 Oh, and welcome back to another episode of AZ Update. I'm your host, Anthony Bartolo, and today we're joined by Puma La Schmidt. Puma, how's it going? Hey, everyone, it's going good. The sun is out. It's a little windy. It's March. Can you feel spring in the air? I can, I can. It's getting warmer. The snow is melting. I don't have a eight foot stack of snow outside my front door anymore, which is awesome. Yeah, same here. I'm ready for sun, summer, and some nice warm beach weather. Yes. Yes, 100% I think a lot of us are in the same boat waiting for that beach weather. Puma, how was this week for you? Let's just say overload of information, like absolute overload. There's so much cool stuff, especially from the IT pro side. But I feel like this Microsoft mesh thing, if I had some type of VR set at home, I might actually put myself in a beach setting. I was just saying, you know what? That'd be really cool. We could have a team outing at the beach. We all get our headsets on. Oh, I'd be amazing. That would be I would be so down for that. I think if you'd missed it, this week was Microsoft Ignite. I'm guessing our spring edition or fall edition, sorry, winter edition, because it was still winter. But what was interesting was a lot of people were in a lot of awe. But all the announcements that were made, and Puma, you're touching on the first one there, which was Microsoft mesh. And what an interesting experience that you can have this virtualized world that multiple people can participate in and collaborate on a new collaboration type plane made available. Immediately people started coming out with ideas of inclusion into this into Microsoft Teams. You mentioned HoloLens, but it's not restricted to just HoloLens. There are other platforms that you can do this on as well. I tried an old VR via my smartphone. So I went on with my smartphone with the goggles, and they'll produce a pair of those as well. And I was able to experience that experience. So it's not just limited to Microsoft hardware. It's available to a plethora of platforms that can support VR, AR, and mixed reality, which was really cool. The add to that is the amount of announcements that came out from the IT professional perspective of security and deployment of Microsoft Mesh and the inclusion of Microsoft Mesh and the ability to start up resources. I don't know about you, Puma, but there was a lot of talk about IT professional services and capabilities and management offerings on a plethora of services that were announced at Microsoft Ignite. I felt the same way. There was a lot, and I have a feeling it's because the IT pros are the ones managing the back ends of these services. Not our back end, but your back end, right? You've got your developers developing this really cool application. But if it's running off the server or just managing your whole Azure environment that the developers typically don't really touch, yeah, it's the IT pros, right? The people that manage the servers. The ladies that make sure, from a security standpoint, that things are secure and connected correctly between your on-premises environment and your Azure environment or whatever cloud environment that you may be. We are pretty much the glue that binds everything together. And we're kind of like routers almost sometimes because we're making sure that those connections are going and business is running and everybody is just happy and productive. So let's showcase another example that was talked about at Ignite. So there was a whole aspect of teaching drones how to be autonomous in terms of their activity, which is interesting because I've actually done that sort of a project. That's so scary. It's interesting the fact that I've done that project five years ago and there was a lot of manual training that was required for teaching the drones how to identify live jackets in the water. And the solution that they looked at here was using digital twins to replicate the data that the drones would be experiencing in a virtualized plane on Microsoft Mesh and teaching these drones how to navigate around trees, rock faces, what have you, in terms of emulating what's in the real world in a virtualized plane, using artificial intelligence to understand the environmentals for this drone to navigate through and teaching it in this virtualized plane for the aspect of identifying individuals that are lost in the forest as an example. And the IT professional plane, all this, is the ability to safeguard who gets access to spin up these resources for that enablement, who gets access to train out the model of AI to feed to the autonomous drones for the enablement of them to learn their environment around them. Previous too, there wasn't really that mechanism or that tool made available. So it was, the solution was built, there was some packaging made available in a manual sense that IT pros would be brought in as an afterthought, unfortunately, to enable this. I love the fact that now the tools are being made available at the same time for both the developer and the IT pro so that, when we talk about CID and we talk about DevOps, but this is now an even bigger collaboration plane that's made available for the IT professionals and developers to work together on. And it is a lot of the IT professional enabling the developer to self-regulate or self make the ability to set up these resources on their own. Whereas before the IT pro would have