buckleyPLANET

A Belated SharePoint Conference 2009 Post

           

I've been so caught up in reading about other's antics at the SharePoint conference 2009 that I've neglected updating my own site. Ah, so much happening this month, so little time to sit and reflect. In short, I have joined the team at echoTechnology, located in downtown Seattle, and so each day has been a deep drink from the fire hose. And then this past Saturday morning I kept the good times rolling by attending the SharePoint Saturday Redmond event at the Microsoft Conference Center. All I need to do now to keep this vibe going is attend one or two major conferences a month….

About SPC: what a tremendous experience! There was so much energy and content and networking, and I think the only way to capture the week is through hash tags and twitter aliases: #spc09 #SharePoint @joeloleson @owenallen @mikewat @gvaros #ShareChurch #ShareHooters #Area51 @fabianwilliams @diegotrashcan @EUSP @WonderLaura @danlewisnet @ericharlan @JoyKnows  #SharePointFairy @meetdux @gannotti @globitz #SharePint @mattbremer @usher #TweetUp (I know I’m missing people – these are just off the top of my head)

Most changes in SharePoint are on the administrative side, including almost 500 Powershell commandlets, a redesign of the Central Admin UI, and the ability to recover from an unattached content db. I enjoyed sessions on VisualStudio extensibility, InfoPath and Access Services, and the guy who presented on mashup using the various new services and OOTB web parts in SharePoint 2010. Very cool stuff.

The sold-out event was fantastic, from the sessions and personal networking, to the 80’s beach party with breakdancers and Huey Lewis and the News, to getting tricked into singing in front of 1500+ people in a Rock Band competition (my band ‘Unhandled Exceptions’ came in 4th out of 8 with our rendition of the Talking Heads ‘Psycho Killer’). Most memorable night? People watching at Club XS as guests of Neudesic CEO, Parsa Rohani and the owner of the MGM Grand, followed by a poorly planned (but totally necessary) 3am search for Area 51 with @joeloleson, @danlewisnet, @ericharlan, and @mattbremer. I got maybe 3 hours sleep that night.

Going forward, I am excited to be back in the world of SharePoint, which is what drew me away from California and toward the Puget Sound 5 years ago, and which continues to grow and amaze the business world (Microsoft’s fastest-growing product, ever). With echoTechnology, I am able to wear multiple hats, and hope to be a very visible member of the SharePoint community. We’ll be launching a new blog, you can follow us on Twitter @echo4sharepoint (individually, I’ll still be @buckleyplanet), and you can join our FaceBook fan page here.

                    

               

Thoughts on Politics

“The most desirable condition for the effective exercise of God-given moral agency is a condition of maximum freedom and responsibility — the opposite of slavery or political oppression. With freedom we can be accountable for our own actions and cannot blame our conditions on our bondage to another"

Dallin H. Oaks

They Had Me At ‘Hello’

While the constant spam flowing through the inbox can be an annoyance, every so often I receive an “offer” that is just so entertaining in all its logic-bending, grammatical-glory, that I have to share with others. Because these kinds of emails just keep coming, I have to believe that there are people out there foolish enough to reply. Sad. Well, here’s the latest:

Hello Christian Buckley

Use the unique opportunity of additional earnings!

Our company hires editors and proof-readers for home-based job.

The clients of our company exchange large quantity of important information, therefore our company as an intermediate link in correspondence regards orthography of extreme importance. For this purpose we need people able to check grammatical, syntactic and stylistic peculiarities of the text.

This work provides for 3-4 hours of employment daily, at your convenience.

It is best solution for those who have the possibility to combine this activity with primary work and for those who do not work for one reason or another (students, pensioners etc.).

• Thus you will form your salary yourself, depending on your desire and possibilities.
• You will get 3 conventional units per each complete 1 Kb of data.
• Your salary will be formed of the quantity of processed data.
• E.g. in case of daily processing of 6-7 Kb of texts your total fee will make up USD 540-630.
• The final pay takes place on the 30th of each month.

Main requirements to seekers:

• Age: 22+ (no upper limit)
• Advanced PC user (e-mail programs, Internet)
• No record of convictions
• Attentiveness, diligence, literacy
• Citizen of the USA

If you are interested in the offered vacancy we kindly request you to send your mail to the address as follows with brief indication of data which you will also find below: meetlady.hrmanager.gilbert@gmail.com

FULL NAME:

HOME ADDRESS:

CITY, STATE, ZIP CODE:

Phone number (home or cell, it is desirable that it should be available any day time):

E-MAIL:

AGE:

OCCUPATION:

EDUCATION:

AVAILABLE TIME TO WORK WITH US:

We guarantee that your message will be processed within 24 hours, and you will receive the answer in any event. Our staff will contact you to clarify all details of joint cooperation. If you have additional questions we are always happy to answer them.

