SPONSORED: Free Webinar – Migration from SharePoint to Office 365

Community Blast Provided and Sponsored by Digital Design. This information was provided by vendor for community education on product. No official review was performed by Vlad Catrinescu and Vlad Catrinescu is not participating in the Webinar.

Microsoft SharePoint Online rapidly becomes a standard for organizations seeking a centralized information repository and collaborative workspace. Businesses are moving their SharePoint-based applications to the cloud in order to reduce IT costs and improve performance.

Such migration can be a long and complex process, not necessarily without an impact on the business operations.

On June 7th we will be sitting together online with our experts Andrey Dolbeshkin –  Head of Office365 practice at Digital Design and Richard Barrett – Technical Solutions Professional at  AvePoint to discuss strategies of migration, business process integrity and continuity and showcase couple of recent projects to highlight DO’s and DONT’s of the migration from SharePoint to Office 365.

Key topics:

• Common midsized and large enterprises migration challenges

• How to build an architecture plan for your Office 365 deployment

• Selecting the right migration strategy

• Typical challenges you may face

• SharePoint customizations

• Performing the migration in 5 steps

• Case from AvePoint

Join us on Tuesday, June 7th at 16:00 European Time | 15:00 UK Time | 10:00 EDT

Register here: http://ift.tt/25wRJV9

Community Blast Provided and Sponsored by Digital Design. This information was provided by vendor for community education on product. No official review was performed by Vlad Catrinescu and Vlad Catrinescu is not participating in the Webinar.

The post SPONSORED: Free Webinar – Migration from SharePoint to Office 365 appeared first on Absolute SharePoint Blog by Vlad Catrinescu.

by Vlad Catrinescu via Absolute SharePoint Blog by Vlad Catrinescu

Microsoft Delays SharePoint 2013 MCSD Retirement

In February, I wrote a blog post that touched many SharePoint Developers announcing that Microsoft is retiring SharePoint 2013 MCSD developer exams as soon as September 30^th, 2016. Microsoft recently did an unannounced update to delay that date.

If we look at the Exams scheduled to retire page (make sure you’re on the en-us version, as other versions may not be up to date) , under the Visual Studio and .NET category, both exam 70-488 and 70-489 are set to retire on March 31^st, 2017

This gives students an extra 6 months to get that MCSD: SharePoint 2013 certifications. However, with SharePoint 2016 already out, would you still pay money to get certified on SharePoint 2013? If you do, make sure to book the exam before July as Microsoft Certification Exams will be more expensive soon

 

Follow me on Social Media and Share this article with your friends!

Microsoft Delays #SharePoint 2013 MCSD Retirement https://t.co/WihlsDqshf http://pic.twitter.com/YzGd4yHYst — Vlad catrinescu (@vladcatrinescu) May 31, 2016

Leave a comment and don’t forget to like the Absolute SharePoint Blog Page   on Facebook and to follow me on Twitter here  for the latest news and technical articles on SharePoint.  I am also a Pluralsight author, and you can view all the courses I created on my author page.

The post Microsoft Delays SharePoint 2013 MCSD Retirement appeared first on Absolute SharePoint Blog by Vlad Catrinescu.

by Vlad Catrinescu via Absolute SharePoint Blog by Vlad Catrinescu

[Video Blog] 3 Ways to Deliver Project Team Success Using SharePoint

Sometimes, it can be difficult for team members to deliver exactly what is expected of them. Too often, they find it hard to contribute to project team success. Common problems they encounter include:

• Finding it hard to understand what the point of the project is and what is expected of them
• Struggling to contribute to projects and feel under pressure to provide updates
• Not knowing where to go for training to deliver on their end of the project

Luckily, SharePoint is a robust collaborative tool that has the answer to all of the above problems. Check out the video below to learn more.

1 Launch each project with a team-focused site

Using a team-focused project site gives team members visibility into a project. This makes it easy for everyone involved in the project to find the work that is assigned to them, the current status of other pieces of work and more. Centralizing the work simplifies your project management process.

2 Use SharePoint as a work management system

SharePoint makes it easy to look at projects across a portfolio. Not only will you be able to view details about a project, but you can look across the whole portfolio of projects and see what work is being done and where. This will allow you to make adjustments as necessary.

3 Use SharePoint’s improved communications tools for easier collaboration

Finally, SharePoint boasts fantastic communications tools that allow for easier collaboration such as knowledge bases, user profiles and advanced search. These tools can be extended even further with the right tools.

This video is a snippet from our webinar series! If you would like to check out more webinars, you can gain access to them here!

by Ciara McDonnell via Everyone's Blog Posts - SharePoint Community

Collab365 round-up, Keynotes, 'behind the scenes', statistics, on-demand - it's all here!

We've been really busy tidying up after the Collab365 Summit and we've got some great blog posts related to it...

HOW WE USE KENDO UI TO BUILD THE UI ON COLLAB365 PLATFORM

Find out how we built some of the core components such as the Conference Agenda, virtual Session Rooms and charts using Kendo UI by Telerik. The platform is built on top of SharePoint so if you are a develoer and would like to know how we use Kendo UI ... you will get a lot out of this post!

http://ift.tt/1WTfvta

COLLAB365 SUMMIT 2016 STATISTICS (AND WATCH ALL 3 KEYNOTES)

Find out who had the most popular session's and how many attended and from where in the world. We've also added a special treat, we've embedded all 3 Keynote sessions into the post.

http://ift.tt/247yZZO

EXPERT MICROSOFT PANEL HOST MICROSOFT GRAPH Q&A

At the recent Collab365 Summit we hosted Yina Arenas, Paul Stubbs and Gareth Jones. The session very interactive and started with a good overview of the "What is the Microsoft Graph?" question. Once Yina gave a good introduction we then moved into an interactive Q&A which allowed the community to fire questions at the expert panel. 

http://ift.tt/1WTfqpn

THE ULTIMATE INTRODUCTION TO MICROSOFT FLOW AND POWERAPPS

We hosted 4 magnificent sessions around PowerApps and Flow as well as a great session talking about Infopath alternatives. If you don't know what PowerApps are then this post, along with the embedded sessions is definitely a must read.

http://ift.tt/247z8MR

HOW TO GET STARTED AS A SHAREPOINT DEVELOPER

Collab365 Live Show host, Andy Talbot caught up with Tom Resing and Christina Singletary from Microsoft last week to get their advice on how to get started as a SharePoint developer. The market has never been better to be a developer. We now have an explosion of mobile apps and a never-ending need to extend and customize SharePoint (on-prem, online and everything in between).

http://ift.tt/1WTfUfd

HOW TO COPE WITH (THE INEVITABLE) CHANGES TO OFFICE 365

At the Collab365 Summit last week we hosted a superb discussion with Captains of SharePoint, Owen Allen (Microsoft), Christian Buckley (Beezy) and Adam Levithan (Metalogix). They specifically discussed the challenges that organizations are facing when using Office 365 (as well as other cloud services) on a daily basis.

http://ift.tt/247yXkH

A BRILLIANT DISCUSSION AROUND THE NEW SHAREPOINT FRAMEWORK

At the Collab365 Summit in Redmond we hosted an amazing discussion with Daniel Kogan and Luca Bandinelli (the brains behind the brand new framework) along with show hosts Mark Wilson and Andy Talbot. 

http://ift.tt/1XtE12x

NODE.JS / GULP - SHAREPOINT DEVELOPMENT AND BUILD SETUP

After the new SharePoint Development model announcement, Bala Murugan started looking into the Node.js , Gulp and Typescript libraries. In this post he takes will a look into how to install Node.js and Setup the Gulp within the Visual Studio projects.

http://ift.tt/247zjYi

WATCH 128 SESSIONS ON-DEMAND WHILE YOU CAN

Finally, I just want to bring your attention to the fact that we've made all 128 sessions available, on-demand at no charge. We'll begin moving them (along with the other 400+ sessions from other conferences) to a brand new home so they wont be there forever. Register and watch for free at the link below.

http://ift.tt/1qtHq4d

COLLAB365 GLOBAL CONFERENCE IS COMING IN OCTOBER

The BIG ONE is coming! In this virtual conference, we'll be going around the world to bring you the latest SharePoint and O365 knowledge from the biggest brains across 6 contintents. It kicks off on October 26 so register to secure your place!

http://ift.tt/1Sicv6r

by Mark Jones via Everyone's Blog Posts - SharePoint Community

Dear Microsoft: Remove the 5000 Item Limit for SharePoint List Views

It’s 2016. In 1993, I used Microsoft Access to process over 1,000,000 records of data to implement a product profitability model at Staples – on an IBM 486 machine.

