Tuesday, January 31, 2017

SPJS Charts for SharePoint – video installation guide

I have added a video installation guide for SPJS Charts for SharePoint in the user manual: http://ift.tt/1U0QSDK

Alexander


by Alexander Bautz via SharePoint JavaScripts

The Site Mailbox is going away in SharePoint Online

This morning, Microsoft published a message in the Office 365 Admin Center for administrators who have at least one Site Mailbox in their organization. Starting as soon as March 2017 (in only 1 month), you will no longer be able to create new Site Mailboxes, however any Site mailboxes will continue to work until September 2017. Instead of site mailboxes, you should now use Office 365 groups.

Site Mailbox is going away in SharePoint Online

Starting September 2017, Microsoft will offer a process to move your content from Site Mailboxes to Office 365 Groups. Here is the full message:

We’re removing Site Mailboxes in SharePoint Online

MC92090

Published On: January 31, 2017

Expires On: September 15, 2017

Beginning March 2017, new SharePoint Online organizations will no longer have access to the Site Mailbox feature, existing SharePoint Online organizations will no longer be able to create new Site Mailboxes; however, any Site Mailboxes provisioned prior to March 2017 will continue to function.

How does this affect me?

You are receiving this message because our reporting indicates your organization has one or more Site Mailboxes available. Beginning March 2017, your users may no longer create new Site Mailboxes. In September 2017, we will have a process in place allowing you to transition your existing Site Mailbox site to an Office 365 Group. We will communicate again in June 2017, via Message Center, with more details.

What do I need to do to prepare for this change?

If you are using the Site Mailbox feature in SharePoint Online, you should consider transitioning to Office 365 Groups, to support email-centric collaborative scenarios. Please click Additional Information to learn more.

Additional information

Were you using Site Mailboxes as part of your day to day collaboration? How does this affect you? Let me know in the comments!

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


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 The Site Mailbox is going away in SharePoint Online appeared first on Absolute SharePoint Blog by Vlad Catrinescu.


by Vlad Catrinescu via Absolute SharePoint Blog by Vlad Catrinescu

Monday, January 30, 2017

SharePoint disaster recovery in Microsoft Azure

So, there are three key questions we should be asking:

What are you doing for you SharePoint disaster recovery? 
Do you have separate farms, using availability groups, stretched farm or nothing?
What is SharePoint disaster recovery?

read more


by via SharePoint Pro

Cloud based Collaboration within Office 365

Office 365 is a great platform to use for any business size. The cost, time to implement and usage makes it a very compelling solution no matter on what features you wish to utilize. One topic that it is close to what I do is “Collaboration”. Most of the clients I work with require some level of collaboration between either internal groups, departments or external teams, probably like most of us do. This feature set is available within Office 365b and has been for some time. The core components historically have been SharePoint Online and OneDrive for Business.

read more


by via SharePoint Pro

Review of Valo: Ready-to-go intranet on Office 365 and SharePoint

Product overview by Vlad Catrinescu – requested by Valo Intranet, but thoughts are my own.

Valo Intranet Logo

SharePoint Server is one of the best, and arguably the most popular platform for Enterprise Intranets in the world. According to the popular and respected Nielsen Norman Group, 9/10 of the best Intranets in the world of 2016 were hosted on the SharePoint platform, and 5/10 of the top Intranets in 2017 also use SharePoint. However, there is a big problem that companies are facing with building an amazing Intranet: The time it takes to build it as well as the number of resources. The average team size to create an award-winning Intranet in 2016 was 14 people, and it took them an average of 16 months building their Intranet.

This is why a lot of third-party vendor started offering “Ready-to-go” solutions for Intranets in SharePoint On-Premises and SharePoint Online, also commonly referred to “Intranet in a box” because of how little effort is required to deploy them and get them fully up and running in your organization. In this review, we will look at an Intranet called Valo Intranet, which won the Best Intranet / Extranet Solution Award at the European SharePoint Conference in 2016. With an award like this, expectations are high, but before we start, here are a few words about Valo Intranet from the product’s website:

Valo Intranet Fall in love with your intranet! Valo is a ready-to-go social intranet on Office 365 and SharePoint. Valo Intranet brings together the most popular intranet features, and creates competitive edge by increasing productivity and improving work satisfaction. Valo is built on Microsoft’s recommended cloud add-in model, so Office 365 continuous updates are always safe.

