Re-awarded as an MVP for the 11th Year

MVP_Logo_Secondary_Blue288_RGB_300ppiFor the last 10 years July 1st has always been a day that I both looked forward to and dreaded.  I’ve looked forward to it because its anniversary of the day that I was awarded the honor of being named as a Microsoft Most Valuable Professional for the first time. But I’ve also dreaded it.  Because no matter how many presentations you’ve made or how much you’ve answered questions on the forums or active you’ve been in the community, you always wonder if its been enough. But then sometime around mid-day the email arrives saying that you have been re-awarded for another year as an MVP.  That email arrived for me today around 11:40 AM (9:40 AM Redmond time). So for the 11th year Microsoft has decided that my contributions to the SharePoint and Office 365 community were sufficient to earn  me an MVP award again for the category of “Office Servers and Services”. 

But this coming year will be a little different than previous years because I plan to move towards partial retirement from my consulting career. Before you get the idea that I’ll be less involved as an MVP, think again. Being an MVP has always been about your contributions to the technical community over and above your regular job. So in the past I often took vacation time to speak at conferences or spent time on the forums before and after work.  Since I won’t be focusing on “earning a paycheck” anymore I’ll be able to devote even more time to community activities. I’m expecting my contributions to the community will go up as I move to retirement, not fade away.

So, I make this offer to Community Leaders

If you are looking for a SharePoint or Office 365 speaker for your event, and you can help me defray travel expenses, I will be willing to travel almost anywhere, at anytime to share what I have learned over the years.

SharePoint, Office 365, and Dynamics CRM are subjects that I’m passionate about. And my moving towards retirement is just a partial thing. I still plan to continue to do consulting and training for many years to come. If consulting/training opportunities come my way I will continue to work. Because that’s now I keep learning new things. But if paying jobs don’t happen to come my way then I’ll live off my retirement savings and spend even more time speaking and answering questions. 

So here’s to another year as an MVP. I think it will be an exciting one.

Presentation to Cincinnati SPUG: Protecting Your Content with SharePoint DLP

security and compliance centerLast week I presented a talk to the Cincinnati SharePoint User’s Group entitled, “Protecting your Content: Demystifying Data Loss Prevention (DLP)
in SharePoint 2016
”. I couldn’t make it to the user group in person, but they were nice enough to let me present it via Skype. At the end of the talk I promised to post my slides.

You can download a read only copy of the slides from the talk using the link below:

Protecting your Content: Demystifying Data Loss Prevention (DLP)

“Boards” Added to Delve and Office Graph

DelveDelve is a new feature of Office 365 that Microsoft has been rolling out to First Release customers since late October.  Its a new search capability that proactively gathers content that may be of interest to you and presents in on “Cards” that provide additional information about the content.  Office Graph is a machine learning engine that is used to analyze the interactions that you have with content and other people in your normal workday.  Your actions are combined with the public and private actions of other people to surface trending content that the analysis engine thinks you may be interested in.  There’s also a search feature so you can impose the relevance ratings reflected by this analysis to regular search queries that you would perform.  All of this is designed to proactively surface content from wherever it may be stored that will be of interest to you Now.

Introduction of Boards

Delve is still evolving to include more actions, content sources, and features. Today Microsoft released a new feature for Delve called Boards.  Boards makes it possible to Tag individual Delve Cards and then surface that collection of Cards as a “Board”.  You can follow Boards to make them easy to retrieve or search for Boards defined by other users.  You can read all about it in Microsoft’s announcement here.

If you would like to learn more about Delve sign up for the Louisville SharePoint User Group Virtual event tomorrow evening at 6:00PM.  I’ll be presenting a session for them on an Intro to Delve and Office Graph.  You can sign up for the session here:

Lou SPU (Louisville SharePoint Users) Meetup  Thursday Jan. 8th, 2015 6:00PM

Speaking at the Cleveland SharePoint User’s Group

sp2013

I will be speaking at the Cleveland SharePoint User Group on Wednesday, October 24th. The meeting will start at 5:00pm. My topic will be "SharePoint 2013: An Overview of the New Features for IT-Pros”. Here’s a brief description of the talk:


Like every new release the SharePoint 2013 Preview Beta has generated a lot of “buzz” over the last few months.   But the important question is, “What’s in it for me and my organization?”  In this talk we’ll try to provide an overview, with demos, of the most significant new features for end users and the administrators who manage SharePoint environments.  This will not include the new “App” model for developers which will  require its own separate discussion.  Here are the topics I will cover:

  • Search – many of the new features in SharePoint 2013 leverage a new Search engine that incorporates everything Microsoft has learned from its FAST Search acquisition
  • Web content management – a new search based page navigation environment that offers better flexibility and control
  • Mobile – improvements have been made to how SharePoint is displayed and used on a variety of mobile devices
  • Records management – a new eDiscovery process takes records management and compliance to the next level
  • Social computing – a more intuitive way to share, follow, and collaborate on information using familiar social networking paradigms
  • Upgrade – only the database attach method remains, but there have been significant improvements to the process

You are invited to participate in the Cleveland SharePoint Group! Cleveland’s forum to share and collaborate on SharePoint as an application, development platform, and integration framework.

Cleveland SharePoint Group Presents

Wednesday, October 24th from 5pm – 7pm

Register for the Event

Cleveland Microsoft Office at 6050 Oak Tree Blvd.
Independence, 44131