When you register for Microsoft Ignite 2018, you have the option to add Pre-Day Workshops on Sunday, September 24. The workshops are all-day (9 AM – 5 PM) deep dives into various technical topics. At $500, it is a great way to maximize your learning opportunities for the week. Most Pre-Day Workshops are setup classroom style offering hands-on learning. You must bring your own device to participate in the workshop. The cost is $500. If you need more incentive to attend besides the wealth of technical information you’re going to get, they’re also giving away a Surface Laptop to one attendee in each workshop.

In addition to the workshops, the Business and Technology Pre-Day sessions from last year are back with a new name, the Diversity and Tech Pre-Day. The cost is $99 if you are also doing a pre-day workshop, otherwise it is $199.

Keep reading for descriptions from the Ignite registration site for each workshop as well as the Diversity and Tech Pre-Day.

Pre-Day Workshops

Azure Migration mega session: discover, assess, move, and extend applications to Azure (PRE21)

Do you need to move applications from your data center to Azure? This pre-day will provide introduction to the process and tools to move multi-tier applications to Azure. We will share best practices to discover application dependencies and strategies for moving application components like databases, servers, and files. We will provide demos and hands-on migration from on-prem environments running in VMWare, Hyper-V, and physical servers. You will try Azure services like Azure Migrate, Database Migration service, and Azure Site Recovery and how to land the application in a mix of IaaS Azure VMs and Azure files. We will include strategies for the upcoming end of support for Windows Server 2008 and R2, and SQL Server 2008 and R2, demonstrate taking advantage of Azure Hybrid Benefit to save on Azure. For workloads you need to keep on-prem, we will share great Azure hybrid scenarios.

Azure Security & Management (PRE20)

In Azure, Security & Management are a joint responsibility between Microsoft and our customers. Microsoft recommends that every production virtual machine is secure and well managed with security, backup and monitoring in place. Azure has built-in tools to help you be more effective more quickly. In this session you will have hands-on experiences with Azure security & management tools including Azure Security Center, Azure Backup, Azure Site Recovery, Azure Monitor & Log Analytics, Azure Cost Management, Azure Policy and much more. This session will be led by experts from Redmond based engineering teams to ensure you get the best help possible. At the end of this pre-day, you will feel confident growing your IT career in Azure.

Building and operating Hybrid Cloud Solutions with Azure and Azure Stack (PRE28)

Pre-Day offers important architectural guidance to help you navigate through the deeper technical sessions throughout the week. We will cover:

• Building a business case and identifying the right use cases for hybrid cloud solutions
• How to assemble the right team, and what skills you should invest in
• How to design modern, cloud-native applications that can help solve real business problems
• Planning, deployment and operations for the Azure Stack life cycle
• How to integrate Azure Stack with existing on-premises systems (such as billing, identity, and monitoring)

Compliance requirements keeping you up at night? Join us for a practical guide to leveraging the compliance tools in Microsoft 365 (PRE02)

The regulatory landscape is not only more complex but also constantly changing. Ensuring compliance in the cloud is a top concern for many organizations. Join Microsoft 365 compliance subject matter experts for a practical guide to leveraging the compliance tools in Microsoft 365. Over the course of a full day workshop, we will take you through a framework for how to approach compliance, tactical steps to create and implement an information governance strategy and the capabilities that can be applied to help protect and control your data, a deep dive into specific topics like GDPR and SEC 17a-4, and an opportunity to connect with your peers, compare notes and create specific action plans for your organization to meet and exceed your compliance obligations.

Container Fest (PRE27)

There is a common thread in advancements in cloud computing – they enable a focus on applications rather than the machines running them. Containers, one of the most topical areas in cloud computing, are the next evolutionary step in virtualization. Companies of every size and from all industries are embracing containers to deliver highly available applications with greater agility in the development, test and deployment cycle. The container fest will cover various phases of application migration to the cloud using container technologies and attendees can get hands on experience with containers technologies including Docker, Service Fabric, Kubernetes, Container Instances and more.

