Dublin, it’s been a pleasure! The Rencore team is back from another enlightening and successful European SharePoint Office 365 & Azure Community Conference (ESPC).
The ESPC is one of the biggest events on our calendar, second only to Microsoft Ignite, and we were glad to really deliver our SharePoint customization Governance, Transformation and Risk Prevention message. What better way to do that than to have our very own speakers Matthias Einig, Erwin van Hunen and Waldek Mastykarz spreading the word! Lest we forget Hugh Wood too, who took to the stage once again to give a great session about Development Best Practices.
Rencore also made it through to the final of the ESPC Awards in the category: Best Management Solution.
Matthias Einig, founder and CEO: “As a company, we were excited to be nominated for the category: Best Management Solution. With our Governance, Transformation and Risk Prevention solutions we are providing organizations customizing SharePoint & Office 365 with a way to secure and modernize their farms and tenants. We provide an innovative and effective way to automatically inventorize, manage and secure your SharePoint and Office 365 customizations.”
We were narrowly beaten by our good colleagues at Syskit who won the award with their SPdocKit – as a group we couldn’t be happier for them and it’s always nice to see a cool company do well! Well done guys.
We attended ESPC with a strong team presence. Four technical guys and three product experts. Everything was coordinated perfectly by our event manager Chrissi Schuster. Here’s a little info on how she organized Rencore at ESPC:
“Organizing Rencore at such an event is always challenging because you plan everything in advance, and watch the pieces come together just a day or two before the event. I always have contingency plans in place just in case something unexpected happens, and trust me, it can happen. Take the latest hurricane tragedy in Orlando, for example. But luckily the weather was not so severe in Dublin. All external partners, vendors, etc. were brilliant at communicating, which is so important in event management. It makes everything a lot more manageable when communication standards are high. For me, the ESPC was a great success.”
Now let’s get down to business.
Matthias Einig, founder and CEO, and Torsten Mandelkow, CTO are pathing the way for a brighter SharePoint customization future. Not only was Matthias giving sessions at the Rencore booth he was also speaking at his own session: Organizational considerations for customizing SharePoint and Office 365.
Matthias’ session heavily focused on Customization Governance, the first step any organization should consider before Customizing SharePoint.
The session addressed what SharePoint customizations, deployment models and solutions are and why they can go wrong, as well as the need to understand the implications of citizen developers as a collective. Citizen developers are key to making SharePoint Online a successful collaborative platform, but we must understand and be aware of the consequences a collaborative platform can cause.
The point is this: if you put the time in at the beginning to initiate a Governance plan consisting of clear rules and protocols, you are building a stable foundation that allows developers to build secure SharePoint solutions and therefore customizations that stand the test of time. Risk Prevention processes make sure that the customizations move fluidly with the latest SharePoint updates, and that’s a topic we will cover later, but Governance addresses the foundations before you start customizing SharePoint and you need to utilize SharePoint’s customization capabilities to get the maximum benefit out of the platform. SharePoint out of the box is like buying a house without buying furniture. Yes, it still functions, but you need to customize the design of the interior to fit your needs.
Between his own session: Provisioning artifacts to SharePoint and SharePoint Online using PowerShell, which was very well received, and demoing SPTransformator at the booth, Erwin got deep into the ESPC spirit, collaborating with others, as well as offering support for the hackathon alongside Waldek.
There was even a “we’re getting the band back together” moment, although the band never actually split, as most of the PnP Core Members: Paolo, Bert, Elio and Vesa joined Erwin and Waldek on stage. It was quite a rarity to have these guys in the same place at the same time. Surprisingly, Rob Wormald, a special guest and a key member of the Angular development team at Google (yes, you read that correctly! Google) joined them, too. Google at a SharePoint conference I hear you say! How can this be? Well, it went down very well and was considered one of the highlights of the speaker sessions.
It was a pleasure catching up with Waldek after ESPC and it was interesting as always to get his take on the event. He was a very busy man, starting the week by delivering a full-day workshop with Eric Overfield. The purpose was to delve deep into SharePoint Framework (SPFx) business scenarios, focusing on the “why” instead of the “ what”. They also demonstrated how to make the best use of the latest SPFx capabilities.
Waldek also presented two 10-minute sessions at the Rencore booth, highlighting the potential risks of customizing SharePoint. The risk of customizing SharePoint is very real and understanding the types of risks allows you to prevent them. Hence, Waldek is keen to get the Risk Prevention message out there, and rightly so! He also took to the stage once again and spoke alongside Vesa Juvonen in the developer keynote session: SharePoint as an Application Platform – Building Engaging Solutions. Consequently, Vesa returned the favor in Waldeks session: Deep-Dive Building Solutions on the SharePoint Framework, which complemented Vesa’s keynote session perfectly.
Hugh wood has been the driving force behind Rencore’s Best Practices Certification program and things have really kicked off in the past couple of months, more specifically, with Lightning Tools being the latest organization to complete the vetting process. The benefits of his session ‘Development Best Practices for a New Development World’ included great tips on avoiding the security pitfalls of Apps and SPFx, understanding browser, API and framework performances, and good practices for a maintainable coded solution.
The benefits of his session ‘Development Best Practices for a New Development World’ included great tips on avoiding the security pitfalls of Apps and SPFx, understanding browser, API and framework performances, and good practices for a maintainable coded solution.
The image to the right depicts the categories that organizations will be vetted for. If the company successfully fits the criteria, they can display the Rencore certification. Our certification is synonymous with high-quality SharePoint customizations.
And finally…
Massive congratulations to Maxim from Infopulse who won our Masskrugstemmen event!
If you would like to join us in person at our next event please click here. It would be great to meet you!
