On Monday, August 27 2018 the 5. Office 365 User Group Hamburg meetup took place. It’s time to do a short review for the meetup and a resumee as well, now that the User Group survived the first year.
One year Office 365 User Group Hamburg
It feels right: more and more people recognize their need for central, application-indipendent helicopter meetup for Office 365 to get some basic information on all the apps they can get from their subscription. Our mission is still to help all those System Engineers and Developers to get linked to the regional community. And, as we have frequent participants from Flensburg to Celle, from Rostock to Bremen, it looks like there is still no competative meetup across Northern Germany with serves as a local alternative for all the commuters.
I can proof the demand just by looking at the attendees count. We initially started the idea with 12 attendees after a discussion on Azure Meetup Hamburg last summer. Today the user group has more than 190 members, still counting, and an average meetup size with 45+ attendees.
In addition, more and more local IT service companies offer their support in sponsering rooms, food and beverage and speakers. For me as a rookie organizer this is a very important component, as we all the time have enough topics to talk about – but people need a date and time, and a location to go to, to join. While saying that, I’m proud to say that we are still independent, if a Micosoft Office 365 community can be named vendor independent :).
Let me say “Thank you” to all of you, supporting the community.
In the next year we will need to improve the User Group. After it turned out that one meetup per quarter is not enough, we already changed the meetup frequency from once in a quarter to every two months. In addition, based on a change in the attendees consistence – we initially started with 90 percent consultants and engineers, but we have an increasing fraction of Office 365 developers today, let’s say 30%. We will try to follow-up that by providing a better mix of development and engineering topics with Office 365.
Please join us in Hamburg. Next meetup is on Monday, October 22th 2018.
Meetup #5
I’m very proud to say that Ragnar Heil joined our 5th meetup: as some of you may remember, once a year ago Ragnar was a former Microsoft employee which pushed this community to start. So now I was very exited about his talk on Working out loud and how this improves cooperation and helps people to be successful.
Next to all the tools he discussed, i.e. Working out loud circles, some tools for Microsoft Teams, OneNote and others, there was a core message: how can we get those employees to share their knowledge and add their value to the companies target when you only listen to them who are loud by default? And at the same time, how can you differ from loud people adding value and them, who only add noise by reposting others announcements?
The other talk of the day was done by me. We did a short wrap-up of the Insider Dev Tour slide decks on Productive Office 365 and Progressive Web Apps. This was preparation for the use-cases where you can use the Teams App Studio, to add web applications to your Microsoft Teams team. During the session we discussed the concept of Store-driven deployment in Windows 10, in Office 365 and in Microsoft Teams as well. I presented some basics of the concept of service workers, and what to think about if a Web App could behave similar to a conventional Win32 or Store app.
Finally, I did a Demo on how to create Web App manifests with Teams App Studio, and how to get the code examples for our UX controls and Chat Bot card code, as far as it is currently available in Teams App Studio
Yesterday, there was a great audience as they went very interactive and engaged, doing all the questions and input of their view on each of boths talk. This is how I like it, where not only the speaker is doing his or her talk to all the people, but also gets some response and – sometimes – a challenge. It shows me that topics are chosen well and the community can add a value, either by adding questions or extracts of their current mindset on use-cases.
Thank you for sponsering and support
At the end of this little article I’d like to say Thank you to the people at thinformatics AG for supporting this meetup with sponsering a room, their presentation equipment and food and beverage. We were proud to be your guest!
Another special Thank you goes to Clemens and Sven for supporting me this time with the opener slot and registration.
Please join us in Hamburg. Next meetup is on Monday, October 22th 2018.