August 20 - 24, 2018

Seattle, WA

The Extranet User Manager team is headed to SharePoint Fest in Seattle this summer! Peter Carson has two sessions scheduled: AZR202 - Publishing Office 365 Websites to External Users with Azure on the Thursday; and OFF302 - Office 365 External Sharing on the Friday. Don't miss this exciting conference where you can learn from the world's leading SharePoint experts. The first two days of the conference will be in-depth workshops, with the final three days consisting of more focused sessions.

The workshops and sessions are all taught by Microsoft Certified Trainers, Microsoft Engineers, and Microsoft MVPs, with topics such as Enterprise Content Management, Power Users, Social SharePoint, Business Value, Implementation/Administration, Office 365, Workflow, Business Intelligence, Special Topics, and SharePoint Development. Choose one complete learning track or mix and match based on what content best meets you and your organization’s current needs! Depending on your role - whether you are a SharePoint administrator, software developer, information architect, or knowledge worker - there are different types of sessions ensuring that you find the right type for you and your team.

Publishing Office 365 Websites to External Users with Azure

Thursday, August 23 from 1:20 - 2:30 PM

Sometimes you need to publish content to a broad external user audience. They don’t need to collaborate, they just need to be able to easily consume that content. This could be your public website, or a private site, that you want to share securely with a particular audience.

In this session, we’ll take you through both public and private scenarios where you want to share your Office 365 content externally. While out of the box in Office 365 you can anonymously share individual documents, there is no way to share a whole site anonymously. We’ll show you how we leverage Azure websites to do this very cost effectively.

Our main scenario is one of our clients, OntarioMD (https://www.ontariomd.ca). Their new public website is authored in Office 365, and then the approval and publishing process pushes that to Microsoft Azure. Hosted in a massively scalable infrastructure for a very reasonable cost, this provides a secure, highly available website. We then extend that and allow registered users to access additional private information through the same site, and supporting apps.

In another example, Wilfrid Laurier University (https://wlu.ca) uses the same approach to publish supporting material for faculty publications among other reasons from Office 365 to their public website.

Office 365 External Sharing

Friday, August 24 from 10:40 - 11:50 AM

External sharing is all about publishing or collaborating with people outside of your organization. In Office 365, this can be done in a number of ways. You can do it directly in some products, such as SharePoint, or through the underlying Azure Active Directory B2B (Business to Business) functionality.

In this session, we'll start by talking about why you should care about external sharing. Users will find ways to do it regardless (typically through email or shadow IT), so you need to provide an easy way for them to do it effectively and securely through your enterprise software (Office 365). Microsoft has made it very easy to do external sharing from anywhere, but this has caused many organizations to turn it off all together. We'll go over scenarios where you want the standard sharing (OneDrive for Business is a common example) and where you need to provide more structure.

A properly designed information architecture in SharePoint allows people to invite external users to their sites, without breaking permissions and opening security holes. We'll show you how you can do this today in your organization using the out of the box Office 365 and Azure B2B experience, and how we can then make it even better with our Extranet User Manager product.