Join power users, decision makers, developers, and administrators at&nbsp;M365 Twin Cities.&nbsp;M365 Twin Cities is the evolution of SharePoint Saturday Twin Cities, an educational event with sessions delivered by Microsoft platform professionals and MVPs. The event will include a variety of sessions on Microsoft Teams, SharePoint, Power Platform, Microsoft Viva, Azure, and OneDrive.
M365 Twin Cities is a FREE community-run in-person event being held on Friday Sept 6, 2024.

Call for sponsors is OPEN.&nbsp; Sponsor Levels <a href="https://www.m365tc.com/M365TCSponsor2024.docx">https://www.m365tc.com/M365TCS...</a> Sponsor Info Pack - Learn about our market, our event, and more...&nbsp; <a href="https://www.m365tc.com/M365TCSponsorInfo2024.pptx">https://www.m365tc.com/M365TCS...</a> Files and additional information can be found at <a href="https://www.m365tc.com" target="_blank">https://www.m365tc.com</a>&nbsp;&nbsp; Contact: sponsors@M365TC.com

M365 Twin Cities

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Welcome

In this Data Security focused session, we will explore tools that can help your organization safe while using GenAI tools by Microsoft and other vendors.

AI governance in the world of GenAI

Join this session to learn more about the future of work with Microsoft 365 Copilot that can help you work better by unleashing your creativity, unlocking productivity, and upleveling your skills. 

Microsoft 365 Copilot is a new feature that combines the power of large language models (LLMs) with your data in the Microsoft Graph—your calendar, emails, chats, documents, meetings, and more—and the Microsoft 365 apps to turn your words into a powerful productivity tool. It works alongside you, embedded in the Microsoft 365 apps you use every day—Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, Teams, and more—to unleash creativity, unlock productivity, and uplevel skills. Copilot provides real-time intelligent assistance and enables users to enhance their creativity, productivity, and skills. 

M365 Copilot is also a new Teams app experience. It works across the LLM, the Microsoft 365 apps, and your data—your calendar, emails, chats, documents, meetings, and contacts—to do things you’ve never been able to do before. 


Introducing Microsoft 365 Copilot

Unleash the full potential of your data creation process with Power Automate and SharePoint Premium. Say goodbye to manual tasks and hello to automation. Power Automate provides a simple yet powerful interface to create custom workflows that streamline your data creation process. SharePoint Premium, on the other hand, utilizes AI to extract valuable information from unstructured sources and categorize it for you. With these tools working together, you'll see improved accuracy, efficiency, and an overall increase in productivity. Join our session to learn how to upgrade your data creation process today with Power Automate and SharePoint Premium.

Streamline data creation using Power Automate and SharePoint Premium

With so many choices for calendars, it is hard to know which one to use for what. 

In this session, we will explore the calendars offered by M365, when to use them, and how to make the most out of each type. 

Calendars! Calendars! Calendars!

It is important to be able to connect to and use data no matter where it resides. Organizations have been using SharePoint and now Microsoft Lists to empower their users to keep track of business activities like orders, issues, and contacts. Dataverse likewise is gaining traction in organizations as a data repository. Using Power BI, we can utilize that important organizational data to enable data-driven decisions.

In this session, we will start by demonstrating how to easily get started with Microsoft Lists and Dataverse data in Power BI. We will then focus on creating and sharing amazing reports based on those lists and Dataverse. Finally, we will walk through creating Power BI apps to accomplish enterprise sharing.

Bringing Microsoft Lists and Dataverse Data into Power BI for Insights

Are you tired of boring SharePoint sites? Worse yet, is your SharePoint site still the generic starter page layout? SharePoint has been my baby for over 20 years and for 20 years they've been calling my baby ugly. Not anymore! Or, at least they don't have to be but all too often I see no one has taken the time to dress up their sites and make them actually interesting and useful. Let's fix that! In this session we will take that generic site from Zero to Hero using the SharePoint Lookbook as inspiration (and a great cheat cheat!)

You will learn:
- What the SharePoint Lookbook is (and where to find it!)
- How to Use Site Templates
- How to Create Visually Appealing SharePoint Pages
- How to Add and Customize Web Parts
- Tips and Tricks, of course!

By the end of this fun and fabulous hour your co-workers will be saying "WOW! Is this SharePoint?"

