During VMware Explore I attended the VMware EUC keynote. During this session Shankar Iyer, Shawn Bass and others dug into the every changing world of hybrid working and how VMware aim to assist.

The session is now available to be viewed online if you have a VMware Explore account
VMware Explore Video Landing

One of the most important aspects for me to hear during the session was VMware’s focus on digital employee experience and not just the technology. It is important in the hybrid world of working that experience, security and productivity are at the front of our technical strategies.

You can read more about this session over at the VMware End-User Computing Blog at the link below

Workspace Security and Digital Employee Experience, intertwined: Conclusions from VMware Explore 2022 Europe - VMware End-User Computing Blog

Please find my doodle with my key thoughts from the session below

View fullsize

If you are managing Microsoft 365 for a large organisation CoreView will allow you to easily create actionable reports to maintain organisational standards, securely delegate administrative tasks to the relative parties such as HR and maximise the use of your Microsoft 365 licencing with licensing optimisation reports and related actions.

You can learn more about CoreView over at their website https://www.coreview.com

View fullsize

The doodle above was created as part of a paid engagement with CoreView to understand the features of their platform and to doodle my thoughts. There has been no expectations set or influence on the content of the doodle or this blog post by CoreView. All thoughts are my own.

I recently had the opportunity to meet with Doug Hazelman - Senior Vice President and Cheif Evangelist of CoreView. Many like me from the virtualisation community will know Doug from his time at Veeam and it was great to catch up with him to hear all about CoreView.

CoreView is a SaaS platform designed to help enterprises that have a heavy reliance on Microsoft 365 within their organisations.

A quick look on their website summarises the product quite well in three given areas;

• See it - Action Enabled Reporting

• Manage it - Granular Privileges for Each User

• Automate it - With cross-SaaS workloads

View fullsize

The reporting functionality is the core element of the platform with over 240 inbuilt reports and the ability to fully customise and filter what is included. The word ‘reporting’ to describe this functionality doesn’t really do it justice, the reporting within CoreView is fully actionable, so once you have found the information that is relevant to you, for example, users who aren’t configured with MFA, you can then undertake the relevant corrective action directly from inside CoreView. Even more impressively you can schedule these reports to run regularly including the corrective actions to easily maintain standards.

View fullsize

Reporting is available for all areas of Microsoft 365 and of particular interest to me, was licensing optimisation and user management as well as the application-specific reports including SharePoint and Teams.

One of the areas I was most impressed with was the ability to delegate administrative access to Microsoft 365 to anybody in the business, including none technical members of the team whilst maintaining security and governance.

CoreView has the concept of virtual tenants or V-Tenants, this allows you to granularly carve up administrative functionality to specific subsets of users within your business. With Microsoft 365 taking such a large role within organisations today there is increasingly becoming a large burden for IT teams to be able to manage the associated administrative tasks. This is exactly where virtual tenants within CoreView comes to the rescue, whether this is delegation from a central Microsoft 365 admin team to certain controls to a service desk or even delegating user management to a representative of an HR department.

The virtual tenant allows you to initially configure which users are within the virtual tenant (this is useful for dept specific delegations) and you are then able to granularly control which permissions are allowed and what should be included in the user interface for these users. Together this allows you to securely and effectively delegate granular administration tasks within Microsoft 365 without risk.

As previously mentioned there are full licensing optimisation reports available allowing you to review per user utilisation of features and functionality in line with the licensing that is in place across the organisation. With the virtual tenants mentioned above, it is possible to take this a stage further and carve up licensing into the virtual tenants, allowing departments to manage their own licensing and to review the relevant reports.

View fullsize

The final component I want to talk about is the ability to review and filter the Microsoft 365 audit logs, from the day you configure CoreView by default it will store a rolling years worth of history with the option to pay for further retention. The audit review capability allows you to quickly and easily search and filter the audit logs to get drilldown to the elements that matter to you. Further to this there are a number of out of the box reports that highlight certain activity from the audit logs such as failed logins and logins with impossible travel.

I was really impressed by what I saw from CoreView and whilst it is focused on enterprise use cases I could see how the functionality would be useful to other organisations and managed service providers. I am hoping to get some time looking into the platform myself and will post any thoughts that I have.

Be sure to checkout CoreView for yourself https://www.coreview.com

View fullsize

Yesterday saw the launch of the new Poly Studio P series, a portfolio of video and audio devices aimed at giving individuals a professional set of tools to work successful irrespective to where they are working.

Included in the line-up was

• Poly Studio P5 - A 1080P Webcam

• Poly Studio P15 - A 4K webcam with combined speaker and microphone array

• Poly Studio P21 - A 21” USB monitor with integrated, speakers, microphone, vanity light and phone charger

Also announced was the new Poly Lens desktop application that gives users the ability to control their device including the settings whilst IT can leverage Poly Cloud

Below you will see a short video covering my initial thoughts

You can watch the full announcement that was live broadcast on Neil Fluester’s channel below.

Alongside VMware I have found the NetApp presentation to be one of the most interesting and relevant for myself. NetApp presented the Microsoft Azure NetApp Files services as well their Virtual Desktop Services offering. This was a really refreshing presentation for me, I had assumed with NetApp presenting we would have seen traditional storage solutions running in the cloud but I was presently surprised by the content presented.

