Office

On May 28th 2016 I visited SharePoint Saturday in Paris (http://www.spsevents.org/city/Paris/Paris2016/). The event was held in the Montparnasse Tower in the center of Paris on the 40th floor. We had an amazing view from that height.

This article contains my notes of the day.

Start of the day

We had some trouble getting in the building because of some regulations of the building owner, but when we were all registered we could go all the way up to the 40th floor. Here we started with a small breakfast, I did not eat in the hotel so I could use this. I came in just after 8 and all sponsors where getting settled because they also had trouble getting into the building. After breakfast and a delay of 15 minutes the first session started at 9:15

Microsoft has released a new framework for developing an awesome front-end called Office UI Fabric. So the big question is why did Microsoft created this framework? We already have a ton of different frameworks for front-end development like Bootstrap, Semantic UI, 960 Grid System and many more.

The short answer is that we did not have a framework for creating Office or SharePoint add-ins that integrates with the looks of Office applications.

Since the introduction of SharePoint 2013 and Office 2013 we as developers have a new option to integrate our applications in SharePoint and Office. The add-in model is in basics just a web application that integrates in SharePoint and Office. Until a few months ago we could not make our add-in look like a part of Office. Andrew Connell wrote a great blog in February of 2015 that we needed guidelines for integrating in Office. The answer to this is the Office UI Fabric that is posted on GitHub.

This week Microsoft released the new version of Office (https://blogs.office.com/2015/09/22/thenewoffice/) and with that came a new version of Skype for Business. I installed this on all of my machines including 1 of my customer, they use an older version of Lync and I got an message that the server version is not compatible with the client.

I had this before with the previous versions of Office so I headed over to the blog of my colleague Albert Hoitingh who had a registry key for the previous versions. So to get this working I used that same registry key and change it from 15 to 16 and everything is working again.