The Lightning Tools team is back from two weeks of exciting and successful SharePoint events! We were a silver sponsor at the SharePoint Conference in Las Vegas May 21-23, and a gold sponsor at the European Collaboration Summit in Wiesbaden Germany May 27-29.
There were some exciting SharePoint announcements at SPC during Jeff Teper’s keynote and in subsequent sessions, such as:
- SharePoint Home sites, an intelligent intranet landing area which includes a personalized Start page
- Fluid Framework and real-time co-authoring for high speed collaboration
- General availability of Microsoft Search, and additional functionality coming around customizing the search experience
- General availability of multi-geo capabilities for SharePoint and Office 365 Groups
- Full list/library experience in Microsoft Teams
We’ll dig deeper into some of these new capabilities in upcoming posts.
Lightning Tools made several announcements at SPC as well!
Our Lightning Conductor content rollup web part, Data Viewer data visualization web part, and Social Squared discussion forum web part have been available as client-side web parts developed under the SharePoint Framework (SPFx) for about 6 months. But now they’re also available as tabs in Microsoft Teams! We worked closely with Vesa Juvonen’s team at Microsoft to be one of the first SharePoint Independent Software Vendors to release web parts as Teams tabs. In fact, Lightning Tools CEO Brett Lonsdale was invited to demonstrate this capability during Vesa’s developer keynote at SPC.
During that demo, we were also able to show off our other product announcements:
– The Lightning Conductor web part can now display content not only from any type of SharePoint list or library, but also from anywhere in Microsoft Graph. This makes it possible to display on your SharePoint page (or now in Teams) things such as OneDrive files, Planner tasks, and Office 365 user and group information. In addition, you can use the Lightning Conductor’s easy yet powerful formatting tools to style that content in the same ways SharePoint content can be styled: add conditional highlighting, icons, data bars, and more. Read more…
– The Data Viewer web part now has a charting feature. This means that you can create pie, bar, and other charts from SharePoint list data, a SQL Azure table, or any Odata source. Read more…
– We wowed the audience with our DeliverPoint permissions reporting and management tool, now available in beta as a SPFx web part. This tool allows site owners and site collection admins to view and manage who has permission to what within their site, and with the new SPFx version this ability extends throughout the Microsoft 365 tenant.
Brett, Sandy, and Jarrad enjoyed meeting existing and new customers at the Lightning Tools booth. We were kept quite busy with all of the people interested in seeing live demos of the new features we announced. We love hearing from people and showing them how our tools can help them solve problems and achieve more with SharePoint! You can schedule a private online demo yourself by submitting this form. And stay tuned for an upcoming episode of Mark Kashman’s Intrazone podcast, where he interviewed Sandy during the conference about our news.
As we often do, we brought our rally racing simulator along to provide some Expo Hall fun for attendees. The person with the best time throughout the conference won our Lego Technic Porsche, which is now on its way to Australia with the winner.
Across the Pond
Next we were off to beautiful Wiesbaden, Germany, for the European Collaboration Summit, a fantastic community-driven event which this year grew to 2000 attendees. We enjoyed showing our European friends what we’ve been up to! The event was held in a newly constructed venue, and was very well organized and enjoyable. The organizers volunteer their time for this conference, and attendee costs are held to a minimum, but everything is always extremely professional.
At CollabSummit, not only did we have a booth and do even more demos, but also both Brett and Sandy presented sessions.
It’s been a busy two weeks, but very energizing with all of the positive feedback we’ve been getting on our new product features! Please like us on Facebook and/or subscribe to our newsletter to keep informed about what’s coming next from Lightning Tools…
