Cloud Talk

Leading a large cloud project is hard, want to make it easier? The decisions you make at the beginning help determine your eventual fate and some seemingly innocuous tool choices can come back to haunt you as your project matures. Come hear Larry and Ralph talk with Eric about what he learned shepherding a project from “Salesware” to “Enterprise Changing” as the cloud changes under him.

In our biggest show so far (3 guests and 2 hosts!), our first return guest, over an hour because Ralph was too lazy to chop it up  (actually because it’s another case of must flow together), we return to Software as a Service (SaaS) use cases where things that are out there in the cloud and sometimes FREE (in this case free!) can be used for the common good and in a big way on a global scale through sheer will of people with vision.

We are not being overly dramatic when we describe Microsoft 365 (formerly Office 365) as one of the most successful and powerful SaaS service platforms out there but given how much of it can be free via a Dev Tenant alone, the fact that they pulled off a Woodstock level event (minus the latrine issues) to have hundreds of speakers cover topics in live events for about 12 thousand users in 7 languages in a 48 hour straight period globally, is stunning!  We just had to know how they happened and how they made it work.  Joel Oleson, Galen Keen and Ryan Schouten fill us in on what was just supposed to be a way to get around the COVID challenges for their Southern California User group event … and ended up being a world event that is both a challenge to the rest of the user group world but also a teaching event in itself to use in the community and to Microsoft as well.   

There is a blog for this, of course: https://collabshow.com/2020/06/11/behind-the-scenes-of-the-microsoft-365-virtual-marathon-microsoft-woodstock/  which is a major source to follow up on with this video but we also have a few other links that are on the show for you to have handy.   

Also, We have some shout outs in the show as well to a few folks like Jana Babackova and Ai Hirano, and Yoshi from Japan responsible for that Power Bi piece in the link below.

 

Here are those links:

• The GitHub Pages based site:  http://www.m365virtualmarathon.com/ 
• GitHub Pages: https://pages.github.com/
• Sessionize (for those who are serious about speaking): https://sessionize.com/ 
• Mouse without Borders Download: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=35460 
• Live Events explained (by Microsoft): https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoftteams/teams-live-events/what-are-teams-live-events 
• The Power BI used for scheduling: https://app.powerbi.com/view?r=eyJrIjoiNGY1YmRkMzQtNGZjMS00YWY5LWE3YmUtYWVjNmRjYWY0MGE5IiwidCI6IjgzZmQ0NjViLTczNGUtNDA1Ny1hZTM3LWU3N2FhN2QzNDcyOSJ9
• The Videos from the conference: https://youtube.com/c/Microsoft365VirtualMarathon 

User group meetings mentioned in the show:

• Microsoft 365 UK User Group – June 17th – https://www.meetup.com/m365uk/events/271141411/
• Kansas City O365 User Group – July 13th – https://www.meetup.com/KCO365-User-Group/events/271171606/

Thanks again to our guests and do enjoy the video and the links!  

Ralph has been getting a lot of communication traffic on this useful communications helper found in the https://lookbook.microsoft.com site (The Look Book) for those who have Office 365, the very major Cloud Service mentioned more than once on the show … A big shout out to the PnP Community ( https://github.com/SharePoint/PnP ) and the Microsoft Team behind it. Even if you don’t use it, peruse the template and let it help for your own efforts.

Stay safe all!

So our first posting now that we are back in the Saddle again … We have a backlog (and not in the Agile sense) of Videos although some of them are likely obsolete and may never see the light of You Tube, a number of them will definitely be worth watching like this one from December 2019 fresh from Ignite but before the big changes came through in January 2020. In fact, Ralph may have said an inadvertent thing or two in the video which we caught in one case but left in another cause its so Real when he has to take a moment out to ask his Mom (yes, extended family) to hang on while he finishes the meeting … fun, fun fun.

There are a couple of key notes to clarify and also on the You Tube description and they are as follows:

• Hub sites – There is no shared security in Hub Sites as sort of implied by Ralph in the Video but actually the though was there would be a future enhancement that might make it work … but that is also not what Ralph meant as the only way to “share” permissions is via Site Designs and Site Scripts where the script associated with the hub does some permissions pieces via script (or Power Automate which might not be free to use depending on how it is done … oh yeah Ralph has a Webinar coming up on that here!)
• Teams versus Teams Site – Yes, the terminology sounds confusing even in the video but the idea is if you make a Team SITE in SharePoint online, you do not automatically get a TEAM as in Microsoft Teams Team … but if you create a MS Teams Team, you DO get a SharePoint Team site. It all has to do with Office 365 Groups. Don’t get confused 🙂

The main Link to get it all is https://aka.ms/O365DevProgram so follow along from there 🙂

We are almost there…watch here for a new video.

Yes folks because we know we are about to get some people visiting after the recent “community outreach” Larry and I have been doing.

It’s a bit sad that we literally had no time in 2019 to even catch up but now …

So, anyways, this is just a place holder post to let you know the site is not forgotten (domain bill came but that’s not why we remembered ;-)) and there will be posts … looking at more Cloud related posts but also a look at various products that help us work with products that are, well, cloud products (go back to Episode 6 and see what we mean …)

Ok then … ready or not here they come …