Photo courtesy @SPBrennan

As you read in my previous post, Fulcrum frequently travels across Virginia and the DC metro area to speak about the capabilities of the SharePoint platform to software developers, IT professionals, and end users at SharePoint user groups and one-day conferences known as SPS (SharePoint Saturday) Events. These events are held in cities around the world and are completely free to the public. The speakers and attendees at these events volunteer their time and sacrifice a Saturday to help others learn more about SharePoint and all the possibilities it offers. On April 12th, I headed north to Beantown to present at the SPS Boston Event at the Microsoft office in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Fulcrum develops and maintains many custom solutions built on the SharePoint platform for our Army INSCOM and Department of Education customers, among others. Many of these solutions are built using a paradigm known as “farm solutions,” where custom code utilizes resources on the same servers that run SharePoint. This can potentially have an adverse impact on the performance of the SharePoint environment. To address this, SharePoint 2013 introduces a brand new app development model that allows custom code to be deployed anywhere, including the cloud or even a Java application server! I presented a session entitled “Build Secure Cloud-Hosted Apps for SharePoint 2013.” In this session, I demonstrated different ways that apps hosted in the cloud can securely work with data stored in SharePoint and discussed how the new app model has the potential to revolutionize SharePoint development, making SharePoint farms run more reliably and efficiently while helping our customers to realize significant cost savings.

If you are interested in learning more about SharePoint 2013 and the new app development model, I encourage you to reach out to me—or any other member of the SharePoint community—anytime. Members of the SharePoint community pride themselves on being accessible and are eager to share their knowledge, guidance, and advice with other SharePoint users around the world. To find the next SPS Event near you, visit http://spsevents.org.