Last week, I was part of Microsoft Ignite 2018 in Orlando, Florida. Both as a speaker and a community booth host, I added to Microsoft’s biggest annual technology event targeted at IT Professionals.

I left home early in the morning of Saturday September 22 for two Delta flights that would take me to New York and then to Orlando.

As I arrived, I met up with a couple of other MVPs in the lobby of the Hyatt who had planned to go out for dinner in the Pointe Orlando area. We ended up at LaFayette’s.

On Sunday, we had a pre-day planned, followed by a party at Bahama Breeze with the folks from Microsoft Netherlands and people for Dutch organizations attending Ignite.

As we talked about Identity, we decided to perform a ‘show and tell of keys’ to see what people are using today in terms of FIDO2. Honestly… it was the only picture I took on Sunday.

Monday morning, I had to get out of bed early to grab some breakfast before we got seated as part of the MVP Priority Seating benefit, in the front rows of the Ignite Keynote by Satya Nadella. I was seated with Aleksandar Nikolic and Robert Smit.

During the Welcome Reception at the Ignite Expo Hall, I had the opportunity to present a 20-minute session on hardening Azure AD tenants. Especially when you have an older Azure AD tenant, certain settings my provide a less than ideal experience from a security perspective. I explained to the attendees how to properly secure user privileges, privileged accounts and service accounts in Azure AD from a technology and process point of view.

I sat in on a couple of sessions throughout Ignite this year, but mostly I helped out Raymond Comvalius with his tasks as community reporter, basically acting as his personal assistant and grip. It meant I spent a lot of time at Community Central and had a lot of fun at two Community Social events and the MVP Wall.

On Thursday, I presented a second session. This time, I shared my team’s experiences going password-less. While the product team presented a lot of innovative ways to decommission passwords.

After the session we got ready to visit Universal Studios Florida and Universal’s Islands of Adventure for Ignite’s Celebration Party.

Friday was another day of sessions and a sweet ‘Goodbye’ to everyone as they went home. We enjoyed Orlando for another day in the pool and at a couple of malls.

Thank you!

Thanks to all the people attending Microsoft Ignite 2018, the people attending my sessions and, of course, the people who stuck around after my session for the interesting discussions. Thanks to the Microsoft Ignite team for making this year’s Ignite fabulous, and of course, my MVP friends who are always fun to hang out with.