We’ve been saddled with a 5000 item limit for views since SharePoint 2010 launched. Oddly, in SharePoint 2007, there was no such limit. When 2010 came out, with its requirements for heavier and beefier hardware, the limit showed up.

I’ve read (well, skimmed) the white papers about why this needs to be. I’ve had long conversations with people in the SharePoint Product Group about the technical debt involved and why it is a “hard” thing to fix. I’ve read the highly visited KB articles about it, like “The number of items in this list exceeds the list view threshold, which is 5000 items” error when you view a SharePoint Online list in Office 365 Enterprise.

Bill Baer (@williambaer) has posted some promising messaging about the thresholds (See: Navigating List View Thresholds in SharePoint Server 2016 IT Preview), but I still don’t see any outward evidence that the limit is going away anytime in the foreseeable future.

I think there have been mixed messages and misinterpreted messages (no blame to Bill). The auto indexing idea which was recently added to Office 365 and comes in SharePoint 2016 (I believe – but I’m not positive) was misconstrued as lifting the 5000 item limit, which it definitely doesn’t.

The 5000 item limit in the UI for lists and libraries is arguably a good thing. There is absolutely NO reason to show more than 5000 items on a view page. Ever. No one can digest that amount of data or make use of it. Views should show just enough information for people to make good decisions about what to do next. (This is a very common mistake in SharePoint information architecture.) There are times when we simply need to have a view which derives from 5000+ items, though. Remember what year it is; 5000 items is a speck, a mote, an iota of data in this Big Data era.

When it comes to calling SharePoint’s APIs, the 5000 item limit simply has to go. It’s a crazy limit in this day and age. I don’t care about all the technical debt talk about it. The SharePoint Product Group should be able to slide a solution underneath, at least on Office 365 – but ideally in on premises versions of SharePoint as well.

That’s the whole point of APIs: you can fix stuff under the hood without breaking any “contracts”. As more and more processing moves off-SharePoint, the 5000 limit is stifling. It’s been a problem for me for years because I live on the client side. I don’t always need all 5000+ items, but I need to know stuff about them: how many items match some criteria, what the sales total is for 12,834 items, how many items fall into a set of groupings, etc.

Whatever approach the Product Group takes shouldn’t matter, as long as they uphold the API contracts. For years they have told us – very rightly – that touching the underlying SQL tables puts us in an unsupported state. As long as we’re calling the APIs, what happens under the covers doesn’t matter. In fact, most of us should care less; that’s Microsoft’s domain and we should leave it to them.

With the new SharePoint Framework (SPX?) coming along – which I think is a TREMENDOUSLY good thing – the 5000 item limit is going to be on the minds of every developer who works with SharePoint. There will be no more server side tricks to haul out to cheat your way around this stuff. Those tricks have been reduced in degrees anyway. If SharePoint is to truly be treated as a service (as I firmly believe it should) then it needs to behave like a service in 2016+, not a service in the 1990s – or earlier.

I’ve heard many people – my fellow MVPs included – say that Microsoft will never fix this. There’s no cool Marketing moment in it, no splash they can make at a conference, little to show in the UI for it. But think of the consequences if they DON’T fix it. How long can we continue to believe that we can pump millions of items into a list (which is the true capacity) only to be told that we can only retrieve fewer than 5000 of them from the client side?

Unfortunately, if we assume they won’t fix it or can’t do it right, then the SPX may be doomed, IMO. I’d prefer to believe that they know it has to be fixed and are working on it. As my friend Jeff Shuey (@shuey) is always saying “I want to believe!”

 

by Marc D Anderson via Marc D Anderson's Blog

Node.js / Gulp - SharePoint Development and Build Setup

After the new SharePoint Development model announcement, I started looking into the Node.js , Gulp and Typescript etc. Here we will look into how to install Node.js and Setup the Gulp within the Visual Studio projects.

Referenced :

• The new SharePoint development model - client web parts , Javascript frameworks...
• Collab365 Summit - a-brilliant-discussion-around-the-sharepoint-framework...

Node.js setup:

• Download and Install the new version of the Node.js.

Configure npm:

By default, the npm is configured to use the default registry registry.npmjs.org. There are some alternatives available and we can use own private registry as well and more details about the registry can be found here.

• Check the npm config: "npm config ls -l" displays the npm config.

• Configure the proxy : This needs to be configured, if we use the corporate proxy. 

npm config set proxy http://username:password@proxy:port 

npm config set https-proxy http://username:passwordproxy:port 
npm set strict-ssl false

The above sets the proxy and not use the ssl for downloading the modules. "username" and "password" are optional. All the custom configs are stored in the .npmrc file. If the default registry is blocked by the proxy, use the custom or mirror registry as below.

npm config set registry <registry url>

Install the npm modules:

Once we set the npm ready, we need to install the required modules to be used within the project. The npm modules can be either installed locally or globally so that it can used across multiple projects.

npm install gulp -g
npm install gulp-uglify -g
npm install gulp-save -g
npm install del -g
npm install gulp-concat -g
npm install gulp-clean-css -g

The above installs the module globally as shown below.
Visual studio Extensions:

There are various task runners extension available for Visual Studio to test and manage the custom task execution. For the below example, I have downloaded the NPM Scripts TaskRunner.

SharePoint Project setup for Package and Gulp:

• Create the SharePoint project.
• Add the package file (package.json) and configure all the dependency modules to be used within the project.

• Create a new Gulp file.

• Modify the package.json to include all the required modules. This installs all the modules locally as mentioned in the screenshot. (Note: use the above mentioned steps to configure the npm, if it fails to install the modules due to proxy/credential issues)

• Configure / Include the script in the Gulp file to carry out the specified tasks and set the binding that the default task is executed before build. (ex: print hello before build)

• So the Gulp tasks gets executed when the project is compiled as shown below.

• The gulp file can be extended to do the pre build tasks like minifying js and css etc as mentioned in the Vardhaman's blog.

if we are going to use the build server to build the package, the node module can be installed locally using the running "node install" command in the folder containing the package.json. This installs the node module locally to the projects. Noticed that the node_module creates the hierarchical path installing all the dependent modules ending up with more than 260 characters. This will cause an issue, when we use the automated build and deployment using the build server while we copy or deleting the folders. So use the "Robocopy" to copy and "rimraf" node module to delete the folders which can be plugged into the build process using the powershell / msbuild.

by Balamurugan Kailasam via Everyone's Blog Posts - SharePoint Community

Be prepared for the SharePoint framework

The SharePoint Framework was announced on 4th of May and it introduced a new model to develop SharePoint webparts that is radically different from its predecessors.

Over the years SharePoint development required a specific environment, with SandBox and Farm webparts is required at least one server with SharePoint and Visual Studio to develop and debug, with the App model introduced in 2013 the SharePoint server is no longer needed but it requires Visual Studio and a Developer site collection hosted on Office 365.

With the new framework you are absolutely free to choose your environment, the only requirement is a computer able to run the latest web technologies, you can even use Mac OS or a Linux distro.

At the moment I’m writing this article the SharePoint framework is not publically available. While it’s too soon to put your hands in the code it might worth invest some time to learn the new technologies used by the framework.

The new api will not replace any of the existent models, all the knowledge that you acquired over the last years will be valid and will help you to make the parallelism between the old and the new model.

If you are already a Senior SharePoint developer or if you are just a web developer, this are the technologies that you should learn in the next months in order to be prepared to the new framework.

Node.js

Node.js in an open-source, cross-platform runtime environment to develop applications it uses an event-driven, non-blocking I/O model that makes it lightweight and efficient. The runtime environment interprets JavaScript using Google Chrome V8 JavaScript engine.

On the other hand, Node.js has npm, the largest ecosystem of open source libraries in the world you can build your own packages to use in your solution or you can use the ones already available from the community. In the SharePoint framework Node.js has the same role that .NET had in the previous development model, and npm is the replacement to the NuGet. To learn more about Node.js visit https://nodejs.org/en/

Yeoman

Yeoman is the template engine in the SharePoint framework and it runs on top of Node.js, the templates used by the framework are downloaded from GitHub, this means that you need also to install Git in your machine.

