Category Archives: Power Platform

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Delivering More Usable Power Apps

When folks start digging in with Power Apps (at least in my experience) they want to accomplish something business-related – trying to add functionality that was missing in their daily activity, their processes, their interactions with others, etc. Power Apps is great at that.

What early Power Apps makers (non-IT) don’t usually consider at first is branding, design, or accessibility. They build something that makes sense for them alone. The scope is one person or one team – which is completely fine – rather than a wider organizational view. For many projects that might be the end of it: “Boom, it works. Process improved”.

In some cases, those relatively small, “home-grown”, simple solutions gain a broader adoption (it gets more popular than originally intended…) – which can bring with it additional considerations… One of those “now more important” topics is UX/design.

As the size and capabilities of an organization increase, app makers often have more policies to follow and resources available. Branding standards and corporate color templates seem to be the first elements that get added. Designers are part the mix. As more resources become available within the org, there can be a variety of UX/design roles that include researchers, designers, and more. These folks can bring creativity and experience to the table that notably improve the look, feel, and functionality of apps.

If they are available in your organization, learn what resources are available and when to get these folks involved.

Investments in design and UX can potentially yield solutions with higher usability and user adoption rates. The same usability goals and techniques that apply to Power Apps also work with other apps and interfaces – this includes custom development as well as dashboards and cards in Teams and Power BI…

In an organization with established development ecosystem, processes and standards are likely being leveraged. Folks know what teams and resources are available. The quickly growing non-IT Power Platform maker population however might not be aware of these resources if they’re not looped-in with the established development org.
As a Power Apps enabled organization, strive to:

  • Learn the differences between the roles: UX, UI, designers (and others)
  • Understand the value UX folks bring to app development
  • Learn when to engage, how to best engage, and what to expect when engaging UX folks

With the popularity of Microsoft’s Power Platform and Power Apps, we’ve added lots of new folks to the maker community. These makers have new (or new to them) tools that enable them to build impactful business solutions but usually don’t have experience satisfying user experience needs of their users. The more you can integrate the UX expertise that’s available out there, the better the organization will be served by these dynamic app-generating efforts.

Note: This quick post was intended to make PA folks aware of UX resources… It’s a far cry from digging in to all the details, benefits, nuances, etc. that you’ll run into if you have the opportunity to work with that crowd. There can be a lot, but there’s also a lot of potential benefit for your users and more. Let me know what your experience is!

References:

More Coming… (Getting input from UX folks…)

Hey UX experts, let me know what other references and links I should add here!

  • What are some good resources for understanding the different roles?
  • What are good resources for understanding why, when and how to effectively engage the different roles?
  • Are there research articles that support effectiveness of UX when applied to the dev process?

Sessions and Tracks and Sponsors, Oh my…

We’ve still got room for more. More sponsors and sponsor-driven content. I keep thinking of all the great content that folks could present.

We’ve got tracks and rooms with openings. I find it hard to believe there are orgs out there that don’t have value to add, skills and knowledge to highlight, and content to share. Who in the Twin Cities area or the Upper Midwest region are the go-to firms that can help with Viva, Copilot, or Power Platform? They’ve got to be out there (I can think of a number of folks that would be great fits…) and eager to reach potential customers. Microsoft is marketing hard along these lines. What say you partners?

Speak up, speak now! If we fill these sponsor slots, we can meet our budget needs for this event. It’s a particularly good deal for local orgs that don’t have to add on travel expenses. As much as our attendees appreciate folks coming from out of town, they also love being made aware of local folks that can help them out – sometimes right now, sometimes down the road.

Heck, even for folks coming from out of town the cost to join our event as a sponsor is a deal compared to larger events and we have an engaged audience already heavily invested in the Microsoft platforms. Come and get em. 🙂

Open tracks/rooms

Take a look at our schedule if you haven’t yet. We’ve got a few rooms and tracks where we’d love to round out the topic areas. Add your voice to an already awesome group of community speakers.

  • Microsoft Viva
  • Copilot / AI
  • Power BI
  • Power Platform
  • Developer

Session ideas and gaps

Have some thoughts in the areas listed above? Drop us a line!

What about these topics or others? This is just me spit balling – not even tossing ideas around with the team that would certainly yield more relevant topics and refine the ones listed here.

