On Thursday 25th February, Pythagoras hosted the first in our new series of Hands-On events, focussing this first session on Office 365. The aim of these sessions is to bring together a small group of customers to see a particular technology in action; hearing about some of its core features and trying them out for themselves with a hands on approach. While you can read about a piece of technology or software in detail, sometimes a real-time demonstration helps you get to grips with it much more beneficially, as well as finding out exactly how it can be adopted into your organisation. It’s also worth noting that Pythagoras are one of the only partners in the UK with the full Microsoft Stack offering.

Hosting the morning were Pythagoras employees Account Manager, Mark Clack, and Office 365 & Azure technology professional, Dan Fernadez-Cao.

Providing some context to the session, the modern workplace has gone through a fundamental shift with regard to the way it operates; employees, particularly millennial’s, now consider mobility to be a crucial element of their working life including having access to information at the tips of their fingers, and being able to use their own devices at work. Following Satya Nadella’s keynote at Future Decoded 2015 (here), Microsoft’s vision is to reinvent productivity and business processes, empowering modern workforces to work smarter, not harder. Now really is a great time to be involved in Microsoft Cloud services.

It also must be noted that more data has been created in the last 4 years than ever before, but our ability to absorb information quicker hasn’t changed. This means data and the tools used to analyse it need to become more intelligent. Office 365 and the rest of the Microsoft stack are making great advances to achieving this, particularly with applications like Power BI that can pull data and display it in easy to digest visualisations.

Overall, the event proved to be a tremendous success, each of the participants taking something away with them to activate in their own organisations.