FAQ podcasts are shorter and more focused on a particular topic. In this episode I’ll talk about the importance of checking your inbound Exchange Online policies to improve security.
This episode was recorded using Microsoft Teams and produced with Camtasia 2019
Mark O returns! Brenton returns! it’s the come back show, just in time for the end of COVID lock down. Mark O’Shea and I talk about the swag or recent changes to the Microsoft 365 Business suite of products. Brenton and I also bring you up to date with all the very latest Microsoft Cloud news as well. What a return it is!
This episode was recorded using Microsoft Teams and produced with Camtasia 2020
FAQ podcasts are shorter and more focused on a particular topic. In this episode I’ll talk about the differences between OneDrive for Business and SharePoint.
This episode was recorded using Microsoft Teams and produced with Camtasia 2019
Robert Crane 0:00
Welcome to the Need to Know podcast. My name is Robert Crane and this is a shorter FAQ episode. These episodes are brought to you by the CIA ops patron community which you can sign up for@www.co ops patron.com. Now I’ve done a number of these FA Q’s, while I thought that one of the topics we really haven’t covered in any depth or started to cover is around security. So I thought that there are going to be lots of FAQs and lots of stories we can talk about with security when it comes to Microsoft Cloud. So I thought I’d kick that off with maybe starting with a discussion to help you get a starting point and all this now, the idea with security is that it’s going to be about defense in depth. Now that means there are going to be multiple systems or multiple configurations to put in place to effectively improve the security and reduce the risk. Now we can never eliminate the risk, right there’s always going to be some sort of risk but
Our job as IT professionals is going to be to minimize this to the best of our capabilities. And that’s going to mean implementing a number of systems to provide that Microsoft gives us lots and lots of options, which I hope to be able to run through over the course of upcoming FAQs. But the way I like to think about it is we need a systematic approach. Now good security is going to be about having a system doing things in a systematic way, and making sure that doesn’t leave any holes, we miss something. And we can repeat that over and over again. Now, the system I would suggest you adopt is one of working from the outside, it’s what’s the furthest point on the defense of our tenant that we can look to secure first and then once we’ve done that successfully, we can then move our way further and further inside the tenant. Now in the Microsoft space, probably the point that is furthest
From the tenant is actually something Microsoft generally won’t handle. That will be your DNS records. Now, there are three major DNS records when you look at security that are very, very important. Now, the first one of these is called the SPF record. Now most people will have to set that up when they’ve configured their tenant. That means that it will already be in place before they even got the tenant up and running. Now, the idea with SPF is for it to basically be a record or a match between the IP address or the actual physical server that is sending mail and the domain that it claims to come from. So basically, the SPF record is going to provide that match to let other people know that the email being sent by your custom domain is authorized to come from the server. Now, what we find is that many customers need the ability to send from multi service
Some might send a bulk email or maybe on prem and also in the cloud. So again, there are the option to you to have multiple servers configured an SPF now, the simply you could have this the better. So if you’ve only got office 365 as the way to send emails, then that’s gonna make it very simple. But if you do have some of the other configurations, then you’re gonna have to make sure that you add those in appropriately. And the idea is, is you’re going to make sure that the syntax is correct. Now, it is very easy to make a simple mistake formatting mistake when it comes to formatting these records. So my advice is even if you have an SPF record in and up and running already, make sure that you go in and double check it now. There are lots of tools out on the internet that will do this for you. mx toolbox.com is a great place that I use, just go in there and you can run a DNS query across all your records, but then focusing on
The ones we’ll be talking about here and SPF the first one. So most people will have SPF in, make sure that it is correct. It is correctly formatted has the right configuration before you go too much further. Now, after you’ve got your SPF, and you’ve verified that go and have a look at Deacon, right, so the idea with DKM is that DKM is a dentist’s record, that will basically provide the key to unlock a cryptographic key that is put into or sent with every email. So the idea is, is that when an email is sent out from the domain, it will include a short cryptographic header. And then when the receiving party gets that they can go back to the DNS record, get the decryption key from the DNS record which has been set up and that will then be used to decrypt the header from the email that was received and I can then verify that that is expected.
And indeed that email did come from that originator. So again, DKM requires typically two DNS records very simple. You only have to put them in do them once. And again, you can use something like MX toolbox to go in and check to see whether you had decom in place. There’s also plenty of places to read up on how Deacon needs to be configured. There is some articles around office 365. Now, office 365 does use a form of dynamic DKM. But it’s always better to go in and have a static version. So once you’ve got your Deacon records in, you can go into the Exchange Online configuration, you’ll find a decom option under protection, and then you can basically ensure sure that it’s working, verify that DKM is correctly configured. And then basically make sure that it’s turned on going forward. So the second thing I get you to check is that make sure that you have a DKM record and
Make sure that he’s set up correctly. And if you are using a Microsoft 365 tenant, you can go into Exchange Online config under decom. And you can make sure that that is set to on. So again, that’s going to provide you additional layer of protection when it comes to your emails. Now the third DNS record is something called demark. Now demark basically does an evaluation on the success of both the SPF and Deacon record. Now it is basically something that you can configure to initially just report you can also configure the situation’s of files demark
A can then quarantine the email and you can then get quite aggressive if you want to insert it to actually reject if it fails demark. So, in summary, the demark is that evaluation of the success of DKM and SPF together and then what action will be taken based on the success or failure of that evaluation.
Now demark, again, is something I would suggest that perhaps you start off with just reporting and there are tools out there that can send you the demark reports to let you know what’s failing and what’s happening. Generally, I would suggest that you move from reporting to at least quarantine so that again, that means that if there is a failure of demark, then we basically look at quarantine in the email rather than accepting it into the system. Now demark, again, is a single DNS record that you put inside your environment, to basically let people know that when they receive an email, they want to evaluate demark and come back to your DNS records and then they can look at what the settings are and then help them make a evaluation based on those settings.
Now, the reality is, is those three DNS records are typically outbound, so they’re typically more important for the
mouths that are being sent to another organization. So to be a good internet citizen, make sure that you do have those records set up correctly and configured appropriately. Now, you can also use that technology to assess inbound emails as well. So basically what we can say is okay, do records that are coming into our environment. If they do not, basically have success with SPF, we can then treat them or mark them as more likely to be spent, which they are. And then we can also do the same with D. Kim and demark. So there are a number of settings inside Exchange Online, particularly that you can go in and modify or set up policies that take different actions depending on the success or failure of what these records replicated for inbound emails. Now, the idea here is is that there is an area that you can go in and sit down
He’s up, we can do this via the web interface. We can also do this with PowerShell. And for example, when emails come in to Exchange Online, they are evaluated, using it what’s called an SEO level. So the spam confidence level. And things like a failure of SPF will generally add to the fact that it’s probably more likely to be spam or not. And then you can set a threshold to determine Okay, well, when it gets over, when the threshold gets over, say seven, which is the default option, then we will treat it as being spam and then you can determine what action you want to take once that evaluation has been made, but the important thing is, is to think about this starting as far out from the tenant as possible. Make sure that your DNS records are correct, especially for the SPF D Kim and demark. You can use tools like MX toolbox calm to evaluate your records.
You can also use that tool to evaluate other records, other tenants other domains as well, because the DNS records are effectively public so you can go out and again, have a look and see how many people have set up SPF have set up things like DKM, and demark. Now a couple of other tools I’d recommend that will help you in this assessment is what’s called the exchange message. analyzer header analyzer. So what it allows you to do, it’s a free tool that you can download from Microsoft is typically an add on for Outlook. So you go and do a search for exchange message analyzer, you can then add that into Outlook. And then when an email is received, you can use that to drill in and report on the message header. So typically, the stuff you don’t see in normal outlook will tell you whether there has been SPF you know, success on the email that you’re looking at. Whether
decom is assessing whether demark is a success. But also lets you know, for example, which servers, the email has come through lots and lots of really good detail in there. And I would certainly recommend that add on as a standard. Now remember, we can load that individually onto a single Outlook client, if you want also works in our the Outlook Web Access as well. And if you’re an administrator, you can add that to the admin area of your Microsoft 365. And then push it out to all your clients. And it’s a recommended option because most clients probably won’t. Customers won’t use it themselves. But if you ever need to troubleshoot Why did this email end up being spam? Or why did this email end up in junk? This message header analyzer is going to allow you to be able to debug and it has a number of links in there that will take you directly to the relevant
articles from Microsoft to let you know how the settings are and where you can make changes. So I would strongly recommend that if you are curious or you’re really wanting to tweak your settings or you want to analyze why emails are ending up in places like junk mail folders, then use this message head analyzer ad in. And you can go and evaluate and see much more detail what the actual message headers how the internet’s rather this, what the actual
process that has taken place, moving this email between servers. So hopefully that’s given you a bit of a start coming to think about security. Good security, like I said, is done in layers. The outermost layer, I believe, is to look at the DNS records. So make sure you have your SPF, your decom and your demark configured and correctly set up. You can evaluate that with a number of tools. Once you’ve got those set up correctly. There are a number of options inside Microsoft 365 to make sure
They that is turned on Microsoft 365 is taking advantage of the signals that are coming from those DNS records. And to do a bit of evaluation and look at those headers in more detail for inbound emails, you can use the free message header analyzer plugin from Microsoft in your outlook that will give you the ability to drill into that if you want to get some more details. So I think very much for taking the time listening to this episode, hopefully we’ll be able to, again, do a number of the dive sessions into specific areas in security down the track. If you do have any suggestions, we do want to hear a topic in more detail, please don’t hesitate to contact me you can do that via director at CIAops dot com. And I’ll take this opportunity once again to thank you very much for listening to this episode.
Brenton talks to Steve Hoskins about a variety of topics but focused on endpoint management, especially Intune. I provide you with a quick on everything that’s happening in teh Microsoft Cloud as usual. So tune in and enjoy.
This episode was recorded using Microsoft Teams and produced with Camtasia 2019
Robert Crane 0:02
This is Episode 238 and my name is Robert Crane and I’m flying solo for this episode. So I’ll give you a quick number of updates on what’s happening the Microsoft Cloud then we can throw over to an in depth interview further along. Now there is a little
Bit of a slowdown, I think in the news cycle from Microsoft, we are approaching build a virtual build that we’ll be having in May. And we’ve also got the Microsoft inspire, which has also gone, basically to a virtual conference. So I think Microsoft’s holding some of these things back to release them, although they did release a range of updates or new releases on this surface range. So we sort of don’t know, it’s like everything else these days. It’s always a bit we don’t quite know what’s going on. So one of the updates that has happened, there has been some news around Microsoft Teams. So Microsoft Teams now is moving into a environment shortly that will allow you to have nine people a Brady Bunch style Hollywood Squares style option to see all the people in the meeting. So let’s move on from the normal four, two by two to a three by three arrangement. Now also teams is
including the ability now to raise hands, I think that’s gonna be a fantastic option to prevent people you know, talking over each other. We’ve also now got background effects. If you haven’t seen that there are the ability to put some background effects behind you to obviously cut out distractions and also minimise or maximise your own privacy. We’ve got some background blur for iOS as well now, and we’ve had some limits increased on the live events as well. So plenty of news coming out of Microsoft Teams as you would expect, at this point in time. So I’ll make sure we put the blog post in there for you to go and have a look at there’s lots and lots to reading. There’s a lot happening with the Microsoft team’s environment. Now one of the other things that caught my eye was some updates around project cortex. Project cortex, again, is coming hopefully very soon, that allow us to manage our information and use AI to aggregate all the
Some webcasts, their webinars that recommended that you probably go and have a look at as well. Some updates around OneDrive for Business, not a huge amount here some updates around the sensitivity, and some version labelling in the desktop, which is a handy feature now so we can get to our version histories directly from our desktop, we used to be able to get to that via the web. But now we can do that directly on the desktop. We’ve also got the ability to delete any locked files there as well. Now, not to be outdone, we’ve also got some improvements in the planet experience in a mobile environment. So planner to do teams all of that is becoming more tightly integrated, so we’ll make sure again that the link to the articles in the show notes so you can have a look at the new options that are available in planner on the mobile environment. And some interesting news also that Microsoft has announced new data centres
In New Zealand and in Poland, so for those people not too far from Australia will see some data centres in New Zealand, the understanding I have, it’s going to take them probably a couple of years to spin those up as good to see, Microsoft continues to grow its footprint there in the options for those around the world to make it much better for people in those localities. Now, probably the biggest thing that’s grabbed my attention of like is the update to the windows virtual desktop. So this is now becoming an arm based model. So this has moved very much a PowerShell environment of being far more integrated with the Azure portal. So you can now spin up your host pools, you can serve your hosts, you can do all that sort of stuff basically, without needing to do everything in PowerShell, which used to be the old way of doing it. So different model, you can see that this product is maturing very quickly. So if you haven’t had a look at windows virtual desktop, I’ll certainly recommend that you go and have a look at it.
claim that quite regularly now, and would recommend that you have a deeper look at it because it’s a very, very important part of Microsoft technology stack going forward. Now with this, with that said that Microsoft has also announced that Defender ATP is in preview for these multi session environments. So that means we can bring out Defender ATP clients into monitor and manage these VDI environments for us as well when it comes to security. Now, also speaking of security, there is a good practical guide here that Microsoft has released about securing remote work with your Microsoft 365 business premium. So some options in there. It’s all pretty much common sense, but it’s good to have it all laid out. It comes down to multi factor authentication, securing your tenant correctly, making sure that your users are doing things in the right way and you have the devices locked in you use your office 365 at
policies but it’s a very good article to go in unless it basically build yourself a bit of a checklist, make sure that you are covering off all those items that they do this there. Another one he for Microsoft stream. So Microsoft stream now gives us the ability to actually capture or record stuff directly on your desktop. That is a really handy little feature for creating how to videos or even doing short informational clips for workers to share and maybe even post up to YouTube. So it’s really simple, really quick and easy to do that’s rolling out as well. Again, have a look at the show notes for more details around that. Now, the other thing that we’ve got he also is some of the security stuff around Defender ATP, I found a really good article here from Microsoft again, that basically shows you how to gain a 24 by seven detection and response coverage using Defender ATP. Now it sort of outlines how
You can just maybe kick off or stop this just via email. So maybe if you’re in a small provider, just do everything by email. And then it does have the ability to look at integrating with things like API’s, and so on. And there’s a lot of really good information in there. And hopefully, it’s pitched at different levels, but we’ll put it in the show notes so that you can go and have a look at that and do a bit of review and and see what Microsoft basically has on offer as well. So there are some articles that we recommend that you go and take a look at. If you’ve got the time. We think that there’s plenty in value there is still not happening out there in the space, maybe not as much is being revealed as yet because I think his builds coming up, not too far away. And we do have some, you know, big expectations around what they may be announcing there as well. Don’t forget there’s also the new Surface devices to go out and have a look at as well. Hopefully they’ll pique your interest there. Another iteration on
arrangement for Microsoft. And I think I’ve covered everything I need to in this short and quick update. So why don’t we get straight into the interview for this episode?
