Microsoft 365 Saturday Event - Super Power Saturday

Wow - what an absolutely phenomenal, empowering, exciting and educational way to spend a Saturday. Before I start with my brief brain dump of the day I MUST give a huge SHOUT-OUT to the beautiful, inside and out, human being that is the great Samit Saini (pictured below) who put this wonderful event together along with the epic man that is Raz! If you are yet to hear Samit's story - well where have you been!? But here is the link https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tBc9ophAYCc <<Check it out!

The Saturday kicked-off with a great opening keynote from Manuela Pilcher (Microsoft) and Andrew Welch (AIS), both pictured below, discussing the importance and need for governance, administration, training and support when utilising the awesomeness of the Microsoft Power Platform - those that know me are aware this is one part of the Power Platform I am obsessed with as it is the piece that ensures adoption and enablement of using and deriving all the benefits from the platform with no unforeseen nastiness!

As Manuela and Andrew navigated through the, often, complex and pertinent world of Power Platform and governance - out of no where Darth Vader and two Storm Troopers appeared.... this genuinely happened, I promise, photo below for proof. Darth tried to put an end to the Power Platform due to it enabling to many users to create business solutions with company data and he was concerned it would get out of control. Luckily... after some conversation was exchanged around leveraging the Centre of Excellence Darth felt comfortable enough to leave.

Then I sneaked off to work on my presentation - nothing like a bit of last minute prep!

Fortunately, I finished this in time to hear the brilliant Michal Guzowski (pictured below) discuss approaches and principals to User Experiences when designing Canvas Apps from the Power Platform suite.

Michal broke down so many great points regarding Gestalt principals (if you're not aware of this look it up - a great way to check your UX design). Michal then went on to show us his own personal journey with a design and how he had many iterations until he was happy with the end result. UX and UI really is a journey - the first app you build you'll be very happy with, then you build another 50 or so applications and revisit that first one and wondered what you was thinking ??.

It was fantastic to finally meet Michal as I was introduced to him around a year ago where we discussed hackathon's - he was the involved in the TDG Global Hackathon and we were discussing 2020s one. We may also have had a beer or two...!

I then did my presentation on leveraging Power Apps inside Dynamics 365 for Finance & Operations - F&O sessions during a Power Platform focused event was a risky call and I did expect only a couple of people to turn up. On top of this, due to the complexities of utilising Power Platform with F&O the take-up of the platform has been less than other areas such as Customer Engagement and Talent now Dynamics 365 for HR... however, I was pleasantly surprised by the audience turned-out and the amount of the questions asked!

After a great closing presentation by Keith Whatling around how the Power Platform has enabled him and his career - also projecting on how we need to enable more people to build the millions of apps the big man himself, Satya, had predicted we then all ventured.... to the pub!

The evenings adventure was fantastic and rounded of the event so well.

One thing I really want to point out is the amount of attendance 500+ with people coming from all around the globe! I have put some other images below.

Picture above: Finally got to meet the legend that is Tim Leung along with the awesome Rory Neary - Tim's book on Power Apps opened up so many doors for me!

Picture above: The one and only Lewis Harris-Manley, Julian Sharp & Ricardo Silvestre

Picture above: I finally got to meet vis-a-vis Rebekka Aalbers, along with Daniel Laskewitz, Kyle Hill and Mr Saini!

Picture above: Mario Trueba, Sara Lagerthirst, Lord Huntingford and Master Hill.

Many more photos but i'll post them on Twitter ;-)