Tuesday 26 November 2019

My sessions at ESPC19

The 2019 edition of the European SharePoint, Office 365 and Azure Conference takes place in Prague next week, and I'm looking forward to delivering talks there. As usual, the event is easily the most important in the Microsoft cloud space on this side of the world, and there'll be great representation from Microsoft starting with keynotes from Jeff Teper, Dan Holme, Scott Hanselman, Alex Simons, Vesa Juvonen and others. In addition, other Microsoft leaders and Program Managers will deliver sessions on Project Cortex, the Microsoft Graph, Content Services, Teams, Yammer and much more - the Microsoft at ESPC19 page has a long list of big name speakers making the journey from Redmond! Over 2500 attendees are expected, and the conference should be a great mix of sessions and networking with many experts, partners and vendors in the Microsoft cloud space.

My sessions

I'm delivering the following two talks:

Using Azure Dev Ops for development or support teams (Thursday 05 December, 14:00)

In many organisations, the workload of a technical team is still managed in SharePoint lists, Excel, Planner or Microsoft Project. However, Azure Dev Ops Boards offer a much better, more visual way for many groups – and it isn’t just for highly-technical dev teams on agile projects. Various types of backlogs and boards exist – these include a Kanban board to suit a team working on a regular pipeline of requests (e.g. a support or help desk team) and a scrum board to support agile development projects (e.g. using sprints and a sprint planning process). There’s something in there for most types of teams and work.

This session will start at the beginning by showing the different types of boards and backlog, and move on to customising things to really suit how your team works. Over the course of several demos we’ll cover various hints and tips, and also consider how to take things to the next level with automated builds (with DevOps Pipelines) that tie into work item tracking.


Top Office 365 Development Techniques to Master - The Hitlist (Tuesday 03 December, 11:45)

Things move fast in Office 365 development, and as Microsoft evolve the platform and APIs, new techniques and approaches become available all the time. As the head of a talented dev team, Chris regularly updates his list of techniques that he believes are essential to have good capability building Office 365 solutions. Between SPFx, the Graph, Teams development, coding in Azure Functions and building solutions in PowerApps and Flow, let’s walk through high-value scenarios at the end of 2019 that should be in every experienced coder’s toolbox, with a demo and code sample for each. This session will help you close any skills gaps and should be a great conversation with some bright minds in the room.

There's still time to register!

The conference will be a great opportunity to get the latest on Microsoft cloud strategy, roadmaps and tips from the field. If you're there please come and say hello, and if not you can still register at the following link!

https://www.sharepointeurope.com/pricing/

Sunday 17 November 2019

My Ignite 2019 announcement slides (plus selected roadmaps)

I recently created some "one page summary" slides of key announcements from Microsoft's recent Ignite 2019 conference and published them to Twitter - but I thought it could also be useful to compile them into one post here. Feel free to use them if they're useful to you - of course, they're my personal take on what I think is important and you might have different priorities, but given the firehose of announcements I always think consolidated summaries can help. Certainly I find the process of parsing the announcements to create the slides helps me to frame Microsoft's overall positioning and progress.

In this post I'm providing three things:
  • My one page summary images
  • Some assorted Microsoft roadmap slides I collected (images)
  • A PowerPoint deck containing all of the above (hosted on SlideShare)

My Ignite summaries  


I collated announcements for Teams, Power Platform, SharePoint and Azure:






Roadmap slides

These are some selected roadmap slides I collected for topics relevant to me:







SlideShare deck

You can download the original slides for all of the above in one PowerPoint deck below: