buckleyPLANET

Lighting a Fire Under Ignite

As many of you probably saw yesterday, Microsoft announced about half of the sessions for the upcoming mega-event, Ignite (http://ignite.microsoft.com/), to take place May 4-8th in Chicago. As part of the initial push, they’ve released a few promotional videos (like this one with Bill Baer and Michael Connolly), which, I am sure, someone is going to take the time to comb through, inferring and imagining everything that is said and, more importantly, what is NOT said as proof of whatever conclusion they’ve already made about the state of the Microsoft world. Looking forward to that.

But aside from the side show entertainment, it is a first look at some of the topics to be covered. Surf over to the Sessions tab and you’ll find Microsoft’s best event website yet, with an easy to navigate selection of topics, organized by audience, topic, format, and level. It’s a little something for everyone. Of course, speakers and timing are not yet available, but at least you’ll get a sense of what is in store, and I assume Microsoft if monitoring feedback for decisions on final topics. At the last SharePoint conference in Vegas, my title and abstract got hijacked in the last couple weeks leading up to the event, causing me to make a few adjustments to my session – but I knew going in that it could happen, and overall I filled a hole on the content roadmap that Microsoft wanted to be sure was covered. Fine by me.

As for content – again, remember that only half the catalogue is up – there are already 85 sessions that cover Office 365, 44 that cover SharePoint, and within those some topics that are sure to be jam-packed, such as

• “The Evolution of SharePoint (vNext On-Premises Overview and Roadmap)” which is what most of the crowd wants to hear about
• “Hybrid Business Connectivity Services with SharePoint Online” which I’m hoping will help answer some of the needs of organizations who want the latest BI capability but who have concerns about, or restrictions that limit their ability to move important data to the cloud
• “Meet Office 365 Compliance Center: Your One Stop Shop for Everything Compliance” to demonstrate the much-needed improvements around compliance, auditing, reporting, and so forth

This time around I am thrilled to be part of the featured speakers, and will be participating in a few things (in addition to the formal agenda, GTconsult has a few things up our sleeves) during the week.

If you have not yet registered for Ignite, I hope you consider going. The show is going to be massive, and with the availability of Windows 10, and the next version of SharePoint on-prem being imminent, its going to be the place to be. When SharePoint 2013 was released in conjunction with Office and Windows et al, it was discussed within the community that that would be the last time we’d see this “uber release” cycle from Microsoft, having entered this world of online first and iterative development. But I have to tell you, the alignment of all of the major MS shows into a single conference and with the releases that are coming, it sure feels like another uber-release. Is it just me?

Collaboration is still about Search

Does anyone remember a few years back when Google ran an ad campaign about how “It’s all about search?” I remember thinking to myself, “What a dumb ad. The internet is not just about search – its about a billion different things.” And yet they were spot on. If you have no way of finding those billion different things, the internet becomes less useful, less transformative. And the same goes for our document and collaboration management platforms. We get all crazed over the next new thing in social or compliance management or communication, but ultimately it comes down to the search experience. All of these features add context, create additional content, and allow us to become more engaged – but at the center of it all is the search experience.

With the launch of the #CollabTalk show on IT Unity this month, there was the tiniest bit of consternation with fans of the 2-year old #CollabTalk tweetjams about whether that model would go away. No folks, the “show” and the “tweetjam” are two very different things. The #CollabTalk show is about the latest news and community chatter around SharePoint, Office 365, et al. The tweetjam remains as a deep-dive into a specific topic each month, as with last month’s focus on SharePoint predictions for 2015 that drew more than 100 participants and generated over 4.2 million impressions (wow). And now that episode 1 of the show is in the can, its time to break the internet by hosting another tweetjam.

This month, the topic is “The Future of SharePoint Search” and will include some of the leading voices in search from the community. Please join us this Friday, January 30th at 9am PST as we explore this topic in depth.

What is a tweetjam, you ask? It’s a gathering of experts on a very public channel (Twitter) allowing anyone to watch or participate. We provide a site at Twubs.com/CollabTalk to capture the conversation, or you can use Twitter or Hootsuite or any other platform you’d like to follow along or jump in. Over the course of the hour, we’ll walk through 7 main questions and give our panelists and participants a chance to answer, share links and experiences, and to ask their own follow up questions, The only guidance is to remember to include the #CollabTalk hashtag and, where relevant, the question/answer number so that people can follow the conversation.

The questions we'll be asking include:

1. What are 3 essential steps when planning your SharePoint search strategy?
2. How important is search to a hybrid SharePoint deployment, and why?
3. What aspects of SharePoint 2013 search capability do organizations fail to take full advantage of?
4. What do admins need to know about the search management experience?
5. How does Delve and the Office Graph change your search strategy, if at all?
6. How does search fit into the NextGen portals strategy?
7. What are the biggest gaps in SharePoint's search roadmap, whether on prem or online?

For this month’s event, the following experts will be participating in our panel (with more to be added):

• Jeff Fried (@jefffried), cto and vp of engineering at BA Insight
• Agnes Molnar (@molnaragnes), SharePoint MVP, founder and managing consultant at Search Explained
• Marc Anderson (@sympmarc), consultant at Sympraxis Consulting
• Naomi Moneypenny (@nmoneypenny), Office365 MVP and cto at ManyWorlds
• Benjamin Niaulin (@bniaulin), SharePoint MVP and evangelist at ShareGate 
• Jeffrey Schwartz (@JeffreySchwartz), editor at 1105 Media, including Redmond and Redmond Channel
• Eric Riz (@rizinsights), SharePoint MVP and ceo of Empty Cubicle 
• Scot Hillier (@scothillier), SharePoint MVP and independent consultant 
• Jeff Willinger (@jwillie), director of collaboration and social business at Rightpoint 
• Dan Holme (@danholme), Office365 MVP, evangelist, and co-founder of ITUnity
• Craig Tarr (@craig_tarr_, co-founder and COO at GTconsult 
• Edin Kapic (@ekapic), SharePoint MVP and architect at Spenta 
• Gokan Ozcifci (@gokanozcifci), SharePoint MVP and IT infrastructure consultant at Neoxy
• Brett Hill (@bretthill), Office365 MVP (one of the very first!) and manager of technical marketing at Riverbed Technology
• Robert Toro (@SharePointToro), SharePoint practice director at Slalom 
• Barry Jinks (@BJinks), founder and ceo at Colligo
• Chris Tomich (@christomich82), SharePoint consultant, dialogue mapper, and co-founder of Glyma
• Dan Barker (@barkingd), global product manager at Dell Software 
• Jeff Shuey (@jshuey), chief evangelist at K2
• Stacy Deere-Strole (@sldeere), owner of Focal Point Solutions 
• Kanwal Khipple (@kkhipple), Office 365 MVP and founder of 2toLead 
• Eric Overfield (@ericoverfield), branding expert and author, founder of PixelMill 
• Sean McNeill (@S_McNeill), Office365 MVP and senior account executive at SkyKick 
• Erica Toelle (@EricaToelle), business architect at Buildingi
• Jason Himmelstein (@sharepointlhorn), SharePoint MVP and senior technical director of SharePoint at Atrion
• James Fowell (@jdfowell), partner manager at Metalogix
• Michelle Caldwell (@shellecaldwell), SharePoint MVP and director of collaboration at Avanade 
• Ben Curry (@curryben), SharePoint MVP, principal architect and managing partner at Summit 7 Systems  
• Paul Stork (@pstork), SharePoint MVP and MCM, principal architect at BlueChip 
• Fabian Williams (@fabianwilliams), SharePoint MVP and senior consultant at Planet Technologies 
• and your host, Christian Buckley (@buckleyplanet), Office365 MVP and Managing Director, Americas for GTconsult 

As always, I expect quite a few more people to drop in for the live event, and encourage any readers to also join us. Feel free to lurk, or to get engaged in the discussion. Either way, its going to be action-packed and a great source of expertise and opinion. And if you’re interested in more of this kind of discussion, don’t miss episode 2 of the #CollabTalk show on IT Unity taking place February 24th at 10am PST (register here).

Event Snapshot for this Week

There’s a lot going on this week, some of it receiving heavy tweet/email marketing coverage, some of it behind the scenes. I thought I’d put together a quick post to highlight the more public activities slated for this week, hopefully helping to drive registrations and participation.

Rewriting the Rulebook on Managing Knowledge
Tuesday, January 27th at 1pm PST
Hosted by IT Unity
Register at http://bit.ly/1C8BmC4

Abstract: Managing knowledge in a business has always been tough, and these days it has become even tougher. The amount of information available has skyrocketed and so too have the formats, places and channels through which it is received. Complexity around how we gather, organize and effectively use information has magnified – and to deal with this complexity, we need a new approach.

In this webinar, Australian-based information management strategist, SharePoint guru, and award-winning author Paul Culmsee will be joined by Office 365 MVP and well-known SharePoint and social strategist Christian Buckley to help participants rewrite the rulebook on managing their intellectual capital. Find out about new approaches, techniques and tools that can be used within your organization to help better leverage your existing knowledge stores and intellectual capital all using SharePoint and featuring Glyma.

Key topics that we will cover include:

• Avoiding the “what happens when Jeff leaves” brain drain crisis
• Tapping into “what’s in the head” and turning it into usable assets for the business
• Bringing a halt to the revolving cycle of “re-inventing the wheel”
• Stopping the nonsensical repetition of costly mistakes

Building Dynamic SharePoint Applications on Both Office 365 and On-Premises
Wednesday, January 28th at 10am PST
Hosted by GTconsult
Register at http://icont.ac/2K5VG

Abstract: One of the major concerns of organizations investigating or upgrading to Office 365 is whether the solutions they've come to rely on with SharePoint on prem can be duplicated online without code. From workflow and forms to branding and personalization, this webinar will look at techniques and solutions that can be used on SharePoint Online and on prem, enabling rich and dynamic functionality regardless of your environment. Join GTconsult co-founder and COO Craig Tarr, with Office 365 MVP Christian Buckley, as they demonstrate the latest SharePoint capabilities.

