SharePoint Evolution Conference 2015 presentations
Last April I had the honor of presenting three sessions at the SharePoint Evolution Conference 2015.
Building solutions with Office Graph
Delve, formerly known as Project Oslo, is a new and innovative way to discover information and content in Office 365. Delve recommends information to you based on analytics from SharePoint, Yammer, Lync and Exchange. In this session we will take a look at the programming API’s of Delve, the Office Graph. We will take a look at the foundation concepts of the Office Graph and see how we can build smart and helpful applications for your organization as well as extending Delve.
In this level-300 developer-oriented session Wictor and I gave a short introduction to what the Office Graph is and how it relates to Delve. Even though our audience was broader than developers only we had interesting discussions showing the different scenarios for leveraging the Office Graph beyond Delve.
Here is the presentation deck that we used at the conference:
Most of the apps that we have showed can be downloaded for free from the Office Store.
Building rich search experiences Apps for SharePoint
Organizations often struggle to make SharePoint Search results useful. In this presentation we will provide you with real-life tips for improving the relevance of SharePoint Search results and show you how you can take them to the next level by integrating Apps for SharePoint in your search results.
For this session Wictor and I have prepared 11 demos (!) showing how you can leverage SharePoint 2013 Search beyond the standard search experience. We knew upfront that we wouldn’t manage to present all of them and because we found all of them equally cool we chose to let the audience decide which demos they wanted to see.
After a short introduction to the concept of building search-driven solutions we presented the audience with a menu from which they could choose. Both Wictor and I had a great time presenting the different demos. We both had a specific set of demos each of us would present and the audience did a great job picking demos that would allow both of us to present our work.
Here is the deck that we used in our session:
We do realize that this deck offers little added value if you missed the session other than a vague reference to what we showed. This is why we decided to do some additional work. First of all we decided to share the code of the majority of our demos. The code is available in Wictor’s SPEvo repo on GitHub. On top of that, to provide you with a little more information about these solutions, we’re planning an additional series of articles about these demos so stay tuned for updates.
If you attended our session we would love to hear what you liked and what you would like to get additional information about. Also we’re keen to hear how you liked the format of us presenting demos à la carte and if it’s something you would like to see in the future as well.
Optimizing SharePoint 2013 public-facing websites for Internet search engines
SharePoint 2013 offers rich capabilities for building public-facing websites. In this session we will walk through the process of optimizing your public-facing website for Internet search engines. Additionally we will discuss the steps required to implement SEO in content-driven portals built using the SPA approach.
Building public-facing websites in SharePoint requires experience with not only the SharePoint platform but also with building public-facing websites and the specific requirements that introduces. Knowing SharePoint you will be able to build a website that looks and works the way you want it to, but which is far from being optimized for Internet search engines.
I started my presentation with an introduction of the approach that we use at Mavention for building public-facing websites with SharePoint and which we think allows us to build great websites optimized for accessibility, performance and Internet search engines. After that I presented a list of common challenges related to optimizing public-facing websites for Internet search engines and let the audience choose what they wanted to talk about. To my surprise the first topic I got a question about (optimizing multilingual websites for Internet search) was not on the list. Nonetheless I had a few examples of how it could be approached.
In my session I used a presentation deck optimized for my talk but which would be a poor post-session reference. So instead of sharing those slides, I built another deck which shortly presents the different topics we discussed and contains links to resources that will help you build great public-facing websites with SharePoint 2013 and optimize them for Internet search engines.
The event
Once again SharePoint Evolution Conference 2015 was a great experience and I’d like to thank Steve Smith and the whole crew involved with the organization of the event for having me and delivering such a wonderful show. Every year again it’s a great honor to be a speaker at this conference and I’m already looking forward to what Steve and his team are preparing for us for 2016.