Blogs

As the newest member (for now) of the AIIM expert community, I thought I’d introduce myself and share some of my technology and business background to give readers a good perspective of the topics I plan to cover, and (hopefully) to elicit some feedback and input from the community. I welcome your ideas and feedback, and will do what I can to make this as interactive as possible.

I am currently the Director of Product Evangelism for Axceler, a SharePoint ISV that specializes in award-winning administration and migration software. While evangelism can mean different things to different companies, my role is split into three categories: product management (helping shape the direction, and specific features within, our products), partner development (identifying and supporting them), and community development (thought leadership, content, and events). I am a very passionate technology advocate, writing through my personal site (buckleyPLANET.com), my company site (info.Axceler.com/blog), NothingButSharePoint.com (I manage the IT Pro channel), and now through AIIM.org.

I started my career as a technical writer and business analyst 20 years ago, quickly moving into technical project management roles, and eventually building out and running project management organizations (PMO) and business analyst teams in dedicated and consulting roles. I spent a number of years in the telecom space before getting hooked on the startup lifestyle, which began while working full-time for Pacific Bell in Pleasanton, CA in the mid-90’s. I was trying to earn my MBA at night, and formed a software company with two classmates with the intention of building a PM/BA collaboration platform using Rational Software’s ClearCase (a powerful software configuration management platform) as the engine. We partnered with Rational, as well as object-oriented database leader Objectivity, and were part of an IBM incubator program (I even had my picture in IBM’s annual report one year).

The company was sold to Rational in January 2001, and I jumped into a VC-funded startup called E2open that sought to build out an ad hoc collaboration platform to help high-tech manufacturing firms better connect with their design partners and suppliers. We built a SharePoint-like platform from scratch and offered it as a hosted service, integrating web meeting (WebEx), presence awareness, and instant messaging into the platform, as well as pioneering some work around large file transfer (LFT) protocols and WAN optimization (in fact, we almost released our own edge device). And this was all in 2001-2003. We were very bleeding-edge.

After leaving E2open, I started a consulting firm and a non-profit (I am a workaholic), working with companies like Hewlett-Packard, Project Arena, and Cadence Design Systems on various collaboration, supply chain, and grid technology projects. While consulting in the Salt Lake City area in 2005, I had my first experience with SharePoint, attempting to deploy (unsuccessfully) Project Server with WSS 2.0 – and while things did not go as planned, I was hooked on the possibilities of the platform. A year later, I joined the team that is now known as Office365. While at Microsoft, I went on to manage an engineering and PM team in advertising operations for a couple years. In 2009, I wanted to get back into SharePoint – and the rest is history.

And here we are today – blogging on AIIM.org. I’ll be writing about what I know well: SharePoint administration, migration, metadata and taxonomy, governance, and implementation. I’ll also talk about broader knowledge management topics, sharing real world examples and personal experiences, and dive deeply into social computing (the technologies), social networking (the relationship aspects of the tools), and social informatics (the way the tools and networks are changing how we do business).

Hopefully this gives you a good perspective of what to expect, and I look forward to hearing from you. Feel free to reach out and connect with me via email, Twitter (@buckleyplanet), and LinkedIn. Thanks for reading!