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Microsoft Ignite

Microsoft Ignite Recap Webinar Series – brought to you by Vlad & Drew

Are you ready for the next Microsoft Ignite? We are only a few weeks away from the annual gathering of Microsoft and their closest friends in sunny Orlando. Ignite is a large conference and has hundreds of announcements across different technologies like Azure, Windows, Data & AI, and Microsoft 365.

It isn’t possible take in all the news and announcements from this wild week so Vlad Catrinescu and myself will be putting together a series of webinars in which we will review what we learned while being there and helping you digest what may be most important to you and your business. We will also have some special guests for each of the webinars so make sure you stay tuned.

For everyone that attends a webinar, we will be having some giveaways with a collection of swag and goodies from Microsoft Ignite, including some lucky attendees who will get 12-month Xbox Live Gold Membership Cards, books, and more!

Vlad Catrinescu & Drew Madelung Microsoft Ignite Recap Webinar Series

Register for each webinar below

Webinar 1: Hot of the press from Microsoft Ignite with Vlad and Drew

Time: Nov 7, 2019 02:00 PM (EST)
Description: Join Microsoft MVPs Vlad Catrinescu and Drew Madelung directly on the floor of Microsoft Ignite and be one of the first people to hear the latest news that Microsoft announces . From the Year of Yammer, to intelligent intranets, and enhancements in compliance & security inside Microsoft 365, we will digest the important announcements for you, tell you why they matter, and point you to additional resources that you can take back to the rest of the organization!
Registration: https://zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_E89uT30mSHGnxhSXzsjHbw

Webinar 2: Microsoft Ignite Recap: SharePoint & OneDrive for Business with Vlad & Drew

Special Guest: Mark Kashman
Time: Nov 12, 2019 01:00 PM (EST)
Description: Join Microsoft MVPs Vlad Catrinescu and Drew Madelung and special guest Mark Kashman the week after Ignite for a recap of the most important SharePoint and OneDrive for Business news that was announced. With the dust and excitement from Ignite settled, and the most important features out and tested, Vlad and Drew will cover the biggest and most important news from Ignite!

Registration: https://zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_8EBMVb5eR7abqh4FIaOJAA

Special Guest!

Mark Kashman

Senior Product Manager @Microsoft

Mark is a senior product manager on the SharePoint & OneDrive team focused primarily on content collaboration in Microsoft 365. He has worked at MSFT since 2000. He started working with SharePoint building a digital asset management (DAM) solution built on top of SharePoint 2007 (IMM, the Interactive Media Manager) before moving to the SharePoint team. Mark also co-hosts The Intrazone podcast (aka.ms/TheIntrazone) – a show about the SharePoint intelligent intranet.

Webinar 3: Microsoft Ignite Recap: Microsoft Teams & Yammer with Vlad & Drew

Special Guest: Karuana Gatimu
Time: Nov 19, 2019 01:00 PM (EST)
Description: Join Microsoft MVPs Vlad Catrinescu and Drew Madelung the week after Ignite for a recap of the most important Microsoft Teams and Yammer news that were announced. With the dust and excitement from Ignite settled, and the most important features potentially out and tested, Vlad and Drew will cover the biggest and most important news from Ignite!
Registration: https://zoom.us/webinar/register/WN__Y9Q2gyMSda2dyFSYCZcfA

Special Guest!

Karuana Gatimu

Lead, Customer Advocacy Group @Microsoft

Lead of Customer Advocacy Group for Microsoft Teams Engineering. Passionate O365 business architect specializing in measurable outcomes, solutions and adoption. Author – Microsoft Service Adoption Specialist course; Steward of Office 365 Champions program. Exec Producer of https://aka.ms/CoffeeintheCloud on YoutTube. Learn more at https://aka.ms/MicrosoftAdoption

Webinar 4: Microsoft Ignite Recap: Microsoft 365 Security & Compliance with Vlad & Drew

Special Guest: Antonio Maio
Time: Nov 21, 2019 01:00 PM (EST)
Description: Join Microsoft MVPs Vlad Catrinescu and Drew Madelung after Ignite for a recap of the most important Security and Compliance news that was announced. With the dust and excitement from Ignite settled, and the most important features potentially out and tested, Vlad and Drew will cover the biggest and most important news from Ignite!
Registration: https://zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_9BdGl9OLQtay00Dxh4N_hA

Special Guest!

Antonio Maio

Associate Director & Senior Enterprise Architect @Protiviti

Antonio Maio is an information security architect with over 25 years of experience in cyber security practices and systems, product management, software development and leadership. Antonio is currently a Senior Manager and Senior SharePoint Architect with Protiviti. He has been awarded a Microsoft Most Valuable Professional award for 8 consecutive years, from 2012 to 2019, specializing in Microsoft SharePoint Server, Office 365 and Office Services. His background includes implementing cryptography and PKI systems, information security technologies, and both information governance and cyber security best practices. His experience with Microsoft SharePoint and Office 365 extends over the last 10 years. When he’s not helping enterprise, military or government organizations solve security challenges, you can catch him speaking at conferences or contributing to the community through this blog.

