Yesterday the European SharePoint, Office 365, and Azure Conference officially kicked off with back to back keynotes from Microsoft, followed by the start of some of the best SharePoint, Office 365, and Azure content I have seen. The ESPC18 organization team along with the program team have done an outstanding job.
The numbers are impressive, this is the largest SharePoint event in Europe, and the largest ESPC yet with over 2140 of us in total, 140+ sessions, 130+ speakers from all over the world, 75+ sponsors, 40+ sessions on Azure, and Microsoft even sent 35+ people from Redmond. This year’s conference only just started, yet I am already packing my bags for next year’s conference, which we will learn more about this Thursday. I expect the excellence to continue.
Day one for me was about laying the groundwork for the sessions to come. Jeff Teper, Microsoft Corporate Vice President of Office, SharePoint, and OneDrive set the stage. SharePoint’s role is to provide content collaboration for the modern workplace, and I cannot agree more. Digital transformation will be a key driver for success within organizations and Office 365 and SharePoint will be pillars upon which we will build the solutions our organizations need to deliver and compete.
During the second keynote, Vesa Juvonen, Microsoft Senior Program Manager, delivered a SharePoint development keynote. I found this telling to see such a keynote on day one, as a developer I always get a kick seeing code in such a format.
One of the other big take-aways from day one was Microsoft’s announcement around portal design. If you haven’t seen it yet, check out http://aka.ms/SharePointLookBook, a downloadable PDF of examples, concepts, and ideas that will inspire your next project.
I look forward to Day 2 of ESPC 2018, learning more about cybersecurity, and absorbing as much content as possible as the program team yet again raised the bar with the best program yet.
