SharePoint Saturday Belgium 2018

It was that time of the year again to visit Belgium for their SharePoint Saturday. An excellent day organized by BIWUG.

This year was a tribute to an amazing SharePoint teacher who passed away too soon, Patrick Tisseghem. I did not know him but heard and read about him, I only was working 1 year with SharePoint when he passed away. During the day there were videos and photos about the things he did for the community.

Then Naomi kicked off the event with a great recap of all the things changing in SharePoint over the last half year and a lot of announcements that where made during Ignite this year.

I went to a Session of Olli Jääskeläinen (@_opax), he talked about the new era of customizing site provisioning. He talked about the new site scripts and site designs and how this way helps with the provisioning of sites. It is only available for modern team and communication sites. The site design is what the user can select at the time of creating. A site design can have multiple site scripts, this way you can create modular parts that can be used in multiple site designs. A site design can also do a call to trigger a flow so you can go beyond the options you have with the site scripts and call a Azure Automation or Azure function that uses the PnP Provisioning template to do the advanced stuff.

Another great option you have is that you can make the site designs available for certain users with the cmdlet (Get/Grant/Revoke)-PnPSiteDesignRights.

My second session was from Vlad Catrinescu (@vladcatrinescu) and was about advanced PowerShell for Office 365. He went thru some scripts on the easy management of licenses using the Azure AD PowerShell modules. The most important part here is that the SkuId is the same in every tenant, so you can reuse your scripts for every tenant you have.

Another thing he mentioned was about Office 365 groups, with the creation you can select the option private, but this is not completely private since everyone can find this group and see who the members are. There are cases you do not want that information in there or even the group to be found by your users. To hide the group membership you need to set this property with the creation of the group, you cannot do this after the group is created and can only be done with PowerShell. To make sure your users cannot find the group you can set the property ‘HiddenFromAddressListsEnabled’

To get all your external users in SharePoint, Microsoft provides the cmdlet ‘Get-SPOExternalUser’, the issue with this one is that it only gives back a max of 50 users, so you need to use paging to get all the users. All scripts are on the site of Vlad (https://absolute-sharepoint.com/)

The first session after lunch was from Naomi Moneypenny and Trab Gatte. They showed how you can use your data from lists and files in Power BI to create great dashboards. Trab also mentioned that the option Publish to the web should be turned off because by using this option there is no security around your data and Microsoft can use it in their data gallery.

The complete guide to the demo can be requested with this form

The second last session was about cognitive services, Azure IoT and Office 365 from Thomas Gölles (@thomvg) and Stephan Bisser (@cloudguy_pro). They showed us with an example of a camera and image recognition to see it the food truck was there. They explained how to train the models and how easy it can be to setup this all with just a few parts. They also mentioned that when using voice with an Amazon Lexa, Cortana or any other voice device in a bot there is no authentication.

The last session of the day was from Jethro Seghers (@jseghers) about security in Office 365 He started with a quote from Gartner “Through 2022, at least 95% of cloud security failures will be the customer’s fault”

So, you are responsible for your security. Microsoft has a lot of great guidance and put that all together on https://securescore.microsoft.com To get points for reviews, you need to open the review from secure score. He also created a e-book and can be found on his site: https://jethroseghers.com/2018/04/17/security-and-office-365-through-secure-score-download-my-ebook/

This concluded all the sessions and we ended with another talk about all the work Patrick Tisseghem did for the SharePoint community. After that, the raffle was done and I won a Super Nintendo mini classic.

Thanks, BIWUG team for another great event