Today, December 29th, Christian Buckley hosted his annual year-end wrap up #CollabTalk TweetJam. The December TweetJam is typically the largest of the year, with community members peeking out from behind their usual work to make their predictions for the Microsoft stack in 2022.
What is a #CollabTalk TweetJam?
As a reminder, if you’re new to the #TweetJam concept, Tweets are short. Currently, Twitter restricts comments to 280 characters and, where URLs are present, using URL shortening to help get the most out of this limited space. If you jump into the conversation, you may see “(1/2)” in a post, which means the poster needed more than 280 characters, so check out that person’s Twitter stream to see the rest of the message.
#CollabTalk does some great stuff helping organize the hundreds of posts that come through in an hour by breaking up the topic into seven questions and requesting everyone use #collabtalk and A1 where the number matches the question. Good stuff if you’re trying to keep up.
Below are my answers to today’s seven questions, and a few of my favorites from the community (way too many to share them all!). I welcome your feedback either in the comments or on Twitter! But if you do join us on Twitter make sure you follow the rules!! Use #CollabTalk A$ where $ is the question number (e.g., “#CollabTalk A3”).
Community Predictions for the Microsoft Ecosystem
It is customary to say hello, both for the participants, but also the lurkers. If you’re going to wax poetic about M365 in such a public forum, it’s only polite to say who you are 😁
Q1 In your opinion, what was the biggest news for Microsoft 365, Dynamics 365, and Azure this year?
Back to some of my favorite responses to Q1 from across the community
Q2 Has your outlook on Microsoft technology and/or strategy changed this past year? Why / why not?
In technology, I have found myself regularly surrounded by people who have the ability to organize and clean their email to the point of something called “Inbox Zero”. Personally, I have only ever found myself with Inbox Zero when I create a new email address, I am generally more like Inbox Tens-of-Thousands. In response to this, I mentioned: “Inbox Uncountable” which led to a challenge to make it into a sticker. Here’s what I came up with. Let me know if you want one!
Q3 Have the introductions of Viva, Flow, and Mesh altered how you / your customers think about collaboration?
One thing I’d like to point out, in case you are not aware, is that the United States Government and supporting infrastructure often use one of Microsoft’s National Tenants in the Government Community Cloud: the GCC, the GCC-High, or the M365-DOD. You’ll see a theme about these tenants relating to often slower release schedules or even, let’s call it, light documentation. Not to say that Microsoft hasn’t gotten BETTER at this, but it’s still a gap. (I love all my friends at Microsoft who have been working tirelessly to fix this gap; thank you all)!
Hal brings up a very good point here – for small organizations, email and file storage may be enough, some automation of workflows, but are all these newer tools still relevant?
Yes, Martina. Despite not having a room in which to put the Holodeck, yes, indeed.
Q4 How has the continued effects of the pandemic impacted your community activities, and what are your community plans going forward?
This last one is such an interesting and divisive comment. I, for one, 100% agree that hybrid events should become the norm for conferences. While I love being back in person, virtual events are vastly more inclusive and enable collaboration with people from around the globe, many of whom are not able to travel due to financial or other restraints.
That said, the technology is not there yet; so while I would like to see this, I am not sure what it should look like. Come on big conference providers, let’s get this figured out, shall we?
Q5 What 3 features (available now, or publicly announced) are having / will have the biggest impact in 2022?
BTW – the use of 1/2 here means that Adam had a post too long for Twitter’s format. Click on his profile to see answer 2/2.
Q6 What are your predictions for the Microsoft ecosystem in 2022 and beyond?
I really need to talk to more people about The Great Resignation. I hear so much about the workforce shift that is happening, people leaving for better, newer, or simply different opportunities. Maybe I’ll pull together a panel on the conversation.
Oh John, how right you are. Licensing is such a massive challenge for enterprises trying to take advantage of the latest and greatest Microsoft tools. Enterprise Records Management, for example, requires use of advanced licensing SKUs which often include per-transaction fees. It is very hard to estimate your annual costs if you don’t know what the load will look like. Thank you, John, for pointing this out!
Q7 If you could give one piece of advice to Microsoft leadership and/or product teams, what would it be?
Now, the “what would you do if you were Satya” question. You have to have a certain amount of audacity (not a strong enough word, but let’s go with it) to answer this. So naturally, there were plenty of suggestions. A few of my favorites:
Wrap
I’m incredibly thankful to Christian for running these monthly discussions and more specifically to the community that has been developed around it. As you can see, despite having many thoughts of my own on the subject I have much to learn and this community is a great way to pick up some new knowledge. May I recommend lurking on Twitter next month and, if you like, even sharing your own thoughts!
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