All right. Welcome, everybody, to our TEC talk today, "The Dos and Don'ts of Teams Live Events for Customer and Vendor Engagements." Thank you for sharing with us these few extra minutes we needed to get started. I'm sure Mark will share our adventure here with you as he goes through the Dos and don'ts.
So a little bit of that before I introduce our topic and our speaker. I wanted to talk about these TEC talks briefly. So a tech talk is in the spirit of our industry event, The Experts Conference, and it is pure Active Directory and Office 365 training, no third party pitches.
And to give you a little bit more details about what the experts conference is, this is an event that we hold every year. We're hosting it in November of this year, November 17 and 18, and we are really excited about this. We brought it back after a seven-year hiatus. Last year we had a sold out event, and we're really excited about this year because not only do we have a hybrid Active Directory security track and Office 365 track, we also have a migration and modernization track.
We'll also carve out time for networking and interacting with those industry experts and peers that you want to hear from, folks like Randy Franklin Smith, Sean Metcalf, Chris McNulty, David Kennedy, our speaker today, Mark Rackley, who will be there. The speakers at this event range from those folks that I just mentioned and Microsoft employees and lots of other Microsoft MVPs and industry experts.
This will be held in Atlanta, Georgia. Right now we're optimistic about COVID-19, and it will be contained before TEC 2020. But we also understand this is a new experience for everyone. So we're planning for every possibility, every possibility for having a safe and healthy event, live event, as well as also offering a full refund to anyone who requested by November 3, 2020. That way you could take advantage of any of the early bird discounts.
And then for those Quest customers, we actually added a pre-conference day. It's November 16, and this is very much focused on the Quest AD Recovery and AD Auditing portfolios and running through some hands-on labs. But the event itself, the 17th and 18th, is just step pure training.
So let's get into the TEC talk today. So I want to introduce our speaker. Mark Rackley is a longtime Microsoft MVP. He is a partner and chief strategy officer at PAIT Group and has more than 25 years of experience designing and developing software solutions. I've worked with Mark for many years around SharePoint, started there with SharePoint, and then, obviously, here with Office 365 and Teams.
He is definitely recognized as a SharePoint geek. He's an active blogger, a presenter, author. He is also the organizer of the North American collaboration summit, so he also puts on his own industry event. And he will be talking about that today as well. So Mark is going to walk us through the Dos and Don'ts of Teams Live Events, what to do here.
And I'm going to turn it over to him. And if you have questions, just put those in the Q&A, and I will manage those and we'll save most of the questions until the end. OK. So Mark, I'm going to send your feed live. Are we ready?
We are ready.
All right. I sent you live.
OK. Going live. So hello, everyone. Thank you for joining us. And again, the interesting parts of getting started this morning will make a great talking point for our presentation today. So anybody has any questions along the way, please stop and ask.
And I need to switch my slide settings. There we go. So today, we were talking about the dos and don'ts of Live Events. And as I do this more and more, there's so many more dos and so many more don'ts, but we'll see if we can add to them as we go.
Jen did a great introduction for me already. My name is Mark Rackley. I do work for a company called PAIT Group, where we do Office 365 and Teams consulting. I do development, speaking, I'm known for liking bacon. So I stay busy in the in this space. So feel free to reach out to me with any questions after the fact. Feel free to check out my blog, or reach out to me on LinkedIn or Twitter.
Jen also mentioned that I do have my own conference. It is called the North American Collaboration Summit, and this is a community event. So it is-- and we have speakers from all over the world, actually. We have a lot of the people that come in from Europe and Canada and come present. And we do this in Branson Missouri, which is kind of like smack dab in the middle of the country.
I live near Branson, Missouri. I'm passionate about this part of the country. It's a part of the country it doesn't get to see this type of technology often, so I love doing this event. I try to make it a lot of fun.
It's a multiday event. We do full-day workshops. Quest is one of our sponsors, so thank you guys so much for sponsoring. You can register today for our September event, and use the coupon code quest to get a $50 discount to get that down even cheaper. Like I said, it's a community event, non-profit event. We just charge as little as possible to cover our costs.
And kind of the impetus for the session was the original dates for my conference were April 2 of this year. And with COVID happening, and that was kind of like right around the timeframe that it just really exploded. So I had about two weeks' notice before I had to shut down the conference and move the dates.
So
01:00:40