Joshua Morden

  SpiceWorld 2020 is a wrap, and I must say that I am very impressed with how well the conference was presented. The SpiceWorks event staff and the Spice Buddies really went all out to make this virtual conference feel as much like the in-person SpiceWorld event as possible. One of the things that makes SpiceWorld unique is the emphasis on community and having fun while learning new things. Compared to other conferences I have attended, the people at SpiceWorld (called Spiceheads in the forums) are much more sociable and eager to discuss IT and share solutions to problems they've encountered in their day-to-day activities. While the in-person interaction was not possible this year, the SpiceBuddies Discord server provided a great way for attendees to chat in real time while viewing the different sessions. It was a lot of fun to reconnect with SpiceWorld friends and meet new ones via the Discord channels. The other thing that makes SpiceWorld different is the entertainment value. Th

  The first day of SpiceWorld 2020 Virtual is in the books, and it was a lot of fun. It was nice to see Jay Hallberg speak at the keynote even though he left the company back in March. The partnership between SpiceWorld and Ziff Davis seems to be going really well so far, and it'll be interesting to see how it grows when things pick up next year. A couple of the sessions that stood out to me were an Office 365 session presented by Mayur Ragha and an Active Directory PowerShell session presented by "PowerShell in a Month's Lunches" author, Jeff Hicks. I am a big user of both products, so it was really nice to learn more about that. The biggest takeaway of Day 1 for me was the presentation quality of the entire conference via the virtual platform. The website does a pretty good job of virtualizing all the things we expect from a SpiceWorld event including the sessions, Passport to Prizes, connecting with vendors, and networking with other attendees. The sites' UI (s

 I'm glad to announce that I will be speaking at SpiceWorld again this year in a presentation titled "Best Practices for Nonprofit and SMB IT Infrastructures." This session will be a follow-up to a presentation I gave a couple of years ago about nonprofit IT and is based upon feedback I received from attendees of that presentation. If you're interested in attending, you can register for SpiceWorld 2020 for FREE here . My session is scheduled for Thursday, September 17th, at 11:15 AM CDT, and a description of the session is shown below. Also, be sure to follow my blog this week as I'll be posting live updates each day with some of my favorite SpiceWorld highlights!