If you follow the Message Center – administrative updates for your M365 tenant but available to anyone really – you may have seen a recent announcement about “NEW Microsoft 365 companion apps…”. There’s a lot to unpack here. First detail that caught my attention however was that they are intending to *automatically* install software on your PC – not a shock, but also something I’m not generally a fan of without more information and prior planning – hence this heads-up for folks.

The Roadmap ID for this change isn’t useful at all. But the Message Center post is well done with lots of details, references, and highlights including how to opt-out of automatic installation (without having to use PowerShell!).

So, what’s Microsoft up to this time? Why the push of client-side apps? What aren’t they getting with their cloud-based solutions? Again, there’s lots to unpack but the Message Center highlights give a good overview.

What’s Installed

There are three apps installed: People, File Search, and Calendar. These can be installed manually – as a set, not individually – via the Microsoft 365 companion app installer.

People and File Search are unique enough to find and launch easily. Be aware however that the new Calendar companion app can be confused with the existing (New Outlook) Calendar app.

The old app/icon:

The new companion app/icon:

Functionality of the apps will vary depending on other licensing and configuration, including Copilot in your environment and tenant. An overview of the companion apps can be found here: Microsoft 365 companions apps overview – Microsoft 365 Apps | Microsoft Learn

More to come…

References

• Message Center post
• Roadmap ID “details”
• Microsoft 365 companions apps overview – Microsoft 365 Apps | Microsoft Learn
• Get started with Microsoft 365 companions – Microsoft Support

Notes / News / Thoughts

• How has no one in the Microsoft ecosphere used “On by Default” as a podcast name? (Discord owns the domain name…)
• Microsoft also recently announced (as seen in a post by Jeff Teper on LinkedIn) they are updating icons again… Fluid forms, vibrant colors – Microsoft Design

This commitment to learning shouldn’t come as a surprise, especially in the medical fields. Technology changes. Our collective understanding of health, medicine, and the human body grows. We expect the highest quality, experience, and knowledge from our health care workers. These professionals need to set time aside for ongoing learning. And they do.

What about those of us in the technology and/or business world?

For starters, most of us aren’t taking oaths for our jobs, but I’m still a fan of making ongoing learning a good practice. I don’t have the stats to back it up for this quick article, but I’m pretty confident learning is good for our mental health. I know keeping up with the latest technology is a requirement for many of us in the tech world if we are going to have effective knowledge of technology capabilities and best practices. With so much change happening so fast it’s hard to keep up or even stay ahead of our users and customers sometimes. AI is just the latest hot topic but change in our world is rapid and not slowing any time soon.

As consumers we experiment (or ‘play’ depending on your perspective) with the tools, we read docs and blogs, we listen to podcasts, and attend training and conferences. Sometimes we do it with management support (funding and time), though often on our own dime and time.

What’s your approach?

• Do you listen to podcasts on your way to work?
• Do you read an article a day or have daily micro-learning approaches?
• Do you save up your time and do deeper dive research that might last longer periods every so often?
• Regular training or conferences via your employer? Check out Community Days for local opportunities!

What works? What doesn’t?

Are you only consuming? Or are you sharing your knowledge with others as well?

Without going too deep into potential business reasons here – maybe we need to make sure users know something (disclaimer, etc.) or see something (branding) – we want to have a form that is displayed *before* the new item form. A splash screen.

Before we add the new screen, let’s set up the New, Edit, and Display functionality. Plenty of documentation on how to do this, but we can look at this older (but still valid) Power Apps blog post about it. Once the forms and properties are stitched together, we can add our new pieces. Why do this? We might not want the splash screen for all applications… like when viewing or editing. We’ll stitch it up just for the NewItem for this example.

1. Navigate to your List (SharePoint or Microsoft Lists)
   Note: If you’re building a solution others in your organization will be using, make sure you’re using a list NOT created in “My Lists”. The list should be in a SharePoint site.
2. Customize forms in Power Apps
   
   
3. Configure the SharePointIntegration control as shown in the blog above.
4. Add the new screen. Let’s call it “SplashScreen”
   
   
5. Add some content to it. Maybe a logo image, disclaimer text, or whatever works for you.
6. Add a button to navigate to the actual NewItem form. (OnSelect: Navigate(CreateScreen))
   
   
7. Update the OnNew property of the SharePointIntegration control to not point to the NewItem form, but the new SplashScreen.
   
