3 times and you have a pattern, right? This is not the first time I write a recap for the past year, (2014, 2013) - and it is always good fun to reflect the last one and plan the next one.
The Past aka 2015
2015 was a super busy year for me - both work, community and private life was packed and very intense.
Events
I attended so many events this year, without my outlook calendar a reflection would not be possible anymore. Lets start with my favorites:
SharePoint Saturday Belgium / Antwerp
That was my first SharePoint Saturday ever - and it was epic. The spirit of the Belgium SharePoint Community is awesome, speaking there was really rewarding for me! Maybe I cant attend in 2016, but if I have the chance I probably will.
ShareCamp 2015
ShareCamp is totally unique, I totally love the open style of the conference - everybody can speak there, beginner, experts, customers, everybody. I totally like the mix, especially when there are topics that are outside of the “SharePoint box”, I learned a lot there and for me that is perfect infotainment.
Search Stammtisch Munich
We are only few, but dynamite comes in small packages 🙂 Every first Monday we meet in my favorite cocktail bar. It is the best place to talk about SharePoint Search and everything around it, from 3rd party to hybrid, to Azure Search - we covered everything. I hope to see more people this year, but well, Search is a niche and won’t attract hundreds.
SharePoint User Group Munich
I think I attended very SharePoint User Group Meeting in Munich (that should be 5-6) and organized one. Always good fun!
Conferences
I had the chance to speak at 2 commercial conferences about SharePoint Search this year: SharePoint Days and ShareConf - for 2016 I will try to speak more, maybe I try a different conference, too. Let’s see how it goes.
My blog
From a content producing side, 2015 wasn’t my best. I only crafted 16 posts, but well some of them took really a lot of time. Cloud Hybrid was one of them - and as a premiere I blogged about my new hobby: Paragliding. As one of my new year resolution is “fly more!” the chances are high that I will blog about it again.
Facts and figures
I like figures and statistics and all that - 89.000 page views is not that bad for my tiny blog, isn’t it? I have nothing to compare too, but I am quite happy with it. +12% from last year!
My most visited blog posts are apparently from 2014 - luckily two are about search and that makes me happy:
- Installing SharePoint 2013 SP1 with SQL Server 2014 on Windows Server 2012 R2 – Picture Love Story (~14.000 views)
-
#SharePoint 2013 – Create a Search Service Application and Search Topology with Powershell (~10.200 views)
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Contributions
On the contributions part, I tried to commit some time to my favorite tool - SharePoint Search Query Tool - and it is totally worth it. I use that tool so often, so why not improve it to make it even better?
Additionally I started my own tool - Azure Search Tool - I have to admit that I haven’t put any time into it recently, but it’s still fully functionally. I will block some time soon to give some more love because its a cool and useful util.
The Future aka 2016
2015 was a shift year - I saw a lot of clients migrating to SharePoint Online and I think even more will do in 2016. With that move I learned a lot about migration to the cloud, SharePoint Apps and Azure - and I think that will be my business focus for 2016. Maybe we launch a SharePoint App as a product - that would be fun!
Lots of work a head, many challenges to be solved - there is a good year ahead of us! And we will see SharePoint 2016 RTM very soon. I am not as excited as I was for SharePoint 2013 - but the platform matures with every release and I hope to see many many Search challenges and projects. Even more as with 2013 because SharePoint Search is business critical, right?
Main goals for next year: SharePoint Search, Apps, Azure, Community, SharePoint Search, Hybrid, Azure Search, Paragliding. I am a simple man 🙂
With that said, I wish you all the best for 2016, health, prosperity, lots of excitement and fun!
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