SharePoint at Microsoft (SME Roundtable September 2016)
Hi. Everyone welcome, to our SharePoint at Microsoft subject, matter expert, or smiie roundtable, i'm daniel. Come now and i'll be your host today we. Are the IT showcase, team and we love to talk with you about how microsoft, does IT, today. We have the IT experts. That build deploy, and manage, SharePoint. Solutions, here at Microsoft this. Semi roundtable, is your opportunity to ask direct, questions and, receive, candid, answers. Before. We get started we, would like to learn a little bit about you please. Take a moment to tell us in the Bing pulse window, how much of your SharePoint, infrastructure, is on-premise, versus, in the cloud and while. You're entering your responses, let's, ask our sameen's to introduce, themselves let's. Start over here on my right good. Morning my, name's Jonathan Lewis I'm a senior, IT service, manager for the collaboration technologies, internally, here at Microsoft and my, team actually was responsible, for migrating. Us SharePoint. To the cloud so we have a lot of great experience. To share there. My. Name is George Shockley, I'm a senior service engineer within Microsoft, IT I was, a part of the SharePoint. Custom portals team that managed our large portals, and help migrate many of them to the cloud my, current position I'm also helping, the whole come, home. A whole part of my team moving, to Azure into, the cloud as well. Alright, i'm darren Offutt service, engineer, focusing, on SharePoint, and office 365 core. Services, and automation so. A lot of the automation, that are our, teams and employees. Across Microsoft, leverage I've I've, helped write and deploy, in some way. Hi. My name is Sam cruisin I'm a pro senior program manager here, in Microsoft, IT my, focus areas are an enterprise discovery, you know things like Enterprise Search and, delve as. Well as user profiles, and, publishing. Thank. You everyone so the opportunity, is there for you to start asking questions now, in the iam window we're, gonna do our best to get through all of the questions in this hour however.
If We don't we're gonna stay behind in the studio after the live broadcast, and continue, to answer your questions, this. Video with the extended footage will be posted, soon after at Microsoft, comm /ai, to showcase, so. Let's, get started with the question and answer portion of our show. So. First, question coming in what are some of the new things coming. Out of Asia that we plan on leveraging. Sure. As. Sure as everybody, knows is continuing, to change on almost a daily basis, and it offers a lot of services, for, not, only SharePoint but a lot of services an IT one, of the biggest things that we're starting to take advantage of, is being able to run applications, there instead of on the SharePoint servers so, we're creating applications. Running in the cloud that the, SharePoint, servers don't actually have to host it allows, us to be more agile, and flexible in, those applications, while at the same time leverage. The SharePoint, api's. And, security. Systems it's. Been a big boon for Microsoft. IT as we've been moving forward into the cloud as we start moving, a lot of our applications from on-prem to the cloud. I'd. Add a little bit to that as well you know in my team we're really looking at ways. That we could leverage things like app insights, app, insights, being a tool that, can be used for a lot of things in our case we'd use it as. Another way to augment the, web metrics that come in the product would. Be a good, way to click. Clicks you, know figure out what what parts the sites are being used and how and who are using it for that matter so that's, one thing that we're exploring, in our space and I think has a really, a, lot, of headroom for us to leverage. Wonderful. Um, how. Do we ensure everyone, at Microsoft, can access, sharepoint, online from, day one at the company, yeah. Okay, oh this is where our office 365, core automation, comes, into play on day, one when an employee account gets created, it, goes in.
Our On-prem Active Directory it syncs up to Azure Active Directory and it's at that point where the magic happens so we'll, take the azure, active directory object, for the employee and. Ensure that it gets a sharepoint online license, it gets licences for all the other products that they'll be using for their day-to-day productivity so. By the time they get on to their laptops they're already able to access office, 365, the, other piece is is we do a lot of self-service, so we have an internal application we. Wrote called Auto sites Auto. Sites allows employees to grab, site. Collections, and have them created to their specification, on-demand all. From day one the minute they they hit the ground running, and. I suspect a lot of people might be interested to know Darren you know what technologies, did we use to do the licensing, because that's a common problem I've heard from a lot of internet yeah so we, started with Microsoft. PowerShell. Using the SPO, management. Shell and the Azure Active Directory, management. Shell we've, since evolved, to, writing. A c-sharp application. That. Is available on, MSDN for anybody that's interested in looking at the source code but. Yeah we've removed a c-sharp the c-sharp application, still does make some calls to the back into powershell, but it's predominantly, leveraging, the new graph API that you've heard so much about. How. Do you make sure all the sites that are no longer used are removed to avoid your implementation. Bloating, or or getting stale so. Jonathan. Maybe this one pick that one yeah this starts to kind of get into the governance space you. You really do need to have a strong governance program in place or you will get the the bloating the you, know we have an, ingrown. Tool that we I used to call it Microsoft secret sauce that. We, had that was only available internally. For a long time but it's actually now available, I believe out on github I'm, not sure, but it is available now to customers, it's, a great it's a great tool it actually rides in Azure as. We were talking about earlier and. If. When. When you know we do the self-service and somebody creates a brand-new, sharepoint online site, then, it, sets an expiry date so. They. Have to up you know update it every year if they want to keep that site if, they don't and auto sites automatically, Flags it and and. Then eventually we, will go, ahead and archive and delete it and. It's extremely. Important, to do that we. Also have you know a lot of other governance available. In that particular, it. Allows us to to. Make sure that people. Are following best, practices, and our. You, know rights management protecting, sensitive data so there's a whole lot of governance. You know applications. That are built into that particular tool but yeah that's primarily what we do is because, it is pretty easy well, the other thing actually one that when they create a brand new site we actually required that they have to site. Collection owners one has to be a full-time employee, because. That is a problem we have people come and go and sites, do get orphaned so but this tool actually allows us to go out and if. It is no longer being used then, we can actually automate having. An archived, and. I'd probably add on a little bit there to that there's, some exciting things happening, in the. In in the box space you know there's you know the product group has been listening to us for years about, the things that that we have to that we feel that we had to do in order to make, governance work within the product and what's, really kind of exciting is they've built a lot of these things into. The product so if. You're a business that maybe doesn't have the, resources, the manpower to build something you, can do things like, classification. Of your sites you know you, know we, call it internally hbi MBI LBI you know high business medium business and low business impact but, also you can do that in the product now and so, we're, starting to see that rollout and something, you can take advantage in your environments as well I guess I just thought of something one other thing sorry when. You move to, the cloud that's, actually an incredibly great time to, clean up your environment so one, of the things I really recommend is is you go out and audit your environment, and, encourage. Your employees as, you're moving to the cloud to actually clean up and that we are not migrating a bunch of useless data I, think. We got a question there what was the name of that tool I don't say. Another. Question coming in can you explain, how office, 365, group permissions, and SharePoint site permissions. Will. Interact once sites are automatically, created with the creation of an office 365 group. Will. They be managed separately or be, dependent, upon each other.
