Office 365 Distilled EP 21: Community is awesome… from SPS Belgium

Steve and Marijn act as roaving reporters on SPS belgium!
We are also becoming whisky snobs..

We did a live podcast, which didn’t go as well as we thought.. People had a long day, sound was not good from the back and Steve was on a roll.
So let’s not try that again 🙂

Numbers from SPS belgium

This is the 9th event. There were around 380 people present! That makes it one of the bigger SPS events in the world.
There were 23 hours of teaching delivered that day! And that all for the crazy price of Free!

It will be the last SPSBelgium event though… there will be something else coming in 2020!

As reporters we talked to a bunch of attendees, speakers, sponsors and nice people in general. We asked them following questions.

How many times did you go to a SPS Belgium event ?

People came for at least 3-5 years, so there are many people coming back! Then again, there are also so many firsttimers attending the party!
What was very cool was that there were a few students in the event, who were getting extra grades when they went to the event.

Is it easy to roll out new Office 365 applications ?

66% said no, 25% said yes.
While Marijn thinks that the number should be higher, Steve thinks not.
Rolling out an application has roughly the same tasks that need to be completed: governance, communications, change management.

Would it be harder to roll out 2 apps at the same time? Or easier? Because you could combine communications or the change process. Or would that stretch the change capability of the people?

What app will you roll out next?

We thought that everyone would be running Teams right now, but a surprising amount of people are planning to roll it out next. Is adoption going to die off, because everyone is already running Office 365 ?

Can users in your organisation create teamsites?

“I am the SharePoint admin, ask me nicely if you want a SharePoint site”. Would you let everyone in your org create their own SharePoint sites? Will you only allow your champions to do it? Or leave it up to IT ?
Would you organise a “drivers license” program for SharePoint ownership ?
If you want to deliver business value, that means deliver value to your business, by taking away the barriers IT have been setting up for years.
This is where governance comes in: the fine balance between making sure our endusers don’t break things, and making sure they are enabled to do more in their daily work.

We and up by talking a little on Ignite, the SharePoint – Teams wedding party and all the other parties we are attending.

Whisky

Image result for the irishman whisky

We are staying in Ireland, after the Kilbeggan rye from last episode.
The Irishman, a 12 year old from… you guessed it.. Ireland. It is a well known classic brand (that Marijn has never heard of).
Steve loves the fruity nose, with some hints of biscuits and speculoos. After 4 years in a barrel, it gained some toffee/liquorice flavors in the back of the mouth.
A nice desssert whisky without a superlong finish.

About: Marijn

Marijn Somers (MVP) has over 14 years experience in the SharePoint world, starting out with SP2007. Over the years the focus has grown to Office 365, with a focus on collaboration and document management. He is a business consultant at Balestra and Principal Content Provider for "Mijn 365 Coach" that offers dutch employee video training. His main work tracks are around user adoption, training and coaching and governance. He is also not afraid to dig deeper in the technicalities with PowerShell, adaptive cards or custom formatting in lists and libraries. You can listen to him on the biweekly "Office 365 Distilled" podcast.