With the release of SharePoint 2016 and the recently announced Future of SharePoint, organizations have many new and updated capabilities at their disposal. But, the question remains regarding what value those new capabilities bring an organization. In this highly interactive session, we’ll focus on how organizations can find real business value in SharePoint and Office 365 by building a roadmap that aligns the goals of the organization with the capabilities of the platform. We’ll also focus on the importance of adoption and governance strategies and walk through some real examples of how organizations have found success with SharePoint and Office 365.

With an MSDN subscription you can run your dev / test environment in Azure IaaS for less than the cost of a cup of coffee each day. In this session we will overview the basics of Azure IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service), the pieces you will use to be successful deploying SharePoint in Azure (including the new Azure Resource Manager templates), and how to use resources as efficiently as possible to reduce your costs and boost your farm performance. This session is targeted to SharePoint developers and administrators. Prior knowledge of Azure is helpful but not a requirement.

Many new features have been announced and introduced in the last year, and it can be hard to keep up with the technologies and their use cases. Forms are still a concern with the deprecation of InfoPath, and today more and more organizations are looking at cloud and/or hybrid scenarios for their solutions. How do we put it all together? In this session, we’ll take a high-level at some of the newest features announced in the Microsoft stack: PowerApps, Flow and Azure Functions. We’ll take a high-level approach to understanding the kinds of solutions they allow us to create. Then we’ll walk thru a demo using each of these features, integrated with SharePoint, and wrapping it all up with a fully functional cloud-powered App.

“Are my nightly SQL Server backups good enough?” “Do I need an off-site disaster recovery facility?” “How do I even start the process of disaster recovery planning?” These are just a few of the more common questions that arise when the topic of SharePoint disaster recovery comes up. As with most things SharePoint, the real answer to each question is oftentimes “it depends.” In this business and process-centric session, we will be taking a look at the topic of SharePoint disaster recovery from multiple perspectives: business continuity planner, technical architect, platform owner, and others. Critical concepts and terms will be explained and defined, and an effective process for analyzing and formulating a disaster recovery plan will be discussed. We’ll also highlight some common mistakes that take place when working to build a disaster recovery strategy and how you can avoid them. By the end of this session, you will be armed with the knowledge needed to plan or review a disaster recovery strategy for your SharePoint environment.”

SharePoint 2016 is the newest version in the On-Premises SharePoint story. But whats the business value for going through another upgrade cycle? In this talk well outline the new features that SharePoint 2016 adds to the mix and how it lays the groundwork for additional features going forward. Well discuss 2016s roots in the cloud, how it changes the underlying service model for deployment, and what role it plays in the ever increasing number of hybrid deployments.