That’s a wrap for the 2025 New Zealand Digital Workplace Conference! Once again, this was a great event, filled with opportunities to learn from expert speakers, discuss the challenges of working in the modern world (not just digitally), connect with others and to stimulate our minds!

If there is one word that sums up this conference for me, it is “connection”. Whether it was a quick hello to a fellow presenter, a chat with someone I hadn’t met before or time spent getting to know people a little more, the connection had meaning.

As a presenter, it is hard to know what will resonate with your audience. I like to do my demo’s live and that leaves a little bit of time for ‘filler content’ while the cogs are turning in some distant data centre. I loved that several people that I didn’t know, took the time to tell me, that my jokes were pretty good! I suspect it is because there is an ounce of truth in them, especially when it comes to getting approval to sign up for a pay-as-you-go service!

There were many highlights from the talks I attended. I double highlighted and used a bold font on the following items in my OneNote.

• Meet people where they are.
• Lift your horizon!
• What is the goal of the goal?
• Would you go onto a building site without training?
• The Death Star may have survived if they had used Purview!
• Finish that thought!

As technology people, we need to get over the idea that we know it all and be open to learning something new. We also need to stop thinking of others as “non-techie” (or whatever term you use), because technology is part of everyone’s life. We also need to build better technology habits, work smarter, have time away from devices, and be present with the people around us.

The most important theme from the conference, was the need to put people at the centre of what we do. Change Management and skills development shouldn’t be an item deleted from the first draft of your plan. It should be the first item (highlighted and in a bold font). Once you have that bit sorted out, then start thinking about what it is you want people to feel when they open their browsers and dive into your Digital Workplace.

I’m guessing you thought my conference summary would be SharePoint this, Power Platform that and of course lots of Copilot related stuff. The conference had all of that covered in technical sessions, non-technical sessions, case studies and the keynote. These are the tools of our trade; the question is why didn’t anyone bother to train us and give us the plans before they sent us to the work site?

Thank you to Debbie Ireland and the Digital Workplace Results team for creating this event, inspiring us and creating a space where we can all grow together. Thanks to all the fantastic presenters, some of whom travelled from Australia, USA and Canada to share their thoughts and expertise. Finally, a big thank you to sponsors who support this event!

P.S. Here’s a little summary of my session on SharePoint Premium

This year I demonstrated some of the AI driven content automation capabilities of SharePoint Premium. 75% of my session was a live demo (I’m old school). My demo included:
✅extracting metadata from invoices including a few shortcomings
✅building a model to extract contract details (live)
✅Configuring and running a sensitive data detector to find documents with bank account details
✅OCR’ing images to make them searchable
✅Using the new eSignature feature to sign a document
✅Brief overview of Archiving features
✅How to set SharePoint Premium up
✅Did I mention it is pay-as-you-go and not per user?

Someone asked me after my talk if they could use this to auto extract metadata from generated documents (using the same format), instead of doing this manually when they are uploaded to SharePoint. YES YOU CAN!