Microsoft Viva

  • Beyond the Intranet – Engaging your employees with Viva
  • Viva overview – A walk through Viva offerings and what to use when
  • Getting started with Viva – What it takes to skill-up and staff-up for your organization
  • Viva case studies – Recently spun up Viva in your org? Here’s what we learned in ours
  • Viva Best Practices

Copilot / AI

  • Microsoft Copilot – An overview of the various products, where they’re at, what’s on the way
  • Copilot stories and case studies – How AI is working for us…
  • Copilot Best Practices

Power BI

  • Power BI vs. Tableau – Pros and Cons
  • Power BI as a part of your overall data strategy and implementation
  • Power BI Best Practices and Case Studies
  • Skilling up your team for Power BI success

Power Platform

Oh my, there’s just so much to cover even with Power BI having its own track…

  • Getting started with Power Apps for Lists and M365
  • Building a Maker community and mentality within your organization
  • Need to Know – Admin’s Guide to managing the Power Platform
  • So. Many. Case Studies.
  • What the heck is Dataverse and why you should care
  • Power Platform tools vs. 3rd Party tools

Personally, I’m curious how consulting organizations are approaching Power Platform regarding doing work for organizations and/or/vs. building trusted advisor roles with makers via training and advising. Seems like opportunities for a broad spectrum of engagements.

Developer

  • Exploring the Pro Dev features and capabilities of the Power Platform
  • Extending M365: Where, When, and How
  • M365 Development Best Practices
  • Extending Power Platform Capabilities with Azure (Azure Functions, AI, and other specific capabilities – there are so many folks don’t realize)

What would you like to hear about?

“I really wish they had a session on…” Speakers, vendors, and others would love to hear what topics folks would like to see covered. We’re usually guessing (albeit with plenty of experience) on what you want to hear and when. We don’t know what stage your org is in and what’s relevant to you now.

Let me know!

Are you an attendee coming in a few weeks? What content are you looking for? What’s relevant for you or your organization right now? Let me know.

Are you a potential sponsor? Need a hand pulling some content together? Do you have someone interested in speaking that wants some coaching or help? Let us know – we’d love to get you started!

References

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Why I Do Community

Why? Why, why, why… It’s a good question and not one I often think about because I decided a while back that it’s worth the time and investment – at least for me. Let’s see if something resonates for you to get involved.

The “why” for me is a combination, if not a balance, of selfish reasons and a desire to contribute.

It’s Fun! 

Reason 1. I find contributing to the community to be fun and rewarding. We are extremely fortunate to have a community full of awesome people that are fun to be with. Consumers of our content are very appreciative and take the time to say "Thanks".

“Thank you so much for that. It’s exactly the information I was looking for.”

– Variations from attendees at different conferences, most recently at M365 Community Days in Ottawa.

Participating allows me to share experiences – other than (and often counter to…) what product marketing puts out – with folks. It fills documentation and experience gaps, it provides practical examples that may align with a certain perspective or apply to a specific vertical, and shares discoveries that others may not have figured out yet.

Share What You’ve Learned

Let’s expand on that last thing for a minute. For me, it’s a prime example for many folks to contribute to community – through a blog post, a forum answer, a video, or some other way. 

Reason 2. A scenario: Someone wants to accomplish something, finds a challenge along the way, and figures out the trick, the path, or method to overcome it. Finally, they want to share what they found so others don't have to experience that same pain. I regularly hit on this same scenario.

Self-motivated learners navigate these paths every day. Sometimes its SMEs digging in to explore and exercise platforms. Sometimes its folks doing their jobs day after day. Community contributors go another step and share what they’ve learned with others.

We need to strike a bit of a balance here IMO. I don’t want to underplay the sharing part. It can take a significant amount of time to do effectively. Creating content (writing blog posts, producing videos, etc.) seems trivial, but often requires research time, writing time, production efforts, etc. – none of which is easy. I also don’t want to overplay the sharing part into some martyr-like effort, but it’s worthwhile to understand the efforts being made by folks and the organizations that employ them.

Stay Connected

Reason 3. Working with the community allows you to stay connected with the community.

So many examples: Organizations using similar tech, 3rd party companies offering products and services in your market, and folks in a variety of roles working with similar products and in similar verticals. It gives you exposure to what other folks are using and running into in their jobs, from their varying perspectives.

Be an Example

Reason 4. I like to contribute to hopefully be an example for others to repeat.

This doesn’t mean folks will choose to do the same things I’m doing, but it should demonstrate that they can – and at different scopes. Not everyone needs to speak at public conferences. They can, in many more cases actually, present internally at their organizations to others that need the info they have.

