Monday 9:00 AM - 5:00 PM · Room 607

Best Practices for Intranet Information Architecture: the key to unlocking AI’s full potential

In this workshop, we will explore the basics of Information Architecture (IA) and its role in creating effective intranets using Microsoft 365, SharePoint, and Viva Connections. We’ll talk about why IA is so important to AI – and how you can ensure that your intranet content can act as a valuable partner in your AI solutions. Whether you are just starting out or looking to improve your current intranet design, this workshop will provide you with the necessary tools and techniques to make the most of new and upcoming features, capabilities, and best practices.

We'll cover key topics including creating and organizing content, building site structures, creating metadata, and leveraging search functionality.

You will take away:

• Approaches for planning navigation across the entire intranet and on individual sites
• Tips and best practices for audiences, hubs, and home sites
• Page design guidance that supports accessibility and great user experiences
• Effective use of metadata on pages and documents – and whether it is OK to use folders to organize your content.
• How to leverage Viva Connections to bring your intranet to your users in the flow of work – and how to plan audiences to ensure that the right tools and information gets to the right groups.
• How Copilot can help your information architecture and vice versa.

You'll leave with a clear understanding of what IA is, why it matters, and how to get started with creating effective intranets that meet your organization's needs.

Monday 9:00 AM - 5:00 PM · Room 619:620

Driving employee engagement – A deep dive into Microsoft Viva, SharePoint, and Microsoft Teams

Hybrid and remote work are the new normal, but work trends indicate the greatest challenges are a sense of community, connection, relationship-building, and inspiration. This full-day workshop explores how Microsoft Viva, SharePoint, and Microsoft Teams come together to foster company culture, unlock communication and engagement opportunities, organize content, and spark employee creativity.

You’ll learn how to:

• Empower your leaders to share news, drive strategic changes, and openly dialogue with employees
• Foster connections & conversations with Viva Engage- Organize your content and intranet with an array of modern SharePoint sites & hubs
• Visualize your information architecture with mind-maps
• Build your Viva Connections implementation strategy

Tuesday 9:00 AM - 12:30 PM · Room 612

Fix that intranet! Improve your intranet content, structure, and processes

This intranet-focused and beginner-friendly half-day workshop will help you transform your SharePoint Online intranet. We'll divide our time into two areas:

Theory & Best Practices: The first half addresses common intranet challenges, such as disorganized content, outdated information, and confusing navigation. We'll cover theoretical aspects of intranet governance, content strategy, and structure optimization.

SharePoint Application: In the latter half, we put theory into practice. Delve into SharePoint specifics, including hub structures, settings, and SharePoint features and tools. Learn to overcome pain points by leveraging SharePoint's abilities for a more organized, current, and user-friendly intranet.

Perfect for those aiming to elevate their intranet experience, this workshop bridges strategic planning with practical SharePoint solutions.

Note: This is not a hands-on build-an-entire-intranet-in-three-hours workshop. This is entirely focused on best practices and ideas for improving your existing intranet's content, structure, and processes leveraging all SharePoint has to offer.

Let's fix that intranet!

Tuesday 1:30 PM - 5:00 PM · Room 612

How to Maximize Your Intranet Potential with Out-of-the-Box Features in Microsoft 365 and SharePoint

Microsoft 365 is packed with powerful tools and features for building an effective intranet. But with so many options, it can be overwhelming to know where to start. In this presentation, we'll take a deep dive into the "out-of-the-box" features of SharePoint Online and Microsoft 365 and show you how to leverage them to build an intranet that meets your organization's unique needs. From creating and organizing content with SharePoint to enhancing communication with Teams and Viva Engage, we'll cover everything you need to get started, including new capabilities like the Brand Center and Copilot for SharePoint. By the end of the workshop, you'll have a solid understanding of the key features of SharePoint Online and how to use them to build an intranet that helps your organization communicate, collaborate, and succeed. You will also understand what is possible “in the box” and where you may want to invest in third party solutions or custom development.

Tuesday 1:30 PM - 5:00 PM · Room 615:616

Microsoft 365 User Adoption Master Class

A smooth deployment isn't enough. Driving effective utilization of SharePoint and Microsoft 365 is more than building effective migration strategies, training users on key features or sending out marketing emails. This master class provides a deep-dive on the components of user adoption. You'll learn why user adoption programs succeed and fail, gain practical experience designing adoption strategies and learn how to leverage innovation games to build consensus.

