Speaking at SharePoint Fest Chicago 2017

This year I have the great pleasure again of travelling to Chicago to speak at SharePoint Fest! This year’s SharePoint Fest is packed with 45 speakers, 100 sessions, 25 full and half day workshops and over 500 attendees, so if you still have budget for a conference this year, don’t miss it! You can even save 100$ with my speaker code below!

Here is what I will be speaking on!

Morning Workshop 9:00 am – 12:30 pm, Wednesday – WS 502 – Automate your business processes with tools from today and tomorrow

One of the big advantages of implementing SharePoint in the enterprise is process automation. By using Out of the box workflows as well as easy to create custom SharePoint Designer Workflows, Power Users are able to automate processes, avoid repetitive tasks, and boost team productivity. Furthermore, new tools such as Flow which are exclusive to Office 365 at the moment allow you to easily create workflows, and integrate SharePoint Online with other systems.

In this half-day workshop, you will learn how to use SharePoint Designer and Flow to create workflows that solve real problems and to automate your business processes in SharePoint On-Premises and SharePoint Online.

OFF 105 – Getting Started with PowerShell for Office 365

Take your Office 365 Administrator skills to the next level by learning to manage Office 365 and automate repetitive tasks using the magic of PowerShell.

In this session, you will learn how to use PowerShell for Office 365!

ADM 205 – Integrating SharePoint and Office Online Server

Office Online Server (formerly known as Office Web Apps) allows your users to view and edit Office Documents directly in the browser, without having to download them locally as well as enables the Durable Links functionality with SharePoint Server 2016. Lastly, since Excel Services is not part of SharePoint 2016 anymore, Office Online Server is mandatory in order to enable Business Intelligence features in SharePoint Server 2016.

In this session, we will look more in detail at what Office Online Server is, best practices on how to install it and how to design an Office Online Server Farm. We will also learn how to properly integrate it with SharePoint Server 2016, and lastly, what features it can bring to other Office Servers products such as Exchange and Skype for Business.

You can check out all the sessions at http://ift.tt/2yZFolo

Hope to see you there!

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by Vlad Catrinescu via Absolute SharePoint Blog by Vlad Catrinescu

Join me at Collab365 Global Conference 2017!

Have you heard about the virtual Collab365 Global Conference 2017 that’s streaming online November 1st – 2nd?

Join me and 120 other speakers from around the world who will be bringing you the very latest content around SharePoint, Office 365, Flow, PowerApps, Azure, OneDrive for Business and of course the increasingly popular Microsoft Teams. The event is produced by the Collab365 Community and is entirely free to attend.

Places are limited to 5000 so be quick and register now.

During the conference I’d love you to watch my session which is called: ‘What do YOU get from SharePoint Hybrid?’

Every time you see a blog post about SharePoint 2016, you see the word hybrid. But what exactly is a hybrid infrastructure and what features does the business user get? In this session, we will look at SharePoint Hybrid from a business user point of view to understand what features we get out of it. We will look at Hybrid Team Sites, Hybrid Search, Hybrid Extranet sites and more!​

If you join me, you will learn:

• Understand what a Hybrid SharePoint deployment actually means
  
• See example use cases where Hybrid is better than going all cloud, or all On-Premises
  

Topic(s):

• Hybrid SharePoint
  
• SharePoint
  

Audience:

• Business Analyst
  
• End User
  
• Power User
  

Time (in UTC) :

• Thursday, November 2 2017 1:00 PM
  

How to attend:

1. Register here.
   
2. At the time listed above go here to watch my session. (you can also add me to your own personal planner from the agenda.
   
3. Be ready to take notes!
   

The post Join me at Collab365 Global Conference 2017! appeared first on Absolute SharePoint Blog by Vlad Catrinescu.

by Vlad Catrinescu via Absolute SharePoint Blog by Vlad Catrinescu

DFFS Package updated to v4.4.3.16

I have released a new version of the DFFS package. You find the change log here and the files in the download section of the user manual.

Please post any comments in the forum.

Best regards,
Alexander

by Alexander Bautz via SharePoint JavaScripts

Column Formatting in SharePoint Online Rolling Out!

Every once in a while, something comes to Office 365 where no one has anything negative to say. (Is that a back-handed complement?)

Column Formatting in @SharePoint Online starts rolling out end of October. https://t.co/FVAz9BxfB6 http://pic.twitter.com/kiiyNtVrT4

— Marc D Anderson (@sympmarc) October 16, 2017

The fact that this tweet got 22 retweets and 34 likes (as of this writing) and lots of eyeballs means this is one of those things.

