Showing posts with label conference. Show all posts
Showing posts with label conference. Show all posts

Wednesday 15 November 2023

Ignite 2023 - Keynotes - Summary

15 & 16 November 2023

Good Keynote: AI is driving a lot of innovation.

Microsoft Fabric in GA (25k instances already).  New feature is 'Mirroring' - copy cosmos/SQL et al into Fabric.  OneLake.  Can bring lots of data from multiple sources into Fabric in near rela time.

MS Teams (320 million users):  Bring everything to the user in one place, not just communications but a canvas for apps.  Good place to build line of business applications.  New teams app - way faster, easier to use.  Teams Premium - intelligent meeting recap is working well, can integrate recap with copilot. 

Copilots - needed for nearly everything you do.  understand context of where you are.  MS has hundreds of copilots.

Copilot Studio - Custom GPT's, can add plugin's to add your own data, can hook into an enterprises unique data.

Copilot for Service - allows agents to get information to provide support, looks interesting.

Personal thoughts: AI is going to be a mega trend that will influence the world hugely, there will be lots of weird decisions on the journey. Currently, it is mainly proving useful as another tool to help improve existing processes.  AI helps me work faster and spend my time on exploration rather than bring base understanding together.

Part 2 Keynote:

Microsoft Graph gives the copilot context within an organisation.  Use plugins to add enterprise data or Open AI GPT's.

Surface Pro Hub 3 released  - looks good, rest of the hardware looks higher spec.

SharePoint Premium - improved knowledge and content management on SharePoint.

Copilot Studio - useful to build internal copilots.  1. Connect copilot to other systems using plugins or GPTs 2. create workflows 3.  Controlled by IT.

Copilot Studio overview

Mesh - Teams can join immersive experience/events, not sure what this means.  GA expected Jan 2024.

Microsoft 365 copilot release to GA 1 November. 

Why Copilot? MS are describing it as a productivity multiplier.  Allows users to be more productive and more creative.  Improves quality of work, avoids searching - as expected.  Makes mistakes but is getting better.

Microsoft Copilot - Bing chat is just MS copilot

So when logging use Entra Id (Azure AD), get contextual enterprise information.  Inherits security and privacy policies.  ACL controlled.  Includes MS graph and Apps.

Try it out: Copilot.microsoft.com  - Chat data is not saved/stored by MS.  Change from "web" to "work".  Also available in Windows taskbar

Ability to use copilot to pull in information, show more graphs, get data.  Good word example getting data from a pptx.

Great example of querying Excel using copilot, created a pivot table. Contrived but looks good, added rainfall from web to look at sales.  Powerful.

Never thought of copilots for being a participant in a meeting - might us amazing.  In teams meeting, takes real time notes, and pulls in info and summaries points for next meeting.  Add as a collaborative partner, can visualize discussions on a meeting whiteboard.

Loop - flexible collaboration, now with copilot.  Not my area but sounds impressive - i don't get it.  People, working with people, now also working with copilot.  Okay.

Copilot for Sales - looks promising.  Hooks into existing CRMs.

Copilot for Service - working with customers, get data that is correct to solve customers problems.  Concise summary, helps craft emails, updates CRM.  Looks very interesting!

Viva - Microsoft copilot dashboard powered by Viva - not sure on this topic.

Summary: People using copilot don't want to loose it.  AI is bringing big changes to many industries.  Promise is to take the grind out of work - sounds great let's see.  Copilot/AI will be a tool and shape how we work.

Saturday 9 November 2013

IaC Presentation for SharePoint Saturday UK

Overview: I am presenting at SharePoint Saturday UK (9 November 2013).  This post contains my slide deck and will answer any questions that arise from the session.

SharePoint Saturday UK 2013 Web Site

 Infrastructure as Code for SharePoint 2013 PowerPoint Presentation

Outline of the session:
Creating automated farm builds is key to having a stable SharePoint on-prem. service. This session looks at how and why automating infrastructure, SharePoint 2013 builds and assets is a good idea. The session is heavily focused on Infrastructure as Code (IaC). I look at building a large on premise SP2013 stretched farm on stable repeatable infrastructure that includes SSRS, WCA/OWA and Blob storage.

This is a technical overview for IT pro’s & architects, throwing in best practices for looking at large SharePoint 2013 deployments. Concepts such as devops and Continuous Delivery (CD) are examined. PowerShell is extensively used with several takeaways provided to jumpstart SharePoint 2013 service creation via IaC.

Sunday 9 December 2012

SharePoint Saturday UK 2012

Great event again, it amazes me that such a great place to get info meet people learn about SharePoint attracts 250 people - that is free.  Sure you need to give up your time and it is a long way but more folks involved with SP in the UK should be at these events.

