August 13th, 11:30 am

Topic: Microsoft Teams Architecture Deep Dive
Location: via Microsoft Teams
Speaker: Max Fritz, Microsoft
Cost: FREE

Topic Details

Want to understand how Teams works under the hood? Then this is the session for you! In this session you can expect to learn all about:
– Teams interaction with other Office 365 services, such as Azure AD, Exchange, SharePoint and more
– Retention and eDiscovery
– Back-end voice and meeting technologies
– Federation and Skype Hybrid
– 3rd Party Applications

Be sure to forward this meeting info to your colleagues and friends!

Speaker Details

Max is an Technical Specialist for Office 365 at Microsoft. He focuses on improving collaboration and simplifying implementation, and has worked with Office 365 for the past eight years. He is a self-proclaimed geek, passionate about a broad range of messaging and collaboration tools and can’t stop talking about the technology he loves.
Max is the founder and leader of the Minnesota Microsoft 365 User Group, and holds MCSA and MCSE Microsoft certifications. Max can be found speaking at Microsoft 365 conferences all over the country.

July 16th, 11:30 am

Topic: Getting started with SharePoint home sites and hubs
Location: via Microsoft Teams
Speaker: Sarah Haase, Microsoft MVP
Cost: FREE

Topic Details

The intelligent intranet is here! With SharePoint hubs, you can bring together families of related SharePoint sites with news and event rollups, unified branding, and a common navigation experience. Home sites bring your intranet to life with personalized and organizational news, events, conversations, and video.

But how do you design an intranet strategy that effectively leverages home sites and hubs? This is your “getting started” guide. In this session, we’ll define what home sites and hubs are, explain how they can be used, and give you strategies for implementing them in your organization.

Be sure to forward this meeting info to your colleagues and friends!

Speaker Details

Sarah Haase is an enterprise collaboration strategist, corporate librarian and internationally-recognized speaker that helps large enterprises reclaim overgrown and ineffective collaboration implementations. Using her rich experience in knowledge management, information architecture and product management, Sarah devises and implements governance and user adoption strategies that drive compliance, engagement and documented benefits/ROI for SharePoint and Office 365.

Sarah is a Microsoft MVP and an organizer for SharePoint Saturday Twin Cities. You can find Sarah online at http://blog.splibrarian.com and @sarahhaase.

June 11th, 11:30 am

Topic: Why Identity is the new barrier in the Cloud, and how to protect it
Location: via Microsoft Teams
Speaker: Ajay Iyer, Microsoft
Cost: FREE

Topic Details

In this session, we will discuss why it’s so important to protect your identity in the cloud, how it can lead to data leaks, and what needs to be done to protect it.

We will review the underlying cyber security reference architecture that Microsoft uses for Identity and Access Management and Threat Protection, and Automated Incident Response to keep your identity and data safe.

Be sure to forward this meeting info to your colleagues and friends!

Speaker Details

Ajay is a Modern Workplace Technical Architect at the St. Louis Microsoft Technology Center, helping customers with strategy & architecture designs, with specialty in Cloud Security, Compliance & Governance.

Connect with Ajay on Twitter.

April 9th, 11:30 am

Topic: Build your first Microsoft Teams App without a single line of code!
Location: via Microsoft Teams (link sent the day of the meeting)
Speaker: Seb Levert, Office Development MVP
Cost: FREE

Topic Details

Microsoft Teams offer an amazing ecosystem for developers to build applications that deliver high value to your organization, but if you are not a developer, this could seem like a tough challenge.

In this session, join Microsoft MVP Sébastien Levert to learn how you can leverage native tools like the App Studio and use your existing investments to magically transform them into Microsoft Teams Apps! We will also look at how Microsoft Power Automate can deliver great content to your Teams channel to keep you up to date with all the signals that happen around you. By the end of this session, not only you will be able to use those apps for yourself, but you will also learn how to distribute them across your entire organization!

