Building a tool to help everyone with Flows: Flow Studio

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So, I've been head-down, deep building a tool to help everyone make better Microsoft Flows

It doesn't have many bells and whistles, it is still in very early alpha.  But it will help makers navigate the Flows we build, and I'm rapidly adding tools to the toolset.  There are near endless ideas of where this can go.

So far, getting a lot of feedback from a few colleagues, I'd love to get more feedback, say from a dozen users.

This app is called Flow Studio, the code name is Kunai (a Ninja dagger, because it helps us slice and dice / sort and filter).

A public alpha version is hosted on Azure Blob Storage and AzureFunctions.  

https://flow-studio.azurewebsites.net/welcome

Please tell me about the bugs, but also tell me about what awesome ideas you'd like to see.

Crazy Version History:

  • 0.0.17 (not yet released) Duplicate Flow
  • 0.0.16 IndexDB caching, remembers settings now
  • 0.0.15 fix URL for run
  • 0.0.14 update to Angular 6
  • 0.0.13 Edit JSON (exercise in opening and saving Flow Definition)
  • 0.0.12 Disable/Enable Flow
  • 0.0.10 ...nested grid, layout, dialog, building out different services, auth, usual headaches

I figure it's the third day of SharePoint Conference North America and it's as good time as any to push this baby into the public.

Please let me know what you think of this.

 

 

If anyone asks is Microsoft still investing in SharePoint - show them this.

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I was attending an MVP community event, and a few non-office MVPs asked me, hey is Microsoft still investing in SharePoint?  Is there anything new coming next?  There hasn't been a product for a few years right?  (This is so odd, we just had SP2016...  and SPO hasn't stopped having new features every month.)

I was also working at a client when one of our advanced users rushed over and asked John - what's going on with this new Teams thing - is Microsoft scrapping SharePoint.  (I was pretty shocked at this one).

Realizing that I'm probably directly connected to the flood of news regarding SharePoint - it is surprising people aren't aware of many of the best and greatest of SharePoint is still to come.  I decided to write this post.

April - SP Tech Con (lastest info as of this post)

This is the latest info as of this post.  Follow Mark Kashman - PM SharePoint. 

This was the SPTechCon keynote. 
https://www.slideshare.net/markkashman/reinventing-content-collaboration-the-future-of-sharepoint-is-now-sptechcon-austin-ms-keynote

 

Feburary - Internal Demo Day

Is there still a SharePoint team?  YES - and they are legion.

Directly from Jeff Teper the father of SharePoint

May - What's next?

2017 May 16 is the SharePoint Virtual Summit.  This is the big one.  Especially if we look back to 2016's May the 4th event when we first embarked on the next step of the Future of SharePoint, and now we see what the team has delivered within just one year.  It's been nothing but awesome. 

So no matter where you are in the world - you should register for the Virtual Summit.

In Australia

The Office 365 Saturday is upon us really soon.  The annual free community event will be coming to a city near you!  You need to sign up.  This helps us plan our catering needs.

All Demo Downloads will be on Github - blog housekeeping

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I've taken a short break from writing blog posts - I haven't been idle, I have been writing something.  Hopefully to be able to share it with everyone soon.  Anticipation is killing me.

As we roll into a new month September!  There are a few planned updates I'm doing for the rest of the year...

  1. Several old blog posts that was in Draft will be merged and published.  These are summary posts from the Office 365 Saturday events I've been going to.
  2. I've been in several SharePoint Sydney user group sessions and that needs summaries too.
  3. SPFx is announced, and now Developer Preview.  Posts there too.
  4. I'm looking around to see what's the best way to record some video sessions as I retire them to the archives.

First big announcement.

All future demo downloads will be on Github!

The download files for my demos on Upskill Your Javascript - from building JS WebParts for SharePoint to Office Add-ins and Azure Functions is up first.

https://github.com/johnnliu/demo-upgrade-your-js

The main driver for this is that the files are updated overtime, and Github really provides a much better place for me to point people to and say the latest files are over here.  Check it out, and if you have Issues - tag them directly on the lines.

So that's the first of the big news.

Seems obvious now...

Seems obvious now...

 

 

Hype Level Insane - #FutureOfSharePoint

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I wrote this as an email to colleagues.  But it got so long and exciting with pictures I decided to publish it.  There are no spoilers and I don't know any secrets.

 

 

#FutureOfSharePoint event is a keynote follow by sessions

There are more sessions after the keynote by Jeff Teper on whatever they will announce, so if you are a SharePoint guy you might be up for a looooonnnnng day.