Wants. To take that. So, at, its core and office 365 group, will have a security. Group principal and Azure Active Directory so. The. Question is it can be both when. It creates the the SharePoint site of, course the group will have permissions, to that site but additionally, the office 365, group will have that security principle, that will let you permission it to other SharePoint sites as. Well as other resources within, office 365 so. I guess the answer to that one is all, and separate. Head beats every all this augments so for example if you wanted to grant someone access. To the SharePoint, piece of the group without, necessarily, giving them access to all the other things that the group can interact with you know the you. Know the. Stuff. In Yammer there's stuff in exchange and, whatnot you can still add your, own security groups created in Active Directory as, your Active Directory and. Indeed you can even add individual, users so it's. Kind of the best of both worlds you can do it both ways and, that, also ties back like Darren said to other tools like power bi I know is heavily utilizing. The office 365, groups to, be able to publish specific, dashboards, to a specific. Group of people in. That manner. If. You have critical workflow, applications. Involving, email how do you ensure no workflow, is in an arid state too long and that the customer knows what to do about it. It's. A tricky one. People, are gonna ask the tricky question a. Lot. Of times this. Is one of I, find, the weaknesses, of the workflow management system within. SharePoint, has. Always been when. It gets into an arid State how do you handle it because most of the time with an arid state you have to dive. Into the uls logs to find the exact error and it, makes it difficult because a normal user can't do that you have to be an administrator, to have access to those uls logs. One. Of the things, that I've been pushing personally. Is moving, to the tools like logic, apps in. Azure. Or the. New, flow, tool because. The users can actually troubleshoot, and see the error messages themselves and be able to do a lot more troubleshooting, than before and they've, actually gotten, better to connectivity than the work flow managers, yeah, I would. I think Jared's right you know spot-on here you, know it's really exciting about flow is it can do a lot of the same not everything to be sure but it can do a lot of the same things that that SharePoint workflow can do historically. While. Also adding. Connectivity. Across apps you know detect. A post in Yammer write, that to a SharePoint list, see. A file uploaded, in the Box you. Know copy that file, from box over to a SharePoint, site collection, so you. Know for. Some scenarios, that's, one way to, go about it but I don't think we have a really great answer on the SharePoint piece because, that's a challenge, we face as well exactly. Thanks. Guys just. A quick update on the poll and this is this is great information for, us so that we can we. Can focus those those answers, we're looking at around 33%, completely. On premise 30%. Completely. In the cloud and then, the other 30% in some sort of hybrid mode so it's a great mix of customers. That we have out there that that. Are listening in today so thank. You for filling in that poll we've, got great questions coming in so keep those coming in in the chat window the.
Next One we have here is how do you keep up with the change management, for new features that are coming out rapidly, and informing. Employees, of those changes. That's. Always been a difficulty I, mean, even even we've gotten, surprised, at times without. With. Seeing, new technologies, all of a sudden show up a video was a good one I know, that surprised a lot of us the first day the. Big thing is to make, sure you have the first. The. First user ring enabled. First. Release thank you first release enabled, so that you can see. Those things have a small, group that's not just IT but also bring in your power users, that are the users, out in the field we, internally, at Microsoft we have a user group that, meets that we talk to about all those features it's. Been super, helpful in getting the word out to the power users, as. To stuff that's coming yeah that's been helpful for us I think another important, piece of that is you have to we have to have a very strong relationship with our product group who actually manages, SharePoint. In the cloud for us we. Really need to make sure that they understand if there's going to be something new at it into the mix. That, we are aware of it because we do have a very stringent change. Process we, have both, a client change process and an infrastructure, change process so we need we need to know when those changes are coming ahead of time so we can actually get it through that process so. We really have to maintain that strong relationship with our product group and, and all that on I guess I can't help but add on and every question I'm sorry so, the the thing I'd add on here is we have a program internally called Microsoft, elite, for. A lot of the features that we know are coming we. Have a team which reaches, out to. Motivated. End-users, internally, and these are the folks who have, expressed a willingness a desire to try. Out the latest and greatest give, us an IT feedback, give you, know in, turn product, group feedback on. The new features and that's something we use heavily in a lot of our areas although, it you know like like I think we said it does still sometimes come.
