Microsoft addresses the burning need most communities of SharePoint 2013 users will face when they consider eschewing full trust solutions for systems built with the new Office (SharePoint) App Model in a video tutorial titled Transform SharePoint Customizations to SharePoint App Model: (01) Introduction to App Model Transition Tasks. This video is led by 2 Senior Program Managers at Microsoft: Steve Walker and Vesa Juvonen The video is the first of a set of six video tutorials on this topic, which were all published on December 18, 2014. The intended audience are “IT pros, consultants, Office developers, and Microsoft partners”….
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While promoting the availability of Office 365 APIs, Microsoft also recently provided extensive video training on the SharePoint App Model
During the month of December, 2014, Microsoft published over 5 hours of video training content on the SharePoint App Model. This training has been packaged into 6 segments, each approximately 50 minutes in length. Each segment is led by two senior program managers who each bring extensive experience with SharePoint to the task: Steve Walker and Vesa Juvonen. I have already written a post to this blog on the second segment in this set. The title of my post is Microsoft recommends branding SharePoint Online, Office 365 with themes, alternate CSS and other CSOM methods rather than creating custom master…
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One more article on the importance of governance to a healthy SharePoint implementation worth a review
Any enterprise content management (ECM) system (including solutions built on Microsoft’s SharePoint Server, on-premises, and/or SharePoint Online, Office 365) should include governance, if it is to be successful. Joe Shepley provides a succinct presentation of the importance of governance in an article titled The SharePoint Information Problem, which was published on the CMSWire website in April of 2014. What I found most helpful about this article is how Shepley connects dysfunctional information management systems built with SharePoint, to what he calls a typical, broader enterprise malaise: “But when you start to dig deeper and ask why organizations have lacked the…
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Why a governance plan for SharePoint should be implemented for software dependent on the platform
SharePoint 2013, on-premises, and SharePoint Online (a component of Microsoft’s Office 365 application suite) present stakeholders with a set of challenges. Perhaps this is nothing new, and normal for any decision to implement a computer technology solution for a specific organization, and its unique set of characteristics. But for any organization with a long-standing commitment to SharePoint, planning a migration to either platform from a predecessor can be especially daunting if a set of custom applications already exists. In this case the question becomes one of how best to migrate this already amortized investment in custom software over to a…
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Be sure to include an ongoing adoption effort in your SharePoint, or SharePoint Online plan
A couple of recently published articles by prominent individuals in the SharePoint community – Chris Riley and Christian Buckley – remind me of an important feature of SharePoint plans more likely to succeed. These plans treat the challenge of user adoption as a chronic condition requiring continuous effort. Riley’s article is Why I Left ECM. The article by Christian Buckley is titled As SharePoint Moves Toward the Cloud, Governance Remains a Priority. While I am at this task, I might as well include a third article, which was published on December 29, 2014, titled ECM isn’t delivering. The common thread…
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Microsoft recommends branding SharePoint Online, Office 365 with themes, alternate CSS and other CSOM methods rather than creating custom master pages
In a video tutorial available to the public on MSDN’s Channel 9, Microsoft presents an argument for branding SharePoint Online, Office 365 sites with themes and other CSOM methods. The title of this video tutorial is Transform SharePoint Customizations to SharePoint App Model: (02) Controlling Branding in SharePoint Using App Model. The tutorial is included in the Microsoft Virtual Academy Jump Start collection and is led by Steve Walker and Vesa Juvonen, who are both Senior Program Managers with Microsoft. One recommendation is repeated over and over again throughout this tutorial, which comprises about one hour of video: don’t create…
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Microsoft changes how Office 365 business users access OneDrive
Apparently Microsoft has changed how Office 365 business users access OneDrive. We maintain an Enterprise E3 plan Office 365 account. I noticed recently the link for OneDrive had been removed from our SharePoint Online user interface (UI). Not only had the link been removed from the Global Navigation set of links on our site, but three new sets of links had been added to our site template, on a horizontal bar located above the global navigation links: Sites Office 365 and a grid-like symbol (or checkerboard), with neither a title, nor a mouse-hover description It appears this new section of…
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With Office 365 APIs available, is there any reason to use the SharePoint app model to build custom solutions for SharePoint Online?
On Monday, December 22, 2014, Sahil Malik of Winsmart published a post titled SharePoint App Model: Rest in Peace on the Winsmart.com blog. The post presents Microsoft’s public announcement of the availability of APIs for Office 365 as a telltale indicator of the demise of the SharePoint 2013 App Model. At least for SharePoint Online. VisualSP has published a considerable amount of training content on the SharePoint 2013 app model. In turn, I wrote a considerable amount of content to this blog on the app model and why, in my opinion, the app model made sense. So I carefully read…
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Microsoft announces the end of the SharePoint Online Public Websites feature of Office 365
On December 22, 2014, a number of online commentators on Microsoft’s Office 365 product published content about Microsoft’s announced decision to remove the Public Websites feature of SharePoint Online. Readers interested in learning more about this announcement are encouraged to read a post to Microsoft’s Support blog, titled Information about upcoming changes to the SharePoint Online Public Website. The decision to remove this feature appears to be entirely consistent, to this writer, when it is considered along with Microsoft’s highly publicized decision, back in October, 2012, to remove Design View (a WYSIWYG editor) from SharePoint Designer 2013. Back then, the…
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A recent study points to serious interest in hybrid computing scenarios across enterprise businesses
On December 19, 2014, CMSWire published No Best of Breed in Cloud Computing – Yet. This article was written by Dom Nicastro. The topic prompting the article is a survey just released by Technology Business Research Inc. The TBR study includes some promising predictions for proponents of hybrid computing scenarios as the best approach for large organizations in the public, private and not-for-profit sectors as they move closer to implementing cloud computing scenarios. Nicastro writes “TBR . . . predicted that public, private and hybrid cloud integration will follow cloud professional services growth in coming years — private cloud adoption…
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