CJG is joining Solliance!

Some exciting news in the land of CJG.
I’ll have made the move over to Solliance.net!
Solliance
This is exciting for me on many levels.  The first being the incredibly smart people I’ll be working with that include, not one, not two, but THREE Microsoft Regional Directors (Michele, Zoiner and Brian) with a fourth (Tim) but a stone throw away!  That’s 4 of 150 in the world!
For those of you that know all the things that Solliance actually does, I’m sure you are running through your mind all the ramifications of this move!
Solliance has gained an incredible trust with Microsoft internally and with customers globally and I’m looking forward to getting big things done in 2018!  Some of the fun things I can talk about include the Microsoft Partner Playbooks (which were a highlight of WPC\Inspire last year), high level internal Microsoft training and external partner training based on the partner playbooks, and so much more!
Without divulging the entire 2018 strategy, I’ll simply say that you’ll be seeing a lot of me (and possibly some other familiar names) out in the field when it comes to security and compliance work!
So what happened with ShareSquared?
The last two years have been spent working with the folks at ShareSquared building some cool products and doing some very interesting projects in the state and local government space.   I was able to build a product called PowerStreamECM that implemented many more features than the more marketed migration tools such as AvePoint or ShareGate.  Additionally Shannon Bray and I were able to build a very advanced Desired State Configuration (DSC) deployment configuration and execution engine that automated deployment of every top SharePoint vendor product (yes I decompiled all of them into deployable modules) with enforced governance and configuration (in ways that DSC was not originally destined to do).
Additionally, we also automated many of the operational things that come with running a consulting company to levels that I have never seen before in other consulting companies.  Oh and I moved us from on-premises to full Azure\Office 365 this year as well (I had to do something as CTO right?).
We got a lot of stuff done in two years and I’m proud of that, but its time to take my skills and my life to the next chapter!
Life
2015-2017 marked one of the more difficult periods of my life.  I wouldn’t exactly call it a “mid-life-crisis” but life certainly gave me a few scares and those crisis’ taught me it doesn’t get any easier the older you get, just more complex and that anything can happen at any time.
Ultimately, it’s how you handle it, grow from it and evolve.  Lucky to have so many supportive and wonderful people that were there for me throughout that crazy period and continue to be!
The best thing I can do now is to follow through and be an example for others to reference and show those that have faith in me that “I got this”.
From this past weekend at our SharePoint Saturday San Diego, the comments and compliments towards the notice in my “change” were very much appreciated.  As many of you know…lots of credit to Sheila E. and just the fact you have to grow up at some point!
2018
Bring on 2018 and the rest of our lives, let’s change the world!
Enjoy!
Chris