Vince365

TL; DR

I’ll be starting at Microsoft as a Program Manager on the Microsoft Graph in January. This is an exiting change and I’d like to take the time to thank 2toLead for the amazing last few years.

New role

I’m exited to announce I’ll be starting at Microsoft in January as a Program Manager on the Microsoft Graph (and other Microsoft Identity Platform topics). I’ll be part of the MIP organization and in the extended team of brilliant people like Yina Arenas, Jeremy Thake, Darrel Miller and many more.

This is truly exiting and humbling to join the team working on the Microsoft Graph. For the readers not familiar with the name: the Microsoft Graph is the unified API for Microsoft 365 services, enabling organizations and developers to tap into the wealth of data and knowledge they are creating over the years.

The API has come a long way since its early days under the name of the “Office 365 unified APIs” and I do believe it has had a tremendous impact on Microsoft’s transformation from a products company to a services and API first company.

It is also a change of trade for me, moving from core development to leading teams of developers and designing great solutions for our customers.

Thank you 2toLead

I’d like to take this opportunity to thank 2toLead for these amazing last 3 years together. I joined as employee number 7 and I am now moving on to a new role from a team of 27 dedicated and talented people.

Not only the culture of remote work has helped me maintain a healthy work-life balance, they make a point to work on bleeding edge projects with noticeable customers. I am pretty sure the mentoring as well as the extended support for community activities are big factors that contributed to me getting this new opportunity.

If you’d like to join 2toLead, do not hesitate to contact Kanwal Khipple on LinkedIn. The company is currently hiring Project Leads, Developers and more.

What about your community involvements?

Most of my community contributions over the last years revolved around Azure DevOps, SharePoint Framework development, Azure development and of course the Microsoft Graph.

I think that will shift to focus on the Microsoft Graph, API design, maybe protocol and standards advocacy (HTTP, Odata, OpenAPI…) and I’ll try to keep some involvement in the local Montréal community as well.

I already blogged in the past about how personal blogs are becoming less relevant in an era of open source development and when great platforms such as stack overflow exist. I’ll probably be blogging on some of the official Microsoft blogs in the future, which means this blog site might transition to other things like my experience working at Microsoft maybe.

Are you moving to Redmond?

No. Our life is in Montréal and I do not see us moving anywhere else anytime soon. Part of my engineering team might be in Nairobi or India anyway. This means I’ll be traveling a little bit and I’ll still be able to have a beer/tea/hot chocolate with the local community members in Montréal.

Weren’t you involved in an IoT thing?

Yes. Part of the great culture of 2toLead is that they are willing to give you personal time for other projects you might have.

A couple of years ago, a friend of mine named Dany started an IoT company with the goal to help customers to optimize energy usage related to climate control. Think of datacenters and frozen products distributors (any frozen pizza, or ice cream you buy transitions through them) that need to cool things down. These industrial systems are still mostly designed without any embedded intelligence and there is a huge opportunity for energy and costs optimization.

Dany reached out multiple times to request help with a few things, like the data pipeline, building the API, setting the foundation of a dashboard portal, authentication and authorization.

Earlier this year SenseAI was acquired by Bases.AI, a company focused on datacenters and AI. And I am sure they have all cards in hand to start a revolution around data, AI and energy management.

They are hiring developers (front end and back end), if you feel like working with this great team, do not hesitate to contact Dany on LinkedIn. And if you’d like to know more about the kind of things they do, you can watch our Microsoft Build session, although the examples were built for the demonstrations, most of the concepts are very similar.

What about the MVP program?

You cannot be a Microsoft Most Valuable Professional anymore if you work for Microsoft. This is a page turning. The program allowed me to make lots of friends passioned about technology and community. I’ll keep many great memories (some of them are blurry, I blame the lemon drops) and if you contribute a lot to the community, you should definitively join the program.

I couple of days ago I had the opportunity to animate a workshop with the amazing Franck Cornu at the Modern Workplace Conference Paris.

We decided to make all the labs available under PnP for you to learn new technologies and patterns.

If you follow the steps described in the labs, you will learn about technologies like Azure Logic Apps, Azure Functions, the Microsoft Graph, Azure Durable Functions, SharePoint WebHook, PnP Provisioning and much more.

