Here is the quick tip on how to turn on & off ULS Logs for Troubleshooting. This is mostly self-reminder note for me.

• Download ULSLogViewer from MSDN, this is one of my all time favorite tool which doesn’t install anything on the SharePoint servers  – http://archive.msdn.microsoft.com/ULSViewer/Release/ProjectReleases.aspx?ReleaseId=3308
• To ensure you can start tracing errors for troubleshooting, You must enable logging. By default you may have been logging Errors but plan to configure Verbose logging to ensure you have all the detailed information your would need for troubleshooting. Please note that verbose would fill up the disk space. Plan to disable as quickly as possible after troubleshooting is completed. To enable logging, Go to Central Admin – Monitoring -> Diagnostic Logging -> Select All categories or whatever you are interested -> Select “Verbose” in both least critical event to report event log & trace log. Although event log is not required, I prefer to log into event logs as well to ensure I have more than one tool for troubleshooting.
• As soon as you would turn on Verbose logging, it should start logging C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\Web Server Extensions\15\LOGS (if that’s your default directory, plan to offload logs on the production environment).  You should see logs are filling up fast as soon as you turn on the Verbose logging.
• To view the errors, Open the logs from File-> Open From -> ULS for real time feed => C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\Web Server Extensions\15\LOGS\
  • You can find error & correlationid => Edit -> Find
  • You can filer log with correlationid => Edit -> Modify filter
• Plan to disable verbose logging or reset to Error logging once troubleshooting is done. To disable logging, Go to Central Admin – Monitoring -> Diagnostic Logging -> Select All categories or whatever you are interested -> Select “None” in both least critical event to report event log & trace log. It should stop filling up logs in the LOGs folder

Hope this helps both newbies and veterans out there. Enjoy!!!!!

Microsoft has just announced that they have released Office 2013 SP1 and SharePoint 2013 SP1 and it’s available to download from Microsoft download center.

Here are the most important announcements for SharePoint professionals.

• SP1 improves compatibility with Windows 8.1, Internet Explorer 11, and Windows Server 2012 R2.
  • SharePoint 2013 RTM and all the PUs and CUs were compatible with Windows 8 and IE 10. With SP1, Microsoft officially announced compatibility with Windows 8.1 as client desktop operating system and IE 11 as browser.
  • SharePoint 2013 RTM with all the PUs and CUs released until January 2014 PU was not supported on the Windows Server 2012 R2. SharePoint 2013 SP1 officially supports SharePoint Server 2012 R2 as server OS.
  • If you are planning to install SharePoint 2013 SP1 on Windows Server 2012 R2, manual slipstreaming is not supported due to package changes in March 2013 PU, instead download directly from your MSDN subscription site.
• SP1 brings SkyDrive Pro rebranded as OneDrive for Business – This is first major release to support OneDrive for Business in SharePoint 2013 after announcements were made to rebrand SkyDrive Pro to OneDrive for Business.
• SP1 includes all the Public Updates (PU) and Cumulative Updates (CU) that have been released since SharePoint 2013 RTM, up to the December 2013 CU and January 2014 PU. What this really means is you don’t need to install March 2013 PU as baseline for SharePoint 2013 SP1. You can install SharePoint 2013 SP1 directly on the SharePoint 2013 RTM.
• Yammer and SharePoint Online OneDrive Hybrid Integration with On-Prem SharePoint environment
  • You can now configure Yammer, SharePoint Online OneDrive, and SharePoint Online Sites link integration with SharePoint 2013 SP1 On-Prem environments from On-Prem central administration site in hybrid scenarios. See Trevor Seward’s blog for more information.
  • Central Administration gets new section called “Office 365″ to configure Yammer and OneDrive & Sites links. This will allow On-Prem administrators to redirect users to the SharePoint Online OneDrive and SharePoint Online Sites in hybrid environment. With 25GB support for personal OneDrive space, this may be no brainier for many organizations. In Past, organizations had to write custom code or custom HTTP handlers to intercept On-Prem My Sites calls (intercepting person.aspx) to redirect users to the cloud.
    
• SP1 provides new apps for Office capabilities and APIs for third-party developers.
  • With SharePoint 2013 RTM, Task Pane Apps for Office was available only for Word, Excel, and Project clients and Excel web apps. SP1 adds support for Task Pane/Composed Apps in Outlook 2013 client.
  • Similarly, Content App for Office was available only for Excel clients and Excel web app. SP1 adds support for inserting content apps in PowerPoint 2013 client.
  • If you are wondering, third kind of Office App introduced in SharePoint 2013 RTM was Mail App for Office which was supported in outlook 2o13 client and outlook web apps. There are no known updates for Mail Apps in SP1.

Great news all around and just right in time for SPC14.

Additional Resources:

• Office 2013 Service Pack 1 now available – http://blogs.office.com/2014/02/25/office-2013-service-pack-1-now-available/
• Announcing the release of Service Pack 1 for Office 2013 and SharePoint 2013 – http://blogs.technet.com/b/office_sustained_engineering/archive/2014/02/25/announcing-the-release-of-service-pack-1-for-office-2013-and-sharepoint-2013.aspx
• SP1 for Office 2013, SharePoint 2013 and Exchange 2013 Released – http://rcpmag.com/articles/2014/02/25/sp1-office-sharepoint-exchange-2013.aspx
• Stefan Goßner’s Service Pack 1 for SharePoint 2013 is now available for download – http://blogs.technet.com/b/stefan_gossner/archive/2014/02/26/service-pack-1-for-sharepoint-2013-is-now-available-for-download.aspx
• Stefan Goßner’s SharePoint 2013 SP1 FAQ – http://blogs.technet.com/b/stefan_gossner/archive/2014/02/27/sp2013-sp1-faq.aspx
• PFE blog – SharePoint 2013, SP1 and Slipstreaming – http://blogs.msdn.com/b/ronalg/archive/2014/02/27/sharepoint-2013-sp1-and-slipstreaming.aspx
• Stefan Goßner’s SharePoint 2013 with SP1 (“slipstream”) is now available for download – http://blogs.technet.com/b/stefan_gossner/archive/2014/02/28/sharepoint-2013-with-sp1-quot-slipstream-quot-is-now-available-for-download.aspx
• SharePoint 2013 and Office 365 with Yammer Integration – http://thesharepointfarm.com/2014/02/new-surface-features-sharepoint-2013-sp1/
• Microsoft announces SkyDrive will soon be renamed OneDrive – http://blogs.technet.com/b/microsoft_blog/archive/2014/01/27/microsoft-announces-skydrive-will-soon-be-renamed-onedrive.aspx
• Bill Baer’s article on SharePoint 2013 RTM support for Windows Server 2012 R2 – http://blogs.technet.com/b/wbaer/archive/2013/09/22/sharepoint-2013-support-for-windows-server-2012-r2.aspx

I have been working on SharePoint Online Intranet for mid-sized organization during last few months. After initial information architecture and logical model of Intranet, we had situation where both Content Query web part or Content Search web part were ideal choice for data roll ups on both Corporate Intranet and department site landing pages.

As with any Microsoft technologies especially in SharePoint space, there are pros and cons of each option and one option might be better in one situation compare to others. Below is high level comparison table I had built while making decision on Content Query Web Part vs Content Search web part. One advice here is don’t go blindly with Content Search web part because it’s latest and greatest. It has it’s own share of disadvantages. At the same time, there is a reason why SharePoint professionals hated Content Query web part and Microsoft recommended Content Search web part in SharePoint 2013. Most important decision here is freshness of data vs. system performance vs. latest and greatest technologies.

Biggest dagger in our plans to use Content Search web part was that it’s not supported for SharePoint Online Plan 1 (at the time of writing this article). Content Search web part is available from web part gallery on SharePoint Online Plan 1 team site but it simply does not display any results. We could have used Search Results web part (brother of Content Search web part) but we decided to stay with Content Query web part mainly because our logical model consists of rolling up data from departmental sub sites. If your information architecture have separate departmental site collections and you would like to see roll up of department data in Corporate site collection, you may have to rely on Search Results web part & display templates in SharePoint Online Plan 1.

Please note that if you have SharePoint 2013 On-premises Enterprise CAL, I would prefer Content Search web part over Content Query web part in most cases except if you are rendering instantaneous data.

Here is the comparison table promised above. Hopefully this table will help you identify correct choice to meet your needs whether it’s SharePoint Online or SharePoint On-premises. Don’t forget to review SharePoint Online Service Description before committing Content Search web part to see whether it’s supported in your plan or not. Pick your poison and deal with it!!

References:

• SharePoint Online Service Description – http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/jj819267.aspx
• MSDN Forum – Content Search web part vs Content Query web part http://social.technet.microsoft.com/forums/sharepoint/en-US/c69e0e45-8517-49ab-a004-bb2e251bcbad/content-search-webpart-vs-content-query-webpart
• Learning SharePoint – Content Search Web Part (CSWP) VS Content Query Web Part (CQWP) -  http://www.learningsharepoint.com/2012/07/22/sharepoint-2013-content-search-web-part-cswp-vs-content-query-web-part-cqwp/
• Content Search Web Part in SharePoint 2013 – http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/jj163789.aspx

I had a privilege to attend my fifth SharePoint Conference in a row. It is interesting to note that even though I wasn’t interested in this conference initially being in between product release, I was pleasantly surprised and felt like this conference had one of the best experiences and contents delivered since SPC09.

Here are the highlights and key takeaways for me from the conference.

Key Note

Major theme of this year’s conference are continued from SPC12 – Cloud, Social, Mobility, and Big Data and expanded into bringing personal experiences like Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn into new workforce user experiences – Social Workplace powered by Yammer & Open Graph, Personalized Insights powered by Office Graph & Oslo, and Next-Gen Portals.

Pre-conference discussions around President Bill Clinton set the high expectations and many of us took our seats almost an hour before the key note. This year’s keynote was one of the first ones I was up front in first 20 rows. Although we were all wondering what Clinton has to do with SharePoint conference, one of the reason he brought in was to discuss conference’s main theme – how technology allowed people to connect, transform, reshape, and played it’s role to solve much bigger humanity issues. Clinton had started great with providing great case studies of how technology helped after Heiti’s earthquake and Srilanka’s Tsunami’s aftermath but he was failed to relate his foundation work with SharePoint and overall technology industry. My take on the conference keynote is it was boring until Bill Clinton left the stage and Teper entered on stage. It was easily seen on twitter that 10000 people were silent while Bill was on stage (they might be listening to him in awe) and became chatty as soon as Teper deliver all the announcements.

While people were waiting for Jeff Teper during Clinton’s speech, Office blogs accidentally leaked (or probably due to Bill’s never-ending speech) all the information what Jeff supposed to announce as breakout speech. By the time Jeff was on stage, unfortunately majority of us on twitter who was following twitter instead of Bill Clinton’s speech, already aware of announcements. Surprisingly, that didn’t affect Jeff’s segment and keynote turned into awe-inspiring moments.

As I mentioned earlier, i wasn’t expecting any major announcements this year (especially SharePoint 2013 SP1 released one week prior to SPC14) but pleasantly surprised to hear significant enhancements and announcements for upcoming year:

• SharePoint On-Premises vNext coming in 2015 (which was leaked on Office 365 blogs)
• New fascinating personalized insight experience called Oslo Windows App, Oslo Office 365 Web UI, and Office Graph (which wasn’t leaked on Office 365 blogs) – Available Office 365 around summer, According to Jeff Teper – Oslo and Office Graph are best innovations Microsoft has done since SharePoint.
• Next-Gen pre-built portals like new Office 365 Video Portal (many more pre-built portals are coming down the road in Office 365) – Soon available on Office 365
• Office 365 Power BI capabilities – Already available on Office 365
• Integrated Yammer Group experience in OWA, new Office 365 Video Portal, and Office Online (formerly known as Office Web Apps) – Soon available on Office 365
• New Office contextual applications support introduced in SP1, Office 365 REST APIs for files, people, lists, mail, tasks, and calendars, new Android SDK for Office 365, newer version of Office Developer Tools for Visual Studio 2013
• Cloud on Ramps features like Yammer and OneDrive integration for Hybrid scenarios in SP2013 SP1 and OneDrive for Business Standalone edition – With standalone edition of OneDrive, Microsoft has declared war against other players in this field like DropBox and Box.Net
• Major Office 365 announcements & reminders like Access Services for no-code cloud Apps, 1 TB Site collection limit, limitless tenant, Multi-factor authentication support, and investments in new Office 365 unified Compliance & Discovery center across SharePoint & Exchange and industry known standard certifications like HIPPA.

One of the most important take away and message from this year’s keynote were from Jared Spataro – “Cloud is on fire” or Jeff Teper – “Cloud is the key”. For those of us working in SharePoint field, this is not new but this year’s conference demonstrated that Office 365 is where all the innovation happens like Oslo & Office Graph, Yammer integration, new Office 365 APIs, 1 TB site collections, Multi-factor authentication support, and SAML 2.0 support. It is evident that Microsoft has released nearly 75 new features since SPC12 and according to Jeff Teper, that’s more than 1 feature per week. Office 365 is where all new shiny things happens and On-Premises will be considered as step child from now on. SharePoint On-Premises are dying to slow death. Another major message was Phase 1 of Office 365 is completed, Phase 1 was all about hosting and foundational work, future is about transformation and connecting the whole suite of Exchange, SharePoint, Yammer, Office, and Windows Azure in Office 365. If you are in SharePoint space, this is nothing but most promising news you may hear.

Sessions and Technology Trends

This year’s conference is the first time I have seen new Microsoft. They have been always tight-lipped in past and worked with partners, MVPs, and MCMs as private TAP program before announcing to general public. This year’s conference was evident that new era of Microsoft has started and many announcements like Oslo & Office Graph, Forms roadmap, Social roadmap were directly released to general public and asked general customer communities to get their feedback on evolution of future of office.

