Last week SharePoint administrators and enthusiasts gathered in Chicago for ILTA’s SharePoint Symposium. They discussed what’s best and what’s next with search, SharePoint on-premises vs. in the cloud, cool Office 365 tools and more.
ILTA’s SharePoint Symposium 2017
ILTA created a key takeaways document from the Symposium highlighting key points discussed by the panelists for each session. Experts also shared overall thoughts and observations on SharePoint.
- For better adoption, talk about the tools used daily, improving functionality and improving the user experience. Do not talk about the platform (SharePoint).
- Many organizations in attendance have moved or plan to move to a cloud-based DMS.
- Many firms, though rarely the largest, have already moved to Exchange Online.
- You won’t be on-premises forever. Microsoft and others continue to make it less palatable. Start moving to the cloud today on your own terms.
- The Cloud is very secure. Fergus Wilson of Repstor offered the analogy, keeping money under your mattress (on-premise) vs. the bank (hosted/cloud).
SOMETHING EXTRA – More Resources and Tools Recommended at the SharePoint Symposium
Panelists and participants and vendor partners also shared cool tools to consider: Microsoft Power BI, Microsoft Graph, Microsoft Secure Score, Intranet in a Box like Akumina’s tool, Handshake Software, nGage Intelligence for visual reporting of analytics, BA Insight’s Longitude Search previewer, Microsoft Teams, Authentic8 Silo, Azure Logic Apps, Microsoft Flow (allowing users, not IT, to build integration) and Microsoft PowerApps.
Panelists provided extra resources for further information and quick solutions including white papers at Office365Intranets.com and Office365Extranets.com, Nielsen Norman Group for design ideas, the Microsoft Trust Center to provide support for security in the cloud, Findwise’s Enterprise Search and Findability Survey of 2016 for what’s now and what’s next in search and Github’s SharePoint PnP for assistance with PowerShell scripts.
You can also review panelist slides from the SharePoint Symposium.
As ILTA’s content curator, I’m always monitoring the discussion forums to discover what topics are top-of-mind among the members. Each week, I focus on a few areas that spark your interest, and I provide some curated resources to assist your own information-gathering on the topics. If there are specific topics you would like assistance exploring, please contact me at joanne@iltanet.org