In this session, attendees will learn how to use the App Studio, they will get a basic knowledge of Power Automate adaptive cards action to bring content into Microsoft Teams and they will also learn the apps governance around Microsoft Teams.

Be sure to forward this meeting info to your colleagues and friends!

Speaker Details

Seb Levert is an Office Development MVP working at Valo Intranet, the product that will make you fall in love with your intranet! He is a Product Owner & Evangelist and is helping his partners & customers reach their business and technology goals by ensuring that quality and simplicity are always the focus in Valo Intranet deployments around the world. Seb speaks regularly at conferences somewhere on the planet. When he gets his hands dirty behind a keyboard coding, he’s building solutions mainly with client-side technologies levering all aspects of the Microsoft Cloud, including the Microsoft Graph and Office 365. You can read Seb’s blog at www.sebastienlevert.com and you can follow his tweets at @sebastienlevert.

March 5th, 11:30 am

Topic: List Formatting: Making Lists Awesome
Location: via Microsoft Teams (link sent the day of the meeting)
In-person meeting in Knoxville; Nashville attendees via MS Teams
Speaker: Chris Kent, Office Development MVP
Cost: FREE

NOTE: We have moved to using Meetup for registering for our meetings. Please follow the link below, join our Meetup group, and register for this meeting. 

Topic Details

Column and View Formatting enable you to quickly and easily provide dynamic visualizations directly in your modern list views. No hardcore development, deployment, or tenant level permissions required! Both non developers and developers can change how fields and rows look in modern list views by creating simple JSON objects.

Learn how to conditionally format fields and rows to take your lists from simple tables to meaningful views. We’ll cover the basics of list formatting, tips and tricks, and the tools and resources available to enable you to get started immediately.

Be sure to forward this meeting info to your colleagues and friends!

Speaker Details

Chris Kent is a Microsoft Office Development MVP and the Office 365 Practice Lead for DMI. He is a frequent contributor to SharePoint Patterns and Practices (PnP) and a member of the SharePoint PnP Core Team where he is especially focused on List Formatting and the SharePoint Framework. He is passionate about mapping technology to real-world solutions.

Chris is a highly-rated speaker and has presented at user groups, SharePoint Saturdays, webinars, and conferences. Every session focuses on practical advice and takeaways. He also posts regularly to his blog, thechriskent.com

April 11th, 11:30 am

Topic: Anatomy of an Office 365 Breach
Location: 8 City Blvd., Suite 403, Nashville, TN 37209 – MAP or via Microsoft Teams (link sent the day of the meeting)
Speaker: Max Fritz
Cost: FREE (free food too!)

NOTE: We have moved to using Meetup for registering for our meetings. Please follow the link below, join our Meetup group, and register for this meeting. 

Topic Details

Ever wonder what it would take to breach the security of your Office 365 tenant? Come to this session and wonder no longer!
We’ll show some of the most common ways attackers are getting access to your tenants, identities and data in a live demo. More importantly, we’ll cover how to protect yourself from these breach points in the future, and even how to detect suspicious activity within your tenant.

Be sure to forward this meeting info to your colleagues and friends!

Speaker Details

Max Fritz is an Office 365 and EMS Architect at Core BTS. He focuses on improving collaboration and simplifying implementation, and has worked with Office 365 for the past eight years. He is a self-proclaimed geek, passionate about a broad range of messaging and collaboration tools and can’t stop talking about the technology he loves.
Max is the founder and leader of the Minnesota Office 365 User Group, and holds MCSA and MCSE Microsoft certifications. Max can be found speaking at Microsoft 365 conferences all over the country.

February 14th, 11:30 am

Topic: Build reports and securely share them in SharePoint (using data from anywhere)
Location: 8 City Blvd., Suite 403, Nashville, TN 37209 – MAP or via Microsoft Teams (link sent the day of the meeting)
Speaker: Daniel Glenn, Microsoft MVP
Cost: FREE (free food too!)

