Luke Evans
Solutions Architect
Reading, United Kingdom
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Luke Evans is a solutions architect currently working at codelooks. Luke is an experienced senior solutiions architect with over 16 years of experience within private and public sectors. Luke has extensive experience in architecture and full end-to-end delivery of cloud digital transformation programmes.
In the past 7 years, Luke has immersed himself Microsoft 365 and Azure and the technologies that underpin and support them with a strong focus on security and identity.
Luke is a Microsoft MVP in M365 Apps and Services.
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Prepare to step into the metaverse with Mesh for Teams
The metaverse is all the talk at present with both Facebook and Microsoft going all into to expand and build into it. But the biggest achievement of the metaverse is an industry wide scramble to figure out just what the metaverse is.
Microsoft Mesh is described by Microsoft as a way of letting people connect with a holographic presence, share across space, and collaborate from anywhere in the world. Mesh for Microsoft Teams combines the mixed-reality capabilities of Microsoft Mesh, which allows people in different physical locations to join collaborative and shared holographic experiences, with the productivity tools of Microsoft Teams, where people can join virtual meetings, send chats, collaborate on shared documents and more.
After attending this session, you will understand at a high-level:
What Mesh for Microsoft Teams is, what new opportunities it introduces and what business benefits it can bring?
A live demo of what stepping into Mesh for Microsoft Teams will feel like
How you can better prepare your organization for the metaverse and Mesh for Microsoft Teams
Technologies in this session will be
Microsoft Teams
AltspaceVR
Prepare for battle - kill Teams bad actors in their tracks using the power of Microsoft Sentinel
Over the course of the pandemic, the entire world switched to remote working, with Teams playing a key part - and the result is that Microsoft Teams has seen an unprecedented amount of growth. In many cases, Teams was thrown out quickly with little planning or governance, to quickly facilitate this shift to remote working.
Unfortunately, this increased usage means that the service has made Teams a more lucrative prize to attackers. Dealing with events and activities occurring across a Teams tenant becomes near impossible at scale. Enter Microsoft Sentinel to help us shutdown any potential threats proactively at scale in real-time.
In this session, we will take you through how to protect your Teams users and data by managing critical changes across and automatically remediate them using Microsoft Sentinel
After attending this session, you will understand at a high-level:
• How to connect Microsoft Teams to Microsoft Sentinel and start retrieving data
• Battle ready Sentinel queries to catch critical real-world Teams threats
• Making use of built-in SOAR capabilities to automate response and generate notifications when critical events occur within your environment, so your team is ready to act
Taking full advantage of Microsoft Teams and Sentinel integration to automate the creation of incident war rooms
How to effortlessly manage your user access - from hire to fire
As organisations grow, and with the constant evolution of technology, users no longer are driven by a need for a desk but instead access to applications, data, and resources. Unfortunately, access is often given without adequate identity governance policies in place. One of most common scenarios where identity governance falls short is the starters, movers, and leavers process - users are often left perpetuality accruing an excess of permissions. Another key example is new starters- they often don't know what access they should have, and even if they do, they may have difficulty locating the right individuals to approve their access.
To prevent data breaches, organisations need to provide the right balance of productivity for users internally and externally while assigning appropriate security to resources.
Azure AD Identity Governance allows organisations to easily give users the ability to performance self-service management of access and security to resources across M365. It does this while providing an audit trail and without impeding rapid provisioning and deprovisioning of users.
In this session you will learn
The business case/benefits of using Azure AD Entitlement Management
Generating and publishing access package
Delegating of responsibilities to business owners
Implementing successfully self-service access reviews
Technologies in this session
Azure AD
Introducing Microsoft Teams Premium, the better way to meet now
We are experiencing a once-in-a-lifetime change in work patterns, and there is no going back to 2019. Hybrid work is just work. Empowering today’s connected, distributed workforce requires technology that makes work easier and more flexible.
Virtual and hybrid meetings continue to take up most of the time spent at work. Now, more than ever, leaders need an integrated solution that combines all the advanced meeting capabilities, takes meeting culture to the next level, and allows them to do more with less.
