365 EduCon (by SPFest)

The Extranet User Manager team is heading to Washington, DC for 365 EduCon DC (by SPFest). This conference brings together experts in Microsoft 365, SharePoint, Office 365, Microsoft Teams, and Azure. Whether you are new to SharePoint or an experienced power user, admin, or developer, 365 EduCon has content designed to fit your experience level and area of interest.

Extranet User Manager's President Peter Carson will be delivering three sessions at the conference:

TMA105 | Open Source Approach to Teams Provisioning

Room 207A | Tues 4:20 PM — 5:30 PM

Our transition into using Microsoft Teams was accelerated with the onset of COVID-19 in early 2020. Sound familiar? With the widespread need for organizations to adapt to remote working, we have heard the same challenge from many organizations from all industry sectors. At the same time cyber-security threats have increased, and the need for implementing properly secured solutions has only increased.

Organizations that have made the shift to Microsoft Teams in somewhat of a hurry are grappling with managing Teams as a solution. This involves trying to manage Teams sprawl and eliminate the potential for redundant teams. With this in mind, we have built an open source solution we're implementing for various clients to provide a structured way to request and create teams. This has evolved significantly over the past several years, and we're taking the covers off our latest version here.

CM204 | Office 365 Extranets: Unstructured and Structured

Room 207B | Wed 4:20 PM — 5:30 PM

Office 365 external sharing is all about publishing or collaborating with people outside of your organization. Users will find ways to do it with or without IT support (typically through email or shadow IT), so it's important for IT to provide an easy way for them to do it effectively and securely.

Sharing can be done in a number of different ways. Unstructured sharing to a small set of external users works well with the OOTB SharePoint features. As the scale increases, structured sharing with a large number of external users needs alternatives such as Azure AD B2B, custom code, or third party solutions. We'll discuss options available and what makes sense where through some real world examples.

BI304 | Integrating Multiple Planner Boards into a Power BI Dashboard

Room 204C | Thur 2:20 PM — 3:30 PM

Microsoft Planner is a planning application available within Microsoft 365. It is fantastic for assigning tasks and sub-tasks to users and has a lot of value in tracking progress for different initiatives. We use planner on both internal and consulting projects as it provides simplified task management. However, when you belong to multiple Planner boards, it can become challenging to manage tasks and get a holistic view of all tasks and their assignments in a single pane.

We found this out quite quickly and turned to building a Power BI dashboard to provide us with this view. Having a solution that allows for rolling up multiple planner boards into portfolios which can then be presented in a very visually appealing dashboard makes it much easier to be decisive and identify potential task conflicts. These portfolios can also be organized into different dashboards, so that security can be applied.