Do not hesitate to open issues if some things could be improved or even to submit pull requests to improve the existing content.

Click here to navigate to the repository.

Happy coding!

I was invited to demonstrate the new Office 365 CLI externalize command during on the of recent PnP calls.

You can watch the full call here

As a reminder this new command allows you to scan a SPFx project and get the external configuration automatically.
Doing this reduces greatly the size of your solutions, improving performances for end users.

You can watch the command in action here and read the documentation here.

The ESPC is one of the biggest technology events in Europe and the biggest with focus on Office 365, SharePoint and Azure.

An interesting particularity of this event, they move to a different European capital each year.

This years edition will be from December 2nd to 5th in Prague and I'm honored to be invited to speak again.

I'll be presenting two sessions:

- How to do DevOps with the SharePoint Framework and why it matters? This session will be an introduction to DevOps practices and an application of the core principles in a SharePoint Framework context.

- Advanced DevOps with the SharePoint Framework. I'll be co-presenting this session with the famous Elio Struyf. During this session we will go over more advanced DevOps concepts when building SharePoint Framework solutions.

If you live in Europe and work with Office 365 and/or Azure, I highly recommend you make the trip and come get awesome content delivered by worldwide experts!

Last September I was invited to speak again on the Microsoft Graph Community call. If you don't know about it, this free online monthly call brings together Microsoft Product Team members and Community members demonstrating new capabilities and real world examples.

It is a great way to catch up on the latest news and I highly recommend you attend it if you work with the Microsoft Graph or would like to. (see attached link)

This time I was presenting a shorter version of my session "Automating Provisioning for your digital workplace: With Azure Durable Functions and the Microsoft Graph".

I demonstrated how you can easily implement complex provisioning workflows tied to your business logic using the latest and greatest frameworks and APIs.

Here is the video starting at my demonstration, but you can of course watch the entire video.

This year again I have the opportunity to speak at the SPS Ottawa and I'll be presenting "Introduction To The Microsoft Graph: Getting Started Quickly & Getting The Most Out Of It".

Together we will cover the basics of the Microsoft Graph, the Microsoft Identity Platform, the value it provides to developers and how to get started.

If you’re in the area Saturday October the 5th 2019 don’t hesitate to register to the event.
Just as a reminder SPS are free events organized by the community with lot of great sessions.

This is a good occasion to expand your network, learn a lot of things and to spend a good day. The event takes place at a new place: Microsoft Ottawa.
See you there!

I am deeply honoured and humbled to announce I have been selected to speak at the Microsoft Build 2019, which will be happening from May 6th to 8th in Seattle.

The subject is going to be a bit different from my usual speaking area however, we will be talking about IoT, health and wellbeing.

Here is the abstract of the session.

Using IoT to improve people’s health and brain power

The office space is a hostile environment for our bodies and health. Back pain, brain asphyxia, drowsing and many more health related issues come cripple our workforce, having huge consequences on employee’s well being and their performance. 

If things are slowly starting to improve with ergonomic desks, medical advisors and other initiatives, let us look at what technology could do to help us. Join Microsoft MVP Vincent Biret for a session on how you can leverage small and simple IoT projects to improve individual’s personal health and increase their day to day well being as well as overall performance. 

Learn about Microsoft Azure IoT and serverless solutions through fun and odd demonstrations during this session packed with examples.

The Microsoft Build is a paid conference with dozens of sessions, mostly from the product teams, focusing on a developper audience. You can learn more about it and register here.
I hope to see many of you there!

SharePoint Fest Washington DC 2018 is happening from April 29th to May the 3rd. This event will feature 2 days pre-conference workshops and 3 days of conference. You can find more information about it on the website. I'll be presenting three sessions:

DEV104 - Migrate your custom components to the SharePoint Framework

Migrate your custom components to the SharePoint Framework.

It’s the 3rd model Microsoft has come with to customize SharePoint in less than 5 years. You may still have add-ins/apps or even solutions running in production and you’re asking yourself what to do about all that?
Do you have to start all over again? And for how long that new model will last?

We’ll see together what could be the reasons pushing you to chose one model or another. Do you need to migrate everything now. How to build applications that will be easy to migrate to the framework if you’re on “old versions” of SharePoint. And how to leverage existing components you’ve developed.

This session is primarily meant for developers and deciders.
AZR202 - Azure Functions: What’s New In V2 & Getting Started

Azure Functions are an extremely important and popular service from Microsoft for serverless workloads. Version 2 of this service is now available and whether you are getting started or looking to migrate and better understand the differences, it’s important to know more about this powerful service and development approach.

Join Vincent Biret, an MVP and expert on Azure development, during his session to get a crash course on tooling, ways to get started, authentication, authorization and how to access and process data quickly. With many demonstrations, you will learn how to leverage Azure Functions to build your APIs and backend services for line of business applications, IoT, data processing and much more!

AZR302 - Automating PROV For Your Digital Workplace: With Azure Durable Functions & Microsoft Graph

Out of the box Microsoft allows you to provision pre-built templates to help users get started and meet your business needs. In the real world almost all organizations extend these templates and further tailor the provisioning of new digital spaces, whether they be SharePoint sites, Microsoft teams or more. Understanding how to automatically create new teams, channels, tabs, invite people, send a welcome message and much more is a critical part of getting more out of Office 365.

Join Vincent Biret, MVP and Office 365 expert, as he demonstrates how to build a better provisioning workflow that leverages Azure Durable Functions and the Microsoft Graph. With what you learn in this session you can better automate and improve the provisioning process and significantly reduce the amount of administrative and manual work needed in Office 365.

It is the second time in a few years I have the ooportunity to speak at the SharePoint Saturday Houston.

Sorry, I had to make the pun…. When the SharePoint Framework originally shipped, the tooling included KarmaJS to write unit tests.

KarmaJS received a lot of complaints about performance, capabilities, modern JavaScript support… This especially if you use is in combination with PhantomJS, a headless web browser project that has been abandoned a long time ago now which also shipped with SPFx.

While some people have been arguing for a choice in unit testing framework with SPFx like we (almost) have choice in web frameworks, we saw little movement on that front over the last years.

A couple of weeks ago, Microsoft release version 1.8.0 of SPFx, it’s a great release especially if we look at it from a tooling modernization perspective (flexibility on the typescript version, depreciation of old fabric stuff…).

However, they also have removed karmaJS from the standard tooling, and they haven’t documented that change, I have reach out to them internally hoping this will get resolved soon.

While you can perfectly bring karma back by installing a few packages and tweaking your project configuration, I’d recommend you move to Jest it’s not a big effort and you will get a much faster test cycle. If you want to see the work this represents on a sample webpart, you can look at this pull request, keep in mind it also includes the upgrade to SPFx 1.8.0.

The PnP generator has included Jest configuration for a while now thanks to the work of Elio Struyf and Andrew Connell and I started the work to update the tooling and documentation around the Azure DevOps integration.

TL; DR;

With the release of Azure DevOps, there’s some new SPFX documentation to set up your CI/CD pipeline in Azure DevOps.  Have a look and share your thoughts.  Your feedback is always welcome! The Patterns and Practices Initiative also includes a newly reorganized DevOps repository for tools and samples around SharePoint Framework Build and Deploy Practices.

The long story

My journey into the SharePoint DevOps world

I have been working around Application Lifecycle Management (ALM), Continuous Integration (CI), Continuous Deployment (CD) and DevOps practices in the SharePoint/Azure/Office 365 ecosystem for several years.  In my experience, whether you’re working alone or as part of a team, adopting proper ALM practices is crucial if you want to produce high quality code.

Historically, SharePoint developers didn’t have many viable options to implement such practices.  Building full trust solutions and using XAML build definitions on Team Foundation Servers were more difficult than  their “open source stack” counterparts. At the time I was part of the SharePoint on-premises product team for Oceanik, a multilingual product for SharePoint, it was painful and slow, though doable, to automate builds and deployments.

