Wictor Wilen

Aprils fools day and for the sixth time I have been awarded with the Microsoft Most Valuable Professional (MVP) recognition for SharePoint Server. Dear Wictor Wilen, Congratulations! We are pleased to present you with the 2015 Microsoft® MVP Award! This award is given to exceptional technical community leaders who actively share their high quality, real world expertise with others. We appreciate your outstanding contributions in SharePoint Server technical communities during the past year.

Here we go, another round of updates of the Office Roadmap. Don’t we love them! And sometimes they roll out even before the roadmap is updated ;-) Changes 2015-03-26 These are the change since yesterday. Now Launched Office 365 Admin App Update: Directly to launched status Features now rolling out Office 365 Groups: adding Like to Conversations: New stuff on the roadmap. Seems like the Office 365 (Exchange) team is building a whole new Yammer… Office 365 Notification Pane: (from development) This feature seems to cause some disturbance in the force. It’s rolling out, but it seems like it is just half finished… It does not (at the time of writing this) work and the user experience is…confusing. Worth mentioning here is that it is rolling out for Groups to start with (something that was changed today as well from yesterday ;-) Option for Passwords to Never Expire: (new on the list) Allows admin to use the UI to configure this rather than only PowerShell Tighter Yammer Integration with Delve: (new on the list) More Yammer in Delve. Why not more Groups in Delve? Features now In Development Office 365 Setup Wizard: (new on the list) The replacement for the basic and advanced setup options. The wizard will include migration from on-premises, Google Apps and more! Really neat!

Another day with some changes in the Office Roadmap, and some really interesting ones actually! Changes 2015-03-25 These are the changes since last time. Now launched Compliance Center for Office 365: From rolling out. Now no one can be less compliant than anyone else, or… Office 365 Groups Notebooks: Coming from nowhere direct to launched. Each Office 365 Group now has a OneNote Notebook. Features now rolling out Edit Office 365 profile details page update: Another newcomer on the list, only this one didn’t make it directly to production :). By clicking on the Gears in the upper-right corner, choosing Office 365 Settings, then choosing Me you will (if your tenant has this feature rolled out) find the new responsive page (https://portal.office.com/profile)

One very common requirement in SharePoint, and other portal solutions for that matter, is to have the possibility to target content to a dynamic audience of users and even secure information based on dynamic rules. Traditionally this has been done with Audiences in SharePoint. Audience is a dynamic set of users that is compiled, usually once a day, and at compile time the rules of the Audience is evaluated. A SharePoint Audience is used to target information, but cannot be used to protect content - ie as a security group.

Some small but interesting additions on the roadmap today. Changes 2015-03-19 New stuff on the roadmap Yammer support for Android Wear devices: (Directly to Launched) Yammer on your wrist! Ok, where’s the Microsoft Band app? Enhanced NDRs: (In Development) Microsoft will now help you understand the cause and reason of NDRs in a much easier way. ExpressRoute for Office 365: (In Development) You want your own redundant fat pipe to the Office 365 Data Centers - then this is your feature. Will be launched this fall.

It’s not easy to keep up on what is happening in the Office and Office 365 world. Everything is changing so fast. Fortunate for us Microsoft and the Office product group has created the Office Roadmap site (http://office.com/roadmap) with all (almost at least) the details on what is in development and rolling out etc. It became quite famous the other week when the new forms solution went from In Development to Cancelled.

It’s not easy to keep up on what is happening in the Office and Office 365 world. Everything is changing so fast. Fortunate for us Microsoft and the Office product group has created the Office Roadmap site (http://office.com/roadmap) with all (almost at least) the details on what is in development and rolling out etc. It became quite famous the other week when the new forms solution went from In Development to Cancelled.

Here’s a little nugget that I’ve planned to blog about for some time, that I needed today for a small task. I needed to do a background job to SharePoint Online that at a scheduled interval downloads list data, process them and optionally updates some data in my site. This can of course be done by creating an executable storing username and password combos, and with the help of the TokenHelper.cs class from the App for SharePoint Web Toolkit NuGet package and some stored username and password combos we can make the Auth pieces quite easy. I don’t like that approach. There’s two big drawbacks with that approach. The first one is storing the username and password – we can solve that with an AppOnly policy, which I blogged about in the SharePoint 2013: Using the App Only policy and App Principals instead of username and password combos post. The second issue is that I very much prefer to script these kind of tasks, it makes it more flexible. Problem with that approach is that we need to manually do the Auth pieces. But from now on you just copy and paste from this post.

It’s been way to long since we had a Sweden SharePoint User Group meeting in Stockholm, but the wait is now over. On the 26th of February we are all invited to the local Microsoft offices to learn more about SharePoint. Specifically this evening we will be able to hear from Erwin van Hunen, who will talk about the Office 365 Patterns and Practices project. We will also be able to hear from Microsoft about their Hybrid OneDrive for Business experiences. If this doesn’t get you fired up, then what would!