Microsoft Student Partner: organizing my first online event

On 3rd June 2020, I organized an online event during the lockdown of Covid-19, on the topic of “Introduction to Docker”. It was my first ever online event, as Microsoft Student Partner, all on my own, without anyone’s help . The event smoothly, and got to learn a lot. In this article though, I would be discussing the services, that really helped me in conducting this event more efficiently. Most of the services are free for you if you are a Microsoft Student Partner. For others, I will mention it in article. This article might help you, if you yourself want to conduct an online event, webinar or workshop of yourself.

Canva: Creating billboards of your event for promotion

No event is complete without promotions. And no promotion is complete without billboard. These billboards act as a great medium of explaining the agenda of your event or workshop to the viewer. Graphics are the best way of communicating for humans. So, a good billboard is very important if you want to attract more audience to your event.

Canva is a great platform to create a professional looking billboards for your event workshop. This platform is easy to use, and includes loads of features, even in free version, which would be enough for creating great poster or billboard for the event. It also provides a learning section to learn about creating your own work on Canva platform. For paid version, you can have a free trial for 30 days, and is priced at $12.95 per team member per month. If you pay annually, it reduces to $9.95 per month.

To sign-up for Canva, log-on to: https://www.canva.com

Here are the posters of my event, that I created using Canva:

Microsoft Office 365: For creating powerpoint presentation

So, no event would be complete without a powerpoint presentation. To explain about concepts of the agenda, a powerpoint presentation. It greatly helps in making the the overall workshop more interactive.

So, in my case, I used Microsoft Office 365, in online format, to create my powerpoint presentation for the event. By using online format, you can edit the presentation from multiple computers, and the file can get saved automatically on cloud. You can also share the link of your presentation to collaborate with others, or just share it in read only format to attendees to your event to reference it afterwards. When the work is complete, you can present your presentation on the Office 365 online platform itself! No need to download the file. But if you want, you can download it onto your local machine, and work on powerpoint platform downloaded on your local machine.

Microsoft Office 365 is a paid platform, which includes more Microsoft services like Microsoft Word, Spreadsheet etc. It is the most widely used platform in its category. It was free for me, since I am a Microsoft Student Partner. However, you can use the same ID, with which your Microsoft Office license is associated with, to use Office 365 online platform! Otherwise, you can use Google’s office solutions, if you don’t have an office license.

To use Office 365, log-on to: https://www.office.com

Microsoft Visual Studio Code: (Optional) one of the best code editors

So, this service is not important or required for everyone. VS Code is essentially a Code Editor, which can be used for workshops, which are programming based or require some kind of tool to code.

I used VS code, to edit code of my Docker files, and explain the code to my attendees. It is very great tool for programming workshops, as it is free, open-source, and easy to use. It has loads of plug-ins for various programming languages, loads of themes, built-in Git, and has in-editor debugging. So, if you want to demonstrate some coding exercise, or practical application of some programming concept, VS Code is a great tool to use.

To download Visual Studio Code, log on to: https://code.visualstudio.com/download

Microsoft Teams: To organize the online event itself

So, now one just needs to host the event itself, using an online meeting platform. So, for organizing the event, I used Microsoft Teams. The free version of platform has unlimited chats and messages, built-in audio and video calling for individuals, groups, and full team meetups, and 10 GB of team file storage plus 2 GB per person for personal storage.

It also has built-in integration with Microsoft Office 365, through which you could share your powerpoint presentations quite efficiently. For scheduling a meeting on Microsoft Teams, follow the following steps:

1. Go to calendar option, and click on schedule a meeting.
2. Add title of your meeting, invite your teammates though their email using add required attendees, schedule timings, add the channel you want to have meeting in, and add description of the meeting.
3. Copy the meeting link from the bottom of description to share, and click on save.
4. You can share the meeting link, and by clicking it, the attendees can directly attend the live event.

If you want to share the screen of your computer, you can do so by clicking share screen option, that appears during the meeting. You can also record the whole meeting, and after the meeting is ended, you will get link to recording of your meeting via your email. You can download, edit or publish recording of your meeting from there.

To sign-up and download teams, log on to: https://www.microsoft.com/en-in/microsoft-365/microsoft-teams/group-chat-software

Experience: of organizing my first online event

The overall experience of organizing the event was great. Due to Covid-19 pandemic, all of us were confined to doing online events only. Many of my college friends and my fellow MSPs helped in promoting my event. Many of them attended the whole session as well! For which I am truly grateful of. I learned many things through this experience. Apart from harnessing my skills and knowledge of topic of the workshop, I improved my presentation skills, learned how to organize everything on my own, and also how to stay calm if something goes wrong, since I encountered one small technical glitch during the starting of session, that was solved easily.

I wrote this article to help many people like me, who are going to be organizing an online event for the first time, and might need some guidance on which tools to use for it. Please do note that, I’ve mentioned only those services and tools, which were required for my workshop only. It is possible that, for your event, you might require some service, that may not be mentioned in this article. So don’t worry! Just write an article like this, to help someone like you in future! I hope, this article might have helped you!