I tend to operate within product-specific and geography-specific community (M365 or Power Platform in Minnesota) – But many organizations are large enough and have technical user communities that can benefit internally from similar actions (lunch and learn sessions, internal blog posts, etc.). Imagine the improved ROI for those product licenses you’re paying for if more people know how to use the tools specifically in the context of your company…

Hey, if I can do this, you can do this. Have you learned something that others might benefit from? Talk about it! Write a blog post or submit a session.

It’s Good Exercise

No, not the physical “exercise” like working out. Though, we do get a lot of steps in attending and running events. 

Reason 5. Contributing to the community is a good exercise in personal and professional skills.

Skills that are useful in our professional and personal lives like communicating, listening, writing, (public) speaking, networking, planning, and many other things. Like many of these skills, they need practice. Practice to ramp up, maintain, and eventually mentor others.

So, if you didn’t need another reason, jump in to better yourself and grow your skills.

Retrospective

I would say my experience (in the context of the current technology community) started with combination of excitement about a technology (yep, SharePoint – a little geeky) that solved some business problems (helping people) and wanting to get more comfortable speaking in front of folks.

I like to share what I know – knowledge, experience, tips and tricks, and more – if it can help someone else. It’s the same general concept that drove me to do consulting, which is a lot of the same thing but being paid for it because you’re working specifically for someone and addressing their needs and efforts.

When I worked for a consulting company, community contributions were useful for a number of reasons. It established credibility – for me and my company – in my topic/technology area. It was good marketing getting the company name out there. It looked good from a “we care about the community” perspective as an organization. That sounds like it’s trying to make us look like something we weren’t – but we were legitimately interested in building community.

Summary

This was maybe a bit more introspective and retrospective than usual. Hopefully still useful to someone. I’m sure there are other reasons I could list, but this is already longer than intended so we’ll stop here.

Get involved. It’s fun and rewarding.

Follow up:

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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

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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…

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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!

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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

M365 Twin Cities Winter 2023 by the Numbers

Background

Our first post-COVID M365 “Saturday” Twin Cities event was on January 21, 2023. Not our normal time of year, but we (the organizing committee, attendees, sponsors, and speakers) have been chomping at the bit to get back in-person so here we are. 🙂 Normally, we host our events twice a year – in the Spring and Fall. Our schedule is primarily dictated by living in the upper Midwest, where Winter can be harsh, and Summer is dedicated to being outside. No one wants to give up summer weekends. So that leaves us with the “shoulder seasons” where we have plenty of other variables to deal with, but we’ve historically had success with. However, we wanted to get back as soon as possible – so here we are. All things considered; I think the event went off well for all involved.

Coming back post-COVID for this event had its own new variables to work with. Specific to the pandemic, were people willing to come back to an in-person event? We knew there were some vocal and passionate folks that would but weren’t sure we’d get back to our normal volume on the first event back. We definitely weren’t as large as we’ve been, but still had successful numbers, I think.

I’m pretty sure there was also a bit of Zoom/Online meeting fatigue. People just want to be back in-person. Me included. That part probably helped us a bit.

Scheduling in the middle of a Minnesota Winter would throw some challenges at us. Weather could have a huge impact. Folks may not want to travel to the event from outside the metro. It can get *really* cold this time of year. Thankfully the day of, we lucked out with both moderate temperatures and no snow. But we likely lost a few sponsors, speakers, and attendees that didn’t plan to attend even with the chance of having to travel in adverse conditions.

For attendees, registering for the event and deciding at the last minute to attend or not isn’t a big deal (for them – it stinks for organizers). They can sign up but not come if the weather turned. For speakers, we figured we’d lean on local folks where we could, but not limit our selection, to local and regional speakers that would be less likely to need to cancel. Signing sponsors for the event seemed to take the biggest hit as we usually have a mix of local, regional, and national companies – even international from time to time. For this event most sponsors ended up being local companies with only 2 coming from out of state. We love *all* our sponsors, but it was unique to have such a local focus.

Numbers

  • 393 Registered attendees
  • 11 sponsors with 9 on-site and 2 that were not
  • 7 on-site sponsors were local companies. 2 were from out of state
  • 25-30 folks staffing vendor booths
  • 130 session submissions from 59 speakers
  • 1 new venue
  • 10 rooms
  • 4 session slots in the schedule (we’ve done up to 5, letting folks out earlier)
  • 43 speakers
    • 16 current or former MVPs
    • 5 Microsoft employees
    • 6 Canadians
    • 6 new speakers
  • 38 sessions
    • 27 M365 sessions
    • 10 Power Platform sessions
    • 5 Viva sessions
    • 2 JSON sessions (whoa, really?)
  • 0 changes to the schedule after printing
  • 30 dozen donuts (we had plenty)
  • 88 pizzas (plus 30 salads)
  • 13,946 steps (Wes)

Some tweaking to do here and there, but we’ll be back. Targeting Fall 2023. As soon as we have a date, we’ll let you know.

