SPC12: Developing apps for SharePoint 2013 with Visual Studio 2012

Speakers: Mike Morton, Sean Laberee

This session was an introduction to the new App model for SharePoint and Office. The room accommodated about 3500 people and it was packed.

• loud cheers from the large crowd for new app dev model experience (e.g., just save and refresh instead of redeploying)
• the new app model uses 'modern' web dev techniques such as JQuery and knockout.js
• funny moment: during a demo, a presenter forget to close a quote and many people yelled out from the audience
• creating web parts is even easier than 2010 visual web parts. (inc. client web parts for office 365)
• cool that you can 'appetize' existing web apps
• apps have events
• use OAuth for security
• apps can be MVC not just web forms
• really cool that you can locally debug using a local DB and then deploy to Azure an it will automatically provision SQL Azure DB for you. This uses dacpac under the hood
• debug uses iisexpress and no app registration is required
• apps for Office can be packaged somehow to be apps for SharePoint—details pending

Geeklit Blog Featured on Microsoft MVP Blog

The Microsoft (MSDN) MVP blog decided to quote one of my posts on the Microsoft SharePoint Conference this year.

My post is called SharePoint Conference as an Attendee. I also wrote another called Wading into the SharePoint Conference and I’ll be posting some notes from the sessions I attended. For example, SharePoint 2013 Conference–Upgrade Deep Dive.

SharePoint 2013 Conference–Upgrade Deep Dive

Speaker: Sean Livingston (Senior Program Manager, Microsoft)

Developing a solid foundation for your users is critical to the success of your SharePoint Server 2013 deployment - in this session we'll share the major changes in how upgrade works in SharePoint Server 2013 and how to best take advantage of new capabilities to enable and deliver a smooth upgrade experience to your users.

This was a 400 level session that described in detail the various out of the box upgrade options that are available for SharePoint administrators. The fundamental message of the session was upgrade is “safer and faster.”

This session was in a huge room and it was almost full. In fact, the session was actually moved to a larger room and there were still people standing in the back. Here are my notes:

· Deferred site collection upgrade is the main new feature. I wrote a post about the deferred site collection upgrade option when the SharePoint 2013 preview was first released. My message in that post was that it’s a good feature, but don’t confuse “deferred” with “incremental.” This is not a feature that allows you to take, for example, one site out of a site collection and migrate it to 2013 while leaving the rest of the content on a 2010 server.

· In short, the deferred site collection upgrade allows SharePoint 2010 customers to “upgrade’ to SharePoint 2013 but still run site collections under the SharePoint 2010 code base. In other words, you have to upgrade the DB schema, but you can run 2010 site collections in 2013. This means--in principle--that custom code for SharePoint 2010 should just work and continue to work until you’re ready to upgrade the site collection. Once you do that, you’ll be running on the 2013 code base.

· Note that this is all at the site collection level—not on a sub-site by sub-site basis.

· Upgrade preview creates a copy. default is 100MB mac. that copy will actually be used is the site collection is upgrades. The size is configurable.

· Upgrade queue is used to control how many upgrade actions are happening at the same time. upgrade throttling. PowerShell upgrade commands will honour the upgrade queue unless you explicitly override it.

· Performance is about 5mins for a small site collection and can be as quick as 45 seconds. However, Sean was clear that, if your site collections were slow to upgrade last time; they will be slow to upgrade again. The “more stuff you have” the longer it will take. This includes features, numbers of sub-sites. it could take hours to upgrade (for “big and gnarly site collections”).

· You can run PowerShell commands to get all the site collections and pipe them into the upgrade queue so that they are all upgrades.

· get-spsite is now shown by default  shows compatibility level in PowerShell commands

· get-spsiteupgradesessions info will show what’s going on the in queue on the server

· get-spsite | upgrade spsite is the basic upgrade command

· Sending email updates when site collections are queue and/or completed is an option. The default is to send mail if upgrade was UI initiated.

· Evaluation site collection creation uses SQL Server snapshots. if mirroring is being used, it won’t work.

· This process snapshots the whole DB regardless of how many site collections are in the DB. Then the site collection is cloned (in the original DB) with -eval added to the URL.

· Expiration date is set for evaluation copy. You can optionally added it to the upgrade queue. Then the snapshot is cleaned up.

· If you don’t have snapshot, a different process is used—a site collection backup. 85GB is the recommended max size for this option. Then backup is restored to a -eval URL. Then the backup is cleaned up.

· SharePoint 2013 does not support partially trusted code solutions. It still supports sandbox. Bin directory is full trust only.