WOW! Is this really SharePoint? Take Your Sites from Zero to Hero with the SharePoint Lookbook

If you have ever done some type of communication, this session will help you make sense of where to start, what to use when and how to get your message out.  If you are working on a large-scale campaign to the entire company or sending an update to your project team, there are all types of communications that happen in an organization.  Learn how to create strategies that flow into governance guidelines and use the technology appropriately for the best results.  This session will focus on using your intranet, SharePoint, Viva Engage, Viva Connections, Amplify and Teams as well as how Copilot can interact, and you will walk away with a better sense of where to start. 

Revamp your Communications from Strategy to Technology

Break

Microsoft Copilot is coming... eventually... but what can you do today to create your own Copilot experiences in Microsoft 365?? Join this demo-packed session as Mark Rackley walks you through how to leverage Azure OpenAI today to create custom Copilots without having to worry about your data leaving your tenant. 

Be Your Own Copilot: How to Create your Own Generative AI Assistant

This comprehensive session covers every essential aspect to ensure a smooth implementation of Microsoft Copilot. From selecting champions who will lead the adoption to developing tailored training programs, managing data access and security, and identifying and engaging key stakeholders, we leave no stone unturned. Additionally, we provide effective training and adoption strategies to ensure your team fully embraces Copilot, boosting productivity and efficiency across all departments. 

- Selecting Champions: Identify key individuals who will drive Copilot adoption and usage within your organization.
- Developing Tailored Training Programs: Create customized training sessions to ensure your team is well-prepared and confident in utilizing Copilot's capabilities.
- Managing Data Access and Security: Learn how to protect sensitive information while maximizing Copilot's potential.
Identifying and Engaging Stakeholders: Ensure all key players are on board and supportive of the new technology.
- Effective Training and Adoption Strategies: Implement strategies to ensure your team fully embraces Copilot and leverages it to boost productivity and efficiency across your organization.

As a takeaway, all attendees will receive a workbook to assist in getting your team started with Copilot! Don't miss out on this opportunity to start maximizing the value of Microsoft Copilot within your organization.   

Microsoft Copilot Starter Kit | Practical Guide to Getting Started

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. 


Integrating Forms with Teams for Real-time Responses

In this Session, we will discuss the importance and implementation of Email Authentication and Security.  We will cover SPF, DKIM, DMARC, as well as common email-based threats.  Are you using all of the features Defender for Office 365 offers to protect your users?  

An Admin's Guide to Email Authentication and Security

Are you a Power BI developer? Have you heard about Microsoft Fabric? What are all of these new "Data" experiences - Data Factory, Data Engineering, Data Science, Data Warehousing, oh my and other items such as Data Activator and Real-Time Intelligence? Wow! Where did Power BI go?

In this session we will go under the covers and unravel the Microsoft Fabric to help educate Power BI developers on the new capabilities available and provide some guidance on how to get started and skilled up on using these new experiences which will include Lakehouse, Dataflows Gen2, Data Pipelines, and Direct Lake mode for Power BI.

Come and learn about Microsoft Fabric and looking forward to answering any questions you might have as well as hear your feedback!

Unraveling Microsoft Fabric for the Power BI User

If anything has been learned from the last few years, its how valuable our collective organizational knowledge is and important it is to make sure everyone has access to it, no matter where or when you work. Microsoft introduced a knowledge management strategy many years ago, an though the different technologies are sprinkled across various 365 services, it is still giving organizations an opportunity to leverage these technologies together into a cohesive strategy.

In this session, Virgil will walk you through the various knowledge management components inside Office 365, including Microsoft Search, SharePoint Premium and Microsoft Viva (and others). He will help you see how your organization could leverage these opportunities and start you down the path to knowledge management success.

Building your own 365 knowledge network

Explore the Microsoft 365 suite through the lens of a grassroots nonprofit. In this session, discover how to move past resource constraints by harnessing free technology resources to improve inefficient processes (like contract management), enhance internal communication and collaboration (through intranet development), and increase productivity (with a seamless cross-functional action item tracker). 

We will share practical insights, guiding you through the steps needed to implement these solutions in your environment, and a litany of cost-free resources that can empower your journey using Microsoft 365 to increase your organization's productivity, communication, and collaboration.

Implementing Microsoft 365 for Small Businesses and Nonprofits

Lunch

The art of prompt engineering of M365 Copilot is the skill of creating effective and clear instructions or questions that tell M365 Copilot what you want it to do for you. 