Thanks to everyone involved for a wonderful event and return to in-person events!

M365TC Sponsors!! – Thank you

While I’m currently talking and thinking about sponsors for our #M365TC event later this week, the following applies to many/most events in our community – even the paid events.

We can’t do this without you. Yes, it’s a somewhat symbiotic relationship between event organizers, sponsors, attendees, and even speakers. Sponsors have another marketing path and sales gets the opportunity to meet with potential clients and customers. We, the event organizers get to put on our event and reach attendees with our knowledge, experience, news – aka: training.

Hopefully it’s mutually beneficial. To what degree of success, is up to many variables, but those of us organizing events do focus on making it a valuable experience for all. Like many things, it’s a bit of a balancing game for everyone involved – finding the right exposure for all without breaking trust with others.

As an organizer of a free community event, we’re even more dependent on sponsors to bring these events to life and we do very much appreciate your investment in time and money.

For the #M365TC – M365 Twin Cities Winter 2023 event, we had a shorter prep timeline than we usually do and scheduled our “back to in-person” event a bit off of our usual “shoulder season” in Minnesota dates – but sponsors still came through. I assume your sales and marketing folks have also been chomping at the bit to some degree to return to in-person opportunities. While there has been a plethora of virtual event opportunities, it’s just not the same for networking and community development.

Our #M365TC Winter 2023 sponsors:

I could put a blurb about each but wouldn’t do them justice – so please click on each, check them out, and be sure to visit with them on Saturday (no really, have a chat – more than just getting their bingo sticker…). We’ve got a few new folks in addition to companies that have been regular and ongoing supporters. While we have a few out-of-town companies, this event will be very local-focused – I suspect a combination of shorter duration planning, MN winters, being so close to the start of the year, and companies getting back up to speed post-COVID.

So, say “Hello”, visit with them on Saturday, and thank them for making our event possible!

If you haven’t registered yet, here’s the link:
M365 Twin Cities – Winter 2023 Tickets, Sat, Jan 21, 2023 at 8:00 AM | Eventbrite

Check out the schedule (including track sponsor and ISV sponsor sessions):
Community Days | M365 Twin Cities

Thank you sponsors!

M365 Twin Cities #M365TC

What is M365 Twin Cities?

M365TC is and organization and event built on the foundation of 10+ years of SharePoint Saturday events. M365TC – like SharePoint Saturdays, SQL Saturdays, and Code Camps, and others – is a free one-day in-person training event put on and supported by the community. Organized by volunteers. Paid for by sponsors. With sessions presented by industry, platform, and community experts in their fields. It’s a ton of great learning potential for you as an individual and for your organization as a whole.

It’s an opportunity for attendees to get free training regardless of organizational budgets. It’s an opportunity for folks to exercise their personal initiative to learn and explore. It’s an opportunity for new speakers to give presenting a try and experienced speakers opportunities to share their knowledge. It’s a mentoring opportunity. It’s a touch point for local service providers and broader service and product vendors to connect with local folks as customers and partners. It’s a networking event to connect with peers in the metro and region.

We usually have two events per year – in the Spring and Fall – that support the rapidly changing technology we talk about. If we have a successful January 2023 event, we’ll likely return to that cadence starting in the Fall of 2023.

By the numbers

For the Saturday January 21, 2023 event, we have:

Why M365?

“M365” is a shift from “SharePoint” as the Microsoft ecosystem shifted, morphed, and expanded. Our SharePoint Saturday events had SharePoint at the center but covered plenty of tangential topics where technology and skill integrations happened. Now, under the M365 umbrella, SharePoint is still a foundational piece but is complemented by a suite of related products and platforms – led now by Teams and working along other areas such as the Power Platform and Azure to name just a few. “M365” provides for the broader scope required to attract attendees, speakers, and sponsors.

Our event here in Minnesota has historically been one of the larger events in the country, though the pandemic took a bite out of our momentum. It’ll take a little time to work back to the events we’ve had in the past – assuming the community still demands them. So please let us know if you are interested in what we’re doing by registering to attend, by spreading the word to co-workers and peers, by letting your organizational leadership and vendors know that we need sponsors to put these events on.

Links