Best regards,

MeetLady Delivery Company

They really sell it, don’t they? I mean, come on people – this is an opportunity to form your salary yourself, and to work with a company that exchange large quantity of important information! Use the unique opportunity of additional earnings! I don’t know what a conventional unit is, but you get THREE of them for each 1 Kb of data! I mean, wow!

I’d totally sign up for this, if not for the fact that I am in the middle of a large financial transaction to help the Crown Prince of Zimbobzni move his inheritance to a US bank via my free checking account…

SharePoint Conference 2009

I delayed and delayed registration, but I am now officially booked for travel to Las Vegas weekend after next to attend the SharePoint Conference 2009 at the Mandalay Bay resort from 10/18 through 10/22. The SharePoint 2010 release is going to be huge. Looking forward to meeting the many different SharePoint ISVs, SIs, and of course Microsoft program and product management teams! For those not as familiar with SharePoint, Jeff Teper, Microsoft CVP for SharePoint Server, recently blogged on the history of SharePoint here.

If you’re planning on attending, please drop me a line and let’s try to connect while we’re there. Or you can follow me via Twitter (@buckleyplanet). See you there!

The Three Voices of Twitter

Trying to figure out how to use Twitter for your business? There are countless articles and blog posting on how to use micro-blogging, many of which purport to share practical experience and tactical advice. A quick search will show you how to use Twitter to promote your blog. Use Twitter for branding. Use it the “right way.” Use it “productively.” And of course, use it to fuel your narcissistic needs (by the way, you can follow me here).

However, many of these articles jump right down into the details without really explaining the basics. As I’ve been talking to various entrepreneurs and startups, I’ve found that the Twitter corporate strategy can be divided into three primary streams of communication: the corporate voice, the SME voice, and the personal voice. Most business entities who are finding success through the use of Twitter may gravitate toward one of these voices, but they definitely use all three. Here’s a quick overview:

1. The Corporate Voice
   This is the traditional, professional voice of your business. You can share event news and links to press releases, discuss upcoming product release news or executive movement. Basically, this is the content that you would otherwise share through traditional marketing and public relations channels.
   
2. The SME Voice
   Depending on your business, this could be the meat-and-potatoes of your Twitter communication, sharing insights into the application of your technology, from an expert’s perspective. This is where you will build your followers, as people want to know more about how they can use your product or service to solve their business problems. The more expertise you share, the more authentic the communication, and, arguably, the more followers you will find.
   
3. The Personal Voice
   At the end of the day, people will sniff out spam and walk away. Rely too heavily on the corporate voice, and people will run away. While the SME voice will attract followers, once a customer or partner is through a particularly sketchy business problem, having found the information they needed through your last few Tweets, they may get bored and wander away. The Personal voice allows you to add some flavor, and build that personal connection to your customers by showing them the person standing behind the curtain. Clearly, you want to be careful on how much you share, and the general tone behind these communications. Too many Tweets about your local sports team, laced with the occasional expletive, and you could find a serious fluctuation in followers.

The hard part in all of this – and this is the part that you need to figure out on your own – is finding that right mix of corporate, SME, and personal voices. It all depends on your industry, your customers, your corporate personality, and your willingness to experiment.

My advice is to develop a plan, measure your success, and iterate:

• Include Twitter in your go-to-market strategy, and as part of your overall corporate PR planning.
• Tweet your daily/weekly/monthly product or service news, making Twitter a primary part of your day-to-day activities.
• Employ the help of your development or product management team to share key scenarios and use cases on a regular basis, giving customers access to the inner working of your team.
• Respond to customer questions or complaints through Twitter, pointing people toward resolved issues on your blog, company website, or other communication vehicles.
• Track the fanboys, follow their Tweets, and ensure that they stay happy by immediately acting on their questions and issues.
• Get creative in your posts, utilizing other media. Add a Twitter feed to your blog, utilize pictures and videos, and make sure any new content is shared via Tweets as it is published.
• And finally, be consistent. Find a rhythm, and keep the content flowing.

It’s Been a Football Weekend

So my friend Joel gets a Twitter update asking if anyone would be interested in 2 free tickets to see the Seahawks versus Raiders, and he is the first to respond – and gets the tickets. In similar fashion, he turns around and asks the Twitterverse if anyone would be interested in tagging along with him, to which I am the first to reply. So there we are on a Thursday night in downtown Seattle, watching a close to capacity (if not capacity) crowd cheering on the Seahawks in what turns out to be a complete route of the Raiders. In truth, the score should be counted at 31-7, because it was at that point with less than 5 minutes to play that they had it clinched, and there was no way the Raiders could come back. The final was actually 31-21. If you’re interested, here’s a play-by-play. My crappy phone pics don’t do it justice, but thankfully Joel’s iPhone can take a decent snapshot (above).

