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Incorporating Evangelism Into your Organization

I was talking with a partner this week about their interest in hiring a technical evangelist and getting more involved in the community. While evangelism job descriptions vary widely depending on the maturity of the organization – and the maturity of the community in which you do business, I was happy to share some of my experiences on what it takes to be successful in the role.

While there is no secret formula, I do believe there are some “best practices” that I have developed or that I’ve witnessed in others inside the SharePoint community, and some healthy strategy and marketing “habits” that you can develop to help you find that right mix of product expertise, thought-leadership, and community involvement to fit your business needs:

1. Love what you do. Passion is key. Find the most vocal and energetic people in the crowd, and you'll generally find a few technical evangelists. There are some who quietly give back, but most are sharing their opinions out front, encouraging others to participate in the community dialog.
   
2. Give your time. Point to any successful technical evangelist and you will see someone who spends a lot of after-hours and weekend time working with partners and customers to help answer questions, solve a technical problem, or to finds the right community connection. While my company may cover my travel to events around the world, I'm often giving up my weekends and working long hours so that I can participate in community activities in addition to my regular workload. We all have day jobs, some more community-focused than others. But one of the distinguishing characteristics of a good evangelist is going above and beyond.
   
3. Be honest about what you know and don't know. My background is building and running product and program management organizations. While I’ve been in technology my entire career, I am not an engineer. But what I am good at is translating the technical for the business user, and vice versa. There’s no shame in redirecting questions from the community to your engineering team. Know your limits, and focus on your strengths.
   
4. Create great content. Let's face it -- content is king. Some evangelists live inside the technical forums, answering multiple questions on a daily basis. Others write profusely through their blogs, and some are more comfortable through video or tool development. The point is -- share your knowledge. Volunteer to present at local user groups, submit abstracts to regional and international conferences – just keep generating content, and sharing your story.
   
5. Become an advocate for your local community. Depending on your technology platform, your city may not have a relevant user group. If not, help start one. If one already exists, attend it on a regular basis. Offer to present, to organize, to clean up afterward. Get to know the organizers, and the people within your community. In short, be involved locally as much as possible.
   
6. Provide product and platform feedback. Be willing to share your feedback with the product teams you represent. For me, this means regular feedback to my own company product teams, as well as feedback to Microsoft regarding the Office 365 platform and related technologies. They want to hear your specific use cases, your industry or customer experiences. Get to know them personally. It is easy to criticize a product or platform for what may be lacking, but you should always focus on helping these teams understand the missing use cases and features so that they can work to improve.
   
7. Keep competition in check. In my travels, I am constantly working side-by-side with competitors. In fact, I consider some of them my closest friends within the community. People can get competitive, especially if you work for an independent software vendor (ISV), like I do, or a strategic integrator (SI, or consulting company). Nothing wrong with a little competition. The pie is huge, and there's plenty for everyone. Try to remain diplomatic in your dealings with competitors, even if they are less than friendly.
   
8. Get creative. One of my favorite business and marketing books is Purple Cow by Seth Godin, in which he talks about standing out from the crowd in an authentic way. Its easy to throw together a marketing campaign to get attention, but its much more difficult to develop and orchestrate and marketing strategy that builds loyalty and converts people into customers. It’s never enough to look at what your competitors do and then simply replicate – you need to go beyond the obvious. In an article for LinkedIn, I referred to this as “baseline marketing” activities, suggesting that organizations need to practice “above the line marketing” to stand out from the crowd. I view this as the primary role of the technical evangelist – to participate in “above the line” strategy and marketing activities. A great example was my very-successful SharePoint 2010-era OneThing video series, which had over 200 videos in the collection.
   
9. Recognize others. I am a big believer in paying it forward. Recognize others for their contributions to the community, learn from them, and try to be like them.
   
10. Constantly expand your knowledge. Regardless of the technology platform, change will be constant, requiring you to keep up to date on trends and competition and how the community is responding to it all. But the tools at your disposal for public relations, marketing automation, social media and related tools for getting the word out are also constantly evolving. As I hear about new tools and technologies, I am constantly trialing software or services, downloading whitepapers, or following the examples of other leaders in the space. Some of them stick, others get replaced quickly with more tools and content. Constantly add tools to your tool belt.

By no means do I believe I do everything right – when you write and talk as much as I do, you tend to put your foot in your mouth A LOT. You need to have an operations mindset, and constantly look for ways to improve upon what you do. Of course, its not all about evangelism – much of this is just great advice for building your personal brand.

Honestly, if you are doing most or all of what I've included here, you will benefit personally and professionally regardless of whether or not you have the official title of ‘technical evangelist,’ and the community will benefit. So get started!

SharePoint Saturday Coming Back to the Pacific Northwest

After submitting a couple sessions for a SharePoint Saturday event taking place in the mid-west next month, I was reflecting on the massive growth of the SharePoint community since I left Microsoft in 2009 and “officially” became an active member of the community. I attended my first SharePoint Saturday on the Microsoft campus about a month after the SharePoint Conference in Las Vegas, and quickly got hooked. At the time, I was running all product management and marketing for a little migration vendor called echoTechnology, and used the SPS events as a major part of my marketing spend. It was – and still is – a great way to connect with the movers-and-shakers within the SharePoint space, and meet face-to-face with customers and partners within your target regions.