NOTE: We have moved to using Meetup for registering for our meetings. Please follow the link below, join our Meetup group, and register for this meeting. 

Topic Details

How can you easily and securely create dashboards and then share them with people within your organization? What if you have SharePoint Server on-premises – how do you securely share Power BI reports?

In this session, we will discuss how to create dashboards using new functionality in SharePoint Online, as well as using Power BI. Then we will walk through the options for sharing those reports on SharePoint Server on-premises and SharePoint Online without having to worry if your company’s data is open to the entire internet. We will discuss how to connect to on-premises data sources like SQL Server and SharePoint, and how to use your data for reporting no matter where it is.

Be sure to forward this meeting info to your colleagues and friends!

Speaker Details

Daniel Glenn is a Microsoft Office Apps and Services MVP with 15 years’ experience building technology solutions, intranets and extranets. As a Practice Lead for InfoWorks, Inc., Daniel helps organizations of all sizes solve complex data challenges by implementing Office 365 and SharePoint without the need of customization and costly investments.

Daniel is a sought-after trainer, providing customized Power BI and Microsoft Flow training for companies around the world. He’s also passionate about giving back and building the Microsoft technical community. Daniel holds leadership roles in various local user groups, serves as an organizer for SharePoint Saturday Nashville, and is a co-host for the popular REgarding 365 Message Center show on https://MessageCenter.Show. You can follow Daniel online at https://DanielGlenn.com and @DanielGlenn on Twitter.

January 11th, 11:30 am

Topic: The Peter Pan complex: Determining when a SharePoint site should grow into a hub site [ slides ]
Location: 8 City Blvd., Suite 403, Nashville, TN 37209 – MAP or via Microsoft Teams (link sent the day of the meeting)
Speaker: Sarah Haase, Microsoft MVP
Cost: FREE (free food too!)

Topic Details

SharePoint hub sites enable us to create a shared experience for a group of related SharePoint sites, including: common navigation, unified branding, aggregated news displays, and multi-site search. But how do you determine which sites should be hubs? And how do you manage the fulfillment of hub site requests?

As SharePoint site owners are educated about the capabilities of hub sites, demand for new hubs will increase. This session outlines key business criteria you’ll want to consider as you start leveraging hub sites. You’ll learn:

• What hub sites are and how hubs can be leveraged
• How to determine when a hub site is needed (e.g. should every department have a hub site? What are the criteria for leveraging a hub site?)
• How to build an organizational strategy for usage and governance of hub sites
• Practical ideas for managing the provisioning of hub sites

Be sure to forward this meeting info to your colleagues and friends!

Speaker Details

Sarah Haase is an enterprise collaboration strategist, corporate librarian, and internationally-recognized speaker that helps large enterprises effectively implement SharePoint and Office 365. Using her rich experience in information architecture and enterprise content management, Sarah implements governance and user adoption strategies that drive compliance, engagement, and documented benefits/ROI.

Sarah is also an Innovation Games practitioner. She designs, organizes, and facilitates interactive Innovation Game exercises to gather rich market data and customer feedback on SharePoint and Office 365.

Sarah was awarded Microsoft’s Most Valuable Professional (MVP) award in February 2018 for her contributions in the Office Apps and Services technical community. She’s also Pragmatic Marketing Level III certified in product management.

You can find Sarah online at https://blog.splibrarian.com and @sarahhaase.

December 4th 5:30pm

Topic: Leading Practices for Planning and Implementing Anything SharePoint and Office 365
Location: 8 City Blvd., Suite 403, Nashville, TN 37209 – MAP or via Skype (link sent the day of the meeting)
Speaker: David Drever, Microsoft MVP
Sponsor: JourneyTEAM
Cost: FREE (free food too!)

Topic Details

There are many technical best practices for completing projects within SharePoint and\or Office365; whether you are building a brand-new farm or tenant, migrating to SharePoint Online or a newer version of on-prem, or developing a large application within the environment. Something not considered often enough and just as important is how to plan that project or solution.