Please register for all the webinars you want to attend.

The webinars will be recorded, and the recording will be sent to all the registered attendees after the webinar has taken place!

Drew @ Ignite 2018

I can’t wait for Microsoft Ignite 2018 this year in Orlando. I was honored to be selected as featured speaker earlier this year for this event. The list of speakers and sessions this year is incredible and I can’t believe I am able to join them as a presenter again this year. If you aren’t able to attend, all sessions (including theaters!) will be live streamed. If there is one that you don’t want to miss make sure you make Jeff Teper’s collaboration keynote on Monday at 4:00 p.m.

This is an exciting time to be working in the Microsoft collaboration space. We have seen the explosion of Teams, the resurgence of SharePoint, the overwhelming adoption of the SharePoint Framework and so much more. I am sure the next set of announcements will not disappoint. 

My sessions

Session 1 – BRK3273 – From start to finish: How to create your modern SharePoint site provisioning solution

Tuesday, September 25 – 10:15 AM – 11:00 AM – OCCC W304 A-D

I am lucky to present this session with a good friend and great speaker Vlad Catrinescu.

Details: Creating modern SharePoint sites only takes a second but what if you want to customize or control that process? It can be a challenge to keep up with all the sites in an organization and can affecat support and governance of a SharePoint environment. In this session, learn how to use Microsoft’s latest tools such as Site Designs, Site Scripts, PnP Site Provisioning, PowerApps and Flow to create a full site provisioning system with custom templates, custom branding, and easy approval before creation!

Session 2 – THR2142 – What you need to know about managing OneDrive for Business

Wednesday, September 26 – 4:35 PM – 4:55 PM – Expo Theater #6

Details: OneDrive for Business is a key workload in Office 365 and should be an integral part of your collaboration strategy. OneDrive provides a cloud location to store, share, and sync your work files and then work with them from any device. OneDrive for Business management needs to be done to support the user and the administrator to ensure the content is always secure. What happens to OneDrive content when someone leaves? What devices have content synced to them? What limits are there and do the users know about them? Learn more about what management capabilities are available and which ones are needed within your enterprise.

Session 3 – Under the Hood Ignite special: Hub sites with Drew Madelung

Tuesday, September 25 – 2:00 PM – 2:45 PM – Immersion Zone Podcast 2

Details: Are you a fan of Under the Hood with Nick Brattoli, or do you want to learn how SharePoint hub sites are being implemented in the real world? If so, head over to the podcast center and listen to host Nick Brattoli and special guest Drew Madelung as they talk about their experiences. 

They discuss topics such as: 
• Changes organizations can make to their information architecture to take advantage of hub sites 
• Navigation schemas that are intuitive and scale well 
• Security and governance models 
• Tips and tricks to provision sites quickly 
• Challenges and workarounds 

SharePoint, OneDrive & Office 365 Collaboration Announcements from Ignite 2017

I will be keeping track of all of the announcements that I can keep up with around SharePoint, OneDrive, and the Office 365 collaboration space at Microsoft Ignite next week using Sway. Since I am using Sway you will be seeing my updates live as I type and publish them.  That means this will be an evergreen Sway and hopefully a 1 stop shop for anyone looking to catch up on all the great news coming out of Ignite. 

 

Microsoft Ignite & SharePoint/O365 – Outcomes

MSIgnite

Well this blog post is coming in quite late as Microsoft Ignite was a little less than a month ago. But I believe in better late than never and there are some good topics that I wanted to follow up with. I was lucky enough to attend Ignite with a great group of folks from Concurrency and was also able to do some great networking to meet new folks in the SharePoint and O365 collaboration world. My initial reaction of Ignite was that it was a little overwhelming at times. Coming from the world of smaller SharePoint conferences having 20k+ people in a giant building with all different types of Microsoft technology led to some long walks and not many deep dive sessions. With the amount of announcements in the Office 365 and SharePoint Server 2016 space that were being discussed it was and still is a challenge to keep up with. Looking at the conference from a strictly SharePoint perspective it felt limited at times. Many of the primary SharePoint sessions were packed to the brim and had to be held in overflow areas. I think this directly spoke to the overwhelming usage that SharePoint has in the enterprise still. I am now very excited to attend the smaller SharePoint specific conferences such as SharePoint Fest and SPTechCon to dig deep into the new experiences. I have been trying to go through all of the videos on Channel 9 but there are so many good ones. If you want to download the videos and slides directly here is a link for instructions on how to do it.

In this post I will try to highlight what I believe to be the best sessions for collaboration around SharePoint and Office 365 and also review my pre-conference predictions.

My prediction outcomes

NextGen Portals

Ok we all knew they were already going to announce something but this still was an exciting topic. The new Knowledge Management portal currently called Codename “InfoPedia” was demonstrated. It was apparent that this portal was still in the early stages of development but their strategy to deploy a KM could be great. The new KM portal will consist of Boards, Articles and Microsites in which users are empowered to generate content quickly in a standardized and already styled way. This leads to a more organically and horizontal growing solution rather than a pre-determined hierarchical solution. Here a great post from Benjamin Niaulin about this topic.

