Office365 Conference 2016 Wrap up

2016-01-10 | Toni Pohl

Last week the second Office 365 Konferenz (office365conferenz.net) took place from 8th to 9th of January 2016 in Cologne. With about 120 attendees the event was fully booked (again).

image

The Conference

Well, this was the second Office 365 Conference in Germany - from the community for the community – which offered many interesting sessions with well-known international speakers.

We would like to point out some topics worth mentioning about this conference:

I would like to give you some impressions around the conference. So, here we start!

Organization

We had the same organization team with a handful of MVPs as last year: Martina Grom, Toni Pohl, Patrick Lamber, Raphael Köllner, Kerstin Rachfahl and Michael Kirst-Neshva (see team).

mvpboxweb

We really appreciate the great support and funding of Microsoft and our supporters Elmar Witte, Michael Schikorra and Ragnar Heil.

There were a lot of emails, virtual Meetings and Calls necessary for organizing this event. Internally we used OneNote, SharePoint Online and mostly a closed Yammer group in the german speaking MVP Yammer Network to coordinate.

It started with organisation of sponsors and contacts, catering, website, a new Call for Papers system with SSO, interfaces, Newsletters, Slidedeck, Bags and so on.

So thanks to all who helped making this possible!

WP_20160107_12_47_08_Rich_LI WP_20160107_13_56_52_Rich_LI

WP_20160107_17_17_15_Rich_LI WP_20160107_16_37_12_Rich_LI

WP_20160107_17_13_42_Rich_LI WP_20160107_16_48_11_Rich

WP_20160107_16_21_28_Rich_LI WP_20160107_17_50_37_Rich_LI

The location

The two day event took place in the Microsoft Office in Cologne, Holzmarkt 2a, 50676 Köln which is a cool location directly on Rheinau Hafen (the small harbour is part of Rhein river).

image image

Although the location is great, it’s not perfect for so many participants since we had to split the event in the 4th and 5th floor. There were two session rooms in 4th floor and one session room in 5th floor, with a window wall with great view over the harbour (as you can see on the two photos from Twitter – thx to @ragnarh and @poschauko). We had two days of sunshine, nevertheless the cost free event was full. Smiley

The Content

The keynote delivered by Michael Schikorra was packed.

keynote

keynote_ragnar2 track3

The 5th floor houses the exclusive Microsoft Executive Briefing Center with a large terrace (which was perfect for smokers), a large video wall, Microsoft Hardware and one session room. The room for Track 3 had more meeting character and was very convenient.

We were very happy that we could used the whole 4th and 5th floor for the conference.
Thx Microsoft and the team!

executivebriefingcenterwall terrace

executivebriefingcenterfloor executivebriefingcenterfaq

The Agenda shows all the sessions delivered on day One…

image

…and day Two.

image

…and some session snapshots (click to enlarge).

WP_20160108_15_09_35_Rich_LI WP_20160108_16_09_02_Rich

WP_20160109_14_49_23_Rich_LI WP_20160109_15_35_34_Rich_LI

WP_20160108_16_27_26_Rich_LI WP_20160108_15_10_34_Rich_LI

WP_20160108_14_39_16_Rich_LI WP_20160108_13_48_35_Rich_LI

WP_20160108_11_46_08_Rich_LI WP_20160108_10_02_08_Rich_LI

sessionfabian WP_20160108_11_47_33_Rich_LI

WP_20160108_13_38_29_Rich WP_20160109_14_15_35_Rich_LI

Slide Decks

We are collecting all session slides and will send the link to all presentations shortly!

Thanks to all!

We would like to thank all attendees, speakers, sponsors and all helping hands for making the second Office 365 Conference such a huge success (again)!

Martina and me want to thank our team, especially Patrick Lamber for his continuously support, Kerstin Rachfahl for the great self made speaker presents and the food and Jenny for taking the event photos (which will be available shortly as well).

Also many thanks to Ana and Jaqueline from the Microsoft team for giving a warm welcome to all participiants and for organizing everything on site!

Also thanks to René Rimbach, Daniel Lehner and Maik Reufer – just to mention some - and all the other helping hands for supporting.

WP_20160108_08_49_42_Rich_LI

Thanks to the Speakers

We got about 100 session proposals for this conference. As content board (the organizers) we have not made our decision easy... We had to select 32 sessions we thought would be inspiring and interesting. We hope you liked the content and there was something for everyone.

The speakers delivered their session for free and in their free time. We had speakers from Germany, Austria, Italy, Norway, France, Belgium, Netherlands, Ireland and the UK (hope I didn’t forget anything?).

speakers1 speakers2

So many thanks to all our speakers, you rocked! We hope you liked the event!

Thanks to our sponsors

Thanks Microsoft for being Premium Sponsor and especially Elmar Witte for supporting our community event in that great way.

image

Our Gold Sponsors made it possible to execute this event cost free for all participants and for the speakers.

Many thanks to Archive360, AvePoint, K2, Nintex, netmail and Rencore for supporting the community!

image

 

Also thanks to our Silver Sponsors who made this event available with their personal commitment and thanks to Medialessen for providing the Mobile App.

image

Internally within atwork I would like to thank our colleagues Doris Schlaffer for the organisation and all the graphics and handouts and Ivo Pavlovic for the technical imlementation of the event system and the website.

Without the Sponsors the Office 365 Conference would not have been possible, so again thanks a lot for your support!

Feedback

On Site we got a lot of feedback from attendees, speakers and sponsors. We will combine this with the session and event rating and post this here in an extra blogpost shortly.

If you want to give additional feedback or to participate in the german speaking Yammer-Group in the Office 365 Network please follow this link: Office 365 Usergroup DACH (Germany, Austria, Switzerland).

SNAGHTML4dbe62b

Mentions in Twitter

See a Twitter Statistics with the hashtag #Office365Konf in #Office365Konf 2016 Twitter Statistics and some impressions in this graphics.

SNAGHTML51d19f1

More Mentions in the web

... and some more impressions here (to be continued):

Summary

We got a lot of positive feedback already and would like to encourage you to send us feedback via the mobile app (if you haven’t rated the sessions untill yet). Your feedback is very valuable for us. Thanks!

We from atwork (@magrom and @atwork) had a great time at the conference and hope you liked it too!

Categories: Event, English, Microsoft, MVP, Office365, Office, atwork, Social

Source: https://blog.atwork.at/post/Office365-Conference-2016-Wrap-up