Speaker

Dylan Hayes

Dylan Hayes

Senior Microsoft 365 Consultant at Blacklight Software

Wakefield, United Kingdom

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I am a Microsoft 365 Consultant working at Blacklight Software, a Microsoft Gold Partner in Wakefield near Leeds. I'm also one of the organisers of the 'Microsoft 365 North' user group. I came to the information technology profession via an long and interesting road, which left me with an abiding passion for solving business problems with technology. Along the way I’ve worked with a lot of different technologies but right now I spend my days applying Microsoft platforms to customer challenges. When I’m not at work I enjoy being outdoors, and running long distances across wild places.

Awards

Area of Expertise

  • Information & Communications Technology

Topics

  • SharePoint
  • Microsoft 365
  • Modern Sharepoint Intranets
  • Copilot Studio
  • Copilot
  • Document Management
  • SharePoint Online
  • Microsoft Power Automate
  • Power Platform

Extending Copilots with Copilot Studio

Copilot is where many of Microsoft's new AI features are surfaced to users. Power Virtual Agents has evolved into Copilot Studio, which is now the focal point for extending the many flavours of Copilots. Learn how Copilot Studio allows low code developers to extend and customise different Copilots.

My Journey to the dark side

An introduction to how the sales process works, and how the sale influences the eventual project from the point of view of somebody who transitioned into sales just as Covid upended the way the world bought and sold.

Securing your plans for World Domination with Microsoft 365

In this talk we're going to look at information security in Microsoft 365 in a fictional case study for an evil supervillain. Just like everybody else, supervillains need to communicate with staff, collaborate with people outside their organisation, and stop information falling into the wrong hands. In this light hearted talk we're going to look at some of the things aspirant supervillains and IT pros can do ensure things go to plan

Speaking and Presenting virtually

We all need to communicate virtually these days. As a speaker I was unhappy with how this was compared to speaking in person so I set out to see if I could improve the process. In the session I'll show how a combination of hardware, software and techniques can vastly improve your virtual presentations. The session is not just aimed at speakers, but anybody who wants to be better at presenting online, which pretty much means all of us.

Lessons from my Journey to the Dark Side

Before a project happens, somebody has to pay for it. Usually that involves a sale. In this talk I'll be talking about what I have learned in my journey from software development to consultancy and sales. Firstly we'll consider and then demolish some stereotypes, talk about why sales is important to technical people and emphasise why everyone is a sales person sometimes before finally talking about dealing with customers.

Intended as fun and informative talk to help developers understand the customer facing side of business

Down the Memory Hole - Using Microsoft 365 labels to manage retention

As more and more information is digitised, managing information becomes ever more critical. Regulations like GDPR and the ever increasing demand for storage mean that 'file and forget' is no longer a viable strategy. Retention labels offer a low effort way to keep the information you need and get rid of what you don't. In the session we will introduce what retention labels are, and cover some common information management scenarios and how to use labels to help solve them.

Ran at 365 Saturday Warsaw and PPUG Leeds previously

Living on Video - The evolution of video in Microsoft 365

After a quick pass through the many lives of video in SharePoint, and the strengths and weaknesses of each iteration, we look at what the complicatedly titled 'Stream (on SharePoint)' can now and can't do for video in SharePoint, as we ask have Microsoft finally got video in SharePoint right?

Hopefully by October, the current wave of features being added to stream should give feature partity to the previous version of Stream classic

Hubsites revisted

SharePoint Hub Sites continue to evolve as a one of the foundational ways of organising intranets. In this session we take a look at what they are, how they can be used, and how to take advantage of the more advanced new features such as nested hub sites.

This is a modernised version of an old talk on hub sites updated to reflect what you can and can't do with the extra complexities of nested hub sites.

