Well, another conference has come and gone. Microsoft Ignite was a good conference. I learned a lot and am glad I came, although my legs are pretty sore from walking. The actual conference center is massive and it seemed like each session I wanted to attend was on the opposite sides of the center. I walked 8 miles yesterday! Good Grief!
So, here are my three take aways from the conference.
- I finally feel like I have a good understanding of how to provision our exchange online and identity accounts to azure from our IDM solution. After having several technical discussions with the Microsoft experts onsite, and talking with my dev manager back at VUMC, I feel pretty confident we have a path going forward and we know what we want to do with our direction. This one thing made the entire conference worth the trip.
- I learned a lot about Microsoft teams. I really want to look more into this and leverage this new tool. There was a big push for teams here. I like the persistent chat features, and the collaboration tools. I know Sal does this with his team. So I want to see about how we can leverage this in ADI.
- Microsoft has done a TON with its products that I have fallen behind on. There are extensive changes to Excel, OneNote, Visio, Outlook, Powerpoint, etc. I feel like I only use 5% of each of these products. I am going to need to invest more time in learning the latest and relearning these tools. I really liked the pivot chart and get and format tools in excel. There are some great options there. Plus, I liked how you could tie visio to data on the backend. Overall, there is a lot still to learn here and some great options!
Overall, this was a good conference and I am glad I came. But I will admit I am pretty fried at this point. Four days was plenty. If I come again, I will probably plan on leaving Thursday night. I don’t know that my brain can take more sessions. Or my feet can walk anymore!
Dan at a Conference 