As has been the case for a number of years now, I helped to select the sessions for the IT/DEV Connections conference, which takes place at the ARIA Hotel in Las Vegas on October 10-13. Given the content that will be covered, it might seem strange to run a conference so close to the Microsoft Ignite event. However, it’s easier to understand when you consider that:
- Microsoft moved the date and location for Ignite from May in Chicago to September in Atlanta and forced Connections to adjust its mid-September date. The logistics and costs involved make it not an easy task to move large conferences and moving both resulted in the current dates.
- Naturally, Ignite will be dominated by Microsoft news and updates about products and other marketing announcements. A great deal of product information will be presented also, but “in the best possible taste”. Don’t expect much critical analysis of the flaws of Microsoft products during Ignite sessions! On the other hand, IT/DEV Connections prides itself on the independent and knowledgeable perspective of its speakers. We certainly like Microsoft technology, but we want to expect the ifs, buts, and maybes of the technology as well so that people are fully-equipped to deploy. That’s why IT/DEV Connections is sometimes called the “Anti Kool-Aid” conference. I have never even seen Kool-Aid (to my knowledge) so this analogy fails on me, but there you are…
- The flood of announcements and news from Ignite need some time to digest and make sense of in terms of what they mean for using different technologies. We hope to be able to help in that respect at IT/DEV Connections.
- Ignite is on the East Coast; IT/DEV Connections is on the West. The ARIA is actually a very good conference hotel that is relatively well insulated from the madness of Las Vegas, if you want that to be the case. On the other hand, it’s also in the middle of the strip…
In any case, below you can find the full set of Enterprise Collaboration sessions planned for IT/DEV Connections. Some well known faces are on the schedule, including Mr. ExchangeServerPro (Paul Cunningham), Chris McNulty, J. Peter Bruzzese, Jeff Guillet (Expta), Benjamin Naulin, Michael Van Horenbeeck (Van Hybrid), Paul Robichaux, and Scot Hillier. The sessions cover everything from managing Exchange and SharePoint on-premises servers to Skype for Business. This year we made a deliberate decision to create a big set of sessions that address the question of how to effectively manage many aspects of Office 365.
I’m looking forward to the Wednesday “Bamboozle the Exchange Experts” session, which will feature the Exchange Server CXP (Customer Experience team),including such well-known speakers as Greg Taylor and Ross Smith IV. Please come along with the most obscure and horrible question you can think up between now and then.
We also have a number of new speakers this year. I wish them well. It’s hard to get up in front of an audience and explain your thoughts on technology (and hopefully make sense).
Join us in Vegas!
Tuesday Sessions
| Tuesday, October 11, 8:00am-9:00am | |
| Best Practices for Deploying and Managing On-Premises Exchange Server | Paul Cunningham |
| Cloudbreaking – Business Intelligence Engineering for SharePoint 2016 and Office 365 | Chris McNulty |
| Office Graph API & Delve, Unleash the Power | Fabian Williams |
| Avoiding the Icarus effect: Office 365 Risk Mitigation | J. Peter Bruzzese |
| Tuesday, October 11th, 9:15am-10:30am | |
| Exchange Performance Disaster Recovery and Migration Troubleshooting | Andrew Higginbotham |
| Migration (Exchange) to Office 365 | Jaap Wesselius |
| Autodiscover is the Hero of the Exchange Motherland | Jeff Guillet |
| Upgrade to SharePoint 2016 | Matthew McDermott |
| Tuesday, October 11th, 11:00am-12:15pm | |
| Automate Exchange deployment with PowerShell Desired State Configuration (DSC) | Ingo Gegenwarth |
| Configuring a proper SMTP relay for Exchange on-premises and Exchange Online | Jeff Guillet |