At the time, SPS Redmond was the second SPS event held on the west coast, following a small and poorly attended SPS in San Francisco. So I started to spend a lot of time (and many weekends) traveling to the east coast to participate in this rapidly expanding community. Of course, every time I boarded a flight on my way east, I thought to myself “Why are there not SPS events on the west coast?”

Having organized and run user groups and other community events in a past life (including a collaboration user group from 2002-2004, hosted by Hurricane Electric in Fremont, CA), I decided to do something about it – and with some like-minded community members, launched SPS East Bay and SPS Los Angeles in late 2010, and later helped organize SPS Sacramento, SPS Silicon Valley (which displaced the East Bay event), SPS Bend, and SPS Utah, as well as re-launched the dormant SPS Redmond. While I am no longer directly involved with some of them, I’m proud to say that all of these events continue to thrive – and am happy to announce 2014 dates for Bend and Redmond!

SharePoint Saturday Bend (#SPSBEND) will take place on October 4th once again at Central Oregon Community College. While this event is one of the smaller events in terms of attendees, the region has a vibrant SharePoint community, and its always been a fun event. The keynote and sponsors are set up around Pioneer Hall, and following the event we always make our way downtown for a SharePint, dinner, and to participate in Bend’s annual winter-fest activities. Whether you’re driving from the Puget Sound or Portland areas, flying in, or joining us from the surrounding community, this is not an event to be missed!

If you’re interested in presenting, please submit your abstracts. We are also looking for event sponsors – download the sponsor form here. And of course, please attend! Invite your entire team from work, or anyone else that might want to take advantage of free SharePoint training. You can register for the event here.

SharePoint Saturday Redmond (#SPSRED) will take place the following weekend on October 11th, once again on the Microsoft campus at the Conference Center in Building 33 (downstairs, not the EBC). Not surprisingly, this event continues to be the largest SPS on the west coast, within close to 400 attendees each year (we plan to beat that number this year). One HUGE benefit of holding a SharePoint event right on campus is that we benefit from having multiple product team speakers, as well as local and international experts. The event is held with the fantastic support of the Puget Sound SharePoint User Group (#PSSPUG), and this year’s event will undoubtedly be a blowout.

We are looking for people to present both regular sessions (75-minutes) and lightning talks (15-20 minutes) and are taking abstracts now, so please submit (and let us know if your submission is a lightning talk, and we’ll contact you with more details). We are also looking for sponsors, so please download the sponsor form here. We look forward to seeing you in Redmond – be sure to register today and let your peers know about this great event.

One last thing I’d like to push out there – if you are interested in getting more involved in the community, there’s no better time than the present. Take a look at the upcoming (and constantly updated) list of events at SPSevents.org and reach out to the organizers within your local community to find out how you can get involved. I don’t know of any SPS event that will turn down offers for volunteers. And if there is no SPS in your region, and you have the desire to help get one started, there are armies of people waiting to help you – just reach out and connect via the SPSevents.org website or through one of the many online communities, such as www.yammer.com/spyam.

July 2014 #CollabTalk TweetJam on #WPC14 takeaways

Coming back from an action-packed Worldwide Partner Conference (#WPC14) in Washington DC, what better way to share our thoughts and ideas and takeaways from this great annual event than a tweetjam? I find myself already sorting through business cards and email threads, trying to piece together an action plan based on many of the great conversations I participated in, but also want to learn from others. I found that many of the sessions I had wanted to attend were double, triple, and quadruple booked against other great sessions – so hearing from other participants, with their notes and ideas – is a great way to dive into the layer below the marketing messaging, and find out what resonated with our peers.

Of course, not everyone attended WPC in person – but with keynotes being streamed live, and numerous presenters sharing their content via blogs, articles, and published presentations, the impact of WPC goes beyond those who attended. And on July 31st, we want to hear your feedback, no matter how you participated.

If you’re new to the tweetjam model, basically its an hour-long public conversation held on Twitter and using a shared hash tag, which is #CollabTalk. You can use your Twitter platform of choice OR go over to http://twubs.com/CollabTalk which automatically appends each message with #CollabTalk, and has a nice feature that allows followers to actually slow the dialog down to a readable speed (it can fly by fairly quickly). The questions we will be discussing are listed below:

"What are your takeaways from the Worldwide Partner Conference?"

• What announcements had the biggest impact on the week at WPC?
• What are the biggest changes you see happening with the Microsoft partner ecosystem?
• What are your thoughts on the maturity of Microsoft’s cloud story?
• What was the standout demo from the keynotes?
• What was the breakout session for the week?
• What stood out about Satya Nadella’s vision keynote – and what were you hoping he would say?
• If you could provide Microsoft with guidance on improving the value prop to partners, what would you say?

