Office365 Redmond Slides and Demos

I had great fun presenting at Office365 Redmond a few Saturdays ago. Not only was it on the Microsoft campus, but some Microsoft folks were in my session as well. It’s always interesting to see the reactions from Microsofties when they see how people really use their stuff.

My session was entitled “Flying in the Cloud: New Ways to Develop for SharePoint”. In some ways, the session was very similar to my old “Developing in SharePoint’s Middle Tier” presentations, but skewed toward Office365 and working with SharePoint Online. One of the great things about working in SharePoint’s Middle Tier is that the same approaches just plain work in both environments. There are a few small differences, but they aren’t of much consequence. I was able to do my demos on my Office365 E1 installation with no problems, since I had worked out my issues with migrating my demo environment from my local VM to SharePoint Online. It wasn’t a simple thing (though it should have been).

It was the inaugural event for Office365 Saturday, and I was interested going in how it would work vis a vis SharePoint Saturday. As it turned out, the majority of sessions were about SharePoint. It’s not clear if that’s because Exchange and Lync are less interesting, the communities for those two products aren’t as strong, or those folks aren’t as willing to spend a Saturday talking about them. In any case, I think that it’ll take a few more of these Office365 Saturday events before we all know whether the idea has legs, at least as a separate event from the venerable old SharePoint Saturdays themselves.

I’ve learned a few things about compatibility of solution files (WSPs) between SharePoint Online and on premises installations over the last few weeks. Because of this, I’m including two WSPs for each demo in a ZIP file. (The few slides I used are also included.) There is a WSP for on premises and one for Office365 for each of the two demo sites. They aren’t exactly the same, but they are close enough for you to see all of the important bits and pieces I demonstrated in the session. If you download things and have issues hydrating them, please let me know what those issues are, as I’m trying to understand as much as I can about these portability considerations.

Thanks to all of the organizers, sponsors, and other speakers for a great day of information and knowledge sharing.