Sad news ... No Jared at NACS 2019

Hello readers. I know I have not kept this blog up recently but things have been very busy on my personal front lately. I have moved out of my current residence to a new place as I sell my home of the last 12 years. I had built my timeline based on my attending the North American Collaboration Summit 2019 in Branson, MO.

This is an event I was looking forward to attending and speaking at. I have heard nothing but praise from my fellow speakers about the event Mark Rackley puts on and wanted to see it for myself. Alas, this was not the year. My moving and sales preparation plans were thwarted by Mother Nature in a couple of ways.

I hope to get the opportunity to speak in future years but I do hope those of you attending and speaking have a blast and learn a lot.

Cheers!

Office 365 Connect 2018

I want to send a large thank you to NC Communications and Nigel Clapham and Spencer Harbar in specific for inviting me to speak at the Office 365 and SharePoint Connect 2018 conference in Haarlem, Netherlands. This is the second time I have spoken at the Philharmonie in Haarlem and enjoyed it just like the last time.

Arriving later on Tuesday, I got to see some fellow speakers in the evening at a local user group meeting. With this conference in town, the local user group gets to have some incredible speakers for their meeting this month. I sat in on some of the discussions and the start of a panel discussion. Unfortunately, my stomach growled so loud it interrupted, or so I felt it was. Dinner was at a place I enjoyed a lot last summer, Thrill Grill, and was as good as I remembered it.

Wednesday started with some errands for my trip in the Netherlands so I missed the Keynote. I did get to the Philmarmonie in time to catch Eric Shupps session on Introduction to Azure Web Applications for Office and SharePoint Developers. The developer in me thanks Eric for some understandings of how to setup Web Apps to work with Azure AD. I had some good conversations with presenters and attendees around many.

In the afternoon, my first session of the conference was an oldie but goodie, Migrating SharePoint from On-Prem to Office 365 - Lessons Learned by Microsoft IT. One of the things I find is that many conferences like this session because so many businesses are still looking at a move from on-prem to the cloud. This is still popular and Office 365 Connect 2018 wanted me to present it. I got some really good interaction and had a great time presenting it. I want to thank all of the folks who attended and made the session a good one.

On Thursday, my second session of the conference was a "Lightning Session". I presented my SharePoint on Azure - Tips and Tricks session. Normally, this is a 60 minute session but I had to cut it down to 20 minutes. I felt bad for the presenter after me as I didn't make the 20 minutes but ended at 25. Another good session with great attendees wrapped up my Office 365 Connect for 2018.

Again, I can't thank the NC Communications team and Nigel Clapham for the opportunity to come speak at their conference and hope to return for more in the future.

Cheers!

Microsoft Tech Talks - Managing Success in Microsoft Teams

I have the great opportunity for another stop on my Road Trip this year in Denver. Working with Art Hogarth and teaming up with Theresa Eller as a co-presenter, we will be presenting how businesses can take advantage of Microsoft Teams and its integration capabilities.

During this session, Theresa and I will demonstrate how to use Microsoft Teams and how it can be leveraged with other Microsoft applications. We will show you how to use Teams to display and analyze data with Power BI, make phone calls, setup automation and other efficiencies with Flow, as well as discuss how to use API’s to connect to other data sources like Salesforce and other developer tasks. We will also discuss the various roles and platforms that are currently available.

If this sounds like something you want to learn about and happen to be in the Denver area on Friday, October 5th, register to join us.

About Theresa Eller

Theresa Eller is a Microsoft Premier Field Engineer with a passion for technology and customer success. Accordingly, she is a frequent speaker in the international SharePoint and Office 365 community. Theresa holds a Master of Arts degree in Teaching and Learning with Technology, has two dogs, and loves to travel.

Meeting Schedule

Time		Schedule
2:00 pm		Food/Networking/Sign-in
2:15 pm		Opening/Welcome/Featured Topic
3:50 pm		Q&A

Additional Details

• Food and drinks will be provided.
• Photographs of attendees will be taken at the event and may be used for Microsoft-internal marketing communications.

Parking

FREE Parking on site!

Location

Microsoft Office
7595 E. Technology Way, Suite 400
Denver, CO 80237

Office 365 Connect

I have been lucky in my speaking career to be invited to a few wonderful events. To that end, when NC Communications asked me to submit session proposals to their Office 365 Connect event in Haarlem, Netherlands, I was beyond thrilled that they selected two of my sessions for this year's Office 365 Connect.

