After 14 years of using Typepad, I am finally updating this blog and moving to Wordpress hosted on Azure. As I finish building out the entirely new design and go through the joys of migrating almost 1,000 blog posts, their many images, and ensure all redirects and links are working, I will post a couple more times here before locking things down. For the most part, this month I'll be focusing more on creating content for other sites (RedmondMag, CMSWire,... Continue reading

May was my second busiest travel month for the year, having logged four trips (but only one international this time) as I prepare for a crazy fall schedule, and it is good to be home -- and get actual work done. Quite a few things in the hopper this month, but let's talk first about what happened last month… I kicked off the month with a trip out to Minneapolis for another SharePoint Saturday Twin Cities event, where I was... Continue reading

Around the world, one obvious trend in the collaboration ecosystem is the increasing focus on employee adoption. It's a no brainer -- you can spend all the money in the world on technology, but if your employees don't use it, you've failed. Organizations are questioning the value of their structured collaboration platforms, many of which evolved from outdated intranet portals and a presenter/audience content distribution methodology. While organizations have had some degree of success with these models, there has been... Continue reading

Like many of you, I’ll be watching tomorrow’s SharePoint Virtual Summit event, which takes place from 10am until 1pm(ish) PDT (UTC –7:00) and am excited to hear more about Microsoft’s plans for the next year. After the May 4th, 2016 event in San Francisco, in some ways re-launching the SharePoint brand (well, giving it a much-needed adrenaline shot in the arm), expectations have been growing for this year’s announcements. When I spoke with Microsoft Corporate VP Jeff Teper (@JeffTeper) a... Continue reading

In case you haven’t been hit by some of my online promotions, after several months of recording content, launching my new company, and trying to find the time to work on several of the important-but-not-billable activities that come with starting a new company, I’ve finally been able to launch the CollabTalk Podcast. You can follow the channel on Soundcloud, subscribe via RSS, and soon will be able to find it through iTunes and Google Play, as well. Some additional setup... Continue reading

I can't tell you how many times I've sung the praises of OneNote. Not that I am an expert in every nuance of the tool, but it has become my primary writing platform -- and an excellent resource for information capture and discovery. I thought I'd share a few thoughts on how to get more out of the tool, and possibly help you increase your own personal productivity. The Personal Agent There was a cover article a few years back... Continue reading

The move to the Digital Workplace will not happen at the flip of a switch, and yet that doesn’t stop tech journalists and IT die-hards from making predictions and forecasts that lean heavily on current trends – while often ignoring the cultural nuances that can make change difficult. A great example: all of the predictions a few years back that social collaboration would be the end of email. While there have certainly been innovations to reduce spam and improve the... Continue reading

I was chatting with Jeff Fried over at BA Insight yesterday, and I was reminded of a conversation we had a few years back while in either New York City or Washington DC (honestly, I can't remember which) where Jeff was teaching a workshop on architecting enterprise search, or something along those lines. What I remember from the conversation, however, was one simple truth: most searches fail because people don’t know what to look for. This may sound like a... Continue reading

Out of the frying pan, and into the fire. With a couple major projects wrapping up at the end of March, and a couple new projects starting up to replace them in April, I had expected things to calm down a bit by end of month. Apparently not. In the midst of customer projects, I also managed to launch the sparse-but-live CollabTalk.com website. Still a ton of work to do there, which I'll whittle away at all month. Of course,... Continue reading

One thing I am really looking forward to in the coming months is taking time to meet with people within the community to discuss their collaboration plans. If you know me at all, you know that I am always happy to answer questions and share what I know about SharePoint and Office 365 – but also around business and marketing topics. Having sold two companies of my own and been through another 5 acquisitions, and built a reputation as a... Continue reading

Collaboration has changed pretty dramatically since I entered the space (officially) back in 1997, when my little startup built our own proprietary instant messaging app, and then developed an early social graph technology for the purpose of automating project management activities. Most organizations have gone from locked down, process-driven corporate portals that provide a digital version of the “binders approach” to information sharing (where team and company knowledge was still largely paper-based), to a model where most of the intellectual... Continue reading

