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Microsoft Cloud IT Pro Podcast

Ben Stegink, Scott Hoag

Your Microsoft Cloud News from a couple of IT Pros

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  • Sep 24, 2020 · 59 min

    Episode 196 – Microsoft Ignite 2020 Ignouncements

    In Episode 196, Ben and Scott talk about the announcements from Microsoft Ignite 2020 that impact Microsoft 365, Microsoft Teams, Microsoft Stream, Microsoft Seach, and Azure. Sponsors Sperry Software – Powerful Outlook Add-ins developed to make your email life easy even if you’re too busy to manage your inbox ShareGate - ShareGate's industry-leading products help IT professionals worldwide migrate their business to the Office 365 or SharePoint, automate their Office 365 governance, and understand their Azure usage & costs Office365AdminPortal.com - Providing admins the knowledge and tools to run Office 365 successfully Intelligink - We focus on the Microsoft Cloud so you can focus on your business Show Notes Microsoft Stream (Reimagined?) The Final Days of Office 365 Video Microsoft Teams Updates Insights and Wellbeing The Briefing email overview Follow Microsoft 365 on Social Media Microsoft Search Updates Project Cortex Twitter taught Microsoft’s AI chatbot to be a racist asshole in less than a day Azure Resource Mover Azure Orbital Azure Automanage Windows Admin Center in the Azure Portal Windows Virtual Desktop Updates About the sponsors Sperry Software, Inc focuses primarily on Microsoft Outlook and more recently Microsoft Office 365, where a plethora of tools and plugins that work with email have been developed. These tools can be extended for almost any situation where email is involved, including automating workflows (e.g., automatically save emails as PDF or automatically archive emails that are over 30 days old), modifying potentially bad user behaviors (e.g., alert the user to suspected phishing emails or prompt the user if they are going to inadvertently reply to all), and increased email security (e.g., prompt the user with a customizable warning if they are about to send an email outside the organization). Get started today by visiting www.SperrySoftware.com/CloudIT Every business will eventually have to move to the cloud and adapt to it. That’s a fact. ShareGate helps with that. Our industry-leading products help IT professionals worldwide migrate their business to the Office 365 or SharePoint, automate their Office 365 governance, and understand their Azure usage & costs. Visit https://sharegate.com/ to learn more. Intelligink utilizes their skill and passion for the Microsoft cloud to empower their customers with the freedom to focus on their core business. They partner with them to implement and administer their cloud technology deployments and solutions. Visit Intelligink.com for more info.

  • Sep 17, 2020 · 32 min

    Episode 195 – New Conversation Button in Microsoft Teams?!?

    In Episode 195, Ben and Scott talk about the "Conversation Button" that has (finally) come to Microsoft Teams and some things to think about in the lead up to Microsoft Ignite. Sponsors Sperry Software – Powerful Outlook Add-ins developed to make your email life easy even if you’re too busy to manage your inbox ShareGate - ShareGate's industry-leading products help IT professionals worldwide migrate their business to the Office 365 or SharePoint, automate their Office 365 governance, and understand their Azure usage & costs Office365AdminPortal.com - Providing admins the knowledge and tools to run Office 365 successfully Intelligink - We focus on the Microsoft Cloud so you can focus on your business Show Notes Teams Rolls Out New Conversation Button Keyboard shortcuts for Microsoft Teams The NFL will use Microsoft Teams to let fans cheer along with players when they score a touchdown The last episode of the podcast I see on Spotify is 192. Should I be seeing new episodes there? What You Need to Know about Episode Limits and Your Podcast RSS Feed Azure updates feed Storage updates Query Acceleration for Azure Data Lake Storage is now generally available Change feed support is now generally available for Azure Blob Storage Azure Blob versioning is now general available Azure Blob storage object replication is now generally available Microsoft Ignite About the sponsors Sperry Software, Inc focuses primarily on Microsoft Outlook and more recently Microsoft Office 365, where a plethora of tools and plugins that work with email have been developed. These tools can be extended for almost any situation where email is involved, including automating workflows (e.g., automatically save emails as PDF or automatically archive emails that are over 30 days old), modifying potentially bad user behaviors (e.g., alert the user to suspected phishing emails or prompt the user if they are going to inadvertently reply to all), and increased email security (e.g., prompt the user with a customizable warning if they are about to send an email outside the organization). Get started today by visiting www.SperrySoftware.com/CloudIT Every business will eventually have to move to the cloud and adapt to it. That’s a fact. ShareGate helps with that. Our industry-leading products help IT professionals worldwide migrate their business to the Office 365 or SharePoint, automate their Office 365 governance, and understand their Azure usage & costs. Visit https://sharegate.com/ to learn more. Intelligink utilizes their skill and passion for the Microsoft cloud to empower their customers with the freedom to focus on their core business. They partner with them to implement and administer their cloud technology deployments and solutions. Visit Intelligink.com for more info.

  • Sep 10, 2020 · 31 min

    Episode 194 – Microsoft Lists GAs in Microsoft Teams

    In Episode 194, Ben and Scott dive into the recent announcement of the GA of Microsoft Lists in Microsoft Teams. Transcript Email Download New Tab - Welcome to episode 194 of the Microsoft cloud It pro podcast, recorded live September 4th, 2020. This, is a show about Microsoft 365 and Azure, from the perspective of IT Pros and end users, where we discuss recent news or topics, and how it relates to you. In this episode, Ben and Scott dive more into Microsoft list, now that they've been recently GAID, both from the Microsoft list point of view, as well as from the app and Microsoft Teams. So, let's dive in and talk. Microsoft lists. - Yeah. - Hit the button. - All right, all of the buttons have been hit. - Excellent, I'm glad we figured that out once again. - And hopefully our video recording this time will put us back side by side, instead of flipping back and forth like last week. - I'ma yell at my producer. - You should, he's using a new camera too, `cause the camera wiggling on his desk annoyed him. But I don't know that I liked this view, I feel like it kind of looking at my nose. - Well, I mean, you're a vlogger now, right? - And that was a vlog point - I'm a vlogger. . What is that thing? - It's the Sony Z... - The Sony ZV1, ZV, ZV? - Yeah, ZV, Sony ZV1. - Yes, see you are a blogger now, that's vlogger camera. - I'm a vlogger. - Yes, we've actually been doing a lot on YouTube. I have another friend of mine that's been doing some YouTube videos too on my channel, and, he, it's interesting, `cause he comes with a different perspective. So he's in a completely different industry than us, but uses Microsoft 365. So he's been doing light more end-user type videos, that we've been putting on the Intelligenk YouTube channel, So if you're looking for like some Word, Excel, and you still a bit of a technology guy too, so he's been playing around with Power apps, but, doing a little bit more beginner videos, I've been doing a bunch more Teams' videos, but, we've been putting like two or three videos up a week on YouTube lately. - You need to get a-- - So... custom channels slug, it's what you need to do there. - I do, I have it already. It's slash Intelligenk. So it's YouTube slash Intelligenk. - You don't get it navigating just through the YouTube directory, that's an-- - You know what, yeah, and I don't know why, `cause if I go into all my settings, it is set to be my custom URL. But going through the directory doesn't get it. I, maybe if I undo it and redo it, I don't know, I blame YouTube. But yes, as a result. - As you should. - I got tired of using webcams, and for a while I was using my itune camera, my iPhone, for video, and I finally splurged and bought the Sony ZV1, and I figured I'd try it for today too. I have a bit of a goofy setup, `cause I'm actually, naturally they released their webcam software for it, for windows, but not for Mac, so I have to go out of the HDMI out, and I have one of the Blackmagic ATEM Mini HDMI switches, So it goes, HDMIO into the Blackmagic ATEM Mini, and then it shows up like that device shows up, as a webcam, so I can pick any one of my four HDMI inputs as my webcam, and my camera's one of them. So, that is what I'm doing. But then it's always like, where do you position the camera, right? `Cause I could put it over there, or I could try to put it up here, but if it's yeah... - Well, the next step is, you get the mount, that can come right over your monitor, and then come down right dead center in the monitor, so it's actually gonna be sitting in front of content on your screen, but you would be looking directly into it, like into the souls of your audience. - Right, I mean, it's small enough, I could probably get away with that, or I could just like set this tripod up, so that, `cause I have a little mini desk tripod, that I could set up, so it's right in front of the monitor, that would work too. But then I couldn't see - Your beautiful face on my monitor Scott. - Oh sure you could. You could find a way to make that happen. - Although I'm not looking at my monitor right now, I'm looking at the camera. That's the weirdest thing with all the webcams and everything, is always like not looking at everybody else, but trying to keep looking at the camera. - Yeah. I keep trying to adjust my set up, like, can I pull mine over further or move the camera, over, you know, what that looks like, and where it comes out in the middle, but-- or we just-- - The struggle is real. - Yeah, or we just need to use Teams for everything, go get ourselves some surface devices, and use the eye fixing feature. - Yeah? - That we could - Is that what's next? The Surface Duo? - No, not the Duo. Didn't we talk about this last week? Well, I didn't know if, I didn't know if you had broke down an order one yeah. - No, I have not. It's interesting to see the feedback on it. It has gotten some good feedback, because, like you said, I drastically... Misunderstood-- - who's had good feedback from? `Cause it's had one of the weirdest roll outs, that I've seen in a while. There's a dual embargo, so, the people who received - Oh calf. - You know those kids for like the first 50 devices-- - But they couldn't turn them on? - Yeah, well they could, they're just not allowed to talk about it. Which is hilarious, because if you're willing to brave Best Buy, at whatever store, the demo units are up with the software on, so you could totally go into a Best Buy or something like that, and just play with the shelf unit, with its demo mode. - Interesting. So, maybe not good reviews it hasn't been terrible, like everybody talks about the price, but they didn't, I personally didn't realize how, in line that pricing actually was with all the other foldables. Because there was another one-- - So the pricing is in line with the form factor, but if you consider other foldables, it is still not up to spec, for a bunch of different things, right? - It's a hardware, it's all apps, use hardware. Yeah, so, SOC Ram camera, all those things are behind, and even the battery is pretty small, because it's such a thin device, I think you're looking at something, it's on the order of like 35, 3,600 milli amp hours, in that battery, versus going to, you know, like something that's a larger, thicker device, like the Fold2 user things that have come out recently. - True, I was pressed by the size of the... Like some of the reviewer said, it looks super wide, like, I look like I'd have to stretch my fingers out, to actually hold it because of the width. - Yeah, not you, you'd be like a one-hander, but-- - You know, like normal people, yeah, two hands. - It was about the same height as the iPhone 11 Max, but it was definitely wider than the iPhone 11 Max. - Yes, yeah. - So. - Different devices for different things, but, we'll see. - Yes. - Again, I am probably not the target market for that, because I have no plans in buying, that or frankly, any foldable for that matter. Because I don't have a use for it. If I need something bigger, I'm gonna take my iPad. And if I want something small, yeah. And I won't have to fiddle with that. Or like, if you want to take a picture, having to take it out, like flip it all the way around to, take a forward facing picture of my kids, instead of a selfie, it's not gonna happen. - But again, that's unique to the surface, the Surface Duo, that was a design decision they made, only to have that camera on the inside, things like the Galaxy Z Flip, or the Galaxy Fold, they do not have that issue, because they have cameras on both the front and back. - Yes, although, like you said, I think those are actually, which one came out, they announced this week, it had a starting price of like $2,000. - That's the Fold2. Yeah It's a Galaxy Z Fold2, yeah. - Anyways, should we actually get into stuff we haven't talked about before, as we rehash stuff we already talked about? - Yeah, what do you wanna talk about? - What do you wanna-- - Physio, AKS... - Lists. - Lists. - That have GAID now in Teams. - You know, yes. So, Lists, I think it was announced just yesterday, so today is what? Today is November... - November? - November. - Wow. - I don't even have slug... - You're so way off in the future-- - Yeah-- - September, let go back a couple months back-- - Maybe, I'm like projecting, I'm wishing it was already in November and it's almost over, yeah. - But then you would have missed Ignite. Okay, we'll talk about that later. - I don't know, I could've gone back and watched on video. - That's okay, it's September 4. - Yeah, so on September 3rd, they announced, that all this stuff was GAing. So, Lists are GAing inside of Teams, and the interesting thing here, the part that I thought was really cool, when you think about like parody between, between the different clouds that are out there, like commercial clouds and sovereign clouds, like GCC, things like that, they actually announced-- - Yup. - That it's coming to both commercial cloud, and GCC at the same time. So awesome job, you know, congratulations lists, and Teams team, they're getting it done, but, the funnier thing is, you still might be in a tenant, that doesn't have Lists, `cause it hasn't finished its global rollout yet. - Right, `cause now it's GA well, yeah. `Cause it's GA, both Lists are GAID, and the List app and Teams is GAID. But, both of them are going through, like you said, that global rollout, so technically, you can have it in Teams, and not in SharePoint, which means it wouldn't work in Teams, or you could have it in SharePoint, but you don't have the app in Teams. I have it in both places. I was surprised how long it took me, like, I'm on the preview beta first release of everything, and, some of the stuff around lists, I didn't actually get in my preview environment, until it GAID. - Yes, yeah. ...

  • Sep 3, 2020 · 33 min

    Episode 193 – Organize All The Things With Project Moca

    In Episode 193, Ben and Scott talk about how to protect your organization with Exchange Online transport rules and prevent the forwarding of messages from other applications like Power Automate. They also talk about Project Moca and how it can be used to organize your personal information through Outlook on the web. Transcript Email Download New Tab - Welcome to episode 193 of the "Microsoft Cloud IT Pro Podcast," recorded live, August 31st, 2020. This is a show about Microsoft 365 in Azure, from the perspective of IT pros and end users. Where we discuss a recent topic or news and how it relates to you. In this episode, Ben and Scott spend some time talking about email exfiltration and security, new features coming for Windows security, that relate to advanced threat protection, Microsoft 365 business. And then we would be remiss if we didn't talk about Moca, Project Moca that is. A new feature coming to Outlook on the web. So let's dive in. - The bites and the bits they make a difference. - They do make a difference. So should we talk about news today? We have a whole bunch of topics we've talked about that we've had, and haven't talked about, all of that. - Yeah, let's do it. - All right, take your pick. You had a few that you had on our list that we haven't talked about. So I'll let you kick it off this week. - Yeah, let's talk about email exfiltration controls for Office 365 connectors. - Perfect, I like that, anything that prevents email from going out if it shouldn't, it's a good thing right, email security? - Yes. - So what are these exfiltration filters that have been rolled out? - So you can do things now, well, they've added extra headers to messages from certain services. So you have things now, like there's an XMS mail application header. And that header might be set to a string value such as Microsoft Power Automate. So you could take something like that and create a transport rule in exchange online, which says all emails that come from Power Automate, now go through this filter chain. So maybe they can be sent to external people. So that's kind of cool and you can extend that and take it forward a little bit. There's also an XMS Mail operation type header, which will have values like forward, reply, send, things like that. So you can potentially like take either or one of those rules and either say, we're going to have rules that execute against a particular application. Like your business needs to keep sensitive information internal, and you never want a Flow in Power Automate to send an email to the outside world no matter what your users say, well, you can do that. Or you can also do things like look for purely forwarded messages going through your system and not even allow things like that. Or combine those two together. If Power Automate is logging into my mailbox and forwarding messages, stop it. Like just kill it at the edge with the transport rule. Which is kind of fun. - So with this, yeah, so this transport rule and the new headers could I now do something like if somebody clicks reply to all on a message that has 250 participants, tell them to stop doing that? - I don't think you can stop the whole thing. There's no great thing for that-- - It's not gonna stop. - buttons that vendors make and put in your mail client but really you just have to teach people better behaviors. - Yes, no amount of technology can fix certain behaviors of people. - No. - That is really nice because there's a lot, as people are using Flow and PowerApps and all of this more, I mean, even I've built stuff for my clients where it is automatically sending out information, it's logging information. Microsoft is putting those technologies in the hand of end users and they might not always realize what they're doing when they create certain Flows. So being able to put some rules in there that looks at the source of these emails, whether it be PowerApps Flow, or I don't know how many it's extended out to, or if it will start extending out to other areas. Definitely a good thing to have for email security. - Yeah, it's interesting. 'Cause it takes this SAS world where, for better or worse, we all feel like we're in less control and it puts some of that control back in, kind of that governance plane or that administrative plane for the product. I don't know that, like so yes it solves the problem of email exfiltration. It doesn't solve the problem of you having to go to your user community and continue to educate them and let them understand the rules that drive the business. Like this is not a feature that goes into Power Automate and says you can never create a Flow with a forwarding rule that goes outside your organization. Like that type of governance doesn't exist there. So now, you might go and implement something like this, but then from a user adoption plane, they could still be going out and creating all these types of things. So I would maybe want to extend that with some reporting and take a look and so if you do set up rules like this, like where are we blocking it? Who was the person or the process that sent it? So that we can go educate them and kind of have a talk and see like hey, are we meeting the needs of the business? Or, did we potentially make things worse? - Yeah, definitely. And it does, that ties in. So I actually had an experience. It wasn't with PowerApps or Flow, but this past, I think it was this past week, where I had a client come to me and say, "Hey, I just had a user set up a mail forwarding rule. "What's going on, can you look it up?" Come to find out, said user of said client clicked on some type of malicious malware that automatically went into her Outlook on the web. So this wasn't even like a Outlook on-prem rule. It was Outlook on the web. So I don't know if it was the whole, I'm signed in, in one tab, I opened it in another tab and created this Outlook on the web rule but I was able to go in through all the audit logs to create an Outlook on the web rule to automatically forward email with certain information in it to some external email address. Fortunately, we had actually set up a mail Flow rule that said, do not allow people to set up rules that forward mail externally. And it prevented this whole fiasco where certain confidential information could have been forwarded. So the nice thing is the rule worked, it caught it all. It didn't allow this rule to be forwarded. And as a result, no mail got forwarded out. But also with all of the unified audit logs, the mail tracing all of the security features available in Office 365, we could also go through and show exactly what had happened. Walk through the, get a good idea of what happened as well as verify that they indeed were protected. - Yeah, so the other thing that I've done in the past there is you, probably want to implement process, like again on top of your transport rules to do things like, just run a PowerShell script that audits everyone in your exchange org. And if they have a forwarding address set on their mailbox, let's bubble that back up and report it. 'Cause you might be killing those things, like you said, on the edge with the transport rule, but that hasn't solved the underlying problem that somebody clicked a malicious link and a grease monkey script came in and did all this stuff and set up emails to forward out. So, you've got two things. Like yeah, was there a rule there? Or was there an all up forwarder placed on the mailbox as well? And what does that look like? So that can manifest itself in a couple different ways. Like I always like just have a script that runs on a cadence and enumerates all the mailboxes and anybody who has a forwarder set to an external domain or something that's external to your organization, you wanna know about that. You don't always need to know about, the manager who picked up somebody's mailbox for the next 30 days and has a forwarding rule in place there. - Right, although in theory, should that be a fowarding rule or should that just be delegated access to the user's mailbox? - Oh, well . That all depends on how people know, how much people know about how to use email. - It is true, so another one that Microsoft actually recently announced in the middle of all of this, so while, I was dealing with this with a client, I also noticed a new message in my message center, linked to a Microsoft 365 roadmap item, where Microsoft is also adding a outbound spam policy rule to block external forwarding for select people in their organization. So this allows you to kind of, with your scenario is, if a certain user does need a forward mail externally or has an external mail forwarding rule on because there probably are some cases where that's necessary, you will now be able to use your anti-spam rules up on anti-spam policies in Office 365 advanced threat protection in their spam policies to block it at that level on a per user basis. So even more interesting announcements and features coming around blocking that mail forwarding data exfiltration. - Yeah, I mentioned this stuff kits, the Math changes a little bit with everybody being at home and any time any device kind of policies and having, you have to shut more of this stuff down at the edge this way. So it's good to see that come out as a native control and not requiring a third party or anything like that. - Right, 'cause there's, going back to the whole work from home. There's probably a lot of companies that have certain proxy filters set up, different edge devices set up for people when they're in the organization. That protect against this stuff and all of a sudden people are at home maybe may or may not be working on a company on device, may or may not be going through your company's network. And, let's be honest when people are at home,...

