TechCon 365 &amp; PWRCON,&nbsp;is a Microsoft 365 and Power Platform Training Conference that brings you the world’s leading experts in&nbsp;Microsoft 365, Power Platform, Azure, &amp; AI.&nbsp;Whether you are new to Microsoft 365 and Power Platform or an experienced power user, admin, or developer,&nbsp;TechCon 365 &amp; PWRCON&nbsp;has content designed to fit your experience level and area of interest. Our workshops and sessions are taught by&nbsp;Microsoft Certified Trainers, Microsoft MVPs, Microsoft Regional Directors and Microsoft product group members.
At Microsoft&nbsp;TechCon 365 &amp; PWRCON, the&nbsp;sessions are offered for the following subjects:&nbsp;Microsoft 365, Copilot, Microsoft Teams, Teams Development, Teams Architecture &amp; Administration, Microsoft Fabric, Dataverse, Syntex/SharePoint Premium, Power BI, Power Automate, Power Apps, Power Virtual Agents, Power Pages, SharePoint Administration &amp; Development, Azure OpenAI, OneDrive, Purview, Loop, Search, Content Management, Power Users, Business Value, Implementation/Administration, Workflow, Business Intelligence,&nbsp;and more. Choose one complete learning track or mix and match based on what content best meets you and your organization’s current needs!

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 TechCon 365 &amp; PWRCON Seattle 2025 Schedule -<a href="https://techcon365.com/Seattle/agenda" target="_blank">https://techcon365.com/Seattle/agenda</a> 
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TechCon 365 and PWRCON Seattle 2025

Room 432

In this workshop, we will explore the basics of Information Architecture (IA) and its role in creating effective intranets using Microsoft 365, SharePoint, and Viva Connections. We’ll talk about why IA is so important to AI – and how you can ensure that your intranet content can act as a valuable partner in your AI solutions. Whether you are just starting out or looking to improve your current intranet design, this workshop will provide you with the necessary tools and techniques to make the most of new and upcoming features, capabilities, and best practices. 

We'll cover key topics including creating and organizing content, building site structures, creating metadata, and leveraging search functionality.

You will take away:
 -  Approaches for planning navigation across the entire intranet and on individual sites
 -  Tips and best practices for audiences, hubs, and home sites
 -  Page design guidance that supports accessibility and great user experiences
 -  Effective use of metadata on pages and documents – and whether it is OK to use folders to organize your content.
 -  How to leverage Viva Connections to bring your intranet to your users in the flow of work – and how to plan audiences to ensure that the right tools and information gets to the right groups.
 -  How Copilot can help your information architecture and vice versa.

You'll leave with a clear understanding of what IA is, why it matters, and how to get started with creating effective intranets that meet your organization's needs.

Best Practices for Intranet Information Architecture: the key to unlocking AI’s full potential

With the ever-changing cloud landscape, organizations struggle to help their employees collaborate and be effective in their day-to-day responsibilities. Adding data protection and security could raise the difficulty even more, as the business needs to balance the ability to collaborate while keeping its information and users safe. Ensuring user engagement and adoption is fundamental to success.

In this workshop, David and Sarah will cover the design and implementation of Microsoft 365's collaboration tools, such as SharePoint, Teams, Viva Engage, and more, while ensuring the solution is safe, secure, and fully collaborative. They'll help you understand how you can work together to protect your organization's information and employees in a manner that encourages endorsement from those using the tools.

Data Protection, Collaboration, and User Engagement: Assisting Your Organization in Doing it All

Microsoft Power Pages is a secure, enterprise-grade, low-code software as a service (SaaS) platform for creating, hosting, and administering modern external-facing business websites. Power Pages provides you with rich, customizable templates, a fluid visual experience through a reimagined design studio, and a new, integrated learning hub to quickly build sites that suit your unique business needs.

We'll learn how to create powerful external-facing websites that allow users outside their organizations to sign in with a wide variety of identities, create and view data in Microsoft Dataverse, or even browse content anonymously. 

Also, we'll learn to quickly create a website and customize it with pages, layout, and content. 

Build external-facing websites using Power Pages

Dive into the world of effortless automation as we explore how Microsoft Power Automate and Teams can transform your daily grind into a breeze. This session is about cutting the manual work and boosting efficiency, making it perfect for anyone looking to streamline their team's workflow. You will see real-life examples of how integrating Power Automate flows into Teams can automate the mundane tasks we all dread, like scheduling meetings, managing approvals, and even keeping track of project updates—all within the familiar space of your Teams channels.