Dear Hacker: Infrastructure security reality check (PRE03)

It is all about these ‘little things and details’. For a hacker it is enough to get only one of them exploited, for administrators it is so much harder – they need to know them all. Experience shows that in vast majority of companies, the security guidelines are too generic and they do not cover most of the security aspects of the newest software and operating systems. Of course it requires some very specific knowledge that may be hard to learn when the work focuses more on creating than destroying, but the results will provide a perspective on what other people with bad intentions can see. Sometimes it is really surprising how often the same paths to enter to the system can be used!

During this intensive workshop, you will become familiar with the mandatory tasks that are performed by hackers or penetration testers in order to check for misconfigurations and vulnerabilities. You will become familiar with the forgotten regions in the operating system where you will find the not-so-obvious settings that help a lot in the hardening process. You will also become familiar with the newest tools that will support you in your everyday tasks. You will leave with a checklist to reference when reviewing your own infrastructure security.

Develop Cloud Native Applications to meet the changing needs of your business faster (PRE25)

Adoption of cloud-native application architectures is helping organizations of all sizes increase their IT agility. Join us for a day full of learning and hands-on experiences. We will have our cloud experts introduce you to cloud-native applications development, share best practices and guide you through hands-on labs.

• Introduction. Cloud-native applications, architecture patterns and key technologies – containers & serverless
• Design & Development. Using serverless technologies e.g. Azure Functions
• Integration. Connect applications & data taking advantage of over 200 out-of-the-box connectors APIs. Use existing 1st & 3rd party APIs
• Data. Build highly responsive & mission-critical applications with Azure CosmosDB

This is a unique opportunity to learn from the best and consult with the engineers building the services that power cloud native apps on Azure.

Get Information Protection up and running with Microsoft 365 (PRE12)

Your business requires you to share company information both inside and outside the company to get the job done. Join the Microsoft 365 team and learn how combining Azure Information Protection, Windows Information Protection, and Office Data Loss Protection can help your company classify data based on sensitivity, add labels manually or automatically, encrypt your sensitive data and define usage rights when needed, and apply protection easily without interrupting your team’s normal course of work, on and off your company’s devices. Also see what’s happening with shared data to gain more control over it. This is the portfolio of capabilities available to you to protect data on devices, protect data in your Office 365 environment, and protect data beyond Office 365 (including other cloud services and on premises and hybrid environments).

Hands-on with PowerApps, Microsoft Flow & the Common Data Service (CDS) (PRE26)

This day has it all! Beginning enthusiasts, intermediate makers, and even advanced business application platform experts will benefit from this App-in-a-day event. You’ll choose from guided projects leveraging PowerApps, Flow and CDS, and/or stretch yourself and others through a set of intermediate to advanced PowerApps and Flow challenges. Proctors and experts from the product teams will guide you through the various tracks and answer your questions. Throughout the day you will gain hands-on experience and be able to leverage mini-clinics that cover fundamentals, product capabilities, tips & tricks, and best practices.

Making teamwork more productive – Plan your organization’s teamwork and collaboration strategy using Microsoft Teams and other Microsoft 365 solutions (PRE05)

Learn how to best utilize the end-to-end suite of the Microsoft 365 Teamwork tools within your organization to help increase collaboration and productivity while remaining secure and compliant. Spanning the ways end users communicate in real-time with efficiencies, share and manage content, and work together seamlessly across the organization, deep dive topics, including hands-on learning opportunities, will focus on Microsoft Teams but also span across Skype for Business, SharePoint, OneDrive, Office 365 Groups, and Yammer. Leave with your own customized plan on how to approach teamwork and collaboration in your organization.

Microsoft AI developer bootcamp (PRE22)

Get a crash course on all of the developer frameworks, APIs, and tools that Microsoft has released in the AI space. Dive in from the ground up and learn how you can plug into Microsoft Cognitive Services RESTful APIs to access the latest and greatest intelligence and integrate it into your apps and solutions. Also, we dive into how to set up Microsoft Cognitive Toolkit on your machine and train and evaluate a pre-built model. Learn how you can build better customer experiences with intelligent bots using Microsoft Bot Framework, including how to make Cortana smarter through your own Cortana Skills.

