Tuesday 9:00 AM - 12:30 PM · Room 435-436

How to Effectively Manage and Govern Your Power Platform Service

In this workshop you will learn how to effectively manage and govern your Power Platform environment with a focus on maintaining control, ensuring compliance, and optimizing resources. This session will cover:

1. Controlling and Monitoring Copilot: Learn best practices for governing AI capabilities like Copilot, ensuring responsible use while enhancing productivity.
2. License and Capacity Management: Understand how to track and allocate licenses, monitor usage, and optimize capacity to meet organizational needs.
3. App and Workflow Creation Control: Explore strategies for managing app and workflow development, enforcing governance policies, and empowering users within boundaries.

This workshop is perfect for administrators, governance leaders, and IT professionals looking to maintain a well-managed and secure Power Platform environment.

Tuesday 9:00 AM - 5:00 PM · Room 443-444

Establishing SharePoint Online Admin Rockstar Status

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 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.

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 431

SharePoint Premium - Implementation

Microsoft advanced content management and experiences - where AI meets content. Whether SharePoint Premium, Microsoft 365 Backup, Microsoft 365 Archive, or SharePoint Embedded, you now have new ways to engage with your most critical content, while managing and protecting it through its lifecycle.

In this half-day workshop, we'll go hands on for configuring billing, model creation, autofill columns, content assembly,

Wednesday 10:20 AM - 11:30 AM · Room 447-448

Getting Started with M365 Copilot

Dive into the future of productivity with this exciting session on Getting Started with M365 Copilot! This is designed to introduce you to the innovative features of Microsoft 365 Copilot, transforming the way you work and collaborate.

In this session, you'll discover how M365 Copilot can assist you in drafting emails, generating reports, and summarizing documents with ease. Learn how Copilot Chat can enhance your communication by providing real-time assistance, answering queries, and offering intelligent suggestions during your conversations.

During this session, you'll: • Explore the key functionalities of M365 Copilot and Copilot Chat. • See live demonstrations of how these tools can streamline your daily tasks. • Gain insights from experts on maximizing your productivity with these features.

Whether you're a seasoned professional or new to Microsoft 365, this session will equip you with the knowledge and skills to leverage these powerful tools effectively. Don't miss out on the opportunity to revolutionize your workflow and boost your efficiency!

Wednesday 11:40 AM - 12:50 PM · Room 442

Managing Insider Risk with Microsoft Purview

Learn how Microsoft Purview Insider Risk Management and Adaptive Protection can effectively manage insider risk by dynamically adjusting security controls based on users' behavior and their data-related activity. I'll showcase the Purview features that work together to safeguard sensitive information and mitigate potential threats from risky users within an organization. To demonstrate, I'll walk thru the practical use-case of a departing employee, the potential data-related risks that are often associated with that, and how Insider Risk Management can help.

In the words of one security leader, ‘If any company thinks they don’t have an insider risk problem, they aren’t paying attention.’

Wednesday 1:30 PM - 1:50 PM · Collab Studio

Save IT resources with email signature & branding automation

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 2:00 PM - 3:10 PM · Room 445-446

Running a High-Performing Service Desk: Structure, Automation and Documentation

A successful service desk depends on the right structure, automation and documentation to ensure efficiency and consistency. This session explores best practices for organizing service desk operations, including queue management, ticket categorization, issue tracking and standardized templates. Attendees will learn how to streamline workflows, reduce inefficiencies and create a scalable support framework that enhances both technician productivity and end-user experience.

Key Takeaways: • How to structure a service desk for efficiency, including queues, ticket categories and issue types. • Best practices for IT documentation to improve knowledge sharing and reduce errors. • The role of automation in enhancing ticket routing, escalation and response times. • Strategies for optimizing workflows to boost technician productivity and service consistency. • How to build a scalable, adaptable service desk that meets evolving IT and business needs.

Thursday 9:50 AM - 10:10 AM · Solution Stage

IT Success Story: How a Small IT Team Cut Ticket Resolution Time in Half With Smart Documentation

Discover how Appalachia Technologies, a managed service provider (MSP) with a small but nimble IT team of just five people, transformed their service delivery approach by embracing a documentation-first mindset. By weaving AI-driven IT documentation into their daily operations, they were able to reduce response and resolution times by 50% and reclaimed over 160 hours annually, utilizing an automated password rotation solution.

