Nothing like finding out about conferences almost at the last minute, but better late than never! A 2-day FREE tech conference was hosted this week with around 1500 people showing up to immediately eat any and all available food in true techie style.  I think we’re starved for those really big events since in SA since Tech Ed was cancelled, no pun intended.

The Tech Summit travels all over the world and we can highly recommend attending one in your city.  If you couldn’t attend it, simply sign in to the Microsoft Tech Community site and watch them on demand.  The sessions are all recorded and the slidedecks available.  Here’s the link to all the Office 365 sessions.  Catch up on all the tweets from this week’s event too.

More good news is that there is SO much free online training available, that budget can no longer be an excuse if you want to get into IT.  All the links have been shared to the Twitter feed, so go and see what interests you and start learning.

There was a severe lack of ladies at this event.  Come on girls, where are you?  Why aren’t you learning IT?  The industry needs you.

Some staggering numbers were shared by Microsoft, including :

• Spending $1billion annually on security R&D
• 200 billion emails scanned for malware every single month
• 120 trillion objects in Azure with 20 million transactions per second (phwoar)
• 100 million Skype meetings a month
• 190 million SharePoint end users

These numbers alone mean it’s never too late to get into these fields because there is just so much to do and learn, and it never stops.

We learnt some pretty nifty tricks for Word and PowerPoint which will be blogged about later; it’s amazing how cool Office has become.  In case you don’t know, FastTrack is available to companies who have bought 50 or more Office 365 licenses which gives you a ton of free onboarding content; they have over 600 engineers on call supporting clients.

It was also great to see some of our clients at the event, catch up with friends from years ago and meet long time social media friends in real life.

I also took the chance to ask Microsoft why we can’t rename site collections.  It seems this is a common request and they’re looking into it, but it’s a pretty hectic architectural change apparently.  That’s okay, we’ll wait, but we need it. 🙂  In other good news, the Message Centre in the Office 365 Admin portal will soon send emails to the global admins when something new arrives.  Yay!!  Because I don’t know about you, but I never remember to go in there to see if there’s new messages. A condensed weekly alert would be awesome. Coming to a tenant near you in June-ish.

It was surprising to hear that adoption is still the biggest challenge with all these tools.  One would think that life would be getting easier with the amount of tech available at our fingertips, but it is clearly not.  Great for adoption specialists like ourselves, but not so great for the world in general.  User adoption, change management and governance did not come up in any of the sessions I attended, barring a little in one.  With all the tech available, don’t forget that there are still people on the other side of all these devices and systems.  They need to be counted and treated with the utmost care and respect, because if you don’t, they ain’t using your fancy tools.

That being said, it was a really great event and we’ll be back next year.  See you there!!