Seattle, WA

Admin/Implementation Track

Monday 9:00 AM - 5:00 PM · Room 604

An Introduction to Microsoft 365 Tenant Administration

Sean McDonough

Sean McDonough

Solutions Architect, Consultant, and Microsoft MVP

So, you were just handed a Microsoft 365 (M365) tenant in the cloud. Congratulations are in order! Now that we’ve dispensed with the pleasantries, you’re probably wondering what the heck you’re supposed to do with that tenant. If so, you’re in luck, as this workshop is designed specifically for you and others who find themselves with the same basic question.

In this workshop, we approach M365 tenant administration from the perspective of someone who now has tenant administration responsibilities without necessarily knowing what that means or encompasses. We’ll spend some time learning the terminology, bounds, and different pieces of tenant administration.

We’ll also investigate how the admin experience is partially coupled to how your organization is licensed. We’ll cover what you need to do to establish your new tenant, and we’ll take a tour of the various admin surfaces available to M365 administrators.

By the end of this workshop, you’ll have a functional understanding of M365 administration and the tools you have available to implement your organization’s cloud vision.

Monday 9:00 AM - 5:00 PM · Room 606

Microsoft 365 Purview: Maintaining and Protecting Your Data Throughout its Lifecycle

David Drever

David Drever

Microsoft 365 MVP - Compliance and M365 Specialist

Joanne Klein

Joanne Klein

Microsoft 365 Independent Consultant

In recent years, the amount of digital content moving to the cloud has been dramatic. No doubt, this has made collaboration easier and more versatile, but it's also brought with it a new set of problems, such as oversharing, exfiltration of data, and non-compliant destruction of data. Organizations like yours must ensure data is available when required and protected when sensitive.

In this workshop, your expert presenters will share their collective knowledge and experience with a deep dive into what Microsoft Purview can do, including coverage of features such as Data Lifecycle Management, Records Management, and Microsoft Information Protection.

But it's not all theory. You'll leave the workshop with their recommended approach for implementation using a Day 1/Day 2/Day 3 incremental model that maintains a balance between the user experience and the necessary protections for your organization.

Now's the time to ensure your data is safe from prying eyes. Don't miss this opportunity to learn from two of the best in the industry on exactly how to make that happen.

Tuesday 9:00 AM - 5:00 PM · Room 606

Microsoft 365 Compliance: Implementing information governance, risk, and compliance management

David Drever

David Drever

Microsoft 365 MVP - Compliance and M365 Specialist

Joanne Klein

Joanne Klein

Microsoft 365 Independent Consultant

Microsoft 365 gives enterprises and government organizations the tools they need in the modern workplace to identify their risky information and to govern their data effectively to meet regulatory compliance needs. These tools help to protect sensitive data from both accidental and malicious data loss, and they protect the organization from risk by ensuring we retain our data appropriately following regulatory controls such as GDPR, NIST, and CIS. Implementing these compliance solutions requires a clear understanding of the capabilities available in the Microsoft cloud and industry best practices for establishing a data governance framework.

In this all-day workshop, David Drever and Joanne Klein will help you learn how to develop a framework for information governance for enterprises and government organizations, including planning a record retention schedule and implementing retention labels/policies. They’ll teach you how to leverage disposition reviews, implement event-based retention, and to apply retention labels to your data automatically. They’ll discuss how utilizing Compliance Manager and Insider Risk Management can further govern your environment. Finally, you will learn how to use eDiscovery to facilitate legal holds and “Freedom of Information and Privacy” (FOIP) requests. Join David and Joanne to discover how to implement data governance and compliance in Microsoft 365!

Tuesday 9:00 AM - 12:30 PM · Room 611

Big Data Analytics in SharePoint and Microsoft 365 with Microsoft Graph Data Connect

Antonio Maio

Antonio Maio

Protiviti - Managing Director & Enterprise Architect

Have you ever worked in a large enterprise-scale SharePoint Online or OneDrive environment with thousands of sites, or millions of files, or thousands of users?