to do it all manually. That change in terms of perception and idea, it's really a great catalyst to push IT professionals forward from being a cost center to being, something that an organization would invest into for the benefit of the organization and support. Oh yeah, totally. It almost takes that foundational work of bringing everybody together and say, okay, we're going to venture in the cloud, we're going to try all these new technologies, but instead of doing it in a silo, it's a collaborative effort. That way, when you are running these services, you're doing it in a secure compliant fashion. I think things are clicking for people out there, like you can't do it alone. It's a team effort, right? And if you work as a team and a collaborative effort, you're going to be more successful in all these new ventures that we're doing, like the drones environment and mesh. When it's collaborative, you're going to get better success because you're going to be secure, you're going to be compliant with your policies and all the regulations. And then things are just going to work a little bit better. What was interesting too was, I did receive a lot of questions online through the Microsoft Ignite chat on Twitter, following the hashtag MS Ignite, about Windows Server Certification. And a lot of people inquiring, well, where is the certification for Windows Server? And it's an interesting conversation. The reason being is, there's currently resources being created or have been published already by our colleague, Oren Thomas, on Microsoft Learn, specifically for Windows Server. Everything from setup to management, to control of resource management, all the aspects security are made available as a resource. And people are still specifically calling out, hey, I want that Windows Server Certification. When is that going to be made available? Is that going to be made available? The challenge I put the position back is, in the aspect of all the management tools that are being made available for all the platforms, and still the requirement for on-premises implementation have said some aspects of the technologies because of certifications or ISO standards or what have you. I know that's a requirement for healthcare, financial, and possibly legal in some aspects. Is it still needed to have a singular Windows Server Certification? And if it is, please do sign up. We do want to know. It's something that we want to take feedback into the Microsoft. Or the exploration into other certifications, not specifically machine learning, but aspect of infrastructure specialists or solution specialists, diversifying your capabilities outside of just looking at Windows Server, right? It was an interesting conversation I had during a Microsoft Ignite. And a lot of people still say, no, I still want that sort of server certification that's a requirement for my job. And it's something that other organizations that I'm applying to are looking for. Your thoughts belong to something like that in regards to Windows Server Certification specifically. I actually have a lot of thoughts on that. I do think it's important because there are organizations out there that still want you to be specifically certified in Windows or Linux. So we have those industries, but then we also have those industries that say, hey, you're a DevOps expert or you're an infrastructure specialist. I'd like to see that. That way we know that you can do more than just Windows. You know infrastructure. Because as an IT Pro, you're more than just a Windows Server or a desktop person, right? You're pretty much everything because you probably have to know the network too. And probably some web apps in there. So having something like that would work. And I tend to see that with a little bit more progressive companies where they're already looking past that Windows Server or Linux that they want something a little bit broader so that they know you can do a little bit of everything. So it's a mix. Overall, I think, yeah, definitely. If you want to get that Windows Server certification, get it. And if you're still apprehensive, at least take some of the learn modules and then for all the previous MCSAs, MCSCs, I think that's a no brainer. It's an upgrade, right? Exactly. Whatever you can do to upscale, for me it's getting my hands dirty and actually doing the work. That's why Microsoft Learn is so beneficial. Very appreciative of Warren Thomas' efforts to get those training modules out there. And there's a plethora of them. I think there's three learning paths of 12. There's a lot of content on server. In the past six months, I mean, it just seemed like there's just been the explosion of Windows Server content, which I think is amazing. It's funny because when I was first getting into tech, I got all the MCSE books, you know, the training books. And I go back and I'm looking and like, oh my gosh, Warren Thomas, I work for them. So, yeah. And then having him see like, pump out all these, you know, learn modules, it's really cool to actually work with someone that wrote the books that helped me get to where I'm at today. Really cool. Paul Jensen in the chat room made mentioned, server knowledge is like having TCP IP knowledge foundational for everything really. And it's true, right? The aspects of what you learn from infrastructure and from setup and management and governance and security on server, so translatable to cloud. We've talked