Commsverse 2020

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.

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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.

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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.

#TFDx Dell Technologies: Power Up the Portfolio - Day Two

As discussed yesterday I am lucky enough to be one of the delegates during the current Dell EMC Storage, Tech Field Day Exclusive event. Today the presentations focused on Dell EMC Power Scale, Power Protect and Power Scale use cases.

You can see my doodles from todays session below. Keep an eye out for posts covering my thoughts and opinions of the demonstrated technologies.

Dell Power Scale
Dell Power Scale and Dell Power Protect
Dell Power Scale Cloud Use Cases
#TFDx Dell Technologies: Power Up the Portfolio - Day One

I am lucky enough to be one of the delegates for the current Tech Field Day virtual event with Dell Technologies.

TFDx Attendees

You can learn more about the event over on the Tech Field Day website at the link below.

https://techfieldday.com/event/powerup/

I am joined on Tech Field Day with some amazing people

Below you will find my doodles from the first days presentations including Dell EMC PowerStore and Dell EMC PowerFlex. Keep an eye on the blog for some more thoughts and opinions regarding the content covered during the presentations.

PowerStore

Dell Power Store
Dell EMC Power Store

PowerFlex

Dell EMC PowerFlex
Dell EMC PowerFlex
vRetreat (Online) May 2020 - Snapt ADC
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Today I joined the vRetreat with Snapt a Application, Delivery Control company that has a new take on ADC. Their solution is based on a cloud managed distributed model with nodes able to be deployed across multiple locations and on multiple platforms. Each node is stateless with configuration, management and monitoring about to be controlled from a single cloud managed control plane delivered as a service. The ADC’s offer a wealth of services including global load balancing, WAF, analytics and much more.

What really stood out for me was the ease of management and the fact it could be deployed across on premises virtual or constrained environments as well as cloud and cloud native solutions.

Check them out > https://www.snapt.net/

vSphere 7, VMware Cloud Foundation 4 and Tanzu Portfolio announcements
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Yesterday VMware released a slew of new products focused on delivering modern applications, alongside virtual applications on any cloud. vSphere 7 has been completely rearchiteced with Kubernetes at its heart, enabled vSphere in conjunction with VMware Cloud Foundation 4 to run all of your applications across any cloud, on-premises or major public clouds.
You can watch the announcements here

Dell Customer Solution Centre Limerick Visit - Feb 2019 - VxRail, IoT, Customer Solutions and more

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.