Over the years we’ve had several ways to change the look of a column in a list view. Early on – say in the SharePoint 2007 and 2010 days – we often used jQuery in the page to do what we needed. This was WAY before it was fashionable to write client side code for SharePoint. It worked just fine, but had pretty decent barriers to entry. You had to know how to write JavaScript, get it into the page, use CSS3-like selectors in jQuery, etc.

In SharePoint 2013, we got something called jsLink, which was part of what most people refer to as Client Side Rendering, or CSR. This was a pretty good mechanism, and also used JavaScript, but with some fairly arcane functions and structure. However, it allowed us to customize both individual fields and entire rows.

Announced at Ignite, we now are getting a new capability to format columns in “modern” list views. It doesn’t seem to have a snazzy name other than “Column Formatting“, but that doesn’t matter.

There’s a great page with documentation and examples which we can tweak to get what we need: Use column formatting to customize SharePoint. This new mechanisms use what’s called declarative customization, meaning we don’t actually write code – though it may feel like code to many of you. Rather than code, we write JSON, which stands for JavaScript Object Notation. JSON is basically a way to store data.

Let’s look at one of the examples from that page.

Say we want to color a column’s value if that value is less than 70. (The text on the page says color it red, but the little image is yellow, so I’m not sure they have it right at the moment – especially since the number is exactly 70.)

In any case, the JSON data below says the following:

If @currentField < 70 Then add the CSS class = sp-field-severity–warning.

which gives us something like this (with the above caveat):

{
   "elmType": "div",
   "txtContent": "@currentField",
   "attributes": {
      "class": {
         "operator": "?",
         "operands": [
            {
               "operator": "<",
               "operands": [
                  "@currentField",
                  70
               ]
            },
            "sp-field-severity--warning",
            ""
         ]
      }
   }
}

While the techies will tell you this isn’t code, it really sort of is. The condition we want to apply is stored as JSON – which is data – but tells SharePoint how to render the field. The fact that we use operators, operands, etc. to make this happen means that we are effectively writing code. That said, I expect we will see a great number of “recipes” arise out in the community, just like we did with the great SPCSR repo in Github. In fact, I challenge all of you to start sharing your recipes as soon as you start using this feature!

As soon as we can all get our hands on this new capability (watch for it in First Release by the end of October), I expect to start adding examples to a new Github repo I just created: SPCustomFormatting. If you don’t understand Github, don’t fret. You’ll be able to just copy the recipes and alter them to meet your needs. If you do understand Github and would like to contribute, please do with a pull request. The faster we build up a set of recipes people can use, the more productive the citizen developer army out there will be!

by Marc D Anderson via Marc D Anderson's Blog

Enabling the “Anyone” Sharing Setting in and Office 365 Site

Julie (@jfj1997) and I are working hard on SPS New England coming up on October 28 in Burlington, MA. I wanted to set up an easy place for the speakers to drop their slide decks. We have a perfectly good Office 365 tenant, so I figured I’d just create a Document Library somewhere and share the link with the speakers so they could do so.

Unfortunately, it wasn’t quite so simple. (What I needed was an Anyone link, but it was grayed out. The message on hover “Your organization is preventing you from selecting this option.” didn’t help me much since, well, I am my organization! (Well, I do have to answer to Julie from time to time.) I’d love for the message to say something link “Talk to your admin about turning on Anyone sharing, as described at this link.” The Learn more link didn’t really help, either. I considered using Dropbox!

Instead of using Dropbox, since I couldn’t figure out the magic incantation to light up the Anyone link in the sharing dialog, I turned to my favorite RTFM replacement, the Twitters.

How can I enable anonymous (Anyone) access in the new sharing dialogs? Looks like all my admin settings allow it. #SPHelp http://pic.twitter.com/GlKjGVR2ml

— Marc D Anderson (@sympmarc) October 12, 2017

I got a bunch of suggestions, and maybe I was too dense to understand them, but I wasn’t getting any joy. Luckily, one of Microsoft’s finest employees, Tom Resing (@resing), saw my tweet:

It seems to me this shouldn't be so hard.

— Tom Resing #O365SRed (@resing) October 12, 2017

Tom’s a swell guy, so he poked around at Microsoft and asked a few people how to do this. Today he got back to me.

Before I tweeted, I had checked the settings in the following two places, so thought I should be good.

First, the Office 365 Admin center, under Security & Privacy. That looked good.

Then I had checked in the SharePoint Admin Center under sharing, and that looked good.

It turns out there is yet another setting I needed to change. This one is in the SharePoint Admin Center and is at the individual Site Collection level under Sharing:

Even though the other settings above say that anonymous links are allowed, I still needed to say that anonymous links were allowed at the Site Collection level.

