During the course of Microsoft Ignite hundreds of sessions are presented to provide information about new products and services.
These are done by Microsoft employees such as software engineers, product designers, and program managers. You will also find many sessions presented by Microsoft Most Valuable Professionals (MVPs) and other industry partners.
All of these sessions will have a lot of information in them and likely be full of demos. While those two aspects of sharing the background and user experience are great. After Microsoft Ignite is over the majority of these sessions will make their way to the web so they can be viewed on-demand by anyone who wants to consume that information. Even PowerPoint slide decks will be made available for download and offline reading/reference.
This morning I attended a different kind of session that I have not been aware of in past conferences and it is called a Customer Immersion Experience (CIE).
The one I attended was on Microsoft 365 but they also offered another option for those wanting to learn about Azure in its own CIE.
The session was 75 minutes long and there were just 12 of us in this experience and each of us had a Surface Pro device that was remotely accessing a virtual machine in Azure. The user profile was setup to make each of us a member of Contoso team and throughout the course of this immersive experience we were demoed several features of Microsoft 365.
Among them we learned about Exchange Data Loss Prevention, Azure Information Protection, setting up team collaboration sites in SharePoint, sharing files via OneDrive, and easily setting up meetings using a feature called Reply with Meeting which I never knew existed. Note: Even this old dog can learn a new trick or two with this type of experience.
There were two instructors to help out individual attendees and with just 12 people in the class there was an opportunity for a more intimate learning environment.
I know everyone can't come to Ignite and attend one of these sessions but there is an option to have a very similar experience at Microsoft's Digital Transformation website that offers a similar experience from your own device anywhere you are located.
These experiences run right in your browser and are easily setup as necessary using a wizard to gather information to personalize the session.
In closing, getting hands on with the latest features and updates to Microsoft 365 can be a tremendous tool in making decisions about what you want to enable in your own enterprise or to learn about what is possible if you are considering a move to the cloud.
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