This weekend was South Coast Summit 2023 and the Microsoft Technology UK Community and Partner Awards 2023.

The event was another great conference thanks to the amazing organising committee. As my personal experience volunteering at and helping to organise events grows, I appreciate even more the time, blood, sweat and tears that goes into organising these events for the community. So a very big..

THANK YOU, Event Organisers!

Gala Dinner and Awards

Friday evening saw something a bit unusual, as we exchanged our usual geek apparel for glitz and glamour, with a few Bond/Austin Powers themed fancy dress items thrown in for good measure. It was time to gala! (It’s a new verb according to Dona Sakar. In the keynote, she said we should ‘gala’ more often and I whole heartedly agree!)

Maybe having won and award I am biased about it being a great evening. I’m not sure I can adequately express how much winning an award at the UK Community Awards means to me. As someone who doesn’t have colleagues in the traditional sense, even being nominated for an award was a huge honour. I was nominated in several categories which meant that more than person in the community felt my contributions had been worthy of note.

Then, after the judges reviewed the nominations and comments, I was a finalist in TWO categories, which just blew me away. It was fantastic to see my nominees in those two categories alongside me as finalists too.

So awards night arrived, and whilst everyone hopes they will win, I thought the winners in the two categories I was in would be Lewis & Kevin.

Best blogger came first and was awarded to …. Lewis! If you haven’t read Lewis’s blog check it out. https://lowcodelewis.com/. I’d also highly recommend Daniel Bramley’s blog and have been actively using his articles in learning to convert Azure AD PowerShell commands to Graph SDK. https://ourcloudnetwork.com/ Both would have been worthy winners of the award and it is an honour to be listed alongside them.

Then it was immediately on to Modern Work Evangelist. Having worked with both Kevin & Chris over the past few years, they are both highly knowledgeable and passionate advocates for Microsoft 365 and associated technologies. I was sat next to Kevin on the Office 365 Distilled Podcast table and was very ready to cheer for him, but Will Rowe, presenting the awards, said the winner was the “effervescent Sara Fennah”! I had been told there were no speeches and it’s a good job, as I don’t think my “Wow” would have cut it! But Wow, just Wow! THANK YOU!!! And yes, still fizzing a few days later.

I have been honestly moved by the lovely comments people made during the event and have reached out to me with across messaging and social media. The award is absolutely fantastic but please know your comments have made it so very special for me.

The excitement on our table didn’t stop there as the winner of the Communities, Community Hero Award Laura Graham-Brown, as also on our table. Congratulations to all winners, finalists and nominees, super stars every single one!

Event Pre- Day

On the Friday I led a New Speakers Workshop with Zoe Wilson and Paddy Byrne. This workshop is a repeat of the one Zoe & I ran in May with Luke Evans & Jose Pinos. It was great to have a full house of 20 attendees which was the limit we has for the workshop. Hopefully everyone is now in the Teams team and ready to rock their conference submissions. Do follow us on socials for details of the next one. We will be back! @NewTCSpeakers or https://www.linkedin.com/company/community-speaker.

The Actual Conference

As well as the keynote, expertly delivered by Dona Sakar and Keith Whatling, I actually got to go to sessions. Not only my own, but really enjoyed seeing Nikki Chapple, Rex De Koning, Onyinye Madubuko, Ragnar Heil, Kevin & Zoe speak as well as joining the Ask the Teams MVP AMA session with Tom Arbuthnot, Nikki Chapple, Ben Lee and Amanda Sterner. All great sessions!

Pub Quiz

And to finish the quiz! The … & Chill team has a reputation to defend. Having started out as Haggis & Chill at Scottish Summit 2021 where we won for the first time, followed with a superb defence and the start of the themed outfits as Bratwurst & Chill at South Coast Summit 2022, we were back in full fancy dress as Copilot & Chill to defend our honour!

Thankfully, we not only won but were able to collect the 2022 trophy too, meaning with team captain Zoe and I travelling home together we were a 3 trophy car!