Community, Office365, Teams

#TeamsCommunityDay at Office 365 User Group in Hamburg, DE

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Teams Community Day is an event driven by many Microsoft 365-based User Groups all across the DACH region in Europe. Typically it takes place in the format of a standard meetup during an evening in a work week.
In 2020, besides a locally organized program of sessions on using and improving your Microsoft Teams experience, they had a live keynote and endnote for envisioning the attendees at the start and a lessons learned and call to action at the end of the event.
Learn more about the Teams Community Day initiative at their website.

Organisation and setup

Like any other conference, an event like Teams Community Day needs to be organized a few months in front of the event.

For me, it all started with a post by Raphael Koellner at the Office 365 User Group Facebook community somewhere back in September/October 2019. In this post he asked the Teams Day organizers from 2018, if there is an interest for running another  Teams Day.

Said and done, some organizers then replied him straight away and from what I remember Raphael added me to the organizers Microsoft Teams Team at the end of October, 2019. At this point, they started with 7 members while at the end the organizer team grew up to 35 members in total for 13 locations – organizers from local Office 365 and Microsoft Teams user groups, some sponsors and more supporters for user groups.

At that point in time, it was all about choosing a date and a list of cities where Teams Community day could take place. It figured out that the end of January 2020 was a good time and while we already choose a name “day”, and indeed there was some discussion on running it as a whole-day event, it figured out that running the event on a evening time slot would be best.

Ah yes, and it was about event marketing. You know, for a non-commercial, private event like that the community design is really important so you can post about the event at Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram and Xing and other social networks.

That’s when we in Hamburg published our “save the date” event and started to look for a venue.

Finding a venue for the Office 365 User Group in Hamburg nowadays is really hard, as we are currently not supported by Microsoft at all. So everything comes out from the initiative of our community members and how they spread the word of mouth around Hambugr and the northern part of Germany.

While it’s great to have so many people joining our events, it get’s a bit more coplicated that we currently are looking for rooms with at least 50 seats. It figured out, a typical evening Office 365 User Group in Hamburg now has almost as many participants as some conferences around here in Hamburg. For Example, my employeer has meeting space, but that is made for meeting rooms and great for trainings and workshops, but it’s not adequate for events of that size. With that, one of the main issues is about finding a venue for the number of attendees. And you still need to keep in mind, that we provide our events for free, so we cannot pay a lot of money for the venue.

Looking for a venue continued until the seasons holidays, when Lilly from Code Working Space came up with an offer to sponsor the rooms for our event. We met in early January and fixed the problem.

In addition, we always are looking for food sponsors. That even is more difficult that finding a venue. When I met Carsten Bona from HanseVision at SharePoint Satuday in Munich, this got fixed as well, and HanseVision together with Bechtle IT-Systemhaus Hamburg donated the food to our about 60-70 community members. So food for the evening was ready to go by January, 14th. Puh.

What makes this even more great is that Caro and Harry also convinced the IT from Oetinger Verlagsgruppe in Hamburg to tell their story, what they experienced as an publishing house on their journey into a world of modern IT with Microsoft 365, which route they took and which tripping hazards they had to take.

Sessions and slide decks at Office 365 User Group in Hamburg

Besides the keynote and the closing note, in Hamburg we had 4 local sessions.


Please find the sessions list as well as the slide decks below

Session Title Speakers Download link
Erfolgsfaktor Ninjas! Microsoft Teams Einführung bei der Verlagsgruppe Oetinger. Markus Heieck, Frauke Hille, Christine Frehe Download link
Change erfolgreich gestalten Thomas Bernhardt Download link
Das Team, der Flow und die Adaptive Card Andre Schmidt (Hamburg), Andreas Schlüter (Berlin) Download link
Vom Bot Composer nach Microsoft Teams Martin Gudel Download link

Please be aware, that you can find presentations and session information from the other locations at the Teams Community Day-Website during the next days.

Finally…

I am very happy that you have appeared so numerous at our event and we, the organizers of the Office 365 User Group in Hamburg, would like to thank you, the speakers, our sponsors and our participants  again and again and again for your supporting this event.

Next event for the Office 365 User Group in Hamburg is the Global PowerPlatform Bootcamp, Hamburg Edition on February 15th at EOS Technology Solutions next to Hauptbahnhof. If you didn’t register yet, make sure you’re on our attendees list before seats are running short.  Register now!