If you have, then you probably understand the challenges with trying to get detailed and timely analytics on your current state, including permissions for all files across all sites, or storage information for all sites and to try and figure out which groups are consuming all your space. Governing large enterprise-scale SharePoint Online and Microsoft 365 environments is a real challenge due to the sheer amount of data you need to reason over.

In this workshop, we'll look at how the Microsoft Graph Data Connect for SharePoint (Project Archimedes) provides some exciting capabilities which will help to get us this data quickly, without getting throttled, and in a form that we can easily report on, across very large enterprise scale environments.

We'll provide a step by step demonstration of how to setup and use Microsoft Graph Data Connect for SharePoint (Project Archimedes), Azure Synapse and Power BI to get access to these data sets quickly and efficiently, without getting throttled, and in a form that we can easily report on across very large enterprise environments.

Tuesday 9:00 AM - 5:00 PM · Room 613:614

Establishing SharePoint Online Admin Rockstar Status

Brian Alderman

Brian Alderman

Former six-year MVP, 28-year MCT, MCSE, Author, Speaker, Consultant

SharePoint Online (SPO) integrates with many services that you need to be familiar with to successfully manage your collaboration content. In this full day workshop, we are going to learn about these different services and how to manage the integration with them by exploring and discussing SharePoint Online best practices for configuring, securing, optimizing, and implementing redundancy.

We will begin by discussing and creating a new Microsoft 365 tenant, followed by exploring how to customize both the M365 and SharePoint administrator dashboards so they only display information related to the Microsoft 365 services and SPO-related components like SharePoint Online and OneDrive.

We will compare, discuss, and explore SharePoint Premium to understand the differences between SharePoint Online and SharePoint Premium and explore the features available in SharePoint Premium including AI integration with SharePoint for content processing, Syntex integration, document portal, content governance, Microsoft backups, Microsoft archives, and SharePoint eSignatures.

We will also explore how to create and assign users to access SharePoint Online as both an end user and as administrators.

Being most scenarios require the migration of content, we will discuss several options for migrating content from many different sources to SharePoint Online and OneDrive using Out-of-Box tools.

Most migrations require at least an interim hybrid configuration, so we will introduce and explore the components that can be configured for a hybrid environment as an interim solution, or as a long-term solution.

We will then roll up our sleeves and explore the configuration of several components of SharePoint Online using both the GUI and PowerShell. These SPO components and configurations include;

Creating, configuring, and managing site collections

Configuring the user profile service (UPS) to ensure your Active Directory data is included in your search index

Exploring several search service configuration options, to ensure your users are able to quickly find the information they need, along with how to access some search-related reports, as well as some suggestions on how to help your users submit better search queries for more accurate search results

Discussing both SharePoint Online and OneDrive configuration options for managing and securing your collaboration content

Create and implementing a structured taxonomy to provide consistent and reliable data in SPO by using published tenant-level content types and managed metadata fields via the term store, as well as other custom column types, that can all be managed by information architects.

As we discuss these topics throughout the day, I’ll be sharing best practices, as well as tips and tricks that every SPO admin should know about while working with SPO.

When you leave the workshop, you’ll have all the skills and best practices to migrate to, configure, manage, and secure SharePoint Online and OneDrive components using the SharePoint Online Admin center, OneDrive admin Center, and PowerShell.

Tuesday 1:30 PM - 5:00 PM · Room 604

Content Management for the AI Era: How to Optimize Your Content for Copilot

Daniel Glenn

Daniel Glenn

Microsoft MVP, Owner and Microsoft 365 Consultant at CollabFront

Content is the lifeblood of every organization. It is how teams collaborate, communicate, and create value. However, managing content effectively can be challenging, especially with the increasing volume and variety of content types. How can you organize, secure, and process your content to maximize its value and prepare it for the next-generation AI assistant, Microsoft 365 Copilot?

