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 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 talk moves past proof-of-concept territory into what it actually takes to run Fabric at scale: governance models that don't obstruct users, workspace structures built to grow, security approaches that avoid expensive rework, and platform decisions that keep costs under control. Elliott draws on practical examples and architecture patterns to show where organisations typically go wrong during adoption and what operating models tend to stick around.

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 approach that routes data to destinations based on a central configuration, allowing teams to segregate and govern data across different workload areas. The solution is designed to work from small business setups through to enterprise architectures.

The format is informal: networking and pizza from 5:45 PM, talks running from 6:30 PM to around 8:30 PM. Leeds Data Platform & Cloud runs these sessions as a community space for data engineers, architects and platform folk to meet, ask questions and compare notes. The group covers Microsoft Azure, data engineering, cloud infrastructure and related tooling.

Attendance is free. Accenture is sponsoring and hosting the event. Because access to the building requires a guest list, registration is essential before the day — organisers need to submit names in advance. Grace O. and Liz H. are hosting on the night.

Why attend

Luke Elliott's talk addresses a gap that most Fabric practitioners hit eventually: getting from a working demo to something production-grade that doesn't collapse under its own governance debt. If you're mid-deployment or planning one, the architecture patterns and operating model discussion are directly applicable.

Shelly Pashley's metadata-driven routing session is practical and demonstrable — she's showing a working solution, not a slide deck of principles. Between the two talks and the networking slot, you'll be in a room with Leeds-based data engineers and architects who are working on the same problems. Pizza is included.

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 — 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 and security.
• Shelly Pashley — demonstrating a metadata-driven, item-name-based approach to dynamic data routing across Fabric workspaces and data stores.