The Year That Will Be: 2015

It’s that time of year when people tend to look back at the prior year or look forward to the new one. In my case, I’m generally choosing to look forward. 2014 was a swell year on most counts, but I’m really looking forward to 2015.

I’m excited about a number of things coming up this year, and I wanted to tell you about some of them.

My 5th Microsoft MVP Award

Yay! I was renewed for my 5th Microsoft MVP award. Always an honor to be included w/such a talented group of people. http://t.co/mE27kMie3n

— Marc D Anderson (@sympmarc) January 1, 2015

Yesterday morning I learned that I received my fifth Microsoft MVP award. As it is each time, it’s an incredible honor to be put in the company of such talented people. The MVP program lets me spend time with some of the brightest and most motivated SharePoint / Office365 people on the planet.

Sympraxis Consulting LLC

Many of you who know me may not be familiar with Sympraxis Consulting LLC. It’s my own little company that I started when I went out on my own (sort of; see below). 2015 promises to be a transition year for my little company. (One resolution I should probably make is to come up with a better Web site than the WSS3-based one I’ve had limping along for the last six years!) Back in 2008, my buddy Pete Sterpe (@petesterpe) and I started Sympraxis together with big dreams. The Fall of 2008 seemed like such a great time – not. Sadly, due as much to the economy as anything else, Pete realized about a year in that he needed a more solid paycheck to fit his life goals at the time.

Luckily for me, Pete is rejoining me at Sympraxis. I’ve known Pete since 1996, when we worked together at Renaissance Solutions. Renaissance focused on knowledge management and performance enhancement by utilizing technology and the Balanced Scorecard. You may know better now where some of my rhetoric comes from. (Sadly even the Way Back Machine doesn’t have a good snapshot of Renaissance from those times, though it does have one of the successor company, Renaissance Worldwide.)

Pete will be ramping back up with Sympraxis as his existing work ramps down, and I am delighted to have him back. He’s one of the sharpest people I’ve ever worked with and our business ethics are perfectly attuned. I hope you get a chance to meet Pete in the near future. You can check out his blog to get to know him a little bit. Since he never changed his About page, you can read how he started Sympraxis with me!

Partnerships

I’ve got two nascent partnerships I’m working on that I’m very excited about. I’ve written about them before but I wanted to go over them here again.

Seven Sigma / Glyma

The first relationship is with the folks at Seven Sigma down in Perth Australia. Paul Culmsee (@paulculmsee) and Chris Tomich (@christomich82) are two of the smartest folks I know in SharePoint land. It turns out that we’ve been admiring each other from afar for a long time. If they weren’t all the way around the planet in Perth, I’m sure we would have worked together sooner. I was lucky enough to meet both of them when I was down in Australia at ShareThePoint‘s 5th Annual Australian SharePoint Conference in Sydney last July. (It’s a great conference if you are anywhere near there for the next one.) We talked about the fact that it would be great to work together in some way and we’re still trying to figure out exactly how that might work. It will be something we’re both convinced will add value and as the partnership starts to gel I think it’s going to be an exciting thing to work together.

Their Glyma product really gets the knowledge management part of me excited. Using the concept of dialog mapping, it’s a fantastic way to encapsulate and map the knowledge contained within an organization as well as a way to help map strategic focus and direction decisions. Watch for more about Glyma from me in the weeks and months ahead.

Dynamic Owl / Bonzai Intranets

The second relationship is with my friends at Dynamic Owl in Vancouver, BC, Canada. Dynamic Owl is headed by Michal Pisarek (@michalpisarek) and he has a small group of incredibly intelligent folks working with him. Michal and I have talked about ways we could work together over the years, but have never come up with something that makes sense.

The Owls’ product is called Bonzai Intranet and I’m incredibly impressed with what Matthew Carriere (@matthewcarriere) and Shereen Qumsieh (@msshushu) have built in a very short time. They’ve taken the learning that they have over the years working in SharePoint and built some of the most common things that they’ve seen time and time again in customer Intranets. The most impressive thing about it to me is the architecture. The majority of the functionality is driven from the client side using AngularJS and calls to CSOM and REST. I’ve been working with them to think through how their architecture might work with Office 365. As we all know there are some different challenges there, but with a bit of good thinking ahead of time I think they are going to be able to do some amazing things.

I’m not exactly sure where these two relationships will lead, but I’m hoping it will go far beyond just pasting each others’ logos into our Web sites. These are great people with whom I hope to work a lot more in 2015.

Community

SharePoint – and by extension – Office365 – would never be what they are without the incredibly strong community around them.

IT Unity Webinar: #CollabTalk, The Show

I’m joining an impressive crew of people to do a new video series on IT Unity. Many of you have probably participated in the #CollabTalk tweet jams that have been going on for the last couple of years. Tweet jams are great, but of course they only have a certain utility since we can type just 140 characters at a time. With this new video series hosted by IT Unity, Christian Buckley (@buckleyplanet), Naomi Moneypenny (@nmoneypenny), Benjamin Niaulin (@bniaulin), and I will be able to go into much more depth about topics that we think are important to people who are interested in Office365. I think we will have a lot of fun and talk about some really important topics at a level of depth that we could never do in a tweet jam.

Conferences

I love speaking at conferences. I learn so much talking about what I do with attendees and getting to go to other speakers’ sessions is the icing on the cake. I used to always say I’d like to teach some day, and this is my way of doing a bit of it on a regular basis.

In 2014 I was fortunate to speak at ShareThePoint’s conferences in Sydney and Auckland, which was my first chance to visit that side of the world. We made it into a family trip to Vietnam and Cambodia, so it was quite the globe-trotting romp. (Don’t look at a globe and tell me how ridiculous that was; I know.)

There were lots of other great conferences, too: SEF in Stockholm, Sweden; SPTechCon in San Francisco and Boston; and SharePointFest in Chicago, just to name some of the most prominent ones.

This year I already have SPTechCon in Austin, TX lined up, along with SharePoint Evolution in London. If you’re dying to keep up with where I’ll be, watch the Speaking page here.

Oh, and Clients!

I’ve been very lucky to have some wonderful clients who have engaged me multiple times over the years. As is always my hope, with most of them I have a long-standing, open and honest relationship. Along with all the fun stuff above, I do occasionally focus on earning a living, and my clients are the best. Here’s to a lot of great projects in 2015!

Summary

Yeah, it may be true. The future may be so bright I’ve gotta wear shades. I don’t mean this in a gloating way by any means. I’m incredibly lucky to be in the position I’m in at this point in my career. For many reasons which I won’t go into here, my time in the sun seems to be in my 50s. Many of my contemporaries may be able to rest on their laurels at this age, having accomplished their world-changing stuff in their 20s or 30s. I’m excited to know that my time is now or may be yet to come. I can’t wait to see what else 2015 has in store for me. Happy New Year!