SharePoint Saturday Utah

As always, SharePoint Saturday Utah is one of my favorite events of the year. The engagement with other speakers and attendees make it an event I look forward to every year. With the new facility, there was a new energy to the day of learning. Originally, I planned to fly in early for the ShareSki on Friday but could not participate. My plans for next year is to participate and enjoy the Utah snow.

Team Up for Success came from a request from the team to cover a topic that no other speaker was covering. Even though I do not claim to be a Microsoft Teams expert, it is a tool that I use extensively at work. This lead me to present a "how-to" and 101 about Microsoft Teams and I thank the attendees for their questions and feedback about this new presentation.

After arriving, the SPS Utah team asked if I could add in one of my standby presentations to help cover for a speaker that got too ill to come out. I was super happy to help out and we added Migrating SharePoint to the Cloud: Lessons Learned by Microsoft IT at the end of the day. The attendees impressed me with a room near its capacity for this presentation.

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Presentation Materials

Migrating SharePoint to the Cloud: Lessons Learned by Microsoft IT

Team up for Success

What's my Current Status?

I am very lucky to know many great people in the IT world. These people are experts in their fields, outspoken about what they know, and love to pass along this knowledge. One of these people is Phoummala Schmitt, aka Exchange Goddess. She is a contributor to the Petri.com website and someone fun to follow on twitter. She started a podcast with two other great IT Experts, Theresa Miller and Melissa Palmer, called Current Status. I have had a few friends appear with them.

Now, let's look back a few months and I get a DM from Phoummala. "Hey, we want you to appear on Current Status to talk about SharePoint." All I could think was, "Is she serious? Is she setting me up for some joke about wanting to talk about SharePoint or are they going to just make fun of me and SharePoint." Knowing Phoummala as I do, I knew that this was not going to be the case, or at least 100% of the case. We setup a time and away we go.

Guess what fans? That show is tonight. You can head over to YouTube and watch it live at 10:00 pm Eastern/7:00 pm Pacific. I will be joining from my hotel room in Dallas (crossing my fingers about bandwidth) to chat with Phoummala, Theresa, and Melissa on SharePoint, Office 365, unicorns, and probably some Azure. Won't you join in and watch?

Change ...

Change is something you cannot stop …
Change impacts you in multiple ways …
Change is just a part of the Information Technology industry …
Change is something IT Pros must embrace or be left behind …
Change …

Just over a year ago, I went through a pretty big change. I left the company I was working for to head back to Microsoft to join the on-prem SharePoint Custom Portals team with Microsoft IT. Looking back over that year has seen many changes with both my job, my team and Microsoft IT in general. Right now, we are in a major change around Modern Engineering practices within Microsoft IT. On top of that, SharePoint is undergoing a massive change around Office 365 and SharePoint on-prem with new releases slated for later this year. Change has been a constant companion and one should not expect anything different, especially in the world of IT.

Many people have talked about the change in the world of IT to allow for rapid evolution and growth of systems and teams. One of the names this has been given is "DevOps". Many may argue about what DevOps is and is not but the view that we are taking is one of the better views that I have seen. DevOps is not about tools. DevOps is not about process. DevOps is about philosophy. It is getting the agility and growth by having all aspects of IT working together and allowing evolution cycles to deliver the best services possible for the customer/user. It is not about developers setting up servers like operations teams. It is not about operations teams making changes to code bases. It is the feature team working together in the best possible manner to deliver the best products and focusing on the customers or users. That means that focusing on the live site and user experiences are the key to delivery in this new world. Some are scared by this change but I see this as where IT needs to focus. Money spent on services should be spent on the best possible experiences for the users.

As we are seeing this change, SharePoint continues to drive towards a major change in its own paradigm. SharePoint has been slowly moving from on-prem to the cloud with Office 365. While SharePoint is still entrenched in the on-prem world, new features are being created for Office 365 that are not making their way back to on-prem. Things like Delve and Groups are being built on the Office 365 infrastructure but are likely not going to find their way back to the on-prem version. We might see some more feature parity from Office 365 to on-prem but the Office 365 version will always have more features than on-prem due to the integration that can be done with Exchange and Lync as well as scale and Azure technologies. It shouldn't be a shock to see that products are changing. To see just how much SharePoint and all of Office 365 is changing, you should head on over to http://roadmap.office.com.

Now, in my previous roles, I didn't get to dive into the technology as my job was to be the Service Owner or Director of IT. In the Microsoft IT world, the Service Owner is the "buck stops with me" person for the service. They work with partner teams and customers to ensure the service is delivered to the users. They meet with all the various teams, provide data on the service, talk about the improvements to the service, and represent the team at all levels. Having been a Service Owner in MSIT earlier, I knew the role and the requirements for the position. In many ways, the Service Owner is the human shield between much of the IT bureaucracy and the team they represent. As I said, I have performed this role, both at Microsoft and my role as Director of IT. This can be a bit of a thankless position and if you are doing a good job, things just work.