And to keep the football theme running, my youngest son, Josh, had his first official game over in Kenmore. Josh plays defensive line, and is really enjoying himself. He had a couple solid tackles, and isn’t phased by his team’s loss, which is great. Glad to see that he is happy playing the game, and less about who wins or loses...although I’m sure he’ll be ecstatic when he has his first win. It was a tad nippy out there, but my wife and I were able to snuggle with our middle son, Nick, and watch from the front row of the stands.

And to top it all off, I was able to follow along on my mobile phone as my alma mater, #20 ranked BYU, was able to defeat #3 Oklahoma in their season opener. While I was never much of a football fan when I attended BYU from 86-89 (I did have season tickets for the 86-97 season), the addition of Coach Bronco Mendenhall has got me excited again about Cougar football, and I think I’ll follow them this year. I might even buy a BYU sweatshirt to replace the one I picked up in 1990. Who knows. Seeing how my daughter will likely attend BYU next year, I should probably stock up.

The Red Herrings of Cloud Computing

I came across yet another article on the limitations of cloud computing posted over on TechFlash (which i found by way of Todd Bishop’s Twitter feed). While the author, Matt Seidel, makes some good points, he fails to do his homework in constructing a defensible position against the cloud. His three primary arguments: instability of these platforms (and the lack of visibility into reasons for their failures), questionable business models (or intent) of the leading cloud computing firms, and the limitations of a proprietary system.

As I commented to the author, he had some good points, but the blanket statements just don't stand up to the many different facets of cloud service offerings. Interestingly, these are the same issues that I tackled while with E2open back in 2001-2003 when I helped build a hosted collaboration and supply-chain visibility platform, and have largely been debunked.

First, regarding the concerns around reliability of the cloud platform, I agree that this should be of primary concern to any company or consumer investigating cloud services. However, the fact is that many of these services already attempt to maintain 99.9% uptime or better. But it is just as critical for cloud service providers need to maintain standard SLAs and uptime commitments as any brick and mortar or in-house solution – but I would argue that most hosted services make uptime and other critical application data much more visible (and timely) than most internal applications. Real-time data is a major selling factor for many of these services, with out-of-the-box integration with many of the leading BI solutions (if not downloadable raw data).

Second, I don’t think there’s much to the argument against companies like Google, Microsoft, and Amazon going against their fundamental business models by moving into the cloud services realm. Much the opposite – I believe the future business models of these companies are very much tied to the cloud, and they are the ones with the capital to research and develop this technology, building out the future platforms. There is still ample space for other players – large and small, entrepreneurial innovations to constantly push the envelope and shape our direction, and for standards bodies, government institutions, and capitalism to shape the industry. In short, I don’t believe that any one company will own the cloud computing space outright, just as no single company owns the internet. There is plenty of opportunity out there for everyone. There’s nothing ominous about Google, Microsoft and Amazon being the leading players.

Third, the concern over the limitations of features in cloud services is the strongest argument again moving toward a hosted application. The main tradeoff of cloud services is that you're usually buying the “plain vanilla” version of a product. If you're talking about offering SharePoint MySites to 50,000 employees, vanilla might be just what you want at an economical price. But if your need is to provide a cutting-edge collaboration platform to partners and customers, a hosted model may not provide the flexibility you need for customization and server-side control. You as a consumer need to figure out these feature tradeoffs, and decide whether you can live without the level of control and customization that comes with self-hosting, and weigh it against the costs.

There are tremendous benefits that come with cloud computing – the main benefit, in my estimation, is your ability to focus on the core of your own business, instead of having to become an expert in, say, CRM. Or collaboration. Or email. Or financial services. Cloud services allow you to “outsource” these activities, reducing (probably) your expenses and improving your core business trajectory.

Having helped launch both the E2open hosted collaboration platform and Microsoft’s enterprise hosted SharePoint platform, my advice to companies is to weigh these factors before moving forward with cloud computing: What is the system reliability/uptime/SLA? What are the features provided, and the limitations compared to current/in-house solutions? What are the integration/reporting/data benefits/limitations? What are the capital expenditure and headcount cost savings?

If you have these questions answered, you’ll be in a better position to take advantage of the next wave of cloud computing services.

Pathwise Opens at Microsoft in September

For those of you keeping tabs, I am managing business development for Pathwise Management, and have set up several “Opens” at Microsoft for September. The internal sponsor of Pathwise, Randy Wootton, GM of US Specialist Sales in the online advertising space, sent an email to members of the Management Excellence Community (MEC) a couple weeks back that provides a great summary of the Open model and the benefits of attending:

Pathwise (http://www.pathwisemanagement.com) is an advanced development program for “already strong” leaders both at Microsoft and other top companies who want to enhance their ability to lead. The founders of Pathwise have distilled 150 years of psychological theory and practice into 10 critical insights designed for business leaders to apply in everyday situations.

