This is a fairly common statement we hear from the members of our community.
“I would love to give a talk, I just don’t know what to talk about or that I’d be any good at talking about it”
Well, unfortunately we can’t wave our magic Goots and help you be an amazing speaker, but we CAN give you a magical support Goots who can stand by your side in the front of the room and practice “getting good”.
And guess what? Most of the time, even when you’re delivering a non-polished first-time session that makes you feel super awkward…you’re still giving back to the community and helping share the lessons you’ve learned in a way that is immensely rewarding.
We still haven’t really answered the question of “okay fine I can suffer the humiliation in front of our friends but I still don’t know WHAT to talk about”. Below we’ve put together an example list of Sessions that we would love to see talked about at MSPGeekCon this year. This list is NOT a comprehensive list, it’s also NOT a required list.
We do not expect you to pick these sessions exactly, or follow the abstract mentioned exactly.
While you absolutely can, this primarily is a list to help generate ideas on your side about topics that are tangentially related. So feel free to run with any of the ones we list below or find something else you feel more like talking about.
One last thing.. (I know, I know you’re sick of my ramblings)
A common concern is making sure that the talk you want to give is not going to conflict or overlap with another person’s talk. If you look at the call for speakers page (https://mspgeekcon.com/speak) at the very bottom of the page you’ll see all currently submitted sessions grouped by Speaker, so you can use that to identify if your topic is already “taken” OR you can use it for inspiration to help you find a topic.
Alright, Session suggestions below
Understanding trust in a modern world
Session about how time impacts trust, and why time drift is an issue. Discussion about basic foundations of relationship building, and how lack of common ground (time) directly affects trust. Domain Trust issues, Time Sync issues, Windows Update and other secure sites will block access due to time drift. SSL Certificates and so on. Can be a session about request signing, cryptography and certificates and how time is a factor.
–MSP, Security, Technical
Management at Scale – The MSP Mindset
Session about how in an MSP, management of a tool must scale across multi-tenant management for efficiency and time savings. Describing the parent/child/grand-child/* hierarchy with inheritance and overrides allowing for ease of management and taking this method beyond product/SaaS development (focusing on key MSP Platforms that do this to demonstrate the effectiveness) and translate it into day to day process management of the MSP to ensure you utilize the scaling effectively.
–Vendor, Operations, Technical Architecture
Selling your service does not mean selling your soul
Session about how good service does not mean instance service. Nor does it mean service at the cost of your sanity, health or that of your team. Describing the state of a healthy client relationship, the need to protect your own time and your employees time, and the respect the client relationship deserves (and as such the client)
–Vendor, MSP, Customer Relationships, Operations/Business
How to get the most out of Tech Support
As an MSP, we often deal with users who are frustrated, upset, snarky, impolite, and less than forth coming with reporting issues. Either they tend to wait too long until the issue has become a big enough deal that it’s an emergency or they half-report the issue and expect us to come up with the details in the meantime. We deal with all of this and yet it doesn’t affect how we as an MSP interact with support. This session is about breaking that double standard. Learn how to be an advocate for both the user and the vendor to remove the finger pointing and work towards real resolution.
– MSP, Vendor Relations, Communication, Operations
Help my Help Desk is on fire
Does your help desk feel like it’s an ER? Running from emergency to emergency, chasing fires? Unable to keep up with the ongoing issues with no time for proactive support? This session will discuss time management, ticket triage processes, and service desk workflows that can be used to ensure smooth, efficient operations. Setting expectations and maintaining SLAs.
Stop thinking about thinking about doing it
Meetings are the insidious killer of productivity. Giving you the feeling of making progress when in reality sucking time and morale from attendees. This session will be about holding productive meetings, how to ensure you don’t have too many of them, and ensure that action items are held accountable.