Migrating SharePoint from On-Prem to Office 365 – Lessons Learned by Microsoft IT covers how Microsoft moved many of its internal SharePoint sites from our on-prem farms onto Office 365. In the beginning, we will cover migration options and how they impact sites and users. Along the way, you can learn the possible migration paths and the capabilities of the Office 365 compared to your current environment. We will focus to the technical how-to of performing migrations to Office 365. Lastly, I will highlight the "gotchas" and guide you through some of the best practices used by Microsoft IT. While I present this session at many different venues, there will be some additional tips and tricks specific for this event. Make sure to come attend on Wednesday, November 14, 2018 at 14:00 in Room B.

Running SharePoint on Azure - Tips and Tricks is a quick session on the best ways to run SharePoint on Azure services. We will look at IaaS from a viewpoint of Compute, Networking and Storage to make the best of Azure hosting. We will also look at other services in Azure that you can utilized for hosting SharePoint on the Public Cloud. Please join me on Thursday, November 15, 2018 at 13:30 in Room E.

On top of my two sessions, I plan to be around the conference center for much of my time over the days. If you would like to setup a quick chat, feel free to contact me about getting together.

Click on the button below to check out the conference site and to enjoy 20% off your registration price, use the code SPKJS20. It will work will all ticket types.

Office 365 Notifies Customers About November Outages

Microsoft Office 365 teams notified users of their system about the recent outages they suffered. In the notification, they explain the reasons for the outages seen and let users know that they do matter via a credit automatically applied to the monthly billing for Office 365. All in all, the transparency and credit goes a long way in keeping customer satisfaction on the product at high levels.

No one likes to suffer through a downtime at all. I hear that daily in my day job as most IT professionals do. When you do have a downtime, the transparency and the response is what counts the most in the end. Users that want to leave will use any excuse to leave you. Users that are your biggest “fanboys” will stay through thick and thin. The transparency and response is what keeps the majority of users, the “We just want it to work” group.

In a mail sent to Office 365 administrators at 4:00 pm PDT today, Microsoft says:

Dear Admin:
The Office 365 team strives to provide exceptional service to all of our customers. On Thursday, November 8 and Tuesday, November 13 we experienced two separate service issues that impacted customers served from our data centers in the Americas. We apologize for the inconvenience these issues caused you and your employees.
We are committed to communicating with our customers in an open and honest manner about service issues and the steps we’re taking to prevent recurrences.
Here are more details about the recent issues:

•

The first service incident occurred on November 8 and resulted in prolonged mail flow delays for many of our customers in North and South America. Office 365 utilizes multiple anti-virus engines to identify and clean virus messages from our customers' inboxes. Going forward, we have built and implemented better recovery tools that allow us to remediate these situations much faster, and we are also adding some additional architectural safeguards that automatically remediate issues of this general nature.

•

On November 13, some customers in North and South America were unable to access email services. This service incident resulted from a combination of issues related to maintenance, network element failures, and increased load on the service. These three issues in combination caused customer access to email services to be degraded for an extended period of time. Significant capacity increases are already underway and we are also adding automated handling on these type of failures to speed recovery time.

Across the organization, we are executing a full review of our processes to proactively identify further actions needed to avoid these situations.
We understand that any disruption in service may result in a disruption to your business. As a gesture of our commitment to ensuring the highest quality service experience Microsoft is changing the standard credit procedure for this incident and is proactively providing your organization a credit equal to 25 percent of your monthly invoice. [Emphasis added by me] The credit will appear on a future invoice, and there’s no need to contact Microsoft to receive this credit. Please note, processing of the credit may take as long as 90 days.
If you have additional questions, please do not hesitate to contact us. Questions and answers about this and other Office 365 issues can be found at our Office 365 community site.
Thank you for choosing Office 365 to host your business productivity applications. We appreciate the serious responsibility we have as a service provider to you, and we know that any issue with the service is a disruption to your business and that’s not acceptable. We apologize for the inconvenience these issues caused you and your employees.
Thank you,
The Office 365 Tea

Given what we know about these outages, it seems to me that the Office 365 team are doing the right thing, both in telling the users what happened, how they are responding to the incidents and the “gesture” of the credit. For some, a credit of 25% their monthly bill is a pretty good gesture.

What have you seen from Office 365 or other hosting providers for information around outages?