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Yammer Conversations now integrated in SharePoint Online and OneDrive for Business

Posted on June 3, 2014 by Joel Oleson

Dear Abby IT, As SharePoint Expert What Should I Do Next in My Career?

Posted on April 25, 2014 by Joel Oleson

I’ve had some fascinating career conversations recently, and just today one message came across Facebook that reminded me of a Dear Abby letter. No offense to Miss Abby and her letters. I hope she doesn’t mind me doing a bit of a parody on her character. In high respect… All rights are hers.

Dear Abby IT,

I’m a SharePoint Admin of 10 years. I’ve had a great career so far and great run as SharePoint Admin. I’m feeling the pressure of the Cloud and not sure what I should do. How do I transition or diversify my skills.What should I do? I’m not getting a straight answer from Microsoft and it likely would be personal anyway. While I still see plenty of SharePoint jobs, I question the longevity of my position what should I be learning next? Azure? SQL? BI?

Thanks for your wisdom over the years,

Signed

Cloudy SharePoint

Dear Cloudy SharePoint,

You are smart to be questioning the amount of IT Admin jobs around the SharePoint, Lync, and Exchange stack. The writing is on the wall for many companies that are either in the process of moving or are working to move their data to the cloud. Mail, Instant Messaging, Enterprise Social, and commodity storage and sharing solutions like SharePoint sites will be first. You are also smart to be considering this before the mass migration of IT folks to new jobs begins en masse.

SharePoint is becoming a commodity. Don’t get me wrong, it does seem to have plenty of good work for the forseable future as companies continue to deploy and push adoption, but the development and IT Admin needs are being saturated or becoming more steady state with less change. There may be some who would disagree with some of this assessment, and I welcome their thoughts. Respond in a blog post and I’m happy to link to it, or add your thoughts in the comments.

The IT Industry is going through a major shift. The emphasis in this paradigm shift is Mobile, Social, Cloud, and Big Data. This will create a lot of new jobs, and replace a whole lot of others. For IT Admins, the Cloud shift will hurt the most. These paradigm shifts happen every few years, and a smart IT person will stay on the edge of it. Developers will also be retooling as a result of these major shifts. Staying on the bleeding edge can get you cut, but the payoff is greater than the risk for sure… On the other hand sticking around until you’ve worked yourself out of a jobs is lame and that kind of loyalty is underappreciated. I hope to see others in the industry be open about what these changes and paradigm shifts will do to jobs and give more visibility to what I see as monumental in this shift. The sky is not falling, but it is shifting.

The shift for most SharePoint folks means ensuring you are diversifying. Start picking up books, projects, and figuring out where you interests are that are incrementally the next step. SharePoint is and will be a great career for many, but having a broad set of skills will make you easier to hire. Companies should not just hire someone because they meet the needs of the position, but for what they offer over many positions in the length of the employment. Diversity is good and this may mean learning Google Apps, Salesforce, Jive and so on. Diversity on a resume is powerful and speaks volumes to your ability to adapt with change. For a developer seeing HTML5, CSS 3 with JQuery, Angular (and a huge variety of other libraries), REST, etc… app development on Azure development C#, SQL Azure, Agile/Scrum development, team based Gethub, variety of repositories in addition to a variety of open source projects on the side including community projects on Codeplex shows you have the ability to work with a virtual team. Going cloud? Get experience across a variety of hosts on prem, private and public clouds… Citrix, Azure, Amazon E3, Google cloud, Rackspace, Cloudshare, etc…

So what to focus on? Here are some ideas… in areas that will really be growing. There are differences in salary, and I do encourage people who have been long in the industry to ensure the career path supports their financial goals. Just because you can do migration work doesn’t mean it will be the most satisfying.

Enterprise Mobile Device Management (Engineering and Solution Management) / Mobile Development
Visual: Designers, Client Side Developers
Virtualization & Infrastructure/ Azure Development
Business Analysts, Scrum Master, Agile Team Manager, Project Managers, Technical
Enterprise Social Community Managers/Consultants/Marketing Social Media Management
BI Analysts, Data Analysts, Big Data Architects, PowerBI, Powerpivot
Cloud Consultants, Azure Development, SQL Azure, Hadoop, Big Data apps and skills
Workflow/Forms and Business Process Management Analysts and Designers

Beyond you can see incremental steps to CRM, AX, LMS, ECM, HR and Financial systems and a number of specialists as IT converges with the business. More careers will shift to technical expertise within lines of business. If you can ease up on your politics you can find a number of interesting careers with partners, and even competitors that will round out your resume. As Microsoft moves towards it’s Devices and Services strategy you may find your interests align in other ways. Most SharePoint environments that will remain on premises will be integrated with LOB systems and in hybrid scenarios. How are your powershell skills?

