Category Archives: M365TC

M365 Twin Cities – Conference Event

M365 Twin Cities is the evolution of SharePoint Saturday Twin Cities and is a Community Days event. As a part of Community Days, we’re also aligned with MGCI – Microsoft’s Global Community Initiative.

We cover topics from M365, Copilot, Power Platform and anything related or adjacent to M365 like Azure, governance, security, and a lot more. Our audience also falls across many personas: Users, decision makers, power users, makers, developers, administrators, and others.

As we’re currently preparing for our 2026 event, let’s recap our 2025 event a bit.

2025 Event By the Numbers

Our 2025 event was on Friday September 19, 2025. We had 705 registrations prior to the event with a number of folks that registered at the event. All in all, we had about 380 folks on site (that’s a pretty normal ratio against registrations). The attendee numbers were a good trend from 2024 where we had about 250 folks – steadily growing post-pandemic.

20250918_172521 — Registration – Ready to go!

The ‘vibe’ was overwhelmingly positive. The higher attendance was immediately obvious and contributed to the higher energy in the room from both attendees and sponsors. As our community usually does, they hit up the sponsors early – even before our opening info session. The coffee and donuts may have helped as well.

We had 31 sessions with 33 speakers across 8 rooms – with the largest session attendance topping out around 110 people! Learning was had by all.

Sponsorships post-pandemic were, and still are, a challenge. The market has changed, the economy has changed, and how sponsors engage with customers has changed. Where we had a little budgetary buffer in the past (pre-pandemic), events are tough to fully fund. We’re hopeful that rising attendee numbers will help bring sponsors back. Our 2025 event had 8 wonderful and fully engaged sponsors.

Locally, we’ve got a really strong Microsoft community – a healthy SharePoint history and M365 adoption across businesses, government, and other organizations. While this is mostly a good thing, it also drives a bit of competition with other groups and events within our community. While this is great for attendees, it’s tough on sponsors and event producers. There’s only so much funding to go around and tight budgets can impact community-driven (and funded) events like ours.

Historically we’ve had 1-2 events a year with 2 events most years. Coming back post-pandemic we’ve tended towards a single event – *and* moved to Fridays – in an effort to make sponsorship funding more reasonable for our supporting vendors.

Next up – Fall Event

Our 2026 event will be held on Friday September 18, 2026. Registration is open. We’re working on session selection and aim to have the schedule up in a few weeks.

Learning – Keep at it

This past weekend I attended a white coat ceremony for the first time. This is a (newer) rite of passage for incoming medical students as they begin their journey to becoming medical professionals. In preparation for the ceremony, each of the classes (degrees/programs) crafted their own oath and each of the three we heard that afternoon included a commitment to continued learning.

This commitment to learning shouldn’t come as a surprise, especially in the medical fields. Technology changes. Our collective understanding of health, medicine, and the human body grows. We expect the highest quality, experience, and knowledge from our health care workers. These professionals need to set time aside for ongoing learning. And they do.

What about those of us in the technology and/or business world?

For starters, most of us aren’t taking oaths for our jobs, but I’m still a fan of making ongoing learning a good practice. I don’t have the stats to back it up for this quick article, but I’m pretty confident learning is good for our mental health. I know keeping up with the latest technology is a requirement for many of us in the tech world if we are going to have effective knowledge of technology capabilities and best practices. With so much change happening so fast it’s hard to keep up or even stay ahead of our users and customers sometimes. AI is just the latest hot topic but change in our world is rapid and not slowing any time soon.

As consumers we experiment (or ‘play’ depending on your perspective) with the tools, we read docs and blogs, we listen to podcasts, and attend training and conferences. Sometimes we do it with management support (funding and time), though often on our own dime and time.

What’s your approach?

Do you listen to podcasts on your way to work?
Do you read an article a day or have daily micro-learning approaches?
Do you save up your time and do deeper dive research that might last longer periods every so often?
Regular training or conferences via your employer? Check out Community Days for local opportunities!

