It’s been a year since we came together as a community to run the Microsoft 365 Virtual Marathon in 2020. That event was a first-of-its-kind community event focused on including attendees and speakers from all parts of the planet in a truly global inclusive event designed to help people make new connections and be more aware of much of the rollout that was happening to support remote work in the early days of COVID while also supporting deep technical knowledge in 15 simultaneous tracks in deep technical content as well as end user and business content delivered by the community.
Those that brought you M365 Virtual Marathon have come back by popular demand April 26-28, 2021 with a continued focus on community engagement, including featured speakers and keynotes from Microsoft and Community Leaders. The M365 Virtual Marathon also features sessions covering new technologies, such as Microsoft Viva, providing a deeper dive, building on the product announcements at Microsoft Ignite. Keynotes include Jeff Teper, Corporate Vice President Teams, SharePoint, OneDrive (and Viva), Karuana Director Microsoft Teams, Heather Newman, Power Platform Principal PM Power Platform Engineering Community, and Laurie Pottmeyer, Microsoft Teams Community
>> Read more about the event at http://m365virtualmarathon.com for Event details
The M365 Virtual Marathon features experts panels on topics from Microsoft Teams, Power Platform in multiple regions around the globe. Over 280 sessions are being delivered by over 100 Microsoft MVPs, MCTs & RDs, in addition to 150 experts and leaders from the community. You’ve heard many announcements from Microsoft from Ignite, the community experts will expand and deep dive on product announcements, as well as provide industry verticals including education and healthcare. We hope you find the event offerings allow you to engage on your terms and attend the session type that interests you most, or catch up and connect with other attendees.
Check out the schedule and line up of speakers on our event page or on SPSEvents.org
The M365 Virtual Marathon begins April 26, 2021, at 09:00 PDT and is 60-hours, ending on April 28, 2021, at 09:00 PDT. We sorted through over 450 sessions to pick the top 280 sessions from over 250 speakers the Americas, Asia-Pacific, Europe, the Middle East, and Africa. The event has sessions presented in seven languages, including French, German, Spanish, Portuguese, Japanese, Arabic, and English. This event has sessions running for more than 2 days straight, so you’re sure to find a time to check out the incredible line up of sessions.
This event is provided for free. We hope to record the sessions and provide them, but please give us time to provide to process and upload what will be 280 hours or 16,800 minutes of sessions. The volunteers on the community spent over 100 hours splicing, downloading then uploading the content last year on our M365VM youtube channel. Thanks for liking and subscribing!
We’re excited to join you in a few weeks for another great event, BY THE COMMUNITY FOR THE COMMUNITY!
Register using the links below and if you would like to volunteer to be a session moderator, please sign up using the Moderator Sign Up form below. The schedule will go LIVE with join links in the session details on SPSevents.org and on m365virtualmarathon.com on 4/26/21 at 9am Pacific, but we encourage you to register so we can be better prepared to serve you.
>>Click Here to Register for M365 Virtual Marathon 2021 and Join the Global Community for this Event<<
What really matters in a Microsoft Teams Deployment? Can you just turn it on and see what happens? What if you were to figure it out along the way? What is Teams Sprawl and why do they refer to your Teams environment as the Wild West? I like to call it herding cats. There’s no reason to herd cats if you can keep your arms around your environment. In fact you can accomplish both good governance and user satisfaction at the same time.
Come join me for 60 minutes on Teams Governance with Q&A. I’ll be diving into each of these 6 Keys to Successful Governance.
When: Wed, Apr 14, 2021 10:00 AM – 11:00 AM PDT / 1PM EDT
Don’t miss the chance to attend the Microsoft Teams governance workshop by Joel Oleson, MVP
Attend this webinar to understand the key elements for streamlining governance using Teams and other Microsoft 365 workloads without compromising on end-user autonomy and IT control.
Please join me, Joel Oleson, MVP, Regional Director, and former Microsoft IT Architect in this free 1 hour webinar on Teams Governance hosted by TeamsHub by Cyclotron for insights and solutions to increase collaboration, productivity, innovation, and adoption for your Microsoft 365 investments.
Many have found the power of collaboration in Teams and others are just getting started, but Telephony is still a struggle for many. The transition from Skype for Business or other telephony systems to Teams, can be a challenge to get your arms around an ever changing and improving set of Telephony features. Teams Voice licensing can also be a struggle if you don’t know where to get started. There are a lot of great features, but where does one start?
In this upcoming free webinar I will be diving into 7 key questions to help you get started with Microsoft Teams Voice and Telephony.
Seven Key Questions to Unleash the Power of Microsoft Telephony
You’re NOT alone. This session is to help you understand the answers to 7 key questions and get you well on your way.