Microsoft Teams Premium is built on the familiar, all-in-one collaboration experience of Microsoft Teams, this new offering makes every meeting from one-on-ones to large meetings, to virtual appointments to webinars more personalized, intelligent, and secure.
After attending this session, you will understand at a high-level:
What Microsoft Teams Premium is, what new opportunities it introduces and what business benefits it can bring
A demo of Teams Premium features
How you can better prepare your organization to make use of Teams Premium
This session is going to be an interactive session that highlights the power of Teams Premium and how we can use its feature set to enhance meetings, virtual appointments, and webinars!
Technologies in this session will be
Microsoft Teams Premium
Microsoft 365 Security Master Class: the Ongoing Battle to Improve Security
A primary concern of any Microsoft 365 admin that lingers is the security of that tenant! Whether you're an experienced tenant admin looking to hone your security skills or you're just getting to grips with the vast array of features and controls, this workshop is for you.
In this interactive workshop, you'll learn how to configure your tenant to security best practices drawing on broad experience from the expert presenters and built upon trusted guidance from the US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) and the UK Nation Cyber Security Centre (NCSC).
This workshop will cover three main technical areas, including work in M365, Azure Active Directory, and Microsoft Sentinel. Expect to:
– Learn the end-to-end Microsoft security story;
– Understand how to set security goals and a security strategy;
– Dive into configuration and tooling options in M365;
– Learn tips on to stay up to date with the constant changes;
– Secure an M365 tenant to CISA, NCSC, and Microsoft best practices;
– Set up a best-practice Microsoft Sentinel tenant;
– Identify real threats and produce security findings and recommendations reports; and
– Create and deliver a summary of your report.
For this workshop you'll need an existing M365 tenant you want to perform a security assessment on (optional, otherwise we will help you setup a test tenant on the day) and a device with software for administration of M365 (e.g., Microsoft Edge, PowerShell).
Stopping data exfiltration dead using Microsoft 365 Endpoint DLP
Stopping data exfiltration dead using Microsoft 365 Endpoint DLP
Protecting sensitive data from risky or inappropriate copying, sharing, transfer, or use is a top priority for any organization. Remote working and data sharing across a plethora of corporate and personally owned devices have created renewed emphasis on providing strong and coordinated protection on the endpoint's employees use every day.
Microsoft Endpoint DLP identifies and protects information on endpoints. It extends the activity monitoring and protection capabilities of DLP to sensitive items that are physically stored on Windows 10, Windows 11, and macOS devices. It delivers three core capabilities: Native protection, seamless deployment, and integrated insights.
In this session, Luke will play the disgruntled employee looking to try and conduct some insider data exfiltration with Jon playing the part of the defenders to try and stop Luke dead in his tracks!
After attending this session, you will understand at a high-level:
What Endpoint DLP is, what are the capabilities and how it can better protect your data
A live demo of Endpoint attacker vs defender
How you can take the insights of Endpoint DLP and integrate it into the Microsoft Sentinel
Technologies in this session will be
Microsoft Teams
Endpoint DLP
Windows 10/11
Taking an Infrastructure as Code approach to Microsoft 365
At present, managing Microsoft 365 configurations across multiple tenancies has proven to be a difficult and complex job. Administrators have to manually manage and configure the hundreds of settings at their disposal to allow for their desired configuration.
However, in recent years, things have changed dramatically. Trends like cloud computing revolutionised—and improved—the way organizations design, develop, and maintain their IT infrastructure. One of the key concepts has been the introduction of Infrastructure as code (IaC). Explained simply, IAC means to manage your IT infrastructure using configuration files.
IaC is used extensively throughout cloud computing (Azure, AWS, etc.) but has never been utilised in the same manner for Microsoft 365.
In this session you will learn:
• How we can use IaC to deliver M365 deployments faster and more consistently
• How Microsoft 365 Desired State Config to
○ Manages
○ Configures
○ Extract and monitor Microsoft 365 tenant configurations
Technologies in covered in this session will be:
• Microsoft 365
• PowerShell
• Desired State Config
• VS Code
• Git
Pimp your Windows Terminal!