What works? What doesn’t?

Are you only consuming? Or are you sharing your knowledge with others as well?

M365 Twin Cities – Session Selection

Uffda. This is the recurring (now annual) “picking sessions and speakers for an event is hard” post.

How it starts

32 session slots available (8 rooms, 4 time slots)
- Of these, we reserve 4 for potential sponsored sessions. These may be freed up for other content as we get closer to the event if we don’t find sponsors to fill them.
- This leaves 28 session slots for community speaker sessions
- NOTE: We’ve had more rooms in the past, but this tends to dilute attendance per session. Fewer rooms tend to raise the number of attendees per session which is nice for presenters. Like anything this is a variable we tweak and adjust as we don’t want rooms too crowded either.
109 sessions submitted from 53 speakers
- Yes – a LOT of Copilot/AI topics this time around. We’ll have plenty but there’s still lots of other relevant topics to talk about.
- We had a notable jump in new speakers submitting – mostly out of town folks that we don’t know personally. I’m curious what drove that… We didn’t change anything that I’m aware of when it comes to Call for Speakers or communications. Interesting.
- As with every event, we also had a number of “regulars” – friends and colleagues – that didn’t submit, which is disappointing. They each have their reasons. When it’s our fault with scheduling it hurts a bit, but we do our best – scheduling is also tough. It’s a bummer to miss opportunities to host and hang out with friends we’ve made in the community.

Our community is blessed with so many folks full of ideas, with wide varieties of experiences, and with the willingness and skills to share their knowledge with others.

Now, expectation setting… We never get this 100% correct for everyone. We guess who’s going to attend and what they want to hear. We base our decisions on previous events, on what we know about the technology, the topics, the speakers, past attendees, and all sorts of input. But we do our best to balance what we can.

Our panel consists of members of the leadership team. Your event and approach may vary. I’m sure there are other variations and ways to do this – maybe put together a content committee or something along those lines. We tend towards simplicity, so here we are.

Priorities, Variables, and Factors… How it comes together

There are a bunch of things we work towards balancing. We want to invite out-of-town speakers, but we like to favor local folks where we can as well. We want to give new speakers an opportunity to speak while also providing known quality speakers for attendees. Because of these priorities we don’t use the blind selection method (looking at titles and abstracts while hiding speaker names).

We leverage our event tool Sessionize where and how we can, sometimes using their selection/rating system and process, sometimes we tweak the methods. The tool does a wonderful job of collecting submissions and later notifying folks once decisions are made.

When it comes to topics, we try to find a variety of timely and relevant topics that apply to our attendee base. We’ll compare similar looking sessions. We’ll look for sessions that appeal to different roles in the M365 world, different products, etc.

Once we get the number of prospect sessions down to around the number we need, we switch gears and start looking at how those sessions fit into slots in the schedule. If we have too few or too many sessions around a topic or what might turn into a topic “track” then we start to massage the schedule to work as well as we can.

Our event doesn’t usually have a keynote. We’ve got a room for it now (we didn’t for a number of years) but attendees seem to prefer filling the time with as many sessions as possible. Better to have 8 topics to choose from for one of the time slots rather than just one and hope it appeals to most.

Finally, we slot the sessions and review the schedule for topic conflicts, overlaps, if speakers have more than one session (not many) they aren’t scheduled at the same time, etc.

Setting the schedule

We whittled the list down to 29 sessions (1 sponsor and 28 community sessions) with a number of backup sessions from the queue of speakers.

We have 33 speakers – a few sessions include more than one presenter. This means we have to turn down 20 folks. This is one of the hardest parts of the process. So many folks that took some of their valuable time to create sessions, write abstracts, and come up with titles. We don’t have room for them all to present, but we are thankful for them and hope they submit again.

Thoughts…

The concept of a content panel is interesting. It might be something to look at if attendee numbers continue to rise. We could also do some more polling of attendees to see what topics folks are interested to either verify our assumptions or give us more data to work with.

