Microsoft Ignite The Tour – London

Today I joined five thousand attendees at the first day of the Microsoft Ignite the Tour – London event. This is the first year I have attended and so I thought I’d write a quick summary for those who could not get a ticket and to encourage you to book well in advance for next year.

For me, the day started with bad traffic and late trains so I missed the rather marvellous Rory Neary present, what I’m told, was a really excellent session on “Enabling everyone to digitise apps and processes with Power Apps and the Power platform”. I’m a fan and avid subscriber of Rory’s You Tube channel and his enthusiasm and prolific Power App creation is totally contagious.

There were many more sessions that I did mange to catch, my favorite being the one hosted by the enigmatic Dux Raymond Sy and Power Platform superstar Donna Sarkar. This session talked about inclusion and diversity, neurodiversity and a heartfelt story from Samit Saini which was so inspiring.

Donna challenged the audience to create their first Power App during the conference and to claim a Power Platypus stickers – which I have to say is really cool;

These conferences bring together some of the cleverest people I’ve ever met. Its an absolute pleasure to be around people who are as enthusiastic about the Power Platform as I am and the conversations are always about ideas, helping others and improving the tools.

One such super star in the making, who took the time to spend an hour with me to discuss his Power App solutions he will be demonstrating in his session tomorrow, is Sancho Harker. Sancho already has a solution in the Power Apps community catalog and a new version on the way soon. He has work diligently on creating a theme tool for Power Apps that shows his dedication to making the tools easier to adopt, use and develop with. The time saving and business value that Sancho’s solutions will give is outstanding. This guys is one to watch 🙂

Microsoft – I applaud you not only for putting on these events, but for filling them with community invested product teams that are here to listen. The perfect example is Microsoft’s Brian Dang – a superb advocate of the technology, great guy and most importantly always listening (and writing notes) on things he can take back to improve the product.

I’m really looking forward to tomorrow, Day 2 will have not only a pop up session from the London Power Platform User Group but also more excellent speakers and attendees to network with and I’ll be on the Ask the Expert area so will have lots of opportunity to enthuse and share with the community.