Happy Birthday, Office 365 User Group in Hamburg

Community work is harder in these days when you’re faced with COVID19 and some additional challenges which come along with that. One of the very basic elements, creating a direct and personal exchange with other attendees, is suddenly moved away.
Even more, the lock down in March hit us as consultants with a really big amount of upcoming implementation of Microsoft Teams. This made it really hard for me to keep in touch with our community members here at Office 365 User Group in Hamburg. I didn’t have as much time as I did the previous two years to manage my community relations, but it’s not fair that just because you’re getting locked down and I’m busier than I was, that you don’t get to read about last years community highlights.

So here we go..

What happened in 2020? Let’s talk about some facts…

As most of you know, from time to time I look at that statistics on meetup attendees and the total number of members, as I think this is one of the hard facts you cannot deny when it comes to the question if your community get’s the imformation it needs.

It’s still my personal goal to provide information and networking to make your life in an evergreen IT environment easier, so I still want to give you a good bandwidth of mid-level sessions and talks on what’s in your Microsoft 365 package and how to use it. Attendees are some kind of currency which is paid when your topics match that. So let’s have a closer look at that, first.

  • on August 21th, 2019, we had 387 members. (see last years statistics  for reference). As per today, Office 365 User Group in Hamburg has 570 community members. About 50% increase – I feel like that’s a good improvement.
  • In the last year, we had 49 attendees in average (no show already removed). That is 1 attendee more that last year, so you may say the number of attendees is constantly ‘high’.
    Unfortunately, I noticed that we have a bit more no show (about 10-15 percent) now that our meetups are done online and people are able to review therecording. No Show is highly increased and I think, we need to work on this a lot during the next year.
    49 members means that about 10 percent of the user group joins every meetup. Let me tell you that I’m really proud of you, guys and girls!
  • in our current description on meetup.com, there is still the phrase ‘we meet about every 2 months’. But be did 9 meetups, including us attending Teams Community Day in January 2020 and Global PowerPlatform Bootcamp as the meetup in February, which is even one more than in year 2.

A word about our sponsors

While in times of COVID19 meetups are online meetings using Microsoft Teams, let’s not forget that we heavily rely on sponsors for in-preson event rooms, food and beverage, swag and all the other stuff what is needed to make our community possible.

So this year I’d like to say a big “Thank you” to all of the companies which helped us with that. Namely

  •  EOS Technology Solutions and my co-organizer Andre Schmidt for so much support on rooms and how to make an evening a great event. Can’t express how thankful I am for your support, Andre!
  • Gruner + Jahr GmbH, rooms, food & beverage
  • Otto GmbH & Co KG, rooms,beverage
  • Sopra Steria, Swag & T’s for PowerPlatform Bootcamp 2020
  • Bechtle IT-Systemhaus Hamburg, food & beverage Teams Community Day 2020
  • HanseVision, food & beverage Teams Community Day 2020
  • Code Working Space GmbH in Hamburg, rooms
  • Clemens von Blücher, give-aways
  • The Migration Wizard, meetup fees, food & beverage, support

Community events are made by great speakers and session

Some of you nowadays join for personal exchange on a meetup, one of the key components is sessions to learn about what’s possible.

For that, let me say another really big Thank You to our community speakers. Follow them on Twitter, LinkedIn, Xing & Co.

While an organizers work mainly is about to select a date and time, speakers invest their free time to provide you with free information on tools, procedures and processes to improve your Microsoft 365 implementation. Let me say Thank You! to them:

  • Andreas Schlüter
  • Ragnar Heil
  • Dux Raymond Sy
  • Andre Schmidt
  • Nicole Enders
  • Frauke Hille
  • Christine Frehe
  • Markus Heieck
  • Dennis Winkelmann
  • Thomas Bernharddt
  • Jakob Schäfer
  • Nicki Borell
  • Michael Greth
  • Tom Martens
  • Timo Wege
  • Viktor Baur
  • Django Lohn
  • Daniel Obermann
  • Tomislav Karafilov
  • Stefan Riedel
  • Luise Freese
  • Alexander Klein
  • Benjamin Konrad
  • André Schiemann
  • Martin Gudel

What a line-up!

Credits for the teaser picture

Thanks to Waldemar Brandt @waldemarbrandt67w for sharing their work on Unsplash.

Back to the future

Of course, looking for sponsors is one of the main things whcih will become even harder after covid19, When the first in-person events will ome back.

While I do no feel comfortable with the idea to run an in-person event today for the high number of attendees to expect, I think we will come back with that in later November with some hybrid-style event (in-person and live stream) with a very limited number of attendees at the meetups location. So let me call out: if you think you can provide a location, some food, swag or other types of sponsoring please contact me on Twitter or on LinkedIn.

We are always glad if you can make an offer on rooms, food and beverage.

Yes, we still try to get closer to other Microsoft Cloud-related communities in Hamburg! And I’m still always looking for speakers from tool vendors.

See you soon! Take care!