What's up?

It’s been a few very busy months for me, and instead of writing a deeply technical article on something esoteric I thought I’d update you a bit on what’s going on.

I wrote earlier about starting school to eventually graduate as an Executive MBA. It’s almost time for Summer break, yet I’ve enjoyed every hour in the classroom and while working on assignments. Some have been very challenging, others have been mostly fun but still time consuming. It’s an intricate balance between work, school, hobbies, family and finding time to think.

I spent a few days in Prague, the Czech Republic late April to plan, discuss and produce the 2019 program for the European SharePoint, Office 365, and Azure Conference. It’s a group effort, led by the great team at ESPC, and together with Donald Hessing, Elio Struyf and Magnus Mårtensson we were able to build a fantastic program and schedule.

In May, I attended Microsoft Build 2019 in Seattle. For the three keynotes, I wrote recap blogs for Rencore, that supported me with the efforts. You can read them here: main keynote, Azure keynote, Microsoft 365 keynote. If you’re interested in the Build session recordings, you can view them here, and here’s a PowerShell script to download decks and videos.

Right after this, SharePoint Conference 2019 took place in Las Vegas. As I spent some time in Montreal and New York after Seattle to meet friends, I instead flew home. Thankfully the keynote was made available, so I watched it remotely and wrote my traditional recap which you can find here.

Back in Finland, I attended and spoke at our traditional SharePoint & Microsoft 365 event with 300 attendees. This is the only event where I get to speak in Finnish and have Finnish slides and demos!

Almost immediately, it was time to attend and speak at the European Collaboration Summit in Wiesbaden, Germany. It’s a community-driven event, and Matthias Einig and Adis Jugo + co. do a fantastic job in running the event of about 2000 attendees. After ECS we spent some time in Germany, enjoying visits to a few wineries and relaxing.

During ECS, my latest book, Modern Business Powered by Microsoft Azure, was also announced and released. ShareGate produces it, and you can get a free digital copy here. I signed 280 copies personally, and I was happy I’ve been taking notes at school with a pencil and paper for months now – writing by hand is fun again!

Plenty of new projects and plans are now in motion for the second half of 2019. More on those after the Summer break!