While most people attend the various SharePoint and other technology events for the content (certainly not for the food) or to showcase our products and services, the most important value from these industry events, IMHO, are the personal contacts you make. Most of the content you can pick up from online recordings or documentation, or by dialing into a web demo. No single marketing activity, no matter how compelling, will drive a sale -- only through multiple touch points and marketing messages will people begin to make a decision. However, relationships are the differentiator. And that's the greatest value of attending events in person -- building those one-to-one relationships with your fellow attendees.
I don't recall the year, but it was at one of the early SharePoint Saturday Boston events where I was introduced to Chris Bortlik, who worked for the regional Microsoft office, in Waltham Massachusetts at the time. Over the years Chris has been a great partner and sounding board for feedback while I worked for some of the leading ISVs in the space. I recently reached out to Chris to talk about his latest role at within the Boston MTC (Microsoft Technology Center), and the evolution underway at all of the global MTCs.
[Christian Buckley] Chris, thanks again for taking the time to chat with me. People love the personal deep dives. Can you share some of your background, how long you’ve been working at Microsoft and with SharePoint, what you did prior to SharePoint?
[Chris Bortlik] Thanks for inviting me to chat.
I have been working at Microsoft since April 2008. During the past 8 years at Microsoft I have held various Business Productivity technical pre-sales roles focused primarily on Office, SharePoint, Yammer, and Office 365. My primary responsibilities have included leading technical briefings, security briefings, executive briefings, strategy briefings, architectural design sessions, solution alignment workshops, Office 365 pilots, and Customer Immersion Experience sessions with many of the largest enterprise customers based in the Northeast of the United States.
I have been fortunate to work closely with various Microsoft product teams thru the Insider and Ranger programs for Office 365, SharePoint, Yammer, and Office and I was recognized by the SharePoint product team with the Insider “top gun award” in 2011.
I have been working with SharePoint since 2001 and have been a frequent speaker at numerous Microsoft events including the SharePoint Conference, TechEd, and Ignite. I was honored to be rated as the top IT Pro speaker at SharePoint Conference 2014 and was the keynote speaker at SharePoint Fest D.C. in 2015. I was a contributing author of the “Essential SharePoint 2010” book and a coauthor of the “Essential SharePoint 2013” book. I also blog regularly on TechNet and am active on social media platforms including Twitter and LinkedIn. I am a co-organizer for the Boston area SharePoint Saturday events and Office 365 user group.
As of January 2016, I have moved into a new role at Microsoft as a Collaboration Solution Architect at the Microsoft Technology Center in Boston, MA.
Prior to joining Microsoft in 2008, I was a customer for 14 years holding senior technical IT leadership, development, and architect roles at enterprise companies including FM Global, John Hancock (Manulife), and One Communications. I have a Bachelor Degree in Computer Science from Wentworth Institute of Technology and a Master of Business Administration degree from Bentley University. Outside of work, my wife, Marisa, and I live in Woburn, MA with our 4 daughters: Kayla, Jessica, Liliana, and Sophia.
[Buckley] Maybe you can dig more into the history of your new Collaboration Solution Architect role – and more broadly, the purpose of the MTC? Many who read this many not be familiar with the function of the MTC, much less with your role. Are you involved in customer engagements and delivery beyond the POC, or do you hand off at some point – and to whom (MCS, partners, etc.)?
[Bortlik] The Microsoft Technology Centers (MTCs) are collaborative environments that provide access to innovative technologies and world-class expertise, enabling Microsoft’s customers and partners to envision, design, and deploy solutions to meet their exact needs. There are currently 37 MTC locations worldwide. Boston, MA is the home of the first MTC that Microsoft launched more than 15 years ago.
In my new role at the MTC I will continue to work closely with Microsoft’s enterprise customers, services, and partners to architect solutions that leverage Office 365 and related technologies including SharePoint, Office, Yammer, Skype for Business, OneDrive for Business, and Exchange. My primary responsibilities include leading Strategy Briefings, Architecture Design Sessions, Workshops, and Proof of Concept engagements at the Boston MTC. I am very excited to have joined the Worldwide MTC community and look forward to blogging more, continuing to speak at various external events, and contributing content via the MTC Studios.
The MTC works closely with our customers, and often Microsoft services, support, and partners, to help them architect their solutions and develop a short and long term roadmap to drive consumption and utilization of Microsoft and our partner’s software, hardware, and online services. The MTC does not perform production support or delivery activities rather we work closely with Microsoft Premier Support, Microsoft Consulting Services, and our partner community who assist our customers with implementing and maintaining the solutions we architect together.
[Buckley] What happens in a typical strategy briefing? What does that process look like?
[Bortlik] During a typical strategy briefing, we start by listening to our customers – this is key to the MTC process and our methodology. We seek first to understand what’s important to our customers and their business. We want to make sure there is alignment with the agenda and the goals for the day for everyone that is investing their valuable time with us. We also want to work with our customers to look broader than the day’s agenda – really dig into their business and technical drivers and help them craft and refine their short, mid, and long term vision and roadmap. We usually discuss the evolution of Microsoft and how we are helping our customers to succeed in a mobile first, cloud first world.
