Building a Hybrid SharePoint Environment

Microsoft has been “All in” on the cloud for several years now. But many companies aren’t sure they are ready to commit all their resources to a cloud environment. Still, most companies see the cost savings and efficiencies to be gained by putting some things in the cloud, like personal sites (OneDrive for Business). To solve this dilemma many companies are moving to a hybrid environment that includes both SharePoint on-premises and Office 365. In this talk we’ll review the case for hybrid cloud environments and demonstrate how to build a hybrid environment using either SharePoint 2013 or 2016. We'll also review each of the hybrid workloads and provide tips on how to maximize the effectiveness of your hybrid environment.

Intro to SharePoint 2019: What's New

TBD - A specific Abstract will be provided about 3 months prior to the event.

Intro To OneDrive Next Gen Sync: What is it, how it works, and can I manage it?

OneDrive and the free storage it provides has changed the way many people work on documents and share information with others. The ability to synchronize that information to local storage so you can continue to work offline is an important component of that change for many people. But the history of synchronization clients for SharePoint has been a confusing landscape at best and a disfunctional mess at worst. The roadmap starting with SharePoint workspace through the original OneDrive Sync client and now culmanating with the OneDrive Next Gen Sync client has been littered with failure and confusion. The release this year of the next round of enhancements for the OneDrive next gen sync client may finally be turning the corner on all that pain and suffering. But there is still a lot of confusion about which client is which and what each client supports and what it doesn't. In this talk we'll cut through all that confusion and show you how to figure out which client you are currently using, which client you should be using and how to get it installed/upgraded. We'll also discuss how to implement and manage the sync process for an entire enterprise. And we'll look at the roadmap of enhancements that are still to come. Find out how your organization can effectively change the way you are working on and sharing information.

Desired State Configuration (DSC): Controlling SharePoint Deployment in Azure VMs

Building SharePoint Farms has always been a long tedious process. Community efforts like AutoSPInstaller helped improve the deployment process of SharePoint Server itself but you still needed to install the supporting infrastructure and the base server OS manually. PowerShell and the Azure Desired State Configuration (DSC) extension make it possible to automate the deployment of complete SharePoint Farms, including the supporting infrastructure like SQL and Active Directory. In this Session we'll talk about how to build and configure an entire SharePoint Farm, including all the supporting servers and infrastructure in Azure, using a combination of PowerShell and DSC. Sample PowerShell Scripts and DSC configurations will be provided so you can try it yourself later.

This was submitted as a workshop, but can be cut down to a standard session by removing the hands-on portion for attendees and just demonstrating the concepts.