There are going to be some huge announcements at Microsoft Ignite that you definitely do not want to miss! This is going to be by far the most exciting Ignite ever with crazy announcements on what Microsoft is delivering inside its cloud offerings. I am genuinely excited at the anticipation is killing me, its made worse because I won’t be there to physically witness it. Sure I will be watching the live stream but I will miss out on the atmosphere when announcements are made. However, in case I am called away from the stream and have to do real work I want to make sure that I at least capture what is announced for later.

I can do this using Microsoft Teams to track social reactions and also follow aggregators using RSS feeds to make sure I have the content in one place at my fingertips on any device I am able to access at the time.

Here are the feeds and social tags you should be following:

RSS Feeds

• Microsoft Ignite Blog: https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/gxcuf89792/rss/board?board.id=MicrosoftIgniteBlog
• Microsoft Ignite Content: https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/gxcuf89792/rss/board?board.id=MicrosoftIgniteContent2017
• Microsoft Ignite Conversations: https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/gxcuf89792/rss/board?board.id=IgniteCommunity
• Community Unified Comms Aggregator (UCNOW): http://imsmarterthanyou.com/s4bnews

Twitter Hashtags

• #MsIgnite
• #MicrosoftTeams
• #Skype4B
• #SfB
• #SfBO
• etc.

What You Need to Do

First off I recommend creating a dedicated channel for this within a Team that you use for general information sharing that is not company specific. I assume that you already know how to do this (clicking the Team ellipsis and clicking Add Channel).

Then you want to create yourself some connectors

Scroll down until you find the RSS connector

Press configure

Add a name for the RSS feed e.g. UC Now or Ignite Blog. Then paste the above RSS feed in and choose the frequency you want to poll the feed. For ignite, I recommend the fastest time frame possible.

Rinse and repeat for Each feed

Now you’ll want to watch Twitter for those quick information releases and huge headlines

Again in Connectors scroll down until you find the twitter connector (You’ll need a twitter account)

Now you will want to add a new twitter account to the connector, you can do this by clicking on the add new twitter account. Once you have authenticated with Twitter then you’re able to select the account to use.

Next track the announcements using specific hashtags you want to follow, for me they’re UC specific, but these can be your preferred tech. Add a list of twitter accounts you may want to follow and then change the frequency to deliver as they are tweeted for ultimate updates

Now in case your Teams client is minimized, you want to be notified when things start to happen, so you want to follow this channel

Now you probably want to change your notification settings so you don’t get mail bombed by updates if your client is minimized, so change your notification settings for followed channels from banner and email, to banner

So get your Teams set up ready for the big event!