| Solving modern day business problems using Power Apps | Fabian Williams |
| Architecting SharePoint 2016 | Liam Cleary |
| Configuring SharePoint Hybrid Search | Matthew McDermott |
| Tuesday, October 11th, 1:15pm-2:30pm | |
| Delve Analytics and the rise of machine learning inside Office 365 | Tony Redmond |
| Building Solutions with the Office Graph | Liam Cleary |
| Message hygiene with Exchange | Jaap Wesselius |
| Deep Dive into Cloud Hybrid Search | Jeff Fried |
| Tuesday, October 11th, 3:00pm-4:15pm | |
| Troubleshooting Exchange Server: Clients, Transport and Security | Paul Cunningham |
| Figuring out this new collaboration with OneDrive, Groups and Team Sites | Benjamin Niaulin |
| The Magnificent Seven: The do’s and don’t about Office 365 Migration | J. Peter Bruzesse |
| Scripting Tasks in SharePoint Online with PowerShell and the REST APIs | Alan Byrne |
Wednesday Sessions
| Wednesday, October 12th, 9:15am-10:30am | |
| Exchange Virtualization Mistakes to Avoid | Andrew Higginbotham |
| A day in the life of an Office 365 consultant | Michael Van Horenbeeck |
| How to Leverage Office 365 Groups in the Enterprise | Justin Harris |
| Data Loss Protection in SharePoint 2016 and SharePoint Online | Liam Cleary |
| Wednesday, October 12th, 11:00am-12:15pm | |
| Monitoring Office 365: What Works and What Doesn’t | Paul Robichaux |
| Demystify OneDrive for Business – The Good and the Bad | Benjamin Niaulin |
| SharePoint In the Clouds – Migrating to Azure and Office 365 | Chris McNulty |
| Office 365 Migration and Administration for Small Businesses | Andrew Higginbotham |
| Wednesday, October 12th, 1:15pm-2:30pm | |
| Bamboozle the Exchange Experts | Tony Redmond |
| Office 365 Governance and Information Architecture | Martina Grom |
| Building Applications for Office 365 and SharePoint with Angular 2, TypeScript, and ASP.NET Core 1.0 | Scot Hillier |
| Office 365 Connectors | Toni Pohl |
| Wednesday, October 12th, 3:00pm-4:15pm | |
| Managing five million Office 365 accounts using PowerShell and some other APIs | Alan Byrne |
| Troubleshooting Exchange client connectivity | Ingo Geganwarth |
| Office in the Outback – Using Office 365 as a Service for Field Mobility Applications | Veli-Matti Vanamo |
| PowerApps, Flow and Logic Apps – what’s in and behind? | Toni Pohl |
Thursday Sessions
| Thursday, October 13th, 8:30am-9:45am | |
| While You Weren’t Looking: going beyond Office 365 | Paul Robichaux |
| How I design global voice solutions with Skype for Business | Stale Hansen |
| Solving real-world problems with Azure Active Directory Premium | Justin Harris |
| Business Value of Office 365 Adoption | Martina Grom |
| Style Your Web Apps and Office & SharePoint Add-ins with the Office UI Fabric | Andrew Connell |
| Thursday, October 13th, 10:15am-11:30am | |
| Succeeding with Skype for Business Meeting Broadcast | Stale Hansen |
| How Office 365 impacts merger and acquisition activities | Joe Palarchio |
| Securing your Office 365 deployment with acronyms: how to leverage EDP, EMS, RMS and AAD! | Michael Van Horenbeeck |
| Learning Angular2 to Building Office Add-ins | Andrew Connell |
| Development for SharePoint Online using JavaScript Injection and Remote Provisioning | Ted Pattison |
| Thursday, October 13th, 12:30pm-1:45pm | |
| How Office 365 will give your security team heartburn and the relief you can provide them | Joe Palarcho |
| Developers Introduction to the Power BI Platform | Ted Pattison |
| Lessons from the Field: Applying Records Management in the Cloud | Veli-Matti Vanamo |
| Experience from the field – How to use a Team Site effectively for Collaboration | Benjamin Niaulin |
| Thursday, October 13th, 2:15pm-3:30pm | |
| Office 365: Deployment and Management – Ask the MVPs | Tony Redmond |
| Office 365: Programming and APIs – Ask the MVPs | Scot Hiller |
See here for more information on IT/DEV Connections.
Thoughtsofanidlemind's Blog 
I really like the list of planned sessions. I’ll try to make it this year.