Join this workshop where you will learn how to get your content in order, so you can fully leverage the capabilities of Microsoft 365 Copilot. • Discover best practices for organizing your files, folders, and sites in Microsoft 365, ensuring easy access and seamless collaboration. • Prepare your content for Copilot, the AI assistant that transforms productivity by generating high-quality content, insights, and actions from your data. • Perform a security and governance audit to ensure information is not leaked through new AI tools. • Walkthrough integrating Copilot into your daily workflow, unlocking the full potential of AI-driven productivity.

By the end of the workshop, you will be equipped with the knowledge and skills to effectively organize your content within Microsoft 365, enabling you to harness the power of Microsoft AI and revolutionize your work experience.

Tuesday 1:30 PM - 5:00 PM · Room 608

Ultimate guide to administering M365 and Teams

Max Fritz

Max Fritz

Microsoft Product Manager

Michelle Gilbert

Michelle Gilbert

Principal Cloud Solution Architect, M365 Copilot, Microsoft

Are you an admin who's been administering M365 for years? Or are you brand new to the admin role? Either way, there will be something for you in this workshop!

We will be taking a deep look into the administration of M365 and some of its services, with a heavy focus on Teams, using the admin center, PowerShell, Graph, and more. Expect deep explainers on what different switches really do, and practical advice on how to configure things appropriately for your organization.

We will spend time in this workshop setting up automations together and sharing real world examples of how to make your job easier.

Wednesday 9:50 AM - 11:00 AM · Room 611

Mastering IT Documentation: Strategies for Success

Maria Popa

Maria Popa

Product Marketing Specialist - IT Glue

Sara Zorica

Sara Zorica

Senior Solutions Engineer, IT Glue

In the ever-evolving IT landscape, enterprises of every size grapple with a critical challenge: managing and consolidating vast amounts of data, especially within Microsoft environments. Effective IT documentation is more critical than ever. Whether you're overseeing a service desk, managing projects, or handling any critical IT function, intelligent documentation is key to managing IT assets, organizing information and standardizing processes.

Yet, many organizations struggle to develop and maintain documentation that truly supports their operations. This workshop is designed to equip IT professionals with the knowledge and skills needed to master IT documentation and drive success within their organizations. Participants will gain actionable insights to elevate their documentation processes.

This session will cover:

  • Fostering a Documentation Culture: Getting your team onboard with documentation is crucial for its success. We'll share practical techniques for inspiring your team to embrace documentation creation, utilization, and maintenance. You'll learn how to cultivate a culture where documentation is valued and prioritized.
  • Understanding Great Documentation: We'll highlight the characteristics of intelligent IT documentation that make them stand out, including clarity, completeness, and relevance. By understanding the hallmarks of great documentation, you'll be better equipped to elevate your own documentation practices.
  • Creating Process Documentation: We'll guide you through the process of creating comprehensive process documentation strategies, covering essential components such as naming conventions, workflows, templates and more. You’ll learn how to establish a robust documentation framework tailored to your organizational needs.
  • Strategies to quantify and maximize the ROI, productivity and utilization of your Microsoft environments. Discover insights for consolidating siloed Microsoft information to centrally track assets and users, securely access passwords and more.

By the end of the session, participants will be equipped with the knowledge and skills to transform their approach to IT documentation, enabling them to drive efficiency, collaboration, and success within their IT teams and across the organization.

Whether you're a seasoned IT professional or new to the world of documentation, this session offers valuable insights to help you master the art of IT documentation.

Wednesday 9:50 AM - 11:00 AM · Room 613:614

Secure Collaboration in M365 within a Zero Trust Lens

Jay Leask

Jay Leask

Modern Work Architect

Microsoft 365 quickly brings together collaborators across your agency and your partners. That built-in collaboration, however, creates new concerns around tracking who has access across your environment. Organizations must monitor how users interact with data within a Zero Trust Architecture.

