group of person sitting indoors

Community Events – Connections

Community events can be about many things. Ours (Community Days, SharePoint Saturdays, M365 days, etc.) are about education, information sharing, and networking. They’re about connections.

Connecting sponsors with attendees, their organizations, customer prospects, potential hires, and peers.

Connecting attendees with each other, with speakers, with potential employers, and with the broader community.

Connecting speakers with their audience.

Connecting product owners with current customers and prospects.

If all goes well, people walk away from the day with LinkedIn connections, X (Twitter) followers, appointments for coffee and meetups, leads to follow-up with, and more.

Sure, education and awareness are a big part too and not to undersell that part, but it is a point in time data point. Hopefully folks walk away knowing how to do something they didn’t before and learn a few keywords or directions to look to dig deeper but the connections are even more important in that they have someone to call with questions, now or in the future.

Connections. Don’t take them for granted. Make the most of your time together. Say hello to the person sitting next to you in a session. Sit with someone new at lunch. Follow up with the person in a session that asked a question for something relevant to you. Introduce yourself to a speaker. Talk to the sponsors. Give the event producers your feedback or let them know if you’ve got a topic you’d love to talk about in the future.

photo of people putting their hands up

Sponsor M365 Twin Cities – We need you.

Community events: community run, community attended, community benefits. These events are fantastic learning and networking opportunities, but they can’t happen without the support of sponsors.

Our event

  • We’ve been running successful local events for over 15 yrs.
  • The Twin Cities is an established and engaged Microsoft community

Our next M365 Twin Cities event is on November 11, 2023. Aside from the recent COVID hiatus, we’ve been running successful events since 2008 – covering topics from SharePoint through the range of M365 products and anything that integrates with the platform including Azure, Power Platform, 3rd party products and services, and more.

Our audience includes folks from the Twin Cities metro area and across Minnesota, as well as lots of folks that come from across the upper Midwest and Canada. If you’re from Minnesota, you’re already familiar with the business and organizational landscape here, but it includes a rich variety of Fortune 500 companies, some of the largest private companies (including the largest) in the world, and government folks from all levels.

Pre-COVID we were getting 600-700 registrations (which translate to email reachable folks) and 300-400 onsite. That’s a typical registration drop off, but wonderful attendance. Our first event back post-COVID had not quite 400 registrations and over 200 people on-site. We were content with these numbers as a return event but are working to grow towards our previous numbers – though a lot has obviously changed in the past few years.

People were excited to be back in-person. Our sponsors in January were thrilled to be able to talk to folks again. There was a lot of excitement in the community.

We’re aiming to build on that.

Sponsorship Levels

We’ve got a handful of different sponsorship levels, but we’re mainly aiming for Company Sponsors and Track Sponsors where we can. If these don’t fit, let me know and we can look at other options that might fit.

Take a peek at our sponsor info sheet here.

We’ve got room for 6 5 track sponsors – who also get to present a session as part of that track.
Tracks include: Viva, Teams, AI/Copilot, Power BI, Power Platform, and Development

The best opportunities are face-to-face – being on-site for the actual event, meeting attendees, and talking about your products and services firsthand.

Sponsors have tables set up in a wide-open space where attendees register and food is served – so attendees will know where you are and have reasons to hang around. We’ll also have plenty of time between sessions for you to visit with attendees.

Where does the money go?

Funds from sponsors go primarily to pay for the venue and food costs. The rest of the budget is for various operational expenses (insurance, printing costs, etc.) and thanking our speakers who volunteer their time and expenses to participate (speaker dinner, etc.). We don’t make money doing this.

Other Notes

Our local (‘ish) community is blessed to be large and involved. We have multiple larger events that happen throughout the year and plenty of smaller more niche groups as well. As part of Microsoft’s MGCI effort – we’re working to expand where we can, strengthen where we’re able, and aim to support users at all levels through community events.

If you’d like to talk with organizers and community members, join us for our M365TC #CoffeeCrew meetups that happen more frequently throughout the year. We try to move around the metro area so more people can participate easily. Join our mailing group.

Thank you, thank you, thank you to all the sponsors we’ve had over the years. Please consider returning this Fall. New folks also very welcome to join the club. 🙂

Quick Links

man showing distress

Cloud Frustration

Am I alone? Probably not.

