Microsoft Cloud Show Episode 016 – Interview with Marc Anderson on Recent Changes Impacting Customers on Office 365

A few weeks back, I sat down (virtually, of course) with Andrew Connell (@AndrewConnell) and Chris Johnson (@LoungeFlyZ) to record an episode of the Microsoft Cloud Show. Andrew was in Florida, I was in Boston, and Chris was way around the world in New Zealand. Ah, the wonders of modern technology.

The only place to stay up to date on everything going on in the Microsoft cloud world including Azure and Office 365.

Whether you are new to the cloud, old hat or just starting to consider what the cloud can do for you this podshow is the place to find all the latest and greatest news and information on what’s going on in the cloud universe.  Join long time Microsoft aficionados and SharePoint experts Andrew Connell and Chris Johnson as they dissect the noise and distill it down, read between the lines and offer expert opinion on what is really going on.  Just the information … no marketing … no BS, just two dudes telling you how they see it.

I was honored to be the very first guest on the show, which already had 15 excellent episodes in the can.

In Episode 016 – Interview with Marc Anderson on Recent Changes Impacting Customers on Office 365, we talked about a number of extremely important things that have been going on with Office365 lately.

I had done a post about one issue that has caused me and users of SPServices the most consternation, Office 365 Update Changes ‘Display Name’ on Required Fields and Andrew had posted about a few others one his blog in Office 365 Needs to Treat the UX as an API if Our Customizations are to Stay Off the Server.

Last week, I released SPServices 2014.01, which addresses the title changes (adding ” Required Field” to the title attribute of some required dropdowns), but there’s a bigger set of issues at play here, as Andrew alludes to in his post.

In the podcast, we talked about the impact of these changes as well as the mindset behind them from the Microsoft side.

If you do any client side development with SharePoint – and that’s where everyone is headed – you owe it to yourself to listen to the podcast. You’ll understand more about what changes to the DOM might mean for you as a developer, or even what might happen to you as a user of customizations that rely on the DOM being stable and predictable.

One things seems certain: we’ll see more changes like the ones we discussed in the podcast and they will have an impact on everyone, not just people replying on Office365. (The same issues started to crop up for people who have applied the December 2013 Cumulative Update (CU) for SharePoint 2010 on premises.)

I want to thank Chris and Andrew for inviting me in for a chat. Assuming I didn’t annoy them too much with my scatological terminology, maybe I’ll be able to visit with them again the next time a round of changes like this pop up and cause ripples in the SharePoint time-space continuum.