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So, last year was a very special year for me, exactly a year ago I've been thrilled to share with more than 11 MVPs across APAC region the honor of hosting 6 Office Developer Bootcamp, what made last year special is that we continuously kept raising the bar.  Starting in 2017 with the first Global Office 365 Developer Bootcamp we had only three cities: Sydney, Melbourne and Auckland for the first year. For 2018 we decided to increase the count by 100% adding Brisbane, Hong Kong and Kuala Lumpur to the mix.  You might wonder why HK & KL, I will let you guys know a bit later.

I thought - with a little nudge from Shiva to share some of the lesson I've learnt in organizing Office 365 Developer Bootcamp across such diverse cities/communities, it goes as below in no particular order:
1.       Pull an awesome team together:  Having Ashish, Cameron, John, Paul and Chris and many more to support this event was a key to success in both 2017 & 2018.
2.       Plan your trip right: if you decided to do a lot of travelling, you got to plan it right, I remember booking a multi-city trip from Sydney->Auckland->Brisbane then back to Sydney. It helps with the budget and kept the MRs less annoyed.
3.       Remote Event Planning is stressful:  I think we could all agree that it's easier to run an event in your city, for last year I believe the toughest event of all was Kuala Lumpur. The main reason that I had no co-speakers and I had to arrive to Microsoft Malaysia very early in the morning having flew in the night before (the people who knows me very well I'm not a morning person and I can't function properly before 10 am!). I also had to change the room setup to match the desired setup (classroom). I still feel bad for the attendees as I ran the whole event from 8am to 3pm.
This year I'm fortunate to have a whole team in Kuala Lumpur to support the event and almost 200 registrations for the event, I even decided not to travel and do a remote session, that would keep someone very happy!
4.       Keep a dynamic Event Format   This is something I've done completely wrong in the first year, what might be your typical event in one place of the world is completely different in another place as the attendees’ expectation might be completely different. You will have to tailor your content to fit the location, having a local team will definitely point you to the right direction
5.        Do your best to understand the culture differences for almost every city, Friday was our first choice for the event day as we discovered that a weekend full day training events usually have a very high dropout rate. 
That wasn't the case for Kuala Lumpur, although I'm a Muslim with two Mohammeds in my name, I completely forgot that Malaysia is a Muslim majority country and they either have Friday off or half working day, I had to move the date to Tuesday and change my hotel and tickets.


So why Kuala Lumpur and Hong Kong, the reason is very simple, it was easier for me to travel to these cities visa free as I still hold an Egyptian passport!

 I'll leave you guys with some photos from the events