I for one would like to welcome our new robotic overlords - an introduction to Power Virtual Agents

Description of Power Virtual agents, in both the Teams and PVA flavours, and interactive demos of including the still in preview generative AI enhancements.

https://forms.office.com/pages/responsepage.aspx?id=YoNWoZ7kPkmZLVHvRzW-U8VRDlIndIhEnDzRbLHJN05UN0JHUU5PTDcyREVKUDIwNFg1QzdDTFVSUi4u

Introduction to Copilot Studio

Copilot studio is the extension and configuration tooling for all the different Copilots provided by Microsoft, and replaces Power Virtual Agents with a far wider suite of capability. Learn what is, how it works and see some examples in action.

Talking about Talking - Public speaking for Developers

Why spoken communication is important and how to be better at it, focusing on practical tips and experience I gained in course of learning how to deliver talks. Covers the why you should do it, how to prepare and structure your talk and how to deal with difficulties.

45 minutes including questions. A version of this was delivered to an internal audience as part of mentoring developers

Real-World Problem Solving with Azure Cognitive Services

This session is aimed at those who are interested in Azure Cognitive Services and how it can be applied to solve real-world problems. Firstly what we mean by Azure Cognitive Services? And how does it relate to the long and sometimes legendary history of what has previously been termed "Artificial Intelligence"? Once past the Terminator and HAL 9000 quotes, we can then examine how cognitive services actually work, and how it is composed of distinct services that each solve particular problems. Then we'll discuss the many services in more detail, and take the time to do some demos of interesting services such as image recognition, sentiment analysis and content moderation and see how they cope (or not) with real-world data.

Delivered many times before in a fun and very interactive way. Not a deeply technical session, but aimed at getting people interested how how cognitive services can be used

Speed through red tape with Office 365 Approvals

Most businesses would like to replace existing paper based processes, but are daunted by the cost and inflexibility of custom development or niche products, especially in today's fast changing world. Building solutions around Office 365 Approvals allows power users and developers to quickly respond to business needs. The talk will demonstrate using various Office 365 components such as Forms, Flow and SharePoint together to streamline and automate common administrative tasks within an organisation. Along the way we'll build solutions to cover typical tasks like onboarding new starters, getting users to read and accept company policy documents, and processing Health and Safety forms.

45 minutes, aimed at a developers and IT professionals with some experience of Office 365

Bringing DevOps to Office 365 deployments

SharePoint has traditionally been much harder to bring a disciplined approach to deployment than it should have, and being able to maintain test and production environments and easily deploy to them was never as easy as everyone else took for granted. At last the tooling seems to have caught up with the need, and Azure DevOps offers the promise of deploying our work in a few clicks. In this talk we'll talk about the lessons we learned in trying to deliver that promise.

45 minutes. Not yet delivered to public audience, but something that there's a great deal of interest in among developers and dev ops professionals trying to bring DevOps practices to Office 365, and I feel I have useful practical lessons to pass on.

SharePoint Hubsites Deep Dive

SharePoint hub site are a relatively new part of the SharePoint online modern user experience. Hub sites offer a way to tie together collections of related modern site with common branding and navigation. Traditionally producing richly featured SharePoint intranets has required either custom coding or the use of an intranet in a box product, but hub sites offer the tantalising prospect of this being ‘out of the box’. The session will explore what hub sites can do for you now, and are likely to do in the near future, and offer guidance based on developing real customer sites based on our own experiences during the first year of hub sites being in General Availability.

Power Apps and Flow

An introduction to the Power Platform and how it brings automation and low/no code solutions to Office 365

Kaizala - Living the mobile first dream

Most organisations have large numbers of staff and contractors who work outside the traditional office. Even in our mobile driven world, reaching these people is a struggle for traditional IT systems. Kaizala aims to change this by putting information into the phones of front line workers, in a way that is mobile first not a mobile enabled version of desktop software. This talk will introduce Kaizala, and it's place within Microsoft 365, how to customise the product and incorporate it into existing business processes. Along the way, we'll be doing plenty of demos which will inspire others to start using it to solve their own business problems.