Valo Intranet has more than 300,000 daily users and 150+ happy customers worldwide. Our dedicated development team works hard with an exciting roadmap – new releases and add-ons coming in every 3 months! Valo Intranet is easy-to-use, mobile-friendly, and technically strong – a flexible solution for the changing world. Valo is the last intranet you’ll need.

The Review

The review of Valo Intranet will be done in a SharePoint Online environment provided by Valo, and pre-populated with some data.

Valo Intranet

Valo Intranet contains multiple features to create a modern Intranet easily, as well as multiple templates and functionalities to make Intranet creation easy. You can see some of those features in the picture below.

Valo Intranet

Valo Intranet

There are also multiple add-ons that you can add, depending of what specific features you want to use on your Intranet, and one that is not on the picture below is Idea Management. We will review some of those Add-ons as part of this review. Something that I find really good, especially being from a bilingual country, is that Valo Intranet supports 14 languages, including French, Spanish and German, which are the most popular I’ve seen when deploying SharePoint at my clients.

Valo Intranet

On the design aspect, Valo does look like a beautiful intranet, the responsive design scales well from the big screen to the small mobile device and user experience is still awesome on the small screen. Let’s take a look at some of the features, or widgets that you can add to your page more in detail. First of all, the News Carrousel seen below displays news to users visiting the Intranet, and it’s possible to target the news to certain users according to some criteria’s. Directly in the carousel, we can see date it was published, the number of comments on that news as well as how many likes it received.

Valo Intranet

The information for the news carrousel is actually created in a SharePoint blog, and brought into the more “presentable” format with the Valo customizations. Users can comment and like the blog post.

Valo Intranet

Similar to out of the box SharePoint blogs, you cannot have threaded comments, or like a comment. I like the idea of using almost native Blogs to display news, because it makes a lot easier for content publishers to create content, since most of them already know how SharePoint blogs work. Next up, the Quick Links. The Quick Links do look beautiful, they have small animations when you go over them as well as a description, similar to the Out of the box Promoted Links Web part but way better.

Valo Intranet

Another feature offered by Valo Intranet is “Surveys”. I am a big fan of using Surveys or Polls on Intranets to get the first-hand feeling of employees on different matters, so I was really happy to see that Valo included a nice widget pictured below for surveys.

Valo Intranet

Something to be aware is that by default, when creating the survey, if you do not modify anything, every user will be able to go to the list, and view what others have answered, since every vote is an item in a list. This might cause problems for polls that are more important, such as employee of the month!

Valo Intranet

However, there is an option that you can change in the List Settings, so users can only see and Edit items that they created, this way they will not be able to see what other users have voted. I think it should be set with the settings below by default in order to avoid any case where the survey creator forgets to change the default settings.

Valo Intranet

Up next, the People Finder widget is a really cool small widget that you can put directly on home page of your Intranet, to allow people to easily find users by searching either names, or phone numbers. The widget can display only one person as seen in the screenshot below, or it can be configured to show more. You can click the “See More” button, which will go to the classic SharePoint People Search page. I like this widget a lot, the only improvement I would have loved was if Valo would have implemented a custom display template or something that looks nicer when clicking the “See More” link, but we’ll maybe get this in a future version.

Valo Intranet

Valo Intranet

Other cool widgets include multiple ways of bringing content from other sources, and displaying them beautifully in your Intranet. Below you can see a RSS Web part, which you can configure with any RSS Feed, a Video Web Part that connects directly to Office 365 video, an Events Web Part that connects to a calendar, and a Blogs web part that displays Delve blogs.

Valo Intranet

Valo also integrates Yammer in your Intranet by allowing you to comment, like and post in your Yammer network feed directly from the Intranet, as well as a widget that displays praises.

Valo Intranet

Valo Intranet also allows you to display activity of your company in Social Media with the Social Hub, a group of Widgets that display content from Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, Pinterest, Facebook, and etc.

Valo Intranet

Intranet Administrators also have access to a page called the Administrator Toolpack. The Administrator Toolpack is a really cool page which allows your Intranet’s administrators to view information on the Most Popular content in your site, as well as content which is not used or might be outdated.

Valo Intranet

Lastly the Workspaces in Valo Intranet allow a user to easily access all the SharePoint Team sites or Office 365 Groups they are a part of, and there are two main types of workspaces: Projects and Teams. The list can be customized according to customer requirements.

Valo Intranet

Valo also offers a mobile app for both Android and iOS which allows users to browse their Intranet on the go. You have three main tabs where you can see the Highlight news, all the News and lastly the Alert News. You can also click a single button and go to your Intranet page and browse it from your mobile device. Something that I wish the app had is a Pin/Password when opening the app since Intranets contain a lot of information about the company if ever the phone is lost / stolen.