One of the pros and cons that come with cloud-based technologies is the speed with which things change. On the pro side, it usually means we’re getting more features, more capabilities, and more potential for business value and/or productivity gains – usually at a faster pace than were released pre-cloud. On the con side, we have the challenges of keeping up: Keeping up with how to use new features, updates with how to use existing features, how to navigate changing interfaces, and the always fun deprecation of features. Finally, there are ongoing challenges to find accurate help as it’s challenging for both platform owners and training materials creators to keep up with production rollouts.

As users at all levels, we’re faced with questions – and often the same ones over and over…

  • Is something wrong with my tenant/instance?
  • Is there something wrong with my environment or configuration that doesn’t match current documentation?
  • Is something wrong with the documentation? Is documentation current?
  • Am I doing something wrong? (One could argue this should be listed first…)

At the moment, I’m working on presentation updates, screen shots, etc. and running into all sorts of weirdness, which is frustrating. I want to get behind Dataverse. I really do. Running into this stuff every time I step away and then come back, I seem to hit this. I can’t be the only one. I fear this same issue is too common for folks new to the platform which are usually my target audience. Hopefully Microsoft can clean it up a bit.

grrr…

woman holding book with blank pages

Add Another Screen to your Custom List Form with Power Apps

Note: This is more of an “idea that might be useful” than a “how-to” post.

Add a Second Screen… for Governance?

Adding a second screen is not rocket science. It’s super easy as you’ll see below. Navigating between two screens is just as easy. In most cases, you’re adding new screens as a part of a larger app with forms, views, and all sorts of wonderful functionality. In this case, we’re merely adding a second screen to inform the user, to provide a space for information not usually made available otherwise.

When customizing a list form in Microsoft Lists or SharePoint, Power Apps creates a special app to replace the default list forms. What makes it special from a Power Apps perspective is that it doesn’t show up in the Power Apps “Apps” listing. It is only available as a part of the list that it’s created for. It also includes a special component called “SharePointIntegration”. I’m not digging into that component in this post, but it’s used to control which Power Apps forms are stitched together with which list Actions.

The vast majority of apps I’ve seen extending lists do a one-to-one replacement of a custom Power App app for the default list forms. It makes sense, that’s the scope and context folks are thinking in at the time. What we’re talking about here merely extends that concept with a little more user-friendliness we haven’t been able to easily add before Power Apps was introduced.

The Quick Steps

  1. If you haven’t already, create the custom form
  2. Once in Power Apps, add a New screen. “FormScreen1” is the default screen created by the app wizard. If you haven’t added any screens to the app, the new one will be “Screen1”.
  3. On the new form, add a Text Label (see below for a suggested layout)
    • Add whatever text you’d like to the control. This is the super helpful text for the user to help them be successful using your form.
  4. On the new form, add a Button
    • Set the button Text to “Back” or whatever makes sense for you.
    • For the button OnSelect, set the formula value to “Navigate(FormScreen1)” – back to the original screen.
  5. On the original screen, add a Button
    Let your UX guidelines dictate where the button should be located on the screen.
    • For the button OnSelect, set the formula value to “Navigate(Screen1)” – navigate to the new screen.
    • Set the button text to “Info”, “More”, “About”, or whatever makes sense to your users.

Your new (second) screen might look something like this – as an extremely simple example. There’s obviously a LOT more you could do with this. The second screen merely unlocks the possibilities without cluttering up your custom form.

Your first screen might look similar to this, but likely with more fields displayed on the form. The key difference we’re adding here is the button that takes the user to the second screen. Check with your UX folks on how to properly position it.

It might be interesting to consider adding a second screen to the app and having it presented to the user *first* – along the lines of a disclaimer the user must accept before continuing. You’d likely need to tweak the SharePointIntegration control to get that working the way you want it. Just a thought.

Potential Uses

There are lots of potential uses here. Just as many as most other Power Apps as the customized list forms really are fully functional apps. The context, however, being part of a list – will likely drive how additional pages might be used.

