Home - European BizApps Summit

How the European BizApps Summit Actually Happened

Here's something that might surprise you: we didn't set out to create another conference.

For more than ten years, the European Collaboration Summit has been the place where Microsoft 365 folks gather to share what they're building. Great event. Solid community. But around 2023, something interesting started happening.

The Power Platform sessions were packed. Standing room only. People were camping out to get into Power BI workshops. By 2024, we looked at the numbers and realized nearly 40% of our agenda had shifted to business applications. The SharePoint admins were learning Power Automate. The Teams developers were building Power Apps. Everyone wanted to talk about Fabric.

We had a choice to make. We could keep cramming more BizApps content into ECS, or we could give this community what it actually needed - its own space.

So that's what we did.

The People Behind It

We have been running tech events long enough to know when something needed to change. We are ourselves Microsoft MVPS, so we got a few more on the boat, some Microsoft product folks, and practitioners who'd been in the trenches. The question wasn't whether to do it, but how to do it right.

The answer? Keep what worked about ECS - the community ownership, the practitioner focus, the no-BS approach to content - and apply it to the business applications space.

MVPs

Microsoft

Community

What Makes This Different

Europe has tech conferences. Lots of them. But most are either vendor showcases or academic exercises. The BizAppsSummit lives in the sweet spot:

It's still community-run.

No vendor controls the agenda. Sessions get selected because they're useful, not because it was vendor-forced.

It's ridiculously practical.

Full-day tutorials where you build actual solutions. Sessions from people who've deployed to thousands of users, not just played in dev environments.

It brings everyone together.

The citizen developer who just discovered Power Apps sits next to the architect designing enterprise solutions. Both learn something.

It's part of something bigger.

Co-located with the CollaboSummit and AI & CloudSummit means you can hop between events. The networking spans all of Microsoft's ecosystem.

Year One and Beyond

We launched in 2025 expecting maybe a few hundred people who were really into Power Platform. Instead, we got developers, architects, business analysts, data engineers, and yes, even some executives who wanted to understand what their teams were building.

The energy was different from other events. Less "look what Microsoft announced" and more "here's how we solved that problem you're facing." People stayed late talking in the hallways. run.events groups formed. Our mobile app exploded with follow-up questions.

Why This Matters

The business applications space is weird. It sits between IT and business users. Between professional developers and citizen developers. Between data platforms and productivity tools.

This summit gets that. It's not trying to force you into a box. Whether you're writing JavaScript in PCF controls or teaching accountants to build their first flow, you belong here.

Microsoft shows up not to sell, but to listen. The product managers take notes during sessions. The engineers debug issues with attendees. The community drives the roadmap in ways that actually matter.

Coming Next

We're always trying to get better. Each year, the community tells us what worked and what didn't. More full-day tutorials. Deeper technical content. Better beer (seriously, this was feedback, even if we are in Germany!).

The summit is what the community makes it. If you're building with Power Platform, working with Fabric, wrestling with Dataverse, or trying to make sense of Dynamics 365 - this is your event.

Come as you are. Bring your problems. Share your solutions.

That's how this whole thing started, and it's how we plan to keep going.

See you in Cologne.

The European BizApps Summit runs alongside the European Collaboration Summit and European AI & Cloud Summit.

Join Us in Cologne

The story of the European BizApps Summit