Tuesday 9:00 AM - 12:30 PM · Room 203AB

Balancing Collaboration and Compliance within Microsoft 365

Hybrid modern work can be full of friction and frustration when it comes to compliance. We all need to help ensure a productive and compliant workplace, but how can you enable easy collaboration in your organization AND implement compliance features? Join Joanne and Daniel as they show how to bring together two equally important yet seemingly incompatible aspects of the modern workplace: collaboration and compliance. With a he-said-she-said approach, Daniel will talk about the modern collaboration tools available in Microsoft 365 and Joanne will share what kinds of Microsoft Purview compliance controls can be applied to help collaboration tools be more compliant. You will walk away with the knowledge to combine collaboration with compliance. Topics covered in the workshop: • How to plan and implement a compliant Viva Connections and Viva Engage environment • What are retention labels and policies and what do they look like in action in collaboration areas? • How to implement data loss techniques while enabling collaboration? • What are sensitivity labels and what types of controls can they place on collaboration? • Do Microsoft Teams have an end-date and how to enable a lifecycle? • Can Copilot help with compliance when it comes to our content and collaboration?

Tuesday 1:30 PM - 5:00 PM · Room 207A

Share, Protect, & Govern Your Data in Teams, SharePoint, & OneDrive

Collaboration lives at the core of a modern workplace and collaboration is built around the ability to access and share information securely. Not all information is the same and the ability to get content securely to the right people, both internal and external, at the right time keeps work moving. But how do you easily and securely your data in Office 365? What are your options to ensure you retain control of your data?

The ability to safeguard your data is possible! In this workshop, we will show you:

• The landscape of data security
• What is Microsoft Purview and how we can use it
• How to secure you data with Information Protection and sensitivity labels
• Control & manage sharing in your tenant
• Prevent exfiltration with Data Loss Prevention
• How to detect, investigate, and take action using Insider Risk Management
• Retain content using Data Lifecycle Management and Records Management

By the end of this workshop you will know what you can do to secure your data and allow your company to collaborate better and achieve more.

Wednesday 11:40 AM - 12:50 PM · Room 204C

IT Pro meets Microsoft Purview Data Lifecycle and Records Management

This session will explain Data Lifecycle and Records Management in Microsoft Purview from an IT-Pro's perspective. With data governance concerns on the rise in the modern workplace, particularly with the use of Microsoft Copilot for Microsoft 365, good data governance is more important than ever. Compliance teams are reaching out to their IT-Pro partners for assistance.

This is unfamiliar territory for many IT-Pros, so this session is designed to help clear the path forward. It covers topics like:

• Recommendations for mapping a retention schedule into a "software-friendly" Purview File Plan
• Using automation to apply retention labels to your content
• Using scopes to scale and meet complex retention requirements
• SharePoint and Teams architecture impacts

Joanne will discuss the skills that IT-Pros should bring to the table when working with their Compliance team partners.

4 Objectives:

• Understand how to interpret retention schedules from a technical perspective
• Understand the dependencies for the automation features in DLM/RM
• Understand the impacts your SP/Teams architecture can have on applying DLM/RM controls
• Understand what decisions need to be solidified early on for DLM/RM

Wednesday 11:40 AM - 12:50 PM · Room 209AB

SharePoint Premium - The future of AI powered content management

SharePoint Premium brings AI, automation, and added security to your content experiences, processing, and governance. SharePoint Premium delivers new ways to engage with your most critical content, managing and protecting it through its lifecycle. It also helps you maximize content value with security and structure – and prepare it for Copilot for Microsoft 365, the next-generation AI assistant that is transforming productivity.

We'll learn about some of the core features of SharePoint Premium such as Content experiences, Content processing and Content governance.

Wednesday 2:20 PM - 3:30 PM · Room 201

Prepare the Organization for Self-Service in Microsoft 365

Rapidly growing companies must balance multiple strategic objectives with a seemingly endless list of action items while maintaining a focus on creating scalable solutions. Often this is all done by a team of one. How can you meet the needs of the business and avoid shadow IT with limited resources? Enter self-service.