  • Content and information sharing (as done here)
    • Who to contact with questions
    • Instructions for the form
  • Visibility to metrics about the list, open items, how fast requests are closed…
  • Additional functionality you don’t want to mix with the main form
  • Visibility to data from another data source
  • … and lots of other things

References

Note: Power Apps Week

So apparently this is Power Apps Week for followers of the Power Hype Machine 😉 as #PowerAddicts get ready for the Power Platform Conference this Fall. I don’t know exactly what that means, but I’m willing to bet David Warner can tell you.

In celebration, I’ll post a few short posts about Power Apps – most, or all, highlighting quick and easy ways to extend M365 capabilities for folks getting their feet wet with Power Apps. Enjoy!

high angle photo of robot

Quick Thoughts: Microsoft Copilot and SaaS Pricing

Microsoft made some pricing announcements today at their Inspire conference that included a $30 charge per person per month for M365 Copilot (AI) licensing. First impression? That’s pretty steep… But let’s dig in a bit.

Not everyone is going to need it (at first).

It’s pretty easy to justify when you know your value per hour and can calculate how much time you’ll save using the new features of Copilot. In many cases it’ll be easy to justify $30 a month cost when you can measure savings directly: “Hey, that thing takes 15 minutes, I do it 10 times a month”… Done.

Other use cases likely won’t be that straightforward, but we’ll see how they manifest.

With this, I’ve already seen it come up in multiple conversations and threads… Know your users and review your use cases before licensing. At this price point, most companies aren’t going to license everyone – at least right away. And there will likely be other added licenses in the mix as well. Don’t expect the Microsoft licensing topic to get any less confusing in the near future (unless maybe we can use AI to help sort out your licensing use cases… Copilot for Licensing?).

SaaS pricing is hard

A little background. SaaS pricing is a challenge. Dig in a little bit and you’ll see plenty of threads talking about how hard it is for companies (especially startups) to price their products. M365, Power Platform, and the rest of the cloud services out there ultimately are SaaS offerings (Software as a Service) – though it may be a bit of a simplification. Microsoft and other big players in the space at least had some historical product pricing to start from that (may or may not directly) lead to subscription pricing used for SaaS.

The nature of cloud-based apps – as we’ve been talking about for as long as Microsoft has been in the cloud – is that we get regular, rapid, incremental updates. We get new features and changes basically weekly – for good or bad. (“Bad” only really for trainers and folks trying to keep up with it all…) This replaces the old 3-year-cycle of product releases from Microsoft where it was much easier to justify a price increase. You could easily put together the list of new and improved features vs. the last product (now 3 years old). Now, things move so fast it’s challenging to keep up and get a high-level view of increased value over time – it’s almost an expectation.

Stepping back a bit, as initial moves to the cloud resolved, it became fairly easy for most organizations to rationalize M365 pricing. Now, years later, not much (relatively speaking) has changed in the pricing, but much has changed with the offering and capabilities. Some organizations have moved up from one level to another, but many have also stayed with the same licensing since they first adopted M365.

Microsoft needs (or at least wants) new revenue streams (oh look, a stock price jump at the time I published this) and it’s harder to justify price increases when you’re incrementally updating your software – harder for end users to see. But incremental (smaller, but more often) updates are the norm with cloud-based software. Vendors then are forced to rebrand and offer bigger bangs to justify step ups in cost. Enter Copilot and today’s licensing announcements. Viva is in this same boat. And don’t forget the recent “Entra” branding for authentication and ID services – just wait.

Power Platform (as part of the Dynamics/D365 product group) has been working on this challenge for a while now. Initial feature offerings were heavily in the M365 integration space – leveraging tens of millions of users. They got the traction they were looking for and at the same time were building a ravenous (#PowerAddicts) community around it to pull the movement ahead even more. But they’ve been seemingly challenged to get a mass shift to newly licensed products and offerings. It does seem to be shifting, but more slowly than (I expect) they’d like. As Power Apps and its sibling products grow and Dataverse finds its space in the storage area – more folks are realizing the business value and making the move to additional licensing.

Cost of ownership

There’s more than the $X/month/user. There’s also the cost of managing and training – after you’ve spent time and money evaluating the technology. Don’t overlook that. Give plenty of time for architecture folks to review functionality, security folks to review risk, your tenant admins time to ramp up, and trainers time to produce the materials you’ll need. It wouldn’t shock me if early on we see a “you need to take this training before we’ll buy this feature for you” sort of approach.

