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Announcements and thoughts from Microsoft Build 2016

(This post is updated March 30th, 11 am PDT) Build 2016: Announcements and thoughts (this blog post) Build 2016: Second day This week I am in San Francisco for the yearly Microsoft Build-conference. I try to attend at least one major Microsoft event every year and as Microsoft Ignite was rescheduled for September, I had a chance to allocate some time to spend 6 days in sunny San Francisco. This blog post will serve as a placeholder for my blogging throughout the week – I hope you’ll find this useful! Travel I’m based in Helsinki, Finland. That’s about 8700 km …
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Recap from SharePoint Saturday Dubai 2016

I had the opportunity and pleasure to present at SharePoint Saturday Dubai 2016 this past weekend. This was also the first international event of the year for me. I’ve never had a chance to visit Dubai so it was a great to visit the warmer climates of UAE for an extended weekend. My presentation topic was a deep dive on SharePoint 2016 architectures. Overall I think it went really well, and I always enjoy when I get to present fresh content, rather than talk about the past. SharePoint 2016 Release Candidate was released just recently so there is plenty to …
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SharePoint Server 2016 Release Candidate and Project Server 2016 Release Candidate are now available

SharePoint Server 2016 Release Candidate and Project Server 2016 Release Candidate versions were released today, January 19th. I’ve been fortunate enough to have been working with SharePoint since the earliest versions in around year 2000, so after so many generations it’s very nice to see the latest release being feature complete and closer to the final 2016 version. I wanted to write a few thoughts on SharePoint Server 2016 while spinning up my VMs to update with the latest RC build. You can download bits for both release candidates here. Where are we today? After SharePoint releases in 2001, 2003, …
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First Helsinki Hackathon was a success–check out the results!

My company (Onsight Helsinki) arranged together with Blue Meteorite the first Helsinki Hackathon event in Helsinki, January 15th. The main theme for the hackathon was to build a working solution using Office 365, especially with the Office 365 APIs and possibly also Microsoft Graph. I was inspired to have a local hackathon after attending the European SharePoint Conference last November, and seeing the results and enthusiasm from attendees who attended the hackathon while there. There’s a chance to learn, spend a great evening with very knowledgeable people and have pizza. What’s not to like? The event started on Friday evening …
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Thoughts from European SharePoint Conference 2015

I had a chance to participate in European SharePoint Conference last week in Stockholm, Sweden. This was nice for several reasons. I didn’t have to travel all the way to Seattle, like the previous week for Microsoft MVP Summit. My flight from Helsinki also took less than an hour, which is very convenient. For the first time ever I chose to fly to Bromma, instead of the more international Arlanda airport in Stockholm. This was a very convenient way of getting to Stockholm fast. The downside is that when leaving Sweden, Bromma seems to be very crowded and cramped. The …
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Thoughts on the next generation of Microsoft MVP award

I’ve been a Microsoft MVP for a little less than 2 years now. It’s been a great journey so far, and I can’t wait to see how next year will turn out with the 2016 wave of releases from Microsoft. It has also been the next logical next step after I completed the Microsoft Certified Master (MCM) certification program in 2012. I’ve been working in IT for 25 years, and each year feels more exciting than the previous to work with Microsoft technologies! Ever since becoming an MVP in 2014 I felt that I should be concentrating more on the …
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Goodbye, SharePoint 2010 and thanks for everything

Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010 and SharePoint Foundation 2010 mainstream support ends October 10, 2015. You can verify this on Microsoft’s Lifecycle page for SharePoint 2010. Weeks go by so fast nowadays, that I actually had to stop for a moment to reflect the fact that it’s been 5 years, and almost two releases since SharePoint 2010 was all the rage. So what does this mean for a company that is still running SharePoint 2010 (Server or Foundation)? It’s not the end of the world, and your SharePoint 2010 farm will not stop on the 11th of October because of this. …
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SharePoint Saturday Barcelona 2015 recap

I was honored and happy to be invited to speak at the first SharePoint Saturday Barcelona this past weekend. The event was organized by SharePoint User Group Catalunya. Visiting Barcelona is always a great experience, and by now it seems to be a yearly tradition to spenD a weekend in warmer climate of Spain around this time of the year. You can see the impressive speaker lineup here. Introduction and first part of the event keynote was delivered by Edin Kapic from Sogeti. Second part of the keynote was delivered by Christian Buckley from Beezy. Update: I just received a …
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Understanding and getting started with Office 365 Video portal

Today, Microsoft released Office 365 Video portal on Office 365. See the official announcement here. Office 365 Video is a video portal solution, that allows users to consume, share and manage video content, a bit like YouTube. Videos are stored and viewed in SharePoint Online. It also handles metadata and search for videos. Technical delivery services, such as transcoding, thumbnails and secure streaming, is provided via Azure Media Services. By using Azure Media Services, tenant owners do not incur additional costs – it’s part of the service, and only SharePoint Online storage is something that might affect your subscription fees. …
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Recommended approach to provisioning content types in SharePoint 2010, 2013 and SharePoint Online

Much has been written and even more has been discussed about content types in SharePoint. Since there’s so many ways to provisioning content types, I wanted to capture the essential information for anyone in need of clear advice on this topic. This article is aimed for all roles of a given SharePoint deployment: site collection admins, IT Pros and developers. And as always with SharePoint, things vary and depend on many factors. What is a content type? Instead of re-hashing what’s already written very nicely on MSDN, here’s a nice quote explaining what a content type is. Note that this …
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