Microsoft Ignite 2018 – Day 4 Preview

I’m not sure how it happened, but somehow it’s already Thursday. Day four, the final full day of Microsoft Ignite. I’m in town through Monday (for Disney of course), but for many of us, this will be the least day to be on site and learn, connect, and make the most of Ignite.

Here’s my lineup for the day. I won’t make it to all of these, but I like to have choices.

• POD1017 – Patch & Switch
  Contrary to what Rick Claus (@RicksterCdn and Joey Snow (@joeysnowsay each week, I most definitely DO NOT stop listening when they stat talking about beer during their shows.

• BRK1094 – Accelerating your IT career
  I’ve heard great things about Ned’s talks from when it was presented internally previously. I’m bummed that they schedule Ned right up against Patch and Switch though.

• THR1156 – “I’m here for the refreshments”: The journey of finding my inner goddess as a woman in tech
  Phoummala has had an interesting journey to get where she is today in IT. It;s great that she has a chance to share that here at Ignite.

• BRK3019 – Delivery Optimization deep dive: How to reduce internet bandwidth impact on your network
  We are not short of bandwidth at the university where I work (25G plus direct peers to Netflix, Google, and I2), but I like seeing the percentage of updates coming from peers go up and up.

• BRK3087 – Office in Virtual Desktop environments
  We have an RDS farm that is used as a virtual lab by our students, and even though they have Office on their own machines, we still need to offer it in the lab primarily due to all of the math and statistics programs that use Excel add-ins.

• BRK3211 – Ask the experts: Successfully deploying, servicing, and managing Windows 1
  This is what Ignite is all about: asking questions of experts. Here’s a great chance to ask your questions about deployment and hear what your peers are asking too.

• BRK3258 – Panel discussion: Microsoft Exchange/Calendar/OWA
  Here’s another option for a chance to ask questions of the experts, this time about all things Exchange, calendaring, and OWA.

• BRK2017 – Configuration Manager Product Team Chalk Talk
  If you have any questions to ask the ConfigMgr product team, bring them here and get some answers.

• BRK2131 – Driving Adoption and Usage with OneDrive: You’ve deployed it, but can you get folks to use it?
  Even though we’re supposed to use another product at work, I’m still hopeful our management may eventually see the light. Plus I bet some of the tips and tricks they share for adoption are equally applicable to other apps.

• BRK3259 – Panel discussion: Microsoft Outlook (Windows, Mac, and Mobile)
  It seems that Thursday is the day for panel discussions, this time about Outlook which is probably the most used application at work. So kind of important for the user experience.

I’ve tagged a lot of sessions, and the energy levels are starting so flag, so we’ll see how today goes. Despite what the folks back home think, spending a week at Ignite digs pretty deep into the mental and physical fuel tank. Tonight we get to have a little fun though, and enjoy both parks at Universal Orlando Resort. These parties give me a chance to check out what Universal is up to without having to spend any of my own money. That leaves me money $$$ to spend at Disney. Which I will be doing a lot of this weekend.

Make the most of today, and if you see me around today or at the party tonight, stop and say hi. I’ll have more stickers to give out, so get one and give your laptop some tiki love. See ya!