SP24 SharePoint / Office 365 Sessions

SharePoint sites out of the box have the capability of being user-friendly, but only if they are designed and configured that way. Wendy shows you 20 simple tips and tricks that site owners or front end SharePoint developers can implement on their SharePoint sites to make them more user-friendly. From navigation best practices, to forms etiquette, to what to put on the home page, to graphics optimization, and much more - you will come away armed with a list of practical usability tips that are easy to implement, and your users will thank you.

SPServices is a widely used jQuery library which abstracts SharePoint’s Web Services and makes them easier to use. It also includes functions which use the various Web Service operations to provide more useful (and cool) capabilities. It works entirely client side and requires no server install. Using the Web Services client-side, you can provide your users a more ‘tactile’ experience. In this session, you’ll learn how to use SPServices to build a more compelling user experience on top of SharePoint.

In this session, we’ll look at the most popular “value-added” SPServices functions as well as how you can use SPServices as part of your own development toolkit.

Agenda:

The cloud is here and will be here awhile - what does that mean to me as an IT Pro or Developer
What’s new in SP1
Is there a vNext, when? Is it the last release?
What’s new in SharePoint Online?
Cover new and coming Features
Death of InfoPath
Recent changes
Conclusion

It’s the most painful, but also one of the most critical keys to SharePoint success: the Content Governance Plan. This session gives your content team the inside track on preparing an effective governance plan and transforming your current content for the new web era. We’ll take a closer look at the lessons learned from organizations who have recently drafted governance plans and we’ll discuss critical points for getting your governance plan drafted and socialized successfully in your organization.

​Real life experience from upgrading SharePoint from 2007/2010 to 2013, and it's nothing like the TechNet Guide. But it's still possible to implement a successful upgrade project. The big question is always, shall you upgrade, or shall you migrate, I will explain you how, when you should consider upgrading and when you should consider migrating, and show you some examples. I will also give some leads to help you succeeds with your upgrade project.

Research has shown that only a small percentage of staff (1-2%) regularly contribute content to their organization's intranet. Imagine if you could increase this percentage? What if you could better harness the knowledge, skills and expertise of all employees within your organization, not just the most vocal 1%? Using lessons learnt and research from the Worldwide Intranet Challenge - the world's largest study of intranet end users - it's possible to use SharePoint to implemented a Wikipedia like system for your organization. This approach makes it easier for all employees to share their valuable knowledge and skills with their colleagues.

So you think you know SharePoint and you think you know JS? It doesn't matter your experience or developer level this fast paced deep dive into SP JS will unveil the secrets of JavaScript in SharePoint, the Dos and Don'ts for JavaScript and if you should be using a transcompiler or not. This will also deep dive you into the ootb object and function structure of SharePoint JavaScript and free you to develop in SharePoint in ways you could only of imagined before. You don't know JS about SharePoint.

It's good to learn from your mistakes - but it's a lot cheaper to learn from someone else's. This is a guided tour of business mis-use of SharePoint, covering internal communications pitfalls, team collaboration nightmares, and tales of when governance goes bad. Illustrated with first-hand examples and lessons that everyone will identify with.

Among numerous Add-ons which help to improve business value of SharePoint, there are those which simplify case management. Using SharePoint as an ECM system, you are sure to organize simple projects (so-called "cases"), and to include tasks, team members and associated content in them. Case management, contrary to project management or personal task management, means flexible teamwork organization in a very agile environment and thus requires wholly new paradigm of work and tools to support it. In my speech I'll explain this paradigm and run a comparison of existing case management tools for SharePoint.

Search is one key area in SharePoint Server 2013 that been totally overhauled and improved with exciting new functionality. One awesome new addition to Search is the new Content Enrichment Web Service callout, which allows processing content as it is crawled and indexed, so you can now implement advanced search solutions that weren't previously possible. This session will provide an overview of this Search extensibility option with demos.