This is a new talk I'm bring out in Jan 2020. Some of my other sessions use demos including Kaizala, and attendees have been very interested in this, which makes this deserves it's own talk. It will be a standard 50 minute session and aimed at IT pros who are interested in kaizala adoption

Approvals and more in Teams using Adaptive Cards

This session will show how to use Power Automate and Approvals in Teams to improve Office 365 approvals processes and extend messaging in Teams with adaptive cards to present information in a richer, more effective and eye-catching way. After all, if Teams is intended to replace email, aren't we missing something by sending approval emails?

30 minute session, using some ideas first used in the my Office 365 Approvals talk

Securing your plans for World Domination with Office 365

In this talk we're going to look at information security in Office 365 in a fictional case study for an evil supervillain. Just like everybody else, supervillains need to communicate with staff, collaborate with people outside their organisation, and stop information falling into the wrong hands.

45 minutes session length, intended as an introductory talk about how to better secure your organisation's information within Office 365. First session Jan 2020

CollabDays Bletchley 2024

Copilot is where many of Microsoft's new AI features are surfaced to users. Power Virtual Agents has evolved into Copilot Studio, which is now the focal point for extending the many flavours of Copilots. Learn how Copilot Studio allows low code developers to extend and customise different Copilots.

September 2024 Bletchley, United Kingdom

Black Country Power Platform User Group

Copilot Studio - Your flight deck for Copilot Customisation

Copilot Studio is the definitive place to customise and extend the many Microsoft Copilots, and it has a few tricks of it's own. This session covers what has changed since we last visited Power Virtual Agents 6 months ago, and looks forward at how Copilot Studio fits into the wider Copilot ecosystem. Naturally, there will be demos.

April 2024 Dudley, United Kingdom

Birmingham D365 & Power Platform User Group

Welcome to our new robotic overlords - An Introduction to CoPilot Studio
Dylan for one would like to welcome our new robotic overlords! An interactive session that provides an introduction to Microsoft Copilot Studio (formally Power Virtual Agents). We will explore what Copilot Studio is, compare it related to previous products like Power Virtual Agents, how it's licensed, and extension points into the rest of the Copilot ecosystem.

April 2024 Birmingham, United Kingdom

DDD North 2024 Sessionize Event

March 2024 Kingston upon Hull, United Kingdom

D365 & Power Platform UG North East December 2023 Meeting

A deep dive and interactive session that provides an introduction to Microsoft Copilot studio formally Power Virtual Agents.

December 2023 Newcastle upon Tyne, United Kingdom

Leeds Data Science Meetup

Microsoft has consolidated many of it's AI capabilities under the Copilot banner. We'll take a look at the newly announced Copilot Studio, which offers a low code approach to building extending the Copilot platform. We'll take a look at the capabilities, and integration points, and compare how it fits in with other similar AI tooling in the Microsoft stack.

November 2023 Leeds, United Kingdom

Black Country Power Platform User Group

In person event presenting an introduction to Power Virtual Agents featuring interactive demos

October 2023 Dudley, United Kingdom

COLLABDAYS BLETCHLEY PARK OCTOBER 2022

Hubsites revisted: SharePoint Hub Sites continue to evolve as a one of the foundational ways of organising intranets. In this session we take a look at what they are, how they can be used, and how to take advantage of the more advanced new features such as nested hub sites.

October 2022 Bletchley, United Kingdom

Living on Video - A guide to video in M 365

An introduction to the long history of video in SharePoint and M 365, before taking a look at what Stream on SharePoint can and can't currently do, and looking at the future.

July 2022

My Journey to the Dark Side

A sometimes irreverent look at how the sales process gives birth to projects, and how the author experience of this since joining the dark side of the force.