Finally, Microsoft Windows has provided an awesome terminal which can step out of the shadows of the Unix-like systems’ terminals! The new Windows terminal is open-source and offers an incredible gamut of customization!
With a myriad of command prompts, scripts, and shells across Windows now, this session will offer a practical demo in how to get how to get working with Windows Terminal to help increase your personal workflow and productivity immediately!
Key learning points will be:
What is Windows Terminal
How to get it running on your system
Why Windows Terminal is the one terminal to rule them all!
What customizations and enhancements are available to help boost your productivity and workflows whether you are a systems administrator or a DevOps engineer!
What is a recommended day zero setup?
Technologies in covered in this session will be:
Windows Terminal
Windows PowerShell
PowerShell Core
Azure Cloud Shell
WSL (Bash)
Git
Transitioning to PowerShell Core for Microsoft Teams, Azure AD and SharePoint Online management and
PowerShell has proven to be an absolutely essential tool for management, reporting and automation within Microsoft 365 for administrators, developers and architects alike. Unfortunately for some, the majority of the Microsoft 365 functionality has normally been limited to Windows based systems.
Thankfully this is all about to change for the better with advent of the multi-platform PowerShell Core, which is close to reaching feature parity with traditional PowerShell for Microsoft 365 environments - and more specifically for SharePoint Online and Microsoft Teams.
Key Learning Points:
• What is PowerShell Core and why should it be important to me?
• How to get started with PowerShell Core to better manage and automate SharePoint Online, Azure AD and Microsoft Teams.
• Developing a high level road map to migrate from PowerShell to PowerShell Core across your existing code bases and solutions
• Key challenges and differences working with PowerShell Core vs PowerShell
Technologies in this session will be
PowerShell
PowerShell Core
Azure AD
Microsoft Teams
SharePoint Online
Microsoft Teams: Usability vs Security
Over the last year, the whole world switched to remote working, with Teams playing a key part - and the result is that Microsoft Teams has seen an unprecedented amount of growth. In many cases, Teams was thrown out quickly with little planning or governance, to quickly facilitate this shift to remote working.
End-users have adopted Teams and love the freedom to work and collaborate in the open with colleagues, customers and partners alike. Microsoft Teams is a fantastic tool for supporting cross-functional and even cross-organisational collaboration, but its openness introduces concerns about unfettered file and data sharing between an unlimited number of users.
Historically, often, effective security came at the expense of usability. And usability came at the expense of security. Many continue to go by the notion that there is no way to achieve both effective security and usability simultaneously - but with Microsoft Teams, and the wider M365 security and compliance capabilities, it can be possible to achieve secure collaboration.
In this session, we will take you through some of the requirements and challenges that your Teams users typically have, and then highlight key technology solutions that can be used to secure these use-cases.
After attending this session, you will understand at a high-level:
• Some of the key use-cases for Microsoft Teams and some the key risks it introduces
• What are the fundamental technical components that Microsoft Teams builds upon
• Where does Microsoft security responsibilities end and yours begin
• An action plan of what you can do today to better secure your Microsoft Teams instance without affecting end user productivity
• What are the licensing implications of the above
Technologies in this session will be
• Microsoft Teams
• SharePoint Online
• Azure AD
• Microsoft 365 E5 Security and Compliance
"I'm in fileshare hell - how do I get out?"
Many organisations are still running legacy file shares, with huge amounts of dark data sitting on on-premises infrastructure that at some point will reach its end of life.
We frequently talk to customers facing this very challenge - usually with a few different reasons for wanting to address their own file share hell. Reasons can include cost savings, having to move out of a datacentre (due to end of contract for example), infrastructure end of life or security / compliance concerns.
We are often asked how to approach getting people out of this nightmare, and in this session, we plan to share some of our findings and recommendations with you.