We get a step closer to the event…

Community Events – From Tasks to Roles

We recently had a MGCI training and office hours session (will update w/links – likely need to be a MGCI member to view) on Committee Roles and Responsibilities. Sharon did a wonderful job providing slides to kick off discussion.

A few years ago, I posted thoughts around the subject from the perspective of the event we run locally in Minnesota: Original Building a Team post.

Not a lot has changed on our event team, but let’s switch things around a bit and focus more on typical tasks for each event. How you choose to define roles around those tasks changes from organization to organization and depends on the skills and interests of the folks you assemble.

My #1 recommendation is still: Don’t go it alone.

*Could* you do everything? Maybe, but it’s not fun or good for your mental health. Start with the basics. Find a crew of peers, coworkers, like-minded community members, whatever it takes to get rolling (it may take a few event iterations to get the right mix). Early events don’t need to be super polished productions; they just need to deliver content to folks.

Then take a peek at the Organizer’s Checklist (will add link when available… MGCI site migration in progress…), work through a list of tasks and see if you have the folks to do what needs doing and evolve your team as needed. It’s an opportunity to do and try new things. You don’t need to be experts. It’s a great time to stretch and grow.

Consult with MGCI Regional Leads or other event organizers to figure out how to start lean… what you can skip, where you can get away with less… Then build from there.

Also keep in mind that tasks could be grouped by *when* they happen as well. You’ll have a significant set of tasks before the event – planning and preparing. You’ll obviously have specific things happening the day-of your event. And there will be a number of follow-up tasks (Don’t drop the ball on these…)

With that, here are roles, tasks, and (maybe rambling…) commentary:
Note: As we mentioned during the office hours, the following list is neither fully comprehensive nor are all the tasks required for every event.