Learn how to spot opportunities for automation in your day-to-day tasks, customize flows that fit your team's needs, and keep everything running smoothly. By the end of this session, you'll be armed with the know-how to make your team more connected and productive without breaking a sweat. Whether you're new to automation or looking to level up your Teams game, this presentation will show you the fun in functionality with Power Automate and Teams.

Boosting Team Efficiency: Easy Automation with Teams Workflows

Have you ever thought "My Teams environment is a mess and I need to clean it up!" or "My users don't really pay attention to how they run their Teams meetings even with sensitive topics"?  Many organizations feel their Microsoft Teams environments are set up inconsistently and are not well governed or secured. As well, Microsoft Teams meetings have become a critical part of our day, every day, and its important to select the right controls and policies so that meetings are safe and secure.  With the move to remote and hybrid work we saw an explosion of Teams usage and adoption! We know these methods of work are here to stay, and with that Teams usage and the number of Teams we have continues to grow.  This makes the need for governance and security in Teams critical!  In this session, we'll share common tips and best practices for conducting safe and secure Teams meetings.  We'll also look at Teams Premium and what it provides to help run secure meetings.  We'll show how to govern your Teams collaboration spaces, how to safely enable guest access, and how to secure sensitive data within Teams.  Join us to learn how to move from chaos to safe, secure and well-governed Microsoft Teams collaboration!

From Chaos to Collaboration: Safe, Secure & Governed Microsoft Teams Collaboration and Meetings

Step into the future of corporate communication with 'The Future of Meetings: Navigating Microsoft Teams Premium's Advanced Features'. This session is a deep dive into the world of Teams Premium, showcasing its cutting-edge features designed to transform your meeting experiences. We'll explore each feature in detail, discussing its practical applications and benefits for your organization. From setting up advanced meeting options to enhancing end-user engagement, you'll gain insights into the full spectrum of Teams Premium capabilities. Our hands-on demonstrations will guide IT Admins through the configuration process while providing business leaders and corporate communications professionals with a clear view of the user experience. Whether it's about facilitating seamless large-scale webinars or conducting interactive town halls, this session is your roadmap to mastering Microsoft Teams Premium. Join us to unlock the potential of next-generation meetings and propel your organizational communication into a new era of efficiency and engagement.

The Future of Meetings: Navigating Microsoft Teams Premium's Advanced Features

AI powered agents feel like they're coming everywhere, but how do you light up your own data in them not just for staff, but also for external guests? How can you incorporate an AI Agent into both scenarios securely?

We'll start the session with a level set on how AI really works, and in particular Retrieval Augmented Generation. A combination of Search and Large Language Models, it lets your chat interface answer questions it hasn't been trained by leveraging search. Built properly it also respects security, and only answers from content the user has access to, which can live in Dataverse, Microsoft 365, or any other search accessible repository.

One approach we'll cover is Copilot Studio, a low-code environment where you can build intelligent chat experiences using ready-made large language models, a dialog manager, and numerous data connectors. These can be published in a variety of ways, and can enforce security against your enterprise data.

The other approach is more roll-your-own, leveraging Azure AI Search, Azure OpenAI, and supporting code based on Microsoft published architectural examples.

We'll also cover consumption based pricing from Microsoft for both.

Feeling faint of heart with all this tech talk? Don't despair. Yes we'll be showing code, but we'll also go over real-world business cases, and the solution architectures that leverage the Microsoft AI stacks.

Copilot Studio vs. Azure OpenAI

Unlock the full potential of workplace collaboration by integrating Power Apps with Microsoft Teams. This session is tailored for IT professionals and power users interested in enhancing team dynamics by seamlessly embedding and publishing custom Power Apps directly into Microsoft Teams. Learn how to design and optimize custom applications that leverage the combined strengths of both platforms, such as streamlined communication workflows and centralized data access. Discover practical strategies and real-world examples to revolutionize team collaboration and productivity.

Enhancing Collaboration with Microsoft Teams and Power Apps

Use of Microsoft Teams has exploded for many companies as a result of the global pandemic. For many organizations Teams has become the app that connects all their employees together. Power Platform apps, like Power Apps, Power Automate, and Power Virtual Agents, provides a low-code platform for extending that functionality. 

