A few of us from Kiefer Consulting attended the M365 Conference in Las Vegas (April 5-April 7). The conference featured an all-star lineup of speakers. Many of the speakers work for Microsoft and I’ve been fortunate to have heard them speak in the past at SharePoint Saturday events. It was great to see so many familiar faces and learn more about the investments that Microsoft is making in Microsoft 365.
In this blog, I share the highlights as well as pages from my notebook. Enjoy!
Highlights:
Work Trend Index
Microsoft has been conducting research to better understand trends in the workplace. We wrote about the Work Trend Index back in October of 2021. Over the course of the conference, several speakers referenced the research that is being conducted by Microsoft. I highly recommend that leaders take a look at Microsoft’s findings. This research is important as organizations seek to better understand how people work, what is important to workers and how to best attract and retain workers.
Power Platform
Microsoft is fully invested in the Power Platform (Power BI, Power Automate, Power Apps, and Virtual Agents). While these apps were built for citizen developers and are marketed as “low-code”, organizations may find that they need help getting started. Business transformation requires a culture shift. Kiefer has experience in helping clients improve and and optimize processes. Our team of consultants can help you in leveraging Power Platform to streamline business processes.
Microsoft Viva
Viva Topics, Viva Insights, Viva Learning, and Viva Connections are all focused on improving the employee experience, delivering the right content and information at the right time. The coolest thing about Viva is that it meets the employee where they are and empowers the workforce. Viva provides organization’s the opportunity to improve employee enhancement.
The Sessions:
I attended the daily keynote and attended sessions on Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday. There were so many sessions, on several occasions I had a hard time picking one. I tried to find a good mix of topics and talked with my colleauges about the sessions they intended to attend to ensure we were getting the most out of the conference. Everyday, the 4 Kiefer employees in our group attended 5 sessions a day and a keynote, so needless to say, we learned a lot!
Viva Connections – Deployment and Enablement Success
Creating incredible experiences for employees is a mission for many organizations. This session focused on the pre-requisites to make that experience and mission a reality. In this session, Liz Sundet covered all aspects of deploying Viva Connections from building out a home site to deployment in Teams. She also talked about change management, user adoption and communications to end users that make the implementation of Viva a success.
Microsoft Community Initiatives Roundtable
I enjoyed this roundtable session which allowed partners to offer feedback on the Microsoft 365 Community Initiative. This informal session offered an opportunity to meet the Steering Committee and informally discuss community leadership and events.
Discover Which Microsoft 365 Search Tools Are Right For You
Let’s face it, as humans we spend a lot of our day searching for things—our wallet, our keys, our inspiration. The reality is we’re spending a lot of time searching for stuff at the ‘office’ too. Employees encounter challenges daily, and they must find the content and information they need to get their job done quickly and easily. According to a study by IDC, data professionals spend 22.2% of their workweek just searching for information.
Do you want to give your employees 22% of their day back?
This session focused on how to utilize Microsoft search tools to empower users and increase productivity. The session covered the following:
- Understanding Microsoft search, and why should you be using it
- Seeing how Microsoft Search compares to SharePoint Search and Teams Search, and understand how Graph plays into all this
- Learning how to configure Microsoft Search with out-of-the-box customizations to effectively present the vital information your employees need
- Real examples of search customization options so you can see how you to take search up a notch at your organization
Using SharePoint Pages and News for Internal Communication
This session focused on what’s new for SharePoint pages and news, including integrations inside Teams. Mark Kashman demonstrated how you can get the full power of SharePoint right inside of Teams and without leaving Teams. Pages and news can transform your internal communication to effectively communicate with peers or the entire organization. This session also highlighted how SharePoint makes internal content more discoverable, more targeted, more accessible and, indeed, more delightful for everyone who needs it.
Change How You Work With Microsoft Loop
In this session, Hugo and David demonstrated how you can change the way you work by leveraging the latest collaboration technologies from Microsoft.
The 2 shared the latest from Microsoft Loop, and discussed how Outlook, SharePoint, Teams, viva, and Mesh fit in the whole picture. The session also highlighted how to prepare an organization to adapt to a whole new way of working.
The conference was an excellent overview of what is new with Microsoft and was great for both the technical and non-technical audience. If you are thinking about attending one of these conferences, I recommend it!