In an effort to bring more great speakers to the Microsoft community here in Utah, I am trying to ramp up the number of guest speakers this year. For our third Microsoft User Group Utah (#MUGUT) webinar this year, we will be joined by Office Apps & Services MVP Antonio Maio (@antoniomaio2), an Enterprise Architect & Director at Protiviti with over 20 years of experience in enterprise application architecture, information security, cybersecurity practices and systems, software development and team leadership. Join us on Tuesday, March 10th at 11am Pacific as Antonio provides a detailed overview of Project Cortex. Registration details below:

Enhance Productivity, Compliance and Knowledge with Microsoft’s New Project Cortex

Tuesday, March 10th at 11am Pacific

With constant changes in technology, empowering your people to utilize and advance their knowledge more rapidly is vital in today’s digital workplace. Microsoft’s new cloud service, Project Cortex, serves as your organization’s knowledge network in the Microsoft Cloud helping your people become more productive utilizing Microsoft applications they already know.

Project Cortex can help your organization automatically gain valuable insights by capturing content, extracting data, organizing information and building a knowledge network from the information you already have. This allows your organization to improve compliance policies, enhance productivity and leverage knowledge quickly and easily. The new cloud service uses Artificial Intelligence (AI) to automatically and intelligently process content so organizations can immediately start to turn that data into knowledge. During this session Antonio will introduce Project Cortex, provide an overview of its capabilities, discuss business use cases for Project Cortex, preview key functionalities and talk about how you will be able to use it in your organization.

Register at http://bit.ly/MUGUT_Antonio

Additionally, I wanted to share out the recordings of our first two MVP webinars this year:

Co-Innovation & Microsoft 365

Led by MVP Tracy Van der Schyff (@tracyvds), this session tackled the topic of innovation and Office 365. Innovation cannot take place in a vacuum, just as our workforce should be diverse, so should our skill sets. The rise of the citizen development era also brings forth the need to understand how workloads integrate and complement each other. Office 365 delivers a vast set of tools to help companies innovate, automate and streamline activities. In this session, Tracy shares guidance on fostering creativity and innovation, building a self-learning | lifelong learning culture, keeping up to date, and examples of co-innovation in Office 365.

 

Hyper-Speed Content Migrations to @MicrosoftTeams

Led by MVP Ragnar Heil (@ragnarh), this session covered planning for SharePoint migrations. Migrations can be simple, but in reality they are time-consuming, kill deadlines, utilize too many human resources, and are inefficient. Regardless of your organization’s size or source environment, successfully moving into the Office 365 Modern Workplace requires industry best practices that have been tested and proven time and again. In this webinar, Ragnar reveals project phase-based insider tips and methodologies to effectively move content, documents and libraries from legacy SharePoint Server, File Servers, Box, Dropbox or Google Drive into Microsoft Teams. Aspects of Tenant-to-Tenant Migrations are covered as well for M&A scenarios.

 

But Wait…There Are More Great Online Events!

These are not part of the #MUGUT, but they’re online, I’m involved in all of them, and within the Office 365 ecosystem:

Getting the Best Use Out of all Office 365 Applications

EUM guest webinar with Office Apps & Services MVP Asif Rehmani (@asifrehmani) on Thursday, March 5th at Noon Eastern. There’s so much that Office 365 has to offer to small and large organizations. However, the current reality is that most organizations are only using about 20% of the available capabilities. Understanding the value of each application and how it all fits together is crucial to getting the best use out of Office 365. In this session, Asif will go over a specific case study related to an organization’s journey of how they chose to utilize Office 365. He’ll discuss which applications were chosen to be used, and which ones were rejected and why. You will walk out of this session with a better understanding of how to organize the various components of Office 365 in your organization.

Register at https://www.extranetusermanager.com/resources/events/

Project Manager and Stakeholders Tools for Success

Hosted by Zen3, join Renaud Montes from Zen3 and RD+MVP Christian Buckley for a 30-minute webinar on March 10th at 10am Pacific on customer engagement and Microsoft 365 task capabilities. Renaud will discuss why you should look beyond the customer survey scores for targeted marketing campaigns. He will also showcase a customer loyalty prediction tool powered by big data, to help marketing teams improve customer engagement. Christian will then present a review of end-to-end task management across the entire Microsoft 365 landscape. The session will help you understand what task capabilities are available today, how tasks communicate (and don’t communicate) with each other across workloads, and where Microsoft is going in the future.

Register at https://t.co/sMZVEWQZcs 

6 Ways to Get Insights on your Microsoft 365 usage

EUM guest webinar with Microsoft MVP John White (@diverdown1964) on Thursday, March 26th at Noon Eastern. What happened to the document? How did that get here? Is anybody reading this stuff? You’ve gotten these questions – how hard was it to answer them? The information is all available, but the best route to the insight is not always obvious. In reality there are multiple ways to report on your usage, each with different strengths and weaknesses. This demo-rich session will highlight 6 different approaches to retrieving and reporting on Microsoft 365 usage information.

Register at https://www.extranetusermanager.com/resources/events/

Power Automate (Flow) vs. Azure Logic Apps

Watch this on-demand recording of the EUM webinar with Microsoft MVP Peter Carson (@carsonpeter) originally recorded Feb 25th, 2020. Power Automate (Flow) is built on top of Azure Logic Apps. In this webinar we’ll compare and contrast between the two options, and provide guidance on when to use which. Much of this is related to what your workflows will be interacting with, and the resulting impact on licensing. Some Power Automate licensing is included as part of Office 365 subscriptions. These are limited to standard connectors only, which just cover interactions with Office 365 services such as Outlook and SharePoint. Connecting to external services (including Azure) requires premium licensing per user or workflow. Azure Logic Apps on the other hand are licensed only on the number of workflow actions executed, which can be very cost effective. However there are differences in functionality, such as the lack of an OOTB approval process in Logic Apps.

Watch on-demand at https://www.extranetusermanager.com/resources/events/

 

The MUGUT team is working on a great event schedule for 2020, including in-person and online events. We just held our 9th annual #M365Friday event (rebranded from SharePoint Saturday Utah) earlier this month and almost doubled our attendees from the past couple years, and we hope to continue this growth through a more diverse set of activities. For those in the Utah area, be sure to follow #MUGUT on Meetup for all of the latest events and activities. And for those outside of the region, you’re always welcome to participate!

And, as always, I invite you to subscribe to my YouTube channel where all of these recordings are uploaded, as well as the many MVP, product team, and community expert interviews that I conduct almost every week. Thanks for following!