But extending Teams with new apps, flows, and bots requires a place to store content.  SharePoint is a possibility, but from a data point of view SharePoint has a lot of limitations since it isn't an actual relational database.  Dataverse, formerly known as CDS, provides relational data storage, rich data types, and enterprise-grade governance. But Dataverse has always been a premium feature requiring extra licensing.  

This is where Microsoft Dataverse for Teams comes in. Using the Power Apps application inside Teams we can build and deploy apps using a custom version of Dataverse that is included in the Microsoft Teams license.  This provides access to a real relational database and one-click solution deployment to the Teams app. 

In this talk we'll take a look at what Dataverse for Teams and how it can be used in the Power Platform to extend the Teams application.  

We'll cover the following points with slides and demos. 
  • What does the Teams License cover?
  • Differences between Dataverse (CDS) and Dataverse for Teams
  • Creating Dataverse Relational Tables
  •  Building a Power App with Dataverse for Teams
  • Integrating Dataverse for Teams with a Flow
  • Accessing Dataverse for Teams from a Bot

Intro to Microsoft Dataverse for Teams: Extending Microsoft Teams with Apps and Flows

Microsoft 365, including Copilot, Teams, SharePoint, Exchange, and more, offers a full suite of tools to solve business problems. But how do we know we're addressing the right problems? "Ship it and forget it" is no longer viable (if it ever was). We must define successful deployment, ensure solutions truly address business needs, and build trust with stakeholders.

This session will explore:
- Addressing Shadow IT consequences
- IT as a service framework
- Business engagement
- Holistic requirements gathering
- Defining success
- Embracing continuous improvement

Join Joy to learn how a Human First approach can maximize your tech skills and ensure effective M365 deployment.


Deploying M365 to Solve Business Problems

Learn about collaborative agent development tailored for Microsoft Teams and Microsoft 365 Copilot using code-first tools such as Visual Studio Code and the Teams Toolkit.

Discover how to leverage Large Language Models (LLMs) to deliver dynamic and intuitive interactions that surpass traditional bots. Create agents that generate content based on your data, execute tasks, and foster collaboration between your users. By the end of this session, you'll have the foundational knowledge to effectively customize, build, and deploy your agents to all of your users on Microsoft Teams and Microsoft 365 Copilot.

Build your custom agent for 320M+ users in Microsoft Teams

When planning out or updating a Microsoft 365 implementation, SharePoint is still important, but it really needs to start with Teams, and then the underlying SharePoint structure for a big part flows out of that. It's not just answering planning questions, but also ensuring that everyone understands that Teams is much more than a meeting and chat platform. 

Topics we'll cover in this session include:

Introducing a maturity model on how organizations leverage Teams, SharePoint, Email, and OneDrive
Level setting on how they work together
Understanding the differences between Standard, Private, and Shared Channels, and the underlying SharePoint site collections
Where do standalone Communication and Team Sites fit into the Teams and SharePoint structure
Guests versus B2B Direct Connect in Teams, and external sharing in SharePoint
Open source scripts and Power BI dashboards to inventory and analyze your file shares, SharePoint on-premises, and SharePoint Online
Answering the question - what does a Team and a Channel represent in my organization
MindJet as a tool for planning your IA
Commercial and open-source solutions for implementing your IA
Real-world scenarios and case studies

Teams First Information Architecture and Governance

Adaptive Cards are everywhere. They are an incredibly versatile way to create actionable messages in the Microsoft 365 and Power Platform ecosystem.

In this session, we will transform traditional email reminders into interactive, informative, and actionable user experiences using Adaptive Cards. We will showcase Microsoft Lists, Microsoft Teams and Power Automate using a maker approach solution development.

We hope that after this session, you'll want to integrate Adaptive Cards into every solution you build!

Get started with Adaptive Cards for Microsoft Teams using Microsoft Lists and Power Automate

If you have ever done some type of communication, this session will help you make sense of where to start, what to use when and how to get your message out.  If you are working on a large-scale campaign to the entire company or sending an update to your project team, there are all types of communications that happen in an organization.  Learn how to create strategies that flow into governance guidelines and use the technology appropriately for the best results.  This session will focus on using your intranet, SharePoint, Viva Engage, Viva Connections, Amplify and Teams as well as how Copilot can interact, and you will walk away with a better sense of where to start. 