Even worse, if the site is a “modern” Office 365 Group -based site, there is no UI to change this setting yet – at least until we have the new SharePoint Admin Center. You’ll need to use Powershell (IMO, the answer should never be “you need Powershell”). If I can find the Powershell, I’ll post it here.

After a few days of trying to figure out, I can start collecting slides! Thanks, Tom!

 

 

 

by Marc D Anderson via Marc D Anderson's Blog

Tip: Docker Extension for VSCode

I've been spending a lot of time with .NET Core, Docker, a plenitude of Azure services, various cloud systems and API's. The common denominator of all my projects of late, is that they're all touching Docker in one way or the other.

With Docker there's plenty of ways to do things. This post is simply a tip if you're using VSCode and also working with Docker to some extent; It'll help with some basic tasks.

Docker Extension for Visual Studio Code, installation

• Press Ctrl + P (Windows)
• Type ext install vscode-docker
• Select and install the extension (as of this writing it's called Docker)
• Verify that there's a new section called Docker in your left panel:

Manage images and containers from inside VSCode

You'll see all your images:

You'll also see all your containers:

From here, you can now manage images and containers more conveniently.

You'll also get a bunch of easy to run commands for Docker straight from inside VScode:

How am I using it?

The way I work with Docker on a daily basis is not set in stone. Most of the things I do, I do cmdline. However, these nuggets and extensions does indeed lighten the load sometimes when you quickly need to get into a container to check the logs, inspect an image or do other similar tasks. While using VSCode as a terminal and debug console isn't my recommendation in the long run, it's pretty convenient during development work.

Give it a shot.

Links

• Docker Extension for VSCode (github)

by Tobias Zimmergren via Zimmergren's thoughts on tech

Speaking at Dev Intersections – Oct 31 to Nov 2 in Las Vegas! Save 50$

At the end of the month, I will be heading out to Las Vegas, Nevada to speak at the popular Dev Intersections conference along some of the biggest name in the Industry such as Steve Guggenheimer, Scott Guthrie, Scott Hanselman and more!

Here is what I will be speaking on:

SESSION: DEEP DIVE INTO DESIGNING A SHAREPOINT 2016 PHYSICAL ARCHITECTURE

SharePoint Server 2016 is the latest release of SharePoint Server and includes awesome features for business users, but quite a few changes for SharePoint IT Professionals. New features such as MinRole, combined with new requirements such as mandatory Office Online Server configuration for Business Intelligence, will change the way that SharePoint Administrators will design their SharePoint farm. In this course, you will learn how to design your SharePoint Server 2016 Farm according to your business needs and Microsoft Best Practices.

SESSION: WHAT DO YOU GET FROM SHAREPOINT HYBRID?

Every time you see a blog post about SharePoint 2016, you see the word hybrid. But what exactly is a hybrid infrastructure and what features does the business user get? In this session, we will look at SharePoint Hybrid from a business user point of view to understand what features we get out of it. We will look at Hybrid Team Sites, Hybrid Search, Hybrid Extranet sites and more!

FULL DAY WORKSHOP: AUTOMATE YOUR BUSINESS PROCESSES WITH TOOLS FROM TODAY AND TOMORROW

One of the big advantages of implementing SharePoint in the enterprise is process automation. By using Out of the box workflows as well as easy to create custom SharePoint Designer Workflows, Power Users are able to automate processes, avoid repetitive tasks, and boost team productivity. Furthermore, new tools such as Flow and PowerApps which are exclusive to Office 365 at the moment allow you to easily create workflow and forms, and integrate SharePoint with other systems. In this full day workshop, you will learn how to use SharePoint Designer, Flow and PowerApps to automate your business processes in SharePoint On-Premises and SharePoint Online.

When registering, make sure to use code CATRINESCU to save 50$ off! You can view all the registration options here: http://ift.tt/1QZokxR . Hope to see you there!

The post Speaking at Dev Intersections – Oct 31 to Nov 2 in Las Vegas! Save 50$ appeared first on Absolute SharePoint Blog by Vlad Catrinescu.

by Vlad Catrinescu via Absolute SharePoint Blog by Vlad Catrinescu

Detecting the Current SharePoint User’s Regional Settings

Brian McCullough (@bpmccullough) pinged me on Twitter today with a question:

. @sympmarc is this still only option fir getting users regional settings client side? Have you come across any other alternatives?

— Brian McCullough (@bpmccullough) October 3, 2017

Brian was asking about an old blog post of mine where I basically screen scraped the data: Detecting the Current User’s Regional Settings with jQuery. It worked fine in the old days, but I didn’t think it would work anymore on SharePoint Online.