As always, we will have an all-star panel of experts on hand to participate in the conversation and to interact with you directly – but anyone can jump in and participate. So don’t be shy -- share your own perspective and company or customer experiences, or just lurk. It’s all good. But be sure to mark your calendars, tell your colleagues, and get involved!

Our panel this month will include:

• Naomi Moneypenny (@nmoneypenny), cto at ManyWorlds
• Barb Levisay (@blevisay),  contributing editor at Redmond Channel Partner magazine
• Tiffany Wallace (@tiffanyWI), director of business development at New Horizons Computer Learning Centers / 5Point Enterprises
• Trevor Hellebuyck (@thellebuyck), cto at Metalogix
• Jeff Willinger (@jwillie), director of collaboration and social business at Rightpoint 
• Barry Jinks (@BJinks), founder and ceo at Colligo
• Paul Solski (@paulsolski), ceo and founder of AIM International
• Matthew Moalem (@mmoalem), corporate development executive at GoKube
• Jeffrey Schwartz (@JeffreySchwartz), editor at 1105 Media, including Redmond and Redmond Channel Partner magazines
• Nikkia Carter (@CarterMcGServ), ceo of Carter-McGowan Services
• Bradley Geldenhuys (@bradgcoza), SharePoint Jedi at GTConsult
• Jeff Shuey (@Jshuey), director of strategic alliances at Gimmal
• Adam Levithan (@collabadam), consultant and social expert at Portal Solutions
• Jordi Plana (@joplana), founder and ceo of Spenta and social platform Beezy
• Dan Usher (@binarybrewery), SharePoint MVP and lead associate at Booz Allen Hamilton
• Harout Katerjian (@haroutkat), founder and principal at Emgage
• Jill Kunkel (@queenkunk), channel program manager at Fpweb.net
• Heather Newman (@heddanewman), founder at ContentPanda, marketing maven at ITUnity
• Jethro Seghers (@jseghers), Office365 MVP and  program manager at BitTitan
• and myself as your host and moderator (@buckleyplanet), SharePoint MVP and chief evangelist at Metalogix

We’ll be adding a few more names to the mix, but whether or not you’re part of the panel, you CAN participate. Please feel free to jump in. I am excited to once again have a lively debate, and look forward to the interaction on #CollabTalk. I plan to provide a summary of the discussion on the ITUnity.com site following the event, so watch for an update via my Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn updates. See you online on the 31st at Twubs.com/CollabTalk

#WPC14 Wrap-Up

I rolled into the driveway this morning at around 1:30am after completing my 5th Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference (#WPC14). And as in years past, I have to say that this is one of the most effective and productive events out there. Thanks again to Microsoft for a stellar event, and for giving your partner ecosystem this great opportunity to come together to both celebrate our wins and to make lasting connections.

As many of you know, I am heavily involved in the MS partner channel, having co-founded the Seattle chapter of the international Association of Microsoft Channel Partners (IAMCP.org) for which I just concluded 3 years serving as chapter president. In addition to writing articles for the Microsoft Partner Network (#MPN) DigitalWPC website, this was my second year participating on the Social Squad along with my good friends and fellow community members Jeff Shuey (@jshuey), Naomi Moneypenny (@nmoneypenny), Nikkia Carter (@CarterMcGServ), Liza Sisler (@Perficient_MSFT), Dux Raymond Sy (@meetdux), and Kelvin Kirby (@KJKirby). I have to say, it is very cool to be sitting up in the press box with folks like Barb Levisay (RCPmag.com), Scott Bekker (also RCPmag.com), and Mary Jo Foley (ZDNet) with an amazing view of the keynote events. Looking forward to participating again next year.

Aside from the great view, its been an opportunity to discuss some of the major announcements being made in real-time, and sharing those thoughts via tweets and blog posts – and in discussions with some of the analysts and experts sitting around me. Some of the announcements included:

• Not surprisingly, a continued push around cloud
• The creation of 3 new Microsoft Partner Network (MPN) cloud competencies for partners, including Small and Midmarket Cloud Solutions, Cloud Productivity, and Cloud Platform
• Following Azure, Dynamics Online soon available in open licensing
• Launch of the Azure Certified program
• Expansion of capabilities and control for cloud partners (such as being able to bill their customers for O365 licenses directly) through the Microsoft Cloud Solutions Provider program
• Much of the vision shared by Microsoft leaders was around a suite of ‘experiences’ across devices, which allowed presenters to showcase both hardware and software. New channel chief Phil Sorgen on Monday talked about connect every single device to a cloud experience, and positioned Microsoft with a “market challenger” stance toward future opportunities
• Scott Guthrie made the claim (and then backed it up with customer and partner evidence) that Microsoft is the only company that can truly deliver hyper-scale, enterprise grade, and hybrid solutions for the cloud (via Azure). He also pointed out that they are the only leader is all four Gartner cloud magic quadrants:
• Cloud infrastructure as a service
• Enterprise application platform as a service
• Public cloud storage services
• x86 server virtualization
• Satya Nadella’s first keynote as CEO, as expected, focused almost entirely on the cloud OS, telling the audience that Microsoft’s (and our) opportunities in the future will be about
• Enterprise-grade cloud infrastructure
• People-centric IT solutions
• Insights from big data
• Modern app development services

One other notable was how much Microsoft emphasized some great customer and partner evidence from the past year, hearkening back to a May 2014 post by Josh Waldo from the Worldwide Cloud Partner Strategy Team at Microsoft which highlighted an ebook and profitability research from IDC.