Sponsor coordination – Activities related to funding the event via sponsors.
- Determine sponsorship levels/packages, pricing, and what’s included. – Don’t do this in a vacuum.
  - Get an understanding of what other groups are charging and providing.
  - Talk to prospects and partners to find out what they need or want from partnering with you as a sponsor.
- There’s a sales component to the role as you are selling sponsorships.
  - Lots of angles on how to build the network – as someone already in the community with connections or finding ways to build new connections.
- Work with communications folks on getting the word out, email blasts, etc.
- Before, during, and after the event you or others will need to tend to the sponsor relationships and needs to make their experience successful.
- Follow up post-event. Might be via email, conversations, and/or surveys. It’s important to thank sponsors as well as find out what worked, what didn’t, what could be done to improve, and how sponsors feel about the value they got from the experience.
Speaker coordination – Activities related to finding and organizing speakers and the sessions they’ll deliver.
- Manages the Call for speakers
  - Familiarity with call for speaker tools like Sessionize or Run.events.
- Communications to prospects, folks accepted as speakers, and those that were not picked.
- Before, during, and after the event you or others will need to tend to speaker relationships to enable them to be successful delivering their content.
  - If you are including and encouraging new speakers, someone will need to spend time with them as mentors. This can be the coordinator, peer speakers, or other community folks that want to help. (e.g. We have a local Power Point MVP that is a great resource…)
- Follow-up post event for feedback.
- Coordinate and manage speaker gifts. Effort here varies with how many speakers you have and what you’re doing for a gift, if it needs to be personalized, etc.
Web and content management. This could be one person or several as there are a number of possible end points and tools to use.
- Sessionize and Run.events – These have a lot of speaker management but aren’t limited to speakers and sessions. Throughout the course of the event a number of things need to be set up, maintained, or cleaned up after the event.
- Community Days – Initial request and configuration, integration with other tools, content updates, and more.
- Event site – If you have a separate website used “off-season” there will be updates throughout the process – keeping information consistent with other platforms and with link updates.
- Social media – These might fall under a social media, marketing, or communications role but needs to be maintained throughout prep, day-of, and post event.
  - There will be specific bursts of activity here: Event announcement and launch, as the event approaches, communications during the event, and timely follow-up (availability of slides/recordings, follow-up surveys, etc.)
Food coordination – It might be as easy as snacks and as complicated as multiple meals throughout the day… The following could be delegated to different folks as needed.
- Some venues require working with on-site food providers. This requires selecting menus, quantities, timing, etc.
- Could require providing information to attendees on where to find food on-site or nearby.
- If bringing food on-site the effort requires transportation and timing preparations. As attendee numbers go up, make sure your vendor can meet expectations.
- Coordinate need for food helpers (might work with a volunteer coordinator) to direct attendees, manage special meals, set up, clean up, and more.
- Speaker dinners – Locate a venue. May need to set menu choices, arrange drink tickets, understand spend minimums, arrange payments and tips, etc.
Venue coordination – Works with venue contacts (event coordinator, IT, food service, security, etc.) as you consider venues and work through the details to pull off a successful event at their venue.
- Manage contracts, insurance, and payments.
- Manage rooms and room sizes.
- Understand what facilities are included (how many tables and chairs, AV equipment, etc.), require extra payments (table covers, etc.)
- Day-of (or prep time the night before) activities might include setting up signage, room prep, cleanup, etc. and can be delegated to other volunteers
Session / Speaker selection – This is usually a group. There are lots of interesting directions this could go (attendee/community “board” input would be intriguing but might be touchy too).
- In many cases, a group of folks on the event organizing team
- Speaker coordinator organizes and delivers submitted session abstracts
- Decide if you’re making choices with/without knowing who the speakers are to avoid bias
Volunteer coordination. – Find them, schedule them, assign them, manage them.
- Work with leadership team to determine staffing needs and requirements
- Good single point of contact for organizers when they need help with something
Project manager (optional – usually one of board/leaders)
Communication (promotion and engagement), Marketing, branding, graphic design – could be multiple people and tasks could be broken out…
- Develop a brand
- Create logos and graphics that will be used for social media, signage, stickers, etc.
- Work with/as communications folks
- Can you tell this isn’t my area of expertise? Connect with Emily Mancini and her Community Day Miami crew!
Organization
- Finances / budget – Make sure you’re working within the $$ you’re able to raise! Keep track of where you’re spending so you can adjust where needed for future events.
- Legal, non-profit, contracts –
  - You’ll likely need a business entity (non-profit or not) to manage money
  - If you want to create a non-profit organization, you’ll need some legal work done
  - There will be ongoing needs to work with contracts (venues, food vendors, and more…)
Event Volunteers
- Registration – Staff the desk. All day(?) Be engaging with attendees, collect info from unregistered folks, and be helpful!
- Signage – How to get to the space. Get around the space. Identify rooms and room schedules
- Day-of helpers/pointers (“where is…”)
- Room helper – A/V, logistics
- Assemble bags/registration packets
- Set up help – other
- Room counters – count attendees in each room during each time block
- Timers – check rooms at end of session time to cue speakers as needed to wrap it up and stay on schedule…
Gifts buyer
- attendee giveaways (keep folks around until end of day)
- Speaker gifts
- May also corral vendor/sponsor giveaways
Swag tasks:
- Source items (4imprint, etc.)
- Work with your designer for any graphics required
- Purchase/order
- Verify
- Distribute
“SharePint” (Happy Hour) organizer (VERY optional) – Where? When? Do you have a sponsor or funding to provide a round? Be aware of liability issues… Our event/community hasn’t done one in a while but as we’ve to Friday events maybe we need to revisit the concept.

Take-aways from the Teams meeting conversation: I will be changing my role title to “Event Instigator”. 🙂

Hope you found something useful in there. Let me know what you think!

The Death of Community on Twitter / X

It seems we’ve hit the tipping point where the Twitter / X facet of the M365 / Power Platform / Microsoft community is effectively dead.

It’s not a loss that’s likely to be celebrated by a mock funeral at a Microsoft conference… (see InfoPath, etc.)