about this numerous times, you know, plus a lot of information that's there that's relevant in today's world. Pumala, let's get started with the news and I think you're up first. Okay. So one of the biggest announcements, at least from the IT Pro side was Azure Auto Manage for virtual machines. It is in public preview. I know we announced it at our fall ignite. I was trying to make sure the right terminology there are following it back back in September 2020. We did announce Auto Manage, but now it's in public preview and we added some more features that it's, like I'm trying to think of the words to describe it. Let's just say from the IT Pro side, it's like love, like hot love, right? One of the biggest features is updating your virtual machines in Azure hot patching. You don't need to reboot your machines. Like, hello, where, like you pretty much, I don't wanna say you don't wanna get rid of your maintenance plans. You probably still have to do one, but the fact that you don't have to reboot your machines for security patches and whatnot, that is amazing. I mean, that's a lifesaver for a lot of people because you can do this store in a day or you know, maybe later in the evening where it's probably off your maintenance hours, but it's gonna save you a lot of time. And now also Auto Manage manages Linux VMs as well. Let's see here. And also another one that I like a lot with the new features with the public preview is the ability to manage the, or use the Auto Manage during the virtual machine creation process in the portal because previously you actually had to go through Azure policy or throw an ARM template. It wasn't very straightforward, but now as you're creating that VM, you can automatically apply those Auto Manage settings onto that virtual machine. They also added the ability to manage, Auto Manage within the virtual machine configurations as well, which is, you know, from a management standpoint, there's so many different ways to manage Auto Manage to manage your virtual machine. It just makes life a lot easier and more efficient for that administrator that's managing that your Azure environment. Oh, the hot patching piece for me is huge. And the fact that it's hot patching on server and on Linux, that's a big deal. And it's something where if you don't have to take, you know, services down, especially now that we're very much in this digital world, it's something where it safeguards the IT professional from saying, hey, I have to take our services down from X amount of time. You know, that's going to be a challenge because we're all 24-7 now. There is no stop time. And, you know, having the hot patching capability, it's huge just as a reminder though that this is in public preview. So it hasn't gone generally available yet. So make sure you're doing your testing, make sure you're providing your feedback, but also make sure you're not deploying this into production just yet. Yeah, don't get too hot yet, right? But definitely play with it. You know, like you said, from the hot patching, it is a lifesaver for so many administrators out there. So definitely try it out and, you know, see where it gets you with that. Next up in the news, we're talking Azure Machine Learning. And again, it's another topic that we don't traditionally talk about with IT pros, but maybe we should. And this is the reason why. So management tools have been made available for Azure Machine Learning, specifically the workspace itself can now be thrown into the whole governance mix. And people, I know you love the governance talk and capabilities that are available. I think you ran, you know, running with scissors or with guardrails on in terms of the cloud. It's something where now natively within Azure Machine Learning workspace, you can invoke RBAC, so role-based access control rules in terms of who can create the workspace, who has access to workspace, what can it be managed? You can put data resources on separated subnets. So I can create my own vNet now for the data resource that for the workspace to gain access to and then set the rules in terms of the access capabilities for that subnet. Even down to the workspace itself, I can actually spin up ARM templates now. So as an IT professional, I can govern over, you know, what a data scientist can spit up as a workspace for Azure Machine Learning and, you know, enable that control in terms of you can spit up this resource, but you can't, you know, make this other resource available. Not technically blueprints. It is something that is being talked about right now, but there is no blueprint functionality, just an ARM template capability, which can be managed from the professionalist perspective and versioning can be made available as well. So very close. But it's something of interest in the fact that making the data scientists self-sufficient and ensuring that they adhere to security rules in terms of how the data is being accessed is a huge benefit being made available on Machine Learning. I'm sorry, but I was just looking at Seth's face. Well, this was the session. So this was the session that gave me the announcement at Microsoft Ignite. I was lucky enough to partake with Seth and Cassie in regards to this. I saw that, yes. It was a great session. It was really cool because we actually took a real world scenario of a tackle truck and, you know, doing analytics around what, you know, what was the best items on the tackle