My experiences as a Microsoft MVP, Office 365 & SharePoint Architect, Administrator, and Consultant
I am happy to announce that I’ll be speaking and attending SQL Saturday Atlanta on July 15th. As one of the largest SQL Saturday events in the USA, we always have a great time of learning and meeting new people.
Please join me – Register via the #SQLSatAtlanta site.
[UPDATED]
Thank you everyone that attended my session – a big group with lots of great questions!
During the SharePoint Summit this month, Microsoft shared the road-map for things to come for SharePoint on-premises and SharePoint Online. If you haven’t heard all the announcements, go watch the recording now. After watching and learning about what was coming, I have a few questions I would like to get answered and my friend Darrell Webster has arranged a way for us all to get those answers!
Darrell is participating in the Digital Workplace Conference in Auckland New Zealand and has invited a few of his Microsoft MVP friends to be part of a live panel asking questions of Microsoft’s own Mark Kashman. I will join Christian Buckley, Alistair Pugin, and Loryan Strant to ask Mark the tough, burning questions we all want to have answered. Do you have questions you want me to ask? Let me know on Twitter!
We are going to have a great time – it all starts Tuesday May 23, 2017, 4pm Central time ( May 24, 2017 9:00 am Auckland time), and if you can’t join in person, you can view it live on Facebook or live on YouTube!
Microsoft announced today the newest improvement in workflow for the SharePoint platform – easy-to-use approval workflows built-in that will enable you to route a document for approval and give you the ability to give a custom message.
In my workflow presentations, I talk about having a simple approval workflow being a great first step but we need a better user experience than what we have been given out-of-the-box with SharePoint in the past. We need the user to be able to approve/deny directly within their email client, without having to go to a SharePoint page, edit the task, complete the task, and then save it. Too many steps!!
With this new functionality using Microsoft Flow, we will now be able to ad-hoc route documents for approval and approval participant will have a one-step action link in their email.
Make sure you check out the new Microsoft Mechanics video “Zero code business process apps in SharePoint with PowerApps and Microsoft Flow” showing this and other improvements to the SharePoint experience.
Today Microsoft announced the next step for PowerApps integration with SharePoint – using PowerApps forms within the context of a SharePoint list or library.
This is another way PowerApps is becoming a strong successor to InfoPath forms and will give your users a rich viewing, creating, and editing experience right within their SharePoint library or list.
This feature will be coming to SharePoint Online & Office 365 this Summer and I expect we will immediately start using the functionality within my client organizations to improve the user experience.
I highly recommend watching the new Microsoft Mechanics video “Zero code business process apps in SharePoint with PowerApps and Microsoft Flow” to get an idea on how the forms will be created and used.
Join me on June 3rd at SQL Saturday Pensacola! I will be teaching the Keys to Successful SharePoint Administration for DBAs and if you are in town I would love for you to attend my session.
Registration is open now! SQLSat Pensacola Info
The Music City Code conference is once again taking place in Nashville and I am excited to be speaking! I was part of a community panel for the 2016 event, and this year I am giving a presentation on using Power BI to bring dashboards to SharePoint.
My first session will be Jun 2nd at 9:30am in room Rand 306. I will also be joining Lisa Anderson’s session as part of a Microsoft MVP panel at 2:40pm on Jun 2nd in room Alumni Classroom 201. Hope to see you at both sessions!
The event runs from June 1-3 – registration is now open! Music City Code Info
[UPDATE]
Thank you everyone who came attended my morning session & joined the MVP discussion. Music City Code is a fantastic event and the attendees were awesome!
What a beautiful room for my MVP talk at #MusicCityCode! Thanks to the attendees and the MVP Panelists! pic.twitter.com/E5vPOZYQuX
— Lisa Anderson (@LisaAnderson312) June 3, 2017
I am presenting at the Nashville Modern Excel user group on April 13, 2017 – come join us! My talk will focus on using SharePoint to build business intelligence dashboards with Power BI and Excel.
Register on the user group site: Nashville Excel & Power BI User Group
[UPDATE]
Thank you to everyone who attended my presentation – what a great group!
For years now, power users have created solutions using Access Services within SharePoint. These solutions have often been the backbone of many business processes for small to medium-sized organizations. Now that Office 365 is widely available and is fairly cost-effective for those organizations, we have new options to solve those business needs.
Microsoft PowerApps is a new member of the Office 365 family and now that PowerApps is generally available within Office 365, Microsoft is recommending to organizations that solutions built with Access Services be migrated to the PowerApps service.
Access Services & Access Web Apps shipped with SharePoint 2016 and will continue being supported as part of the SharePoint product life-cycle.
Moving forward, information workers should build their apps using PowerApps on top of SharePoint lists to give the feature-rich solutions their users need with the full on-going support of Microsoft and the tech community.
Last December I posted the news that Microsoft will allow Office 365 admins to postpone the removal of their Office 365 public sites – which are special SharePoint Online site collections that can be used as an internet site for companies.
There wasn’t a big announcement on how to actually do the postponing, which is understandable as Microsoft would rather you not keep your public site so they don’t have to support it.
To postpone the deletion of your SharePoint Online public site, go to the SharePoint admin center – the URL location is in the format: https://[ReplaceWithYourTenantName]-admin.sharepoint.com/_layouts/15/online/SiteCollections.aspx – and go to the settings page. For the setting “Postpone deletion of SharePoint Online public websites”, select I’d like to keep my public website until March 31, 2018.
As the setting notes, you will have until March 31, 2018 to find a replacement for your public internet site. Don’t wait! Start a project now to make the change so next March doesn’t sneak up on you. Contact me if I can help with your transition.
The business intelligence landscape in SharePoint has a new and improved story to tell with Power BI! Join me on April 13th at the Nashville Excel & Power BI User Group – I present a session on Power BI Dashboards in SharePoint Online.
The presentation will be heavy on demos as I walk through the BI options in SharePoint – using list views, Excel, and Power BI – to tell great data stories. I will also show the awesomeness of the Power BI mobile app on iOS!
The meeting is free and lunch is provided! Register: Nashville Excel & Power BI Meetup
