 That little pause right after that and the video transition always kind of gets me a little caught up in the timing and everything else like that. But hey, welcome everybody. We're streaming to a whole bunch of different locations, might be on LinkedIn, might be on YouTube, might be on Twitter. My name's Rick Claus. I'm a Cloud Advocate Lead here at Microsoft and this is Coffee with Rick, talking about Microsoft Ignite. I'm joined by a new friend that I just made a little while ago by the name of Ashley Steiner. Good morning, Ashley. How are you doing today? Good morning. I'm doing well. So I just want to say you were referred to me as someone that I should go off and talk to by my good friend Rich Campbell, who's your past across before. You are a co-host of a podcast that I absolutely love the name. Would you mind just sharing the name of the podcast that you're working with and who you're collaborating on with? Yeah, absolutely. So I'm on a podcast called The Dynamics Hot Dish. We're coming up on three years. And like you said, I'm a co-host. The other hosts on the podcast are Liz McGlennan and Allie Nelson. And for those of you out there who don't know what a hot dish is, we're all Midwestern. I guess we're all from the Midwest, I'll say. And a hot dish in the Midwest is what people, it's a casserole basically. So people in the Midwest call it a hot dish. So we wanted to bring our roots into the podcast a little bit also while keeping it about tech. And so how did you folks all connect up and meet each other? And that sort of stuff around the, and I'm assuming around the dynamics and the dynamics platform. Can you, can you share your backstory on that one there? Is that a curiosity? Yeah, absolutely. So I've known Liz for coming on like 12 years. We actually started out of college at the same company. We got bought by the same company. We're both the CRM admins at our individual companies. And then we're put on a project to combine CRM systems. And honestly, I think we've stayed close because of the community. I don't know if once, you know, we went on to a different positions and different jobs. I would like to say that we'd still be friends, but being in the community of dynamics definitely helped. And then Ali was actually a customer of Liz's when she worked at Stone Ridge or Power Objects. I can't remember. And so they became friends and kind of brought her into the podcast as well. Nice. Now I remember when we were trying to coordinate dates that we could go off and connect up and have some coffee together. We were chatting earlier about stuff. And you were mentioning that you were off at a bunch of different conferences. And so this is about Microsoft Ignite, but it's also about community, about conferences and stuff. So I'd be curious if you could share like where, what your thoughts were on the conference that you were most recently at and then follow that up with a second question around, hey, I hear you going to Microsoft Ignite. So where were you just recently? And how was the conference? I was actually at Community Summit in Charlotte, North Carolina. It's held by Dynamics Communities. It was a great conference. I've been going every year since 2012. So this is like my 11th one. It's always a great conference for community. Really great to connect with like end users and not just other partners, consultants like myself. So really enjoy, enjoy that conference. And then yes, excited about Ignite. This is actually my first Ignite. I don't know if we had talked about that. So I am thrilled and excited to finally be going to Ignite. And I'm going to probably sound like a broken record. I'm so excited to hear more about co-pilot. And the reason I am is because there's a lot of sessions on co-pilot with customer service and sales. Co-pilot has been with the marketing app for quite a long time now. And we've all seen like the cool things that it does, but I'm really excited to see how it's going to start getting integrated into the other first party apps. Okay. Okay. So there's going to be some very cool stuff with regards to co-pilot and specifically in the dynamic space from what I understand. Again, I don't know the full details because I've only been looking cursorily like everybody else. And for those of you joining us again, I see there's Daniel has joined us and same thing with Richard Hooper from across the pond over in the UK has joined us as well. You mentioned it's your first time at Microsoft Ignite, which is absolutely awesome. I can't wait to welcome you and say hello in person and have a coffee or a tea or whichever it happens to be when we're there in person. The part that's interesting for me is obviously going off and registering for Microsoft Ignite. So you've already registered. You have access to the tools. You have access to all the content. So for anyone that's watching the coffee chat that we're having right now, go off and register now. The on-site in-person experience is sold out. We sold out very early in the process because of all the excitement. But the online and digital experience is still very much available for people to go off and register. So we've done a big investment on the hybrid capabilities of being able to bring over 140 different sessions to you across three and a half days. So please go off and register at Microsoft. Get the right URL here, ignite.microsoft.com. So you are registered. You're going to be there in person at your first time. I didn't even know that. That's awesome. From looking at the tools. So we released the tools just last week. And by the tools, that basically means the scheduler. So you can see all the sessions. You're starting to build your schedule. So curiosity, which ones are you interested in going to? Which ones have kind of caught your eyes being interested? Yeah. And I'm really glad you get an email. So I guess I should clarify. This is my first one in person. I've definitely attended Ignite sessions online over the last few years or listened to them afterwards. They're recorded a lot of times. So it was really cool to be able to like RSVP into the ones that are on site and kind of snag my place. Okay. So specific sessions I'm excited about is accelerate seller productivity with Dynamics 365 sales. And that specifically gets into talking about how they're going to put co-pilot into