During this workshop, you will: • Learn the basic foundations of user adoption, including key intrinsic and extrinsic motivators • Understand how different types of users in your organization can make (or break) your chances of user adoption success • Understand how innovation games can help drive shared understanding, uncover user requirements and drive engagement/enthusiasm • Examine real-world user adoption programs and determine how and why they were successful

Wednesday 9:50 AM - 11:00 AM · Room 602:603

Will AI replace search?

In today's rapidly evolving technological landscape, the question of whether artificial intelligence (AI) will replace enterprise search is becoming increasingly relevant. In many organizations, it’s not a question anymore - rather it’s an “all-in” on AI.

During this session, we will explore the evolving relationship between information retrieval and content generation. We will discuss the implications of AI in the context of governance, information management, information architecture, permissions, as well as the balance (or the lack of balance) between information retrieval and content generation.

Join us for this thought-provoking discussion on the future of enterprise search in the era of AI. Gain valuable insights, and discover strategies for harnessing the power of AI while ensuring responsible and effective implementation within your organization.

Wednesday 9:50 AM - 11:00 AM · Room 611

Mastering IT Documentation: Strategies for Success

In the ever-evolving IT landscape, enterprises of every size grapple with a critical challenge: managing and consolidating vast amounts of data, especially within Microsoft environments. Effective IT documentation is more critical than ever. Whether you're overseeing a service desk, managing projects, or handling any critical IT function, intelligent documentation is key to managing IT assets, organizing information and standardizing processes.

Yet, many organizations struggle to develop and maintain documentation that truly supports their operations. This workshop is designed to equip IT professionals with the knowledge and skills needed to master IT documentation and drive success within their organizations. Participants will gain actionable insights to elevate their documentation processes.

This session will cover:

• Fostering a Documentation Culture: Getting your team onboard with documentation is crucial for its success. We'll share practical techniques for inspiring your team to embrace documentation creation, utilization, and maintenance. You'll learn how to cultivate a culture where documentation is valued and prioritized.
• Understanding Great Documentation: We'll highlight the characteristics of intelligent IT documentation that make them stand out, including clarity, completeness, and relevance. By understanding the hallmarks of great documentation, you'll be better equipped to elevate your own documentation practices.
• Creating Process Documentation: We'll guide you through the process of creating comprehensive process documentation strategies, covering essential components such as naming conventions, workflows, templates and more. You’ll learn how to establish a robust documentation framework tailored to your organizational needs.
• Strategies to quantify and maximize the ROI, productivity and utilization of your Microsoft environments. Discover insights for consolidating siloed Microsoft information to centrally track assets and users, securely access passwords and more.

By the end of the session, participants will be equipped with the knowledge and skills to transform their approach to IT documentation, enabling them to drive efficiency, collaboration, and success within their IT teams and across the organization.

Whether you're a seasoned IT professional or new to the world of documentation, this session offers valuable insights to help you master the art of IT documentation.

Wednesday 9:50 AM - 11:00 AM · Room 619:620

What's new and next for Microsoft Viva

Find out what's new and what's next for Microsoft Viva

Wednesday 1:50 PM - 3:00 PM · Room 607

Elevating Your Experience: Improving Findability and Knowledge Discovery in Microsoft 365 and ShareP

In today's fast-paced business environment, quick and easy access to knowledge is critical for success. Unfortunately, many organizations and people struggle with finding and accessing information within their intranets.

In this session, we’ll review several different strategies to improve findability in Microsoft 365 – from simple tips to help users be more successful with search to more strategic approaches for intranet navigation and structure using home sites and hubs, information delivery with Viva Connections, improving knowledge management with Viva Topics and Viva Engage, and how Copilot can help.

You will learn practical and actionable tips and tricks that you can implement immediately as you evolve your employee experiences.

Wednesday 1:50 PM - 3:00 PM · Room 612

Automatically capture information about incoming files in Microsoft 365

Files are at the core of Microsoft 365. Word, PowerPoint, and Excel documents, of course. In addition, all kinds of files, PDFs, pictures, and video are created, shared, viewed, edited, and deleted all day, every day in organizations around the world through the tools and services included as part of their Microsoft 365 subscriptions.

Tom Resing is a member of the SharePoint Premium product engineering team at Microsoft. Every day, Tom thinks about the user experience around files and their properties how content AI does or doesn't empower people to achieve more with files.

Come to this session to get an overview of the how, why, what, when, and where you can get started with automatically capturing information about files as they are added to SharePoint, including when they're added in conversations in Teams channels.

Note that the majority of this talk relates to the new SharePoint Premium offering. However, Tom will demonstrate how you can get started for very little cost and explain scenarios that might provide immediate value to your organization.