When I set my SPC Calendar a week prior to conference, I was impressed with conference schedule. This is first time I have seen sub keynotes (IT Pro, DEV, and Executives) followed by main event key note. I really love the idea of dividing conference audience into three focus areas and have them kick-start through sub key notes. This year, I had decided to focus on Office 365, SharePoint Online, Hybrid, and IT Pro sessions. On Day 1, I started out my journey of IT Pro sessions with Bill Baer’s rousing IT Pro audience key note and Sam Hassani’s Hybrid end-to-end overview. Last session of Day 1 really changed my perception of Microsoft and where they are going in future while attending Introducing Codename Oslo and the Office Graph session. This is first time I believe I was in awe and flabbergasted with what future promises. Ever since SharePoint 2013 came out, many of our customers wanted personalized & social intranet and thinking about possibility of Office Graph really set the high bar for remaining conference. Although it was downhill after that session, Office Graph and Oslo gave me enough motivation to keep going through remaining best practices sessions.

Day 2 started out with Forms Update and yet again, I was impressed with new Microsoft who shared their early stage of Forms direction with customers and where they are going with future after death of Info Path. Unfortunately Forms Update was one of the last session with major announcements and remaining conference was about the best practices and future of SharePoint custom development. I have attended various best practices sessions throughout remaining time of conference on both IT Pro and DEV areas including Todd Knidlt’s Load Testing SharePoint 2013 with Visual Studio 2013, Paul Summers and Dan Benson’s Develop Advanced Search Driven SharePoint 2013 Apps, Eric Shupps’s Developing an intranet on Office 365, Chris Bortlik’s SharePoint Online Management and Control, Vesa Juvonen’s Real-world examples of FTC to CAM transformations, Tedd Pattison’s SharePoint Apps best practices with OData and REST APIs, Jeremy Thake’s SharePoint 2013 Apps with AngularJS, and David Mann’s Deep dive: REST and CSOM comparison.

In general, SPC14 was clear as far as where Microsoft is taking SharePoint. Message was much similar to SPC11 and SPC12 where building blocks were set. Office 365, Social, Hybrid, Apps Model, REST and CSOM, JavaScript and HTML5 were major themes and technology trends. There wasn’t one single session regarding Full Trust farm solutions. If you are in IT Pro space, plan to either work for Microsoft or change your skill sets. If you are in DEV space, plan to learn front-end developer skills. That’s where Microsoft is going whether you like it or not.

New Era for Microsoft

Although I have mentioned above, I have never seen Microsoft sharing their concepts and non-production ready features or systems to the general public. This is definitely new Microsoft. They have always been tight lipped in past. Either it’s acquisition of Yammer with their “Open By Default” mantra or new thinking of Jeff Teper’s team, office division in Microsoft is setting new stone for how Microsoft will collaboratively work with partners and customers. Their showcase of Oslo & Office Graph and InfoPath Forms replacement road map in early stages of product development are proof of new era for Microsoft. This was one of the most surprisingly pleasant experiences I had during this conference.

Pleasant Experiences

If you read my SPC12 recap, I had a section called unpleasant experiences. This year, it was 100% opposite. All the attendees must be proud of all the services including wireless, day-long coffee, fruits, & snacks, well-maintained large meals area, large exhibit hall, number of water coolers & rest rooms, and large session rooms. It made attendee’s life navigating through conference much easier. Huge kudos to the Microsoft and SPC workforce for making it happen. Great job folks!!!

Late Night Parties, Networking, and Community

This might be first year since SPC08, I have never attended any late night parties including Monday Night AvePoint Red Party, Tuesday Night Main Event Race Track, or Wednesday Night Metalogix Party. Instead, either i had spent time networking with my team or enjoyed gambling at Casinos. This year, I had decided to try different and actively tried my best to track down my twitter buddies whom I never met. One of the best part of the conference was to wander around myself and enjoy fellow SharePointers watching while they were resting or hurrying up in between sessions.

During SPC12, I had somehow missed out community board and never put my stamp on it. This year it was different. Here are some of the pictures of community board before, after, and my place on the SharePoint timeline. Thanks to Mark Kashman (@mkashman) for posting before and after pictures of SPC14 community board on twitter.

Conferences like SharePoint Conference are unique and affect your professional career at many different level. One of the major benefits for me is it allows me to steer my career in different direction, check out vendor community, motivate me to learn new things, and most importantly – connect with people whom I never met but bonded through twitter. I would highly encourage to attend these kind of events if you can.

Last but not least, big thank you to my employer – Slalom Consulting and local Chicago Portal and Collaboration leadership to provide me great opportunity to experience SPC14 and learn future trends of where Microsoft is going with SharePoint and Office 365 product line.

I have attended Bill Baer’s SPC14 sub keynote for IT Professionals track. I usually love whatever Bill Baer presents. I had attended his SharePoint 2013 IT Pro Intro presentation at SPC12 and he was able to run through his presentation packed with full 2 hours of content in less than an hour. His fast, rapid fire, and clearly articulated presentation style is perfect for IT Pro keynotes. This year man himself beat his previous record and completed IT Pro audience keynote in less than half hour and gave attendees more than 2 hours of break prior to breakout sessions.

Here are the major highlights of SPC14 IT Pro audience keynote. Thanks to Ali Mazaheri (@AliMazaheri) capturing brilliant picture of Bill while prepping up for the session.

On-Premises Server Investments

• SharePoint Server 201x Launch – vNext availability around mid-2015 calendar year
• SharePoint 2013 SP1 released in Feb 2014
  • Service pack contains all the cumulative updates and the public updates since RTM including March 2013 Public Update, March PU is no longer baseline, you can install SP2013 SP1 on SP2013 RTM.
  • One Drive for Business for On-premises (Replaces SkyDrive Pro as personal storage)
  • Windows Server 2012 R2 Support
  • New Cloud Ramp features like Office 365 Administration category for On-premises – Hybrid integration & redirection for Yammer and OneDrive for Business, Audience & Security Groups enabled which would allow selectively redirect users to Office 365 OneDrive for Business

Office 365 Innovations

• 1 TB Site Collection, Limitless Tenant (customers pay for storage)
• Codename Fort Knox – encrypting shredded storage
• Multi-Factor Authentication Support for General Users – It’s been available to Admin Users since June 2013, available for any users since Feb 2013, increases the security of user log ins for cloud services above and beyond just a password, users are required to acknowledge a phone call, text message, or an app notification on their smartphone after correctly entering their password

Hybrid Investments

• Yammer Newsfeed and OneDrive for Business Integration – Available with SP2013 SP1 On-Premises Server Version
• Use Windows Server 2012 R2 Web App Proxy as recommended replacement for  retired TMG reverse proxy
• Investments in Search
  • Today – Query Federation – Two discrete result sets
  • Future – Remote Indexing, Crawling Remote Sources, and Single Index – One single results & refinement set

Additional announcements:

• New Office 365 IT Pro Yammer Network – https://www.yammer.com/ITProNetwork/
• Access apps General Availability for Office 365 customers – Announced in Feb 2014, Was available as Preview since Feb 2013, Now available for production use
• Simplified login to Yammer from SharePoint Online -  Announced in Feb 2014, ability to enable user mapping between Yammer and Office 365 identities, avoid prompt for log in while browsing both systems, please note that this is still not a single sign-on solution, you still have two identities and required Yammer ID if you are accessing Yammer directly.
• SAML 2.0 Support for Federation – Announced in March 2014, support for SAML 2.0 identity providers, although this wasn’t announced during keynote, I had to add this because it came out right after SPC14 – another testament of Office 365 continuous innovations even Microsoft speakers didn’t know it’s coming on last day of conference.

If you haven’t been to SPC14 IT Pro keynote, there you have it!!!! Enjoy!!!

Ever since Microsoft has announced that InfoPath 2013 would be last release for their most popular forms technology, industry and SharePoint community was awaiting for what’s next at Microsoft’s announcements at SPC14.

As you have may have noticed from my blog articles, I have been huge fan of InfoPath form services and different capabilities it would bring to deliver quick no-code solutions for customers backed by amazing InfoPath community. Although InfoPath forms had its limitations (branding, mobility support, XSLT based technology, required Enterprise CALs etc.), disciplined approach allowed me to design and maintain complex enterprise level InfoPath 2010 and SharePoint 2010 solutions.

Ever since Microsoft has announced InfoPath Forms replacement roadmap update session at SPC14, industry and community leaders were looking forward to this session. Interestingly, while announcing has InfoPath and SharePoint forms update in January 2014, Microsoft has dropped some hints of Microsoft Word and Access Services being replacement for InfoPath form services. Microsoft provided early insight on their plans to deliver next generation intelligent, flexible, agile, and integrated forms experience that spans devices and browsers.

Fast Forward, SPC14 Day 2, 100s of us gathered in large conference room where Microsoft first time unveiled and provided sneak peek into their vision for future of Forms technologies and how they would like to work with customers and partners. In past, Microsoft has been tight-lipped and worked with partners, MVPs, and MCMs as private TAP program before announcing to general public. This year’s conference including both InfoPath and Forms roadmap session, it was evident that new era of Microsoft has started and many announcements like InfoPath directly released to general public and asked general customer communities to get their feedback on evolution of future of office.

It was interesting to note that as one of the speakers introduced themselves as Product Manager in Access Services group, many of us disappointed to have probability of Access Services as replacement for InfoPath forms services as first impression. Many of our shoulders were dropped and hopes scattered but this was new Microsoft. Soon very next slide Microsoft started session with quote from Charles Kettering – “The world hates change, yet it is the only thing that has brought progress”, which set the lower expectations tone for remainder of the session. Microsoft sent the message early and quickly that what you see is early insight into their thought process in forms technology and looking for customers and partners to help them out to help industry. They started session with message of starting of new journey – today we are outlining what we see as requirements, today we are sketching how we may fulfill those requirements, and asked for participation for our input, help, feedback, scenarios at http://OfficeForms.uservoice.com

Here are the major highlights of “Update on InfoPath and SharePoint Forms” Session

Vision and Guiding Principles

• Getting away from “One size fits all”, multiple options to cater different demand
• In an effort to streamline forms investments and deliver a more integrated Office forms user experience, Microsoft is retiring InfoPath and investing in new forms technology across SharePoint, Access, and Word
• Meet today’s businesses demand to easily design, deploy, and use intelligent, integrated forms experience across Office clients, servers, and devices that everyone can use on their PC, tablet, or phone
• InfoPath 2013 is the last release of the desktop client, InfoPath Forms Services in SharePoint Server 2013 is the last release of InfoPath Forms Services. Again reminder here is – InfoPath will be supported for next 10 years but there will be no new innovation.

InfoPath Forms Replacement Options – Office and SharePoint Forms

• Excel Surveys
  • Also referred as FoSS, pronounced “Fossis” – Forms on Spreadsheet
  • Design in Excel Online, great for quick surveys – web forms presented to users and data pushed into Excel
  • Already available for Office 365 and OneDrive customers, will be continuously improved
  • Already included with Office 2013 but web version will be available in SharePoint Sever vNext
• List Forms
  • Replacement for InfoPath List Forms, Microsoft is aware of current experience of List Forms is modal and says “Modals are annoying”.
  • Also referred as FoSL, pronounced “Fossil” – Forms on SharePoint List, It provides a very easy and low entry point for customization directly within browser for power users
  • FoSL are based on Access design package technology, built into SharePoint, tied to single SharePoint List, will be available as “Customize Form” Ribbon menu for SharePoint Lists
  • FoSL has no SQL backend, no Access backend, and no Code.
  • Modern design capability – design in browser, browser drag and drop, resize controls in browser, and side by side view of list data and list Form
  • In near 3-6 months, support will be added for cascading combos, lookup between lists, SharePoint list workflows, auto form layout from SharePoint list schema and anything prioritized from customer feedback program
  • In near 1 year, support will be added for rules, business logic, hide/show of sections, mobile & touch friendly, personal profile information, Office 365 APIs & objects integration and anything prioritized from customer feedback program
  • For future, support will be added for web service calls, enterprise data, and eSignature and anything prioritized from customer feedback program
  • Available for Office 365 customer in between summer 2014 and October 2015
  • Available for SharePoint On-Premises customers in SharePoint vNext server product in 2015
• Structured Documents
  • Possible replacement for InfoPath Forms Library
  • Based on Microsoft word technologies
  • Although Microsoft didn’t share any backend architecture, content controls might use as design and data extract
  • Meets the requirements for high fidelity, printable, archival forms, and meant to look like piece of paper
  • More information and plans will be released at the end of the 2014. MS Word team will provide a roadmap for structured forms by end of year. No specific word on when it will be available for On-Premises and Office 365 customers.
• App Forms
  • Based on Access Services Apps technology
  • Meets the requirements with relational data with SQL backend. Think as a self-contained apps with collection if lists and items linked together through relationships.
  • Any forms doesn’t require SharePoint List or Spreadsheet as data back-end
  • Access Apps will have similar UI as FoSL – side by side view of data and forms
  • Already available for Office 365 Customers as Access Services, will be continuously improved, Access Services data stored in SQL Azure for Office 365 customers
  • Already included with Office 2013 & SharePoint 2013 for On-Premises as Access Services 2013 Service Application

Questions & Answers

This is where I respected Microsoft most. Sonya and her band of presenters brave enough to not only finish their roadmap earlier but allowed attendees enough time (more than half an hour) for Q&A. This is brave Microsoft who just didn’t wanted to say something and run away but embrace the community and understand their pain points for future direction of forms. Bravo, Microsoft!!!!!

