Anatomy of a successful Fabric deployment & Name your target

Two talks on Microsoft Fabric make up the programme for this Leeds Data Platform & Cloud meetup on Tuesday 9 June 2026 at Infinity Works, part of Accenture, on Wellington Street.

Luke Elliott opens with Anatomy of a Successful Fabric Deployment: Lessons from the Frontline. The premise is blunt: most organisations can build a Fabric proof of concept; far fewer get it to scale. Elliott works through governance models that don't frustrate users, workspace structures built for growth, security approaches that avoid costly rework, and platform decisions that keep operational overhead manageable. He uses practical architecture patterns to show where adoption goes wrong and what separates a sustainable platform from a short-lived experiment.

Shelly Pashley follows with Name Your Target!, a session on item-name-driven dynamic data dissemination across workspaces and data stores in Microsoft Fabric. She demonstrates a metadata-driven methodology that routes data to destinations based on a central configuration, allowing teams to segregate and govern data across different workload areas. The approach is designed to work from small business setups through to enterprise-scale architectures.

The format is informal: networking from 17:45, drinks and pizza from 18:00, then the two talks with a short break between them. The evening wraps up at 20:30. Accenture is sponsoring and hosting the event, which means attendees must register in advance — a list of names is submitted to the venue before the day, and unregistered guests may have trouble getting in.

Leeds Data Platform & Cloud (LDPaC) runs regular in-person meetups for data and cloud practitioners across the city. The group covers Microsoft Azure, data engineering, infrastructure and related topics, and draws a mix of engineers, architects and analysts. Events are free and open to anyone working in or curious about the data and cloud space.

Why attend

Both talks are practitioner-led and grounded in real deployments rather than product marketing. If you are working on a Fabric rollout — or about to start one — Elliott's session covers the structural decisions that tend to cause problems later: governance, workspace design, security and cost. Pashley's metadata-driven approach is a concrete pattern you can take back to your own architecture.

Beyond the talks, the format gives you a proper chunk of time to meet other data and cloud engineers in Leeds. Pizza and drinks are provided from 18:00, and the room will include people at all stages of Fabric adoption.

Agenda

• 17:45 – 18:00 Networking
• 18:00 – 18:30 Drinks & pizza
• 18:30 – 18:40 Intro
• 18:40 – 19:30 Talk 1: Anatomy of a Successful Fabric Deployment: Lessons from the Frontline — Luke Elliott
• 19:30 – 19:40 Break
• 19:40 – 20:30 Talk 2: Name Your Target! — Shelly Pashley

Speakers

• Luke Elliott — speaking on real-world lessons from scaling Microsoft Fabric deployments, covering governance, workspace structure, security and platform decisions.
• Shelly Pashley — demonstrating a metadata-driven approach to dynamic data dissemination across workspaces and data stores in Microsoft Fabric.