Key Takeaways:

• Understand some of the key differences between SharePoint online and on prem
• Learn how powerful solutions, such as project hubs, shopping carts, information roll-ups and other solutions can be built without code
• Pick up some great tips and tricks to make your end users more productive

#CollabTalk TweetJam: The Future of SharePoint Search
Friday, January 30th at 9am PST
Hosted by GTconsult
Join us on Twitter or twubs.com/CollabTalk 

Abstract: For almost 2 years, the #CollabTalk tweetjams have brought together experts and the community for lively discussions around topics that impact SharePoint, Office 365, and other Microsoft productivity solutions. In this month’s discussion, we will tackle the future of SharePoint search, asking our panel and anyone who wants to participate and share their experiences their thoughts on the impacts of Microsoft’s roadmap. Panelists to include the co-hosts of the #CollabTalk Show on IT Unity – Christian Buckley, Naomi Moneypenny, Marc Anderson, and Benjamin Niaulin, as well as experts and MVPs Jeff Fried (BA Insight), Agnes Molnar (MVP, Scot Hillier (MVP), Paul Stork (MVP), Brett Hill (MVP) and others. Follow along on Twitter using the #CollabTalk hashtag, or follow the link to the Twubs site.

As always, in-between these activities I will be publishing a flurry of content, and working on client projects. Lots to do, lots to do….

Leveraging Your Increasingly Complex Knowledge Assets

Time is a fickle thing. You have an hour to kill before a flight, and the time seems to crawl by at a snail’s pace. But the six hours you have left to complete what seems like a simple presentation for a meeting tomorrow morning is gone in a flash of light. So much of our technological advances have to do with our increasing need to control time and space (it seems), or at least to automate, to streamline, to optimize. All for what? To spend more time with our friends and families? Then why is it that with all of our innovations we are spending more time in front of the computer or with our faces buried in our mobile phones while ignoring our families than ever before?

Now take a look at the changes in the international business landscape. The globalization of business is due in large part to some of these same technological advances. In the last decade alone we’ve seen how the need to have an international presence impacts our product and marketing strategies, not to mention our chances at corporate longevity. But even with all of our advances, connecting teams across geographical boundaries remains one of the most difficult tasks to master, much less connecting our disparate business output in context of projects and workloads that cross time zones. With all of our advances in knowledge management and collaboration, our ability to produce has skyrocketed while our ability to correlate what is produced with the work of others has been in decline.

How can you better connect your business output with those you work with, while in different teams, different office, or on different continents? There are conference calls, of course. Video conferencing and webcasts help. Instant Messaging and the various social computing tools, while increasing productivity, can at the same time be one of the biggest productivity drains. We spend countless hours developing and fine tuning our collaboration platforms, only to ignore some of the basic functionality and…well….never actually collaborate with people using these tools. Instead, they become very large, very expensive file shares. The result is very often the creation of new data silos within the organization.

And so we jump to new tools, with more features. We focus on "adoption" and "engagement" and giving people what they say they want in a platform. But none of this matters if you cannot keep your intellectual property -- your content, your ideas, your output -- in sync, make it searchable, share-able, relate-able. All of your efficiency gains at the individual level are irrelevant if communication and sharing fails at the team and corporate level, and if you cannot leverage your vast treasure troves of experience and knowledge to spark innovation within your organization.

At some point in your career, you are going to run into the problem of connecting people and/or data between two or more locations – or at least managing teams across a great divide. With managing multiple teams -- not to mention multiple geographies and time zones -- come problems of complexity, communication, and integration. How do you coordinate activities? How do you manage build schedules? Which of the three "best practices" we have documented will be the best fit for this new organization? How do legal and compliance standards differ, and how will that impact our approach, our budget, and our deadline?

Collaborating across multiple locations has become the norm. When setting up a new office in a distant location, there are certain obvious steps: communication channels need to be established, for sure, and processes must be adapted to meet the needs of a larger, more spread out team. But we cannot assume that having our data centrally located, in the cloud, will automatically solve the problem of capturing, sharing, and getting value from our intellectual property -- our knowledge assets. As my good friend Paul Culmsee says, this is a "wicked problem" that more and more organizations are running into.

In a webinar next Tuesday, January 27th at 1pm PST, Paul and I will be discussing ways in which businesses can better manage their information assets. You can register for our webinar entitled "Rewriting the Rulebook for Managing Knowledge" and learn how to deal with this complexity. Hope you can make it!

You Cannot Over-Plan for a Move to a Hybrid Model

During the inaugural #CollabTalk show on IT Unity this morning, one of the topics we discussed was hybrid SharePoint deployments, and how the messaging out of Microsoft has been an about-face, with more than one third of the sessions at the previous SharePoint Conference focusing on the on prem or hybrid story. One of the comments I made was its no longer a story about upgrade or migration to the next version, but about a transition toward the cloud – and for some, it could be a very long transition. Some organizations are still trying to realize business value out of the investments they’ve already made, and are not yet ready to make additional investments in the3 cloud – no matter how appealing the new capabilities. As the panel agreed today, taking the next steps forward toward the cloud should be based on sound business planning. In short, do what is right for your business, your end users, and your customers.

