Quite Cloudy by Scott Cameron: 2016

Thursday, November 3, 2016

Hybrid Cloud - Move at Your Own Pace

This is the first in a series of Hybrid Cloud articles where I review what "Cloud" means, discuss it's value, and move on to showing how to actually leverage cloud in your business. The second blog, Hybrid Cloud - IaaS Foundation Part 1 is available now.

Are you thinking about going to the cloud and worried about having to go all-in and re-engineer your whole IT strategy? Don't get hung up on the word "cloud" - the cloud is really just another data center - just one run by a company that does it professionally and focuses on doing it at scale and with resources you couldn't hope to match. Besides... you don't have to go all-in at all. You can adopt a hybrid approach.

Remember Mr. Miagi from the Karate Kid? "Walk left side, safe. Walk right side, safe. Walk middle, sooner or later [makes squish gesture] get squish just like grape." Yeah... the hybrid cloud isn't like that at all.

With the hybrid cloud you get the best of both worlds - on-premises and the cloud. You leave the workloads and data on-site that can't or don't make sense to move to the cloud and you move the rest. Oh, and you can do it at your own pace and back out any time you like without penalty. Did I mention you pay for only what you use and get billed by the minute?

Here's how "cloud" looks in a traditional data center:

You manage everything from the hardware and networking up through the O/S, data and applications.

At the other end of the spectrum you have full cloud computing or Software as a Service (SaaS) where everything is managed by the provider and you just get a web application:

Hybrid cloud isn't just mixing which services are provided by you and the vendor- as you see in Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) and Platform as a Service (PaaS):

Hybrid actually takes portions of a workload - some data, an application, some infrastructure - and moves just that to the cloud, leaving the rest on-premises. Here's an example:

In this case, the data is stored in the existing data center but is connected to services in the cloud:

Data is stored in your on-premises data center
A Windows virtual machine in IaaS in the cloud runs a custom application that connects back to the data center. (You choose a VM on IaaS instead of PaaS because the custom code requires O/S customization.) The virtual machine could even integrate data from multiple on-premises and cloud sources.
A web application that takes the output from the custom app on the VM is hosted on PaaS (to enable easier scaling and reduce patching and O/S management overhead).
The application on PaaS then presents a web interface that is integrated in to your SharePoint Online intranet portal.

I'm not an application architect (though I can hook you up with some good ones!) but there are lots of options to choose from. The beautiful thing about the cloud is that you can choose the best option for each part of your solution and you don't have to move the whole application to the cloud.

In another example, your Exchange e-mail is on-premises and you want to move just some of your users to the cloud:

In the diagram above, there are some Exchange users in the cloud and some on-premises. They interact with each other as if they were on the same e-mail system. You can choose to move just some mailboxes to the cloud or all of them and even move them back if you like. Perhaps you have some users with e-mail data that contains trade secrets or bank card information... leave them on-premises if you like and just move the general user population to gain efficiency and scale where it makes sense.

The two main things you gain from the cloud are:

Scalability
Flexibility

And with hybrid cloud you don't have to sacrifice your current IT infrastructure and practices to leverage the cloud's benefits.

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This article is cross posted from my original on LinkedIn Pulse: Hybrid Cloud - Move at Your Own Pace.

Friday, October 14, 2016

4 Shocking Microsoft Products You Need to Know About

Whoah! Microsoft did What?

You've been using Microsoft's products for a while now - Office, Exchange, SharePoint, Skype. You know how to use them, what they do. Here are a few you probably haven't used. Some are really interesting and different than what you normally expect from Microsoft. Some are actually free!
Here are 4 Strange Microsoft Products You Need to Know About:

Sway

Are you bored with PowerPoint? Need to create a quick and easy visual presentation on the web? Log in with your Microsoft Account at Sway.com and you can create a visually stunning presentation quickly and easily.

Choose a template then develop your story line with text, pictures and rich media easily - video, audio, Tweets and more. Invite someone to co-create your Sway or review it if you like, then when you're done if you don't like it, hit the Remix button to give it a new look.

When you're done hit the Share button to share it on Facebook or Twitter or upload it to your public gallery on Docs.com.

Sway is free with a Microsoft account. You can also get free Outlook.com mail and free OneDrive storage with that same account. Go to live.com to get an account, but most people have one already.

Flow

Have you ever missed an e-mail from your boss? Are you tired of posting updates twice - once to Twitter and once to Facebook? Maybe you'd like to automatically save your e-mail attachments to SharePoint. You can do all this and more with Microsoft Flow.

Flow has dozens of pre-created automations already built that you can use, or create your own from a selection of "triggers", conditions, and actions.