M365 Copilot will then use its large language model to generate a summary based on your prompt. Prompt engineering helps you collaborate with M365 Copilot by following up on your prompts with more questions or feedback, which can help M365 Copilot learn from your preferences and improve its suggestions over time.

If you want to learn more about prompt engineering this session is for you as we will learn the essential ingredients of a prompt and how to properly communicate with semantic index and connect to our data.

The Art of Prompt Engineering in Copilot for M365

As more organizations use Microsoft Teams Voice, they are faced with management challenges and functionality gaps. This session will discuss and demonstrate ways to overcome these obstacles quickly and easily. .
 
- Either Provision and/or de-provision users using templates and workflows or completely automate the process .
- Manage phone numbers and extensions without spreadsheets .
- Enable tier 1 help desk agents to process Teams related work tickets including on and off-boarding .
- Limit certain administrators from some Teams settings using Role Based Access Controls (RBAC) .
- Much more .
 
This is a must attend session for any IT professional currently administering Microsoft Teams for voice. 

Teams Voice Tools: A Strategy for Conquering Common Obstacles

Microsoft Lists have had quite the glow up from the basic days of SharePoint lists. Today, you can plan events, build custom calendars, track inventory, build schedules, and even manage entire projects right from the humble-yet-powerful table-based tool. But how can you and your organization make the most of it?

Join Heidi as she geeks out on a deep-dive adventure into the use cases, proven practices, and success stories of this bastion of team productivity. She'll cover using Lists in Teams, SharePoint, and the Lists app, the nuances between different types of lists for various scenarios, and give a taste of making some beautiful JSON-customized views for your glorious data.

You'll leave this session with tons of ideas for using this included—as in, free!—tool that comes with your Microsoft 365 license, in addition to hearing about all the recently added and new tools and features available in Lists, especially the major upgrade to List forms! This is a session you don't want to miss, so make sure to add it to your... list.

Microsoft Lists: the productivity game changer for everyday people

Connect with community members in a moderated session to share pains, perspectives, and ideas with each other regarding technical skills and keeping up with rapid product change. 
Share your experiences, successes, and failures when it comes to keeping individuals, teams, and organizations up to speed with products and capabilities and making the most of M365 for your business.  

Roundtable Discussion @ Tech Skill Management - Skilling up and Keeping up

Azure Functions is a serverless compute service that enables you to run code on-demand without having to explicitly provision or manage infrastructure. This session will introduce you to Azure Functions, show you how to build and deploy functions that act as web services or timer jobs, and show you how to secure your functions using Entra ID (Azure Active Directory). Familiarity with Entra ID app registration and authentication will be beneficial for attendees of this session.

An Introduction To Development With Azure Functions

Are you deploying M365 to your organization?
Are you migrating from on-prem to M365?
Are you rescuing a failed or stalled M365 deployment?
Are your users just not adopting M365 like they should?

Deploying M365 to your organization can be a daunting task. It’s not as simple as “turn it on and they will use it…”

In our experience, the most important part of an M365 rollout is engaging the business and stakeholders in the planning phase to ensure proper architecture, governance, usage, and ultimately adoption. Learn how to utilize our proven Analysis and Design process to your M365 rollout to engage the appropriate people in your organization. We will discuss in detail how to properly plan your M365 rollout, including:

- Implement a Strategy Team to guide the process
- Utilize key employee Focus Groups to educate, engage, and empower the business stakeholders
- Identify “Killer Features” to accelerate adoption
- Shift M365 from an IT Project to a Business Initiative

This session will focus primarily on the rollout of the M365 Collaboration tools, including Teams, SharePoint, and OneDrive but many of the techniques that we discuss can be used on other M365 tools as well.

How to Strategically and Successfully Deploy M365 to your Organization

In this session, we will delve into the crucial elements of sustaining mental well-being amidst the rapid pace of the tech industry. We'll discuss the factors that impact our mental health at work, pinpoint stress triggers, and develop strategies to manage them. We'll learn to recognize the warning signs of mental health struggles in ourselves and others, and understand the importance of addressing these issues promptly. Together, we'll discover ways to cultivate a supportive work environment and give mental health the attention it deserves.

Ctrl+Alt+Wellness: Prioritizing Mental Health in the Digital Age

🔥 What’s on the Playlist?