Brenton Johnson 8:12
I have Steve Hosking here from, he is now a Microsoft employee as of next week, and has extensive experience and knowledge around the Intune platform. He’s been doing a series of videos, which I mentioned a few weeks in the podcast, which was, you know, very good, very useful for me, as far as, you know, getting a bit more of a feel for the sorts of things that I can do. Certainly since last time I looked at it, it’s changed significantly, are remember when it was back in Silverlight. It’s, I don’t even recognise it anymore. And yeah, just the things that are coming out. So I thought, I know what I’ll do. I’ll reach out to Steve and ask him if he’ll come up with
In the podcast, and thankfully for us, he agreed. So welcome, Steve. Brendan.
Steve Hoskins 9:08
It’s great to have you on the podcast. So I might start by asking you, what is that? They
Brenton Johnson 9:17
say, what’s your background? How did you get here? You know, what, How’d you end up here? Alright, so my background is around Device Management. I’ve spent the last 20 years ish. I feel old now, but
Steve Hoskins 9:33
almost 20 years doing and use compute and various different
situations. So I’ve started my career as a first and second level support to an end use compute fund. Everybody’s been there, everybody’s enjoyed that.
But rather than going into that whole data centre infrastructure space, which is the typical journey, I’ve stepped into the infinite CEO of the SME development space. And that’s where I specialised in doing device provisioning device OS and managing that OS layer and being a very specialised person and doing that. And then yes, so that then I spent 10 years literally going from organisation to organisation, rolling out XP, Windows seven, Windows 10, Windows 8.1 and stepping through all of those different technologies and using what SMS 2003 and I still remember the feature pack 1.0 the difference between that and 1.1, which was the big one was that they changed the Wim format in the beta from Longhorn to Vista. And it caused a whole heap of problems with the actual
how you actually decompiled it and you had to change the executable to use it. So I’ve got a bit of history.
Brenton Johnson 10:52
You’ve got your stripes, so to speak.
Steve Hoskins 10:54
Yeah. And then we stepped through into like CMOS seven and cM 12 And then we’ve played a lot of fun with that. So for last five, five and a half years, I’ve been working for a company called vigil and it is a partner. And then in the last, what, three, four years, we started moving across and very much specialising in that insurance space. So since 2017, that has been our core direction from my practice. And we worked extensively with Microsoft on that. So over those three years, I’ve been Microsoft MVP, very lucky in being in that situation, have had a lot of fun with that, and given me access to be able to go in and understand all of the new technologies as they’ve been coming up.
Brenton Johnson 11:43
Yeah, that’s, that’s,
that’s really cool. So you’ve got a fair bit of experience in it. You’ve obviously jumped onto the chain thing quite early. You know, it wasn’t much of a product back in the day. Days compared to alternatives out there. So can you walk me through a little bit about the evolution of Intune? And where it’s come from and what the ideas behind it was? And, you know, how, how we should be thinking about it?
Unknown Speaker 12:14
Yeah. So what Intune when it first started out, it was designed for Windows seven support. It came out from the windows team, the Windows OS team actually built it. And it was designed to be managing home users and things like that. And that spawned to hang on, we could do this for enterprise organisations. And the conversation was, oh, we should be looking at insurance like, cool. You’d go and have a look at it. It was very entry level. Remain rudimentary is probably the better word. And so being a negative it was, it was still being built out. But it was very much built on Silverlight. There was no automation, there was no way to start. standardise easily. So Config Manager ended up being the de facto product for most enterprises and other products were for the consumer in the small to medium business. But then what 2017, Microsoft turned around and went, we’ve rewritten it, we’ve listened, we’re going to put it on the Microsoft Graph. And the Microsoft Graph is fully is a fully extensible REST API that allows us to do automation, whether we’re using PowerShell, C sharp, JavaScript, any scripting language you can think of. So it gives you that whole flexibility of building that out and having consistency across multiple tenants as required. And that’s that’s probably the big thing is, it’s always evolving. So when the modern version of Intune came out, which is the graph API engine, for example, there was no ability to deploy when 32 applications you’re providing have the ability to deploy a single file MSI. And I don’t know about you, I, I personally, I haven’t found any apps that are a single file MSI. Especially when you bring in third party AV products. We’re sitting there during the initial builds of our first auto pilot customer. This is before ASP was there. This was before any of this technology was there. Were sitting there and going, Oh, we need to get so FOSS installed. We’ve got this MSI this executable what we’ll do is we’ll wrap it inside an MSI. And what the executable was actually doing was going and downloading and other MSI, but multiple MSI s. So what that then in turn meant was, the MSI wrapper had to either be just dropped onto the computer and always going to assume that was successful. Or if we sat and waited for the executable to run inside the MSI came back with an error. So I can’t run because there’s another MSI running. So we had to get very creative. And we got to the point where we use when they brought in the PowerShell scripts, which was awesome. Where we could go and download content from blob storage and Azure. And then it would give you the ability to do that whole installation of anything. Whenever you needed to bring in the window to apps. It has just changed the whole market for Microsoft around Intune. It’s allowed you to move so long as you have packages under the site under a kick. Yeah, I keep tweaking no that there’s a little bit you
Brenton Johnson 15:38
said I in the video, so yeah, yeah, like,
Unknown Speaker 15:41
it’s still like, it hasn’t been expanded out. But the whole packaging of applications and this is where it allows you to start building standardised installation media for all of your small business customers. And you can start building out your automated configuration for All of your customers. So if you’ve got multiple environments where you need to make sure that they’ve got a consistent BitLocker configuration, which is pretty standard, you’re going to sit there and say, I want to have BitLocker turned on, I want non admins to be able to BitLocker. And I want it done solidly. And there’s no third party encryption already on that. These are like this four settings that you set, you can export that out using Microsoft graph with PowerShell, scary word PowerShell. And export it out into a JSON object. And then you can go and import that into any other customers you need. Once you spend a bit of time playing around with this, you learn that you have the ability then to start using that same authentication token and going in across all of your customers. So one of the one of the last projects I’ve worked on it, vigilant for an internal reporting scenario is we step into each one of our customers tenants and we check to see what the state of have applications installation of the compliance of the Windows updates. And then we return it back into teams into a channel for our support guys to go and look at. So you can go in there and go, Oh, this is what’s going on. And we can actually go from there. And one of the things that we’ve added in there is then the ability to add chicken portal. So you click on the button, and it goes to the portal page for that problem. As well as Go on, look at the video. And there’s a video on how to fix that problem.
Brenton Johnson 17:31
Oh, wow.
Unknown Speaker 17:33
All right. pointed guidance. And it’s that scalability of being that this is all just powered on graph. And Azure Automation. Like there’s no real huge trickery around it. But once you start talking around that sort of technology you go, huh, interesting.
Brenton Johnson 17:53
Yeah, and then it’s probably important to note too, that you guys don’t have like 400 developers sitting in a room with stuff out your 30 man team. You know, you’re not unlike other msps from SOS perspective, but you’re able to leverage these technologies here because you’ve actually gone down invested in understanding what a REST API is how workout interacts. You know, I think the sort of fundamentals of it that we use to all learn about how technology works on the underside, is becoming less relevant. And it’s becoming much more about Do you understand how, you know, Linux says, This is kinda like the nonsense it’s going on that if you understand our open web standards, and you know, like, I’ve hired a web developer, why did I hire a web developer? Well, when I spoke to him about rest API’s, he didn’t know much about PowerShell but he knows JavaScript Well, if you know JavaScript, you’re highly valuable to me. Sure. And I think there’s a huge amount of stuff. He’s much better on those sorts of things than the picks it up quicker than I do. You know, that’s, that’s the benefit of being that age. I can tell you that I’m old now. But Geez, I used to pick stuff up a lot quicker than I was younger. Oh, come on. Yeah. I’ve got a lane on my experience now. Well, I’ve seen that 100 times. So I can keep up because I still have that background. But I didn’t know the background. I find that very difficult.
Steve Hoskins 19:33
Exactly. And positive to go back from what you’re saying is
we’ve spent the last eight weeks six No, six weeks working on this UI, getting it all into teams, on a team of three people. Yeah, amazing. Right. We’ve had one guy that’s been probably 60% of his time, and that’s the priority that that is the most amount of time that we’re putting on Right, and we start breaking it down and go more, where’s their return on investment that is worth saving having each one of us, first of all support guys going into each one of our customers tenants, and finding out status of that configuration.
Brenton Johnson 20:17
And a huge time saver.
Unknown Speaker 20:19
And then from a training point of view, it gives us the ability to turn around and go, Well, look, I need to bring on a new resource, I don’t need to sit them down to teach them one on one how to do mention. I’m just going to point them at these videos. So we’ve spent time recording videos recording content, so that at the end of the day, once I’ve left, as I have now the organisation, people can still go in and learn that content. Whereas if I sit there and do a one on one, it’s dead time. It’s not reasonable. So it becomes not valuable. So this is part of that whole Change your paradigm of thinking, especially most, most organisations and most partners, you guys are going to have an f5 licence as part of your internal usage rights. Go and use it for strength. So there are video up there, capture, do whatever you need to do, it doesn’t need to be perfect. Like, one of the biggest barriers that I’ve found with this resource getting him involved, is I just want to perfect I’m gonna go in and modify the script in order the closed captions in such stream, I’m going to do this, I’m going to do that, like, why more important to have the content there. It doesn’t even need to be perfect. It just needs to be there so people can use it. And you stop talking through that story and people go, Oh, okay.
Brenton Johnson 21:51
And it’s your maximum, isn’t it? Perfect. That’s right. And I think what you’re you’re really talking about is you’re looking at the stuff That really brings value for you guys and your customers, and you’re building and prioritising around that. And because you know, it’s an eye, it’s a REST API. It’s not like you have to really build a whole, you know, million dollar build around it, you can just build into the parts you want. Once you both indicated, you can go to the API endpoint that you want, and, you know, retrieve the data, send the data, um, you know, probably sound a bit, not developer enough. But that’s essentially all it is. Right? It’s, you know, there’s like four major functions in a REST API, right from, like, you know,
Unknown Speaker 22:39
that the time it’s taken us to build our tool sets to export that content. It’s probably been five days. Yeah, development time. And the most of it, the bulk of it is just sitting there and making sure it’s consistent. But we’re now to the point where we can, we can export and import whole configuration We’ve spent the time to understand the toolset. So if you’re using PowerShell, go and use Visual Studio code, commit your code, do version control, and then start looking into tasks. So my colleague at vigilant, Ben Rader, who he appears on, on the intern training session quite often. He’s done some really awesome stuff around tasks and in 32 apps, where we have the ability just to hit f1. go build, and we’ll go and build the app and then go publish and like, okay, it’s already up there. I’m going to go and get a coffee. You just fill it all out as the MLM wallets doing while it’s doing the folk up. You can walk away, don’t have to think about it.
Brenton Johnson 23:47
Hackensack put your feet up. Yep. And not harder, right? Yeah,
Unknown Speaker 23:51
exactly. That, oh, there’s a new version of zoom. All right? Get the MSI good. Put it into the file, build and publish. It’s good. But, yeah. So it’s, it’s about making your life easier. And that’s where you start building that automation process it. And that’s, I think, a big value point that most organisations are still grappling with. It’s it’s one of those big changes in mindset. Once you’ve gone cloud cool, what’s next? Well, how do I make it consistent? And look, look, you’re never going to have consistency for all of your customers.
