Tech Carpenter - Ahmad Najjar's Blog

… there was a time, when SharePoint like a topic has usually one session inside bigger technical events or was not part of some events at all and we want a change. So, we created an event! The Czech SharePoint Conference Once again, I'm headed to the Czech Republic, but this time around to its beating heart city of Prague, whereas I'll be part of the Czech SharePoint conference 2017 ! The Czech SharePoint Conference 2017 will be held between 6th - 8th November in Prague at Microsoft HQ, Vyskočilova Praha 4 ... A couple of the famous and well-known local speakers will be speaking there, in addition to the well-known world travelers Micheal Noel and Joel Oleson! I'm so humbled and honored to be among them ... For the Czech SharePoint Conference 2017 I have prepared a session and a workshop. On Monday, November 6th I'll kick off with a session on  Modern Business Applications: Microsoft flow, PowerApps & latest News from Ignite :  Microsoft is investing eno...

I've been so eager to write about Microsoft Flow since I have started using it about a year ago! However, I've seen a lot of articles out there by community contributors talking about almost every single capability that Flow can do ... In addition, I personally believe that the Microsoft Flow team is doing a good job putting people on the right learning track. There are many scenarios that we could consider using Flow with, however in this very post I'll be writing about when to consider Flow while building custom developed applications ... Flow could be your "LEGO"  building block for almost every application! As developers, almost every single one of us have developed against at least one API, and I surely believe that many have developed APIs that connects to third party services and/or social media ... Now, this task is usually a bit costly during the project, whereas developers have to go through the technical documentation for those APIs and absorb th...

I’m so excited to be part of my 6th SharePoint Saturday event this year! Once again I’m flying to England but this time to another city; and to be more specific I’m headed to the prestigious city of Cambridge! SharePoint Saturday Cambridge will be held at Møller Centre at Churchill College in Cambridge, and as per the event organizers, and I quote “This time it is WAR!” SPS Cambridge will be joining with a sister event (SQLSaturday Cambridge) whereas event speakers and attendees this time will do battle with one another to show *who* is the boss -so expect lots of fun and games throughout the day to mark our special Civil War Edition. SOUNDS FUN! As I did in SPS Toronto, and as part of my tech channel “The 365-Tech Talk” I’ll be doing interviews with my fellow speakers at SPS Cambridge  … For SPS Cambridge, I’ll be holding a session on PowerApps & Microsoft Flow: Advanced Scenarios which will give a deep dive on PowerApps and Flow for building and using custom busines...

Community contribution doesn’t know any limits! And this time around my contribution passion drove me to another continent and specifically to Canada-Toronto, whereas I’ll be part of one of the biggest community events in north America generally and Canada particularly. SharePoint Saturday Toronto is known for its awesome reputation, not to mention it was one of the first events to host Jeff Teper – Office, SharePoint and OneDrive corporate vice president at Microsoft – or for short “The father of SharePoint”.  As per SPS Toronto organizers, a huge crowd is expected to show up at this year's event, which is a good opportunity to meet with more people from the community and hear their stories.  For SPS Toronto I have prepared two things, a session and a surprise ! I’ll start with the latter mystery, which is something I’m going to announce/launch during this week before SPS Toronto, whereas it’s going to be a pleasant surprise for the community in general and for th...

Once again, I'm ready to be part of another SharePoint Saturday! This time, I'll be speaking at the 6th SharePoint Saturday in the UAE (United Arab Emirates) in the city of Dubai on 15th July. I'll be meeting with some usual faces from SPS Warsaw 2017, but also looking forward to meet new faces and hear their SharePoint stories... For SPS Dubai, I'll be throwing a session on  PowerApps & Microsoft Flow: Advanced Scenarios which will give a deep dive on PowerApps and Flow for building and using custom business apps that connect to your data and work across the web and mobile. An I'll also shed some light on the scenarios where the need to customize and develop extra features for workflows, in order to take workflows to the next level. This session demonstrates key advanced scenarios addressing the next level workflows using PowerApps and Flow, featuring Azure API Apps and Azure Functions. As usual, my session brand is fun slides and demos, demos, demo...

The minute we hear the word machine learning, many thoughts rush into our minds, starting from high-tech robotics, sophisticated complex algorithms and ending by Sci-fi movies (of course!). Well, we might be partially right if the plan is to assemble a robot or reinvent an auto-pilot car, but this is no longer the case these days! In the recent years, Machine Learning is being widely used in business scenarios or – to be fair – it’s even becoming mainstream! Predictive machine learning modules and/or sentiments are being used in our day-to-day tools and utilities. For example, there are off-the-shelf SaaS sentiments to tell whether a tweet from a customer is a good feedback (happy customer) or a bad feedback (unhappy customer). Another example that we could find off-the-shelf is face recognition, which is a service we could feed with a couple of (face) photos of a person, and then feed a totally different photo – of the same person – other than the ones provided at the begin...

I'm honored and humbled to be speaking at the 3rd SharePoint Saturday in London on 24th June. SPS London is known to be one of the most famous and elegant SPSs around Europe! This year around, Chris McNulty, Senior Product Manager (and by definition SON of the Father of SharePoint 😁) at Microsoft will be throwing a closing keynote discussing the Future of SharePoint building based on the announcements made at the virtual SharePoint Summit in May. This year's SPS London is bigger than ever, 43 speakers - including myself - will be participating in this year's geek out, delivering various sessions touching on subjects like bots, IoT, webhooks, SharePoint Framework, Microsoft Teams, and - of course - PowerApps and Microsoft Flow, which I'll be speaking about in my session. I'll be delivering a session on  Building Applications with Power Apps, Microsoft Flow and Office 365 which illustrates the use of PowerApps and Flow for building and using custom busin...

I'll be speaking at the very first SharePoint Saturday in the Czech republic in the city of Brno on 10th June. What is most exciting about this is not only being part of the very first SPS in Brno, but also doing two sessions! My first observation is, unlike any other SPS event I've been to, SPS Brno 2017 speakers gets to speak for 1 hour and 15 minutes, which gives enough room for alotta fun and loads of demos, which in turn will turn sessions into a firehose of information! For SPS Brno, these are the two sessions I'll be doing: Go with the Microsoft Flow which will be an introduction on Microsoft Flow and how it can help you save time, and make your business highly visible by partnering with Microsoft's growing ecosystem including O365 and SharePoint Online. I'll demonstrate how you can create an automated workflow between your favorite O365 apps and services to get notifications, synchronize files, collect data, and more! PowerApps & Microsoft F...