Venue setup.  Small invite only place.

 

A lot of SharePoint MVPs have invitations to be physically at the event – there’s a significant gathering of them.  Perhaps Microsoft will consider giving our SharePoint MVP titles back 😉  Office Server and Services is nice.  But being a SharePoint MVP was special.

A group of SharePoint MVPs.  A murder of SharePoint MVPs?

There are times I really think about moving to America.  This is one of those times.

 

Australian Timezone

I’m debating whether to sleep really early and wake up at 2am.  Or just read it tomorrow – I’m pretty sure there will be Sway, liveblog, twitter coverage #FutureofSharePoint, yamjams and a number of MVP impression videos after the event.

I do hope the event will be broadcasted via Skype-broadcast.  Eat your own dogfood Team Office.

Next week Collab365 is broadcasting from MS HQ.  I hope they are setting up with MS and will utilize Skype to run their online conference.  In the past years we have used YouTube.

There is a PowerBI livequery dashboard set up with MS’s new Microsoft Flow

http://whitepages.unlimitedviz.com/2016/05/integrating-microsoft-flow-power-bi-real-time-reporting/

 

SharePoint Can't Be "Dead"

Reading the tea-leaf from what’s public:  To people that says “SharePoint is dead”...

Jeff Teper would not have returned to this role and be “Corporate Vice President of OneDrive and SharePoint” only to tell the world SharePoint is dead.

MS would not invite 20+ SharePoint MVPs to a physical event to tell the world SharePoint is dead.

My expectation is that the news will be really positive.  But my personal hype level is already far too high.

 

Key MS people to follow:

https://twitter.com/jeffteper  Father of SharePoint, Corporate VP.

https://twitter.com/mkashman

https://twitter.com/williambaer

https://twitter.com/AdamHarmetz 

https://twitter.com/danholme   Founder of IT Unity and MVP, recently joining Microsoft to continue Office evangelism. 

 

This rant is already too long and with pictures I might make this a blog post.  But no guesses from me.  Things will either get released with much fanfare, or they won’t.  😊

SharePoint Events and news catch up for Australia - April/May 2016

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I was preparing this list for our April Sydney SharePoint Usergroup event.

April 28-29 Digital Workplace Conference in Melbourne

tile-blog-dwc.png

This is the annual Australian SharePoint Conference / ShareThePoint Conference by Debbie Ireland.  The biggest Australian SharePoint show for the year.  A lot of opportunity for networking, user cases and physically meeting and talking with the community experts.  Lots of Australian and overseas visiting SharePoint experts across the spectrum (IT Pro, Business, Power User, Dev) at this event.  http://dwcau.com.au/  

 

April 28-29 Cloud Roadshow in Sydney

This is a Microsoft event for a developer audience.  Focused on Azure.

https://microsoftcloudroadshow.com/sydney

 

May the 4th - Future of SharePoint

This is an streaming online event with Jeff Teper, the father of SharePoint (and now OneDrive).  It would be live on May the 5th for Australians and probably very early in the morning.  Check timezones.

https://resources.office.com/en-us-landing-the-future-of-sharepoint.html

 

May 7 Office 365 Saturday Perth

The SharePoint / Office 365 Saturday events for 2016 kicks off again from Perth.

http://www.o365saturdayaustralia.com/perth

 

May 10-12 Collab365 Online Summit

The SP24 / Collab 365 guys are back again for 2016 with a huge lineup of streaming and recorded sessions.

http://collab365.events/collab365-summit-2016/

 

OneDrive for Business

There was a recent blog post was really good with information on 2016 roadmap.

https://blogs.office.com/2016/04/12/onedrive-for-business-recognized-as-an-efss-leader-and-continues-momentum-with-spring-updates/#wsEJ4t8xOHg24iYE.97

(Ignore the marketing intro about industry recognition… the roadmap items like Win 8.1, pause sync, and also Doc Lib sync in 3rd quarter 2016 is good info)

 

New Document Library UX went live

https://support.office.com/en-us/article/What-is-a-document-library-3b5976dd-65cf-4c9e-bf5a-713c10ca2872?ui=en-US&rs=en-US&ad=US

Almost universally, the reception is cautious.  We like seeing updates.  We don't like missing ribbons and hiding team collaboration features.  Robert Crane has one of the earliest pieces on this http://blog.ciaops.com/2016/04/this-seems-like-siloing-to-me.html that I really echo with.