This week I had the good fortune of attending and speaking at the Modern Workplace Conference in Paris from October 16-18. It was also an opportunity for me to visit France for the first time and experience a small taste of their culture.
Ahead of the event, the speaker event was a gourmet dinner on a Seine river cruise where we floated past the Eiffel Tower lit up at night and other beautiful sights of Paris. It was a wonderful way to meet everyone, see a historic monument of Paris, and witness life on the banks of the Seine… people having picnics, drinking wine, and relaxing. So good.

The conference event was held at the beautifully unique Microsoft building with a pre-con day and 2 full-days of sessions. My session was titled Let’s Build an Adoption Centre in Office 365 and was full of demos and ideas on how to build one yourself using nothing more than a Communication site, SharePoint Hub, Content Types and Site Columns in SharePoint Online. I love giving this session since it can all be done without any code and is a scalable solution for many different kinds of publishing scenarios in SharePoint, not just for Office 365 Adoption.
One of the highlights for the event was having sketchnote artist and my friend, Luise Freese, do a sketch note of my session. How cool is that? I think it captures the session perfectly! Check it out…
Link to my presentation: Let’s Build an Adoption Centre in Office 365.
There were 2 fantastic keynotes for the event given by Lori Wright and Dan Holme. This is a testament to the full-on support Microsoft has for community events like this. I want to thank Dan personally for giving me a shout-out in his keynote on building an Adoption Hub. A first for me!!
I managed to steal away for a few hours and enjoy some of the sights and sounds of Paris. I like to enjoy the culture in simple ways so one of the highlights for me was enjoying a crepe and café latte in a small French patisserie listening to the bells of the beautiful Notre Dame Cathedral. It was a memorable moment.
Thanks to the organizers and sponsors for this event, for inviting me and having faith in me to deliver. I really appreciate the opportunity and hope to be back some day.

-JCK