There is still a lot of money to be made and the IT field will be one that will continue to pay handsomely. Don’t be driven by greed or you’ll lose your happiness, remember it’s important to find balance in your life… figure out what interests you and go for it! See yourself as an Agile being, that is ever incrementally progressing and you won’t go wrong. Learn the principles of course correction.

Don’t fret… just plan. The future is bright!

Abby IT

Birth of the SharePoint Community in Jamaica #SPSJamaica

Posted on April 2, 2014 by Joel Oleson

4 Comments

I’ve personally been fascinated by Jamaica since before I started traveling. I really enjoy the reggae music. Bob Marley and the Whalers had a huge impact on the world of music. As a student of the world’s religions I am also fascinated by the Rastafari movement and the connections with King Solomon and have read the Kebra Negast, when preparing for my trip to Ethiopia and in understanding culture of Eastern Africa and my visit to Emperor Haile Selassie I tomb in Addis Abba. (You can read more about my travels to Ethiopia to the Rock Hewn Churches and the Empire and castles of Gandor Ethiopia. Connections even go deeper when I think about my Jamaican friends and how happy they are, and how addictive the smiles of my friends.

The story of my visit to Jamaica for SharePoint Saturday stars with a conversation with a close friend. Fabian Williams, a popular SharePoint personality known for his deep technical knowledge in the DC area in the federal space, but also as a popular SharePoint speaker. I was among speaker friends at the speaker dinner in Virginia Beach, not far from where I had encountered my first Rastafarian friend in Hampton 20 years earlier. I’m always up for a good adventure, so when Fabian asked “So, when are we going to do Jamaica?” I responded with, I’m ready and a few others expressed interest including Naomi Moneypenny. We talked about our visit to some Jamaican stops in Fort Lauderdale, including the Jerk Chicken and goat. Incredible food. I looked at my calendar and realized I’d be in Orlando at the beginning of April. So I said, if we can make it happen the weekend of March 29th, I can be there. Others said they were free, and I set off to make it happen. One thing about me, if I put my mind to it, I can make it happen. My friends know this.

Later I was talking to Roger Taylor on Facebook from Jamaica, and he shared that he *REALLY* wanted to come and speak, and that he hadn’t been back in 23 years. I knew for Roger this trip was going to mean a lot. After I got the eventbrite page up, it was Jim Bob Howard that I reached out to. He was there when we started planning the event. He has an incredible passion around building community as a connector. A lot of the early signups we had on the eventbrite were due to his work in helping us find the real SharePoint talent in Jamaica. Jim Bob has spent many hours helping us connect with people that have a passion for technology that help us move mountains to put on successful events.

Roger really helped me focus on the event. Every few days he’d ping me and ask me where we were at with venue, or the site, or updates on attendees. Sadly, about a week before SharePoint Saturday Jamaica, Roger was hit by a drunk driver. The collision could have easily killed him. Despite the injuries to his leg, cheek and eye, he pushed through and came to speak. His doctors orders were to not use his eyes, so he led a discussion on cloud computing.

At the SharePoint conference it was conversations with my new friend Jennifer Pearcy. She has been traveling to the island for many years and has a deep passion and love for the people. All of the speakers paid out of pocket to get to Jamaica, but Jennifer traveled the furthest. She flew from Saskatchewan Canada, to Vancouver and on down to Jamaica. She also traveled with an extra suitcase filled with school supplies and soccer balls for a school she’s been supporting every time she comes. That’s awesome. I got my first dose of connecting with the kids in Nine mile, when I shared some extra pens that were in my bag. The kids really liked the yammer pen and were almost ready to fight over it. I also emptied my bag of some of my speaker shirts, so if you’re in Nine Mile and you see a SharePoint speaker shirt, you know where it came from.

