I was pleased to present "Making Room for Governance" at this year's SharePoint Saturday in Denver's Microsoft Tech Center.  The pop-up blizzard on Thursday made travel and travel delays an adventure level-up, and I had a wonderful time learning from other consultants and experts about the challenges and opportunities they're working on with Microsoft 365 (and sometimes on-premise) tools.

Governance is just a downright un-sexy topic.  It's about as exciting as an annual wellness exam.  No one likes it, no one looks forward to it, but we all know it's good to do.  So you can imagine my surprise when I had a great crowd in a first-morning presentation slot, AND they had wonderful questions and engagement!  I was also pleased to see that there were FIVE other presenters touching on Governance topics through the day, so if this is a topic you're interested in, please be sure to check those out as well.

My approach - in Governance and other business solutions - is to define solutions with an eye toward utilizing the tools you already have in place.  Most of my passion is with Office 365 and Microsoft 365, so these were the platform assumptions that I used generally - but I wanted to start off with some over-arching principles about what Governance is, what it can do, how to manage it, and make it as seamless and painless as possible.  Fortunately there are more  tools onboard the O365 experience that help with this, including AI-driven automation opportunities. There is still a lag in what Governance tools are natively offered and what third-party tools have been able to provide that allow IT departments and global admins to better manage their tenants, but it's getting better all the time.  

I'm embedding my slide presentation, but there aren't speakers notes that accompany these.  During the live presentation, I elicited input from the audience as to what platforms they're using, where they are and are not using Governance, and challenges they're seeing in their rapidly changing industries - and tailored discussion for recommendations that could be easily adopted.  What that means for these slides is that they might look a little boring without that context.  Or, without the context of the theme music accompanying the discussion.  If you're curious about that, or anything else touched on here, please reach out and ask.  

If you're in the Denver area, join these great folks at the Denver Office 365 and SharePoint Meetups!
Be sure to check out the collection of speakers and slide decks on the SharePoint Saturday - Denver speakers page. 

I had a wonderful time at SharePoint Saturday in Denver - and am already making plans for next year!

In the August features announcement about new features in SharePoint, I see my old arch-enemy, World Clocks and Time Zone webparts make an appearance.  I never have had much use for these web parts personally.  And honestly, I've never really understood their appeal beyond usenet groups and Myspace, when they were standard attributes. 

But I am wise enough to know that my way isn't the only way, and over time I have been repeatedly surprised by enterprise clients who really, really love these web parts. 

Over the years I've had to build custom code web parts to display the time and date.  With Office 365 and SharePoint Online, there have been a few solutions around for the last year or so available on Github or via third parties, but now there is a built-in weather and world clock web part option for modern page layouts.  

There are lots of other neat features too - call to action buttons, hero web part updates, News and announcement rollups - but what I'm betting right here and now that the biggest "wins" out of this rollout will be the time and weather features.  

Read more at the tech community blog announcement here.  It looks like some of the ideas that OlivierCC has had available over on GitHub for 2 years are finally making their way into the Office 365 ecosystem!  Here is a link to his sampling of SharePoint Framework /SPFx webparts. 

So saying the use of JSON scripts (even if just copying and pasting) is "no code" has always seemed a little weaselly to me.  now / Soon, some types of column formatting in SharePoint will be able to be done through the UI in a more user-friendly manner. This hits targeted release folks in December, and general availability in January.  In the article, you can try it out through a demo. 

Check out our new interactive Office 365 page for information to help you understand the myriad of apps and licenses available, from small business to corporate enterprises.