Wednesday 1:50 PM - 3:00 PM · Room 613:614

5 Immediate Things You Can Do To Increase Microsoft 365 and Power Apps User Adoption

Traditionally training Microsoft 365, SharePoint or Power Apps users is a waste of time. Instead, increase user adoption and decrease support tickets by providing User Adoption as a Service (UAaaS).

Come to this session and I'll tell you the 5 strategies that will help you cut down on support calls and have your users Love the environment and content you create for them in Microsoft 365 and Power Apps.

Wednesday 3:40 PM - 4:50 PM · Room 607

Building your organizational home site & hubs strategy

It's a flat new world in SharePoint. We've moved on from classic and hierarchical site collections and built an array of modern sites. But how do we organize our content, sites, and intranets in this new world?

This session introduces home sites and hubs and provides guidance on how to build a strong content management strategy for their use. We'll define what home sites and hubs are, lay the conceptual groundwork for understanding their use, and provide a creative new way of conceptualizing the logical ties between your myriad of flat SharePoint sites.

We’ll also discuss how Viva Connections plays into our intranet and home site strategy.

Thursday 10:30 AM - 11:40 AM · Room 607

Intranet Surgery: How Copilot and Viva Connections can give your intranet a makeover

Are you tired of your intranet looking like it’s stuck in the 90s? Do you want to give it a makeover without breaking the bank? Look no further than Copilot, Viva Connections, and some critical best practices for helping your intranet deliver ongoing value to your employees and the organization.

In this presentation, we’ll talk about how to perform intranet surgery using the latest AI-powered tools from Microsoft. With Copilot, you can generate new content for your intranet in seconds, from catchy headlines to informative articles. With Viva Connections, you can customize your intranet to match your organization’s brand and culture and provide a seamless experience for your employees in the flow of work – to connect, collaborate, and learn. With the latest best practices for discovery and governance, you can ensure that your intranet rehab is successful and transforms your intranet powerful tool for communication, collaboration, and innovation.

Thursday 10:30 AM - 11:40 AM · Room 611

Creating Intelligent Intranet Using Microsoft Teams, SharePoint, and Viva Engage!

A lot has changed since Microsoft began recommending flat information architecture for modern SharePoint intranets.

In this session we’ll discuss:

• The advantages of flat information architecture
• How hub sites provide consistent navigation and content rollups
• How Teams connected team sites play a role in the intranet
• Using Engage to engage employees
• Creating a single-pane-of-glass experience for employees with Microsoft Viva

Thursday 12:00 PM - 12:30 PM · Collab Studio

Building an Intelligence-Driven IT Documentation Framework with IT Glue

In today's rapidly evolving digital landscape, efficient IT documentation is essential for businesses to stay competitive and secure. Discover how intelligence-driven IT documentation becomes a linchpin, enabling IT teams to excel in this transformative journey with critical IT information at their fingertips.

In this Solution Showcase, discover how IT Glue helps over 16,000 partners globally to revolutionize their IT documentation by centralizing and streamlining critical information, enhancing operational efficiency and bolstering security measures.

Join the session and discover how to: • Build intelligent IT documentation using out-of-the-box templates and workflows. • Create relationships between your documentation, so that no matter what information you need, it’s always at your fingertips. • Integrate Intune, Microsoft 365, Active Directory and Entra ID documentation into IT Glue, to track Microsoft assets, users and licenses, in one easy place.

Don't miss this opportunity to elevate your IT documentation and learn how to unlock the full potential of your IT teams.

Thursday 12:00 PM - 12:30 PM · Solution Stage

How to Run a Successful Intranet

Unlock the blueprint for running a successful intranet that empowers your workforce and drives organizational success. This session will take a deep dive into the secrets of running a thriving intranet and unveil the groundbreaking insights from the inaugural global benchmarking report on intranet success.

Discover the key findings, best practices, and actionable strategies shared by leading organizations worldwide. From optimizing user experience to enhancing collaboration and maximizing productivity, explore the vital ingredients that differentiate a mediocre intranet from a truly exceptional one. Key Takeaways:

1. Insights into optimizing the user experience for maximum engagement
2. Strategies for enhancing collaboration and knowledge sharing
3. Best practices for driving productivity and efficiency
4. Actionable tips for maintaining and evolving your intranet over time Don't miss this opportunity to gain invaluable insights, network with industry peers, and revolutionize how you manage your intranet.

Thursday 12:40 PM - 1:50 PM · Room 613:614

From Clicks to Insights: Leveraging Microsoft Clarity in Your M365 Environment

Want to get inside the minds of your Microsoft 365 users without relying on hit-or-miss surveys to increase digital adoption? This eye-opening session will show you how to leverage the free Microsoft Clarity product for real-time behavioral analytics.

