 Hello, and welcome back to another episode of AZ Update. I'm Anthony Bartol, joined as always by producer Pierre Roman. Pierre, how's it going? I don't know yet. I spent the night cleaning up after the dogs because one of them is going through some physical manifestation of a dubious nature. Hard time. I've experienced that with my dog as well. It's never a good time. I wish people got to see us behind the scenes when the countdown clock goes on and you and I are dancing away. I have to admit when we've got that music, that was over a year ago when Seth and I built LearnTV back-end. He put that as the whole music in between shows. I immediately loved it. It's so catchy. It's catchy, right? And it's like... Anyway. So it's summertime and there's a lot going on in summertime. I hope everybody's taking a break. That's the most important thing. I've done the camping thing already and I know you've taken a bit of the break and I got another break coming up. You've been working on an interesting project this summer in regards to home automation, which has piqued my interest, especially in my interest around IoT. Can you share a little bit about what you've been doing? Well, yeah. I've been slowly changing. In my office, everything is like smart LEDs and my monitors are all plugged into smart plugs. I'm trying to make my carbon footprint a little less, but when you're running six monitors, four studio lights, a bunch of LEDs before behind and like computers galore. At some point at night or when I leave my office, now I have like one button on my stream deck that basically shuts off all of the non-essentials. So the only thing that stays on is my tower. So all the lights go off. I've got a smart plug for the actual office lights and everything else is like built into cabinets under like hard to reach plugs that have like those like smart plugs on them. Well, at one point, we lost the internet. Right. And everything because there are smart plugs that you don't have, it's all web hooks to the service, so smart life or, anyway, the only ones that did work was for the Phillips Hue, but which are only the ones in my back here, because the hub is local. Everything else, I couldn't turn on my lights. I couldn't turn on my monitors at the crawl under a desk reach for the and then like hit the little button to turn on everything. So I decided to have it all in-house, not depend on any services outside of my house. So I am now I put a Raspberry Pi 4 plus 4B plus with a power or ethernet hat in my rack in the wiring closet, and I'm running Home Assistant on it. And now I've been adding all the Wi-Fi plugs to it. I've ordered my Zigbee and my Z-Wave sticks or hubs that I'm going to plug into it. And I'm going to basically slowly change my entire house into smart. For example, the lights in front of my house is on a timer. In the summer, it goes off at six o'clock in the evening when it's not dark until nine. So I change it and then as the day gets shorter until we get to four o'clock in the afternoon, completely dark here in Canada. So now with home automation, I have like all these routine that's monitors. So it based on my geography at sundown turned on this plug, this plug, this switch. And so it turns on certain lights in the house and turns out the lights in the front. And then at 11 o'clock or midnight, make sure to turn that on, turn that off. And I'm also received a switch box that will allow me for 240. And that's for the pool equipment. And that's also going to be on a timer. So I got about two timers, one for the heater, one for the pumps. And I'll be able to coordinate like that. So it's been an interesting journey. There's a lot of open source really dubious add-ons for those service. But there's others that are like beautiful. Like you install it, it detects them. You configure them, like it's, yeah, there's thoughts behind them. So it's always been the issue with free software or open source software that some is really good and fits really, and others are just thrown together and haven't been maintained in years. And because of the search criteria as you put it in Bing or Google, and also that's the one that comes up and you try, you go down the rabbit hole with that. So that's been my, I'm trying to lessen my dependency on the internet for my home automation. I went the route of, you know, the light bulbs. The kids really enjoy the changing of the color of the light bulbs for their mood for the room. So I did, you know, I didn't go the Phillips Hue route. I went lease cost. Not thinking about it. Just like light bulb connects to the Wi-Fi. I don't remember the brand. It's an open source brand that was made available. I do think I'm going to be changing it all only because I'm not a fan of light bulb connecting directly to the router. It's causing a lot of bandwidth issues and traffic. And I've even gone forward and implemented quality of service on the router to restrict the amount of bandwidth that light bulbs are getting. But I think something like Phillips Hue that has its own hub would be a little bit better. For me with that would be the reach of the hub. Where would the hub be placed so that it could reach the light bulbs? No, because Phillips Hue is a Zigbee standard. Okay. And Zigbee is a mesh network. So as long as one bulb is in reach of another light bulb, for example, it will actually connect together. And then through that connect to the hub at some point. I'm more interested too in the back end in terms of the data that you can extract from let's say power usage. Wow. So you had me mention of the light bulb turning on at a certain time, turning off at a certain time or even the pump for the back for your pool. There is a module you can put in your electrical panel. Okay. That's basically monitors the kilowatt hours that your house is currently controlling. And there are some smart plugs that not only turn on and off, but actually will send back voltage and amperage being utilized. So you could actually set when your dishwasher is ending its cycle because at one point the wattage and the voltage would go down. They're required. So there are, but when you get to that, you get into some significant investment in