For those organizations who have decided to make the move to the cloud, Office 365 has become an increasingly attractive platform. But even with the leading SharePoint-to-SharePoint and file share-to-SharePoint solutions, Office365 migrations remain a complex migration activity. Most third-party tools focus on one aspect of the migration (SharePoint content) but fail to provide and end-to-end solution (email, file shares, site structure), leaving it up to the end users to slowly (and manually) migrate their workloads to the new system. Migrations are never as quick and simple as you hope them to be, but having the enterprise-scale tools in place to assess your migration, do the heavy lifting, and then organize and automate management and governance once you've moved, can greatly reduce the risks inherent within migration activities.

Of course, having the tools is just part of the solution -- you still need to do some planning, and have people around you with experience managing the task at hand. When I started working with internal and external customers to plan out their migrations while still with Microsoft, I always started the process with a catalog of content and solutions. While the desired end state (hybrid) is slightly different than what I was working with while still inside the company, my advice to my customers while at Microsoft has not changed much:

• Identify and prioritize the workloads to be moved. Clarify the business benefits of each workload, and employ a phased approach. Recognize that there may also be some workloads that should remain (at least for the near future) within your on premises environment, such as a ticketing system, or a highly customized product development platform. Be aware of the customizations within these workloads -- understand which use cases can be supported today, and move remaining workloads across as your cloud platform matures. 
  
• Clarify the relationship of data and content between platforms. If you are planning to maintain a hybrid platform, think about the need for data or content to be correlated (synchronized) between environments, and how each will be managed. Have a clear understanding of how data, roles, and permissions are shared between on prem and cloud -- throughout the transition if temporary (phased migration) or ongoing if planning to maintain a hybrid environment.
  
• Identify the governance, compliance, reporting constraints. An underlying problem with SharePoint deployments, in general, is that organizations do not make a sufficient effort in defining success metrics, and methods for monitoring activity against those metrics, up front. It is important that you develop a governance strategy for both the old (on prem) and new (cloud) platforms, understanding (and documenting) how they will be managed individually, as well as together as a single platform. For many organization, one of the primary constraints of moving to the cloud is not necessarily the technologies (although there are some limitations, for sure) but in the inability to manage SharePoint Online the same way as on prem.
  
• Define how end users will be transitioned. At the end of the day, no migration will be successful if your end users do not adopt the new platform. When your use cases have been defined, your data and content requirements are being met, and your governance strategy is in place, you also need to consider the end user experience. What is your plan for transitioning users to your new system? Prioritize your use cases, and work with your end users to transition to the new model -- providing training and feedback loops, so that you can learn from the process and improve the model for future workloads.

The main message here is that moving to the cloud is never as simple as pulling out a credit card, signing up for an online service, and adding people's emails. It requires thoughtful planning -- and a lot of heavy lifting. My advice: go in with your eyes open, and don’t skimp on the planning activities. What may appear to be high planning costs up front will save you money and headaches further down the road.

Launching CollabTalk

One of my goals for 2015 is to spend less time on the road, and more time generating content to help the SharePoint community transition to the cloud. Of course, I’ve been telling myself and others that I’d like to do less travel for a couple years now, and somehow it hasn’t quite worked out. But with the move to GTconsult and the opening of our office in downtown Bellevue WA, it’s been a slow but steady switch from globe-trotting evangelist to a P&L owner with more of a regional focus. You’ll still see me out and about on occasion, with trips to APAC and EMEA, and of course across the US. But my intent is to really amplify my online activities through video and content.

Of course, one of my more successful online exploits has been my monthly tweetjams. Started while at Axceler two years back, and maintained through the 13 months with Metalogix, it continues to grow and gets great feedback from community members and customers alike. And no matter what happens next, folks, the tweetjams will continue! In fact, I am finalizing our next tweetjam topic and questions for Friday, January 30th at 9am PST, and will push out details and panelist details later this week. So….going forward, when you hear/see me talking about CollabTalk, its about the online show. When I talk about the CollabTalk tweetjam, you’ll know it’s the Twitter activity (although we may be moving from Twubs.com/CollabTalk over to IT Unity there, as well).

Whenever I do make it out on the road, as with this past weekend when I keynoted SharePoint Saturday Denver, one of my favorite activities is to just sit with my fellow presenters and banter. What’s fun about this is that we get into the technology, sharing war stories and best practices, but in a much more laid back manner. Last fall as I was starting to think about my content goals for end of year and into 2015, and started to think about how I could capture this informal conversational style while still providing value to the community. That’s when I thought to extend the CollabTalk brand – not as a tweetjam replacement, but as an informal (and often funny) conversation between friends around topics that interest us, and those within the SharePoint and Office 365 community.

I shared some of my ideas with Jackie Baillie and Dan Holme at ITUnity.com and they were instantly onboard, offering their platform and support to make it all happen. And so here we are a few weeks later, on the eve of the launch of our new #CollabTalk show, with episode/webisode 1 commencing at 10am PST. If you would like to join our live audience, you can register at http://itunity.com/go/CollabTalk

In case you haven’t seen it, the IT Unity team put together a fun video montage as a promo:

Some aspects of the show will evolve over time. We have a format we’ll be following that will allow us to break up each episode into shorter videos around each topic, which will be great for SEO, as well as for sponsorships. One area where we’re already discussing changes is in ways that we can get the audience to participate. Of course, questions will be monitored within the platform (Adobe Connect), through Yammer on the SPYam network, and using the #CollabTalk hashtag on Twitter. But your feedback is always welcome, so please let us know how we can improve the format – and what topics you would like to hear us discuss.