  • Aug 27, 2020 · 34 min

    Episode 192 – SkyNet Is Real

    In Episode 192, Ben and Scott talk about the deprecation of Internet Explorer, the impacts of Cloud Shell being open-sourced, and a new button Microsoft Teams for starting new conversations. Transcript Email Download New Tab - Welcome to episode 192 of the Microsoft Cloud IT Pro Podcast, recorded live, August 23rd, 2020. This is a show about Microsoft 365 and Azure from the perspective of IT pros and end users where we discuss a recent topic or news and how it relates to you. And this episode, Ben and Scott get back on track and start off the show talking about the new Microsoft Flight Simulator, as well as the latest DARPA AI project. And from there, we dive into Microsoft 365 and Azure news talking about the Microsoft Cloud Shell, about Internet Explorer 11, Microsoft Forms Pro, Microsoft Ignite, and other news and announcements related to Microsoft 365 and Azure. - I don't even know how to start. I have nothing creative. It's episode 192. A month from now, we're going to be recording 200, Scott. What are we going to do for, I feel like we should do something for 200. We didn't do anything for 100. We are very poor at celebrating our accomplishments. - What could we do? Continue to stay inside some more? - Sure. - We've gt that going for us. - Two months away, two months, it's the end of some month and the year 2020. October, it'll be like Halloween, right-ish? - So it'll only be, you know, 105, and it'll be nice and humid outside. - Yeah, maybe we can dress up since we did start doing videos, Scott. Last week's episode, I actually published, we were recording our video, I went in and marked it up a little bit. But we actually published video of us on YouTube. So if you want the whole unedited video version of the podcast, you can go find it on YouTube now. And we'll see, hopefully I can keep doing it. I need to fix my camera though. I have a standup desk that wiggles, as you can probably see in my video. - Yeah, well, we'll have to add not only a non-wiggly camera, but like a discord chat or something like that. - Oh, man, this is going to get to be a lot of work. - I know. - So do you want my random news for the day? I have two random news articles for you. Which one do you want, one or two? This one's more interesting. - Well, let's back up. So Flight Simulator came out. Have you played it yet. - No, but it has a 212-story building, you know, in a city. - It's in Melbourne, it's in Melbourne, Australia. Do you know how they got that 212-story obelisk inside the middle of the city? - You found one of my random links and I have not read it all yet, other than somebody had a typo somewhere and they scraped the data from there and that's how it got there. But I have not had a chance to read all the details. - So mapping is an interesting thing. You know, there's a lot of companies out there that potentially provide map data. There are certainly some that build their own. You think maybe about like Google or Apple, you know, driving cars around for their street views and things like that. But they're also collecting telemetry and road data. You've got navigation applications like, coming from the Tom-Toms of the world, maybe you've got Waze. So there's kind of commercial open-source things out there. And one of the things that Microsoft bases it's data, map data off of, for not only Flight Simulator, but things like potentially Bing is OpenStreetMap. And in OpenStreetMap, there's an entry for a building in Melbourne, Australia, which is two stories tall, but was inadvertently entered through a typo to be 212 stories. And when you are leveraging OpenStreetMap and kind of taking it as a source of truth, you would just say, Hey, here's a thing that we need to render on our map in realtime. So combine it with satellite imagery data and kind of do the 3D overlay on it. - And there you have it 212-story building. Have you played it yet? It looks like, I haven't seen how big it is. It's said it comes on 10 DVDs. And I watched some YouTube videos of people getting like their Microsoft unboxing kits of it with all the accessories. I won't lie, I was kind of jealous of these people getting top of the line yokes and sticks and throttle controls along with the game from Microsoft. - Yes, so I did, I don't have any of that stuff. And embarrassingly, I can't start the download this month because I live under the Comcast regime, and if I do, I will go over my data cap, because it is a massive, massive download. So it's on the order of 130 to 150 gigs just to kind of run through the pre-install for it. - Yeah, that sounds about right if it's 10 DVDs worth of data. - Yeah, so if you are a Game Pass subscriber, like a Microsoft Game Pass Ultimate subscriber, there's a version in the Windows Store that you can get through Game Pass for, quote/unquote, free, because it is part of your existing subscription. - I wonder if I can play it in a VM. - I did it and you really cannot. - Yeah, that was kind of my guess. - Yeah. That was going to be my first thing, was like loaded up inside parallels, but I actually went and stole one of my kids' laptops because it's got a newer Radeon chip in it. - That's funny. - So maybe I'll come over to your place and like just hang on the wifi and download it or something. - Perfect, well, cause I have two internet connections now. So I have two one-terabyte limits. I have a terabyte limit from AT&T and a terabyte limit from Xfinity. So we'll just pick the one that I'm the lowest on. You can download it on that one. - That's the way to do it. So Flight Simulator, that'll be the thing to do. - Alright, so my next one is along the same lines. Did you follow any of the DARPA stuff the last few days? - I have not-- - So DARPA had the alpha dogfight trials, and what this was, I should send you a link to this, is a AI competition with AI dogfights, I think that, there it goes, with AI dog fighting. So essentially a simulated dogfight between F-16s. So there were eight, I think there were eight teams. They've whittled it down over the course of, apparently this whole thing has been going on for awhile. But they whittled it down over the course of the last year or so, and then had the finals of it over the last three days where these eight teams were all having simulated dog fights all using AI, teaching their models as they were running through these simulations. And then they capped it all off with the winner of the competition flying against one of the top F-16 pilots, and it was an AI versus human dogfight in a simulated environment. And it was, I watched some of it off and on and it was fascinating to watch the AI battles, but then watching AI versus humans. And all I can say, Scott, is the human race is in trouble. We're going to get exterminated by the machines. - Skynet is real? - Skynet is real. No, it wasn't even close. Like, it was absolute domination by the AI flying the F-16 versus the human. I'm not a pilot nor have I ever been in the military, but just watching it from my perspective, a lot of it seemed to be the fact that, using the AI, once the planes got close to having them in the cone of a legitimate gunshot, the AI was able to precisely aim a lot better than the human was. Kind of like, you know, when you go play video games and if you put like any of the first-person shooters on the expert level, and those bots always seem to be able to precisely aim, it kind of felt like that in these dogfights. That aiming ability was just a lot more steady and a lot more precise than somebody's hands. - Yeah, you know, I think that was always one of the things, right? Computers don't have any, you know, they don't have any shake, they don't have any muscle memory to overcome or, you know, getting nervous in those situations. You also have to contend with, if an AI is driving the process, like say it was even a real plane that was being driven by AI, there's nothing to contend with in the way of natural physical force. So you don't have to worry about overcoming G-forces in a bank or anything like that. And as a human, right, as a bag of like meaty flesh, you are at a tactical disadvantage. - Yeah, so it was interesting. They streamed a bunch of it on YouTube. So I think that all the YouTube videos are still out there, so we can link to this article or you can go search for the alpha dog fight trials and watch some of the videos. And there's definitely a lot of it you can skip through, because there was a lot of talking but, I mean, the fun part was the AI battles. - Yeah, that's the best kind of YouTube, all the stuff that you can skip through. Maybe you just go find the alpha dog fight on TikTok and then doom scroll your way through it. - Yes, TikTok is banned in the US, Scott. No TikTok, bad TikTok. - Not yet. - We're going to make the internet great again. - It still has days left. Days, I say. - Okay, and that's all the political stuff we're getting into on this podcast. - Oh, what else? - On to news doomsday. Here's a terrible segue. Doomsday, Internet Explorer is going to meet its doom in 2021 when it comes to the Microsoft 365 apps. So I think this was, they announced it the 17th, they announced it four days ago. So earlier this week, August 17, Microsoft announced you have one year of support for Internet Explorer 11 and Microsoft Edge legacy to work or to be supported. I guess it doesn't mean it's not gonna work, but to be supported in internet Explorer 11. So come August 17, 2021, the only supported browsers for Microsoft 365 are going to be the new Edge, and then I'm going to assume, Chrome, Safari, Firefox are all going to stay supported as well. But maybe, finally, people are starting to kick IE 11 to the curb. - One can only hope. You know, it was a weird road to get to Credge. and I think some people are still put off by the way the upg

  • Aug 20, 2020 · 31 min

    Episode 191 – Fortnite, Foldables, and Azure AD, Oh My!

    In Episode 191, Ben and Scott get distracted and talk about how good Fortnite is when lawsuits are involved, new exciting world of foldables with the Surface Duo, and the preview of Azure AD role-assignments to cloud-based Azure AD groups. Transcript Email Download New Tab - Welcome to episode 191 of the Microsoft Cloud IT Pro podcast, recorded live on August 14th, 2020. This is a show about Microsoft 365 and Azure, from the perspective of IT pros and end users, where we discuss the topic or recent news and how it relates to you. In this episode, Ben completely derail Scott from our plan topics, by bringing up things such as lawsuits in the technology space, the Microsoft duo and the DataFlex rename. Then we wrap up the show by talking about the newly released public preview feature, assigning groups to Azure AD roles. Record, recording all the things. - All of them, all the time, - Including Scott in his Batman shirt. - That's right. - Hey Scott, should we start doing video? Should we start actually putting the video of this out on YouTube? - We could. - Or should we start live streaming this to YouTube? We've talked about this in the past, but I don't know that we've ever talked about it publicly and I just kind of suckered you in out of the blue. - We can do whatever you want Ben, I'm here to support you. - Yeah, you're here to support me. I don't know, we should come up with something to do. We should do, maybe we should start by just posting the videos. And then if we get ambitious stream because streaming always brings complications. - Yeah, we know how that goes. - Yeah. And then we can add it, although to be fair, neither one of us are probably gonna edit video. We'll just throw like an intro out on there and an outro on there and say, "Here, YouTube have fun with this." - Something like that. How better would it be, if we, could we embed a video in a video. - We could have the inception of podcasts, right? - Yeah. - I have a TV back here, maybe I can put the video of us. Oh, there, there's the TV. I could raise it up, put a video of us on there and have the whole inception effect. - I mean, most of it's gonna be just me with a coffee cup in front of my face. - Whatever, man makes it that way every once in a while too. So I have a question for you, Scott, the junior you can confuse pear logos and Apple logos. - Well, yes, if you've ever watched Nickelodeon show, you would know this. - Yeah, my kids aren't, we haven't introduced them to Nickelodeon yet. - No, it would have been like Nickelodeon when you were a kid. - Oh. And you're expecting me to remember that. I didn't have Nickelodeon when I was a kid either we didn't pay for cable. My parents are Dutch, aka cheap. So we never had cable. - Well, we played outside. - In the way back when in all Nickelodeon shows, all Apple products would have a pear logo on them. - Got it. Yeah, I don't remember that. But this is not related to Nickelodeon's pear, Apple is actually suing a company of five employees because they're green, obviously pear logo can get confused with Apple's black Apple logo. I mean we can throw a link to like the image in the screenshots. They look absolutely nothing alike and people are furious at Apple, which understandably so this is a little bit of a ridiculous lawsuit. - Yeah, I gotta pick the brands. - You gotta protect the fruit. I've actually heard Apple have sued several companies whenever somebody comes out with another fruit logo, they just sue them. I think Apple thinks they own all the fruit or something, who knows, that's my random news for the day. - That is fairly random. - We could talk about lawsuits all day long today, cause there's another interesting one that hit yesterday, that you had mentioned. - That I had mentioned? - That you had mentioned wasn't it yesterday? with Epic games is suing Apple. - Well, Epic is suing everybody. So there's a little bit of a, if you play Fortnite and lots and lots and lots of people, play Fortnite, I am very bad at Fortnite. I don't play it every day. I'm very bad at it. And you know generally go in and die quickly and then go with, this is not the game for me, but occasionally I come back to it because it's on all the devices and you know, it's a little bit of a time waster. So if you play Fortnite you're probably, you're probably aware of this, but if you don't play Fortnite, Fortnite is a super duper big game, right? It's hugely popular and it's available on all sorts of platforms, on certainly Apple's app store, it's available in Google play, it's on PC, it's on Mac. If there's a device out there with a screen that can run it, it's basically on it and ready to go. Within Fortnite, like many other games today, it's a free game to play, but you can buy virtual items within it, using virtual dollars or Vbox. And Fortnite came out with an update where they were giving a 20% discount off of Vbox, if you bought them through basically Fortnite's payment processing engine or Epic's payment processing engine over your app store of choice, so normally on both Google and Apple for in app purchases within games, you pay that 30% overhead to the app store provider. And they act as the payment processor and any kind of subscriptions or things would go through them. And ultimately not back to kind of the, you know, the company that was perhaps making the product like Epic in this case. Well, Epic, like I said, they pushed an update, which they did in a very interesting way. It wasn't an actually an update to the app. So it wasn't like you went into your app store of choice and you saw, Oh, there's new version of Fortnite, and it comes with these features. They basically shadow pushed it. So it kinda didn't go through the regular review process on either side for Apple or Google and it presented two prices. It said, "Hey, here's the price you pay in the app store, "$10 or come and buy your Vbox from us at a 20% discount." And they had both buttons in the app, so effectively you could do an online purchase through their own payment processing engine. And you know, they would still take their overhead and kind of do whatever they needed to do there. So long and short of it is that skirts a bunch of rules, whether those rules are right and wrong is kind of a whole different thing that, you know, they're not paying that 30% cut to the app store that is providing that payment processing functionality to them. So Apple removed them very quickly. So if you already have the app on your device, you still have the app on your device, but if you delete the app or if you were a new user coming in, you cannot delete the app right now. There's kind of like if you think about like Apple being able to remove things from, or kind of control distribution of apps, there's really three levers they could pull here, they could say, "Okay, I'm not gonna do anything, "and we're gonna let Epic continue forward with Fortnite "with this model that probably wasn't gonna happen." There's this second method where they can effectively remove it from the app store and remove it from search, so if somebody new is coming in, they can't download it. And now Epic cannot push any updates to the binaries for that application as well. There also would've been a third option, which is nuclear option, which would have been revoke Epic's developers certificate and then make Fortnite stop working on everyone's devices. And Apple kind of chose the middle of the road one there, Google also a couple of hours after Apple, went ahead and pulled Epic out of their store as well. So now Epic, who makes Fortnite, has filed lawsuits against both Apple and Google, that they are by all accounts, not very likely to win at all. You know, they're choosing to take this stand, which, you know, whatever you think of that, the 30% cut and everything else, you know, Epic's got a little bit of money to play with and, you know, they're willing to roll the dice on some lawsuits and things. - Yeah, it'll be interesting because Apple's also getting sued in the EU for that same 30% cut policy. - There's arguments to be made there, if you go, I don't know if you've had a chance to read through any of the, kind of the briefs around what Epic has going on, but effectively their argument in the Apple lawsuit at least boils down to the app store is anti-competitive. And they're kind of making the argument that they should be able to have their own app store on Apple devices and not just for their game. Like they don't want to just push their game out, they want to host another app store on Apple devices and make all that stuff work and come through. So obviously if Epic was able to do that, they would probably stand to make on the order of, you know, billions of dollars, if they were large enough and had enough developers, pushing apps into their store, but that also requires a bunch of platform support from someone like Apple. Like I don't think it would be possible today to just make an alternative app store without Apple's blessing, cause how would you get the app store onto your Apple device? You'd either have to download it from Apple's app store to begin with, which then it's subject called the you know, sand boxing and restrictions, or it would have to be preloaded and that just ain't gonna happen. - Yeah, it's all really interesting because it's all geared around the anti-competitive stuff, and I mean, it gets that applicant has some monopoly, but if you're going to choose to put it on iOS devices, like if you're going to choose to put something on my website or my platform, you're kind of going to have to adhere to the policies that I have for my platform. And again, you can't do another app store. You can't do in app purchases, maybe 30% is a big cut, but then just don't put it on there, I guess....