Configuring a network for optimal discovery and monitoring
SNMP What? Which Version? And what can I even do with it? WTF are syslog traps anyways. This session will dive into network observational tools and how to setup network devices to ensure proper performance, up/down, and bandwidth monitoring
Why Probes are bad and how the concept of a probe points to a larger issue with the security mindset
What’s worse than a hacker brute forcing your devices on the same physical network? Blasting your passwords out to all devices on the network in an attempt to discover them allowing it to be stolen by a bad actor on the network. Underline how probes as a deployment method is something people were using because they were thinking of convenience not security and other mindset shifts that should be considered to be truly a security first approach. Maybe present tactics for mass deploy across a network you’re unfamiliar with
How risk assessments should impact your decision making regardless of if it’s a technical or business decision
Learn how to practically use a basic risk assessment framework to identify what needs to happen (or what you want to do), what can go wrong, how big of a problem is it if it does go wrong, and what are steps you can take to mitigate both it going wrong as well as the problem to reduce/minimize risk. We’ll demonstrate the framework being utilized for both decision making in business, in tech troubleshooting steps, as well as security architecture design
Why folders are evil (and why your brain still loves them)
Folders feel natural — they mimic how we organize the physical world — but they’re fundamentally flawed in a digital one. This session explores how hierarchical thinking limits discoverability, collaboration, and automation. We’ll break down why nested structures cause duplication, version sprawl, and context loss, and how modern systems use tagging, relationships, and object-based storage to replace hierarchy with flexibility. Learn how to rethink organization for scalability and how to help your team transition away from the comfort of “folders within folders.”
– Productivity, Systems Design, Operations
Microsoft 365 Start to Finish – Building a Secure Tenant Baseline
Setting up Microsoft 365 isn’t just clicking “Next.” This session walks through the complete lifecycle of a secure tenant setup — from domain onboarding and identity management to conditional access and security defaults. Learn when to embrace Microsoft’s “secure by default” options and when to override them for flexibility or compliance. We’ll cover practical setup decisions that impact everything downstream: licensing, Exchange and SharePoint configurations, Intune enrollment, and how to standardize security across clients without locking yourself into chaos later. Perfect for anyone building, rebuilding, or auditing their tenant baseline.
– Cloud, Security, Systems Administration, Technical Operations
A Journey Through the Ages – Windows Then and Now
From the clunky charm of Windows 3.11 to the sleek polish of Windows 11, much has changed — yet so much remains the same. This session takes a nostalgic but practical walk through the evolution of Windows, highlighting what’s truly different and what never really changed. We’ll explore how legacy foundations like INI and INF files still shape modern configuration, how the registry evolved, and why HKU vs HKLM still defines user vs system behavior. You’ll see how environment variables, permissions, and context continue to influence everything from admin rights to firewall rules. Walk away with a new appreciation for how Windows grew up — and how understanding its roots still makes you a better troubleshooter today.
– Technical, Systems Administration, OS Fundamentals, Nostalgia
Why is it always DNS (and why it rarely actually is)
When something breaks, the default joke is “it’s always DNS” — but that mindset hides a deeper issue: most problems aren’t technical, they’re dependency blindness. This session explores the layers of systems we take for granted — DNS, DHCP, routing, certificates, authentication, APIs — and how assumptions at each layer cascade into misleading symptoms. Learn how to troubleshoot by peeling back dependencies in logical order, identifying what’s truly failing versus what’s just reporting the failure.
– Troubleshooting, Networking, Operations, Technical
How to look behind the curtain of KPIs to see the real data, and why should you bother
If you come from a sales background, you already know your ABCs (Always Be Closing) from a business and even technical perspective, you want learn a different kind of ABC… Always Be Curious. Seeing a fancy graph or gauge of a metric looks good on paper or even on screen, but if you don’t understand what that number relates to and how it was created then the KPI isn’t really worth it. We’ll dig into the need for curiosity, and how to evaluate the underlying data to ensure it makes sense. We’ll also cover the intention behind the KPI so that you can ensure you’re spending time on something that will provide a real return