In this session, we will share how to:

• Prepare the organization for self-service solution builds in Microsoft 365
• Create a consistent user experience across solutions
• Report on activity in your environment with out of the box tools to support your governance
• Establish a global steering committee to drive right-sized solutions across the organization

Leave this session with actionable steps to begin changing the way your organization creates spaces for collaboration.

Wednesday 2:20 PM - 3:30 PM · Room 204C

What’s New with OneDrive!

Are you caught up with all the new features in OneDrive? Have you rolled out OneDrive and not provided any new information to your users about what's new?

OneDrive in Microsoft 365 continues to evolve and we as end-users and IT professionals need to try keep up. Join me as we walk through the newest improvements and changes to the world of OneDrive and now content AI. This session will be demo filled and by the end you will see the investment and dedication that Microsoft has too provide a solid file management and sync solution.

Wednesday 2:20 PM - 3:30 PM · Room 209AB

Implementing Microsoft 365 Data Loss Prevention. A Real World Approach

As more and more organizations' content is stored in cloud locations, it can become further at risk for accidental or malicious misuse. Users make good use of cloud collaboration features to share documents with others. Information contained within documents or even the intended recipient of the files may not be properly considered before transmission. This can often lead to data loss and poses significant risks to the organization. To protect against the loss of data control, organizations are looking for solutions that protect the data when it is shared.

Join David as he takes a practical approach to understand data loss prevention techniques and capabilities available within Microsoft 365. David will also provide a real-world approach to implementing the technologies with a strong consideration of the balance of protection and user experience.

Wednesday 4:20 PM - 5:30 PM · Room 201

Navigating Document Approval in SharePoint: A Practical Case Study

At her medical research non-profit, different departments rely heavily on SOP documents, or Standard Operating Procedures. These documents have to go through annual reviews that are several layers deep, in addition to needing a group approval of the final SOP.

In this session, Lindsay will break down exactly how she built SOP approval processes for four different departments using just SharePoint document libraries, Power Automate, and Approvals that have served their purpose effectively and efficiently for years.

Wednesday 4:20 PM - 5:30 PM · Room 204AB

Data recovery options for SharePoint/OneDrive

SharePoint and OneDrive include several content recovery options for SharePoint and OneDrive for Business administrators, site collection administrators, and end users. Educating your end users on SharePoint recovery options like the site recycle bin, versioning, and site collection recycle bin can lighten the burden on your admins.

Using either a GUI or PowerShell you can backup and restore your entire SharePoint Server farm or components of it. In SharePoint Server you can also perform more granular content backups by exporting site collections, site, libraries, and lists, and there are options for recovering these site collections, sites, lists and libraries from content databases that are no longer part of your SharePoint Server farm.

With a vast majority of your SharePoint Server content stored in SQL Server it is imperative that you have an efficient way to recover items or entire databases as quickly as possible.

This discussion will introduce the Best Practices framework that will allow your SharePoint Server administrators to configure SharePoint as well as SQL Server for quick content recovery, minimizing the downtime and providing shorter and achievable Service Level Agreements (SLA’s).

Wednesday 4:20 PM - 5:30 PM · Room 204C

Building a Policy Center with PnP Modern Search

In a modern Intranet, we generally want to store content in the site where it should be managed. We think of this as distributed content management and it's similar to the way News works in modern SharePoint. This usually means each department or organizational unit can manage their content using a process which makes sense for them.

At the same time, we may want to roll up that content in one central location for ease of access. A Policy Center is a great example of this approach and one we find ourselves building for many of our clients.

In this session, you'll see how the following components add up to make a Policy Center:

• Information architecture (IA) in the form of Site Columns and a Content Type to represent a Policy
• A Site Template which only instantiates a Policy library in the site and applies the IA
• A Policy library in each Intranet site, deployed using the Site Template, with Policies specific to that department
• Changes to the search schema to support metadata filtering
• A Policy Center page built using PnP Modern Search Web Parts to display the Policies from across the Intranet

Additionally, we'll discuss various approaches to solve the content management puzzle - before the Policy is even visible on the Intranet.

Wednesday 4:20 PM - 5:30 PM · Room 207A

Microsoft Lists: The Ultimate Guide to Track, Organize, and Collaborate

Microsoft Lists is a powerful app that helps you track information and organize your work with ease. Whether you want to manage your personal tasks or collaborate with your team, Microsoft Lists can help you create customizable lists that suit your needs.

