​SharePoint Saturday Montreal was a great event on February 2, 2013.  You can go to the event page at www.sharepointsaturday.org/montreal to see all about it.  Serge Tremblay, Nicolas Georgeault. Alain Lord, Philippe Ouellet, and Benjamin Niaulin did a fantastic job organizing.  Not only was the venue ideal, the Wi-Fi solid, and the speakers delivering both English and French sessions, but they even had Montreal's famous Schwartz's Deli serving Montreal smoked meat sandwiches for lunch - awesome.

I gave two talks at the event.  The first was my Extranets in SharePoint, and the second was Upgrading and Migrating to SharePoint 2013.  Links to the presentations can be found below.

• Extranets in SharePoint
• Upgrading and Migrating to SharePoint 2013

Sessions were only 45 minutes long, and there was a lot of material to pack in.  Particularly for the upgrade talk, I didn't get into any of the special upgrade considerations like My Sites, User Profiles, or Search.  I promise to start blogging more frequently again, and expand on these topics shortly.

​On September 27th I delivered a seminar at Microsoft with a simultaneous live webinar on Web Content Management in SharePoint 2010 and SharePoint 2013.

We explored what's new for SharePoint 2013, particularly as it applies to Web Content Management and upgrading to the new platform from SharePoint 2010. Some of the exciting features demonstrated were:

• Design Manager - Build and manage your branding with any web design tool
• Channels - Tailor your content to the device or browser
• Managed Navigation
• Customizing search with HTML display templates
• The new Content Search Web Part
• Image Renditions - Manage your web-friendly images through the browser
• Cross-Site Publishing - Share your content between Intranet and public web site
• SEO and Analytics Enhancements
• Improved content author user experience

We also looked into enhancing the experience in both 2010 and 2013 with our Digital Marketing Suite, Microsoft’s exciting announcements around Azure Media Services and SharePoint on Azure, and how you upgrade your 2010 publishing sites to SharePoint 2013.

You can view the presentations and videos from the link below:

Web Content Management in SharePoint 2010 and 2013

​It's been a while since I've posted, and now I have a backlog of SharePoint 2013 content that I'd like to get posted out there, so I need to find the time.  I've been playing with the beta since early this year, but now that it is public, it's time to start talking about it.

I figured the best place to start would be two of my favourite topics: Upgrading and Web Content Management (WCM).  What better place to start on that than on my blog site itself, which is hosted on SharePoint 2010.

Being a WCM fan, when it came time to move my blog site to SharePoint 2010, I decided not to use the blog template, but rather base it off the full WCM publishing site template.  This gave me much better control over the branding and user experience, but it required some extra work to pull it all together.  Some of it I never did get fully completed, so I'll have to get back to that too.  I have custom web parts for the archive and tag cloud sections that I need to deploy, as well as ideas around the anonymous commenting and CAPTCHA requirements for a public blog.  I'll save that for another day, but hopefully soon.

​If you have a look at the TechNet SharePoint 2013 Preview articles, you'll see that Microsoft has done a great job of documenting a lot of the cool new features in 2013.  The first paragraph briefly describes an improvement to the Word cut and paste experience for content authors.  I can't say enough how important I see that being, so I've devoted a full post just to that topic at SharePoint 2013 Word Cut and Paste.

Naturally I was keen to try the feature out, so one of the first things I did was open my new 2013 blog site (which still looked like 2010), and paste some rich text in from Word.  Boy was I disappointed to see that it didn't work.  What I didn't realize is that I had to complete the site collection upgrade to be able to see the new feature (yes 2010 mode really does work like 2010).

It was now time to try the Site Collection Upgrade.  Much like in 2010, in the Site Collection Administration section of Site Settings, there is a Site collection upgrade option.  Running this goes through the site collection upgrade, and another log file is generated.  I still had missing features for some of our products that I hadn't tested the upgrade on yet, but otherwise the upgrade went well.

Again like 2010, the resulting site worked but looked all wrong, for the same reasons.  The upgrade had changed the master page reference to a new v15.master page, that didn't have any of my custom branding on it.  It was time to figure out Design Masters, which are the new way of doing master pages in 2013.

​It's time to start getting my Fall speaking schedule in place, and my first talks to get booked are on upgrading a SharePoint 2010 publishing site to SharePoint 2013, along with an overview of the changes and new features in Web Content Management (WCM) in SharePoint 2013.

The first part of the talk will be a discussion of the process for upgrading a site to 2013, as well as a live demo of that process using this blog site.  The main steps I'll be following are:

1. Building the 2013 farm (briefly, this is a whole topic on its own)
2. Attaching a backup of the 2010 content database to 2013
3. Performing the Site Collection Upgrade
4. Updating the branding with the new Design Manager

The second half of the talk will be a walk-through of some of the cool new features in 2013 from a WCM perspective.  These include:

• Branding changes with Design Manager
• Much improved Word cut and paste
• Video content types
• Image renditions (automatically generated resized versions of images for different purposes, such as web friendly, thumbnail, or full fidelity for download)
• Content search web parts versus content query web parts
• Catalog-enabled libraries and lists versus reusable content
• Friendly URLs
• Design channels for different devices

 You can come see this talk at the following venues:

• TSPUG Wed Sept 19, 2012 6:00 PM
• HSPUG Thu Sept 20, 2012 6:00 PM

 I repeated the same talk in person at Microsoft Canada and as a webinar the following week.  Presentations and recordings are available at www.envisionit.com/products/events/Pages/Seminar-2012-09-27-Web-Content-Management-in-SharePoint-2010-and-2013.aspx.