Key takeaways from my first European SharePoint Conference
Working for more than 8 years with SharePoint and Office365 I was looking forward to attending my first ESPC. I was filled with excitement about meeting a lot of passionate people, learning from them and sharing our experiences working on Microsoft technologies.
My favorite sessions were presented by:
Chris O’Brien, who emphasized useful skills and techniques for delivering solutions in Office 365 that should be in every experienced coder’s toolbox. Here are some of them:
- Working effectively with the Microsoft Graph from Postman (and coding against the JSON returned)
- Calling a back-end API (e.g. an Azure Function) securely from SharePoint, with SPFx isolated web parts and AAD auth (hint: use KeyVault references in your Azure Function app settings)
- Templating SharePoint sites effectively with Site Designs and PnP templates
Laura Kokkarinen gave an on-point summary of the capabilities of Site Design and Site Scripts, and how we can use these to create consistent experiences for our users. Some takeaways:
- There is a limit of 100 site scripts and 100 site designs per tenant
- You can use sitedesigner.io to build your site design
- Or you can export it from an already existing site using the new command: GetSPOSiteScriptFromWeb (at the moment not documented, but here is a demo from the community call)
- Check out her impressions on ESPC
And last but not least… the great Scott Hanselman, who rose and exceeded my expectations. He gave a thrilling presentation about how the latest advancements in technology empower us; we should not be nostalgic that the old technologies that we used so often are now being overthrown by newer, cooler ones.
The only constant in this world is change, we should be happy that this change is making us more productive. With all the power that Microsoft is giving us, we don’t need to focus on plumbing, but rather on bringing business value to our customers.
Many other sessions would be worth mentioning, including Vesa Juvonen’s introduction to Fluid Framework and Project Cortex. Be sure to follow the progress on these new cool features and services. You can also check out his interview during ESPC, where you can get a preview of the topics covered in his sessions.
During the breaks, I visited the vendor booths and learned a lot about the latest products and services built on top of the Microsoft365 suite. I got to know many great products that I can further recommend to our customers.
Top 3 ideas I came home with:
- Enforced one of my core beliefs: focus on what brings business value to our customers, pick the right tools for the job.
- The Microsoft 365 ecosystem is changing fast, attending such a conference helps us stay in touch with the community.
- There are a lot of products on top of Office 365 that are quite similar, identifying a core differentiator is of utmost importance in order to thrive in the market.
The atmosphere was awesome. You could feel that everyone was happy to be there, from the vendors at the sponsor booths to speakers and attendees. The organizers were very fast to adapt to any change in the schedule. The speakers were carefully chosen to meet all expectations: from deep technical dives for developers to business-focused sessions for strategic decision-makers.
I will attend future ESPC events for sure!
