Heading South for the Digital Workplace Conference NZ

While I may not be traveling nearly as much as years past, I’m gearing up this week for back-to-back travels to two of my favorite locations: Auckland and Seattle.

On Saturday, I’ll be flying from Salt Lake City to Auckland via LAX, landing early Monday morning in one of my favorite destinations, New Zealand, to speak at one of my favorite events: The Digital Workplace Conference (https://dwcnz.co.nz/), being held once again at the Cordis Hotel. This will be my 8th or 9th visit to NZ, I believe. Over the years, I’ve always tried to book a side adventure into my NZ visits, but alas, this year is all business. I’m flying in Monday, with the main event Tuesday and Wednesday, and then have an all-day workshop on Thursday, and will be back out again on Friday. If you are (or plan to be) in the area and want to participate in this fantastic event, you can register here. This will be my 3rd time keynoting the event, and I’m really looking forward to my topic this year.

You can find the agenda here, and my sessions are as follows:

Keynote: The End of the World As We Know It: A Digital Transformation Dystopian Future
Tuesday, April 30th, 9am to 10:30am
I’ll be at the end of the opening session, and will talk about the impacts of NOT preparing for digital transformation. Serious stuff, folks, so don’t miss this one. Maybe I’ll live stream again this year?

Session: Why does my Digital Marketing suck?
Tuesday, April 30th, 12:15pm to 1:15pm
Modern digital marketing is changing rapidly, and rising above the noise of the competition is becoming increasingly difficult. In this session we’ll look at marketing strategy through the lens of a startup founder as it moves from inception through delivery, walking through the framework for marketing success in today’s climate. Attendees will walk away with a better understanding of not only the complexity of digital marketing, but what is required to move forward at each step of the way.

Session: Top 20 Tips for Office 365 Productivity
Wednesday, May 1st, 3:00pm to 4:00pm
In this fun and informative session, I will share 20 of my favorite Office 365 and Microsoft Office productivity tips, with a focus on personal productivity. These tips will span the entire Office 365 platform (Yammer, SharePoint, Teams, and the Office suite), and attendees should walk away with at least 4 or 5 gems that can have an immediate impact on your own (and your team’s) productivity.

Workshop: Mastering Microsoft Teams Administration and Information Architecture
Thursday, May 2nd, 9:00am to 4:00pm
One of the collaboration strengths of Microsoft Teams is its relatively simple hierarchy, focused on improving small team (inner loop) collaboration and communication. However, organizations still need to be thoughtful about how they align their broader information architecture (IA) across all Office 365 workloads. In the first half of the workshop, we will walk through the out-of-the-box administrative, compliance, and auditing capabilities of Microsoft Teams to ensure that participants are aware of the capabilities (and limitations) of Teams administration. During the second half of the day, we will outline the core tenets of your O365 IA (for most organizations, built within SharePoint) and discuss how these translate across the other workloads, and specifically Microsoft Teams. We’ll cover where the information lives, who has access, and how Teams impacts your long-term information management strategy.

From Auckland I’ll briefly touch down in Fiji (not long enough to explore, unfortunately) and LAX before making it home to SLC, but will only be home for a day before heading to Seattle for activities around Microsoft Build. I’ll be there participating in the RD and MVP activities and have a couple other meetings, and then will be home late on Wednesday, May 8th.

I’m excited to see friends and make new contacts, but am seriously slammed this week as I prepare to be on the road for an extended period. Of course, there’s a lot more happening in May. My daughter graduates from grad school in Minneapolis, so my wife and I fly out to visit for a couple days before I fly to Las Vegas for the SharePoint Conference (for a full 24 hours!), touching down home in time to welcome back our middle son, who has been serving a 2-year church mission in Sweden. May is going to be a busy month, for sure, but talk about a hectic 3rd week!