  • Aug 13, 2020 · 39 min

    Episode 190 – Sometimes The Waveforms Lie

    In Episode 190, Ben and Scott talk about the difficulties of naming human genes when Excel gets in the way, improvements coming to the automatic cleanup of deployment history within Azure Resource Manager, and the automatic enablement of App Lock in the Microsoft Authenticator app. Transcript Email Download New Tab - Welcome to episode 190 of the Microsoft Cloud IT Pro Podcast recorded live on August 7th, 2020. This is a show about Microsoft 365 and Azure, from the perspective of IT pros and end users, where we discuss the topic or recent news and how it relates to you. In this episode, Ben and Scott talk about Excel getting in the way of naming human genes, Azure resource manager deployment cleanup, and the Microsoft Authenticator app among other recent Microsoft Cloud news. Had to make sure it wasn't picking up my audio somewhere else because the waveforms can lie. - The wave, okay. - Well, you just kinda see the waveforms there. You don't know which mic it's coming from. - The waveforms can lie. That's gonna become my new motto mantra. - The waveforms can lie, not human genes are really dates. - This is like, super fun because we all know that Excel makes the world go round. And, - Absolutely. - Excel not only makes the world go round. I mean, it's a database, it's a defacto kind of business driver. It does so many things that people don't think about in so many industries and so many businesses to the point that it impacts the way scientists on a global scale name human genes, so that they can continue their research, which is just amazing. - I had not seen this article until you sent it to me this morning. - It's an issue with the way that Excel automatically parses data. So, I'm sure we've all been there where you paste a number into Excel, or you Paste a string that has a number on it and Excel decides it is, something else. So, some genes have alphanumeric symbols, like there'll be a mix of uppercase alphas and a number such as MARCH1, which is short for membrane associated ring-CH-type finger 1. But, Excel doesn't know that MARCH1 is membrane associated ring-CH-type finger 1. It thinks that that is the 1st of March. So, it will change it into a date column with formatting that is appropriate for what you put in, which was MARCH1. So, it'll be 1-Mar, one March, right? And you go to the next column and the next column could be one April and then one May, but that's not what you were trying to do. You were trying to do another thing. So, you would think as a rational person, you would come back and say, "Okay, auto formatting is getting in the way of me putting my gene data into Excel so that I can do whatever manipulations or visualizations of the data that I want to there." Well, Excel does not offer the option to turn off auto formatting. And the only way that you could really avoid it is to remember that you'd have to change the data type for each individual column before you went and pasted that data in there. So, that would certainly be a way around it, but you'd have to teach every scientist in the world how to do this, that uses Excel. And that might not be the most scalable thing. So, how do you fix this problem? Excel, well can't be fixed, but you can fix the way or change the way that you name things to better accommodate the tools that your users use. So therefore, the HUGO Gene Nomenclature Committee or the HGNC has recently published new guidelines for gene naming, including that any symbols that affect data handling and retrieval like MARCH1, would fall into that category. They will now be renamed, so MARCH1 is gonna become MARCHF1, SEPT1, S-E-P-T-1, has become SEPTIN1 and a number of others along the way. So, as of right now, 27 genes have been renamed to accommodate this. And of course there will potentially be more. - Huh? - Yeah. - So now do they have to go back and rename all these genes and all these different databases everywhere or is it just kind of okay going forward from this date, whatever date they actually renamed them, August 6th or whatever, it's going to be the new name and everything with the old name remains the old name? - Well, like, unlike many things, you're gonna be in a period of time where you've got the old spreadsheets and the old databases and everything that have MARCH1 and MARCHF1. So, you've got to now potentially accommodate for both of them. But if you were sitting down and doing genetic research today, and you're following the guidelines from this standards body, you would go down the new path and you'd be a little bit safer. - Maybe we should just stop using Excel as a database. - Let's not be drastic. - Oh my, can you imagine being the person at Microsoft saying, "Hey, you know this update I made to Excel, I just forced everybody to rename human genes." The stories they can tell their grandkids someday. - Right? - I don't even know where to go from here. - Well, - I think my brain's still on vacation. I got back yesterday morning. I woke my kids up at 4:30 a.m. to get on the plane and come home. - Well, you made it. - We made it. Do you feel overwhelmed by trying to manage your Office 365 environment? Are you facing unexpected issues that disrupt your company's productivity? Intelligink is here to help much like you take your car to the mechanic that has specialized knowledge on how to best keep your car running, Intelligink helps you with your Microsoft Cloud environment because that's their expertise. Intelligink keeps up with the latest updates in the Microsoft Cloud to help keep your business running smoothly and ahead of the curve. Whether you are a small organization with just a few users up to an organization of several thousand employees, they want to partner with you to implement and administer your Microsoft Cloud technology. Visit them at intelligink.com/podcast. That's I-N-T-E-L-L-I-G-I-N-K .com/podcast for more information or to schedule a 30 minute call to get started with them today. Remember Intelligink focuses on the Microsoft Cloud so you can focus on your business. - Let's talk about some Azure stuff since, - Azure stuff, - Yes. - or Event stuff? - Since your brain is fine, Event stuff. - Since my brain is fine. What's event stuff? - What's event stuff? - What's event stuff? Ignite. That's about all. Ignite, it's coming. And we will not be there live in-person because there is no live in-person, which we already knew. However, it's gonna be September 22 through 24, which is three days, but it's 48 hours straight of streaming Ignite presentations. So, similar to how they did Build, jump on and just watch Ignite for 48 hours. Although I'm guessing in there, there's gonna be replays of sessions so they can get various sessions and various time zones and, all of that. So, you won't need to try to figure out how to stay up for 48 hours if you want to watch it all. - That is genuinely the intent, is not to have you, Ben, staying up for 48 hours, but providing coverage for a potentially worldwide audience. - Yes, however, we will be live from our homes where there is no lines for food and no lines for restrooms. - Yeah. - And, - I'm trying to figure out, do I broadcast from the desk or the couch? What's the optimal situation there? - See I was going for the pool. I might just go sit up by the pool, kick my feet up, listen to the waterfall trickle, in the 95 degree Florida heat. That's the disadvantage, right? Although it was gonna be in New Orleans this year. - Which also would be hot. - Which also would be hot. But unfortunately here by having it go virtual, it does not allow us to escape the heat that is usually associated with Microsoft Ignite. We are still gonna be attending Microsoft Ignite in the sweltering heat of the Southern United States. - Yeah, well, you cannot get away from that one. - All right, enough about that one. We also have GlobalCon coming up too. That was the other event I was gonna say. The Collab365 guys, Mark Jones, the whole team over there are doing GlobalCon3 that I'm doing some stuff for. There's a, Power Platform day coming up that I have a Power Platform fundamental session at, and then they're doing a full five-day conference later this year and I don't have the dates off the top of my head even though I should. - GlobalCon - Con. - 3. - is, - Yes. - September 8 through September 11. - So, my whole month of September is just pretty much gonna be conferences because Mark Rackley is still planning on doing his conference as well. Last I have heard at the end of September, shortly after Ignite. - You have not escaped conference season. - We have not. We just have escaped traveling for conference season, but that's all the conference events news I have. ♪ Tu tu tuli ♪ Yeah, most of it's all virtual. So enjoy virtual conferences from the comfort of your own home, without the flights, the lines for the bathroom, the lines for food, and sleeping in hotels. - Those are all the fun parts of conferences. - Yeah, okay. - I'm running out of conference shirts to wear. - I see you're wearing a conference shirt today, - I am. - Because that's, - the way it goes. And I've had to go back to regular T-shirts and things during the workweek and, it's getting rough. - I don't have many. Did I tell you this story when we walked past one of the Microsoft Stores a few months back when Microsoft Stores were still a thing? My daughter saw the Microsoft sign on the store and said, "Hey daddy, that's what's on all of your shirts." - Yeah. - Oops. - Yeah, we gotta get you some new shirts. - Apparently, okay. With that, should we talk Azure stuff now? - Yeah, let's, let's talk some Azure stuff. So, there are some changes potentially coming to ARM, which could be beneficial to certain types of customers. So, when I say ARM, Azure Resource Manager,...

  • Aug 6, 2020 · 32 min

    Episode 189 – Teams Client Updates

    In Episode 189, Ben and Scott discuss some of the enhancements to the Microsoft Teams client on desktop and mobile with the public rollout of pop out meetings and chats as well as the Tasks app in Teams for task management across Planner, To Do, and Outlook/Exchange Online mailboxes. Transcript Email Download New Tab - Welcome to episode 189. This is Microsoft Cloud IT Pro podcast recorded live on July 31st, 2020. This is a show about Microsoft 365 and Azure, from the perspective of our it pros and end users. Where we discuss a topic or recent news and how it leads to you. In this episode, Ben and Scott discussed some of the enhancements to the Microsoft Teams client on desktop and mobile with the public rollout of pop-out meetings and chats, as well as the Tasks app in Teams for task management across Planner, To-Do and Outlook or Exchange Online mailboxes. - So guess what I did in honor of episode 189, which means absolutely nothing. And then we're getting close to 200. Will we need to do something fancy for episode 200? - No, we'll be there right around conference season. Right around the socially distance conference season. - Yes. Although I am going to one conference there. As in person as of yet, we will see. Mark Rack. I am braving Mark Rackley's North American collaboration summit at this point in time. - Yeah. I don't know. Have you checked the news this week? I know you've been remote up there. - I am hiding from the news. - Google is officially remote until summer 2021. Microsoft, I think we're not far behind. Like nobody at Microsoft is going back until at least January 2021. CES is going virtual. Let's put it that way. - I saw that I did see CES was going virtual. - That's the point that we're at. - Though to be fair, I mean, Mark Rackley is great, but his conference also is not quite as big as CES. Because of all of it understandably so his registration dropped. So I think it's gonna be a combination of in-person and virtual and then yeah. He's doing some things, but I think because registration dropped, it's gonna be a lot easier to socially distance there. I think he's working on some things. Again, we'll have to see, 'cause there it is still a couple months away. - It'll be interesting. - It shall be. But that is not what I'd do in episode of 189. I actually pushed the button and upgraded to Big Sur. So I could not take it any longer. - So there is no upgrade to Big Sur. It's a beta. You should not be doing this. You should be playing with the mm-hmm map with Sean and I. - Sure to not tell me about the mm-hmm map. No, I've actually been surprised. It has been three or four days now. I have two apps that just don't work. They're minor ones. One of them is the bartender app that I use to help manage my menu bar. And the other one is my TripMode app that helps me control which apps are allowed to access the internet. Particularly when I'm in a hotspot, my bandwidth is limited. Neither one of them are day-to-day critical. But other than that, everything has actually been working really well. - You're a brave soul . And would you look at that. - I don't know if I'm classified as brave. Usually it comes back and I tell myself I was a stupid soul. As of right now. - On that note. - As of right now, though, it's doing okay. So yes, the icons are a little different to get used to. But they're really are kind of like people have said. Under the covers, there's a lot of changes because the whole ARM processor coming. But on the surface, other than some of those visuals, I haven't noticed much change in pretty much anything. Other than visually. - Our gardens are a great way to improve productivity and save time in the workplace. And Sperry Software has all the Add-ins you'll ever need. To Save As PDF Add-in is a best seller and it is great for project backups, legal discovery, and more. This Add-In saves the email and attachments as PDF files. It's easy to download, easy to install and Sperry Software's unparalleled customer services is always ready to help. Download a free trial at sperrysoftware.com. S-P-E-R-R-Y-S-O-F-T-W-A-R-E.com and see for yourself how great Save As PDF is. Listeners can get 20% off their order today by entering the code, cloudit. That's cloudit, C-L-O-U-D-I-T. All one word at checkout. Sperry Software; work in email, not on email. - So that's my Apple news and I have no random links for... I forgot to do it again, Scott. Find some random off-the-wall news article for you. - I got you covered. I'll put some stuff about Google in the pandemic 'cause that keeps everything going. - Everybody, Google's just gonna dissolve their company headquarters and everybody's gonna be remote for the rest of time. I wonder how many companies will do that out of all of this. That they'll just say, "you know what? We really don't need an office anymore." Or at least massively reduce the footprint of their office. - I saw a great tweet the other day. I forget who did it. I'll see if I can pull it up. And I'm gonna paraphrase it, but it was along the lines of, this pandemic has done 100 times more for the digital transformation of your company than your last five CIOs. - There is definitely some truth to that. 'Cause Microsoft has been seeing it too, right? They compared it to like four years of digital transformation in four months or a year of digital or two years in like a month. But along the same lines where I've seen a few different quotes that kind of imply the same thing. That this has caused the, I can't think of the word, but it's expedited the whole digital transformation in pretty much every company out there. - It's definitely the thing. Corey Quinn. "COVID-19 has done more to further your company's digital transformation the last dozen CIOs." There we go. Oh wait, at least I get to quote. - But the amount of conversations I've had with people that never would want to talk to me about Teams in office 365 before, cause they had no idea what it was, now like every time I run into somebody they're like, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah Teams. And I'm like, "yup." Everybody's using Teams. Teams, Teams, everywhere. - Teams, Teams everywhere. Now we just gotta teach people how to reply to conversations versus starting a new thread. Which I continue to argue is not a user issue. That is 100% a UI issue. And then we need to teach people how to share properly and understand what they're sharing. which again, I will argue is not an end user issue. It is a UI issue. There are some things in there that just need to be fixed. And if they get like little things done, it'd be so much better. - Although there are some things you could do, like not so much from the chat, but from the sharing perspective. If you really don't ever want people sharing their whole desktop, because of notifications. To be fair, you can go set up a policy to remove desktop sharing and allow them only to share applications which could help with some of that. - So the new one is, I don't know if you've played around with the latest version of Teams where you get the ability, actually, I don't know if it's on Mac yet, but it's definitely out on windows in most tenants. Except Mark Anderson's. There's the ability to have your meetings split into a new window so that your Teams client with kind of your chat and access to Teams or your apps or whatever it happens to be stays in one window. And then your meeting pops out into another window - I do have that. - Yeah so there's some weird behaviors there. Like you mentioned, app sharing. So if you share an app in the old client experience, guess the legacy client experience. When you shared an app or you shared your desktop, no matter what you shared a little window popped up and sometimes you would see it in like a desktop share. You'd see like the little window in the in the lower right hand corner of your screen, which would show that you are screen-sharing. Well now with that new pop-up mode where every chat or every meeting can be its own window, that little sharing window doesn't pop up anymore. It's very hard to figure out, how do I stop sharing? The only way to stop sharing is to find your way back to the original meeting window now, and then find the Stop sharing button there. Where in the past you would have had two places to do it. You would have had that little pop-up window that came up and was kind of persistent unless you minimized it. And you would have had the meeting window. So that's a little bit of a regression, I think. The other one that's been killing me is, if there's a chat going on in the meeting, alongside the meeting, that chat is potentially showing up in two different places. In my case, and I think for lots of us, we have multiple monitors. Or maybe you have your laptop and a monitor. You've got two screens. And if you leave the Teams window up, so it kind of the persistent Teams window with chats, access to your Teams apps, all that stuff. And you have this meeting window up now on the other side, if somebody chats you in that meeting chat and you have the chat bar in I don't know, window, pane, whatever it is, that little slider, Open for chat. You actually see that text come in in real time in two places and it's very distracting. So you go like, okay, I'm just gonna minimize the other Teams window because I don't wanna be distracted by all that other incoming stuff. Well, the other issue you run into is, because Teams is an Electron app and it is a poor citizen for following operating system conventions on any platform it's on, particularly when it comes to notifications, it responds in horrible ways. Like if I'm just a meeting participant, I'm not in DND mode, especially in DND mode like on my desktop. So I'll still be getting toast notifications for all those chats....

  • Jul 30, 2020 · 35 min

    Episode 188 – Are You Inspired Yet?