truck to sell in specific areas. So they did the analytic work around that. But what was cool was, what if you're capturing information that is pie based, right? So personal information, you don't want to allow the data scientists to have access to that because that becomes an issue. And so the availability of creating that separate sub-debt and then creating the ability for the data scientists to be self-sufficient in creation of the workspaces themselves and adhering to the rules of no pie information being utilized and no direct access to that information. It was all detailed out into this live demo that we did at Ignite. There's documentation made available on itobstock.com in regards to this. But what's really cool is that that governance piece is not just for traditional compute, it's being extended across a plethora of platforms, which is really cool. Well, governance is, it is key, right? I think originally or back in the day, people, it was an afterthought. It was like, oh, we gotta get governance phoned. Now it's just part of the process of deploying your services, your hardware. It's just governance is included in everything. Like I said before, things just work a lot better. You're safer and you're compliant. You don't have legal coming after you, right? That's it, exactly, right? Let's continue on with the news next up, Pumala. Yeah, so this past summer, I had done our roaming reporter when we announced the public preview of our AVS, Azure VMware solution. And now that service from Azure on VMware solution, the Azure Migrate tool, that is now GA, generally available. So if you've been using it as preview, you can use it in production now, just for those that are not too familiar with the product. So within Azure Migrate, there is the component you can actually assess your VMware virtual machines in order to migrate that environment into Azure. And what I mean into Azure is taking your whole VMware solution, your on-premises environment and putting it into our Microsoft data centers that's specific to you with specific hardware. So we're not talking about sharing hardware with the non-VMware solution. So it's basically like picking up your environment and putting it over here. But the assessment tool within Azure Migrate will run through the assessment, determine what resources are needed for your environment and spit out a report to you that says, okay, this is what you're gonna need. And then you can basically determine what you're gonna have to do for the migration if you're gonna have to go up down. But the Azure Migrate tool is now generally available to use. And that's big, right? It takes away a lot of the guesswork in regards to your migration plans and to have that assessment being available in terms of either these are the resources it can seamlessly move over. These are the ones you may have problems with in the course of action you need to take. I'm not a VMware specialist. I know you are much more... Yeah, so it's like the Azure VMware converter the VMware converter tool back in the day, which it's still available. It would do the assessment for you when you're doing a PDV, a physical to virtual machine. Like I like to tell people it's sort of like that, right? When it does a scan on your physical machine during the conversion process, it tells you like, here's what all you need when it goes over and do you wanna keep these same settings or adjust? Most of the time you keep the same settings. So it's very similar to that for those that are on the VMware side. It's just a little, it's more robust and it's built into the whole Azure Migrate service itself. So you're not having to install third-party utility to figure out what you're gonna need to do on the Azure side. So it's definitely an important tool to use rather than just going, okay, I think I'm going to need this because now when you had the assessment report, you're able to determine from a cost perspective how much things may cost you once you start bringing things over to the other side. I almost said the dark side, but it's not the dark side. Let's continue on with the news. So next up, this was an interesting one, the low code, no code enablement via the Power Platform. Pumila, how are your Excel formula crafting skills? Let's just say I can do some damage to already built-in spreadsheets like the exchange storage calculator. I think I've messed the formulas on that. That thing's like a database. Yeah, so I'm not the greatest, but I can hack my way around. So near and dear to our good friend Donna Sackar's heart, the Power Platform announcements were huge at Microsoft Ignite. I love, you know, I'm not a developer and I like to dabble in IoT and I've been learning Python and been learning, you know, some aspects of code, JavaScript and what have you. This is really cool because if you can craft code or craft formulas inside of Excel, the whole PowerFX offering has that ability to, you know, extend your solution capabilities. And I love that. You know, you don't have to be a developer to solve today's problems. You just have to come up with the solutions to do so. And so tools like PowerFX and Power Automate, both are great tools to, you know, invoke that creativity within individuals to go forth and build out these solutions and not be hindered that, oh, I don't know how to code. So I can't do this, right? It's something where it's inclusive of all. I know, you know, people