Category Archives: SharePoint Saturday

M365 Twin Cities Logo

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.

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.

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

Spring and More, Conferences Galore!

As SharePoint and Office 365 continue to evolve, the SharePoint community seems to be as strong as ever. There are a bunch of conferences coming up over the next few months. Here are a few notable ones:

March 2-3 – North American Collaboration Summit – Branson, MO
Better hurry up if you want to make this one. There are a ton of great speakers in town for this one as it’s just before the MVP Summit in Redmond. So catch these folks while you can. It is a great value for your time and a nice little escape from Winter for a few days.
FYI – It *is* drivable from the Twin Cities – we’ve done it a few times. Smile
Discount Code: COLLABSUMMIT50

March 26-30 – SharePoint Fest – Washington DC
A quality SharePoint, Office 365, Azure, and Microsoft Teams event offered several times a year between DC, Seattle (August), and Chicago (December). These folks do a great job. They’ve been doing this ‘series’ for a few years and they just seem to get better. They’ve recently switched to a longer 5-day format that includes 2 days of workshops and 3 days of sessions. Be sure to check them out. I’ll be doing a workshop and 3 sessions at the DC event.
Discount Code: PrestonDC100

April 7 – SharePoint Saturday Omaha – Omaha, NE

April 14th – SharePoint Saturday Twin Cities – Minneapolis, MN
Back for our Spring event with registration just opening up today.
FREE

May 5 – SharePoint Saturday Chicago Suburbs – Chicago, IL

May 21-23 – SharePoint Conference North America – Las Vegas, NV
Note: This is NOT a Microsoft-run event like previous ‘SPC’ events, but it IS Microsoft sponsored, backed, and endorsed. There will be a LOT of product group folks attending and speaking in addition to plenty of community-recognized experts, MVPs, etc.
Discount Code: https://t.co/K9n43i1UOr

And of course there continue to be SharePoint Saturday (SPS) events throughout the US and the world. Please remember, not all SPS events are listed on the SPSEvents site – Including OURS – for a variety of reasons. So keep up to date with your local and regional groups so you don’t miss out on a great event!

So much information, so little time. Hope to cross paths with you at some of these!

Client-Side Rendering (CSR) demystified – Slides

At SPC14 – the SharePoint Conference 2014 – I initially presented a session on Client-Side Rendering in SharePoint 2013 as implemented using JS Link through the web interface. CSR and JS Link using uploaded JavaScript files and the JS Link web part property pointed at the appropriate JavaScript files – to be differentiated from JS Link baked into managed code.

The recording and slides for the SPC session are available here – on Channel9: http://channel9.msdn.com/events/SharePoint-Conference/2014/SPC318

This content has also since been presented (in slight variations of the original) at a few SharePoint Saturday events.

SharePoint Saturday Twin Cities–May 2013

Another great event this past weekend – for those of us that were able to navigate the monsoon in the morning. Almost 500 attendees made it in.

Slide decks should be posted to the www.spstc.com soon. Until then I posted mine out on Slideshare if anyone wants to take a peek at them.

SharePoint 101: What is this thing called ‘SharePoint’?
This is a really high level overview of what SharePoint is and what it offers to an organization…

Understanding SharePoint Roles
This is an overview of all the different roles and responsibilities that can play a part in a SharePoint implementation… lots of discussion during the session…

Registration is open for the Spring 2013 SharePoint Saturday Twin Cities

SharePoint Saturday Twin Cites will have its Spring event on May 18th, 2013. We will again be at the Normandale Community College campus, but this time will be using the brand spanking new wing and rooms (still using the same entrance area on the West side).

Registration: http://spstcspring2013.eventbrite.com/

The last few events have filled up – so get signed up early. Also please be courteous to other hopeful attendees and cancel your registration if you are unable to join us.

We’ve got one of the largest SharePoint Saturday events in the country and with feedback from attendees, speakers and sponsors, one of the most successful as well. So join us for another day of SharePoint with tracks for SharePoint 101, Information Workers, Developers, IT Pros and a new vendor showcase room – all for free.

We have a new web site on the way as well. Keep an eye on http://www.spstc.com for information on sponsors, speakers, sessions and schedules coming soon. Also ‘Like’ our Facebook page for more immediate updates.  https://www.facebook.com/SPSTwinCities

We look forward to seeing you there!

SharePoint Saturday Chicago – SharePoint 101

Saturday June 11th was the suburban edition of SharePoint Saturday Chicago.  Raymond (@iwkid), Phil (@pjirsa) and I made the trip with a handful of others from Minnesota.

The organizers did a wonderful job and the weather turned out great as well.  Lots of great sessions and speakers.  They also tried some new things, which was cool.  We had a 101 track and a deep dive room in addition to some of the more traditional IT Pro and Developer tracks.  Also in the mix, and well timed – was an Office 365 track.

I was lucky enough to kick off the 101 track.  We started the day aimed at folks who don’t know much, if anything, about SharePoint.  Hopefully this was useful and enough information to get folks started for the rest of the day.  The track was as follows:

Before getting started, my session was also dubbed “the SharePoint session you should send your mom to…”  and someone did.  Smile

The track seemed to go over well.  We had 20-30 people in each session throughout the day.  The intro topic is a little tough for SharePoint Saturday’s because generally the only people that know about SPS events are those that are already in tune with the SharePoint community.  I think there is a LOT more potential for this track/area, but it might require different or additional marketing to get the audience that it’s really targeted at.  Hopefully we can repeat and expand on the 101 track in other events as well.

My slides are available on Slideshare HERE.

New SharePoint Blogger!

Lookout SharePoint world – Sarah Haase (locally of Best Buy fame) has entered the blogosphere.  Sarah has been a presenter at the Minnesota SharePoint User Group, SharePoint Saturday – Twin Cities and the Best Practices Conferences and always has great information, especially when it comes to measuring the ROI of SharePoint solutions. 

Well, she finally started up a blog here:  http://sarahlhaase.wordpress.com/

Go check it out!