 everyone and welcome back to another episode of AZ update. I'm Anthony Bartol. Joined as always by Sarah Lean and producer Pierre. Sarah, how's it going? I'm good. Thanks, Anthony. How you doing? Good, good. If right on cue just before we started, my dog started barking away. We've been doing this for over a year now in terms of broadcasting from our homes and doing a lot of live streaming and doing a lot of virtual presentations. You recently just had an event that just happened this week that you were speaking at. Tell us a little bit about that. Yeah, so I was speaking at Tecarama, which is a big conference usually when it's in person. And one I've definitely always wanted to speak at and finally got accepted. Just to assume it was in virtual mode. But yeah, so I was presenting, I think it was, was it Tuesday? Tuesday, I think it was. My session and the calamitous nature that it is from working at home. My neighbor decided to do some construction or deconstruction. He's taken down his decking. He's wood decking at the back of his house and bang on cue. The minute I started my session, he also started hammering and all I could hear was the hammer noises. And God knows what else power tools he was using, Anthony. Honestly, it was horrendous. I don't know if the audience could hear. No one told me or no one complained, but it was really loud. It was like he was right beside me and it just annoyed me to be honest, Anthony. And then bang on cue five minutes after I finished, guess who also finished the deconstruction. So yeah, but I think that's just the challenges that we have to put up with working from home. I think we've all probably had some kind of lawnmower incident in the background of videos or leaf blowers or God knows what Anthony, yeah, dogs. Well, I think I have my dog barking. I have my kids on the same bandwidth. So I've actually had this segment, my bandwidth for my internet. So when the show is on, I remove the capabilities that they have for high definition streaming. They should be watching their classmates in the school right now. But the whole aspect of working from home has its challenges, right? We have the situations where normal life still prevails. Dogs are gonna bark, washing machines are gonna sound off when they're finished. Lawnmowers are gonna run, drills are gonna go. And it's a lot like at the start of this, everybody was what do we do? How do we do this? What are we going to try to accomplish together? I think we've come to the point now where people understand, right? It's the whole aspect of, hey, we're all in this together. We're all at home trying to do our best to help stop what's going on out there. And people don't mind if there's a dog barking or a drill happening. It does bug us though, right? This is our day-to-day lives or day-to-day activities in our jobs. For me, it's when I have to do recordings. And it's like, I can't do them during the day because of the dog barking and other activities going on. So this is when I usually do like 11 o'clock at night till two in the morning. And so when you see a couple of the recordings, like the hall lens ones, I just completed, why do you have bags under your eyes all of a sudden? It's two a.m. and I'm doing the recording because it's dead quiet and I'm able to do that during that time. And I have full bandwidth to do so and could I do the recording using a tool that's in the cloud. And it's interesting that we freak out when we hear this stuff happening in the background, but the audience, they understand and it's awesome. The other memes that you hear is like, when there's the conferences, the virtual conferences and they're being hosted on Teams as an example and somebody's on mute or, hey, can you flip to the next slide? That was a running meme during the pandemic as well. It's been interesting, but we just, we work through it, right? Yeah, I know. I think it's just annoying from our point of view as a speaker or a presenter because it knocks your timing off, I think. Right. A lot of people don't think that presenting is a skill, but it is because you're trying to build that crescendo to the bit of news or the announcement or the technical breakthrough that you're sharing. And then you've got someone bang, bang, bang, bang, bang. Just one more. But I don't think these kinds of distractions for speakers or presenters is necessarily a new thing. We've all probably had to deal with this in speaker halls where we've been trying to speak and lunch has also been carted out across the hall. I think I had that experience in South Africa. And then one of our colleagues, Aaron, actually had a power cut during one of his sessions and had to still continue. The speakers, the organizers still wanted him to present with no power in the building. So he was just shouting at them with no slides and no demos. So, yeah, we have fun as speakers, definitely. Well, that's the thing, right? I actually had that situation in DC when we were doing the tech tour across the country. And it was interesting that the microphone power was still on, but the slide power went out and I was delivering a session on cognitive services, which is all about optical recognition. So here I am delivering this presentation, nothing on screen showing how these devices were recognizing objects, but I had to be creative and explain everybody. Power's out, that's fine, we can continue on. And if you visualize in your mind, this device looking at this