Between keynotes and content sessions, I spent much of my time in partner meetings and on the exhibit floor talking to various product and service providers to get some insight into the ebb and flow of the channel. As I was sitting at lunch on Thursday with a partner, discussing some of our takeaways from the conference, I remarked that the shift toward the cloud feels like it has finally taken root, and through various partner and customer evidence we are really beginning to see not just sales and marketing positioning, but real movement of small, medium, and enterprise customers toward Microsoft’s cloud vision that was outlined over past WPC events. From my perspective, customers are beginning to understand the real costs of moving to the cloud (which is why hybrid is becoming a larger part of many strategies) and the real benefits. While the transition of the enterprise will take longer than Microsoft marketing teams are hoping, the movement is visible.

And for those who missed them, I also presented two sessions in the social hub, which you can find here:

#WPC14 ES685 -- Instant Productivity with Yammer from Christian Buckley

#WPC14 ES682 -- Connecting with Partners Using Yammer from Christian Buckley

If you missed the Monday and Wednesday vision keynotes, don’t worry – they’re still available online for streaming at http://www.digitalwpc.com/Community/Pages/Home.aspx

Microsoft Seeks to Improve App Management with Apportals

One of the primary criticisms of Microsoft’s app strategy has been the (perceived) focus on consumers rather than enterprises, where Microsoft has long been the leader. Partners and business customers alike have been struggling with how to translate more complex business activities into the Windows 8.x app model. As a result, Microsoft today has launched Windows Apportals as a way to help business users “organize and reveal only the data and apps needed for a specific role or task.”

Apportals are essentially nested apps that were designed to help streamline multiple business activities, and reduce “app fatigue.” They can run on any Windows 8.1 device, whether desktop or touch, they are deployed through the Corpor App Store, and they leverage Active Directory to help security trim what is viewed and shared based on a user’s role. In short, anything that can run in Windows can run within an Apportal.

From Microsoft: “A Windows Apportal is a Windows 8.1 app that can integrate your entire Line of Business (LOB) stack into a single, modern, touch-based experience. The concept behind Apportals is simple – introduce the same nested folder structure common in a desktop OS to the modern mobile OS. The result is a UI experience that allows the user to drill from the Start screen (composed of Live Tiles) to another mini-Start screen (composed of Grid Tiles). And best of all, because an Apportal is built out of the OS, everything that runs on Windows runs in a Windows Apportal, including Desktop Windows 7 Applications; Modern Windows 8 Apps; and Web Applications.”

Here’s a quick video demo via Wonderful World of Marketing:

Here is a second video from the same team digging deeper into Apportal functionality:

I’m sure we’ll be hearing a lot more about Apportals next week at the Worldwide Partner Conference (#WPC14) taking place in Washington DC, but if you’re looking for more details, here are a few more links:

• Microsoft launches new Windows Apportals

• Microsoft launches Apportals to improve app management on Windows 8

• Microsoft Announces Windows Apportals For The Enterprise

• Microsoft Launching Apportals: Grouped and Infinitely Nested Apps and Data

• Modern UI-based Windows Apportals for Windows 8.1 business users launched

July and August 2014 Travel Plans

While I very much enjoy the community activities and interesting destinations, I really am more of a homebody. My idea of a perfect vacation is a stack of sci-fi DVDs and a huge bowl of popcorn in front of my big screen. But my “visit” with the family is quickly coming to a close as I prepare for some major events, followed by an EPIC road trip (which includes some vacation time between SPUG activities).

This Sunday (7/13) I head to Washington DC to participate in my 5th Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference (#WPC14). I return home on the 17th….only to catch a flight on the 19th to Auckland, New Zealand to participate in my 4th New Zealand SharePoint Conference (#NZSPC). Disappointed to miss the Australian SPC next week, but WPC took priority this year. At the end of the month, I’ll be on the road for an almost 3-week road trip, with confirmed SPUG activities in Salt Lake City, Utah on 7/30, and Nashua, New Hampshire on 8/7. I’m waiting for confirmations on 2 or 3 other SPUGs as I make my way through the northeast by car (that’s right – I’m driving from Seattle to the east coast and back), and will conclude my speaking circuit at an Office365 event back in Washington DC on 8/15.

It’s going to be a jam-packed adventure, that’s for sure. Along the way, I plan to visit numerous historical and LDS church history locations (Nauvoo, IL, Kirtland, OH, and Palmyra, NY) that I have never visited before, but plan to end the trip with my second visit to one of my all-time favorite landmarks: Mount Rushmore. Very excited to head back through that part of the country when Sturgis is NOT underway (made that mistake once before).