• Where can I participate in Forms discussion and provide our feedback? – http://officeforms.uservoice.com/
• We have many InfoPath forms in use, what do we do? What should I use to build and complete forms right now? – Microsoft says you should continue to use InfoPath technology but I would say it depends with caution – I would continue use InfoPath on SharePoint 2013 On-premises but plan to redesign for future version of SharePoint On-premises servers. I would avoid using InfoPath for new development if needed in Office 365 or plan for redesign with new Forms technologies as soon as it’s available in near future.
• How long will InfoPath be supported? - The InfoPath 2013 client will be supported through April 2023, InfoPath Forms Services for SharePoint Server 2013 will be supported until April 2023 (please note that it’s supported until 2023 only for SharePoint Server 2013, there might be no InfoPath Form Services in vNext of SharePoint, this should be read as – InfoPath Form Services will be supported on SharePoint On-Premises until 2013 as long as SharePoint Server supports InfoPath Form Services), Office 365 users will have until at least the next major release of Office, plus some e.g. Office 365 support will have until 2015 Q3 or possibly 2016 Q1 in Office 365. Microsoft will provide full notice before anything is turned off.
• Will Microsoft provide migration tools for InfoPath? – No plans yet, Microsoft doesn’t know yet, they are evaluating various options to aid in migration. Third parties may provide tools, or even support running InfoPath forms into the future
• When should I use Access vs. FoSL? – Access is best for self-contained apps consisting of multiple related tables and multiple forms. FoSL is best for a single form on top of a single table (SharePoint List)
• What about support for CSR, LightSwitch, Visual Studio, Custom APIs etc.? – Microsoft is deliberately targeting information workers & power users who do not code, these are other developer technologies, for those who code
• Will we able to propagate forms across multiple environments? – You can package it as an App Package. No story yet for FoSL.
• Is it possible to inject JavaScript in forms? – Presently no, it’s a closed system. Allows Microsoft to refactor for mobile, touch, etc.
• We are using repeating tables today in InfoPath forms library, is it going to be supported? - Multi-value fields & repeating are something Microsoft is looking at for future. Please voice your feedback at http://officeforms.uservoice.com/
• What about reusability with InfoPath forms library and content types for structured design? – Microsoft don’t have any answers yet. They are looking at Word structured documents to answer this.
• What kind of functionality we may lose with newer direction? – Nothing formal. Maybe code behind and custom code as future is focused on Information Worker
• Will FoSL support cascading combos? – Yes, this was added to Access this last year, there are plans to make it available in FoSL
• Will there be any offline support? - Microsoft is looking at caching. It’s on radar, probably looking at 1 year in future
• What about support for external data sources? - Yes, Microsoft is looking at least a year out

Overall, I loved Microsoft’s new approach engaging customers to provide best solutions to customers (that’s what I preach as consultant as well). Having multiple options instead of 1 pill for everything, it seems like future of Forms is going to include multiple options, latest web technologies, & office contextual experience with clear direction on when to use what.

References

• Voice your opinion on Office Forms Future – http://officeforms.uservoice.com/
• SPCTV Insight into Future of the Forms – https://channel9.msdn.com/Events/SharePoint-Conference/2014/SPCtv-Insights-into-the-Future-of-Forms
• Office Blogs’ Update on InfoPaths and SharePoint Forms – http://blogs.office.com/2014/01/31/update-on-infopath-and-sharepoint-forms/
• Tobias Zimmergren’s The future of Forms with SharePoint and Office 365 – http://zimmergren.net/business/the-future-of-forms-with-sharepoint-and-office-365
• Jennifer Mason’s Navigating the Microsoft Forms Roadmap #SPC14 – http://www.cmswire.com/cms/social-business/navigating-the-microsoft-forms-roadmap-spc14-024389.php
• SHAREPOINT CONFERENCE 14 NOTES: UPDATE ON INFOPATH AND SHAREPOINT FORMS – http://www.deliveron.com/blog/post/SharePoint-Conference-14-Notes-Update-on-InfoPath-and-SharePoint-Forms.aspx

One of the highest points and pleasant surprises of SPC14 for me was to get insight on work Microsoft is doing with Office Graph and codename Oslo and how it can change Microsoft’s space in personalized work spaces. There was no news of Oslo prior to the conference and even Microsoft kept it secret prior to sharing updated conference schedule around Day 1 keynote.

While introducing Oslo first time to the attendees during SPC14 keynote, Jeff Teper mentioned Oslo is one of the best innovations they have done since SharePoint. With that statement, little he knows, he must have set the high expectations among attendees. With the little demo during keynote, I was intrigued but it didn’t sync in until I attended “Introducing Codename Oslo and the Office Graph” session later on same day. What I saw at this session can be considered as jaw-dropping, mind-blowing, and awe-inspiring contents Microsoft planning to bring to corporates and their customers as personalized workspace experiences. While many organizations are still catching up Social Intranets, it’s good to see Microsoft is staying ahead in futuristic personalized workspaces game. This was game changer for me and reason for this was only one – I tried to build similar personalized experiences in past without much success on SharePoint 2013 platform.

Ever since SharePoint 2013 came out and FAST was integrated with SharePoint Enterprise Search and all the new innovations with SharePoint 2013 Search, I was in the quest of building personalized interfaces on top of Search engine around Q4 2012. I had several ideas of personalized social intranets which required custom solutions with the assist of Search, User Profile, and Managed Metadata APIs. As I deep dived into architecting personalized experiences, I was well aware that SharePoint 2013 platform wasn’t mature enough to build personalized interfaces with ease. Integrating User Profile APIs with Search and Managed Metadata, capturing user interactions with the system, capturing social interactions among users, and presenting intellectual personalized information required much more sophisticated foundational framework within SharePoint.

As I was watching Codename Oslo and Office Graph sessions, it was evident that I had found my answer and I was blown away with all the innovations Microsoft has done with Office Graph. Although this is great and I am on bandwagon, only time will tell if Office Graph is real game changer in personalized workspaces as it promised at SPC14.

What is Oslo and Office Graph?

Oslo is a code name for new people-centered personalized & contextual experience and proactive insights in Office 365. Users will get information through personalized insights that are created by analyzing content, interactions, and other activity streams across Office 365.

Oslo’s secret sauce is Office Graph. The Office Graph maps the relationships among people and information. Office Graph is a visualization of relations between users, groups, files, conversations, and other contents through machine learning and captures information the way it can be used to intelligently connect people each other and consumed as personalized experience to surface the most relevant content to the user as “Me, Myself, and Mine” interface. Office Graphs is nothing but mix of search, machine learning and gathering data about everything you do (“signals”) based on your personal network. Office Graph brings content what is relevant to you and who is relevant for you.

Although Office Graph is based on Yammer Enterprise Graph, both the Yammer Enterprise Graph and Microsoft Office Graph are two separate frameworks. According to Jared Spataro, they are extending Yammer’s concept of the Enterprise Graph across Office 365 to create something they are calling the Office Graph to map the relationships between people and information by simply recording likes, posts, replies, shares, and uploads. This will allow Microsoft to capture signals from email, social conversations, documents, sites, instant messages, meetings, and more to map the relationships between the people and other objects in the organization.

While Office Graph is underlying technology & brain power, Oslo is the first scenario to showcase true power of Office Graph and how Microsoft can create flipboard-like tiled experience with rich visuals to display plain SharePoint information in much more eye appealing way. Office Graph insights surface through Oslo. As initial implementation, Oslo is focused on documents but it can be easily extensible for Yammer conversations and other Office objects in future. By tapping into the Office Graph, Oslo serves up in a single user interface for personalized insights based on meetings, people, conversations, documents. Oslo surfaces what might be most relevant for each individual based on what they’re already doing in Exchange, Outlook, SharePoint, Office, Lync, and Yammer.

Additionally, it is important to note that Office Graph and Oslo are NOT SharePoint Search. Although Office Graph underlying architecture hasn’t been shared with general public apart from Microsoft has revealed that it’s a collection of analyzed signals via machine learning (might require very complex infrastructure to support signaling and machine learning for on-premises), Office Graph is more proactive & about discoverability while Search is reactive & about findability. Office Graph is all about information comes to me and discovering information while Search is all about information I am looking for. These are fundamentally two different things and at the end of opposite spectrum of information consumption.

Questions and Answers

I had a privilege to stop by Microsoft booth for “Discovery and Personalized Insights Center” and ask few questions to Oslo & Office Graph engineers.

• What is underlying architecture for Oslo and Office Graph? – Office Graph is underlying framework powers Oslo. We can’t share much information except its more proactive and based on signaling framework to capture user activities. It compliments Enterprise Search and Usage Analytics workloads for personalized insights.
• Is Oslo available only as windows app? - No, Oslo comes in two flavors – Windows App and Office 365 web interface as new workload.
• When does Oslo available for customers? – Oslo experience will be available by second half of 2014 in Office 365
• Is Oslo available for On-Premises customers? – No on-premises roadmap available for Oslo.
• Are Office Graph APIs available for developers and partners? – Yes, Office Graph APIs will be available for partners and customers and extensible to build intelligent experiences
• How can I participate in customer program for Oslo and enable on my tenant? – Plan to visit Office 365 Pre-release program to sign up for preview – http://prereleaseprograms-public.sharepoint.com/

Community Impressions

Office Graph and Oslo has been interpreted many different ways at the SharePoint Conference but some of the best impressions (including mine) and quotes I had captured during SPC14 from twitter feed are below:

Additional References

• Work like a network! Enterprise social and the future of work – http://blogs.office.com/2014/03/03/work-like-a-network-enterprise-social-and-the-future-of-work/
• Technology is enabling new ways of working – http://blogs.office.com/2014/03/03/technology-is-enabling-new-ways-of-working/
• Deep Dive Into Oslo and Office Graph – http://www.cmswire.com/cms/social-business/deep-dive-into-oslo-and-office-graph-spc14-024372.php
• Socializing SharePoint – http://www.cmswire.com/cms/social-business/socializing-sharepoint-spc14-024374.php
• Microsoft Demos New Office 365 and SharePoint Online Collaboration Technologies – http://redmondmag.com/articles/2014/03/03/office-365-and-sharepoint-online-collaboration.aspx
• SPC14: Introducing Codename Oslo and the Office Graph – http://melcher.it/2014/03/spc14-introducing-codename-oslo-office-graph/
• SharePoint gets personal with the Office Graph and Yammer integration -http://www.citeworld.com/social/23056/microsoft-sharepoint-personal-graph-search-yammer-integration

Recently we have used Content Query Web Parts in one of the SharePoint Online Intranet environments and one of the first things we have noticed was severe performance issues while loading department and corporate landing pages hosting CQWPs. Before I proceed, you may ask why would I use CQWP when search based technologies available but there are always reasons why you would use one technology over another (read delay in content refresh due to search crawl).

In this article, I wanted to highlight some of the methods and approaches we had explored to improve CQWP and what worked and what’s not.

Limit the Content Source

CQWP is known to rollup data with in same site collection based on either list type or content type. Options available are – Show items from all sites in this site collection, Show items from the following site and all sub sites, and Show items from the following list. Larger the content source and number of sub sites, content query web part can take longer to query data from all the sub sites and lists. Smaller the content source for specific list, faster the performance. As you increase the content source to sub sites or all the sites in site collection, it will affect the overall performance.

You may ask, why use CQWP in SharePoint Online to display data from specific list in specific site when many better options available. One of the major reasons are if you can’t use App Model, Search based web parts, there aren’t many options to display list data in specific design format apart from Content Query web part in no-code cloud solution model. Without support for coded Sandbox solutions (was supported in SharePoint 2010 online), you may able to use Script editor web part which would allow you to use CSOM or REST based APIs to query list data but CQWPs are easy to design with custom XSLT which might provide better maintenance story & reusable templates for future updates.

New feature SharePoint 2010 CQWP – SLOTs makes it even easier to design and maintain CQWPs as no-code solutions. If you are planning to use CQWPs to display data from specific list or sub sites, plan to limit the content source as much as possible to improve the performance. In our case, our CQWPs are limited to specific SharePoint list which wasn’t an option to improve performance further.

• https://blogs.realdolmen.com/experts/2012/06/19/practical-guide-to-the-sharepoint-2010-content-query-web-part-cqwp/

View field override

By default, CQWP returns all the fields from the SharePoint list but you can specify ViewFieldsOverride to return only sub set of fields you would need to display, sort, and filter. In theory, this should improve performance due to less overhead on backend query engine but we didn’t see any noticeable performance improvement.

• http://blogs.msdn.com/b/mimorr/archive/2009/11/19/improve-performance-of-content-query-web-parts-using-viewfieldsoverride.aspx
• http://sharepoint.stackexchange.com/questions/84295/how-can-i-use-viewfieldsoverride-property-in-cqwp-programatically-it-will-be-gr

Create Index for filters

If you are querying SharePoint List whether it’s custom code or CQWP web part, this is no brainier. Creating index for columns used for sorting and filtering on the SharePoint list should improve performance but this is another approach we tried without great performance improvement.

• https://www.nothingbutsharepoint.com/sites/eusp/Pages/SharePoint-2010-Content-Query-Web-Part-Demistified.aspx

Object Cache

As many of us are aware, SharePoint uses Object Cache to improve performance for CQQP and cross-list queries in addition to caching sites, lists, libraries, page layouts and pages objects on the web front-end servers RAM.

I have used Object Cache in past successfully to improve CQWP and cross-list queries performance on on-premises farm. Just like many other server and hardware level features, SharePoint Online doesn’t support Object Cache and SharePoint Administrators have no control over enabling or increasing size of Object Cache in SharePoint Online. This was a big disappointment news for us. If Object Cache would have been available (we understand the reason why it’s not enabled on multi-tenant shared hardware), it would be great boost for CQWP performance improvement. If you are reading this article to improve performance in On-Premises environment, read no further and use this approach.

• http://karinebosch.wordpress.com/my-articles/improving-performance-of-sharepoint-sites/part-5-object-caching/
• http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/sharepoint-server-help/configure-object-cache-settings-HA010157783.aspx

Output caching

With publishing features enabled (required for CQWP), you have one more option to improve the page performance by using Output caching option. For each output cached version of page request, the server does not have to make a round trip to the database to fetch the source code for the .aspx page, any .ascx controls on the page, reload and re-render the controls, and re-query any data sources that the controls rely on for data. Although technically this shouldn’t improve the CQWP performance, we were lucky enough to have option to enable Output Caching on SharePoint Online tenant. You can enable output caching at site collection, site, or page layout level.

http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/sharepoint-server-help/improve-page-rendering-by-configuring-output-caching-HA101785628.aspx

Since we had CQWPs on home page landing pages, after enabling output caching at both site collection and page layout level, we noticed huge performance improvements. Output caching may not be ideal solution for SharePoint On-premises farm to improve CQWP performances, it did the magic in SharePoint Online.

Hope this helps!!!!

I will be speaking at SharePoint Saturday Chicago Suburbs on May 17th after missing out last year. In addition, I am really proud that Slalom Consulting will be sponsoring this supposed to be great event as Silver sponsor.

Ever since Office 365 and SharePoint Online came out few years ago, I have noticed reluctance from seasoned SharePoint On-Premises developers and architects to embrace SharePoint Online. As Microsoft has been emphasizing in last few conferences, cloud is inevitable and that’s where future is.

Understanding SharePoint Online and Office 365 physical architecture, logical architecture, security & authentication architecture, storage architecture, change management, cloud & hybrid adoption strategies, and key differences between SharePoint On Premises & SharePoint Online especially cloud first message & cloud only features are very important for seasoned On-Prem SharePoint professionals while taking baby steps towards cloud. That’s where my session will fill the gap and provide jump start what every On-Premises SharePoint professionals might be looking for.

