TEC Talk: The Dos and Don’ts of Teams Live Events for Customer and Vendor Engagement

All right, welcome, everybody, to our TEC talk today "The Dos and Don'ts of Teams Live Events for Customer and Vendor Engagements." Thank you for bearing with us these few extra minutes we needed to get started. I'm sure Mark will share that, our adventure here with you as he goes through the dos and don'ts. So a little bit of background before I introduce our topic and our speaker. I wanted to talk about these TEC talks briefly. So a TEC talk is in the spirit of our industry event, the Experts Conference, and it is pure Active Directory and Office 365 training, no third-party pitches. To give you a little bit more details about what the Experts Conference is, this is an event that we hold every year. We're hosting it in November of this year, November 17 and 18. And we are really excited about this. We brought it back out to seven year hiatus last year. We had a sold-out event. We're really excited about this year because not only do we have a hybrid Active Directory security track and Office 365 track, we also have a migration and modernization track. We'll also carve out time for networking and interacting with those industry experts and peers that you want to hear from-- folks like Randy Franklin Smith, Sean Metcalf, Chris McNulty, David Kennedy, our speaker today, Mark Rackley, who will be there. The speakers at this event range from those folks that I just mentioned, Microsoft employees, and lots of other Microsoft MVPs and industry experts. This will be held in Atlanta, Georgia. Right now we're optimistic about COVID-19 will be contained before TEC 2020. But we also understand this is a new experience for everyone. So we're planning for every possibility-- every possibility for having a safe and healthy event, live event, as well as also offering a full refund to anyone who requests it by November 3, 2020-- that way you can take advantage of any of the early bird discounts. And then for those Quest customers, we actually added a pre-conference day. It's November 16, and this is very much focused on the Quest AD recovery and AD auditing portfolios and running through some hands-on labs. But the event itself, 17 and 18, is just that pure training. So let's get into the TEC talk today. So I want to introduce our speaker. Mark Rackley is a longtime Microsoft MVP. He is a partner and chief strategy officer at the PAIT Group and has more than 25 years of experience designing and developing software solutions I've worked with Mark for many years around SharePoint, started there with SharePoint, and then obviously here with Office 365 and Teams. He is definitely recognized as a SharePoint geek to active blogger, a presenter, author. He is also the organizer of the North American Collaboration Summit. So he also puts on his own industry event, and he will be talking about that today as well. So Mark is going to walk us through the dos and don'ts about Teams live events, what to do here. And I'm going to turn it over to him. And if you have questions, but just put those in the Q&A, and I will manage those. And we'll save most of the questions until the end. OK, so Mark, I am going to send your feed live. Are we ready? We are ready. All right. Oh. Oh. I sent you live. OK. So hello, everyone. Thank you for joining us. And again, the interesting parts of getting started this morning will make a great talking point for our presentation today. So anybody has any questions along the way, please stop and ask. And I need to switch my slide settings. There we go. So today we're going to be talking about the dos and don'ts of live events. And as I do this more and more, there's so many more dos and so many more don'ts. So we'll see if we can add to them as we go. Jen did a great introduction for me already. My name is Mark Rackley. I do work for a company called Pait Group where we do Office 365 and Teams consulting. I do development, speaking. I'm known for liking bacon. So I stay busy in this space. So feel free to reach out to me with any questions after the fact. Feel free to check out my blog or reach out to me on LinkedIn or Twitter. Jen also mentioned that I do have my own conference. It is called the North American Collaboration Summit. And this is a community event. So it is-- and we have speakers from all over the world, actually. We have a lot of MVPs that come in from Europe and Canada and come present. And we do this in Branson, Missouri, which is kind of smack dab in the middle of the country. I live near Branson, Missouri. I'm passionate about this part of the country. It's part of the country that doesn't get to see this type of technology often. So I love doing this event. I try to make it a lot of fun. It's a multiday event. We do full-day workshops. Quest is one of our sponsors. So thank you guys so much for sponsoring. You can register today for our September event, and you can use the coupon code "Quest" to get a $50 discount to get that down even cheaper. Like I said, it's a community event, nonprofit event. We just charge as little as possible to cover our costs. And kind of the impetus for the session was the original dates for my conference were April 2 of this year. And with COVID happening, and that was kind of right on the time frame that it just really exploded. So I had about two weeks notice before I had to shut down the conference and move the dates. So we already had over 300