Here are my confirmed events to date (will update as additional details surface):

Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference (#WPC14)
Washington DC, July 13th through 17th, www.digitalwpc.com

ES685 – Instant Productivity with Yammer
Monday, July 14th, 3:00 to 3:30pm, Expo Hall: Social Hub
Wondering where to begin with Yammer and what steps you can take to quickly realize its business benefits? Come and join this session conducted by SharePoint and Yammer Certified Admin Christian Buckley, Chief Evangelist at SharePoint ISV Metalogix, as he walks through several tips and tricks for getting the most out of Yammer.

ES682 – Connecting with Partners Using Yammer
Tuesday, July 15th, 12:30pm to 1:00pm, Expo Hall: Social Hub
One of the most compelling use cases for the Yammer platform is how quick and easy it is to connect with partners and expand your partner relationships. In this session, SharePoint MVP and Yammer Certified Admin, Christian Buckley, Chief Evangelist at SharePoint ISV Metalogix, will demonstrate how simply and powerfully Yammer can connect your company with partners and customers. He will also show how Yammer is perfect for maintaining product or sales-related communities.

#RoadSPUG2014

From Seattle to the East Coast and Back, July 30th through August 15th

8 Things to Consider as SharePoint Moves to the Cloud
Utah SharePoint User Group
Thursday, July 31st, 3:00pm to 5:00pm, WesTech Engineering, 3665 S West Temple, Salt Lake City
Over the next 3 to 5 years, Microsoft estimates that 50% or more of the existing SharePoint customer base will maintain a hybrid environment. As companies make this transition, do you understand the true cost and governance impacts of moving to the cloud? In this presentation, attendees will get an overview of the many different paths from SharePoint on premises to the cloud--with an outline of the costs, risks, and considerations so that companies can properly prepare for the move. While some technical aspects of SharePoint's architecture will be covered, the goal is to provide business owners and administrators alike with a firm understanding of the hidden costs of implementing and maintaining a hybrid SharePoint environment, or a pure cloud SharePoint environment. This event sponsored by Metalogix!

10 Steps Toward Information Governance Nirvana
Granite State (NH) SharePoint Users
Thursday, August 7th, 6:00pm to 8:00pm. (Date confirmed, waiting to confirm details)
Most organizations have some semblance of information governance in place today, but it is often scattered across team and divisional boundaries, with no centralized authority or enforcement. The goal of this session is to provide attendees with a roadmap for decision rights and permissions, and a framework for management of roles and policies around content creation, site provisioning, storage optimization, archiving, retention and deletion.

Baby-Stepping Into the Cloud with Hybrid Workloads
Washington DC Office365 Ramp-Up Day
Friday, August 15th, 8:00am to 9:00am
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 session 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.

Of course, in the middle of all of this I will be running my monthly #CollabTalk tweetjam, currently scheduled for the morning of the 31st, however the topic and panel have not yet been finalized. Hope to have that completed before I disappear to DC this weekend. I am also trying to confirm a couple webinar dates/times while on the road, which means its going to be a fairly jam-packed adventure.

Looking forward to seeing a few new states, and having some stories to tell.

Finding Your Place on the SharePoint Social Adoption Curve

Everyone claims to have the inside track on the social movement, yet few people really understand how social will improve team collaboration in a meaningful and measurable way. Every new technology goes through an adoption curve -- best outlined in the familiar innovation adoption lifecycle by Bohlen, Beal and Rogers at Iowa State University (above), which was used by Geoffrey Moore in his seminal book, Crossing the Chasm.

In the adoption curve, innovators create or embrace new technologies and ideas, which are then picked up by early adopters who synthesize the new ideas and , in most cases, find the first true business applications for these technologies, which is a critical step for any product or service to find its way into the early majority. These early adopters provide essential feedback and real-world applications, helping the technology mature.

One of the factors that helps any technology move from the limited financial opportunity (for the most part) of early adopters and into the realm of the mainstream adopters is the ability to link "features" to specific business outcomes. Within the realm of social computing technology, the transition to demonstrable connections between qualitative benefits and business output is beginning to be realized.

As I prepare to hit the road again this weekend, heading to Washington DC to attend my fifth Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference (#WPC14), this topic reminds me of a session I provided at last year’s WPC that compared the social capabilities in SharePoint 2013 to those of Yammer (you can see it on SlideShare), and even wrote an article for Microsoft’s DigitalWPC website on the topic. Because of my focus on the role of social in broader collaboration strategies, I'm often asked "What is the business benefit of social in SharePoint."

At a high-level, my prepared answer is to tell people that social is another layer of the search experience -- that it is about adding context to content, making that content more searchable, more findable. But I thought I'd provide a quick breakdown of what I mean. Specifically, my view is that there are five primary business benefits to using the social features in SharePoint:

1. Data context and correlation -- As people interact with the content you upload, they relate your content with other relevant content, such as projects you might not be  member of, studies that may correlate, or conversations on similar topics that you may not be aware of elsewhere in your organization. These conversations, tags, links, and sharing help to build context to your content that you alone might never be able to accomplish.
   