Recommended sessions for this topic:

OneDrive for Business Sync Updates

Again we knew this coming but everything announced here was great news. I could write multiple blog posts on all of the new stuff they announced around this topic but here are the juicy highlights. The new OD4B sync client will use the current OneDrive protocol. There will be a unified sync client across OneDrive and OneDrive for Business platforms and the preview and RTM client will be available by end of year. Some other important things to note with the new client:

    • Selective sync (everyone have a round of applause for this one)
    • No more 20k file limit
    • Support for up to 10GB files
    • Blocking of unmanaged PCs
    • Includes PC and Mac

Recommended sessions for this topic:

Simplified Hybrid with SharePoint

I attended the SharePoint Hybrid pre-conference at Ignite and got to see first hand what is coming with hybrid in SharePoint and Office 365. Overall the strategy is clear to me that hybrid will be the new on-premises. There are features that will only be available in Office 365 and Microsoft’s strategy is not to bring you to the cloud but bring the cloud to you. This will allow enterprises to opt-in to hybrid on your own terms. This was very obvious in their hybrid strategy moving forward. Microsoft is trying to make they hybrid experience transparent. I won’t go deep into any of these strategies but if you want to discuss them just shoot me an email or a tweet. Their primary pillars are:

    • Hybrid Search
    • Hybrid OneDrive
    • Hybrid Extranet
    • Hybrid Team Sites
    • Cloud-drive Hybrid Picker
    • In the future with no further info yet…
      • Hybrid taxonomy story
      • Hybrid DLP
      • Hybrid eDiscovery

Recommended sessions for this topic:

What I hoped to see

Future of Forms

Isn’t this everyone’s favorite SharePoint topic? I came in hoping to hear something about forms, or at least anything. With the incredible amount of announcements there was still nothing new on forms. The current state still exists in which InfoPath 2013 will continue to work in Office 365 and SharePoint Server 2016. The only time I heard forms being discussed in a session was during the MVP panel that I linked to above. The panel confirmed the current state and provided similar input to what I am currently telling my clients. If it is a small list form customization go ahead with InfoPath. If you have a larger and more long term forms requirement it is time to look at a 3rd party or custom development.

Future of SharePoint Workflow

There were not architectural changes announced during Ignite. With a total of 0 sessions and 0 discussions about workflow during Ignite I would tend to lean towards the thought that there will be no architectural changes. Workflow will continue to run on Workflow Foundation 4 as an external resource as it does today on-premises and in Office 365. Now there was some news that will affect workflow creators.

There will not be a SharePoint Designer 2016 but SharePoint Designer 2013 will continue to be supported.

I think this is an important step in the evolution of productivity in SharePoint and Office 365. Obviously SharePoint Designer was built with on-premises as its base. That much control is unnecessary in a cloud solution like Office 365. So on that side it makes sense to start bringing in limits. And of course anyone who has used SharePoint Designer heavily in the past knows it was a very buggy product that loved to crash. It is important to remember that we are over a year away from the release of SharePoint Server 2016 so there will be more news around this topic.

As far as workflow creation, I do believe that this is a step in the right direction and hope to see a browser based workflow creation experience. I will also use this time to plug my session at SPBiz that is directly related to SharePoint Designer workflows. This should be a great free online conference.

Future of Yammer

I was very wrong with my prediction here. I was leaning towards the thought that brand for “Yammer” itself would be going away. It was stated pretty loud and clear that this was not the case. There were multiple sessions around this solution including the Yammer Roadmap. Yammer is here to stay and will have a place in the Office 365 ecosystem. Each experience that comes with Office 365 does have its appropriate use cases. The challenge that we currently are and will continue to face is the confusion around when and where to use an experience. There was even a session around this topic titled How to Decide When to Use SharePoint and Yammer and Office 365 Groups and Outlook and Skype. Obviously if we had to have a major session on this topic there is confusion on what to do. I hope this vision continues to clear moving forward.

One item of note around Yammer and Office 365 is that the UI for Yammer is changing to align better with the rest of Office 365. If you are a part of the Office 365 Network (and if you’re reading my blog and are not, go join it now) you are already seeing these changes happening.

The Site Actions Menu in SharePoint Server 2016 not changing locations from the top right

I can confirm that it is staying in the right from the demos performed. No need for any panic from the community.

Anything else interesting?

I think the winner of most interesting topic during Ignite and so far after Ignite has been Office 365 Groups. Microsoft is putting a ton of time and effort into this collaboration experience. I believe that Office 365 Groups still need some help around the governance and control but they will be a go to solution in the future. Here is a link to a great blog post from Nik Patel that will go into a little more detail. Overall groups will be an experience that encompasses nearly all aspects of Office 365.

yammer-post-image

Recommended sessions for this topic:

Here are some other interesting topics and some sessions about each.

SharePoint Server 2016

Office 365 Security

Office 365 Migration API

 

I look forward to the next Microsoft Ignite conference in 2016 coming back to Chicago on May 9-13. It will be interesting to look back on this post and see how different the landscape moves in just 1 year.