Microsoft Social Listening MSL for Dynamics

I want to share a new product that MSFT is planning to roll out to GA Q2 or Q3 2014.
This new product comes about as a result of a few important acquisitions for Microsoft.
First, Parature, a leading cloud based customer self-service portal is exactly something Dynamics CRM has been in need of providing.
Second and third are 2 social engineering start ups NetBreeze and InsideView.

These screens are very new, so expect them to change!
Microsoft Social Listening is a way to provide users with BI Analytics of social activity and tie it to a CRM record. Wow. Twitter Analytics in Excel was just a bit of what MSL can provide from a BI perspective. But the sheer volume was exhausting even for PowerBI for the end user. My PowerBI Twitter Analytics data refreshes were taking 10 minutes. MSFT has invested heavily in the Twitter firehoses, something the start ups could not afford, so these posts are 'near' real time.
Shout out to Girish Raja for his teams efforts and the slides from SPC 284

The last screen is where you map the post to a CRM record.

SharePoint 3rd party Product Announcements made at the 2014 SharePoint Conference

A flurry of new product announcements were made at SPC14. Here are a few of the big players...

ShareGate

I spoke with owner Benjamin Niaulin while on the bus to the Las Vegas Speedway where he suggested downloading all available tools now and letting them auto update. They are a SCRUM team, so they release patches biweekly.

The biggest request from his no-brainier migration tool was to truly make it no-brainier and make all features available in PowerShell. This gives you the ability to schedule a migration task. The announcement the next morning came via email that they released PowerShell utilities and I was ecstatic that our customer who use Layer2.de with it's horrible support can now use ShareGate, which costs less and who's Help and Buttons are not written in German! 

• PowerShell Commands 
• Scheduling made possible through PowerShell 
• Choice Column values copied even if a choice is no longer available 
• Export to Excel let’s you Merge documents, rename them or move them 

Harmon.ie 

launches first enterprise collaboration hub. The product has come a long way, but not long enough in my mind. 

Yaccov Cohen created a first ever SharePoint Top Influencers list. Dignitaries include Marc Anderson, Jeremy Thake, Scot Hilier…but they didn't include the Bottom Influencers list, who could include Chris McNulty, Mike Gilronan and myself.

Bamboo Solutions

The latest version of Bamboo Solutions’ process automation solution is now available for SharePoint 2013. Bamboo Workflow Conductor 3.5 allows users to create, manage and reuse custom business processes without having to do custom coding. 

K2 

announces K2 Appit release, delivering no-code workflow apps for Microsoft SharePoint Server 2013 and Microsoft SharePoint Online, in the cloud.

KnowledgeLake 

expands Office 365 capabilities for SharePoint ECM suite of products

KnowledgeLake has announced it is bringing the power and functionality of KnowledgeLake Imaging to Office.  

Metalogix 

Metalogix announced a complete solution to move e-mail, files and SharePoint content to Microsoft Office 365. Metalogix has expanded its suite of content and collaboration tools with the announcement of Email Migrator 3.0 and Content Matrix 7.0, which work together, or independently to expedite the migration of email, files and SharePoint into Office 365 and better enable an organization’s.

Qbase 

Qbase LLC, a leading provider of information technology and business intelligence solutions, today announced the launch of MetaCarta for SharePoint 2013, a plug-in enrichment service that geo-enables both structured and unstructured content inside the SharePoint 2013 environment

SharePoint Conference 2014 Recap

Last week I attended the 2014 SharePoint Conference. 
This was my second SPC and I was able to pace myself enough to keep much better notes up until the last day. Last year I had burned out early, as there is only so many sessions one can attend in a week, my mind was numb. I attended a variety of sessions including Executive, ITPro, Developer and Business User. I think this was the reason why my last SPC was so difficult for me by the final day, as I had attended pure ITPro and Developer sessions and took 2 tests, whew! Exhausting.

Keynote
The Keynote was delivered by President Bill Clinton who encouraged us to "do good" while making advancements with our technology. He impressed us with examples of how technology assisted The Clinton Foundation's efforts in (among a few) post earthquake Haiti to align the country's only mobile provider with the Dutch bank so that people can have access to banking and their money. 
Basically, make the world a better place with technology. 
(See 'Matrix Reloaded' and 'IronMan' and 'Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy' movies for shining examples of how Technology can Do Good)


User Voice 
There were many product announcements made, which I will blog separately. The single most impressive take away for me was the incredible openness and reaching out that the MSFT Office and SharePoint teams expressed with the attendees. It was very refreshing. My Tweets were answered and favorited by those teams many times. In fact, When Sonya Koptyev announced the UserVoice site at the InfoPath Roadmap session we were blown away that they had launched an entire site dedicated to our user feedback.

Office Social Graph and Oslo
The next BigThing was the OpenGraph and Oslo. This blew my mind because of the nature of an app fabric that connects content with Users, AD and Yammer activity feeds. The code name Oslo is the display method for the Announcements on steroids style view that is so exciting, blogs are sprouting up about it like mad daily. 

Connecting Content through People
Oslo is a search technology mostly, and it inspires us to search for people instead of document names or metadata. Content is trending around people, or me. People present content to me. I search for these trends and OfficeGraph filters and bubbles content that I want to see through Oslo display templates.