Tag: Update

Long overdue update

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:

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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.

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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.

Update!

I know I promised you the "Mother of all test environments.” But I’ve been busy. Let me tell you what I’ve been up to:

  1. Taking on new responsibilities at work:
    • Taking over Dynamics CRM – Our CRM resource decided to leave Trek a few weeks ago. Our team will be taking over the administration of our deployment and I’ll be one of the main points of contact. Hopefully I’ll have some good blog posts coming out around the topic. Does that make me the Dynamics Wookiee too? (har har har)
    • Working more with Active Directory – cool stuff going on here
    • SSRS Integration with SharePoint – I could write an entire blog around this subject alone, especially my experiences around making SSRS talk with DB2
    • More and more training, especially around Excel Services
    • Learning more about SQL and the inter-workings with SharePoint
    • More developer type experiences
    • Yammer integrations
  2. Getting ready for SQL Saturday St. Louis. I had the pleasure of speaking there last year and it was a blast. Well sort of, my CloudShare environment died on me 3 hours before my session, but that experience aside, it was definitely a highlight for me. I’ll be speaking about SharePoint and Yammer at Trek so stay tuned there.
  3. Blog challenge at work – gotta write 1 blog post a week so I ‘m getting my ducks all lined up so I can pwn.
  4. The holidays [nuff said]

  5. Getting my head wrapped around SharePoint 2013 – so many cool things there it’s not even funny.
  6. And finally, planning world domination

On a completely unrelated side note (and because I need to get to 300 words in for this post due to point 3) I did all my holiday shopping through Amazon. Muuuuuuuch better way to go when it comes to getting everyone’s Xmas gifts. Amazon Prime was money too. Highly suggest you give it a try.