SharePoint Saturday Ensenada 2019

I want to send out a huge thank you to the SharePoint Saturday Ensenada team for letting me talk about practical uses of the Power Platform. As a first-time event, I was impressed with the turn-out and the engagement from the attendees on all topics. I have never seen so many happy faces diving in to learn all about SharePoint, Office 365, Microsoft Teams, and the Power Platform.

Attendees talking with the great sponsors of SPS Ensenada, Crow Canyon Software and iTProve Corporation

My presentation for this inaugural event was The Power is in Everyone’s Hands – Practical use of PowerApps, Flow and PowerBI where I talked about practical uses of the Power Platform for "No-Code" Applications. This is one of my favorite hands-on sessions as I show many demos and interact with the attendees as much as I can. For SPS Ensenada, the interact was incredible and I was having a lot of fun, even when folks stumped with a few questions. I had to use my friend, Wes Miller's favorite phrase, "It depends", way too much.

Ever since SharePoint 2010, there was a push to provide a way for Business and Power Users to create their own "application" to help their business processes and goals. At that time, SharePoint Designer became the tool of choice. Those users could create amazing business process management systems with SharePoint Lists, Libraries, Workflow Manager, and InfoPath. As companies are moving to Office 365, they are wondering how to move these developed platforms. The answer is now Power Platform with PowerBI, PowerApps, and Microsoft Flow. I showed how I use Power Platform to do some basic management of data from Twitter to Azure Storage Tables to SharePoint Lists to PowerApps. The possibilities are nearly endless with the Power Platform. The best part in the end about the Power Platform? If you hit the limits of the capabilities, there are ways for IT teams to take what you have done and move to larger systems like Azure Logic Apps, Web Apps, and SQL Server BI.

To help you get through some of the rough times and questions about the Power Platform, feel free to leave a comment and I can respond. If you want to ask me a question privately, use my contact form on the site.

I can't thank the organizing committee enough for letting me come down and present on the Power Platform. As this was the inaugural event for Ensenada and Baja California, I felt privileged to help kick of this event and look forward to next year where I hope to return and talk more with the great attendees. Lastly, I do want to thank David and Nichole Leveille of Crush Networks for the great SharePint afterwards. While almost every SharePoint event has these networking and social gatherings, this one kept going and going with great conversations, laughing, and good spirits. Plus, being right on the oceanside with an premium view of the Pacific Ocean and the sunset that evening did not hurt either.

The crowd enjoying themselves at the SPS Ensenada SharePint

SharePoint Saturday Los Angeles 2019

I want to send out a huge thank you to the SharePoint Saturday Los Angeles team for letting me talk about my journey to the Cloud. This was an incredible event in the Southern California area. Thank you for adding me at the last minute to fill gaps.

My presentation for this year's event was Don't Fear if the Forecast is Cloud! where I talked about my journey from Server Hugger to lover of Cloud and Modern Engineering. I know it can be a tough situation when you don't have all the information. There is mo much FUD (Fear, Uncertainty, Doubt) about the Cloud and I hope to clear at least a start of that. My journey has been rough at times as I had to change my mindset and learn new skills to enable my change. Do not feel bad if you are having a rough time with the change; that is a very normal response.

To help you get through some of the rough times and questionsabout the Cloud or my journey, feel free to leave a comment and I can resond. If you want to ask me a question privately, use my contact form on the site.

SharePoint Saturday Ensenada 2019

I am a very lucky person in that I have pretty good friend in David Leveille of Crush Networks. I have been pretty quiet this year as far as travelling to events like SharePoint Saturdays. Take a gander at my post about being back to find out why I have been a bit quiet. All of that changed a couple of weeks ago with a simple text. So, here we go!

I will be heading down to Ensenada, Mexico to speak on October 12, 2019 at SharePoint Saturday Ensenada. I am excited on many levels as this will be my first trip to Mexico ever, this will be the first ever SharePoint Saturday in Ensenada, and I get to speak with the lovely attendees about the Power Platform. SharePoint used to offer with SharePoint Designer a quick easy way to make business processes and "apps" using SharePoint as the platform. In my session, The Power is in Everyone’s Hands – Practical use of PowerApps, Flow and PowerBI, I will show how these new technologies can be easily fitted into daily work for anyone to help create these easy to manage business "apps" without the need to understand application development. If you are a business user, power user, or IT Professional, you can create quick and easy to use systems to help your business processes. I will even build an application live as a part of the session.

I would love for anyone in the local area to come and attend to show how much SharePoint is loved all over. Heck, travel down and attend while taking some time on the lovely shores around Ensenada. Click on the button below to find out more and register for the event.