The process improved somewhat with the SharePoint Add-ins development model and Visual Studio Team Services’ new build system (originally called 2015, or JSON builds).  At that time, I had the chance to explore these new options and be part of the Attribute product team, which was a semantic analysis product which would automatically tag your documents in SharePoint.  With all the learning I’ve been doing, I took the opportunity and started speaking and blogging about these experiences I had discovered.

The power of the community

Great things happen when individuals with similar interests and passions come together.  This is exactly what happened to me.  Through my speaking engagements, I started building my personal network.  Together, we shared our issues and came up with different approaches for solving them.

If you spend enough time in the SharePoint development ecosystem, you are likely to come across some great community leaders in the domain.  I’m lucky to have had the chance meet some of them, such as Elio Struyf, Waldek Mastykarz, Andrew Connell, and Vesa Juvonen amongst many others.  Following our early encounters, Elio and I  started building a Repository to demonstrate how to integrate SharePoint Framework and Visual Studio Team Services to have a better toolchain.  The goal was to provide blog posts, which we both wrote independently with no real coordination.  It took longer than expected to complete the work as we both hold jobs, are frequent speakers, and have other responsibilities.  Fortunately for us, there were several factors that played in our favour:

• In December 2017, Waldek Mastykarz and Andrew Connell created the Office 365 CLI to help you script and automate administrative tasks for Office 365 from any platform.
• In March 2018, we met with Vesa Juvonen, who recommended moving the documentation under the OfficeDev PnP and Official Microsoft documentation
• In May 2018, Microsoft came out with long requested ALM APIs making it much easier to deploy “apps” to SharePoint.
• Shortly after the ALM APIs were released, the Office 365 CLI implemented these APIs making the whole thing much easier

New documentation, new repositories

I would like to introduce you to this new documentation article, which guides you through setting up and configuring your CI/CD pipeline for the SharePoint Framework with Azure DevOps.  I suggest you try it out.  If you run into any problems, please don’t hesitate to open any issues. More importantly I would like to introduce you to the SharePoint Framework Build and Deploy Practices repository.  This is the first step for documenting the ALM process for the SharePoint development ecosystem.  What could you add to that?  Is there anything you would like to see that is not there today?  CircleCI?  AppVeyor?  Travis?  Jenkins?

About this blog

You probably have noticed seeing less content on this blog over the last year. The main reasons being GitHub and Stack Overflow. Those platforms have truly changed the development landscape over the last few years. From my perspective I think it is much more beneficial to the whole community if the solution that would have been in a blog post is directly incorporated in an open source project. Same if the knowledge answering this question or revealing that bug is shared on platforms that have more exposure, mechanisms to triage/dispatch/address it, etc.

Conclusion and final thanks

This has been an amazing journey which allowed me to learn a plethora of things as well as meet and get to know peers. In addition to the people that I mentioned through the article, I’d like to thank my friend Haniel Croitoru who proofread not only the documentation but also this article.

As 2018 is concluding (we’ll be in 2019 by the time this blog post is published), I’ve taken a few days off to rest, spend time with the family, play video games, read, watch movies and… catch up on my blog posts writing.

Almost a month ago now I was presenting at the SharePoint Saturday Toronto, huge thanks to Eric Riz, Kanwal Khipple and Noorez Khamiz for organizing the event! More importantly, they had to find a new venue at the last minute because the original one was forced to closed done for a few days and they pulled it off!

During the event Yana Berkovich, Kate Wilson, Sherman Woo, Mark Kashman and myself got together to record an episode of the Intrazone podcast: SharePoint from the Canadian POV.

During this episode we talked about different subjects including development, governance, information architecture, data visualization and much more, I encourage you to check it out!

The Microsoft Ignite tour is a series of events that take place in cities around the world. This series of events is organized by Microsoft and presenters are picked among Microsoft Employees, Regional Directors and MVPs.

I’ll have the opportunity to present one session “How to do DevOps with the SharePoint Framework and why it matters?”. During this session we will explore together how you can setup your continuous integration and continuous deployment pipeline leveraging Azure DevOps (formerly Visual Studio Team Services).

The event will be taking place at the Metro Toronto Convention Centre the 10^th and 11^th of January and you can register for free here.

See you there!

