SharePoint Engage 2017 in Phoenix

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The SharePoint Engage conference held by the SharePoint Institute will include various sessions on topics ranging from users, project focus, and more advanced topics, which will be taught by SharePoint experts, Microsoft Certified Trainers, and Microsoft MVPs. You will get the chance to have your questions answered by SharePoint experts and engage with your fellow SharePoint peers. With all of this practical knowledge you will be able to take advantage of what you have learned immediately in your own environment. Don't miss out on learning how SharePoint is evolving and progressing and what may be expected from future releases.

Peter Carson, President of Envision IT, will be speaking at and also sponsoring the event. Keep an eye out for our Extranet User Manager booth at the conference. Envision IT’s Extranet User Manager product (EUM) turns your Extranet into a seamless portal that quickly and securely allows users inside and outside your network to collaborate and share information. With delegation, anyone can be given rights to manage the set of external users and the groups they belong to, as well as self-registration and approval workflows. In the cloud we now support Azure B2B and Office 365, and on-premises we act as an identity provider with password management, lost password reset, and single sign-on with multi-factor authentication.

Session - Electronic Forms and Alternative SharePoint App Approaches

Building fully interactive electronic forms and apps can be a complex undertaking. Power user tools such as Nintex Forms or Microsoft InfoPath can be great for non-developers, but often do not take you all the way there, or can't be customized exactly the way that is desired. Using the SharePoint Apps model is a potential solution, but it can be much more complex than the solution needs to be. In this session we’ll look at alternatives to these approaches, with techniques that can be leveraged both with today’s script editor web part and the still in preview SharePoint Framework (SPFx).

We'll start by looking at how we can build rich, interactive HTML forms using common open-source techniques. Bootstrap is one that allows us to build fully responsive forms that adapt to a changing browser size on tablets and phones as well as desktops, and provides an ideal experience on all devices. We'll also touch on HTML engines such as Handlebars or Knockout that allow us to generate the HTML quickly and dynamically. Lastly, we'll cover how to save that form information. Whether it is going directly into SharePoint, or updating other line of business systems, REST APIs are our approach here. Don't worry if you're not a coder, we're going to stay at the conceptual level. The key is that REST is a very standard way of communicating between systems. We can use the built-in REST methods provided by Microsoft in SharePoint (whether On-Premises or in Office 365), or we can build our own if we need to run with elevated permissions (important in a lot of electronic forms) or access other systems. Security and single sign-on is an important aspect of this, and we achieve this without all the complexity of traditional SharePoint apps.

Some of the examples that we'll show during the session are:

• Vacation request form (both simple and a more complex SAP integrated example)
• Pension portal with address and banking change forms, and a pension calculator
• An anonymous library resource booking form for a secondary school
• A Bootstrap compatible responsive global navigation control driven from the SharePoint term store

The examples will be for both Office 365 and On-Premises SharePoint 2013 / 2016.