With the growing momentum of cloud-based infrastructure platforms and web services, there are more opportunities, and sometimes even requirements, to expand our development projects beyond on-premises scenarios. While many of our SharePoint solutions are capable of being ported to the Cloud with little to no change, it’s important to understand which technologies, tooling, patterns and practices we can use to best utilize the Cloud for our dev projects.

In this talk, we’ll discuss several areas to consider when moving your SharePoint development to the Cloud, including the differences, unique advantages, and potential limitations of SharePoint Online (Office 365) and Azure. We’ll show how the tooling helps support this effort through services like Visual Studio Online. We’ll also consider what the future roadmap might look like for our development projects and how we can position them in preparation for the future.

Ricardo is a SharePoint Consultant with Bennett Adelson, focusing on delivery of quality SharePoint solutions, especially in the area of custom development, application lifecycle management, and systems integration. Ricardo is a seasoned software developer who's helped deliver solutions in the public, non-profit, and private sector, and specializes in combining out-of-box feature sets with tools like SharePoint Designer, Visual Studio, InfoPath and workflow tools like Nintex. He is also heavily involved in the local and international SharePoint community, having given talks and technical demonstrations at local user groups, non-profit agencies and national conferences and webinars. He’s been a contributing author at NothingButSharePoint.com, and has co-authored a whitepaper with Dell Software on SharePoint Customization Best Practices. You can find him online in social media (@ricardo303, @spcowbell) or also visit his SharePoint blog at www.sharepointcowbell.com.