Here is my session title and short description:

Office 365 and SharePoint Online Ramp-up in 60 Minutes for On-Premises SharePoint Professionals

If you are experienced On-Premises SharePoint 2010 Professional and just getting into Office 365 and SharePoint Online, sometimes it can be overwhelming and daunting to get up to speed with cloud technologies. Nik Patel, Principal Consultant from Slalom Consulting will provide high level overview and key architectural differences between On-Premises SharePoint vs. SharePoint Online features for seasoned On-Premises SharePoint Professionals. This is must session for both entry level or seasoned SharePoint Online professionals.

Looking forward to see you there.

One of the reasons why developers and programmers hate no code solutions and SPD is because even trival tasks can be tricky. I have been recently building lots of no-code solutions and came across several different challenges in SharePoint Designer workflows which usually considered as very common tasks using Visual Studio or coded solutions. One of them is to get logged in user name. After looking through several different options, I have found that there is no out of box option available in SharePoint designer which would return currently logged in user’s full name.

After quick Google search, I stumbled upon stack trace article which gave me hint but it still took me while to figure out the correct solution. Do not use stack trace article as it would return wrong info (Current User returns surprisingly item creator information while Modified By guaranteed to return currently logged in user information).

Here is how I was able to derive currently logged in user’s full name and detailed step by step guide.

Step 1 => From the SharePoint Designer workflow string builder window,  click on the Add or change lookup

Step 2 => On the Lookup for string window, select following:
field data to retrieve =>  data source - user profiles, field from source - first name
find the list item => field – account name, value – click on “…”

Step 3 => On the next popup window,  select workflow lookup for a user. It should open up another popup window called “lookup for person or group”, select current item -> modified by. Click series of OK buttons on all the pop up windows until you get back to the string builder window.

Step 4 => At this stage, it should return currently logged in user’s first name. Repeat all these 1-3 steps for last name and final result should be full name.

Hope this step by step guide would help. This will definitely help in future if I come across similar situation.

Some of the most common scenarios for SharePoint workflows are email notifications, approval notifications, or scheduled reminders. Recently I have been working in the organization where security is utmost important and one of the most common requests are once item is created, it should be managed by only handful number of folks.

Since current version of SharePoint Online is SharePoint 2013 and lot more, one of my first instinct was to look at SharePoint 2013 designer workflows to see if there are any options to create item level security upon item created or saved. After initial research, came across this useful MSDN forum entry, where it’s clearly mentioned that SharePoint 2013 designer workflows doesn’t have any out of box activities to set item level security and may not be possible without creating any custom Visual Studio workflow activities or accessing APIs.

One alternative of limitations of SharePoint 2013 designer workflows was to use SharePoint 2010 designer workflows. This is one of those valid use cases where you would prefer SharePoint 2010 designer workflows over SharePoint 2013 designer workflows.

Configuring item level permissions in SharePoint 2010 designer is straightforward. Start with creating a new SharePoint Designer 2010 workflow.

On the workflow designer surface, select surface outside of Step 1. Once you select outside surface, “Impersonation Step” will be enabled on the Ribbon. Click on the Impersonation Step to add Impersonation Step.

Once you add Impersonation Step, you can add “Replace List Item Permissions” action.

This activity is straightforward to configure. You can follow series of popups to select current users or SharePoint security groups or predefined SharePoint groups or specific users to select set of users and what kind of permissions needs to set.

Here is how it would look like once you select what kind of permissions for which users are selected.

Once this workflow is configured, you are ready to save and publish. Since this workflow required impersonation, it is important to note that workflow will run under account with which workflow is published and this account must have full control permission on the list. In other words, you must publish this workflow with admin user credentials.

Here is much better and much more in-depth article than mine on how to set item level permissions using SharePoint Designer 2010 - http://spcycle.blogspot.com/2012/01/how-to-create-workflow-to-change-item.html

This is it. Might be great handy tip for me in future and my clients.

Thanks everyone who has made to my session at the SharePoint Saturday Suburbs Chicago 2014. It was great to see many familiar faces and great interest in learning SharePoint Online and Office 365.

Since 2012, I have been involved in building handful of different SharePoint Online Intranets and each experience has been different. I wanted to share my experience and real world lessons learned and wanted to share with attendees why I really think Office 365 is here to stay and what’s really needed to ramp up their knowledge in 75 minutes.

My approach was to take attendees through the journey from beginning to future state and how to adopt SharePoint Online. Major areas my session focused was:

• SharePoint Online History
• Essential cloud benefits – Cost Benefits, Quick Ramp up Time, and IT’s role as Innovation
• Office 365 Physical and Logical Architecture
• Office 365 Identity Management
• Office 365 Licensing
• Overview of SharePoint Online features and limitations
• Upcoming Office 365 features announced at SPC14
• Office 365 on-boarding with Hybrid implementation

I would like to special thanks to following SPC14 session speakers & breakout sessions for their great content. Many of the slides referenced in my presentation were used from following SPC14 session decks. If you haven’t seen any of the SPC14 videos, please check out following at Channel 9 for much more detailed information on Microsoft roadmap and Office 365/SharePoint Online insight.

• SPC202-Alistair Speirs, Jeff Medford-A behind the scenes look at Office 365 for IT Pros
• SPC216-Simon Skaria-SharePoint Online-Built for the Enterprise
• SPC244-Bill Baer-IT Pro audience keynote  SharePoint on-premises, in the cloud, and everything in between
• SPC245-Kieran Gupta, Kate Dramstad-OneDrive for Business and Mobility- Access your files while on the go from any device or platform
• SPC251-Mary David, Sarat Subramaniam-Sharing content internally and externally with OneDrive for Business and SharePoint
• SPC268-Tejas Mehta, Kieran Gupta-What’s new and what’s coming for OneDrive for Business
• SPC269-Brian Jones, Rob Lefferts-Developer audience keynote  What’s new for the Office & SharePoint developer
• SPC282-Christophe Fiessinger, Juliet Wei-Microsoft’s roadmap for Enterprise Social
• SPC286-Vasu Rangaswami-The Ins and Outs of SharePoint Licensing
• SPC348-Sonya Koptyev, Greg Lindhorst-Update on InfoPath and SharePoint Forms
• SPC2014-Gerald Ferry, Marc Mroz-Introducing the New Office Video Experience
• SPC2015-Cem Aykan, Ashok Kuppusamy-Introducing Codename Oslo and the Office Graph
• SPC3999-Rob Howard-SharePoint Power Hour-New developer APIs and features for Apps for SharePoint

It was great to see usual faces in Chicago Community, clients, and colleagues. Special thanks to SharePoint Saturday Chicago Suburbs team for outstanding event.

I am privileged to be invited as featured speaker at this year’s SharePoint Fest Chicago on Dec 8th. Slalom Consulting is once again proud to be Platinum Sponsor this year. I will be speaking on one of the most relevant and complex topics in the SharePoint world as hybrid deployments.

As organizations are maturing into their cloud investments and awe-inspiring Office 365 innovations, hybrid deployments are inevitable at times and organizations are forced to configure co-existence between SharePoint On-premises and SharePoint Online environment. Please attend SharePoint Fest and my expert level session walking through end-to-end configuration blueprint of SharePoint hybrid deployments.

OFF 204 – Anatomy of SharePoint and Office 365 Hybrid Deployment – Real-world End-to-End Configuration Blueprint

SharePoint landscape is changing and moving towards cloud architecture as Office 365. As Microsoft investing heavily in cloud & devices services, are IT or business agile enough to stay ahead of the curve to adopt future trends and keep up with the Microsoft and industry pace? Do organizations have clear guidance and technical expertise on where to invest whether SharePoint on-premises, SharePoint Online, or SharePoint hybrid?

Nik Patel, Principal Consultant and SharePoint Lead Architect from Slalom Consulting will provide real-world guidance and recommendations of what are the major factors and workloads for organizations to stay on-premises or move it to the cloud. This session will provide end to end blue print of architecting different SharePoint and identity workloads in hybrid environment focusing on practical guidance on SharePoint 2013 On-Premises, Office 365 and SharePoint Online, ADFS, Azure Active Directory, Azure Active Directory Sync, and Windows Server 2012 Web Application Proxy configuration.

This is level 300 session focused on advanced SharePoint on-premises, cloud, and hybrid concepts for IT Pros and SharePoint Architects.

Major features & concepts covered in the session would be:

• Decision tree for SharePoint Hybrid workloads – where to deploy which workload?
• Understanding pre-requisites for hybrid deployments – domain, URLs, certs etc.
• Understanding basic Office 365 tenant, Windows Azure IaaS and PaaS tenants, and SharePoint 2013 On-Premises lab architecture setup
• Understanding SSO, ADFS and DirSync (now Azure Active Directory Sync) basics
• Federate SharePoint On-Premises farm to ADFS 3.0 and overcome limitations around Search and User Profile Sync service
• Publishing On-Premises farm through Windows Server 2012 Web Application Proxy to Internet
• Federating On-Premises farm to Office 365 through ADFS 3.0
• Configuration of Office 365 Windows Azure Active Directory access in Windows Azure
• Configure Hybrid Search – Outbound Search and Inbound Search
• Configure OneDrive for Business and Sites Redirection to cloud
• And.. if time permits.. many more – Hybrid Apps, Yammer redirection etc.

Hoping to see you there!!!!!

Thanks for everyone who has made to my session at the SharePoint Fest Chicago 2014. I was really surprised with turnout for advanced IT Pro session. I had a great fun walking attendees through what are pre-requisites and detailed steps required to configure SharePoint Hybrid solution from beginning to end and what are the different gotchas they should be avoiding.

As promised, here is my session deck available through Slide Share. Feel free to download and reach out to me if you have any questions. Please watch out for this space as I am planning to build this presentation with advanced features like OneDrive for Business, Yammer, BCS, Record Management, and Apps for SharePoint hybrid walkthroughs in 2015.

Additionally, I had a great time spent with the SharePoint Community and Slalom team at SharePoint Fest and if you are in Chicago, this is one of the most premier events for SharePoint and Office 365 professionals!!

Over the last weekend, I was in the process of restoring my SharePoint 2013 farm VMs on Windows Server 2008 R2 built over the last year. My goal was to restore and start adding additional pieces in the complex SharePoint 2013 farm including office web apps and provider hosted apps environment. To my shocking surprise, both ADFS and SharePoint seem dead as I was trying to test the pulse of the baseline restored working environment.

During the testing of ADFS sign in page – https://adfs.niks.local/adfs/ls/IdpInitiatedSignon.aspx, I came across ADFS generic error message and upon further investigating on the event logs, it didn’t take me long to see both ADFS token-decrypting and token-signing certificates were expired. As you can see from following screens, ADFS certs were expired on July 2014 while restoring these VMs in December 2014.

Solution was straightforward. Renew the ADFS token-decrypting and token-signing certificates and update ADFS token-signing certificates in the SharePoint. As it happens with most of the things in SharePoint world, there is no end-to-end real world guide and I had to look up various different articles to come up with the correct process.

This whole research and restoration process took me more than few hours (including documentation) and there is no reason to waste that research and use as future reference if I ever need it again. That’s the true inspiration for this blog article.

Renew ADFS 2.0 Token-decrypting and Token-signing certificates
Usually these certs gets renewed automatically every year in production 24×7 environment if automatic certificate rollover is enabled (default ADFS setting to renew every 365 days) but since VMs were shut down, there was no way ADFS would renew those certs upon restoration process.

To renew both token certificates, you would require to load ADFS 2.0 PowerShell module on Windows Server 2008 R2 and run Update-ADFSCertificate command with urgent switch to force certificate renewals. Please note that Urgent switch will rollover certs immediately and removes older certificates right away. If your certs aren’t expired, it may result into temporary service outage.

You can login to the one of the ADFS server as an administrator and run Windows PowerShell commands as an administrator.

Add-PSSnapin Microsoft.Adfs.PowerShell
Update-ADFSCertificate -Urgent

Alternatively you can run following command to specify specific certificate type. e.g. to renew only ADFS-signing certificate, you would run following command. Valid certificate types are “Token-Encryption” or “Token-Signing”.

Update-ADFSCertificate -CertificateType Token-Signing -Urgent

After running ADFS commands, it should refresh the certs for another year. As you can see from following screen, ADFS certs are renewed for another year until 12/21/2015. Alternatively you can change CertificateDuration by running Set-ADFSProperties to set the long duration. For the security best practices (even in development environment), it is nice to follow standard ADFS 1-year certificate renewal best practices.

If you are trying to access ADFS IDP sign in page, you may result into same error. This step would require restarting the ADFS windows service and you should have working ADFS environment.

Restore ADFS 2.0 and SharePoint 2013 On-Premises Federation

Since ADFS token-signing certificate was expired, if you are trying to access SharePoint, it may result into ID4220 – SAML assertion error due to invalid certificate stored in the SharePoint cert store.

You would require to export the ADFS token-signing certificate from the ADFS server. It is important to note that newly generated ADFS certificates may not be trusted. You must trust these certificates in the trusted root certificate authorities store on the ADFS server prior to exporting them for SharePoint import.

Once ADFS certificate is trusted, you can export the cert and copy it over to the one of the SharePoint server (preferably server running on central administration) where you can run SharePoint PowerShell commands.

It is important to note that once you copy over ADFS token-signing certificate, it may not be locally trusted on the SharePoint server. You must make sure this cert is added to the local trusted root certificate authorities store on the SharePoint server where you are planning to import into SharePoint store. If you import invalid certificate, you may get error “The root of the certificate chain is not a trusted root authority”.

Next step is to run the SharePoint PowerShell command as an administrator on one of the SharePoint servers in the farm where ADFS token-signing certificate is trusted. Please note that you need to run these commands only once in one of the servers in the farm. No need to run on each and every SharePoint server in the farm.