Valo Intranet

That’s it for the review as a user, now let’s take a quick look of the experience to customize Valo. Something I realized very fast is that while Valo is awesome to use and consume, some webaprts will really need you to read the manual in order to customize them due to the number of available options. On the first picture to the left below you have the parameters required for the advanced news and on the right, the default content to show blog posts. Customizing all the widgets to show the things you want can be quite challenging on a few features.

Valo Intranet

That is not the case for all the available widgets, because some of them are really easy, for example branding your site can easily be done with the Valo Style Editor. Simply choose what colors you want where from the Style Editor, and done! No CSS knowledge needed!

Valo Intranet

Other features such as the Admin Toolpack that I’ve talked about earlier, is configured from a SharePoint list, and you can easily change the values as your business requirements change.

Valo Intranet

Conclusion

In this blog post we have reviewed Valo, a Ready-To-Go Intranet for SharePoint On-Premises and Office 365. Valo beautifully displays a lot of useful widgets of information on your Intranet and allows you to create a modern, beautiful looking Intranet in a matter of weeks. Throughout the review, I have found most of the widgets very useful and well displayed, but some of them have a lot of options to configure, so you can’t do it without reading the manual. I have loved how well Valo handles the display of information, both on a 4K display as well as on my Android Phone, and I think that the Workspaces and Admin Toolpack features will be very useful for every company that decides to use Valo. Lastly, the fact that Valo Intranet works with 14 languages, and supports multilingual intranet scenarios makes it a good product for global companies, or for companies that are based in a bilingual country.

If you are looking for a Ready-To-Go Intranet for SharePoint, definitely check out Valo by clicking on the banner below.

Valo Intranet

The post Review of Valo: Ready-to-go intranet on Office 365 and SharePoint appeared first on Absolute SharePoint Blog by Vlad Catrinescu.


by Vlad Catrinescu via Absolute SharePoint Blog by Vlad Catrinescu

Sunday, January 29, 2017

SPJS Charts for SharePoint v6.1.0

After some delays I have finally released SPJS Charts for SharePoint v6.1.0. this is a complete rewrite of the query and filter from v6.0.0 and adds much more flexible filter options and eases the setup as you no longer need to user Custom CAML when you want to use filters.

You find the change log here.

Please post any questions in the forum.

Best regards,
Alexander


by Alexander Bautz via SharePoint JavaScripts

Tuesday, January 24, 2017

Blog Update on the Stores Throwing Food Away – Good Job Woolies, and Spar!

I have to give a big thumbs up to Woolworths who reacted instantly to the blog I wrote last night on food being thrown away.  I got calls and emails from the CEO office and representatives this morning who assured me that this is indeed NOT policy.  It is a well documented instruction on their intranet (score another point there Woolies), that stores either donate to charities and offer it at huge discounts to staff.  The store in Mall of Africa was acting out of instruction and it’s being addressed.  AND the staff on the floors will not be getting intro trouble over this either.  Kudos guys. 🙂

good-job-woolworths

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I popped into my Spar on the way home today, straight to the floor manager and again : “How often do you throw food away?”  Instant answer – “we don’t, it all goes to charities every day, they come and fetch it”.  Nice one too Spar.

good-job-spar

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Jury still out on Checkers and Pick n Pay.


Filed under: Leadership
by Veronique Palmer via Views from Veronique

Speaking at SharePoint Fest D.C. 2017

This April, I will be headed to Washington DC to speak at the well-known SharePoint Fest Conference! If you did not sign up yet, you can register now with code CatrinescuDC200 and save 200$ of the registration price! You can also try your chance to Win a free Pass to SharePoint Fest DC 2017

Here are the sessions and workshops that I will do:

Half Day Workshop- Implementing a SharePoint 2013 / 2016 Hybrid Infrastructure

SharePoint Hybrid infrastructures are gaining popularity, so SharePoint IT professionals need to prepare.

In this half day workshop, we will learn what is a Hybrid SharePoint Infrastructure, what are the prerequisites, and how to configure the following Hybrid SharePoint Features:

  • Hybrid OneDrive for Business
  • Hybrid Sites
  • Hybrid Cloud Search
  • Hybrid Federated Search

Level: Advanced

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!

Session: PowerShell for Office 365

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!

To get all the information about the conference, check out their site: http://ift.tt/1E6ZA0d

Hope to see you there!