object and how it looks at it, it was pretty interesting. What was even funnier was the comments that were afterwards, and this is the thing, we definitely love your feedback when you provide it. It's awesome because it allows us to better prepare for future presentations and future episodes as an update in other shows. One of the comments was, awesome, even though the power went out, the screen went out behind him, he was still able to visualize in my mind what the whole cognitive service piece was. I was like, wow, that's pretty powerful. But this is the thing, right? This is great practice for when we do, I'll get back together and we're able to shake hands again and break bread again and have conversations again, which is hopefully soon, right? Like in Canada, we're very high on the first jab. It is Victoria Day weekend for us here in Canada, so everybody has Monday off in Canada. We're excited that we're coming closer to the end of this lockdown and the pandemic, and hopefully that means we get to see everybody again in person soon. Yeah, hopefully, we'll see. So let's get started with the news, and Sarah, you're up first. Yeah, so a bit of news that we've actually, I think spoke about not that long ago. The Azure Bastion now has support for vNet peering, and it's in general availability. So I think we spoke about it when it was announced. I think that was at Ignite actually in March, and that was when it was in public preview. Now it's in GA, so it's fully supported, fully production, you can use this without any fear. And what this really does allow you to do is deploy one Bastion environment within your network. And if you have vNet peering between your different vNets, then you can actually use that Bastion box to jump across to those other servers. So previously we had to deploy a Bastion pair vNet, which made it really expensive and a bit clunky, if I'm truly honest. But now we have that support where you can actually jump across vNets if the peering is there. So great feature, like I said, we've spoke about it before, but I just wanted to highlight that it's in GA, so it's production-ready, so you can actually use it. And hopefully this implementation of it will save you some money because you don't have to deploy multiple Bastion boxes in your environment and help you maybe manage your environment a bit better, a bit easier, and yeah, everybody loves cost savings as well. So it's a great feature of this as well. And this is big news because prior to, like you said, you would have set up a Bastion instance for every vNet, right, for that connectivity. So there's a huge cost savings in respect to that as well. And then even the complexity piece, because I don't have to know which instance of Bastion I have to log into now, right? That's the biggest thing. Let's label everything with the tape, with the handwriting on it, like the hockey sticks in terms of whose name is what, for log and where, you know, that's a big deal. Cause I could imagine, you know, the complexity of, hey, I've logged into the wrong instance and I'm trying to do X, maybe something as simple as this is a developer segment and this is a production segment and I've gone into the production segment and implemented something I shouldn't have, right? Like it takes away a lot of that, you know, guesswork in terms of, am I on the right subnet? Am I doing the right thing? Obviously there should be other indicators that should tell you that, but hey, you know, mistakes happen, right? It's just a little bit, we're all human and this alleviates a lot of the mistakes, which is good, right? Yeah, absolutely, absolutely. Let's continue on with the news. So next up, there is the Admin Center Version 2103.2 preview has now become available. This has a lot of availability in preview again. So this is specifically for testing and for providing updates or feedback from you testing out this functionality. We have the access denied error that's been fixed. We have Power Show commands that weren't working previously in the previous release 2103 that have also been fixed as well. The certificate error has also been addressed. This is big news. Windows Admin Center now supports signing into Azure China Cloud. So the functionality wasn't there before and now you have the functionality to either choose global or Azure China. So hello to everybody in China and our audience there. Now have access to Windows Admin Center. Remember that this is in preview. So your feedback is of great importance in respect to your thoughts and the update that's going on right now. Other updates I wanted to really quickly talk about. There's event tool updates that can provide you better insights in terms of the details that are going on with your implementation and the feedback that you're receiving from that. It's a lot more robust in terms of its capabilities and it's reporting. The remote desktop tools update is also available. This is a big one and I didn't think it was that big but there's a lot of people that have been saying, yes, this is awesome. The Windows time service extension is also now in preview. So the ability for synchronization of all your servers to a specific time. This can become a challenge if you have multi-regional, multi-country implementations of your VMs across the world being used across the world having that all synced in one felt swoop from Windows Admin Center to make sure that your operands and your automation stays scheduled