Brenton Johnson 24:35
different requirements, you know, some, some requirements, customers require certain things and other customers require other things a term but i think is across the board stuff, luckier. BitLocker example where you deploy BitLocker regardless of the customer, I’ve never had a situation where deploying BitLocker hasn’t been a good idea. Sure, I’m sure you’ve probably come across A few where they use the third party tool or something but her.
Unknown Speaker 25:04
Oh, my customers, I walk in there and go, we’re doing BitLocker and we’re doing Defender ATP and they would go okay.
Brenton Johnson 25:15
Honestly, I bet everyone wishes their customers were just like,
Unknown Speaker 25:18
yep. Well, this is where you if they say no, I’ve had. So we’ve been doing Intune deployment full time for three years now. And
Steve Hoskins 25:33
I’ve had
two customers where we have not used the default defender. The first one, where and that was our first full autopilot before his pay on 709. And we’re sitting there so 1607 1609 we’re sitting there with the old build and ah, it was it was chaos. But that was and then that was so close. And actually, I don’t think we’ve done another one without always just done Defender ATP of defender. Because why make the effort? Why? Why pay for a consultant to come in and do that change for you? Yeah. And BitLocker it’s a no brainer. Well, let me just turn around.
Brenton Johnson 26:25
Yeah, like there’s nothing in the Snowden papers about it so it’s probably our that’s my that’s my opinion on everything. Like if it’s not in the Snowden papers, if it didn’t come in hack that. Shadow brokers did a while back. Probably okay. You know, like, is cold boot attacks and those sorts things we get nation states after, then you might want to look at how you store your information. But you know, 99.9% of people or threats out there, exactly. It’s not gonna it’s the best thing. You can do it’s better than not doing it.
Steve Hoskins 27:02
Essential. And that’s it. Right. It’s about to turn. It’s not about it’s impregnable. Because it’s not knowing corruption is impregnable. If you throw enough cycles at it, yeah. Simple as that. So, look, I, I make my life easy because I sit there and I just go, well, we’re doing it this way. And if you don’t like it, we’ll let’s see how we do it my way. Well, budget Great.
Brenton Johnson 27:32
So do you want to spend your money going and getting an incremental benefit of point 000 1%? That, you know, may or may not be that because you have no idea because joining something signed on standard or do you want to stay in the safety of numbers? Where you know, if anything does happen in that situation, there’s going to be advice coming out. There’s going to be help. There’s going to be PowerShell scripts. There’s going to be all this sort of stuff. stuff. And I think this is a sort of interesting conversation and I might work might go into a little bit about back onto the chain a little bit around use cases for different sized companies. So say if you had say a five c company at 25, a company 50 or 100, say company, like how would you go about? Because, you know, in tunes a bit like the REST API example is saying you don’t have to deploy everything in Intune. You can just say what policies you want. So, as a baseline, what do you think is probably the most important policies that all organisations should have under that hundred seat, Mark?
Steve Hoskins 28:41
That the simplest ones that I’d be sitting there and saying is make sure you have office 365 going out, but make sure you have Windows Update for Business turned on and ideally with a pilot rang good. If you’re small enough, just send it out and turn on The drivers and other Microsoft product updates in Microsoft apply for business or Windows business. Because that’s going to make your life so much easier. I have a number of people that have turned around I’ve actually been to a couple of recent customers we like all we need to have the Dell support command or on our computer because we want to have all the drivers being installed from Dell. So why I couldn’t get them directly from Microsoft. And they just get pushed straight down and oh, yeah, but it’s not doing firmware. It’s like no, it is doing firmware. It’s doing everything you want it to be doing. But you don’t have to think about it. You don’t have another tool, another agent on your computer taking these cycles. And then we go across into right we’ll make sure you have BitLocker turn on BitLocker is important. Or apart, turn it on. cetera. Love it. Get new computers with it. It is one of those things where I don’t want local admin on my computers. I don’t know about you, but I don’t want local admins on my computers. That’s the simple fact. And my my end users, they’re not local admins. They’re not going to be local admins, my whole organisation a visual on it. We’re not local admins, they had the ability to go and get global admin, or device admin or whatever was relevant to their level in the organisation, but they had to be on request with him. But from a security point of view, we didn’t have local user accounts, local user accounts, and not required in any organisation anymore.
Brenton Johnson 30:40
Yeah, and I think this is an interesting distinguishing feature when we’re talking about the videos. And you talking about like, you know, if the computers messing up and we don’t know what’s wrong with it, we just blow it up. Now memory started, we just gotten a new engine, and it just resets the device. So moving Enable from having this sort of idea that they have to spend hours and hours setting up a device, the way they like it, all of that sort of thing. A lot of those configurations can be done with watching. So when people log in 90% of it’s done, what I would say is look into and we’ll do a good percentage of it. But it doesn’t need to, you don’t need to auto Configure. Your staff are smarter than what they were 10 to 15 years ago when it comes to it. When we were doing so is for XP.
Steve Hoskins 31:33
It was a hard, hard, hard learning curve, because you’d have people coming in and I’ve never used a computer. This isn’t just like people in their 50s and 60s at that point. This was people coming out of high school I still remember in 2000 when I was 2001 when I went to uni, and one of the light one of the girls that she turns around to one of the other guys can you Come and show me how to actually use a floppy disk and so farms. So you’ve just gotten into uni. It’s like, Yeah, I was never shown in high school. I don’t know. So, oh, whereas that’s not the case anymore. And that’s the that’s that whole change of mentality. But the other the other setting that I highly recommend to just turn off it’s not even a conversation just turn on is enterprise state roaming. Enterprise state roaming gives you that whole common experience across all your computers. And then OneDrive known folder move like, I can’t go on enough about this product. It is going to make your life easier. You don’t even need to think about it. It just works.
Brenton Johnson 32:44
Episode Six for everyone listening.
Steve Hoskins 32:48
You go.
Brenton Johnson 32:50
Yeah, scenario that was one of the things that we looked at. One of the first videos I watched, I’m like, Oh, this is awesome. I’m loving this. So I wrote up a whole policy around was deployed and, you know, why are we why things would on the way that they are? And yeah, it’s just like that sort of thing because we always have, it’s always senior management because snowflakes or whatever. And if they lose one file on their desktop, even if they just moved it to a different space on their desktop, and they just can’t find it anymore, and he’s opened up OneDrive, you’re like, oh, there it is. Oh, ha, cool. You backed it up. I’m like, No, no, it’s still on your desktop. You just moved it. Oh, did I? Oh, okay. Well, you know, if you have all of that stuff, then you can start thinking okay, I’ve got enterprise state roaming, again, as long as you have Microsoft 365 business, or one of the, you know, proper skews day one in it, you’ll be fine. If you try to do a lot of stuff on business premium, you’re gonna have a pretty,
Steve Hoskins 33:49
that’s just regretful that didn’t.
Brenton Johnson 33:52
Well, yeah, I should, I shouldn’t age the podcast too much. So what I meant to say is, if you are using Microsoft 365 business or Microsoft 365 Essentials, those are not good skis for doing look, you know, device and user management with the office and email and SharePoint and OneDrive. But they’re not management skews the management excuse, or self tracing small business and enterprise equivalents of those.
Steve Hoskins 34:22
That the simple fact is, and I know I’m going to oversimplify it when it comes to licencing and everything associated, but think of it the same as getting insurance going and paying that little bit of extra is that insurance for you on your at a point of view. It’s going to save you in the long run. Yeah.
It’s it’s gonna an extra $5 a week, a month, or $50 a month
could break the company maybe but it’s something to look at and go what happens if I Don’t do it. I know one of the big conversations I’ve had recently with guys at Microsoft is, alright. We’re wanting to put these companies into spaces because of the coverts. And and everything associated with like, how do I make sure that I don’t lose all of my content, all my configuration and everything associated? When we spin up at the end of the cycle? It’s like, wow, that’s that’s a great question. Because you can’t just pause payment. Soon as you pause payment on your subscription, you’re sitting there and go hang on. All of my mailboxes disappear. All of my data starts disappearing. Yeah, and I will what we’ll do is we’ll just back it all up into a storage like cool, but how do we bring it back? Yeah, we and you start talking as well. If you’re sitting on the the bare minimum price point today I can’t help you Yeah, there’s no step back. But if you’re sitting on, say an f5 or an a three and you need to are out also we’re going to money. You can step it back. But it’s it’s tough. I understand. But all of these technologies, they’re there for a really good reason. Defender ATP, that is such a, I can’t go on enough about why that is such an important product for your platform, like security centre, staff, all of that information that you can pull back around. Are you compliant? Do you have any risks in your environment? Do you have all of your applications not just the Microsoft applications, but all of your applications patched
Brenton Johnson 36:50
these are really key and core things that a lot of organisations are missing. Its and then they’re looking at third party products. Like, why you already got it and use it? So yeah, I think that goes back to our original conversation around. You don’t have to use the third party products, if you have the correct tooling for the size of the organisation you are, if you’re Coca Cola, and you have a huge IT team and one tenant to manage, you know, it’s it’s a different compensation to someone who might have, you know, 12 or 15 customers varying in size from five to 50 or 100 stuff. But then you go well, or at will, that’s what we that’s the environment that we’re in, how we’re gonna, how we’re gonna manage that. So I think it’s, it’s gonna be an interesting thing is RMM tools. Most of the MSP world or the managed service provider world will live and die by their RMM tool. There’s a lot of automation built into it. It does a lot of this stuff for them in a slightly different Why, but then you have security experts running around saying it’s the most dangerous tool ever invented is the RMM tool. There’s nothing more dangerous than an RMM tool as well, they’re actually use code Configuration Manager.
Steve Hoskins 38:19
So no, no, I this is all seriousness like you go to the, the blackhat conferences and things like that, and like half ago on hacker con and things like that. They talk about Config Manager. Like security in your config manager environment is so important. But there’s so many organisations that are out there and just say I, I’m just going to run it as HTTP. I’m not going to worry about it, because it’s just just corporate data doesn’t matter. So talk computer data. And so yeah, yeah, cool. That’s one way of going the other way, is the ability to reset your computer, the ability to go in take from it change permissions on everything in your system. So yeah, these these systems are super powerful. And
Unknown Speaker 39:10
you’ve got to be careful.
Brenton Johnson 39:12
Why are you familiar with the 10 immutable laws of IoT security that was published back in 2000, and then updated again, I think about 2013. I got one of the MVPs are Microsoft and it’s probably still there, they probably moved over from TechNet. And like, one of them is if a bad guy has access to your PC, it’s not your PC anymore. Security is not a panacea. You know, it’s like all of this stuff that was written it’s all getting a bit aged, you know, but the principles are pretty, you know, they pretty rotten with the immutable laws. I was pretty impressed. Yeah, all I learned about them probably like 2007. And we’re talking about servers and, and you know, all of this sort of stuff, and, you know, but that one always sticks with me if a bad guy has access to your PCs. your PC anymore. I’m like, Oh, it’s true. And you know, Windows credential manager is not the most secure thing in the world. Uh huh. I remember at the cybersecurity conference in Melbourne, they had a presenter there showing how she could get every single credential ever saved in Microsoft by doing all this crazy stuff on the computer shows you know a very dangerous individual if you’re on a bad side. Luckily, she’s one of the good guys but you know what I mean? Like it’s it’s probably it’s not good enough to sit back and go, you know, I it’s fine. You know, such and such RMM tool we won’t name any of the five names of RMM tools out there is fine because we’re consistently saying and it’s generally not their fault To be honest, usually password spray attacks guys. You know, these are the sorts of things the breakdowns your customers, don’t use your company name in the past Good.
FAQ podcasts are shorter and more focused on a particular topic. In this episode I’ll talk about the differences between OneDrive for Business and SharePoint.
This episode was recorded using Microsoft Teams and produced with Camtasia 2019
Robert Crane 0:00
Welcome along to the Need to Know podcast. My name is Robert Crane and this is episode 237. Now, these episodes are shorter episodes known as FA Q’s and they are aimed at a deeper dive into some of the technologies in the Microsoft Cloud. Now these episodes are brought to you by my CIAOPS Patron community and again, you’ll find information about that at http://www.ciaopspatron.com. Check it out if you’re interested in learning more and keeping up to date with everything in the Microsoft Cloud. Now what I want to cover today is a very common question I see out there around the differences between OneDrive for Business and SharePoint. Now the first point of order is to note that SharePoint is a technology, a service that OneDrive for Business takes advantage of. So the way to think about it is that SharePoint is the overarching technology that OneDrive for Business runs on and will also designate the common area as team sites. So again, think of SharePoint, the top of the tree, and that’s providing the storage capabilities for files and folders for OneDrive for Business and for team sites. And also for Microsoft Teams as well. So think of, again SharePoint as the manner in which items files are stored in Microsoft is five, four, which OneDrive
takes advantage of it, and so does team sites. Now one of the other differentiators here is to appreciate that OneDrive for Business is designed as personal storage per user. And team sites are designed for shared data. So think about a OneDrive for Business as what is on your desktop, my documents or a home drive or traditional home drive, you would have had potentially with a on prem server, and think of team sites as location for shared file. So this is going to be you know, the F drive in the old style file, so therefore shared location used by multiple people. Now, OneDrive for Business, as I said, is aimed at personal storage. And basically all you get is a single document library, right? So inside SharePoint technology, there are these apps or these locations where you can put information. The location that you put files into in SharePoint technology is called a document library.