2. Questions and answers -- It never hurts to have multiple means through which users can find the answers they need to business questions. As social becomes more and more of a layer between enterprise applications, we will use these tools to find quick answers -- people are able to leverage their networks of experts much more quickly than, say, through a search page. Social provides a quick and easy way to share data and knowledge.
   
3. Identify expertise -- Upload dozens of documents on a single topic, and you will likely be recognized as an expert (at least by volume) on a topic. But social helps surface subject matter experts (SMEs) directly, or more importantly, indirectly through their activities. As people like, rate, follow, and share content with SharePoint, they begin surfacing in search results as an expert because of their social expertise -- expertise that you might not otherwise identify if not for the social tools used.
   
4. Extending search -- Social builds, extends, and improves search through the dynamic creation of end-user-generated keywords, or folksonomy. As users connect and discuss content, they apply tags or keywords that help them personally relate to that content, and track themes or data trends in SharePoint. Every like, every tag, every rating or share helps improve the overall search experience by adding to the folksonomy, which then -- through proactive governance -- can help improve your system taxonomy.
   
5. Team connection -- While the terms "social" and "collaboration" are often blurred, I like to separate their definitions by saying that social technology helps teams collaborate by building connections across traditional data silos. Social is the tool by which collaboration is achieved. Social helps teams connect and relate whether they are across the hall, across campus, or around the world -- thus improving collaboration.

Many organizations are running as quickly as they can toward social  without understanding what they are actually trying to accomplish. As with any technology deployment, you rarely recognize the financial benefit when you cannot first identify the business goal. That's certainly the case with social.

There are reasons to use SharePoint 2013 on premises social features, and reasons to use the Yammer model. While Microsoft is focusing their innovation efforts within the cloud, expanding social features within SharePoint Online, Yammer, and through integrations across the office 365 platform, what your business actually needs for the next 3 to 5 years may not put you in the Innovator or even the Early adopter segment….but that’s ok. Both SharePoint on prem and online (with Yammer integrations) provide powerful and flexible solutions, and both have distinct business value. The real key to gaining business benefit out of the Microsoft social platforms is to begin with a clear definition of your desired business outcomes. Know what you want to achieve up front, and the right technology will become more readily apparent.

Governance Planning for Office365 Growth

In a CIOUpdate.com article entitled Prolific SharePoint Sites Undermine Governance, technology writer Jake Frazier outlined a common problem with the growing number of SharePoint customers: the uncontrolled growth of SharePoint sites, and how it impacts governance. Data shared at the SharePoint Conference (#SPC14) in Las Vegas earlier this year estimates the average SharePoint farm size at just over 1 terabyte, with 50 to 75% growth per year. SharePoint continues to proliferate in the marketplace, with KMWorld reporting SharePoint licenses worldwide at over 130 million, and SharePoint Online usage through Office365 growing at a fast pace. The more sites that are created and the more content added to your environment, the more difficult it can be to change course, correct mistakes, and implement a governance model. But the business value to having a formal governance model in place is enormous. As Mr. Frazier points out,

“To accomplish the defensible disposal of information, including information in SharePoint sites, companies must put in place and enforce a record retention policy that recognizes the three major reasons to keep information: business value, regulatory requirements and legal holds.“

The difficult part of building out any kind governance plan is figuring out where to begin. While the ideal situation is to have a plan in place from the beginning, it’s just not realistic. Most organizations adopted SharePoint by trying out the free version (WSS or Foundation), only adopting the enterprise version once users had adopted the platform. My prediction is that we’ll repeat this pattern with Office365. According to Microsoft at last year’s Worldwide Partner Conference (#WPC13) which took place in Houston, Texas, 90% of Office365 customers have adopted the platform for its hosted Exchange capabilities, with 6% adopting primarily because of Lync capabilities, and only 4% moving to the platform for SharePoint Online. However, I expect we’ll see a change in the next 24 months as many organizations come to the same conclusion that many organizations reached historically with SharePoint: we are paying for SharePoint through Office365, so let’s start using it. As a result, I predict SharePoint Online usage will increase dramatically as the platform matures, far outpacing on premises usage of the platform.

From a governance, risk and compliance perspective, this sudden push into SharePoint Online should encourage some healthy introspection. Suddenly, many IT organizations will find themselves trying to clean up, organize, and administer these systems. What they need is help in building out governance in a real-time environment.  Mr. Frazier outlines two very important steps in building a plan for taking back control of governance:

• Getting executive support. This is essential to any IT project, but especially with SharePoint governance, as you may need to enforce certain policies, using both the carrot and the stick.
• Creating a cross-functional taskforce or governance committee. This is where your governance model is debated, designed, and approved by stakeholders across your organization.

