Speaking at the European SharePoint, Office 365 and Azure Conference 2018

In two weeks’ time, ESPC 2018 takes place in Copenhagen – this year’s event looks amazing, and I think it’s no secret that Microsoft now use this event as their European platform, rather than running their own major Office 365 conference in the region. I’m honoured to have two speaking slots, and this year I’m actually on the programme team for the conference so I’ve been involved in putting the schedule and speakers together, along with some other responsibilities.

It’s not too late to get a ticket! I’m biased this year of course, but I don’t there’s any comparable event in Europe where you can learn as much and have great conversations with Microsoft product group people, senior execs, MVPs, and highly-talented people in the industry. Microsoft are sending a lot of people, including:

• Jeff Teper - Corporate Vice President for SharePoint, OneDrive and Office
• Dan Holme - Director of Product Marketing (SharePoint)
• Adam Harmentz - Partner Group Programme Management on SharePoint and Office 365
• Omar Shahine - Director of Program Management, OneDrive and SharePoint
• Aaron Rimmer - Director of OneDrive Product Marketing
• Vesa Juvonen - Senior Program Manager, SharePoint engineering (tech keynote)
• Sean Squires - Senior Program Manager, SharePoint experiences
• Mike Ammerlaan - Director, Office & SharePoint Ecosystem Marketing
• Naomi Moneypenny - Senior Product Manager, Enterprise Search
• Chris McNulty - Senior Product Manager, SharePoint and Office 365
• Karuana Gatimu - Principal Program Manager, Customer Advocacy Group, Microsoft Teams Engineering

There are a lot more too! See https://www.sharepointeurope.com/microsoft-sessions-espc18/ for full details.

My sessions

The details of my talks are:

Enterprise PowerApps – rich apps with offline support and on-premises data (Tuesday 27 November, 15:15)

PowerApps can be simple at first, but more advanced scenarios can be tricky. In this session we’ll look at key recipes for building enterprise apps, including what you need to do to make your app work offline and how to connect to on-premises data. We’ll also consider “the good, the bad and the ugly” of PowerApps – from use across devices, techniques for improving performance, through to common headaches when building applications.

An A-Z of Azure Functions (Wednesday 27 November, 15:15)

Azure Functions are the “get out of jail card” for the architect/developer implementing Office 365 solutions. Can’t do exactly what you need in a Flow? Need to look-up some data when your PowerApp loads? Implementing custom team sites using Site Designs? Need to run a process on a schedule? Chances are that an Azure Function is the answer – so you need a thorough understanding of this building block to weave it into your solutions effectively. We’ll look at authentication, scaling, coding styles, calling the Microsoft Graph and other advanced features, so that you can always call out to some custom behaviour whatever your scenario is.

Go talk to your boss!

This event goes from strength to strength, and previous years in Barcelona, Stockholm, Vienna and Dublin were all amazing. I strongly recommend trying to attend if at all possible – and I haven’t even mentioned the full day pre-conference tutorials from the likes of Andrew Connell, Paolo Pialorsi, Susan Hanley, John White and Tiago Costa, and the fantastic evening events. It’s been great working with the other members of the programme team (Mike Ammerlaan, Bill Baer, Jussi Roine, Agnes Molnar, Donald Hessing and of course Tracy O’Connell) so far, and I’m looking forward to a great event now.

Full details are at https://www.sharepointeurope.com of course. Hope to see you there!

Office 365 dev scenarios to master – top of mind November 2018

Every now and then I like to gather a list of scenarios that I think are important for Office 365/SharePoint developers to have experience in. Occasionally I’ll put a slide together to list them out, something that’s a better format than my rough OneNote notes, and put in front of my team (and myself!) as a checklist of useful skills and techniques for delivering solutions in Office 365. No doubt there is no single “correct” list and it’s all very subjective – however, the image below shows some that are top of mind for me at the moment, and I thought it might be worth sharing. I’ve had to deal with nearly all these recently, so that’s completely shaping my list! But I figure a developer who can deal with all these scenarios efficiently has quite a lot of capability in Office 365 at the moment:

(Click to enlarge)

Very shortly I’d expect to add a bunch of SPFx/Teams integration scenarios to this list (when SPFx 1.7 lands) – and no doubt there are lots of other areas to consider too. It’s an ever-changing landscape, and I think going through the exercise semi-regularly is useful in itself!