For instance, you can create a Flow like this:
Receive e-mail from Bob > Create a Wunderlist task > Add the subject from Bob's e-mail as the Title for a new Wunderlist task.

If you're a geek like I am and have played with home automation, Flow is a lot like IFTTT (If This then That) but for business. It's a cool concept and it will be interesting to see what people come up with.

Flow is another free service from Microsoft and just requires an account. Sign up at live.com.
BONUS: Check out Wunderlist - its a great (and free!) to-do and personal planning app for the web and most mobile devices. Wunderlist is a part of Microsoft as well! Thank you Satya!

Delve

For those business users already on Office 365 with files in OneDrive and SharePoint, Delve provides a way to share and discover documents, subject matter experts, groups, and more... all based on your own preferences, content and existing contacts and groups.

Delve lets you "favorite" boards and documents to enable easy recall of content you discover. The feature is quite similar to what you see in Pinterest.

For instance, if you share a lot of documents with your marketing team and they publish a new design style guide or PowerPoint template to the public, you can go to Delve and quickly see the new doc without having to go search for it on SharePoint.

Delve also allows you to:

Post and share an internal blog
View your organization's structure - see the reporting structure for your internal contacts
Offer public praise to your coworkers
Discover various documents you have security to view for contacts, groups, and contacts of contacts
Dive in to MyAnalytics (with an additional license) - get details about how you use your time, who you should stay in touch with, set goals for how to manage your day and more.

Access Delve from within your Office 365 portal at portal.office.com. You can open it from the "Waffle" menu in the upper-left-corner if you have access. Requires an appropriate Office 365 subscription.

Planner

Need to get organized but think Microsoft Project is overkill? If you have Office 365, Planner goes hand-in-hand with Office 365 groups to allow for easy team collaboration on tasks with light project management tracking and metrics.

If you're familiar with kanban boards and cards, Planner is very similar. You Create a task or card on one of several boards. The boards organize the cards either in to categories or as a reflection of process or backlog for items to do.

You can use Planner to assign tasks to team members and then easily track status of all tasks in the Chart view. Planner is closely tied to Office 365 Groups and you can manage a Notebook, store files, share a Calendar and even use the Conversations view to discuss progress of your project. Office 365 Groups could (and probably will!) be an entire blog of its own. There's lots to like there.

Like Delve, Planner requires an Office 365 subscription and appropriate access to be granted.

Keep an Eye on Office 365 and Microsoft for More

Microsoft has moved to a cloud-first model. You see innovative applications like these popping up regularly now. There will likely never be a full on-premises Office client for any of these applications but they are all built to work well on mobile devices, may be integrated in to other Microsoft apps and may show up in the mobile app stores as well.

The cloud allows Microsoft to quickly develop and market test applications and those that catch on will stick around while others may fall off. You can be sure of one thing, though... you'll see more of these and some may look strange if your only experience with Microsoft is Office.

(This article is cross posted from my LinkedIn Pulse blog)

Thursday, May 5, 2016

E-mail Tip #1 from my Time at Microsoft - Notifying Your Coworkers about Vacation

I recently posted my Top 7 E-mail Tips and Tricks from my Time at Microsoft on LinkedIn. I'd like to share some of those tricks here as well. Here is the first of several!

Many companies have a vacation calendar that can be accessed through Outlook. The problem with vacation calendars though, is that people have to go look at them for them to be useful. Here's how you can put your vacation on the calendar and notify those you work with in a meaningful but non-intrusive way:

a. Highlight the vacation time on your calendar, right-click on it and choose New Meeting Request:

b. Add your co-workers and vacation calendar to the recipient list and type in a subject that includes what it is (vacation) and your name. In the location box indicate that you'll be OOO (out of office):

c. Change the Free/Busy status to Free. This will ensure that when your coworkers accept the invitation it doesn't block off THEIR calendars. They'll see that you are out of the office but it won't affect their ability to schedule items during that time.

d. Click the Response Options button and uncheck Request Responses. This way the recipients of your invitation don't need to click to accept the invite and you don't receive back a response from them.

e. Click in the Reminder box and change the default (generally 15 minutes) to "None."

f. Click the Send button to send the invite. It should look like this on your calendar and theirs:

You just notified your coworkers and the vacation calendar that you would be on vacation and out of the office with minimal interruption to them and without affecting their own calendar availability.

You should note that this just notifies others about you being out of the office. If you want the your Outlook calendar to actually reserve the time as unavailable you will need to create a second, personal-only, calendar entry. Your calendar would look something like this if you do: