Overview
The European Power Platform Conference was held in Dublin, Ireland from June 20-23, 2023. The conference brought together the Microsoft Power Platform Communities for 3 days of in-person learning, connections, and inspiration. The conference provided a host of professional development opportunities, which included 3 inspirational keynotes, 6 expert full day tutorials and 90+ specialist sessions, delivered by global Power Platform experts and Microsoft Corporate and community leaders. The conference covered all aspects of the Power Platform including Power Apps, Power BI, Power Automate, Power Virtual Agents, Power Pages and Dynamics 365. The conference was attended by 1200 professional peers who gained expert insight and heard the latest innovations across the platform. The conference was given to you by the team behind the highly popular European SharePoint, Office 365 & Azure Conference (ESPC)
Pre-day tutorials
The pre-day tutorials provided a full day of training covering various topics. I delivered a workshop with MVP Amhad Najjar in a combination of general Power Platform development and a session focused on Power Pages development techniques. Unfortunately, due to time constraints we were unable to facilitate hands-on labs, but I focused heavily on demonstrating actual working code.
Day 1
The main conference opened with traditional Irish drumming and dancing. Charles Lamanna talked about Power Platform in the age of AI – Copilot and more. With additional content and demos from Kendra Springer and April Dunham.
For the breakout sessions I attended a session on copilots and fusion teams delivered by Dona Sarkar. Dona is an incredible storyteller and had great insight on working with AI and addressing some of the anxieties and issues people may have.
I presented a session called “Crash Course on Power Pages” which is an updated session that I presented last year and that I have presented dozens of times. It was an amazing experience to present on the main auditorium stage.
One of my MVP friends, Oliver Rodriques was supposed to present a session on Power Pages in the real world but unfortunately had a family situation. My friend (and podcast co-host) Ulrikke Akerbæk stepped in and presented Oliver’s material. Priya Vaidyanathan (Power Pages principal PM manager), MVP Victor Dantes, and myself were on hand to answer questions and also offer some examples. This showed the true spirit of community to help Oliver out.
During the afternoon I spend some time at the Microsoft booth. Overall it was fairly quiet but was able to answer a few questions.
Day 2
The second day keynote was delivered by Pelligrino Riccardi who is a well known motivational speaker and he presented How to Create LA DOLCE VITA in a Work Environment of Change and Uncertainty. It was an amazing session where one minute you were laughing, the next minute you would be crying and back to laughing again.
Following the keynote, I attended the following sessions:
- Become the Best Power Platform Admin (Michael Roth MVP). Michael has a lot of great tips and examples for administration of the Power Platform.
- Power Automate Advanced Patterns and Best Practices with Doctor Flow (Serge Luca MVP) Serge is one of the foremost community experts in Power Automate. I believe I have a good grasp on building flows, but Serge takes it to the next level.
- PCF Development: 10 Pro Tips I wish I knew from the start (Scott Durow MVP). If you haven’t seen any of Scott’s videos on YouTube, you are missing out. Scott has built some amazing Power Apps including 3D games! In this session, Scott goes over a lot of good tips for building PCF controls, something that I personally want to learn more about so this was a great start.
- Automated End-to-End Testing of Model-Driven Power Apps using Playwright (Ryan Spain). This was a great introduction to using the Playwright tool for testing, but I feel it could be used for a lot of other automation tasks.
- Power up your cloud flows with APIs (Ahmad Najjar MVP) – This session covered on ways to further extend Power Automate using APIs.
- As part of the conference, my friend and MVP mentee, Ulrikke Akerbæk and I recorded daily summaries for our podcast “The Power Platform BOOST!” podcast. With Ulrikke living in Norway and me in Canada, we normally record our podcast episodes remotely, but this gave us the opportunity to record “in person”. Check out our summaries of EPPC here:
Summary
The European Power Platform Conference was an amazing experience and one of the best conferences in our community. The organization, attention to detail and professionalism shined. It was announced that next year’s conference will be held in Brussels, Belgium.
Nick Doelman is a Senior Content Developer at Microsoft, Power Platform trainer and coach, presenter, podcaster, Microsoft Certified Trainer, competitive Powerlifter, and former Microsoft MVP. Follow Nick on twitter, LinkedIN, or Instagram.
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