as required. This is a big deal in terms of this type of functionality. Last but not least, there was the additional partner ecosystem capabilities. So the whole aspect of our partners that are enabling solutions like Azure Stack HCI and the functionality Windows Admin Center comes into play, specific to the partner technology now managed through Windows Admin Center as well. Sarah, what are your thoughts? I'm a big fan of Windows Admin Center. I think even if you just look at that presentation I did at Tecorama, I think every demo included how to do something via Windows Admin Center. So being able to see additional features come in that potentially our customers have asked for is great. Obviously Azure Stack HCI is a big play right now. So additional functionality within Windows Admin Center is also great as well. One thing I never realized, I am Antony and I don't know if anybody else realized this. You can actually author your own extensions for Windows Admin Center. So yes, we, Matt Microsoft, actually release a lot of extensions that you can add on which is functionality and then you get our partner ecosystem. I think that one you showed was HP had authored one. We as people, as developers, as IT professionals can actually author extensions and use them within Windows Admin Center as well. I didn't know that. Like it's open source to that certain degree so you can add in your own extensions. I don't know. That was pretty cool to me when I found out about that. I didn't know either. So this is breaking news, it's something where, and that's the thing. We talked about it earlier in the previous news item in terms of Bastion and having separate Bastions for separate vNets now eliminated with vNet peering. The same holds true with Windows Admin Center because prior to you would have to go to each admin console for each VM to make changes in adjustments and that I do the right change to my own right console in that whole bit. Having that functionality from Windows Admin Center, centralizing your functionality, making sure that everything is up to par in terms of the specs. And now, as you announced, the ability to create your own extensions for functionality X or whatever you want to accomplish. That's huge. It allows you to now modify the tools as required, specifically to your organization's needs, making your lives easier in regards to your administration of VM. So that's awesome that that functionality exists. And I don't think a lot of people know that, that the extensions can be created using the tools because it's an open source API, right? Yeah, it's pretty cool. There's a whole bunch of documentation on it. So if you're a developer, if you know how to do all that funky stuff, I don't, definitely check that out and see how you can use it. Let's continue on with the news, Sarah Bure, you're up next. Yes, so we kind of have a biggie here. We have a kind of retiree approaching retiree age. IE11 or Internet Explorer 11 is actually going to retire in June 2022. Yeah, 2022. That's really hard to say, too many twos. So yeah, this is kind of a big one because I remember using IE11. I remember trying to roll it out, trying to deal with how we turn things on or make things work and all that kind of stuff. So it's another sad one to see this great technology, now that it's legacy though, kind of go away and actually you all have to think about now what you do with this retiree. If you're still using it within your environment, you do have to think about plans to change things up. We do have functionality within Microsoft Edge, which is the IE mode. So you can, if you have legacy applications, it's still need IE11 compatibility. Then that is built within Edge as well. So have a look at that, understand what that means. You've gone until June 2022 to do this. So please don't come to us in May 2022 and be like, I haven't done anything about it because you've been warned. One of the things I do want to call out though that's happening this year in terms of IE11 though is Windows Virtual Desktop. The web client will no longer be supporting IE11. So if you're accessing Windows Virtual Desktops through IE11, then that's going to stop in September this year, September this year. So you need to think about potentially changing up your browser or removing IE11 from your build so that people don't accidentally use that out of muscle memory. So that's something to bear in mind. So definitely check out this bigger announcement. I think on the page that Anthony's shown you on screen here, there's a video and the lady's talking about the actual implications of all of this. So definitely worth watching because it's a five minute video, so you'll get lots of information there. It's definitely one you have to watch over over, but maybe we'll have to have a party in June 2022 for IE11. A party in person, hopefully. That would be awesome. So we actually have the video on the blog as well. So on itopstock.com, the latest AZ update. Blog post has the video embedded in there so you don't have to go searching for it. What's interesting about this is a couple of things. Had a lot of conversations with individuals online when the announcement came out. First thing that they said was, you know, Paul Jensen actually said in the chat best, it's not me, it's you, right? In regards to IE11. I'm going to date myself here. I remember when Internet Explorer on Windows 3.1 being implemented, Sarah was like, I wasn't even in... You