I was watching the SharePoint Conference North America 2018 Keynote (#SPC18 on Twitter) and I must admit, I “geeked out” a little bit about SharePoint Spaces and started to contemplate how I could convince the executive team to sign off on a Commercial 
HoloLens. If you are not familiar with SharePoint Spaces head over to the GeekWire article on SharePoint spaces by Nat Levy. Essentially Microsoft is using Office 365/SharePoint Online to bring mixed reality creation to the masses. The astute reader will notice that you don’t need the HoloLens but to you good reader, I say phooey…go big or go home. If you or your organization want to get in on the private preview you can nominate your organization using the SharePoint Spaces Form (love that they are using MS Forms for this😊). Continue reading “SharePoint Conference 2018 Day 1 Recap”
Author: Duane Odum
What’s New in Office 365 (May 2018)
Keep an eye on your Office 365 Admin Message Center over the next couple months. As Microsoft is getting ramped up for SharePoint Conference North America May 21st – 23rd in Las Vegas, NV we can expect to see more updates and enhancements rolling out than normal. Below are some of the highlights of the announcements from April:
Office 365 Organization Theme Update
- Intend to rollout in June 2018 and while it’s not a major change it is something to be aware of….
It’s a No Code/Low Code World in Office 365
Time to come clean…I have a love/hate relationship with Office 365. A majority of my work life for the past 3 years has been dedicated to Office 365 and while I see the excellent value it provides it’s taking away something I really enjoy, code. While I was assisting a client with a OneDrive for Business rollout last week I had an epiphany. In the past 5 months I have probably written around 1,000 lines of code for work and it has mostly been JavaScript, TypeScript or PowerShell. I’ve not done a single line of C# code this year for work. Some of the other folks in our group have so it has not been a total annihilation of managed code but it kind of has been for me and I do miss it. Continue reading “It’s a No Code/Low Code World in Office 365”
External Users Access Change in Office 365
If you receive the Office 365 Message Center Update Notifications you know that it’s rare to see a “Major Update Notification” that you must act upon quickly, but that is exactly what we received on Saturday February 24th. Starting on March 23, 2018 external users will no longer belong to the following groups in SharePoint Online: Everyone, All Authenticated Users and All Forms Users. While this does not directly impact any of the Office 365 customers we are engaged with on a regular basis I am sure it will impact some organizations in a major way.
Continue reading “External Users Access Change in Office 365”
Microsoft Recertification Redux
To be clear, Microsoft isn’t certifying folks on the Redux JS library, at least not yet. The title of this article refers to the literary term redux, loosely meaning “restored”. If you are reading this you likely know that Microsoft overhauled their certification process. This was the first time I had to recertify since those changes went into effect and a lot of folks were inquiring about the experience. So, without further ado…
Microsoft provides an overview of the certifications available for individuals to prove their expertise. However, if your organization is a Microsoft Partner you are probably going to be asked to take exams based on your organizations existing competency needs. If you really want to go down that rabbit hole feel free to do so by checking out the Competency Partners information but this posts intent is to provide an overview of my thoughts of my first recertification under the new criteria. Continue reading “Microsoft Recertification Redux”
Connecting Existing Sites to Office 365 Groups…Kind of
One of the big announcements from the SharePoint conference in May was Microsoft planning to allow the connection of existing Team Sites to Office 365 Groups. This was also championed at Ignite a few weeks ago and Microsoft even put out some more specific guidance on this in the Work better together with SharePoint Team Sites Office 365 App Integrations post by Mark Kashman. Roughly 1/3 of the way down the page there is a heading titled Connect an existing SharePoint team site to a new Office 365 group that details out exactly what we will need to do. This is awesome, we can take advantage of all the benefits of Office 365 groups for our existing team sites…not so fast. Continue reading “Connecting Existing Sites to Office 365 Groups…Kind of”
Office 365 Collaboration Confusion
A couple weeks ago, Microsoft held their annual Ignite conference and I would usually be blogging about all the cool new things coming to Office 365. This year has been a bit a different experience altogether, not for a lack of features announced from Microsoft though…there were plenty of awesome new features announced. We’ve spent the past couple weeks fielding questions on Office 365 from existing customers and folks looking to make the move or at least understand the options available.