sales. Yeah. And then what I also really like about the tools on Dynamics, specifically that you mentioned is you build out your event and then it says, hey, you have an hour and a half open in your schedule. Go find sessions that fit this time. And yesterday I was fine tuning my schedule. And that's how I was actually able to find another session that kind of does the same thing about bringing co-pilot into building a personalized experience inside of Dynamics. So definitely, yeah, I agree with you. Use the tools, build out your schedule. I love that feature where you can find things that fill the gaps. That's unique. I've never seen that at any other conference. That's cool. I'm glad. I'll make sure I pass that feedback on to the tools team that went off and built that. That's an awesome observation. I do want to obviously caution everybody that you should not necessarily completely jam-pack every single minute of your time. There's lots of options you can go to in the in-person experience. So one of the things in in-person experience that I'm sure you're going to get a chance to block some time off, take a look at, is known as the hub or the expert meetup capabilities inside the hub. So this year we experimented with Microsoft Build in the previous conference to distribute all these different experts across multiple rooms to kind of have like a journey you would go through on the building. We took the feedback and said, you know what, let's actually consolidate them together inside of one space. And then that way it's a one-stop shop. People go off into drop some time in, go off and find some experts to ask your questions to, and also connect up with the community that you're mentioning too. So take some time and check out the hub if you're in-person, as well as in-person pieces that you don't get if you're online. Do you have any questions about the sessions or about the logistics or things you should try to do or anything else like that? Since I'll take advantage of the fact that you've just revealed the fact that it's your first time for an in-person experience, anything that you have any questions about that I could help out with maybe? Yeah. I'd love to hear more about kind of how the, because a lot of the conferences I go to, they segregate. That's a terrible word to use. The different products. Does Ignite kind of include everybody into the same spaces so you're kind of interacting and mingling with people that are there for different purposes or products? Yeah. The facilities that we're in for the in-person experience is a single new modern building construction in the Washington State Convention Center. It's called the Summit Building. We are spread across all five floors. And like you meant it, we don't group people together inside of different areas. So up there is the Dynamics folks. And over here is the Infrastructure folks and stuff like that. We try to encourage a mingling of different people across the board. And the big place you see this mingling is in the place that I mentioned, known as the hub, because every single expert area is inside that one spot. And so I want to say there's over a hundred different engineering teams that will be represented inside that one space across eight or nine different topics that are the overall high level governance of how we're talking about content at Microsoft Ignite. Plus also on top of that, I want to say over 80 different feature partners that are in there as well that are participating. Don't quote me on the number of 80 because I'm sure I've screwed that up and the people in charge of partners are going to get mad at me. But let's just say there will be plenty of both Microsoft expertise, community expertise, MVPs and RDs, as well as Microsoft value partners that are going to be there as well as featured partners that are participating. So mix and mingle, cross pollinate, and that's actually one of the suggestions I have is kind of go outside of your comfort zone and look at some of the sessions that are not necessarily in your wheelhouse that happen to be there. I see some of the discussion that's happening online for people asking questions about the number of people that are going to be there. So attendee-wise, we're looking over 4,000 people are going to be attending. And then there's, as you can probably imagine, I don't know the official number, but hundreds and hundreds of people from the point of view of partners and Microsoft people that are going to be there and community members as well. So we'll give you the final tally on numbers at the end of the event. I was curious. There's a particular type of session that's kind of interesting and new. I don't know if you've come across these before at other community sessions. They're called discussion sessions. Have you managed to find any of those that are of interest you might have put inside your schedule? I haven't put any into my schedule. I'm also there on behalf of the podcast and we'll be doing on-site interviews. So I've had to be a little light on my schedule, especially to you, but I'm not sure if my schedule, especially to your recommendation of don't pack it completely full. So I've had to be sensitive to those on-site interviews that I'm doing, but I've seen roundtables happen at other conferences. I don't know if that's kind of the direction that they're leaning with those discussions, but I've seen those be, excuse me, I've seen those be really successful because you kind of encourage conversation, encourage people to bring up their experiences and you kind of learn from what other people have done or not what to do. So you mentioned the roundtables and that's one style of discussion. Those are specifically put on by engineering teams looking for feedback about the products to be able to go off and make changes and do things. The ones that I was, that you're mentioning that have been at other community conferences, those kind of fall into the classification of what we call discussion sessions. Discussion sessions are set up slightly different than a breakout where a breakout is like outbound presentation kind of stuff and demos and things, whereas the discussion session is like you mentioned, it's more of a panel discussion or a small group of engineers or community members or future partners around a particular topic. And they have