And you only get one of those with OneDrive for Business. Whereas with team sites, you can have as many document libraries as you want. So the first differentiation point around these two technologies is that OneDrive is you get one document library with team sites, you can create as many document libraries as you want to help you separate out and manage your different files in their environment. So when we open our OneDrive for Business, we see one document library, and basically just see a list of files and folders. So think about the fact that we get no width. We don’t get the ability to add additional apps. We can’t add document libraries to OneDrive for Business. We can’t add calendars, contacts, lists all the other things that our intranet into OneDrive for Business or OneDrive for Business is a solely aimed at allowing users to store they follow information. Now this is really good to allow users to get information off there.
My Documents off their desktop off their home drive from a server and put it into an area in the cloud, which is backed up manage, maintain controlled and accessible remotely. Now, the most important thing I think about any SharePoint technology bit OneDrive for Business or team sites, is the fact that it’s all searchable. So once we put information up into SharePoint technologies, we’re able to take advantage of the fact that all the data will be indexed and can be recovered or can be viewed basically using search. Alright, so OneDrive for Business, one document library, you can’t add more document libraries. And you can, for example, add sub areas, you just get one single area with no width and no depth. It’s just a storage location. Now when you start out, in most cases, users will get at least one terabyte of space in their OneDrive for business to be able to store their own personal files. Okay, so one terabyte per user.
Generally is what is provision and is aimed at the users personal documents is not a place for parsers. It’s not a place largely for common documents, right? That is what we use team sites for. Now, the idea here with team sites is that it’s designed for this shared storage concepts. divined for designed for users to work on files in a group environment. Right. Now, as I mentioned, in SharePoint, you can add as many apps as you want to broaden what is available in that location. So you can add multiple document libraries. So you may have one location for your policies, your procedures, maybe a templates areas where you can keep building these out. And the advantage of having different document libraries, for example, is you can format them in a different way. And you can also have different permissions. But with team sites, we can also add things like calendars, contacts, lists,
We can build it out into a true intranet environment. So the idea with team sites is that it is for a group of people. And we can add more content in there besides just pure files and OneDrive for Business, largely designed for pure file storage. Now, when we basically configure our environment with our team sites, we get one terabyte of total storage across all of the teams I separate. So remember that when we create a Microsoft team, we get a team site, a SharePoint team site, into which we can put our documents for our Microsoft team, that and all the other SharePoint team sites when added together their total storage is or cannot exceed, generally one terabyte now, you get that one terabyte standing space which is shared across your Microsoft team, the team’s site environment and you also then get an additional 10
gigabytes per user added onto that space, you start with one terabyte. And then for every licenced user you have, using SharePoint team sites, you will get an additional 10 gig of storage capacity added on to that one terabyte, right? So if you have 10 users, you’re going to get 10 times the 10 gigs, you’re going to get hundred gigs of additional storage. And that means you’re going to get basically 1.1 gigs worth or sorry, 1.1 terabytes worth of data out there that you can use to put all your shared documents in. Now, not only can you get the one terabyte starting space with SharePoint team sites, you get the 10 gig per licence use as well, but you could also buy additional storage. So one of the advantages of SharePoint team sites is the fact that you get the one terabyte 10 gig per licence user
Then you also can add additional storage on there as a paid option if you so choose. So that makes it a little bit more extensive, a little bit more flexible to achieve what you want. Now, remember that this total space is one terabyte you can manage that you can make that automatically allocated, you can control that by the different team site, if you wish. Now, what are some of the other differences between my SharePoint team sites versus OneDrive for Business? Well, in a SharePoint team site, you get something called check in check out. So what that means is that when users work on typically we’re typically Office documents inside these technology inside SharePoint technologies. Then what happens is, is they are co authored by default, which means that multiple users can edit them, update them, change them at the same time by default. Now, there are probably times when you want to make sure that only as
single author has access to a document. In that case, you can check the document out, the author can update the file, everybody else can view the last version of it. And then when they’re finished, when the author’s finished with that they check the document in and make it available later on. So, SharePoint team sites gives us the ability to do these document manage which we management, which we don’t see with OneDrive for Business, because OneDrive for Business, again, is designed for a single user to work with. Now, probably the biggest difference between OneDrive for Business and SharePoint team sites is the fact that you get metadata. So metadata is available in SharePoint team sites, what use metadata for us think of it like tagging files. So the idea is is you will put a file into a SharePoint team site document library, and then you would tag it so instead of creating folders or very deep structure, you would use the tagging to keep that structure as flat as possible. The advantage of
Doing and using metadata which you can now filter, you can now sort. And you can now launch automated processes based on the metadata, you have now, a file an item inside, a SharePoint team site can have as many metadata tags effectively as you wish. So you can tag a file lot by, for example, an author by location by whatever you wish by a customer. And then you can start using that to filter and sort and we don’t see that metadata capability in OneDrive for Business. Now, the other thing with SharePoint team site is we can create a hierarchical structure so we can create something called sub sites inside our SharePoint team sites to allow us to organise our data in a hierarchical structure. Now generally best practices not to do very deep data structures these days, but it is possible and again, it’s one of the differentiation points between
A SharePoint team site and OneDrive for Business so they get ticked off. At SharePoint team sites. It’s much more like a traditional file server with data located in a hierarchical structure, and OneDrive for Business as just a single location with no sub area that you can put your files and folders if you want. So just in summary, again, the idea here is that the technology the storage technology, then the Microsoft Cloud typically uses easy storage technology, known as SharePoint that’s been with us probably for over 20 years now. Now, that technology allows us to build OneDrive for Business, which is a limited subset of the full features of SharePoint, as well as team sites. So team sites are aimed at grouping together information files, Contacts, Calendars, for a group of people, a team of people, where I OneDrive for Business is purely designed as a
storage location for a user’s files, right. So every user generally, by default, will get their own OneDrive for Business, they can put their own files in there, they can then access them in any location, they can share the odd file in and out of that. But if they’re working on a group of files, like your traditional file server, the idea is to put it into SharePoint team sites. Now, there are some differences between the two and what’s available and what surfaced and you get more of the functionality in SharePoint team sites. So you get things like check in check out, you get the ability to add additional metadata. You can, for example, pin files to the top of a document library list. To highlight them. You can also add calendars, contacts lists a number of different apps into a SharePoint team site to make it more like an intranet, right? So you want to gather all your information in there. Now importantly, remember that other components of the Microsoft Cloud like Microsoft Teams, do you
Use SharePoint team sites. So every time you create a Microsoft team, it will create a SharePoint team site in which you can put your files and folders in there that is surfaced in the Microsoft team’s interface. But you can dig in behind that. And you can go and get access to that full SharePoint team site from that Microsoft team if you want. Alright, so remember that the storage for a group of users is going to be in a SharePoint team site. And the individual data location for users and their files is going to be OneDrive for Business. And both of these are built on SharePoint technology giving us a lot of these enterprise capabilities, document management that is available in that. So hopefully that has given you a bit better clarification as to the difference between OneDrive for Business and SharePoint Online. And it sort of boils down to the fact that they both stores locations, they’re both built on SharePoint, OneDrive for Business is
individual users with SharePoint team sites are four groups of users. And that’s where you’re going to get the best usage and functionality out of that. Now, of course, you can use those services for other things, but they really shine when they are used in the correct way for storing data. So with that, Have you enjoyed that episode? Thank you very much for listening. You have been listening to the Need to Know podcast from CIA ops training on using technologies like SharePoint online or Microsoft 365, visit www dot CIA ops academy.com. by purchasing from the selections available, you’ll be directly supporting this podcast. To provide feedback on this episode, visit www.ciaops.com slash contact
Even though still in lockdown we are bringing you the latest Microsoft Cloud news along with an interview with long time MVP and creator of VisualSP, Asif Rehmani. Asif’s VisualSP tool is a amazing way to help people learn more about Microsoft 365 by providing context sensitive help via the single press of a button. He is also passionate about adoption and looking at helping customers by looking at their needs through their own eyes. Lots of great take away from a very experienced trainer.
We hope everyone stays safe and enjoys this episode.
This episode was recorded using Microsoft Teams and produced with Camtasia 2019
Robert Crane 0:43
Welcome along to another need to know podcast? My name is Robert Crane , this is Episode 236. And joining me on the other side of the microphone there is Brenton Johnson Welcome back.
Brenton Johnson 0:52
Good to be back, Robert.
Robert Crane 0:54
So unfortunately we are basically in the same side of the phase when it comes to Coronavirus and staying sanitised? Hopefully everything at your end is still positive there is a lot of negativity around at the moment we still don’t know the end result of this. It’s going to be a challenge but working from home now a lot of people seem to have adjusted to how are you finding it now what’s probably Week Four of lockdown or week three of lockdown these days.
Brenton Johnson 1:21
It’s ok for for me because I was an early adopter to the whole lockdown thing. Interesting this 60% of Australians can work from heart. So it’s quite remarkable numbers. We’re seeing the rise of zoom, which has been hilarious. And people not realising that they have video conferencing on their computer and then going Oh, can you instal zoom on like, I can. But can you read these articles from all the top cybersecurity buddies first, and then sign off on the risk? And like yeah, we don’t care zoom. I’m like okay. For the bar, you know, for the most part, it’s been fairly time, you know, most of our customers are zero trust. Anyway, so it hasn’t really registered too much. It’s just really my own sanity of sitting around the harm and, you know, getting out for walks every day and just trying to keep active and trying to keep, you know, keep moving. has been the main thing. How about yourself, Robert?
Robert Crane 2:28
Well, again, it’s a it’s a bit of a you get a bit of cabin fever, I think sitting in the same room looking at the same screens and you do go for a walk and do a bit of exercise and read up other things. But again, it does ghin begin to get a little bit claustrophobic. I think that people who aren’t used to working from home for extended periods, again, are going to obviously struggle we see that if you got kids or husband, all these other things all under one roof or trying to use the same internet to get work done to stay basically distracted then again, it’s going to be a big challenge. I think that Not knowing exactly how long this is going to last makes it very difficult for a lot of people. But luckily, we’ve still got the ability obviously to go shopping and do that. And in Australia at least it seems that we are now well on top of the the infections, we’re not obviously out of the woods, but we are much better off than we were. But the question then comes again to the you know, the certainty of when all this is going to end Now, speaking of that, it’s very interesting that Microsoft came out and said they are not planning to run any face to face events until July 2021. So again, they will obviously really evaluate that over time. That’s a pretty big statement when you think about it, they’re not prepared to run any so inspires not going to be on ignites potentially not going to be on build. All of those face to face events are going virtual, from Microsoft’s point of view. So that is a huge change and obviously they need to book venues and arrange stuff well in advance so they getting out in front of these early so I’m sure a lot of other suppliers a lot of other vendors are Doing this as well. But that’s going to be, you know, a major impact, I think for quite an extended period of time. And it goes back to this, how do we effectively, you know, network in inverted commas when we aren’t at these sort of events. So that’s going to be, I think, a big challenge going forward. And a lot of people look forward to some of the very large events. But I think also too, I heard a comment, which is interesting. This may give Microsoft the excuse to pull all of those events into one super mega event being basically Ignite. So build will go into Ignite. All the other stuff will go into one super mega conference that Microsoft run once a year in the US. So we’ll see how that goes. But that sort of the, the position that Microsoft’s taken on, a lot of other companies are going virtual as well. Have you partaken in any you know, meetings or those sorts of things from vendors so far? Brenton?
Brenton Johnson 4:54
Oh, yes, same old webinars and stuff. I’ve been poking my head in those but You know, nothing that would have been in person that’s gone virtual, I’ve really seeked out. I’m doing so much video conferencing and firing and all of this that I’m calling a barber To be honest, I want to just get out, walk around the like, listen to podcasts and just, you know, do that sort of thing. So the idea of sitting at home watching a webinar is not my idea of good time and everyone’s doing it at the moment. And I think people will get good at doing
Robert Crane 5:32
it well either like that’s the other challenge as well. I think a lot of people undertaken doing webinars for the first time and again, they aren’t doing it you know, as well as they could be because they treat it like a an in person event or something. So yeah, there are some challenges, certainly some challenges there. Now, probably best to launch into some news. There are some important items now. Obviously, the the number one item which I don’t think we talked about last time was the renaming of the Office 365 business skews to Microsoft 365. So basically the Business Essentials and business premium now moves to a Microsoft 365 naming conventions there are now three Microsoft 365 business skews was like what’s this thing is called This is a basic or standard, then sorry, a basic standard and then a a premium. And the that transition happens, I think on the 21st of April and that would indicate to me that all the other schools, the enterprise schools are probably going to be renamed to Microsoft Certified business as well. So, yeah, what’s your take on these? This renaming thing that Microsoft’s undertaking?