On January the 3^rd I’ve been invited to speak (virtually) at the Granite State SharePoint Users group. I’ll be presenting the session “The Microsoft Graph and the SharePoint Framework on steroids with Azure Functions”.

This session will demonstrate how you can tap into a wealth of data and insights from the Microsoft Graph, interact with the user using the SharePoint Framework and extend components with complex line of business logic leveraging serverless Azure Functions.

If you can make it to the Microsoft Store in Salem come join the user group, it is free and there will be pizza! Don’t forget to register with the meetup event here.

If you can be physically present, you can also attend the presentation online here.

This year again I have the opportunity to speak at the SPS Toronto.

I’ll give a speech about “Migrate your custom components to the SharePoint Framework”.

Together we will see how you can transition from either the server-side object model or the add-ins development fashions to the modern SharePoint Framework approach. This session is mostly meant for developers and technical architects who are curious about getting started on the new model and that might have legacy applications.

Together we will see a lot of demonstrations, examples and you’ll leave the session with a clear understanding of how to transition your existing custom solutions to the latest and greatest.

If you’re in the area Saturday November, the 24th 2018 don’t hesitate to register to the event.

Just as a reminder SPS are free events organized by the community with lot of great sessions. This is a good occasion to expand your network, learn a lot of things and to spend a good day.

See you there! 

www.spsevents.org/city/Toronto/Toronto2018

This year again I have the opportunity to speak at the SPS Ottawa. It has become a regular event for me. This SPS is really dear to me because not only I get to see a lot of Canadian MVPs friends but it also was the first event ever I was presenting in (a broken) English a long time ago.

This year I'll present "The Microsoft Graph and SharePoint Framework under steroids with Azure functions" or how these three technologies really represent a power trio to build customizations in Office 365. Together we'll see how to leverage the Graph to access your company's data, how to leverage the SharePoint Framework to access the Graph and build user centric applications as well as how to leverage Microsoft Graph connected Azure Functions via the SharePoint Framework to implement your line of business logic with backend processing capabilities.

If you’re in the area Saturday November the 10th 2018 don’t hesitate to register to the event.
Just as a reminder SPS are free events organized by the community with lot of great sessions.

This is a good occasion to expand your network, learn a lot of things and to spend a good day. The event takes place at algonquin college.
See you there!

This year again I have the opportunity to speak at the SPS New England.

I’ll give a speech about “Improving DevOps using Microsoft's Business Productivity Tools and more” and I'll be co-presenting the session with my friend Haniel Croitoru.

We'll explore together how DevOps practices impact and improve solutions delivery for your customers and for the best. With real life scenarios and experience for the field we'll show you how you can get started and what to expect out of it.

If you’re in the area Saturday October, the 20^th 2018 don’t hesitate to register to the event.

Just as a reminder SPS are free events organized by the community with lot of great sessions.

This is a good occasion to expand your network, learn a lot of things and to spend a good day. The event takes place at Microsoft offices

See you there!

I am delighted to announce I have been selected to speak at the European SharePoint Conference 2018. This event will take place in Copenhagen, Denmark from the 26^th to the 29^th of November.

I will be speaking about “Migrate your custom components to the SharePoint Framework”.

“It’s the 3rd model Microsoft has come with to customize SharePoint in less than 5 years. You may still have add-ins/apps or even solutions running in production and you’re asking yourself what to do about all that?

Do you have to start all over again? And for how long that new model will last?

We’ll see together what reasons could push you to chose one model or another. Do you need to migrate everything now? How to build applications that will be easy to migrate to the framework if you’re on “old versions” of SharePoint? And how to leverage existing components you’ve developed.”

This session is primarily meant for developers, architects and deciders.

Although this is a paid event, you can get a discount of 100E with the code ESPC18SPK!!

I am truly honored to be part of this excellent speakers line up and can’t wait to be at the event to attend some of the sessions myself!

I hope I will see you there! Information and registration https://www.sharepointeurope.com

I Have the pleasure to announce I have been selected to speak at SPS Pittsburgh 2018.

I’ll give a speech about the graph “How to do Dev-Ops with the SharePoint Framework and why it matters”.

Together we’ll see why it’s important to follow the DevOps processes, methodologies, and philosophy and how to implement it for the SharePoint Framework with Visual Studio Team Services (or TFS). Go from the original idea to production automating as much as possible!