The next part of the agenda is typically a visit to our Envisioning Center (EC). The EC has four different sets available for customers to see a “day in the life” of leveraging Microsoft solutions for example as a mobile worker, office worker, home worker, or from another work location. The EC enables our customers to see the “art of the possible” and to brainstorm how these capabilities could be leveraged in their environment.
The remainder of the strategy briefing varies based on the customer’s interests and goals. Often it includes a deeper dive in areas related to Office 365, Azure, or other Microsoft technologies that are relevant to the customer’s solution needs. A key part of the afternoon of the strategy briefing session is spending plenty of time white boarding and mapping the Microsoft solutions to a customer’s strategy then helping the customer develop an actionable set of next steps with a focus on both long term strategy and short term deliverables that can be rapidly delivered and iterated. We want to focus on making this real and driving some quick wins that have high business impact.
[Buckley] I was able to participate in a few of these while working for Microsoft in Redmond a few years back, and those strategy briefings really seemed to provide a lot of value. Jumping to technology -- what has changed the most, in your view, about Microsoft’s collaboration solutions over the past, say, 5 years (aside from the move to the cloud)?
[Bortlik] Great question. For me, it’s really about the pace of innovation and change. When I first started working at Microsoft almost 8 years ago, our collaboration solutions were typically on a 3+year development cycle generally with the 1st year spent on requirements gathering and writing specifications; the 2nd year spent on development and unit testing; and the 3rd year spent on integration testing and preparing the products to ship. Even after the products shipped, it would then often take customers years to test and upgrade the various server platforms (e.g. SharePoint, Exchange, and Lync) which affected the end user experience and how tightly we could build dependencies and integration points across the Office client and server technologies.
[Buckley] Things have changed pretty dramatically.
[Bortlik] Microsoft is now rapidly developing, testing, and shipping new solutions. This is enabling us to be more agile and responsive to customer and partner feedback. This approach is also enabling our customers to more easily adopt new capabilities and work on end user communication and change management since we are not rolling out thousands of new features once every 3 years. Users are seeing a regular set of smaller updates which is very similar to what they are used to as consumers of technologies at home and in their personal lives.
[Buckley] I have to believe that one of the exciting things about your new role is that you get to go deeper into an expanded list of Microsoft technologies. That's a big part of these strategy sessions -- certainly when you're talking with the larger Enterprise customers, who want to better understand not just what is available today -- but what is coming on the Microsoft roadmap. What are you most excited about? And what are customers asking about the most?
[Bortlik] I am excited to be able to go broader and deeper into other Microsoft technologies including the Enterprise Mobility Suite (primarily Azure Active Directory, Intune, and Azure Rights Management), Dynamics CRM, Azure, PowerApps and Power BI.
Two hot topics with customers right now are hybrid and compliance/protection.
Many enterprise customers have made significant investments in SharePoint on-premises. Common capabilities moving to SharePoint Online first are OneDrive for Business, team/project sites, and Extranets. Many customers have begun moving their Intranets to SharePoint Online as well. Hybrid search is a key scenario as well – especially with the changes rolling out for cloud hybrid search. Customers are excited to be able to see their on-premises and online content accessible via a consolidated set of search results and to be able to bring on-premises content into the Office Graph and Delve.
As more data is moved into Office 365, customers continue to express interest in how Microsoft can help them protect their data and enforce their compliance policies. We’ve been having lots of discussions around the native Data Loss Prevention, eDiscovery, Auditing, Mobile Device Management, Customer Lockbox, Archival, Retention, and Information Rights Management capabilities that are built into Office 365 and extended by the Enterprise Mobility Suite.
[Buckley] These are areas that were once dominated by the ISVs, but we're seeing a shift in those capabilities moving to Office 365. That shift came up in our year end CollabTalk tweetjam in December 2015, where the focus was on 2016 predictions for SharePoint and Office 365. Looking forward, what from the public roadmap do you feel will have the greatest impact on customers?
[Bortlik] Office 365 Groups continue to impress me especially how rapidly this new capability is evolving and how the product team is responding to customer feedback. I am excited to see how we are now able to really unify the user experience across Outlook, OneNote, Exchange Online, and SharePoint Online. 2016 will see Skype for Business, Yammer, and other Office 365 services integrated into Office 365 Groups as well. To me, Office 365 Groups reflects Microsoft’s continued investments to increase integration across the service and improve the user experience both of which will result in continued usage and adoption of Office 365 which helps our customers to realize the full value of their investments.
There is certainly more to come with the Microsoft roadmap in the near term, with some announcements coming with the general availability of SharePoint 2016. We're all looking forward to hearing more about Microsoft's road map, and as CVP Jeff Teper has stated a number of times in the last few months, for 2016 to become one of the biggest years for SharePoint.
Thank you again Chris for taking time out of your busy schedule to answer some questions and share insights into your new role, and the role of the Microsoft Technology Centers. You can find Chris on Twitter at @cbortlik and blogging at http://ift.tt/1XaDWhY
by Christian Buckley via Everyone's Blog Posts - SharePoint Community
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