Happy New Year folks! After a well deserved long holiday and as new year begins with reflection and following the principles of continuous improvement. Below are some of the highlights of where some of my time for SharePoint and Office 365 technical community was spent through speaking engagements and blog posts.

I was lucky enough to be a speaker at following community events and as ever learning from my peers.

• Securing SharePoint environment and its content –  SUGUK Cambridge – March 2016
• Power Users Guide to Office 365 – Collab365 Summit – May 2016
• SharePoint Upgrade or Migration, or is it both? – SPS Events Madrid – May 2016
• Bringing your data to life using Power BI – SPS Events London – July 2016
• SharePoint Upgrade or Migration, or is it both? – SPS Events London – July 2016
• Power Users Guide to Office 365 – SPS Events Brussels – October 2016
• Changing the way you work with Modern SharePoint Team Sites and Office 365 Groups – Collab365 Global Conference – October 2016

I was also fortunate to work with some of the high-profile organisations in particular the universities in London as well as some of the private sector organisations with the likes of global insurance firm and a global consultancy. It still amazes me how different organisations use Office 365 and SharePoint for their needs with varying degrees of maturity and adoption and together with the product rollout of features and updates from Microsoft makes this cloud collaboration space a very exciting and challenging environments to be in.
The biggest take away for me in 2016 was the new lease of life for SharePoint as informed by Future of SharePoint event, major updates to SharePoint experiences and the SharePoint App!

I also had the opportunity to take up couple of courses in TOGAF 9 Foundation & Certified and ITIL Continual Service Improvement (CSI) with an aim of consolidating my long standing work and projects experiences to align with formal training. To finish off the year, I was delighted to have passed both the foundation and certified exams and achieve TOGAF 9 Certified.

As part of my yearly commitment to support charitable causes, I decided to support Movember Foundation to help stop young men dying by volunteering to grow a full beard for the whole of November. I was very pleased to beat my fundraising target of £500, to which finally I managed to raise £618.

As I settle into 2017 and look forward to working with various organisations I will endeavour to share more experiences and my views around the developments in the SharePoint and office 365 products and services.

Enjoy the year!

Chirag

Published by Chirag Patel @techChirag

Chirag is an independent Microsoft 365 consultant at Patel Consulting, and Microsoft MVP (Office & Apps Services), based in UK with more than 20 years of industry experience. He is also a BCS (British Computer Society) Member & Chartered IT Professional, Microsoft 365 Certified Enterprise Administrator Expert, MCT (Microsoft Certified Trainer) and TOGAF9 Certified Architect. He works with a wide variety of clients in many sectors, designing and implementing business collaboration, data and information management solutions and services based on Microsoft Teams, SharePoint and Microsoft 365 technologies, Power Platform to create business value for both themselves and their customers, including UK Microsoft Gold Partners with deployment, upgrade and migration services delivery. Chirag is an active Microsoft 365 community participant, frequent speaker at local and international events including Microsoft 365 Saturdays, Power Saturdays, SharePoint Saturdays, Collab365, TeamsFest, Modern Workplace Summit and Scottish Summit. You can follow Chirag on twitter at @techChirag. View all posts by Chirag Patel @techChirag