Here is my summary of European SharePoint Conference 2014 in Barcelona day 1.

Keynote 1: The New World of Working (Simon Skaria, Group Program Manager, Microsoft USA)

Office 365 started early and now has a great response from business. About 60% of the global fortune 500 companies are using it. It has 250.000 responses per second (Twitter has 5.700).

It deals to
■Work like a network (mysites which were there before myspace)
■On device of your choice
■As better tool to manage information

It brings you a social workplace with personalized insights and acts like the next generation portal. Examples are the video platform and the yammer integration (conversations related to documents or files) and the integration between Office, SharePoint, Yammer, OneDrive for Business and more.

It also offers much for developers as next generation developer platform. The security is really high within the data centres. They provide many certificates and encryption to protect the business critical data.

The demos about new features were really great, especially the video platform, the apps integration in outlook and the bi track.

Resumee: Great new features and many possibilities to use office 365 / cloud services.

Keynote 2: Now we know, Now we don’t (Dan Holme, IT Unity USA)

ITunity.com new community – Should have a look.

“Microsoft has changed”
■Teams working in silos (Windows Team, Office Team, Bing Team – every team works for themselves or solved the same problem) – Now they are closer and work together.
■MS had a big deal building the cloud as the innovation (Office 365, etc.)
■Unified experiences (mobile, pcs, web, all devices, developers)

“IT has changed”
■Earlier: Business & IT has to deal with Requirements, Service, Costs
■Then: Outsourcing grew because of IT was cost intensive and too slow. IT squeezed down but it keeps control and managing the IT
■Insourcing came up cause of centralization and bad services. IT serves more platforms more services and generated so more costs and infrastructure and maintenance.
■Then Cloud offers a possibility to use many platforms without knowledge about infrastructure, updates and application

That makes IT seems to be slow from business view. Because Business gets the feeling to get software when it is needed immediately now – thanks to cloud.

“We are the ones with budget. If IT can’t deliver we will go around them.”

“Information Technology should be Innovation Technology”

The New IT Opportunities:
■Drive new outcomes:
■Transform business
■Build experiences
■Advance innovation

At the moment we should look how we can work together. Therefore SharePoint doesn’t matter, but business matter and people matter and the objectives. Raise the value, lower the risk.

Why should I consider SP2013?

SP2010 was planned 2006 in a pre Facebook and pre iPhone World and it was great for the year 2006. But it came out 2010. “SP2010 is so 2006” – think of cross browser support, mobile access.

Should I upgrade?

Don’t upgrade – move forward based on use case evolution. “No Big Upgrade” Projects anymore.

Upgrade don’t deliver value – Moving forward by migrate time by time not at one point.

Doing it for business reasons not cause of new technology. Be prepared – test SP2013, Office 365 and Azure.

Decision tree for migration from 2007 to 2010/2013

Can it be done by SP2010? Can it be done better by SP2013?

Think always: “Business won’t wait”

Which cloud should I use?

SaaS = Office 365

Private Cloud = Office

Paas = Office 365

Many cloud players like amazon, fpweb.net, rackspace, dropbox are out there.

Business thinks of things to do: collaboration, connect, comment, posting, sharing, working BUT not SharePoint. Think of Business Needs!

“…long term planning is dead” You cannot guess what technology will be in 5 years

Cloud Concerns:
■Cannot customize = lack of flexibility
■Security
■Data sovereignty
■Data loss

This session was my favorite from day 1. Great thanks to Dan Holmes.

Now we come to the Sessions from the day…

Session: Exploring SharePoint 2013 enhanced Video and Digital Media by Joel Oleson

SP2013 now has the content type video. It is acting like a document set and supports many features for video like HTML 5 Player, Thumbnail generating from video, uploading and embedding videos. Important is that you use an asset library for that, because there is the content type already included. It also can handle video renditions. What most important is, that you can also link to videos from youtube or your fileshare. That’s so important, cause sometimes it makes no sense to store thousands of videos in SharePoint or migrate all videos to SharePoint.

Session: Implementing a hybrid SharePoint 2013 & Office 365 environment by Rene Modery

SP2013 On-Premise means in your data centre or in a data centre from your hosting provider. Hybrid does not mean to use them both living next to each other, but to integrate them. So first ask yourself why do you want it or need it? A good reason could be to continue using valuable investments or using the awesomeness of cloud. If you use it for a migration aspect, it is temporarly but if you like to use it permanent it’s an integration.

You can use the following services in a hybrid model:
■Search
■BCS (Access LOBs from on-Premise in Office 365)
■Duet Enterprise Online
■Onedrive for business
■Identity Management (one for both systems / ADFS)

The setup is like this:
■Setup SP2013
■Get Office 365 E Plan
■Get a Domain
■Prepare Active directory
■Configure Directory Synchronization
■Provide a reverse Proxy
■Provide ADFS and ADFS Proxy
■Using some Powershells

Important notice here, you cannot use managed metadata shared on both platforms.

Each platform has its own search index, but you can configure to display results from both.

Session: What’s new & what comes for onedrive for business by Lincoln deMar

Onedrive for Business covers
■All my files in one place
■Get work done. Together
■A trusted enterprisegrade service

The session was full of demos about using and working with it. You can follow Sites and documents as well as see the shared documents to you and also manage your own docs. The search only works for those documents and sites which you are following or shared to. Some new features are the “quicklinks” like uploading, new document or share which are now top of the library view so users can easily reach them instead using the ribbon.

Session: SharePoint Online vs. On-Premise vs. Hybrid – make the right choice by Rene Modery

The ideal SP environment is not available “one size fits all” would be nice.

The most important step is the business. Business matters. If you’re IT is not providing fast services, the business might get it from the cloud.

What kind of topology you should use depends on what you are concerning. You should make a list of advantages and disadvantages for those scenarios.

In my opinion what is really important is that you should classify your content and decide what content should be protected, needs to be protected and which content can be stored in the cloud. Maybe it is also important to pay attention to the work process. It could be important to be independent from device or anything else. So as we often say in IT: “It depends…”

Resumee of day 1:

The first day of the conference was really great. I had super sessions which are inspiring me and open dialogues with everybody. What I take with me is
■Cloud topic is really interesting
■Office 365 offers really cool features
■Business matters, not SharePoint

Karsten Pohnke
He is Consultant for SharePoint Solutions for collaboration, communication and business processes. He provides his customers applications based on standard features as well as development or combining the power of several microsoft tools like Dynamics CRM. In his free time he tries to collect tipps and worthy experience in this blog.