Brenton Johnson 6:42
I think it’s good. I think it’s gonna cause a lot of confusion in the marketplace. around you know, what used to be office 365 business premium is now going to be Microsoft 365 business. What’s Microsoft 365 business is now going to be Microsoft three Six, five business premium, those sorts of things are going to be very challenging for people. They usually just see the 365 people, you know, just call it 365. That being said, in if you think outside of your immediate 12 month period of change, the naming convention makes a lot more sense, rather than having a conversation about what’s the difference between office 365 and Microsoft 365. You just say, hey, there’s three plans. One is web apps, SharePoint, you know, file storage email, you know, for a basic sort of worker that’s not an information worker. If you need desktop apps, that’s an extra 10 bucks a month. And if you need security over the top of it, you can step up to the premium, which comes with security, and Device Management and those sorts of things. So that’s a much easier conversation and trying to explain. So yes, you have office 365 and Microsoft 365 and have you heard of Microsoft 365 and blah, blah, blah, like all this sort of stuff now, it’s just it’s a easy step up in price. Now it’s about 10 bucks every jump. And it’s, it makes sense to explain to people, the naming convention aligns to the value proposition, which I think is the problem that they are having people go, Oh, well, I’m already on the premium product. Why would I go down to the business product? And that I heard that’s just the office as I know, that’s office 365. Business, Microsoft 365. Businesses business Premium Plus security. What? So yeah, all of that is very, very positive, I think, but it’s going to be painful in the in the short term. But I think now that we’re very much settled in this cloud productivity space, it’s going to make a big difference and we need to start putting in big rock foundations. Now also, we don’t have this confusion forever. So a little bit of short term pain for long term In my opinion, so just
Robert Crane 9:02
to be clear, office 360, we’ll put the link in the show notes, office 365 Business Essentials, which was the web version of everything is now Microsoft 365, business basic, office 365 business premium, which was the desktop and the back end Web Services now become Microsoft 365 Business Standard. And the Microsoft 365 business, which was the services the desktop apps plus, basically, the Enterprise Mobility Suite on top is now become Microsoft issued five business premium. So we now have as Brenton indicates a basic standard or premium. I think they make a hell of a lot of sense, as you said, going forward. Yes, there will be some confusion initially with people that are transitioning, but I think in the long run, if you’re playing the long game, it does make a lot of sense. And my gut feeling is is that they will make the same changes to enterprise as well. In the near future. I would guess. The other thing they’ve done, which I think, to me is a little bit more confusing, maybe not to the people, most people The renaming of the just the pure desktop apps to Microsoft 365 apps. So that’s an interesting one as well. So I will put a link in the show notes, you can go and have a review. But at the end of the day, there are no functionality differences or changes between the two at this stage. But it’s really like I said, a moving towards a total Microsoft 365 brand rather than an office 365 because now we’re incorporating all the security in these add ons now, to speak about some value ads that have come now to Microsoft 365 business premium, they’ve now included the full version of Azure AD p one, that is fantastic news. Now, the other thing I note also is they’re now going to include the Microsoft Cloud Print is also going to come to Microsoft 365 business premium as well. So you’ll be able to use the new Microsoft Cloud printing service with your Microsoft 365 business premium, Azure AD Pay one is also included. So that’s going to give you things like dynamic groups and a number of other a few other missing features, and again, make it much easier to sell and to understand, I think so this sort of all works in, I think into this Microsoft 365. rebranding as well. So what’s your thoughts on the addition of Azure AD p one?
Brenton Johnson 11:20
I think from a simplicity point of view, it’s, um, it’s really good because we’re having these conversations with customers, where it’ll be like, now you get paid one, but only parts of pay one, and they go which parts and it’s like, well, I’ll have to look it up every time because I keep adding and changing it or adding new things to it. So things like conditional access, when initially in Microsoft 365 business, there was lots of features that really cater the value proposition of Microsoft 365 business that just weren’t included when it first launched, you know, things like ATP and stuff. So it was very difficult now it’s just okay, you get paid one. So everything that you were talking about, you know, it’s just less things to remember less exceptions. And when you try to troubleshoot stuff, it makes things a lot easier to. So this article is quite good. In a sense, it points out a few good capabilities that are coming. So Cloud App Security, sorry, our cloud app discovery, I should say. So you can say what’s going on in your environment, who’s doing what you’ll get the application proxy, the dynamic groups, and password lists, authentication. So the all of this sort of stuff, makes things a lot, a lot easier. When you’re talking to people. I don’t know how much of a big of a difference it’s going to make. Certainly some customers will be impacted a lot. But I think it’s going to be much more of a bump for the service providers. You no longer have to figure out what’s in what’s out and then explain that to the customer. So much easier just to say, you know, you get paid one, it’s worth eight bucks a month or something. So yeah, it’s basically worth jumping up to business, Microsoft 365 business premium from Microsoft 365 Business Standard, because you’re gonna pay that any way to jump up to p one. So those sorts of conversations become so much easier. I think it’s great. Not much more to say on early.
Robert Crane 13:29
Oh, again, I think that’s that alignment piece that we’ve been talking about, you know, it’s going to include the full one of these two for one of that before one of these. So that makes it much easier to understand remove some of that complexity, as you said. Now, I noticed in the notes here, you’ve got some things that are coming shortly, to teams you can probably let people know about so what do we have on the roadmap that people should be seeing very shortly in their Microsoft Teams meetings?
Brenton Johnson 13:55
All right, so I just want to do a bit of a because teams has become such a massive part. Of what everyone is doing. I want to do a quick recap of some of the stuff that’s happened this year. So, oh, that ain’t to December last year, you can get it on Linux show, they’ll make a big difference to people. Yeah, so you got display names in teams, Windows Server gets the desktop app teams, read receipts. I bet that’s pretty cool for a lot of people paying your favourite apps, editing. So you can now edit stuff, which is go you can tag mentioned a group role department, etc. You can work offline now in teams, which is pretty cool. There’s a lot of people who live and die by the offline mode in Outlook because they don’t want to be hassled but all their work is in there. So they have to have outlook open so they put it in offline mode. So that’s kind of cool. Cool improvements for the team calendar. And now you can end the meeting for everybody, which is kind of cool. So that’s what’s happened. What’s coming up is we’re going to have background effects in teams meetings. So for those who remember when Microsoft relates the blurring of the video, one of the ways I promoted is there was a news anchor in the UK and he was working from home and this kid came in and just started screaming in the background and all of that sort of thing. And Microsoft put the blur around the background. So it’s like, this is what it looks like with blur. So now they’re extending that capability. You know, people are very it says it’s very heavily popular blur feature. So you can put in your new background,
Robert Crane 15:50
custom, supposedly a custom backgrounds, you can look as I enter the office, bleach everybody. Anytime you’re on a team’s meeting somebody from Microsoft, you always see them with a custom background. I will know Briefly that that blurring actually came from an engineer at Microsoft, who was basically Deaf now, when they met on teams with their parents over in India, they were distracted by all the other stuff going on in the around the, you know, around the meeting. So, she basically went in and programmed to have the blue so she could just focus on a parent speaking it was like, very interesting that you know, such a, an inclusive, you know, requirement is now proved so popular. So, yeah, we should see that hopefully, I probably can add your own custom backgrounds. So again, I haven’t seen that in my tenant and hopefully won’t be too far away. So what else we got?
Brenton Johnson 16:41
Yeah, we got the new experience for launching instant channel meetings. So that’s, oh, have you seen this one yet? pop up in your tenant?
Robert Crane 16:52
Yeah, look, there’s there’s been a couple little bits and pieces you get them. And there are like I said, the I think the end meetings very good because again, if you leave them And someone stays in there or they haven’t disconnected and that meeting continues on and on and on and on. You can also like say what is in media, you can force people to get out. One of the things you can also do is you can now basically make somebody an attendee, one of the things that is also coming is the hand up. So raise their hands, if you do have a question, you can basically go and raise your hand and then that can be answered now, for anybody who’s been on teams meeting with, you know, with a lot of people that can be challenged when you’re working with a with a large group, everybody want to talk at the top. So the raise the hand features are a nice one that will be added shortly. So I think there’s a lot of these to an extent, you’ve got to realise that suppose initially teams really wasn’t designed for this mess, the sudden uptake, and there are a lot of features on the roadmap but good on Microsoft, they bring a lot of these forward because people are asking for them like the custom backgrounds raised hand in meeting those sort of things. So there are a lot of these sort of features we should expect to see before the end of this month. And I would accept expect to To keep adding more and more features again it’s very much in the spotlight and the amount of users keeps growing day in and day out. So again a good opportunity to start rolling out some of these things I think.
Brenton Johnson 18:10
Yeah, definitely.
Robert Crane 18:13
All right, so one another one from me that I found basically he is there’s been a couple of Microsoft articles about you know, setting up a home business working from home and also how people how you can as an IT department, effectively support your mobile worker. This will be a challenge for many people because they will come to a PC which is normally a home PC they’ll be expecting to work and how is the secure how’s the company information, lockdown, Microsoft’s got some good articles there to help people understand what the challenges are and how to again make these bite more secure. One of the other ones that I’m really keen to see and can’t wait to get my hands on is project cortex or project cortex will basically take information stored your vironment and And kind of build the intranet for you on the fly customised to your own needs. I think we’re going to see that in a short order of time. And we really good to see what how that works, what it does, how effective it is that may change the collaboration approach in this modern age where you don’t have to worry about building necessarily an intranet. It’s built for you on the fly with AI. So that’s pretty, pretty interesting. We’ve also also popped some articles in there for you to have a look at around the security of Microsoft Teams. So, given Zoom’s challenges, Microsoft came out with a response saying, look, this is how we secure teams, this is what we comply with. So if you do need to compare one with the other, there are some articles there from Microsoft that you can go in and have a look at. There’s a few updates on the OneDrive roadmap. There’s, for example, document coming to Android. So have a look at those. I expect more and more stuff again to come out for OneDrive shortly. Again, I think Microsoft very focused at the moment on making sure teams is up and running and working and ashes working and all this sort of stuff because the demand has increased, basically, dramatically. So let’s keep our fingers crossed that they make sure that all of that’s working. The other one that I thought was interesting is the general availability now of the robotic process, automation RPA stuff. So that will allow you to interface older applications with things like flow to automate a lot of processes. And that is now general generally available, you can now buy a licence for it and use it inside your environment to automate a lot of your stuff. And another one there is the power of AI in Microsoft 365. There’s a lot of artificial intelligence automation built in there. There’s an article in there that we can put in for you in for you to go and have a look so even down at the desktop, Microsoft’s doing a lot of stuff there as well. What else have you got on your radar there? Brenton?
Brenton Johnson 20:57
Huh? Yeah. So Bit of a got to actually let’s start with a more comical one. So if anyone has skills in COBOL programming, they might be a job for you. So there’s some legacy applications always find these legacy authentic applications hilarious. I always like learning about how like someone had wrote an application 40 years ago, they’ve never ever updated it. And now, there’s no one else to code it. They’re saying the biggest problem with COBOL programme is, is they’re all in the higher risk COVID group. So they’re pretty difficult to find in the first instance. And yet, they can’t really come in and work on the product without being at heightened risk of potentially dying from the disease. So anyway, I put that in there as a bit of a laugh because this unemployment crisis, old patents On this old COBOL programming, and you can imagine how hard that’s getting smashed at the moment. So it’s probably a good cautionary lesson for people that you’re talking to who want to hold on to their old legacy applications and you go, this might not be you today, but it will be you eventually. So it’s time to make the leap and start fixing some of these problems and it’s a good time to do it while it’s quiet. And the other one left is from one of my favourite publications Ars Technica, and Jim Slater, he assaulter has he put up some unique things that are only in the Edge browser than on in Chrome that will compel you to switch. So if you haven’t switched to the new krej or chromium edge, then he is some really good reasons and the last reason He’s put on here is the high definition Netflix? Apparently the only way you can get 4k Netflix is with Microsoft Edge on Windows 10. I don’t know why. But you know, they’ve got things like edge collections, the reading mode, the smart copy, you know, vertical tabs, which, you know, that looks really cool. Particularly if you’re an ultra wide like me, I could certainly leave with that. Vertical tabs, so I get the extra real estate. So yeah, really, really cool. So check that out. If you you know, if you’re trying to try and get everyone on the edge, knock on crime, whatever, this might get them across the line.
Robert Crane 23:42
So that’s all for me profiles in it. So you can run multiple office 365 sessions. So that’s really good. So I can log into multi tenant and not be, you know, not have clashes and issues and token issues. I think that’s familiar. That’s the the major thing as well and it supports all the extensions that are used as well. So I think It’s been fantastic. And I also like the ability that you can apply policy to it from Intune, which helps you lock it down and again, make it more secure. So, certainly if you haven’t tried it, I think most windows 10 machines have automatically updated to the new version now. So again, Mark to Microsoft’s credit, again, throw away its old browsers. Now, again, it seems to be getting some great success for this. So if you haven’t had a look at it, I would certainly recommend I think it runs on just about every platform to I think it runs back to Windows seven if you still got that as well. So, again, Microsoft’s done the right thing, they finally got around to doing it. But again, it’s shows you what they can do when they focus. Alright, anything else we need to cover before we wind up and let people get into our interview for this episode?
Brenton Johnson 24:45
No, that’s all from me.
