Notes from the SharePoint 2018 Conference, Las Vegas

The 2018 Microsoft SharePoint Conference was hosted at the MGM in Las Vegas this year after being merged with Ignite for the last few years. Attendence was much smaller than previous years with about 2,500 plus attendees versus closer to 10,000-20,000 in years past. Most of this is probably attributable to the merging the SharePoint conference with the Microsoft Ignite conference, although I would suspect the increasing percentage of SharePoint Online customers has something to do with it as well. Gone are the days of server side object model code, and every farm having dedicated Sharepoint IT Pros.
Below are some of the announcements and takeaways from the conference.

⦁ Announced the release of SharePoint Spaces – mixed reality support for SharePoint while using a VR headset such as Oculus Rift, Samsung, or MS Holo Lens.
⦁ SharePoint On Premises 2019 to be released 2H 2018. Faster sites, more mobile support, Project Server 2019 built in, supports Flow and Power App, supports # and % in folder and file names and allows 400 characters url path.
Lots of discussion of SharePoint Communication sites and Hub sites which can help group together site collections
⦁ Continued investment in Microsft Teams (inner loop, smaller collaboration group similar to Slack) and Office 365 Groups.
⦁ Re-confirmed Flow and Power Apps are the replacement for SharePoint workflows, and its new engine in Logic Apps, which is it’s own engine does not build from Workflow Foundation. Flow and PowerApps are compatible with SharePoint 2016 On-Premises Feature Pack 2, SharePoint 2019 On-Premises, and SP Online.
⦁ Re-confirmed SharePoint Designer and InfoPath are going away but will be supported through 2026.
⦁ For Flow, there is a 30 day limit on wait states currently (see discussion of Workflow Foundation below)
⦁ Regarding SharePoint topology, Microsoft re-affirmed its moving towards a flatter organization of multiple site collections versus nested sub sites from the old days. This fits much better with SharePoint Online and the site collections can be connected with Hub sites.
⦁ Modern SharePoint development contineus to focus more on client-side development such as the SPFx or SharePoint Framework development using Node.js, Typescript, and React or Angular. I don’t think I saw any C# in any Dev session the whole week.
⦁ You can use a SharePoint On Premises Gateway to surface On-Premises data from SQL to Flow, Power Apps, and Power BI in SharePoint Online.
I stopped by the Microsoft booth to talk to some SharePoint engineers regarding Flow versus Workflow Foundation (WF). They didn’t know what was going ot happen to it, but it sounds like it’s going away. Flow is built on Logic Apps, which is a new engine not built from WF.

The enternatinment this year was the B52’s playing poolside at the MGM.