When viewed individually, core pillars of Zero Trust, such as network, data, and user, are bound in M365: How is our service secured? How do we protect sensitive data? Which users do we authenticate in our system? However, this approach misses the intersection across Zero Trusts pillars in the collaboration spaces themselves.

In the past years we've talked about Governance, but by not talking about security we are leaving a large hole in the security of our data.

In this presentation, we will discuss the importance of including your Collaboration Workspaces (Teams, SharePoint Site Collections, and Groups) in your security plans and how to leverage native and 3rd party tools to best accomplish this.

Wednesday 11:00 AM - 11:30 AM · Solution Stage

Save IT resources with email signature & branding automation

Ewelina Manka

Ewelina Manka

Sales Manager at CodeTwo

How to set up email signatures for an entire company? Sounds like an easy task: just send a signature template to your users and ask them to add it in their Outlook, mobile devices, etc. Done! Well... not really. In reality, you will end up with just a couple of signatures set up correctly and hours spent by your IT Team to fix the remaining ones. The cycle repeats when your company’s signature needs to be updated. With 120k+ customers worldwide (including Facebook, Samsung or UNICEF) and over 16 years on the market, we know that managing email signatures is actually a huge problem for many organizations.

Emails are still #1 communication channel in business: the average person sends 40 emails per day and spends 28% of their working time on emails. So, having a professional, fully branded email signature across all devices and email apps is also a straightforward way to increase brand awareness.

During this session, we will show you how you can easily automate email signatures and branding in a Microsoft 365 organization with CodeTwo, and unlock new marketing opportunities offered by email signatures. Find out how one person can set up signatures for everyone in your organization within just minutes, saving you both time and resources.

We will also cover the following: • Integrating email signatures with Entra ID (Azure AD) • Setting up different signatures for different teams or email recipients, or for internal and external communication • Delegating emails signature management task non-IT teams like Marketing • Automating email marketing campaigns & customer feedback collection • Central management of automatic replies and out-of-office messages, and more.

Wednesday 11:30 AM - 12:40 PM · Room 608

Bye, Bye Microsoft Syntex, Hello SharePoint Premium!

Daniel Christian

Daniel Christian

Microsoft Business Application MVP

Joanne Klein

Joanne Klein

Microsoft 365 Independent Consultant

At the Microsoft Ignite event in November 2023, Microsoft made the official announcement of transitioning Syntex to SharePoint Premium.

Join Joanne Klein and Daniel Christian, Microsoft MVPs as they walk you through the new SharePoint Premium and all the features that come along with it that can help improve the experience, process and governance of all the content that resides in your SharePoint sites.

Wednesday 1:50 PM - 3:00 PM · Room 602:603

Establish a Data Protection Strategy with Microsoft Purview

Antonio Maio

Antonio Maio

Protiviti - Managing Director & Enterprise Architect

Data Protection is top of mind for all organizations that work with sensitive information. As those organizations move into the Microsoft Cloud and adopt Cloud services faster and faster, establishing a strong data protection strategy is critical to protecting the information that your business runs on and preventing threats from both external attackers and insiders.

Whether you're concerned about unstructured or structured data, risks from accidental or malicious data leaks, external threats, ransomware, external sharing, or any combination of these, having a Data Protection Strategy that protects your data no matter where it lives is a critical part of that strategy.

Microsoft Purview provides robust capabilities for protecting that data, both in the cloud, on-premises or shared externally and understanding those capabilities is an important part of rolling out controls to protect your information.

Join Antonio as he shares important considerations for establishing a Data Protection strategy for your organization and learn how you can use the extensive features of Microsoft Purview to protect your critical business information.

