We were very privileged to be on the list to have a mini Ignite in town – and what a feast it was! 3000 people filled Sandton Convention Centre for 2 days.

The line up was great, nearly every session we went to we left thinking “phwoar”! The Power BI stuff rocked our world the most by far. We’ve signed up for an advanced course then and there. The licenses are a bit sneaky, they are not free – but man, are they worth it! You can pull date in from over 80 different sources. If you really want to change things, they need to be measurable. Power BI just takes it to another level completely. Make some time for this toy, it will be worth your while.

One thing that has become abundantly clear, is that we are going to have to rethink how we have been managing SharePoint for the past (almost) 2 decades. The cloud is simply not the same animal and we are going to have to go back to the drawing board. All those big and medium sized companies migrating from SharePoint 2010 to the cloud …. phew … are you in for a surprise. Do not under-estimate the change that is coming. Microsoft 365 / SharePoint Online and all its friends are chalk and cheese different to classic, on-premise versions. The governance implications are massive, combined with the huge complexity of the permissions model. We’ve been on it a while now and it’s not getting much easier. That’s the thing with platforms that do so much, you need to learn so much.

If you are responsible in any way for SharePoint farms, are a SharePoint Admin on O365, or even a power user used to managing multiple site collections – you need to block out time to get your head around what the new technical landscape looks like. It’s even more important if you are migrating from any on-prem version. This is compounded even further when they reported that we can expect a 4300% increase expected data production in the next year! Interesting times. We live in a time of massive technological change, we can’t know how this is going to end.

We made all our notes on Twitter – so please have a look at Michelle’s and my feeds to catch the snippets of highlights from the sessions. We had loads of shenanigans too with plenty of fun pics!

I did a quick live feed at the end of the event, check it out on Facebook.

Do not miss the next Ignite, it sells out fast! It is worth the 2 days off work. Can’t wait for the next one. Thanks Microsoft, it was epic. Not Tech-Ed epic, but still great! 😀