What We Learned at Microsoft’s Partner Days Event
On 5th and 6th February San-iT’s Barry Lowe (MD), Seb Graham (Commercial Director) and Matthew Simmons (Solutions Architect) headed down to Twickenham to get their fingers well and truly on the pulse at one of Microsoft’s Partner Days events.
Microsoft Partner Days is a new two-day event that helps to equip Microsoft partners with the insight, skills and connections to support their clients through their own digital transformations. Taking place three times a year, Partner Days allows partners to grow and evolve with Microsoft. It’s an exciting time in the digital world to help customers in the SMB sector accelerate their growth aspirations through technology adoption.
Throughout the day there were workshops on Microsoft products such as Azure, Microsoft365 and Windows 10, giving attendees all the information they need to support customers to move forwards in their own digital transformations.
Sessions ranged from ‘Devices For The Modern Workplace’, ‘Moving to Microsoft 365’, ‘How to Make Money From the Cloud’, ‘Social Selling’ and ‘Azure – The Modern Platform’.
Barry, Seb and Matthew came back full of energy, brimming with new ideas having learned about the new technologies which we at San-iT can implement to help our clients be at the top of their game. They also got a chance to play with some of the latest video conferencing tech and made the most of using Skype For Business to chat with the office on this 83″ touchscreen unit.
Here’s Matthew Simmons on a couple of his favourite sessions:
Azure as a modern platform
One of the key things I took away was around developing logic apps within Azure. The newest member of the Azure family gives the opportunity to build, schedule and automate processes as workflows in a much more in-depth way than Flows within 365. The possibilities of integrating into a multitude of apps, data, systems and services across the company or enterprise, are endless.
There are also easy to use design tools so it’s much easier to create scalable solutions whether you are integrating apps, data, systems or B2B communications. All this, no matter whether you are in the cloud, on premises or a hybrid of both.
Examples given included moving files around that had been uploaded whether through ftp or via cloud and also manipulating uploaded images for size. Both of these then integrated with communication tools and sending internally or externally through tools like Mailchimp.
Security in the marketplace
We already use Enterprise, Mobility and Security for our clients as well as other tools around compliance, but this workshop helped me understand how to take this further to create an effective set of policies and controls.
We learned about the three main areas for IT system protection:
Confidentiality
The system contains information that requires protection from unauthorized disclosure.
Integrity
The system contains information that must be protected from unauthorized, unanticipated, or unintentional modification.
Availability
The system contains information or provides services that must be available on a timely basis to meet mission requirements or to avoid substantial losses.
We are always looking to expand our knowledge on the latest technologies to help our clients stay safe, secure and increase productivity. We are proud to have recently been awarded Silver Status for Cloud Computing from Microsoft and events like this help us to continue to develop our team, helping us move towards our next target, Gold Status.