Finally, $30 a month is a baseline. Many large enterprises are able to negotiate pricing, so keep that in mind. Sorry SMB. 🙁

Other offerings

Copilot is a consistent brand, but it’s not one single cost. There will be a collection of products across the Microsoft stack and licensing will be different and separate for each. Copilot for Business (from Microsoft-owned GitHub) is a nice example since it’s so different from M365 offerings. It’s still “Copilot” but a very different offering for developers rather than business users (though… there’s the “maker” argument for another day. 🙂 )

Bottom line is, start thinking about Copilot licensing across the stack. There will likely be additional offerings. We already know about several in the flurry of announcements.

Not everything falls under “Copilot” either. Teams Premium, while feeling like a bit of an overlap with Copilot, has its own licensing and capabilities. You may need one, or the other, or both – hence the importance of evaluating your environment and users before diving in.

Security

Microsoft is all over the security concerns. ChatGPT and others have highlighted the risk of playing with AI in the public domain and its collection of user data to learn and train itself.

Microsoft is working overtime to let folks how data is used, how their version of AI is being built, and how common components (LLM) are kept separate from organizational data (Microsoft Graph). There’s obviously going to be some risk with data in the cloud, but efforts and intention are in place. Each organization will need to evaluate the risks for themselves. As with other technologies, certain areas will be slower to adopt due to risk. We’ll keep hearing more from Microsoft and the community on this.

Recap

As the capabilities of software increase – so will the costs. This isn’t a bad thing. Microsoft and their industry peers are adding new capabilities far faster than they have in the past and many of them add great value for their users.

The challenge to us as consumers again falls into keeping up with the changes. As much as these new capabilities benefit us, we need to invest time and effort to learn how to best use them and reap the benefits.

It’s easy to get sucked into the hype. There’s a lot of cool stuff here. Just temper your expectations a bit to not get too frustrated or disappointed. We’re early in the AI application cycle. It’s going to take time to mature and polish implementation. Exciting times.

Other links

We Don’t Need… Oh Hey, Badges!

(Yep, they added Credly badges this year.)

If one of the goals of the Microsoft MVP program was to build a crazy enthusiastic community of experts, marketers, evangelists, community leads, feedback conduits, and more, I’d say they’ve been successful. The Microsoft tech community continues to grow year over year and the momentum created by folks (MVPs, Microsoft employees, and lots of other folks…) brings all sorts of great content to learn from.

Do other technical communities have similar programs? Salesforce, Workday, Service Now, or others? (I’m legitimately asking and curious…Respond in comments if you know of other programs)

If you follow the Microsoft technical community on pretty much any social media platform, you likely saw the flurry of “excited, humbled, grateful, and honored” posts that coincided with the annual re-award cycle. New “MVPs” are awarded and announced throughout the year, but July 1st (or thereabouts) is when existing MVP award winners hear whether or not they’ve been re-awarded for another year – hence the flooding of your threads. (sorry)

Grateful and Honored

I am also honored to be re-awarded this year. I continue to work in the M365, Microsoft Teams, SharePoint, and Microsoft Lists spaces – but am also working to get a larger foothold in the Power Platform and Power Apps space as well. My favorite space is in the bridge between the two communities and platforms helping folks established in M365 expand their capabilities with Power Apps. There’s an interesting combination of a huge existing (M365) community using Lists and a dramatically expanded set of technical capabilities that come with the Power Platform that I love to share.

Notes and Expectations

With every year comes a number of “How to become and MVP” posts. Many are good intros and roadmaps for how to be good community contributors and leaders. It is important to remember, however, that following anyone’s guidance is not a guarantee to an MVP Award. The process remains subjective – there is no sure-fire recipe that equals a slam dunk award. I’m not saying this to dissuade anyone – far be it. I’m 100% supportive of anyone contributing in any way they can. I merely want to set expectations appropriately.

With that in mind, if you see something, say something. Wait… that’s not right… 😉 If you see folks doing awesome things in the community, please let folks know. We are as eager as you to identify and recognize them. Pull those Microsoft folks or MVPs aside and let us know who’s rocking it as these are the ones that can nominate people to be considered for the MVP award.

