Long before the cloud became a pervasive part of enterprise computing, SharePoint developers had a fairly straightforward set of options for extending out-of-the box functionality – full trust or sandbox, web parts or application pages, event receivers or timer jobs, web services or server-side API’s. There wasn’t much confusion regarding the structure or composition of […]

When: April 2nd – 5th, 2017 Where: Austin, Texas Spring is coming and that means another trip to the great capitol of Texas for SPTechCon 2017. The BZ Media folks do a fantastic job putting this show together – many of your favorite speakers, lots of vendors giving out free prizes, tons of great content […]

​One of the most significant new improvements in SharePoint 2016 is the MinRole funcionality. Any SharePoint administrator who is responsible for maintaining a farm consisting of more than three or four servers can attest to the difficulty of maintaining the proper allocation of services on each server. In a properly distributed farm architecture, each server […]

​With the introduction of the SharePoint Framework, organizations now have an entirely new option to choose from when designing custom extensions for their cloud and on-premise collaboration solutions. Although this new model provides additional capabilities and addresses many of the feature gaps present in Azure Web Applications and SharePoint Add-Ins, it also makes the development […]

At the Future of SharePoint event earlier this year, Microsoft announced a new customization model known as the SharePoint Framework. Naturally, this led to much speculation and discussion as the bits were only available to a few early beta testers and not much was provided in the way of samples or documentation. A number of […]

Let us say, for the sake of discussion, that you, being an enthusiastic SharePoint and Office developer, have just created a shiny new Add-In and you are ready to unleash it to the world. As we live in modern times where everything is on YouTube and selfies have been replaced by live video from smartphones, you decide to include some […]

Today Microsoft officially announced an exciting new set of technologies known as the "SharePoint Framework". Developers everywhere should be excited about this announcement as it means we (finally!) have a proper modern web development experience for SharePoint publishing both on-premises and in the cloud. To learn more about what the SharePoint Framework is and how […]

Office 365 makes sharing documents with other users extremely easy – just select the item, click ’Share’ and enter an e-mail address or pick a user from the directory – job done. Unfortunately, replicating this behavior in code is not quite so simple. Vesa Juvonen has demonstrated an approach to this using CSOM and there […]

​My latest article for SPTechReport is now online: One of the greatest strengths of the Microsoft collaboration platform, which now encompasses both SharePoint on-premises and Office 365 in the cloud, has always been its rich extensibility options. Customers who wish to enhance the platform with dynamic line-of-business solutions or organization-specific customizations have a rich set […]

​Ther​e is a lot of discussion lately in the SharePoint community regarding the future of pure client-side applications (meaning those comprised entirely of HTML and JavaScript). Most of the posts I see are negative, with complaints centered around the lack of compiled code, complexity of app webs, perceived security weaknesses and inability to support forms-based authentication. […]