Power Platform 24 Live!

We recently completed the first ever 24 hour event exclusively focused on the Power Platform – Power Platform 24. The Dynamics and Power Platform community has fantastic events literally across the globe. As amazing as these in person events are, not everyone can attend as either a speaker or attendee. We wanted to remove geography as an obstacle!

Moving to a virtual format allows the team to include both speakers and attendees who may otherwise miss the opportunity to share with and learn from the community. For organizers, the added benefit is lower overhead because you don’t need to secure a venue, coordinate speaker travel, provide prizes, or feed anyone. All said, lots of pros for this virtual event format.

Our first event went off without a hitch! So maybe we had a very minor glitch or two, but the sessions were fantastic and the event ran like a well oiled machine all because of amazing speakers and a group of dedicated organizers.

I personally learned much from the experience, so I wanted to share some thoughts for those that might want to organize a similar event. This post covers a bit about the approach to organizing the event and some tools used to run the show.

Organizing the Event

The event came together fairly quickly after the idea was thrown out in a group conversation: anyone interested in hosting a virtual Power Platform event? The response was of course, “Heck yeah!” The volunteers immediately began throwing around ideas. We had a lot to discuss but most of it boiled down to these main topics:

  • How do we choose speakers?
  • How do we host each presentation?
  • How do we register attendees?

Most of the organizers have some experience running in person events, virtual events, or both so we started with some best practices in mind. We also brought experience with a variety of tools based from past events. This experience gave us a nice head start, we then simply needed to choose what works best for a virtual event spanning a full 24 hours!

Choosing speakers

The team chose sessionize.com as the platform for a call for speakers and vetting the submissions. If you have not used the platform, definitely check it out. Sessionize is offers excellent tools for both organizers and speakers to to organize event submissions and manage sessions across multiple events. Another huge plus is that for the service is free for free community events. Sessionize features alone could take up a full post!

Once you lock down your call for speakers, we used sessionize to categorize, review, and rate submissions. The organizing team reviewed each of the more than 70 submissions, ranking them based on the information provided by the speaker. This was honestly one of the hardest part of the process because we received so many excellent submissions.

We considered multiple tracks because of the number of submissions, meaning we could run two or three concurrent hour long sessions. This was our first 24 hour event, so we chose a single track of 24 one hour sessions, starting at 8:30 AM EST and running through 8:30 AM the next day.

Hosting the event

This was the big decision: What platform do we use to host the event? We can all list a dozen virtual event platforms in just a few minutes, but that doesn’t actually make things easier. We ended up choosing Teams and a Teams Live Event. This makes sense as this is a Microsoft Power Platform event, but here is an excellent article that Purvin Patel shared which helped make our decision: Produce a live event using Teams. This article outlines how to set up a Team Live Event and details around Producer roles.

The Teams Live event setup means assigning users to a producer role where they can monitor a control the live stream, Q&A channel, manage the event notes, and start/stop the event. Another important feature is the ability to record each session. This may not be a requirement for other events, but we wanted to provide recordings for both attendees and speakers. This is an excellent feature but the limitation of 4 hours per recording is something to keep in mind if you choose this platform. We needed to keep this limitation in mind when scheduling the sessions and producers.

Using a Teams Live event requires Office 365 and Teams licenses. Fortunately, the XrmVirtual crew is already delivering live events using Teams, so they offered to run the event for us. We now had a chosen platform, so we needed to decide how to run the sessions.

Delivering the Sessions

We broke the 24 hours into six blocks of 4 hours and we took volunteers as producers for each segment, which worked perfectly with our 4 hour cap on recording. A producer was logged in the speaker during the session to handle connected issues, answer or raise questions, and manage transitions between speakers.

This meant that we posted six 4 hour Team Live events that ran in sequence. Once these were established, individual invites were sent to each speaker with a link for the correct block of time. This was all handled by the XrmVirtual team and I felt it worked out great as both a speaker and a producer. It was easy for me but I know it took a lot of time to set up!

At the start of each session, a producer logged in to Teams with the correct account, share any slides that were required at the time, and kick off the session, and began recording. The speaker could then just shared their screen and delivered the session. Once the session was complete, the producer shut down the event to end recording while the next producer was already up an running with the next speaker.

Registering event attendees

Registering event attendees seems pretty important, so why is it last in the list?

Well our solution for registering users for the event was pretty simple: we didn’t register users. Fortunately, the Teams Live event platform allows users to connect without a prior registration and post questions anonymously. We had no need to track any user info, manage cancellations, etc. Attendees could jump on to catch a session and disconnect when done.

This could be an issue with different virtual delivery platforms but it did not seem to be an issue for us. I believe we averaged about 100 attendees per session which is a pretty nice number. I’ve had in person sessions with only 5 people, so 100 is pretty nice! We had some excellent questions by attendees which really adds to the delivery. And of course, attendees who missed the live session can jump online and view the recorded sessions on demand!

Testing, 1…2…

One practice that made this event run so smoothly was… practice! The week prior to the event, XrmVirtual team set up test sessions to ensure speakers could connect without issue. Each speaker jumped on to the Team event, shared their screen, and tested their audio. It sounds simple, and it was, but it saved us from potential issues on the day of the event.

We also made sure that producers understood the Teams setup operates. The XrmVirtual team provided a new account from their Office organization for each 4 hour block. Each account was granted producer rights on their respective Team Live events. Having enough accounts is another item to consider if you choose a Teams Live event as a platform.

I was not the one that set up the Teams Live event for all of the sessions, but from an end user perspective, I found this event went smoothly and the Teams platform is fairly easy to use.

Thanks once again!

I will call out the organizing team here in case you want to reach out and say thanks! For me, I wanted to say thanks once again to the organizing team for gathering and vetting the speakers, setting up the infrastructure, communicating with speakers and attendees, taking time to act as producers (at really crazy hours!), processing all of the recorded videos, and advertising the event.

Thanks for simply giving up a chunk of your free time to make this event happen.

Julie Yack
David Yack
Joel Lindstrom
Aiden Kaskela
Beth Burrell
Michael Ochs
Sarah Jelinek

Everyone on the team pitched in, but I think a few special shout outs are in order – thanks to Julie for owning the meetings and technical bits with the producer setup and being online for 16 or so hours monitoring the event real time. And thanks to David Yack for spending his weekend breaking down all of the videos and hosting them for our viewing pleasure.

And thanks to all of the speakers that gave up their time to plan and provide some excellent sessions for the community! Check out the full list of speakers at the Power Platform 24 site! You can check out the recorded events now that they have been posted here!

I am looking forward to another Power Platform 24 event… Keep an eye out for the next event announcement!

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