Alumni

Each year there are also folks that aren’t re-awarded for one reason or another. And while this change of award status can come with a sense of loss it also puts a spotlight on the relationships that are formed. Relationships often grow beyond just a collection of geeky content contributors. There are connections, partnerships, networks, and friendships that form and last well beyond the MVP program (not to mention even a few marriages) and our time as MVPs. So, when that time has ended and award years lapse, as it will eventually for all of us – either temporarily (plenty of folks get re-awarded later) or permanently as our careers and priorities change, be sure to reflect on all the great stuff they have contributed over the years. Thanks to all MVPs, current and alumni.

References

Idea typography png sticker, light

No one cares… about your idea

The “no one cares” challenge is a hard one for entrepreneurs (at least it is for me) that hits early and often.

Hey, look at this cool thing I’m building!! *crickets*

What does it mean? How does it break down?
There are probably a LOT of possibilities including, but not limited to:

  1. People are too busy (giving attention to their own work, problems, family, life, you name it…). You’ll probably always be battling the “too busy” problem – even with an awesome idea/product.
  2. People don’t understand the context.
  3. The problem your solving doesn’t apply to them.
  4. The problem you’re solving isn’t a problem for them (anyone?).
  5. The problem(s) you’re solving aren’t big enough to invest or spend time or money on a solution.
  6. Impostor syndrome

That’s just off the top of my head. I’m sure there are plenty of reasons.

Early on you might be in stealth mode, building in secret, not sharing, having people sign NDAs because you don’t know any better, etc. Some folks (other founders) tell you about how this is unnecessary, but many of us (at that point) don’t yet understand why not. We saw “The Social Network” movie and have that debacle in the back of our heads forever now.

I’d like to think it happens because you’re not talking to the right people, the right audience. Sometimes you’re not. Sometimes the right audience isn’t in your normal community and you have to find them. (see “product/market fit”)

Regardless of the reason, it can definitely lead to anxiety over whether or not the idea is actually valuable to someone – other than yourself. Then you doubt yourself. Enter Impostor Syndrome and more… yada, yada, yada.

I’m sure there’s more to it. I’m still learning and hopefully always will be. But the “no one cares” thing still sucks.

I’m sure there’s more to it. I’m still learning and hopefully always will be. But the “no one cares” thing still sucks.

Don’t Lose Hope

The flip sides:

  1. It doesn’t mean your idea is bad (Though, it could be…).
  2. It doesn’t mean pieces/parts of your solution couldn’t be used elsewhere.
  3. It doesn’t mean you should quit. Though you should do some self-reflection from time to time. And frankly, sometimes you should quit. Just don’t be flippant about it.
  4. It doesn’t mean you’re not developing, learning, and growing along this path you’re on – Or that you won’t be successful with the current idea, a different idea, or another career path all-together.

How do you get past it? Talk to people. Then talk to some more. Don’t talk about your solution. Encourage them to talk about their challenges, dig in. There are plenty of articles and books about this approach.

Find that (sometimes) elusive “target market”.

There’s also: “Building in public” which has a lot of value as long as you understand when exceptions apply. Building in public gives you the ability, time, and audience to explain what you’re doing and why you’re doing it… something otherwise left to sales and marketing down the road. You usually building with an audience – with a peer group and/or potential contextual audience you want – which can save on those sales/marketing efforts down the road and maybe even land you an early customer.

This isn’t something others haven’t said before. Maybe it’ll hit a few new folks that need to hear it though. Good luck! I know I could use some. 🙂

people holding their phones

Community Events – Local Reach

Another BIG event going on this week in the M365 world: M365 Conference 2023 in Las Vegas. It’s a 3rd party conference, though heavily invested and involved with by Microsoft by way of speakers, keynotes, sponsorship and other content. Lots of big announcements.

But not everyone can attend.

Not everyone can get there. Not everyone *wants to* attend or go to Vegas. And with a looming recession and/or economic outlook for many organizations, it might not be a great time to send folks to out of state costly conferences.

Enter… local events.

Now, I’m not trying to poo-poo these big events. They’ve got a ton of value. I speak at some of them. They’re a fantastic opportunity to step away from your day-to-day responsibilities (if you can…) meet with community (topic-wise, not geographic community) folks, spend time chatting, building broader networks, or meet and connect with Microsoft and vendor contacts. The coverage that larger events offer is also extremely important in that you can see so many sessions, workshops, vendors, and more in one spot. In addition to this week’s event, there are events like 365 EduCon that offer options in more cities throughout the year.