· Claims authentication is now default for new web applications. The recommendation is to use claims mode exclusively. Existing 2010 claims providers would just work.

· If you delete s site and then upgrade the site collection(or apply a CU patch), the site recycle bin can now restore the site (by running the upgrade. This means recycle bin is now much safer.

· Cross farm services compatibility means now that you don’t have to do a big bang upgrade . 2013 federated services can be consumed by 2010 farm.

· Added in RTM is a maintenance window feature. These are called maintenance windows objects. many settings such as start, end, Duration. It also allows you to display a message to users about maintenance; that’s handy.

Wading into the SharePoint Conference

As part of my SPC as an Attendee blog series, I’ll be publishing some posts about specific sessions. It’s getting late now, so I’ll have to continue with that over the next few days.

One definite highlight at the Microsoft SharePoint Conference 2012 was the Jon Bon Jovi concert at the attendee party. The venue (just like the last SPC in Las Vegas) was the Mandalay Bay beach. As you can see in the photo above, the stage is actually across the water from the beach, so the best ‘seat’ available required wading into the pool. I decided that I’d take the plunge and was pleasantly surprised to find that the water was actually warmer than the air.

Yes, they did have lifeguards on duty (lots of them), so you can rest assured that the attendees were safe.

- the fireworks at the SPC12 concert were amazing

SharePoint Conference as an Attendee

SPC as an Attendee

I’m writing this post in the first developer session of the Microsoft SharePoint Conference 2012 in Las Vegas. This is the first time I’ve attended SPC and not spent a lot of time either preparing speaker sessions or working booths in the exhibit hall. This year, I’m working the Microsoft booth but most of my time will be spent attending sessions and learning as much about SharePoint 2013 as I can absorb. However, as an MVP, I also want to do something for the SharePoint community at large, so I thought I’d write some posts about SPC as an attendee.

The first thing to note at SPC12 (aside from coffee costing $4 in my hotel room—if I make it that is!) is that the scale is not just as big as ever, but bigger.

- the cool thing about this view (Mix on the 64th floor of The Hotel) is that we could actually see bats flying into the Luxor’s beam—presumably to catch insects attracted to the light

There are roughly 10,000 people here at the Mandalay Bay Convention Center. The first SharePoint conference I attended had roughly 400 attendees and last year’s event was about 7500. That’s amazing growth.

- excellent to see NCompass Labs mentioned in the SharePoint timeline

- 10,000 people having breakfast

SharePoint Conference Keynote

#spc12 was the top trending tag on Twitter during the keynote this morning. What’s even more impressive about that is that 10.000 attendees from 85 countries can pretty easily overwhelm the network. I couldn’t even get on.

I was wondering about the strong Yammer content at this show (including the keynote), but now it makes sense to me.  Microsoft is working hard on the SharePoint/Yammer integration, so waiting for the next SharePoint conference would be too long. During the keynote, they showed the current integration, talked about the future and demo’d a Windows 8 app for Yammer. Also, they announced that Yammer will be free with SharePoint online (inc. features you'd have to pay for in the paid Yammer subscription today).

I was impressed with the customer video. It featured a Nationwide SharePoint “Spot” solution that uses Yammer today. It looked great. I was also impressed that the keynote Office 365 videos were run out of one of the European data centers. That was a gutsy move for such important demos and they looked great. Microsoft wanted to make the point that performance doesn’t have to suffer because you move to the cloud and that point was clear.

The exhibit hall is about 30% larger and boasts 250 partners. I’ll have to write more about the exhibit hall. There are a number of additions to the exhibit hall this year including the community lounge.

And here’s a random Vegas image for you…

- coolest vine rack in Vegas… baby

Microsoft MVP Summit 2012 is Coming

Next week is the Microsoft Most Valuable Professional (MVP) Summit. I enjoyed last year’s summit very much, so I’m looking forward to this year’s event. You can read about the summit on the MVP Award Program Blog:

“This year, more than 1,500 MVPs will travel from 70 countries to meet with members of the Microsoft community. They share their valuable real-world feedback with our product teams to help drive improvements and innovation in Microsoft technologies, and they learn about what’s new and what’s coming in our products.”

The summit takes place in Redmond and Bellevue and it the best chance to spend time with other MVP award recipients. The tracks are divided by topic, so I’ll mainly be seeing the SharePoint and Office 365 MVPs.

