Extending Copilot with Copilot Studio

Copilot is where many of Microsoft's new AI features are surfaced to users. Copilot Studio is the focal point for extending the many flavours of Copilots. Learn how Copilot Studio allows low code developers to extend and customise Copilots, and the important differences between Copilot Studio and Azure Open AI Studio.

My Journey to the dark side

An introduction to how the sales process works, and how the sale influences the eventual project from the point of view of somebody who transitioned into sales just as Covid upended the way the world bought and sold.

Securing your plans for World Domination with Microsoft 365

In this talk we're going to look at information security in Microsoft 365 in a fictional case study for an evil supervillain. Just like everybody else, supervillains need to communicate with staff, collaborate with people outside their organisation, and stop information falling into the wrong hands. In this light hearted talk we're going to look at some of the things aspirant supervillains and IT pros can do ensure things go to plan

Speaking and Presenting virtually

We all need to communicate virtually these days. As a speaker I was unhappy with how this was compared to speaking in person so I set out to see if I could improve the process. In the session I'll show how a combination of hardware, software and techniques can vastly improve your virtual presentations. The session is not just aimed at speakers, but anybody who wants to be better at presenting online, which pretty much means all of us.

Lessons from my Journey to the Dark Side

Before a project happens, somebody has to pay for it. Usually that involves a sale. In this talk I'll be talking about what I have learned in my journey from software development to consultancy and sales. Firstly we'll consider and then demolish some stereotypes, talk about why sales is important to technical people and emphasise why everyone is a sales person sometimes before finally talking about dealing with customers.

Intended as fun and informative talk to help developers understand the customer facing side of business

Down the Memory Hole - Using Microsoft 365 labels to manage retention

As more and more information is digitised, managing information becomes ever more critical. Regulations like GDPR and the ever increasing demand for storage mean that 'file and forget' is no longer a viable strategy. Retention labels offer a low effort way to keep the information you need and get rid of what you don't. In the session we will introduce what retention labels are, and cover some common information management scenarios and how to use labels to help solve them.

Ran at 365 Saturday Warsaw and PPUG Leeds previously

Living on Video - The evolution of video in Microsoft 365

After a quick pass through the many lives of video in SharePoint, and the strengths and weaknesses of each iteration, we look at what the complicatedly titled 'Stream (on SharePoint)' can now and can't do for video in SharePoint, as we ask have Microsoft finally got video in SharePoint right?

Hopefully by October, the current wave of features being added to stream should give feature partity to the previous version of Stream classic

Hubsites revisted

SharePoint Hub Sites continue to evolve as a one of the foundational ways of organising intranets. In this session we take a look at what they are, how they can be used, and how to take advantage of the more advanced new features such as nested hub sites.

This is a modernised version of an old talk on hub sites updated to reflect what you can and can't do with the extra complexities of nested hub sites.

I for one would like to welcome our new robotic overlords - an introduction to Power Virtual Agents

Description of Power Virtual agents, in both the Teams and PVA flavours, and interactive demos of including the still in preview generative AI enhancements.

https://forms.office.com/pages/responsepage.aspx?id=YoNWoZ7kPkmZLVHvRzW-U8VRDlIndIhEnDzRbLHJN05UN0JHUU5PTDcyREVKUDIwNFg1QzdDTFVSUi4u

Introduction to Copilot Studio

Copilot studio is the extension and configuration tooling for all the different Copilots provided by Microsoft, and replaces Power Virtual Agents with a far wider suite of capability. Learn what is, how it works and see some examples in action.

Talking about Talking - Public speaking for Developers

Why spoken communication is important and how to be better at it, focusing on practical tips and experience I gained in course of learning how to deliver talks. Covers the why you should do it, how to prepare and structure your talk and how to deal with difficulties.

