South Coast User Group - Meetup - May 5th 2026

South Coast User Group – May 5th 2026, Evening Meetup

🗓 Time: 7:00 PM – 9:00 PM
📍 Location: Hilton Hotel, Utilita Bowl (Ageas Bowl), Southampton, In-person
🍕 Food & Drinks: Provided
🎟 Cost: Free

Join us for an evening of learning, sharing, and networking with the South Coast User Group. This is a relaxed, community-led Microsoft event bringing together professionals, enthusiasts, and practitioners from across the region.

Whether you’re deep into Microsoft technologies or just starting your journey, this session offers practical insights, real-world experiences, and the chance to connect with like-minded people.

Agenda
18:30 - 19:00 | Arrival & Networking
Grab a drink, meet fellow attendees, and get settled.

19:00 – 20:50 | Community Talks & Demos
We’ll hear from several speakers covering a range of Microsoft-related topics, including real-world use cases, lessons learned, and practical tips you can take back to your day job.
Short, focused sessions with time for questions and discussion.

Session 1: Stop the Scroll of Doom: 10 Game inspired UI Tricks in Power Apps, Sandra Kiel, Microsoft MVP

• Stop the Scroll of Doom isn’t about fancy visuals. It’s about one thing: making Power Apps feel obvious to use.
• Many business apps don’t fail because they are broken. They fail because they are tiring. One endless screen. Too many buttons. No clear “where am I”, no progress, no feedback, weired error messages. Users scroll, guess, hesitate, and then… they just stop using the app and find ways arround.
• Games handle complexity differently. They guide players with clear objectives, simple navigation, visible progress, and tiny feedback moments that build trust. And the best part: you can use the same tricks in Power Apps without turning your app into a toy.
• In this session, i will give you 10 practical game UI tricks to upgrade your Power Apps UX, focused on:
• Clear navigation (so users never feel lost)
• Progress and save points (so tasks feel finishable)
• Micro feedback (so every click feels reliable)

Session 2: Title: Building an Office Legal AI Assistant Plugin using Microsoft AI, Luke Smith, Solution Architect, Elysian:IT
In this technical deep dive, we’ll build an Office Add‑in that helps lawyers and compliance teams work faster—right inside Word with a Teams Chat interface . We’ll call the Legislation AI API (LEX) for legislation queries and metadata, add Azure OpenAI for summarisation, clause extraction, host a secure backend on Azure Functions/App Service. You’ll see a code walkthrough: Office.js UI, task pane commands, an API facade to LEX, prompt engineering patterns, and guardrails. We’ll close with a live demo and deployment tips.

19:50 - 20:10 - Dinner!

Session 3: NEVER MISS ANYTHING AGAIN: Proactive Workload Management with Copilot Studio, Dave Buckley
Power Platform Lead, Valto
A practical use case for AI you can use daily. Getting lost in pings daily? Swamped by the shadow admin (the admin of admin)?

In this session you'll learn how we can hook Copilot into your teams and email notifications, prioritising your tasks before you even have to, escalating to project managers when workloads are rising and scheduling your day before you even arrive to work, all whilst remaining contextually aware to your existing project workload.

You will learn how to implement this solution from the ground up, no prior knowledge required!

Session 4: Moving Beyond Pilots to Value: The AI Operating Model Blueprint, martin.neale, CEO ICS.AI
Most AI programmes fail for one reason: they remain fragmented pilots that never scale into real value. In this session, Martin will share what organisations need to do differently to turn AI from experimentation into measurable outcomes. Drawing on the SMART AI Target Operating Model (TOM) and real delivery experience, the session explores how to build a unified approach across resident services, staff productivity and back-office operations — with governance, safety and accountability built in. Using examples such as Derby City Council, Martin will show how an operating model approach enables faster adoption, stronger control, and bankable value at scale.

20:50 – 21:00 | Open Networking & Wrap-Up
Final conversations, follow-up questions, and community catch-ups before we close.

Who Should Attend?

• Microsoft professionals & practitioners
• Developers, architects, consultants, and IT leaders
• Anyone interested in Microsoft technologies and the wider community

Why Attend?

• Learn from local community speakers
• Discover practical insights and real-world solutions
• Network in a friendly, informal setting
• Enjoy free food and drinks while you learn

We look forward to seeing you there and continuing to grow the South Coast Microsoft community together.