Wednesday 1:50 PM - 3:00 PM · Room 608

Microsoft 365 Groups - The Force That Binds the Universe (of Apps) Together

Joy Apple

Joy Apple

The Joy of SharePoint - Microsoft MVP & Modern Work Strategist

Microsoft 365 Groups are at the heart of modern collaboration and security models. Much like the Force binds the universe together, M365 Groups binds our apps. They provide permissions management and a security service that can simplify managing access to users throughout SharePoint, Teams, Planner, and more.

Let's take a closer look at the power of Microsoft 365 Groups and how they can bring together security, collaboration, and communication. We'll learn how to use the Force... Groups to streamline modern work in the context of Microsoft 365 applications such as Microsoft Teams, SharePoint, and Outlook, as well as how guest management works within a Group.

Wednesday 1:50 PM - 3:00 PM · Room 619:620

Integrating Forms with Teams for Real-time Responses

Brian Alderman

Brian Alderman

Former six-year MVP, 28-year MCT, MCSE, Author, Speaker, Consultant

Do you ever wonder what your Microsoft Team members are thinking or what their thoughts are on a specific topic or initiative? Microsoft Forms is a powerful and versatile tool that allows you to create surveys, quizzes, and polls that can be responded to by your Team members which allows you to view real-time responses from your participants. These results can then be exported to an Excel spreadsheet for additional analysis, and to generate some neat visual charts or graphs using Power BI.

In this session we are going to introduce and discuss the different types of uses for Forms, how to create a form on a Microsoft Teams channel, explore the configuration options for these forms, as well as how to export the results for use in other Microsoft products, like Power BI.

Wednesday 3:40 PM - 4:50 PM · Room 602:603

You Have Sensitive Information. Now Let's Protect It.

David Drever

David Drever

Microsoft 365 MVP - Compliance and M365 Specialist

Every organization has data considered sensitive to their business, employees, or even the industry they exist within. In 2021, nearly 80% of large organizations experienced data breaches that had compromised information. As a result, protecting its data has become a priority for many organizations worldwide. Microsoft provides several tools for identifying sensitive information within the organization and protecting it from being provided to sources that should not have it.

In this session, we'll cover features and processes such as Microsoft Information Protection (MIP), Data Loss Prevention (DLP), and more to help you protect your organization's sensitive information from leaving your control and falling into the hands of those that should not have it.

Wednesday 3:40 PM - 4:50 PM · Room 608

Driving rollout & adoption of Microsoft 365 and Copilot with Microsoft Viva

Heather Cook

Heather Cook

Principal PM, Global Evangelism and Events, M365 Customer Advocacy Group, Microsoft

Karuana Gatimu

Karuana Gatimu

Customer Advocacy Group, Microsoft Teams Engineering

Learn how to use Microsoft Viva to plan, communicate, measure, and support your organization’s rollout of Copilot or other Microsoft services. See Viva in action in this demo-heavy session. Learn real-world strategies, best practices, templates, and prescriptive guidance for an end-to-end campaign to drive adoption and share knowledge about Copilot. Help your organization successfully deploy and harness one of the most powerful productivity tools on the planet.

Wednesday 3:40 PM - 4:50 PM · Room 612

Managing Change in a Microsoft World! Office 365 Governance and Change Management.

Max Fritz

Max Fritz

Microsoft Product Manager

Michelle Gilbert

Michelle Gilbert

Principal Cloud Solution Architect, M365 Copilot, Microsoft

This session will focus on how to best operationalize your Office 365 investment.

We will walk through how to develop a governance board focusing on tenant and service management, define roles and responsibilities, learn how to manage change in a SAAS solution that uses an evergreen service management model, and develop a system of communication to better support your customers.

Thursday 12:00 PM - 12:30 PM · Collab Studio

Building an Intelligence-Driven IT Documentation Framework with IT Glue

Thomas Griffith

Thomas Griffith

Product Owner - IT Glue

In today's rapidly evolving digital landscape, efficient IT documentation is essential for businesses to stay competitive and secure. Discover how intelligence-driven IT documentation becomes a linchpin, enabling IT teams to excel in this transformative journey with critical IT information at their fingertips.