Robert Crane 24:47
All right. Well, how can we stay in contact with Brendan, the man
Brenton Johnson 24:52
best way to get on to me is Twitter. Say at contact Brenton. You can just google me Brandon Johnson. I’ll be the first result.
Robert Crane 25:01
Excellent. All right, well, you can follow the podcast at UK podcast on Twitter and Facebook feedback at need to know cloud will send us an email that, again, we hope that you take the time to let us know what you’d like to hear any feedback that you’ve got. We welcome all of that. And myself. I’m found on the Twitter at director CIA. I’ll take this opportunity to thank Brenton and make sure that everybody out there stay safe. Hopefully we’ll be back with a another episode when things are a little bit more positive. Fingers crossed, but and to let go.
I’m joined by Asif Romani. Welcome, Asif. Thank you. Good to be here. So as always, I will get Steve to introduce yourself. Let everybody know who he is and what he does. So if you could do that for us, that’d be great.
Asif Rehmani 25:49
Absolutely. My name has mentioned by Robert is Asif Rehmai. I’m from Chicago, Illinois, United States. been an MVP since 2007 with Microsoft and I love to train to mentor and basically help people, that’s what I’ve been doing for quite some time started with SharePoint in 2001. Then obviously migrated with everybody else to Office 365. But anything and everything Microsoft I love to talk about.
Robert Crane 26:13
So I will let people know that I have been following your stuff for a long wall. And I remember back in the day, and this is taking us back to prehistoric days, the stuff used to do around infopath That’s right. And that was that was really fantastic at the time was a bit of a brain meld for me to try and work and use this and then you know, found your stuff and consumed a lot of that. So, again, thanks for that. And obviously, thanks for all the stuff that you are doing and being an MVP for quite a long time there. So again, appreciate the effort and work you’re doing in the space. Now pleasure. What I’ve done is I’ve asked Asif to come around and to talk about some of the training Eddins we can add into our environments, especially around the SharePoint teams. To help people get up to speed and to learn this because for a lot of people, all of a sudden they’ve moved from maybe a traditional on prem f drive, you know, files and folders into suddenly this new web based world that is SharePoint that is teams is very different. And that requires them to step up their knowledge. So how are we going to help them do that now, again, probably the place to start is a product or a service or an offering from Microsoft called learning pathways which we can plug in for free into our SharePoint environment to us a bit of training now, I think this is a really smart offering a really good offering from Microsoft, what’s your sort of take on the this sort of service offering from Microsoft,
Asif Rehmani 27:47
with any manufacturer of any software, honestly, they need to serve their customers so the software could be used on a effective basis, and I think, learning pathways offering which It is an open source offering, obviously, not officially supported by Microsoft but supported by the community. But the offering itself, I think it was a should have been offered a long time ago. I’m very, very glad that Microsoft did offer that to consolidate all the material that they’ve been producing anyway, in terms of articles and videos and all and make it available, easily accessible through a communication site that people can go to and take basically courses. So I’m glad Microsoft did that. I wish they had done it even earlier. But hey, better late than never. And definitely, I’ve been telling people about this as well that if you don’t have anything currently and you want something for free and get started with a matter of days, you can do that with learning pathways.
Robert Crane 28:45
So in your experience, obviously working in this environment and training and all that, do you see, what do you feel is sort of the biggest challenge for people coming into this environment is that, you know, simply getting their head around the whole thing or working with files or, you know, they want to customise, what do you find is their biggest challenge once this sort of plunked into this environment that they, you know, need a product, a training product, whatever come?
Asif Rehmani 29:14
Well, I come from a SharePoint background. And then from SharePoint Now, of course, looking all different office 365 tools. Some of the same challenges that were there in the SharePoint on premises days are still have now in SharePoint Online and everything else in office 365. And that is, where do I go to do what if I’m looking to gather a list of content? Where do I go? What do I do? And how do I get help when I need help? I think that still remains a challenge since Microsoft has always been a company that provides wonderful, but too many tools to do some similar things to what do I do when and how do I do it? And where do I go to start is still beautiful? A fear that I think end users have. So that still remains a challenge when I’m looking at something exactly how do I know what I’m looking at what I shouldn’t be doing what I should not be doing, according to Microsoft, and also according to my company rules and regulations. That whole dilemma still stymies. And user adoption, unfortunately, still gets people to hesitate for them to do their job. I’ve been a big believer in the whole aspect of end users are there to get their job done. They’re not necessarily looking to get trained, they just want to get their job done and be done with it. And that’s been a challenge and continues to be challenge I feel within the Microsoft world.
Robert Crane 30:42
So if we have a look at learning pathways, and I’ve put this in for a few people and shown them and basically to give people a bit of an idea, it’s basically a site collection that you put inside your environment. You create the links you point people to it, the content is largely surface from other Microsoft resources. So it’s kept up to date. But its surface through a nice easily to use site now, I would suggest in my personal experience has been with is is that users like it, they certainly see it. I think it’s great. I mean, the most, one of the most common questions I get from users is, where’s the office 365 manual. So this is a very good way to point people. Now, one of the downsides, I find is that you show it to them and they look at it. But then over time, they get distracted, they want to do other things. They don’t tend to come back because they have to navigate to that actual location, go to that site, like a book on the shelf, they don’t pull it down and read it. I mean, is that sort of your experience as well, when it comes to you know, utilising a tool like this?
Asif Rehmani 31:48
Yeah, you know, the importance of context. I cannot emphasise enough. It’s like, we have a gym membership, but how many times we’re going to go to the gym, you know, as opposed to if you have something right there. You go out and use it, lift some weights, etc. Or you have a wonderful, no digital camera, but you don’t have it in the time when you really need it. So you pull out your phone, and then you go ahead and take a picture with that. What you have available at the context of when you need something is much, much more important, much more important. Then some place which is going to have an abundance of what you need is my experience. So I’ve been a trainer for a very long time. I’ve trained developers, then administrators, and then power users, which is my infopath, SharePoint designer days. And then I started training end users. And I realised something which is a what I alluded to, before that end users don’t want to be trained. And I repeat that end users really don’t want to be trained, they just want to get their job done. And when they’re looking to get their job done, at that point, their moment of need, it’s very difficult for them to get out from that context and go to a different context to find something that they’re looking for. makes it very difficult, even if it’s a very readily somewhere, but they have to actually navigate their search, there is an actual destination that they have to go to look for it. It’s much easier when you have even if it’s not, that’s not that much information, but only the stuff that you need available to you in your context. So yes, that’s been definitely my experience, that users when they find something in context of their environment, they’re much more motivated, as opposed to having to go to a destination to look for something.
Robert Crane 33:27
So strangely enough, it would seem to me that there is a need in the market for this. And I would suggest that probably you have a solution to this, don’t you?
Asif Rehmani 33:35
Now we do. We do because of my own experience as a trainer, and our company has been focused on the context sensitive help and context sensitive training space for a long time. It just made sense for us to build on top of learning pathways. We partnered up we were we were one of the early adoption partners in the programme officially for Microsoft. And we have a better together story where we take their content and To expose it in context of the environment for the user. So when they’re in their own OneDrive, their own document library or their own Excel Online or whatever, they see the context, I’m sorry, they see the content coming from Microsoft directly in their context. And what we do and I know, verbally talking about is, of course not as is the exact same as visual, but I’ll try to paint a story that a tab comes up on their screen, it says need help, question mark. And that just follows them around when they navigate from place to place. And whenever they click on that tab, it will show them all the information that they need to know what is OneDrive, for example, how do I change the margins? And if I’m in a Word document, what is the if look function, if I’m in Excel and things like that, things that you know that you need to know, but you don’t know exactly where to find it, it’s right there. Within that Need Help tab, click on it, you get the information, and you use it and you’re done. Very simple.
Robert Crane 34:56
All right. So again, certainly recommend this. I think is a great solution. But before we maybe dive into a little bit deeper, do you want to tell people the easy way they can get this obviously for their browser, but also for teams. And again, it is a free plugin for both. So it does give us a bit of an idea of how they can actually step through and get this fantastic tool you’ve created.
Asif Rehmani 35:19
Absolutely. The best and easiest way is to do a search for visual SP. That’s one word visual S. p space plugin, because they do a search for that. The first first link that comes up actually has the download for for everything. And that is it’s a browser plugin that they instal in any browser edge, Chrome, Internet Explorer, or Firefox, whatever. Once they instal it, it appears for them in their browser wherever they go. That’s the first thing. within that same download page. They will also see an app that they can go to for Microsoft Teams that they can Access. And you can also go to Microsoft Teams directly and do the do a search in the App Store gallery for visual SP and you’ll find it there. So there’s an app, visual SP, you download that added either of those things take literally 10 seconds each to add to your environment. Once you do it, it just works because it authenticates you realises who you are, and gives you the content directly coming from Microsoft.
Robert Crane 36:25
Okay, so we obviously now know how to go in and instal it in teams and in our browser, and again, totally recommend that for people giving people the context of being able to get help exactly where they are. So why don’t you give us a bit of an idea or I suppose as to you know, the extent of these I mean, what when they do, ask for help, what are they going to see, is it just going to be a link to somewhere else? What sort of content are they going to see when they do ask for help?
Asif Rehmani 36:58
Yeah, So, as I’ve mentioned before, let’s say you are in OneDrive, you’re looking to see how do I share content with someone? Or how do I do a search in OneDrive? Or how do I set metadata, they do a search, or they navigate through the content available, which is, like I said, coming from Microsoft learning pathways through visual SP to them. Once they find something that they were looking for, they click on the actual item. And it brings up the item directly within the context of their environment in a splash screen. There is no new tab that opens up, there’s a new window that opens up. And they might seem like small things that a new tab and a new window. So what it’s not a big deal, it is a big deal. It is a big deal for the user, because the context changes to have to go somewhere then to look for it. So we don’t send them anywhere. The modal dialogue as it’s called by developers or just a splash screen that comes up and it shows them whichever specific video or article or something else, whatever the format, it isn’t directly On top as a layer on top of their environment, and that helps to keep the context keep the user in their learning in their, you know, flow fork, as I like to call it. So their flow of work does not change, they see exactly what they want to see and they get back to work immediately.
Robert Crane 38:17
I agree with you, I think that again, if a user is distracted by another tab, they potentially don’t go to it or they get distracted and go somewhere else. So it gives them it sort of splits their attention or distracting them, I suppose, is another way to look at but if it pops up inside the environment and again, how it sort of darkens or you know, basically puts the focus on on what they learned and I think the the concept that I like especially with you know, the way that you’ve done it here is this concept of micro learning I just need to learn this I get a video a little bit of text, right you know, I maybe five 610 minutes, and then I go on and keep doing my job. So I think this concept of micro learning is really really powerful because at the moment as we would appreciate many people are very, very good. Hi, I’m poor, and I just need to know how to do this quickly and blah, blah, blah. So I think that is really powerful Now, is there a way to look at it, let’s take a step back and let’s Okay, that’s great in front end user, I can get the information I want, I’ve got it in my face and got it when I need it, which is great. But let’s step back and look at the business owner here. The business owner here is hopefully paying these employees to get their job done, and to work and, you know, how are they going to be able to, to know that these people are learning effectively or are consuming this information and not you know, just making mistakes in the product? What what’s in the, you’re offering there for the administrator?
Asif Rehmani 39:45
Yeah. So our product is much, much more fully featured. In addition to what we’ve talked about. So far. The freemium part of the product, our partnership with the with Microsoft, is to provide all this content available. Free of charge a product is free, their content is free comes to the user for free. However, when a manager does have those additional needs of how do I customise things, how do I make my own content? How do I see the analytics of what people are searching for? What they’re clicking on, which, you know, places they’re going to what do I need to provide them help with? For that we have the analytics, the customization features, the management features for the help items for the administrators of how who do I want within my company to have the permission to change some things around and who might not want to mess with it? All those things are premium feature features that provide that come with visual speed as well.
Robert Crane 40:42
So I think that would you agree that probably analytics a so super important these days to actually get a feel for what’s going on but they’re also so much easier now? Because they baked into the one interface, but do you actually see people using them, or is it maybe something that’s overlooked that they’re not taking advantage of, in your experience?
Asif Rehmani 41:06
analytics have been ignored, unfortunately, for quite some time in the past. In fact, even Microsoft, I think, had a wake up call a few years back when they started seeing all that data of what is being used and what is not being used within Office 365 Microsoft became one of the biggest tenant of all these companies out there, right, providing all these services. And they realised that some of the things which seemed to be simple and straightforward that people should know about it, people were not clicking on it, but they were not, you know, getting benefit from it. And then Microsoft started taking a look at the data very, very closely as a tenant host provided himself and then same thing happened, I think, trickled down a lot more people within the tendencies within their environment, they started taking a look much more deeply as to what is exactly going on. And they realise the exact same thing. Once again is a full feature rich set of applications and services that they’re providing. They’re building all these solutions, but you know, not many people are taking advantage of some of these deep technologies. And then you start looking at as to all right, what’s going on? Why is the interfaces not correct? Am I not providing the right kind of help to people? What’s going on and but it all starts with looking at analytics first, and then diving as to the why the psychology empathising with the users understanding exactly what they need the help on the guidance on and then changing interfaces or whatever else that’s needed to make it simple for them. So the no features that were not exposed before make it become easily become easier for them to get good access to. I agree, I’m sorry. Good.