In this session, we will:
• Take you through the options for migrating your data
• Help you understand the business case for moving data to M365, and where Azure Files can fit into this
• The benefits of moving content into SharePoint Online and Microsoft Teams
• How you approach the challenge of understanding your data and planning the migration
• Key lessons learned
Technologies in this session will be
• Microsoft Teams
• SharePoint Online
• OneDrive for Business
• Azure Files
• Microsoft 365 Security and Compliance
Controlled collaboration - build a provisioning solution for Microsoft Teams and SharePoint
Moving to Microsoft 365 delivers significant productivity and capability benefits to workforces, and provides them with technology which can truly transform and modernize their ways of working.
At Agilisys we want to be able to empower end-users within our client organizations to create collaborative spaces within Office 365. In our experience the self-serve approach to creating new sites and teams within Office 365 does not meet the governance requirements which many of our clients have.
During this session we will take you through what the different options are for controlled provisioning, why a provisioning solution may be needed and give examples of solutions we have implemented to address the various governance requirements we see across our clients.
We will then go on to deliver a technical demonstration of how you can build an effective provisioning solution.
During the technical demo we will talk about what are the challenges can arise without a controlled provisioning method in place. We will go on to demonstrate how you can build a rapid provisioning solution for standardized Teams and SharePoint using the inbuilt technologies within Office 365.
The practical demo will include PowerApps, Flow, Microsoft Teams, SharePoint Online, Azure AD and Microsoft Graph.
How to secure, manage and store secrets when working with PowerShell
PowerShell has proven to be an absolutely essential tool for management, reporting and automation within Microsoft 365 and Azure for administrators, developers and architects alike.
One of the key themes that has had a multitude of approaches (some good, some bad and some ugly!) over the years has been the management and secure storage of passwords, certificates and secrets when using them in solutions.
Thankfully this is all about to change for the better with introduction of the Secrets Management module. The purpose of the Secrets Management module is to provide secure storage of and access to secrets in your PowerShell solutions
Key Learning Points:
What are the components of the PowerShell Secrets Management module?
What vault types are available, how do you interact with them and what are recommend?
How to start utilising the Secrets Management in your solutions today
Key challenges and tips when working with Secrets Management
Technologies in this session will be
PowerShell 7
Microsoft Azure (Key Vault)
Microsoft 365 (Teams, SharePoint Online, Azure)
Is your Microsoft Teams instance secure - How do you fix it?
Over the course of the last year, we've seen an unparalleled growth of remote-work tools. This growth has catapulted Microsoft Teams to one of the largest collaboration platforms in the world.
Microsoft Teams is a fantastic tool for supporting cross-functional and even cross-organisational collaboration, but its openness introduces concerns about unfettered file and data sharing between an unlimited number of users.
With the increased adoption of Microsoft Teams, It is vital to ensure that Teams environments are configured securely and support effectively collaboration. This sessions looks to help strike the balance between the two.
After attending this session, you will understand:
What are the fundamental technical components that Microsoft Teams builds upon
Where does Microsoft security responsibilities end and yours begin
What Teams features should you secure, how should you do it and what balance you should strike
A plan of action in the event of experiencing a breach within Microsoft Teams
Technologies in this session will be
Microsoft Teams
SharePoint Online
PowerShell
Azure AD
Implementing Zero Trust with Microsoft Azure AD: Privileged Identity Management
Privileged identity management is emerging as one of the hottest topics in cybersecurity. Azure AD Privileged Identity Management (PIM). PIM is a service that enables you to manage, control, and monitor access to critical resources in your cloud environment. This includes resources in Azure AD, Azure, and Microsoft 365 workloads such as Microsoft Teams, SharePoint Online or Microsoft Intune.
In this session, you will gain an understanding of Azure AD Privileged Identity Management and hear about how I've previously deployed it to customers, lessons learned and some best practices from those deployments.
Key Learning Points:
How Azure AD PIM can help manage, control, and monitor access to key workflows in services across Microsoft 365 and Azure
Developing a high level road map of to secure privileged access against cyber attackers.
Key concepts of configuration of Azure AD PIM with a focus on deploying with infrastructure-as-code
Key challenges and lessons learnt in operating Azure AD PIM on a day to day basis
Technology in this session will be:
Azure AD
Azure AD Privileged Identity Management
PowerShell
Make asset management easier through automating provision / deletion new starter and leaver accounts
Moving to Microsoft 365 delivers significant productivity and capability benefits to workforces, and provides them with technology which can truly transform and modernise their ways of working.
