Last week was quite the change as I traded sunburn in Sydney for frostbite in Amsterdam to attend ESPC 2023!
I love the size of this event (at around 1500 attendees). It is large enough to attract some of the world’s best speakers and topic experts, key Microsoft leaders (such as Jeff Teper and Karuana Gatimu), and yet it is small enough to network, make genuine connections with people and have shared experiences.
I spent most of the week in the expo hall talking to people on the Ideagen OnePlace Solutions booth. Thanks to everyone that came up and had a chat across the week, it was great to see customers, partners, old friends and most importantly meet new people and hear of your challenges and successes in the world of Microsoft 365 and beyond.
These were my key takeaways from the conference:
- Not surprisingly there were lots of sessions and discussion around Copilots (all of them!) Although now it’s becoming available to customers outside of Microsoft the conversation is less about hype and more about the basic realities.
- You need data to be actually stored somewhere central and accessible to others for Copilot to make use of it.
- Cleanup your data so it is accurate. Crap in = Crap out
- Get rid of old incorrect/conflicting data that may confuse Copilot.
- SharePoint Embedded public preview announced Announcing SharePoint Embedded Public Preview at ESPC23 – Microsoft Community Hub
- More clarity around the rebranding and evolution of Microsoft Syntex to SharePoint Premium Introducing SharePoint Premium – the future of AI powered content management and experiences – Microsoft Community Hub
- Since Microsoft announced general availability of the new rebuilt Teams client in October there was plenty of discussion about performance improvements, technical rollout, change management and feature parity with Teams classic. Introducing the new Microsoft Teams client – Teams | Microsoft Learn
Cameron Dwyer 