In this session, we’ll walk through their real-world playbook, from how they structured their documentation to the habits and workflows that helped drive efficiency, consistency and visibility across the team.

Whether you're just getting started with IT documentation or looking to refine your approach, this session will equip you with practical strategies to optimize efficiency and maximize the impact of documentation in your IT operations.

Thursday 4:00 PM - 5:10 PM · Room 421-422

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 compliance concerns on the rise in the modern workplace, 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 • Understanding what configurations can't (easily) be changed after-the-fact

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

Thursday 4:00 PM - 5:10 PM · Room 432

Deploying M365 to Solve Business Problems

Microsoft 365, including Copilot, Teams, SharePoint, Exchange, and more, offers a full suite of tools to solve business problems. But how do we know we're addressing the right problems? "Ship it and forget it" is no longer viable (if it ever was). We must define successful deployment, ensure solutions truly address business needs, and build trust with stakeholders.

This session will explore:

• Addressing Shadow IT consequences
• IT as a service framework
• Business engagement
• Holistic requirements gathering
• Defining success
• Embracing continuous improvement

Join Joy to learn how a Human First approach can maximize your tech skills and ensure effective M365 deployment.

Thursday 4:00 PM - 5:10 PM · Room 435-436

Enable Secure External Sharing for the Microsoft 365 Administrator

Does the idea of your users sharing content externally keep you up at night? Join Vlad Catrinescu in this demo-filled session to learn what security controls Microsoft 365 and SharePoint Online offer in order to enable users to securely share content in SharePoint, OneDrive, and Microsoft Teams

Thursday 4:00 PM - 5:10 PM · Room 442

Real-World Implementation Experiences of Microsoft Purview

Organizations have invested heavily in recent years in moving to Microsoft 365 to improve productivity and collaboration. With this transition comes incredible opportunities to increase business efficiencies. However, it also brings increased risks as users collaborate more with internal coworkers as well as with external partners and customers. In addition, the continually changing regulatory compliance landscape makes this an ever evolving challenge. Microsoft has provided a robust set of capabilities for mitigating risks and meeting compliance obligations with Microsoft Purview, such as information protection, data loss prevention, records management and eDiscovery. In this session, we'll share real-world experiences implementing Microsoft Purview across different types of organizations. We'll deep dive into many the features of Purview, share real examples and provide actionable guidance to help you leverage Microsoft Purview to mitigate risks and comply with regulations in your organization.

Thursday 4:00 PM - 5:10 PM · Room 445-446

What's all the hype about SharePoint/OneDrive hybrid

Microsoft SharePoint Server on-premises now makes it better, and easier, than ever to integrate with SharePoint Online and OneDrive for Business providing a rich, robust, and powerful collaboration hybrid solution for your organization.

In this session we will learn what SharePoint/OneDrive hybrid is about, as well as why it may be beneficial to your organization. We’ll explore the several hybrid components including Active Directory configurations, search, managed metadata, connectivity services, as well as other hybrid components and their requirements.

In addition, we'll introduce an overview of the configuration steps necessary in both Microsoft 365 and SharePoint Server on-premises for a successful hybrid configuration.

Friday 9:00 AM - 10:10 AM · Room 445-446

Your Magical Microsoft Map of Community, Learning and Training

Join us in the session to learn all that Microsoft has to offer for career development and satisfaction. It's a vibrant, large community with many tools and programs that are free. Let us help you get the most from the resources that exist.

Friday 10:20 AM - 11:30 AM · Room 421-422

Microsoft Purview Compliance – Tales from the Trenches

As more and more of an organization's data is stored within the cloud, controlling the amount of data can be daunting. Administrators and compliance professionals are being called on 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 using Microsoft 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 421-422

Establish a Data Protection Strategy with Microsoft Purview

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.

Friday 12:30 PM - 1:40 PM · Room 437-439

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).

Friday 12:30 PM - 1:40 PM · Room 442

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

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.