Some of you might have noticed that I have ceased writing for Petri.com. After 486 articles, my piece describing the technology in Microsoft Viva is my last. At least for now.
Change is as good as a rest, or so I am told. My change is to move to Practical365.com, where I’ll be helping the team there to increase the volume and quality of the coverage across the Microsoft 365 ecosystem. I’ve already started with volume; quality is harder (including my own), but we’ll do our best over time.
Closing the Circle
Practical365.com has a long history in the Exchange world. The site started as ExchangeServerPro.com under the direction of Paul Cunningham, located in Brisbane, Australia. One thing I noticed this week was the internal time for the site is still AEST (Australian Eastern Standard Time), possibly the last artefact of Paul’s time with the site.
Reflecting the need to cover more than just Exchange on-premises and cloud topics, ExchangeServerPro.com evolved to become Practical365.com in 2016. I discussed writing for the site at that time because Paul and I were working on the first editions of the Office 365 for IT Pros eBook and we sold books through Practical365.com. At the time, I decided to go to Petri.com, so it’s kind of closing the circle to join Practical365.com now.
New Writers Wanted
One of the big things we want to do is to give good writers the chance to share their knowledge about Microsoft 365 topics with the world. “Good” is hard to define, but I think the following attributes characterize what we are looking for:
Practical experience and in-depth knowledge of Microsoft 365. Not the whole suite, but the topics you want to write about. We don’t want people to describe how things work. We want them to get inside Microsoft 365 and explain how and why something works the way it does, and how to avoid pitfalls when deploying or managing the technology.
We’re particularly interested in articles about:
- Azure Active Directory, including policy implementation (like conditional access policies), hybrid connectivity, and security.
- SharePoint Online.
- Exchange Online.
- Teams.
- Other Office 365 services like Forms, Stream, and Planner.
- Microsoft 365 management.
- Creating solutions for Microsoft 365 management challenges with PowerShell, the Microsoft Graph API, or Power Automate.
Our target readers are tenant administrators and anyone involved in deploying or managing tenants. We assume our readers understand the technology and don’t need to be taught how to suck eggs. Instead, they want to be delighted and excited by the possibilities which exist in the technology they use.
Ability to write concise and coherent text about technical topics in English. Lots of people can write about technology. Fewer can explain technology in a clear way that others can understand. The site will help writers learn the art. My ability to write was honed by the copy and technical editors in publishing houses like Digital Press and Microsoft Press, magazines like Windows NT Magazine, and sites like Penton. Some of the editors were tough. All insisted on quality and completeness. And all helped develop my writing. It takes time to evolve your style to discuss technology, but it’s like anything else that is mastered over time.
The writers we’d like to talk to are not necessarily MVPs (achieving MVP status has nothing to do with your ability to write). We want solid practitioners who know their material inside-out. And if you write for Practical365.com, we’ll compensate you fairly for the time and effort we know goes into creating the kind of articles we are looking for.
If you’re interested in taking up the challenge of becoming a Practical365.com writer, please contact mailto:team@practical365.com.
Moving Forward
I’ll be writing for Practical365.com on a regular basis. I’ll also be helping to coach new writers, do technical edits for submitted articles, and generally help the site evolve.
I’ll also be helping with TEC (The Experts Conference), which is now associated with Practical365.com. TEC 2021 is a virtual event over September 1-3. We hope to have many Practical365.com authors present at TEC to share their knowledge in another way. You can preregister now for TEC. Looking forward to seeing you virtually in September!