The sessions are presented by SharePoint team members, so it’s a great chance to pick the brains of the product team members. Not to mention there are still a few people who I worked with during my time on the MCMS and SharePoint teams, so it will be great to see some old friends as well.

- last year’s attendee party was at Safeco Field

SharePoint Saturday Honolulu 2011

This year marked the first SharePoint Saturday Honolulu event. And to distinguish themselves, they held the event on a Friday. I greatly enjoyed this event and it was well organized, so hats off to the organizing committee and the volunteers. It also didn’t hurt that I got to spend the week in Oahu, Hawaii.

- Yes, it was on a Friday

At the event, I presented a session about the SharePoint 2010 SP1 supportability changes and how these changes affect real-world storage considerations. Naturally, since Remote BLOB Storage (BLOB offloading) is the future of SharePoint storage management, I spent a good deal of my time talking about RBS.

I also enjoyed being on the Ask the Experts panel, which featured some prominent SharePoint community characters and some great conversation.

- Yes, that’s a dinosaur foot behind me. Honolulu Community College has dinosaurs

Thank you to the organizers and thanks for the invite to return next year. BTW –the real flower leis upon arrival were a nice touch.

Speaking at SharePoint Saturday Honolulu

I’m pleased to be presenting at SharePoint Saturday Honolulu, Dec 2, 2011. I’ve been fortunate to present at a number of SharePoint Saturday events—from small ones all the way up to SharePoint Saturday the Conference in DC.

I’ll be doing a presentation about the SharePoint 2010 SP1 supportability changes. I’ve never been to Hawaii, so I’m looking forward to seeing the islands as well.

Yes, SharePoint Saturday Honolulu is on Friday.

I’m Speaking at Microsoft TechDays in Vancouver

This year, I’ll be presenting a session about migration file shares to Microsoft SharePoint at Microsoft TechDays 2011 in Vancouver.

I’ve attended TechDays Halifax in the past, but this will be my first session at the conference.

Microsoft SharePoint Conference 2011 Wrap-up

This year’s sold out Microsoft SharePoint Conference (#SPC11) was so busy for me that it caught me a little off guard. You know those blog posts about preparing for conferences that list things such as stocking up on business cards and organizing meetings ahead of time, well I ran out of cards and completely ran out of time to talk to all the people I had meant to chat with. That same craziness explains why this post is just a tad late.

This year’s conference was October 3-6 in Anaheim, CA at the Anaheim Convention Center. Right next to Disneyland, you could argue that this is the happiest convention center on Earth.

The show was a smashing success for Metalogix—one of the reasons it was so busy for me. We had our most popular booth ever, talked our throats dry about SharePoint and Office 365, hosted multiple parties and met with countless partners and customers. We also had a pretty popular Metalogix prize giveaway.

The Anaheim convention center is a great venue

A swarm of people at the Metalogix booth

After the exhibit hall closed, I managed a shot without people blocking the Metalogix booth

Microsoft rented Disneyland for the attendee party. The last time I went to Disneyland was in 2005 for the E3 conference. I was happy to be able to ride Splash Mountain this time around as it went down for maintenance while I was in line last time. And, no, I didn’t get wet; others from Metalogix came out soaked, but I basically got sprayed once.

The @NBSharePoint “I’m just here for SharePint” shirt (I’m holding Minnie Mouse ears for my daughter)

At this year’s show, I presented a session with Steve Marsh about considerations for creating SharePoint farms with terabytes of data. Our session was literally the last one in the guide. It was fun closing the conference, but I have to admit that I prefer to speak early and then have the rest of the event to meet with people; until I actually speak, I can’t help but tweak my presentation, so it’s always on my mind.

The rooms were darkly lit, so not a great speaker photo op

Metalogix also had great representation in other sessions. For example, the session about the Microsoft Search First Initiative, co-presented by our partners Microsoft and Arcovis.

I’ll finish with one more shot of the venue. Doesn’t this image just yell, “SharePoint in the cloud?”

All in all, SPC11 was a great event and I’m really psyched about the Microsoft SharePoint Conference (#SPC12) in Las Vegas in 2012.

SharePoint Conference Attendance Is Down–Is that a problem?

There are many, many, SharePoint conferences around the world. But the biggest one remains the Microsoft SharePoint Conference (SPC). It happens about every 18 months or so and it’s the official event for all things SharePoint. This year’s conference is October 3-6 in Anaheim, CA and many of the attendees are thrilled that Microsoft has rented Disneyland for the attendee party.