I’d like to thank the IT Unity team -- Dan, Jackie, Lyman, Erik, Heather, Karen, and the rest of the team -- for all of their help and support to make this program happen, and am excited to get things underway. And, of course, thank you to Benjamin, Marc and Naomi for agreeing to be a part of this. It’s going to be fun.

Hybrid vs Coexistence vs Replication

A couple months back, I was having a conversation with Microsoft's Bill Baer (@williambaer), who most of you know as a technical product marketing manager on the SharePoint team, and for many years now has been the go-to guy for all things upgrade and migration-related (with Sean Livingston a close second). We were talking about the state of the upgrade and migration space, and specifically, about the nuances of the hybrid conversations. You see -- there are many flavors of "hybrid" out there, depending on who you are talking with. A point we both agreed on is that it (hybrid) is no longer really a discussion about upgrade or migration, or the process of making changes to the hardware and components of your platform, or moving from old to new version of SharePoint.

Yes, there are still upgrades happening (on prem platforms getting updated hardware, or maybe a new version of SQL Server) and migrations (moving from 2007 to 2013). But as more organizations are seriously looking at their cloud strategies, and many starting to make the transition, there are hybrid strategies being used to bridge the gaps opening up due to a variety of things, such as a lack of parity in some features in Office 365, security concerns of moving some data types to the cloud, or latency/performance issues.

In our conversation, I commented that the language being used to discuss "hybrid" was confusing to many customers, and how it was important to delineate between the various strategies available to companies wanting to plan their move to the cloud. Bill agreed, saying that there needed to be greater clarity in messaging and strategies between hybrid, coexistence, and replication strategies for SharePoint (Bill, please correct me if I misrepresent anything you said).

Now, how I define and differentiate between hybrid, coexistence, and replication strategies might be very different from what Bill would articulate, but this being my blog, he'll have to chime in using the comments below just like everyone else…

What is hybrid?

Depending on who you ask, you'll get a different answer. Microsoft has a few definitions, 3rd party hosting companies have an answer, pure cloud solution providers another. Essentially, I define hybrid has a solution with both on premises and cloud components, with some level of integration between them. In most cases, when people are asking about hybrid SharePoint solutions, it’s about maintaining aspects of their existing on premises SharePoint platform while leveraging Office 365 in part or in its entirety with solutions that bridge the two systems, such as an integrated search experience, or pulling online and offline data for reporting and dashboards, and so forth. Hybrid might also include the use of Azure, or even Yammer, alongside your on prem components. You can find more on Microsoft's definitions and guidance on TechNet.

Of course, hosting partners like Rackspace and Fpweb and others would argue that they also provide hybrid solutions, and they're right. Private cloud is, by definition, cloud.

While 12 to 18 months back Microsoft was a reluctant source on hybrid guidance, the push by customers large and small has helped them see the light that moving toward the cloud is not a simple one or two-step process, but will take transition time. I'll give them credit, however, that once they had the data and realized the importance of the hybrid story, they jumped onboard with both feet and have developed content and solutions to help the hybrid customer. The last SharePoint Conference contained a good amount of hybrid content, and I expect to see more at this year's Ignite event in Chicago.

What is coexistence?

This is more about the side-by-side experience. I know many customers who have spent a good deal of time and money on their on prem SharePoint environment, with extensive line of business integrations, and they're just not ready to make the move to the cloud just yet -- or even incur the costs of a hybrid solution (which has additional overhead). Coexistence is having both on prem and cloud components, but without any level of integration.

A good example is Yammer, which is a purely cloud experience. There are many customers who want to use this platform for employee and partner community development, but do not have immediate plans to either integrate Yammer into their on prem environment (maybe they're using the native SharePoint social capabilities and don't want to lose that data) or make any other cloud decisions.

The coexistence story is not that uncommon, actually. While working with some Lotus Notes customers back in the early days of BPOS/Office 365, we ran into major technical difficulties in convincing people to move away from their database-driven applications and templates in Lotus Notes, and so proposed a coexistence strategy whereby any new project would be reviewed and a decision made: did this project need to be hosted in the old system due to its reliance on these apps and business processes, or could it be deployed within SharePoint? What happened over time was that users slowly adopted the SharePoint platform, displacing Lotus Notes in an organic, rather than forced, way. Teams could take the time that they needed to make the transition, saving on migration costs and push back.

What is replication?

For this one, Bill may have another definition. In my mind, this is more about duplication of a system or data, such as when setting up separate development or staging environments. Increasingly, organizations or using the cloud to provision and host these non-production environments. Most people don't consider the use of cloud-based dev or staging environments as "hybrid," scenarios, although technically they are part of a larger hybrid platform.

Of course, the biggest question of all: which is the right strategy for your own organization? And that's where the most common answer for all-things-SharePoint comes into play -- it depends. What is your goal? What skills do you have in place? What are your short-term and long-term requirements?

The beauty of these cloud options is that we now have more choices than ever before, and that's a good thing. The hard part is understanding the costs and impacts (overhead, governance, training, performance) of the choices you make. Good luck with that.