   Set(SharePointFormMode, "CreateForm"); NewForm(CreateItemForm); Navigate(SplashScreen, ScreenTransition.None)

And there you go. That’s one way to do it. There are other approaches as well. Do what works for you.

Interesting little note:
Back in SharePoint, while you’re on the splash screen, the Save/Cancel functionality – which is sort of a container for the Power App form – still functions as it should. If you try to Save it’ll fail because you haven’t filled in required fields like Title yet…

How it starts

• 32 session slots available (8 rooms, 4 time slots)
  • Of these, we reserve 4 for potential sponsored sessions. These may be freed up for other content as we get closer to the event if we don’t find sponsors to fill them.
  • This leaves 28 session slots for community speaker sessions
  • NOTE: We’ve had more rooms in the past, but this tends to dilute attendance per session. Fewer rooms tend to raise the number of attendees per session which is nice for presenters. Like anything this is a variable we tweak and adjust as we don’t want rooms too crowded either.
• 109 sessions submitted from 53 speakers
  • Yes – a LOT of Copilot/AI topics this time around. We’ll have plenty but there’s still lots of other relevant topics to talk about.
  • We had a notable jump in new speakers submitting – mostly out of town folks that we don’t know personally. I’m curious what drove that… We didn’t change anything that I’m aware of when it comes to Call for Speakers or communications. Interesting.
  • As with every event, we also had a number of “regulars” – friends and colleagues – that didn’t submit, which is disappointing. They each have their reasons. When it’s our fault with scheduling it hurts a bit, but we do our best – scheduling is also tough. It’s a bummer to miss opportunities to host and hang out with friends we’ve made in the community.

Our community is blessed with so many folks full of ideas, with wide varieties of experiences, and with the willingness and skills to share their knowledge with others.

Now, expectation setting… We never get this 100% correct for everyone. We guess who’s going to attend and what they want to hear. We base our decisions on previous events, on what we know about the technology, the topics, the speakers, past attendees, and all sorts of input. But we do our best to balance what we can.

Our panel consists of members of the leadership team. Your event and approach may vary. I’m sure there are other variations and ways to do this – maybe put together a content committee or something along those lines. We tend towards simplicity, so here we are.

Priorities, Variables, and Factors… How it comes together

There are a bunch of things we work towards balancing. We want to invite out-of-town speakers, but we like to favor local folks where we can as well. We want to give new speakers an opportunity to speak while also providing known quality speakers for attendees. Because of these priorities we don’t use the blind selection method (looking at titles and abstracts while hiding speaker names).

We leverage our event tool Sessionize where and how we can, sometimes using their selection/rating system and process, sometimes we tweak the methods. The tool does a wonderful job of collecting submissions and later notifying folks once decisions are made.

When it comes to topics, we try to find a variety of timely and relevant topics that apply to our attendee base. We’ll compare similar looking sessions. We’ll look for sessions that appeal to different roles in the M365 world, different products, etc.

Once we get the number of prospect sessions down to around the number we need, we switch gears and start looking at how those sessions fit into slots in the schedule. If we have too few or too many sessions around a topic or what might turn into a topic “track” then we start to massage the schedule to work as well as we can.

Our event doesn’t usually have a keynote. We’ve got a room for it now (we didn’t for a number of years) but attendees seem to prefer filling the time with as many sessions as possible. Better to have 8 topics to choose from for one of the time slots rather than just one and hope it appeals to most.

Finally, we slot the sessions and review the schedule for topic conflicts, overlaps, if speakers have more than one session (not many) they aren’t scheduled at the same time, etc.

Setting the schedule

We whittled the list down to 29 sessions (1 sponsor and 28 community sessions) with a number of backup sessions from the queue of speakers.