In this session, you will learn how to:

• Access Microsoft Lists from web, desktop, mobile, and Teams
• Sync your lists for offline access
• Sort, filter, and group your list items
• Choose from different views such as Gallery, Calendar, and Board
• Format your views and columns with conditional formatting
• Customize your forms with no-code or low-code solutions
• Integrate your lists with Power Apps and Power Automate
• Set up alerts, rules, and notifications for your lists
• Share your lists with colleagues and control permissions And more!

Join us for this ultimate guide to Microsoft Lists and discover how you can use it efficiently for any scenario.

Thursday 9:00 AM - 10:10 AM · Room 201

Knowledge Management Strategies for Microsoft 365 in the Copilot World

With the deprecation of Viva Topics in February 2025, Microsoft is losing the “hero” application for Knowledge Management in Microsoft 365. But Viva Topics alone was never enough and certainly not the only app in your Knowledge Management toolkit.

In this session, we will discuss strategies for leveraging Microsoft 365 to achieve your KM goals – from both manual and automatic metadata classification in SharePoint to enhance explicit knowledge to AI-assisted tacit knowledge and expertise location experiences with Viva Engage and Answers in Viva to Copilot-assisted knowledge experiences grounded in your organizational content.

You will take away practical strategies for achieving your KM goals and a deeper understanding of how Microsoft 365 and Copilot can help you in your journey.

Thursday 9:00 AM - 10:10 AM · Room 209AB

Metadata & Folders. Better Together.

When you start using SharePoint everyone says, "Don't use folders." If that is true, how do we organize and find the stuff we put into SharePoint? Metadata.

In this session, we will explore what metadata is, how to use it, and how to get our co-workers to use it. Recreate this demo when you get back to the office to win your users over to the metadata side.

This demo works in SharePoint Online and On-Premises.

Key Take Aways:

• What is metadata?
• When to use metadata
• Choices for metadata • When to use folders

Thursday 10:40 AM - 11:50 AM · Room 204C

An end-to-end look at SharePoint Premium Content Processing

SharePoint Premium is a big step forward for Content Services in Microsoft 365 by providing the ability to integrate AI into the flow of work. Unstructured content is being produced at an alarming rate in modern workplaces today and organizations need a way to improve the effectiveness of business processes surrounding it.

SharePoint Premium's content processing capabilities help by automatically classifying content, extracting metadata, improving search, enhancing knowledge sharing, and applying appropriate governance controls. SharePoint Premium is this and so much more!

To demonstrate, Joanne Klein will walk through a live demo of building and training an Unstructured Document Processing model in SharePoint as well as the additional capabilities it provides once classified.

The walkthrough will cover setup, training, deployment, and some of the "extras" you get with SharePoint Premium.

Thursday 1:10 PM - 2:20 PM · Room 208AB

Enhancing Communication and Collaboration through Customized Search Experiences

In SharePoint Online and Microsoft Teams, we are building a flat hierarchy through separate site collections or Teams and creating connections through hub site relationships. This supports organizational change, cleaner permission models, and so much more but can prove challenging when you want to centralize a subset of content across these site collections.

Join us as we explore different approaches for centralizing your content in this modern decentralized world. You will leave with scenarios and best practices for how to structure and deliver content throughout your tenant.

What we'll cover:

• Understanding the hub site structure and search scopes
• Using the content type gallery for consistent information architecture
• Centralizing content through search experiences (including Modern PnP search web part and search verticals)
• Creating intuitive microlearning content (through Learning Pathways or Viva Learning)

Thursday 2:30 PM - 3:40 PM · Room 204C

Modernizing Your Data Retention. Moving Beyond the Created Date

Historically, data retention in an environment has been based mainly on two key pieces of data: when the document was created or when the document was last modified. More recently, retention policies have also been controlled based on the content of the data, but again determining disposition goes back to created or last modified dates.

Perhaps you would like more options for controlling document retention. Maybe basing retention policies for employee documents on when they are no longer with the company, or project documents that are retained based on the project end date make more sense to your organization. In this session, we will illustrate how you can go beyond the basic created or modified dates of data to controlling retention based on events that occur. No longer do you need to be constrained to a few pieces of metadata for determining the data retention policies of your content.