were still in school at that time, I know. And you had this scenario where, oh my God, this is great. And then the complaints that we were getting because what was happening is when IE was being created, you had IE1, 2, 3, like, I think they stopped at 5 and then they started layering on top of the existing because there was functionality that organizations were taking advantage of that Microsoft couldn't remove from the browser. And so they just kept on adding layers. And I remember the resource requirements for IE11 were so huge because there was all these underlying layers that were required to be there. And that was the main complaint in terms of how slow IE11 was. So one of the conversations that occurred online was the whole aspect of, well, you know that organizations are just going to go out and spin up IE11 in a VM and have it running there. You don't have to do that. So if your organization has implemented long-term service branching in Windows 10, you can actually have IE11 still running in that long-term service branch, as well as Windows Server will still retain IE11 for the time being past the retirement date. Do take in consideration, though, that support for IE11 will no longer exist. So any security patches, any additional functionality, all that type of capability will be no longer supported for IE11. You can still run it on Windows Server and on long-term service branch for Windows 10 if you've implemented it in your organization or elsewhere else after June 22nd. Sorry, June 22nd. No, is it June 22nd? I don't know what date it is. It's just June 22nd. Yeah, June 22nd. See, twos are hard for me, too. 2022 will no longer be supported. Take the time to go forward and start doing the testing and understanding how IE mode inside of Edge works and make sure that your functionality is there. The one thing that people are coming out and saying, they're intranet sites are going to stop working. We've been using intranet sites for a long time here. They seem to be working fine in Edge. The switch over to IE if it's required is automated. You can force the functionality as well if you wanted to have that force function put forth. But start testing now. Don't wait until June 22nd. Continue on with the news. IT support tools for Windows 10 version 21H1, which was just released. Of course, when they launch the new update for the OS, they're going to launch the IT tools as well. Enablement package. This is huge, the biggest challenge. All these updates come into play, and you're having your end users reset numerous times in respect to, hey, this update's come out. Hey, this update's come out. The availability of the enablement package can be created by the IT group directly and package all together the updates as required. So it's one push instead of multiple pushes. Yeah, in doing so, of course, you have a scenario of bandwidth utilization, which would be a lot greater if you're doing this one push as opposed to multiple. But if you schedule in times, obviously, off hours, that'll alleviate a lot of the headaches. It's a balance because you either have the situation where you do the one push and it's a big push, or you do smaller little pushes of all the other different updates. And it's totally up to IT in terms of what they want to select in regards to that. The other aspect is the templates have also been made available and updated. And of course they can't find it right now. Yeah, so the ADMX templates have also been updated to support functionality specifically around group policy settings for 421H1. So check those out in all the functionalities, all listed on our blog post today, the talks about what's been updated. The administrative templates, of course, are updated as well. Another interesting one, and I don't know, Sarah, if you saw this, sorry, Windows Hello multi-camera support is also made available on 21H1. This means that you can have multiple cameras do the authentication of you signing in. That's pretty cool. It's pretty cool. It's interesting, right? So I'm like, okay, I guess I'm going to do multi-factor authentication with the front of my face and the side of my face. I find it interesting in terms of that functionality being made available. But that's pretty cool in that you have this capability. I wonder if something where you have a scenario where you have the camera on your computer and then you use your smartphone to do the facial recognition for Windows Hello to authenticate to your device. Like you do right now with the Authenticator app on the device itself. I think that's a pretty interesting piece in terms of what's been added for your security schema on Windows 10. Again, it can be enforced through the new Windows 10 tools being available. What are your thoughts, Sarah? That's pretty cool. I wonder if the camera ones, though, for people who have a webcam, because my webcam is right in front of me, right? But it's not got Windows Hello. And then over on my left-hand side is my laptop, which has Windows Hello. So sometimes I sit down and wait for the screen to unlock here. And it doesn't, because that's not where the camera is. And then they have to go like that and stare at that screen. So multi-support for cameras would probably actually be quite good for people in that terms. I would obviously have to upgrade my webcam. I hate him, but yeah, I'm going to ask the boss for that one. Well, what's interesting, and that's the thing, I thought it was just