Up And surprise us yeah that's a great great call-out. Awesome. So we've got a question here from someone who perhaps knew, how things used to work in Microsoft a while ago we, used to have a workflow, tool that provisioned, team sites how. Are you controlling the approval process for the new office 365. Groups and team sites, and. The follow-up to that is if office 365, group creation, is restricted, the owner is not able to manage the group's membership, I. Don't. Think we are actually controlling the office 365, groups creation at the moment it is a discussion we're still having internally, over the overall lifecycle management of it as well as to ensure that office 365, groups remain in compliance with Microsoft, security. And legal best practices, but at the moment we've been letting our employees, just go wild with the the new features, they. Can create the office 365 groups, as they will and they. Have full control over it I don't, believe with our automation that we're anticipating on restricting, that we'll be mostly focusing, more on the top level lifecycle. Management. You know weeding, out stale stale. Groups. Making. Sure that groups, are classified, based on the type of data they might be sharing that. Will. Probably be the extent, of what we'll be managing here at Microsoft. It's kind of it's a cultural thing really at Microsoft, so. Yeah I don't see us restricting, that we don't really have a an approval process per se it's all automated. It's all self-help, so, I don't see that changing anytime soon, we. Do have you, know auditing, and. Other. Things in plays like, compliance. Center yeah compliance, LP. Which is data, loss prevention. That. Can go out and flag sensitive, data and make sure that we're not doing anything stupid there so and, or, people aren't using dirty words and the names of their URLs. Or things like that so we do we do kind of that's about the extent to which we actually really you. Know monitor the environment yeah. I mean one of the things we're responsible, as part of IT is, to to. Get. In front of the technology, and and maybe stress it out if possible, before our, customers do so you, know one of the best ways to do that is just open the floodgates yeah and, see how many, how. Many groups can be created, and and and, see what sort of fun we can get our our management team into for that clear. It. So another question here what's the best practice for SharePoint, app developers. To properly, test their apps on SharePoint Online. Performance. And load testing specifically. Oh good. Question it's a great question I can take this one um one, of the big things for SharePoint, apps is there's basically, two, modes. Of SharePoint apps when you talk to SharePoint Online there's provider, hosted apps or SharePoint hosted, in the, case of SharePoint hosted apps they're typically JavaScript.
So There's. No real load on the server other than hitting the api's. When. It comes to provider hosted apps you're typically hosting, in some, other provider like asher or, you can even host an AWS, or some other system or even a SAS provider, and then. You just be load testing, that app over there when it comes to these sharepoint, side those. Apps will typically run in some sort of iframe, or it'll launch and take over the sharepoint window after passing, the permissions. Along, from. What I understand, the SharePoint product group if, you're gonna try and put a load test, against, the sharepoint, online product, you're probably gonna get blocked because they're gonna think, of it as a denial of service attack there's. A lot of throttling place but I think the long story short is we. Test in production, because. Of the new app model and because the way SharePoint Online handles, apps there, isn't anything servers, that we typically have to be worried about so when I'm developing my apps for automation I test, in production, knowing, that if something goes wrong it's only affecting, the specific, sites that I'm testing against, of, course before I turn, it on the rest of the company, exactly. Okay, one, other thing is you can also get, a dev, tenancy, or a dev site on your tenancy which, is a bit read access yeah production, yeah Ellicott you access debugging. Tools so. Definitely set up a test but it's in your production, tendency, exactly, testing and production used to be a huge taboo not so much with SharePoint Online I'm finding - exactly and I think it's probably a good time to drop in to the the new SharePoint framework, yeah so the new SharePoint framework, if, you're not familiar with it about a month month and a half ago we we did version one on. September. 21st we actually did Rev four so go out and find that and learn a little bit more about it it's very exciting it's. A way where we're you, know that it's our path forward for customization really, it's, the notion of a client-side web part, you know you're instantiating, that in the browser and what's, really kind of exciting at about it from a test perspective not, so much the performance, and and you, know whatnot but more about functionality, is it's.
A It can be rendered entirely, on the client machine without having to have a SharePoint, site collection, so you can actually, build, your code, deployed. Immediately test, it right there on your own machine and then, if it works then only then deploy. It up to the cloud so that's. A very exciting thing and. Something I didn't, create all our devs to look look, into. It's. Great that you know with the cloud in, the past you know we'd have our our test beds and our test systems, that you, know or really no resemblance to the the production environment and, and now, being able to to, do testing. Against. Our production environment is, is. A great opportunity so. Another. Question coming in do we have critical apps in SharePoint, that require, the business logic to be monitored, and what, do you advise if a customer, requests, such monitoring. We've. Got auto sites. I'm, thinking, between the, two of us we have the most experience, because we've ran a lot of the infrastructure, yeah yeah in, on the custom, portal side we did some custom monitoring. Using. Virtual. Studio is a virtual visual studio, test. Suite where, you can actually track, a web, test and then we put that into scum, with a special tool I can't remember that the, tool was called but I think it's an open-source tool that, we were actually able to have. The scum tool do a execute. A set of commands against the websites and it. Monitored, and sent. Back at any error when, that occurred yeah. And, on Prem we we did have a lot of synthetics, and we are still working, on the synthetic story for SPO to understand, more on synthetic transactions. Understand, when there may be performance, issues, and SPO that we can catch ahead of time and I know that internally, with a few of our applications, we've used as who will call to a pin sites a pin. Sites for, instance turned on to our auto sites tool that we mentioned earlier lets. Us understand, ahead of time if there may be some performance, issues some latency if the, tool is having, longer. Than expected call, times for making certain calls to like hazard claims. We do use app insights to kind of get a sense of whether or not they're, Auto sites could be heading into a bit of a storm which, of course would affect the ability to create sites in a timely manner so, yeah, app insights, is one one tool we believe is it's an incredible tool when you tie it into any sort of development, platform, either, SharePoint, or Azure because, you can get a lot of detail about the health. Of the system through that. Great. So there's. A couple, of comments here in the in, the chat window and someone said 99%, on Fred 1% in the cloud so I'm assuming that question, is around the the, mix that we have for. SharePoint at the moment we're we're, closer to about, 97%. In the cloud and we, keep people on Prem for a specific reason we, actually still have customers, that are running it on Prem so we actually need to be able to test, pretest, our bits before we actually push those out to customers on, Prem we do also have certainly. Some compliance and regulatory issues, that we deal with out in Europe, Middle East and Africa and APJ, that, have caused us to keep a couple of regional on Prem sites so that we don't run. Afoul of the local. You know compliance, officers and things like that based. On our being pulse which divert at least 35 percent of our customers we're, definitely hybrid on frame we're definitely hybrid right. Great. Thank you um. When a site expires, where, do you archive it to and how I. Can. Answer that so. When. A site expires, we do go through a deletion process that, deletion process goes. Through the natural recycle, bin of SharePoint, Online so. It's it's retained there for, a while on. The back end we, do require a ten-year retention policy, so it does get archived, as part of our our data backup, processes, that, are built into the SharePoint Online and, should.
