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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

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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.

Hammerspace presented on Day 3 of #SFD21 taking place virtually due to the COVID-19 Pandemic. See my doodle above covering their presentation. I will be following up with a few more thoughts and opinions of the presentation after #SFD21 completes.

Intel presented on Day 3 of #SFD21 taking place virtually due to the COVID-19 Pandemic. Please see my doodle above covering their presentation . I will be following up with a few more thoughts and opinions of the presentation after #SFD21 completes.

Be sure to check out my previous doodles covering the Intel Storage Moment event late last year.

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NetApp presented on Day 2 of #SFD21 taking place virtually due to the COVID-19 Pandemic. See my doodle above covering their presentation. I will be following up with a few more thoughts and opinions of the presentation after #SFD21 completes.

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Tintri presented on Day 1 of #SFD21 taking place virtually due to the COVID-19 Pandemic. See my doodle above covering their presentation. I will be following up with a few more thoughts and opinions of the presentation after #SFD21 completes.

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You are able to watch the presentation back for yourself on the Storage Field Day website

MinIO Presents at Storage Field Day 21 - Tech Field Day

Here is my second doodle from from the Intel Memory and Storage Moment event. On day 2 Intel specialists joined the Tech Field Day team to review the latest announcments around Intel Optane Technologies.

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I am lucky enough to be taking part in another Field Day event, this time a special event dedicated to Intel’s latest innovations in memory and storage. You are able to watch the presentations from Intel’s event over on their website here.

During the keynote presentations there were a number of key product announcements regarding their Optane Storage and Memory portfolio as well as NAND based offerings. You can see my doodle below covering these updates.

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Intel Storage and Memory Annoucments for Optane and NAND.

Most impressive to me was the evolution in these critical technologies and particularly the advancements in the Optane technologies allowing for new and innovative use cases, in both storage and memory ecspecially when looking at benefits of persistent memory on the DDR bus.

Products Announced

Client

• Intel Optane Memory H20

• Intel 3D NAND SSD QLC 670P

Data Center

• Intel Optane SSD P5800X

• Intel 3D NAND SSD TLC - D7-P5510

• Intel 3eD NAND SSD QLC - D5-P5316

StorPool installs on standard servers, running on Linux it pools all performance and capacity across nodes starting initially from 3 nodes. It offers high throughput with up to 1 million IOPS per node offering in excess of 10million IOPS in a 10 node system, critically with extremely low latency. StorPool is focused on new-age IT workloads including KVM and Kubernetes but also support vSphere and Hyper-V. Due to it’s high performance, low latency and software defined nature StorPool is often utilised by Hosting Providors and MSPs to deliver multi-tenant cloud solutions.

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Pure Storage presented their software defined storage management platform for Kubernetes PortWorx. PortWorx was acquired by Pure Storage in September this year after working closely within many customers utilising PortWorx for Kubernetes projects on top of Pure Storage. PortWorx will continue to be agnostic of the underlying storage platform and offers Kubernetes centric, Backup, DR, Migration, Security and Automation tools alongside software defined storage. Another of it’s USPs is its application centric approach aligned with how containers are deployed apposed to a machine centric approach that other solutions take.

An interesting presentation from a solution that ticks a number of boxes for those looking at storage management solutions for Kubernetes, if you would like to try PortWorx out yourself check out the interactive demos https://central.portworx.com/.

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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.

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Here is my first doodle from VMworld 2020 covering the general session with Pat Gelsinger and Sanjay Poonen. There is lots of discussions about VMware’s Any App, Any Cloud, Any Device, with Intrinsic Security vision with a strong focus on abstracting, securing and supporting operations for kubernetes across multi cloud.

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 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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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.

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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.