What I Learned at #SPC14

This was my first year attending SharePoint Conference, and it was a real blast. I picked up a lot of good nuggets from my trip, here’s a highlight of my favorites:

Pahhhtttaaayyy

College was a long time ago, but it appears I still got it, or so I thought. My team from Boston spent a lot of time enjoying the post-session events. I’ve heard rumors that casinos in Vegas pump oxygen to keep you awake and perky. It worked! It’s taken me a couple of days to recoup from the lack of oxygen here at home, my body has caught up with me. I was able to attend AvePoint’s Red and Metalogix’s Best of Breed parties, what a blast!

Vegas

What happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas, unless it’s been uploaded. Social media has made it wayyy to easy for people to upload pictures in the spur of the moment. I definitely did it, and I’ve seen others have as well. Fortunately, since we’re all professionals, nothing discriminating was accidentally posted. We took this a step further with my team. We shared a photo stream on our iPhones and shared photos instantly with each other and others outside of our group. It got me thinking long term, at other events how to best share photos across people using different phones, and Yammer came to mind ;).

Yammer

SharePoint Social, the new stuff that came with SharePoint 2013, is being retired already. Yammer is definitely the go-to social solution for Microsoft across the board. Microsoft revealed some pretty awesome insights in how they’re envisioning integration of a Yammer feed, basically everywhere. I can’t wait. Of course, Office 365 first, but they did say it’ll be available OnPrem too (the integration, not hosting Yammer onprem).

Because of this tight integration across the board, I’ll be really surprised if there’s another SPC. I’m guessing we’ll see a rebrand of the conference to heavily focus on O365 and Yammer more.

Responsive Design

There was a lot on mobile and responsive design, I mean a lot! I only went to one session on it, since I’m quite familiar and it’s not a huge priority of mine, there were more interesting sessions available. A couple others went to most of the responsive sessions, and they mentioned that they were all similar, except for that specific presenter’s lessons learned. This tells me that mobile is a getting bigger and more and more people are actually doing it, not just talking about it. I’ve done some responsive on 2013 already, and I see more and more projects creep up with it. It’s a good sign that mobile is being taken more seriously with businesses.

Office Graph and Oslo

Microsoft revealed a sweet new set of APIs called Office Graph. Much like Open Graph on other systems, Office Graph provides social insights into everything about you, across SharePoint, Yammer and other Microsoft applications. Oslo (no, not the master page) is an app for Win8, and a web site for other platforms, which integrates and provides a rich user interface for Office Graph. Without going into great detail here, check out Nik’s post: http://nikpatel.net/2014/03/09/my-first-impressions-of-office-graph-and-codename-oslo-in-office-365/.

Long Live InfoPath

InfoPath has finally, and officially, seen it’s end. What’s next for custom forms? That has yet to be determined, but Microsoft is open to suggestions. Again, I defer to Nik’s excellent post on the SPC session that discussed InfoPath: http://nikpatel.net/2014/03/08/future-of-infopath-spc14-notes-from-office-and-sharepoint-forms-roadmap-update/

Very Exciting

There is definitely some exciting things coming from Microsoft in the SharePoint/Social space, from Yammer integration to a new custom forms generator, 2014 is bound to be full of new updates! ‘Til then, Happy SharePointing!