Yeoman is responsible to create the project structure with all the files and folders like visual studio does but using the console.

To learn more about Yeoman visit http://yeoman.io/

TypeScript

TypeScript is an open source language created and maintained by Microsoft, it is a super set of set of JavaScript that extends the language it’s executed on top of Node.js and it’s suitable for client and server side applications. If you are coming from C#, TypeScript is the easiest way to start developing with script languages, all the concepts like classes and objects are available in TypeScript.

If you are already a web developer the learning curve is smaller, JavaScript code is valid TypeScript code, TypeScript converts all the code to native JavaScript but it’s recommended to take a look at the TypeScript documentation to take fully advantage of the technology.

Other JavaScript libraries like jQuery will also work with the SharePoint framework you just need to import them to the project, I’ll cover this topic in a future article. To learn more about TypeScript visit http://ift.tt/1MphRfp

React, AngularJS or other framework

All the above are great frameworks to develop web apps, at the moment I’m writing this the Yeoman generator only includes an empty template and a template that uses React.

React might be the appropriated choice as it was chosen by Microsoft to develop Delve and the new document library, but if you are familiar with other frameworks go with it there is absolutely no limitation related with the frameworks.

To learn more about React visit http://ift.tt/1jBdybn

To learn more about Angular JS visit https://angularjs.org/

REST api

With REST api you can perform basic create, read, update, and delete operations by using the Representational State Transfer (REST) interface provided by SharePoint.

The REST interface exposes all of the SharePoint entities and operations that are available in the other SharePoint client APIs.

One advantage of using REST is that you don’t have to add references to any SharePoint libraries or client assemblies. Instead, you make HTTP requests to the appropriate endpoints to retrieve or update SharePoint entities, such as webs, lists, and list items.

To learn more about the REST api visit http://ift.tt/1blUn8l

Gulp

Gulp is a task runner to automate processes built on Node.js.

It can be used to compile TypeScript or Less files, in the new framework Gulp does the same that MS Build. Gulp is used in the SharePoint framework in a variety of tasks like build the webpart or upload it to the CDN.

I’ll cover this topic in detail in a future article.

To learn more about Gulp visit http://gulpjs.com/

Office UI fabric

Office UI Fabric is the front-end toolkit that makes your app or add-in blend seamlessly into Office.

Included are all the web components, styles, icons and fonts used by Microsoft SharePoint and other Office application. This is not directly related with the SharePoint framework and it’s not mandatory use it to build your webparts.

It’s a good starting point to build an application that breaths Microsoft style, out of the box the end user will be familiar with the layout and components of the application.

To learn more about Office Fabric UI visit http://ift.tt/1OEbMeo

Conclusion

For the first time Microsoft embrace the open source technologies and we no longer need proprietary software to build webparts to SharePoint.

This might take a few months to land in the new version of SharePoint, it will be first available on Office 365 and later on SharePoint 2016 on prem.

If you are not a web developer and are not familiar with the web stack you still have a few months to learn the basics before starting building things in the new framework.

In the meantime, check the table below that makes a parallelism between the new and the old development model.

Web Stack -> Microsoft Tools
Node.js -> .Net framework
npm -> NuGet
Yeoman -> Visual Studio Project
Gulp.js -> MSBuild
TypeScript -> C#

This post was originally written in my blog - HANDS ON SharePoint

by João Ferreira via Everyone's Blog Posts - SharePoint Community

Workflows in SharePoint

SharePoint has had a Workflow engine either built in natively or installed over the top for some time now. In a previous post I walked through the steps to get it installed in SharePoint 2016 too.

http://ift.tt/1RPHKqE

read more

by via SharePoint Pro

How we use Kendo UI on the Collab365 Platform

2 years ago a simple suggestion by a friend on email turned into an idea that has resulted in us delivering our 7th online conference. We’ve always had a passion to get involved in the community and to attempt to bring top quality training to those that need it. To achieve this we’ve needed to keep costs to a minimum and that’s why we built our own virtual conference platform.

This post is part of our ‘Behind the Scenes’ series and is aimed at developers who are interested in how we used the highly popular Kendo UI by Telerik, a Progress Company, to build a large chunk of our conference User Interface. We’ve used it in lots of places, but this post will concentrate on the following 3:

• Conference Agenda and Timeline – built with Kendo UI Scheduler
• Session Room – built using several Kendo UI controls as well as an awesome usage of MVVM
• ‘Which room are people in’ control – built using Kendo UI Chart

A word about our data...

Before we get into how we put the Collab365 Agenda control together, I just wanted to let you in on a secret! When requesting data about our conference (such as speakers, track or session information), we never go direct to our SharePoint lists. You may think this is a strange thing to do, but if you consider that we’re limited by platform size and have to scale to 1,000s of users (with a burst at any time), we had to think seriously about how we scaled SharePoint.

We also cache as much as possible by using a CDN. This means that that Javascript & CSS files, as well as images are all cached outside of SharePoint. Saving potentially 10,000s of requests per second at peak!

If you use SharePoint for internal needs and have a version above Foundation you will get the benefits of Object caching, page output caching and can easily scale to your maximum estimated load as you know how many staff you have!

Note! As SharePoint lists all support returning data using REST it's also very simple to bind them to all of the Kendo UI controls.  

Conference Agenda

When running either a physical or virtual conference, one of the key features you need is for attendees to be able to view the agenda before it actually begins (to allow them to build their own agenda), and also during the conference so they can work out which virtual room to go to.

• Agenda Requirements​
• We wanted something that could be filtered by parameters such as skill level, track, speaker, audience etc.
• It needed to render nicely on mobile devices.
• The ability for attendees to visualise tracks across a time slot.
• Easy to put on both our conference platform and also WordPress site.
• Ability to control what’s displayed in the event section.
• Something that can work easily with our data, which is in JSON format.

How did we build it?

To build the agenda we used the Kendo UI Scheduler control, which is a purpose built control that allows you to display data in a calendar format. It has two views:

The 'Agenda View'​

This view is the traditional view that allows you to see what’s happening hour by hour. (There are a few more views supported by the scheduler, but we hid them as they weren’t needed).

The 'Timeline view'

The Timeline view is most useful for our management team as it easily lets us see where we may have conflicts (such as a similar sessions being broadcast at the same time).

Databinding

One of the other cool things about using the scheduler is that it supports JSON out of the box and the OData protocol, meaning that all we need to do is give it our list of cached ‘Sessions’ in JSON format. You also tell the control about the relevant metadata and then let it take away all of the pain of rendering the grid.

dataSource: {filter: mySessionFilters,data: data,
schema: {
model: {
id: "ID",
status: function() {
return getClbSessionStatus(this);
},
hashtag: function() {
return this.clbSessionHashtag.substring(1);
},
sessionRoomId: function() {
return this.clbSessionHashtag.substring(1).replace('#', '');
},
speakerPhoto: function() {
return tenantUrl + this.Session_x0020_Speaker_x003A_Smal;
},
conferenceName: function() {
return conferenceTitle;
},
tenantUrl: function() {
return tenantUrl;
},
status: function() {
if (!this.sessionStatus) {
setClbSessionStatus(this);
}
return this.sessionStatus;
},
statusHtml: function() {
if (!this.sessionStatusHtml) {
setClbSessionStatusHtml(this);
}
return this.sessionStatusHtml
},
fields: {
taskId: {
from: "ID",
type: "number"
},
title: {
from: "Title",
defaultValue: "No title",
validation: {
required: true
}
},
start: {
type: "date",
from: "clbSessionStartTime",
parse: function(value) {
if (value != null) return new Date(parseInt(value.substr(6)));
else return conferenceStartDate
}
},
end: {
type: "date",
from: "clbSessionEndTime",
parse: function(value) {
if (value != null) return new Date(parseInt(value.substr(6)));
else return conferenceStartDate
}
},
level: {
from: "clbSessionLevel"
},
track: {
from: "clbSessionTrack"
},
topic: {
from: "clbSessionTopic"
},
language: {
from: "clbSessionLanguage"
},
speaker: {
from: "clbSessionSpeaker"
},
audience: {
from: 'clbSessionSuitableFor'
},
speakerId: {
from: 'Session_x0020_Speaker_x003A_ID'
}
}
}
},
},
}

The “data” as passed in via a “data:data” statement happens to be an array JSON object that defines each session.