The post Speaking at SharePoint Fest D.C. 2017 appeared first on Absolute SharePoint Blog by Vlad Catrinescu.


by Vlad Catrinescu via Absolute SharePoint Blog by Vlad Catrinescu

Monday, January 23, 2017

Some Woolworths and Checkers Stores Throw Perfectly Good Food Away Every Day

I walked into Woolworths in the Mall of Africa this afternoon, just in time to see the deli staff throw an entire plate of gorgeous pineapple pieces into the dustbin. This was followed instantly by an entire plate of gorgeous watermelon pieces, with a half a plate of grapes up next; and a full plate of chocolate, a full platter of chips, and a 3 quarter platter of cake – the latter 3 which I had just sampled – all headed for the bin.

Here’s how the conversation went :

  • “What do you think you are doing?”
  • “We need to wash the plates”
  • “Why are you throwing perfectly good food into the dustbin??”
  • “We have to”
  • “What are you talking about?”
  • “We have to throw all the food away every 4 hours”
  • “I beg your pardon?!  Why are you doing that?! Give it to the homeless!”
  • “We aren’t allowed to”
  • “But why not, there is nothing wrong with that food!”
  • “It’s got germs now, we can’t give it away”
  • “Oh please, customers have been sticking their fingers in those platters all day, how come suddenly now it has germs?!  We have immune systems you know and this is Africa.  See these grapes, watch me eating one!  See these chips, watch me eating one!  I don’t care how long they’ve been here, they look absolutely perfect! Why don’t you wash it, then juice it, or turn it into icecream or something??”
  • “We know, but it’s policy.  We are not allowed to give any of this food away or do anything with it.”
  • “Not even to you as staff??”
  • “No, they say we will steal more if they give us the left over food”
  • “So let me get this straight … Woolworths throws away plates of perfectly good food into the dustbin every single day every 4 hours every single day?!”
  • “Yes that’s right”
  • “When there is nothing wrong with it; when there is a taxi rank not 100m from here with people living on the breadline who can use this food?”
  • “Yes”
  • “And staff are not allowed to have any either”
  • “No”
  • “Get me a store manager, now.”
  • “They do it in the restaurant too.  Every day at 3 o’clock they throw away any food not eaten”
  • “Fine, get me the restaurant manager too”

What ensued was a surreal conversation for an hour with the Woolworths deli and restaurant staff and managers about this criminal waste of food and a major rant by me of how unacceptable this is!  I told them I am taking pictures of this, they put the lid on the dustbin and said I can’t, that they would get fired.  That in fact, they are not allowed to say anything about this “policy” for fear of being fired. Staff at this Woolworths are not allowed to touch this food, nor buy it at cost, nor give it away, nor question the policy in any way.  What kind of tyrant is running the show there? The staff told me they did strike once, but not one word of it was mentioned in the press, it was all quietly swept under the covers so now they feel powerless. Then some conversation about the amount of food that was left made it necessary to throw away or something.  Whereupon I said “how about this for a concept – don’t put any food out at all for people to taste if this is the result!  It’s shameful!”

Does this food look off or bad to you? All of it got thrown away today.  A small sample of what I saw lying around.

grapes

cakes

muffins

Enraged, I left and drove to the shopping centre 1,5km down the road to a Woolworths and Checkers there.  I figured I’d go to Checkers first because I now refuse to shop at Woolworths, then figured I better ask Checkers staff too.  So get to the deli section and ask them outright “How often do you throw this food away?”.  They professed to not understand what I was asking and pointed out a manager to me.  Three of them came over and I asked them the same question.

  • “How often do you throw this food away?”
  • “Every morning”
  • “So you through away all the food not eaten in a day, every single morning”
  • “Yes”
  • “Even when not 4 minutes from here is a Builders Warehouse with at least 100 people on the street corners begging for work because they are pretty much destitute”
  • “It’s policy”
  • “Why can’t you give it to your staff?”
  • “Because they may steal more.  What happens is that they will buffer how much was put out and we will lose lots of money”
  • “Really…. you don’t maybe think that if you treat staff properly and pay them a decent salary, that they wouldn’t steal so much in the first place?”
  • “I didn’t say that they do steal, please don’t quote me on this.  It’s store policy, let me give you the store manager’s details, I have no say over the policy, we are not allowed to give the food away, you need to speak to a the store manager”  He seemed desperate to end this conversation.

It felt like de ja vu…. different store, same story from same level of staff. Mmmm….

