Neues aus der Community – Thrive Conference 2022

von Till Gorr, 31.05.2022

To Slovenia!

Last week I had the great opportunity to visit Thrive conference from the 24th to 25th May in Slovenia.

After a 5-hour trip from our company headquarters in Schwabach we arrived at the ECO Hotel Bohinjska Bistrica in Slovenia the day before the event started. On the way we enjoyed the beautiful Slovenian landscape such as lake Bled which is an iconic place known all over the world.

The event itself started the next morning with the Keynote and a welcoming introduction by Branka Slinkar and her event organizers team. The Keynote was presented virtually by Jeff Teper and was focused all about upcoming features and products such as Microsoft Loop and as always you can expect much for the next months to come. My main takeaway of the keynote was the discussion between the speakers and what we should take with us from the keynote. Basically, it’s simple but you must remind yourself often in these everchanging days and that is to not focus on all the existing and upcoming features and products at once, since those are just far too many. Instead, we should focus on our pain points or areas of biggest interest for our daily work to improve, and which feature helps us best in achieving to grow.

During the 2 days you could choose from over 50+ sessions held by known Experts and MVPs covering the full bandwidth of the Microsoft landscape: From Exchange, Intune Autopilot to Conditional Access and Cloud Apps Security to Power Bi and DevOps.

For me, this setup was just perfect! This way I could join sessions other than related only to Exchange that helped me broaden my horizon and inspiring me to have a look into other technical solutions and to test around in personal projects. One of my highlights were the sessions held by Paula Januszkiewicz and Mike Jankowski-Lorek from CQURE covering security topics such as how wrong configured certificate templates can help to infiltrate companies and on the other hand how you can look for signs that indicate you have been hacked already.

In general, all the sessions were top notch and the big advantage of Thrive is that you can directly ask your questions to the speakers during the session or while socialising in the evening. Speaking about the non-technical side of the event, the organization was perfect, the location well-chosen and you had the opportunity to taste local food such as Bled cream cake and local wine and beer. Looking around in the evening you could experience a happy and lively community, and everyone took funny pictures in front of the photo booth that was sponsored by Intellity.

Overall, Thrive conference was definitely worth the trip and I can recommend the conference to everybody enjoying technical experts sessions and networking with the Microsoft community. Again, big thanks to the team that put so much effort in managing and planning Thrive. I am looking forward to the next Thrive conference in Slovenia.