Cloud Talk

Larry and Ralph are back with a live episode of Cloud Talk. Things discussed:

Azure Lighthouse

Raspberry Pi

Intel NUC

Intel Compute Stick

Microsoft Inspire

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!