Filters

The filters you see to select subsets of the agenda were also pretty easy to implement once we’d populated the pull down lists (called DropDownLists within Kendo UI) with all of the possible values. The great thing is that, as all of our JSON is downloaded to the browser as a file, we don’t need to go back to the server to filter.

initFilters = function(data) {var filterValues = getFilterValues(data);container.find(".levelsFilter").kendoMultiSelect({
placeholder: "Select skill levels...",
dataSource: {
data: filterValues.levels
}
});
container.find(".tracksFilter").kendoMultiSelect({
placeholder: "Select tracks...",
dataSource: {
data: filterValues.tracks
}
});
container.find(".speakersFilter").kendoMultiSelect({
placeholder: "Select speakers...",
dataSource: {
data: filterValues.speakers
}
});
container.find(".audiencesFilter").kendoMultiSelect({
placeholder: "Select audiences...",
dataSource: {
data: filterValues.audiences
}
});
container.find(".topicsFilter").kendoMultiSelect({
placeholder: "Select topics...",
dataSource: {
data: filterValues.topics
}
});
container.find(".statusFilter").kendoMultiSelect({
placeholder: "Select status...",
dataSource: {
data: ["Scheduled", "Live", "Finished", "Cancelled"]
}
});
container.find(".agendaFilters select.agendaFilter").change(applyFilters);
}

Responsive

17% of our conference attendees access the site via a mobile or tablet.

That’s nearly 1 in every 5 attendees accessing the pages with a small display. It’s often hard to show lots of data nicely onto a small screen, but with some media queries the scheduler does a good job.

Here’s how it looks on an iPhone 5:

Portable to WordPress

One other major requirement we have is that we need to publish the agenda long before we open the conference platform. This helps us to tell attendees what sessions are available. However, we didn’t want to duplicate data.

Luckily, as Kendo UI is purely a client-side library (with no server requirements), and also because we don’t go direct to SharePoint lists, it’s very easy to include and reuse it in any web platform.

We built the control to be portable and with very little JavaScript and with a few includes plus some initialisation code we were able to get it rendering inside of WordPress with very little effort.

Here’s the code to bring it in:

<link href="http://ift.tt/1WKmhAR" rel="stylesheet" /><link href="http://ift.tt/1TysIn6" rel="stylesheet" /><script type="text/javascript" Src="http://ift.tt/1WKlRdK"></script>
<script src="http://ift.tt/1Tyt8tw Library/Conference/Assets/scripts/agenda.js"></script>
<script src="http://ift.tt/1Tyt8tw Library/Conference/Assets/scripts/agenda-template.js"></script>
<script type="text/javascript">
jQuery(document).ready(function() {
var options = {
popout: false,
height: 700,
currentTime: clbCom.getSvrTime(),
template: clbAgendaTemplate,
dataSource: allSessions.sessions,
conferenceName: clbConferenceSettings().conferenceName,
conferenceStartDateTime: clbConferenceSettings().conferenceStartDateTime,
conferenceEndDateTime: clbConferenceSettings().conferenceEndDateTime,
conferenceSiteUrl: clbConferenceSettings().confSiteUrl,
tenantSiteUrl: clbConferenceSettings().tenantSiteUrl,
landingPageUrl: clbConferenceSettings().landingPageUrl,
enableMyAgenda: false,
showPlanButtons: false
}
jQuery(".agenda").clbAgenda(options);
});
</script>

And here’s how it looks:

The anatomy of a virtual session room

Each session is delivered and presented in its own virtual session room. The session room has the following aspects:​

As with nearly all of the platform, it’s very lightweight when accessing SharePoint. We feed in the same browser cached JSON files for session, speaker and sponsor.

This means most of the UI rendering is done on the client-side rather than the server. To make our UI as clean and maintainable as possible we take advantage of the Kendo UI in-built MVVM framework. This allows us to bind our data (the “model”) to the page (the “view”) without having to write any of that plumbing code that you normally have to do.

Take a look at the code below, you will notice ‘data-bind’ statements which don’t pollute HTML. Those statements are used by the Kendo UI binding framework and they tell Kendo UI what object to extract from the view and replace at the time that it’s rendered.

<SharePoint:SPSecurityTrimmedControl ID="SPSecurityTrimmedControlPlayer1" runat="server" AuthenticationRestrictions="AnonymousUsersOnly"><div class="main-box clearfix"><header class="main-box-header clearfix">
<h2 data-bind="text: Title"></h2>
<div class="cf"></div>
</header>
<div class="main-box-body clearfix">
<div id="playerHeading">
<div id="playerTitle" data-bind="text: clbSubTitle"></div>
<div id="onAir" data-bind="style: {color: clbRoomStatusColor}, text: clbRoomStatus" class="offAirStatus"></div>
</div>
<div class="iframe-container" id="playerContainer">
<div id="noMessage">
<div class="alert alert-block fade in" style="text-align:left;">
<i class="fa fa-info-circle fa-fw fa-lg" style="padding-bottom:10px"></i><strong>Not logged In!</strong>
<p>In order to take advantage of the features and also view the sessions, you need to register for a free account, or login.</p>
<p>
<asp:literal runat="server" Text="&lt;a class='btn btn-primary collreg' href='/sitepages/Summit2016.aspx?Source=" />
<SharePoint:ProjectProperty Property="Url" runat="server" />
<asp:literal runat="server" Text="' &gt; Register &lt;/a&gt;" />
<asp:literal runat="server" Text="&lt;a class='btn btn-primary' href='/_layouts/15/Authenticate.aspx?Source=" />
<SharePoint:ProjectProperty Property="Url" runat="server" />
<asp:literal runat="server" Text="' &gt; Sign In &lt;/a&gt;" />
</p>
</div>
</div>
<div id="playerTools">
<div id="clockLogo">
<img alt="Collab365" class="playerImage" data-bind="attr: { src: clbPlayerLogo }" />
<div id="playerClock">
</div>
</div>
<div id="muteBtn" class='plybtn mute'></div>
<div id="fullScrBrn" class="plybtn fullscreen"></div>
</div>
</div>
</div>
</div>
</SharePoint:SPSecurityTrimmedControl>

The code snippet below illustrates how we create an “observable” object and bind it into “<BODY>” tag in the HTML. The cool thing here is that as the object is ‘observable’ this means that the Kendo UI MVVM framework will keep watching for changes. So if, for example, some user action causes our ObservableRoom to update then the UI also updates automatically. The binding is also two-way meaning that if you had bound “title” to text box, for example, and a user typed in a new title, the backend object would also be updated.

observableRoom = kendo.observable(session);observableRoom.set("clbTwitterHref", "https://twitter.com/search?q=" + session.clbSessionHashtag);observableRoom.set("clbTwitterTitle", "Tweet using " + session.clbSessionHashtag);
observableRoom.set("clbTwitterTxtLink", "Tweets about "#Collab365 Conference"");
observableRoom.set("clbDerivedTitle", session.clbSessionHashtag + " : " + session.clbTimeSlot);
observableRoom.set("clbRoomStatus", "Off Air");
observableRoom.set("docReadHead", "<a href='#'>My Reading Tasks</a>");
observableRoom.set("docReadStrap", "Any recommended or required reading tasks that the Speaker, Anchor or Collab365 Team have assigned to you are listed below.");
observableRoom.set("clbFlagUrl", siteCollectionUrl + "/Style Library/Conference/Assets/img/flags/32/" + session.clbSessionLanguage + ".png");
observableRoom.set("clbPlayerLogo", siteCollectionUrl + "/SiteAssets/sessionlogo.png");
observableRoom.set("clbProfilePictureUrlLarge", "/SiteAssets/img_placeholder.png");
if (observableRoom.clbSessionYouWillLearn == null) {
observableRoom.clbSessionYouWillLearn = '';
}
observableRoom.clbSessionSuitableFor = clbRoom.cleanSPArray(observableRoom.clbSessionSuitableFor);
observableRoom.clbSessionTopic = clbRoom.cleanSPArray(observableRoom.clbSessionTopic);
kendo.bind($('body'), observableRoom);

I am sure you will agree this saves a ton of boilerplate code and reduces the potential for bugs tremendously. If you do any form of complex JavaScript UI always consider using an approach such as this.