We have 33 speakers – a few sessions include more than one presenter. This means we have to turn down 20 folks. This is one of the hardest parts of the process. So many folks that took some of their valuable time to create sessions, write abstracts, and come up with titles. We don’t have room for them all to present, but we are thankful for them and hope they submit again.

Thoughts…

The concept of a content panel is interesting. It might be something to look at if attendee numbers continue to rise. We could also do some more polling of attendees to see what topics folks are interested to either verify our assumptions or give us more data to work with.

We get a step closer to the event…

The premise of their episode title and some of the take-aways that struck Andrew and Julie were:

• “Power Platform is still king” – Julie’s observation while working the Ask the Experts table/panel and seeing the line – the demand – for Power Platform Q&A.
• “The number of people that think that the way to build something custom on M365 – that your only option is Power Platform.” – Andrew’s observation after Seattle’s TechCon event.

I don’t necessarily disagree with these observations. Many folks that have dug into the Power Platform are invested… Power Apps and Power Automate have become their “hammer”, their tools of choice, their platform of preference and bias – both the community and marketing Microsoft has built around these tools does little to discourage that thinking.

Awareness

I don’t know if folks aren’t aware of other methods to customize M365, or if they simply aren’t driven to find or investigate other options. For many of these folks – folks in the Power Platform’s target audience – “development”, “pro-code”, etc. is a no-go. Many are business users that have little interest in becoming developers and shy away from conversations about actual coding.

As for me, while I focus on a range between out-of-box capabilities for power users of M365 through Power Apps makers, I try to include the full range of options available for folks in the conversation: from out of box capabilities, to tools like Power Platform that extend traditional platform capabilities, to pro-dev customizations. 3rd party products also figure in the mix and also change at a rate challenging to keep up with.

Power Platform is accessible

I’m not sure “accessible” is the right word… but for many M365 users the step up to Power Apps and Power Automate is a lot more approachable, achievable, reachable, and viable than stepping into the “pro-dev” development world. Mostly from a skills perspective. They can start experimenting with *some* Power Apps and Flows with very little effort and see results. Now, I understand that getting bigger results with Power Platform requires an investment of time and effort to do more advanced things. If someone were to compare efforts at becoming a high-level Power App maker with the effort to become an effective pro-developer resource… I’m not sure what that might look like. I am confident that most Power Apps folks would still choose Power Apps. Digging into the reasons for that would be interesting…

For a lot of folks, there’s a bit of disillusionment with IT and development. Developers are almost always overworked and have huge backlogs of work (new or maintenance) to keep them busy – making new requests hard to deliver on a timely basis. With that, lots of folks see opportunity with Power Apps as a way to get what they need from a business standpoint more quickly and easily.

Yes, those of us on the IT side know choosing that path comes with a price. But folks trying to get their jobs done will still do it and deal with the “other stuff” later. Often with the blessing of their (non-IT) managers.

Some organizations don’t have developers available in-house, so they need to engage with consultants – which cost money. These (usually) small to medium (“SMB”) organizations often resort to seeing how much they can get done with the tools and licensing they have available – which leads them to the Power Platform.

“Not Enterprise-Ready”

Most of the folks I work with are at the intro-level of Power Apps, where I’m making folks aware of what’s available within existing M365 licensing. While I’ve seen some larger implementations, I don’t (IMO) have enough experience there to say where the Power Platform may falter in enterprise-level implementations – specifically when it comes to the limitations of the platforms.

What I do know is that there is plenty of room for error in governance – both in planning and implementation. Most every pro-dev shop will enforce some level of application lifecycle management – or “ALM”. In short, this means they develop in an environment separate from the production data and functionality. While there are ways to implement ALM features with the Power Platform, it would be interesting to see stats on how many orgs that use Power Apps and flows are implementing ALM. Without ALM, they’re introducing risk to their environments. Risk to data. Risk to processes that can grow into business-critical levels. And more.

There are more Power Platform for M365 is “not ready” topics, but ALM is one of them.
I’d quickly add data to that list… where you choose to manage your data is important as solutions grow. Microsoft Lists and SharePoint Lists (the same thing) are wonderful tools for business users but have limitations and cede to Dataverse or SQL as they need to scale over time.