We Ever have to recover it we work with the office 365 product group to recover any data that's over 90 days old and so it's kind of the user experience I call it the three-strikes-you're-out experience. So if. Your site expires and, you're a site collection owner or admin. You, will get an email basically, saying you, know your site is expiring on X date please go out and either renew, it or if you don't want the site any longer don't take any action and no, further action is required if. They don't take any action then they will actually get another email just, saying this is a reminder your site will be expiring. On X date and. At such time they don't take any action there we will actually, basically. Put it in read-only mode and. Then we'll do one more the third one the third strike, that. That's just one last reminder to the site collection owners and admins if they haven't taken any action that their, site will actually be locked down and go, through the archive process that Darren, was discussing, and I'll add to that the auto. Sites process you're describing it will also put a little pink banner into the same collection so even. For you. Know if someone's ignoring their email like I imagine. It's in, the real world IT departments, don't always get their mails read we're. Also doing that in right in the context. Of the site collection so what a person visits like site collection they realize that there's an action necessary to either extend or, update. Their owners or what, happened and yeah and they can take action if they have important data that's out there. It's. Amazing how many users are using sites that the. Administrators, of them well. There's also Sarah Lee where there's also sites that get used once a year yeah and that's always a problem, they're, not really looking for expiration. Emails. So that's, one that we have to manage pretty carefully as well exactly.
Excellent. Have, you ever considered implementing. A workflow event receiver that would forward the exception, stack trace to an administrator. I. Don't I don't know we do, because a lot of times the administrators, aren't the developers, yeah, so, the, developers, themselves may, implement, something like that but we don't our selves because when. We're on prem we. Have full access to the log so we typically go and, pull, those logs for the developers, so, we're, typically in the logs I don't know about you guys yeah. The, average administrator, on our SharePoint, is an employee so forwarding. Forwarding, any of the information over to them can sometimes cause a bit. Of confusion where, for. A lot of those applications that are being developed we. Do them I mean a lot of developers internally, do have, workflows. That forward, any sort of specific errors and. Of course again going back to app insights, you, know any sort of exceptions. Or anything through and we do have those monitored, and forwarded to an actual developer. Specifically. To the administrators, not so much and it's mostly just to kind of avoid confusion, they're, more end-user administrators. And less developer, administrators. At least NRMA except Microsoft yeah I'd say in my experience though a lot, of the bigger. Portals, that are that are doing the half development, and are heavily customized, will, have kind of their own little homegrown, team. Like, almost like at tier one that, actually is familiar, with the code because if, they if, they have custom code and we don't know anything about that code we, can't support that site so a lot of them if. They're going to have still. Customized, applications. Then they, typically have their own support, team, developers. With a custom portals team we had a a, team, that specifically, monitored for those events and took care of them yep. Ok, great so, there's a question here I'm going to admit to not, sure I know what it's asking but we'll throw it to the team anyway how, can you access you LS on a 365. Now, I'm not sure if that means URLs, unified, logging service logging. Services see that's why we have subject matter expert. I can. Start and if anybody wants to jump in on this so the short answer is we, don't. The. More in-depth answer, is a lot, of what you look for in the ULS is starting, to surface in the unified logging, service that combines, exchange, power bi. Listed. Power bi onedrive, Exchange and SharePoint so. The unified audit. Logs do, allow us to look at who's uploaded, viewed files what, type of actions are being taken what type of security adjustments. Are happening, what's, being shared externally who's. Being invited it basically, everything, we want to know about those sites or security, or legal may want to know or users may want to know about their own sites the, unified auditing. Service, the. Unified audit logs are basically. What we turn to. For. Any sort of in-depth, you know correlation, IDs or server-side, errors, typically. Because as a customer, we don't manage the server side those, those particular, errors haven't had as much importance, as in an investigation. Piece, it would be something that we as a customer, do escalate, to the to the product group and then, they go and investigate it on their side and will, usually get the issue through root cause analysis. Exactly. I mean the. Change into office 365 is we aren't server. Administrators, anymore we don't have to worry about the server level problems. We. Don't have to patch the servers that's one of the greatest things we ask for attending myself we no longer have to patch servers, as. Far as SharePoint servers but, when it comes to logging, issues. With applications, this is where the cloud app model has become. A better thing, the. Logging, is being done over with the app and a sure if it's provider hosted, then you can put app insights, on both that as well as the sharepoint. Hosted. Apps so you can get more in-depth logging, and more in depth depth, debugging. Via app, insights, and via those debugging, tools then, you could ever, with. SharePoint especially SharePoint Online because you don't have that access and we've.
Really Taken the step actually as far as developing apps, internally. To, actually say if you're you, know if you're on Prem and you have you. Want to develop a full trust code application on the SharePoint servers then, your. Supports going to be best effort. We're really pushing everybody to the cloud out model even if you're gonna stay on Prem go. To the cloud app model start, looking at that now ahead, of time and, the cloud app model can work perfectly. With on parameters on, cloud you know the cloud you. Know servers, as well so that's, but we basically have told our users if you create and. They do this if you create a full, test code, application and, what, they do is they go out and they spend $100,000. On mr. bender who comes and creates this application, then, they say thank you very much here's your hundred thousand dollars go, away, there's never documentation. They don't understand, the code so, we have a really difficult time, supporting. That so we're really pushing that with our users go, to the cloud app model it's a much better it's a much better support, model and get, away from colchester, code on that sharepoint. Servers and it makes upgrades and migration to the cloud so much ease capsule, it does. Okay. So we've got a a question a comment and a question, all in one here's, no JavaScript. Yeah. Why. I'm. Not sure what this is relating, to there's, really actually I think Jared should answer this one it, was relating, to the SharePoint, applications, and how they run JavaScript. On the client side they do. JavaScript. You, yes. JavaScript, can be a difficult language to work with however one of the great things about the cloud app model is you're, not tied to just JavaScript you have a variety, of, both. Languages, and hosting. Opportunities, with. The cloud app model that you can take advantage of I know people that have written applications. For office 365 that are on Ruby on Rails so. It's. It's, it's, an amazing change. In how, we are, in. The, technology today, javascript. Is great because it can run on almost every. Web, client, I, know. They're probably one or two serve, or one or two web, clients out there that don't run JavaScript well and so there.
