Azure, Community, General, Microsoft Graph, Office365, Teams

Technology Conference Hamburg – review and slide deck download

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Last Friday, May 17th, Technology Conference Hamburg took place at the Microsoft Office in Hamburg, Gasstrasse. As I’m currently very busy on my job, I wasn’t able to attend for the whole day, nevertheless as they have a strong focus on the Microsoft Cloud plattfom, Azure and Office 365 as well, I really wanted to see what’s going on there at Microsoft.

When I learned there is a conference like this I also submitted a session on Microsft Teams explaining key concepts of a modern collaborative workspace and was very happy they choose this talk to be at their agenda. Later I found this was a lucky coincidence as my new college here at Kramer & Crew in Hamburg, Dataplatform MVP Björn Peters, also did a talk on Azure SQL and why it maybe is a good idea to move your on-prem SQL database there.

An Intro for those who didn’t notice that there is a Technology Conference Hamburg


I noticed there is this conference for the first time when I visited the Technology Meetup Hamburg; please find more details  at https://www.meetup.com/de-DE/Hamburger-Technology-Meetup/ .

As far as I understood the concept yet, the conference together with the meetup is based on activities of members of the Microsoft Student Partners program, Domonik and Susanne. They focus on students and young professionals and their goal is to leverage your career as an IT pro and/or Developer.

So they provide local user group meetups and conferences where you can learn more on the Microsoft Plattform technologies and how you can develop, deploy, integrate and operate your solution. As a consequence you have a high rate of students and young professionals at that type of conference.

For me as an IT professional who started in the old world on an IBM AIX 4.x RISC processor, this is the perfect place to meet that “next generation IT” they talk about when Gartner, KPMG and others envision the modern workplace so I can do a reality check for the one or the other thesis on how that generation will be used to work together with their motivation and depencies to do jobs using that world with modern devices and more.

Two different tracks, workshops

After kicking off the conference with a keynote to envision attendees in the morning, they split it up into two tracks – the first track with an interesting selection of talks and another track having half-day workshops on how you can deploy Websites to an Azure WebApp as well as an introduction on how to start using Microsoft Graph.

As I did a talk by myself, unfortunately I cannot give you more details on the workshops – but I’m sure one day I will go for such a session.

Lunch break and time for networking

Lunchtime is always a very important time at a conference where you can talk to other attendees about what you listened to in the morning, and get an impression on the others interests and Networking – that is what’s community is for.

What’s really suprising to me is that I didnt find all that tweets and pictures on Twitter which do comments and attribution of the speakers sessions. Still not sure if this is a part of using modern tehnologies by young people and I just didn’t review the next generations facebook and/or instagram, but it’s a little embarrassing when you had about 70 attendees at a conference who do not do any tweet.

Looks like students todays do concentrate a lot more on session contents than it has been at the times when I went to the university?

Microsoft Teams – the collaborative workspace in Office 365 [slide deck download]

After lunch I did the first session in the Talks track, about 25-30 attendees went with me. I gave a short overview about what Microsoft Teams is, why we need it and how we can use it to get more out of the orchestration of other Office 365 apps by using Microsoft Teams.

In Addition, I showed how you may integrate other apps like PowerApps adn external Apps by choosing the Apps directly from the “Add Tabs” menu or using the Microsoft Teams App Store.

This was combined with some learnings of modern collaboration and management, so you not only had a view on the tool and some fancy buttons you may press but an organisational background to form your process and set some improvements by using Microsoft Teams.

  • What is in it for your organisation?
  • what is in it for you as an employeee?
  • what comes out of the “central” with a central collaboration environment?
  • what comes out of the “collaboration” with a central collaboration environment?

The session got really interactive with a lot of attendees questions – I love it when you can learn more about what’s in peoples heads now that they throw all their open issues on you.

So this time it was not an in-depth technical talk, but from the chat after the session ended and a lot of afterwards questions in the lobby I hope to understand that attendees really enjoyed my session and now are in a move to use Microsoft Teams [a little bit different than before].

If you are interested in my slide deck please download it here!

Resumee

I think Technology Conference Hamburg is a good start for students and trainees to get information about what’s going on with Microsoft Technologies and training on the Microsoft cloud plattform.

I’d like to say Thank you to Dominik Dormeyer and Sandra Stankewitz for organizing this conference and I hope there will be some more to inspire more and more students and learners for technologies which run in their daily lifes background.

Ah’, and last but not least Thank you to my employer Kramer & Crew for letting me contribute to this conference during my regular working hours. This is another great proof of that community is important even more for you when you plan your carreer at the IT sector.

Hope you all had a good travel back home!