BIFocal LLC

Month: April 2015

  • A new chapter: You can go home again

    8 years ago Jill and I moved from Austin, TX to New England as newlyweds to start our new life together. I had just accepted a new job with Raytheon to work on a technology that was completely foreign to me. I had spent the previous 10 years of my career focused on relatively known commodities, but when I jumped into SharePoint it was a total unknown to me. Little did we know then the amazing road that was ahead of us. Every year has been another milestone:

    2007: married & moved to Massachusetts
    2008: Max was born
    2009: bought our home and moved to New Hampshire
    2010: Sam was born
    2011: Left Raytheon for Sentri
    2012: Sentri acquired KMA
    2013: Polycom acquired Sentri and I left Polycom for Atrion
    2014: Awarded SharePoint MVP
    2015: …

    heading to Texas

    This week I accepted an offer to be the Office 365 Advisory Services Manager for Rackspace , a position that is moving us back home to Texas. I am thrilled to take on a new challenge that is focused completely on Office 365 and couldn’t be happier to be joining the amazing team at Rackspace and get to partner with the ever amazing Jennifer Mason Roth on our Office 365 offering.

    For our family this change is semi-sweet as we truly love our life in New Hampshire, our friends, and the family that we have built over the past 8 years. We have built & strengthened bonds here that will last our lifetime and we will be back regularly to visit. I cannot imagine a morning during baseball season that Sam won’t be waking up and asking “Did the Red Sox win last night?” before he even says good morning to us. He has told me that he is excited that we are moving to where the Texas Longhorns play though. Max is excited to learn to play “Deep in the Heart of Texas” now in addition to “Yankee Doodle”.

    I will miss the amazing people that I have been lucky enough to work with for the past 2 years at Atrion . The team there continues to be strong & growing. I know that they are going to keep doing amazing things for our customers. The opportunities that I have had during my time at Atrion have allowed me to grow both personally & professionally. I look forward to continuing the relationships that I have developed over the past 2 years.

    I will also miss the New England family of SharePoint communities that have embraced me so thoroughly over these past 5 years. I am excited that part of my world at Rackspace includes getting to continue my dedication to the community and I will be back for SPSBoston, helping to run the 5th annual SPSNH, and speaking at SPTechCon during the rest of the year and hopefully for many years to come.

    The next few months are going to be crazy as I dive head first into my new world at Rackspace and we relocate the family to Texas. I will be at Ignite working the Office 365 Developer booth for Microsoft during my first official week at Rackspace. Be sure to stop by and visit me to hear about all of the great stuff that Microsoft is doing to enable Devs in the Office 365 world.

  • Ignite is sold out?!? Now what?

    For the past 2 years I have been honored to be the Speaker co-chair for the SharePoint Intersections Conference with Dan Holme. This year SharePoint Intersections is in Scottsdale, Arizona, May 18-21and the line up is epic. We have Ruven Gotz, Asif Rehmani, Scott Hillier, Mike Fitzmaurice, Brian Alderman, Mark Rackley, Michelle Caldwell, and Andrew Connell to name a few.

    DevIntersection is co-located with SharePoint Intersection. This means that developers can take advantage of sessions not only about SharePoint, but also about Visual Studio, ASP.NET, HTML, SQL and open web standards like angular, from the absolute best speakers on those topics.

    SharePoint Intersection features great content for Developers, IT Pros, and business owners of SharePoint and Office 365. We’ll be covering hybrid, security, governance, workflow and business process automation, and much, much more.

    There will be dozens of awesome presenters including Microsoft’s own Jeremy Thake, Scott Hanselman, Scott Guthrie and Steve Guggenheimer so you’ll get to hear both the “Microsoft” and the “independent” perspective on todays’ and tomorrow’s technologies, including all of the big news from Ignite.

    And a Surface for Free…

    SharePoint Intersection just announced a ridiculously cool package. If you register for the Complete Package, which includes the event and 2 workshops, you will get the recently-announced Surface 3, for free!

    Shirley Brothers and her team work tirelessly to ensure a great event experience, with delicious food and a gorgeous venue–the five-star Fairmont Scottsdale Princess resort. All that, with a price tag lower than Ignite and a Surface on your desk to build your next SharePoint or Office 365 project!

    Register today at http://www.spintersection.com/Sharepoint-Office365-Conference/!