Whether you are an IT Pro, Dev, Business Analyst, Project Manager or even a member of your company’s management team you will benefit from this session. We will discuss a series of topics that should be considered for any significant SharePoint project. These topics will be illustrated by real-world pitfalls that occurred when they weren’t followed and why using them were beneficial. Items from whom should be involved in the project to proofs-of-concept to SharePoint Governance will be covered to demonstrate how leading practices will result in a better solution in the end.

Be sure to forward this meeting info to your colleagues and friends!

[UPDATE]: Slides from the session can be found here.

Speaker Details

David Drever

David is the Digital Workplace Services Lead at Solvera Solutions, and a 3 time Office Apps and Services MVP. Over the last 18 years, David has worked in a wide variety of areas in IT ranging from Desktop\Server support to developing in C++ and .NET technologies. Over that period, David has been able to add value to a wide variety of clients in several sectors, including utilities, government, banking, and agriculture.

For the past eight years, David has been working exclusively in the SharePoint and Office365 domain. He has helped stand up multiple Enterprise SharePoint environments as well as designed and built numerous SharePoint solutions. David’s extensive experience in SharePoint is complemented by a range of SharePoint training courses and Certifications. He is a knowledgeable and sought-after international speaker within IT circles and consulted regularly by companies formulating their SharePoint strategies.

Sponsor Details

JourneyTEAM is an award-winning consulting firm with proven technology and measurable results. They take Microsoft products; Dynamics 365, SharePoint intranet, Office 365, CRM, GP, NAV, SL, POS, AX, RMS and modify them to work for you. The team has expert level, Microsoft Gold certified consultants that dive deep into the dynamics of your organization and solve complex issues. They have solutions for sales, marketing, productivity, collaboration, analytics, accounting, security and more. www.journeyteam.com

September 4th 5:30pm

Topic: Build a full Intranet in 60 minutes!
Location: 8 City Blvd., Suite 403, Nashville, TN 37209 – MAP
Speaker: Sébastien Levert
Sponsor: Valo Intranet
Cost: FREE (free food too!)

Topic Details

You always wanted to see how easy it was to build a full branded intranet using Communication Sites, Modern Team Sites and Hub Sites in less than an hour? This session is for you! You will learn how easy it is to build a basic intranet with the OOTB experience Microsoft provides!

Be sure to forward this meeting info to your colleagues and friends!

Sponsor Details

Fall in love with your intranet! Valo is a ready-to-go modern intranet on Office 365 and SharePoint. Say goodbye to email chaos and old-fashioned ways of working. Valo Intranet brings together the most popular intranet features, and creates competitive edge by increasing productivity and improving work satisfaction. Valo is built on Microsoft’s recommended cloud add-in model, so Office 365 continuous updates are always safe.

Valo Intranet has more than 1,000,000 daily users and 350+ happy customers worldwide. Valo Intranet is easy-to-use, mobile-friendly, and technically strong – a flexible solution for the changing world. Valo is the last intranet you’ll need!

Speaker Details

Sébastien Levert is an Office Development MVP, a Microsoft Certified Software Developer and works at Valo Intranet, the product that will make you fall in love with your intranet. He is a Product Evangelist & Partner Manager for North America and is helping his partners & customers reaching their business and technology goals by ensuring that quality and simplicity are always the focus in Valo Intranet deployments around the world. Seb is speaking regularly at conferences around the world like SharePoint Saturdays, European SharePoint Conference and European Collaboration Summit. Even though he loves travelling, he loves his local community where he is an organizer of the Quebec SharePoint User Group, an organizer of MSDEVMTL and an organizer of 2 SharePoint Saturdays (Quebec & Montreal). You can read Seb’s blog at www.sebastienlevert.com and you can follow his tweets at @sebastienlevert.

[UPDATE]

Here are the SUG slides from the meeting: Sept 2018 update slides