terms of rewiring or and tools investment for that. And I'm not at that point else. I'll look at my bill. I've applied that practice at a hack in previous years. It's something here in Canada, specifically in Ontario, the hydro companies, they have the fluctuation of rates. And in some cases, the rates come down where they pay you to consume because they have an abundance of power at that time that needs to be consumed. And so, you know, running your dishwasher, having time to run in a specific time would be awesome in terms of when is the least amount of impact to the grid in terms of that, right? Your house consumption is most likely, even they're turned off as your TVs, your radios, your like all that electronics that never really turns off. It just goes to sleep. It turns off the display, but the rest of the unit still works. So I am thinking too of adding smart plugs to where my TVs are. So when I turn it off, it actually turns them off. The only challenge with that, though, is that if there's an update that's being pushed through, the TV won't get it, right? Because it'll be off. Yeah, but how often do you get an update on your TV? Depends. I know. I know. Well, people are probably wondering why we're spending so much time on the opening banner today this week. We are? We're 10 minutes in. We haven't hit the news yet. All right. It is summertime. It is vacation time. And it is two months before two months ish because the dates haven't been announced for fall ignite. So I'm a lot of our compatriots in the product groups are not really doing a lot of in terms of announcements. What have you thought on that lately? It's interesting. I see as more as people are taking a break. There's a lot of people on vacation right now. Absolutely. Engineering is still working. Engineering is still doing their thing. There's still announcements that are coming out. It's not as frequent as it was in the past. But that's the usual time right now. Especially in the U.S., going back to school is a lot sooner than in Canada. And in parts around the world, I know our colleagues in Australia, they've been full gung-ho. There's a lot of activity going on out there because they're in there. I think they're in spring right now. And so around the world, activity is happening. It's just from an engineering perspective right now is the break time. It's the slow time of the year. Right. And it's great to see that people are taking a break. Especially with the current situation that's on us right now in regards to people working from home. You're living at work is the term I'm hearing a lot, right? It's awesome to see that people are actually taking a break. The new thing that I'm hearing right now is people are deleting their work apps from their mobile devices, which is an awesome idea to completely break away, to completely get out of work and just enjoy the time off, which is awesome. Yep. And Paul Jensen in the chat says, like, night hype, let's go. Yes. We're not quite there yet. We don't even know what the dates are. So, but we'll let you know as soon as we find out. What else is going on? Oh, not much, but how about we hit the first story? Let's hit the first story. So let's go. Okay. So first story Europe. I am. Oh, okay. You wanted to hit it. Let's go. So this is not necessarily an announcement, but this is something we found that I thought was very, very useful for real life scenarios. When you have ADFS, you have active directory on prem. You've got the ADFS on prem or anywhere. And then you've got also Azure AD. And you're looking at migrating or consolidating to Azure AD just to remove complexity into your environment. So this article from Eric, Eric, which is a customer engineer. So a customer facing engineer. What's the actual title? Customer service engineer. Customer service engineer. So basically the, I think is the new term for either a consultant or a PFE. In any case, he's gone through and based on his real world experience going with customers, one customer after another that have done those migrations. That's created a list of notes from the field that like, okay, if you're in this situation, this is one thing you have to look at. Generally, this is what people that are looking at that migration from ADFS to Azure AD. This is the stuff that they forget. This is the stuff that they skim over where they shouldn't be. So it has a really, really good listing of all the things that you need to take care of and look at and evaluate before you start doing your migration. And even through your migration, how you set up SSO for applications that had SSO config in ADFS but may not have it or the configuration is different in Azure AD. So even though it's not like a product announcement, I wanted to highlight it because it is for people out there that are in the real world, not in the engineering development bubble that need to do that migration. It has a ton of really, really good information to help you in your migration journey. Here's what I love about this article. This article takes real world experiences in terms of the migration, but also takes into consideration, what is the business purpose for this migration? And actually sussing out, hey, what are the indicators or what are the items that I have to pay attention to in terms of the reasoning behind doing this migration to Azure AD? Not just doing it for the sake of moving to the cloud or doing it for the sake that the business is saying, oh, we need to move to the cloud to compete. Let us sit down and do some analytics around the benefits of moving to the cloud, the benefits of what we can do with the instances, applications, practices that we currently have in an organization when moving to Azure AD. Does it reduce complexities? Does it increase capabilities? You know, that's all taken into consideration once that's analyzed and then agreed upon by the organization as a whole. And that's a key point. A lot of people don't take that in consideration. It can't just be a standalone, you know, one team is doing the work and then everybody has to fall suit in terms of what's being done. It has to be done as a collective by the organization that's enabling this. Once that's been