Hackathon @ European SharePoint Conference 2017

This year’s hackathon was a blast. Stephan and I partnered with Thomas and Saulius to defend last year’s victory (See Vesa’s blog post).

ESPC17 Hackathon

The hackathon started off with Mike’s introduction and a quick review on the last year’s results. Mike loves to hack and you can feel his passion for programming, when he introduces the concept of hackathon: “There is no good hackathon without pizza and beer!” 🙂

The hackathon rules and experts to support the teams can be found here: ESPC Hacakthon

This year our new formed team came up with an idea to do something with bots and Office 365. In the end we tried to revolutionize support activities focused on Office 365: “SharePoint Assistant” was born.

SharePoint Assistent is a predictive QnABot that guesses what the user needs – based on prior usage of the bot or the current user context. The bot can be embedded in an SPFx Extension Webpart in any SharePoint Online site collection. Other options would be to integrate this bot in Teams, Skype and many more.

You can find the whole team and the result presentation in this devpost submission: SharePoint Assistant

The competitors had really great ideas and I was totally impressed by the winning teams solution – Our team was the follow up though.

The winning team used the SharePoint audit logs to create Yammer communities based on analysis. The solution was that impressive because they used fairly simple tools to automate the whole process. Flow, Excel, Data pools were the names of the most used tools.

Another team automated their process of coffee delivery to their offices. They integrated a small circuit board through an email flow into Office 365.

There were further more two solutions shown on how to create PDF documents form Excel or Word directly in an SPO library.

Hacking during the European SharePoint Conference is fun. It allows to break out of the day to day life, get to know new technologies and shows what’s possible with Office 365, Azure and the developers tool belt.

Thank you, Mike and VESA for making this possible!