GT are back to Copenhagen for ESPC22
On Sunday 27 November our European SharePoint 2022 conference team arrived in Copenhagen. It was cold and dark, but we were filled with anticipation for the conference to begin. We checked into the hotel and completed registration for the conference. Craig, Annie, Jacqui and I were ready.
Day 1
The first day of the conference was dedicated to full day tutorials. Our team decided to go to the SharePoint Framework (SPFx) session by Paolo Pialorsi. SPFx is a library that allows developers to develop customisable web parts which can be deployed into SharePoint, Teams, Viva Connections and even Outlook. We also discussed the PnP community and some of the cool SPFx solutions which have been developed there that are already publicly available. Our newfound knowledge paired with the experience of Chad Carlse – an experienced SPFx developer who has just joined the A-Team should lead to some new and interesting apps in the next couple of months.
Day 2
The day started with a Key Note speech from the Microsoft product managers. They talked about some of the new technologies that have been developed recently including:
· Teams scheduled messaging – which is going to very useful for teams with members in different time zones as well as organisations with flexible working hours.
· Microsoft Loop – a widget that can be inserted into Teams chats or Outlook that allows users to create lists collaboratively in real time. It will be ideal for putting together lists on the fly during meetings.
· Syntex – Microsofts new document e-signing tool. Though less flexible than some of the existing 3rd party solutions (such as Adobe or Docusign), the fact that this is a Microsoft product has perks – licencing is managed in one place and integration between other products on the Microsoft Suite is easier to setup. Our team will be paying close attention for new features for this product.
We also enjoyed a session about list formatting. Marijn Somers went through everything from user friendly options that we could introduce to our clients to develop themselves to more complicated examples that use JSON objects to configure the styling of the lists and columns. We even went through some github repositories that showed off the high level of flexibility and extensibility of this feature.
Day 2 also marked the start of the Vendor Expo for all sponsors of the event. Craig and Annie were managing our booth and met tonnes of participants from the conference. It was great to get to interact with the community and meet some potential clients and partners.
Day 3
The highlight of day 3 was a session with Vlad Catrinescu. He explained how the Power Virtual Agent can be used to develop Teams chat bots. The technology is easy to pick up for anyone familiar with Power Automate and can allow developers to quickly build chat bots as a solution to quickly disseminate information or complete simple tasks (through Power Automate).
In the evening we went to the party in Copenhagen city. The party was a circus themed dinner with singing, dancing and circus performers who put together a great show! We enjoyed the show, the food and the conversations with the people at our table.
Day 4
On the final day of the conference, we went to 2 talks about search both hosted by Mikael Svenson. The first was the Search API and how it can be extended using graph to search throughout an entire tenant as well as the potential risks with creating such a solution. The second session focused on the PnP search web part which is currently the best way to all of the functionality of search on Modern SharePoint. Though the A-Team is using the solution for most intranets that we build we learnt a few tricks that we can’t wait to implement.