like an in-room host and moderator that then will go off and start the discussion off, kick off some brief little bit of a kind of level setting, but then solicit questions from people in the room but also online as well. So these discussion sessions are actually completely hybrid this year, which allows for a two-way discussion, both online and also in the room as well. Yeah, I appreciate the hybrid. Sorry, I was going to say I really appreciate how Microsoft is investing in that hybrid because there are a lot of companies that are still not allowing their folks to travel or they've seen that you can still do a lot without traveling. So I really appreciate it. That's something that a lot of the other conferences are not doing is creating this hybrid experience. The hybrid is an interesting challenge. I'm a big proponent of it. I really like it because if you think about a traditional breakout session that you're having at a conference, you're normally there in a room. You've got a couple hundred people, 300, 500, maybe a thousand if it's a keynote or whatever. But you want to ask a question. You want to ask something and there might be some time left over for questions at the end. Maybe there's like two microphones in the room. You can stand in line and ask a question in front of all those people. One thing that we're doing at Microsoft Ignite, which I think is pretty cool for this hybrid capability is everybody in the room and online watching the sessions live are able to ask questions the same way with the interactive chat on the side. So the example that I give for the value is a particularly popular speaker in the infrastructure space is a friend of mine, Mark Rosinovich. Normally he speaks to rooms of like thousands of people, miniature keynotes or full keynotes. And you would maybe get one or two questions in at the very end of one of his sessions. During the hybrid capability what we've done, my team was helping out answer questions. We actually answered 850 questions during a 45 minute session which was insane. Wow, that's crazy. That's one of the commitments to the concept of hybrid. And so when we go through and do tech evaluations and preparatory work for the different sessions and helping out the speakers get prepared, we tell them, encourage people to ask questions, have a team there to be able to answer them. So this is great for the in-person but also most excellent for that online audience that happens to be there too. And is that done through the mobile app? Like is there a mobile app people can download or how do they ask those questions in person? So when you book your schedule and you are going to go off and take a look at the particular session and you look at the session details page, when the session is live, the interactive chat comes up right inside of that particular or just to the side of the actual window that happens to be there. So on your computer, if you're remote, on your laptop or it can be also on your phone as well. So when you're in the room, when you're watching that Dynamics integration into the sales side of things as an example, just take your mobile device and then there is what's known as the built-in, not the built-in, sorry, the web app that you can install from the website when you're surfing to it on your phone, that gives you access to the questions as well as the session details that are there too. Awesome. I see Simon's asking us about whether or not Microsoft Ignite is going to be going back to the UK at some point in time because we used to have this kind of show on the road. And I'm just going to say at this point in time, I'm not aware of any plans. It's not completely ruled out. It's just a matter of making sure that the industry and everybody else is ready to start doing a larger-scale conference that kind of goes around. We're kind of doing whatever the industry's doing and trying to make sure that we do it right when we do have the opportunity to do stuff. I just see that we're basically almost done for allocated time. My gosh, the time has flown. Just passed. Went so quick. Did I know it? Any closing thoughts or anything that you'd recommend or anything you'd like to ask in the closing moments there, Ashley? Yes. I did see two questions coming on Twitter. I'd love to answer if we... I'll answer them quickly. But Tatiana asked about hot dishes and I have to... have to answer. Okay, yes, absolutely. So that she's tried a hot dish recipes on our website of our favorite hot dishes. Okay. It's dynamicshotdish.com. Go to the site, check it out. If you're looking for something specific, basically a hot dish is whatever you have in your cupboard, throw it together and put it in the oven. So the recipe. And then Jason had asked about like how to get ready for watching online. My biggest recommendation is eliminate distractions. Close your outlook. Close your teams. Really commit yourself to being at the conference, even though you're virtual. Because if you're trying to do both work and attend the conference online, it's not going to work. So that's my biggest recommendation. I've even heard of some friends online that have gone through and said, you know what? I'm going to book a hotel room just so I can be away from my regular desk and I'm going to watch remote. That's a little extreme. Yes, a little out there. I do definitely encourage exactly what you just mentioned. Make and allocate the time and the space. Use the tools to build your schedule. And we have a handy feature called a backpack, which you didn't get a chance to talk about. That's where you can kind of stash your sessions for a post-event resource. But Ashley, it's been great chatting with you. Thanks so much for taking the time to chat today about Microsoft at night. And I look forward to being able to meet you in person. And like I said, raise a cup and have a cheers while we're in person at Microsoft at night. For the rest of the folks that are going to be joining us online, you'll be able to catch us during the interstitials, during the keynotes. Who knows? We'll happen to see where people are. We're going to try to make this as interactive and hybrid motion. But with that, I'm going to have to say adieu. It was great talking with you, Ashley. And we'll catch everybody next time on Coffee with Rick for Microsoft at Night. Thanks for having me.