Today’s video has been recorded from SharePoint Saturday Gulf 2014. What’s different about this session is that it’s all demos, few slides then a long demo that explains & shows the different aspects for managing the Lifecycle of SharePoint & Office 365 apps. This includes but not limited to Continuous integration, Continuous deployment, Automated Testing, Manual Testing, etc…
Please note that this video is in Arabic, to watch the English version, please check my session at SP24 Conference from here.
During the past few years, I’ve been promoting, writing, speaking about and explaining the Application Lifecycle Management practices for SharePoint and Office 365 . During those years, I’ve created a lot of content that is unfortunately scattered all over the internet. Today, I’ve published a Curation that provides the best articles, presentations, videos and tools about this topic.
On November 18, 2014, Microsoft added a new feature to the enterprise versions of Office 365 called Office 365 Video, the first version of its out-of-box corporate video portal. This feature will enable Office 365 users to create a Mini internal YouTube platforms within their organizations. Thanks to seamless integration with Azure Media Services, videos are rendered and streamed to provide an excellent experience across devices and platforms.
The company describes Office 365 Video as the first of a coming series of new NextGen portals that can be set up quickly and leverage Office Graph machine learning, Yammer social interactions, and mobile usage scenarios.
“Office 365 Video provides organizations with a secure, company-wide destination for posting, sharing and discovering video content,” Office 365 senior product manager Mark Kashman notes in a new post to the Office Blogs. “From onboarding new employees, to distributing a CEO message company wide, to community contributions, video is now a first-class citizen to power and enrich your internal communications.”
Watch the below illustrated video to learn more about how the service stores and preps your video file once you upload it into Office 365 Video.
Yesterday Microsoft made a few big announcements at their Connect event to expand its horizons in the cloud and to open up their tools & platforms to a much broader audience than ever before.
Here is a quick summary for the announcements:
.NET Goes Open Source and now available on GitHub
Developers can write .NET code and target Windows, Linux or Mac OS!! (This one is my favorite)
Free Visual Studio Community 2013(Has all features of Visual Studio Professional, supports extensibility and supports iOS and Android app development)
iOS and Android projects are first class citizens in Visual Studio 2015.
It is a major strategy change; this is not the company I knew for years! I am super excited and even more committed to Microsoft now J
Do not get me wrong; Microsoft did not kill the Lync product. It just rebranded it to “Skype for Business”.
Microsoft acquired Skype in 2011. Back then, it was very vague what the long-term strategy was behind having two separate products that could both do almost the same thing. When it came time to consolidate the brands, Skype’s large consumer footprint and instant familiarity made it the easy choice over Lync and a couple of days ago, Microsoft announced it: Effective in 2015, Lync will become Skype for Business.
Skype for Business will retain Lync’s infrastructure—the ability to use on-premises servers, optional federation with external communications networks, and so on and so forth—but the branding and client design will closely match those of Microsoft’s consumer communication platform.
Skype for Business will further improve interoperability with the consumer version of Skype. While voice and instant messaging are already interoperable between Lync and Skype (watch this video to see the interoperability in action), the next version will add video messaging and access to the Skype user directory. This will mean that, should administrators choose to enable it; the Skype for Business client software will serve as a fairly fully featured Skype client (for consumer), too.
Just wanted to drop a quick note about an upcoming Office 365 training opportunity that is coming soon to our region: Dubai Office 365 Summit!
The Office 365 Summit is a series of limited invitation 2 day workshops for Microsoft’s most valued customers and partners providing deep-dive readiness on all productivity workloads from Microsoft product experts.
Office 365 Summit will feature over 60 breakout sessions with 300-400 level content across IT Professional, Development, Sales & CIE, Adoption and Education tracks. During the Summit, you will have the opportunity to interact and learn from your industry peers and representatives from Microsoft and participate in hands-on learning. Select a location below and register now to secure your spot!
In addition, the Office 365 Summit site has a plethora of Readiness materials! Get the latest training materials and technical presentations from the Office team. Download presentations from Ignite events, get links to webcasts, Labs, and find other online training resources.
Quick-Hit Technology Thoughts from a Territory Manager @ Nintex, Microsoft Regional Director and 6x Microsoft MVP
Ayman El-Hattab's Technology Blog 