Chris O'Brien
Products and Services Director, Advania UK
London, United Kingdom
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Chris is the Products and Services Director at Advania UK, leading a team of Product Directors in key service areas of Modern Work, Azure, Cyber Security and Compliance, Cloud Voice, and Fresh, our award-winning digital workplace product built on Microsoft 365. The team focuses on innovation, developing new offerings to ensure Advania remain at the cutting edge across Microsoft 365, Azure and Dynamics 365.
Chris has received the Microsoft MVP award for 17 consecutive years. He publishes a highly-regarded technical blog at www.sharepointnutsandbolts.com, and regularly speaks at Microsoft and industry events.
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Supercharge knowledge acquisition with Viva Topics
Finding information and expertise is far too time-consuming in the vast majority of organisations. Poor search tools, the sprawl of repositories and sites, unceasing content growth and difficulties recognising authoritative content all conspire against the information worker. No wonder McKinsey and IDC state that the average knowledge worker spends 20-30% of their time just looking for things.
Viva Topics is Microsoft's AI-powered answer to this challenge. Could it be a platform for you to implement? In this session we'll walk through how to plan for Viva Topics, how to enable it, topic identification and curation, and discuss launch strategies. We'll demo an existing environment so you can see the technology in action.
From there we'll wrap up with a discussion on licensing and Microsoft's future roadmap.
Training SharePoint Syntex AI to read documents like a human
From the very beginnings of parchment and papyrus, documents have been a great invention - but they have their constraints and now we're drowning in them. Critical data and knowledge gets buried within them, leading to a series of challenges that mean very few organisations truly get value from the content they create.
SharePoint Syntex allows you to tap into AI not only to recognise different types of document in Microsoft 365, but also to extract critical information from them. No more opening 20 documents to find the one you're looking for! But implementation isn't always simple, and there's a lot to learn about how to plan for Syntex, how to train the system to understand your document formats, the capabilities of Classifiers and Extractors, and how to implement Syntex for best effect. We'll walk through these details, explaining the difference between the two Syntex models of document understanding and form understanding along the way.
We'll complete the session with a discussion on licensing and roadmap, so you leave armed with everything you need to get started with SharePoint Syntex.
Using Azure Dev Ops Boards to manage dev or support team work
In many organisations, the workload of a technical team is still managed in SharePoint lists, Excel, Planner or Microsoft Project. However, Azure Dev Ops Boards offer a much better, more visual way for many groups – and it isn’t just for highly-technical dev teams on agile projects. Various types of backlogs and boards exist – these include a Kanban board to suit a team working on a regular pipeline of requests (e.g. a support or help desk team) and a scrum board to support agile development projects (e.g. using sprints and a sprint planning process). There’s something in there for most types of teams and work.
This session will start at the beginning by showing the different types of boards and backlog, and move on to customising things to really suit how your team works. Over the course of several demos we’ll cover various hints and tips, and also consider how to take things to the next level with automated builds (with Dev Ops Pipelines) that tie into work item tracking.
Infuse AI into your Microsoft 365 apps - 3 approaches compared
Bringing AI into your applications has never been easier, and huge benefits can be unlocked when some level of intelligent processing of your data happens. From auto-tagging of incident report images uploaded from a Power App, to Power Automate Flows that detect anomalies in documents, to apps which detect if a retail shelf is low on stock - so many improvements to your SharePoint-based processes are now within easy reach.
In this session we'll cover several scenario demos showing how you can instantly get better insights from your data and better outcomes with little effort - and no developers required! This session is aimed at anyone building solutions on the Power Platform.
Understanding the AI toolbox for Microsoft 365 - Syntex, AI Builder, Azure OpenAI and more
AI in Microsoft 365 isn't just about Copilot - there's an entire AI toolbox to choose from powering new types of solutions which simply weren't possible a couple of years ago. The challenge is that staying up-to-date with the options and capabilities is more challenging than ever, and understanding the respective suitability for different business problems can be even more difficult.
Your solution might benefit from classic AI powers such as content classification, sentiment detection or image recognition, and in these cases you'll have more than one option to choose from. When automating document processes however, tools like Microsoft Syntex are specifically designed for this case so you'll have less implementation work to do. If you need chat or generative AI functions, ChatGPT and the GPT models come immediately to mind but aren't always a perfect fit.
Overall, choosing the best option needs an understanding of capabilities, how your data and content can be used, licensing models, possible costs, and sometimes the process for AI model tuning. This session will discuss use cases and provide demos of each tool in the toolbox, allowing you to build an understanding of what to use when and how to start with the best fit option. We'll demystify today's AI choices for Microsoft 365 solutions and have a great discussion based on experiences from the field.
Microsoft 365 Copilot - experiences from the field
For those using it, Microsoft 365 Copilot is revolutionising the way we work - how we create documents, how we find answers, and how we execute so many of the minor tasks related to consuming and creating content. With its ability to understand your email, Teams chats, calendar, documents and more, Copilot combines ChatGPT-style generative AI capabilities with the most relevant data at work. This conference session aims to explore use cases, specific benefits, and explain how to go about proving the business case for Copilot licensing. Attendees will hear real-life experiences from the field and lessons learnt from adopting the technology.
