In today’s end of day panel discussion, live from ESPC19, Christian Buckley, Dux Raymond Sy, Magnus Mårtensson and Nicole Enders discuss what they recommend, are looking forward to and why it’s important over the next 3 days of the conference.

Video Transcript

Christian: Hey we’re at another end of day wrap-up here at the European SharePoint, Office365 in Azure conference in Prague and I’ve got a crew here of the other community reporters and my name is Christian Buckley with Collab Talk out of the US and who am I sitting with?

Dux: My name is Dux with Avepoint.

Nicole: My name is Nicole Enders from Conet.

Magnus: And I’m Magnus Martensson from Lofty Soft how you doing?

Christian: I see what you did there branding cover there on the side cut out. Oh we’re not supposed to talk about that? No, well let’s talk about like the day like what happened over the course today so we had the keynotes we had of course Jeff Teper keynote we had an azure keynote and at the same time we had Karuana talking about Microsoft teams and then in the in the evening we had the Hanselman, Scott Hanselman keynotes. So what kind of stood out for the day for each of you?

Dux: So for me I watched Scott’s keynote in the end I thought it was really a good walk through of history of how the cloud came about but also a lot of poignant learnings through the ages so I thought that was really good.

Nicole: Yeah I enjoyed Scott’s keynote too but I was really looking forward for Jeff’s keynote this morning because I was like at Ignite so I wanted to see it live and my highlight is Project Cortex so I was attending one session there as well.

Dux: What was your favorite part about project cortex?

Nicole: I like the idea that you have this AI based knowledge management so you don’t need to do as something else we had so many projects in the past with our customers where we were talking about oh you need content types you need meta data and every time you have the issue when does anybody edit the metadata where does it come from.

Dux: In one of the things just quickly the project cortex I’m sure Christian you saw it – is it makes SharePoint much more relevant now right like I was thinking at one point like content types, taxonomy term store do we still need that but thanks to project cortex it makes it much more useful.

Christian: Yeah one thing I was just going to point out if you’ve not been watching the other livestream so I actually got to interview Naomi Moneypenny earlier today talking about Project Cortex going into some of the background of the detail around that but yeah I think it’s very exciting because as we’ve always talked about we’ve been the SharePoint space for many years talking about it. It’s not about what you’ve collected all this information and you’re searching for it but you want to be able to find it and now you in the intelligent search it’s always been the issue of it’s not about searching it’s about finding and so I love this way it’s just yet another way to surface all of that knowledge all those information assets in our organization it’s very cool.

Magnus: Oh yeah well so I’m the Azure guy in the room and therefore I’m gonna swivel this over to Azure because you know what they built cortex on top of yeah you guessed it right so you kind of need Azure to build anything these days and so my takeaway from the azure keynote is like this wall-to-wall like that’s craziness of here’s this great thing that we’re doing and here’s this other great thing that we’re doing and oh by the way we’re also doing this great thing. It’s just all like all consuming overwhelming whenever there’s an azure keynote at any large-scale event it just becomes completely crazy there is no person in the world that can keep up with all of these things that are happening but we do our very best and we kind of look like we know what we’re talking about sometimes yes a little bit so that the keynotes for Azure was filled wall-to-wall crazy new things oh we’re doing this we’re doing that and I’m really enjoying it.

Christian: And Teper also covered some of that talk just talking about the numbers shared like the rate of growth of Azure I mean Microsoft cloud is just exploded onto the scene over the last like four or five years.

Magnus: It has yes so now that we have for Microsoft Azure public data centres like 54 of them which is bonkers, imagine the number of dollars that went into building all of that concrete and all of that metal and putting all of those networks together it’s a lot of stuff and what that turns into is a massive opportunity for an individual right so a person who is investing now heavily in Azure learning and training and getting to know Azure will have a lot to do in the decade to come because you know all Azure.

Dux: Well one thing that Scott said it’s really true is look it’s there’s no better time than the started company today imagine if you are start-up and you build your infrastructure in the cloud and it’s scalable all the services are there I don’t have to worry about buying servers deploying VMs and you can focus on your core business and I think that’s what the cloud can truly empower people to do. So one thing around today though I mean the sessions were great I saw a lot of sessions were well attended what about the conference itself anything that stood out for all of you I know everyone goes to a lot of conferences but anything that stood out this week or this past couple days?

Nicole: I was really impressed arrived this morning so it was so well organized I got my badge, I could go out here on this floor visit the expo so I think some were arriving at this moment but every time when you have a question you can ask somebody where’s everybody helps you’re so well organized.

Magnus: Definitely well put. We’re sitting now you guys can’t see this on the live stream but we’re sitting in this little glass booth thing right on the middle, the fishbowl and we’re sitting here in the fishbowl and there’s like all people around us having you know drinks and things and talking and there’s this Expo area with all the vendors and all the people that are here we’re having a lot of fun here and you can’t see it now because it’s evening time it’s dark outside right but this backdrop it is astounding. Prague is a beautiful city and we have you know I don’t know how tall these glass windows are they’re really tall and you can see all of Prague all the beautiful parts of the city right outside the windows and the venue is great. It’s a maze but as you said we have people showing us around so that that helps but the fact that these people organized this event so well it is a treat to be at a good organised event.

Dux: How about you Christian what stood out for you?

Magnus: Sure so we are on day one well next almost a one day zero was the workshop day right and there was a lot of people like there were so many people in the workshops oh my goodness.

Christian: There was over 1,000 people I believe in the workshops.

Magnus: Like 10 parallel or crazy.

Christian: I think there was 11 parallel workshops.

Magnus: That’s a lot, and so people were learning all Monday.

Christian: I just realised we turn it up to 11 they used to have 10 and they turned it up to 11.

Magnus: Wow okay cool so they turn it up to 11 is the new 10 and so day one though we are still on day one right there is more days to you know of this conference two more days and so what’s gonna happen next what are you looking forward to?

Dux: Yeah shameless plug I have a session tomorrow. I was gonna say one thing that I really like about this event is sure there’s a lot of great tech sessions a lot of people but I think they started last year putting them more focus on things outside of tech diversity inclusion, human in IT so along that lines I have a session tomorrow on how you can improve your public speaking skills which a lot of us need.

Magnus: Are you plugging your session come on man!

Dux: Course, tune in 11:45 and I’ll walk you through tips and tricks and I would be a rock star presenter.

Nicole: I’m so sorry wanted to attend your session to promote you but I am also looking forward to you some more team sessions and we have the Vesa keynote on Thursdays so I’m looking forward for this to because I’m a developer I want to know what’s going on with SPF X and Co but I also think there’s so much time to do networking to meet other people so we have two days left.

Magnus: We gotta pace ourselves it’s two days left two days to go what you know.

Christian: And plus we’re doing there will be dozens more interviews happening live streams and recorded interviews so there be content that’s coming out to the live streams that you see now and as well as interviews that will be over the next couple of weeks so a lot that’s happening.

Magnus: And officially we’re turned up to 11.

Christian: And we are turned up to 11 and but let’s round it out with on Thursday my session. So actually I’m doing a panel discussion around you know what does it mean to build a hub for your organization so we’re talking a lot about Microsoft Teams and cause it’s not just about teams it’s not about a single product or a single workload and everything else that’s involved with that so I think it’s gonna be a great discussion I know it’ll be exciting.

Dux: So wait before we wrap up we have to at least teach people a word in Czech right because we’re in Prague we’re in Prague right so maybe we should teach them how to say cheers Na zdraví yes it’s true I’m not making it up so with that what cheers to the ESPC.

All: Na zdraví.