In this Solution Showcase, discover how IT Glue helps over 16,000 partners globally to revolutionize their IT documentation by centralizing and streamlining critical information, enhancing operational efficiency and bolstering security measures.

Join the session and discover how to: • Build intelligent IT documentation using out-of-the-box templates and workflows. • Create relationships between your documentation, so that no matter what information you need, it’s always at your fingertips. • Integrate Intune, Microsoft 365, Active Directory and Entra ID documentation into IT Glue, to track Microsoft assets, users and licenses, in one easy place.

Don't miss this opportunity to elevate your IT documentation and learn how to unlock the full potential of your IT teams.

Thursday 12:40 PM - 1:50 PM · Room 612

Learn How to Govern and Secure Microsoft 365 with SharePoint Advanced Management

Antonio Maio

Antonio Maio

Protiviti - Managing Director & Enterprise Architect

Microsoft SharePoint Premium brings together a set of key capabilities for better governing Microsoft SharePoint Online and OneDrive as well as securing collaboration within Microsoft 365. This is in addition to the Content Ai capabilities that SharePoint Premium has brought to our SharePoint Online environments.

In this session we'll walk through and demonstrate each of the capabilities within SharePoint Advanced Management (SAM) and discuss real-world scenarios where you can restrict access to sensitive sites and content, run data governance reports to gain insight on where your organization may have risk, and look at the advanced features for managing content lifecycle.

We'll also share insights into the licenses needed to take advantage of each feature. Join us to discover the Microsoft SharePoint Premium - SharePoint Advanced Management features.

Thursday 2:00 PM - 3:10 PM · Room 602:603

Exploring Microsoft 365 migration considerations and tools

Brian Alderman

Brian Alderman

Former six-year MVP, 28-year MCT, MCSE, Author, Speaker, Consultant

Congratulations, on your decision to move to Microsoft 365. If your mind is running rampant on how to complete the migration, this session is for you.

We will begin by exploring the steps necessary during the following migration phases • Before the migration • Completing the migration • Managing the cloud-based content after migration

As you can guess, you’re going to need to know what the best approach is to complete the migration, so we will also discuss what your migration options are, and what tools are available, including out of the box tools like the SharePoint Migration Assessment Tool (SMAT), the SharePoint Migration Tool (SPMT), Migration Manager, as well as several other tools to help streamline and successfully complete your migration to Microsoft 365.

Thursday 2:00 PM - 3:10 PM · Room 612

Unlock SharePoint Premium content services by connecting Azure Pay-as-you-go billing

Tom Resing

Tom Resing

Content designer @ Microsoft focused on M365

Microsoft Syntex is evolving into the new SharePoint Premium offering and at the same time, new value in content AI is being unlocked through a first-time billing method for Microsoft 365--pay-as-you-go billing through Azure billing.

Azure billing might be new to some organizations even when they're familiar with Microsoft 365. However, taking the time to understand how and why the two services are connected for SharePoint Premium will help you unlock significant value for your organization.

Tom Resing is a member of the SharePoint Premium product engineering team at Microsoft. Every day, Tom thinks about how we communicate the user value of our content AI services.

Come to this session to get an overview of the how, why, what, when, and where you can get started with the admin steps that allow your users to begin automatically capturing information about files as they are added to SharePoint, including when they're added in conversations in Teams channels.

Thursday 3:50 PM - 5:00 PM · Room 602:603

Microsoft Teams in a Regulated Environment

Max Fritz

Max Fritz

Microsoft Product Manager

Come learn how you can deploy, use, and achieve success with Teams in a regulated environment.

In this session we will show you the strategies and technologies you need to succeed.

You will learn:

  • Governance Strategies
  • Compliance & Records Management
  • Security Options
  • Monitoring & Auditing Capabilities
  • Training and Enablement
Thursday 3:50 PM - 5:00 PM · Room 607

Top 10 best practices every Admin should be doing in M365!

