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.
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-
Here are some of my top picks of the new features coming to Microsoft Teams, discussed at Microsoft Ignite 2020
Here is my doodle covering a number of sessions focusing on Microsoft 365 specifically Teams from day one of Microsoft Ignite 2020
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!
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.
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.
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.
I am talking to a large amount of people about the calling functionality within Teams at present so I’m my usual fashion I thought I would draw a doodle to help me illustrate the architecture.
The diagram above illustrates the different components within the architecture of a simple direct routing implementation of Microsoft Teams Calling including some of the licensing considerations over and above the 365 licence you are likely to already have.
This is just one of the configuration options available for Teams and if you are looking for a more simplistic solution using Teams native calling plans maybe a better option for you.
Megan Warren and I recently presented at Commsverse Online 2020, covering productivity and well-being in conjunction with Microsoft 365. The doodle above depicts some of the take-aways from the presentation.
Please find links below to a few resources mentioned
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.
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.
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.
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.
I am lucky enough to be one of the delegates for the current Tech Field Day virtual event with Dell Technologies.
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
Andrea Mauro, @Andrea_Mauro, http://vinfrastructure.it/en/
Arjan Timmerman, @ArjanTim, https://www.techunplugged.io/blog/ http://tupodcast.blubrry.net
Becky Elliott, @BeckyLElliott, https://beckyelliott.com/blog/
Chris M Evans, @ChrisMEvans, https://www.architecting.it/blog/
Enrico Signoretti, @ESignoretti, http://juku.it/en
Gina Rosenthal, @GMinks, http://digitalsunshinesolutions.com/ http://ginaminks.com
Keith Townsend, @CTOAdvisor, http://thectoadvisor.com/
Ray Lucchesi, @RayLucchesi, http://www.SilvertonConsulting.com http://www.RayOnStorage.com
Tim Crawford, @TCrawford, http://AVOA.com
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
PowerFlex
The second presentation from this afternoons vRetreat covered Datrium DRaaS. Their DRaaS offering allows you to replicate from any on-premises VMware infrastructure to a fully managed instance of VMware on AWS.
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/
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