Over time, the registration grew and we had 20, then 30, then 40 registered. After SPC14 (the SharePoint Conference in Vegas) I ran into Craig, the organizer of SharePoint Saturday Bermuda. Which itself was a great event. When I chatted with him about what I was doing in Jamaica he wanted to help. He connected me with George from Microsoft over much of the Caribbean. George connected us to Marcelle Smart, the Microsoft country manager in Jamaica. Over the course of the next few weeks we’d work out a venue (JAMPRO), and almost lost the event when we found out it was going to conflict with the countries largest and most important sporting event. CHAMPS. I continued to push for the event despite the conflict, and we kept it on track. Marcelle from Microsoft, really took care of us. When we were setting up our Speaker dinner she invited us to join the IT Community dinner fish fry in Kingston. This is where we met some of the most influential IT folks on the island and would have an opportunity to promote the event event further.

I’ll save my travel photos of the beautiful island for my travel blog (post coming soon), but we really had an incredible time connecting with the people. I rented a car and drove from Montego Bay to Kingston and had a day of adventure on either side of the event in my travels to Ocho Rios, hiking Dunns River falls, and visit to the Bob’s houses on Hope Road, Trench town, and deep in the jungle in the hills in Nine mile. All of which I recommend.

When we first arrived at the venue on Saturday morning. I was starting to get a little nervous. Would anyone show up? Slowly but surely we had a solid showing which included a great diversity of talent with many of the people there showing real depth and experience in SharePoint with more than a few going back as far as SharePoint 2003. In addition we had real records managers, admins, developers, and people from some of the most important companies in Jamaica. This wasn’t a room of students with no connection to SharePoint. All of them had powered through on their own, so meeting others had that much more of an impact each other. It was fascinating at lunch to listen to them get to know each other and quickly have a ton in common. I love being in a position to help build a community and what I witnessed here was the birth of the SharePoint community in Jamaica. Microsoft has lent their support, and all of the people who attended raised their hands in interest in joining the user group. Afterwards, I connected with Renee who traveled over 2 hours to be there. It doesn’t take many of those to make me feel and know that my little sacrifice of my time and money was worth it to help these awesome people get further in their careers and in their lives as technology in nations like Jamaica means opportunity and change. It transforms the lives of people. It’s cool to be part of that transformation and help enable the change.

If anyone has doubts about the impact of building community. All they really need to do is visit a SharePoint Saturday event. These events are built by the community for the community. No one gets paid and everyone sacrifices their weekend and these are the strong ones. You meet the ones that sacrifice the most to share their passion for technology and changing their families and communities.

After the speaker dinner a few of us went out to Mas Camp, a festival leading up to Carnival. While there I met a randomly met a SharePoint Admin named Richard, he recognized my SharePoint shirt. Richard spends his time working on SharePoint and has spent many hours writing powershell scripts and doing support and maintenance for the platform. Amazing. You didn’t think that could happen in Jamica, did you? He even reads this blog! Don’t underestimate the power of technology and community. Out of Chaos comes order or better said, out of many one people. I see that in our community… When we come together as one, there’s nothing we can’t accomplish.

My new friend Chris Reckord and his awesome yammer shirt! Yep, Yammer has fans in Jamaica too! The power of social!!!

My hope is for the Jamaican Community to grow and flourish. It will help the careers of many and strengthen the companies as it grows. It is now in the hands of the locals. Next time I go to Jamaica it won’t be an event that I’ve organized, it will be the SharePoint Community in Jamaica that will be hosting and inviting speakers from around the globe to come and visit this amazing island and becoming one people from many. In the words of Bob Marley… “One Love, One Heart… Let’s get together and feel alright!”

10 Ways SharePoint is Taking the Backseat, Office 365 and Yammer are Driving

Posted on March 18, 2014 by Joel Oleson

7 Comments

There were more than a few hints at #SPC14 that SharePoint as a brand is being asked to make room for the 1st string soloists Office 365 and Yammer. You’ll notice that I made the call back in October to change my blog from SharePoint to Collab, so as to embrace this new change as much as it hurts. Let me pull back the Microsoft curtain a little to help you see what I see. I’m not the only one who’s yelling “Paradigm Shift” and “Time to Circle the Wagons” (Is interest in SharePoint dropping) but most of this conversation thus far has been on more obscure blogs and tweets. Now I think it’s time to start talking about this in the open. I invite other readers to share their perspective. I think it’s great to have this in the open. As Ben put it… Is the SharePoint Brand Disappearing?