May 2022

South Coast Summit 2021 Sessionize Event

October 2021 Southampton, United Kingdom

Better video communication - Tips, technology and techniques

For the last year, we're all needed to communicate virtually. As a speaker I was unhappy with how this was compared to speaking in person so I set out to see if I could improve the process. In the session I'll show my continuing quest to use a combination of hardware, software and techniques to improve virtual presentations.

April 2021

Virtual Scottish Summit 2021 Sessionize Event

February 2021

DDD 2020 Sessionize Event

December 2020

Down the Memory Hole - Using Microsoft 365 labels to manage retention

As more and more information is digitised, managing information becomes ever more critical. Regulations like GDPR and the ever increasing demand for storage mean that 'file and forget' is no longer a viable strategy. Retention labels offer a low effort way to keep the information you need and get rid of what you don't. In the session we will introduce what retention labels are, and cover some common information management scenarios and how to use labels to help solve them.

October 2020

365 Saturday Warsaw 2020 VIRTUAL Sessionize Event

October 2020 Warsaw, Poland

Securing your plans for World Domination with Office 365 - West Midlands SharePoint user group

Virtual version of previous talk on M365 security including Sensitivity Labels using IRM on documents

July 2020

Azure Congitive Services (Online)

Azure Cognitive Services talk - online version

May 2020

The Lockdown Sessions : Session Two

Co-presented with Simon Hudson a session on MS Teams best practice

May 2020

The Lockdown Sessions : Microsoft Teams in a Remote World (part I)

Co-presented with Simon Hudson on using Microsoft Teams effectively, with tips, best practice and general discussion.

May 2020

Power Platform User Group London

Securing your plans for World Domination with Office 365

March 2020 London, United Kingdom

Power Platform User Group Leeds

Securing your plans for World Domination with Office 365

March 2020 Leeds, United Kingdom

DDD North 2020! Sessionize Event

February 2020

NEBytes

Kaizala - Living the mobile first dream

January 2020 Newcastle upon Tyne, United Kingdom

NEBytes

Securing your plans for World Domination with Office 365

January 2020 Newcastle upon Tyne, United Kingdom

Power Platform User Group Leeds

Approvals and more in Teams using Adaptive Cards

January 2020 Leeds, United Kingdom

Power Platform User Group West Midlands

Realworld Problem Solving with Azure Cognitive Services

December 2019 Stourbridge, United Kingdom

Leeds Data

Cognitive Services and AI Builder

November 2019 Leeds, United Kingdom

SPS Leicester

Approvals in Office 365

November 2019 Leicester, United Kingdom

Power Platform User Group Leeds

Realworld Problem Solving with Azure Cognitive Services

November 2019 Leeds, United Kingdom

NEBytes

Approvals in Office 365 + Custom Machine learning

October 2019 Newcastle upon Tyne, United Kingdom

Leeds Sharp

Real World Problem Solving with Azure Cognitive Services - extended edition

September 2019 Leeds, United Kingdom

Power Platform User Group East Midlands

Real World Problem Solving with Azure Cognitive Services

September 2019 Nottingham, United Kingdom

Power Platform User Group Leeds

Work Permits with Flow and Approvals

September 2019 Leeds, United Kingdom

D365UG/CRMUG Yorkshire

Real World Problem Solving with Azure Cognitive Services

May 2019 Leeds, United Kingdom

Microsoft Cloud User Group

Real World Problem Solving with Azure Cognitive Services

April 2019 Manchester, United Kingdom

DDD North

Office 365 as a Development Platform

March 2019 Kingston upon Hull, United Kingdom

NEBytes

SharePoint Hubsites deep dive

January 2019 Newcastle upon Tyne, United Kingdom

Power Platform User Group Leeds

SharePoint Hubsites deep dive

September 2018 Leeds, United Kingdom

Power Platform User Group Leeds

PowerApps and Flow

March 2018 Leeds, United Kingdom

Dylan Hayes

Senior Microsoft 365 Consultant at Blacklight Software

Wakefield, United Kingdom

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