Microsoft AI machine learning bootcamp (PRE23)

Get a crash course on the deep and machine learning tools and mechanisms available through the Microsoft AI platform. We’ll dive into the tooling available to make your model creation, experimentation and training, as well as deployment seamless. We’ll look into tooling like Visual Studio and Visual Studio Code Tools for AI, as well as the Azure Machine Learning Workbench and others that make this process streamlined end to end to allow developers and data scientists to dig in quickly.

Microsoft Content Services (ECM) in Office 365 (PRE07)

As SharePoint explodes in enterprise capacity, big data often results in a lot of big noise, too. Content Services extends the patterns and systems used to shape long-term document storage to shape the first year, or even the first day of the content lifecycle. This workshop is intended for enterprise architects and content managers looking to optimize the user experience for document-centric collaboration in SharePoint, OneDrive and Office 365. We’ll cover:

• Principles of SharePoint information architecture
• Hands on creation of managed content team sites integrated into Microsoft 365
• Harvest – the best ways to analyze, discover and reuse preexisting content from the Microsoft Graph
• Create – deploying Office Lens and Content Types to ensure content is “born” managed
• Coordinate – Using document libraries, MMS, Flow and search to systematize and improve content collaboration and publishing
• Protect – establishing information governance policies for content retention/deletion, data loss prevention, records management, and automatic classification

Modern Management for a Modern World – A technical deep dive into modern device management made easy with Microsoft Intune (PRE10)

Learn how to configure an end-to-end deployment of Microsoft Intune. This session will be delivered by technical Program Managers who will share real world scenarios learnt from customer deployments. In this session you will learn how to deploy, manage and secure your Windows 10, iOS, Android and OSX devices from the cloud; how to control access to you corporate resources using Azure Active Directory Conditional Access; How to implement a Data Loss Prevention strategy on these devices and secure your corporate data, and how Microsoft Graph is simplifying IT operations. This is a deep dive session and includes demos of the latest innovations. Please bring a Windows 10 and an iOS/Android device and follow the instructors as they step you through common user scenarios. Share your learnings during our Q/A session and have Microsoft Program Managers help you be successful.

Modernizing Windows 10 and Office 365 ProPlus deployment and management using Microsoft 365 (PRE04)

Learn what it means to modernize your deployment and management of Windows 10 and Office 365 ProPlus using the Microsoft 365 platform. In this workshop we will deep dive topics including Windows AutoPilot, Azure Active Directory, Office 365 ProPlus and Microsoft Intune. We’ll take a look into readiness and assessment tools with Windows Analytics to help modernize your approach to updates, and learn bridging techniques to build a path between traditional and modern IT.

OneDrive for Business deep dive from start to finish (PRE08)

In this all-day session we will walk you through the key areas you’ll need to know to help you and your organization to not just adopt OneDrive, but to drive usage and adoption, enabling collaboration and teamwork within your organization. We will cover key topics like how to best plan, deploy, manage and secure OneDrive, how leveraging new features like Flow can help to transform your business, and why designing a change management plan is key to driving adoption within your organization. We will even learn from customer experts who will share how they transformed their organizations, leading to a new collaboration culture with OneDrive, SharePoint and Exchange.

Securing and managing SharePoint in large and complex organizations (PRE06)

In this workshop you’ll develop the knowledge and skills to deploy, manage, and secure SharePoint and OneDrive in large, complex, and regulated environments.  Workshop content will cover getting up and running then dive deep into developing complex security, architecture and implementations.  Whether you’re currently on-premises, in the cloud, or somewhere in between, we’ll help you develop the right plans to making SharePoint and OneDrive a success in your organization – including discussions and guidance on configuring multi-geo capabilities, conditional access across user, device and location pivots, AIP, session management and more.

Securing the Modern Workplace with Microsoft365 (PRE11)

Employees are more mobile than ever. Accessing and protecting your company resources is a growing concern. How do you secure this ‘Modern Workplace’ where the perimeter is no longer the physical walls? Join the Engineering Product Groups from across Microsoft to learn how to use the security features of Enterprise Mobility & Security (EMS) with Office365 and Windows to deliver world-class productivity with enterprise grade security. This will be a deep dive session focusing on different scenarios such as Conditional Access and Windows Hello For Business. We will cover the key decisions to make, best practices of these deployments, and debugging tips. If you’ve purchased M365 or EMS, this is a session not to miss.

