A Chance to Meet Your Favorite Microsoft Experts

The Experts Conference (TEC) 2024 is just around the corner, and as a proud sponsor, the Practical 365 crew will be there in full force, Oct. 1-2. Not only will we be at the booth, but some of our top writers will be hosting sessions at the event. As you may have seen from our ads (like the one below this paragraph), Practical 365 is offering a BOGO deal on TEC pre-con workshops/ general admission. Essentially, for the price of one standard admission ticket, you also get to check out our exclusive pre-con workshops on Monday, Sept. 30.

PowerShell Scripting: Managing Users, Groups and Mailboxes in M365

Reflecting on the resounding success and positive feedback from the PowerShell script-off at TEC 2023, we are thrilled to announce that Practical 365’s very own, Michel De Rooij and Jaap Wesselius are hosting a PowerShell workshop at TEC 2024.

In the everyday practice of managing Office 365, administrators still fall back to admin portals to accomplish tasks. This can be fine for most one-off tasks. But sometimes, administrators are presumed to be developers, requiring them to get scripting for bulk operations or automation. Unfortunately, we know this is not always the case. The goal of this workshop is to change that rhetoric and help IT professionals make a breakthrough in PowerShell and start using scripting to manage entities in Microsoft 365 services.

In addition to concepts that lay a common foundation during the workshop, the workshop will focus on the core elements of managing Microsoft 365. This comes down to managing Users and Groups in all their forms and Mailboxes. We will demonstrate practical examples and scenarios that you can easily apply to your own cloud-only tenant with minimal tailoring. The goal is to help administrators use more PowerShell for daily administrative tasks. Plus, Michel and Jaap are giving away a free copy of their PowerShell ebook to all attendees.

Mastering Conditional Access: Unleashing Advanced Capabilities for Secure Cloud Access

If you are already proficient in PowerShell, then maybe a workshop centered around Mastering Conditional Access might be more up your alley.

This workshop, hosted by Microsoft MVP, Louis Mastelinck, is designed to provide you with the essential knowledge and skills to get started with conditional access. As Entra ID evolves and its capabilities expand, it might feel overwhelming, as if you might miss the train. Even if you are already familiar with the basics, fear not; this session will also introduce you to some of the more advanced features of conditional access.

Exclusively during this workshop, we welcome special guest Etan Basseri, Senior Product Manager at Microsoft, who will ensure you have the necessary logging enabled, understand the different authentication methods, and explain why conditional access is replacing the old-school “per-user MFA” portal. Etan will discuss best practices and much more, including how CA policy logic is processed and how it affects our design decisions.

Once we have covered the basics, it will be time to put your newly acquired knowledge and skills into practice. The workshop includes hands-on exercises to perform in your own temporary tenant. You will discover and gain experience with new features in conditional access, such as passkeys, forced re-authentication, authentication context, session policies, and more.

Make sure to bring your laptop and an up-to-date phone with the authenticator app installed. If you have a FIDO2 key lying around in your desk drawer, bring it along because you will make good use of it during the workshop. A couple of weeks before the start of the workshop, attendees will receive an instruction video on how to set up their own test tenant.

Security is Bigger in Texas

Everything is bigger in Texas, and that legend reigns true for TEC 2024. Join us in Dallas, Texas, Oct. 1-2, and make sure you take advantage of Practical 365’s promotional offer to join one of these pre-con workshops for free (with the purchase of a General Admission ticket).

About the Author

Jacob Stokes

Jacob Stokes is a Content Marketing Specialist at Quest Software and Managerial Editor of Practical 365. He helps to facilitate and plan guest appearances on the Practical 365 Podcast, interacts with followers of the blog via social media, recruits new talent at Microsoft events, and ensures blog scheduling runs smoothly.

Leave a Reply