Learn how to spot popular pages, dead clicks, rage clicks, and more in your environment and interpret them to improve your user training and support initiatives. By the end of this session, you'll know how to utilize heat maps, session recordings and other dashboard insights available in Microsoft Clarity to identify key areas where users struggle, ensuring your governance and compliance measures are both effective and user-friendly. Don't miss out on this chance to revamp how you understand and support your M365 users!

Thursday 2:00 PM - 3:10 PM · Room 607

Helping Your New Intranet Reach Airspeed Velocity

The creation of the first intranet happened in the latter part of the 20th century, but no one would recognize that as an intranet by today’s standards. Since then, intranet implementations and the platforms they’re built on have matured significantly and grown in complexity.

In this session, we’ll be looking at the modern intranet with a focus on SharePoint-based design and implementation. There are plenty of decisions to consider and points to deliberate even before you jump into action. We’ll discuss optimal team composition, roles that should be factored-in, technological considerations, stakeholder involvement/representation, project lifecycle needs, launch considerations, and more.

I’ll be sharing my experiences, highlights, triumphs, and painful lessons learned architecting intranets of varying sizes for the last decade or so. In short: we will be covering the things I wish I had known before I ever started working on intranets in the hope that they will spare you some of the pain I endured.

Friday 9:00 AM - 10:10 AM · Room 604

Governance made easy: How to plan an effective governance strategy for your intranet

Are you tired of your intranet and Microsoft 365 being a mess of unorganized, outdated, and non-compliant content? Do you have a governance plan that no one reads, follows, or cares about? Do you want to learn an approach to make your digital workplace more efficient, engaging, and secure?

If you answered yes to any of these questions, then this session is for you! Join us to learn how to plan and implement governance for your intranet, Microsoft Viva, and Microsoft 365 in a way that actually works – and provides a framework to address new capabilities like Copilot.

Whether you are new to governance or a seasoned pro, this session will give you the tips, tricks, and templates you need to succeed!

Friday 9:00 AM - 10:10 AM · Room 608

Getting started with Viva Amplify

Learn how to save time and deliver more effective communications with Viva Amplify with this introductory session. We'll cover how to get setup and started with the latest Viva tool designed for organizational communications, including getting access, creating & managing campaigns, publishing to multiple channels, and measuring impact and reporting.

Friday 10:20 AM - 11:30 AM · Room 604

How to do Search and Content Assessment in Microsoft 365

Before you start improving findability in your organization, it’s essential to do a reality check: what content you have, how everything is stored, how everything is being used, who the key users are, etc.

Based on real-world examples, this session demonstrates how to do a search/content assessment and plan your short/middle/long term action plan to improve findability (based on real-life case studies).

How to do a systematic review of your Microsoft 365 content and Information Architecture, and how it contributes to your organization’s key activities, and where are the gaps.

What the “Report on Findings” should contain, including:

• Landscape and gap analysis;
• Suggestions and recommendations;
• How to enhance the out-of-the-box search in Microsoft 365;
• Where and why you might need custom search application(s);
• Recommend roadmap and action plan;
• Governance and maintenance

Benefits of Attending this Session:

• Understand the lay of the land – where your organization is at the moment
• Evaluate potential improvements and enhancements
• Create an actionable plan – start implementing right when you’re back from this conference

Friday 10:20 AM - 11:30 AM · Room 619:620

The Future of Your Intranet: Beautiful, flexible and AI ready powered by SharePoint

What is the intranet of the future all about? We'll cover industry trends around content presentation, more robust authoring experiences, and what the era of AI means for your intranet. Learn about the future of SharePoint Portals. This is the SharePoint session you don't want to miss.

Friday 12:30 PM - 1:40 PM · Room 611

Power employee engagement with Microsoft Viva, SharePoint, and Microsoft Teams

Hybrid and remote work are the new normal, but work trends indicate the greatest challenges are a sense of community, connection, relationship-building, and inspiration.

This session highlights how Microsoft Viva, SharePoint, and Microsoft Teams come together to foster company culture, unlock communication and engagement opportunities, organize content, and spark employee creativity.

Friday 12:30 PM - 1:40 PM · Room 612

Setup Context Sensitive Training and Support for Your SharePoint Based Intranet Sites

Lots of companies are enhancing their existing SharePoint based intranets and portals or migrating to SharePoint Online from third party tools. The challenge now is to make sure your users will be using the SharePoint intranet and finding information and support at their moment of need.

This session will show real use case scenarios of how companies around the world are onboarding their users on their SharePoint intranet as well as keeping them engaged and fully supported in context of their SharePoint environments. The result: increased usage of SharePoint portals while reducing internal support costs.