That Might be one or two but for. The most part javascript, is a universal. Client-side. Code base and, in the new SharePoint framework, you, know sadly we don't have David Johnson here this week who would probably go into a little bit more depth on this but. The new shame or SharePoint framework allows, you to develop, in almost, anything you want you know like I understand some you know like the product coupe developed, a lot of the new stuff that you see in the SharePoint home space and the new and. The new publishing model with the, SharePoint. News that was announced here this week that, was all done in angular, so, and not. Only did they build it that way you can build that way going forward too so I would, say that if you if javascript, is you, for you then, maybe angular, maybe typescript, or some other I know there's more than those it's quite a developer. Choose. The way that makes sense for you SharePoint, is going to support all new, ways of doing things going forward we, can we can rise Jared later for bringing up JavaScript. Right. So, look at for the next couple of questions I'm gonna go into to our standard. Spiel, I'll, repeat. That we are IT, showcase, so we're the internal IT organization. Here we. Are not here to announce. New. Functionality, or new technology, and those sorts of things that are coming out but I will ask the questions if there is something publicly, that we can we can talk about or at least give you our opinion on we, certainly will so so the next question is SharePoint, designer is, not currently, supported right, what, technology. Is replacing it, is, that something that so. SharePoint, designer, is still actually supported, you, know so it still works. With office 365 and its current instance and will for, a little bit of time to come but, really I think what we're starting to see is you. Know between the new SharePoint framework, the. Ability, to do workflows, outside, of designer, but using flow and, and and what-have-you and building. Things and power apps you're, starting to see a lot of things we used to do in SharePoint designer are being, replaced. With new go forward, strategies, new new technologies, that will accomplish a lot of the same goals that we've done historically in, SharePoint designer without. Having to use SharePoint designer so I think. You. Know you, know as daniel said we're not here to make any announcements and I'm not sure we're privy to this one even if we knew. The roadmap I don't, that's for sure but, I think the the the. Signals, from the proto Kroop are pretty clear SharePoint. Designer isn't is in a maintained. State right now and the, new technologies, are the way of the future of course that that comes at as hard as Visual Studio right. Now very popular, application that, a lot of developers are starting to move to if they haven't been on already as visual studio and the. The key there also is yes there are the, larger, versions of Visual Studio like the enterprise and developer packages there's, also a base, version, called Visual Studio code, yeah great and that can that's. Specialized, for, specific. Installs and they I believe there's one for web, / SharePoint, yep and then there's a new wires a new, module that's been recently updated one for PowerShell as well so it's great for any of that Espio scripting, we mentioned earlier. Thanks. Along. The same lines maybe is, there something coming for admins to get a complete, overview of the permissions across the various and I assume they mean sites so. Collections. It's. A tricky one because of course I. Haven't seen one yet and. Of course we just mentioned not mentioning anything sort of upcoming, I know, that it is a big focus for us and the product group and something we've been we've, been discussing in detail about more complexity, above and beyond the the permission, checks and the.
Fine Grained permission management, features that are already in SharePoint Online but. I don't, think we have anything we can really, just what would the way I'd answer that one is in this way you. Know there are a number of Microsoft. Gold partners that, provide solutions. That will go out in and. Interrogate. Your environment, and can look for things such as permissions, look for things such as usage, and, so on and so forth so that's one possible, answer for, you know I don't. Know this scenario but that's one possible, play for the the person, asking the question in. Addition I would mention that our Auto site's tool it's. Something that matches our security, classification. With, certain rules around groups, so, for example if you have a top-secret site something we call hbi you. Know we limit the use of you. Know broad, security. Groups we limit how, many users we might, turn on certain, security, features like. DRM. Here I RM rather so, you. Know that you, can look at that for, one idea but I think right now the best, answer is there's a lot of great, partners out there that that play in this space yeah one, thing I would mention about our rights, management protection, is we, don't force, that on our, hbi sites, we. Do call. You know flag, sites, if they're HPI, site and they're not properly using rights management because we do require it but we stopped short of actually forcing, it on those sites because we can cause a lot more problems than, we'll solve, so we do hold our users accountable, when. It comes to that sort of thing and I think that's one of the key points is in Microsoft, IP we do put. A lot of the ownership back on to the. Site. Owners and the site collection administrators. To, manage, their data we don't we, don't have a heavy hand but. That's because we hold them responsible if. Their data gets out it's. Their own problem they, need to you know we'll help them deal with it but yeah they need to protect it but if they're not doing the right things we do know about it yeah so we just stopped short of taking action we we, will send out the three-strikes-you're-out type, of emails for sites, that are not properly using rights management protection, on executive, data and that, we do have a lot of sensitive data in the cloud you. Know so, we're doing some really great stuff, you know and so the crop the cloud is perfectly secure. For that sort of thing one of the things you know that, that, I like to mention is we're doing our earnings. Release from. The cloud because, it, allowed the earnings release people to have such better, you. Know collaboration. On the documents, because they're heavy co-authors. So. We're actually doing that from the cloud it doesn't get much more sensitive, than that so, we're. Actually really we're. Really living it. Great, okay. I'm gonna take a deep breath before I ask this question because it's a long one and I hope the answer is not we, can't comment on this we. Have a highly structured team, site collection, architecture, to minimize duplicate, data and, encourage, them to work globally, as a team with. The self-service, of office 365 groups, and team sites we, need to closely manage, the sites however. We don't have an admin center to manage the office 365 groups. And, soon the associated team service will, we have an admin Center for office groups when they are released and we'll powershell, commandlets be updated, to assist the administrators, with managing office 365. Groups and team signs okay I think. I can take a crack at this and I think it doesn't have to be the answer we're not allowed to talk about it so, yes. There. Will be more management features coming in the graphical. User interface, of the office 365 admin portal so, you will start to see more exposure, to onedrive for business you'll. Be able to manage users. Onedrive for business sites directly from the office 365 admin, portal and with, office groups we, mentioned earlier that there is a security, principle within Azure, Active Directory that, will be the entry point to manage that group you'll be able to manage ownership, of, certain settings, related. To it and in regards, to PowerShell, yes, that's coming, the. Idea is is and something that we're currently testing internally, is the, ability to manage, non, grid sites so think grid being SharePoint. Team sites, and. Stuff you would typically, classify, as a standard, SharePoint online. Site collection, non, grid is onedrive, for business office. Groups and, any, other SharePoint. Back-end. Pieces, that could be coming into the future yeah, we are going, to enable commandlets, that will allow you to, expose. And manage those office, 365, sites the same way you would a team site today and I.
