Today, I attended an incredibly informative session by Jeff Woolsey. During the session Jeff took us on an exhilarating journey into the world of cloud technologies and the power of collaboration between VMware and Microsoft.

Picture this: just a few years ago, it would have been unimaginable to see Microsoft at a VMware event. But times are changing, and in a truly impressive display, Microsoft not only exhibited but also delivered sessions showcasing the incredible synergy between these tech giants.

The session began with Jeff posing a crucial question: What cloud journey are you on? He polled the audience to find out if they were on an all-public cloud journey, all-private cloud journey, or a hybrid cloud journey. The result was eye-opening — 100% of the room raised their hands for a hybrid cloud journey. It's a testament to the industry's direction and the path that businesses are eager to tread.

Throughout the session, Jeff delved into three key areas, offering us practical demonstrations of the technology in action:

1. Azure VMware Solution: Imagine having your VMware environment seamlessly running in Azure. Jeff showcased how this integration is a game-changer for businesses, allowing them to harness the power of VMware within Azure.

2. Azure Arc: Next up was the management of Windows services in Azure. Jeff illustrated how Azure Arc simplifies managing these services, providing a centralized solution that streamlines operations.

3. Azure Arc-enabled vSphere and SQL: Jeff didn't stop there. He demonstrated how Azure Arc takes control of vSphere management, and even delved into the world of SQL, all within the Azure environment.

What truly stood out was the unified portal in Azure that brought everything together. From managing policies to bolstering security, Jeff showed us the incredible capabilities of this consolidated platform. It's a one-stop destination that empowers businesses with comprehensive control over their cloud environment.

Jeff's passion for the subject was palpable, and his captivating presentation style made it a truly enjoyable experience. It's fantastic to witness the partnership between VMware and Azure, as they work hand in hand to elevate the hybrid cloud journey that so many businesses are embarking on.

Stay tuned for more updates and insights as I continue to explore the ever-evolving tech landscape here at VM explore. The future of tech is bright, and together, we're on the cusp of something extraordinary.

I'm gearing up for an exciting adventure at VMware Explore 2023 in sunny Barcelona, and I can't wait to share what's in store this week. The event is right around the corner, and I'm getting ready to dive into a world of tech innovation.

As I prepare for the event, I'm already feeling the buzz of anticipation. Meeting familiar faces in the community area is just the start of what promises to be an engaging and exciting week.

But what excites is the lineup of sessions, especially those that explore the collaboration between VMware and Microsoft. These industry giants are poised to reshape the way businesses operate and how users engage with technology.

I'm particularly looking forward to the EUC keynote session. Each year, it's where I gain insights into VMware's efforts to enhance the employee experience in the tech-driven workplace.

I'll be your tech scout on the ground, providing real-time updates through blogs, vlogs, and tech snapshots. I'll capture key statistics and inspiring quotes from the sessions, so you won't miss a beat.

Stay connected with me on Twitter at @biztechmeg and keep an eye on techdoodles.co.uk for all the updates and insights.

After a busy week at VMware Explore 2022, we wanted to reflect on our week. We discuss our experience of being back at live events, what sessions we enjoyed, what we have learnt and of course the key take aways.

Check out our video below to hear our final thoughts.

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

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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

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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.

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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.

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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

My doodles below depict my study notes from the Microsoft Azure Fundamentals training delivered remotely to customers and partners by Matt Hester and Garrett Bundy.

Below are my notes covering Modules 1 through 4

Further resources can be found at the links below

• Use the Azure portal

• Customize the dashboard

• Estimate costs with Azure pricing calculator

• Predict and optimize with Cost Management and Azure Advisor

• Estimate the Total Cost of Ownership with the Azure TCO calculator

• Take the Role Based Assessments at Pluralsight

• Sign up for the AZ900 certification exam

• Visit Microsoft Learn for more free education about Azure

• Create an Azure account

• Create a website hosted in Azure

• Configure an App Service

• Overview of Azure Cloud Shell

• Work with Panes

I found the above video by the fantastic John Savill really informative. Make sure to check out his YouTube channel for more fantastic Azure content (1) John Savill - YouTube.

Core Cloud Concepts and Core Azure Services

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Core Azure Services

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Security, Privacy and Compliance

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Pricing and Support

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Today Microsoft announced Viva, an Employee Experience Platform integrated right into Microsoft Teams.

Initially, Viva will contain four separate modules.

Viva Connections - Culture and Communication - Utilising SharePoint and Yammer

Viva Insights - Productivity and Well-Being - Utilising Insights

Viva Learning - Utilising content from LinkedIn Learning, Microsoft Learn, Your own content and content from leading providers

Viva Topics - Knowledge and Expertise utilising AI to and in-house experts to tag content with Topics to create your organisations own Wikipedia to be sure people can find the right information at the right time. Previously Project Cortex

For more information check out this the Microsoft VIva page here

Employee Experience & Engagement | Microsoft Viva

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-

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Here are some of my top picks of the new features coming to Microsoft Teams, discussed at Microsoft Ignite 2020

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

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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!

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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.

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I am talking to a large amount of people about the calling functionality within Teams at present so I’m my usual fashion I thought I would draw a doodle to help me illustrate the architecture.

The diagram above illustrates the different components within the architecture of a simple direct routing implementation of Microsoft Teams Calling including some of the licensing considerations over and above the 365 licence you are likely to already have.

This is just one of the configuration options available for Teams and if you are looking for a more simplistic solution using Teams native calling plans maybe a better option for you.

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Megan Warren and I recently presented at Commsverse Online 2020, covering productivity and well-being in conjunction with Microsoft 365. The doodle above depicts some of the take-aways from the presentation.

Please find links below to a few resources mentioned

Microsoft MyAnalytics

Swipe Gestures in Outlook IOS

Forest

How to be a Productivity Ninja Book

The CORD productivity monitor

Teams integrated status lights

Over the last few days, I have been attending and presenting at Commsverse the Microsoft Teams conference. The conference was originally going to be an in-person conference at Mercedes Benz world but due to the current lockdown status, the team behind Commsverse have moved the in-person conference to next year and pulled together a virtual conference.

My first presentation concentrated on increasing productivity whilst at work and disconnecting from work within your personal time to help protect your well-being. I was joined on this presentation by Megan Warren and we spoke about, Microsoft Teams, My Analytics, productivity methodologies and much more. I will follow up with a doodle covering the content shortly.

My second session focused on driving adoption of Teams and Microsoft 365, with my colleague Anthony Charman. We presented about the importance of treating a Microsoft Teams project as not only a technology project but also a business change project, engage the business leaders and users to make Teams relevant to the users and raise levels of adoption. Again I will share some information separately on this.

I was really impressed by the variety of sessions and the quality of presenters during the conference. With experts covering a wide range of subjects such as calling, meetings, collaboration, devices and much more.

I was really impressed by the amount of effort that the team behind Commsverse put into making the conference possible and the fact the conference was all hosted on Microsoft technologies. The main body of the conference was ran through Microsoft Teams with Teams setup as vendor booths and places to chat for attendees, the sessions were delivered using Microsoft Teams Live Events. Whilst there were challenges behind using this as a platform for a 2000+ attendee global event I think the team behind Commsverse did an amazing event to make this possible.

One of the interesting use cases was the use of AltSpaceVR for a show floor area, whilst it wasn’t widely used during the times I visited I found it a really good interactive platform to walk around and speak to vendors.

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