Office 365 Advent Calendar – 13 Useful Office 365 Sessions from Microsoft Ignite

End of September, the Microsoft Ignite conference took place in Atlanta with hundreds of sessions across a huge rang of Microsoft products. The great news is that these sessions are available on demand for anyone to view! If you’re interested in taking them offline, have a look at the Ignite 2016 Slidedeck and Video downloader script.

Today, I’ll share with you some of my favourite sessions:

Drive productivity with OneDrive and SharePoint file collaboration

Files are at the core of the modern world. They reflect people’s and organizations’ aspirations, processes and outcomes. Making it easy to securely create and collaborate on important files such as budgets, reports, whitepapers and presentations is critical to organizational success. See all the options that Microsoft OneDrive and Microsoft SharePoint provide to enable people to work together more effectively to drive successful outcomes. We demonstrate all the possibilities available today for browser, mobile and desktop experiences and how this fits into productivity tools and essential business applications.

Why I recommend it: A great overview of OneDrive for Business and SharePoint and which route Microsoft is taking with them.

Build your intranet with Microsoft Office 365

There is a growing trend of organizations moving to the cloud to meet their intranet needs. While many organizations are running their intranets on premise, many are considering entirely cloud-based solutions or running them on platforms like Office 365. The question for many companies is “should our intranet be built with Microsoft Office 365?”

In this session, Richard Harbridge explores:
• The benefits Office 365 brings to an intranet
• Where the issues and challenges will lie
• When and how you may integrate Office 365 with your existing intranet today

Why I recommend it: Richard is a great guy and passionate presenter. He’s got a lot of experience and knows what he’s talking about. This topic here is one very close to my heart, as I’ve been working with SharePoint as an intranet platform since 2007.

Build business applications with Power Apps, Microsoft Flow, and Office 365

PowerApps and Flow are services for building and using custom business apps that connect to your data and work across the web and mobile – without the time and expense of custom software development. This session demonstrates how to build custom business applications, describes the vision behind PowerApps and Flow, and features key scenarios.

Why I recommend it: People have been looking for an InfoPath replacement every since it has been deprecated. While PowerApps is far from being one, it is at least the successor to InfoPath and may at some point in the future offer similar functionality. Either way, if you’re interested in forms and business processes, this is a good introduction to the latest Microsoft tools which became generally available in the meantime.

Improve Office 365 adoption: top 10 ways

How are organizations able to succeed with the constant change of Microsoft Office 365? Office 365 provides an incredible amount of value to individual employees, teams, departments and organizations. Much of this value is not realized immediately upon purchase or even deployment of Office 365. The value is realized as more and more users understand, adopt and embrace the technology that has been implemented. So how can organizations drive faster, sustainable and effective adoption? They perform campaigns, run activities, and take action. Join Kanwal Khipple as he shares industry leading real world experience, advice and activities that other customers are leveraging to get more from Office 365 and drive more meaningful adoption.

Why I recommend it: It’s a panel discussion by Susan Hanley, Richard Harbridge, Christian Buckley, and Kanwal Khipple! And if you do not just want to introduce some technology, but want to ensure that people use it and receive value from it, you should definitely watch this.

Learn about PnP and the new SharePoint Framework

Office 365 Dev and SharePoint Patterns & Practices (PnP) helps customers move forward whether building solutions for today or tomorrow. Get latest update on the provided samples, reusable components and practices. See also what the PnP team is doing to support the new Microsoft SharePoint Framework and how you can participate to this community driven initiative.

Why I recommend it: If you look at my other Office 365 Advent Calendar posts, you can see that I posted quite a good amount of samples for the PnP PowerShell cmdlets. But this is not the only thing coming from the PnP team, there’s lots more! Vesa shows you all the other awesome things, and gives some introduction on the new SharePoint Framework. If you’re a SharePoint developer, this is a session not to be missed.