One interesting statistic about this year’s conference (#SPC11) is that registration is rumoured to be lower than the last show. The last SharePoint conference, SPC 2009, boasted an impressive 7,400 attendees at a time when the economy was still reeling from the crash. At that show, there was a buzz (and I was contributing to it) about how SharePoint was so healthy that there was no sign of the recession in the SharePoint space. By comparison, the 2007 conference had 3,800 attendees.

[Update: I’m told that registration has been solid right down to the wire and we should all stay tuned to see what the real number is when the show starts on Monday.]

[Update to the update: It has just been announced (the Friday before the show) that the conference has sold out. The actual attendee number hasn’t been announced yet.]

So, the rumoured lower attendance this year begs the question, “Is this a sign of a slow down in the SharePoint community?” and by extension, a problem that Microsoft needs to worry about? My position is that there is no issue and my rationale is threefold: the SharePoint business is healthy, this is the worst time in the SharePoint release cycle for a conference, and the SharePoint community is healthy.

The SharePoint business is healthy

SharePoint was the fastest Microsoft product in history to reach $1 Billion in revenue. That’s quite an accomplishment and it might be tempting for the SharePoint group to rest on their laurels. Well, that’s not the way Microsoft works. Product group employees typically change jobs every two years or so. That’s not to say that the whole team that shipped Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 (MOSS) has moved on to other projects, but most of them are likely in different roles and that means this is their first release with their current responsibilities. That’s one of the techniques at Microsoft for keeping employees engaged.

In a recent survey conducted by Metalogix Software and ESG, “which surveyed 3,129 IT professionals, 64 percent of North American and Western European organizations are currently using SharePoint, while an additional 12 percent intend to within the next 24 months. This overwhelmingly confirms that SharePoint is now considered to be a top business application – 80 percent ranked it among their top 10 business applications- a significant update since the March 2009 survey.”

Of course, there’s another key factor in the outlook for SharePoint. In short, Office 365 changes the landscape of SharePoint market potential. Office 365 is Microsoft’s cloud offering that includes SharePoint 2010. For many companies out there, the attraction to the economics of the cloud will have them taking a long hard look at the silver lining of the Office 365 cloud (yes, that’s a mangled metaphor I know, sorry). Also, as I recently discussed in a couple of Metalogix hybrid cloud webinars, there are many scenarios that organizations are looking at which involve both SharePoint Online (e.g., Office 365) and SharePoint on-premises.

This is the worst time in the release cycle for a conference

We’re basically in the middle of the SharePoint release cycle. It’s a terrible time for a conference since the Beta of the next version is not out yet and the current release has been out for some time. This makes the conference a tougher sell for many people who have to justify the time and expense to their managers.

The SharePoint community is healthy

If you have any doubts at all about the SharePoint community, just call up Dux Raymond Sy (@meetdux)—or any of the organizers for that matter—and ask how SharePoint Saturday the Conference went in DC this year. It was roughly twice the size of the same event last year and, at the time, that was the largest SharePoint Saturday event ever.

The SharePoint community is stronger than ever and it’s showing no signs of slowing. There are dozens of SharePoint experts around the world taking time out of their lives to travel to SharePoint conferences and deliver educational sessions. In fact, organizers of these events are receiving hundreds more session proposals than they can accommodate. The vibrant SharePoint community is envied by many and things are humming along just fine.

- signing a book at SPSTC in DC

And now, my shameless plug: I’ll be doing a book signing at the Metalogix booth (we’re giving away copies of How to Do Everything: SharePoint 2010) and I’ll be co-presenting a session with Dr. Steve Marsh, on Thursday, October 6, at noon. The session is entitled, “At Last - Size Doesn’t Matter! Considerations for building a SharePoint ECM platform to accommodate TBs of Content” and will focus on three different customer scenarios that demonstrate how to free your SharePoint content.

- the Metalogix billboard on Interstate 105 in Anaheim

I’m speaking at the Microsoft SharePoint Conference 2011

I’ll be presenting a session at the Microsoft SharePoint Conference 2011 (#SPC11) in Anaheim, CA. I’ve had the honour of speaking at this show in the past—going back to the “Portal Airlift” in 2001. Last time, at SPC09, I presented a session on upgrading/migration to SharePoint 2010.

This year’s attendee party is at Disneyland, so I’m sure lots of people are excited about that.

Of course, Metalogix will also have a strong presence at the big event as well. If you’re attending the show, look for the Metalogix booth in the exhibitor’s hall.

