SharePoint Fest 2018 in Washington, DC

March 26 - 30, 2018

Washington, D.C.

Extranet User Manager is headed to SharePoint Fest next year, this time in Washington, D.C.! We are sponsoring the event and will have a booth set up. Stop by to learn more about our extranet product. We would love to chat. And don't miss Peter Carson's workshop on the Tuesday from 9 AM - 5 PM. He'll be going over how to collaborate and publish securely, both within your organization and outside it. Then on the Thursday he will be speaking about the management of modern team sites, communication sites, and Office 365 groups. And on the Friday he will host a talk about Office 365 external sharing. You can find the full details about the workshop and sessions below.

At SharePoint Fest D.C. there will be lots of technical classes and workshops, and all taught by Microsoft Certified Trainers, Microsoft engineers, and Microsoft MVPs. The topics covered include: Enterprise Content Management, Power Users, Social SharePoint, Business Value, Implementation/Administration, Office 365, Workflow, Business Intelligence, Special Topics, and SharePoint Development. You can choose one complete learning track or tailor it to meet you and your organization's current needs.

There will also be numerous sessions created for SharePoint administrators, software developers, information architects, and knowledge workers, which will ensure that you and your team walk away with as much knowledge as you desire to truly leverage SharePoint in your current environment! It's a conference you do not want to miss.

Peter Carson Hosting a Full Day Workshop on March 27 at 9 AM

WS 405 - Collaborating and Publishing Securely, Internally and Externally

Microsoft's modern SharePoint experience has really begun to come together. We started with new lists and libraries, then team and communication sites, and finally Office 365 groups.  During this workshop we'll go over how you can leverage these experiences to collaborate effectively both within and outside your organization, and securely publish content internally, to external users, and anonymously.

The chapters we'll cover during this full day workshop are:

• Overview of the modern sites and Office 365 Groups experience
• Implementing a site request and provisioning process to provide governance
• Light branding of your sites
• Leveraging SharePoint Framework web parts to navigate to sites
• Sharing your sites and groups with external users by leveraging Office 365 external sharing and Azure Active Directory B2B
• Publishing your content from Office 365 to an Azure Website
• Providing both anonymous and secure access to your Azure website

All the PowerShell, Azure Function, Flow, PowerApps, and SharePoint Framework code is published as an open source project.  Coming out of the session, you'll have a strong overview on how to build an Office 365 Intranet, Extranet, and even a public website authored in Office 365 and hosted in Azure, plus the tools to make that happen.

Peter Carson Speaking on March 28 from 4:20 - 5:30 PM

AZR 105 - Office 365 One to Many Sharing Through Azure

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 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 (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 Azure's 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 (wlu.ca) uses the same approach to publish supporting material for faculty publications and other reasons from Office 365 to their public website.

Peter Carson Speaking on March 29 from 4:20 - 5:30 PM

ECM 205 - Managing Modern Team Sites, Communication Sites, and Office 365 Groups

Microsoft's modern SharePoint experience has really begun to come together. We started with new lists and libraries, then team and communication sites, and finally Office 365 groups. Allowing anyone to create these sites is empowering, but it can also lead to an out of control environment. How do we put some organization and governance around this process, without stifling the creativity? Many organizations have addressed this with some sort of site provisioning process.

In this session, we'll go through a simple method that you can adopt in your own organization. Site templates can be created and saved using the open source techniques Microsoft has published in their Office Dev PnP project. We build on that with a simple list and PowerShell script to allow users to request a new site, have it approved, and have the script create the site. This is wired together with a PowerApps form, Flow workflow, and PowerShell hosted in an Azure function. 

All the components needed to implement this are open sourced, so you can deploy it in your own environment.

With the foundations in place, we'll then take you through some case studies for running projects and illustrate how we leverage the power of Office 365 Groups ourselves.  Conversations (Outlook, Yammer, or Teams), shared calendar, OneNote, Planner, Stream, and Power BI can all be part of the solution, along with PowerApps for forms, and Flow for workflows. 

Peter Carson Speaking on March 30 from 2:20 - 3:30 PM

ECM 304 - Office 365 External Sharing

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.  Microsoft is making great strides in exposing a consistent, simple sharing experience across many of their Office 365 products.

This sharing can take two main forms:

• Sharing anonymous links to view or edit documents or folders, where users just need the link and there is no need to sign in
• Inviting existing or new external users to documents, folders, sites, or Office 365 Groups

We'll go over the user experience on both the sharing and receiving side.  Flows are different for external users that already use Office 365 themselves, versus other business or consumer email users.  From there we'll look at some of the controls you can put in place as an administrator.

• What level of sharing is permitted across Office 365, or for particular sites
• Who is allowed to share
• Setting expiry dates on links
• Requiring one-time use verification codes, and re-verifications
• Only allowing certain email domains to be shared with, or blocking certain ones

Lastly, we'll talk about how this experience can be customized.  Microsoft publishes the REST API for Azure AD B2B that powers this, and you can take over much of the experience, including the invitation emails for external users.  Self-registration and approvals are scenarios that can be built using this, and we'll go over some customer examples.

 

About Peter Carson

Peter Carson, President of Extranet User Manager and a Microsoft MVP, is a recognized expert in Office 365, SharePoint, and Extranet strategies. Read Peter's full bio and check out some of EUM's recent articles and blogs for all things Microsoft and extranet related.