Thursday 4:20 PM - 5:30 PM · Room 207B

I didn't know you could do that with OneDrive!

OneDrive is more than just cloud storage for your files. It’s a smart way to work and collaborate across Microsoft 365. Whether you need to share documents with your team, sync files to your desktop, or protect your work from accidental loss, OneDrive has you covered.

In this engaging and practical session, I will show you how to make the most of OneDrive’s features to boost your productivity and make work easier.

Learn how to:

• Let OneDrive track activity and sharing for you
• Open and save files directly from Word, Excel, PowerPoint, & OneNote
• Manage changes with document version history
• Securely share content with people inside & outside the organization
• Quickly access SharePoint documents and libraries without leaving OneDrive
• Move and copy files quickly and easily with between - OneDrive and SharePoint
• Sync files locally with OneDrive files on-demand
• Share files in Microsoft Teams
• Restore files if they get deleted, overwritten, corrupted, or infected by malware
• Automate repetitive activities with flow And more!

Don’t miss this chance to learn how OneDrive can transform the way you work.

Friday 9:00 AM - 10:10 AM · Room 207A

Understanding Copilot (Part 1): Enhancing Findability and Discoverability with Copilot and Search

In Microsoft 365, efficient information retrieval is critical to do our jobs effectively and there are a variety of ways to support the findability and discoverability of this business-critical content. This session adopts a user-centric approach while exploring specific use cases where Microsoft search and Copilot excel. We will delve into the technical nuances of natural language search and semantic indexes, along with best practices for information architecture. Key Takeaways: Technical Insights: Understand the differences between natural language search and semantic indexes. Effective Search Strategies: Explore when to leverage Copilot and Microsoft search for optimal results.

Join us for Part 1 of this 2-part series, where we discuss empowering users to navigate digital spaces effectively through Copilot and search techniques.

Friday 10:20 AM - 11:30 AM · Room 204AB

Microsoft Purview Compliance – Tales from the Trenches

As more and more of an organization's data is stored within the cloud, controlling the sheer amount of data can be daunting. Administrators and compliance professionals are being called on more and more to support content management to ensure it is protected and maintained throughout its data lifecycle.

Joanne and David have assisted organizations for years and helped many enterprises design and build compliance solutions within Microsoft 365 Purview from the ground up. In this session, they'll discuss critical topics organizations should consider when implementing Records Management and Information Protection controls. They will also cover common pitfalls affecting the organization on its compliance journey.

Friday 12:30 PM - 1:40 PM · Room 202A

Buttons in Microsoft Lists - Logic for Non-devs

In Microsoft Lists, formatting can be done easily, and buttons can be created using a little JSON code. Wouldn't it be nice for end users to be able to click a button on an item in a list, to set a value or run a flow, without even having to open the item or file?

In this session, you will learn how to create simple buttons to click to run a workflow. No menus, no panels, super simple for end users!

Laura Rogers will teach you the logic used in order to assign the action that the button takes, how to set up the button's visual appearance, and its text, and how to create conditional formatting.

Friday 12:30 PM - 1:40 PM · Room 204AB

Using Site Templates to Deploy Consistent Information Architecture

A great information architecture improves many content management scenarios, from search, to business processes, to ease of content tagging and storage.

In this session, we'll look at how Site Templates can be used to create reusable site building blocks rather than focusing on configuring the entire site. By using these specific building blocks together, you can build up your sites to have capabilities you need, in whatever combinations make the most sense for the work at hand.

Friday 12:30 PM - 1:40 PM · Room 209AB

AI in Viva Engage for communications and knowledge management

Discover how AI is being used in Viva Engage, an enterprise social network that connects people across an organization all in one place to enhance communication and knowledge sharing. In this session, you will learn about some of the superpowers of new generative AI technologies, best practices for making the most of them, and how they’re being used to power AI features in Viva Engage. If you’re rolling out Microsoft Copilot in your organization, or will be soon, this session is a must-join as we will also cover the AI-powered adoption support features in Viva Engage– built to support your successful Copilot rollout.