It was bugging me that I couldn’t remember the answer, so I went digging into some SharePoint pages to see what I could see. In two different SharePoint Online tenants, I saw that the

_spPageContextInfo

 object has the following properties:

"preferUserTimeZone": false,
  "userTimeZoneData": null,
  "userTime24": false,
  "webTimeZoneData": {
    "Description": "(UTC-05:00) Eastern Time (US and Canada)",
    "Bias": 300,
    "Id": 10,
    "DaylightBias": -60,
    "DaylightDate": {
      "Year": 0,
      "Month": 3,
      "DayOfWeek": 0,
      "Day": 2,
      "Hour": 2,
      "Minute": 0,
      "Second": 0,
      "Milliseconds": 0
    },
    "StandardBias": 0,
    "StandardDate": {
      "Year": 0,
      "Month": 11,
      "DayOfWeek": 0,
      "Day": 1,
      "Hour": 2,
      "Minute": 0,
      "Second": 0,
      "Milliseconds": 0
    }
  },
  "webTime24": false

As I recall, if the

userTimeZoneData

  is not null, then the user has set their time zone themselves. If it is null, then the user is going along with the

webTimeZoneData

. I don’t have an example, but I’m pretty sure you can also check

preferUserTimeZone

  to see if the user wants to have her own time set.

Note that there are lots of other goodies in 

_spPageContextInfo

 as well. The other properties which are pertinent to time zones are:

• userTime24
  

    – Does the user prefer 24 hour (military ) time?

• webTime24
  

    – Does the Web display 24 hour (military ) time?

The

TimeZoneData

  properties are also quite rich, showing the time zone description, the bias from GMT, Daylight Savings Time bias (usually 60 mins, but sometimes 30 mins), when DST starts and ends.

Note that depending on the version of SharePoint you’re running, your mileage may vary.

Does anybody really know what time it is?

 

by Marc D Anderson via Marc D Anderson's Blog

Speaking at IT/Dev Connections in San Francisco

Later this month I will be heading over to San Francisco to speak at IT/Dev Connections 2017! It’s the first time I will be speaking at this event, and I am really excited to speak there with other very talented speakers such as Liam Cleary, Andrew Connell, Max Fritz, Daniel Glenn, Gokan Ozcifci and more!

Here is what I will be speaking on:

Full Day Workshop: SharePoint 2016: Design, Deploy, Configure and Manage a Stable and Performant SharePoint On-Premises or Hybrid Farm (With Gokan Ozcifci)

In this full day workshop, IT Professionals will learn how to install and configure SharePoint Server 2016 per Microsoft’s best practices, and how to adapt them to their client’s budget. Microsoft SharePoint Server 2016 provides a broad array of hybrid capabilities enabling you to cloud-accelerate your on-premises deployment. Learn more about the capabilities in SharePoint Server 2016 and how to best implement hybrid scenarios. In this workshop you’ll learn about: – A comprehensive introduction into SharePoint 2016 architecture. – The whole new Concept in Server Roles (with the MinRole Concept) and with Architectural possibilities in Hybrid deployments. – Guidance, Best Practices and lessons learned from the field covering MinRole, high availability and common topologies scenarios. – A clear focus on patterns, features, stacks and deployment techniques, providing useful information to understand how and when to implement hybrid scenarios with Microsoft Office 365

General Session: Integrating Office Online Server with SharePoint and Exchange

Office Online Server (formerly known as Office Web Apps) lets users view and edit Office Documents directly in the browser, without having to download them locally. It also lets them use the Durable Links function in SharePoint Server 2016. And since Excel Services isn’t part of SharePoint 2016 anymore, Office Online Server is required to use Business Intelligence features in SharePoint Server 2016. On the Exchange side, Office Online Server lets users view Office Documents in the Outlook on the web with high fidelity. When you integrate the three, SharePoint, OOS and Exchange 2016, you can use Modern Attachments On-Premises. This session will cover Office Online Server, best practices on how to install it and how to design an Office Online Server Farm. You’ll also learn how to properly integrate it with SharePoint Server 2016 and Exchange Server 2016.

General Session: Manage Office 365 with PowerShell

Take your Office 365 Administrator skills further by learning to automate repetitive tasks using the magic of PowerShell. In this session, you will learn how to use PowerShell for Office 365, and we will focus on SharePoint online. A basic understanding of PowerShell is recommended to get the most out of this session!

Panel: ATE: Ask the Experts – Enterprise Collaboration Track

This is your chance to get all your questions answered before heading back to work from IT/Dev Connections 2017! Join this session to hammer our expert panel with your burning questions and solve your biggest issues.

I hope to see as many of you as possible there, and if you didn’t register yet, they are running a Flash Sale with 250$ off until October 8^th with code EX250OFF! Check out the full conference details at: http://ift.tt/2uoZGPy

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by Vlad Catrinescu via Absolute SharePoint Blog by Vlad Catrinescu