What I am saying is that local – usually community-run – events have a place, an important one – for many folks.

Community events like our M365TwinCities event (working on a Fall date…), the upcoming MN M365 User Group Spring Workshop, or even frequent M365TC #CoffeeCrew events fill important gaps in our communities. In upcoming weeks here in Minnesota we’ll be reviewing this week’s big announcements from Microsoft, offering more in depth coverage with workshop sessions, or just having a coffee and connecting with others. Similar groups will be meeting all over the US and the world doing the same thing.

SO. Get familiar with your local community. Join it. Take part in it. Contribute to it with your time and experience. And if there’s not a community you’re looking for – consider building one!

wood letter tiles forming a message

Community Events – Find your Context

OK. Two quick points to make regarding “context”:

  1. The posts I’m writing about community events are my opinions. Just one opinion of many that are out there. Heck, it’s just one opinion on my team – ask Sarah or Tamara what they think. These are not “Do it this way or you’re wrong” posts. I’m attempting to give my perspective for folks to hopefully glean something useful from when considering, or running, your own events. You should also seek other opinions. 🙂
  2. Understand your own context… your community. When considering hosting an event, do your best to understand the context you’re working in. That context is going to include things like the communities you’re a part of, the technology you’re working with, the organizations that are a part of the area you’re in, and the organizational cultures you’re working with as well.

My Context

I’m a consultant that’s worked with consulting firms of all sizes and as an independent. Before that I worked for a large retail organization where I had my first exposure to SharePoint. I’ve been working with SharePoint, Lists, M365, Teams, the Power Platform, and a lot of the rest of the Microsoft tools since then – almost 20 yrs. I’ve been a Microsoft MVP since 2009. I’ve been speaking at and organizing user groups and community events throughout that time.

I’m not trying to toot my own horn. I merely want to establish that I’ve got some background in this stuff.

I’m in the Twin Cities – Minneapolis, St. Paul – Minnesota. Our metro area is home to a large and healthy Fortune 500 community of organizations in addition to the largest private company in the US. There’s also a significant representation of government organizations from the state, county, and city levels. All of these public, private, and governmental organizations use the Microsoft suite.

The Twin Cities is also home to a number of user-driven groups around technology. User groups, meetups, consulting company-driven groups, Microsoft-driven events, and community events like our M365TC group. Lots to choose from and enough where we’ve got a track record that attendees can count on and are comfortable attending.

Our Event – M365 Twin Cities

Our event has been an all-day Saturday event – in the style of SharePoint Saturday – now Community Days – events. We generally run two events per year – in the Spring and Fall. Part of our context in Minnesota is weather – so as mentioned in the Pick a Date post – we don’t (usually) mess with Winter scheduling or compete with Summer scheduling. Winter does still like to mess with us – even with Spring and Fall events… Our event usually draws 300-400 attendees – which is larger than most SPS-like events.

We’ve been able to keep it free to attendees so far with company sponsorships covering event costs.

You can see more details about the most recent event in our recap post.

All in all, it’s a relatively fantastic environment – and context – to run successful events in. We’ve got an eager and interested audience, a fair number of folks willing and interested in speaking, and a combination of local and national companies willing to invest in events as sponsors.

Why?

Why am I posting about community events?

  • I love helping folks skill up on technologies, solutions, productivity, and more. Community events are a great (and usually free!) way for folks to learn and grow.
  • I’ve been part of a group running events for many years and want to help others do the same.
  • I’ve recently been named a Regional Leader for the Microsoft Global Community Initiative (MGCI) and part of our job is to help others run events and develop communities.

What does your context look like?

Your Event – Your Context

You don’t have to be a long-time participant in a technical community. In fact, we readily welcome and encourage new folks to get involved. It does, however, help if you have spent some time in the community – meeting people, discovering groups, and getting a feel for what works and what doesn’t in your area. That’s where I recommend starting.

Do you have an audience? Can you find it? Can you build it?

Is there an existing group or event you can spin off from? Maybe a slightly different topic or audience where a new event may expand or complement the existing group or event? Most recently we’ve seen Power Platform groups spinning up in areas with thriving M365 groups as one example.

