SharePoint Fest 2016 in Chicago

At SharePoint Fest you’ll be able to attend technical classes and workshops – taught by Microsoft Certified Trainers, Microsoft engineers, and Microsoft MVPs – covering Enterprise Content Management, Power Users, Social SharePoint, Business Value, Implementation/Administration, Office 365, Workflow, Business Intelligence, Special Topics, and SharePoint Development. There are sessions created for SharePoint administrators, software developers, information architects and knowledge workers which will ensure that you and your team walk away with as much knowledge as you desire to truly leverage SharePoint.

Peter Carson from Envision IT will be delivering two sessions. His first session is Running Effective Projects in Office 365​ and the second is Electronic Forms and Alternative SharePoint App Approaches​.

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 - Running Effective Projects in Office 365

Many organizations create project site templates to manage their projects in SharePoint, either online or on-premises. However SharePoint is only part of the equation when it comes to collaborating effectively on projects. Office 365 Groups attempt to go further with that, but end up scaling back on what you can do in SharePoint. We've blended the best of both together.

This session will cover the following:

• Review of a projects site template we've created in Office 365 using SharePoint Online and Office 365 Groups
• How we extend the Office 365 Groups UI, and also include it in the SharePoint sites
• Build a site creation workflow process to automate the creation of sites and groups in Office 365, project groups in Extranet User Manager, and configure all the permissions
• Use Nintex Forms and Workflows to drive this process
• Inviting external users into the project site with Extranet User Manager
• How to maintain private internal content and project content shared with the external group
• Single sign-on to other project tools outside of Office 365

Benefits:

• Leverage Office 365 Groups and Team Sites together
• Provide effective governance around creating and using project sites
• Include people from outside your organization in your collaborative project sites

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, highlighted by real-world scenarios where we have implemented them.

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.​