What about AngularJS?​

In many cases, you can also easily use AngularJS with Kendo UI. We chose not to as the Kendo UI binding framework was all we needed and didn’t want the extra page weight that Angular brings. However, your case may be different so it’s worth mentioning that you can use it 

Tab Controls​

Our session room contains a lot of information and we needed something to organise it without having an endless vertical scroll. So we opted for Kendo UI TabStrip. It’s responsive out of the box and pretty easy to develop.

Here’s an example of our Chat and Tweet tab

Here’s the mark-up for the Chat and Twitter control:

<div id="quick_post"><div class="main-box clearfix"><header class="main-box-header clearfix">
<h2>Get Social
<span class="chatSponsorContainer">
sponsored by
<a href="http://beezy.net/" target="_blank"><img src="/confs/Summit2016/SiteAssets/beezy-logo-S.png" alt="Beezy" /></a>
</span>
</h2>
</header>
<div class="main-box-body clearfix">
<div class="k-widget k-header k-tabstrip" id="tabstripChat" role="tablist">
<ul class="k-tabstrip-items k-reset">
<li role="tab" class="k-state-active k-item k-tab-on-top k-state-default k-first">
Chat
</li>
<li role="tab">
Tweet
</li>
</ul>
<div class="chatContainer">
<div id="chatApp">
<chat ng-controller="chatCtrl"></chat>
</div>
</div>
<div>
<div class="twitterContainer">
<p class="heading">Join the session conversation on Twitter...
<span class="pull-right twitBtn-container"></span>
</p>
<div class="iframe-container">
<a data-bind="attr: { href: clbTwitterHref, data-widget-id: clbTwitterDataId}" class="twitter-timeline" href="https://twitter.com/search?q=%23SPBiz" data-widget-id="448566281650704385" data-chrome="transparent noheader">
View Tweets about this session.
</a>
</div>
</div>
</div>
</div>
</div>
</div>
</div>

'Which room are people in’ control

The 3rd use of Kendo UI that I wanted to bring to your attention is our really popular chart that sits on the home page. This chart comes into its own during conference hours. Its main purpose is to indicate to attendees how many people are in each session. The UI is built using the Kendo UI Chart control and this what it looks like and how we put it together:

The markup is extremely simple, you just need to declare a “DIV” with an ID that can then be referenced in JavaScript.

The code that brings it all together is as follows.

$("#UsersByRoomChart").kendoChart({theme: "Bootstrap",chartArea: {
height: 250
},
legend: {
visible: false
},
transitions: false,
valueAxis: {
//                                majorUnit:1,
visible: false,
labels: {
visible: false
},
majorGridLines: {
visible: false
},
line: {
visible: false
},
axisCrossingValue: 0
},
seriesDefaults: {
type: "column"
},
series: [{
field: "Connections",
categoryField: "Speaker",
color: function(point) {
var colors = ['#DE3C01', '#076EC4', '#E9D404', '#016E55', '#08428C', '#4F4F4F', '#B6B6B6'];
return colors[point.index];
}
}],
tooltip: {
visible: true,
format: "{0}%",
font: "1em Segoe UI",
template: "<img class='sessionSpeakerPhoto hidden-xs' src='#= dataItem.SpeakerImage#'> Session: #= dataItem.HubTitle # - #= dataItem.Connections#"
},
seriesClick: func.onSeriesClick,
dataSource: {
data: json
}
});

This creates the code at page load time. When a user moves to a room we log it into Azure. Then we send a SignalR message back down to the home page to tell the chart to refresh.

Wrap up​

I hope you found this blog useful and please don’t hesitate to ask any questions. If you want to know more about Kendo UI, the trail it’s downloadable here:​

DOWNLOAD KENDO

by Mark Jones via Everyone's Blog Posts - SharePoint Community

Moving from SharePoint 2010 to SharePoint Online the Right Way

As mainstream support ends for SharePoint 2010 with the release of SharePoint 2016, many organizations are looking at options for moving forward. One option for moving forward is to move up, to Office 365 and SharePoint Online, taking advantage of all the benefits of the cloud.

One challenge, however, with moving to the cloud is that many businesses have invested heavily over the years in custom sites and portals on SharePoint 2010 that deliver vibrant intranet portals and powerful applications using server-based web parts and custom branding.

Much of this will not transfer to the new SharePoint Online architecture, meaning that organizations will not be able to take advantage of the Office 365 Ecosystem, where all components like SharePoint and Microsoft Office are available in one central place.
​
End users will not settle for basic SharePoint, and many small- to medium-size businesses do not have the budget nor the resources to rebuild everything. How do you get access to all the cool new capabilities without starting from scratch?

You could hire a consulting firm (again) to build it, but this might cost $100,000s and take several months to complete. Many vendors do not have the expertise to build custom applications “correctly,” so that they are not impacted by Office 365 platform changes. When these applications are not built correctly, they will stop operating the next month, when Microsoft changes or updates Office 365.

OR

The other, and more affordable, option is for SMBs to leverage out-of-the-box portals and application templates. These flexible application templates give users the level of feature, function, and ease-of-use they are used to.

By choosing the right application templates, ones that are Office 365 and SharePoint native, organizations will also be able to use SharePoint power user skills to quickly modify the templates to their specific needs.

SP Marketplace is one vendor that offers Office 365 and SharePoint native application templates. Unlike many other vendors that tried to transfer their SharePoint On-premise offerings, we began by designing our solutions on Office 365 from the very start in 2012.

Our products went through the change from 2010 to 2013 on Office 365, and continue to evolve today with the new Office 365 Ecosystem. We have a deep understanding of the cloud and offer 11 modules that are part of an overall site structure and anchored by an intranet home portal at the top.
​
The templates are Office 365 “future proof” because they have a “native” Office 365 look and feel, a responsive user interface, and are 100% customizable using standard SharePoint.

These templates also are designed to fit into the Office 365 Ecosystem and feel like a natural part of the platform. And, they already integrate with Office 365 features, such as Delve, Skype for Business, and Groups.

Don’t shortchange your company by not moving to Office 365 and SharePoint Online because of the challenges. Modernize your custom SharePoint environment by starting with accelerator templates, customize and migrate your content from 2010. It will make the move to the cloud seem like a gift rather than challenge.

Learn more about SP Marketplace solution templates at http://ift.tt/1C5O6qM. Follow us on Twitter and LinkedIn for all the latest Office 365 and SharePoint news and updates.

by Darrell Trimble via Everyone's Blog Posts - SharePoint Community

Connect external services to SharePoint using Microsoft Flow

Connecting external services to SharePoint specially the ones that are not part of Microsoft ecosystem was incredibly hard but this is about to change with Microsoft Flow.

Microsoft Flow is an event-automation service developed to create automated workflows between your favorite apps and services to get notifications, synchronize files, collect data, and more.

SharePoint 2016 was officially announced last week and it will include a full integration of Microsoft Flow but you don’t need to wait to put your hands in the new version, if you have SharePoint online you can start using it today.

At the moment I’m writing this article Microsoft Flow it’s still in Preview, and you will need to register with your Office 365 account.

Even though it supports a variety of services in this article I’ll just use Twitter and SharePoint.

1. To register open the Microsoft Flow site and click in the Sign up free
2. While your account is being created open one of your SharePoint site collections and create a custom list to save the tweets.
   Let’s use the column Title to save the tweet and create a new column to save the Author.
   
3. Open Microsoft Flow, the option will appear in the waffle icon in the Office 365 suite bar
4. In Microsoft Flow click My Flows and then click Create new flow
5. Let’s start with Twitter, this will execute an action every time that a tweeter appears and matches a certain condition. Once you select it you will need to Sign in into your Twitter account
   
6. Write your query, in this case all the tweets with the hash tag #handsonsharepoint will be processed
7. Click in the plus icon to add an action
   
8. Select SharePoint Online – Create Item and Sign in into SharePoint online
9. In the Site url field write the url of the site where you’ve created the list
10. All the lists from the site will populate the List name field, select the one you’ve created to save the tweets
11. In the Title field select the the Tweet text
12. In the Author field select the Tweeted by
13. Provide a name to the Flow and press Create Flow
    
14. The Flow will start running immediately and you have the option to share it in the Microsoft Flow gallery
15. To test your Flow make a tweet that match your query
    
16. After a few minutes it will appear in the list

Let me know in the comments section what are your thoughts about Microsoft Flow, will this be useful to automate events in your SharePoint?