$cert= New-Object System.Security.Cryptography.X509Certificates.X509Certificate2(“C:\Host\ADFS Signing v1.cer“)
$sts = Get-SPTrustedIdentityTokenIssuer
$sts | Set-SPTrustedIdentityTokenIssuer -ImportTrustCertificate $cert

You can run the Get-SPTrustedIdentityTokenIssuer to verify that certificate thumbprint and expiration date matches the renewed ADFS federation trust. Additionally, please verify if new ADFS token-signing certificate is uploaded on the SharePoint trust store from the central administration screen. If it isn’t, you can manually upload the certificate. If trust page doesn’t show valid certificate, SharePoint will throw similar error – “The root of the certificate chain is not a trusted root authority”

Last but least step, you must verify SharePoint access using ADFS federation and you should be able to login successfully.

Hope this saves some time for someone who is trying to accomplish similar tasks.

References

• Updating the X.509 Certificate of a Trusted Identity Provider in SharePoint 2010/2013 – http://www.sharepoint-reference.com/Blog/Lists/Posts/Post.aspx?ID=36
• AD FS 2.0 Token Signing Certificates – http://blog.auth360.net/2012/01/08/expiring-ad-fs-2-0-token-signing-certificates/
• How to renew your ADFS 2.0 token signing certificate in SharePoint – http://www.benjaminathawes.com/2013/07/31/how-to-renew-your-adfs-2-0-token-signing-certificate-in-sharepoint/
• Configuring SharePoint 2010 and ADFS v2 End to End – http://blogs.technet.com/b/speschka/archive/2010/07/30/configuring-sharepoint-2010-and-adfs-v2-end-to-end.aspx
• ADFS Token-Signing and Token-Decrypt Certificates Expiration Process and Dates – http://blogs.technet.com/b/tfg/archive/2014/04/21/token-signing-and-token-decrypt-certificates-expiration-process-and-dates.aspx
• AD FS 2.0 for Windows PowerShell Basics – http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/adfs2-powershell-basics(v=ws.10).aspx

If you are trying to map the network drive to SharePoint Online document library or any other libraries like Master Page Gallery for design manager from your windows explorer and if you come across this error –  “The Mapped Network Drive could not be created because the following error has occurred: Access Denied. Before opening files in this location, you must first add the web site to your trusted sites list, browse to the web site and select the option to login Automatically.”, here are some options and reference blog articles I have tried to make it work.

Situation: I needed to map the network drive to update design templates for content search web parts and encounter an error while trying to map network drive with traditional on-premises method on 64-bit Windows 8 Enterprise desktop machine with Internet Explorer 10 and 32-bit Office 2013 professional plus edition installed.

Prerequisites: To configure WebDEV for SharePoint online sites, I needed to ensure I have following options configured on my desktop, IE, and SharePoint Online sites in addition to 32-bit Office 2013 professional plus edition. Although I haven’t tested, my understanding is WebDEV doesn’t work for 64-bit Office 2013 edition.

• Add SharePoint Online Site URL to the trusted site on the IE. You can optionally trust all the SharePoint Online sites by adding https://*.sharepoint.com.

• Make Sure WebClient windows service is running under Local Service account. This is the WebDEV service running on the windows desktop making SharePoint online libraries available through windows explorer or any other windows client utilities. E.g. if you are planning to sync OneDrive for Business to your OneDrive client and sync doesn’t work, you may want to ensure this service has started.

• Uncheck “Enable Protected Mode” for internet zone in the IE.

• Check “Keep me signed in” while logging into the SharePoint Online site

• Make sure user has atleast contribute permission to the SharePoint Online site, document library, or galleries. In my case – user has site collection administration permission.

Verification: Once you have all the options configured properly, plan to login to the SharePoint Online site using internet explorer. At this moment, you can follow similar steps as above (in situation section) to map the network drive from windows explorer and you should be able to map the SharePoint online libraries.

You can also optionally visit any document libraries or predefined galleries like master pages and open the library using “Open with Windows Explorer” option.

References

• Map Network Drive / WebDav with SharePoint Online O365 – http://blogs.technet.com/b/sharepoint_made_easy/archive/2013/03/20/map-network-drive-webdav-with-sharepoint-online-o365.aspx
• Map a network drive – design manager 2013 – http://community.office365.com/en-us/f/154/t/166272.aspx
• Enabling the WebClient service in Windows if OneNote cannot sync to SkyDrive – http://blogs.msdn.com/b/johnguin/archive/2012/06/24/enabling-the-webclient-service-in-windows.aspx

This is one of those personal reminder/reference articles for me. This seems like fairly common configuration required for SharePoint Online designers. Although each configuration may require different solution depending on desktop operating system, browser version, and office version, hopefully some of the pointers mentioned in this article would be helpful. If you come across different solution for different scenario, please don’t forget to drop the note and your resolution in comments section!!!!

I had a wonderful chance to experience first ever Microsoft Ignite, which was termed as ONE Microsoft conference for IT Pros and Office Pros. Ever since news of Microsoft Ignite came out, industry wasn’t sure what to expect from this conference. Since Ignite is replacement of formerly product specific conferences like SharePoint Conference, Exchange Conference, and TechEd, it was labelled as arguably biggest conference Microsoft would offer.

Key Note and Conference Theme

Microsoft Ignite started with bang as Satya Nadella opened the conference with some of the key messages of how Microsoft itself is transforming and motivated to change industry along with them. His keynote was mainly focused on three major categories with sub plots demoed by corporate VPs – Personal computing, reinvent productivity, and intelligent cloud. In my opinion, keynote was successful to connect dots of how Microsoft will meet future workforce & business needs by the time it’s ended.

Some of the major innovations and taking points during keynote was:

• Personal computing – Windows 10 and start menu, Cortana integration in Windows, Continuum for Phone for PC experience, next-gen Microsoft Edge browser, Windows Hello biometric sensors for secure login, and selective file-based encryption feature
• Reinvent productivity and business processes with modern workplace – Real-time video and audio conferencing with Skype for business, intelligent experiences like Office 365 Graph and organizational Delve analytics, and real-time word 2016 client co-authoring
• Build the secure intelligent cloud – Windows Azure innovations and Windows 10 Business Update

One more key take away for me was to hear Satya’s perspective of what Microsoft thinks about their conferences landscape – Convergence is for business, Build is for developers, and Ignite is for IT Pros.

Sessions – Focus on Modern Workplace

When I was looking at the Ignite session builder, it was clear enough for me that where I wanted to focus being Office 365 and SharePoint professional. From pre-day SharePoint hybrid training to conference days – my preference was attending sessions around SharePoint 2016 and Office 365. Although I would have preferred to have many community based level 300-400 sessions, Microsoft’s level 100-200 product announcements didn’t disappointed and provided loads of information.

Some of my key takeaways here are:

• SharePoint 2016 – Bill Baer’s Wednesday morning session in McCormick Place’s biggest room – Aire Theatre’s was jam packed with both attendees and session content. Bill unveiled upcoming vNext SharePoint architectural innovations like zero-downtime patching, new min-role topology, and higher SharePoint product boundaries. This was definitely one of the most important sessions I had attended at this conference as far as SharePoint roadmap, which would require me to watch again and again to digest everything.
• SharePoint Hybrid – With hybrid being first class citizen in vNext (and upcoming SharePoint 2013 update), new cloud search application and cloud based Unified index, hybrid user profiles, and hybrid extranets, Microsoft has strengthened their vision to make both SharePoint cloud and on-premises environment transparent. This would be definitely key to success for SharePoint deployments in coming years.
• Office 365 Groups – Last year at SPC14, I was sold on Codename Oslo (Delve) with its personalized insights feature, this year I was sold on Office 365 Groups as either future replacement for SharePoint team sites or parallel feature to bring all Office 365 productivity tools together. Microsoft has some of the biggest challenges to bring all productivity tools like SharePoint, Exchange, Yammer, and Skype for business together and sounds like Office 365 Groups would provide that solution.
• Office 365 Delve – Within year of unveiling Delve and Office Graph last year at SPC14, it’s quickly becoming Office 365’s intelligent fabric and unifying all products together with amazing predefined people experiences where content and people able to help finding each other to improve employee productivity. This is definitely becoming core features of the Office 365. It’s kind of funny but there was hardly an Office 365 session where Delve wasn’t demoed and after a time – I was so frustrated that I didn’t wanted to see another Office 365 Delve’s upcoming feature called “Boards”.
• Office 365 Next-Gen Portals – This is one of those features I haven’t been sold yet. I do understand the needs of pre-built portals but Microsoft should focus on APIs, platforms, and extensibility instead of building predefined portals. Video portal is still huge question mark (I should confess here that I love media services architecture behind it). New knowledge portal seems like half-baked at this moment (similar as InfoPath story told at SPC14). I would be curious to see where Microsoft takes Next-Gen portal architecture and what kind of platform extensibility it would provide.
• Office 365 Unified APIs – Yina’s session on Office 365 Unified APIs was one of my favorite sessions along with Bill Baer’s SharePoint 2016 session. Importance of having Unified APIs for developer was fully demonstrated on Yina’s session and it was great to see Microsoft investing where it really matters for Office 365 developers. With all these hundreds of Office 365 standalone products, Office 365 Unified APIs, Office 365 Group APIs, and Office Graph APIs would soon become developer’s best friend to build unified business solutions.
• Yammer – This is no longer buzz word anymore. Yammer along with SharePoint was hardly mentioned in the Keynote. Both of Yammer’s co-founders David Sacks and Adam Pisoni are no longer at the Microsoft. Yammer has been quickly becoming underlying social computing thread spanning across various Office 365 technologies and moving into direction of previously acquired companies like FAST, ProClarity, and Vermeer Technologies. There wasn’t any key innovations worth highlighting in conference keynote and whatever Yammer sessions available, it was offered around best practices by the communities and product managers.

As an Office 365 professional, my key takeaway was Office 365 Delve, Office 365 Groups, and Office 365 Unified APIs as some of the biggest innovations happened since SharePoint in Microsoft office division for employee productivity solutions and sounds like they have just started with their innovations.

Networking

Many of us would agree that best part about these conferences are not sessions (they are recorded and you can watch afterwards) but it’s more of networking, talking to vendors in expo halls, and getting insight from Microsoft product managers.

Without doubt, Ignite provided great platform for anyone who wanted to interact with partner and product community in addition to Microsoft product mangers. I had my fair share of interaction to meet with some of my fairly common tweeps who I haven’t met earlier. I might be bias but it felt like SharePoint and Office 365 community had biggest presence at this conference which proves need for standalone Office 365 conference in future.

Conference Logistics

Any conference with more 20,000 attendees have their work cut out from get go. It was interesting to see Microsoft finalizing Chicago’s McCormick Place as Ignite host. This place is massive with 4 large halls connecting all of them with grand concourse. As you walk into McCormick place and looking at large ignite signs, one can wonder the sheer size of event location.

But, in my humble opinion, large building size wouldn’t be only criteria for conference location. Some of the most common needs of big conferences like this would be wifi, timely food services, snacks/coffee/refreshments, transportation, unwinding options, and after-hour activities. Although coffee and refreshments were constantly provided, food lines and quality of food was probably one of the worst of all the Microsoft conferences I have attended. To make it worse, there were hardly any other options either within conference center or nearby as alternatives.

While Chicago is great location for the after-hour activities and sightseeing, location of McCormick place didn’t make it easy for anyone. Ever since McCormick place was announced as conference location probably due to its sheer size, I was skeptical about this location being Chicagoan. There is no easy way to get there, it’s far enough that you can’t walk from downtown, and there isn’t large presence of restaurants or hotels nearby. In my book, it’s nightmare for attendees unless you are driving. Apart from food, transportation was arguably second biggest complaint I have heard from attendees at this conference. Even though shuttle services were running from various hotel locations from the downtown, it wasn’t useful in most cases if you want to unwind during afternoon sessions due to their morning and evening schedules. Cab lines were ridiculously long and CTA lines were far enough for people to walk to unwind or recharge at whim and attend sessions again.

In short, I never liked the idea of McCormick place for Microsoft Ignite event for various reasons mentioned above.

Parting Notes

My take on this event is – many of us who attended Microsoft Ignite conference this year may not come back again. Microsoft has tried their best to share as many as new innovations they can but they were still 100 and 200 level for many senior IT professionals. This conference was all about high level announcements and less about deep dive and best practices. For seasoned IT professionals, it wasn’t worth much. Perhaps Microsoft rather split Microsoft Ignite into two – TechEd (which would cover .NET framework, Azure, SQL, and Windows) and Office (which would cover Office 365, SharePoint, Yammer, Skype for Business, and Exchange). This may allow Microsoft to bring best of both worlds – announcements and deep dive/best practices/MVP community based sessions.

Having said that, I wasn’t loud enough during the event and Ignite will be back again in Chicago next year – same time and same place. Hopefully lessons would be learned and event would be better but trust has been broken.

As a final parting note, regardless of pros and cons of large conferences like this, one of the best outcomes came out from this conference was approx. more than 600 recorded sessions (30 per time slot) available for public consumption on Channel 9 covering virtually latest and greatest of every single Microsoft IT Pro and Office technologies. That’s a gift from Microsoft and it’s up for grab!!!

Additional Ignite Takeaways

• Well Written Ignite v1 Issues – http://thoughtsofanidlemind.com/2015/05/10/microsoft-ignite-2015-wrap-up/
• Benjamin Niaulin’s Recap – http://en.share-gate.com/blog/ignite-collaboration-in-a-modern-workplace-transformed
• Bob German’s Ignite Recap – http://bob1german.com/2015/05/12/ignite2015recap/
• John White’s Ignite Impressions – http://whitepages.unlimitedviz.com/2015/05/ignite-impressions/
• Joel Oleson’s favorite SharePoint 2016 annoucements – http://www.collabshow.com/2015/05/11/top-5-new-sharepoint-2016-features-announced-at-ignite/
• Chris O’Brien’s take on NextGen portals annoucements – http://www.sharepointnutsandbolts.com/2015/05/Office-365-NextGen-portals-Microsites-Boards-Knowledge-Management-portal.html
• Bill Baer’s Update on What’s New in SharePoint 2016 Installation and Deployment – http://blogs.technet.com/b/wbaer/archive/2015/05/12/what-s-new-in-sharepoint-server-2016-installation-and-deployment.aspx
• Office Blog – What’s New in Office 365 Administration – http://blogs.office.com/2015/05/05/whats-new-in-office-365-administration-from-microsoft-ignite/
• Office Blog – Change Management and First Release changes – http://blogs.office.com/2015/05/05/manage-change-and-stay-informed-in-office-365/
• Mary Jo Foley’s take on SharePoint 2016 Hybrid – http://www.zdnet.com/article/microsofts-sharepoint-2016-whats-hybrid-got-to-do-with-it/
• Proficient’s Takeaway – http://blogs.perficient.com/microsoft/2015/05/huge-improvements-announced-for-sharepoint-2016-ignite-2015/

Idea behind this article is to compile and brain dump all the key takeaways & announcements (including opinions at times) from the Ignite 2015 conference focused around Office 365, SharePoint, OneDrive for Business, and Yammer.