The Noise to Innovation Ratio

I hate quiet work environments, and need some kind of background noise. Of course, I occasionally need to shut a door and focus on a call or have a private meeting, but for most of the day, I draw energy from the people activity around me, or from the sound of music playing in the background. I'm always amazed to walk into an office setting that is so quiet that any slight disturbance, like the squeak of a chair or gentle cough of a peer, seems to echo through the room like the crashing of a cymbal.

According to the Journal of Consumer Research (from an article in HemispheresMagazine.com) and based on the results of experiments looking for the relationship of noise to creativity, a moderate amount of noise is conducive to creative success. Across five experiments investigating whether a low (50dB), medium (70dB), or high (85dB) volume within a typical coffee shop setting, the results indicated again and again that a medium amount of noise resulted in the most creative thinking, "providing just enough of a distraction to disrupt mental processing and cause abstracted thinking, but isn't so loud that it reduced processing overall."

It makes perfect sense to me, kind of like when you take a shower and the rhythmic sound of the water helps you to solve a problem, or by stepping back from a problem and listening to some music or watching a completely unrelated program on TV can help you to recognize new patterns, or take an earlier idea into an entirely new direction altogether.

Preparing for a West Coast Flyover

I’ve been getting used to this being-off-the-road-thing these past few weeks, enjoying the luxuries of sleep and regular exercise since before the holidays. It’s been an action-packed month, with a very busy week leading up to my Friday morning flight out. Aside from sales and customer activities, I’m toiling away on the next book and a couple whitepapers today and tomorrow, and getting ready for the weekend and another SharePoint Saturday. And then Thursday there’s an IAMCP networking event and luncheon and the Puget Sound SharePoint Users Group and board meeting. As I sit here and think about it, I have easily presented at 75+ SharePoint Saturday events in the past 5.5 years. Truly amazing. And many more to come, including another one in Redmond in October. Stay tuned!

If you’re following me on Twitter (@buckleyplanet) then you’ve probably seen an uptick in mentions of Glyma, one of my clients. We are starting to schedule private demos now that we have a couple key partners in place, and so I’ll be talking about that more and more in the coming weeks. I have a webinar scheduled with Glyma co-founder Paul Culmsee (@paulculmsee) on the 27th (details below), and will be planning some regional face-to-face presentations.

The other big news is that GTconsult co-founder and COO Craig Tarr (@craig_tarr) will be working from the Bellevue office for a couple months, which is very exciting. For those who did not get enough of Craig when he was here last, here’s your opportunity! And for those who saw far too much of Craig, my apologies. Craig and I have a joint webinar on January 28th, and then will be putting on an invitation-only road show event in late February. Oh, and he;s coming to his first SPTechCon, so that should be fun!

Overall, looking forward to a busy winter and spring! Here’s what is coming up in the next few weeks:

SharePoint Saturday Denver
Jan 17th, http://www.spsevents.org/city/denver/denver2015 
Keynote: Realigning SharePoint for the vNext Social Organization
The world is witnessing the dawn of the social organization, with rapidly evolving solutions that impact team dynamics, collaboration, and real-time communication. For many managers, it can difficult keeping up with all of the new features and shifting roadmaps coming out of Microsoft. New options within SharePoint, Office 365 and Yammer are exciting, but many teams struggle to develop a social strategy that aligns with their business needs. This keynote will provide attendees with insights into the changes required to move from document-centric collaboration toward the vNext social organization, sharing real-world examples and guidance to help them make more informed choices as they develop social strategies for their own organizations.
Session: Managing SharePoint On Prem vs Online: Compare and Contrast
The purpose of this session is to outline the major administrative differences between SharePoint on prem and SharePoint Online, comparing reporting, auditing, and information governance differences between the platforms. The intent is to help organizations make informed decisions about what it will take to transition to SharePoint in the cloud, either through a hybrid model or moving entirely to the cloud. In addition to showing administrative capabilities of both platforms, the session will walk through some management considerations for hybrid planning.

The #CollabTalk show: Episode 1
Jan 20th, 10am PT, http://www.itunity.com/webinar/collabtalk-sharepoint-office365-vlog-773 
For almost two years, monthly #CollabTalk tweetjams have brought together experts from around the SharePoint and Office 365 community to discuss important topics at length. Beginning January 20, 2015, #CollabTalk moves to IT Unity – and from Twitter to a video blog format. The monthly #CollabTalk show will continue to bring you expert opinions on the pressing issues of the day, and will be hosted by Office 365 MVPs Christian Buckley (@buckleyplanet) and Naomi Moneypenny (@nmoneypenny) and SharePoint MVPs Benjamin Niaulin (@bniaulin) and Marc Anderson (@sympmarc). Join us for the inaugural broadcast of #CollabTalk in our new video format, and, as always, join the discussion on Twitter using the #CollabTalk hashtag.
For our inaugural show, we’ll discuss: Public sites in Office 365, Hybrid SharePoint environments, The new Office 365 Groups, and OfficeMix and Sway. We hope you can join us!