Azure NetApp Files

Firstly we saw the Microsoft Service named Azure NetApp Files. A service ran by Microsoft natively in Azure (Not through the marketplace) allowing you to run Windows and Linux workloads in the cloud with high performance, as well as offering enterprise grade storage management including snapshots, clones, replication and tiering)

Azure NetApp Files supports NFS v3 and v4.1 as well as SMB3 allowing for a range of file based use cases, discussed was use cases around Enterprise File Repositories, Databases, HPC and VDI

https://cloud.netapp.com/azure-netapp-files

NetApp Virtual Desktop Services (VDS)

NetApp VDS comes from the acquisition of CloudJumper earlier this year. VDS is SaaS control plane allowing you to deploy, manage and optimise virtual desktop environment across on-premises and public clouds. Unlike Citrix and VMware Horizon, VDS leaves the brokering up to Microsoft RDS or WVD in the native cloud infrastructures and concentrates on the management capabilities mentioned previously.

With Microsoft’s release and continued improvement of WVD I am increasingly seeing customers wanting to look at the native Microsoft offering without rapping a third party brokering service. As such NetApp VDS sits nicely in this gap allowing admins to rely on WVD for the element it is best at whilst adding full lifecycle management capabilities.

https://cloud.netapp.com/virtual-desktop-service

Conclusion

It was refreshing to see cloud services from a traditional storage vendor like NetApp and I look forward to learning more and covering more about these technologies.

View fullsize

View fullsize

View fullsize

I was really impressed to see how VMware was maturing their EUC offerings with a look at day 0 operations and on-boarding of new hires, automation and ease of management. With the changes to work habits VMware EUC solutions have been pivotal at supporting businesses transform and allow flexible working and new working requirements.

This doodle covers some bascis of Microsoft Teams calling alongside some of the new features coming to calling within Microsoft Teams. It also covers the session looking at the capabilities for First-Line workers available in Microsoft Teams.

More information about calling can be found here > https://news.microsoft.com/ignite-2020-book-of-news/#4101-new-calling-features-are-coming-soon-to-microsoft-teams

More information about new features for first-line workers can be found here > https://news.microsoft.com/ignite-2020-book-of-news/#4105-new-microsoft-teams-capabilities-support-firstline-workers-as-the-digital-transformation-of-essential-work-accelerates-

View fullsize

Here is my doodle covering a number of sessions focusing on Microsoft 365 specifically Teams from day one of Microsoft Ignite 2020

View fullsize

Below you can see my first two doodles covering Satya Nadella’s keynote “Building Digital Resilience” and “The Future of Work” keynote by Jared Spataro. It was amazing to hear how Microsoft are powering all areas of Digital Transformation across organisation especially in these unprecedented times!

View fullsize

The biggest focus for me is the workspace technology and I was really pleased to see a focus on not only productivity but also well-being! Microsoft announced new well-being features, the first is centred around a digital commute. The digital commute allows you to wrap up your day the right way, allowing you to better disconnect from work. We saw a review of your tasks, a reflection of the day and integration with Headspace for an end of day meditation session! I love Headspace and I am so pleased to see it is coming to teams in 2021!! The next element was enhancement to MyAnalytics giving insights to users right inside Teams to allow you to better make intelligent changes to help your productivity and well-being. Also demonstrated was manager and leader insights powered by Analytics allowing better coaching and proactive management based upon trends within teams. I will be blogging more about all of this over at https://www.definetomorrow.co.uk in the coming days.

View fullsize

The second presentation from today’s vRetreat was 10ZiG. 10ZiG produce a range of thin clients and a repurposing OS as well as offering a centralised management platform.

View fullsize

Today I attended the virtual vRetreat event with Runecast and 10Zig, above you can see my doodle covering the Runecast presentation by @kev_johnson.

Runecast allows VMware administrators to proactively manage their vSphere patching, security compliance and HCL compatibility. By doing this it is predicted up to 90% of known issues can be prevented.

View fullsize

I spent the day with the fantastic Paul Wynne at the Dell Customer Solution Center in Limerick Ireland. The trip was planned as a training exercise for some of the members of my team but as ever the trip was really informative and it was great to see the latest new technologies and business solutions available from Dell. During our visit we covered both VMware SDDC solutions and how VxRail interacts and enhances these capabilities, we visited the innovation center looking at the business aligned IoT solutions and much more.

View fullsize

View fullsize

View fullsize

Here is my doodle covering the day 1 general session from VMworld in Barcelona, VMware further executing on their vision of any device, any application on any cloud with intrinsic security.

Here is my first doodle from VMworld 2019 covering the partner general session. In this session VMware discussed their strategy and new partner programme.

VMworld is taking place in San Francisco, California this week, here are my thoughts from Mondays general session by VMware’s CEO Pat Gelsinger and COO Sanjay Poonen.

The initial general session of VMworld 2019 was used to further build upon the delivery of VMware’s vision of Any Cloud, Any Application, Any Device with Intrinsic Security. We saw big announcements and updates in terms of Any Cloud, Any Application, and Intrinsic Security but maybe short of details regarding the traditonal EUC business in the initial general session.

Further commentary to come shortly at DefineTomorrow.co.uk

View fullsize

View fullsize

Earlier this year VMware and Okta announced a partnership to integrate each others products to unify the user context with the device context provided by Okta and VMware Workspace ONE. At VMworld 2018 in Barcelona I sat the session regarding the use of their products to drive a zero trust approach but to enable the users with passwordless experience.

View fullsize

The digital workspace keynote was one of my favourite sessions of VMworld 2018, Shawn Bass (VMware EUC CTO) and team demonstrated their modern management approach across heterogeneous devices as well as demonstrating the user focused experiences of mobile flow and the new Workspace ONE intelligent hub. Finally with Workspace ONE intelligence IT are able to be empowered with the intelligent information around the applications and devices to deliver amazing user focused support. 

Please see my doodle below  

View fullsize