Check Out MS Ignite 2019
As I write this post, the Microsoft Ignite conference has been underway for almost a full day. This year, it runs from Sunday, November 3 through Friday, November 8. This annual gathering occurs each fall in Orlando, FL (and is followed up with a “Tour” version in big cities around the globe). Why am I telling you this? Because Ignite makes many of its sessions available online over the Internet, as well as live to paying attendees, and is very much worth checking into. If you visit the Session Catalog — please note that you must use a Microsoft Tech Community account to sign up remotely for any Ignite sessions — you can see what’s available, and add items of interest to your virtual schedule. Once on your schedule, you can then tune into, watch, and listen any sessions you like, as long as they’re made remotely available. To see what’s live at any given moment, visit the home page and click on any item of interest in the Live Now blog (shown below).
Whatever’s running when you check the “Live Now” block is immediately accessible from this page with a single mouse click.
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Getting to On-Demand Video for Previous Session Recordings
If you click the channels button at the top of the preceding window, you get a series of tabs in that block. The leftmost tab is labeled “On Demand,” and it shows the list of pre-recorded sessions that you can view. On Day 2 of the conference that’s not much just yet, but this collection will grow. Right now, however, only two on-demand recordings are up: (1) The Vision Keynote and (2) A Live Pre-Show Kick Off. Over time, the collection of items will get pretty large and you’ll have more to choose from. At present, your best strategy should be to work out your schedule and tune into live sessions as they start streaming. According to the Session Scheduler there is a total of 1576 sessions scheduled over the entire duration of the conference, so there will be a LOT to choose from.
Working with the Session Scheduler
You can filter sessions by start time, session type, learning path, level, product, format, and topic. The topic categories inlcude productivity, infrastructure, security, development, data, fundamentals, intelligence, management and deployment. Here’s a snippet of what’s included under a Win10.Guru interest (or obsession) — namely, deployment, further refined by filtering on the word “Windows.”
Selecting the Deployment topic and searching for “Windows” turns up 14 interesting results. 6 are shown here.
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In short, there’s a lot of interesting stuff going on at Ignite. You can tune in remotely for free. But you won’t know what you’re missing unless you go and check. So please: do just that. Enjoy!
Author: Ed Tittel
Ed Tittel is a 30-plus-year computer industry veteran. He’s a Princeton and multiple University of Texas graduate who’s worked in IT since 1981 when he started his first programming job. Over the past three decades he’s also worked as a manager, technical evangelist, consultant, trainer, and an expert witness. See his professional bio for all the details.