Many will applaud the shift – for whatever personal, political, or other reason they may have. Personally, I’m bummed – mostly at the loss of interaction, touch points, and availability of connecting with folks. I don’t think there’s been a better platform for *anyone* to connect with anyone and I don’t know of any other platform that’s doing it as well or better than Twitter did.

It was free. It was simple. For the most part if someone was on the platform, you could reach them. And in our community, many/most of us would respond when someone pinged us. It was a great tool that augmented conference engagement. If you attended, you could connect with speakers. If you weren’t attending a particular conference, you could “ride along” with the happenings by watching the feed. It was great for generating momentum and getting feedback without waiting for the follow-up posts.

Sarah, Antonio, and Mike recently touched on this as a part of their most recent M365 Voice podcast – Episode 127 – How to engage with M365 Community Members. I suppose this post is somewhat of a response to their conversation…

A considerable part of the audience, influencer, and community within the Microsoft technical community rejected the platform as a way to reject Musk and the combined “big tech” group behind social platforms. But it’s also not the only reason. Times are changing.

Content Overload

As consumers of content and media, we’re faced with an increasingly overwhelming amount of information, signals, notifications – being shoved down our throats – all the time – fighting for our attention. As noted by a few comments in the podcast mentioned above, many platforms are trying hard to push notifications – even fun ones like Bird Buddy (non-technical aside… 🙂 ) But we only have so much bandwidth, time, and attention.

There’s already been considerable pushback on overload and it’s likely to continue – which is good. Less “noise” is better for our mental health, our family time, our focus time, and more…

We’ll likely see more curation of content brought to us via AI solutions, agents, or whatever we need to narrow the stream and get the content we need while filtering out what we don’t.

Our community, however, has conflicting forces. On one hand we want to manage the noise and limit inputs, while on the other hand we have consistently increasing complexity. What used to be “just” SharePoint, is now a full suite of M365 applications, integrations, capabilities, and functionality that’s grown in both scope and depth.

A recent LinkedIn post by Ali Schwanke called out how “complex and feature-rich tools” challenges us with keeping up our skills and awareness. While her article referred to HubSpot, the issue absolutely applies in the M365 community as well.

What’s Next?

Where are you connecting with community? Do you feel a need to connect? Can you find the information you’re looking for with the platforms we have available?

For now, Microsoft and its leadership are still posting to X. They’ll continue to post on channels as long as it’s useful to reach their audiences. As the audience, we’ll keep trying to find balance between platforms and finding the information we need to best do our jobs and serve the community.

References / Links

Microsoft 365 Voice

The Usual Suspects is still Community

Just back from our latest #CoffeeCrew here in the Twin Cities. It was a small group today – just 5 of us. And that’s fine. But it had me wondering for a moment or two if it was worth continuing.

It is, I think.

It’s easy for those of us in a community-building… community to get wrapped up in the numbers. Driving attendance, having larger gatherings, adding new people, etc. But it’s also important to remember some basics:

Meeting with “the usual folks”, the old-timers, the established group is a good thing too. We still need relationship-building time. Time to catch up and recharge for when we need to be on our A-game with larger groups and meeting new people.
Meeting with smaller groups allows some of us to have deeper conversations. Having a large gathering can sometimes take away from that.

Would I love to have new folks attend our #CoffeeCrew meetups? Absolutely. Would I love to have larger turnouts? That’d be great!

This morning someone asked if I’d ever scheduled one where no one showed up. I don’t think so, but I have had at least one where only one person showed up – and we had a great chat. I figure if no one shows for one of these – I’m still enjoying time out of the house (my usual work location) getting some food and caffeine and catching up on work or whatever is on the agenda for the day.

So, for now, we’ll keep carrying on. I hope you’ll join the conversation.

Note: Next month we’re aiming for Angel Food Bakery in St. Louis Park – per request. Apparently, the Halloween treats are superb. As soon as I find an alternative to Facebook events, I’ll get that scheduled and posted.