    In Episode 188, Ben and Scott discuss some of the latest announcements from Microsoft Inspire, including NFS support of Azure Blob Storage, the GA of Microsoft Lists, and the announcement of Microsoft Dataflex and Microsoft Dataflex Pro. Transcript Email Download New Tab - [Ben] Welcome to episode 188 of the Microsoft Cloud IT Pro podcast recorded live on July 23rd, 2020. This is a show about Microsoft 365 and Azure, from the perspective of it pros and end users, where we discuss the topic of recent news and how it relates to you. In this episode, Ben and Scott review some of the news coming out of Microsoft Inspire around Microsoft 365 and Azure, including blob storage, Data Flex, and Microsoft lists. Happy Thursday, Thursday. - [Scott] Yeah, Thursday, you made it to another one. Are you feeling inspired yet? - [Ben] I am feeling very inspired, not only by Inspire being inspiring or providing inspiration, is that what Inspire is supposed to do is provide inspiration? - [Scott] Yeah. In fact, it is, it is supposed to inspire Microsoft partners to go out and build awesome things. - [Ben] But I also just had a five-day, six-day, something like that, vacation up in Michigan on the beach, on the lake, paddle boarding and kayaking. And I barely have any cell phone signal up there. So I, frankly just pretty much ignored my phone for five days. It was also an inspiring and relaxing experience. - [Scott] Yeah, that sounds like you're living the dream. You're not missing much back here, like heat, global pandemics, all the fun things. - [Ben] Yeah, I frankly have no idea what's going on in Florida right now. And I don't care, I'll figure it out when we get back home. - [Scott] That's the spirit. - [Ben] Because now I'm back in Michigan recording on my Bose headset. So if my audio is a little off. I am hanging out at my parents for a couple more weeks, have a wedding coming up while we're here and all that. But people probably do not care so much about my inspiring personal life. They probably care more about the inspiration coming from Inspire this week, which I got back from vacation to a flood of news that I've been trying to catch up on. - [Scott] Yeah, quite a bit of news. So as Microsoft has been doing for many of their events lately, they've published their book of news. This time it didn't go out as a book, but it's a website. You get the table of contents, go ahead and browse through it. And you can take a look at all of the announcements around things like Azure, Microsoft 365, certainly business applications, or biz apps like dynamics play a large part in the partner ecosystem. So there's a specific section for that as well as security and compliance, then it wouldn't be a partner conference without partner enablement. And then some, a little bit about sustainability initiatives and things like that that are coming up or in a process now. But if you're interested in what happened at Inspire and you normally go, I shouldn't be interested in Inspire because that's the partner conference and I'm not a partner, or maybe you work for a partner and the relationship side of Microsoft and its partners isn't relevant to you day to day. A lot of these announcements, aren't about how to sell things in the partner ecosystem. They really are functionality within the platform and to a certain degree material changes in functionality. So you'll see some quite a bit of movement on the Teams and Microsoft 365 side, there was a bunch of Azure announcements from Azure stack HCI integrations and improving some of the hybrid flows that exist today. Some networking enhancements, a bunch of stuff around discs. There was a little bit around storage, even developer tooling got some announcements in there with some announcements from Hashi Corp, bringing things forward. So I would encourage you if you deal with Azure, or Microsoft 365 to at least go through, read through those sections and see what functionality A is coming, B is available today and has GA'd or C, is both been announced as coming and is available for you to play with in the form of maybe like a public preview. - [Ben] Yeah, this Inspire was interesting because I feel like, at least in previous years it has been much more partner focused news. And I felt like this year, it was almost like another mini, I don't know if I want to go so far as to say a mini Build or a mini Ignite, but there was a lot more just Microsoft 365 Azure news that really applies to everybody that came out this year, I guess more so than I felt like came out previous years around Inspire. - [Scott] Yeah, I think that's fair. And that certainly feels right. I would have to think that a lot of it has to do with the marketing engine. And if you're spinning up all this marketing for partners, why not use it to market to the broader world as well? Especially if you're lighting up features that apply to the broader world. And I think you'll potentially see more of that just during pandemic times as they don't have those opportunities to get out and about so much. - [Ben] Yeah, so definitely go check out the book of news. 'Cause there's no way we're going to talk about all of it today at the time we have, but we figured we'd go through and pick out some of our favorites. Some of the ones that are maybe most applicable to our audience, or maybe just the ones everybody is talking about after Inspire like another product rename. - [Scott] Another product name. - [Ben] Do you feel overwhelmed by trying to manage your Office 365 environment? Are you facing unexpected issues that disrupt your company's productivity? Intelligink is here to help. Much like you take your car to the mechanic that has specialized knowledge on how to best keep your car running, Intelligink helps you with your Microsoft cloud environment because that's their expertise. Intelligink keeps up with the latest updates in the Microsoft cloud to help keep your business running smoothly and ahead of the curve. Whether you were a small organization with just a few users, up to an organization of several thousand employees, they want to partner with you to implement and administer your Microsoft cloud technology. visit them at Intelligink.com/podcast. That's I-N-T-E-L-L-I-G-I-N-K .com/podcast for more information or to schedule a 30-minute call to get started with them today. Remember Intelligink focuses on the Microsoft cloud. So you can focus on your business. - [Scott] I have a feeling that we're going to spend a good amount of time on Microsoft 365 stuff. So why don't we start with a couple of the Azure announcements, 'cause those are quick hits to get through, and then we can dive into all of that product rename that you mentioned. - [Ben] Perfect, sounds good. So which Azure one would you like to start with? - [Scott] So there wasn't a ton of Azure news, like we said, news comes when news comes. So there's a couple of things that have happened in regard to migration. So specifically tooling, like Azure Migrate has been continuing to have new features added to it over time. So initially Azure Migrate started out and it could assess VMware environments and it was targeted at those and potentially bringing VMware customers over to Azure. And then they added hyper V support over the last couple of months, I believe, probably the last six months or so. They've done things like added support for importing your own inventories. So if you have a physical inventory and maybe you don't want Azure Migrate tooling to actively assess it like go out and interrogate the performance counters on my servers, things like that. You just wanted to give it a CSV file that said I've got this server with this name, it's got this much CPU, this much RAM, tell me what the equivalent or right size thing would be in Azure and how much it's going to cost me or my pricing agreement. They've added functionality like that. At Inspire, they announced the ability where they've added another kind of import mechanism. So now you can import and create assessments using uploaded configuration management database data. And they've also included support for those AVS assessments, those Azure VMware solution assessments. And then they've worked a little bit on the assessment engine itself and some of the recommend or the recommendation engine, I guess, and some of the pieces that come out of there. So you'll see that it's a little bit more holistic and able to give you a better sense of where you should land on the other side. And over time, I think you'll continue to see improvements in there. Another thing that was announced very recently, I believe this one was pre Inspire, but they did mention it at Inspire, again is Microsoft has support for shared discs with virtual machines now. So you can do things like spin up a disc in Azure that now you can attach to or mount multiple virtual machines at the same time, which enables you to do things that you haven't been able to do in the past. Like maybe a traditional fail over cluster because it required that cluster shared volume. Some of those workloads are now ready to go and they would have support natively in the operating system. And you're not doing any weird workarounds on the backend to fake having a shared disc. It's just a native capability and ready to go. - [Ben] Interesting, so I missed this one. This one is not then spinning up like an Azure file share or creating a disc and doing a traditional SMB share of it. But it's having a, say physical virtual disc, you essentially have that virtual disc file. And you can attach that virtual disc straight to two different VMs in Azure. - [Scott] Correct. Yeah, so this was originally talked about like in the way back when, it went into preview, like early in 2020, but I don't know that, like you said,...

  • Jul 23, 2020 · 34 min

    Episode 187 – AAD Alternate Login ID and Sensitive by Default in SharePoint

    In Episode 187, Ben and Scott discuss the newly announced preview for alternate login IDs in Azure Active Directory, enabling "sensitive by default" labels with DLP in SharePoint Online, and the GA of the new Microsoft Secure Score. Transcript Email Download New Tab - Welcome to Episode 187 of the Microsoft Cloud IT pro podcast, recorded live on July 14 2020. This is a show about Microsoft 365 and Azure from the perspective of IT pros and end users. Where we discuss the topic or recent news and how it relates to you. In this episode, Ben and Scott covers some recent Microsoft 365 News, including Azure AD alternate login ID, sensitive by default in SharePoint and OneDrive and some other security related news. It's Wednesday, this has me all thrown off my game, cause I'm going on vacation, and I'm not-- - It's not even Wednesday, it's only Tuesday. - Yeah, see, I told you. Tuesday has me all turned off my game. Cause I am going on vacation to a remote cottage in Michigan to enjoy the sun and the sand and the water in social isolation from everyone, including a cell phone signal. - You think it's gonna be done. - Yes, I'm actually looking forward to it. My parents have a cottage up there, I have not seen it yet. So they got it like a year ago and I have not been up there to visit or to see the cottage because the last time we were up there it was winter. And just you don't go up there in the winter. Well, you could, but my kids would not have enjoyed it as much as I would have. - I think it's safe to say one does not go to Michigan in the winter, let alone to the cottage, the remote cottage at Michigan. - At Michigan, one absolutely goes to Michigan because there's snow to play in. - Yeah. - Then well billing to be had, sledding to be done, snowboarding. All of the fun winter sports. - Yeah, and you can almost go find yourself a real mountain. - I could, I could just go to Denver instead or to Utah or Montana, Canada. All of the above definitely have better skiing. But they're also-- - The northeast. - All the more expensive and I don't have family there. - The Northwest, little bit of Europe, bring the family with you. - I have always wanted to go to the Alps, to go skiing. My brother has done it, I have not. - I will not discourage you. - Perfect. - You should live your dreams. - Now I just have to convince my family. I need to get all my kids skiing. Do you know how hard it is to teach kids to ski and snowboard in Florida? - I do as I've been flying my mind around too, to do the same thing. - Yeah, once they get a little older, we'll teach them. We'll get them and then I'll go to Switzerland and-- - I'm gonna teach them how to ride the one wheel cause that's not like snowboarding, but it's close. - How close is it? Because I believe you have had the privilege of riding a one wheel a lot. - I bought one so yeah, now I gotta get my money's worth out of it. - Yes well, but do you get to ride it or have your kids hijacked it? - No, I ride it. - Okay. Is it like snowboarding then? - Not quite with the stock tire that comes on it. I think you need a different tire to make it feel a little bit more like that. But it is super fun. It's definitely a thing that you can get into with potentially like a deeper carve than a longboard. It's different than skateboarding or snowboarding or skiing, or any of those things, but it's definitely fun. It's addicting. - I might have to add that to my Christmas list, birthday list when I stopped buying LEGO sets. are a great way to improve productivity and save time in the workplace and Sperry software has all the add ins you'll ever need. The Save as PDF add in is a best seller and it's great for project backups, legal discovery and more. This add in saves the email and attachments as PDF files, it's easy to download, easy to install and Sperry software's unparalleled Customer service is always ready to help. Download a free trial at Sperry software.com. S-P-E-R-R-Y-S-O-F-T-W-A-R-E.com and see for yourself how great Save as PDF is. Listeners can get 20% off their order today by entering the code "CloudIT". That's cloud IT, C-L-O-U-D-I-T all one word at check out. Sperry software work in email, not on email. - So, in other news, should we talk about cloud news? - Yeah, - We could just turn into the rambling guys podcast. - No, there's been a bunch of fun stuff with Azure AD. - There has been. So this was when, I think it came out yesterday. So it came out Monday, July 13 cause I saw it right before I crawled in bed last night. In this one is that, using some PowerShell now, you can go in and enable user friendly sign in to Azure AD with email as an alternate login to an ID. As an alternate login ID, which is normally your UPN. So this is interesting because I still talk to clients that just assume they're always using their email cause they don't realize email and UPN are 99% of the time, the exact same in Office 365 but in reality, your UPN and your email, do not have to match up one for one. And Microsoft just, I would say they encourage you to keep the same because it does tend to lead to less confusion for people, when your UPN and your email address are the same thing. - True story. So now with this one, you don't have to do that which can come in handy, especially when it comes to, some of those cases where you have trusted domains because I was thinking through this last night and making sure that it all made sense in my head is, a lot of times you may have two different domains you have, well, two different domains, you can't have the same UPN suffix in the two different domains. So people run into problems because of how Azure AD sync works. You can only put it on one server, you have to trust your domain. You have to sync all your users up and then they end up with different UPNs or different email addresses. Now you could in theory, sync two different domains with two different UPNs, set the same email address for all the users and let them use that single email address as their login ID. Instead of having separate UPNs from separate domains. Did I think through all that properly? - I'm still confused as to why you'd want to, you'd be losing the ability for per user resolution, like if every user had the same email address, and you turn this on, what user would it resolve to when they log in? - Sorry, I probably phrased that wrong, not the same user, but users from two different domains with two different UPN all having the same email domain. So think your UPN is user one at Company A, and then you have user B at company two, but they could both have user one at parent company.com and user two at parent company.com as their email address and now use that to log in, even though their primary UPN suffix is different. - Correct, and it should still resolve back, so I haven't turned this one on yet, but it looks like what it's using is any addresses that resolve in the proxy addresses attribute. So as long as you've got that in there, you'd be cleared and ready to go. So it certainly helps out in situations like that. I've worked with a number of organizations where sign in IDs do not equate to email addresses in any way, shape or form. Like every law firm, I've worked for almost 99% of the time, my login for Active Directory was just employee ID, lots of financial institutions were that way. So you'd be a number to log into your computer and then you'd have your email address and all the other things on the other side, which led to all those customizations of like you said, swapping in email address and sending it up as the UPN attribute through AD Connect and weirdness ensues, because users have two different login names and everything else. So effectively with this, you can still keep your UPN, your users still resolve to their UPN. But theoretically, anything that's a match within a proxy addresses attribute should go ahead and get them through. But certainly you wouldn't wanna end up in that situation where multiple users have the same email address and proxy addresses cause I don't know how it would resolve. Does the first one win, does a random one win, that could be a little weird. - Yes, I misspoke there. When I was talking about users with the same email addresses. I meant just users with the same domain. - I totally get where you're going. - But you're still gonna have some weird user behavior, I think with this one cause you're logging in with the email address and effectively what you're doing is, you're using that address for Home RAM discovery, and then relying on things like synced passwords and Azure AD to go ahead and pick things up. So this isn't gonna work if you have ADFS. Cause well, you'd still be redirected through Home RAM discovery or HAD to your ADFS server. But then in ADFS, you're gonna have to use your real login and password. This is you sync your passwords and do password hash synchronization and all that stuff to Azure AD. And you're relying on that as a login mechanism. And then once you've logged in with your email address, you're still resolving to your UPN. So, if you log in with Ben.Stegink, but you're B Stegink is your actual username. That's still what's gonna show up inside of the sweep bar and things like that when you go to your profile. - Yes, and it does look like, like you were saying, it can be any proxy address. So it's not just your primary SMTP but in theory, if I had B Stegink as my UPN and I had an email address that was Ben Stegink and Ben and B Steg and all of those I could in theory use any of those email addresses to login. But you're right, I have not turned this on and tried it yet. I should definitely do that. Because why wouldn't I want to try something that just came out in preview in my primary tenant? - I thought that's what your primary tenant was there for? ...

  • Jul 16, 2020 · 39 min

    Episode 186 – Azure Synapse, Cognitive Search, and Forms Recognizer

    In Episode 186, Ben and Scott talk through several scenarios around the use of Azure Synapse, Forms Recognizer, and Azure Cognitive Search. Transcript Email Download New Tab - Welcome to Episode 186 of the "Microsoft Cloud IT Pro Podcast," recorded live on July 9th, 2020. This is a show about Microsoft 365 and Azure, from the perspective of IT pros and end users, where we discuss a topic or recent news and how it relates to you. In this episode, Ben and Scott dive into some work Ben has been doing lately, involving Azure Synapse, Cognitive Search and Forms Recognizer. I don't know how many of our listeners follow American football. Did you see the news from the American Football League or the NFL? Technically the National Football League, but they only play in America, so I don't really know why it's national, although, international, I don't know. Anyhu, did you hear the news from them yesterday? - I did not. - NFL teams will be forbidden from post-game interactions within six feet of each other and jersey exchanges between players will be prohibited during the 2020 season. The reaction from the NFL fan or NFL players, "Aren't we going to be touching each other's jerseys "during the game?" Kind of pointless to prohibit interactions and jersey exchanges after the game. Or this is a perfect example of the NFL thinking in a nutshell. Players can go engage in a full-contact game and do it safely, however it is deemed unsafe for them to exchange jerseys after the game. - Yeah. - Let that one sink in, because you hear stories about what happens in those games. I'm sure those players are getting spit on and get spit in their face when they're under those piles. My random tidbit for the day. - Yeah, I don't know what to tell you about that one. Just a little bit of just logic that does not flow through that app. - Yeah. Okay, so there's my random tidbit for the day. We'll keep it short, we won't go on a 10-minute side topic. We've been doing that the last few weeks, only about Max stuff. - Oh, we could keep going about Max stuff. - We could keep going about Max stuff. We could turn into the "Microsoft 365 Apple Podcast." - Yeah, we could talk about how apps crash and eat up the GPU in wrong ways and just all sorts of things. - Or we could talk about running betas. - We could talk about running betas and things that go on there as well. No one should run a beta on their daily driver, but here you and I are. But you go further than I do, you do the operating systems on your laptop and PCs as well. I'm not that brave. - Yes, I have not done my operating system yet on this go around. I have learned my lesson after the last two or three. I'll probably wait another week or two. - But you did your watch. - I did my watch. - Why? - It's like, 'cause what harm can it do on a watch? - What harm can it do? Let's go back and pull up the thread. Hey Scott, isn't it annoying how I can never update the watch 'cause I have to reset it every time? What harm could it possibly do? Pushing two and a half gigs over a crappy Bluetooth LE connection, yeah. - It only takes four hours to update and then once it updates, it doesn't have enough space to install the next update. - You should not do that. Your phone, your iPad, sure, you can back up and restore those. That's your other problem with your watch, is you have to take it in for service if you wanna step back in an iOS version. - Or if you wanna go backwards. True - Yes. - I can always do a restart though after I upgrade, once I reset it, just to go to the next beta version. All right. - That is one way to live your life, for sure. - On the edge, or being very patient while my watch updates. I mean, I figured with my watch, what do I? It really has to keep time. If I get different notifications, all of that, to me my watch was less risky because there's really nothing I could lose on my watch. I mean, I suppose I could break it, but I'm not gonna incur data loss if a beta version on the watch goes bad. - Yeah, but you won't be able to track how many times you've stood up. - See, I don't stand up. Like this is me sitting and this is me standing up. My watch can't really tell, 'cause I stay the same height, no matter what. For all of you that are listening on audio and couldn't see the video. - I am trying to help you out here and you just refuse, you're obstinate. - I am. Other people have told me that, or I'm just stubborn. I'm a firstborn, I am stubborn. As IT professionals in the cloud era, sometimes it feels like we don't speak the same language as the rest of the organization. So when stakeholders from finance or other departments start asking about a specific project or teams that Azure costs, they don't always realize how much work is involved in obtaining that information, sifting through cluttered CSVs and a complex, massive metadata in order to manually create custom views and reports. It's a real headache. On top of helping you understand and reduce your organization's overall Azure spend, ShareGate Overcast lets you group resources into meaningful CostHubs and map them to real world business scenarios. This way, you can track costs in the way that makes most sense with your corporate structure, whether it's by-product, business unit, team or otherwise. It's a flexible, intuitive and business-friendly way of tracking Azure infrastructure costs. And it's only available in ShareGate's Overcast. Find out more on sharegate.com/itpro. So back to cloud news, Azure. Should I talk about Azure? I was doing an interesting project this last week 'cause I was looking for projects, and this one popped up and I figured, kind of like my Apple beta watch, why not? What could go wrong? - Yeah, what could happen here? - I'm a modern desktop guy, what could go wrong if I start doing something related to development in Azure? Under the story, it's all working, absolutely nothing. But I spent a week. And by a week, I mean like a full week, like Monday I worked on it from 8:00 a.m. until 4:30 a.m. I almost worked on this for 24 hours, and then I slept for a while. But I got to play with Azure Synapse Analytics, which, in parentheses, formerly SQL data warehouse with a question mark. Oh no, that was the what is, it's the beginning of a, apparently I should have slept more last night. Anyways, Azure Synapse Analytics, Azure Cognitive Search, some of the different features in Cognitive Search, and then I tied that in with an Azure function, with Forms Recognizer, and kind of built out a demo lab-type scenario, leveraging all of those different tools. And actually, it was really interesting. I think part of the interesting thing about this one for me, is it's looking at all these Azure services, which under the covers, you're like, "Oh, that's modern desktop stuff. "They just rebranded it and made it user-friendly." - Sure, that's one way to think about it. - At least for some of it. So should I walk through the scenario that I built and then we can kind of talk about some of the tools? - Yeah. - Okay, so this is how it worked. I took some Azure Blob storage. So first of all, we have a storage account, Azure Blob storage. We've talked a lot about that. So I didn't include that in the whole line of processing, but in this Azure Blob storage, I created just Blob storage, upload some invoices to it, so some PDF invoices. And Cognitive Search has the ability to go index this Blob storage, so I set up the Cognitive Search, goes and indexes this. And you can do some different things with Cognitive Search in terms of how you extend that indexing process to pick up different data. So the way I did it is when the index ran, it incorporated a custom skill set which actually went off and called an Azure function. So upload invoices, run an index, call an Azure function with this custom skillset and this Azure function passed over the necessary information for Cognitive, or, not for Cognitive Search, for Forms Recognizer to be able to pick up these PDFs as they were getting indexed. So Forms Recognizer picked up the PDFs, did a bunch of processing and these PDFs doing Form Recognizer to pull out things like prices and invoice numbers and quantity and the total amount of data, so all that information you may wanna pull off an invoice. And then another part of the whole kind of search is knowledge store. So you can take these pieces of metadata and actually shove them out to enrich your search results or, in my case, I stored them as JSON files back in my Blob storage that you just go in and pick and choose key pieces of information. So I was saving like five different pieces of information pulled off of these forms via that custom skillset to JSON files in Blob storage. I think I ended up setting it just to once a day. My pipeline ran in Azure Synapse, that actually went in, picked up these JSON files via a data flow in my Synapse pipeline, pulled out the key pieces of metadata, did a little bit more data manipulation, did some string cleanup, did some converting from strings to integers or to decimals, and then pushed them into a SQL database or the Azure SQL pool that was in Azure Synapse. So end of the day, it didn't do a lot of the data warehouse aspects of Synapse or some of the analytics. This was kind of part of a bigger solution as well, that incorporated a bunch more into Synapse. And there's a bunch of things you could go do with that in Synapse from there, but that was kind of the gist of how all of those tools ended up tying together in the solution. - Yeah, I think it kind of speaks to that ability to link services together and kind of build out the glue wherever you did it. And then you have a bunch of extensibility in there as well, right? Just to cross that stack to be able to, the thing you said you're not using potentially Synapse as a true d