Final Thoughts… for now

*Some* of the perceptions above are biased by the conference’s target audience. I think we’ve been seeing fewer Developer attendees and more Power Platform folks.

Power Apps have their place in the maker/development/customization space. What role it plays, where triggers exist for review, migration, or other will vary from organization to organization. In an ideal world Power Platform tools are introduced to an environment in partnership with Pro-devs. ALM for Power Apps and flows are modeled on Pro-dev processes, and more.

I think Power Apps are a great way to extend List functionality – both with forms and data presentation.

I think it’d be great to see some Pro-Dev comparisons to each of the tools in the Power Platform space. Come up with some common scenarios where Power Apps, Flows, BI or other are implemented and discuss the efforts and capabilities of either approach…

It’s also important to get the “there are multiple approaches to customizations” conversation to decision makers – often the folks NOT at conferences. (generalization, not the rule…)

There are a lot of threads here that could be pulled… Lots to talk about. And lots of “it depends”.

… and we haven’t even touched how/where the D365 community differs from the M365 community and Power Platform’s piece of that conversation…

A few years ago, I posted thoughts around the subject from the perspective of the event we run locally in Minnesota: Original Building a Team post.

Not a lot has changed on our event team, but let’s switch things around a bit and focus more on typical tasks for each event. How you choose to define roles around those tasks changes from organization to organization and depends on the skills and interests of the folks you assemble. 

My #1 recommendation is still: Don’t go it alone.

*Could* you do everything? Maybe, but it’s not fun or good for your mental health. Start with the basics. Find a crew of peers, coworkers, like-minded community members, whatever it takes to get rolling (it may take a few event iterations to get the right mix). Early events don’t need to be super polished productions; they just need to deliver content to folks. 

Then take a peek at the Organizer’s Checklist (will add link when available… MGCI site migration in progress…), work through a list of tasks and see if you have the folks to do what needs doing and evolve your team as needed. It’s an opportunity to do and try new things. You don’t need to be experts. It’s a great time to stretch and grow. 

Consult with MGCI Regional Leads or other event organizers to figure out how to start lean… what you can skip, where you can get away with less… Then build from there. 

Also keep in mind that tasks could be grouped by *when* they happen as well. You’ll have a significant set of tasks before the event – planning and preparing. You’ll obviously have specific things happening the day-of your event. And there will be a number of follow-up tasks (Don’t drop the ball on these…) 

With that, here are roles, tasks, and (maybe rambling…) commentary: 
Note: As we mentioned during the office hours, the following list is neither fully comprehensive nor are all the tasks required for every event.  