As you probably saw in the news yesterday, Microsoft has released it’s third quarter earnings with the company reporting revenue of $22.1 billion with operating income at $5.6 billion, GAAP. Net Income during the period was $4.8 billion with a diluted EPS for the quarter being $0.61. The most interesting tidbit, however, with Microsoft claiming a $15.2 billion run rate for their cloud services. The company is very tight-lipped on how it calculates some of their cloud numbers, but some... Continue reading

In the latest edition of Redmond Channel Partner magazine (RCPmag.com), a short article by Editor in Chief Scott Bekker caught my eye in which he shares some important data points from a recent report from Champion Solutions Group, who surveyed a small sample of Office 365 administrators to try and quantify the total cost of ownership (TCO) of managing Office 365. This topic goes back several years for me, back when I was a member of the Microsoft Managed Solutions... Continue reading

With so much talk about "productivity transformation" and moving businesses to the "digital workplace," I really thought we would see a huge spike in the hiring of one specific role: the Business Analyst. Did I miss something? Has it happened? Are companies hiring them, possibly under a different title that has, until now, slipped underneath the radar? The role of the Business Analyst is, in my view, critical to the successful move of any organization into vNext of their business... Continue reading

It’s amazing to see the SharePoint community continue to grow. While there are many new tools in the space (Teams, Planner, OneDrive for Business, Yammer, etc) that may pull users away from the traditional SharePoint interface, the reality is that SharePoint services are very much a part of most of these products and features – and SharePoint is a key component of the overall Office 365 platform. According to the recent CollabTalk/BYU study, the ecosystem is projected to grow by... Continue reading

Since last fall, I've been partnering with the team over at tyGraph (www.tyGraph.com) around the metrics for my monthly CollabTalk tweetjams, helping them tweak their analytics to improve upon some of the over-priced and questionable-value Twitter tools out there. They improved their measurements, which are now all that I use for my online events -- and it also resulted in tyGraph signing on as an official sponsor back in August 2016 (or thereabouts). It was out of those initial conversations... Continue reading

It’s been a whirlwind of a week. Literally, in fact. I stepped off the airplane on Sunday in Austin to learn that a tornado warning had just been lifted on the airport and surrounding area. I was traveling for the SPTechCon Austin event, and apparently the event hotel was in the direct path of the storm, which managed to uproot a few trees out in the parking lot. Missed that one. But it was the logical end to a frenzied... Continue reading

I am very excited about SPTechCon Austin next week, flying from Salt Lake City to Texas early on Sunday morning, arriving with plenty of time to lock myself away in my hotel room to work on content But seriously, I am looking forward to joining three of my fellow MVPs on stage next week for a panel discussion -- who also happen to be sponsors of the Hybrid SharePoint research project I’ve been working on since January. We are now... Continue reading

Nothing like weeks on end alone in a basement office working on gargantuan whitepapers and research projects to make you appreciate getting back out there on the road for more SharePoint and Office 365 events! Looking forward to big announcements next week – and especially to start talking about the results of the Hybrid SharePoint initiative kicked off in January in partnership with the Marriott School of Management at Brigham Young University (located about 30 minutes south of me in... Continue reading

We live in a world that is increasingly being measured at every click, every decision, every outcome – even within the tools we use to connect and praise our peers and employees. Praise and recognition are an important part of any collaboration platform. Of course, different users, teams, and business units are motivated in different ways. Having lived through a couple sales-centric organizations, I saw the power of leaderboards to drive the competitive nature of the sales teams – providing... Continue reading

All of this this talk about Teams, Groups, SharePoint, and Yammer – and yet not much talk about the leading collaboration tool in use today: email. Yes, that’s right – email. Having a discussion on collaboration without email is kind of like talking project management tools without mentioning Excel, which remains the top tool for the category. In project management, Excel may not be the best tool, or the right tool for every solution, but it’s the default solution and,... Continue reading

Back in early 2014, I wrote a piece for Wired.com called ‘The Future Requires Social Portability’ where I reminisced on a time from my telecommunications career when we built out a number of key operational capabilities, including number portability. It’s something we largely take for granted now – when you switch carriers, the ability to keep your phone number. I’m old enough to remember when the phone came with the house, with no ability to disconnect the cord from the... Continue reading