SharePoint is an evolving platform: in 2007, we were all building farm web parts. Then in 2010, we were introduced with sandbox web parts, with the beginnings of the client side object model. In 2013, we are looking at the evolved app model, with a super-charged REST service. As developers, while it is great to learn about what's coming down the pike, it feels extremely frustrating not knowing what to learn, or attend a session and learn a technology that you can’t put to use because you don’t use the latest and the most cutting edge in your organization. Let’s take a step back, let’s look at how to build a web part using only JavaScript. Let’s separate the UX from the logic. Then let’s plug in different types of CRUD code to work with different versions of SharePoint, across different data sources: lists, search or user profile. This session is about learning how to use JavaScript to build amazing web parts, regardless of what version of SharePoint you have.

SharePoint development and fun do not always have much in common! Everyone who has ever developed for SharePoint in Visual Studio might know what I mean. Even a small SharePoint solution consist already of a large amount of different files (xml, cs, js, css, resx, jpg, aspx, etc) which may be structured differently depending on the preferences and experience of the developer.
Particularly the extensive XML Schema for manifest.xml, feature.xml, element.xml, Content Types, List Definitions, etc. is an endless source of surprise and cannot be debugged at all in Visual Studio.

As a way out, many developers choose to develop standard SharePoint artefacts programmatically rather than following the declarative approach which make the solutions even more complex.
As a result it is really hard to analyze SharePoint solutions, find violations against the XML schema, best practices, coding guidelines or to pinpoint performance sinks and cyclomatic dependencies of artefacts.

Neither Visual Studio nor other tools like FXCop, StyleCop etc. allow to perform SharePoint specific automatic code analysis.

This session will show the SharePoint code analysis framework (SPCAF) available at www.spcaf.com which addresses exactly this gap and you will learn how to easily develop your own rules for it.

You have read all the TechNet articles and passed all the exams, but moving from on premise to on cloud there will always be gotcha’s that you were not prepared for. I will go through my real world experiences in moving clients big and small to SharePoint Online from 2007/2010/2013

​​As a developer or technical lead, your early Office 365 projects are likely to raise some big questions. How should you interpret Microsoft's mixed messages on sandbox solutions? How should test environments be handled in the cloud? Do you need to run more than one Office 365 tenancy? When you can't deploy files to the LAYOUTS directory, where should global assets such as CSS and JavaScript be stored? What about automation, when only 30 PowerShell cmdlets are available in SharePoint Online? And just how do you provision Managed Metadata fields, when the on-premises techniques cannot be used? This session walks through the “dev strategy” decisions we made at Content and Code, and why. Over the course of several demos, we’ll also discuss apps, automation scripts and also advanced techniques such as Continuous Integration for Office 365. Hopefully even people not expecting to work on an Office 365 development project can come away with flavour of what such a project might look like.

Microsoft’s mobile device and tablet strategy are only the beginning. You can’t begin to understand the mobile world without looking at the enterprise bring your own (BYOD) strategy. Touch is revolutionizing our interfaces, and you can’t develop to a minimum resolution size. The world of design has dramatically changed with Responsive Web Design and Adaptive strategies. In this session we’ll look at the best and the worst of mobile web design. In addition, you’ll come away with a good understanding of what to do for your SharePoint 2010 and SharePoint 2013 mobile device strategy.

In today’s project-centric work environment, the ability to coordinate multiple projects with distributed teams—and making high-level strategic decisions based upon consolidated project progress, risk and resource usage information—is critical. When it comes to project management, every individual, team, and organization has unique needs. Microsoft's vision for project management is to enable individuals and teams to choose the tool that is the best fit for their specific project while still delivering the visibility that their organization needs to ensure focus on the right priorities. This session will help you understand how all the solutions across Office 365, SharePoint, and Project fit together so you can chart a realistic approach to project management for your organization that will deliver immediate value with an eye to the future.