This is mainly information for my reference but I am happy to share with others if it helps. Hopefully this would make good bedtime reading and help you fall in sleep effortlessly. Please note that this work will be in progress for next few months until I am able to review all the key sessions I would like to review for the Ignite 2015.

Evolution of SharePoint and Office 365 for Productivity Tools

If you don’t have enough time to read this whole article, here are the high level takeaways and general strategy from Microsoft (as per my assumption and what I read/seen) and my mapping of current workloads to the future workloads

• Identity – Azure Active Directory (no change over here)
• Portals – SharePoint => Office 365 Next-Gen Portals
• Files – SharePoint, Yammer, and OneDrive for Business => SharePoint as a back-end and OneDrive for Business as UI consumption layer
• Email, Calendar, and Tasks – Exchange Online
• Instant Messaging, Video Chat, and conferencing – Sky for Business
• Social – Yammer => Yammer  (no change over here)
• Teams – SharePoint and Yammer => Office 365 Groups – spanning across all the suite members as content creation layer
• Search and Discovery – SharePoint Enterprise Search => Delve, spanning across all the suite members as content consumption layer
• Apps and Customization – Office 365 API including Office Graph (no change over here)
• Future workloads – Sway for Business – Canvas for building great presentations or stories (releasing worldwide Q2 2015 as preview with first release) and Bing for Business – Map functionality (??)

Here is probably one of the best picture I was able to found from the Ignite stating future state of Office 365 workloads and how they would work together. One of the most fascinating things for me being a SharePoint professional, there is no SharePoint on Apps layer in this diagram. SharePoint is soon becoming underlying document storage and portal layer for various Office 365 Apps.

Office 365 Groups – Road map and Architecture

• Termed as next wave of collaboration platform on Office 365, possible replacement or competing product for SharePoint Online team sites and Yammer groups
• Core principles – Single definition, public by default, self-service, easy to manage, shared with non-members including outside of organization, and contextual & historical
• Available now as of Jan, rolling out on all tenants – Unifying layer for all the Office 365 workloads, unifies exchange online for mail & calendar, SharePoint and OneNote for files, Skype for instant messaging and conversations (yes – no Yammer conversations as of now)
• SharePoint Online integration – Underlying structure for groups is SharePoint site collection,  shared left hand navigation & header, 1 TB doc library, UI of groups files are exposed through OneDrive for Business, sharing with other groups feature, groups files recycle bin, shared with us view, modern email attachments
• Upcoming features – Creation of modern responsive web pages using NextGen page authoring canvas mechanism, Office graph & delve for groups insights, Group profile in Delve, external Office 365 groups (even for partners and customers) will be available once Guest User feature is enabled
• How about Yammer and SharePoint team sites? – Groups will be wired with Yammer down the road as well, blended experience with SharePoint sites coming way down the road as well (you can invite Office 365 groups to SharePoint sites as of now for shared membership)
• Collaboration experience from wherever you are – Office 365 UI, upcoming outlook 2016 client, or upcoming mobile apps
• Azure AD as data source for Groups identity and first stop for groups creation, Forward Sync capability will be used to sync groups information with Office 365 workloads
• Group creation from anywhere you are as lightweight task-pane UI – available from OWA & OD4B, preview in Outlook 2016 add-in
• Administration as of now – Groups management capability in Office 365 Admin site, PowerShell commands to manage groups, eDiscovery works fine across group main and group files as of now
• Administration features coming in 2015 – Guests membership, dynamic membership – members added by rules as AAD dynamic groups, DLP, Groups quota management for SPO files, and Soft-deletion of groups (tenant administrators can restore groups)
• Extensibility – Groups REST APIs in preview as Microsoft Graph REST endpoints
• Building Groups Apps – You must register app in the Azure portal, configure either read.all or readwrite.all app permissions

Office 365 Next-Gen Portals – Road map and Architecture

• Office 365 only-feature as of now, built on top of SharePoint platform (everything is stored in the Site Collections)
• Key principles – Common, intelligent, social, mobile, ready to-go, and high value portals
• Extensibility & APIs are on the road map, current focus is on ready-to-go
• Video Portal rolling out worldwide, available as first release as of now, only 1 video portal per tenant, powered by Azure media services, native mobile apps, html 5 video player, basic REST APIs for video portal is in preview, hybrid link to Office 365 video from SharePoint Server 2016, secure encrypted adaptive streaming, SharePoint stores master copy, Azure media service keeps thumbnails and transcoded videos. SharePoint timer job syncs SharePoint and Azure video copies
• New People experiences in delve – Finding people through content & content through people, people discovery scenarios (connections discovery, expertise discovery), extensibility for adding boards will be available later
• Upcoming KM solutions – Solving issues of sea of data, Delve boards (lightweight collection of content and sharing by add to board feature – tagging as cards, rolling out worldwide in few months), microsites (modern web articles authoring experience – easy to create, easy to learn), and InfoPedia (codename for upcoming KM portal for personalized knowledge gateway – ready-to-go curation, browsing, finding and communication of definitive knowledge across organizations)
• Articles – Consider them as modern SharePoint publishing pages, use SharePoint for auto-save, rich-text, and publishing features, getting shipped now along with as blogging engine on delve
• Technical architecture – Responsive by design, Powered by Office 365 workloads
• Storage architecture – 1 hub site collection per tenant to serve single app pages like video or article pages, content site collection per video channel, microsite, blogs etc., created on demand, discovery compliant
• Permissions Simplified – Use SharePoint as permission model but simplified user experience, permissions are at container level
• New APIs for ready to go publishing and video portal and uses the core SharePoint APIs to interact with SharePoint features
• Both Page renderer and authoring canvas engine uses new NextGen page controls – video player, page rollup, rich text editor, document control etc.
• Front-end UI – Single Page Apps – video portal home pages, microsite article pages, content pages
• Authoring canvas – NextGen portal team will join hands with Sway & SharePoint team on modern authoring in the enterprise
• In future – possibility of publishing Sway in SharePoint or options to allow SharePoint publishing pages to leverage Sway UX and rendering engine

Delve and Office Graph – Updates and Road map

• Delve and Office Graph cloud-only feature
• Delve and Office Graph are Office 365’s intelligent framework for the personalized insight and as a serendipity discovery portal, Office Graph is the engine and Delve is user experience app, present combined view of all the silos content and teams together as modern visual experience
• It is important to note – Delve does not store any content, contents are stored in the destination systems like exchange or SharePoint, Delve will display these information as Pinterest like cards with additional analytics like number of views, number of yammer comments etc.
• Throughout 2014, focus was around basic features – documents and contents from the colleagues and sites users are following, initial focus was on SharePoint and OneDrive for Business documents, released first version of Office Graph REST API for extensibility
• Delve by default – respects security permissions and privacy, shows most recent document version if versioning is enabled
• Control features – Tenant level & user level opt-out
• In 2015 Q1 – Delve started expanding to other Office 365 workloads – added new features like exchange email attachments , yammer conversation link attachments cards, and video portal content cards
• Just released worldwide in Q2 2015 – Delve people experiences – idea here is to find people through content and find content through people – people profile information from Azure AD and additional information like organization browse, people activities, possible replacement of SharePoint and Yammer user profiles, people connections discovery and expertise discovery
• Release in progress in Q2 2015 – 1:1 communications and conversations in People Profiles, people profile gestures like praise card, Boards – allow you to tag and collect information informal way by tagging Delve cards, following view which will show activities of people, sites, and boards you are following (possible replacement of SharePoint social following feature)
• Road map – Extensibility & APIs for LOB and 3rd party apps to create cards e.g. Salesforce etc.
• Road map – After fall SharePoint on-premises PU and cloud search service application for SharePoint 2013 and 2016, Delve would be able collect metadata of On-Premises content from cloud search index and will show these content as cards from the SharePoint on-premises
• Road map – Office 365 Group Analytics and Groups Profile (similar as People Profile)
• Road map – Organization analytics and personalized dashboard like information about work map, work life balance, amount of time spent on meetings etc.
• Road map – Nature language queries (e.g. documents modified by Colleague X)
• Current Concerns – Pinterest like cards view of Delve – easy to get lost on all visuals and what’s important for you, draft documents would show up just like search without any indicators

OneDrive for Business and OneDrive Sync – Updates and Roadmap

• OneDrive for Business Updates
  • OneDrive for Business is vNext consumer experience for files in Office 365 whether your files in SharePoint, Yammer, Office 365 Groups – various views like Shared, Sites folder, Groups folder etc. to consume files from one place
  • OneDrive for Business built for informal collaboration (formal collaboration could happen in Office 365 Groups or SharePoint Team Sites or Yammer Groups)
  • Existing features – 1 TB storage, office online integration, rich file preview, drag and drop uploads, smart search, simple copy and move with right click, simple sharing options, guest links, modern attachments for OWA, auditing and reporting (not usage analytics)
  • Upcoming features for product experience – Expiration of anonymous shares, next-gen sync client (see OneDrive Sync Updates section), unified web UX – no longer SharePoint UI, instead similar as OneDrive for Consumer simplified UI, company-shareable links, modern attachments for Outlook, expiration of all external shares
  • Upcoming features for administrative control – Storage quota control, allowlist/denylist external sharing domains, disable external sharing for specific users, remove 20,000 file limit (ships with next-gen sync client), large file support (10Gb) (ships with next-gen sync client), cross-tenant sharing control, OneDrive usage reporting
  • OneDrive for business will use next-gen Sync but continue to have SharePoint as backend for storage and other features
• OneDrive Sync Updates
  • Next Generation of OneDrive Sync announced, RTM of v1 by end of 2015
  • Single reliable sync engine for all platforms & devices (instead of zillions of engines available right now) including for consumer and business platforms
  • Consistent syntax and semantics of sync protocol across consumer & business OneDrive, built on lessons learned from consumer OneDrive
  • Key features – selective sync per folders & devices, no more double caching of files on local hard drive
  • Sync limits – SharePoint library – 5k, OneDrive for Business – No more 20k
  • File size limits – Increased from 2 GB to 10 GB
  • Administrative features – block personal sync, block unmanaged sync, migrate existing users

Yammer – Updates and Road map

• No major announcements for Yammer but message is clear – Yammer is not dead, it will become social fabric across all the workloads in Office 365 suite
• Immediate focus on moving Yammer in Microsoft data centers (completed in mid-May 2015) and tight integration with Microsoft Office 365 Azure AD for foundational identity work, this would allow Yammer to integrate tightly with other tools like Office 365 Groups and OneDrive for Business
• Moving forward strategy and plans – Less focus on networks and more focus on groups – modern and clean design with more white spaces, prioritized content
• Upcoming plans – Delve integration by feeding yammer signals to Delve and inline yammer conversations task pane in Delve
• Upcoming feature – External messaging with global icon indicators, and compliance features like HIPPA
• Upcoming feature – External groups, ability to share groups outside of the organization, might require Azure AD integration and Office 365 guest link feature
• Upcoming feature – once Azure AD is integrated, move Yammer document storage to SharePoint and exposed through OneDrive4Business similar as Office 365 Groups
• Upcoming feature – Intelligent speculation from my end – once Azure AD is integrated, replace exchange conversations with Yammer conversations in Office 365 Groups, after all – Yammer is social tool in Office 365

SharePoint 2016 Announcements

• Only IT Pro investments announced, stay tuned for Information Worker announcements in coming months
• No plans to deprecate any features from SharePoint 2013 for vNext including InfoPath Form Services, SharePoint Social, Full Trust Farm Solutions, and Sandbox Solutions
• Public Beta will be in Q4 2015, GA and RTM availability in Q2 2016
• First ever cloud-down codebase based on SharePoint Online, backported capabilities for on-premises differentiators (e.g. PerformancePoint)
• Software Requirements – Windows Server 2012 R2 and later, SQL Server 2014 SP1 and later, and .NET Framework 4.5.2 and later
• Continue support for embedded version of Windows Server AppFabric 1.1 for distributed cache and social features, windows team is still committed to support embed version in SharePoint through product lifecycle even though it’s not supported in GA Windows servers.
• Upgrade Scenario – Upgrade only from SharePoint 2013 to SharePoint 2016 using database-attach upgrade method, not supported direct upgrade from SharePoint 2010 or earlier
• SAML as first class citizen as Authentication protocol, Windows Identity over SAML claims as well
• SMTP can use non-default ports and supports sending emails to SMTP servers using STARTTLS connection encryption
• New MinRole topology – designed based on SPO learning and SP2013 streamlined topology, option to choose during installation wizard to optimize user services, robot services, and caching services – Front-End, Application, Distributed Cache, Search, and Specialized Load, support for specialized load for existing SharePoint installation patterns, support for SharePoint health analyzer to enforce min-role topology – scans all role except special load, new cmdlets would be released to support automation of these services configurations, MinRole will change search topology, core limitation of SpecialLoad is that it is excluded from compliance and reporting capabilities
• Simplified Patch Management – Zero-downtime patching, not sure what this really means yet except it will have smaller update footprint with reduced number of MSI and MSP
• Improved Boundaries – Content DBs can be in TB’s, List Thresold >5000, Max FileSize is increased to 10 GB, and 2x increase in Search Scale with 500 million items
• Improved files upload/download performance – BITS protocol support to upstream and downstream document response, BITS will optimize upload and download chunking, uploads will use BITS instead of Cobalt, byte-range HTTP GETs for download, and BITS specific block-based upload protocol for uploading files
• User Profile Sync Service Update – Support for only unidirectional AD Sync for read-only, removed built-in FIM based User Profile Sync service, still supports external FIM service including Microsoft Identity Manager to support both read-write scenarios
  DocID based Durable Links, it remains same even with document move
• There will be no SharePoint Foundation 2016
• There will be no SharePoint Designer 2016, SPD 2013 along with InfoPath Designer 2013 will work with SharePoint 2016

SharePoint Online and OneDrive for Business Migration Enhancements

• New Improved APIs supports and Azure based migration approach, better equipped to scale to the demand, better alternative to current CSOM based approach which Microsoft throttled to avoid end-user performance impact.
• New APIs support both file shares, SharePoint on-premises, Google, and any other data source, they are testing Lotus Notes as well
• Approach is create source package for the API to accept, upload package on Azure temporary storage (cost is very minimal for storage), and SharePoint Online timer job based import content into SPO (avoiding front-end CSOM calls)
• New APIs still support for only contents, no support for web parts or workflows yet.

