It was all about Yammer (no surprise there).  I ran through where I thought things were at with regards to the current overlap and confusion between the out of the box SharePoint social features vs. those in Yammer, some roadmap information about what to expect over the next year with regards to the integration of the two products and also a few bits for developers on what APIs are available.  I also demoed a sneak peak of an app for SharePoint Online that we are publishing shortly that lets people post information to Yammer from SharePoint (more on that soon in a future post).

I was also a little antagonistic (trying to get people questioning and thinking a bit more) with my analogy between SP vs. Yammer and the Matrix movies Red pill vs. Blue pill decision that Neo has to make.  Blue pill, stay blissfully ignorant that Yammer isn’t the future of all things social in SharePoint and other Microsoft products, or the Red pill, take the painful truth of reality now and get ready for the future albeit painful and a bit messy for the time being.

It was a fun session and i really enjoyed the opportunity to present.

My slides are below if you are interested in taking a look.  (they don’t really articulate a lot of what i spoke about outside of the slides, but hopefully it helps a little)

-CJ

This year it is in New Orleans from June 3rd – June 6th and I will be there doing a session on SharePoint and App development tips and tricks.

SBS-B401 : Tips You Need to Know for Creating Apps for Microsoft Office and SharePoint 2013

In this session, we cover some tools and techniques for building out apps for Microsoft Office and SharePoint, including architecting for cross-domain scenarios, types of apps and much, much more. This is a must attend session for all app for Office and SharePoint developers.

Thursday June 6th at 10:15 am – Room TBD

So if you are are a SharePoint person attending it would be great to have you come along … or just get in touch at the event to chat!

-CJ

http://www.sharepointevolutionconference.com

I am presenting two sessions next week on Monday and Tuesday on the process of building SharePoint and the other on building modern intranets using search, metadata and blending the old style of hierarchical sites with newer techniques of search based solutions.

P&M308 – Leverage the power of metadata and search driven Intranets

Learn how to take all that chaos and clutter in your organization and move it to an organized discoverable system that enables users to quickly navigate and find documents and information that is most relevant to them.  This is a soup to nuts session on the design decisions, things you need to think about and how to build a purely metadata and search driven Intranet to unlock the full power of your content.

This session is going to be all about building Intranets using the same features and functionality everyone is talking about in 2013 for building public facing internet sites. aka Web Content Management (WCM).  I’ll discuss traditionally structured intranets, hierarchy and storage systems in SharePoint, authoring considerations & a model for blending the old style hierarchical intranets with modern search driven techniques! 

Come and hear how you can leverage some of these new techniques with the old to deliver a great experience for your users whether they like to browse, search or a mixture of both

-CJ.

Often when people see a company take on an investment like Nintex announced today they scoff and wonder what luxury locations the owners will now be sunning themselves in.  They usually see it as selling out and not what that deal really represents.

I want you to take a pause for a moment and think about what something like this means for the SharePoint industry.  Think about what a deal like this says. 

These folks have decided to invest $222 million (!!  ma-ma-ma-million) in an independent SharePoint business.  They have decided that there is room for that business to grow in a huge way and to get a handsome return on their investment.

This was a business that, when I first got into SharePoint, started with a recycle bin feature for SharePoint document libraries all those many years ago and grew it into a tens of million dollar business.  Nintex Workflow is now THE singularly most widely used ISV application in SharePoint worldwide.  It’s huge.

We (the entire SharePoint community) should all be all stopped dead in our tracks and being blown away about how incredible this is.

This is awesome because it means outsiders view the space as growing and being worthwhile investing in. 

This is awesome because it means those folks out there with an idea and passion can see where it could take them.  It inspires people to make a go of it and bet on their passion and enthusiasm.

And most importantly this is awesome because it means companies like Nintex can raise money and use it to build their business with new amazing products and solve more of the tough problems facing organizations with tools like SharePoint.

Enterprise software doesn’t have the glitz, glamour and absurd hype the consumer market has … but it does have boat loads of value.  Just look at companies like Yammer being bought by Microsoft, Box taking more funding than you can shake any reasonable length stick at & companies like Splunk and WorkDay are rocking along nicely in the enterprise space.