like you have young children, I have young children as well. Even at school, when they're doing coding, it's not coding in the traditional, let's bring up the IDE and start typing away in big commands, it's block coding. And they're teaching more of the how to build out solutions as opposed to what is the appropriate code to do X. And this is that same logic being brought into the Power Platform that ensures that everybody has the capability to participate. Yeah, it's, to me, it's solutions-based problem solving. You know, like you said, no code. It's just because at the end of the day, does it really matter what tools you're using? As long as you solve the problem. Right. Let's continue on with the news. Oh, I've got, yeah, I actually have some hot news, another hot news. For those that have on-premises exchange servers, please patch your servers. The product's group has released several Alabama patches. They are critical security updates for your exchange servers 2013, 2016, and 2019. Reason why is because we do know of a zero day threat on those machines. So you want to get those machines patched. Please do so. I beg you, as the exchange caught us, get those machines patched. This is the blog post that the exchange group had put out the other day. So it's, you know, if you're not sure, you can go to that blog post and find out, you know, more details on the specific patches that were pushed down. But big theme is patch those machines. You don't want your mailboxes get taken over. So in regards to events this week, obviously it was Microsoft Ignite. So there's no huge events that are going on for the remainder of this week. However, there is, it is a Fortnite. So that means that patch and switch will be on today and you'll find them on patch and switch, sorry, twitch.tv forward slash patch and switch. That'll be going on today. Next up beyond that in terms of events, we have our Microsoft module of the week. And this week, because of all the announcements that happened on the Plower platform, we're making, you know, special awareness of the Microsoft Learn, Microsoft Learn module, Automate and sorry, Automated Business Process with Power Automate. Now, you know, a lot of people will look at this and say, well, this is not technical. What do you mean business process? What it like? Oh, it's technical. It is. And what I love about this learning path is it doesn't just focus on the Power Automate piece. I'm actually going to scroll down and I know a producer here doesn't like it when I do that. But there is a full on IT Pro section that is the user admin center to manage environments and data policies in Power Automate. This incorporates all aspects of the technology made available on the Power platform, not just from a development perspective, not just from a business solutions perspective, but also the IT professionals role in this. The trifecta is the business decision maker, the IT professional and the developer all working in collaboration to build out business solutions. The same holds true for the Power platform. It's not just about the solutions that are being crafted. They also have to adhere to, you know, regulatory compliance from an organizational perspective as well. Our team, you know, in terms of the IT professionals, we are starting to have all these conversations with the developer teams in respect to this because it's not just the creation of said applications to address opportunities. It's also the what data can they gain access to, what environments can they gain access to? And this is very beneficial to us from an IT professional perspective to understand the scope that Power platform can enable and how we can enable these tools on behalf of the rest of the people in the organization to try to support their capability around creativity to address opportunities. With the Power platform, it's more than just developers. It's your, you know, a business administrator, your office manager. People can do all sorts of things with it. You can create surveys and whatnot. It's amazing, like my mind is blown by the amount of things that can be created from the Power platform. So having this admin center really helps the IT professional like you said, right? Now you can enable people to pretty much find solutions on their own. And then you just make sure that it's locked up and tightened up and, you know, no one's doing anything bad and you don't get, you know, lawyers coming after you. Pugla, so awesome to have you on the show today. If you want to get a hold of you on social, what's the best way to do so? I'm always on the Twitters as at exchange goddess. I'm also on LinkedIn, but yeah, check me out on Twitter if you have any questions, concerns, comments don't like my lobsters, you know. And your lobster actually made it on the live stream, which was really cool too, for example. Yes, squeaky lobster. I love it. I love it. That was awesome. Yes, that is the unofficial, official mascot of exchange. And if you want to get a hold of producer Pierre, you can do so on Twitter at Wired Connect. And if you want to get a hold of me for some reason, you can get a hold of me on Twitter as well at Wireless Life. All the links for all the topics that we talked about today is available on itopsock.com. So look for the latest blog posts and you'll see all the links for everything today. Everybody have a great weekend and we'll see you next Friday. Bye, everyone.