While these two recommendations are essential steps to taking back control of your SharePoint governance, they are just the beginning of your planning process. Some additional steps might include:

• Create a governance strategy. Formalize your plans, so that stakeholders and end users alike can provide input, and help make the resulting plan part of your company culture, ensuring long-term success.
• Understand your usage and activity. Start your planning with data, so that you better understand who is using SharePoint, how they are using it, and where there are gaps in your planning.
• Map out your records management policies. Different departments may have different rules they need to adhere to, and one set of rules may not apply to everyone.
• Implement and iterate. Once the plan has been built and signed off by your executive sponsor, stakeholders, and end user influencers, begin to implement - making sure you have a strong change management process in place, so that you can make changes and adjust your strategy as you learn.

I know I often sound like a broken record on this topic, but it really comes down to proper planning. If you fail to plan, you might as well plan to fail.

June 2014 Content Wrap-Up

After a hectic schedule in May, June was relatively quiet – allowing me to spend a bit more time on content, and preparing for a heaving summer schedule. After spending a couple days in Washington DC to participate in the AIIM.org Executive Leadership council event, followed by SharePoint Saturday DC, I was home for a couple days before heading down to Johannesburg for the SHARE Conference and some quality time with my friends and Metalogix business partners GTconsult. Thanks again to Brad, Warren and Craig for a great week in South Africa, one of my favorite destinations. I also got to be the fan-boy for a moment, running into Constellation Research founder and SHARE event keynote Ray Wang (@rwang0), and snapped the photo above. Great meeting you in person Ray!

Within the articles produced last month, I kicked things off with a more in-depth overview of my planned travels and topics:

• Upcoming Events: June And July 2014 (buckleyPLANET) http://bit.ly/1jKlkkR
• Going To Johannesburg To Talk About The Cloud (buckleyPLANET) http://bit.ly/1vxbGan

A recurring theme that is gaining traction for me is the topic of “hybrid” SharePoint environments. While that one word contains many different permutations, it is a topic that is appearing within more and more organizational planning sessions as companies try to figure out their strategy for moving SharePoint infrastructure into the cloud. It was the topic of my SharePoint Conference session in Las Vegas, and will be the focus of several of my keynote presentations throughout this year. In May, I led a well-attended tweetjam on the topic, from which I have been discussing in detail through an article series on ITUnity.com:

• Do I Need a Hybrid Strategy for SharePoint? (ITUnity) http://bit.ly/VFJdVp
• Common Hybrid Scenarios (ITUnity) http://bit.ly/1mmqpQG
• How Much Elbow Grease Does Hybrid Require? (ITUnity) http://bit.ly/1iWlMBH
• What You Need to Know About Deploying Hybrid Search (ITUnity) http://bit.ly/1pXhN6s
• Hybrid SharePoint Road Blocks (ITUnity) http://bit.ly/1mlbeMV

Another mainstay for me in the topic of governance – usually written from a planning / project management perspective. My intent is to make this information as actionable as possible so that readers can incorporate some of these ideas right into their collaboration planning efforts:

• Practical Guidance For SharePoint Governance Planning (buckleyPLANET) http://bit.ly/1o9i1pK
• Understand the Governance Impacts of Moving to the Cloud (Business2Community) http://bit.ly/1o2jL2R
• Taking Action on Your SharePoint Governance Strategy with ControlPoint (Metalogix blog) http://bit.ly/VdLKFG
• 5 Considerations for Building Your Governance Strategy (AIIM) http://bit.ly/1qyCwBf
• Planning for SharePoint Governance, Compliance, and Monitoring (Metalogix blog) http://bit.ly/1m9eWHJ
• Automating Policies in SharePoint to Stay in Control (Metalogix blog) http://bit.ly/1xhNkEj

For June, the #CollabTalk tweetjam turned its attention to the SharePoint user experience, which I’ll be expanding on in July with an article for CMSWire (in the works now) and some additional ideas shared through my personal blog:

• June 2014 #CollabTalk TweetJam On SharePoint UX (buckleyPLANET) http://bit.ly/TDskZy
• Making the SharePoint UX More "Sticky" (Storify) http://bit.ly/1lzSVO7
• Boosting Your SharePoint Adoption (Metalogix blog) http://bit.ly/1xhNs6P
• Improving Findability Is Not Just About Metadata (buckleyPLANET) http://bit.ly/1qR9Yk4
• Guess What? The Key to SharePoint Success is STILL Metadata and Taxonomy (AIIM) http://bit.ly/1keMH6j

Of course, I don’t think I’ve gone a month in the last 5 years without writing at least one article about migrations. I have a few more ideas in the hopper as interest ramps up around SharePoint 2013, as well as the more complex move to Office 365 (because of Exchange, file share, AND SharePoint content migration requirements):

• Don't Forget Your End Users in Your Migration Planning (Metalogix bloeg) http://bit.ly/1z89M4A
• The Value of a SharePoint Training Plan (Metalogix blog) http://bit.ly/1rjSdwc
• 5 Steps for Building a SharePoint Migration Plan (CMSWire) http://bit.ly/1rYDbcQ

