Its over! (My 2014 Review)

Traditions are traditions - at least when you repeat at least once, right? So last year I started to review my year with SharePoint - lets do it again.

Conferences & Social

2013 started great - after several attempts I convinced my company to send me to the very last SharePoint Conference in Las Vegas - and it was epic. Not only that I covered 30 SharePoint sessions, I met friends and new friends - I knew some of them via Twitter for a long time, but meeting in person is a totally different story, of course! If you wanna relieve my experience including my summary you can read my posts here.

On the speaking side, I submitted 10-15 sessions this year, some where accepted, some rejected. I was accepted in Zürich, Switzerland at Collaboration Days (international speaker, yay!) and in Duesseldorf at ShareConf, Germany - I had good fun and received good feedback. The most challenging speaking engagement was SP24 - even tho my session was pre-recorded. My inner devil forced me to record my session (50 Minutes) multiple times - in the end I did not need a script, even for the jokes 😉

Additionally I visted the User Group in Munich several times - of course I had a search talk there. Will continue that in 2015, for sure.

With Dave Hollembaek, we started an “informal gathering” / Stammtisch about Enterprise Search (we are not limited to SharePoint, but focused) in Munich - if you wanna join, please feel free!

More conferences are on my roadmap for 2015! 

Blogs & Comments

I spent some time with my little blog this year - new theme with mobile support and 31 blog posts - on the statistics side (I love analytics!) I had 78,783 views on my blog (82% more than 2013) and 133 comments (29% more than 2013) with 103 blog posts in total.

My most viewed posts:

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  <a title="#SharePoint 2013 – Create a Search Service Application and Search Topology with Powershell" href="http://melcher.it/2012/07/sharepoint-2013-create-a-search-service-application-and-topology-with-powershell/" target="_blank">#SharePoint 2013 - Create a Search Service Application and Search Topology with Powershell</a>
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  53 comments
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  14,409 views
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  <a title="Install Office Web Apps 2013 for SharePoint 2013 – with PDF Preview" href="http://melcher.it/2013/05/install-office-web-apps-2013-for-sharepoint-2013-with-pdf-preview/" target="_blank">Install Office Web Apps 2013 for SharePoint 2013 - with PDF Preview</a>
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  53 comments
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  12,536 views
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  <a title="Cache cluster is down, restart the cache cluster and Retry" href="http://melcher.it/2013/02/cache-cluster-is-down-restart-the-cache-cluster-and-retry/" target="_blank">Cache cluster is down, restart the cache cluster and Retry</a>
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  11 comments
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  6,665 views
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  <a title="Installing SharePoint 2013 SP1 with SQL Server 2014 on Windows Server 2012 R2 – Picture Love Story" href="http://melcher.it/2014/05/installing-sharepoint-2013-sp1-sql-server-2014-windows-server-2012-r2-picture-love-story/" target="_blank">Installing SharePoint 2013 SP1 with SQL Server 2014 on Windows Server 2012 R2 - Picture Love Story</a>
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  6 comments
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  6,465 views
</td>

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  <a title="Powershell: List all IIS WebApplications (.net version, state, identity)" href="http://melcher.it/2013/03/powershell-list-all-iis-webapplications-net-version-state-identity/" target="_blank">Powershell: List all IIS WebApplications (.net version, state, identity)</a>
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  19 comments
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  5,797 views
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4. was published in 2014 - the others are older posts.

Where do all the visitors come from?

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  22,490 views
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  6,237 views
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  5,177 views
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  4,789 views
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  3,342 views
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United States

Germany

India

United Kingdom

Canada

In total my blog was visited from 176 countries.

Search Projects

When I look at my projects of 2014 most of them were somehow SharePoint Search-related. My clients are obviously the best - so they gave my some pretty nice challenges, mostly integration of SAP or third party systems - or indexing huge volumns (90,000,000 items in 2 weeks). Thanks for the continued trust!

SharePoint Certifications

I only managed to pass two Certifications last year - but a new years resolution is to finish both my MCSE (only 70-332 missing!!!) and MCSD for SharePoint 2013. I tried to register for a training, but I was greated with:

After December 31st, 2014 if you wish to take a Microsoft certification exam, please visit the Microsoft Learning web site for further information.

So I tried to scheduled an online proctored exam - but Germany is not on the list… so I scheduled a on-site exam beginning of January. Yay!

Predictions

• 2015 will be the year of search! Again.

For 2014 I predicted that the Service Pack 1 for SharePoint 2013 will bring some major search enhancements - some under the hood features were added, but I am still waiting for the long "announced" push API. I hope to see Delve for on-prem installations, too - but I think that will stay a wish. On the other side, that will hopefully push some to the cloud - or hybrid at least.

• Hosting on Azure for Dev/Test will even more accelerate – even in Germany.

I said the same almost last year. But I saw some changes, some new clients moved directly to Office 365 - some at least looked at it. Cloud is still not very popular in Germany, in 2015 I hopefully see some more traction.

Happy New Year!

I wish you all a healthy and wealthy Happy New Year. Hope to see you soon!