Time to knock the dust off the blog. I only have 1 post on the year. But I have good reasons. LOTS of change at work and home. Let’s replay everything month-by-month.
March
In March I was given the opportunity to manage the Trek Helpdesk. My plan was to combine the Enterprise Collaboration team (team of 1: me) with the Helpdesk (team of 5). There were a lot of synergies (see what I did there?) between the types of work the two teams were doing. I was trying to get people to use collaboration tools, but was limited in my reach. Now with the Helpdesk I can educate far more people about collaboration tools while marrying that with even better technology experiences (read: hardware). We started testing all kinds of new platforms: tablets, touchscreen laptops, ultrabooks, high-end desktops. Very cool, slick stuff.
April
Dawn and I welcomed our third son to the family; Shane. Check out photos here: http://1drv.ms/1zTEv5V. We couldn’t be happier. That said, 3 kids is a LOT of work.
May
May was a particular busy month for me. Filmed a pretty cool case study for Microsoft. Check it out:
In May I also got to migrate Trek’s sister company Trek Travel to SharePoint Online. We moved about 180GB of content using Sharegate‘s Migration tool from their on-premises fileshare to SharePoint online. Worked like a charm!
What I’m especially proud of is how fast SharePoint has permeated their day-to-day work. The other day one of their Mac users called in and their laptop had to be rebuilt. One of the helpdesk guys asked “how much content do you have stored on the laptop?” Know what the user said? “None, it’s all on SharePoint.” Score one for SharePoint!
June
Even busier month! Traveled to Vista, CA and New York all in the span of 9 days. Needless to say my sleep schedule was busted.
Electra bikes is based in Vista. I took Ben with me so we could take inventory and get a handle on the place. The office is really chill and all about having fun. The weather was awesome too.
I visited NYC for the first time. I was invited to speak at Microsoft’s “Future of Work” event. The panel of invitees included Jamba Juice, Delphi, Herman Miller, Trek, and a couple of industry analysts. We all gave our take on what the future of work will look like and how we’ll get there.
I got to stay in Times Square for a few nights. Here’s the view from my hotel room:
July
A good chunk of family time in July. I actually started drafting this blog post in July…
I started ordering Surface Pro 3’s in July and the feedback has been outstanding. The best part about the Pro 3 is the keyboard cover. We experimented with the Dell Venue 11 but the biggest complaint was the keyboard cover. Users said it just wasn’t going to work tactile-wise no matter how much they liked the tablet itself.
August
My wife and I took the family to Florida. For the last 3 years we’ve gone down to Siesta Key. There’s nothing to do but sit on the beach and watch the day go by.
Technology-wise I’ve been focusing on two things at home: decreasing my Cable bill and scanning all our paperwork. Both will be the subject of upcoming blog posts.
September
So far this month the biggest focus has been on Records Management (RM). It’s been awhile since I’ve had to do any work around RM. SharePoint 2013 has come a long way with RM. I’ve also noticed that the SharePoint community doesn’t have a lot in terms of resources so I’ll be posting about that soon too.
Finally, I had the opportunity to visit Herman Miller’s Design Yard last week. They take things to a whole different level. They’re all about making the most of a space’s purpose and driving every ounce of value from that space. I know I’ll never look at a conference room the same way again.
http://c.brightcove.com/services/viewer/federated_f9?isVid=1&isUI=1
I hope to get back in the swing of posting regularly again. See you soon.
Adventures in Tech 