Over the last few years, I have had the good fortune to attend and present at several community events: online webinars, community driven learning events, and even a global hackathon. I’ve been part of the organizing team for several of these events. These are amazing experiences and I’ve benefited both personally and professionally by meeting new people, sharing ideas and experiences, and just making some great memories.
So I am excited to talk a bit about the new 365 Power Up event series being organized by myself, Julie Yack, Mark Christie, and Nick Doelman. This is a community driven event series focused on the Power Platform and related technologies – Power Apps, Power Automate, Power BI, Power Apps Portals, AI Builder, and Dynamics 365… just to name a few!
Why another event series?
The 365 Power Up event series is new but the format should be familiar. These are one or two day events with a content tracks curated by the local organizers. Each event is organized by community members which means content and speakers that will be received well by fellow community members and customers. This format has been used successfully for years on SQL Saturday, SharePoint Saturday, and 365 Saturday/Dynamics Power events.
With all these other events going on around the Power Platform and related Microsoft platforms, why yet another event series?
We simply want to help the Power Platform community continue to deliver killer community driven events by addressing some of the challenges we’ve seen in our collective experience.
The day to day organization and event delivery is still in the hands of the local organizers. We provide the common banner under which you can run a community event with an offer of help where needed.
How can our 365 Power Up group help? Organizing one of these events can be a challenge for both seasoned organizers and newcomers. We can to offer guidance on best practices, event promotion, finding event speakers and venues, and facilitating communication all around.
A key challenge that drove us to form this event series is communication – between organizers, speakers, hosts, or sponsors. If someone has a question, our team will do our best to find the person with the answer. Solid communication can dramatically impact the success of an event.
A more concrete offering is a our website promoting upcoming events and hosting shared information. Longer term, we hope this can grow into hub for organizers, speakers, and attendees.
Our website
Over the last several months, we’ve put together a website to showcase upcoming events. Currently, I am managing the site and content. This includes providing a list of your speakers, their session listing, event location details, and a listing of your sponsors.
For organizers, we do not yet support attendee registrations on our portal. We suggest external tools such as eventbrite.com for attendee registration and sessionize.com for calls for speaker content. I had considered building out attendee registration and speaker management, but those are some pretty powerful tools. I simply did not want delay our initial event kick off waiting for these capabilities on the portal! I plan on adding them in the near future. Adding them to the backlog!
In the meantime, check out the website here: 365 Power Up. We posted our mission statement, some team information, and material on organizing your own event, and most importantly, a list of upcoming events. Specifically, the mission statement offers more detail about or goals and intentions.
I am actively working on content as I build out the administrative tools, so keep an eye out for updates for new events and organizer. In the meantime, drop me a line with any questions or suggestions. If you have a great template you want to share, some suggestions on vendors, or simply some advice for event organizers, please let me know and I will post it on the site!
On a bit of a selfish side note, I am using the website as a learning experience. I started with a blank portal and built our current portal from scratch as a Power Apps Portals. I plan on writing up a series of posts about my experiences building out the various moving parts. I also have a few features that should pose a challenge, so I am looking forward to sharing these upcoming posts.
Attend an event!
On January 25, we will be running the first event in the 365 Power Up event series in Philadelphia – check out the link to view the line up and register for PowerUpPhilly! Soon to follow, we have 365 Power Up Tampa and the Scottish Summit. Both are shaping up to be amazing events! We have a few others that are on the backburner, so keep an eye on the site for new event posts!
Better yet… Organize an event!
If you are interested in organizing your own event, please drop a line. We have a Contact Us page on the website but feel free to add a comment here or send an email via this site. I would love to discuss future events and help wherever I can!