SharePoint 2013/2016 On-Premises Server and Office 365 Hybrid Innovations

• Cloud driven hybrid would be first class citizen in SharePoint 2016
• Office 365 Hybrid Search – New Cloud search service application for SharePoint 2013 and 2016 will generate unified cloud-based index (support for SharePoint 2013 comes out in Q4 2015 as PU), allows you to search both cloud and on-premises data from SharePoint Online and Delve, allows you to crawl SharePoint 2010 farm as well, use IsExternalContent:1 managed property to filter on-premises data
• Cloud-driven hybrid scenario picker for consistent automated hybrid cloud-initiated hybrid workload deployment

Office 365 Administration Portal Enhancements

• Office 365 Usage Reporting Dashboard, visually appealing, rolling out in Q3 2015
• Office 365 content pack for Power BI – Enables powerful reporting and analytics capabilities of Power BI to analyze and create interactive dashboards to gain insight in service adoption, available soon in Summer 2015
• Workload-specific Admin Roles – Ability to streamline service administration roles, rolling out in June 2015
• First Release program changes – First releases can be applied to organization or select people level. SharePoint Online can’t be applied to select people yet. Suite bar can be configured for either organization or select people level. This will roll out in next few weeks.
• Office 365 Service Communication API 2.0 – https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/office/dn776043.aspx

Office 365 and SharePoint Development Updates

• Apps for office & SharePoint are re-branded as Add-ins – Office Add-ins and SharePoint Add-ins
• Preview version of Unified Office 365 REST APIs – One API to rule them all – https://graph.microsoft.com/, interactive graph explorer along with JSON response, in-built CORS support, tokens are available through OAuth 2.0 flow, OpenID connect for SSO, eliminates the need for the resource specific access token handlers and Office 365 Discovery Service released in Q4 2014
• More Office 365 APIs released – OneNote, OneDrive, Video Portal, Office 365 Groups, and Office Graph
• App Registry page – Still going through Microsoft dogfood phase. New option to register on-premises apps on Azure AD as low trust app to use common consent framework to develop against whole o365 suite with same set of tokens (current option is ACS low trust app)
• Support for Tenant-less NAPA – http://www.napacloudapp.com, removed dependency on SharePoint site collection, ability to create office apps without Visual Studio using office.js framework, requires login using Microsoft account
• Ability to pin/unpin add-ins to app launcher from my apps page, app launcher can be configured at organization level or as user preference
• Office365 Developer program launch – http://dev.office.com/devprogram. One stop for engineering updates, 1-year free developer tenant subscription, training, tools, hands on labs, benefits, and webinars.
• REST based Office 365 APIs (corresponding native SDKs for .NET, iOS, Android), Office 365 Discovery Services, ADAL (Active Directory Authentication Library) APIs were released throughout Q4 2014 and Q1 2015

Session Reviewed So far

Here are the list of sessions I have reviewed so far based on my interest during and after Ignite. All the session slides and videos are available on Channel 9

• SharePoint and Office 365 IT Pro Track
  • FND2203-Bill Baer-The Evolution of SharePoint-Overview and Road map
  • BRK2188-Bill Baer-What’s New for IT Professionals in SharePoint Server 2016
  • BRK3134-Manas Biswas-Implementing Next Generation SharePoint Hybrid Search with the Cloud Search Service Application
  • BRK2121_Andy O’Donald-Managing Change in an Office 365 Rapid Release World
  • BRK3153-Joe Newell-Migration to SharePoint Online Best Practices and New API Investments
• Office 365 and SharePoint Developer Track
  • FND2202-Rob Lefferts and Jereme Thake-Office Development Matters, and Here’s Why
  • BRK4117-Rob Howard-Get Your Hands Dirty with the Office 365 RESTful APIs
  • BRK3199-Yina Arenas-Supercharging Your Custom Solutions with the Office 365 Unified API Endpoint
  • BRK3170-Steve Walker-Deep Dive into Custom App Provisioning and Deployment in Microsoft Office 365
  • BRK4104-Steve Walker-Setting Up Your On-Premises SharePoint Environment for Custom App Development
  • BRK4111-Vesa Juvonen-Future Proofing Your On-Premises SharePoint Development
• vNext Team Sites – Next-Gen Collaboration – Office 365 Groups
  • BRK2114-Amit Gupta and Christophe Fiessinger-Microsoft Office 365 Groups Overview and Roadmap
  • BRK3114-Christoph Fiessinger-Microsoft Office 365 Groups Deep Dive
  • BRK2113-Andy Haon-Collaborate on Files and Information within Office 365 Groups
• vNext Search and Insights – Delve
  • BRK1105-Asok Kuppusamy and Cem Aykan-Office Delve and Office Graph Vision and Roadmap
  • BRK2176-Stefan Debald and Welly Lee-A New People Experience in Delve-Discover People Through Content, and Content Through People
  • BRK2107-Gary Danoys-Break Down Organizational Silos and Gain New Insights with Office Graph and Office Delve
• vNext Portals – Next-Gen Portals
  • BRK2173-Mark Kashman and Adam Harmetz-Intelligent, Ready-to-Go NextGen Portals in Office 365
  • BRK2174-Victor Poznanski and Christopher Kehler-The New Knowledge Management Portal in Office 365
  • BRK2176-Stefan Debald and Welly Lee-A New People Experience in Delve-Discover People Through Content, and Content Through People
  • BRK2205-Daniel Kogan-Behind the Scenes-Engineering NextGen Portals
• vNext Files – OneDrive for Business and OneDrive for Consumers
  • BRK2192-Reuben Krippner-A File’s Future with OneDrive for Business
  • BRK4110-Jason Moore-I Sync, Therefore I Am, A Deep Dive on OneDrive Sync Capabilities and Roadmap
• Microsoft’s ESN Offering – Yammer
  • BRK2103_Juliet Wei and Ben Zvi-Yammer Roadmap
• Great Recap Sway Slides
  • Mark Kashman’s SharePoint Unplugged – https://sway.com/uwhQ8MU4_vrpCuWZ
  • Mark Kashman’s Next-Gen Poral – https://sway.com/jSGt5aKXltTdxfUA

Enjoy!!!!!!

Although my background is focused around SharePoint development, ASP.NET development and Microsoft web technologies, I don’t code any more the amount of code I used to do. If I am lucky enough, I would spend 2-3 months a year to lead the SharePoint development team and make my hands dirty with the code for 4-5 weeks along with overseeing team activities and setting the architectural direction. Even though I am not exposed to code 365 days a year, it is important to note that not only I would keep up with the latest innovations announced whether at TechEd, SPC, Build, and now Ignite, I would also continue to play with these innovations in my lab as much as I can with basic scenarios.

Luckily (or unluckily) for one reasons or another, I have been leading SharePoint development teams over the last 4 years building four different kind of traditional SharePoint intranets with each approach varied (and influenced) from each other either because of client requirements or SharePoint development industry trends.

• Spring 2012 – SharePoint Online 2010, used sandbox solutions with code and content queries approach with Mark Anderson’s SPServices as a provider for cross-site collection communications, no content by search web parts in SharePoint 2010 and no full trust code in SharePoint Online
• Spring 2013 – SharePoint On-Premises 2013 Standard, used full trust model approach, Apps wasn’t supported in SharePoint running on Windows Server 2008 R2, ADFS 2.0, and Sandbox solutions with code was already deprecated. Due to no Content by search web parts in standard editions and full trust model approach, we went wild with all kind of tried and tested – SharePoint 2010 full trust development best practices for the SharePoint 2013 platform.
• Spring 2014 – SharePoint Online 2013, used no-code sandbox solutions and content queries approach, sandbox solutions with code was already deprecated, client didn’t wanted to use Apps approach. Not to mention, we as a team didn’t have enough time to ramp up with technology and Content Search web part wasn’t available in SharePoint Online 2013 at that time, SharePoint artifacts provisioned declaratively through features framework and sandbox solutions packaging and business features were written with HTML, CSS, XSLT, and JavaScript.
• Spring 2015 – SharePoint On-Premises 2013 Enterprise, used provider hosted remote provisioning and App script parts approach, we didn’t wanted to use dreaded iframe based App Parts or extremely limited SharePoint hosted apps mainly because of responsive design, instead used script editor and content by search web parts, SharePoint artifacts provisioned through CSOM code and Office 365 PnP program, business features were written with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript.

Having bored you with my credentials, let’s get to the meat of the story. Ever since Microsoft has released SharePoint Online and SharePoint 2013 Apps Model, there has been various announcements, recommendations, and best practices from the community and the Microsoft. Rapid innovations fueled with Microsoft’s cloud-driven approach, confused both industry and developers over the time.

SharePoint Development – Where we came from

When SharePoint 2007 was released, it was clear that SharePoint Full Trust model with server side code is the future and everyone from Microsoft and community (Microsoft partnered with Ted Pattison who wrote one of my favorite books – Inside WSS 3.0) declared it as future of SharePoint development platform. After all, SharePoint 2007 remote APIs were written as ASMX SOAP services when XML and XSLT was ruling web world. Even though Visual Studio tooling wasn’t available when product was released, SharePoint community kindheartedly adopted this model.

Deployment issues of SharePoint 2007 (and BPOS, Microsoft’s dedicated cloud SharePoint offering) full trust model code running on SharePoint servers itself was evident after few years industry adoption, which forced Microsoft to release Sandbox Solutions to alleviate the problems of full trust model (mostly bad development best practices) with the release of SharePoint 2010. SharePoint 2010 also tried to enhance remote framework as proprietary CSOM and industry standard REST APIs. If you have attended SPC09, there was a pretty impressive session from Scot Hillier on why admins should allow only Sandbox solutions from then on. Even with Microsoft’s push for Sandbox solutions as future of SharePoint development, restrictions of this model was never adopted by both developers and industry. Many of us thought that Sandbox solutions was Microsoft’s brainchild to support future version of BPOS, which was released as SharePoint Online 2010 (first version of multi-tenant architecture powered as Office 365) in May 2012.

Fast forward to July 2012 and SPC12, Microsoft announced it’s next wave of SharePoint development platform – Apps Model. Again, Microsoft partnered with Andrew Connell, Ted Pattison, and Scott Hillier to onboard traditional SharePoint developers to the Apps model. SharePoint 2013 continued its investment in remote APIs to please both traditional developers and open source web developers with Unified REST and CSOM APIs. All the issues related to Full trust model running on the SharePoint servers causing upgrade issues, limitations of Sandbox solutions which would run only at the Site collection level under strange resourcing system, and Microsoft’s own cultural transition to adopt web industry best practices, Microsoft decided to offer Apps Model which means code will run outside of the SharePoint servers, in it’s own domain, which would not only make SharePoint deployment stabilized and upgradable but allow SharePoint developers to adopt latest and greatest innovations in web technologies including ASP.NET MVC. Now, it’s been 3 years since Apps Model has been released and in most cases – industry and community has formed their opinions – although everyone agree on running customization besides the SharePoint rather than on the SharePoint, industry is not keen on adopting Apps Model. So why adoption is slow? Faulty architecture again? – Answer is partially YES.

Microsoft initially announced three Apps model – SharePoint hosted model (extremely limited), Provider hosted model (standalone Apps), and Azure Hosted Apps. Microsoft killed Azure hosted apps within 2 years stating scalability and manageability concern. I wasn’t surprised. I am yet to meet someone who had invested in Azure hosted apps. In general, any one who has configured Apps Model on the SharePoint 2013 on-premises farm wants to avoid it all together because of it’s complexity and additional hardware cost. While provider hosted model does provide some benefits (at the expense of complex infrastructure, most of the benefits comes at the remote provisioning patterns from PnP library), SharePoint hosted model is joke in most cases. Like they says, if there is smoke, that means there must be fire. Although there is no verdict on Apps model judgement as of May 2015, rumors are already out there. Industry is already trying their best to avoid complexity of Apps infrastructure for SharePoint On-premises. Majority of the SharePoint developers are not willing to adopt this model and continue to invest on SharePoint full trust and sandbox solutions. If that’s enough, there has been sarcastic (and partially true) blogs stating Apps Model is dying.

Fast Forward to SharePoint 2016 and future of SharePoint development

As far as SharePoint 2016 development platform, here are the key messages and clarifications from various Microsoft speakers at the Ignite 2015 for future of SharePoint on-premises development.

• Farm Solutions will be still supported
• Sandbox Solutions with declarative code will be supported, there will be no further enhancement in Sandbox code service.
• Microsoft will continue to invest in Apps Model, both SharePoint and Provider hosted Apps model would be supported
• InfoPath Form Services will be supported and will work with InfoPath Form Designer 2013,  there will be no further enhancement in InfoPath forms service but Microsoft has no replacement story for forms.
• SharePoint Designer won’t be released for SharePoint 2016 and Office 2016, SharePoint Designer 2013 will work fine with SharePoint 2016

My take on these announcements are there is nothing here which would make SharePoint developers to change what they are doing right now on the SharePoint on-premises. They may continue to develop customizations using farm solutions (although it’s not necessary after Office 365 PnP guidance and reusable code) or invest in unspoken sandbox solutions rather than leaning towards equally fatal Apps model. Smart developers may not build any code on top of SharePoint platform but as happened in past, everyone wants to take short cuts and develop fast without thinking of maintenance in future. As long as there is SharePoint on-premises software and unless there are Apps model innovations (both infrastructure complexity and iframe UI), people will continue to develop using Full trust model (and unfortunately using sandbox model).