that. I thought it was just, okay, so I have my webcam that doesn't have the IR support, and then I have the webcam that does. So I can have both connected and have the multiple angles. I can make fancy videos like Produce the Paradise. It's actually for multiple IR enabled cameras. So that you can have different forms of authentication, which is like, oh, that's interesting. What is the plans behind that, right? I'm wondering how much of that, too, comes into play with HoloLens in terms of its camera support and that functionality. I don't know, right? It's going to be really confusing if you need to get your phone out to unlock your PC. Do you know what, like, although maybe because they're always stuck to our faces, right? Pretty much, right? I'm watching the latest TikTok that Rick Claes is doing and him dancing on the platform. Let's do a quick shout-out to those in the chat room today, and a lot of people that are on there today. It's actually a full house today. We have Andrew McCollum here. We have Robert Jr. here. We have Audio Guy Steve. I always say it wrong, and I know I'm not trying to be rude and say it wrong, but I'm just going to say it. Audio Guy Steve is in the house. John Flores joins us today. That's awesome. Hello, John. How's it going? We have here producer Pierre is chatting away inside of the room. Paul Jensen, always great to see you, sir. Who else do we have? Andrew, Paul, Andrew, Paul. They're all talking about the instances of what's been happening in the background when they're watching live streams and all the chaos that happens. They're talking about Windows Virtual Desktop and the functionality IE 11. They're talking a lot about IE 11 in terms of the Andrew McCollum used to carry around a nook in the mini DC to do his demonstrations on wheels, which is crazy. Lots of great ideas being shared in the chat room. So if you're watching the show, do participate on the YouTube chat room. And on Facebook, hi, great to see you too. And on Twitch as well. Producer Pierre is monitoring all the chat rooms and we're always happy to have the conversations with you. Let's jump into events. Microsoft Build is happening next week. This is the second offering of Build that's occurring in the current time. So it'll be in virtual format as well. All free. Everybody's able to attend. So definitely checked it out. A lot of announcements will be made. And don't feel that, you know, if you think this is just a developer conference, there's a lot of IT Pro information that's coming out. So if you're an assistant admin, definitely want to check this out. And as I mentioned, it's free, which is pretty cool. Patch and switch. We have coming up the testing and production. So I'm going to go ahead and show you guys. Steve will be sharing their tips and tricks and making fun of me apparently during this session. They don't pick on you, Sarah. They just pick on me. It's okay. I'm used to it, right? Producer Pierre is laughing in the background and clapping his hands. Hello World is also going on. It's actually Hello Microsoft Build this week in preparation for next week's build. Rick Claus was actually a host on the show, which was awesome to see him on there. He took over my spot on the Mondays. So next week, there will be no Hello World or Hello Built because it will be built. But the week after, we'll be back in the normal production of that show as well. Last but not least, we have the Microsoft Learn module the week. Sarah, I'll let you run with this one because this is near and dear to your heart as well. Hybrid. We love hybrid, right? So yeah, this module talks about some of the services that you can get and trying to introduce that hybrid cloud environment with Azure into your IT environment. Because I think there's a lot of talk about hybrid, but then what does that mean? How does that work? How do you manage that? How do you secure that? So this module tries to introduce you to all of that and answer some of those questions and try and explain some of those things that you have to think about in decision points that you need to think about. So yeah, definitely check that out because it should answer a bunch of questions and hopefully clarify some stuff for you as well. So and this is a great interest to a lot of people because hey, I'm on-premises. I don't want to go to cloud. What is my in-between? And this is your in-between and it's hands-on labs. It's hands-on learning in terms of the functionality made available for hybrid built by engineers on our team. I think Lauren Thomas had a hand in this one and so did Thomas Mara in regards to crafting this. So you know it's going to be quality work that's been done and provide us our feedback as always in terms of what you thought about it, what's missing, what you like to see added to this functionality. Sarah, we're at the end of the show. This was a jam-packed show just before build. If people want to get a hold of you, what's the best way to get a hold of you? Yep, you can find me on Twitter at Techie Last. That's probably the best way to get a hold of me. And if you want to get a hold of producer Pierre, you can do so on Twitter at Wiredknuck. And if you want to get a hold of me for some reason, you can also get a hold of me on Twitter at Wireless Life. Next week is build. Have a great week. Have a great weekend and long weekend to the Canadians and others that are out there celebrating Victoria Day. And we'll see you all next week.