• Sponsor coordination – Activities related to funding the event via sponsors.
  • Determine sponsorship levels/packages, pricing, and what’s included. – Don’t do this in a vacuum.
    • Get an understanding of what other groups are charging and providing.
    • Talk to prospects and partners to find out what they need or want from partnering with you as a sponsor.
  • There’s a sales component to the role as you are selling sponsorships.
    • Lots of angles on how to build the network – as someone already in the community with connections or finding ways to build new connections.
  • Work with communications folks on getting the word out, email blasts, etc.
  • Before, during, and after the event you or others will need to tend to the sponsor relationships and needs to make their experience successful.
  • Follow up post-event. Might be via email, conversations, and/or surveys. It’s important to thank sponsors as well as find out what worked, what didn’t, what could be done to improve, and how sponsors feel about the value they got from the experience.
• Speaker coordination – Activities related to finding and organizing speakers and the sessions they’ll deliver.
  • Manages the Call for speakers
    • Familiarity with call for speaker tools like Sessionize or Run.events.
  • Communications to prospects, folks accepted as speakers, and those that were not picked.
  • Before, during, and after the event you or others will need to tend to speaker relationships to enable them to be successful delivering their content.
    • If you are including and encouraging new speakers, someone will need to spend time with them as mentors. This can be the coordinator, peer speakers, or other community folks that want to help. (e.g. We have a local Power Point MVP that is a great resource…)
  • Follow-up post event for feedback.
  • Coordinate and manage speaker gifts. Effort here varies with how many speakers you have and what you’re doing for a gift, if it needs to be personalized, etc.
• Web and content management. This could be one person or several as there are a number of possible end points and tools to use.
  • Sessionize and Run.events – These have a lot of speaker management but aren’t limited to speakers and sessions. Throughout the course of the event a number of things need to be set up, maintained, or cleaned up after the event.
  • Community Days – Initial request and configuration, integration with other tools, content updates, and more.
  • Event site – If you have a separate website used “off-season” there will be updates throughout the process – keeping information consistent with other platforms and with link updates.
  • Social media – These might fall under a social media, marketing, or communications role but needs to be maintained throughout prep, day-of, and post event.
    • There will be specific bursts of activity here: Event announcement and launch, as the event approaches, communications during the event, and timely follow-up (availability of slides/recordings, follow-up surveys, etc.)
• Food coordination – It might be as easy as snacks and as complicated as multiple meals throughout the day… The following could be delegated to different folks as needed.
  • Some venues require working with on-site food providers. This requires selecting menus, quantities, timing, etc.
  • Could require providing information to attendees on where to find food on-site or nearby.
  • If bringing food on-site the effort requires transportation and timing preparations. As attendee numbers go up, make sure your vendor can meet expectations.
  • Coordinate need for food helpers (might work with a volunteer coordinator) to direct attendees, manage special meals, set up, clean up, and more.
  • Speaker dinners – Locate a venue. May need to set menu choices, arrange drink tickets, understand spend minimums, arrange payments and tips, etc.
• Venue coordination – Works with venue contacts (event coordinator, IT, food service, security, etc.) as you consider venues and work through the details to pull off a successful event at their venue.
  • Manage contracts, insurance, and payments.
  • Manage rooms and room sizes.
  • Understand what facilities are included (how many tables and chairs, AV equipment, etc.), require extra payments (table covers, etc.)
  • Day-of (or prep time the night before) activities might include setting up signage, room prep, cleanup, etc. and can be delegated to other volunteers
• Session / Speaker selection – This is usually a group. There are lots of interesting directions this could go (attendee/community “board” input would be intriguing but might be touchy too).
  • In many cases, a group of folks on the event organizing team
  • Speaker coordinator organizes and delivers submitted session abstracts
  • Decide if you’re making choices with/without knowing who the speakers are to avoid bias
• Volunteer coordination. – Find them, schedule them, assign them, manage them.
  • Work with leadership team to determine staffing needs and requirements
  • Good single point of contact for organizers when they need help with something
• Project manager (optional – usually one of board/leaders)
• Communication (promotion and engagement), Marketing, branding, graphic design – could be multiple people and tasks could be broken out…
  • Develop a brand
  • Create logos and graphics that will be used for social media, signage, stickers, etc.
  • Work with/as communications folks
  • Can you tell this isn’t my area of expertise? Connect with Emily Mancini and her Community Day Miami crew!
• Organization
  • Finances / budget – Make sure you’re working within the $$ you’re able to raise! Keep track of where you’re spending so you can adjust where needed for future events.
  • Legal, non-profit, contracts –
    • You’ll likely need a business entity (non-profit or not) to manage money
    • If you want to create a non-profit organization, you’ll need some legal work done
    • There will be ongoing needs to work with contracts (venues, food vendors, and more…)
• Event Volunteers
  • Registration – Staff the desk. All day(?) Be engaging with attendees, collect info from unregistered folks, and be helpful!
  • Signage – How to get to the space. Get around the space. Identify rooms and room schedules
  • Day-of helpers/pointers (“where is…”)
  • Room helper – A/V, logistics
  • Assemble bags/registration packets
  • Set up help – other
  • Room counters – count attendees in each room during each time block
  • Timers – check rooms at end of session time to cue speakers as needed to wrap it up and stay on schedule…
• Gifts buyer
  • attendee giveaways (keep folks around until end of day)
  • Speaker gifts
  • May also corral vendor/sponsor giveaways
• Swag tasks:
  • Source items (4imprint, etc.)
  • Work with your designer for any graphics required
  • Purchase/order
  • Verify
  • Distribute
• “SharePint” (Happy Hour) organizer (VERY optional) – Where? When? Do you have a sponsor or funding to provide a round? Be aware of liability issues… Our event/community hasn’t done one in a while but as we’ve to Friday events maybe we need to revisit the concept.