I gave the same shpeel to both stores :

“Policy?  Really?  I don’t give a rats ass about some ‘policy’.  This is morally wrong in a country where most of its citizens are starving, jobless and homeless – the policy sucks! Can you imagine how sickening it must be to be living on the breadline as it is, and having to watch yourself throw away perfectly good food because of a “policy”?  Can you imagine how deadened those staff must feel being so helpless and forced to do this?  Can you imagine being so intimidated that you are too terrified to stand up for what is ethically right?  Can you imagine being too scared to give your name for fear of being fired?  Can you imagine the tons of food being wasted by these 2 companies alone, every single day – because of policy?! It’s reprehensible…

I went to the other Woolworths – straight to the deli with the same question. Much to my surprise and without the slightest hesitation I was told that they throw nothing away, it all goes to the homeless charities every single day.

  • “Nothing at all gets thrown out, ever?”
  • “No, after 4 hours we have to take it off the frontline, but we move it to refrigerated storage in the back and package it, then the charities fetch it every day.  If one doesn’t arrive, their quota goes to the next one.  We have about 6 that come regularly.  And then staff can also buy it at a huge discount if they want to”
  • “So what about the policy of throwing food away”
  • “What policy?”

I proceeded to recount the events at the previous two stores, and while they couldn’t comment on Checkers, they said that Mall of Africa had this completely wrong.  It’s not company-wide policy, each store decides for itself.  They were appalled to hear how much food was being wasted and felt there was no excuse for this, I couldn’t agree more.

I told all the stores that I am going straight to social media with this.

So what about Woolworths’ quote to 702 in 2015?

justin-smith-woolworths

Clearly lies based on what I witnessed today and was told by their own staff! Accountability people, we need to start having some.

To all the big food chains (Pick n Pay and Spar, I’m checking on you tomorrow…) :

Look I get it, stuff happens.  Things get out of control.  People screw you over. You retaliate.  But this is not the answer…. A policy that allows for perfectly good food to be thrown out is unacceptable to me.  In a country of incredibly desperate people and so many in need, surely there are better ways that this can be handled?  I’ll probably get the botulism and stock theft argument, or ‘it’s law’, to which I can only say is a gigantic cop out.  The food being chucked out is just fine, we all know that.  Some bean counter somewhere may have taken some random sample to test hygiene in a place that is impossible to keep clean in the first place. We have immune systems.  The homeless don’t care about some piece of paper.

Plus you are causing your own issues.  You can’t pay people minimum wage, make them work 12 hour shifts, not give them any food then make them throw what food there is into a dustbin and not expect some backlash. How did you think this was going to end? I said to all those staff members in all the stores that if I was in their position, I would have found every single opportunity to rob you blind!  How could you blame them? I would never dream of doing that to someone who treated me like gold.  Is that the result of becoming the behemoth companies that you are? Marginalised staff, wasted food and irrate customers?  Have you gotten so out of touch with the people on grass roots level that you have driven a customer to total rage to take up the cause of your own staff and needy people in this country because of a policy?!

needyWhy are your staff so terrified of losing their jobs? Why is this food not being dealt with better?  I can understand meat, chicken and seafood might have issues, or stuff way past a sell-by date; but fruits and vegetables, breads, cakes, and cooked food?  Come on…. Call the charities and tell them to come and fetch it man.  Within 5 minutes from those stores are  5 taxi ranks, endless jobless people on the street, a very poor children’s home – surely all those people would benefit from that food?  I am abundantly aware that there will be 2 sides to this story, and I would be more than happy to hear yours.  Oh, and by the way – don’t even think of holding the staff on the ground hostage to this.  This is not their fault….

To the staff in all these types of stores :

Why do you blindly accept a policy that is blatantly wrong?  You are many and they are few. When you stand together, you can question this type of behaviour.  You have strength and you have power, stand and be counted!  Stop thinking about yourself as an employee for one second, let’s just talk human to human here.  Do you think this is right?  Are you making ends meet?  Could you do with some of this food? Do you know people who could use this food?”  Unanimous answers in both stores said that no, they do not make ends meet, agree the policy is terrible, and know lots of people who could use the food.  My domestic eats pap (maize meal) pretty much all month because she can’t afford anything else, and she would kill to have the food every day that was just turfed in front of my eyes.  You said you would too.  Don’t accept life as “this is just the way it is”.  It isn’t!  You can change it. Use social media to your advantage. #StrongerTogether!