ratified and the organization has accepted that change of what's going to occur. I love the fact that, you know, it's notes from the field in terms of, you know, I experienced this. This is how we address it. And what I love about this and it being in tech community, it's an open dialogue. So it allows for everybody who's reading the article to ask questions directly to Eric, who is the customer service engineer, to, hey, I've come into this situation. Can you help? It's, you know, and I love when we share these stories because they extend in terms of, you know, knowledge and capability to platforms like Reddit and Twitter and everything else. Well, anything that fosters the continuation of a dialogue as to between our customers that are using the products and our engineering that are building the products to say, listen, this is great. This is great. However, like these, there's a blocker here. And how are we addressing that blocker right now? It's like duct tape and bubblegum in some cases because you have to get it to work. And we've in IT and operations, we've all been there where it doesn't work like my at home DNS auto changer is duct tape and bubble work bubblegum working on a pie. Wouldn't it be better if that particular service supported dynamic DNS updates? Yes. Does it right now? No. So we put some duct tape on it. But eventually that conversation will generate a work item and a developer will grab it and figure out the a new way of going around that problem in them and removing that blocker. But I especially like the thought process in his article that highlights the what they what he calls the matrix of priority business priority when you're looking at your environment in terms of usage is very low to very high of criticality to very low to very high and then using all of that information to actually kind of like make a priority list of what you need to do or what what applications you need to address when you're looking at migration. So that's really cool. So we continue on with the news. Absolutely. So, Pierre, have you seen this yet? Full screen for a second. So this year. It's interesting that we tie we're tying this into our, you know, beginning banter in regards to your home automation projects that you run thus far. This is the Azure pre percept kit. What's great about this, this is a full encompassing solution that you can utilize for any experimentation around site, around sounds, understanding the environment around you. And what I love about this is in taking a kit like this and working with a organization called Stratique, which Goren, I'm going to apologize because I know Goren's in the chat room. Goren, sick, I believe I was how you pronounce it is taking this solution taking this development kit and has built out a solution that is so, you know, needed in these times in regards to understanding how many people are in one space. And is there an overage of people in one space, you know, in scenario, you know, we have to keep a bit of spacing between people. What a great way to use the Azure precept kit, percept kit, sorry, and take that in connected to a solution that understands in terms of detection, how many people are in a room. What is the, you know, the area inside of this room, and how to then understand is there too many people in this room. Should there be, you know, how many people can actually be in this room to ensure proper spacing. If you're designing out the room as a common area or as a desk applied area, how are you taking this scenario and having this ability to prove out the concept and I love this. There's a great video to that's that's attached to this. As you can see that the kit just sits on top here inside of the room and does the monitoring of you know how many people are in the space. There's Goren right there who engineered this and I love that he's now shared this out in terms of this practice. You know, we talk about the open source piece and the creativity around this taking the solution and having the ability to detect people inside of the room ensure that there's, you know, enough spacing amongst the people, a certain amount of people inside of the room. It's something where from an automation standpoint makes things easier, provide that report out and the plethora of data that you can capture from this, you know, how many people are using this room. Maybe this room needs to be repurposed to something else because it's not being used as it should be or it's a really cool solution based on the dev kit. So back to your example in terms of the dynamic DNS on Raspberry Pi. So awesome to have this ability to have a test to see the functionality and then build upon that and that's something where, you know, you have this ability to test out something with a dev kit. It takes a very, you know, small effort to put it up because it's already built for you. And then you attach the logic to it. So the machine learning logic. In this instance here you have computer vision logic that's reporting out to Power BI that utilizes then the strategy. Platforms for reporting to have the understanding of how many people should be in this room. Is there too many people in this room in this scenario? Is the room being utilized as it should be or is it not being utilized at all and needs to be repurposed? And then from there possibly building out an actual solution or Gorin may go forth and build out a prototype that actually, you know, is part of a light fixture in the room. So you don't have this device there but now it's proven out its capability and now Gorin can use this creativity to build something else using the kit, which is awesome to see. The thing I really love about this is the fact that and a bit of background on that thought is before I came back to advocacy, I did a couple of years, a few years in OCP which working with startups. And one of my, one of the companies that I work with was a startup that was building an infrastructure and hardware to do exactly that. So they put the sensor under the table and they would detect heat change, motion, but it couldn't detect, because the technology wasn't there yet, how many people were in the room versus how many heat sources were in the