Following my SPSDC session on June 7th, I was chatting with Adam Levithan (@collabadam), Neil McNeely (@neilmcneely) and Susan Lennon (@susanlennon) about some of the differences between SharePoint on prem and online feature differences, and to help answer a question from Neil, went onto TechNet and pulled together a quick post on the topic in an attempt to make what Microsoft had published a little more “consumable.” Unfortunately, the amount of detail behind most of the links is minimal, but my opinion is that this is an improvement:

• SharePoint Online Vs OnPrem: Feature Comparison (buckleyPLANET) http://bit.ly/1o2g6SJ

For those who have been following me for a while, you know that I am very much an active member of the partner community, having just wrapped up 3 years as president of the Seattle chapter of the International Association of Microsoft Channel Partners (IAMCP). I’m also a leadership/orgabizational development junkie, and often write on the topics of marketing, leadership, and management:

• Extending Your Partner Footprint At #WPC14 (buckleyPLANET) http://bit.ly/1jKlvwt
• The Power Of Community To Drive Innovation (buckleyPLANET) http://bit.ly/1pJNog9
• Ignore that Pie in the Sky: Understanding Your Real Market Potential (LinkedIn) http://linkd.in/1ooWLhu
• How Well Do You Capitalize on Your Talent Pool? (LinkedIn) http://linkd.in/1xhRrQE

Another persistent theme in my writing is the business side of social collaboration. People still have a lot of questions about where it fits within their organizational strategy, and so I’ll keep sharing my thoughts and experiences on the topic:

• Defining The ROI Of Social Is Still Difficult (buckleyPLANET) http://bit.ly/1ooSxGD
• Social Should Be Able To Demonstrate Business Value (AIIM) http://bit.ly/1lzRY8l
• 10 Observations on Changes Due to Social Collaboration (AIIM) http://bit.ly/1pXkzbI

I’m also planning to write more about some of the business implications of Office365 – not from a feature standpoint, but from a broader, cloud-collaboration standpoint. This shift toward the cloud is changing the way we look at collaboration:

• Insight Into The Office365 Roadmap (buckleyPLANET) http://bit.ly/1sXTrij
• Understanding the Business Impact of an Office 365 and Salesforce Partnership (Metalogix blog) http://bit.ly/1mlbGe5

And finally, I wanted to include an interview I did with Redmond Channel Partner’s Barb Levisay on the topic of Microsoft’s Worldwide Partner Conference, which I’ll be attending in DC this month (because I LOVE visiting DC in the heat of summer!). I thought I was one of several being interviewed, but it ended up being just me. Thanks Barb! Hope people find it helpful:

• [Interviewed] Set Your Game Plan for the Worldwide Partner Conference (Redmond Channel Partner Magazine) http://bit.ly/1mUsTKq

IAMCP Seattle Presidency Change

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

After three years as co-founder and president of the Seattle Chapter of the International Association of Microsoft Channel Partners (IAMCP), it is time for a change – and I am excited to share our new chapter leadership team, effective immediately:

• President -- Jeff Shuey, Gimmal
• Vice President -- Barb Campbell, Colligo
• Communications -- Christian Buckley, Metalogix
• Membership -- Faye Plum, QuickStart
• Speakers -- Paul Solski, AIM Corp International
• Sponsors -- Joe Martino, Concur

Of course, this is not a very dramatic change, as Jeff and I co-founded the chapter back in 2011, and most of the board has been working together for much of that time. But a change in leadership always includes fresh ideas and new energy, and I know Jeff has some great ideas on how to further expand the chapter as both an IAMCP US board member and a long-time Microsoft Partner Network member. Honestly, Jeff is the best person for the job, and as Immediate Past President (IPP) I will work with Jeff during this transition and with the board to continue to fill our open seats and develop a strategy for FY2015.

In addition to the folks listed above who will all continue to play very visible roles in the development of the Seattle chapter, I’d also like to thank Stephane Bennour for serving the last couple years as Vice President, allowing us to leverage his experience of running the France chapter to help get us established. I’d also like to thank Carsten Winsnes, Marcy Knott, Monique Bulette, and Owen Allen as past board members for helping to make this chapter a success.

Highlights for me over the past three years were our events with Microsoft COO Kevin Turner (picture of Jeff and I with Kevin above, right), and getting to know our former MS Channel Chief Jon Roskill personally. And, of course, I love the networking events we’ve been able to hold – and I plan to help spearhead many more (at least quarterly), so make sure you subscribe to our newsletter for updates.

The purpose of IAMCP is not about getting more face time with Microsoft, nor is it about product or technical training events – although both happen at chapter meetings. What it is about is peer-to-peer networking with other Microsoft partners. It’s amazing to look back over the past three years and add up all of the leads, the opportunities, and the deals that were done through the connections made at IAMCP. I’m looking forward to the next couple years with Jeff at the helm, and will continue to do what I can to help make the chapter a success, and to increase the value of IAMCP membership for all of our chapter members.

I hope to see many of you in DC later this month for #WPC14!