High Monkey at M365 Twin Cities 2026

Last week, hundreds of people braved the mid-September rain & gathered at Hennepin Technical College to learn from each other. Thirty-five sessions across nine rooms, taught by MVPs and practitioners who work in these platforms every day, running from intro-level walkthroughs to genuine deep dives. Admins, developers, decision makers, and plenty of people who just wanted a better handle on what their organization is already sitting on. This year's M365 Twin Cities was a success, as it always is.

The event has been running since 2008 - it started as Twin Cities SharePoint Camp, became SharePoint Saturday Twin Cities, and is now M365 Twin Cities. It runs twice a year, spring and fall, and is free every single time. Eighteen years of volunteers putting on one of the largest and longest-running Microsoft community events in the country for free - hats off to them.

High Monkey was there with a booth, and Virgil was there speaking. Here's what we took away from this year's event.

Everybody is trying to figure out AI

We talked to a lot of people on Friday. Some stopped for thirty seconds, some stayed for 15 minutes. We had a lot of great exchanges and loved learning about people's organizations, the challenges they face, and the goals that they have. Across all of those conversations, the same subject kept surfacing: AI. Where it fits, whether it fits, what to actually do about it all.

We weren't imagining the pattern, either, go look at the schedule! Sixteen of the thirty-five sessions had AI, Copilot, or agents in the title. Nine rooms, four time slots, and nearly half the program aimed at one question. Copilot Studio for beginners, autonomous agents, governing the agent era, AI readiness for government, agentifying your data. As we can all see, people are eager to learn and make sense of these new times we're in.

The people we talked to sounded like people with real jobs, real content, and real systems, trying to work out which parts of this are worth their time. The questions were practical ones. How work is actually going to change in these digital spaces. What Microsoft is building toward. Where Copilot fits into what they already have. There was plenty of ordinary shop talk mixed in too, including a healthy amount of venting about digital pet peeves.

Virgil's session

Virgil presented Copilot and Microsoft Search: Better together at this year's conference.

The premise: marketing and hype have convinced a lot of organizations that they're choosing between AI and search. He doesn't buy it - traditional and generative search are good at different jobs, and the better answer is usually to let each do the thing it's actually built for instead of forcing one tool to carry everything.

Given what the rest of the building spent the day asking about, it landed in the right room on the right morning.

If you want to walk through the argument yourself, Virgil's slides from the session are available here.

Our first time out with the new look

The day before the conference, we launched a rebrand. New logo, new palette, redesigned site. Friday was the first time any of it existed in physical space: new banners, new tablecloth, the whole setup.

Virgil wrote about the why on LinkedIn, and he put the motives behind our rebrand incredibly:

"As we were coming up on our 28th anniversary, I realized some things might have gotten a bit stale. Earlier this year, High Monkey embarked on a journey to freshen up the company with the way we do sales, the way we do marketing, the way we interact with customers, deliver projects and a whole lot more. The world, but especially the world of technology, is changing so rapidly, we realized we needed a better way to keep up, make smart decisions around the trends to follow and the ones not to. So this transformation has brought a revitalized life to the team and our overall direction."

Towards the end of what he was saying there is the same problem every person at our booth was describing. Which trends deserve your attention and which ones don't? We just happen to have spent this year working on it from the inside, and from our perspective our new branding is a reflection of that.

The High Monkey booth

We ran the Vikings ticket cornhole raffle again, which made its debut at last year's conference. The premise was you fill out an entry, then step to the side of the booth and take three tosses at our cornhole board. However many points you put up, that's how many raffle entries went into our system. It was a hit, and we daresay it is becoming a highlight of the conference cafeteria. We are proud of all the people who thought they would do horribly but faced their fears and put on generational cornhole performances.

But only one player could be crowned champion. Join us in congratulating Rachel G., who won the raffle and is headed to U.S. Bank Stadium to watch the Vikings take on the Colts next month!

We also brought our signature banana candy and the keyboard brushes, which are both also traditions for our booth at this point but longer-standing. Every year those brushes stop at least a dozen people mid-stride. "Wait, what is that?" Well everyone, it's a tiny brush for your dusty keyboard, it has a super old High Monkey logo on it, and you didn't know you needed it but you do. If you didn't get one this year, next year's your chance.

Thank you to the event leaders

Huge thanks to Tamara Bredemus, Don Donais, Jim Ferguson, Sarah Haase, and Wes Preston for everything you did to ensure this event ran smoothly.

Organizing something this size takes months of work on top of everyone's actual job, and it shows up in the small things: coffee ready before the first session, food arriving exactly when it should, someone always nearby to point you toward the next room or the next refill. Nobody spent Friday feeling lost or unwelcome, and this power five made this happen.

If we talked on Friday

If you stopped at our booth and we ran out of time, or you've been chewing on where AI fits in your organization, we'd like to keep that conversation going.

Those conversations are our favorite part of these events, and just because the event is over doesn't mean our conversations have to be.

Reach out and we'll find a time to talk.