I am thrilled and honoured to be invited to speak at the SharePoint Unite conference in beautiful Haarlem, Netherlands on October 24-26, 2017. This will be my first trip to the Netherlands and I am really looking forward to experiencing the culture and meeting new people while I’m there.

Travelling to the Netherlands is an exciting, new travel adventure for me. I have a personal connection to both Belgium and the Netherlands – two places I will be visiting while in Europe. Read my blog post “My Tech Travels and some Canadian History“, to learn about why I’m so honoured to be able to visit both of these countries.

This is a great opportunity for me to share my knowledge and experience with others in the European SharePoint/O365 community as well as learn from an impressive lineup of speakers for the event.

If you’re going to be there please find me and say hi. It would be great to meet in person. Click here to register for the event. Make sure you use my discount code, SPKRJOKL10, for 10% off!

I am presenting 2 sessions:

Office 365: Practical Adoption Strategies

Office 365 is being rolled out worldwide to organizations of all sizes. Although each is unique and has different needs, they all have one thing in common: the need for end-user adoption. One of the key aspects of Office 365 is collaboration and the numerous services that are deployed to support it. Ironically, although many of the features are built with ease of use in mind, if you’ve ever watched a first-time user of Office 365, you’ll soon realize it’s not always intuitive for end-users to know how it all works together. To realize the benefits of Office 365, we need to ensure it is fully adopted across the organization and second-nature in users’ day-to-day collaborative work processes. Although you can take the “wing it/organic” approach, you may not get the results you are hoping for. What are some strategies and tactics you can use to stack the odds in your favour for a high degree of adoption in your organization? I’ll share my 3-step strategy and some specific tactics for each so that your end-users can fly with Office 365!

Information Management and Governance in Office 365

What does Information Management and Governance mean within the context of Office 365? What are the tools that allow us to manage it? In this session, we’ll talk about the traditional ways we’ve approached this discipline and how the new collaboration world is disrupting this.

Organizations need to empower employees to reap the benefits of new collaboration tools in the digital workplace, but they can’t compromise the security, compliance, and protection of corporate assets while doing it.

Capabilities are being rolled out to help organizations keep both managed and unmanaged content secure and compliant throughout Office 365. We’ll talk about setting organizations up for success on all fronts from an Information Management perspective.

I hope to see you there!

Blog post: 8 minute read
Date last verified: August 2017

I know what you’re thinking… hasn’t this topic been covered enough already Joanne? Please hear me out…I’ve been around the SharePoint space long enough to have read at least 30-40 different blog posts talking about why the list view threshold limit exists in the first place, correct ways to provision libraries so you don’t run into it and how you can set yourself up for success if you exceed it. Heck, I’ve even written one of them! 😉

Here is the official link from Microsoft on managing them (Manage large lists and libraries in SharePoint) and an important excerpt from it explaining where the number 5000 comes from:

To minimize database contention SQL Server, the back-end database for SharePoint, often uses row-level locking as a strategy to ensure accurate updates without adversely impacting other users who are accessing other rows. However, if a read or write database operation, such as a query, causes more than 5,000 rows to be locked at once, then it’s more efficient for SQL Server to temporarily lock the entire table until the database operation is completed.

NOTE: The actual number is not always 5,000, and can vary depending on your site, the amount of activity in the database, and your site’s configuration.

When the whole table is locked, it prevents other users from accessing the table. If this happens too often, then users will experience a degradation of system performance. Therefore, thresholds and limits are essential to help minimize the impact of resource-intensive database operations and balance the needs of all users.

I understand the technical reason behind the threshold limit but I still wasn’t satisfied with how well I understood the end-user experience. I suspect there are others out there who, like me, weren’t exactly sure what an end-user would see once the threshold limit was exceeded. Yes, I knew it would throw an error but I wanted to test out Microsoft’s recommendations in the link above to see if I could get around the limit if I designed a library using them. I not only wanted to document my observations but since my Office 365 tenants seem to be straddling both classic and modern worlds right now, I also wanted to capture some Modern library screenshots and document what the differences, if any, were between it and a Classic one. Continue reading “SharePoint Online List View Threshold” →

I’m happy to announce I’ve been selected to speak at this year’s SharePoint Saturday event in Toronto on August 19. I’m looking forward to heading East to attend the event as both an attendee and a speaker, to meet new people and hang out with friends. It is sure to be a fantastic event from start to finish!

There’s a great lineup of sessions – check them out here.

In my session I’ll be talking about Information Management in an Office 365 Collaboration world.

Synopsis: What does Information Management and Data Governance mean within the context of Office 365? What are some tools we can use to manage it?

Organizations need to empower employees to  reap the benefits of new collaboration services in the digital workplace, but they can’t compromise the security, compliance and protection of  corporate assets while doing it. Capabilities are being rolled out to help organizations keep both managed and unmanaged content secure and compliant throughout and beyond O365.

This session covers setting organizations up for success from an Information Management perspective without hindering usage and adoption of O365. Discussion covers DLP, AIP, and Retention.

If this is something you’re trying to manage, come on by! I’d love to talk about it.

[Update – session added] I will also be sharing some practical adoption ideas for O365 in an additional session as well. If you have ideas to share or want to get some new ones, join me!

Registration details are HERE.

[Update August 20, 2017] Here are the links to my 2 presentations:

• Information Management in an Office 365 Collaboration World
• Practical Adoption Strategies for Office 365

Thanks for coming to the event!

-JCK