1. The SharePoint Conference keynote was all about Office 365 and Yammer with lots of cool announcements around Office Graph, Oslo (Code name), SP1 integration to SharePoint online, and a bunch more. You can read my post about the various announcements: Next version of SharePoint in 2015 and other things I learned at SharePoint Conference #SPC14 and SharePoint Conference Enterprise Social Announcement Wrap-Up

2. There were a couple of other reinforcements in the keynote which reinforced “Cloud First!” and Not all features (you see here) are going into Office 365 will make it to SharePoint on Premise. (Like Groups?) You really need to understand the new world of incremental releases to understand there’s really no such thing as “Non Launch Year.” The things that were announced were innovative and life changing and you should sit up and pay attention to what *really* happened at #SPC14. This post is a hint.

3. The previous plan to have annual cadence and quicker releases for on premises SharePoint has been updated. The next release of SharePoint will be in 2015. No other significant announcements related to that product were mentioned at the conference… Well, there was one… The SharePoint Social features will not be enhanced. Personally I interpret that as specifically related to the SharePoint newsfeed. They don’t plan to invest in putting yammer like features in SharePoint. They’re done. Seems that mention of Social SharePoint often relates directly to the newsfeed despite the fact that blogs, wikis, and so forth use to be part of the “social” features of SharePoint, but the Office team (SharePoint?) is gathering feedback for improving the CMS features of SharePoint 2015 and in Office 365.

4. Any and all barriers to the cloud are attempting to be removed. You’ll notice the Self service provisioning features, and the unlimited size per tenant were both excuses that the cloud wasn’t ready for scale. Now those excuses are gone.

5, Microsoft field has little to no incentive to sell SharePoint on premises. Most if not 100% of the SharePoint sales specialists have been moved to other technologies with emphasis on CRM, Office 365, and Yammer.

6. The Ask the Experts at #SPC14 had T-shirts for SharePoint, Yammer, and Office 365. Equal footing at a SharePoint conference, but when you dig into the sessions you’d realize all the new cool stuff was all about Office 365 and Yammer. That’s not just because we are in a non launch year. It’s because it’s going to be cloud first, and all the cool stuff will go to Office 365 first, and SharePoint on premises can take a back seat.

7. The new yammer itpronetwork for SharePoint is all about Office 365… Have you noticed that yet? I think it’s high time to talk about the consulting and IT roles in Office 365. So far there’s a lot less need for IT with all of this efficiency. Just sayin’! I think this paradigm shift will result in new and different jobs… definitely some retooling for developers, but they will continue to be needed for business solutions and integration work, and tons more, but the server customizations have got to go… or at least they need to be minimized and kept in a small box at home (in the smallish on premises datacenter) that shouldn’t get touched as often as it has. I could and should do a post about what this means career wise for folks, because it is a new economy and all this emphasis on Social, Mobile, Cloud, and Big Data many consulting firms will need to find a new niche.

8. SharePoint Vendors are scared they see the emphasis on Cloud and they are trying to retool as well – in this new world of Office 365, so far we haven’t seen any killer apps and big money projects. Tell me if I’m wrong. I’d love to hear about the coolest app that’s making bank. The Office and SharePoint Store or Marketplace have been around for a couple of years now. There’s definitely significant deployment in Office 365 and even enough upgrades on SharePoint 2013 that there should be some buzz around killer apps. Not yet. I agree the mobile space is the exception. There are some interesting things happening there.

9. Why haven’t we rebranded the community yet? There have been some attempts at trying to do Office 365 camps and SharePoint Saturdays. There’s some big muscle behind the Office 365 event in Europe, but it’s taking a lot more effort to get out the same crowd. Office 365 is too big of an umbrella, and thus far the Lync person, Exchange/Mail person, and SharePoint peep have been different people. They have very little in common. Even in the *real* Office 365 deployment, there should be very little need for help on the Lync and Exchange side after the migration and (client) deployments are complete. I bet we could learn a few things from the Exchange experts out there. That sure has been a shrinking community. I feel for them. Very interested to hear the details from their Exchange Conference. They haven’t seen any real love for quite a while. Cloud cloud cloud. Don’t agree? Take me to task! What is the paradigm shift creating for the Mail folks? I spoke at a Office 365 Saturday in Redmond. Weirdest crowd in my session on SharePoint online. I had very little in common with the people in the room, and their questions were all about migration and customizations. Lots of complaining.