Mark Macrae, Anthony Pounder & Brett Lonsdale set up SharePoint Saturday, it's huge, the speakers are great and give their time.  People who attend are good to speak too.  So my thanks to the speakers, the 3 fellas mentioned above and Rik from BlackMarble (great conversation).

The presentations I saw were with my thoughts:
  • Wes Hackett (Bring SP into your Office with Apps for Office), I saw a fair amount of this at SPC but Wes brought some good ideas and presented the topic extremely well.  Apps are really powerful in Office and SP2013 but I'm not sold it's going to work as well as MS are preaching.
  • Bill Ayers (Lean-Agile Development with SharePoint), best session I went to.  Had a chat with Chris, Alan (Eardly) & Bill afterwards - really  good stuff, with a topic relevant to my current project.  Unit test and SP are not a great combination in my opinion sure you can using a Mocking framework but I'm not sold, the learning curve for the team is high (effective TDD takes time no matter how many converted devs tell me it's simple), you spend time mocking.  The list goes on and the right projects with the right management buy in 100% I'm behind it I just think it's probably less than 10% of SharePoint projects.   The main take away which I agree with is SCRUM for SP projects is great.  Implementing scrum has challenges but is worth the pain in most scenarios.  Testing is key, you can use Integration tests instead of Unit Tests in VS.  I advocate projects use Code UI testing as with most SP projects you get the most "bang for your buck" (not part of the talk).
  • Martin Hatch (Performance and Load Testing using Visual Studio), good overview with demo and walk thru.  It is amazing what VS 2012 ultimate.  You can definitely remove project risk by using these tools and it's no longer in the domain of load runner experts.  VS has firmly tooled dev and teams to monitor performance and determine bottlenecks.
  • Marjn Somers (Extending SP with Simple jQuery Solutions), this is a funny guy well at a SP conference the bar is pretty low in the comedy genre.  I felt it was too simple (and i'm a simpleton (not the pattern) - sic) but as a 101 into SP and jQuery excellent.
  • Adam Burcher (PowerShell - Let me script that for you!), was well presented.  It was an intro into PS and PS for SP. I didn't get much out of it but it was well presented and the demo of showing SP devs how easy it is to convert a C# event handler's code into PS was extremely effective.
Sessions I missed and would of like to see where Andrew Woodwards on Why you need a SharePoint Centre of Excellence (CoE), Paul Hunts session on Sift thru Search and deliver more, Chris O'Brien Getting to Grips with SP2013 Apps, Mark Macrae's BI talk would of been good to attend also.


 

Sunday 11 November 2012

SPC12

Sunday 11 Nov 2012:  It's the middle of the night in Las Vegas and I'm wide awake still being on UK time, registration for SPC12 is in 18 odd hours so I thought I'd write a post about #SPC12.

Booking has been easy and glad it's in Vegas again.  I've looked at the sessions for the conference and they look good.  I'm pretty eager to jump into SP2013 so I have done some prep such as reading Sahil Malik's pamphlet/book chapter on "SharePoint 2013 Planet of the Apps" and I watched a couple of video's from the \\Build\ conference last week that they are repeating at SPC2012.

As always for SPC the sessions look good and there are just way to many of them so I have to try figure out what I want from SPC12.  Personally the big to changes for me in SharePoint 2013 are "Apps" & "Search" and with the architecture being more of an amendment than a fundamental shift, these are the 2 areas for me.  There are arguably other areas to focus on such as workflow & WCM but Apps & search are game changes for in my world.  Saying that there are so many sessions on these 2 topics I'm still double or triple booked using the MySPC tool (really nice tool by the way).

Sunday:
Register & collect my Surface & Nokia phone (probably not).  Walked thru the vendor stands see what is out there.  I also have a challenge with a colleague to find the most useless piece of SWAG for our team to judge once we are back next week  -their is a lot of utterly useless SWAG out there.  I did see Skytap that is worth a look at.  It's pretty much a development cloud solutions but I definitely think this is a great service - Good

Anyway I'll keep updating as time permits. 
Registration has been open all day - but going t the evening reception and too see the vendors.