Copilot Fundamentals: We’ll kick things off with the basics—think of it as tuning our instruments before the grand symphony. 🎻 We’ll explore Copilot’s DNA, its neural synapses, and how it’s wired to make your life easier. 🤖
Suite Serenade: Copilot isn’t a solo act—it’s the lead guitarist in the Microsoft 365 band! 🎸 We’ll jam through Teams, Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and more. Copilot’s got backstage passes to all the apps, and we’ll show you how it harmonizes across the suite. 🎶
Showtime!: Lights, camera, action! 🎬 Get ready for live demos that’ll leave you saying, “Whoa, did Copilot just read my mind?” We’ll whip up code, craft emails, and even compose poetry (yes, really!). 📝✨

🌟 Why Attend?

Boost Your Creativity: Copilot’s like having a muse that never sleeps. 🌙✨
Supercharge Efficiency: Say goodbye to writer’s block and hello to warp-speed productivity. 🚀
Become an AI Rockstar: Impress your colleagues, your cat, and maybe even your houseplants. 🌿🎤
So grab your virtual backstage pass, and let’s make some Copilot magic! 🎩✨

(This description was created using Copilot)

A Day in the Life with Copilot: [Your Industry] Reimagined

Microsoft 365 (M365) Search is a powerful tool that enables users to find relevant information across their organization’s resources. In this session, we’ll explore how to extend M365 Search to enhance productivity and collaboration. We’ll cover two key aspects: leveraging M365 Search as an enterprise search engine and integrating it with Copilot.
 
Key takeaways from this session will include:
* Understanding the benefits of M365 search for enterprise use.
* Strategies for extending M365 search for enterprise needs.
* Integrating Copilot with M365 search using Microsoft Graph connectors and Copilot Studio

Join us to unlock the full potential of M365 Search and Copilot, empowering your organization with intelligent search capabilities.

Extending Microsoft 365 Search for Enterprise and Copilot Integration

In this presentation, we explore how to enhance security within your Microsoft ecosystem. Learn practical steps to safeguard your data, users, and assets as we embark on a journey toward stronger protection.

From Legacy to Zero Trust:  Modernize your Security Approach

In this fun and informative session, Christian Buckley and Tom Duff will share 20 of their favorite Microsoft 365 productivity tips, with a focus on personal productivity. 

20 Microsoft 365 Productivity Tips

When Microsoft Purview is discussed with organizations, it is usually in the context of Information Protection or Records Management.  Sometimes, both are known as being part of Purview.  But in reality, Microsoft Purview is so much more than just either of these features.  Purview is a suite within the Microsoft 365 platform and provides several services to organizations that understand the power of the toolset.

Join David as he highlights, defines, and describes the many features of Microsoft Purview.  You'll come away with a working knowledge of Purview and it's many parts. 
 He'll explain the intended use of each feature and provide you with the knowledge you need to answer the question, now what?

I've Got Microsoft Purview!... Now What?

Do you ever look at a report to gather insights on your data only to have to go to another platform or application to actually take action on the insights you gained?  This session will introduce you to using Power BI as a data integration and application delivery platform so that you can visualize your data and immediately and easily execute changes, notify key players, and update related data.

Integrate Power Apps into Power BI Reports to Make Your Data Actionable

The introduction of the Approvals Actions in Microsoft Power Automate has simplified the process of creating Approval Workflows. 

In this talk we’ll go beyond the process of building basic parallel or serial approval flows and look at advanced techniques that can be used to take them to the next level. 

We’ll demonstrate solutions for the following:
• Applying custom formatting to the approval email
• Recording approval results and comments
• Setting SharePoint content Approval status
• Forwarding an approval if the approver is out of the office
• Escalating an approval that hasn’t been responded to
• Sending periodic reminders about pending approvals
• Building an approval workflow for an adjustable list of approvers
• Creating an approval that will work for more than 30 days

Building Modern Approvals using Microsoft Power Automate: Advanced Concepts

Join us to learn how you can use Microsoft 365 to foster an inclusive and accessible workplace.
We’ll cover essential features within Microsoft 365 that cater to a wide range of accessibility needs, including tools for visual, auditory, and mobility impairments. Additionally, learn how to use Microsoft 365 tools in an inclusive way to ensure every voice is heard and everyone can participate in the way that works best for them. Tools will include everything from Immersive Reader and Accessibility Checker to Loop and Clipchamp (and maybe even some Copilot!).
You'll walk away with ideas on using these features effectively in your every-day workflows to ensure everyone can fully participate and contribute to your organization’s success.

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Community Days | M365 Twin Cities