Christian Buckley was selected as ‘MVP Takeover’ for the month of August. Christian tells the European SharePoint Community about himself and what content and information he found or finds useful. Read on to find out more!

MVP Takeover by Christian Buckley

For those who don’t know Christian, he’s been involved with SharePoint since 2005 when he moved past tinkering and deployed the platform for an enterprise customer. From there, he joined Microsoft for a few years, helping create an early version of the SharePoint Online platform that is now part of Office365. After leaving Microsoft, he joined a small SharePoint migration ISV (echoTechnology) that was quickly bought up by his current company, Axceler, where he serves as their Director of Evangelism, driving product awareness and community development.

Christian earned the SharePoint Server MVP award in 2012 and 2013, is an internationally recognized author and speaker, and a Forbes Top 25 SharePoint Influencer. Prior to Microsoft, he worked with some of the world’s largest technology companies to build and deploy social, collaboration, and supply chain solutions, and co-founded a software collaboration company that he sold to Rational Software back in 2001. Co-author of Microsoft SharePoint 2010: Creating and Implementing Real-World Projects (MSPress) and 3 books on software configuration management, Christian is president of IAMCP Seattle, and is part of AIIM.org’s Executive Leadership Council. He is also the founder of the SamaritanWeb, a non-profit that connects experts with entrepreneurs and startups, and can be found online at www.buckleyplanet.com and @buckleyplanet

• Top 5 Twitter Accounts they would recommend the community to follow

@paulculmsee Paul Culmsee is an author and consultant who represents to me project management and business analysis “best practices”

@mkashman Mark Kashman is on the SharePoint product team, and always has clear, informative presentations and blog posts with answers to trending community questions

@jshuey Jeff Shuey is one of the most prolific tweeters in the SharePoint space who also knows the Microsoft partner channel, and constantly promotes “paying it forward”

@AIIMcmty Bryant Duhon is the official tweeter for the AIIM community, providing links to great content and people within the structured collaboration space

@sympmarc Marc Anderson is my favorite dev blogger in the SharePoint space, because he also understands and writes about the business impacts

• Featured eBook – an eBook that they have found to be beneficial

I’m still having great conversations with people about the ebook I published at the end of 2010 called Inside the SharePoint Community: 4 Strategies for Building Your Personal Brand for people who want to do more to build their own personal brands, or to build out their company’s brand. It’s sort of a guidebook for getting started with evangelism.

• Featured Video – A SharePoint video that you believe would be of interest to the European SharePoint Community

For those still looking to get the most out of their SharePoint 2010 platform, I created around 200 videos for my series The One Thing starring experts, MVPs and MCMs from around the world sharing their favorite features and best practices on a wide range of SP2010 topics. Of course, a personal favorite is still my video How to Become a SharePoint Site Admin.

• Top 5 SharePoint Articles

This is a difficult list to compile. Some of my favorite articles topped my list at the time because they answered a question or solved a particular problem. I’m not sure there’s a way to compile a “Top 5 of All Time” list because I just don’t keep track of it all, but there are some definite “must reads” from the community:

2. Managed Metadata Column Limitations is one of many examples of the depth and detail within Michal Pisarek’s blog posts (@MichalPisarek). Definitely a blog to follow.

3. A very timely article was the Derrick Wlodarz post SharePoint isn’t why Snowden breached the NSA – lax security is reminding everyone that even the most secure systems in the world can be “hacked” by someone with bad intentions.

4. On that note, I wanted to post a link to something by Liam Cleary (@hellpoitsliam) related to his stellar Think You Can Hack SharePoint? Presentation, but came across this Channel9 video from TechEd 2013 instead. If you have not seen one of Liam’s presentations on this topic, it’s a must-see session.

5. Another favorite post is Chris O’Brien’s Displaying the right data in the content Search web part in SharePoint 2013 from March (@ChrisO_Brien). This is one of those great posts that walks you through an issue end-to-end, step-by-step, with screenshots and descriptions of every possible configuration to solve your problem. Another must-follow MVP and blogger.

• Highlight a cool SharePoint tool

For companies expanding their SharePoint footprint into the social collaboration space – whether using the social features inside of SharePoint, or through Yammer – then one of the coolest tools coming out this year is ViewPoint Enterprise, which allows you to track and measure end user adoption and engagement.

• Guest MVP’s choice of content to highlight

A couple things bookmarked in my browser that I often point people toward are Know Thy User: The Missing Element in SharePoint Solutions (User Centered Design for SharePoint) by Marcy Kellar (@marcykellar), which is one of the best presentations I’ve seen, and then SharePoint in Plain English, which is still one of the best videos created to help people understand just what SharePoint does.

Personally, I’ve been doing a lot of writing around the broader subject of collaboration, and will have a couple whitepapers out later this year on the topic. The article A Holistic Approach to Successful Collaboration (CMSWire) provides a good overview of what I’ll be writing about for the next few months, and hopefully helps organizations who are at a crossroads with how to move forward with continuing to build out SharePoint, and add social collaboration solutions such as Yammer and other tools.

On the topic of Yammer, I wrote two articles which received a lot of attention from within the community, as well as from Microsoft. A Perspective On SharePoint, Yammer, And Microsoft was an attempt to organize my own thoughts around where the product team is heading, and to clarify some of the themes and marketing messages I saw coming out of Microsoft. Overall, its still a very positive message for Microsoft, but I do have a ‘Part 2’ article coming out later this year. The other article is Yammer: One Year Later written for Microsoft’s partner channel at DigitalWPC.com and released the week of the Yammer acquisition anniversary. In my mind, both are required reading for organizations trying to figure out how to move forward with their social collaboration planning.