North American Collaboration Summit 2019

Hello to my readers. I have started getting my plans for conferences in 2019 together and I am happy to announce that I will be presenting this coming year at the North American Collaboration Summit in Branson, MO.

I have heard a lot about this conference from many of my SharePoint Speaker friends and I knew I needed to get it on my schedule. Now, many of you might say "Why Branson, Missouri?" This conference started as SharePointalooza and has grown to the event we now know. I have heard a lot of good things about the creator and coordinator, Mark Rackley.

Now, if you want to get all sorts of information on how to use SharePoint on Azure, come attend my session Running SharePoint on Azure – Tips and Tricks. I will go over the basics of hosting SharePoint on Azure and covering specific scenarios.

I encourage you to join myself and tons of great speakers on SharePoint and Office 365 in Branson.

SharePoint Saturday Kansas City 2018

It was my pleasure to come to Kansas City for SharePoint Saturday Kansas City 2018. I was excited to speak on PowerApps and Microsoft Flow in the morning and Migrations to SharePoint Online in the afternoon. The great thing about intimate events like SharePoint Saturdays is the interaction with the attendees and I was not disappointed by SPSKC.

Friday night was a great time to talk engage with the other speakers at the SPSKC Speaker Dinner. The selection of location at Hayward Pit BBQ was a great choice. I was hoping to get some Kansas City barbeque on this tip and I was quite pleased with the quality and choice of meats. (Insert Tim Allen monkey grunt here) On top of the food, the conversations were great with the speakers, especially spending time with Mike Fitzmaurice chatting about tech and the Bed and Breakfast industry.

Saturday started with Stacy Deere-Strole's keynote to kick things off. I got my first session in the morning, Quick and Easy Business Apps with PowerApps and Microsoft Flow. I had a great audience of various types of roles from IT Pro administrators to Devs to Business Users. One of the things that feeds me as a speaker is the reaction from my audience and I had a great time with this audience. We got to experience PowerApps and Microsoft Flows around Twitter and the #SPSKC hashtag. I showed how I can schedule tweets and follow the hashtag using Microsoft Flow, PowerApps, and SharePoint Lists. Click the button below to get the slides that I presented in the session and thank you to all of the attendees of this session.

In the afternoon, I gathered some folks to talk about Migrating SharePoint to the Cloud: Lessons Learned by Microsoft IT. In the session, we got to talk about some of the mindsets and steps taken for migrations to SharePoint Online. Those mindsets and steps could also be taken for on-prem upgrades as well, which made the information even more effective. Then, we talked about how Microsoft IT migrated our key internal portal from on-prem to the cloud. If you click the button below this paragraph, you can get a copy of the slides I presented in the session. Again, I want to thank all of the people that attended the session and added to the discussion.

Now that SharePoint Kansas City is done for 2018, I would like to thank the planning committee, folks like Sharon Weaver, Jonathan Weaver, and Nate Chamberlain, and the sponsors like Focal Point Solutions, INNOVA Consulting, K2, SkySync, Smarter Consulting, and Trabon Solutions for making this a very successful event. I look forward to returning again and engaging with the SharePoint/Office 365 Community of Kansas City.

SharePoint Saturday Denver

Another SharePoint Saturday and another great event! I want to thank the SharePoint Saturday Committee for Denver, Colorado for inviting me to speak and giving me the opportunity for not only one, but two sessions. The attendees were great and had incredible questions for both sessions.

The day started with the keynote delivered by Dan Holme about many of the announcements for SharePoint both on-prem and in Office 365. Some of the announcements were from Microsoft Ignite but some also announced prior to Microsoft Ignite. The audience loved his hands-on presentations which added to his presentation.

After the keynote, my first session of the day was Migrating SharePoint to the Cloud: Lessons Learned by Microsoft IT. The attendees were very interested in this topic and understanding how they can effectively move from SharePoint on-prem to SharePoint Online. I walked through how we setup and ran the projects to move to the cloud, the mines we stepped on and how to avoid them. I appreciated the good questions and interaction we had.

Later in the day, I got my first opportunity to co-present with Rick Claus, Lead of the Cloud Ops Advocate team at Microsoft. We spoke about our Journey to the Cloud as we have changed our careers going from Server Huggers to Cloud Administrators. We spoke about the change in mindset we had to do ourselves and then help enable in others around us. This change was internal teams at Microsoft for myself and for IT Professionals around the world for Rick. While most of the presentation was our story, the end of the presentation, including the deck, talked about how you can work to get the Cloud Mindset. Check out the links and resources to help you along.

