Last Wednesday and Thursday, Microsoft organized a Tech Summit event in the Amsterdam RAI. I was invited as a booth expert and a speaker.

As one of the last Tech Summit events in a long row of events, my experience with the organization for the Tech Summit was top notch. It started on Tuesday already.

On Tuesday, Microsoft arranged for a speaker check-in between 4 PM and 6 PM. We were all invited to the speaker room, check out our rooms, the booth, the theater, discuss slides and pick up our badges and T-shirts.

Wednesday morning I arrived at the Amsterdam RAI at around 7:30 AM. It was a cloudy day. The perfect weather for an indoor event…

I joined the other experts at the booth around 8 AM, until the keynote started at around 9:30 AM. By then, we had answered a handful of questions on Exchange, Azure Active Directory, Teams and Skype for Business already! I met with one of this blog’s biggest fans and spent most of my day at the Experts booth on Wednesday, before heading home at 7 PM.

Thursday morning, I arrived at 7 AM. This was the day I was to present a 60-minute session on GDPR (AVG) in terms of Microsoft 365 from 10:45 and 11:45. I studied the slides and demos Microsoft provided me. It was a really nice slide deck that began with explaining the background for GDPR, then to introduce Microsoft Compliance Manager, followed by explaining some of the more difficult moving parts of Microsoft 365, including Conditional Access, Azure AD Identity Protection, Azure Information Protection and Office 365 Advanced Threat Protection. Alas, the slide deck didn’t include eDiscovery, for which I apologized to the audience beforehand.

Room Elicium 2 was packed with people, mostly technical people I recognized, although the session was advertised as a session for decision makers.

After a short break for lunch, I was scheduled for a second presentation. This time I was in for even more fun with one of my own favorite presentations in a nice informal setting; Talking for 15 minutes on the silly stuff people do when it comes to AD FS and Hybrid Identity.

The feedback I received from the people that were actually able to follow the presentation in the busy expo area was overwhelmingly positive:

It’s always nice to hear when people enjoyed learning things I present on.

After the session I joined Jeff Woolsey again at the Experts Booth, where we discussed GDPR and baselines with one of the Netherlands’ largest healthcare insurers. Another interesting question came from an organization that would currently create user administrator accounts in Azure AD for partner admins, so they could create user objects for their partner users to access the app. They figured this saved them a lot of money on user administration. Apparently, no-one had introduced them to Azure AD B2B, yet.

Thank you!

A big ‘Thank You!’ to all Microsoft Tech Summit attendees, sponsors, speakers and staff for making the past week such an enjoyable experience!

I had a lot of fun and I hope you did, too!