Think I think that covers that yeah good. Questions it's a great question thanks now. We may have actually answered this question but is there a plan for detailed, blogs for sharepoint online to be able or, to be available for developers, similar to you lslands, this, will assist in identifying and fixing bugs for SPO, app developer, I think. You covered some of this didn't you I covered some of it I don't know what the plan is if there's going to be more detailed logs most, of the time the recommendation, is to have a dev, tenancy, where you have more detailed debugging. Capable, as well. As you. Using. Something like application insights. Because, application, insights can actually, tie deeper, into systems I believe they're also. App. The. Application insights team is working with SPO to try and marry the tools a little bit more for, that specific. Capability. Great. Things, this. Is gonna be an interesting one I'm sure you guys are gonna dive at this how, easy will it be to do a rollback from cloud back to on Krim ooh it's. A tough one um. Now. That depends, cuz of course we're. Talking about two very broad environments, here cloud can, be anything from CRM power bi SharePoint, but in the confines of SharePoint, as, Sam mentioned we, do have deep, partnerships, with. With third-party providers, out there that do have tools that allow migrations, from on-prem to the cloud but, adversely they also allow you to do migrations, from the cloud to on Prem so, the short answer is, however. Difficult, it was for you to migrate to the cloud it should, be as equal, or less difficult to move back if you, had to but I would most certainly hope that you wouldn't the, key concern is have you taken advantage, of a technology, that's a boy in the cloud yeah on SharePoint Online there, are some capabilities. That are sharepoint online only, and when you go back to on Prem you're gonna lose that that's, just got to be an acknowledgement, of hey if we're gonna move back to on Prem we're gonna lose this capability yeah much like Jonathan, Louis said when. We went from on Prem the cloud there was a lot of cleanup and a lot of prep work that had to be done if you do want to migrate from cloud back to on Prem for instance there. Are certain, that I pieces. Of your of your company that you identify okay we really need to move this back to on Prem yeah, there would still have to be some prep work as Jared said there could be features, leveraged, that were specific, to office 365 now, that our. Feature sets are somewhat, diverging. Between on Prem and cloud you, would want to make sure that you take inventory of those and and of course do that clean up before you move back it. Could be difficult or it could be really easy depending, on your on your circumstances. Is interesting to get more context, around that question yes when, we were migrating, to the cloud and, we definitely had to roll sites back on. Occasion, when we actually really severely, broke those sites so, if you're talking about during a migration to the cloud I think it's a slightly different question and. Definitely. A loaded one it's it's tricky to answer in full and this may shock everyone we're not planning on rolling back to the. No. Okay. Cool do. We have any recommendations. To securely, manage our clients, and employees multiple, domains on a single tenant or is it possible. So. I know we've got a few efforts with Windows Intune and it's kind of out of the scope of this showcase, we, do use Windows Intune to manage client devices we, also have rolled out multi-factor, authentication, across, all of our o 365, service stack so, if. You're on an internal. Site. I guess behind a TFS then, you don't have to worry as much about the two-factor, piece but if you're as your ad connected, or you're outside of your corporate environment, and you're interfacing with a DFS suite we do use multi-factor, authentication, right. Now it's a blend of either smart, card for the old traditionalists. And phon, factor, and. The, Windows Azure Authenticator, app for, for the folks that are using some of the new authentication technical, or virtual, smart cards or the virtual smart card absolutely, yeah we, have many ways to prove, your identity from. Virtual. Smart cards you need, a device that will support, TPM. Which is trusted platform module. Most. Laptops today do you actually support that so it works really well they're obviously on your phone most of them probably don't support, it so we do have the phone factor authentication that actually works really well I use, it quite often. Great. Hopefully. A quick question here because I want, to take a quick moment to thank you we've got lots of questions so we'll, see if we can we we can get through as many of these as possible is, the site archiving, something we need to configure or is it a built in feature it, was referring back to you yeah it's a built in feature so, the site recycle, bin.
So. Actually I should I should step back a bit all, the stuff we talked about auto sites the three-strikes Jonathan, Lewis brought up that's, all stuff that's internal to what, MSI T Road the, site recycle, bin automatically. Configured, you can take advantage of it today anything. That gets removed, from that site recycle, bin is what, gets archived, under. Under, the retention that would be something that you don't have to configure but you would have to request from the office 365 product Rupe using your standard service. Request process. Depending. On the customer, that may be submitting, a service request within the o 365, admin, portal or it may be engaging, a Microsoft premier, Technical. Account Manager, either way anything. That you need to get outside of outside, of the standard, recycle. Bin construct, you, and requests but you don't have to do any configuration on, your side for that the. Only other piece that I know in. Relational archiving, is litigation, holds that, you would have to configure on a per onedrive basis, per mailbox basis, so. Okay. Thanks I'm gonna skip forward to a question then we'll go back are you using the site collection closure delete, policy, or an external web load. Sounds. If I'm understanding the question correctly I this, is related to the auto sites tool that we use and, it's, an external workflow running, a measure right. If. The site collection owner email, address no longer exists, and bounces, back do. You call the organization to, update the cert the owner now, I'm guessing, you. In this content, theories or context, is the office, 365, team. Do. We get notified if the email. Address no longer exists and bounces back no. We. Think that's the short, answer so our, approach this one so I'll answer, this in a different way so you've. Heard us bring up auto sites and maybe you're even sick of it by now one. Of the things those other sites does. Is it goes through and ensures that every site collection has at least two, valid, site collection owners you. Know so the idea is you know every time we renew, we enforce, you. Know that there's at least one FTE which is a full-time employee. Your. Person configured, as a site collection admin and by. Making. Sure that every user is valid then we avoid, the worst of the hey. This this email, is no longer valid is that answering the right question do you think I, was. The only thing I was gonna say it's probably slightly different for onedrive for business I do believe that when. Somebody leaves the company the. Manager does get access, to their onedrive, data. To, make sure that there's nothing really. Important. Out there that could get, deleted, so yeah, it's slightly different there and there was a recent issue that we discovered internally on that one where that wasn't working as expected, but it's at, least here at Microsoft you. Know where we discover the problem I think it was just us that was impacted by this one but it's working, as as, design, yep. It wouldn't be a conversation, without input path being brought up do. You use over time you'll use things, like InfoPath, performs, applications. Or code CSR, on mass. Try. Answer is yes, yes. We still have a lot of people use info path and we know that info, path is. Being. Just deprecated, I guess is the best words it's. It's 2020 yeah, it's definitely going through the standard, Microsoft Office, Support Lifecycle. Yes. Even at Microsoft, even when we have things that we're kind of phasing out we, have a lot of employees that will insist on using it right on till the very last day that the lights go dark so definitely, still have a lot of CSR, still, have a lot of info path we're.
