MVP

SharePoint Days conference has evolved to Thrive conference! We are looking forward to Thrive conference in beautiful Rimske Terme/Slovenia from 8th to 9th November! Join us and a bunch of experts and MVP fellows at this great event that’s close to Austria and Central Europe! Have a look a the great speakers lineup and the agenda with a lot of tracks and sessions around SharePoint, Office365 and Azure! As in the last year, Martina and I are honored to be part of Thrive conference. ...

It was a busy week! Ignite is the largest and leading event for IT-Professionals and Decision-Makers in the Microsoft universe. This year, the conference took place in Orlando, Florida, from 25th to 29th September. With approximately 30,000 attendees and about 700 breakout, a lot of theater-sessions a large expo and a lot of networking this event was … big #dataoverflow. See my personal impressions here. Welcome to Florida After the first Ignite conference in Chicago in May 2015 and in Atlanta in September 2016, the event location this year was Orlando. From our company, atwork, five persons attended (see our colleagues Dominik, Andreas and Jens from Germany with the blue atwork T-Shirts below) and Martina Grom was a speaker. Florida did welcome us with hot and humid weather with a lot of sunshine and a bit of scattered rain showers – back in summer time. So, we used the weekend before Ignite for visiting a Disney Park and the Star Wars universe with our MVP pal Loryan. For us, the conference started on Sunday with a pre-day and a lot of technical information. ...

Office 365 groups span over various Office 365 services and provide a great way for collaborating. By default, every user can create an Office 365 group. While self-service is a good thing and many businesses adopted into that direction, some companies still prefer the controlled approach. In real world environments, organizations usually want to restrict the group provisioning so that IT can control the wild growth of groups. This article series shows how to create an Office 365 group with an attached approval process with SharePoint Online, Flow and Azure functions. See how this works here! ...

We are delighted to announce that our CEO, Martina Grom, will be speaker at this year’s Microsoft Ignite conference. Ignite is Microsoft’s largest IT conference that will take place from September 25 - 29, 2017 in Orlando, Florida. Ignite will offer about 900+ sessions, insights and roadmaps from industry leaders, and deep dives and live demos on the products you use every day. As in the last years at Ignite Chicago 2015 and Ignite Atlanta 2016, Martina will deliver sessions about the Office 365 eco system. See more information at speaker Martina Grom. ...

Am 21. Juni fand bei Microsoft Wien das Community Event BUILD 2017 Redelivery statt. Spät aber doch, hier ein paar Eindrücke vom Event mit einigen Schnappschüssen! Unter dem Motto //BUILD on Tour Neuigkeiten für Devs und IT-Pros organisierten Gerhard Göschl (MSFT), Gerwald Oberleitner (MSFT), Martina Grom (MVP, RD) und Rainer Stropek (MVP, RD) das Event im Office von Microsoft Wien. Es gab drei Tracks, mit den Zielgruppen für Entwickler, IT-Pros und Open Source Software sowie zusätzlich einen Hands-On Workshop über Azure Stack. Die Veranstaltung wurde von der community für die community veranstaltet und war kostenfrei. Vielen Dank an alle Sprecher (aus der MVP community), an den Sponsor Microsoft und an alle Teilnehmer! ...

Well, it’s 1st of July and guess what? I got reawarded as a Microsoft MVP for the 5th time. And, I was accepted by two Product Groups for my contributions of the last year: I got the MVP award for Microsoft Azure and for Office Development. Wow! See my MVP-Profile here. For me, being awarded as a Microsoft MVP is a great honor. This award is a marvelous acknowledgment for all my activities as conferences, meetups, blog articles and all my other contributions to the various national and international IT-communities. I started as a MVP for “Client Development” in 2013 which then was re-organized in “Windows Development”. It was a very exiting time to be part of that group among great personalities! Today, I’m doing mostly projects around Microsoft Azure and Office Development, so I’m really proud and happy that my community contributions ended up in these two new competencies. ...

This week, the first European Collaboration Summit (ECS) took place in beautiful Zagreb. We enjoyed the community conference together with about 500 attendees and about 60 speakers and we had a blast! ECS (www.collaborationsummit.rocks) is the new brand of the community event SPC Adriatics, extended from SharePoint and Project topics to all the new Microsoft cloud services around Office 365 and Azure, organized by the team around Branka, Adis, Toni and Nenad (see some history at 2014, wrap-up and 2013). This year, our Martina supported compiling the sessions for the Business track. ...

We did it again.. attending this year’s Microsoft BUILD conference in Seattle. See some of our impressions here! This year, Microsoft BUILD conference took place from May 10th to 12th near Microsoft’s home in Seattle. In total, this was the 7th BUILD conference. After the Professional Developer’s Conference (PDC) in the past and a break, the first BUILD started in September 2011 in Los Angeles, Anaheim, where Windows 8 was announced. The second BUILD end of October 2012 was interesting since it happened directly in Redmond at the Microsoft Campus with a big tent for the keynote (near the Conference Building 31) and Steve Ballmer himself presenting Windows 8 and Windows Phone 8. From then on (2013 to 2016), BUILD had it’s location in San Francisco at the Moscone Center. I still remember what an expensive location Silicone Valley and SanFran was. In 2013, Windows 8.1 was announced. In 2014, Universal Apps and the Lumia phone got most attention (can you remember, there was a time when Microsoft wanted to participate in the mobile device market with hardware and software…). In 2015, “Cloud First” – Azure (which was renamed from Windows Azure to Microsoft Azure in 2014 already) - took the stage, followed by Windows 10 that came in that summer. In 2016, it was time for the Cortana, Bots, Cognitive Services, Xamarin, and the Windows Windows 10 Anniversary Update. The Mixed Reality project “HoloLens” was announced in January 2016 at the virtual “Windows 10: The Next Chapter” event completely unexpected (although the Kinect project lead into that). ...

We are very happy and proud that our CEO, Martina Grom, has been re-awarded as Microsoft Regional Director (RD) this April! The Microsoft Regional Director Program consists of 150 of the world’s top technology visionaries chosen specifically for their proven cross-platform expertise. RD’s must be nominated by Microsoft and this is a very exclusive program. Find out more about that exceptional business and community leaders at the Microsoft RD website rd.microsoft.com. ...

Yesterday, on the 22nd April 2017, the fifth Microsoft Global Azure Bootcamp happened worldwide where user groups and communities organized events to learn about Azure and Cloud Computing. In Austria, the #GAB happened in Linz. We had a great day with Azure and the community! See details at the website of global.azurebootcamp.net. The official twitter hashtag was #GlobalAzure (but many, as I, used #GAB2017, but that’s life ). As in the years before, Rainer Stropek (MVP, RD) with Karin and their team of Coding Club Linz organized the event in Austria, Linz in Wissensturm, see Global Azure Bootcamp 2017 in Austria. ...