Take-aways from the Teams meeting conversation: I will be changing my role title to “Event Instigator”.

Hope you found something useful in there. Let me know what you think!

“Complex and feature-rich tools…”

It’s a phrase I saw in a LinkedIn article not long ago that resonated with me as a concise way to convey two connected issues that we see users and organizations facing with enterprise software these days.

• Product complexity – Leads to users not finding functionality they want intuitively in the interface.
• Knowledge gaps – The larger the feature portfolio, the tougher it is for users to master the skills needed for their role or specific activities.

Now, complex and feature-rich tools are a good thing, right? They’re filled with so much promise. As new features are added and software grows, at some point these products can get more difficult for users to use – and more challenging to meet those ROI expectations. Not to mention the added twist we have now with cloud-based applications and the speed at which they change. It’s a moving target to get up to speed and stay up to date with features and our ability to leverage them.

While the article linked above talked about both business value and usage with HubSpot, the issues absolutely apply to Microsoft’s M365, Power Platform, and other enterprise platforms like Workday, ServiceNow, etc. as well. In-house custom applications aren’t immune either. In fact, custom solutions might be more challenged because they don’t have a level of support, documentation, or training that commercial products (should) have.

To make the problem worse, the biggest group of users are typically business users whose main priority isn’t learning software but is actually running the business.

“Does the product do this?”

The problems listed above are obviously related. As features are added, removed, or changed – training materials and resources need to keep up and users need time to consume them. But the changes keep coming, so it’s a never-ending effort. You end up with users at all levels and roles not aware of capabilities that could be impactful for them.

How do you address a large and complex set of features?
Maintain, or subscribe to, a definitive list of platform features, activities, skills, and capabilities. Sounds like it should be easy, but it’s usually not. Between the size and complexity of platforms these days and the rate of change, it’s difficult for folks to know what’s available, what’s not, what’s changing, etc.

How do you address knowledge gaps? How do users know what they don’t know?

• Use assessments – *not* exams – to figure out where the gaps are. It’s not a pass/fail situation. It’s a non-punitive metric of what you have awareness of and what you don’t so you can put focus on the gaps when and if you need to.
• Provide resources, training, champions, examples, and all the traditional materials for users to skill up when, where, and how they prefer to learn.

So, we do our best. If we have a platform team (or whatever it’s called in your organization) they can be responsible – as their job – for knowing the tool inside and out and understanding how the organization leverages the tool. They either create or work with a training department to create or source training and reference material. We utilize change management policies to deliver timely communication about changes coming, and the people/roles that are affected.

If you don’t have a platform team, there might be an IT generalist on the tech side or user “champions” on the business side that do their best to keep up with features and capabilities.

Prevention – Governance

Training, resources, change management… you name it. Get ahead of knowledge gaps by preparing materials and training sessions before introducing tools – when you can. But there’s still work to do after deployment.

Build and maintain training and other resources so you can leverage them throughout the lifecycle of the product or application. Maintaining resources is key for new users to an organization and folks that skill-up over time.

No plan, implementation, or organization is perfect though. There will always be gaps. There will always be new folks coming to the organization or to new roles and positions. The best we can do is set the environment and systems up as best we can with the staff, tools, and funding we have available.

3rd party tools and services might also be part of the mix. That list of features, skills, etc. mentioned above? Let someone else manage the definitive list. Focus your organization on the training materials needed for your situation. There are also tools like VisualSP that enable in-app, just in time learning for users. There are options. Find what works for your users.

Artificial Intelligence

AI is certainly going to help with issues like this as well. As product owners add AI chat interfaces, users will have more ways to search or ask for what they are looking for and have better results than previous “help” interfaces were able to support.

Set users up for success

This is the same message product owners, consultants, trainers, etc. have been preaching for years. Establish a location for users (not just “end users” but all roles) can come to find the info they need within your org. It might be called a “Center of Excellence”. It might be something you build, or a collection of tools, services, etc. you cobble together. You can start with common community-built knowledge, links, etc. and then curate or build organizational-specific knowledge, experiences, learning links, and more.