However when utilising a consumption-based licencing model, it is vital that organisations put in place processes that help manage and automate asset and licence management.
During this session we will talk about the financial impact of not managing users and licence consumption effectively, and take you through a case-study of how we built an effective automated self-service starter and leavers solution and the impact this delivered to our clients.
We will then take you through a technical demo of how you can build an automated solution for requesting and provisioning new starters. We will also give you suggestions for how you can extend this onboarding solution to perform additional tasks related to IT or HR onboarding of new employees.
Our session will cover SharePoint Online and SPFx web-parts, Azure AD, Azure Automation and Flow. The practical demo will cover a PowerApps form, Flow, Azure AD and Azure Automation.
Secure sharing with large volumes of external users in SharePoint Online
Moving to Microsoft 365 delivers significant productivity and capability benefits to workforces, and provides them with technology which can truly transform and modernize their ways of working.
With on-premise SharePoint, external-sharing was managed securely at a physical level by having a second farm in the DMZ - this allowed internal-only content to be securely ring-fenced away from anything that was being shared with external organizations or users.
Within SharePoint Online it is also possible to safely and securely manage your external-sharing settings even without this physical separation, and a key requirement we see across our customers is this ability to work and collaborate securely with external organizations, entities and individuals.
Agilisys have developed customer solutions to manage collaboration with thousands of external users in a safe and controlled manner. During this technical session we will take you through how we utilize the M365 technology stack to build an effective external user management solution.
The practical demo will include SharePoint Online, Azure AD, Azure B2B, Azure Automation and Microsoft Flow.
Tackle your unstructured fileshare data and plan migration to Microsoft 365 with AIP Scanner
Moving to Microsoft 365 delivers significant productivity and capability benefits to workforces, and provides them with technology which can truly transform and modernise their ways of working.
However when migrating to Microsoft 365 one of the key challenges organisations face is their existing unstructured data. Unstructured data’ is typically data held in network file shares, personal / home drives and other legacy applications, and in our experience we typically see very old content, huge amounts of nested folders and lack of clear ownership within the organisation.
During this session we will explain in more detail what unstructured data is and why you need to care about it, including legislation such as GDPR. We will then take you through what the different options are available to help manage and extract value from unstructured data, and the benefits and advantages of migrating your content into SharePoint Online or OneDrive for Business. This will include real life scenarios and use-cases we have encountered where we have had to analyse and understand huge volumes of customer fileshare data ahead of migrating into Microsoft 365.
We will give a technical demo of how to use functionality available within Microsoft 365 to help ingest, understand, classify and govern unstructured data. As part of this technical session we will use SharePoint Online, Microsoft Security and Compliance, Office 365 Unified Labelling, Azure Information Protection and Azure Information Protection Scanner.
May 2023 Microsoft 365 Conference Sessionize Event
Microsoft Cloud Security User Group User group Sessionize Event
M365 Chicago - A Salute to Services! Sessionize Event
Virtual M365 Friday Cincinnati Sessionize Event
South Coast Summit 2022 Sessionize Event
The North American Collaboration Summit 2022 Sessionize Event
Teams10X - Sep 28-29, 2022 Sessionize Event
CollabDays Netherlands 2022 Sessionize Event
Metaverse One Sessionize Event
Scottish Summit 2022 Sessionize Event
Microsoft 365 Virtual Marathon 2022 Sessionize Event
TeamsCommunityDay 2022 Sessionize Event
Microsoft 365 Security and Compliance User Group User group Sessionize Event
Festive Tech Calendar 2021 Sessionize Event
Collabdays Lisbon 2021 Sessionize Event
South Coast Summit 2021 Sessionize Event
The North American Collaboration Summit 2021 Sessionize Event
A Taste of M365 Chicago! Sessionize Event
Microsoft 365 Virtual Marathon Sessionize Event
CollabDays Bremen 2021 Sessionize Event
Virtual Scottish Summit 2021 Sessionize Event
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