Michelle Gilbert

Michelle Gilbert

Principal Cloud Solution Architect, M365 Copilot, Microsoft

Come and learn the top 10 best practices you should be doing to both manage and secure your environment. Tenant configuration can be a balance of usability and security when planning your roll-out or management model.

These best practices will assist you in improving visibility into M365 and help you understand the necessary controls needed to have in place to ensure your tenant is protected.

Thursday 3:50 PM - 5:00 PM · Room 611

Migrating to Microsoft 365 – Your Guide to a Successful Move

Daniel Glenn

Daniel Glenn

Microsoft MVP, Owner and Microsoft 365 Consultant at CollabFront

Your organization’s content is likely stored in many places, from user’s computers to file shares. However, if your organization wants to take advantage of all the benefits in the cloud, where do you begin when planning your move to Microsoft 365? What are the frequent roadblocks to a migration to Microsoft 365 and how do you adapt your efforts? Do you have to pay for third-party migration software, or can you use out of the box tools?

We will discuss how your organization can take advantage of tools like SharePoint and OneDrive in Microsoft 365, what the process of mapping data looks like, and what are the many options for migrating. We will also examine the process of discovering business processes that will affect your migration.

Using information from real-world projects, you see the common issues that organizations encounter with migrations. You will know the tools you can use, and just how to use them to make your migration a success.

Thursday 3:50 PM - 5:00 PM · Room 615:616

The Project Master Guide: 5 Ways to Manage Projects with Microsoft 365 and Dynamics 365

Geoff Ables

Geoff Ables

Microsoft MVP, Best Selling Author

Managing projects goes beyond just checking off tasks and setting milestones. It's a meticulous (and sometimes maddening) blend of documentation, communication, teamwork, monitoring, and more. Microsoft makes myriad solutions available to aid in this process - but finding and tailoring the right ones to your specific needs can be challenging.

Join us for this lively session as we demystify the diverse range of Microsoft's project management tools. Our deep dive includes:

  • Fundamentals Exposed: Start simple with To-Do and Planner.
  • Progressive PM Tools: Delve into Microsoft Project for the Web and Project Operations.
  • Create a PMO Solution: Integrate Teams, SharePoint, and Hub sites with your selected PM tools for a comprehensive solution.
  • AI in Action: Discover the transformative power of AI in boosting project management outcomes.

There's even more! We'll also guide you through instances where balancing multiple tools is optimal, and times when it's not.

Join our expedition, equipping yourself with the knowledge to lead projects, from the simplest to the most intricate.

Friday 9:00 AM - 10:10 AM · Room 612

Essential Microsoft 365 security features crash course

Karinne Bessette

Karinne Bessette

Technologist, PS @Veeam

Security is top of mind for any business moving to the cloud and even more so for those who had to move out of necessity without a clear action plan. Knowing where to start and what is available can be half the battle.

This session will cover some of the top concepts when it comes to securing and monitoring your Microsoft 365 environment, the best tools to start with, and which admin center you can find them in.

Including but not limited to a look at the Microsoft Purview compliance portal and Microsoft 365 Defender admin center and the osmosis process that has happened since parting ways from what was formally known as the Security and Compliance center.

The best part is that some of these are available in your subscription now at no extra charge!

Friday 10:20 AM - 11:30 AM · Room 608

The Ins and Outs of M365 Backup & Archiving

Jaclynn Hiranaka

Jaclynn Hiranaka

Principal Product Manager

Wayne Ewington

Wayne Ewington

Principal Product Manager

Learn the latest on M365 Backup & Archiving – file level archiving, Teams support for backup, and much more are now available in preview!

Friday 12:30 PM - 1:40 PM · Room 609

Data Lifecycle and Records Management – Tales from the Trenches

David Drever

David Drever

Microsoft 365 MVP - Compliance and M365 Specialist

Joanne Klein

Joanne Klein

Microsoft 365 Independent Consultant

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 record managers are being called on more and more to support content management to ensure it is maintained and destroyed based on required schedules within the business.