The Cloud Native Network (PRE24)

The transformation of the enterprise and corporate application landscape is highly reliant on the often legacy prone network, to fully adapt to your strategy and the new reality. Fully realizing the cloud potential will involve taking a deep dive into trends like SDWAN and cloud native security, how the network is currently used to connect branches, secure the perimeters and access resources and applications across both cloud and existing on-premises infrastructure.

Focusing on creating the best possible experience for your users, how to build, secure, scale and tune the network for your applications and resources. We offer an opportunity to learn more around the virtual and clouded datacenter in the context of networking and how to efficiently make decisions and plot a strategy for your future network.

Train the trainer: Plan your Microsoft Office 365 training and end-user adoption strategy and unleash your organization’s full productivity potential (PRE01)

The key to a successful Microsoft Office 365 deployment is organization wide, end-user adoption. This session focuses on providing IT Pros tasked with post deployment, end-user training with the tools and resources required to successfully train all users so they can realize their full productivity potential. After attending this all-day workshop, attendees will leave with a custom end-user training and adoption plan that includes step-by-step guidance in the following areas:

• Change management planning, guidance and best practices
• Training content, resources and delivery guidance focused on core productivity scenarios
• Creating an internal champions framework
• Real-world customer success testimonials
• End-user communication templates and tactical training delivery guidance
• Plan to track success and engage with leadership.

Understanding, optimizing, and troubleshooting Office 365 network connectivity (PRE09)

This Pre-Day is spent learning about optimizing network connectivity to Office 365. Learn the pros and cons of each connectivity model to Office 365 (Proxied, Direct, ExpressRoute), how each major service connects, and how to optimize it. We’ll discuss the Microsoft global network and how best to connect your network to it. In addition, learn the process for performance optimization and what tests to perform in a troubleshooting engagement.

Diversity and Tech Pre-Day

Join us for an afternoon of personal and professional inspiration with the Diversity and Tech Pre-Day Sunday, September 23. This year there are two options that will allow attendees to experience both Diversity and Tech, in addition to the Microsoft Ignite technical Pre-Day Workshops. 

• Diversity and Tech Full Pre-Day (Fee: $199.00 USD) starts with a Power lunch at noon, followed by two 90-minute workshops and an evening Welcome Reception. 
• Diversity and Tech Pre-Day Add On (Fee: $99.00 USD) allows for those attending the Microsoft Ignite technical Pre-Day Workshops to also incorporate some of the Sunday Diversity and Tech Pre-Day activities into their schedule. Attendees who purchase the Add-On Pass will get to join the Power Lunch at noon, the second workshop kicking off at 5:30 PM after the Microsoft Ignite Pre-Day Workshops end, as well as the evening Welcome Reception. 

Diversity and Tech Pre-Day (DT01)

The Business and Technology Pre-Day returns to Microsoft Ignite with a new name — the “Diversity and Tech Pre-Day”— as we celebrate the wonderful facets and faces of diversity and inclusion in the tech industry. Join us for an afternoon of personal and professional inspiration in developing your diversity superpower, gain practical advice for advancing your career in technology and hear from our tech superstars on how to advocate for yourself at work. Get to know your peers who are passionate about diversity and inclusion, and learning how to make a positive impact. We warmly welcome both men and women passionate about diversity and inclusion in tech to participate! This Pre-Day features a Power Lunch session, two highly interactive workshops and a Welcome Reception.

Diversity and Tech Pre-Day Add On (DT02)

The Business and Technology Pre-Day returns to Microsoft Ignite with a new name — the “Diversity and Tech Pre-Day”— as we celebrate the wonderful facets and faces of diversity and inclusion in the tech industry. This Diversity and Tech Pre-Day add-on is for those who plan to attend Technical Pre-Day sessions and still participate in Diversity and Tech activities. This add-on includes a Power Lunch session, one interactive afternoon workshop and a Welcome Reception that perfectly complements the Technical Pre-Day schedule.