SharePoint Saturday Los Angeles 2019

I am excited to say that the wonderful folks at SharePoint Los Angeles 2019 have added me to their awesome speaker lineup at the last minute. It came out of the blue but I am happy to be joining the wonderful speaker lineup they have already.

So what am I talking about? For SPSLA, I plan to bring one of my favorite sessions, "Don't fear if the forecast is cloudy!" First things first, no.. the session has nothing to do with Seattle weather. Although, that might be an interesting session... This session is talking about how I have moved from a self-proclaimed server hugger to my love of the cloud and what it can do for anyone, be their role IT Pro, Developer, Business User, or Power User. The cloud can be scary for many, offer too many options that confuse, or feels insecure compared to on-premises systems. My plan is to have about 15-20 minutes of presentation and spending the rest of the session answering your burning questions about "the Cloud".

Join us for SharePoint Los Angeles 2019 at the Microsoft Playa Vista office. Breakfast and Registration starts at 7:30 am with opening remarks at 8:00 am.

Heeee'ssss Back!

Hello to all my readers. It has been since January this year honestly since I have been creating content on my blog. For those who did not know, this has been a busy, busy year for me. Because of that, certain things have fallen off my list of things to do. Blogging was one of those things but was not the only thing.

Social Media was another thing. For most of 2019, I was only using Instagram for short stints, Twitter to help send out a few things like Patch and Switch recordings and stuff I really felt needed to get out, and I went through Facebook here and there. The only Social Media that I was keeping a real eye on was LinkedIn for professional reasons.

You might be thinking, "Why did you go away then Jared?"

Well, I got super busy and I wanted to focus on me and getting through many things going on. What might those have been? Well ...

• Got my condo ready for sale starting in February into March
• Moved out of my condo into a rental apartment (which got delayed thanks to a snowstorm and impacted my attendance for NACS 2019)
• Moved into a new rental apartment and setting it up
• Reduced the "stuff" in my home, which I need to do more of (Thanks to Wendy for helping me with this and the move preparation)
• Sold my condo (Thanks to Denise and her team of folks in getting my condo ready for sale)
• Changes in my work team that caused our on-call schedule to go to 3 weeks (1 week as a backup, 1 week as primary from 4pm to 10pm, 1 week as primary from 10am to 4pm)
• Preparations for changes to my work team in the coming months
• Shoulder pain from my prior surgery in March of 2018
• Travelling to Minnesota to help my mother visit her childhood hometowns before her brother moves to Wyoming

Quite a bit going on, eh? So what now?

Well, I am slowly getting back on Social Media. I am not going to be on it as much as I used to be. My goal is to enjoy myself and when Social Media doesn't help my enjoyment of my life, it will be packed away for a while. I will definitely be around on Instagram with more photography that I am doing. I have a backlog of photographs that I need to process and pull together. I plan to show those off more as I am proud of the shots I have been able to get so far. I am also looking forward to more shots in various places around the world.

On top of Social Media, I plan to get some blogging done. Yes ... there will be more posts here. I want to make sure I post some blog posts at least monthly, maybe even more. I have some topics I have built up for a while now and would love to get those out. If you have something for me to talk about, let me know and I can put it in my list of things to think about and blog. Easiest is to comment below or hit me up on Twitter, @jshoq.

One change to my site you might have seen is the "In The News" page. I have been using a great service to monitor RSS feeds called NewsBlur. One of the benefits of a paid account is a personal blog that I can use to call out articles and post comments about those articles. Instead of having another link off to that, I have been able to integrate it into my site. I have some more work to do on it but I am excited about it. I can offer links to articles that I have read that I feel are important along with a quick commentary of that article. Feel free to paruse that page now and look at the updates I do to it over the next few months.

In the area of talking and presenting, I have been super quiet here. Unfortunately, my summer prevented me from applying to Microsoft Ignite this year so I won't be there this November. However, thanks to David Leveille of Crush Networks and Heather Newman, I got a couple of last minute slots at SharePoint Saturday Los Angeles and Ensanda. I will post more details about each delivery but I am looking forward to seeing my SharePoint friends and talking about the Cloud, Office 365 and Power Platform.

So what is after that? Well, I hope to get out and speak again more. My team's on-call rotation is putting a bit of a hamper on that but I plan to work with my managers to get me time to head out. If you have an event where you need a speaker talking about SharePoint, Office 365, Power Platform, Azure, Cloud, DevOps or Site Reliability Engineering, please feel free to contact me about it.