David and Joanne have assisted organizations for years and helped many enterprises design and build record management solutions within Microsoft 365 from the ground up.

In this session, they will discuss critical topics organizations should consider when implementing their record management environment. They will also cover common pitfalls affecting the organization as it journeys down the information governance path.

Friday 12:30 PM - 1:40 PM · Room 615:616

How Microsoft Does IT: Governance and Administration in the Era of Copilot

Katia Gomes Cavalcanti

Katia Gomes Cavalcanti

Senior Product Manager, Microsoft

How does Microsoft empower its own employees with guardrails and governance for Microsoft 365 to set ourselves up for success with Copilot for Microsoft 365? How are we dealing with oversharing and sprawl, what can you do today and where are we going?

Friday 1:50 PM - 3:00 PM · Room 604

Data recovery options for SharePoint/OneDrive

Brian Alderman

Brian Alderman

Former six-year MVP, 28-year MCT, MCSE, Author, Speaker, Consultant

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.

We will then compare, discuss, and explore Microsoft Backup, and Microsoft Archive that can be used to perform your own backups for quicker and easier document recovery.

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).

Friday 1:50 PM - 3:00 PM · Room 607

Nailing Down Performance Issues in SharePoint Online Sites (2024 Edition)

Sean McDonough

Sean McDonough

Solutions Architect, Consultant, and Microsoft MVP

SharePoint Online (SPO) has been with us for over a decade, and in that time it has received numerous changes and adjustments intended to optimize performance. Despite the work that has gone into the platform, some organization still find users reporting a poor experience and "bad performance."

In this session, we will look at development and design approaches that will enable SPO to deliver optimal performance when your organization begins using it. We'll review the current state of tooling available for our use (like the Page Diagnostics for SharePoint tool) and how it can be used to guide analysis of performance issues. We will also look at elements in any environment that can negatively impact SPO performance to make it look like the "bad guy" when SPO is actually innocent.

At the conclusion of this session, participants will have the confidence needed to troubleshoot, classify, and possibly resolve performance-based issues in their SPO tenant.

Friday 1:50 PM - 3:00 PM · Room 608

Keeping up with change in Microsoft 365 in the AI Era

Daniel Glenn

Daniel Glenn

Microsoft MVP, Owner and Microsoft 365 Consultant at CollabFront

Every month there are dozens of changes made throughout the services in Microsoft 365. The changes can bring brand new features, but also change aspects on which your business solutions are based.

How do you stay informed about the changes and prepare your environment for all the updates? How can you keep your users up-to-date with the features that are available and manage the process of change? How does Ai and Copilot help (or not)? During this session, we will discuss how IT Pros and collaboration enablers can keep up with all the changes, promote adoption with your users, and help your organization stay focused on what you do best. Real-world examples of how you can manage all the data available to you will be shared. You will leave with the tools you need to be proactive in managing cloud changes in your organization.

Friday 1:50 PM - 3:00 PM · Room 615:616

Viva Underground. An Outcome-based Route to Success with Microsoft Viva

Jay Leask

Jay Leask

Modern Work Architect

Joy Apple

Joy Apple

The Joy of SharePoint - Microsoft MVP & Modern Work Strategist

Have you begun your journey into Microsoft Viva or is the landscape too intimidating? Unsure which tech to deploy first? Consultants have too many opinions on which tool will improve your business?

Join Joy and Jay as they present their Viva Underground: a map of outcome-based paths to Viva success, focused on your business needs.

There is no one "starting place" for Viva, but there are many paths you can take based on your organizational objectives.

Key Takeaways:

  • How to begin defining your Employee Experience priorities
  • How to decide which route to take to help achieve your organizational goals
  • Approaching Microsoft Viva from a people-first perspective

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