I had the absolute pleasure to present at the Modern Workplace Summit this week in beautiful Oslo, Norway! I was so thrilled to get selected to present. I’ve admired Norway on paper for quite some time and really wanted to see if it lived up to my expectations and I’m happy to report that it did! But that’s for another blog post. Let’s talk about the conference!
The conference was held in the Thon Oslo Airport hotel which was a perfect venue. Very accessible, thanks to the shuttle bus to and from the airport. They also had a large conference venue that was attached to the main hotel via a walk way but was it’s own separate building which was amazing. It felt like it was all ours. Not a shared space. Very, very cool! There was also a pretty funky snowflake light within view. I’d bet that looks amazing when there’s snow on the ground. The food on offer was also pretty damn good! Thanks for the grub, guys!
The conference had multiple tracks focused on Business Productivity, Office 365, Skype for Business and Windows 10. I found the Business Productivity track to be interesting. I’ve never been to a Tech conference that had catered for that level. I think that was really great to have. I’ll be the first to admit, Being so deep into the weeds of the technical side of things, my business acumen could use a little work so some of those sessions were very appealing to me. They did have sessions that were more about business practices but also had others providing a high level of productivity solutions like Sharepoint. Kudos to the organizers for catering to a wide area of interest. Much cool, So Usefulness!
My sessions fell under the Windows 10 track. I spent my first day attending Windows 10 sessions. I got to see great speakers like Mikael Nystrom, Johan Arwidmark, Olav Tvedt and Kent Agerlund present, which was a treat! I think and hope that if you put all of our sessions together and attended them, you’ll be in a pretty great position to dive into your Windows 10 migration! I know I learned a lot!
My presentation covered some methodology for use when migrating your applications from Windows 7 or maybe Windows 8 to Windows 10. This methodology included collecting a list of your applications in use today, rationalizing this list in a way to create cost savings and streamline the migration process, analyze your applications for compatibility issues, remediate those applications with compatibility issues, deal with those damn incompatible web applications and THEN deliver. I also touched on the fact that with Windows 10 possibly being the last OS migration, it means this may be our last chance to completely start with a clean slate. With that in mind, I talked about transforming the desktop by delivering a richer end user experience and improving the working lives of your Admins. This of course was by going virtual! Something I am very, very familiar with! If you’d like to view my slides, you can find them here: (Some of the Demos will be uploaded soon)
On Tuesday night, I got to take part in a panel discussion around Windows 10 as part of our group. The group was aptly named “The Four Deploymenteers”. It was a pretty cool experience! Ironically, I think we may have had some technical difficulties during our discussion but I got a kick out of it! Note how awkwardly I’m shifting around on my stool. I was not only the youngest on the panel (sorry guys!), I was also by far the shortest 🙂