  • Jul 9, 2020 · 36 min

    Episode 185 – Microsoft Teams for Personal Life

    In Episode 185, Ben and Scott discuss the new features that are coming to Microsoft Teams for personal accounts including group chats and task management. Transcript Email Download New Tab - Welcome to Episode 185 of the Microsoft Cloud IT Pro Podcast recorded live on July 1 2020. This is a show about Microsoft 365 and Azure from the perspective of IT pros and end users, where we discuss the topic or recent news and how it relates to you. In this episode, Ben and Scott diverge from some of the business and enterprise features available in Microsoft Teams and talk about recent updates to the mobile client that allows you to use it for personal chats and group chats, task management and other personal group collaboration both with family as well as friends. - Woo hoo. - Woo hoo? Why are you excited? Because it's July 2, and you know what that means? - That it's almost July 3. - Yeah, it really means absolutely nothing to you and I. Means that today's tech... or tomorrow is technically a vacation, so we're recording on Thursday instead of Friday because someone wants to sleep in here. - Who? Your wife- - Someone not being me. - Your wife and my wife? - No, are you kidding me? My kids get us up way too early. I haven't slept-in in a long time, and my youngest has figured out how to climb out of his crib, so he just comes wandering into our bedroom at random times during the morning now. - Ah huh, that's always fun. - Yes, he is not saying anything or nor can understand that he has to stay in his bedroom until a certain time so he just climbs out and wanders around the house till he finds somebody. - Well, I just hope he finds you before he finds the mess in the kitchen or whatever else... - Yeah, well so we had- - Parent's mind. - We have a two story house so we have gates upstairs, so as long as we remember to shut the gates he can't get downstairs, he'll just stand at the top and grab it and rattle it, if he can't find us upstairs. Usually we're still upstairs and he finds us in bed. I think this morning he walked over to his brother's bed and was like ah trying to wake him up to get someone to play with him or something. - Perfect. - Yes, fun times. - Always fun. - That's all you got. - That's all you got? - Do you feel overwhelmed by trying to manage your office 365 environment? Are you facing unexpected issues that disrupt your company's productivity? Intelligink is here to help. Much like you take your car to the mechanic that has specialized knowledge on how to best keep your car running, Intelligink helps you with your Microsoft Cloud environment, because that's their expertise. Intelligink keeps up with the latest updates in the Microsoft Cloud to help keep your business running smoothly and ahead of the curve. Whether you're a small organization with just a few users up to an organization of several thousand employees, they want to partner with you to implement and administer your Microsoft Cloud Technology. visit them at Intelligink.com/podcast, that's Intelligink.com/podcast for more information or to schedule a 30 minute call to get started with them today. Remember Intelligink focuses on the Microsoft Cloud so you can focus on your business. - I got a new toy. - Oh, you did get a new toy, that's what July two means, it means your new toy came yesterday. - Yes it does. - What's your new toy? I already know what it is. - Yeah, well I'm getting on that Intel Mac train cause it's a good time to do it, right? - Right before it pulls out of the station, - Yeah, yeah. - Never to be seen again. - B&H had some good discounts on MacBook Pros the other day and I've wanted to get back to the Mac for a while, so this was an opportunity to pick one up so I just did some little things, massive, it weighs about a million pounds, you lied to me. 16 inch MacBook Pro. - Very nice. - Just the base model because I don't computer the way you computer. - I will say you will be happy with it. And frankly, who cares if it's a beast and weighs a ton because realistically, where are you gonna take it right now? From the bedroom to the kitchen? Cause for the last four months, that's about all the further you've been traveling. - Yeah, yeah, I know, but it is massive. It's really nice, like I forgot how nice Mac hardware is. Keyboard's great; I didn't have to go with that crappy whatever keyboard they- - The Vendored keyboard? - Or whatever thing they had before, trackpad's awesome. I really missed Mac trackpads and gestures and tools like BetterTouchTool, which everyone should buy because it's awesome. - Yes, BetterTouchTool magnet. - Uh, what's magnet? - Oh, you're missing out, go find magnet in the App Store, or you're gonna turn it into the Apple podcast. Sorry for all of our fellow Microsoft people that don't use Mac's.... - Yeah, they all should. - So did you get used to the window snapping on Windows where you can like drag it and let it snap to the top, or the right side, or all of that? - Yes, that's what better snap tool is for. - Yeah, so you can do better snap tool, I like... IOS is not the correct link. - I already- - It's in the App Store. - Yeah. I already did better snap tool. - So I had better snap tool, and I tend to like magnet better. - What do you like about magnet better? - Looks a little bit more like power toys, than better snap tool is. - So I don't know do I have... And it honestly may have just been that I started using it first and I get used to how I had magnet organized. Does better snap tools let you like double click on the top bar to get your full screen and can you replicate all of the windows 10 snap functionality in BetterTouchTools? - As far as I know, yeah, I can double click to go big or go small and drag to corners. So snap to top, snap to left, snap to top left, bottom left all those kinds of things. - I can't remember what there... there was something that I ended up on magnet over a better snap tool, but I have no idea what it was. - And you can do custom snap areas, like make custom zoom areas and all those things. - Yap, and I have keyboard shortcuts for mine too. I use keyboard shortcuts a lot to snap them to different parts of the screen. - Yep, better snap tool does all that too. - Yeah, who knows? I have no idea at this point in time, but I actually own both of them and I have BetterTouchTool and Alfred - Yeah, I'm gonna try and go with just the regular launcher for now, which I know is a dumb idea but... - Yeah, it really is, you gonna go by Alfred. - So I actually bought all this stuff a long time ago and still have it, and it's the beauty of the Mac App Store although I don't know how developers make money there since I can just go download all my old things. - Well, that's not a whole lot different than Windows, right? - Well, it is different than Windows cause I would never buy software in the Windows. - Buy software for Windows? - Well, no, you buy software for Windows just not in the Windows Store. So there is a difference there. So yeah, I get that going, Parallels was on sale yesterday, and just been setting things up, Reader, it's nice to have life back. - Oh, here's another one of my new favorite tools that I've used for a while. But they're going to subscription model which kind of irritated me. Have you ever gotten another separate clipboard manager? - So I've used a Pastebot in the past, was thinking about going back to that. - Okay, so I have just... There's a Paste clipboard manager. So it's not Pastebot it's just Paste and it does... like as a whole clipboard manager, but then it also has apps for all the other ones. So the same clipboard manager links and clipboard are on all your devices. So natively in Mac you can just copy and paste from one to the other, this does the whole copy but then you have the whole clipboard manager history on every single device. - That's a Windows thing right there. - That is yeah, copy link. Okay, there you go, there's my clipboard manager that I use. - Yeah, that's- - That let's you categorize links and all of that. So I have links like my business address, that are just saved in their own categories so whenever I need it, I just have all of that stuff handy in different categories. - Hmm, Gotcha. - Yeah. - That was my new fun thing which led to a whole... Yeah. An evening of me being locked away from my wife, well, she's like, "What are you doing?" "Setting up the new computer." The FedEx guy was funny too- - Priorities. - It was set for my sign for delivery- - Ah huh. - Not a problem to be home for delivery, but the FedEx guy came and knocked on the door. So I go and open the door and he's standing there with his pad and I'm looking at him and I ask, I said, "Do you want me to sign?" and he looks at me and he goes, "Scott?" I said, "Yes" He goes "Nah we're good." I was like, "Huh?" Well, "Oh, okay." "Got it." - Have you ordered any pizza since the whole lockdown for delivery? - No, but we have done delivery from a couple different places. - So we just got like Papa John's the other day, and it's interesting cause same type of thing, like they'll come up to your door and... We have a Nest doorbell so we can kind of watch some of the stuff. Like they pull the pizza out of the pizza carrier that's keeping it warm, they put the pizza carrier on the ground in front of your door, put your pizzas on it, and then like back up six, eight, 10 feet from... or ring the doorbell and then they back up like six or eight, 10 feet from the door and you open it and they're like "There's your pizza, and you can reach down and pick it up." And it's like this awkward wave of "Hi I can't even really come close to you so it's a good thing I gave you a tip on the credit card otherwise I just have to kinda throw money on the ground for you." And then you close the door and they come back and pick up

  • Jul 2, 2020 · 34 min

    Episode 184 – OneDrive for Business Shortcuts

    In Episode 184, Ben and Scott get into Scott's inability to dive headfirst into iOS 14 and some of the announcements from WWDC and then discuss some new functionality coming to OneDrive for Business. Transcript Email Download New Tab - Welcome to Episode 184 of the Microsoft Cloud IT Pro Podcast. Recorded live on June 26th, 2020. This is a show about Microsoft 365 and Azure from the perspective of IT Pros and end-users, where we discuss the topic or recent news and how it relates to you. In this episode, Ben and Scott kind of diverge from the Azure and Microsoft 365 news and spend the first 15 minutes talking about various tidbits from Apple's WWDC conference. So if you don't care about their thoughts on apples, skip the first 15 minutes and jump to the second half of the episode where they discuss some recent SharePoint in OneDrive news. - My brain is still on vacation. - Yeah, It's still stuck in the mountains of North Carolina. - It is Georgia, we didn't go to North Carolina-- - We stuck to Georgia. It was almost North Carolina. - Did you stick to Georgia, did Georgia stick on you? It's a little muggy this time of year. - You know what? It was actually really nice. - 'Cause you go into the mountains. - ' Cause we were in the mountains, like we'd wake up in the morning and it was like 55, 60 degrees and it was beautiful. So we took hikes, let my kids go play in the streams and throw rocks and naturally, because it was cool, we didn't take swimsuits or they weren't wearing swimsuits, so we just let them soak their clothes and they had fun. And then the very last day it was hot so we spent the day playing in the pool that was there on the beach and in boats and social distancing in boats, canoes and kayaks and all that. - Nice! - So it was, it was a good break. - Well, I mean, if you ever do it again and you want, you can always borrow the paddleboards. I have inflatable paddleboards, those are fun. - I do, so they had some paddleboards there that we could use too and I did not try one. I thought about trying to get my kids on one with me, but I have not actually paddleboarded before. - All right, let's do a quick thought experiment. You're in a chair, yes? - So if I can sit in a chair, you're saying I can paddleboard? - No, quite the opposite. If you can stand up out of the chair and stand without putting your hand on the chair to hold you up, you're probably pretty good. - I'm pretty good. Well, see I could snowboard and ski and all that, so I could probably do it just fine, but I also wasn't sure how well the paddleboards, like, have you ever put a kid on your paddleboard with you? - Yeah, kid, yep. - Okay, I tried the dogs. - Yeah. - I See, so yeah, I probably could have done it. I guess we'll have to go do it again, an the excuse to go on another vacation. - There you go. - Outlook Add-ins are a great way to improve productivity and save time in the workplace. And Sperry software has all the add- ins you'll ever need. The Save as PDF add-in is a best seller and is great for project backups, legal discovery, and more. This add-in saves the email and attachments as PDF files. It's easy to download, easy to install and Sperry software's unparalleled customer service is always ready to help. Download a free trial at "sperrysoftware.com", S-P-E-R-R-Y-S-O-F-T-W-A-R-E.com. and see for yourself how great Save as PDF is. Listeners can get 20% off their order today by entering the code "CloudIT". That's CloudIT, C-L-O-U-DIT, all One word at checkout. Sperry software work in email, not on email. - So Scott, how has iOS 14? - A completely unrelated Cloud news? - I can't pull the trigger, I've got the profile. - Oh, you haven't done it yet? - No, I haven't done it yet. 'Cause all my devices are daily drivers. - Oh yeah, that's right. - Every single one of them and I'm not as brave as you are. - I though this time your tweets, that you had actually pulled the trigger on at least a device. - I'm sure I will at some points, I don't know. My biggest concern at this point isn't programs not working, like I would think most of the apps that I need are available as websites anyway. So that's fine. - Except for Mario Kart. - No, I don't play Mario Kart. - Not, not . - Mario Kart is my only broken app. - I don't even know why you play that on an iPhone, get a Switch. - I don't have a Switch that's why I play it on the iPhone. - Yeah, like that stuff's all fine and fine, okay? But I am also on a set of managed devices. So they're all joined to Intune and things like that. I don't know how Intune is gonna react when it sees iOS 14. And if it considers that an iOS version number, it doesn't know about and then all of a sudden I'm jailbroken and it's a big pain to go backwards and, you know, get a backup, do the IPSW restore and all that kind of stuff. - It's true. Yes, I was forgetting about the fact that the whole Intune management and that actually cares about build numbers and-- - Who knows if it does, or if it doesn't--- - It doesn't, scientists don't want to be the one to try it. So I'll probably try it with the public beta when it's an even worse time to do it and . - Yeah, that's what all the companies start locking it down when the public beta is actually out and all of their employees could go do it just easily. - But public betas aren't too bad. They're usually a dev release or two behind. So the expectation would be that in another week or two, you go from dev beta one to dev beta two. And that takes us into July and then at some point in July, public beta one comes out, but public beta one is really the same build as dev beta two or dev beta three. And then they track behind a little bit from there. - I feel like there's a company though, it's chart trying to lock it down more once they hit public beta, because you're gonna get a lot more people that go install it once it hits public beta. With dev beta, you're not gonna get as many people that are gonna go try it. - Well, you're gonna get. - I don't know, you're gonna get crazy people like you and I, that don't do any type of development on Apple, like I'm not building or releasing iOS apps or Mac apps, but we're paying to be in the dev program. So that we can have access to beta profiles. - Because we just don't have any patience when it comes to shiny new toys. - That's it GIF MIC. You know what all I want is my live tiles and my full convergence of iOS, Android, and web iOS. That's all I need. - I don't like, there's some stuff here. This can cause some controversy, I did not see anything, so I watched the key, well, I did not watch the keynote. I had the keynote playing in the background for WWDC, I did not see anything that was innovative in that entire keynote up until the last 30 minutes. Everything else I looked at and I was like, they ripped that off from Windows phone, from Android, from something else. And then the only, in my opinion, the only really innovative thing or groundbreaking thing they started talking about was their plan to switch from Intel to ARM and to go to all of their own silicone chips. That was the most innovative thing I saw in the entire, however many hours they talked about all of the stuff they're doing. - Yeah, I mean, we're in the point in the cycle where innovation is tough, but everybody can refine and riff on a series of ideas. - Right. - Which I'm totally fine with, like, people complain that like, "Oh, Apple took that from Android "or it came from Web iOS or," whatever it was. Like, yeah certainly there's inspiration to be found there but quite often the Apple way of doing it for better or worse is more refined. Or if it's not more refined, like way more people are gonna use it. Both my parents have Android phones, they don't even know what widgets on the home screen are, but I guarantee you that every single person who has an iPhone, once they figure out widgets are there, they're gonna be lit up and be a thing. - Right. - And that's the power of that ecosystem. - I don't have a problem with that. Like again, I'm loved the widgets, I like the idea. It's not that I'm expecting them to be innovative, I think it's the fact that I feel like a lot of times they sell it as being innovative. And it's this magical new experience of this beautiful thing and-- - Well, that's the job of marketing. That's a different conversation. - Oh yes. - You can be like yoga in Spaceballs, it's just merchandising, merchandising, merchandising. - Yes. - It's fine. Go do it and do it better and get more people to adopt it and make it simpler but don't sell it as a brand new idea. That's all it is we're making iOS better and you do not need a keynote that long to cover what they did. But anyways, that has absolutely nothing to do with cloud news, that's just me ranting. - Yes, I mean, there's some fun stuff there and it's kind of exciting. And so you mentioned Apple silicon, so that's gonna bring ARM into the mainstream as well, like today there's all sorts of ARM devices out there. You've got things like iOS devices or iPad iOS devices. So iPhones and iPads and things like that. There's a slew of Andrew tablets like all the, you know, Fire HD tablets, Microsoft has a Surface Pro X or it's an extra 10 underneath, I think it's the X. - I don't know, - And so, but that's the ARM-based Surface Pro tablet. So that has been kicking around for a while. But again, it's gonna be kind of Apple potentially bringing it mainstream and lighting some of that up. So that's gonna be exciting as well, like to have kind of a new, fun convergence thing going on. - Right at least-- - But it's gonna be all locked down in the apply kind of ways. So good luck installing customer OSS and all the things that you're using. - As soon as I, until it comes to installing my Windows VM on an arm based Mac,...