Monday 12 Nov 2012:
Monday: Looks like a moan for Monday
  • Wifi Access  is lousy at the conference. - Poor
  • Keynote - no great shakes, yes there is yammer/social, developer model is a big change.  I'm pretty underwhelmed; not nearly as good as I was expecting.  The pitch of trust us it's good and what a great community - isn't really what I was looking for.  It ended pretty well with Scott Guthrie's Azure/developer piece - Average
  • Hands-on labs where closed most of the day - Poor
  • What’s New for developers in Office 2013 & SharePoint 2013
    Session has been informative on the app model.  It’s all CSOM, REST and azure apparently for SharePoint developers.  I’m certainly not sold on the app dev model, the security looks like a minefield - Average
  • Met 2 people from Texas over lunch – interesting stories and their thoughts quite different on the keynote - Good
  • The 1st afternoon session went to “What’s New in Search for SharePoint 2013”, search looks great, the UX is really good and all the best parts of FAST have been used for the SP2013 search.  FAST and SP search are now 1 product.  Management of search is great – I’m really glad I attend this over the dev session that that from all reports was brilliant - Great
  • Last session of the day I decided to go to “Search Architecture in SharePoint 2013” as I enjoyed the last session.  It was good.  Architecture is more like fast than SP2010 search.  The big component areas are: 1) Crawl 2) Index 3) Query 4) Analytics – relevance, links.   The is no managed property database in SP2013, it stored within the index.  Management of the crawl and query components looks good - Great
  • Met up with 2 guys to discuss the sessions we all went to for 1 hour at the end of the day, got their thoughts and really useful insights into other sessions and points- Great
Tuesday 13 Nov 2012:
Tuesday:  Pretty long day with some mixed sessions.
  • I couldn't get into my 1st 2 session options for the 1st morning session "Hybrid Overview Connecting SP2013 on-prem. to Office 365" or "Customizing Search Experiences in SharePoint 2013" - Poor
  • "0-60 with Office and SP2013 apps using Napa and VS2012" was my 4th choice session and it was OK - tool seems OK, it is good that it can move the code from the online IDE (NAPA) to VS 2012 - Average.
  • "Crawl and Index all enterprise Content for SP2013 Search - good presentation with lots of good tips - Great
  • Hands-on labs worked for me and I did 2 on search they are really good.  Others were having connectivity issues but it worked for - Great
  • "Understanding OAuth, REST & OData" with Ted Pattison was full - Poor
  • In it's place I went to "People search Extensibility in SP2013" there are excellent improvements in people search such as phonics search, improved user profile integration, both presenters were engaging and there demos we good to watch  - Great
  • "Step-by-Step: Building search driven applications" by Scott Hillier was good - search is so powerful and he showed great improvements for non-coded solutions.  The CSOM/REST search api's are great and his explanation of when to choose the options we good.  In summary for C# use CSOM for JavaScript either is good.- Brilliant
  • Getting pretty tired and the last session was "SharePoint 2013 Identity and Authentication Smackdown" fire alarm pretty much ruined the session and I was too tired to take in the content, the guys seemed knowledgeable but I got very little out of this session. Poor
Not looking forward to the Bon Jovi BBQ evening but going to check it out as I need to get dinner anyway.  Poor
Booze Session with Vitali & Chad was fun but burnt myself out.

Wednesday 14 Nov 2012:
Wednesday:  Missed the morning sessions (sic).
  • "Understanding 2013 tools and best practices for creating enterprise forms" - InfoPath is still there but not a preferred option and it looks like no improvements have been done.  Access services looks good, you use the access client app to describe for views (used to be called forms) and the underlying tables.  These tables are created in SQL or SQL Azure.  This looks like a good tool to cover the mini application space in organisations that is taken care of by Lotus Notes or Access client dbs (mdf).  Lastly we looked at using HTML5 and JavaScript to interact with SP lists as the underlying data source, this works but it remains to be seen if developers and organisations will embrace this manner for form generation - Good
  • "Custom Security Trimming for Search in SP2013" a really interesting session where the extremely knowledgeable guys looked at having ACL's/security trimming for 3rd party indexed systems.  It can be done but it get tricky real fast.  Early vs late filtering in the query pipeline were reviewed - Great
  • "Creating Custom Workflow Activities and Actions" was good - The tooling SPD is good for declarative workflows.  Obviously code activities are only available for on-prem. full trust farms (not on SP365).  Workflow is based on .NET 4.5 so a lot better than workflows in SP2010 - Good
  • Went to ask the experts and spoke to some folks at the vendor stands, nothing outstanding - Average
Thursday 15 Nov 2012:
Thursday:  Glad it's coming to an end

Highlight was the beer house in Vegas.  Didn't speak to much SharePoint at this Corey Roth Organised event.  Met some good guys and went onto a soiree/booze session in a suite in the Mandalay bay, continued talking and met some really nice folks.  Dean the reluctant SharePoint barmen pours way to a strong drink - Brilliant

Overall: SPC was good again, couple of small improvements such as poor Wifi & room size selection but overall this is always streets ahead of the other SP conferences.  Met some good people, learnt a lot from the speakers and attendees.  I'm kind of done with Vegas and it's a long trip for the folks from Europe but it's so good. I'll hopefully come to the next big release SPC - paul.