room. But it was proprietary. It was very expensive and you couldn't just do a proof of concept with it because you basically had to buy the thing. There wasn't anything to allow you to try it out and test it. I find this kit that you met that you showed is a fairly inexpensive way to try it out to see what the benefits are. And then, as you mentioned, once you've realized the benefits, roll it out into something more framed, if the word is correct. Really cool. I think as a development kit, this is a great way to do a proof of concept. I've seen a lot of creativity around what can be done with the kit. I even see the camera being removed from the base that you have here and implemented on items that move. So, you know, sky's the limit in terms of capability and what you can do with it. The interesting, the chat room is all talking about the awesome. If you're interested in getting a Percept kit, you can do so, aka.ms4 slash Azure Percept. We've actually put it into the chat room right there so that you can go into it. Definitely check out Gorin's article as well because he does run through the steps and the logic to implement this type of solution. I'd love to see what people can build on top of this. And I hope, you know, they circle back with Gorin to share what they, you know, and that's a big thing too, right? Not just replicating what was done. What do you add to this project to move it forward? And that's the whole benefit of the open source piece, right? I've been amazed by some of the simple solutions that are being deployed out there with like GoPro's and or even just Raspberry Pi cameras. High resolution, sitting somewhere where like Azure or a compute at the edge where it's actually calculated right there, how many people are in this aisle in the store, how many people are like the flow of people within the store and then you can adjust your business. It's inspiring to see what people can do when you actually release some technology that's useful. Let's continue on just because we got just over five minutes left. The show is going by really quickly. Let's talk about events. You have the show this week, right? We do. We have our little endeavor. So it is the off night or the off day for Patch and Switch, but Jay Shock and I or Steve, the audio guy and myself are taking over again the Patch and Switch stream channel where we're going to be testing and production. And we have a special guest today to talk about different types of content. Do you want to share who your special guest is going to be? April Dunham. April Dunham is going to be joining us because she's new to streaming, but she's done a whole lot of content creation. And now she's kind of trying different types of content, different models in terms of format, media and frequencies. So we wanted to continue the discussion that we started two weeks ago with that. You haven't seen April's stuff. She is Power Platform Guru. I had the pleasure of working with her in regards to a project we did with Second Harvest to help save 2,000 pounds worth of food from going to waste and actually going to people who need it most. And it was awesome to see her and Greg from the Power Platform team as well also participated and collaborated with us to get this done. What I love about April is how she breaks down the steps in terms of the adoption. So she makes it so it's inclusive for everyone to participate in everybody too. I'm not a developer. You're not a developer. But with Power Automate going through the sequences as easy as doing the functions and calculations you would do in Excel, the capability through menus is awesome and she does a great job of detailing that. So I'm very excited to see her. It's not a Power Platform though. It's about content in general. So it's going to be a fun conversation about what else is going on in the world? Well, last but not least, we have the Microsoft Learn module of the week. And this is the tie into your news item in regards to the AD Federated Services Migration, migrating application workloads and data to Azure. So it's that whole thing where, hey, you want to understand the reasoning behind the moving of an app from on-premises to cloud. Here's a great tool that you can actually run through and do hands-on labs in regards to, you know, having the application move from your on-premises to cloud, what you need to take into consideration, the steps to accomplish this. There's even the inclusion of a SQL server made available from moving from SQL to Azure SQL for that instance of your database if required as well. Yeah, it's great. And the one thing that the learning path or the learning module actually walks you through is the assessment, which is, in my opinion, the part that most customers spend the least amount of time on and should be the part that they spend the most amount of time on. Assessing your environment so that you completely understand from A to Z, all of the dependencies and everything else, because you could have a database and you know that there's somebody in your company that is using your database or some table in your database as a lookup table. And not changing any data, they're just looking it up. And if you move that database, you're breaking something else somewhere. So, there we go. So we're almost at the end of the show. We haven't even said hello to everybody in the chat room yet. So quickly, hello to Robert Jr., to Paul Jensen, to Goran Busek. Thank you for joining us today and thank you again for that great article that you shared. Paul Jensen, Jared Shockley is on the chat room. He'll be on with you later on testing production. Andrew McCollum is always out here. Pierre, if people want to get a hold of you, what's the best way to get a hold of you? I have been and always shall be at Wired Canuck. And if you want to get a hold of me for some reason, you can do so at Wired Us Live. And if you want to ping the show, you can do that too at AZ Update Show on Twitter, all available to take your questions and take your suggestions for any articles that you see of interest that we should cover on the show. Everybody have a great and safe weekend and we'll see you all next Friday. All right, cheers. Ciao.