If you’re in the area Saturday September, the 15^th 2018 don’t hesitate to register to the event.

Just as a reminder SPS are free events organized by the community with lot of great sessions.

This is a good occasion to expand your network, learn a lot of things and to spend a good day. The event takes place at Microsoft Offices, 30 Isabella St.

See you there!

SharePoint Fest Seattle 2018 is happening from August 20th to 24th. This event will feature 2 days pre-conference workshops and 3 days of conference. You can find more information about it on the website. I’ve been selected amongst 74 other speakers (including people from Microsoft product teams!!) to present this year two sessions:

AZR203 - Azure Functions In The Real World: Lessons Learned & Best Practices

“Azure Functions is one of the most powerful new solutions provided by Microsoft. Customers are leveraging it, and it has generally been available for a year now quietly delivering value across hundreds of projects. Many of you are probably asking yourself questions like “are functions mature enough?” or “are they production ready?” or even “is the right tooling here yet?” when considering this option for your projects.”

AZR302 – Microsoft Graph and SharePoint Framework under steroids with Azure Functions

“Modern development means client side first, backend second. However, there are still cases where you might need some backend processing, for long running operations, heavy computing consuming tasks or security concerns.

During that session we will learn how you can build server-less solutions to support modern development. We will determine together when it makes sense to offload things on the backend and when is does not. We will have a lot of examples working with the Microsoft Graph as well as the SharePoint Framework.

Finally, we will see that server-less does not mean hacky solutions and that proper continuous integration and deployment processes can be implemented.”

I’m truly honored to be part of this prestigious event with so many other great SharePoint/Office 365 speakers. If you haven’t booked your ticket to the event yet, go ahead!

See you there.

I Have the pleasure to announce I have been selected to speak at SPS Charlotte 2018.

I’ll give a speech about the graph “How to do Dev-Ops with the SharePoint Framework and why it matters”.

Together we’ll see why it’s important to follow the DevOps processes, methodologies, and philosophy and how to implement it for the SharePoint Framework with Visual Studio Team Services (or TFS). Go from the original idea to production automating as much as possible!

If you’re in the area Saturday August, the 18^th 2018 don’t hesitate to register to the event.

Just as a reminder SPS are free events organized by the community with lot of great sessions.

This is a good occasion to expand your network, learn a lot of things and to spend a good day. The event takes place at the UNC Charlotte Center City.

See you there!

I must admit I’ve not been on page lately for the blog posts. However, I had the privilege (among other great speakers) to present during the Microsoft Graph Community call for the month of June.

Microsoft Graph Community calls are online webinar organized by the Microsoft Graph Team. The Team usually presents announcements and then allows time for community speakers to presents discoveries, real life solutions and lessons learnt with the Microsoft Graph. Those call are free to attend and if you’re not already registered, here is all the information you need.

During this edition I was presenting a real-life solution that we (2toLead) built and deployed to more than 100 000 users. This solution helps the customer be more efficient when organizing online meetings by creating the invitations in Exchange, creating a structured space in SharePoint to capture key elements (agenda, tasks, comments…) and creating a Skype online meeting so people can attend virtually.

This solution relies heavily on the Microsoft Graph and during the project we learnt a few tricks I’m sharing during the demonstration that could be useful to any of you building solutions that take advantage of the Microsoft Graph.

Here is the link to watch the recording (that also contains awesome demonstration with Flow and PowerApps).

Last week I had the honor to be a guest on the Microsoft 365 Dev Podcast hosted by Jeremy Thake and Paul Schaeflein.

It was the second time I was invited on a podcast (the first one being in French about devops), this is a fun exercise where the content is delivered as a discussion between the hosts and the guests.

During this episode we discussed about two main topics:

• The Microsoft Graph open extensions (currently starting a project using those at 2toLead)
• The Calendar capabilities in the Microsoft Graph (and I shared a few tricks that might interested you if you plan on using those APIs)

I’d like to thank Jeremy and Paul for giving me this opportunity and for the good conversations.

Click here to listen to the podcast (multiple platforms supported) and don’t forget to subscribe to it!