Robert Crane 42:48
I was gonna say it’s, I think, the more you begin to look at this, you look at it and you step back and look at it as a trainer or or somebody who’s trying to help users get up to speed it. It really is interesting, too. actually see, as you said, the analytics because what you think, you know, is easy turns out to be very hard for users. Yeah, of course, we’ve been doing it or you know it, people have been doing it or SharePoint people have been doing it for years, it’s a natural thing to, you know, upload something to a library or create a folder. But you overlook, again, this fact that the user in many cases, especially today, this could be their very first experience where they’re actually forced to, you know, work totally in this environment. And you know, that blocker, initial blocker can have such ramifications down the track because if they don’t have a good experience initially Oh, I can’t get over that that blocker quickly. They really form this this you know, don’t say hatred, but this you know, I don’t like this product, you know, they they feel this resistance to it. And I think anything that you can do to improve that, look at the analytics and then implementing, you know, tools like you have in the learning paths as well to overcome that is going to be so important. I think moving forward especially Now we’re seeing such a massive need for people to move from, you know, these old comfortable world they are in into this new modern, you know, web interface. So yeah, I really think the analytics are, as you say, a place to start, and that’s why it’s worth you know, investing in that and getting that sort of information. Yeah. available to your managers to the people to make sure that the people that they’re working with are are fully productive. And again, you know, that’s what I think is a key component if you’re really serious about this and implementing lycett a product like you’ve got so i think that’s that’s really good is there there any other things in your experience that that you’ve learned over the time that you’ve brought to your product to to help overcome this this you know, this learning stigma or or getting people on the fast track to using the product?
Asif Rehmani 44:48
I’ll use the example that you’ve mentioned actually of micro learning. That is super important for folks to understand that. It’s not just us talking about it here but Microsoft himself and Other companies outside of Microsoft, SAP and Salesforce and everybody else’s thinking about how do we get information to end users, we’re not talking about power users and developers, we’re talking about end users quickly, easily, efficiently to them. And that means if we’re making videos has got to be approximately two minutes or less, if we’re making articles has got to be right to the point where they need, what they need it and be done. All those things are very important. In the end of the day, we need to truly truly empathise with the end users and not give them the same tools that would work for IT professionals or developers because they just don’t work for end users. Many of us who have had the it background, think like it people and it’s hard to make that turn that pivot in our minds to understand what is important to an end user who is just trying to get their job done. They might be very super intelligent in their own profession, such as a legal profession or health or manufacturing or whatever else, but they might not have any The desire to become a quote unquote, office 365 person or SharePoint person, they just want to use these tools, get their job done, and then move on to the next task. How do we help them do that the best way possible. That is, I think the main thing that I learned many years back and I try to tell as many people as possible to keep that in mind before designing anything.
Robert Crane 46:24
So you have a huge amount of experience over time with the Microsoft products and SharePoint on prem. And then in the cloud, training users training people, you know, in these environments, and you’ve obviously created and crafted solution to solve many of these problems. What sort of if you look ahead, where do you see this, this sort of going in general, the, the, as more people I would assume, now that we’ve been forced to a lot of people being forced to move into these online environment, which is a large mental shift you do you feel that okay, after a period of time, people will get The basics and they’ll move on. I mean, how do you see it sort of, you know, I suppose down the track, what are the requirements going to be is going to be the same or users simply going to need to be taught the same things? Or are we going to have to, you know, take them to the next level? I mean, again, just looking into the future, what do you see?
Asif Rehmani 47:17
Yeah, well, eventually, we’ll get to a point. But this is quite some time later, in my opinion, where we’ll start predicting what the user needs, and then giving it to them before they even know that they need it. And that’s where the artificial intelligence machine learning will come into play. And what I mean by that is, if you have a big mass of data from, let’s say, a million users of what they’re doing in a specific interface, it’s easy to predict what is important to 80% of them and what is not important. So you start surfacing that content up, you start surfacing that help up. So even before they need that thing, it just becomes available to them at the right time. machine learning, artificial intelligence will definitely get there. But us as humans also have to pay attention to what the needs are even before that, and try to understand that user behaviour, and then trying to serve our users, especially now in the remote scenario, where you can’t go to a cubicle or you can’t send some a meme or something like that easily to get to people. How do you get to them and help them do their job at their moment of need? We will definitely get there with all these technologies. But as humans, we also have to change our behaviour to support our users before we get there, from the systems and processes level, in my opinion.
Robert Crane 48:40
Okay, well, it’s a fair comment. I agree with you that the AI is going to pay more important role and I think the signals that Microsoft’s getting from a large environment now and growing environment of users can help them produce better results and hopefully, again, make people more and more productive. Now in your product. Are there any other, you know, hidden gems that you found that that really worked for people, what some other features of you know your environment, you’ve created that that again, you find work really, really well to serve the needs we’ve talked about?
Asif Rehmani 49:15
Sure.
One of the things that works well with any product, including ours, in my opinion, is looking at the behaviour that people are already doing outside of work, and try to emulate those behaviours inside the work environment. So I’ll give you a very specific example. Many times when we go to our websites that we go as consumers to do our personal work, for example, you go to your bank website, or you go to your auto loan and you’re looking for insurance or something like that. All different things like you find help directly on the page as you need it in form of, for example, in line help, or a walkthrough that comes up and a bubble that shows your right you’re here for the first time. I know you’re For the first time, let me walk you through certain things that you need to know. Or if you don’t need to know anything right now, the inline help with the small circle and question mark is available by the label, maybe it’s complex label that you’ve maybe you’ll need in the future, but it’s there. It’s all over the internet. You know, it’s in many, many SaaS applications that we use as consumers, why not bring the same functionality within the enterprise applications that we’re using. We’ve done that with visual SP. So we provide a way for administrators of their environment to put in line help or to put walkthroughs, which are very specific to what their users need. For example, if I’m going to a SharePoint site, we’ll talk about SharePoint specifically here. I need to know who the owner for this site is, or I need to get some information that’s not readily available. That’s not provided by Microsoft because Microsoft doesn’t know my environment. I need to know what’s what makes sense for us. How to open up a support ticket. If I need help, those kind of things are easily surfable by using walkthrough as an inline help, which our application lets administrators make extremely easily and quickly without using any code whatsoever. I’ve been a big believer in producing no code or low code solutions. So when we started building this application, many years ago, there was something that I insisted on that we also do, and make it easier for power users, business managers, intranet managers, communication specialists, enterprise managers, whatever you want to call these folks, but folks who are responsible for their users to help them you know, they are the ones who make these layers for their users. They don’t have to go to a developer to do it. Because developers are always busy. They’re always busy, is good for these folks themselves to do what they need to do to help their users and that’s what we allow them to do with their product.
Robert Crane 51:56
Alright, so apart from what we’ve spoken about, Apart from the fact that the users, people listening can go and grab some of your tools there for free, is the best way for people to get a feel for the advanced features and what we’ve talked about here and what is available in the commercial versions to visit websites that the best location for them to get that sort of information.
Asif Rehmani 52:21
Yes, there will be the best way. So apart from like I said, we already talked about that if you do a search for visual SP space plugin, they’ll get to the plugin page which all the different plugins teams as well as browser. However, if they want to know all the all the different features, they can go to visual sp.com. From there from the products menu, they’ll see all the different specific use case scenarios and products that we have for Microsoft Teams for learning pathways as well and for office 365 as well as if they just want to communicate information to users. For example, in terms of announcements or Or alerts or things like that, which is very, very important these days, how they can do that everything is available on the website,
Robert Crane 53:07
I’ll make sure that all the links in the show notes, when we release the episodes, you can go and look at that in more detail and encourage you to do that. And I think that the pricing There is also so very, very cost effective. So if you do want to look at that, add it to environment, obviously start with the free ones, get a feel for it, but I think you’ll be pretty impressed. And again, if you’re a manager wanting to take to the next level, look at some of the advanced features, I certainly encourage you to go and look at those details. And certainly consider this as an option. Because I think and you probably agree with me that probably most people being a technical background and experienced in the product. They do the migration and they typically expect the user then to just pick up and run with it. And one of the things that’s generally overlooked or not invested in is his training. And again, that’s why obviously I’ve created this product. I mean, is that sort of what we’re seeing in the The market, you know, the expectation that users will pick this sort of stuff up rather than actually giving him a helping hand.
Asif Rehmani 54:06
I was one of those people who thought that well making amazing solutions that obviously people are going to use it. Until I learned the hard way that that is not how technology works. That’s not how people work. You know, it’s the build it and they will come has never been true. But we just thought it was true because we didn’t have the right data. Or we’re not looking at the right data. We were just thinking, well, it’s beautiful. Of course people use it. When people like myself also started to look deeply as to what is it that people are actually using or not using? That’s when our eyes opened up, like oh my god, it doesn’t matter how much beautiful wonderful, amazing tools and utilities you give them. It didn’t it’s always gonna come down to what’s in it for them. You know, I like to talk about wi I FM what’s in it for them as a radio station, radio w FM is playing in everybody’s mind. And you have to tune into that station, you have to understand exactly what they are thinking about what’s in it for them, and then align your frequency with their frequency to help them with what they’re looking for. Once you do that, then everything else becomes easy. But until you do that, nothing is easy. Doesn’t matter how wonderful beautiful, amazing solutions you think you’re building, they will not use it.
Robert Crane 55:24
Alright, so as we get towards the end here and begin to wrap up, I’m going to ask you to do is again to share any contact details with our audience, how can they keep up with you on the social or reach out or wave Hello, wherever they want to do on the socials. But as a long term experienced SharePoint operator, a lot of people are coming into this environment, the SharePoint and teams environment for the very first time, many of them may be doing it without the help of a skilled IT person in the sort of tools and services. So if you can give us maybe, you know, a couple of kicks in just for those people who are just coming into this, you know, relatively new and beginning to experience this environment. You know what some basics they can do, obviously apart from adding the fantastic tools that you make available, but are there any other simple tips that they could take to make their life easier just based on your experience? So if you could do that, and also have any contact details you wish to share with people, that’d be great.
Asif Rehmani 56:23
Absolutely. What I’ve learned in my own experience, and this goes way beyond SharePoint or even computers in general is you only bite off what you can chew. And same thing when looking for your own customers, your own employees in this case, give them what they need, and only what they need. If you give them too many systems, too many ways of doing the exact same thing. They will turn them off. Too much is not always good. Sometimes less is more I’m sure we’ve all heard that before but I’m I don’t think we all follow that unfortunately. In terms of Office 365. For example, if you’re coming in for the first time, obviously the, you’re gonna see all the different apps and you’re gonna think, Oh, well, let’s open everything up. Bad idea, in my humble opinion, give people what they need, and then ramp it up instead of giving them everything, realising a month, six months from now that everything is in chaos, chaos, you know, chaotic right now and then pulling everything back. So starting here mentally, give what people need, grow from there. And then same thing as you’re giving them specific tools, utilities, applications, give them the right guidance, the training, the governance regulations, whatever they need to know, as you’re opening things up. So they get comfortable using these things, and they keep coming back instead of looking into for the first time I never coming back. So think about these things. In my humble opinion. These things have always at least from what I’ve seen work, when you go complete, open everything up. That has never worked, at least from what I’ve seen. So that’s my humble opinion. My contact information is If you do want to get in touch with me, I am on Twitter, LinkedIn email as well. My name as if at visual sp.com is the email address. Or you can go with my complete name also for money. One word, that’s how I am in Twitter and then just also for money on LinkedIn as well. These are the three best ways to connect with me.
Robert Crane 58:21
Excellent Well, I will make sure that all those contact details in the show notes of people get in contact you with links to the products that you have mentioned in highly recommend that people go and have a look at the website. The videos you’ve got up there that actually demonstrate this unfortunately can’t do justice to this necessarily. In audio only visual is a very important component. I would also echo your statement about not overloading customers. My I like to consider that Robert’s rule of three years you don’t give people more than three things or three changes at a time to deal with that can be very frustrating for it. People who just want to do everything and close the ticket and move on this is you’ve got a sword Ease people into it because for them, it’s a massive change, you know, you just don’t appreciate they’ve been doing, you know, Ctrl F or Ctrl S, you know, saving all their life and all of a sudden, you know, SharePoint is automatically saving in the background. And that can be, again, very confusing. So again, Holly, echo those thoughts as well. I will take the opportunity to thank SJ for his time today and the information that he has shared and also on behalf of the community, the work that he is making available for free as part of this and again, encourage people to do that reach out to him make contact with him. And again, consumers products are I think they in this day and age, I think they are a massive value add and again, great and really appreciate you doing that. at no cost. I can’t thank you very much for being on podcast and sharing.
Asif Rehmani 59:46
Thank you very much, Robert for having me. It’s been a pleasure.
Robert Crane 59:48
Excellent. All right. Well, I thank everybody for listening to this episode of The Need to Know podcast.