So let met talk about why I came back to work at Microsoft. One of the things that I got offered by returning to Microsoft was to return in a very technical role as a Senior Service Engineer. My time would be spent working on the technology again. I got to focus and play with technology over the past year. Part of what I got to focus on was SharePoint 2013 infrastructure upgrades, running SharePoint on Azure and preparing for the next version of SharePoint. I was not a Service Owner anymore. This was freeing for me and I have loved the past year. On top of this, I got to work with and for a friend of mine I used to work with on my first stint with Microsoft. She was a good Service Owner in that she was the human shield allowing me to get work done. You might be wondering where all of this is going … Back in January, my Service Owner gave her notice of intent to leave at the end of the month. 

Change … 

I am now the Service Owner as well as being the Senior Service Engineer. I have been working with my peer to determine our roadmap and the future of our service. Being both the engineer and service owner, my time is taken up with more meetings, data gathering, and worrying about live site issues more so than just as the engineer.

I want to thank my friend, Aliya Kahn, for being that human shield for the past year. In just 4 weeks of being in this position, I can see exactly what she did for me and the team. Service ownership is very tough and can take a toll on a person professionally and personally. I will miss her, her jokes, and her optimism on a daily basis. She is missed but change brings opportunities. Here's to those new opportunities. 

Many of you might be wondering why I haven't been on much of social media as of late. These new responsibilities of the Service Owner position has been keeping me very busy. I am still trying to figure out my schedule and keeping my sanity, but I will be back online soon.

Upgrading Windows 10 Disconnect your VMs?

So how many of you upgraded your machines to Windows 10 Technical Preview? Go ahead ... raise your hands. I will! My work desktop is a lovely Dell Precision T7610 with Core i7 processor, 32 GB of RAM, 2 TB of storage and nice dual monitors form me to spread my work out onto. The Windows 10 Technical Preview program has been great on this rig and I can't wait to see what the team will do next.

However, I came in this Monday and started to do some work on my Hyper-V Virtual Machines that I host on this system. With 32 GB of RAM and dual NICs, I setup one for all of my VMs to connect while the other NIC is for my main OS. However, none of my VMs could get out of the main box. I checked and the cables were all plugged in. The system looked happy. What was I to do?

First, I noticed that the virtual NIC on the VMs showed that the cable was "disconnected". Now, I am a bit slow on the uptake sometime but how can a virtual NIC connected to a virtual switch be disconnected. Looking through my system, I couldn't find a virtual cable that I had to plug in. Maybe that will be something for HoloLens but I couldn't tell you because I haven't gotten my rig yet. So, that indicator gave me a suspicion around the connectivity.

Second, I went into the NIC settings on the computer/VM host to validate that the NIC was indeed connected to the network and it was happy there. Of course, it was happy and said that all should be well. This led me to think that the virtual switch was not working right.

Third, I went into the VM settings for the NICs and "removed" the cable setting the virtual switch to "Not Connected" applying that setting. After doing that, I put the setting back to my virtual switch that I use for my network connectivity ... still no go. Something tells me this is the switch.

Taking in my work so far, I set all VMs using this virtual switch to "Not Connected", thus unplugging them from the virtual switch. I removed the virtual switch and saved the settings. Then, I created a new virtual switch connected to that NIC validating that all settings worked. Once the virtual switch was recreated, I "plugged" the virtual machines in. Logging in to each machine, I verified that indeed all connectivity was returned and they were all happy. Good thing too as I needed to test some RegEx expressions for IIS URL Rewrite Tool.

I hope this helps you in your troubleshooting and maybe gives you a quick resolution to check prior to more troubleshooting.

Level Up Azure for IT Pros ... And SharePoint Too!

p>Hope that everyone had a great Thanksgiving holiday in the US and getting ready for the holiday season around the world. I have been enjoying time with my family in New York including giving my niece and nephew a brand new Xbox One. They have been filling their free time since with many waves of Plants vs. Zombies: Garden Warfare. Even I am getting into it now. I am guessing there will be many multiplayer games on Xbox Live with them. Oh darn!

One of the things I forgot to blog about earlier is one of the best events online for IT Pros. The Azure IaaS for IT Pros Online Event that has been hosted by Rick Claus is giving IT Professionals some great information about Azure and specifically the infrastructure as a service (IaaS) offerings. Azure keeps adding incredible services for Azure users including some recent additions: 

• D-Series VMs with more memory and dedicated Intel CPU Cores 
• G-Series (aka Godzilla-Series) with even more memory and dedicated Intel CPU Cores 
• Premium Storage on SSD for Standard D-Series and G-Series servers that will offer 4,000 IOPs per VHD (Standard storage offers 500 IOPs per VHD).

Getting an opportunity to play with these services has excited me to what Azure can offer IT Professionals. One of the best uses of Azure for IT Pros is making "proof of concept" environments. You can prove how technologies work while not taking any of your current on-prem hardware. Another easy use is running development or QA testing environments. In both of these cases, you can turn on and off the environment while you need it and only be billed for the environment while it is on.

But I have buried the lead here folks. On Thursday, at 12:00 Pacific time, I will be talking about SharePoint on Azure. Yup, that's right … I will be talking about how to run SharePoint on Azure. There are some tweaks and best practices I will be talking about with SharePoint on Azure IaaS. I will also go over the new Cloud App Model (CAM) and how you can use Azure with it. Lastly, there's a few other things Azure can help with around SharePoint. I am including my introduction video here:

I recommend you heading over to http://aka.ms/levelupazure to watch the recorded sessions and to see me live tomorrow. If you can't see me live, you can always catch up on the recordings.