Hoping That by introducing new things like office forms, that our, employees, will naturally adopt, those and gravitate, but, we know that come, come. The end of the lie and lights go out there are still going to be people using it and even surprised that InfoPath went away so, yeah, short, answer is yes yes, story. There is similar to SharePoint designer you. Know a lot of the things that InfoPath does can, do. Aspects. Of those are now being done in. Some cases a lot better and other tools so you know we're trying to you know between here in 2024, come up with a way that that, not only. Keeps. Us on par but makes it an even better experience to do it in another, way that's a problem for future us to figure out yeah 2024. Seems like a long way off doesn't, it exactly. Okay. Let's see if we can get a few more of these so for SharePoint API see some JSON, versus rest I'm. Going to change the question a little bit it says what's the Microsoft, preference, and I say what's your preference, so, what, I'm seeing within a lot of Microsoft, IT is, utilization. Of rest they. It's a preferred API methodology. Can. Be utilized a little bit better the, great thing about SharePoint, though is we, can use either yeah. It's it's a personal, preference or team preference, rather than a best. Practice, and that's a great thing about the way SharePoint, has been taking a, look, at the whole, developer. Model, is to give as much, openness. To tools so that people can use angular they can use JavaScript things what, they want whatever fits their style yes and, the drop and I would have there too is you know there's. Some really exciting developments, in the Microsoft. Craft space yes space you. Know it used to be you, know if you wanted to hit this API you had to, go find out where this lived and there'd, be another one over here and another one over here you. Know if you have a second go to graft, up Microsoft IO IO where there's a lot of documentation and and, really the big feature here is you can access you. Know everything, from site collections down to an individual, doc level to even items inside, of documents, right, from graph and, they're all in one place, one-stop shop it's, a lot easier to do a lot of things that you used to do via. All these disparate sources, so. I mean in an oblique way, that that would be one answer to this question as well yeah it's it, comes down to every. One of those is a tool and there. Isn't a perfect tool or one that we prefer office. Graph is a popular, one for many of the reasons Sam mentioned office. Graph the key is is that it is the office, graph API and that it pulls a lot of aspects of office 365, so speaking. To the office 365 automation. That we do graph. API is the one I personally, leverage, because, it allows me not only to interact with SharePoint, it lets me interact with exchange it, lets me go grab, every. Aspect of a user profile, from, a ad and SharePoint, so, depending. On what type of top level automation. That I'm doing it gives me kind of that bird's-eye view to pick and choose the different building blocks that I need to kind of provide, a seamless automation.
Experience, And. Then of course the REST API we use that occasionally, to grab things like the, new exchange photo data so. If we need to get high-resolution, photo pix I'll use the REST API but, I will put it into a shoe store app application where I'm predominantly, grabbing, the office. API so much. Like building a house we're using multiple tools and, I don't think I have any one that I prefer, just, one that I leverage the most which is office, a graph API. Okay. What's. Our best practice on displaying over 5,000, items on a list do you increase the limit. Well. I think this is the same guidance, we've been given for years which is index, columns, use subfolders. Different. Views that use customized. Views so you're not trying to show all 5,000 wines exact, five thousand limit is still there and it's something we all live with but. You can make, it work for you if you're if you're clever you can work around it yes but. It's still something probably. Shouldn't do as. Far as having full five thousand. Okay. What's, the best code base to develop as your hosted, apps which will be scalable, well. The best code base I'll. Jump in and take measure, the. Best code base is what. You want to use, the. Great thing about the new service fabric, and Azure is you, can utilize the, service fabric in almost. Any language. That you want to your preference, the key, thing is to make sure and design. Your. Service. To. Properly, scale and think, about it in the term of micro services smaller little services, versus larger, more monolithic, the. Smaller services, that you have you can then scale each one individually, which. Is wonderful when you think about it you can have a you. Can have one aspect, of your system, maybe it's pulling information from graph and. Oh that that all of a sudden gets used a lot by all aspects, of your application that, can grow as it needs and then, shrink, when it's not in use and it's. Probably that's the best way I tell people to start developing in Azure z' start, at the micro server scale I know mark. Russinovich has, talked a lot about micro services especially when it comes to containers, that, sort of thing it is, kind, of it, is not kind of it is the future of development especially, on the Azure platform and, I highly recommend it and the great thing about this micro, service world, is you can then connect to other services, like the office graph like. Being, able to connect into api's into Skype for business or, into. Onedrive, or whatever. Those capabilities. Are that. You're looking for. Okay. Do, we use Yammer or office 365, groups this should be a simple answer both. Just. Yes I think. The, one key takeaway hopefully. That you're hearing from us is here, at Microsoft we. And IT don't, in. Anyway, for sone to do their business we make tools available we, allow them to self you know create sites and then you. Know develop solutions. On top of those sites we, only get involved where we're asked, or where, a policy, has been. Bent. A little too far so you, know we don't consider, ourselves here. To be in the way of end-users we let them find, the tool that works for them yeah and that's a very key, actually. A key ending position that but puts puts, us in mostly. Because we like to be able to observe what our employees are doing and what they gravitate, towards, if if. For instance we start seeing a sudden pull away from Yammer, or a steep. Decline in usership it does, give us valuable feedback or perhaps a point of investigation, found why are people leaving, it is there is there one of our other technologies, that they're gravitating towards it gives us a very unique insight. That the product group just beats up so we, don't try, to I, guess, we basically don't try to create dams and we don't try to create flow we try to let our employees basically, leverage all our tools I think our job is to provide them with the knowledge and and training. And any sort of advice, that they need but, the idea is is to kind of step back and say you guys do what you need to do you, find the tools that speak you to you the most and we're, gonna watch and understand. You know from a top level what you're using and why and hopefully.