We'll demo Microsoft 365 Copilot in a production tenant, showing its ability to infer conclusions from meetings, the latest status on projects and client situations, and summarise lengthy e-mail threads and Teams chats. We'll show how Copilot streamlines the creation of presentations, Word documents, and even summary notes and e-mails. Attendees will also learn about the technical aspects of implementing Copilot, including integration with existing systems and data privacy concerns.
By the end of the session, attendees will be equipped with the knowledge and tools necessary to adopt Microsoft 365 Copilot and take their businesses to the next level.
Bring your enterprise data to ChatGPT with Azure Cognitive Search and OpenAI
ChatGPT and Microsoft 365 Copilot have revolutionised how we search for answers and create content, but in many cases we need to supplement their information sources. Perhaps it's client data from your CRM platform, company information found on your public website, product details in a SQL database, or HR data from a custom platform - overall, the ability to combine your enterprise data with GPT capabilities unlocks the door to amazing solutions. In this session we'll look at how to achieve this through the combination of Azure Cognitive Search and Azure OpenAI.
We'll start with getting the foundations up and running in Azure, and then move to indexing your specific content. Exposing information to ChatGPT has some differences to building a traditional search solution, so we'll cover approaches you might need to prepare your data. The front end of your bot can be implemented in different ways, from Power Virtual Agents to custom development so we'll look at options there.
Through several demos, this session will equip you with the knowledge to create an end-to-end solution which combines powerful chat and content generation capabilities with your specific data. Hopefully you'll be inspired by the possibilities this approach provides!
Microsoft Syntex deep-dive - from AI document understanding to content governance
As the AI era has unfolded, so have Microsoft AI investments such as Syntex. Even as ChatGPT has been woven into technologies like Microsoft 365 Copilot, Syntex provides unique superpowers when it comes to documents and forms a critical part of the AI and automation toolbox. Documents sit at the heart of many organisational processes - the scenarios are endless when you think about CVs, contracts, product specifications, service descriptions, project reports, insurance policies, risk assessments, safety reports and others, and that's before we get to more general documents like purchase orders and invoices. As a 'Preferred' member of Microsoft's Content AI programme from day one, we've worked with Syntex from the beginning and have lots of stories to share about how AI document understanding or automated document creation have transformed real-world processes in organisations we've worked with.
This session will demo all the major areas of Syntex, starting with how to train AI to understand specific documents you have and showing real examples of what this can unlock. Once your Microsoft 365 tenant can recognise, understand, and extract key elements from distinct document types you have, magic things can happen. We'll then consider automating the creation of new documents from your data through Syntex Content Assembly, providing the foundations to move away from "copy/paste from the previous one" forever. Syntex can also help you reduce risk by getting a grip of sensitive documents in your environment by automating protection and governance controls - most organisations still do a terrible job of this, so we'll explore how Syntex helps.
Finally, we'll explore Syntex Advanced Management capabilities which help you manage your content through it's lifecycle - including data access insights, eSignatures, backup/restore, archiving and access policies. Understanding these tools will help you find where your sensitive data is and where your organisation's data is overshared.
Think of this as an "all-up Syntex from the field" session, aimed at anyone building solutions or providing business tools based on Microsoft 365 pillars of SharePoint, Teams and the Power Platform. You'll learn what Syntex can do, how to start a pilot, or how to take your Syntex knowledge and use to the next level.
Integrate ChatGPT into SPFx and Power Platform solutions with OpenAI and Azure OpenAI
Bringing the powers of ChatGPT to your solution opens many doors, but there are many routes and the options can be confusing. Should you go direct to OpenAI or use Azure OpenAI? What does it look like to integrate from the Power Platform compared to SPFx? This session is aimed at anyone building solutions in Microsoft 365 and aims to demystify the options for pro developers and app makers alike. Chris and Anoop will share their stories of approaching ChatGPT and Open AI capabilities from different angles - Chris with a Power Platform focus and using Azure OpenAI, and Anoop with a SPFx focus and integrating with OpenAI's own hosted service. The combination will allow you to build a view of the various ChatGPT integration flavours and implementation approaches, giving you the knowledge to implement ChatGPT in a way which fits the solution you're building and how the organisation needs to work with AI.
We'll base our exploration in different use cases supported by several demos. We'll start with summarisation and translation of SharePoint pages via the Microsoft Graph. Expanding on the power of this recipe, you'll also learn how to extend this approach to other scenarios such as auto-generation of possible titles and relevant thumbnails based on keywords from the page. As a bonus, attendees will receive resources including code that can be used by developers. We'll also explore how to implement content classification and content generation tools through Power Automate, allowing processes to be streamlined and workflows simplified.
This is a great opportunity to see SharePoint, Teams, and Power Platform integration approaches for ChatGPT compared and contrasted in one session. Since we'll also cover the choice between OpenAI and Azure OpenAI, attendees will leave with a solid understanding of the options and approaches to suit a wide variety of needs. If nothing else, this session will have two MVPs for the price of one and the potential for some very bad jokes.
Chris O'Brien
Products and Services Director, Advania UK
London, United Kingdom
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