SPS Paris and SPS Belgium

Arjan Cornelissen
PowerShell, exchange, microsoft-azure, office, office-365, office-dev-pnp, power-bi, sharepoint
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Last two weekends I went to SharePoint Saturday in Paris and Belgium. It is always great to meet other SharePoint and Office 365 consultants, customers and suppliers.

SPS Paris

The first weekend I went to Paris where I did not read my emails to carefully, so I was at the wrong venue. I was not the only one. It took some extra time to get to the new location. Arrived there I was just in time for the first session; this was a session about the secure score site from Microsoft. The URL of the Secure Score is http://securescore.office.com. Here you can log in with an administrator account and see what security settings you can do to make your tenant more secure. You need to be a Global Administrator, SharePoint Administrator, Exchange Administrator or Compliance Administrator to access it.

The next session was about content security; this focusses more on how we can protect the actual content instead of the old way of securing the premises, defending the fort. These days the user works more remote and protecting your IP is becoming harder with just a firewall around your environment. With changing the way, you think about security you can make your environment more secure. The old way was looking outside; the new approach is to look inside. By doing this, you look at what your users are doing with the content and look for anomalies in the behavior of your employees. Besides protecting the know vulnerabilities, you need to look at the unknown vulnerabilities. Look at bad domains, stolen credentials and use dynamic analysis.

Then I attended a session on when to choose what platform. I hear this question more often because there are too many chooses and overlap in the applications within Office 365. Dux Raymond Sy from AvePoint did an excellent presentation about this. He mentioned that email is still the most used platform for communication and that the current generation does not like to use email at all. The best way to figure out what to use when is to describe business scenario’s and find answers to these questions

  • As someone in …..
  • I want to ….
  • Using ….
  • I will know this is successful when …..

After collecting all the scenario’s, prioritize them on impact and difficulty. In general use: Yammer for asking questions on who did what, sharing ideas

SharePoint for formalizing a project

Teams to work on the project

Skype for business to video conferences and meetings

Email to ask people outside the organization, customer

SharePoint for archiving

We had a closing keynote at the end of the day from Mark Kashman. He did a demo of the new SharePoint App on his Android tablet. He also showed the new HubSite and the thoughts behind this. The HubSite makes it possible to connect several team sites and communication sites and create an entry point for your employees.

SPS Belgium

In Belgium, we started with a keynote from Mike Fitzmaurice. He talked about the citizen developer manifesto. The developer does not have the time to solve all business needs, and business users are building solutions next to their job. These solutions are usually small applications that make their job a lot easier and less repetitive. The goal for the developer should be to build the Lego bricks that the citizen developer can use. Amazon adopted this way of working.

Another great session was about auditing. With the coming changes and GDPR, you need to prove what happened in your environment. Auditing can help with this. In the session was explained what option you have in SharePoint with auditing. He also mentioned that Microsoft is logging everything, it is your task to use the audit for your needs. It is best to use the Office 365 Unified logs instead of the SharePoint audit logs. You still need to enable it per site collection, but you have the search on one place. You can also use PowerShell to go thru all records and save the critical logs in a database to report on. Besides logging your users, you should log your administrators and eDiscovery users. Slides of this session can be found here and the script he showed here.