events – EdinKapic.com

Speaking at SharePoint Konferenz Erding 2016

Last week I was in Germany, in the little village of Erding (near Munich), delivering two sessions at SharePoint Konferenz 2016. It was a very good event with fantastic speaker lineup and nice environment.

My two sessions were Extending Authentication and Authorization and High-Trust SharePoint Add-Ins for On-Premises Development.

SPKonferenz Keynote Speakers

Extending Authentication and Authorization

In this talk I focused on explaining the architecture of claims identity in SharePoint. From there I went to explain how to extend the claims with custom claim providers, together with the explanation on how to use other identity providers such as ADFS or Thinktecture Identity Server with SharePoint. I had a fairly good Q&A session after my talk.

You can find the sample claim provider code at http://bcned.in/ClaimProvider.

Extending Authentication and Authorization from Edin Kapic

High-Trust SharePoint Add-Ins for On-Premises Development

My second session was focused on how to build on-premises apps/add-ins (high-trust or S2S) using certificate authentication instead of OAuth-brokered authentication. I highlighted some of the challenges and also some of the extensibility points that we don’t have in low-trust apps. Again, I had nice Q&A time after my talk.

High-Trust Add-Ins SharePoint for On-Premises Development from Edin Kapic

Talking about Claims and Claim Providers at ESPC15 in Stockholm

Last week I was in Stockholm for the annual European SharePoint Conference 2015. A little bit tired after being in USA for MVP Summit the previous week, but happy to meet my dear SharePointers and get to know some new ones.

My talk was about “Extending Authentication and Authorization”. I talked about claims, the underpinning of all thinks AuthN and AuthZ in SharePoint 2013. My demo was a custom claims provider that exposed dummy claims in People Picker that were used to protect confidential document from normal users.

I also demoed the federated authentication with SharePoint and ADFS.

You can find my slides on the ESPC15 website or on SlideShare. The demo claims provider code is also available on my OneDrive.

ESPC15 – Extending Authentication and Authorization from Edin Kapic

Special thanks to Spencer Harbar for coming with the claims as boarding pass analogy in the first place. It’s a great explanation tool.

Galileo and SharePoint (via Azure) at SPS London 2015

Yesterday (July 11th) I was presenting at the very first SharePoint Saturday London. The SPS event was very well organized by Peter Baddeley and Seb Matthews.

Galileo with PIR sensor sending data to Azure

My session was about connecting IoT to Office 365 (via Azure). I used an Intel Galileo prototyping board with a Passive Infrared sensor (PIR). The sensor data was used to determine if a meeting room was empty or occupied. The raw data is uploaded by Galileo to an Azure Notification Hub. A continuously-running Stream Analytics job is then used to translate the raw data to 1-minute resolution of the room availability and to insert this data into Azure Table Storage. Finally, a provider-hosted Office 365 SharePoint application is used to visualize the room availability.

The slides for my talk are available at SlideShare and the code is now live at GitHub.

What I Learned at SharePoint Saturday Stockholm

As I mentioned in my previous post, last weekend was well spent with the SharePoint Saturday crowd in Stockholm, Sweden. In this post I want to highlight what I have learned from it. It was very difficult to choose which session to attend , as I had my own session to worry about.

JavaScript

There were two very good sessions about JavaScript in SharePoint.

The first one was called “SharePoint JavaScript, Doing It Right” and it was presented by Hugh Wood, very knowledgeable guy from Rencore (by the way, they are the makers of SPCAF, pay them a visit). He summarized his detailed posts on SharePoint JS inner workings. If you haven’t read them before, you don’t know what are you missing.

Spssthlm19 SharePoint Javascript – Doing it right from Hugh Wood

The other session was called “Mixing power of CSR with flexibility of KnockoutJs: three examples” and it was presented by Andrei Markeev. I couldn’t attend it but I spoke with Andrei and I am really looking forward to see the slides and the sample code. Andrei’s GitHub repository has some very good things to have in SharePoint arsenal: a CSR live tool (Cisar) and CAML JS console.

Workflows

The second thing I learned in Stockholm was just how awesome is the new workflow development experience with Visual Studio. SharePoint 2013 and Office 365 workflows use the new, external engine and all the calls are client-side code, either JS in SharePoint or REST API on your servers.

The session was called “Advanced SharePoint Workflow Scenarios” and was flawlessly presented by Paolo Pialorsi from PiaSys. If you haven’t heard about Paolo, which is very doubtful, he is the guy who wrote The Book on SharePoint Development and he’s one of the brightest SharePoint people I know. Check his slides and source code, there is a trove of information there. Grazie, Paolo!

Full-Trust Code to SharePoint Apps Transformation

Another session I liked was called “Transforming SharePoint Farm Solutions to the App Model” and presented by another Rencore genius and one of the founders of SharePoint Saturday Stockholm, Matthias Einig. He outlined the SharePoint development roadmap and the main obstacles from moving to the cloud. I think that it was a sober assessment of the state of SharePoint development right now.

Transforming SharePoint Farm Solutions to the App Model #SPSSTHLM23 from Matthias Einig

Were you at SharePoint Saturday Stockholm 2015? What did YOU learn?

SharePoint Code Maintainance and Unit Testing Talk at SPS Stockholm

Last weekend I have attended another SharePoint Saturday, this time in Stockholm. The weather was nicer than the last year, and the attendance was over the top: 300 attendees to learn about and discuss SharePoint topics from the expert speakers.