This post was originally written in my blog - HANDS ON SharePoint

by João Ferreira via Everyone's Blog Posts - SharePoint Community

Steps to deploy a farm solution in a SharePoint Farm:

Steps to deploy a farm solution (wsp file) in a SharePoint Farm:

Please follow the steps below to deploy a “farm solution” in a SharePoint Farm (both 2010 & 2013). A farm solution is something that can have an impact on the entire farm when deployed and being a SharePoint Administrator you can activate this on a specific web application or (on multiple web applications if you use the full-trust model ).

1. Login to the SharePoint WFE server using the “SharePoint Farm account “.
2. Open the “SharePoint Management Shell “window with elevated permissions and type the below command as show in the screenshot.

“ Add-SPSolution –LiteralPath D:\WSP\SPD_SendEmailWithAttachment.wsp”

Literal Path -->  Mention the folder path where you have saved the .wsp file.

SPD_SendEmailWithAttachment --> Here in this scenario the name of the wsp file that we are deploying is “SendEmailwithAttachment” and hence it has been named so.

WSP --> WSP stands for Windows SharePoint.

3. Once you’re done typing the above command, hit “enter “and it will give you the details of the wsp file as shown below.

4. Once you’re done with that, run the below mentioned command to get the details of the .wsp file. Please make sure you’re copying the solution ID properly.

5. Now since you’re done with adding the farm solution, please go ahead and run the below mentioned command to install it. Please check the screenshot below for reference

“Install-SPSolution –Identity “solution ID” –GACDeployment”  (Solution ID would be the ID which you see in the screenshot below)

6. Finally, once you’re done installing the farm solution please navigate to “System settings” in Central Administration and click on “Manage farm solutions” as shown below.

7. Please check whether you’re able to see the wsp file that you currently deployed in the list of wsp files available there. In our scenario the wsp file name is “spd_sendemailwithattachment.wsp” and you can see that in the list of wsp files that has been deployed on the farm.

8. Since we have verified that the .wsp file has been deployed successfully, the next step would be to activate the feature on the web application. For this click on “Manage web applications” in Central Administration -->Select the web application on which you need to activate the feature --> click on Manage features on the top ribbon interface.

9. Finally check for the feature related to the solution that we deployed and click on activate (check screenshot below).

Thanks for reading this post . Happy SharePointing!!!

by Vignesh Ganesan via Everyone's Blog Posts - SharePoint Community

Introduction to PowerApps

Recently Microsoft released for all PowerApps. This has been a project that has been available in preview for some time but now we are able to play. To get access to it simple navigate to http://ift.tt/1TgmE0W

Once there you will see the bold statement explaining what PowerApps is.

read more

by via SharePoint Pro

Welcome to Penton Technology's New Professional Education Platform

We’re pleased to share the new interactive Penton Technology Professional Education platform, designed to enrich the online education experience for technology professionals.

“Our new education platform allows tech professionals to enhance their careers, advance their skills and access critical education on-demand,” said Rod Trent, Education and Conferences Director for Penton Technology.

read more

by via SharePoint Pro

Store

Stay current with eBooks, online training, conferences, and project plans! The technology world changes daily, and sometimes hourly, so keeping up with the skills is crucial. Our team is dedicated to get you the information you need!

read more

by via SharePoint Pro

Charts for SharePoint v5 BETA 4

New beta version released – follow these instructions to install: http://ift.tt/1U0QxRI

There is no change log for this revision, but it fixes the issues reported in the forum: http://ift.tt/1O92us7

The user manual is “work in progress”: http://ift.tt/1U0QSDK

Alexander

by Alexander Bautz via SharePoint JavaScripts

Top 10 Reasons to Upgrade to SharePoint 2016 Infographic

SharePoint 2016 Top 10 Reasons to Upgrade

The post Top 10 Reasons to Upgrade to SharePoint 2016 Infographic appeared first on CollabShow.

by Joel Oleson via CollabShow

The SharePoint Mobility story

Historically SharePoint has not had a great mobility story. However I am a great believer in first understanding what we mean by the word “mobility”. For quite some time we have associated this with just the ability to use something on a mobile device when in reality if we do a Google Search we find it actually means: “the ability to move or be moved freely and easily”, with the key words being “Move”, “Freely” and “Easily”.

read more

by via SharePoint Pro

SharePoint Community Newsletter - Week 20

Hello SharePointers and welcome to this SharePoint Community Newsletter! We will cover news about SharePoint 2016, Office 365 and Yammer as well as upcoming events.

  *** 128 Collab365 Summit Sessions now available on-demand!*** 

We just made 128 Collab365 Summit sessions covering the very latest on Office 365 and SharePoint on-demand? This provides an incredible amount of information around SharePoint 2016, Office365, Delve, PowerApps, Flow, Sway, Azure and much more - all for free.

http://bit.ly/1XzAJLi

***Win a free Pass to SPTechCon Boston 2016***

Do you want to go to SPTechCon Boston 2016 this June?  Enter this raffle to get a chance to win a 4-Day All-Access Conference Pass to SPTechCon Boston June 27-30!

http://spvlad.com/1WDXL4m

*** Microsoft Releases SharePoint 2016 MCSE information*** 

After a popular session at Collab365 Conference last week where Microsoft Learning talked about the SharePoint 2016 exams, they finally released the information on their site as well. The exam number is 70-339 and is called Managing Microsoft SharePoint Server 2016.  Read more about this exam here:

http://spvlad.com/25b75BT

*** Share an SPO Site Using a Custom HTML Email With Users Imported From a CSV File*** 

Get a more customized External Sharing solution with this script  by  SharePoint Expert Paul Choquette.

http://spvlad.com/1W2qrUB

*** Watch the full, on-demand Future Of SharePoint keynote*** 

Come celebrate SharePoint and see Jeff Teper, CVP OneDrive and SharePoint, unveil our new vision and roadmap for SharePoint and OneDrive for Business, both on-premises and in the cloud with Office 365.

http://spvlad.com/1rTWedM

by Vlad Catrinescu via Everyone's Blog Posts - SharePoint Community

128 Collab365 Summit Sessions now available on-demand!

ANNOUNCEMENT: We just made 128 Collab365 Summit sessions covering the very latest on Office 365 and SharePoint on-demand? This provides an incredible amount of information around SharePoint 2016, Office365, Delve, PowerApps, Flow, Sway, Azure and much more - all for free. Now that all 3 days of the Live Show are available, this means you can watch the 3 amazing Keynotes delivered by Microsoft's Bill Bear, Yina Arenas, Rob Howard and Mark Kashman at your convenience. Microsoft shared much more detail around the announcements made at the 'Future of SharePoint' event, so they're a 'must see'. Simply put - this is the freshest and most upto date content on SharePoint 2016 and Office 365 that you can find! How to get access to the sessions? You can log-on to the conference lobby via this link, or if you haven't registered yet please do it here. What's Next? ... 24-hr GOBAL CONFERENCE 2016 Now that we've finished our post Summit clean-up tasks all of our attention is moving to the Collab365 Global Conference! We are now making plans to produce the world's only truly global SharePoint and Office 365 Conference taking place on October 26th-27th, online.  This conference lasts for 24 continuous hours and will feature speakers representing communities across 6 continents! This event is unmissable... REGISTER FOR GLOBAL CONFERENCE BBTW, registration for the conference will remain free for as long as possible. However, we may need to introduce charging to help cover production costs, so secure your free place now and don't miss out. Have a great day, Mark Jones Founder : Collaboris, Collab365 + SharePoint-Community.net

<![endif]-->

by Mark Jones via Everyone's Blog Posts - SharePoint Community

Win a free Pass to SPTechCon Boston 2016

I have been blogging about learning resources for a while and one of the best ways to learn from the experts is to attend in person conferences! SPTechCon gave me a 4-Day All-Access Conference Pass to SPTechCon Boston 2016 to give away to the readers of my blog! To enter you simply have to put your name and email (They will not be shared with SPTechCon unless you’re the winner of the pass), and you can get bonus entries if you follow @vladcatrinescu on Twitter and like the Absolute SharePoint page on Facebook! Furthermore you can tweet about the giveaway every day and get 9 bonus entries for every time you tweet!

