Christian Buckley News & Articles

In a series of surveys last year of more than 1,000 SharePoint administrators and business professionals, much was learned about how people "perceived" their organizations to be handling their SharePoint governance strategy. The data showed a large gap between those perceptions and what governance actually looked like inside businesses. 

As a SharePoint MVP, active member of the global SharePoint community, an experienced project manager with knowledge of SharePoint business user topics, I am often asked "What are the best practices for SharePoint governance?"

A lot of thought goes into the decision to move part or all of a company's resources to the cloud, but one thing often goes ignored: governance.

The nature of how we collaborate has evolved.

Interested in increasing SharePoint end user adoption and productivity? Gamification might be for you. 

If you go to a SharePoint conference, chances are high that Christian Buckley will be there. An active member of the SharePoint community, Christian travels the Western United States and the greater world spreading the SharePoint love. Find out how Christian found his passion in this interview.

It's easy to become overwhelmed with the seemingly instant rise of the social revolution. Knowing what your role should be and which tools you should be using can seem daunting. Where do you start? What is appropriate for yourself, and what is right for your business?

On day one at the SharePoint Conference 2012 in Las Vegas, Nevada, Chris Plescia and Jeff Schumann from Nationwide Insurance provided a detailed view into their company's successful efforts to develop an employee portal and social platform based on SharePoint and Yammer. Their presentation presents an excellent case study in how to build out an enterprise-wide social platform that both meets the requirements of the business and the expectations of the end users.

When I paired up with fellow SharePoint expert Geoff Varosky (@gvaro) last year for a presentation at SPTechCon Boston, we decided to create a fake company as part of our effort to create use cases and working examples without having to rely on the Microsoft-provided generic company Contoso. During our working sessions, somehow the conversation degraded (if you know Geoff and I, this is not surprising) into a wild and silly fake company, where our characters (yes, we created characters) were also in a band together. So we found ourselves in Boston, presenting several beginner scenarios on how someone new to SharePoint could quickly become a "rock star," with all of our examples based around the activities two fake employees in a fake rock band called Horse's End.

Think you're not getting the most out of your SharePoint deployment? That's because you probably don't have the ability to experiment.

On September 8th, I found myself on the road again, far from my home in the Seattle area, participating as a speaker at the annual SharePoint Saturday Cape Town (#SPSCPT) event in South Africa.

One of the major complaints about SharePoint is that, while it contains the potential for expanded business productivity and automation, within many organizations it has become yet another file share. 

While attending TechEd Europe in Amsterdam last month, I was able to attend a session on the topic of big data by Gert Drapers, a principal software architect on the SQL Server team at Microsoft. His session, entitled "Big Data, Big Deal?" was based on content by David J. DeWitt and Rimma Nehme from their SQL Pass 2011 keynote, and sought to clarify the definition of big data and Microsoft's role in the space.

While attending Microsoft TechEd 2012 in Orlando, Florida, I participated in a Birds of a Feather (BOF) session in which we discussed one of the more controversial topics within the SharePoint community: at what point can you call yourself a SharePoint developer?

With broad adoption of SharePoint 2010 coupled with the business need to drive down costs and management overhead of information technology, many organizations are looking more closely at hosted versions of SharePoint -- both private and public cloud offerings, as well as Office365.