Protected: M365 Twin Cities Fall 2024 – Event Producer Version

M365 Twin Cities Fall 2024 – By the Numbers

Our most recent M365 Twin Cities event was on Friday September 6th, 2024.

On what was our first Friday event (all previous events have been on Saturdays – as part of the “SharePoint Saturday” tradition), we had:

463 folks registered for the event
- 250+ of those were NEW to us
- We had approximately 260 folks on site.
20 dozen donuts
20 boxes of coffee
32 salads, 81 pizzas and cheese bread consumed (once they finally arrived…)
275 cans of soda
8 rooms with a total of 29 sessions (11 so far available to review)
32 speakers
- 4 Microsoft folks
- 1 Pastor
- A bunch of current and former Microsoft MVPs
- 3 Canadians (that admitted it…)
1 round table discussion session
3 sponsored sessions
7 awesome sponsors – Check them out!
2 speakers suffered minor burns from sticky buns… (They’re OK)
3 LEGO sets were given away at the end of the day – 2 Groots and a Concorde!
Session feedback is still coming in, so we’ll see how that goes. (Keep them coming!)
1 schedule change after printing.

Not bad.

We had a few bumps along the way, but overall, the Friday event went over very well. Lots of great conversations were had, networking was done, and folks walked away with a bit more knowledge than they had before.

Check in with Community Days for events in your area and keep up with us on our site and social accounts for updates, meetups, and more.

End User Sessions at M365 Twin Cities

OK, I just finished rambling about content for end users at technical conferences. There’s a lot of great stuff out there and here’s a sampling of what we’ve got to offer end users on Friday September 6, 2024 at the latest M365 Twin Cities event in Minnesota:

Introducing Microsoft 365 Copilot – with Michelle Gilbert
Michelle is a local Microsoft resource so you’ll be getting the latest info straight from the source. Are you using Copilot? Do you know what it is? Should you? This’ll be a great opportunity to get the overview you need on what’s available now, what’s coming, and why you should care about AI in the Microsoft space.
Calendars! Calendars! Calendars! – with Tamara Bredemus
If you’ve never attended a session by Tamara, that alone should be enough to check this out – she’s awesome. But the topic is a hot one with so many options and folks not knowing which to use. Check this one out.
Integrating Forms with Teams for Real-time Responses – with Brian Alderman
Between Microsoft’s launch of Teams and the explosion of usage during the pandemic, there are a LOT of Teams users within every organization. Teams keeps adding features and this is a solid one you should be aware of. Check it out.
Microsoft Lists: the productivity game changer for everyday people – with Heidi Jordon
Lists have been around for over 20 years as a structured way to manage data – data we’ve been trying to get you to get off those post-it notes and out of Excel files. Heidi is going to go through a bunch of use cases so you can see what we’ve been talking about and leave you wanting to dig into Lists when you’re back at work.
20 Microsoft 365 Productivity Tips – with Christian Buckley and Tom Duff
Another favorite of attendees because they’re entertaining and the content is relevant to what folks are doing everyday within the Microsoft toolsets. Highly recommended to check out.

You will walk away with skills you can use and info you can act on.

This is just a sampling. We’ll have a few more sessions posted between now and the event, so keep checking the links below for the latest.

Tech Conferences – Also for End Users

Maybe it’s me, but it seems that there aren’t enough end users at technical conferences. There are a variety of tech events out there and some of them are absolutely deeper dives for technical professionals. But there are more – either professionally produced or community-run – that include content for everyone.

Now, I could have said “training” instead of “conferences”, but training is more obvious (everyone needs it, including end users) and often covered by training departments within larger organizations. The conferences part here is also important because it involves networking with peers – usually outside of the organization. People with different perspectives and company cultures that can bring new ideas and approaches to common issues. Conferences are also great opportunities to interact with SMEs – either community contributors or the folks building the products.