The prize only includes the conference pass and not any travel costs or anything else. Just the conference pass! Here is a small paragraph about the conference

SPTechCon: The SharePoint Technology Conference is returning to Boston, June 27-30, 2016! SPTechCon offers more than 80 technical classes and tutorials — presented by the most knowledgeable instructors working in SharePoint today — to help attendees improve their skills and broaden their knowledge of Microsoft’s collaboration and productivity software.

SPTechCon Boston will feature the first conference sessions on SharePoint 2016, the highly anticipated next release of SharePoint! We will also bring you more on working with SharePoint 2013 and Office 365, with practical information you can put to use on the job right away! Whether you’re looking to upgrade to a later version than the one you’re currently on, or simply need answers to those daunting problems you’ve been unable to overcome, SPTechCon is the place for you!

SPTechCon offers classes and tutorials for IT professionals, business decision makers, information workers, software architects and developers. Each presenter at the conference will be a true SharePoint expert, with many drawn from Microsoft’s tech teams or from outside authorities with Microsoft MVP status.

Good Luck!

 

Click here to view this promotion.

The post Win a free Pass to SPTechCon Boston 2016 appeared first on Absolute SharePoint Blog by Vlad Catrinescu.

by Vlad Catrinescu via Absolute SharePoint Blog by Vlad Catrinescu

Charts for SharePoint v5 BETA 3

New beta version released – follow these instructions to install: http://ift.tt/21LHDNP.

There is no change log for this revision, but it fixes the issues reported in the forum: http://ift.tt/1O92us7

Alexander

by Alexander Bautz via SharePoint JavaScripts

Share an SPO Site Using a Custom HTML Email With Users Imported From a CSV File

I wrote this script as a means for bulk setup of existing vendors for our extranet on SharePoint Online. One of the biggest issues with the current flow for adding external users is that the invitation emails get sent from Microsoft and the content is mostly static. In my experience, many external users may disregard the email as junk mail or their email servers may even flag it automatically as such. External users expect to see emails from your domain, not Microsoft's. This script will send an email via your Exchange Online with the content of your choosing (including HTML.) The CSV file should contain just one column of data, external users' email addresses, named Email.

The script can be found at this link on Gist.

by Paul Choquette via Everyone's Blog Posts - SharePoint Community

Microsoft Releases SharePoint 2016 MCSE information

After a popular session at Collab365 Conference last week where Microsoft Learning talked about the SharePoint 2016 exams, they finally released the information on their site as well. The exam number is 70-339 and is called Managing Microsoft SharePoint Server 2016. According to the Collab365 Conference session, the 70-339 exam will be the only SharePoint exam required for the SharePoint 2016 MCSE certification. The date on the Microsoft learning site for the exam release is June 20^th, so in a bit more than a month.

The 70-339 exam will test you on the following topics:

• Design SharePoint infrastructure (15–20%)
• Plan authentication and security (15–20%)
• Plan workload optimization (15–20%)
• Plan productivity solutions (15–20%)
• Manage search capabilities (10–15%)
• Plan and configure cloud services (5–10%)
• Monitor and optimize a SharePoint environment (10–15%)

The path for the SharePoint 2016 MCSE is not yet released, but if we look at the MCSE: Messaging (Exchange 2016) exam path, the path for the SharePoint 2016 MCSE would be the following:

• 70-346 (Managing Office 365 Identities and Requirements)
• 70-347 (Enabling Office 365 Services)

After successfully completing steps 1 and 2, you’ll earn a Microsoft Certified Solutions Associate (MCSA): Office 365 certification.

• 70-339 (Managing Microsoft SharePoint Server 2016 (in development))

To view more information about the exam from the Microsoft Learning site, check out the exam here: http://ift.tt/1OvJij4 .

#Microsoft Releases #SharePoint 2016 MCSE information https://t.co/FoL638T32A #sp2016 http://pic.twitter.com/J1FYKus5y3

— Vlad catrinescu (@vladcatrinescu) May 16, 2016

Opinions on 70-339 (Managing Microsoft SharePoint Server 2016)

I know the exam is still under development and the description might change, but as I am reading the exam objectives, there are a lot of strange descriptions. Let’s look at the Exam Objectives in detail. Those are my personal opinions and the bullets will start with “Vlad: “. Feel free to give me your opinions on the exam , or on my opinions in the comments.

Design SharePoint infrastructure (15–20%)

• Design information architecture
  • Design an inter-site navigational taxonomy; design site columns and content types; design keywords, synonyms, promoted results, managed properties, durable links, and document library accessibility; plan information management policies; plan compliance features, such as document fingerprinting and item-level encryption; plan search for sensitive and non-sensitive content; plan managed site structures; plan term sets; plan for support of Open Document Format (ODF); plan mobile navigation
    • Vlad: Glad to see that planning the Sensitive and non-sensitive information, especially that DLP is only mapped per site collection, so that certainly makes sense. Durable Links is also mentioned, although I don’t see what you can plan for it, except use it or not use it. Also, I never heard about document fingerprinting and Item-level encryption in SharePoint before. Something I will have to read more on.
• Design a logical architecture
  • Plan application pools; plan web applications; plan for software boundaries; plan content databases; plan host-header site collections; plan Fast Site Collection creation; plan zones and alternate access mapping
• Design a physical architecture
  • Design a server farm topology (traditional, streamlined, hybrid) by using MinRole (user roles, robot services roles, cache services roles); design Central Administration deployment; design a storage architecture, including ReFS; configure basic request management; define individual server requirements; define service topologies; plan server load balancing; plan a network infrastructure; plan for large file support; plan an app hosting model
    • Vlad: The first phrase confuses me; how can I plan a traditional topology by using MinRole? It should read (Traditional, streamlined, MinRole), and then it should maybe have talked about On-Premises and Hybrid.
• Plan an installation
  • Identify and configure installation prerequisites, implement scripted deployment, plan Access Services deployment, plan Project Server installation, implement patch slipstreaming, plan and install language packs, plan and configure service connection points, plan installation tracking and auditing, plan and install Office Online Server, implement managed paths for Office 365 migrations, configure SharePoint hybrid cloud settings
    • Vlad: Not sure what “Managed Paths for Office 365 Migrations” is. Should we only use the two Office 365 Managed Paths (/sites, /teams) On-Premises as well? Also, what can we track and audit in the install?
• Plan a hybrid cloud environment
  • Plan for deployment of Office Online; configure server-to-server authentication; configure OAuth; configure Audiences and hybrid features, to include Search, OneDrive for Business, Team Sites, extensible App Launcher, and hybrid picker tools
    • Vlad: Why is Office Online in the Hybrid cloud? Already that Microsoft confused a lot of clients because Office Online Server, is on-premises, but clients think that it’s in Office 365 only. By putting it in the “Hybrid Cloud” category, it will confuse people even more.

Plan authentication and security (15–20%)

• Plan and configure authentication
  
  • Plan and configure Windows authentication, plan and configure anonymous authentication, plan connection encryption (TLS, SMTP), plan and configure identity federation, configure claims providers, configure site-to-site (S2S) intra-server and OAuth authentication, configure connections to Access Control Service, configure authentication for hybrid cloud deployment
    
• Plan and configure authorization
  
  • Plan and configure SharePoint users and groups, plan and configure People Picker, plan and configure sharing (hints, one-click, create and share), plan and configure permission inheritance, plan and configure anonymous access, plan web application policies
    
    • Vlad: One Click Share is a permission nightmare.
      
