Speaking at TechEd 2014 on Apps for Office

TechEd Europe is just round the corner (October 28-31, in Barcelona), and recently I’ve been heads-down preparing to speak there on the Office 365 track. Most of the other speakers on this track are Microsoft folks from the Office 365/SharePoint/Exchange product groups (including Rob Howard, Brian Jones, Vesa Juvonen, Steve Walker, Jeremy Thake, Mauricio Ordonez and Sonya Koptyev) so there’ll be some *great* information being dispensed – my aim is to sprinkle in some field experience there too :) As an added bonus, I hear that TechEd will have an announcement or two that developers in this space will like.

My session is on Apps for Office, and I’m fortunate to be co-presenting with Andrew Salamatov from the Exchange team. Andrew is a Program Manager whose team builds the capabilities around mail apps, and he has some very cool stuff to show in this area. Apps for Office in general are becoming very interesting to me, as it kinda feels like there hasn’t been huge amounts of take-up of Apps for Office since the launch – maybe that’s confined to my corner of the Office 365/SharePoint-focused development world, but I think it’s surprising given the power and possibilities there. After all, many users LIVE in Office applications, and from the dev perspective it’s really just web development with some Office-specific JavaScript APIs these days – WAY less scary than previous models :)

Overall, Andrew and I have a couple of cool demos to show, including a Word task pane app which analyses the contents of a document to find you similar items across your SharePoint environment/tenancy whilst you're working with the document.

Here are the session details:

DEV-B307: Weave your enterprise solutions directly into Office products with the App Model (Friday, October 31 12:00 PM - 1:15 PM Room: Hall 8.0 Room D4)

Apps for SharePoint and Apps for Office allow you as an enterprise developer to weave your existing enterprise solutions throughout the Office products that your users live in day to day. In this session you will see compelling real world examples that light up existing Office products in context of key enterprise scenarios. The session will highlight tips and tricks on architecting this solution in Visual Studio along with Patterns & Practices guidance.

• Understand what scenarios are available to surface your customizations in Office products
• See real world enterprise scenarios that span multiple products stitching together an enterprise solution
• Learn tips on how to architect enterprise solutions with the App Model

Hopefully see you there!