I run the product management team for SharePoint user experiences. Over 20 people on my team are speaking at Ignite this week on all things SharePoint and Microsoft 365. I’ve sat in over 35 hours of outline reviews, dry runs, and demo preps these past few weeks, and I wanted to share my thoughts on some of the “hidden gem” sessions you should consider attending this week in Orlando.
First, if you are looking for the big picture sessions – this link will take you to the 9 key sessions. These are the overviews of Comm Sites (BRK2136), Biz Apps (BRK2105), ECM (BRK2104), Search (BRK2103), Team Sites (BRK2102), OneDrive (BRK2133), Employee Engagement (BRK2101), SharePoint Framework (BRK3314) and Compliance (BRK2100). These are the broad coverage sessions that allow you to bring home the big picture.
But on to the “hidden gems” that you may not have discovered on your own in the session catalog:
- Sessions by design/engineering/data science. Of course, we in product and our colleagues in marketing have a strong show for you. But if you are looking for something different, try these:
- BRK3080 Our lead architects of the modern SharePoint will be live on stage building a no code solution for you.
- BRK3090 Our head of design for SharePoint will be talking about all the best practices for branding your modern site.
- BRK2125Our head of data science will be on stage dropping knowledge on what the data shows makes a team site successful in it’s first few days of use.
- THR4008 Our head of security will show you how we keep your data secure
- THR3101 Our lead architect for substrate and search integration discusses how we architect some of our AI features behind the scenes.
- THR3131 Our heads of accessibility will give you great advice on how to design an intranet accessible to people of all abilities
- BRK3319 Our head of user experience engineering (basically a design role that codes on the front end too) will walk through what’s new with Fabric – allowing you to create apps and web part that look like our out of the box ones.
- Getting you modern! There are a few sessions you should attend if you want help ensuring your transition to modern experiences goes smoothly:
- THR2242 Quickly learn how to modernize your existing team sites!
- BRK2363 All you need to know about migrations to the cloud
- THR3095 Migrating your custom solutions to SPFx
- BRK3153 Migrating your SharePoint workflows to Flow
- Practical advice on how to design your intranet BRK3360. 2019 is the year you should redesign your intranet – but you don’t have to start without references and great guidance. We’ve paired up our expert in product on hubs with the lead in our IT organization who is deploying a modern intranet to Microsoft Employees.
- Theaters Sessions. These snack sized sessions are often where we try out new types of content and give new speakers a chance to shine. Here are a few of my favorite:
- THR2017 Geek out on doclibs. See how metadata and Flow can make you ten times more productive with your team’s files.
- THR1031 SharePoint 101. Learn how to describe SharePoint to someone who doesn’t know what it is!
- THR3094 Learn how to design web parts that look great
- THR3132 If you miss the big portal overview session, you can see the live on stage portal building part at this theater.
- See a portal built right in front of you BRK2136. Our Comm Sites overview talk will be extra special this year. Not only do we have a lot of announces and demos, but we are going to build a portal live on stage from scratch with a dedicated team of portal builders from product, engineering, and design. We’ve really upped the stage craft on this one – it’s a can’t miss session.
- Intelligence. If you are looking to understand how AI changes your content landscape, check out these two sessions:
- BRK3255 We’ll discuss how both OOTB and via Azure Cognitive Services you can give your content super powers – audio transcriptions, sentiment analysis, language translations, and more. We’ve even brought in an expert in Azure Cognitive Services to be on stage with us.
- THR3101 Hear how we use signals processing to give you personalized and recommended feeds.
Of course, there is more – lots more on Lists (BRK3096), Mobile (THR2025), Graph APIs (BRK3290), News THR2260), Performance Tuning (BRK4006), PNP & dev community (BRK3316) and more! See you all around the conference!
-Adam
P.S. Thanks for reading this far and just for fun - if you are looking for some good tunes as you walk to one of our sessions, check out this Ignite 2018 playlist inspired by modern SharePoint - upbeat songs about renewal & community.