In my opinion, Pathwise starts where The Management Excellence Foundation Program leaves off in terms of helping leaders further develop those--difficult to master--Microsoft competencies of Executive Maturity, Systems Thinking, and Interpersonal Awareness and Effectiveness. Incorporating a similar experiential learning model and extending the sense of community to include those outside of Microsoft, the program delivers material over time and in a manner that enables participants to master these tools and create a new way of “being” as a leader.

The “Opens” are events that focus on teaching two of the Pathwise “Essentials” (the critical insights listed above), Suspension of Attention and Transference. At the end of the session, you should have two new skills/tools that you can use to improve your ability to interact with others in high pressure situations. The Open is not a sales pitch, rather it is an actual two-hour class that gives participants a solid experience of Pathwise. There is also no cost, other than your time, to attend.

For those of you inside Microsoft who would like to attend, there are a few openings still available:

• September 15^th 12:00PM – 2:00PM, 99/3535
• September 17^th 10:00AM – 12:00PM, 113/4181
• September 24^th 10:00AM – 12:00PM, 99/1535
• September 29^th 12:00PM – 2:00PM, SEA-320Westlake/6029

If you’re outside of Microsoft but within the Puget Sound, and would like to schedule an Open at your company, you can reach me at cbuck@pathwisemanagement.com

Social Enterprises, TagSpoon, and Next Steps

Several months back, I began talking with a friend at Microsoft about an idea of his to create a consortium of non-profits and social/humanitarian-based for-profit companies. In November, Social Enterprises was created, and Daniel is working on the paperwork for 501c3 status, which will allow him, among other things, to accept donations as part of his tax status. I’ve agreed to participate as a member of the board of directors, and am excited to see this venture get off the ground. (I am still on the board of Story of My Life Foundation, although my role is small)

Which got me thinking about my own startup concept, TagSpoon (formerly known as the Samaritan-Web Project), and whether I should form the legal entity as a non-profit (which was my original intent) or as a for-profit company. I still haven’t decided, to be honest, and am concentrating more on the resources available to me to build out the platform. I have a couple developer friends who have offered to help build and test the web-based platform, and another who is a gifted web designer who will help with the look and feel and branding.

Since officially leaving Microsoft last month, I am surprised at how little time I’ve had to make any progress on this new venture, but things are still moving forward. After several whiteboard sessions, the key scenarios have been outlined and a BRD is taking shape.

What is fascinating to me is how my original idea, which I came up with back in 2002, is still relevant today (and I don’t believe has been adequately answered by the competition). A summary from my initial blog post:

The underlying premise to my work is that people want to help people - but unless it is easy for people to find service opportunities, they won't necessarily seek them out. Existing tools are fine for people looking for opps, but I am interested in finding ways to make it more viral - using network science and collaboration technology to push knowledge of these service opportunities out to a broader audience.

Looking forward to the next steps.

Summer Running Projects

I reached a huge goal this past week by running in the inaugural Seattle Rock and Roll Marathon. I did the entire 26.2 miles in 5:11 – not the fastest, and about 30 minutes slower than I had intended, but happy to have reached this milestone and had the experience. Now I can focus on improving my time. The pic above is of me about to cross the finish line. While I don’t expect to ever qualify for Boston, I do plan to make this a biannual occurrence. I’m hoping to run a second full marathon later this year – possibly the California International Marathon in early December. The weather is always beautiful that time of year in Northern California, and the course is pretty much downhill from Folsom to the Capital.

It was a beautiful day for the Rock and Roll. My favorite part was running across I-90 out to Mercer Island and back, and then across the top of the viaduct. With plans to tear down the viaduct and build an underground highway along the water, I wonder if last weekend’s race will be the last time anyone gets to see Seattle from that vantage point? It was an incredible view, with not a cloud in the sky. Least favorite part – running through the tunnels all the way up to Queen Anne hill. Running across the Union Lake bridge, watching the faster runners pass by on my right, was the most difficult for me.

Prior to the Rock and Roll, I also ran my first 10k out here in Duvall, as part of the Duvall Days festivities. A bit fast for me. I’ve run “the hill” on plenty of occasions (pictured below, left), but not that fast. I completed the 6-mile course in just over 54 minutes, and enjoyed the light drizzle of rain. I’ve decided that I prefer running in the rain, in fact.

My legs are still a bit sore this week, but I am planning to head into the gym this afternoon for a couple hours, then get a deep tissue massage. It’s all good.