There's a moment at every event when it stops feeling like work. At M365 Community Days NYC this year, it came early.
On July 31st, more than 240 people checked in at Microsoft's office at 11 Times Square for a full day of Microsoft 365 (M365), Copilot, and AI. More than forty sessions, two panels, and rooms that were full from the first session at 9:30 right through Heather Cook's closing keynote.
Learning From the Person Next to You
You can watch a recorded session on your own. What you can't do is turn to the person next to you and ask how they got the same thing past their own security team. That's what these days are for.
Kishore Bitra from the City of Baltimore showed a resident services agent built in Copilot Studio, and the questions kept coming long after the session ended. One attendee called the Women in Tech panel the highlight of the day. Author Jared Matfess signed books.
Heather Cook closed it out with the keynote, and got a room full of IT people to quietly write postcards to their future selves.
The team from RealActivity called it "a volunteer-led event tighter than most paid conferences." I'll take that.
The Game That Gets People Talking
If you were there, you played GooseChase. It's a scavenger hunt that runs on your phone all day, and the missions are simple and a little silly: take a photo with a group of people drinking coffee, find someone wearing the same color shirt as you, grab a picture with a speaker. Every one of them means walking up to someone you don't know.
That's the whole point. It gives people a reason to say hello, and it's a fan favorite every year.
Volunteer Run, Start to Finish
Nobody gets paid to run M365 NYC, and the prep starts long before the doors open. Every year it begins with a car packed to the roof with snacks, prizes, and equipment for the drive into the city. Pradeep Raja recruited and led 16 volunteers, some of them at their very first conference. Sucheta Gawade built the GooseChase game mission by mission, chased every speaker and sponsor for content, and was still adding missions the morning of the event. Diego Domingos da Silva ran all of our social media from a distance, made a spotlight video for every speaker, learned new tools to do it, and went way past anything we asked for. It landed: speakers thanked him by name in their own posts, and if you run events, his write-up is worth your time. Sucheta and Diego, I'm very grateful.
Thank You
Congratulations to the whole team: Pradeep Raja, Sucheta Gawade, Diego Domingos da Silva, Pooja Rajpal, Stacy Burris, Claire Hynes, Amie Seisay, Jason Rivera, Amanda Coe, Himanshu Goil, Manpreet Singh, Rajaniesh Kaushikk, and Peter Ward.
Thank you to our headline sponsor Devicie, and to AvePoint, Cambay Solutions, Orchestry, Seisay IT Solutions, Cloudwell, SoHo Dragon, Skillstinget, AI Maitri, and the Tri-State Office 365 User Group. Thank you to Microsoft for opening the doors at Times Square again, and to every speaker who gave up a Friday to teach what they know.
Not everything went right. The lunch line and audio/video help are already on next year's list.
Why We Keep Doing This
You get to watch a room fill up. You see someone new find their feet by lunchtime. And Pradeep, after a long day running volunteers, has already asked to take on sponsors next year.
That's how community events last. New people get pulled in, get a real job to do, and find out they're good at it. If you organize anything, ask someone new to help.
See you next year.
Links
- M365 NYC: the official site, with the full 2026 schedule
- Creating community before the event: Lessons from M365 NYC: Diego's write-up
- CommunityDays.org: find an event near you