Renewed as MVP and changed category

I have the pleasure to announce I’ve been renewed as a Microsoft MVP, for the fifth year in a row (time flies, I’m getting old). A slight change this time, my award is Office development.

Over the years I’ve been a SharePoint MVP, an Office Servers and Services MVP and now an Office development MVP.

Originally Microsoft had it’s MVPs organized by products, which made a lot of sense in a on premises world which required a deep knowledge in something very specific. Also, it allowed MVP’s to be connected directly with the teams at Microsoft on their product. However, over the last decade the industry transitioned to a cloud first model and somebody who was working with SharePoint (or Exchange, Skype…) is most likely to be working with Office 365 at large (and some Azure as well). A couple of years ago (3?) Microsoft decided to reorganize the MVP program to have award categories (Azure, Office servers and services, Visual Studio and Team Services…) which regroup contribution areas (e.g. OSS: SharePoint, Exchange, Office 365, …)

The only downside for that reorganization is that in the case of Office Servers and Services, the focus was now much more on the “IT pros” and “power user” side of things, with little attention given to any developers (aren’t those guys in Azure now?) when at the time, the SharePoint category would include devs as well.

After a year Microsoft realized that and decided to create the Office Dev award category (which regroups SharePoint dev, Office 365 dev, Excel “dev”, Office add-ins…) and somehow randomly dispatched the MVP’s in that award.

I’m not going to dive in the intricacy of the program (and I don’t think I’m allowed to at some point) but basically the category you’re in will dictate the content you have access to, the product teams that will listen to you and so on. During the last MVP summit, my content was way off my centers of interest and I had to ask all the time to my friends in the “correct” category “hey which room are we going to next?”.

This new category should map much better to my interests and contributions and allow me to have better interaction with the many different product teams at Microsoft.

About this blog

I started this blog eight years ago now, (time flies, I’m really getting old) back when I was student (I’d soon become a Microsoft Student Partner) and the primary focus was to fill the gaps of Microsoft documentation and my memory.

The idea was simple, whenever I had a problem the documentation wasn’t giving a clear answer to and I didn’t want to forget the solution for, I’d document it. And instead of keeping that for myself, let’s put it on a blog so it might help over people.

Over the years a lot of things changed: Microsoft is much more active on their blogging platform (the focus changed a bit though), they transitioned a to open source, even the documentation is based on open source allowing us to fill the gaps with a much simpler process, people read less and watch more, and cross-technology help platforms emerged (thinking about stack overflow).

With those considerations in mind I think it’s much more valuable to contribute to the global effort on those public platforms (stackoverflow, github…) that will benefit everybody (even those that have no clue about your blog) and allow for peer reviews, updates, etc…

Besides investing more time on those way of contributing, I also changed a lot, my focus back then was both IT pro and dev, and I’ve matured to understand my core passion is development (in a DevOps philosophy).

Lastly I spend much more time giving in person sessions at events than a couple of years ago.( I actually gave my first session in English ever almost five years ago now at SharePoint Saturday Ottawa, hopefully my English has improved since).

All those reasons hopefully explain why there’s a bit less content over here, and this is for the greater good :)

To conclude this post, I’d like to thank all my peers (MVPs or not), the people leading/following/challenging me and finally Simran Chaudhry who was until recently an amazing Canadian MVP lead during my four first years as an MVP!

This year again I have the opportunity to speak at the SPS NYC.

I’ll give a speech about “Migrate your custom components to the SharePoint Framework”.

Together we will see how you can transition from either the server-side object model or the add-ins development fashions to the modern SharePoint Framework approach. This session is mostly meant for developers and technical architects who are curious about getting started on the new model and that might have legacy applications.

Together we will see a lot of demonstrations, examples and you’ll leave the session with a clear understanding of how to transition your existing custom solutions to the latest and greatest.

If you’re in the area Saturday July, the 28th 2018 don’t hesitate to register to the event.

Just as a reminder SPS are free events organized by the community with lot of great sessions.

This is a good occasion to expand your network, learn a lot of things and to spend a good day.

See you there! 

http://www.spsevents.org/city/nyc/nyc2018