European SharePoint Conference Speaker 5 Quick Questions Christian Buckley

Five Quick Questions with Conference Speaker Christian Buckley

1) Can you give us a preview of what you’ll be discussing on stage?
I’ve been speaking a lot lately on adoption strategy – for having a plan in place around how you will introduce, educate, and iterate on your rollout. My approach is very much taking a page from my experience with new product introduction (NPI) strategies, and so my session on adoption will help give people an idea of how to approach an Office 365 deployment so that it “sticks” and both the end users and the management team have their expectations met. The title is a bit of a “click bait” attempt to get attention, as there is no 100% adoption of any technology, but there are certainly practical steps you can take to ensure maximum success.

2) Who are 3 people you want to meet at #ESPC15?
I’ve been active in the community since I left Microsoft in 2009, and feel that there are very few of the speakers and organizers I don’t already know. Of course, I am looking forward to seeing many of my friends – and connecting directly with customers while spending time at the Beezy booth. I’m hoping to grab some additional time with Jeff Teper and Seth Patton, to spend some time with Chris McNulty and discuss his recent move over to Microsoft, and to seek out any of the Microsoft CSMs (Customer Success Managers) who might be attending. Honestly, I am looking at the schedule now, and there are about a dozen conversations I hope to have while I am there. Doing things online is great, but there’s no substitute for in person collaboration.

3) If you weren’t CMO of Beezy, what would you be doing?
Well, that would imply acquisition – so I suppose I’d be semi-retired, sitting on a beach in Hawaii with my wife! But seriously, I have considered myself a “collaboration and social guy” since I entered the space in the mid-1990s, starting in KM and then in project and portfolio management, building social tools back in 98/98 and then moving into the SharePoint space in 2005. I’d love to go back to school and pursue a doctorate in some aspect of networking science, write books and teach, but always with my hand in some kind of collaboration technology venture.

4) What was your first job?
My first job, or my first *real* job? I mean, I did roofing and hardware floors and door to door sales as most teenagers did over summers. In college, I created and sold t-shirts and worked for the two school newspapers doing layout and designing ads, and before I was married I was a runner for a law firm in Northern California. But my first real tech job was part of a marketing team for a small company outside of Sacramento that worked closely with HP to refurbish and resell hardware. I worked extensively with Aldus PageMaker, and Borland’s Paradox and QuattroPro, before picking on Excel, back when it had its proprietary macro language. It was around that time when the 486 came out (I had grown up a Mac user) that I purchased my first PC, and entered officially into the Microsoft technology world.

5) What does the future of Office 365 & SharePoint look like in your eyes?
I think we’re at an interesting point. For a long time I have been a strong advocate for hybrid, mostly because of the reality of the level of investment that has been made in on-prem and the time it will take for organizations to move to the cloud. There are many things to get excited about in Office 365, but I’m eager to better understand the Microsoft roadmap for SharePoint, as right now it is a bit lost in the current wave of announcements around Groups, which is Outlook-based. From a customer standpoint, SharePoint is still moving forward – whether on prem or in the cloud, and my bet for enterprise investment continues to be SharePoint. At the end of the day, what this means for customers is that they have more options, not fewer. And I’m sure we’ll have this conversation again when we’re on the eve of release for SharePoint 2019.