  • Jun 25, 2020 · 35 min

    Episode 183 – Microsoft 365 Network Monitoring Goodness

    In Episode 183, Ben and Scott go through some of the recent announcements for network performance recommendations and the general availability of Azure Files AD DS authentication. Transcript Email Download New Tab - [Ben] Welcome to episode 183 of the Microsoft Cloud IT Pro Podcast recorded live on June 12th, 2020. This is a show about Microsoft 365 and Azure, from the perspective of it pros and end users, where we discuss a topic or recent news, and how that relates to you. In this episode, Ben and Scott, jump back into Microsoft 365 land, to talk about recent announcements around network performance recommendations from Microsoft, as it relates to Microsoft 365. They also spend some time in Azure talking about Azure files and active directory authentication. - [Ben] How was week one? You are one week in the books as a blue badge. - [Scott] I survived it. - [Ben] Remotely, so you survived it. What is the first week kind of like a first week, anywhere else where you just, I think I saw it. You were just watching a bunch of videos, and doing a bunch of learning and figuring out where everything is, and what you're supposed to do, and where you're supposed to find that and all that. - [Scott] Yeah. Yeah, I mean, you go to a new company, you get to learn the way they do things. - [Ben] Yep, exactly. And now, since you're in the Eastern time zone, and they're in the Pacific time zone, are your hours like 11 to eight? - [Scott] No. No, I'm primarily in my hours so far. - [Ben] You're just sticking your hours so far. - [Scott] So far, mostly. - [Ben] Perfect. All right. So essentially, we're now a blue badge. I have a question for you that I ran across on Facebook. I'm going to not say who it is or not say which Facebook group I saw it in, so said person could remain nameless. But I have a question for you, Scott. Do you know, or the question was anyone, does anyone know what is the best way to add WordPress plugins, for creating their own design in SharePoint 2019? - [Scott] Step one, uninstall SharePoint 2019 step-- - [Ben] install WordPress. - [Scott] Step two, install WordPress, yes. PHP and.net and com are not compatible. - [Ben] They don't work together, it made me laugh. - [Scott] You could certainly write your, well I dunno, maybe like your SPFx thingamajiggers and put them in I-frames or something. And those could be in WordPress right? - [Ben] And then pull in a WordPress site. Just put WordPress in an I-frame in SharePoint, in teams. - [Scott] . - [Ben] Bingo. - [Scott] It's all just code somewhere. - [Ben] Inception for Office 365 and WordPress. Now I was making breakfast this morning and I saw that, and it just gave me a chuckle. - [Scott] Indeed, yeah well. - [Ben] Yeah, I don't have anything else, I'm tired. It's been a long week, I'm going on vacation next week. - [Scott] Yeah. - [Ben] Yeah. - [Scott] Disney's open again. - [Ben] No, We are actually going up. We're going North now, we're going up to Georgia. - [Scott] Georgia is not North, it's still in the South. - [Ben] It is North for me. - [Scott] very true. - [Ben] As is just about everything. - [Scott] There we go, very true. - [Ben] Yeah, so we're taking out for a week and just getting away with the whole family. Some of my in-laws us, we rented a house and we're gonna go social distance somewhere in the woods, in Georgia. - [Scott] Excellent, we're thinking about doing the same, but we'll do it closer to when the leaves change. 'Cause Palm tree leaves don't really change color, but if you do go to Georgia or North Carolina or South Carolina, you start to get into leaves. That actually changed, so we're gonna do that more in like October, November. - [Ben] Got it, nice, I think we might, well, it's not a might actually later this year, we aren't gonna brave the airports too and fly up to Michigan to see my family. We bought plane tickets the other day. They were cheap. Nice thing is it's a direct flight from one small airport to another small airport with no layovers, no Atlanta, no anything. So we shall see how that goes. I will let you know how the airports are later the summer. - [Scott} Basket up. - [Ben] Yup. Well, so it was interesting when I booked the flights, they actually give you a, they put a disclaimer on there that based on how many plane tickets we're gonna sell, we may not be able to adhere to social distancing guidelines on the plane. And then they give you a check box. Do you want to be notified when this flight is over like 60% sold? So you can book these flights and then get notified if your plane is gonna be really full and if you can adhere to social distancing. And I'm assuming they'd let you cancel or reschedule if you're uncomfortable with a over 60% full flight, which just seems weird because the last time I was on a flight that had that few people. I don't remember the last time I was on a flight that had that few people. - [Scott] Yeah, that'd be a pretty interesting thing. - [Ben] So, I will let you know on that other news I'm just full of random tidbits of news. - [Ben] As IT professionals and the cloud era. Sometimes it feels like we don't speak the same language as the rest of the organization. So when stakeholders from finance or other departments start asking about a specific project or teams that Azure costs, they don't always realize how much work is involved in obtaining that information. Sifting through cluttered CSVs and a complex, massive metadata in order to manually create custom views and reports. It's a real headache. On top of helping you understand and reduce your organization's overall Azure spend ShareGate Overcast, lets you group resources into meaningful cost hubs and map them to real world business scenarios. This way you can track costs in the way that makes most sense with your corporate structure, whether it's byproduct business unit, team, or otherwise. It's a flexible, intuitive and business friendly way of tracking Azure infrastructure costs. And it's only available in ShareGate Overcast. Find out more on sharegate.com/it pro. - [Ben] So I'm trying something else. I'm gonna do some self promotion. Could I do some self promotion at the beginning of our podcast. I'm I allowed to do that? - [Scott] Sure. As long as it's shameless self promotion. - [Ben] As long as it's shameless. So July 9, I'm gonna try something new, I'm gonna actually do a one day workshop, like all in teams for 20 people. And it's gonna be a combination of some videos. We'll have some live calls, some office hours, some resources people can download and it will be within teams from 7:00 a.m Eastern to 7:00 p.m Eastern time. And... - [Scott] 12 hours. - [Ben] 12 hours. But it's not gonna be that you have to be there for 12 hours. So 77 bucks, you can go sign up. I'm limiting it to 20 people. So I have enough time to give everybody attention and you can come in, watch the videos work through like challenges that I'm gonna have in your team in terms of configuring teams policies, and some of the team settings and messaging policies and all of that. And then you'll have resources you can download. And during those 12 hours I'll be available for chat for office hour type calls for some one on one calls and then you'll have access to everything for like 30 days after that. But I won't be actively monitoring that team's channel anymore - [Scott] Gotcha. - [Ben] So there is going to be a registration in the show notes because I need to make sure I have the URL, right? So go look at the show notes 'Cause I'm still getting the registration all set up and configured. But if you are interested in learning all about teams policies in a one day workshop and then have a bunch of resources to go take and do at your your own tenant and, or threaten your own tenant, Go click the registration link in the show notes and find out more. - [Scott] Very cool. - [Ben] And then maybe I'll do more. If people like it and I fill up, I can always do more workshops for 20 people, or I may expand it out and do one day or two day or three days on different topics. So if this isn't your cup of tea, let me know and we'll see what other workshops we can do. - [Scott] Just like that. You're so accommodating. - [Ben] Just like that. I am, I do it for the people Scott. All about the people. - [Scott] All about them, huh. - [Ben] Okay. All about, yes, Okay. We're gonna stop. Now we'll get into some real news. Do you wanna talk about, well that's real news. Do you wanna talk about other news? That's not my news. - [Scott] Yeah, how about network assessments? You wanna start there? - [Ben] Network assessments. So this one was interesting. And if you have been paying attention to conferences, this was actually initially announced back getting night. As I went back and dug through it. And I really hadn't seen anything else about it. And then Jeff Teper has recorded a keynote that has been playing at a few of the conferences going around. It was at the virtual marathon that I took part in. I think there was... What was the one in Europe? There was one in Europe, I think this past week. - [Scott] The European Collaboration Summit. - [Ben] Yeah. I thought they had a different name. But I know it's the... - [Scott] ECS. - [Ben] ECS, Okay. So there was that one, I think there was one other one. And then there's the Collab365 Summit that is their global Cantu. That's actually gonna be going on when this comes out. But in there Jeff Teper and I can't remember who else. Somebody else joined him for the keynote, but he talked about a network performance tool. And as you have, it's tied to Office or Office 365, Microsoft 365. And as you set up your offices in different locations, this tool can tell you about network performance in these different locations around the world or around whatever country you're in and what t

  • Jun 18, 2020 · 37 min

    Episode 182 – Hands-On Kubernetes on Azure with Nills Franssens

    In Episode 182, Ben and Scott sit down with Nills Franssens, a Senior Cloud Solution Architect at Microsoft to talk about his new Kubernetes book, "Hands-On Kubernetes on Azure". Transcript Email Download New Tab - Welcome to Episode 182 of the Microsoft cloud IT Pro Podcast recorded live on June 12th of 2020. This is a show about Microsoft 365 and Azure, from the perspective of it pros and end users, where we discuss a topic or recent news and how it relates to you. In this episode, Ben and Scott hop on a call with Nills, a Senior Cloud Solution Architect at Microsoft and the author of "Hands-On Kubernetes on Azure," which is currently available for free on azure.com. We have another interview episode for everyone today, I'm excited to go through this one. So we have a guest who I've done some work with in the past, through a couple of Microsoft projects that I've been involved with and some community programs over there, like OpenHack. And yeah, he just recently wrote a book too, which having participated and written some technical materials before I very much feel the pain and we can commiserate about that if you want to as well, but Nills, why don't you go ahead and introduce yourself here real quick. - Hi, my name is Nills, I'm a Senior Cloud Solution Architect with Microsoft based in San Jose, California. And as Scott said, I recently wrote and published a book on running Kubernetes on Azure, which was a very fun experience of writing the book outside of Kubernetes. My main area of expertise within Azure is everything related to infrastructure, networking, storage and the general automation of the platform. And I'm actually very happy to be here and talk to Ben and Scott 'cause I'm a listener of the podcast as well. - Alright, well, good to hear it. And did you actually say you had fun writing the book? I think you're the first person that I've ever talked to, that wrote a technical book that actually said it was fun. - It definitely there're periods where it was not as fun, but I think the overall experience was a good experience. It took a lot of time and a lot of nights and weekends, 'cause I think the one thing that I didn't realize when I signed up was I knew Microsoft had a moonlighting policy. So I couldn't write anything during business hours and what I didn't realize was exactly how much time was required to write the book. But if I look back on the process, I find that might not have been the right word, but it's actually a really nice process that I went through. And it's fun to actually have the physical book in my hands right now. And I learned a ton just during the process, both technically and about becoming a better writer as well. - Got it, I can see that, so I've never written a book. I think Scott has helped out on some, but I'm like, it would be, I think from my perspective, it would be interesting to go through the process. And I feel like you've learned a lot 'cause obviously you want the book to be correct and you wanna really cover everything. And I feel like once you actually had that book in your hand, like you said, it would be really rewarding knowing that you went through all of that and wrote it. - Yes, and I think you're absolutely correct and you learn a ton and I think when you're writing a book, you actually need to go back and take a beginner's mindset about the technology that you're writing about 'cause once you're dealing with something and you've been working with something for a couple of years, certain basic things, you don't even consider them and you don't even think about what's underneath those basics. And then once you actually start writing a book, you need to go back to basics and figure some things out. And what I found important was using the right words and the right terminology to describe certain things. And just as a stupid example in Kubernetes, there's this thing called an ingress that you can use to do some layer-7 load balancing. So basically do routing based on the host name that you send. And there's an ingress and an ingress controller, and like I always drew both terms together and I didn't even realize what the difference was between an ingress and an ingress controller. I just mixed the words and when writing the book, I was like, what I'm writing this I actually want to use the correct terminology. And that was some of the things that I researched and learned because when you write a book, you actually want to be factually correct. You just don't just want to be, yeah, it works. You actually want to be correct in what you say. - If you're a good author, yes, that's the way to go. So I make that mistake all the time. I tend to use those two synonymously as well. It's not something that I would very much think about along the way 'cause usually once you're down to the nitty gritty, you're like, what do I actually need to do? I need to set up a deployment for an ingress controller so I can actually get that software or that construct, whatever that thing is out there. So we can start routing traffic for me, now . - One of the things that helped as well for me when I was writing this was I had somebody from the publisher 'cause the book is in self published. I worked with Packt as a publisher and I had... I don't know what the actual term is of the person, but I had somebody working with me who reviewed everything that I wrote. And she wasn't a Kubernetes expert, which was actually perfect because when I wrote something and something didn't make sense to her, she could actually ask a lot of clarifying questions, which I then had to research myself 'cause something's just seems so common sense when you're dealing with something for a couple of years that you don't realize, and then having somebody writing or working with you that actually points out to you, "Hey, why do you use this term and not that term?" Worked, helped me a lot in just tuning my own knowledge and sharpening my own knowledge. - Oh, you should get on board that train. - I am not a Kubernetes guy at all, well, I probably should. So does this book take it from, let's say someone of my level who literally knows just a little bit about Kubernetes from what Scott and I have talked about on the podcast to someone, to your level Nils, where you're like a complete and total expert on Kubernetes, or should you have some Kubernetes experience going into this? What does that level of the book and what is the, I guess the journey or the path that the book will take you through as you work through it or read through it? - The book itself doesn't require you to have any prior knowledge of Kubernetes itself. The main focus on the book is by itself is "Hands-On Kubernetes on Azure." So the book is very practical with a lot of examples in it. And if I think about how we laid it out, there's three sections in the book itself. One is just simple basics where we cover what's Docker what's containers. What's this thing called Kubernetes and why do we even need it to setting up the cluster on Azure, which are like the absolute basics. Then there's a second section, which covers more of the Kubernetes' constructs that you need to know, like deploying the parts, deploying services, doing some ingress folk, how you could potentially secure certain things. So that's section two, which focuses more Kubernetes itself. And it touches on Kubernetes on Azure in a couple of places, for instance, with a cluster autoscaler that needs to interact a little with Azure, but it's that section. I think 90% of that section you could do on an Azure Kubernetes cluster, as well as on a Kubernetes cluster anywhere, let's say you run them, run it on your own laptop, or even on GCP or AWS. I think 90% of that content is pretty neutral. And then there's a third section on the book where we actually cover some more of the in-depth Azure integrations, where we describe how you can integrate with some past services. There's a chapter on Event Hubs, there's a chapter on my SQL databases, there's another chapter where we actually run Azure functions with KEDA which is a pretty new project. As your functions with KEDA on an Azure Kubernetes cluster, you don't have to have any prior knowledge if you wanna start reading the book. And if you actually have no prior knowledge, this is a good way to get you started from level 100 to level 300. The book itself doesn't make you a in-depth experts 'cause there's too much in the Kubernetes ecosystem to fit in one book I believe. But I think if you have no knowledge of it, it's a good way to get started and to get a good understanding of what it takes to build and run applications on Kubernetes. - As IT professionals and the Cloud era. Sometimes it feels like we don't speak the same language as the rest of the organization. So when stakeholders from finance or other departments start asking about a specific project or teams that Azure costs, they don't always realize how much work is involved in obtaining that information. Sifting through cluttered CSVs is a complex massive metadata in order to manually create custom views and reports. It's a real headache on top of helping you understand and reduce your organization's overall Azure spend, ShareGate Overcast, lets you group resources into meaningful cost hubs and map them to real world business scenarios. This way you can track costs in the way that makes most sense with your corporate structure, whether it's byproduct, business unit, team, or otherwise. It's a flexible, intuitive and business friendly way of tracking Azure infrastructure costs. And it's only available in ShareGate Overcast, find out more on sharegate.com/ITPro - Yeah, I think there's a lot that goes into the Kubernetes and that ecosystem. And then there's AKS, which is Kubernetes, kind of,...