Again, I would like to thank the SharePoint Saturday Denver team, specifically Liz Sundet and Jeff Willinger, for reaching out and asking me to speak. It also gave me a great opportunity to collaborate with Rick for the first time and to introduce Rick to the SharePoint community. I also want to thank Theresa Eller for reminding me to apply for this great day of sharing and Art Hogarth for joining in after the Tech Talk we did the day before.

Microsoft Tech Talks - Managing Success in Microsoft Teams

I want to thank Art Hogarth, Jason Morales and Adam Findlan of the Denver Microsot Tech Talks team for the opportunity to speak with Theresa Eller on how to Manage Success in Microsoft Teams. The turnout was great from the local community with IT Pros from across many different business types as well as those supporting government agencies and military branches. On top of the great attendees, the nacho bar was the hit of the day!

The attendees got to listen to me talking about the infrastructure and services that Microsoft Teams utilize. After surviving my presenting, they got to see some great demos from Theresa showing how Microsoft Teams could be used and integration with Power BI. On top of the great information, we got a lot of great questions from the audience and valuable conversations from the questions and answers.

The sides that were presented during the Tech Talk will be available by clicking the following button and finding the October 2018 Tech Talk.

Microsoft Ignite 2018

Even though this was not my first Microsoft Ignite or Microsoft TechEd, this was my first time attending as a speaker and Microsoft Expert working in a Product Group booth. I want to thank the Azure Customer Success team and the Cloud Ops Advocates for the opportunity to speak with the attendees and TheCUBE for the opportunity to chat with them about Site Reliability Engineering.

As usual with Microsoft Ignite (or Microsoft TechEd before that), the week is spent walking, talking, eating and networking. While I did not have a step counting device, I spent a good amount of time during the week with others using them. If I had to estimate my mileage, my mileage would have ranged from 4.5 miles on the shortest day to the 9-10 miles on the longest day. My legs are definitely not up for this on a consistent basis. Thanks to the hot tub at my hotel, I was able to recover a couple of times during the week.

During the week, I spent two of the days in the Azure Customer Success booth talking about the five habits of highly effective Azure users. You can head over to https://aka.ms/fivehabits to find out more about them. They include using Azure Advisor, Azure Mobile App, Azure Service Health, and Azure Roadmap. Now, you might say that is just four things. The fifth thing is engaging with your peers and the community. I am a member of #TheKrewe and the SharePoint communities. When I see very successful IT Pros, they are engaged with their communities both asking and answering questions.

This leads me to the networking part of my week. It was great to get back in touch with friends and colleagues from around the world. It was also great getting to know new friends. The one thing that Microsoft Ignite does is bring IT Pros from around the world together in one place to talk and share ideas. Michael Bender, a Cloud Ops Advocate for Microsoft and leader of #TheKrewe, talked about on his blog about a successful conference that sessions are important but hallway conversations are almost more important. I took advantage of this as much as I could throughout the week, both on-site at Microsoft Ignite and in the evenings.

The biggest part of my week was my presentation on Thursday. I have been lucky to speak at some great events on my own and on behalf of Microsoft. This is one of the highlights of my speaking career. The 75 minutes I got to talk with the attendees about my journey towards the Site Reliability Engineering role was very close to my heart. I can't thank the attendees both in-person and online. The best part is the session was recorded and available online for those that could not attend live. You can watch the video streaming below or click on the button below, sign up for a Tech Community account, and download the video and PowerPoint deck.

If that wasn't enough, I got another opportunity thanks to Phoummala Schmitt, another Cloud Ops Advocate from Microsoft. She introduced me to Stuart Miniman from TheCUBE and we got to chatting about Site Reliability Engineering. One thing led to another and I got the opportunity to that with Stu and his co-host, Rebecca Knight, about SRE on TheCUBE. Thanks to Stu, Rebecca and the team from TheCUBE for the opportunity to talk about SRE in the Enterprise environment.

Jared Shockley, Sr. Site Reliability Engineer, Microsoft sits with Stu Miniman & Rebecca Knight for Microsoft Ignite 2018 for Microsoft Ignite 2018 in Orlando, FL. #MSIgnite #Microsoft #theCUBE #SRE #AzOps

Microsoft Ignite 2018 was a great week for me professionally and personally. With the move of the event to early November next year, I am hoping to get myself back as a speaker.