In this one-hour free webinar, Microsoft MVP Joel Oleson and Cayosoft founder Bob Bobel will drill down on the Microsoft Teams telephony stack. We will unlock the knowledge surrounding the key features of calling and telephony in Microsoft Teams and answer 7 key questions to Unleash the Power of Microsoft Teams.
Join us for the free webinar on Thursday April 15 at 11am Pacific Time 2pm Eastern Time to learn more!
The Microsoft 365 Services Agreement lists 3 different times a recommended a “regular backup” of your data. According to IDC there are 67% of Microsoft 365 customers who do not regularly backup their data.
It wasn’t until I recently started digging into backups and what Microsoft expects customers to be doing in the 2 way services agreement that I realized many may be relying 100% on Microsoft for recovery of their critical business data without realizing that Microsoft actually expects customers to be managing permissions, managing security, and managing a regular backup.
Microsoft Service Agreement:
•4 a iv – “You should have a regular backup plan as Microsoft won’t be able to retrieve Your Content or Data once your account is closed.”
•4 f – “You should have a regular backup plan.”
•6 b – “We recommend that you regularly backup Your Content and Data…”
Microsoft produced a “Shared Responsibility Model” to help customers to understand who has responsibility and at what level across SAAS, PAAS, IAAS, and On Prem. I highly recommend referring to this across the various workloads and services you may be subscribed to from Microsoft.
Now that you’re wondering about backups. I’m putting together a webinar on backup and recovery for Microsoft 365. In an upcoming webinar I’m going to dive into some of the limitations for how long and in various ways Microsoft 365 retains and backs up your data in Teams, SharePoint, OneDrive and Exchange. How long can you request a file be restored that was accidentally deleted? What about an incriminating deleted Teams chat messages or a sensitive deleted exchange message or inbox? These questions will be answered and more…
>> Join me as I explore more on this topic in a free 1 hour webinar:
Title: Backup and Recovery for Microsoft 365–SharePoint, Exchange, Teams, OneDrive and More
Get peace of mind and keep your cloud data safe from disaster
When: Session starts on April 20, 2021 at 11 a.m. PDT/2 p.m. EDT.
Do you know how often your data is being backed up? Do you know how many days back you can get your data from Microsoft? Do you know if there was an extended outage what you would do for critical business data? Do you have a business continuity plan in the case of a major breach? These questions and more will be discussed as we reverse engineer the backup and recovery policies of Microsoft and find the edge of the cliff. After you understand the capabilities of Microsoft and the boundary of the cliff, you will explore where are you on the Maturity Model and plans around backup and recovery. The time is better now than ever before to focus on backups for remote employees and backups for Microsoft 365 with a serious plan for business continuity and recovery. Join us in this free, one-hour learning session with Microsoft MVP Joel Oleson and Synology to find out more.
I’ve been trying to watch and take in as much as I can from this “Surprise” spring version of Microsoft Ignite. It used to be we’d need to digest once a year the announcements from Microsoft Ignite. Now you’ve got two big ones. I guess the good news is we get that much more transparency into what is happening in Redmond. We shouldn’t complain. The three year cycle to the 6 month cycle or is it really one month cycle… I’ll let you decide. Either way, Join me on either my Club House tomorrow morning or join me on the experts panel on Tuesday morning 9am Pacific time. I put together my 5 Favorite Announcements from Spring 2021 Microsoft Ignite. 1. Viva Connections will be free! It hasn’t even shipped yet and Microsoft Viva Connections with all the cool feeds coming at you is going to be included in the SharePoint licensing. That’s so awesome!! I think it’s going to be very important that we get this right. Is the Intranet dead? Did Viva Connections kill it? I don’t think so. I think there’s still an important need for corporations to learn how to both communicate to users, but also to gather and engage, and also provide value and direction for getting to the tools we use everyday and those rare ones we are digging into a mega menu, targeted content and departmental solutions… absolutely. Do I think that the Viva brand is here to stay and we should all be making Viva part of our Microsoft vernacular… absolutely… this train is just leaving the station. Read the Viva Guide to Ignite for tons more details. Watch Jared Spataro’s very funny and clever session on the Hybrid workplace on demand (no signin required) Also check out Chuck’s session on Viva on employee experience it includes a cameo from Naomi where she shows off some new Teams integration with Viva Topics… it’s way more than highlighting. Viva Learning will enter public preview in April 2021. “Starting in March, the Microsoft Teams desktop experience for Viva Connections – which provides a curated, company-branded experience including news, conversations and other resources for employees – will begin rolling out to all customers as part of their existing Microsoft 365 license.” On-Demand Sessions: | Introducing Microsoft Viva Connections by Adam Harmetz Viva Connections is your gateway to a modern employee