Do you have folks willing to invest time and energy in running an event? Can you find them?

Do you have local companies willing to invest $ in supporting events?

Is there an event you’ve attended that you might model your event/group on? Speak with the event organizer and see if they’d be willing to answer questions, etc. to get you started.

You don’t have to start big. Find a group of peers and start a user group that meets on a monthly basis. There are lots of variations and paths to building communities, groups, and events.

Community Events

Find them. Join them. Create them. Build them.

I’ve listed ours and others below. These are just a sampling.

References

photo of person holding book

Community Events – Pick your Topic

Creating a community event.

You’ve got a team, or maybe just a few folks to get started. Now it’s time to pick a topic for your event. You can’t talk about *everything*. Well, you could, but it would be a lot harder to attract attendees, speakers, and sponsors without defining a scope.

For me, a “topic” is both a subject and audience. The combination of these will give shape to your event for attendees, expectations to folks submitting sessions, and a scope for potential sponsors that want to understand what products and services your audience will be interested in.

Picking a topic shouldn’t be too hard for your team. In many cases, it’s the unifying subject that brings you together.

  • What subject matter are you passionate about? SharePoint, Dynamics365, Microsoft Teams, Power Platform, ServiceNow, Workday, or something like a specific integration between two products – niche subjects are certainly welcome if there’s an audience. etc.
  • What new topics do you want to get the word out about? Cloud-based products change so fast that it’s challenging for folks to keep up. The flip side to that might be maintaining a community for legacy products that still have customers that need attention (on-premises products potentially a few versions back…)
  • What specific pain point do you want to address? Is there a particular product + audience combination you want to target? For example: Law Offices using Microsoft Teams or M365
  • What underserved audience needs addressing? e.g. UX best practices across the M365 platform… You don’t have to start a community or event that has events on a regular basis. Events could be as needed or develop into regularly scheduled once the community grows to sufficient size.
  • Is it some or all of the above?

A topic your team is interested in should be a minimum for you and your team. The event and the effort lose some of its energy if it’s not something your team is excited about or invested in.

How broad or narrow do you want your scope to be? All of M365, or a specific product or group of products? All of the Power Platform, or just certain ones? All of Azure (ouch) or something more manageable?

Do you want to focus on one or more roles related to the topic, or open to any? We started with traditional roles like IT Pros, Devs, and Users… but roles have expanded and evolved. Each product might have its own set of roles as well. Project managers, site administrators, channel administrators, and so many more.

What’s your vision?

Topic and audience is a good place to start defining your vision for the event. Once you have those narrowed down, you can start to get into practical decisions about how the event will run, be scheduled, be hosted and paid for, etc. We’ll cover more about the vision in future posts.

Event Naming

Your topic and scope will also contribute to your event name. If you’ve got something in mind, great! If you don’t, you could default to using a name/brand consistent in the community like the “Community Days” brand. Just make sure it’s a brand and name that’s available for use, that you follow rules that may come with the name, etc. There’s a lot of value in using a known name in that it can come with built-in expectations for attendees, speakers, and sponsors. We can talk about the specific benefits of Community Days in another post.

Gaps and Overlaps

One other thing to keep in mind when considering your topic, is what groups, topics, and events already exist in your market? Do you want to compete with other events and groups? Do you want to offer complementary content or events? Do you want to fill a gap or offer something a little different to differentiate from existing groups? Knowing your market will help you find a place in it to be successful without negatively affecting other groups.

Our event: M365TC

It’s been quite a while since I thought about this topic from scratch.

For many of us in the Microsoft M365 and SharePoint space, we started doing events around the SharePoint product. Our event started in 2008 as a “SharePoint Camp” for IT Pros, Developers, and users. It aligned with the “SharePoint Saturday” brand shortly after and then evolved over the years as SharePoint grew with content expanding to include technologies and products that integrated with SharePoint as well. Now, in its current form we’ve switched from “SharePoint” to “M365” to accommodate how the platform has evolved and products are marketed. The roles have changed a bit as well, adding executives, managers, decision makers, citizen developers and more.

What’s your topic going to be? Reach out to other local event producers and organizers or regional leaders if you want help in figuring out your event topic!