Automating Deployment and LifeCycle Management of Power Platform Solutions The Power Platform provides a suite of low-code/no-code tools for building custom solutions that help organizations automate their business processes. However, Power Platform was not really built with deployment and lifecycle management in mind, and deploying Power Platform solutions from development to test and production environments can be a nerves-consuming and time-consuming process. That's where different other platforms come into the play, such as Azure DevOps. With Azure DevOps, we can automate the deployment of Power Platform solutions and individual artifacts, such as Apps, Flows and Dataverse tables. In this session, Adis will briefly introduce you to the key features of Azure DevOps, such as builds, releases, and pipelines, but we will not go deeply into Azure DevOps concepts and features; instead: we will focus on their practical use for Power Platform deployments. We will also explore how to manage environment variables and configuration data, and how to handle deployment errors and rollbacks. By the end of this session, you will have a comprehensive understanding of how to use Azure DevOps to automate the deployment of Power Platform solutions. Join us to learn how to save time, reduce errors, and increase the reliability of your deployment processes.

When we built run.events, we had a question about how to build and optimize all approval and back-office processes, in a simple yet efficient way, which would be easy for our back-office and support staff to use, and which wouldn’t hamper their productivity. These processes included approving new organizers and events, as well as automating back-office processes such as triggering support processes or newsletter subscriptions. We quickly decided to use Azure Logic Apps for that. This session will introduce you to the capabilities of Azure Logic Apps and how we used it for automating all approval and back-office processes. We will dive into the key features of Azure Logic Apps, including connectors, triggers, and actions, and how they can be used to automate a wide range of processes. We will also discuss the challenges that we faced, such as listening to database triggers and dealing with multiple development/staging/production environments. Additionally, we will cover how we used Azure Logic Apps to create workflows that integrate with third-party products we use for sales (HubSpot), marketing (HubSpot and Mailjet), and support (Front). In the end, we achieved what we wanted: our back-office and support staff mainly use email for the vast majority of back-office processes. And it is Azure Logic Apps that does the magic in the background of orchestrating it all. This session will demonstrate how we achieved this, and we will share real-life experiences and challenges we encountered while implementing it all.

Join us for a candid look behind the scenes at run.events, the platform that has become essential for many event organizers worldwide who want to manage their events efficiently. Taking the road less traveled, without relying on outside funding and with a dedicated, compact team, was what formed run.events into its current state. Our reliance on the robust Microsoft Azure public cloud platform (we'll share why we eliminated the last two AWS services from our architecture only a few weeks ago), a focus on user experience, and the integration of automation workflows have been the foundation of what run.events is today, enabling us to serve a global audience. In this session, we'll share the architectural, developmental, technological, and emotional challenges encountered while building the platform. We'll discuss the good and not-so-good decisions. We will discuss how our first European Collaboration Summit taught us that standard Azure load testing isn't always sufficient, leading us to scale our Azure SQL Server to the max to get through the event (which we did!). We'll also talk about why you should be in Microsoft for Startups program during the initial development and early go-to-market stages of building a SaaS product, and how being in that program has saved our money and our skin. :) To wrap up, we'll provide some insights into where we are now, the challenges we're currently facing and how we're addressing them, our ideas for the future, and how Microsoft taught us that a bug in production is not the end of the world. :)

We all know the drill: event organizers agree with the venues on the expo plan, then they send it to potential sponsors and exhibitors who decide if they are going to participate and choose their spots based on that plan. They purchase booth furniture and equipment from the booth builder, and then at the event, there is a surprise moment to see if everything looks the way it is supposed to and if the chosen spot was really good. But what if sponsors and exhibitors could walk through and around their booth months before the event happens? What if they could configure their booth based on the impressions from that walk-through and immediately place their order with the booth builder? What if event organizers could then walk through the expo where all booth configurations would be immediately applied, all of this months before the event? This session will talk about how event organizers can effectively use Metaverse to automate and visualize the process of booth selection, planning, and ordering, as a collaborative process between organizers, exhibitors, and booth builders. You will see how the legendary Rheingoldhalle in Mainz, Germany, has been recreated in the Metaverse to help organizers plan the event expo, and sponsors and exhibitors to configure, visualize, and order their booths. This session whil shed light on how Metaverse can *really* be used to the benefits of the event organizers, how this particular use case has been implemented, and what the experience was like for both the event organizers and the sponsors and exhibitors.

This session explores the evolution of session, speaker, and agenda management from a cumbersome process whoch involves a mix of tools like custom forms for content submissions, Excel sheets for selection, and manual HTML updates for website integration into fully automated content, agenda and speaker management worfkflow for modern-day events. We will talk about flexible speaker and content selection process, which can range from Calls for Content to direct speaker invitations; Content Teams formation and management, drag-and-drop agenda building, dynamic integration with the event website and mobile apps, advanced communication capabilities, session feedback management, and resource sharing for speakers. Concluding with the significant benefits realized through this transition, the session emphasizes how an integrated approach to managing content, speakers, and agendas not only saves time but also enhances the overall experience for attendees and speakers, showcasing the importance of a holistic approach in event management.