experience ![]() 2. Microsoft Teams Webinar features – As someone who has been doing a lot of events. It seems like there’s a continuous battle to convince the Marketing folks that Teams is good enough, or it’s convincing the community that there are marketing reasons we didn’t use Teams. Announced at Ignite among dozens of other amazing Teams announcements is a pile of goodness for supporting real true webinars with over 1000 attendees internal or external with powerful attendance reports, and registration pages for our webinars that are integrated. He even teased about a webinar of 20,000 attendees. (That’s my target for M365 Virtual Marathon. The call for speakers is open. We already have 100 speakers lined up, but we seriously want 500.) Even setting up this event I wish I had this feature to be able to gather registrations for our experts panel. Here’s your Guide to Ignite from the Teams Team. Teams has more than 100 new features since COVID has started. Teams “Casting” and meetings rooms features were super cool. Some fantastic vision shared by Jared Spataro. The Teams Rooms of the future are already looking super awesome. Love the speech to text in captions and avatar facial and voice recognition. You can see the new webinar features in action in the “Easy, Intuitive Webinars with Microsoft Teams: Virtual Engagement in the Age of Remote Work” with Lars Johnson, Sr. Director, Microsoft Teams Marketing; and Christina Torok, Sr. Product Marketing Manager 3. Announcing Microsoft Mesh! – AR/VR took a big leap forward. The keynote showed us what is possible when running an event in VR. AltSpaceVR hosted the keynote as well as provided an opportunity to connect with people around the globe. I really enjoyed seeing friends from Utah, Germany, Netherlands, and Australia all in what felt like a hallway. The demonstration of Pokémon GO experience built on Niantic’s planet-scale platform that has enabled millions of people to have augmented reality experiences in the real world, is planned to be enhanced with Microsoft Mesh features enabling people to be present together in shared experiences across space and time. I’m anxious to see that myself. The keynote in AltspaceVR encouraged me to commit to putting together a future event and incorporating AltspaceVR into our virtual events. (I’ve been already trying to do that, but also hoping others are convinced.) 4. Announcing Power Point Live with Teams and Presenter Mode – Presenter mode is the latest innovation in Microsoft Teams that empowers you to customize how your video feed and content appear to the audience. Seeing the speaker can reduce the cognitive overload for your audience since they can read your non-verbal cues and stay more focused with you as their visual guide. Presenter mode is a great companion to PowerPoint Live in Teams that makes your presentation immersive and engaging. |
Power Fx A new language for low code developers to be implemented across the Power Platform. Currently used as the language to develop canvas apps in Microsoft Power Apps, Power Fx will eventually become the consistent language across the Power Platform. You can learn more about this and other Power Platform and Dynamics features announced at Ignite.
The key sessions to watch:
What’s new and what’s next for Microsoft Power Platform
Hosted by Charles Lamanna, CVP, Low Code Application Platform and Julie Strauss, Partner PM Director
Power BI and Data
Drive a data culture with Power BI: Vision, strategy, and roadmap
Hosted by Arun Ulagaratchagan, CVP, Power BI
5. Azure – I feel so far behind in the LOADS of updates to Azure. I wouldn’t be surprised if half of Ignite was focused on this. I can’t not mention a few of them.
Semantic search capability in Azure Cognitive Search now in preview.
Azure Communication Services to be generally available, with Microsoft Teams interoperability in preview
Private Azure Marketplace now generally available
Windows Server 2022 is now available in preview
Azure Percept, AI-powered family of edge devices and services, now in preview
Yes I missed about 1000 other things including a few of your favorites I’m sure. Put them in the comments I’d love to hear them so I don’t miss them in the panel, but dive into the Book of Ignite AKA Book of Knowledge AKA Ignite Bible for more.
Join us on Tuesday March 9th at 9am Pacific 12pm Eastern with
Wow! Just wow! IGNITE 2021 has been packed with so many announcements, and roadmap updates…
From Mixed Reality Pokemon adventures with Microsoft to Viva Connections being included with your Microsoft 365 licensing… Did you catch ’em all??? No one did… believe us! As a result the best way to consume all of those updates in the shortest way possible is with a broad experts panel. Here we’ve assembled Developers, Architects, Evangelists, and IT Pros across the Microsoft 365 workloads. Bring your questions and join us for this experts panel! This 1 hour session is an opportunity to hear from top experts, MVPs, RDs to discuss and interact with the community. Bring your questions and be ready to take ferocious notes!
Experts Lineup:
Eric Overfield, CEO of Pixelmill, MVP & MS Regional Director
Jeff Willinger, Digital Workspace Innovator, MVP
Ryan Schouten, MVP Blizzard Entertainment
Joel Oleson, Sr. Product Manager, TeamsHUB by Cyclotron & Founder Joel365, MVP & RD
Sharon Weaver, CEO Smarter Consulting, Microsoft Regional Director
Amber Bahl, CEO, TeamsHUB by Cyclotron
What you’ll learn:: Announcements Roadmap updates Open Q&A Expert Feedback Discussions about what’s coming next