This week the annual Dutch Experts Live meeting was there again in Den Bosch, I was there together with some of my colleagues from NEXXT, and this is my impression of the event 🙂

Early in the morning…

I set my alarm to 05:15, went to Zwolle to pick up my colleague Matthijs Hilboezen at 06:15, and we were there at the event at around 07:50. I Parked the car, luckily in the first parking part, and it was already pretty busy. I immediately met two colleagues from my previous job, Pieter Jorritsma and Eise de Vries, and that is what Experts Live is also all about… Meeting new and old colleagues and people from the Community! We checked in and attended the first session before the keynote, which started at 09:00.

Manage Modern Workplace Infrastructure as code in Azure DevOps

The session of Dennis Westerman was nicely paced and technical, Azure DevOps/Pipelines, Best practices (Like using multiple tenants instead of testing in your production environment 😉 ) and was done in half an hour with room for questions afterward. I got some well-needed coffee and went to the big room for the keynote from Dona Sarkar at 09:00.

Keynote

Before the keynote started, a hilarious short movie was shown with all kinds of puns about IT/Microsoft. It was about a hacker stealing the source code of Azure in the Mission Impossible theme 😀 You can watch it now here!

The keynote itself was impressive. Dona talked about AI and accessibility and gave a good insight into how she and her team work on improving things so that everyone can use IT to its best.

Damien Van Robaeys

Before his session started, I quickly approached Damien to shake hands. He’s the creator of one of my favorite and most used tools: Run-In-Sandbox. (I did a PR on that with some changes, and we have had contact since then, great guy!)

Inside Windows Autopilot

The next session was from Michael Niehaus and Rudy Ooms about the history of Windows Autopilot, its issues, and its development to where it’s now. It was nice to see their interaction, and I got a lot of technical insight during the session. I had a little chat with Rudy after the session ended and finally shook hands with Mister MDM 🙂

Manage your IT infrastructure like a rock star with PowerShell

This was a session with many people in a small room. I was a few minutes late and had almost no room to stand. It was loud from the outside, and I was happy that the doors were closed. Heiko Brenn had an excellent Rock Star themed session prepared but unfortunately had some issues that made the musical playlist part not work out that great 🙁 He showed us the difficulty of PowerShell for IT staff and the business and the ScriptRunner solution to mitigate that. Having an excellent webpage with Role-Based Access to delegate administrative tasks with auditing behind it works!

You could get the PowerShell cheat sheet in poster format after the session. You can also download it from here. And… Friday, the 30th of June, I will be in a Ask Me Anything session with Heiko Brenn and Markus Hipp 🙂

Lunch

I started smelling food during the ScriptRunner session and knew it was time for lunch 🙂 “Broodje kroket” or “Broodje kaassoufle” and other sandwiches. We took the time to see all the suppliers at Experts Live and met many colleagues and companies.

Automate your tenant with PowerShell and Azure Functions

By far the funniest session of them all, Emanuelle Bartolesi didn’t take himself too seriously during it 😀 He showed us a lot of things about how to use Azure Functions to your benefit and the limitations. Great session! Here’s a picture that I made during the session of our Italian Super Mario: (You can see that on his cap)

Never forget another Microsoft Intune administrative task by using low-code solutions

Excellent session from Peter van der Woude and Django Lohn with things we all encounter in Intune and how to mitigate those. I didn’t follow the whole session because I had something else to do next…

Podcast session with the WorkplaceDudes

Jeroen Burgerhout asked me if I wanted to be in their live podcast at Experts Live, and I said of course! He asked me to be there at around14:30, and my turn was up after their interview with the keynote speaker Dona Sarkar 🙂 After a short introduction, we discussed why and how to use PowerShell for Intune, future development, and their upcoming meetup. It was fantastic to be on the podcast, which was also recorded on video. I can’t wait to see and hear myself 😉 WorkplaceDudes, thanks for this opportunity!

Picture of the PodKas / Aquarium room with Dona in it just before I went in 🙂

Getting WaC: Workplace as Code with M365DSC

After a short coffee break, the last session started. Ralph Eckhard showed all the steps and best practices in using Microsoft 365 Desired State Configuration. This is something we are using at our company too, but Ralph is next level 😀 Great session, but one thing I will never forget. It started once, “Could the owner of the Opel Corsa with license plate number … Please remove the car”. Ok… And then again through the intercom… And again, and every time somewhat more irritated 😀 Everybody started making jokes about it, and if somebody stood up to leave the room, we all thought: That must be the guy from the Opel Corsa 😀

The end

And that was it, all sessions were done, and I think I speak for everyone there… I had a great day and will be there in 2024! I was part of the program panel this year, and hopefully, I will be in it again next year. Choosing the sessions was challenging because of the large number of quality sessions, and I hope I choose the right ones for you 😉