• Plan and configure platform and farm security
  
  • Plan and configure security isolation, services lockdown, and antivirus settings; plan and configure certificate management; plan for Kerberos support for service applications; plan and configure information rights management (IRM), delegated farm administration, and delegated service application administration; plan and configure managed accounts; plan and configure blocked file types; plan and configure web part security, including WOPI support
    
• Create and configure a User Profile Service (UPA) application
  
  • Configure a UPA application, configure social permissions, plan and configure sync connections of MIM 2016 synchronization, configure profile properties, configure claims integration with UPA
    
• Manage site and site collection security
  
  • Manage site access requests, manage App permissions, manage anonymous access, manage permission inheritance, configure permission levels, configure HTML field security
    
• Provision and configure web applications
  
  • Create managed paths, configure Alternate Access Mappings (AAM), configure SharePoint Designer settings
    

Plan workload optimization (15–20%)

• Create and maintain site collections
  
  • Provision Fast Site Collection Creation, configure Host header site collections, configure self-service site creation, maintain site owners, maintain site quotas, configure site policies, configure a team mailbox, plan Sites Page Pinning
    
• Plan SharePoint high availability and disaster recovery solutions
  
  • Plan for service distribution, plan for service instance configuration, plan for physical server distribution, plan for network redundancy, plan for server load balancing, plan for SQL Server aliases, plan for SQL Server clustering, plan for SQL Server AlwaysOn Availability Groups, plan for SQL Server Log Shipping, plan for storage redundancy, plan for login replication
    
• Plan backup and restore
  
  • Establish a SharePoint backup schedule, establish a SQL Server backup schedule, plan a non-production environment content refresh, plan for farm configuration recovery, plan for service application recovery, plan for content recovery, configure a recovery solution using SQL Database running in Azure and other Azure backup solutions
    
    • Vlad: Happy to see Azure here for DR, but wonder what the “Other Azure Backup solutions” are.
      
• Plan and configure social workloads
  
  • Plan communities, plan My Sites, plan OneDrive redirection, plan social permissions, plan user profiles, plan activity feeds, plan connections, configure Yammer settings
    
    • Vlad: OneDrive redirection and Yammer should be in Hybrid, not here.
      
• Plan and configure a Web Content Management (WCM) workload
  
  • Plan and configure channels, plan and configure product catalog and topic pages, plan and configure Design Manager, plan and configure content deployment, plan and configure display templates, plan and configure variations
    
• Plan and configure an Enterprise Content Management (ECM) workload
  
  • Plan and configure E-Discovery; plan and configure document routing; plan and configure co-authoring; plan and configure durable links; plan and configure record disposition and retention; plan large document repositories; plan and configure software boundaries; plan and configure Data Loss Prevention, In-Place Holds, and Document Deletion features
    
    • Vlad: How can we configure Software boundaries J ? Also there is nothing to configure with Durable Links… everything is done when connecting Office Online Server to SharePoint.
      

Plan productivity solutions (15–20%)

• Evaluate content and customizations
  • Perform migration pre-check tasks, analyze content database test results, configure web application authentication for upgrade, resolve orphan objects, resolve missing file system components, resolve configuration conflict issues
• Plan an upgrade process
  • Plan removal of servers in rotation, configure a parallel upgrade, configure read-only access for content, configure upgrade farms, measure upgrade performance, plan an installation sequence, plan and migrate SharePoint on-premises to SharePoint Online or a hybrid topology
    • Vlad: Plan Remove of servers in rotation, I hope it’s from the NLB and not the farm. Wonder what they will cover in the migrating to SharePoint Online… how to use a third party? The FastTrack isn’t anything technical, so doubt it will be covered, and the PowerShell cmdlets are still very basic.
• Create and configure app management
  • Create and configure the App Store, create and configure subscriptions, configure marketplace connections, configure DNS entries, configure wildcard certificates
    • Vlad: Aren’t those Add-ins now J?
• Create and configure productivity services
  • Create and configure Office Online Server, Microsoft Access services, Microsoft Visio services, Microsoft Word Automation services, Microsoft PowerPoint Conversion services, and Translation Services; configure hybrid OneDrive for Business with Profile Redirection and Extensible App Launcher; plan and install Office Online Server, SharePoint Insights, and SharePoint Server Telemetry features
    • Vlad: Office online Server again, didn’t we already plan and configure for it 3x? J. Also, a lot of Hybrid here again… and Office Online Server in the middle of hybrid features, even if it has nothing to do with Hybrid. SharePoint Insights isn’t even yet released in beta, so hopefully no questions on it at launch and… “SharePoint Server Telemetry features”. That’s something I never heard off before, so maybe this is a leak of an upcoming feature in the first Feature Pack? Who knows… but hopefully they won’t test on it June 20^th.
• Create and configure a Business Connectivity Service (BCS) and Secure Store application
  • Import and configure BCS models, configure BCS model security, configure BCS for search, generate a Secure Store master key, manage Secure Store target application permissions, create Secure Store target applications, configure hybrid BCS
    • Vlad: Hybrid BCS is a different beast than BCS… wonder why this is here and not in the hybrid section.
• Manage SharePoint solutions and applications
  • Manage sandbox solution quotas, configure sandbox solution management, deploy farm solutions, upgrade farm solutions, deploy Apps, upgrade Apps

Manage search capabilities (10–15%)

• Create and configure Enterprise search
  • Plan and configure a search topology, plan and configure content sources, plan and configure crawl schedules, plan and configure crawl rules, plan and configure crawl performance, plan and configure security trimming, choose and configure hybrid search
• Create and configure a Managed Metadata Service (MMS) application
  • Configure proxy settings for managed service applications, configure content type hub settings, configure sharing term sets, plan and configure content type propagation schedules, configure custom properties, configure term store permissions, configure managed metadata service (MMS) imports
• Manage search
  • Manage result sources; manage query rules; manage display templates; manage Search Engine Optimization (SEO) settings; manage result types; manage a search schema; manage federated search, including integration with Delve and Office Graph
    • Vlad: Delve + Office Graph don’t work with Federated Search. Hope they mean Cloud Hybrid Search.
• Manage taxonomy
  • Manage site collection term set access, manage term set navigation, manage topic catalog pages, configure custom properties, configure search refinement, configure list refinement
• Plan and configure a search workload
  • Plan and configure search result relevancy, plan and configure index freshness, plan and configure result sources, plan and configure the end-user experience, plan and configure a search schema, analyze search analytics reports

Plan and configure cloud services (5–10%)

• Plan and configure a BI infrastructure
  • Plan and configure Performance Point, plan and configure reporting services, plan and configure PowerPivot, plan and configure Excel Services (Office Online only), plan and configure PowerView, plan and configure BI security
    • Vlad: Again a comment about Office Online + BI being in Hybrid. Why is BI in the Cloud Services Category, when Office Online Server has NOTHING to do with Office 365? Again more confusion to make clients think that Office Online Server is not on-premises.
• Create and configure work management
  • Configure a connection to Exchange, activate and configure a connection to Microsoft Project Server 2016, manage trusts, plan Exchange configuration for E-Discovery
    • Vlad: Why is this in the Cloud Services section? Project Server 2016 is on Premises, as well as Exchange 2016.
• Plan and configure cloud and federated hybrid search
  • Plan and configure on-premises and Office 365 search and encrypted metadata when content is transferred to the search index in Office 365, configure user specific queries and inbound/outbound or bi-directional hybrid topologies

Monitor and optimize a SharePoint environment (10–15%)

• Monitor a SharePoint environment
  • Define monitoring requirements, configure performance counter capture, configure page performance monitoring, configure usage and health providers, monitor and forecast storage needs, monitor SharePoint hybrid cloud deployments
• Tune and optimize a SharePoint environment
  • Plan and configure SQL optimization, execute database maintenance rules, plan for capacity software boundaries, estimate storage requirements, plan and configure caching and a caching strategy, tune network performance, plan and configure Zero Downtime Patching
    • Vlad: You can’t really configure Zero Down Time Patching (ZDT). You can plan for it, you can plan your upgrade sequence, but there is nothing to configure for ZDT.
• Troubleshoot a SharePoint environment
  • Establish baseline performance, perform client-side tracing, perform server-side tracing, analyze usage data, enable a developer dashboard, analyze diagnostic logs, troubleshoot SharePoint hybrid cloud issues

What do you think about the exam contents? Anything missing, anything that shouldn’t be there? Should this have been two different exams? One for On-Prem and one for Hybrid? Let me know in the comments!

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#Microsoft Releases #SharePoint 2016 MCSE information https://t.co/FoL638T32A #sp2016 http://pic.twitter.com/J1FYKus5y3 — Vlad catrinescu (@vladcatrinescu) May 16, 2016

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by Vlad Catrinescu via Absolute SharePoint Blog by Vlad Catrinescu