  • Jun 11, 2020 · 43 min

    Episode 181 – Deep[er] Dive on Azure Sentinel

    In Episode 181, Ben and Scott go deeper into Azure Sentinel, discussing considerations for the design and segmentation of your Sentinel workspaces. Transcript Email Download New Tab - [Ben] Welcome to episode 181 of the Microsoft Cloud IT pro podcast recorded live on June 5, 2020. This is a show about Microsoft 365 and Azure, from the perspective of IT pros and end users where we discuss the topic or recent news and how it relates to you. In this episode, Scott and Ben take a little bit deeper dive into Azure Sentinel and what you can do with it. And here we are, Scott. A Friday, but not just any Friday. This Friday is unique from all other Fridays. - [Scott] It is, is it? - [Ben] Every Friday is unique technically, right? Every Friday is not like the other. One of these things is not on, no don't get me started. - [Scott] No, stop the madness. No, this is your last day, which means we may have to update our intro. We need to talk about that but why might we have to intro, update our intro, Scott? - [Scott] I am going to go out into the wider world and live one of my adult dreams. I'm gonna become a blue badge. - [Ben] Look at you. - [Scott] Look at me. - [Ben] You are moving up. You are leaving me. No, you're not leaving me. We're gonna still keep doing the podcast, you're just changing jobs, which is exciting. I know I've talked to a bunch and this is something you have been trying for wanting to do for a long time. So it's exciting for me to be excited for you because I do know how excited you have been to do this. - [Scott] Yeah, I think it will be very interesting. So I'm gonna be living in a little bit of a different life. I am joining the Azure storage product team as a product manager within a Cogs group. So I'll primarily be working with customers around Azure blob storage, which storage is kinda the backbone of, just about everything that you do in the cloud. At the end of the day, if you think about Azure, it's really a bunch of compute. It's a big hypervisor and then stuff that's running in storage, which tends to be blobs, that could be virtual machine disks, could be something you upload for a workload, could be like data lakes all run in blob storage, things like that. So I think it'd be very exciting to be a little bit closer to kinda the core and backend of everything that drives Azure. - [Ben] Got it, very cool. You are gonna be focused then explicitly on just blob storage because storage has all those other things like you have your blobs and your Azure file shares and all of those that function differently and do different things and you are not Azure storage but you are Azure blob storage. - [Scott] That's my understanding of it. I'll let you know more as it evolves. - [Bob] As it develops when you start here in a few more days. - [Scott] Yes. - [Bob] So you already, how was starting a new job in this world of quarantine? - [Scott] It's very interesting. I think like lots of employers, Microsoft isn't probably too unique in trying to figure out how to onboard employees remotely. I remember when I was a virtual TSP, when back when they used to have like purple badges at Microsoft and your badge came with, your picture and all those things, just usually a normal bad but also your clients certificate for CACing into things. And you weren't allowed to just say, "Hi, I'm Scott" and somebody would send you a badge with a CAC and they'd give you your password in plain text over email and you go like, "Ooh, look at me, I'm on the network." There was a little bit more, a little bit more involved with that. You had to go to a Microsoft location and see somebody in person. So there's certainly things like that. I think it's even interesting for hiring practices like in the United States, you have to prove that you're eligible to work in the United States. So you have to provide documentation such as your passport or your driver's license and your social security card. There's this whole combination of documents that you need to provide that you're allowed to work in the country. And I think lots of countries are like that in the same vein but typically those need to be verified in person. So in the US that is certainly a thing, the IRS says, "Hey, you have to verify these documents in person "as an employer." They've waived all those rules for right now and they're letting employers do virtual verification. But even for that, at some point, like they're very explicit and it calls out in hiring documentation that once things open back up again and we can be non-virtual, you're gonna have to show up at an office with this documentation and make sure we know who you are. - [Ben] Okay, got it, interesting. It's just so bizarre, all of that. I was talking to somebody too, that said banks are struggling with the same thing, not so much from hiring but in terms of opening new accounts and doing the same type of verification. - [Scott] I would imagine it hits lots and lots and lots of different places. - [Ben] Yes, but now I don't know. We haven't figured this out yet. We'll have to figure this out because we are recording this on our typical Friday, which means by the time you will, people will hear this or you, the listeners will be hearing this, you will have been a Microsoft employee for four days. So we still need to figure out what kind of intro I need to put at the beginning of this, that these are your opinions and not the opinions of Microsoft and that disclaimery type stuff or if we even need that. - [Scott] Yeah, we'll get all that stuff sorted. - [Ben] We'll figure it out. - [Scott] Yes, fun times. - [Ben] Do you feel overwhelmed by trying to manage your Office 365 environment? Are you facing unexpected issues that disrupt your company's productivity. Intelligink is here to help, much like you take your car to the mechanic that has specialized knowledge on how to best keep your car running, Intelligink helps you with your Microsoft cloud environment because that's their expertise. Intelligink keeps up with the latest updates in the Microsoft cloud to keep your business running smoothly and ahead of the curve. Whether you are a small organization with just a few users up to an organization of several thousand employees, they want to partner with you to implement and administer your Microsoft cloud technology. Visit them at intelligink.com/podcast. That's I-N-T-E-L-L-I-G-I-N-K.com/podcast, for more information or to schedule a 30-minute call to get started with them today. Remember Intelligink focuses on the Microsoft cloud, so you can focus on your business. - [Ben] So should we dive into our topic now today? - [Scott] Yeah, absolutely. - [Ben] It has nothing to do with what you're gonna be doing, but it has to do with what you are presenting on here shortly. - [Scott] It does. I think one of the interesting things about my current role is potentially the variety of offerings that come along with them. And so we've been doing, and you've been helping out as a coach in a big bootcamp that Microsoft has been putting on this week. So they had their first virtual partner bootcamp. There was a select group of partners that were invited to this event. I think we had about 1700 attendees signed up, which was pretty good for like an internal, very partner driven event, but all 300 plus level content for four days across a bunch of different tracks, AppDev, Infra, Teams, Versatrack, which is what you're participating in. So in my tracking infrastructure, we've been doing deep dives on arm, including Azure resource manager templates. We've also done as we talked about last week, a bunch of Kubernetes stuff. Like I was talking about some of the heartburn with just Jason and things like that, that was all born out of putting together all this content around Kubernetes. And then my last one, my last session today is on Azure Sentinel. - [Bob] This is an interesting one. We actually had, we did an episode a while back when Sentinel first came out and then we recently had somebody ask too they're like, "Hey, could you dive a little bit deeper to Sentinel? "You did like an overview, but can we dive deeper?" So you're like, "Hey, Scott just wrote a bunch of "three, 400 level content on Sentinel. "Someone asked about Sentinel. "Maybe we should do a Sentinel episode." - [Scott] Yeah, it's totally doable. - [Ben] Yes, so if people, and there may be people that have not heard our intro episode. So should we just start really briefly by what Sentinel is if people have not heard of it or didn't listen to that episode or are just curious, what is Sentinel? - [Scott[ Sentinel is Microsoft's cloud based SIM. So it's an event collector that allows you to do not just collection, but also analysis of security events and logs that you might store across your environments, all in the cloud. So you're leveraging cloud for not only the storage of your logs, but also for the compute and really for the, I think that beauty of computational machine learning and things like that, to help you understand all of those logs as they're aggregated together. So if you think about most environments that you probably have today, let's say you run in Azure. That means you have an Azure subscription, which means you have an activity log you monitor, it means you have Azure AD. And it also means that you have all these workloads that you run off plate. Even if you turn up a VM, that VM has a windows event log or if you're doing Linux, you might be doing Swisslog, something like that. So there's operational events coming from those you're probably a little bit on prem. So maybe you have some clients or servers on prem that are doing things. Like if I have a windows server, it probably has a firewall turned on and that's generating telemetry and logging....

  • Jun 4, 2020 · 29 min

    Episode 180 – JSON All The Things!

    In Episode 180, Ben and Scott talk through a recent experience Scott had when working with service principals in Azure AD for use with Azure Kubernetes Service. They also get into some of the fun that can be had with parsing JSON from the command line with jq and JMESPath. Transcript Email Download New Tab - [Ben] Welcome to Episode 180 of the Microsoft Cloud IT Pro Podcast recorded live on May 29 2020. This is a show about Microsoft 365 and Azure from the perspective of IT pros and end users where we discuss the topic or recent news and how it relates to you. In this episode, Scott and Ben talked through a recent experience Scott had when working with service principals in Azure AD for use with Azure Kubernetes Service and then wrap up talking a little bit about Parsing JSON in the command line. Hey, Scott, we're recording Episode 180 today. - [Scott] 180, amazing. - [Ben] It really is. And you know what other mark we crossed recently, 'cause we don't talk about this much. 400,000 downloads over the lifetime of the podcast. - [Scott] Nice, I gotta go update the About page. - [Ben] You should. We should actually make some updates around that. So we have, it has been going on three years now. Because we record extra at events. I can't remember when we started this, but it was about this time three years ago. Which means I have talked to you every week for three years. - [Scott] And you're better for it. I keep telling you that, but you don't believe me. - [Ben] I would not be the same man I am today had it not been for you, Scott. - [Scott] Boy, let's see if I can teach you some stuff today. Maybe you too could teach me some stuff. - [Ben] If we talk about AKS, like you have suggested you would like to because you have been living in the world of AKS. Not to be confused with ACKS when you're talking about networking. Bad joke. - [Scott] No, there's a TCP joke in there somewhere. - [Ben] Yes, you will probably be teaching me more because AKS is not something that I have done much with or have much knowledge in. So would you like to talk AKS today, Scott? - [Scott] Yeah, we can talk about AKS. I have a bit of a personal question first though. So my wife and I have been going back and forth on this one. Do you ever have dreams about work? Like, do you get so involved in your work that you go to bed at night and you dream about it? - [Ben] Not a lot. I think I've done it once or twice, but it is not a regular occurrence. However, based on your Facebook status, I thought that was a joke. So is your Facebook status actually happened to you the other night? It was at twitter. - [Scott] It's been happening to me on the regular lately. So I am either far too close to my work, or my brain is just warping in a very strange way. So last night, I was watching TV and fell asleep on the couch. And I'd been spending a little bit of time in the morning running through and playing within AKS deployment. And one of the things you end up doing in AKS quite a bit after it's deployed or heck even, while it's deploying, especially when you're working with Azure CLI or things like that is you're gonna be playing a lot with JSON objects. When you're in bash, you want to find better ways to play with JSON. Because you don't wanna be potentially just manipulating raw strings or not having things like access to logical operators for doing selects of given nodes in a JSON document or anything like that, right? You just need a way to like prettify it and make it usable to you, so that you can query within it and kind of figure things out. So one of the tools that I found that I like to do that is jq. So that's a lightweight and flexible command line JSON processor. Think like I said for JSON data. And, you're on the right path for what it does. Certainly, there's a lot of tooling built into other things like Azure CLI supports queries with JMESPath. If you're looking like I was doing a bunch of stuff with, like you said, AKS over the last couple weeks. One of the things you end up doing there is using kube-control or kube-cuddle, whatever you want to call it, quite a bit to, you're always querying for services, deployments, nodes, pods, things like that. And there's an operator where you can either get your output back from kube-control as JSON, or you can use what they've built in for JSONPaths, which uses a query language that's like what's in JMESPath, but not all the way there, which is like what's in jq, but not all the way there. So my brains been really worked around these things. So I spent, I don't know, maybe like 30-45 minutes in the morning, trying to figure out this one jq query or I would have been happy if it was a JSONPath query or anything else that I could have gotten it into. When you're in Kubernetes, and you're doing something like, say you do kube-control, get nodes or describe nodes, whatever you wanna do to get your data back. Some providers like Microsoft, when they do things like label a node or label a pod with their annotations, they'll go ahead and label them in a way that some JSON parsers, particularly like jq don't like. They will have characters in them that just can't be parsed from a bash command line without a bunch of escaping, or other things otherwise. So something like a forward slash, or an equal sign, just weird things through bash off in general, and then you end up in string processing land and all these kinds of things. - [Ben] So what you're saying is, Microsoft did not follow conventions around something that has been a standard. Not to bash on Microsoft. - [Scott] So jq is totally an external tool. - [Ben] So they don't follow certain standards. Microsoft's not just ignoring standards here. - [Scott] I can't say that I love that, a million of their annotations have things like forward slashes in them which some parsers treat as a new node and not part of just a key value pair, things like that. - [Ben] Got it. So is there a standard around how this should all be laid out when you go look at these parsers and stuff, not to go down a rabbit hole? - [Scott] Well, I mean, it's just JSON. So they should be able to parse JSON. But now then you get into, I'm trying to parse from bash, or just a Linux shell. So whether it was zsh, ksh, or bash, whatever it happened to be, they all have their own rules for string processing from the command line, and then you're trying to figure out the right way to pass strings into things to get it all wired up and where it needs to be. Anyway, I was doing some stuff trying to get down to, I was just trying to write a simple query that retrieved nodes in a node pool. And it gave me the node pool name 'cause it's a cluster with a bunch of different node pools, and then I needed an annotation off of there for the failure domains. So when you create multiple node pools within AKS, you can also take those node pools and push them out to availability zones if you want to. So you can have each node in an AZ. So really the way to figure out where your node sits, is doing something like querying for the failure domain. So it's failure-domain.beta.kubernetes.io/zone, and then that'll give you the name of the zone you're in. And then you can pull out the node name or metadata.labels.agentpool gives you the node name and things like that. So you end up doing all this weird stuff. All I wanted to do was, I wanted. Well, I was first trying to just do a select statement. So with most selects, and you go look at jq's documentation, you're like, all right, select equals this. That makes sense, right? As a nice operator to do equality tax. It also does greater than and less than, but I didn't want to do any of those things, I wanted to do basically a like, or a match, like you might be used to inside of PowerShell. Or you do like, Where clause with a wildcard or something like that. - [Ben] So, essentially, like in CONTAINS. - [Scott] Yeah, exactly. But it took 45 minutes for CONTAINS to click in my head. So I was diving through the jq documentation, which isn't like the greatest thing, hey, it's okay. but I'm sitting there like, "All right, so there's not a practical example "for the one thing I wanna do." And I should have just rung you up, 'cause you would have said, "Hey, you're trying to do a CONTAINS," and then I would have just done a find on the operator page, and the function page and said, "Look, there's a CONTAINS function." That will help me a whole bunch and bring it back. So I've been living like this weird nightmare of JSON and CLI and all sorts of fun things like that. - [Ben] So to bring that full circle that you actually dream about that then last night while you were sleeping on the couch? - [Scott] Yeah, no, totally had a dream about browsing through the jq documentation. And looking for select and then it was just awesome. - [Ben] We need to find you some hobbies or we need to get you doing more work so that you're way more tired when you go to bed and you don't dream about it. - [Scott] Yeah, no, it's, I agree something to do there. - [Ben] As IT professionals in the Cloud era, sometimes that feels like we don't speak the same language as the rest of the organization. So when stakeholders from finance or other departments start asking about a specific project or teams Azure costs, they don't always realize how much work is involved in obtaining that information, sifting through cluttered CSVs and a complex mess of metadata in order to manually create custom views and reports. It's a real headache. On top of helping you understand and reduce your organization's overall Azure spend, ShareGate overcast, lets you group resources into meaningful cost hubs and map them to real world business scenarios. This way, you can track costs in the way that makes most sense with your corporate structure....

  • May 28, 2020 · 42 min

    Episode 179 – Azure Static Web Apps != Azure Static Websites

    In Episode 179, Ben and Scott discuss some of their favorite announcements from Microsoft Build 2020 including Azure Static Web Apps, Microsoft Lists, improvements to Teams, and more! Transcript Email Download New Tab - [Ben] Welcome to Episode 179 of the Microsoft Cloud IT Pro Podcast recorded live on May 22 2020. This is a show about Microsoft 365 and Azure from the perspective of IT pros and end users. Where we discuss the topic or recent news and how it relates to you. In this episode, despite focusing on IT pros, Ben and Scott talk Build 2020 News, including Azure Static Web Apps, Microsoft List improvements to Teams and more. - [Ben] Now we're supposed to come up with some intro, we've ruined it. - [Scott] So... - [Ben] So build was this week. - [Scott] Build was this week. There was some fun stuff at Build. - [Ben] What do you say about them apples? How about them List? Or how about them Static Websites and Azure App Services. - [Scott] So those are actually pretty cool. - [Ben] They are spun one up the other day. - [Scott] Yeah? - [Ben] There were some, cool Build stuff. So we figured, why not talk about cool Build stuff? Because that's what all the cool kids are doing right now, right? - [Scott] There you go. Well, that's it. Why be trend setters when you can be trend followers? - [Ben] Exactly. It's way more easier to be followers. It's a lot less work. - [Scott] It is less work to be a follower. It's hard to gain followers. - [Ben] Although we've managed to do a decent job I think! - [Scott] There's always next week. - [Ben] There is always next week. I'm sure we could bomb it pretty quick. Kinda like that thing with your grades, right? You fail one test and your grade like drops in half and then it takes forever to recover. I bet you could do the same thing with followers. - [Scott] You could. Although I think grades are a little bit easier right now. I don't know how you're all handling it with homeschooling? But it seems like from what I've seen with my kids, and certainly my wife's school, they're kinda at the point where, I mean it's end of the year anyway. So, all grades were due last week that kinda thing. But it's really hit just that point where everybody has been doing this remote thing for a while, and you could have potentially had, like a month and a half to two months of a child that never showed up online, but they still turned in their work and did things, right? They never showed up to any of the online meetings or whatever it was. So what do you do like with those kids? They do the work, but was the meeting the participation? What does that look like? And how does that come through for grades? And it's a very interesting thing. So some of it's like, "They turned in the work. "Here's an A." Right. - [Scott] "At least they opened it up, that's a B. "They didn't look at it, they didn't turn it in. "Well, still kinda put 'em through, so that's a C." - [Ben] Yeah. So we've been talking to a bunch of our friends, 'cause we have friends in the neighborhood, friends from church, all of that, that their kids go to school and they're like, "I could never home-school." And, frankly, we don't envy them. Like the situation, you guys found yourselves in, is way more challenging than what we were in. Because my wife's been working with my kids all year, she knows exactly where they are, she has it all planned out, it doesn't really change anything. She's just continuing to work with them, and she knew exactly what place they all were and what they had to do to finish up and she can make sure there's the participation there 'cause she also wasn't working. Her work was her four kids and homeschooling, where you guys it's like, well we both still have to work, We have to try to help our kids keep learning, but yet we have absolutely no idea what our kids were necessarily doing in school or what the participation looked like. And you guys just kinda got thrown into the middle of it. That is like 100 times harder. - [Scott] Yeah, but I think-- - [Ben] I will stick to my opinion. - [Scott] Yeah, but I think compared to some households, like at least ours, we're pretty lucky. My wife's a teacher and she teaches grade school. So she's pretty close to the work that my kids are doing, 'cause I have one in grade school and one in middle school. Even for the middle schooler, 'cause my wife used to teach Middle School, she's got a lot of that kind of in her back pocket as well. So I've kind of made it through unscathed. - [Ben] I'm sure with your wife being a teacher, my wife and I got a good kick out of this. Again, not even with our kids in school, the CDC's recommendations for when kids go back to school this fall? - [Scott] No, what are their recommendations? - [Ben] Talk about something else I'm gonna have to find-- - [Scott] Oh, are you talking about that Venn diagram? The 123? - [Ben] No, like they literally CDC published a List of recommendations for going back to school. And it was absolutely absurd. Like you look through it and you're like, obviously the people that wrote this for the CDC have never been in a school before. It was like, no, I mean, it had things on there from their recommendations like, "No eating in the cafeteria. "Everybody eats lunch at their own desk. "All the hallways have to be one way hallways. "All the desks in the classrooms have to be at least "six feet apart." It was, here it is. I found it. I delayed enough while I was talking. - [Scott] "Considerations For Schools." - [Ben] Oh, this doesn't actually have the List though. I am going down that link rabbit trail of one link to the next link, but it stays in the same site, never actually gets you to the source. But yes, it is... Like you read through it and you're like, "Maybe you could get high schoolers to follow that?" But, like Grade school, Elementary school, I don't see how you can ever manage to do that in a school. - [Scott] I think they'll have to come up with some interesting, like workarounds. And ultimately, they're gonna have to do things that businesses are doing too. Potentially considers staggered days, so, maybe, as child in a class where you might have gone five days a week, you might only go two days a week to that class in person, because they're staggering through the rest of the school or whatever it happens to be. And certainly a lot of that stuff will change with lunchtimes, where you do your work, how much you're at your desk versus just randomly roaming the halls and things like that. And then the consideration becomes, certainly age and things like that. You're probably not gonna get a, two year old to wear a mask all day. But once you're into some of those grade schoolers, and certainly up from there, it's not so much about, "Can they do it?" It's like, you're just gonna have to do it. - [Ben] Yeah, it'll definitely be interesting. Maybe they can use Microsoft Lists to track everything that is going on. - [Scott] Maybe they could use-- - [Ben] That was a terrible segue. How was that for a horrible segue? - [Scott] Maybe they could use Microsoft. What is Microsoft List? - [Ben] What is Microsoft List? So apparently, I thought Microsoft Lists were just an improvement on SharePoint Lists. You dropped a bombshell on me this morning, saying, "I watched a 20 minute YouTube video, "that is the source of all things truth, "and Microsoft Lists or not SharePoint Lists. - [Scott] Well, that's not what I said. I said, "So Microsoft Lists are really just SharePoint Lists "when it's not telling anybody." - [Ben] Oh, is that what it was? - [Scott] That's what I said. - [Ben] I misheard. I need more coffee. - [Scott] Yeah, and there was pre-coffee, so. - [Ben] That was pre-coffee? Okay. That makes sense, I get that. That yes, they're SharePoint Lists. - [Scott] Except I think they announced it in a very confusing way, 'cause they don't really talk it. They talk about how it's the evolution of SharePoint Lists, but at no point do they actually say it's SharePoint on the back end, but then you start to go and look at the way things are created and you go, "Huh, that's interesting." Like, I got to create a new List and it asked me to pick a site to put that List in. And then all of a sudden, it's, "Hey, let's go use that List in SharePoint "or use it in Microsoft Teams, "and we're back to just a List," Which is cool. I've always thought Lists were very powerful things. And certainly it's better to have more functionality and more UI and things like that. I was a little confused when I saw an article on The Verge, about Microsoft Lists and it talks about how, "Hey, this is this great new thing." But it's not SharePoint anymore. And it's more like Airtable and I was like, "Hold on, dial it back." - [Ben] Okay. - [Scott] You read what the marketing folks gave you. - [Ben] Right. I was gonna say, so the first problem here was you went to The Verge and do you read. Those two things, I went to the Microsoft website, and I looked at pictures. And I didn't get any of that because I looked at pictures. There was was like, "Oh, it's just new SharePoint Lists." So I missed all the dramatization around it, because I was just looking at pictures and like you said when you look at it, and when you're looking at the pictures and diving into it, it like to me I just kind of was like, "Oh, it's a SharePoint Lists." Because it has all the same buttons, it has all the same... It does have an updated look and feel and it has some new functionality. But if you've been doing SharePoint Lists for long enough, it's a SharePoint List With new lipstick on it. - [Scott] Interesting, now that you've got Lists directly integrated into Teams, now Teams is not only your hub for chats and tasks and kinda yammer all the things they've been putting in there, now,...