My talk was about how to build SharePoint code that’s both maintainable and testing-friendly. I have approached the talk from the coarse to finer detail, from the distribution of the solution components into SharePoint to the dependency injection mechanisms and principles of SOLID and GRASP object-oriented design.

The demo I shared with the attendees was a very simple SharePoint provider-hosted app in ASP.NET MVC that displays the user full name and the login username. I started with a very coupled code that all sat in the Index action in the controller and I ended with a testable design that had the SharePoint ClientContext dynamically injected to the service at runtime, dutifully abstracted behind an interface. I used Unity IoC container and Moq for mocking the dependencies in the tests.

You can find the slides at my SlideShare page, as usual, and the source code for the demo (in a form of a Mercurial repository) on my OneDrive. I have received some very good comments about the topic and the techniques mentioned in the session.

If you have attended my session at SPS Stockholm, I have questions for you.

What have you liked most?
What haven’t you liked at all?
What could be done better?

Let me know how can I improve the talk for future events.

Speaking at the European SharePoint Conference in a Week

The European SharePoint Conference is less than three weeks away and I’m delighted to be part of such an exceptional line up. The conference will take place in Barcelona, Spain from the 5-8^th May 2014 and is Europe’s largest SharePoint event bringing you great sessions and the latest innovations from Las Vegas.

Browse through the superb conference programme including 110 sessions, keynotes, and tutorials, including topics covering the latest news from SPC14 including what’s new with

SharePoint 2013 SP1
Office Graph/Oslo
new Office 365 REST APIs
Access AppsCloud Business Apps

I will be conducting a session called “Social Business Value Demystified: Real-World Experiences” aimed at Business Decisions Markers and End Users.

In this session I will outline why social technologies are useful for the business and how to align them with the business value. I will focus not on the technology but the reason why we use it. The rationale for this session topic is sharing what we have learned from the customers that use our best-of-the-breed social network for SharePoint on premises: Beezy.

Get a free whitepaper about the 4 Enablers of a Social Intranet.

The European SharePoint Conference will be run over four days and with over 1000 SharePoint attendee’s already signed up don’t miss this fantastic opportunity to mingle with the European SharePoint Community.

If you want to deepen your SharePoint expertise, to understand the trend of the SharePoint market, and to learn how to leverage Microsoft Office 365 for your business, including the revolutionary Enterprise Social wave, the European SharePoint Conference is the best place to be in 2014!

Prices start from €1150! There is also special group discounts for bookings of 3 or more people.

Book Now and I’ll see you in Barcelona in May

SharePoint Conference 2014 and Scalable App Architecture Talk

Tomorrow I will be flying to Las Vegas, for my third SharePoint Conference there (you can see my impressions from 2009 and 2012). This time, I’m honoured to be a speaker.

By the way, I can’t believe that it has been 5 years since my first SharePoint Conference in Vegas. Time really flies.

Beezy at SPC14

My colleagues from Beezy will also be present at the conference, showcasing our best-of-the-breed enterprise social network for SharePoint. Please visit them at the booth #1140. You’ll find out what Beezy is and how it can help you embrace social computing at work.

The idea for my talk came out of Beezy development. We had to design Beezy for high scalability, as it was going to be used in companies with tens of thousands of users. I have envisioned a talk that summarizes the key tenets and practices for scalable applications, especially at the back-end (API end). It’s a topic that hasn’t really entered the mainstream programming in SharePoint, but with the app model that exposes your app to potentially millions of users, it should be gaining wider audience.

7 Tenets for Highly Scalable Apps for SharePoint 2013

My session is about highly scalable apps for SharePoint 2013 and how to architect the solutions for scalability. There are several techniques that can be used to achieve scalability, such as aggressive and distributed caching, queuing, using non-relational storage, using non-blocking async calls and so on. I will try to give a glimpse of those techniques and to enable you as a developer to use those new tools in your toolbelt.

Are you attending SPC14? Join the conversation at Yammer about my session! Ask questions and post comments to help me make the session live up to your expectations.

Ongoing Sample App Code

I have also started an ongoing scalable app demo (https://bitbucket.org/ekapic/scalable-app) that I intend to evolve to a complete example app built with the core messages of my session. Right now I have the source code that I’ll use in my demos, but I will keep adding the app code in the next months. You can find the ongoing demo app code hosted at BitBucket. Feel free to fork it as you wish.

See you all in Vegas!

I’ll be speaking at SharePoint Evolutions Conference in London

A few months ago I was confirmed as a speaker on the SharePoint Evolutions Conference (aka SPEVO13) that will take place in London, from April 15th to 17th. This conference is organized by the fantastic folks at Combined Knowledge and it was formerly known as the International SharePoint Conference (ISC).

The conference will be crammed with SharePoint experts and community leaders. Still not registered? There are still seats left. Wondering about what will you find at the conference:

Over 113 Sessions delivered by Global SharePoint Experts, Microsoft Speakers and MVP’s.
3 Days of Sessions covering Business, Technical, Developer, Information Worker, Community and Case Study Tracks and Ask the Experts sessions
Over 40 hours of networking opportunities

I will speak in the Community track. My session is about a real-world case that the company I work for is involved. I expect to contribute the things that we learned during the successive improvements of the customer’s SharePoint intranet, both in technical and organizational sense. I hope that somebody will find some inspiration in the things that I will share and hopefully it will help others to avoid some of the pains that we experienced.

On the other hand, I’m eager to meet the old friends from the fantastic SharePoint community and to make some new ones! The community is the BEST part of SharePoint, by large.

See you all in London!