What is SharePoint Governance to YOU? - Stephen Cawood

A couple of weeks ago at SharePoint Saturday The Conference in
DC, I recorded a short video for NothingButSharePoint.com’s video blog series What is SharePoint Governance to YOU?
I hadn’t announced GovernanceHx yet, so I didn’t talk about my own community project to provide SharePoint Governance administration in the cloud. But now that GovernanceHx has been announced, it’s clear why I chose the particular message for my contribution to What is SharePoint Governance to YOU? Check out the GovernanceHx post for more details.

Speaking at SharePoint Saturday The Conference 2011

I had a great time this weekend presenting at SharePoint Saturday The Conference. It was the largest SharePoint Saturday event ever and it’s a great credit to the teams of organizers, volunteers, vendors and speakers that it went so well.

It is truly remarkable how the SharePoint community continues to produce these sorts of quality events. With 280 sessions, you can imagine how much effort went into the three days.

Where else can you see a talent show where a Metalogix employee (Corey) sings Mack the Knife while migrating a SharePoint 2007 site to SharePoint 2010?

At this year’s show, I co-presented two sessions about SharePoint migration and BLOB offloading with fellow Metalogix employee Corey Milliman and I also did two book signings for How to Do Everything: SharePoint 2010.

So now that #SPSTCDC is over, what will I do? I’m goin’ to Disneyland!

(For those who haven't heard, the attendee party is at Disneyland)

Metalogix Loves SharePoint Saturday

This weekend I was in New York for SharePoint Saturday. I presented a session on migrating to Microsoft Office 365 (Metalogix was a Microsoft Office 365 sponsor). This was the third time I’ve attended the SharePoint Saturday New York event and I always enjoy going. This year was no exception, there were some great speakers and things ran smoothly.

In addition to sponsoring the event, we wanted to do something different. What we came up with was to post “Metalogix loves SharePoint” sign in Times Square. It was great to walk around Times Square and see the Metalogix logo between an infinite number of ads for the Smurfs. Metalogix is also giving away Flip cameras to people who tweeted photos of the billboard.

You can read all about it on the Metalogix blog: Metalogix Loves SharePoint Saturday, NY

Metalogix was a proud Microsoft Office 365 sponsor at SharePoint Saturday New York this weekend. To show our pride, we arranged to have "Metalogix loves SharePoint" shown on one of the big billboards in Times Square.

We also held a contest to win Flip cameras. People who took a photo of the Metalogix billboard in Times Square tweeted their photos to the @metalogix Twitter account and are now entered to win a camera. We will be notifying the winners of the Flip cameras this week.

Speaking at SharePoint Saturday New York 2011

For the third year in a row, I’ll enjoy the privilege of being at the SharePoint Saturday New York (#spsnyc) community conference.

Metalogix is the Office 365 sponsor and I’ll be speaking about SharePoint upgrade and migration.

website: http://www.sharepointsaturday.org/ny

Featured in MVP Summit Video on TechNet

During the Microsoft MVP Summit Earlier this month, I participated in a video question session where Microsoft MVPs talked about how they currently use online resources.

If you blink, you’ll miss me, but you can see the video on TechNet.com. I’ll have to work on my showmanship—although, in my defense, I was sick as a dog during the conference and trying to keep that fact to myself.

 

Question 2 in the same series.

Microsoft MVP Summit 2011

I’m currently in Vancouver and tomorrow I’ll be making my way down to the Seattle area for the Microsoft MVP Summit. Last October, I received an MVP Award for Microsoft SharePoint, so this is my first visit to the summit.

Unfortunately, for my blog, everything at the summit is under the umbrella of the MVP non-disclosure agreement, so I won’t be able to blog or tweet about the content of the sessions.

As usual, I’ll try to find time to meet up with my former colleagues in the area, but I’m really looking forward to the summit itself. The main keynote speaker is Steve Ballmer, CEO, Microsoft. I once lost $10 because a friend bet me that I’d speak to or shake hands with Ballmer or Gates within a year of starting work in Redmond. I bumped into Ballmer backstage at a Microsoft conference in New Orleans and I was $10 the poorer.

Microsoft Tech Days in Halifax!

Microsoft TechDays is in Halifax November 2-3 at the World Trade Centre.

This is a great local event and I’m happy to see that Microsoft decided to come back to Halifax after the sold out show last year.

From the Tech Days session page: “If you're a technical professional in Canada, review from the six tracks offered through the two day Tech•Days experience in each venue. Select from over 50 sessions to build your schedule.”

Last night, I went to the speaker dinner and met a bunch of the people who have flown in to present on various topics.

I highly recommend this event. Check it out!