  • May 21, 2020 · 43 min

    Episode 178 – Securing remote work using M365

    In Episode 178, Ben and Scott dive into what you should think about when securing Microsoft 365 at a high level and run down the areas you'll want to focus on first. Transcript Email Download New Tab - [Ben] Welcome to Episode 178 of the Microsoft Cloud IT pro podcast, recorded live on May 15 2020. This is a show about Microsoft 365 and Azure from the perspective of IT pros and end users. Where we discuss the topic or recent news and how it relates to you. Is this episode Scott and Ben take a high level approach and rundown what you should consider when securing your Microsoft 365 environment, based on recently published recommendations from Microsoft. - [Scott] Mic check one, two, three. - [Ben] Mic sir? - [Scott] Sure. - [Ben] Are we checking for Mic? - [Scott] Why not, let's do it. - [Ben] We're gonna get zoom bombed by mic. - [Scott] That's how your weeks gone huh? I say my, I say mic check and you're gonna make mic jokes. - [Ben] I'm gonna make mic jokes. You know what I got a lot of sleep last night after not sleeping the night before. So that may affect my sense of humor. - [Scott] So either way you would have been grogging out of it. Love it. - [Ben] Yeah, pretty much. However, I did make an upgrade to our home network today. - [Scott] Oh, yeah? - [Ben] Yes, I now have. - [Scott] You renamed the WiFi from FBI surveillance fan to stay away there's COVID - [Ben] No, but that would be kind of funny. I now have redundant internet coming to our house. It was even more nerdy than renaming the WiFi. - [Scott] Oh, cool. So you run everything into a router that's gonna support that failover for you then? - [Ben] Yep, I have a unifi USG, and it has a LAN. Well, so it has a LAN and WAN, and then a LAN slash WAN. So you can use it for whatever you want to. So right now it is set up as two LANs and I have a AT&T going into one way LAN, Comcast going into another LAN. And if one of them drops, it automatically fails over. - [Scott] Perfect, can you bond those connections together and use them both at the same time? Or is just one strictly there for failover. - [Ben] So technically, I could. - [Scott] Technically. - [Ben] Technically I could do. - [Scott] I could have even more bandwidth. Like I can see you like the Infinity Gauntlet in your hand, you're just squeezing. - [Ben] Yeah, I could do lots of things. So I did test it, I actually like reached over and just turned off my Comcast modem. And AT&T picked right up and turned it back on, it flipped over, I could see it in all the logs where it switches your primary way in connection, however, what I think I'm going to do. So Dan Patrick, over at CES Alliance wrote an article about this on the Build Five Nines site. And he and I were actually talking about this and trying to figure out some of the routing, I think I'm going to stick a bunch of my family and streaming devices on one way in connection, and keep the other one for work stuff now as all of that- [Scott] Gotcha. - [Ben] All right? - [Scott] Well, yeah, you might wanna just like separate them and keep them all on one and potentially do the failover thing, right? 'Cause then if you put one on one and one on the other, if one goes down then stuff. - [Ben] So I think and I need to go through Dan's article and probably talk to him a little bit more about how he did it, is you can do both, where it still works as a failover. And you can have them on both VNet. So it's essentially like two VNets that, you can do policy based routing, but then it still will fail over when it fails over. I need to dig through all of it a little more. - [Scott] Gotcha. Yeah, it's a little bit of a setup to do what he was doing. 'Cause yes, he was doing a couple things with like policy based routing on his USG user. - [Ben] Yes, exactly. So I'm gonna go through that. I may try to do that because it would also help with my other problem is that Xfinity limits you to so much bandwidth a month. - [Scott] Not right now, they don't. - [Ben] Not right now they don't. But when they do go back, so I've been paying for extra because I have a tendency to go over my allocated bandwidth. - [Scott] I do the same thing you do. Yeah, we're limited to one terabyte and. everybody says, how do you go through a terabyte? Well try having two kids at home who are streaming everything all the time? My job requires streaming like, what was I doing today? Oh, yeah, just doing some deployments and trying to test them locally meant downloading, not just a bunch of ISOs and doing installs, but full VHDs for environments. So those really don't like zip up and compress very well. So it's easy to blow through, 20 gigs in a small download. And then you kind of do that every day a couple times. And it adds up quick. - [Ben] Yeah. So see, what you can do is you can get redundant internet. Because now you're paying almost the exact same amount. And it's like five or $10 more to have a second internet connection. Technically, now, instead of paying $50 for unlimited, I just have two of them, and I have a two terabytes which I don't know that I've ever gone over two terabytes. - [Scott] Only if you split your traffic the right way. - [Ben] Right, so that comes back into some of those policy based, if I can split all my streaming over one, and all my work over another, I might be able to get away with dropping my unlimited internet and putting that money towards my redundant internet. - [Scott] Interesting. I guess that works if you live in one of those magical places, so people internationally are laughing at us 'cause they're like, what do you mean magical place? Well, one of those magical places where you can have two internet providers. The neighborhood I live in is one of those magical places where it is Comcast or Bust. - [Ben] I'm sorry. - [Scott] Oh, well, I could get AT&T like DSL, but it's really, really, really slow. It's not worth it. I miss my days at firehouse, let's put it that way. - [Ben] Fair enough. I like my Comcast, so I have the Comcast one gig. That's my plain one. And that also helps you go over your internet in a hurry when you can transfer data at a gigabit per second. You can blow through a terabyte really quickly. And then my AT&T is like 50 Megs, so that is most definitely my backup. And I don't know if it'll work for streaming we'll have to see. But that is my non Cloud related not news for the week. - [Scott] Good for you. I'm glad You're geeking out in all the right ways over there. - [Ben] Yes, I do. Outlook add-ins are a great way to improve productivity and save time in the workplace. And Sperry Software has all the add-ins you'll ever need. The Save as PDF add-in is a best seller, and is great for project backups legal discovery and more. This add-in saves the email and attachments as PDF files. It's easy to download, easy to install, and Sperry Software's unparalleled Customer service is always ready to help. Download a free trial at SperrySoftware.com, S-P-E-R-R-Y-S-O-F-T-W-A-R-E.com, and see for yourself how great Save as PDF is. Listeners can get 20% off their order today by entering the code, Cloud IT. That's Cloud IT, C-L-O-U-D-I-T, all one word at checkout. Sperry Software work in email, not on email. So should we get on to our topic or do you have any not news you wanna talk about? Any Build sessions we should pay attention to now that schedules out? - [Scott] So I haven't looked at the schedule for Build, but I did go through my Build attendee box and hang my lanyard up with all my other lanyards. I think there's gonna be in general, I think Build will be a little bit more developer oriented this year. It looks like it has less kind of market texture sessions. Like certainly there's the keynote and things in the beginning. But there's a pretty wide variety of sessions out there, wait, I think I saw in the catalog, they even have a couple of sessions on, like, dedicated to Rust. They're going in a certain way. If you are signed up for build, awesome, go take a look at the catalog. If you are not signed up for Build, go register and put that in and or go view any of the videos or things afterwards. It looks like they're limiting session registrations. So some sessions are filling up, which I find funny. - [Ben] You know what I just realized, Build's gonna be over by the time people hear this, I think. - [Scott] Yeah, well, well they can go watch the video soon. - [Ben] Go watch the videos. - [Scott] They will all be recorded. - [Ben] Yes, if you're listening to this sorry you missed Build go find videos. - [Scott] It'll come back around again. It'll be there someday. - [Ben] Yes exactly. I did not get a Build box, I was not on the, I was not quick enough, I was too slow. Because it looks like they only sent those out to like the first few thousand attendees. I don't know how many the first few thousand is, but I was most definitely not in the box list. And I think I've seen some others that were not in the box list as well. - [Scott] Gotcha. Yeah, I was so it was a, what was it? It was like a bamboo lunch box. It was some stickers, some socks, a lanyard and kind of a welcome to, oh welcome to Build card so. - [Ben] Got it. - [Scott] So it was a nice thing to get. But it's not like you're missing out on a free surface go or something like that. - [Ben] Well, I kind of wanted the socks. But other than that, I'm fine. However, if you are listening to this, and you missed out on the Build bikes and you want swag, let us know via Twitter or Facebook or some way, go to the podcast, leave a comment. Because we have a ton of stickers that we don't have anywhere to give out because life has been canceled. And we will send you stickers because I have like 500 of them in my office and nowhere to go with them. So it does not Build swag, but we have swag, if you want it,...

  • May 14, 2020 · 33 min

    Episode 177 – Friends Should Let Friends Buy Microsoft 365 Business Premium

    In Episode 177, Ben and Scott break down the changes in Microsoft 365 Business Premium and how it compares against Office 365 Enterprise Plans including the Office 365 E3. Transcript Email Download New Tab - [Ben] Welcome to episode 177 of the Microsoft cloud IT pro podcast recorded live on May eight 2020. This is a show about Microsoft 365 with Azure from the perspective of IT pros and its users where we discuss the topic or recent news and how it relates to you. In this episode, Scott and Ben take a more detailed look at the recently renamed and improved Microsoft 365 business plans and discuss with these updates, should friends now let friends by business? Everybody now his kids and dogs and all sorts of things or people or animals making noise in the background to their meetings. - [Scot] Yeah, I think we're all getting better at it though, so maybe for those who haven't been doing the remote thing now that they've had a couple of weeks to not necessarily settle in to it, but experience it and recognizing that for some of us it's going to be coming for a long time. I think especially for technology companies, I mean Facebook announced that through the rest of 2020 just go for it. - [Ben] Really, I missed that. - [Scot] Yep, yep, go forth and do it. Amazon is at least October, Microsoft still has their campus effectively shut down. So it's gonna be a thing for a while and I think for us, like in this segment and this area, we're going to continue to experience it. - [Ben] Yeah, although to be fair, I've been experiencing it for like 10 years now. - [Scot] Yes. - [Ben] My kids literally don't know what it's like for me to have to leave the house for work. They get upset when I have to leave to go to work. They're like, "Why do you have to leave?" Some people do these everyday guys. - [Scot] You've done it again. - [Ben] Yes. They just don't know what it's like to have daddy actually leave every day to go to work. - [Scot] Man, you know, they'll have to figure out their own lives at some point, you know, let them grow up in flutter and all those things. - [Ben] What it is. Yes, they'll realize it. Maybe, who knows? Maybe everybody will work for home for the rest of their lives. I think you are gonna see a lot more people or companies staying open to remote work 'cause this is forced everybody to figure it out. I know there's some people I've talked to that they're like, "This just does not work for us. "We're not as productive." All of that, we need to be at the same spot. But I think there's a lot of companies that are also realizing, "Hey, this isn't as unproductive "or as bad or as prohibitive to our daily activities "as we thought it was." - [Scot] Yeah, interestingly, I also think lots of folks are gonna have to figure out the burnout factor and really starting it and mass in this time is a different thing then all of a sudden a company you phasing into remote work or just easing your way into it and figuring out what that balance is for, what is productivity at home? I think a lot of folks who are potentially looking at their teams and saying, "Well, we can't work remotely," oh, that's not attitude 'cause you're gonna have to figure out a way to do that in a lot of cases. And also by saying you can't, you're automatically throwing up a barrier to being successful there, but being able to align those times and boundaries between work and home life and recognizing that, yeah, this other thing is going on in the outside. - [Ben] Yeah, it's interesting and there's definitely a difference between being forced to work remotely and like you said, having that gradual roll and have it being an option. I would say there's more challenges with the way it happened this way. Well, it has opened up a lot of eyes. It also is a lot more challenging when you do it this way. Than if it, like you said, it's a gradual roll in a gradual rollout, you start with options and just do it a little bit at a time. Doing it this way definitely has brought a whole set of challenges. - [Scot] So one of the little things that gets me, is I have an established place to do work every day. I have my desk, it has my monitors, there's a nice warning ring on the desk where my coffee cup goes. There's a place for the keyboard, a place for my mouse, microphone, all those kinds of things. And my wife potentially transitioning to a remote role as a teacher. She's kind of settled on just one or two different places in the house to work in. And I've offered, like last night she's been working on an extra class and trying to do all these recordings for her students and things so she can put them up. So she came into the office and was sitting at my desk, which I'm normally on a laptop, but then it's just in clamshell plugged into all these monitors and she brought her laptop stand-in. She brought her keyboard in, brought her mouse in and she sat, stood up, it's a standing desk. So she stood up at the desk and I said all we gotta do is pull that little USBC cable out of my laptop and we can put it into yours and you could at least have the keyboard. And if you don't want the keyboard, keep using your keyboard 'cause that's all Bluetooth, that's fine. I get, you don't wanna use somebody else's mouse 'cause everybody's kind of partial to things like that, but you can totally use your keyboard and just all of a sudden have these screens like go ahead, have the 34-inch monitor and things like that. And she looked at me like I was crazy just like I couldn't be productive like that. I'm like, I couldn't be productive on a single screen. - [Ben] Yeah, it's everybody figuring out how they work best. As IT professionals in the cloud era, sometimes it feels like we don't speak the same language as the rest of the organization. So when stakeholders from finance or other departments start asking about a specific project or Teams Azure costs, they don't always realize how much work is involved in obtaining that information. Sifting through cluttered CSVs and complex massive metadata in order to manually create custom views and reports. It's a real headache. On top of helping you understand and reduce your organization's overall Azure spend. ShareGate Overcast lets you group resources into meaningful cost hubs and map them to real-world business scenarios. This way you can track costs in the way that makes most sense with your corporate structure, whether it's by product, business unit, team or otherwise. It's a flexible, intuitive and business-friendly way of tracking Azure infrastructure costs and it's only available in ShareGate Overcast. Find out more on sharegate.com/itpro. So we have an interesting topic. This topic today, speaking of working came up probably about a month ago now. I think this has been out and I saw some articles about it and we kind of put some notes together and were like, "We should record this at some point in time." So today is your lucky day Scot. - [Scot] Every day is my lucky day when I get to talk to you, Ben. - [Ben] Aw, that's so sweet. That was a little weird. Now you got me all thrown off. It's been a long week. So we recorded an episode a while back. I don't even remember which episode it was where we said, "Friends do not let friends by business "when it comes to office 365," and we had a whole list of reasons why. About a month ago, Microsoft made some announcements that we talked about, about renaming the business 365 skews. And as a part of that, one of the, I would say new skews with some added features to it is you can now get Microsoft 365 business premium, which includes Windows 10, office 365... well no, that'd be Microsoft 365 business standard, I believe it's one of the Microsoft 365 business skews as well as essentially EMS. You're getting Azure active directory premium. So you get all three of those for $20 a month, which is the exact same price as a office 365 E3 plan. So a lot of people have been asking, "Why would I buy office 365 E3 for $20 "when I can get Microsoft 365 E3 "or Microsoft 365 business premium for $20 a month?" Why would I not get that one with all these other features, Windows 10, Azure active directory premium, it's essentially all the EMS stuff. Although we're gonna talk about, it's not all of that. So do friends still not let friends buy business or have they changed this enough that Microsoft 365 business premium is actually a very solid option now where you're not quite as handicapped as maybe you were before. So we figured we'd dive in, discuss that. There was also a blog article that came out around securing remote work, tying into our intro to using Microsoft 365 business premium. - [Scot] And then that article really piggybacks and the concepts there piggyback kinda whole cons the licensing construct where they added Azure AD premium P1 to those licenses. So having access to conditional access I think ups the game and changes it a little bit. 'Cause that's one of those differentiators between those two skews. - [Ben] It really is. And before it was always an Add-on and now all of a sudden it has come bundled. So we decided this episode, we're just gonna talk about Microsoft 365 business premium and where it actually does make some sense now. I think my opinion, we'll see what Scott thinks. As well as scenarios where frankly it still doesn't make sense even though there's more features to it as opposed to like the E3 plan. - [Scot] Yeah, let's get into it. - [Ben] Alright, so where do you wanna kick it off? How do you wanna kick it off? - [Scot] So I tend to look at it from one of those clear differentiators between those business plans and the enterprise plans is the number of users that you can bring into those skews. So having a hard cap on the number of users, like if I was gonna build out a decision tree to say,...

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