Obviously, you can’t stop work and send everyone. But you can often send more than we’re currently seeing – especially free local events. These events aren’t just for IT. Ultimately, having end users in attendance can also help IT by bringing a business perspective to product features. And yes, these product feature conversations do still need to be tempered by IT realities: cost, time, risk, and many more…

We’ve always had end users at conferences, but never enough when you consider where and how the impact on business occurs and just how many users there are out there. The impact they make isn’t isolated though. It requires partnerships within each org. Users aren’t going to be successful if the platform isn’t deployed or configured correctly (IT Pros). Users aren’t going to be successful if platform owners don’t make connections between tech and business priorities, train users, and keep them up to speed.

Engaging technology to further the business requires awareness, skills, and a bit of balance between a number of teams. The benefits can be awesome.

End users are challenged by awareness, instruction, divided priorities, and limited time. We can group these a bit. Priorities and time go together as there’s often not enough time (this continues to get worse as organizations keep trying to get lean…) and business, not tools, are (and should be) the priority. Learning tools is secondary even if the end result makes the business more efficient.

Awareness and instruction go together with the awareness part often overlooked (also another topic…). Users need to get a grasp of what tools or capabilities are available (awareness) and then learn how to use them (instruction) when they’re relevant. In an ideal situation someone like a platform team or a customer success team may cover awareness in terms of what features are available and where they fit – translating between the tool and business needs. In many cases, however, IT can be a blocker of sorts… not letting users know features are available, or even disabling them.

Disabling features can very well be for legit reasons (security, conflicts with capability offered by other products, etc.). In some cases, they might not enable features until they’ve been tested and validated, IT trains up on them, or training materials are created. And again, we run into crunch time with IT not having enough time to dig in. If end users learn themselves about features, they can inquire about them with IT and help determine when it might be a business priority to deploy features and capabilities. It’s for each organization to find the balance that works for them between business needs, IT capabilities, and prioritizing them.

More than ever before (at least that I’ve seen) the makers of apps, tools, and services are reaching out directly to end users instead of relying on IT as an intermediary. They’re both building tools that appeal to end users and marketing directly to them. Microsoft Lists, for example, has been around for over 20 years (SharePoint, then Microsoft Lists) and is aimed at end users to manage information with structure. More recently the Microsoft Power Platform targeted all users with Power Automate and Power Apps – though I’d argue Power Apps is very much NOT for all users… but that’s another post. Currently, we’re in the midst of AI and Copilot rollouts that will have impact on everyone.

Summary

The more end users we can get at conferences, in training, and engaging within technical communities, the better. They can gain awareness to features and capabilities to understand where and when they might be useful in their business needs. They’ll know when to ask IT to turn a feature on they might not have access to initially. They can build personal networks and provide valuable feedback to product owners.

So, especially when it comes to local and free (or for marginal costs…) events, make the time when you are able to enable your employees and your teams to join the conversation! It’s good for mental health to step away from the grind every so often too. 🙂

Context and Perspective

My opinion and experience here is biased on several accounts:

I’m an event producer. Just small, local, community-run events, but still. I’m interested in getting folks to events both because I want events to be successful and because I want folks to have the opportunity to learn, to skill up, to become more effective with the tools they use (that’s why we put them on after all…).
I’m also involved with a group that promotes community events and encourages folks to produce them.
The tech spaces I work in (Microsoft M365, SharePoint, Lists, Teams, Power Apps, etc.) have historically been near the “edge” of where tech professionals, power users, and end users come together.
I speak at a variety of events – both community-run and larger commercial events.

References

M365 Twin Cities – Next one on Sept. 6, 2024 – The event I put on with a team of awesome folks
MGCI (Microsoft Global Community Initiative) – The organization I am associated with as a Regional Leader to
Community Days – Community-run events (Primarily. Others are listed as well) associated with MGCI’s efforts..
TechCon 365 – A larger professionally run event that typically produces 3 or so events per year across the US. A week-long event with workshops, keynotes, and sessions.
If you’re interested in these, let me know as I often have discount codes available.