In this session I would like to explain, how you can make the use of SharePoint in your organization more social. We will discuss how SharePoint Server 2013 has been enhanced for the way people work, providing people with a conversant, reliable sight of information, collaboration, and process. We can discuss how we can use SharePoint 2013, as a Social platform with a comprehensive, easily-managed and integrated platform to meet business requirements. So I hopes it makes sense that we talk about social features of SharePoint, as 2013 version is adding more social and mobile features. Some of these features and their impact on the enterprise will be discussed in in my session. Most of the Organizations currently looking to integrate more social collaboration into their business. SharePoint Server 2013 provides an ample solution for connected information work that enables people to transform the way they like to work while preserving the benefits of structured processes, compliance.

Integrating excel services, metadata, documents, links, lists and promoted links to create a complete Project Dashboard. The Project Dashboard can be extended to many real life scenarios to optimize your business and it's workflow.

In this session I will walk you through best practices and tips and tricks for defining, designing and building a SharePoint 2013 UX project.
These activities include: Identifying what users want (Requirements). Taking those needs/wants and creating the experience with Axure interactive wireframes. Using current trends such as flat design to create mockups in Photoshop for a slick modern UI that is tailored to your business. And finally slinging some HTML/CSS to build the visual design for both desktop and mobile using basic CSS3 Responsive Design media queries.

Have you ever wished you had more hours in the day? We might have the next best thing! Find out how you can go back in time using PowerShell with SharePoint! In this session you'll learn the basics of PowerShell with SharePoint, and you'll see a few scripts that can help you go back in time by enabling versioning, recording Site Groups and Users and more. Between our "time travel" scripts, and scripts that just save time, this is one session that pays for itself. This material is all usable as soon as you've completed the session!

This session will provide an overview of tools and libraries available for branding SharePoint 2013 branding solutions. We will review the new design manager, code snippets and the new display templates for content search web parts as well as fundamentals such as master pages, page layouts, publishing content types and best practices when developing front end solutions to SharePoint platform. We will also quickly introduce to popular technologies available and that concurrently work well in SharePoint 2013 such as jquery.js, bootstrap.js or spservices.js

Our SharePoint environment is a lot like many others – a SharePoint 2007 implementation that was used more as a file dump than a collaboration space. With minimal user adoption, we were never quite ready to implement 2010, with a pilot SharePoint 2010 implementation stalled out of the gate.
In the meantime, some content was put on Box and other services to address external collaboration needs. Business users needed more relevant search results, content databases had grown uncomfortably large, and access controls had become spaghetti. Fortunately, site sprawl wasn’t too bad… except that the reason for that was the low adoption.
SharePoint 2013 arrived to a perfect storm – business and technology needs to be addressed, content that needs to be brought back in-house, and user adoption that needs to be improved. Time to upgrade!
See how we approached the upgrade, the issues than needed to be addressed, and the questions that needed to be answered.

SharePoint has always had a big emphasis on Content Management and Search, and the new wave of online services is here. In this session, I’ll demonstrate the most important Search features and capabilities in Office 365, including configuration options, centralized and delegated administration as well as Search-driven catalogs and application features.

In this session, we will cover four main pillars of SharePoint that are crucial for all – consultants, IT Pros and clients. The aim is to get a feature-proof and cost efficient SharePoint environment by building a new or transforming an existing platform. Like a classical symphony, our session will consist of four movements:

Allegro – Planning Phase – 7 Best Practices

Adagio – Business Needs – 7 Best Practices

Minuet – Implementation Phase – 7 Best Practices
Rondo – Post Implementation Phase / Governance – 7 Best Practices

In this session I will uncover how the team managed the process of pulling together the worlds largest on-line SharePoint Conference. I delve into how they managed to on-board speakers, anchors and attendees using SharePoint and add-ons such as DocRead, DocSurvey and Extradium.

If you want to take a behind the scenes tour of how we managed to pull together 106 sessions with a team spread across the world, then this one is for you!