speaking – 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.

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.

I Have Been Renewed as MVP for Second Year

On the April Fools Day, I have received the confirmation that my MVP Award has been renewed. I wish to thank to everyone who made it possible: the conference and community event organizers, the sponsors, Microsoft community leads and, of course, the attendees that come to the community to learn, mix and network. Thank you very much!

This year has begun with me speaking at SharePoint Saturday Stockholm in January. Then, the most expected SharePoint event of the year: Microsoft SharePoint Conference 2014 in Las Vegas. Right now on my radar there are three more events: SharePoint Saturday Belgium later this April, the European SharePoint Conference Barcelona in May and SharePoint Summit Toronto in late May.

The community work never stops.

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!

Come see me at the European SharePoint Conference 2014!

In case you missed it, the European SharePoint Conference 2014 programme is now available and I’m delighted to announce that I am speaking at Europe’s largest SharePoint event in Barcelona, Spain from the 5-8^th May 2014. For me it’s double satisfaction: to be speaking again at the ESPC and to see SharePoint circus coming to my home city. (It’s easier to play at home)

I will be conducting a session on Social Business Value Demystified: Real-World Experiences aimed at Business Decisions Markers and End Users. In this session you will learn how to connect business value and social features of SharePoint in order to support the organizational activities, how to organize communities of knowledge and how to integrate search and metadata into your overall social enterprise strategy.

The European SharePoint Conference will be run over four days and will feature over 100 informative SharePoint sessions and 6 preconference tutorials providing you with a fantastic opportunity for learning and building your SharePoint skills. Check out the full Conference Programme to see all sessions and topics that are being covered by me and other renowned SharePoint experts from Europe and all over the world.

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

Prices start as low as €995! There is also special group discounts for bookings of 3 or more people. Book Now and I’ll see you in Barcelona in May!

My Talk at SharePoint Summit Vancouver 2013

Last month I attended SharePoint Summit 2013 in Vancouver as a speaker. I was really looking forward to it, being my first time in Canada.

First I did a tour of Vancouver, strolling around and getting to know the neighbourhood. The city downtown is very compact and can be explored by simply walking around. I event tried the famous Japadog from the stand on Burrard St. Delicious!

My first talk was about the hype of enterprise social networks and how to get the real business value out of them. Several very interesting questions were raised during the session. Here are the slides:

Social Business Value Demystified: Real-World Experiences from Edin Kapic

My second talk, the day after, was about how to build a highly scalable app on the cloud, leveraging Windows Azure. I explained concepts such as queuing, distributed caching and async requests (with a short and eye-opening demo). It was also received very well and sparked a debate.

7 Key Things for Building a Highly-Scalable SharePoint 2013 App from Edin Kapic

The organization of the event was done very professionaly. The venue (Fairmont Hotel Vancouver) was a perfect place, very centric and friendly to the business attendees. Not to mention Mavis and Beau, two sweet dogs that are the official dog ambassadors of the hotel.

On the downside, the scheduling of the sessions could be improved as several sessions with similar audiences were being scheduled on the same time, and the "keynote" presentations were also scheduled at the same time as some of the breakout sessions, in detriment of the assistance. The organizing team should take note of that for the future editions.

The best thing about the summit was the opportunity I had to connect to speakers and attendees and exchange many ideas about the use of our favourite platform. Thank you all for a very good time in Vancouver!

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!