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M365 Conference Next Week in Orlando
Next week, I shall present two sessions at the M365 conference in Orlando (if you still want to attend the event, here’s a $100 off discount code). It’s the first time for me to present at this conference. A previous commitment to speak fell through due to a family event and then the pandemic and other reasons prevented the M365 conference from getting onto my agenda.
I have two sessions:
- Mastering the Microsoft Graph PowerShell SDK (Tuesday, April 30, 11:30am).
- Don’t Let Copilot for Microsoft 365 Be a Vanity Project (Wednesday, May 1, 8am).
Please come along if you’re interested in these topics. Heckling is welcome, but only if it’s intelligent and interesting.
Seeking Joy in the M365 Conference Schedule
One of the things I like to do in the period leading up to a conference is figure out which sessions to attend. There’s always a chance to learn from someone else’s take on a subject that you might think you know well.
Browsing the session schedule, the effect of Microsoft sponsorship is evident. There’s lots of sessions covering topics that are important to current Microsoft initiatives, especially those associated with the OneDrive and SharePoint organization (ODSP). As expected, Copilot for Microsoft 365 features prominently, including the interesting topic of extending Copilot to cover tenant-specific content. Teams, SharePoint, Online OneDrive for Business, and Purview all get slots, with the number assigned to Teams much reduced compared to previous events.
I guess the all-embracing focus on Copilot detracts from the attention Microsoft pays to Teams, and that’s reflected in the conference schedule. On a positive note, Teams has 320 million monthly active users. Microsoft can certainly extract more revenue from the installed base by selling $10/user/month Teams Premium licenses, but they’d prefer to sell $30/user/month Copilot for Microsoft 365 licenses instead.
The session schedule is rounded out with slots for topics like Viva Suite, Viva Connections, Viva Amplify, and Viva Engage. These products are not in the same major workload category as SharePoint Online and Teams, but they have a relatively small fan base who will be happy to see this content.
Entra ID and Exchange Online Missing from the M365 Conf Schedule
What’s missing from the conference is any mention of two major technologies that exert massive influence over Microsoft 365: Entra ID and Exchange Online. I cannot understand how any conference asserting itself to be the “biggest and most exciting Microsoft 365 community event of the year” can ignore these workloads. Simply put, if you don’t get Entra ID right, your Microsoft 365 tenant is at risk of compromise. And if you don’t pay attention to Exchange Online, the workloads that depend on email will experience problems.
It’s not as if there is nothing to discuss in these areas. The recent Midnight Blizzard attack against Microsoft’s own tenant resulted in exfiltration of email from executive mailboxes and caused an upswing of interest in better management of OAuth apps. Microsoft has an ongoing campaign to increase the percentage of Entra ID accounts protected by multifactor authentication (now around 38%) and makes substantial investments in tools like conditional access policies, authentication method, and the Authenticator app (now previewing support for passkeys). Sessions helping people understand the risk environment, how to manage inbound connections into tenants, and how to use tools to secure tenants and trace bad actor actions would be invaluable to anyone involved with a Microsoft 365 tenant.
Relating to Exchange Online, there has been much comment about Microsoft’s plans to stop old on-premises Exchange servers sending email to Exchange Online over connectors in hybrid organizations. Microsoft recently announced plans to introduce a high-volume email service, the deprecation of Exchange Web Services in Exchange Online (forcing developers to use Graph APIs instead), the deprecation of SMTP AUTH client submissions, and a new way of controlling how much external email can be sent from mailboxes. There’s also the introduction of a new version of a subscription-based Exchange Server to consider. And on the client side, there’s the ongoing fuss and bother around the Outlook Monarch client to discuss.
The folks who choose sessions to appear on a conference schedule can justifiably claim that the reason why Entra ID and Exchange Online sessions are not there is that speakers don’t submit sessions for consideration. This is true, but potential speakers take guidance from conference organizers about what topics the conference wishes to feature. And naturally, speakers are influenced by the priorities set by Microsoft, which leads to large numbers of sessions featuring the technology du jour. In this instance, it’s Copilot.
The point is that technologies like Entra ID and Exchange Online are essential to Microsoft 365 success. Every one of the 400 million plus Office 365 paid seats uses Entra ID and the number of Exchange Online mailboxes is in the billions. A tenant can run perfectly well with low-end Office 365 licenses and ignore Copilot for Microsoft 365 and the entire Viva Suite. But if users cannot connect and sign-in securely, the tenant will fail. And if users can’t access their email, they won’t be slow to let the tenant administrators know.
No Conference Gets it Perfectly Right
No technology conference ever offers the perfect mix of sessions to inform and inspire attendees. However, I think that the program teams responsible for choosing sessions should do a better job of selecting topics that reflect the real-life concerns of customers instead of sessions aligned with Microsoft marketing priorities. Achieving a better balance between coverage of new initiatives and the technology everyone works with daily would make conferences more attractive and valuable, even if it might annoy some of the marketing fraternity.