Use That for product improvement, exactly. Like, you said we're more of the advisor role, in. That scenario for, sure I'm, gonna try and squeeze in maybe one more question before we have to wrap up because we're getting close to ten o'clock. Forms. For those of us not proficient, in JavaScript, should we be learning power apps. He. Is kind of looking from the dev side and I think Darren's gonna say thank you I think it's a great opportunity, for no. Code development, is power apps absolutely. Not, only do you get the. Power apps running, in potentially. In web browser but you also have the capability to start looking at even mobile apps that you can deploy, on to various. Mobile environments. And it makes it very easy you. Can focus on the business logic and the forms, themselves without having to deal with a code base, yeah, it's a very power, ups is very empowering. You know being one. Of the engineers here at office 365, I really, do encourage people to learn power apps, because. It does empower them to do a lot more and, rely, on. Engineering. A lot less which is a great thing because it means you can you can design your apps your way and. Not not, have to worry about too much engineering oversight, or having to work, with too many teams and it can really improve, your your product turnout time. One. Of the one of the last things I would say on that the great thing about tying into power apps and into the platform, on SharePoint is then you can tie in to the graph and into things like delve that, information, is all together and easily, searchable. Across. A broad spectrum which. Makes it even easier, to, bubble. Up information I, would. Say right. Okay. So we're getting near the end of our hour so we're gonna have to wrap this up here you, should be able to see another poll question on, your screen please take a moment to let us know what you think about our IQ showcase, webinars, as. We wrap up I want to ask each of us means one final question and I want, to get them to keep their answers as brief as they can for these each, of you have worked for chef's with SharePoint, sorry for a while now what's, the one key takeaway you would like our customers, to leave with today what's down on this side yeah. I think if I was good to encourage everyone in the audience go, to blogs at office.com we've, announced a ton of new stuff this week at ignite it's, very exciting and, if I was to pick on one technology go. Look at office graph and all the things you can do with, the office graph framework. I'm. The. Biggest takeaway I have that I like but SharePoint Online is that I get to work from bed from any device whether. Or not it can connect to a corporate VPN and they still make it possible so it's very liberating, right. That's all I got it's, nice to see you're not in your pajamas yeah yeah, no they made me put clothes on I guess. One, of the key takeaways for myself is as, we move to the cloud to the cloud is to embrace it embrace that change one of the biggest, things that I've been able to do is, I. Had. A slight change in job moving to not just cover a sharepoint but a sure but Darrin, and I both had major job, changes, if you will from administering. Servers, and you, know making sure patches are done - now, administering, business processes, or I'm, in. A different, position because I chose to be in a different position to move to the cloud you know help Microsoft, move to the cloud so it's embrace. That change it's not gonna be a negative it's gonna be a positive thing. All. Right save, the best, for last, I. For. Me when I think about moving to the cloud and those, folks this is really more at those folks who are moving to the cloud I think. It's extremely important, to make sure you understand, your on-prem, environment, as you're. Going or at least first and find. Out how, many sites you have out there that are just vanilla smaller. Sites those are easier to migrate put, those at the front of your migration list the, ones that are heavily, customized you, will run into problems and move, those to the very back so we kind of took a crawl, walk run we. Crawled, at first we got maybe five site collections a night at peak, we were closer to 300, and then, as we got towards the end of the list and had those those hard rocks to move you. Know then. Then we're kind of back to five a night but cleanup you know make sure that you take this advantage to clean up your environment it's, the perfect time for doing that.
We. Have some additional questions that we're going to try and get through. How. Do you handle security maintenance in SharePoint, with respect to onboarding, new people, and mapping, them to their access role that they need and a follow up is is this centralized, via IT or trusted to the business, its. Trusted to the business yeah. When. A new employee on. Boards at Microsoft, we enable, them with all the basic licenses, and access that they'll need when, it comes specific, security, permissioning, and. Leave kind of as a rite of passage we. We, have the employees work with their immediate team to get into the security groups that they need they, have to go through the same access, requests, for any sort of internal software that they might need access to we. Do try to streamline that with some internal tools that. Do look at your org and determine. If we make it easier or harder for, you to get, access to certain things but it is basically. Down to the end-user and his immediate team to, get them the security the. Security that they need to do their job and we've had some interesting discussions around, adding like just-in-time. Access. To the mix is that does that move forward any further yeah. Yes so we do have we, do have just-in-time. We have a secure administrative, workstation model, where, anybody, who's a high we, call a high risk administrator, somebody, who has immense. Access, to the company we get these these workstations that allow us to work securely that, piece is identified, and automated, based on the security groups that we we get approved for and. Of course with office 365 we've. Just rolled out the azure privileged, Identity Management model that, one. Still, has a manual application process. People still have to manually apply go through business justification. But once they're, the. Automation. Kicks. In and they can elevate for four to eight hours spurts, depending, on the access they need but. That's limited to a certain. Set of admins very small set of admins, yeah right but, yeah I think just adding on for, the for, the regular. Users the the business, businesses. That we support we. Leave it to them to add, users to SharePoint, sites to add users to security, groups and they. Can optionally participate. In dynamic, security groups so by, joining a certain organization reporting. Up to a certain leader, then, they can automatically, get to added. So. Okay. Next question how do you create dynamic digital, forms when InfoPath, is not an option anymore. Well. Currently, InfoPath, still is an option. There. Is going to be some, new, technology, they're still working on coming out I would, also say powe
2018-02-28 23:27
