Walkthrough: download in bulk your favorite resources from MS Ignite

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Audience: end users.

Microsoft Ignite has poured on us tons of Microsoft 365 announcements, and thankfully tons of resources to help us get started. Your first step to access those resources is to head to myignite.microsoft.com. There, you can explore the sessions, and for each you’ll get access, in the right hand pane, to a number of resources.

Notice in particular the one that says “Download Resources”. It’s actually the exact same for every session, and lets you download a PowerShell script that in turn will help you download resources.

Great and easy for a techie. For the regular business user, PowerShell can be a little bit intimidating. However, it has become an essential tool in modern Microsoft 365, where some settings get released through PowerShell first, before being surfaced in the admin or setting menus.

So let’s turn this to our advantage, and take this opportunity to get started with PowerShell and at the same time get a copy of our favorite resources.

Disclaimer: this is NOT an invitation to start downloading and running any PowerShell script available from the internet. Scripts can be harmful, especially as they can leverage your credentials. Only use trusted sources and use your own judgment. We are going to trust Microsoft on this specific one.

Click on “Download Resources” to download the zip file, and unzip it. It should look like this in file explorer:

The instructions are in the readme, let me just use an example to walk you through.

  1. First, you need to identify the sessions you are interested in, using their session code located toward the bottom of the page. Let’s pick two of my favorites:
    DB158 (Collaboration announcements)
    DB154 (Project Cortex)
  2. Back in file explorer, where we unzipped, open PowerShell from the file menu

3. You’ll get a blue screen, we’re doing just fine:

Now you can type the PowerShell command and let the script download your resources – just make sure you have room on your computer as these include large videos!

.\Download-Resources.ps1 -directory . -sessionCodes "DB158,DB154"

4. You’ll be presented with a warning, just type R and enter to run once.

5. You can now follow the progress as files get downloaded

6. We’re done! If that was your first PowerShell experience, congratulations!