Finally, build momentum. With more folks using the software and platforms successfully, there will be more opportunities to share what they’re doing and how they’re doing it. Raise that collective awareness and skill level.

It’s not a loss that’s likely to be celebrated by a mock funeral at a Microsoft conference… (see InfoPath, etc.)

Many will applaud the shift – for whatever personal, political, or other reason they may have. Personally, I’m bummed – mostly at the loss of interaction, touch points, and availability of connecting with folks. I don’t think there’s been a better platform for *anyone* to connect with anyone and I don’t know of any other platform that’s doing it as well or better than Twitter did.

It was free. It was simple. For the most part if someone was on the platform, you could reach them. And in our community, many/most of us would respond when someone pinged us. It was a great tool that augmented conference engagement. If you attended, you could connect with speakers. If you weren’t attending a particular conference, you could “ride along” with the happenings by watching the feed. It was great for generating momentum and getting feedback without waiting for the follow-up posts.

Sarah, Antonio, and Mike recently touched on this as a part of their most recent M365 Voice podcast – Episode 127 – How to engage with M365 Community Members. I suppose this post is somewhat of a response to their conversation…

A considerable part of the audience, influencer, and community within the Microsoft technical community rejected the platform as a way to reject Musk and the combined “big tech” group behind social platforms. But it’s also not the only reason. Times are changing.

Content Overload

As consumers of content and media, we’re faced with an increasingly overwhelming amount of information, signals, notifications – being shoved down our throats – all the time – fighting for our attention. As noted by a few comments in the podcast mentioned above, many platforms are trying hard to push notifications – even fun ones like Bird Buddy (non-technical aside… ) But we only have so much bandwidth, time, and attention.

There’s already been considerable pushback on overload and it’s likely to continue – which is good. Less “noise” is better for our mental health, our family time, our focus time, and more…

We’ll likely see more curation of content brought to us via AI solutions, agents, or whatever we need to narrow the stream and get the content we need while filtering out what we don’t.

Our community, however, has conflicting forces. On one hand we want to manage the noise and limit inputs, while on the other hand we have consistently increasing complexity. What used to be “just” SharePoint, is now a full suite of M365 applications, integrations, capabilities, and functionality that’s grown in both scope and depth.

A recent LinkedIn post by Ali Schwanke called out how “complex and feature-rich tools” challenges us with keeping up our skills and awareness. While her article referred to HubSpot, the issue absolutely applies in the M365 community as well.

What’s Next?

Where are you connecting with community? Do you feel a need to connect? Can you find the information you’re looking for with the platforms we have available?

For now, Microsoft and its leadership are still posting to X. They’ll continue to post on channels as long as it’s useful to reach their audiences. As the audience, we’ll keep trying to find balance between platforms and finding the information we need to best do our jobs and serve the community.

References / Links

Microsoft 365 Voice

It is, I think.

It’s easy for those of us in a community-building… community to get wrapped up in the numbers. Driving attendance, having larger gatherings, adding new people, etc. But it’s also important to remember some basics:

• Meeting with “the usual folks”, the old-timers, the established group is a good thing too. We still need relationship-building time. Time to catch up and recharge for when we need to be on our A-game with larger groups and meeting new people.
• Meeting with smaller groups allows some of us to have deeper conversations. Having a large gathering can sometimes take away from that.

Would I love to have new folks attend our #CoffeeCrew meetups? Absolutely. Would I love to have larger turnouts? That’d be great!

This morning someone asked if I’d ever scheduled one where no one showed up. I don’t think so, but I have had at least one where only one person showed up – and we had a great chat. I figure if no one shows for one of these – I’m still enjoying time out of the house (my usual work location) getting some food and caffeine and catching up on work or whatever is on the agenda for the day.

So, for now, we’ll keep carrying on. I hope you’ll join the conversation.

Note: Next month we’re aiming for Angel Food Bakery in St. Louis Park – per request. Apparently, the Halloween treats are superb. As soon as I find an alternative to Facebook events, I’ll get that scheduled and posted.

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