PhantomJS for SharePoint and Office365 at Collab365

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Great news everyone!

Collab 365 Global Conference

Collab 365 is a free online conference that's just around the corner - this is run by the team behind last year's successful SP24 conference (which was the craziest 24hours - around the clock and around the world).

https://collab365.conferencehosts.com/SitePages/GlobalConference.aspx

This time, the guys are less crazy and will instead have 12hours spanning over two days.  (So a total of 24 hours).

PhantomJS: Headless Browser for SharePoint and Office 365

I have been having a lot of fun locally presenting this topic in the Office 365 Saturday events around Australia, and will be presenting this online at Collab 365. 

My session is scheduled for 08 October (day 1 - my time), 12PM-1PM.  Please check your local time.  In Australia, this conference spans 08-09 October. 

https://collab365.conferencehosts.com/sitepages/agenda.aspx

PhantomJS is an interesting tool.  It is free - and it is basically browser that you can script to automate many things, without a UI.  I cover scenarios and scripts that will allow you to use it effectively with SharePoint On-Premises and Office 365.

If you are a developer - this is a great tool to add to your toolset.  Even if you aren't - as long as you aren't scared of a bit of scripting, you will still find the scenarios for PhantomJS interesting and, well, different.

There are several other sessions I wanted to catch up on, and plenty of MVPs and Microsoft presenting on all things Office 365. 

I hope to see you at Collab 365!

 

 

Office 365 Saturday 2015 - Melbourne

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I visited sunny Melbourne (so strange!) for Office 365 Saturday last weekend, covering PhantomJS and SharePoint.  We also geeked out in general around the lunch desk and debated the direction of Add-Ins and the future of SharePoint development.

It was so good to see many of the locals turn up - familiar faces and new faces.  We geeked out on PhantomJS and why you need to know about this tool for your toolbox, even if you don't need it right now.

We then flowed onto Colin's session on making a million dollars (in progress) in the App Store. 

Downloads to my presentation and zip files.

Melbourne was so enjoyable.  I had to leave early to catch my flight home.  Next stop is Adelaide:

Office 365 Saturday Adelaide - 12 September 2015

http://www.o365saturdayaustralia.com/adelaide

PhantomJS and Office 365 Brisbane

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I thoroughly enjoyed my trip up to Brisbane.  I got to see some friends, saw my sister and presented PhantomJS with SharePoint and SharePoint Online.

 

The response was tremendous, those that came to my session seems really interested and gave me more ideas for future discussions. 

The presentation and demo are here

The new business case scenarios:

  • Automated Smoke Testing of sites - randomly check pages and DOM exist - "nothing has so far blown up"
  • Smoke Testing of sites with different credentials!
  • Scanning and scrapping text off dynamic (Single Page Application) pages and feed them to SharePoint's Search Indexing Service.  Thus, you can have textual search linking back to dynamic URLs.

I also really enjoyed Elaine's session on SharePoint 2016.


The next Office 365 Saturday in Australia will be in Melbourne.  The registration is up here:

http://www.o365saturdayaustralia.com/melbourne

Presenting "PhantomJS" at SPBizConf free online conference on June 18.

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I will be presenting "Introducing PhantomJS: Headless Browser for your SharePoint/Online" in the SPBizConf on 18 June.

http://www.spbizconf.com/events/headless-in-sharepoint-phantomjs-will-blow-your-mind/

Despite the -JS in the name of the title, PhantomJS is not another Javascript library.  Instead, it is a headless browser that lets you automate many tasks involving a browser, and there are some very nifty tricks you can use this to build site directories or create PDF snapshot of documents and forms.

Timing

Technically, because of Timezone Differences, it will actually be the 19th of June at 7AM in the morning.  The session is pre-recorded and I will basically be watching it along with the attendees and replying to questions in the chat room.

More Online.  More content.

Online Conferences such as SPBizConf and Unity Online are a new thing for me, and has prompted me to start looking into setting up recording room at home for more, higher quality, recorded content to be made available from my local presentations.  I'm very excited to be able to participate in global conferences like this without the expense of having to do crazy travel - travelling from Australia to "anywhere" tend to get expensive very quickly.

Will it blow my mind?

The curious will see the old name of the session.  I've since calm down and renamed the title, but the old URL has to stick for link reasons.  You need to let me know if this session gave you great ideas about what sort of shenanigans you get up to afterwards.

Office 365 Saturday Perth #O365PER summary

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On 22nd of May I had the pleasure of presenting O365 Saturday Perth.  In the past years, we have called this SharePoint Saturday.  We re-branded the name and this year had a mix of content from SharePoint On-Premises, SharePoint Online as well as Azure and Office 365.

People from Perth are always early risers - the room was quite packed early in the day.

Here's James Milne presenting the keynote.

I presented Introducing PhantomJS: Headless browser for SharePoint/Online.

Had lots of feedback about what people found it interesting, many people said it has potential for scenarios that they didn't think were previously possible.  I'm very keen to hear more feedback especially for different business cases.

Some of the feedback and demos will be rolled into an updated content over the year, so stay tuned.

Here are the PowerPoint and ZIP files for the presentation.