45 minutes including questions. A version of this was delivered to an internal audience as part of mentoring developers

Real-World Problem Solving with Azure Cognitive Services

This session is aimed at those who are interested in Azure Cognitive Services and how it can be applied to solve real-world problems. Firstly what we mean by Azure Cognitive Services? And how does it relate to the long and sometimes legendary history of what has previously been termed "Artificial Intelligence"? Once past the Terminator and HAL 9000 quotes, we can then examine how cognitive services actually work, and how it is composed of distinct services that each solve particular problems. Then we'll discuss the many services in more detail, and take the time to do some demos of interesting services such as image recognition, sentiment analysis and content moderation and see how they cope (or not) with real-world data.

Delivered many times before in a fun and very interactive way. Not a deeply technical session, but aimed at getting people interested how how cognitive services can be used

Speed through red tape with Office 365 Approvals

Most businesses would like to replace existing paper based processes, but are daunted by the cost and inflexibility of custom development or niche products, especially in today's fast changing world. Building solutions around Office 365 Approvals allows power users and developers to quickly respond to business needs. The talk will demonstrate using various Office 365 components such as Forms, Flow and SharePoint together to streamline and automate common administrative tasks within an organisation. Along the way we'll build solutions to cover typical tasks like onboarding new starters, getting users to read and accept company policy documents, and processing Health and Safety forms.

45 minutes, aimed at a developers and IT professionals with some experience of Office 365

Bringing DevOps to Office 365 deployments

SharePoint has traditionally been much harder to bring a disciplined approach to deployment than it should have, and being able to maintain test and production environments and easily deploy to them was never as easy as everyone else took for granted. At last the tooling seems to have caught up with the need, and Azure DevOps offers the promise of deploying our work in a few clicks. In this talk we'll talk about the lessons we learned in trying to deliver that promise.

45 minutes. Not yet delivered to public audience, but something that there's a great deal of interest in among developers and dev ops professionals trying to bring DevOps practices to Office 365, and I feel I have useful practical lessons to pass on.

SharePoint Hubsites Deep Dive

SharePoint hub site are a relatively new part of the SharePoint online modern user experience. Hub sites offer a way to tie together collections of related modern site with common branding and navigation. Traditionally producing richly featured SharePoint intranets has required either custom coding or the use of an intranet in a box product, but hub sites offer the tantalising prospect of this being ‘out of the box’. The session will explore what hub sites can do for you now, and are likely to do in the near future, and offer guidance based on developing real customer sites based on our own experiences during the first year of hub sites being in General Availability.

Power Apps and Flow

An introduction to the Power Platform and how it brings automation and low/no code solutions to Office 365

Kaizala - Living the mobile first dream

Most organisations have large numbers of staff and contractors who work outside the traditional office. Even in our mobile driven world, reaching these people is a struggle for traditional IT systems. Kaizala aims to change this by putting information into the phones of front line workers, in a way that is mobile first not a mobile enabled version of desktop software. This talk will introduce Kaizala, and it's place within Microsoft 365, how to customise the product and incorporate it into existing business processes. Along the way, we'll be doing plenty of demos which will inspire others to start using it to solve their own business problems.

This is a new talk I'm bring out in Jan 2020. Some of my other sessions use demos including Kaizala, and attendees have been very interested in this, which makes this deserves it's own talk. It will be a standard 50 minute session and aimed at IT pros who are interested in kaizala adoption

Approvals and more in Teams using Adaptive Cards

This session will show how to use Power Automate and Approvals in Teams to improve Office 365 approvals processes and extend messaging in Teams with adaptive cards to present information in a richer, more effective and eye-catching way. After all, if Teams is intended to replace email, aren't we missing something by sending approval emails?

30 minute session, using some ideas first used in the my Office 365 Approvals talk

Securing your plans for World Domination with Office 365

In this talk we're going to look at information security in Office 365 in a fictional case study for an evil supervillain. Just like everybody else, supervillains need to communicate with staff, collaborate with people outside their organisation, and stop information falling into the wrong hands.

45 minutes session length, intended as an introductory talk about how to better secure your organisation's information within Office 365. First session Jan 2020