10. Right after the event, I saw a few tweets that resonated with my own thoughts… Did I just attend the last Microsoft SharePoint Conference???

Don’t stop believing. As a community we will figure things out and react to what we’ve got. What we’ve been given isn’t bad. I’m super excited… just trying to help turn the train or boat or whatever you want to call this thing we’re on. I don’t want to leave anyone behind and I can already see people who are betting on Cobalt in 1999!

Personally, I’m a yammer fan and I’m ready to do the MC Yammer Dance! Stop! It’s Yammer time. Time to drink some yammer Kool Aid. Watch Adam Pisoni’s presentation(s) and you’ll get the vision of post agile and You’ll feel so much better after you have. Then you can join the club! Microsoft has been drinking it, but doesn’t know how to better explain to you why it’s time to go to the cloud and get on board the Office 365 and Yammer train. All of this being said, SharePoint is “sites” and it’s not going away… it’s just taking a back seat as Office 365 brand grows and yammer transforms the business with enterprise social and beyond. Still not convinced? Ask someone from Redmond what the coolest team is to be on between Office 365, Yammer and SharePoint… SharePoint? There’s still someone working on SharePoint?

Love to hear your thoughts!

Some of My Fav Pics – Social Side of SharePoint Conference #SPC14

Posted on March 17, 2014 by Joel Oleson

2 Comments

There was all this talk about working like a network, working social, and working in the open, but I felt like the SharePoint Conference was a chance to rekindle relationships with friends from all over the world. I had friends from Argentina, Colombia, Brunei, Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa who travelled crazy distances to come and listen to sessions… No, they were there for the same reasons I was… to meet up and network with friends, and see if there’s anything new in any of these roadmap sessions that will help us better understand the direction of the product teams.

In previous years there were a number of social activities planned, and just a month out I was getting worried that people were so caught up in the cloud battle and just too exhausted to try to put something together. In the past I’ve always gotten caught up in all of the parties and trying to connect with as many people as possible, that I decided it was again important to track socially what was going on and help contribute to a calendar of activities.

While Most saw the scene above…

This is what #SPC14 looked like to me…

#ShareHike at Valley of Fire on Saturday before the event with @ghurlman @mosslover @tashasev @manojviduranga and becky’s friend Leah and Luis.

We even took our shoes off going through the narrows… extreme!

Sunday with my #ShareChurch friends

Sunday night at ShareComedy with @gvaro at the ViewDo Lounge

InfoPath Funeral Monday at Lunch

Musical FlashMob… SharePoint People… Don’t Stop Believing!

@joeypatterson, @sharepointmom @darcehess @mikecferrara (not seen in this photo… another 30 singers!)

Welcome reception @RonFetters is the blurry guy jumping

Me and my fellow YammerTime friend @mikecferrara

Best Conversations were in the hallways… @danholme @jeffdeverter @laurarogers @toddklindt

Exhibit Hall randomness @markrackley @fabianwilliams @joeloleson @gvaro @cjgivens @ericharlan @

Michael Noel @michaeltnoel 19 book author signing the Russian version of his SharePoint book being photo bombed by @zlatandzinic

@jwilly and @marcykeller with @sharepointmom @wendyneal @markrackley

#Shareaoke! David Pileggi @DavidPileggi is a so much fun! We’re doing a repeat in Boston for Best of SPC! We had Naomi and her friend with us… in China Town Las Vegas.

More hallway conversations with @cmcnulty @marcykeller Mark and @pswider

@markrackley and me getting bonked by an attendee

Marti Gras parade with @NMoneypenny @pswider and @michaeltnoel

Out at the Las Vegas Motor Speedway with @popsharepoint @nmoneypenny

@robertbogue with his lovely wife

Concert at the attendee party! Alena gets up and close with the band.

Every day and night, my car was packed whenever we went out on adventures. @pswider and his girlfriend Alena.

The community area was really just a place to hook up your laptop and as a meeting place it was even confusing, I hope next year they listen to the community for putting this together.