To all of us consumers :

We need to ask better questions of our stores, seriously.  I am nauseated enough having to shop anywhere for anything knowing the contents of our food, without having to know this on top of it too. And to be honest, I don’t think I had actually even thought of it before. Until I saw it with my own eyes a couple of hours ago, I may actually not even have believed it!  I used to love trying out all the testers of things, but now that I know what happens behind that, I don’t ever want to taste anything there ever again.  Go and ask every single grocer you frequent about their policy on food that is thrown away and challenge the status quo!  Stop being sheep for goodness sake. This country is in dire need of a gigantic kick up the ass on every level.  Every one of us is accountable for the mess it is in. A search for a store name throwing food away comes up blank on Google.  How is this possible? Only a tiny handful articles came up that I could find, one referenced above. Why? Because we consumers blindly accept what is marketed to us covered in pretty wrappings and hollow rhetoric – and then complain about the state of the nation.

It’s not that there’s not enough food on the planet for everyone.  It’s that people can’t afford to pay for it.  Very nicely engineered.  Only you and I can change that. We both know that there is zero motivation for the food giants to change their ways – unless we the people force them to.   So when you go shopping tomorrow, go and ask some hard questions and see what you get told.

wasted-food

 


Filed under: Leadership
by Veronique Palmer via Views from Veronique

Win a free Pass to SharePoint Fest DC 2017

This April, I am really glad to speak at one of my favorite SharePoint conferences -SharePoint Fest.  SharePoint Fest usually does 4 conferences per year ( Denver – DC – Seattle – Chicago) , and I try to speak at all of them every year! To give back to the awesome SharePoint community, and to try to meet as many of the blog readers as possible, I talked to SharePoint Fest and they gave me one SharePoint Fest DC 2017 Gold Pass to give away to the readers of my blog!

SharePoint Fest DC 2017

To enter you simply have to put your name and email, 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:

SharePoint Fest is a two-day training conference (plus two optional days of workshops) that will have over 80 sessions spread across multiple tracks that bring together SharePoint enthusiasts and practitioners with many of the leading SharePoint experts and solution providers in the country.

At SharePoint Fest, attendees will be able to attend workshops and seminars – taught by Microsoft Certified Trainers, Microsoft engineers, and Microsoft MCMs and MVPs – covering Enterprise Content Management, Implementation/Administration, Business Value, Search, Business Intelligence, Office 365 and SharePoint Development. Attendees will be able to choose one complete learning track or mix and match based on what content best meets their current needs.

There will be sessions created for SharePoint administrators, software developers, business analysts, information architects, and knowledge workers, which will ensure that attendees walk away with as much knowledge as they desire to truly leverage SharePoint in their current environment.

 SharePoint Fest DC 2017 Giveaway

Enter the raffle below to win one of the two passes! You got until February 14th to enter! Remember that you can tweet about the giveaway every day in order to win more entries! Remember that even if you don’t win , you can use CatrinescuDC200  to save 200$ of the registration cost!

Click here to view this promotion.

The post Win a free Pass to SharePoint Fest DC 2017 appeared first on Absolute SharePoint Blog by Vlad Catrinescu.


by Vlad Catrinescu via Absolute SharePoint Blog by Vlad Catrinescu

Friday, January 20, 2017

Speaking at the aOS Canadian Tour in Quebec City, Montreal, Ottawa and Toronto

In October, last year, I was really lucky to be part of the first aOS tour ever in South Africa, when we travelled between Cape Town and Durban in the AvePoint Red Bus. It was an awesome experience, and we had the chance to visit some smaller communities in George and Port Elizabeth and share our SharePoint Knowledge. Here is a picture of the awesome crew from the South Africa road trip!

The South African aOS road trip 2016

In February 2017, I will participate in another aOS tour, this time a bit closer to home. The aOSCanadian Tour is a free conference taking place in four different Canadian cities, over the span of five days. Starting February 6th 2017 we will tour from Quebec City, to Montreal, Ottawa all the way down to Toronto with some of the most influential speakers from Europe and Canada.

I will be presenting in all 4 cities my session called What do YOU get from SharePoint Hybrid?. This session is aimed at everyone who wants to know, what do we actually get from a hybrid SharePoint deployment. Here is the description:

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!

You can register here for every event:

Hope to see you there!

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

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 Speaking at the aOS Canadian Tour in Quebec City, Montreal, Ottawa and Toronto appeared first on Absolute SharePoint Blog by Vlad Catrinescu.


by Vlad Catrinescu via Absolute SharePoint Blog by Vlad Catrinescu