It’s outcomes like this one for Nintex that make our space an exciting one to be in and something we should all pause, consider and congratulate the Nintex team on.  Provoke loves Nintex products and we use them to help our customers everyday.  We can’t wait to see where their next adventures takes them and look forward to being a part of that journey for many years to come.

Congrats to Brett, Brian, Steve, Mike, Ryan, Alberto and the rest of the Nintex crew!!

-Chris.

• Pilers (derived from pile … warning not a real word)
• Filers

Pilers – just let their inbox grow to monumental size and rely on search etc… to find things.  There are loads of these people around.  Their inboxes grow to multiple GB and they never file or clear anything out.

Filers – once they read an email and do whatever they need to do they delete it OR file it in a folder somewhere. They rely on both folder hierarchy and search to find email.

I am a filer. I like having a folder for a particular project etc… I cant really say why … but it seems to work best for me.

Now to the point of this post …

At Provoke we use Exchange Online for our email system. It rocks. MS look after it for us.  We get 4GM mailbox sizes.

4GB !?!?!? you might say … how on earth do you cope with only 4GB?!?!? That’s what I said. (That is about 1 yr of email for me)

In Exchange Online E3 you can get this nifty feature called an Online Archive.  It lets you stick all sorts of stuff in there and it doesn’t go towards your mailbox quota. 

I have 100GB of this archive which is awesome.

The other thing you need is a way to get mail into that archive.  Enter policy!

When you select a folder in your mailbox in Outlook you can tap the Set Folder Policy button:

And then set a Policy to move mail to the archive after it gets to a particular age.  Policies inherit so you don’t have to do this on every folder. 

Then you set the Online Archive setting to a time period after which you want to move email to the archive. In my case I like 6 months.

You access it via outlook or OWA just as you normally would.  It shows up along side your mail mailbox.

Another cool thing about this is that it frees up space in your offline mail store (OST) on your computer.  The Online Archive is online available online … not when you are offline.

No more email mailbox quota problems.  NICE!

-CJ.

The main point on writing that post 6.5 years ago was to provide a simple summary of the options available for development in SharePoint 2007. At the time those were:

• Web Parts
• _Layouts application
• User Controls
• ASPX pages added to a site with code behind

Towards the end of the post I summarized the choices in a simple decision matrix (below):

Now fast forward to 2013 and the new release of SharePoint 2013 … Most of that matrix still holds true albeit with a couple of minor tweaks. Back when I wrote the original post there was no support for SharePoint built into Visual Studio for example.  Today instead of the Smart Part (thx again Jan Tielens) you can use a Visual WebPart (which is a user control that is compiled down to a server control by Visual Studio, but which gives you the benefits of the visual design surface at design time, unlike a standard WebPart).

Given so long has passed I thought it was about time that I revisited the choices and took a look at what has changed in the last 6.5 years!

Before I go on, I want to reiterate that this is my personal opinion. Many of you won’t agree.  So this is really just a summary of the decision matrix I use in my head when evaluating the options and deciding on the best choice for the situation.

Evolution of the matrix…

Updating this matrix is a lot trickier now we have SharePoint Online where many of the pervious on-prem options don’t exist. e.g. no full trust code.

I went back and forth on deciding what my updated matrix would include. This took a while and, given I am a big proponent of SharePoint Online, I would prefer everyone think about designing their solutions with the possibility of moving to SharePoint Online in future.

Why?  Well in a recent internal email amongst developers here is what I said (some bit snipped):

Apps should be our first choice moving forward.

The reason is simple.  There is no future in Sandbox Solutions or Full trust solutions.

Notice i said “first” .. not only When will Sandbox Solutions go away? Shortly after the new app model supports everything you can do in a sandbox solution. MS will deprecate it as fast as they can and then turn it off after giving  everyone a year to re-write their code.

Trust me, MS wants to kill sandbox solutions as fast as they can.  Same with full trust code. It gives SharePoint a bad name when SharePoint fails … even because of code someone else wrote and deployed to it.  The sandbox is too expensive to run in Office 365 and therefore will be shot. To be clear, the goal is to remove any 3rd party code running within a SharePoint process. Doing so will improve the security, scalability and reliability of SharePoint.

Now that might sound a bit harsh … and to be fair I was trying to be … but my point is the long term vision for SharePoint is to not host other peoples code.  The new app model might not be a perfect replacement today … but given time I’m willing to bet it will get better and support more of the things you can’t do today.

Then I went on…

For now we should be thinking Apps first … and augmenting it with sandbox and full trust only when needed.  Otherwise we are painting ourselves in a corner. This is most important for 365 solutions.  Still, 2 years from now we shouldn’t be having to explain ourselves to our customers for painting them into a corner where they can’t migrate to 365 or upgrade to the latest version of SharePoint because of our recommendations. Not good.

Don’t get me wrong.  I’m not saying “no sandbox” and “no full trust” … i’m just saying we should be leading with apps first and then backing in sandbox and full trust only when needed.

I like apps because they also mean we are not constrained to what development options SharePoint imposes like MVC or the latest improvements in the .Net framework.  Because your code runs remotely you can run it on anything you like. It could be PHP for example.

<mega tangent> PS: can we start a petition to stop calling the new model the “app  model” and call it something like the “remote code model” that “apps” happen to use. Then we can reserve “apps” for stuff that gets put in the Marketplace. I know this won’t happen but it would be nice “Apps” was a bad idea IMHO.</mega tangent>

Back to the matrix…

After going back and forth on it for a while I came to the stark realization that a matrix was no longer required.  Dev has got simpler for a change!

So here is my new “matrix” … or the “Decision List 2013 edition” as I am now calling it:

1. Design Manager package (on-prem or online)
2. App for SharePoint (on-prem or online)
3. Sandbox Web Part (on-prem or online)
4. Full Trust Web Part (on-prem only)
5. Full Trust everything else (on-prem only) (_layouts pages etc…)

It’s pretty straightforward when you think about it.  Start with the lightest touch possible and only step down to the next heaviest when you have to.  This might seem screamingly obvious, but it would surprise you (or not) how many developers jump for the most heavy weight option first because it’s the most powerful and they don’t have to think.

Further more option #2  above can be further expanded to:

1. SharePoint Hosted App
2. Provider Hosted App

You may notice the absence of the Auto Hosted app type above. This is the option where you package your application and SharePoint will automatically host the application code for you in Azure. Reasons for this are simple A) its not available (yet)  B) it’s horrid (my opinion).  Auto Hosted apps code runs in Azure space managed and controlled by SharePoint Online … not you.  I hate the thought of having to support code running in a location I have no control over and no visibility.  For example, unable to see what is going wrong when a customer calls asking for support.  For the small price you pay hosting in Azure directly via the Provider Hosted model you will reap payback many times over when you need to upgrade your app and or diagnose a support issue and can’t tell what is going on.

Summary…

Regardless of your like or dislike of the new app model there is one thing that is clear … at least to me anyway. That your code will not live inside the SharePoint process in the future. For me, that means thinking about how to start designing solutions with this in mind as to not inadvertently painting yourself into a corner that is costly and painful to get out of.  Sure, there will be situations today that mean you have no other choice to use some sandbox and full trust code.  But …

My words of advice are simple.  Think apps first and fall back to heavier options if needed.

This way over time as the new app model gets better and becomes the starting point for all SharePoint development you will already be ahead of the curve and will have an easier path to the cloud when your customers are ready.

+ ask any developer if they would rather be using MVC, Razor, SignalR etc… my bet is they say “yes”.

-CJ

Now we have the next major iteration of those tools that have just released for SharePoint and Office 2013!

Read the announcement here:
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/somasegar/archive/2013/03/04/now-available-office-developer-tools-for-visual-studio-2012.aspx

Randall also has a write up on them here: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/officeapps/archive/2013/03/05/download-the-office-and-sharepoint-visual-studio-tools.aspx

They come complete with fancy colored icons in the new project picker!  (the preview was grey scale). I laugh … but the grey pissed me off for some reason.

Personally I love the mention about Continuous Integration workflows and new debugging features with service bus … and looking forward to getting my sticky hands and playing around some more.

Get them here: http://aka.ms/OfficeDevToolsForVS2012.

Great work @chakkaradeep!!

-CJ.

I recently read Jeremy’s post about picking SharePoint social over Yammer “for right now” and wanted to weigh in on why I think they are not making the call I would have.  It’s all just personal opinion of course and Jeremy and I are close friends and no doubt he will attempt to convince me otherwise over a few beers shortly

In my humble opinion the only reason you should consider using SharePoint 2013’s social features over Yammer is if your organization is 100% unable to use a cloud based service.

Why?

Because there isn’t a future in SharePoint on-prem social features.  It’s just not what Microsoft does when it changes direction.

When Microsoft takes a bet on something big there are never two options to pick from. There is only one option and the rest is dead to them.  Rightly or wrongly, whether you like it or not, for good or bad … that’s just the way it works.  This basically means that after that speed it approximately takes for one synapse to fire Microsoft and all its muscle (sales and otherwise) stopped selling on-prem social and started selling the new cloud social story like it was never any other way.  You won’t hear anything pitching on-prem social over Yammer and it will only be used as a fall back position if the organization cant use the cloud for whatever reason.

“What should I use for social?  Yammer or the SharePoint newsfeed?”  My answer has been clear: Go Yammer!  Yammer is our big bet for enterprise social, and we’re committed to making it the underlying social layer for all of our products.” – Jared Spataro, Senior Director – SharePoint, Microsoft Corp – 19th March 2013

Update 19th March 2013:  If you want more of a nail in coffin then look no further then Jared’s latest update on the Enterprise Social Roadmap. The quote above is from this post Yammer and SharePoint: Enterprise Social Roadmap Update. If you read that 90% of the post is dedicated to Yammer with a fraction dedicated to “If you are old and clunky and stay on-prem then here is a skinny bone to chew on”.

“Cool” you might say.  “That doesn’t change what you can and can’t do with the product.  On-Prem is still my bag baby!”

If you look at the features, pros and cons and line them up side by side on-prem SharePoint social will win the sprint today … by quite a long margin.

But mark my words … it won’t win the marathon.

Here is my prediction for the next couple of years.  SharePoint on-prem social features might be lucky to get a few new features. Maybe a some in the next update, maybe a few the one after.  But where we really quit the crap and bring on the meat will be in SharePoint + Yammer integration. This is obviously not rocket science given MS just spent $1B+ dollars on it. Everything social in SharePoint Online will be ripped out and replaced/backed by Yammer with deep integrations that don’t exist today.  100% effort will be put into this experience as a first class citizen vs. the on-prem story… sad face … I like on-prem too … but like I mentioned above on-prems dead baby.

Eventually there will be no Yammer. It will just be SharePoint Online with a lot more rocking social features built by a team that deeply understand Enterprise social.  MS didn’t buy Yammer for their customers (they were mostly already SharePoint customers anyway) … they bought them for the kudos in enterprise social and the team of people who get it. Microsoft needs to win enterprise social big time and Yammer are the A game.

So why would I say don’t invest in on-prem social with the SharePoint features you get in 2013 if you can at all help it?

I would put money on there not being a great upgrade story on-prem to whatever comes next in the cloud … if at all. There could be one IF you are using SharePoint social features in 365 today … maybe.

Maybe I will have to eat my hat some day when I look back at these words … but if I were made to pick a winning horse today I would be betting on Yammer and having a smoother path to niceness with future releases.

Sure, this might mean having a muddled and semi painful story now as Jeremy points out in his post. This might mean you need to educate users around using Yammer, doing some work to federate for authentication purposes so you don’t have two logins, doing some integration work to make it easier to post stuff to Yammer from SharePoint etc.…   at least until MS pull the next round of SharePoint integrations with Yammer out of the hat and make things a lot less confusing etc.…

But at the end of the day I would be ok with that vs. being backed into a corner that you cant get out of or have a harder time getting out of.  Even if that means living with a less integrated experience today.

Who knows … I could be 100% totally wrong (in some ways I wish I will be) but maybe I wont and I hope to have saved a few of you from writing a kilotonne of migration code trying to get all those posts, likes and follows moved over to Yammer … but having said that I am sure AvePoint will have a nice migration tool ready for that eventuality anyway … so maybe all this is moot PS: AvePoint migration tools rock by the way.

PS: The real moment I will freak out about Social in the enterprise will be when Facebook finally gets around to releasing an Enterprise offering walled garden style social experience for organizations.  I have thought for a while now that it would be “any moment now” … but nada so far.  If that happened and they offered light weight document collab etc.… it would be a game changer.  But maybe zuck is holding off while him and Steve continue their wee love fest while trying to stiff Google. Time will tell I guess.

-CJ.

As the name suggests … It’s all about starting development on SharePoint 2013.  As you may have read or heard there is quite a bit of new stuff for developers in 2013 and this book aims to serve as a guide for those looking to grapple with those changes.

Topics include …  the new app model, developer tools, Azure, building and packaging apps, publishing in the SharePoint Store, distributing them internal to an organization, OAuth, Client Side OM, REST APIs, integrated SP + Office apps, Remote Event Receivers, Business Connectivity Services, Office Services & Workflow.

A core theme throughout the book is learning about the new development options available in 2013 and how and when to take advantage of them.

I wrote five of the fifteen chapters …

• Developing, Integrating, and Building Applications
  in SharePoint 2013
• Packaging, and Deploying SharePoint 2013 Apps
• Distributing SharePoint 2013 Apps
• Overview of the Client-Side Object Model and REST APIs
• Overview of OAuth in SharePoint 2013

Like I mentioned above, writing a book was something I have wanted to do for a while now but never got around to it.  I really have to thank Steve Fox for giving me the opportunity to collaborate on this.

It should be available soon and is already available for pre-order on Amazon:

Get it while its HOT!

-CJ.

My Trips lets you sync those plans down to your phone or PC and take them with you when you travel.  As awesome as the world is these days its highly likely you will be stuck without an internet connection at the most inopportune time

I wrote the first version of My Trips as an experiment when I wanted to take a look at building a phone app for Windows Phone… one thing led to another and nek minnit everyone wants it and I had to make it into a real app and publish it. 

Long story short … it’s used by more people than I had ever hoped

So when Windows 8 came around people started asking when I would release My Trips for it.  Of course it didn’t take much convincing and I really wanted to try my hand at Win8 development.

So it was a sweet moment last night when I finally finished version 1 of My Trips for Windows and submitted it for certification.  Hopefully nothing major will come up in certification and it will be in the Windows Store soon!

Did you just port the phone version?

To answer the question, no it wasn’t a smooth port at all. In fact I would say 85% of the code is new.  I want to write a few posts about the experience of the move to Windows 8, but for now it is fair to say that the way I built the phone application didn’t exactly lend itself to code sharing.  The phone app wasn’t built with a  nice separation of concerns using something like a pattern like MVVM.  I decided that rather than continue building on the mess I would start almost from scratch and build up with Win8 version using the (excellent) Caliburn Micro framework to facilitate a clean MVVM pattern.

The resultant code is a wonder of cleanliness, maintainability and extensibility that should make it a lot easier to port to other places if needed and maintain more simply.  If you are into clean code I highly recommend taking a look at Caliburn.

So given all I really managed to reuse code wise were a few TripIt API classes and some data model classes it really was quite a bit of work to get the rest written up.  All new Views, View Models, some Models and lots of ancillary code for caching, settings etc…Hence why it took a while longer than I had hoped.

I didn’t end up getting 100% feature parity with the phone application just yet.  That will take a bit more time.  The basics are there however, syncing your trips to your device and viewing them. Additionally things like support for Snapped view in Win8 and “Fill” view (that is the opposite side of the screen to snap view).

Here are a few screenshots of v1:

Splash screen…	Trip list…
A flight…	A hotel…
Snapped view with another app on the right…

For the devs reading I chose to write the app in C# and XAML over JS/HTML.  I personally find the C# XAML experience a LOT more productive … especially when you add in tools and frameworks like Caliburn Micro.

Like I said above, I hope to follow up with a few posts about the experience in more detail and about Win 8 development in general. 

Also … drop me a note in the comments or the contact section of the blog if you need any Windows 8 development done.  I know some people

Thanks,

-Chris Johnson.