Trends on Office 365 development platform

Let’s turn our eye to other side of the SharePoint development world – SharePoint Online and Office 365 development. Ever since Microsoft started upgrading all the Office 365 tenants with SharePoint Online 2013 in Q1 2013, innovations in the Office 365 development platform is mind-boggling. If Microsoft ever wants to control the future of the SharePoint development, this was the platform for them. From the get go, they have made it very easy for anyone adopting SharePoint online Apps development by preprovisioning Apps services infrastructure (arguably one of the most complex infrastructure configuration in SharePoint history along with User Profile Sync Service Application in SharePoint 2010 and 2013) and enabling Azure PaaS and ACS for apps hosting platform. Developers who were early adoptors and lucky enough to work on the SharePoint Online customizations projects were flying in blissful world of SharePoint Online Apps development including Azure PaaS development and web technologies innovations like ASP.NET MVC, Angular JS, Knockout JS, and Node.JS.

Ever since Chris Johnson and Jeremy Thake embarked their journey on Office 365 developer program after SPC14, Microsoft gained huge momentum on not only onboarding reluctant SharePoint developers on the Apps platform from many fronts including weekly Office developer podcasts (in parallel efforts from Vesa Juvonen and Steve Walker’s Office 365 Patterns and Practices program) but also innovated on Office 365 development platform itself. Throughout Summer of 2014, Apps model marketing was at its highest peak which culminated into amazing Office 365 and Office Graph APIs innovations announced during TechEd Europe 2014. Annoucements of Office 365 and ADAL APIs were probably first glimpse of Microsoft’s vision of Office 365 as developer platform. In the meanwhile, Microsoft continued their effort on Office 365 PnP program on MVA throughout winter to continue winning SharePoint developers, making it more of community efforts on GitHub and delivered through Nuget packages.

Fast forward to Ignite 2015, out of all the new innovations Microsoft have announced including APIs for Groups and NextGen portals, Office 365 Unified APIs are probably one of the most strategic APIs came out from Microsoft after Win32 APIs in early 90s, ASP.NET released in 2001, and SharePoint solutions and features framework released in 2006. For traditional SharePoint developers, this might be the time to look back and start shredding all their SharePoint server development methodologies and start adapting Office 365 REST APIs, Azure Active Directory as Auth platform, and Office 365 PnP program for code transformation for both SharePoint on-premises and SharePoint Online customization.

Parting Thoughts

In short, my final takeaway here is future of the SharePoint development community would continue to divide depending on what kind of hosted environment they would work and we may experience the trend of traditional SharePoint 2007/2010 development and futurastic world of the Office 365 development.

Personally, my approach and my quick guidance to all the developers would be:

• For SharePoint On-Premises:
  • Avoid full trust and sandbox solutions what so ever. Administrators should plan to disable Sandbox code services on the SharePoint farms. Administrators should plan to have governance policies to avoid deployment of custom solutions from the Central Administration.
  • Plan to provision SharePoint artifacts using remote provisioning pattern – CSOM APIs reusing Office 365 patterns and practices code. Start investing in the provider hosted apps for remote provisioning and custom business applications. If Apps infrastructure and High Turst (S2S) configuration is not your cup of tea, you may want to use console applications (code based approach) to provision all the SharePoint artifacts from the remote servers.
  • Plan to build customization using OOB web parts like CEWP, CSWP, and SEWP using HTML 5, CSS 3, JS Link, and Javascript frameworks. Avoid CQWP as far as you can.
  • For fully integrated custom applications, in extreme cases, if you want to avoid provider hosted model, you can plan to just build ASP.NET standalone web applications and interact with SharePoint CSOM and REST remotely.
  • Adopt Office 365 Patterns and Practices for ShaePoint On-premises development and avoid features and solutions framework.
• For SharePoint Online and Office 365:
  • Avoid sandbox solutions what so ever.
  • Start investing in the Azure PaaS or on-premises provider hosted apps over low trust (OAuth) configuration to host ASP.NET web applications
  • Start building custom apps using Office 365 Unified APIs and Azure AD consent framework to build your NextGen customizations.

Last but not least, I would leave you with some of my must have SharePoint and Office 365 development resources. It sounds like road ahead for traditional SharePoint developers is more fun, rejuvenate their careers, and chance to get back to roots of innovative web technologies. Good luck!!!

• Office Developer Platform Program – http://dev.office.com/
• Developer Track Sessions from Ignite 2015 and Build 2015 (This is latest from Microsoft as of May 2015) – http://channel9.msdn.com/Events/Ignite/2015?sort=sequential&direction=desc&term=&r=Development#theSessions & http://channel9.msdn.com/Events/Build/2015
• Developer Track Sessions from TechEd Europe (This is latest from Microsoft as of Nov 2014) – http://channel9.msdn.com/Events/TechEd/Europe/2014?sort=sequential&direction=desc&term=&r=Developer+Platform+and+Tools
• Office 365 for developers MVA Training – http://www.microsoftvirtualacademy.com/product-training/office-development
• Starter Frameworks – Office 365 Patterns & Practices – Github & Nuget Packages

The current landscape for Microsoft collaboration tools enables myriad of choices for all the organizations – SharePoint Team Sites, Yammer, and now new shiny kid in the neighborhood – Office 365 Groups.

Microsoft unveiled Office 365 Groups last fall and further announced the capabilities of new Office 365 Groups features and it’s road map at Microsoft Ignite 2015. I have said loud and clear during Ignite and afterwards that one feature really blew me away while I was at the Ignite was the Office 365 Groups. I was blown away by CodeName Oslo (Now Delve) at the SPC14 and Office 365 Groups did same to me at the Ignite 2015. Attendees who has seen the Office 365 Groups feature demoed at the Ignite has either prematurely, jokingly, or as a visionary, formed an opinion as possible replacement for SharePoint team sites or Yammer groups as modern collaboration tool. Being visionary is great but what about being realistic – Are we really ready to adopt Office 365 Groups now? After reading various blog articles, I thought it might be great to dive in this discussion and share my opinion.

What are the Office 365 Groups?

Based on what Microsoft has shared from engineering and architectural perspective, it’s still vague but at high level, Office 365 Groups are a NextGen collaboration tool on Office 365 platform unifying all the workloads like SharePoint Online, Exchange Online, OneDrive for Business, Delve, Yammer, and any other thing you would come across in the Office 365. Along with Delve, Microsoft termed Office 365 Groups as intelligent fabric which ties various workloads of the Office 365 as out of the box features.

The picture below depicts how Office 365 Groups would be key to bring all the Office 365 wild west workloads together. It’s nothing but unifying layer for all the Office 365 workloads – exchange online for mail & calendar & conversations, OneDrive for business and SharePoint for files, Skype for business for instant messaging and conversations (yes – no Yammer conversations as of now), and Office graph & Delve for groups insights. If that’s not enough, once Yammer is integrated with Azure AD, Office 365 Groups will be wired with Yammer down the road as well. I wouldn’t be surprised if existing exchange conversations replaced by Yammer social conversations by 2016.

From the business end, Office 365 has 6 core principles – Single definition, Public by default, Self-service, Sharing to non-members (even if they are not part of your active directory for external groups), Easy to Manage, and Contextual & historical. Out of all them, two most important core principles in my book are – Single Definition and Contextual & Historical. Not only they are best practices in many organizations but it’s really hard to achieve in a traditional manner.

• Single Definition – Groups definitions are stored in the Azure Active Directory, which is underlying identity management system across all the Office 365 workloads (including Yammer in near future, which will trigger bringing yammer conversations in Office 365 in my book). Identify management is one of the biggest concerns in modern distributed/cloud architecture and having all these distinct systems talked to each other would have been tricky if it required identity sync from various workloads. From my end, Microsoft nailed this requirement of single identity and it’s a core foundational work for the Office 365 groups.
• Contextual and Historical – One of the most important thing about Groups is having all the conversations whether it’s in email or instant messaging tool, stored at the same place. This itself is a great use case for the collaboration. If someone joins the team on 10th day or 2nd month (this happens almost every single project), all the historical and contextual information are available for someone to get up to speed. All the passive knowledge turns into gold for the new comer. What a win!!

Office 365 Groups – Under the Hood

As far as 1000 ft. architectural view, Office 365 Groups have three unique architectural components – single identity across all the platform, federated resources which would allow to extend this concept to future workloads (e.g. Yammer or Delve), and loose coupling of each services which would allow each workloads to build their processes to react group service contracts. Regardless of where Group creation request comes from, it will always gets created in AAD and feature called “Forward Sync” will notify each of the Office 365 services to provision their features as needed.

What I really liked here is each Office 365 workloads still have full freedom on what to do once request comes from AAD and what pieces needs to be provisioned immediately and what can wait. e.g. Whenever Office 365 Group is requested, SharePoint online provisions underlying expensive plumbing like site collections but wouldn’t provision document libraries until users in the group start creating or uploading documents. These documents won’t be visible to group users on their OneDrive for Business until document libraries are being used.

Having said that, personally I believe Office 365 Groups are in their infancy. It’s well-thought out robust architecture which has foundation for security, scalability, and service oriented architecture best practices. But, Office 365 groups still lacking guidance on how everything wired together including storage architecture, provisioning, deprovisioning, archival, and auditing process. There aren’t much guidance from the Microsoft on the governance and site life cycle management (there is no guarantee of Microsoft would deliver this either – even SharePoint Sites and Yammer having these issues).

Are Office 365 Groups ready to be adopted as collaboration platform?

First thing first, I don’t think Office 365 Groups are replacement for SharePoint Team Sites or even Yammer Groups. Without doubt, Office 365 Groups are NextGen Collaboration on Office 365 platform. But, if I need tools for large scale collaborations right now (as of May 2015) especially on the SharePoint On-Premises (and even on SharePoint Online at times), answer would be No.

As I have mentioned earlier, Office 365 Groups are in their infancy and might be mature enough within next few years for full blown adoption. It has started as promising platform which delivers great unified concept out of the box, first class Office 365 administration UI, APIs for extensibility, and most importantly Microsoft’s intention to make it real. There are still many features especially  workflows for business automation process, custom page authoring, custom lists and libraries, standardizing lists definition via content types are missing. Keep in mind that these will be typical business requests once honeymoon period is over after adopting current state of Office 365 Groups and IT may not have any place to hide except wait for Microsoft to deliver.

My personal takes here are:

• Office 365 Groups are great replacement for the team sites and project sites collaboration in the SharePoint Online if you are willing to adopt Group features in the current state and if business is flexbile enough to adopt cloud release cycle. It is still immature for my liking and may not be 100% mature until second half of 2016. There are only five key features Groups have as of now – files, notes, mail, calendar, and conversations. Exchange calendar and mail integration are killer features something SharePoint team sites have tried in past using site mailbox features. These features might be good enough for most teams. Advance teams might require announcements, pages, tasks, contacts, custom apps, and many other things we are used to with SharePoint team sites. If you really are early adopter, I would suggest to start rolling out Office 365 Groups as pilots to the specific areas of the organization. Start avoiding SharePoint online for team sites unless you are required to customize business processes. It is important to note that organization size, culture, business needs, and licencing investments would have great impact on adopting Office 365 Groups as well. Just like few years ago, we had dilemma of SharePoint Social vs Yammer, now we have another dilemma of SharePoint Team Sites vs Office 365 Groups. Just like Yammer as an ESN investments, Office 365 Groups as a collaboration platform would be clear winner down the road but what about now? Tough choice to make especially if business can’t wait for maturity of Office 365 groups.
• SharePoint team sites are still valid in the SharePoint on-premises for the collaboration. Probably only choice you have been left with because both Office 365 and Yammer are cloud-only feature as of now. Landscape for this may change once we have hybrid team sites in SharePoint 2016 and possible option to have hybrid Office 365 Groups where some of the exchange on-premises and SharePoint on-premises can be integrated with cloud feature. But, as of now – collaboration feature for SharePoint on-premises is tried and tested old friend – SharePoint team sites.
• It is also important to note that while SharePoint team sites can be both collaboration and communication feature, Office 365 Groups are collaboration only features (as of now, until Microsoft offers more streamline publishing approach like NextGen Portals’ authoring canvas to create article pages). Organizations who requires traditional SharePoint intranets like corporate communication and department communication pages, SharePoint is still valid whether it’s SharePoint Online or SharePoint On-Premises.
• Based on the Yammer roadmap at the Ignite 2015, Yammer will be integrated with Azure Active Directory later this year and integrated with Office 365 Groups in first half of 2016. Yammer will be treated as a App and integrated with Office 365 Groups as a exeprience making most possible candidate for replacing current exchange conversations with Yammer conversations. What this really means? In my book, it means Yammer will be treated as just like any other applications like SharePoint Online and Exchange Online in Groups scheme and Office 365 groups will be king of collaboration tools.

Like what Richard Harbridge & Kanwal Khipple mentioned in their Ignite session, there is no single solution to meet your business needs and you may want to rely on toolsets provided by Office 365 and adopt your tools as needed. There are cases where Yammer would make sense, at times SharePoint Online or OneDrive for Business would make sense, and there are times where Office 365 Groups would be a clear choice. It’s a nature of adoption of cloud offering. Think and weight your options and make wiser decision while you adopt!!!

Additional articles from the community thought leaders & Microsoft

• Articles
  • What are Groups for Office 365 – http://en.share-gate.com/blog/groups-for-office-365
  • Office Blog – Delivering First Chapeter of the Office 365 Groups, Sep 2014 – http://blogs.office.com/2014/09/25/delivering-first-chapter-groups-office-365/
  • Yammer Blog – How Yammer and Office 365 Groups better together – http://blogs.office.com/2015/05/20/recapping-yammer-highlights-and-key-takeaways-from-ignite/
  • Wictor Wilen’s Opinion- SharePoint Team Sites are dead – http://www.wictorwilen.se/sharepoint-team-sites-are-dead
  • Groups for Office 365 Transforming Collaboration – http://www.cmswire.com/cms/social-business/groups-for-office-365-transforming-collaboration-029203.php
• Ignite Sessions
  • Microsoft Office 365 Groups Overview and Roadmap – https://channel9.msdn.com/Events/Ignite/2015/BRK2114 
  • Microsoft Office 365 Groups Deep Dive –https://channel9.msdn.com/Events/Ignite/2015/BRK3114 
  • Collaborate on Files and Information within Office 365 Groups –https://channel9.msdn.com/Events/Ignite/2015/BRK2113
  • How to Decide When to Use SharePoint and Yammer and Office 365 Groups and Outlook and Skype – https://channel9.msdn.com/Events/Ignite/2015/BRK2102