InfoGovCon Panel
Jan 21st, 11am PT, http://infogovcon.com/webinars/812-panel-guerrilla-tactics-infusing-information-governance-practices-via-subterfuge
Guerrilla Tactics: Infusing Information Governance Practices via Subterfuge
Join us for an innovative panel discussion around implementing Information Governance in an organization that may be hostile to the concept and by leveraging existing processes.
Many projects have no mandate related to Information Governance. We’ll discuss how good information governance practices can be infused, mainly through subterfuge. We’ll explore topics such as project team composition, requirements gathering, information architecture, and how to sneak your way in front of corporate governance councils. Every project needs to be framed by good Information Governance practices; this is how some of the leaders in the industry help make it happen.

IT Unity Webinar
Jan 27th, 1pm PT, http://www.itunity.com/webinar/rewriting-rule-book-managing-knowledge-755
Rewriting the Rulebook on Managing Knowledge
Managing knowledge in a business has always been tough, and these days it has become even tougher. The amount of information available has skyrocketed and so too have the formats, places and channels through which it is received. Complexity around how we gather, organize and effectively use information has magnified – and to deal with this complexity, we need a new approach.

In this webinar, Australian-based information management strategist, SharePoint guru, and award-winning author Paul Culmsee will be joined by Office 365 MVP and well-known SharePoint and social strategist Christian Buckley to help participants rewrite the rulebook on managing their intellectual capital. Find out about new approaches, techniques and tools that can be used within your organization to help better leverage your existing knowledge stores and intellectual capital all using SharePoint and featuring Glyma. 

Key topics that we will cover include:

• Avoiding the “what happens when Jeff leaves” brain drain crisis
• Tapping into “what’s in the head” and turning it into usable assets for the business
• Bringing a halt to the revolving cycle of “re-inventing the wheel”
• Stopping the nonsensical repetition of costly mistakes

GTconsult Webinar
Jan 28th, 10am PT, http://icont.ac/2K5VG
Building Dynamic SharePoint Applications on Both Office 365 and On-premise
One of the major concerns of organizations investigating or upgrading to Office 365 is whether the solutions they've come to rely on with SharePoint on prem can be duplicated online without code. From workflow and forms to branding and personalization, this webinar will look at techniques and solutions that can be used on SharePoint Online and on prem, enabling rich and dynamic functionality regardless of your environment. Join GTconsult co-founder and COO Craig Tarr, with Office 365 MVP Christian Buckley, as they demonstrate the latest SharePoint capabilities.

Key Takeaways:

• Understand some of the key differences between SharePoint online and on prem
• Learn how powerful solutions, such as project hubs, shopping carts, information roll-ups and other solutions can be built without code
• Pick up some great tips and tricks to make your end users more productive

GTconsult Webinar
Feb 4th, 9am PT, (registration not yet open)
Gaining Deeper Insights Into SharePoint Performance, History, and Trends with Umlindi
Creating and tracking metrics is good, but correlating various data points to identify insights is where the real business benefit is realized. In this webinar, hosted by GTconsult co-founder and CEO Bradley Geldenhuys, with Office365 MVP Christian Buckley, we will demonstrate how to use real time data and historic trends to provide proactive maintenance of your SharePoint environments, using real data that matter to end users, such as page load times and IIS connections. Join this webinar to learn how GTconsult’s Umlindi platform can improve the performance and manageability of SharePoint.

Vancouver SPUG
Feb 5th, 6pm PT, http://www.vanspug.org/
Still waiting to hear from the VANSPUG on which topic I’ll be presenting, but I will definitely be driving up to Vancouver for the evening, and participating in a SharePint following the event. Also presenting will be Barry Jinks, CEO of Colligo. Follow @VanSPUG for more details.

SPTechCon Austin
Feb 9th through 11th, http://www.sptechcon.com/ 
Session: Baby-Stepping Into the Cloud with Hybrid Workloads
As organizations begin to think about their roadmap toward the cloud, they need to consider how best to move away from their on-premises infrastructure investments. There are multiple paths into the cloud, depending on the goals and needs of the business. This class walks through some of the various hybrid options – what they are, what they take to implement, and the risks, feature gaps, and overhead for deploying them.

EuropeanSP Webinar  
Feb 19th, 7am PT, (registration not open yet)
The Business Value of Social
End users want business tools that more closely match their personal online experience, but many businesses struggle to understand how these tools will actually provide business benefit. The goal of this session is to help participants understand the social features within SharePoint 2013, Office 365, and Yammer – and provide key use cases for each platform. We’ll discuss Delve and the Office Graph, the new inline social and Groups functionality, and outline the business value of social -- showcasing how social features will help your organization improve user adoption of SharePoint, and increase overall end user productivity.

The #CollabTalk show: Episode 2
Feb 24th, 10am PT 
Tune in for our second episode! We’ll discuss 3 or 4 new topics, and may possibly have a special guest! 

GTconsult Road Show
Feb 25th, 9am to 1pm
This invitation-only event for partners and customers will walk through the migration and on-boarding path from SharePoint on prem to Office 365, showcasing a number of powerful solutions that can be built in SharePoint Online without needing to code. Speakers will include Christian Buckley and Craig Tarr from GTconsult, Jared Shockley from Microsoft IT, and one or two other guest speakers.

I hope you can all make it to one or more of these events! As always, slides will be published to my SlideShare profile, and webinar recordings made available to registrants within a day or two of each event.

On a personal note, the other big activity happening this next month is that my daughter (my oldest) returns from her 18-month LDS mission to San Pablo, Philippines in early February, and at the end of March my oldest (of three) son returns from his 2-year LDS mission to Scottsdale, Arizona. We’re very excited to have them both home, if only for a few weeks before they both return to school, work, and normal life. I’m often reflecting on changes within the SharePoint community, but what is truly amazing is that all 4 of my kids are grown up and just about all moved out. Oh, and that 2 (soon to be all 3) of my boys are taller than me. Life goes by so fast.

Maintaining Control of Your Data

In the early days of SharePoint (way back in 2006) while I was still working at Microsoft, we ran into a number of customers who were struggling with the migration of their extensive email archives and collaboration content from Lotus Notes to the (at the time) new SharePoint Online platform. We spent a lot of time working with these customers and members of the Exchange team in trying to figure out a migration strategy for these customers. After numerous migration tool vendor meetings, product reviews, interviews with consultants, and various forays into building our own technical solutions, we came to the conclusion that for many of these customers, the right path forward was to leave their content where it was.

The successful deployment of the platform in these organizations usually meant standing up SharePoint side by side against Lotus Notes (or other platforms), and as new projects were initiated, allowing the end users to decided "Does this new project need to be associated with our legacy content and customizations, or can it be built on our new SharePoint environment?" In a conversation with Jared Spataro, GM of Enterprise Social at Microsoft, at Microsoft's Worldwide Partner Conference (WPC) last year, he shared that while at Open Text they often gave customers this same advice. From a migration perspective, this advice eases the pain. Migrations are rarely straight-forward. But what this "best practice" of standing up the new system side-by-side with the old and having end users decide whether or not to move means maintaining two (or more) platforms. For a while, at least.

With all of the platform advances made since then, some aspects of our "best practice" remains in force. We now have more options for moving data from legacy platforms to SharePoint (online or on prem), from third-party migration tools to more powerful APIs that allow us to index and search across file shares, BLOB storage on inexpensive hardware, or a variety of cloud-based and on prem storage options. Some organizations are even using OneDrive as a mechanism for bridging the gap between legacy and the cloud, allowing end users to transfer content on their own, as needed. But with all of these options, we're not only seeing an explosion in the growth of content, but growth in the number of platforms being used.

Two years ago, Microsoft with Steve Ballmer at the helm was "all in" on the cloud, with a sales strategy to push customers to move all of their data to the cloud. As Microsoft pushed, customers began to push back -- not because people did not understand the cost efficiencies and scalability of reducing or removing infrastructure, but because they began to look seriously at what it would take to re-architect customizations and line of business application integrations. The reality is that many organizations still need to realize business value at the investments they've already made before moving to a new platform. On top of that, some of these legacy systems -- and other non-standard, vertical-specific (line of business) apps -- required strict governance standards, apart from what was managed for SharePoint and other basic collaboration solutions.

In short, many enterprises have realized that while the cloud may be the future, their transition toward that future may take some time. What this means, of course, is that some of these organizations will need to maintain some very complex security and management models. As more and more cloud-based solutions are used (Dropbox, Box, Google Drive, etc) the potential risks of data mismanagement increase. While implementing a hybrid cloud solution seems like the best of both worlds -- maintain business-critical on premise solutions while taking advantage of key cloud workloads, like using Office 365 and SharePoint Online for new team site provisioning -- the reality is that hybrid solutions create massive security governance risks, and therefore require careful planning.

I recently sat through a demonstration of the ownCloud platform, which may answer some of the security and management concerns of organizations who increasingly find themselves with a growing number of content and data sources on premises as well as in the cloud -- many of them with valid reasons for being there. Personally, I think the days of any company being locked down to a single platform are gone. As a SharePoint guy, I recognize that most of my customers (and my own company) actively use other tools and platforms, such as Dropbox, Amazon Web Services, and yes, even local file shares. What ownCloud provides is capability to centrally manage data being accessed from SharePoint and other data repositories, whether behind the firewall or through external connections, such as mobile devices.

What impressed me about the ownCloud solution is that it is completely on prem and controlled by the customer, ensuring that your data is safe and your policies and procedures are being met. Solutions like this provide much needed capability for organizations who plan to remain on prem, or who are making the transition to the cloud, ensuring that employees have access to the right data -- and that access meets all of your regulatory, compliance, and governance requirements.

You can find out more about ownCloud on their website at www.owncloud.com, as well as watch this overview video which explains their solutions:

 

At the end of the day, I am a huge cloud advocate. The majority of my company's data resides in Office 365 or in Azure. However, as I mentioned above, we use other platforms for specific workloads, and still maintain data on prem. And while many of the companies and customers I speak with are on a similar path toward the cloud with a mixture of on prem and cloud data sources, most will admit that their various file systems and platforms are not meeting their own security and compliance requirements.

Every time I hear about another security breach, I think of all of these unsecure, non-compliant hybrid platforms out there. Ask yourself: how secure is your data? Do you know what sensitive data is being shared between systems behind the firewall? What about outside of your firewall, on cloud-based storage systems? How much visibility do you have?

Maybe its time you developed a plan.