

WP_20141011_007[1]I also wrote a bit about the events mentioned above. In particular, this month’s #CollabTalk tweetjam was very successful, with over 25 panelists and a couple dozen other participants. If you are an IT Pro, its definitely worth a read:

And finally, I wouldn’t be me if I didn’t post a few articles on the topics of governance and migration planning. It’s my meat and potatoes, people.

It was a jam-packed and exciting month. I enjoyed playing host to Brad and Craig for the couple weeks they were here from South Africa, and look forward to having them back over for various events next year. I believe that Brad and Warren are coming over for SPTechCon in February, so stay tuned.

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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 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.