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Welcome along to this episode of The Need to Know podcast My name is Robert Crane and we are at Episode 235 and four to 35. We are going to do a FAQ so there’s we FAQ number eight FAQs are shorter deep dive look into technology. processes, and so on rather than our extended format of news and interviews. So hopefully, I’ll be able to get across my intention here in about 15 minutes or so. So as always, appreciate any feedback, any comments that you have what you’d like me to present in these shorter areas. And if you haven’t heard an FAQ, go back and have a look at the previous episodes. So what I’m going to talk about in this FAQ is a rule of thumb or is a number of rules of thumb that you should have, when you look about moving to the cloud. Now, Robert has a rule of three, my rule of three basically is a governing rule, other use in many, many circumstances. So let me give you an example of way. So when you do adoption, or when you work with users my experience is is that most users struggle to manage any more than three changes at a time. So for example, if you implement Microsoft 365 for a customer, and you introduced them to OneDrive, you introduced them to teams you introduced them. to SharePoint and then you try and introduce something else, maybe the email move to the cloud as well, you’re gonna have a lot of them. Now as soon as you overload them, what happens is there is catastrophic failure. So think of it like juggling balls, if you’ve got one ball easy to do two bit challenging three, yes, this is probably the limit. When I give the person four balls to juggle, they don’t just reject the fourth ball I throw at them, they will drop all the others as well. So this is what we see when we do adoption is that people, when they’re overloaded, they basically have catastrophic failure. And they reject everything. So once you start overloading and those are not at all bad, I don’t want to hear about it. I just want to take it back to the way it used to be. So again, my advice is that when you’re looking at adoption, think about the number of changes that you bring to people to again, allow them to digest it, and move on to start with three maybe that’s in my case, OneDrive. Yammer, and then maybe potentially start talking to them about teams, and then leave it let it settle down. Let them get familiar with Understand the tools, then come back, and then maybe look at doing communication sites, or then Power BI or power automate, and they leave it and then go on to the next three. So you need to look at this as an extended process because people just cannot digest the amount of change in such a short period of time generally. So Robert’s rule of three is don’t overload your users with too much change to quickly look at it as a process of small bites incrementing and improving over time, to allow users to build on that knowledge so they can move forward easily and competently without feeling that it’s too much for them to head on. They don’t understand it before moving to the next step. Now, where else can the rule of three be applied? Well, basically, one of the other rules I like to try and achieve is to have a structure that is no more than three layers deep. So if you think about a team, so you will have a team that will be level one, a channel inside the team is level two, and then a folder or a subfolder within files within a team would be realise now, if you can avoid going deeper than that, that’s great. That should be the ultimate aim best practice to aim for that may not be possible 100% understand that. But the reason is, is that very deep structures, as I have spoken about before, become extremely difficult to navigate for many users who aren’t familiar with that structure. So they go into the location, they go up and down folders all day looking for files. So if we can keep these as flat as possible, and basically when I look at my file structure within a team, what I want to see is the files at that level or the folders and again, the folders need to be categorised in such a way that they’re obvious for me to see what they are. So again, if I have a folder within a folder, then at that top level, I can’t see what that sub folder is, again, all about so that makes it difficult means I have to go in and navigate in and then navigate out again, to see whether the information is there. I mean, obviously search is the way to do it. But again, if you can try And stick to some sort of rule about the maximum depth. Now the other advantage of setting a maximum depth level depth level is that you don’t exceed the URL limit. So as we go deeper and deeper and deeper into structures, obviously the URL, the length of the file path increases, increases, increases. And that becomes more and more difficult to work with it also becomes more difficult to Structure and Change if we need to. So again, Robert, rule three is try and as much as you can keep the depth of your structure to no more than three levels. All right, so that will should make things easy for people to work with. Now, if you’re out there with packages and you’re offering and you’re providing things to users, again, Robert’s rule three would apply as gold, silver, bronze or package one package to package three don’t overload people with too many options. So if we look at the Microsoft 365 environment, they have recently gone to a change And incorporated basically Microsoft 365, basic, Microsoft 365 standard and Microsoft 365.
Premium. Okay, so the idea here is, is that we now have business plans that are Business Standard, business, basic and also business premium. Now again, Robert’s rule of three applies here as well, we’ve seen that just keep it simple. So again, you can go to the user initial and say what about business? Basic, not good enough, doesn’t have the desktop implementations or we can go then up to Business Standard, or we can go up to business premium. So you’ll see a lot of this I think, in other strategies that larger businesses use because, again, we don’t want to overload customers with again, too much choice. They certainly need an amount of choice but I would suggest again, we get cognitive overload when we go beyond the normal three choices. So again, if you can try and keep your offerings to around Another one I’ve got for you is around bandwidth. Now one of the most important things that you can do when you go implement the cloud for customers or you’re looking to move to the cloud yourself is to estimate the bandwidth you’re going to need. Now, hopefully everybody appreciates that. ADSL basically, is isometric, which means the download limit is far greater than the upload limit. So typically ADSL uploads are about point five or point six of a meg up. And that really isn’t adequate for a large amount of users. So again, I’ve got a rule of thumb that basically says, I have low medium and high usages. So again, that sort of depends on if they’re using OneDrive extensively doing lots of sinking if they’re working totally in the cloud, or they do have some on prem. So Robert’s rule of thumb for this is basically you would need or you would estimate to need about half a meg per user for loads usage, one Meg per user for medium usage and to me per user for high usage. So if we take an average company that may be 10 employees, that would mean it would be half a meg times 10. So that will be a five Meg, link up. All right, so they have as much as they want down. That’s not a problem. But the most important thing when you’re looking at the cloud and cloud usage is that link the speed back up to the data centre. So importantly, the estimate that I have used as a rule of thumb is basically as I said, half a meg for low usage, typically, the majority is more on prem, a one Meg, per user, for a medium. So that’s going to be typical business that is moving a lot of their stuff to the cloud. They’re using OneDrive, they’re using SharePoint, they’re using teams, but maybe still have some on prem applications or data. And the final one would be at least two Meg per user, for basically everybody for everybody with everything in the cloud. So again, take that example with 10 users. Multiply that by two Make. So we’re going to need a 20 meg link up back into the internet to allow people to work effectively. Now, of course, you can vary that link those speeds, but it helps to have that rule of thumb so you can walk into a business. Or you can assess it and say, Okay, we’ve got 20 users, and we expect it to start out as low usage. But eventually we’re going to get up to high usage. So why don’t we go for a more powerful link to start off with? So the recommendation I’ve got here for you is that sit back and have a think based on your experience, you know, what sort of guiding principles or rules of thumb Can you give people to help them make estimations when moving to this cloud environment. So again, just in summary, minor, typically everything around a number three. So firstly, again, don’t overload people with more than three changes at a time look at it as a process of three changes, pause, three changes, pause, three changes, pause, and then also look at it as no more than three levels deep. That makes navigation much easier. Any offering any packaging, whatever. Again, gold, silver, bronze, three options again make it easy for people. And as I also said there with the bandwidth, three options there look at low, medium high, and it’s not perfect you can adjust it you can make whatever you want but it just gives you that ability to do the back of the envelope calculation or thought process when you’re working this sort of thing out rather than having to wonder about it. So hopefully, that’s given you some sort of guidance there. Remember, make up your own rule whatever works for you. But I have a rule for you which I generally apply in a lot of cases and I find that works very very well. So again, so if you do want to contact a stay with stay in tune with what’s happening on the podcast, make sure you visit at into k podcast on Twitter and Facebook. Feedback at need to know cloud. Again you can find me at director CIA welcome any comments, feedback or suggestions you may have for these sort of episodes that are a little A bit more in depth I suppose, but shorter lead to get through your drive and get through your day. So, with that, thank you very much for listening listening to this episode.
In this episode I’m back with Brenton to bring you up to date with news from the cloud as well as hopefully give you some resources to help during these challenging times. Also with that in mind I speak with Tim O’Neill from Dicker Data all about what’s happening out there with IT partners and the challenges as well as opportunities.
This episode was recorded using Microsoft Teams and produced with Camtasia 2019
Robert Crane 0:43
Welcome along to a Need to Know podcast we’ve got the hand sanitizer out and we’ve made sure that we’re all clean and tidy. And we’ve also brought in a fully sanitised Brenton Johnson welcome along Brenton. Good to be back Robert. It is said that we are in some unprecedent Time’s at the moment we take this opportunity to hope everybody is safe staying safe doing the right thing. And this incident or incidents or situation won’t last too much longer. Unfortunately, it would seem it’s going to be at least six months, but fingers crossed that it won’t be hopefully it’s not affecting people to bail out and get on with remote stuff. I know I can. How are you and your customers funny, Brendan?
Brenton Johnson 1:24
I bronzes sort of fell into the swing of things. People are panicked and having all these problems and whatever. But all my customers just went back to their normal way of working of using teams. And you know, they’re asking a few questions around video conferencing. They may not do a lot of that beforehand, but now they’re doing a lot more of that. And yeah, it’s just all been business as usual for most people. I think the challenge for most people is trying to figure out how to be productive at home for my customers. They’re sort of a month ahead of the pack. Everyone’s trying to bpn back into head office and they don’t have bandwidth and it doesn’t know what to do. And they’re often sleekness sleepless nights. And I’ve basically gone beyond Corp with all my customers. Sure I say zero trust with all my customers years ago. So it’s not really a problem that I have to deal with thankfully.
Robert Crane 2:21
Well, again, I think it’s obviously going to a major shift, it’s going to change the way a lot of people who have worked this way before, I think it’s going to accelerate this move to the cloud, it’s going to expose those who were hesitant and perhaps aren’t skilled enough in the cloud. So there are some big changes even at the end of all this, I think it is going to be one of these seismic changes in humanity, probably, again, it is something that really seems to be affecting the whole planet. We’re not through it yet. And I think once we finish that we do have an economic situation to deal with as well. That’s going to be a consequence of the shutdown. But since Brent and I are skilled operators and Brent is still making noise in the background. You Even though he’s in a podcast, do you think you’d know by now that we will bring you the best news, we’ll keep it light, we’ll keep it focused on some information for you. And we’ll bring you an interview as well, which I think is relevant for the time. So I’m going to kick it off and let people know that the large Microsoft inspire conference, which is their worldwide partner conference has been cancelled. We just see whether they go virtual. The MVP summit that I was scheduled to attend in probably would have been to a couple of weeks ago, again was cancelled and they ran it virtually there and it very successfully served together very quickly. My interest will be to see whether we get ignite which is the big technical conference cancelled my bet would be on Yes, because they’re already streaming. They’re already doing a lot of that remotely. We will see but basically all the meetings all anything to do with the community is going online and that is forcing a lot of people to get up to speed with it quickly, but I think Microsoft has the skills already in the product. So, see how we go with that. But what else have you seen out there that’s cancelled or shifting to virtual meetings online there. Brenton?
Brenton Johnson 4:13
Oh, you know, like, I’ve got a client that does all the videos for events and all the AV for events and stuff and you know, everything’s cancelled for them for the foreseeable future. So I think everything’s going to be shifted online. I think one of the big challenges is it takes 12 to 18 months to organise big conference. Most people are planning a conference, the second that the conference ends, is planning the one for two or three years down the track. So I don’t think it’s going to be as simple as Alright, everything’s back on again. But you know, the way that we’re talking about this is pandemic if we can get on top of it. We can have it all over and done within six weeks if they will, can stick to the rules. But it’ll just be a case of how compliant people are. I did find a good, I thought I’d share this one just for Euro, but it’s a Power BI from the Victorian Government. And he talks, it shares a little bit about how the cases are progressing and what where they’re from, and what government area and all of that sort of stuff all down in Power BI.
Robert Crane 5:22
That’s a good little thing, I did come across that as well. So we’ll share that make sure that’s in the show notes to people, I’ve got one that I found across on GitHub that I recommend. That’s really good as well for regular updates. And hopefully, again, it all starts dropping off but shows you what’s achievable with the tools. And this is obviously something that’s been made public as well. So you can do that with Power BI. So if you remember the Power BI has a free T and he’s able to push out information like this freely as well. That’s pretty darn impressive. So another reason I think to look at the Microsoft Cloud for a lot of your solutions. Now, the other thing that we should mention here too, is that Microsoft is giving people the option For some free or trial licences to start using things like teams and SharePoint and OneDrive work in the cloud, and we’ll make sure that the links for those are in the show notes. There isn’t a one trial licence. I think it’s six months, that people can spin up any one enterprise, he wanted to start using that. And there’s also what’s called a team’s exploratory licence, which again, gives you roughly about six months I believe, to spin up and get experienced with that. So if you have customers that are looking at and and maybe it hasn’t, maybe their cash flow is the impacted. These are two options that they can take out from Microsoft, I know a lot of other providers are doing something similar around the services that they offer. So again, keep an eye out for what’s available. We’ll make sure these ones from Microsoft are in the show notes for you to take advantage of. Now, one of the other things that I saw that was interesting is Microsoft has announced some new first line worker licences. So we used to have just about Basically f1, which was the standard licence, but now, we basically have a f3 and f1. And also we have an office 365 f3. So we have Microsoft 365 f1, Microsoft 365 f3 and office 365 f3. So I don’t know if more skews are a good idea here there are a number of different options available to release with the F three being the more powerful and the office 365 being the cheap and cheerful option, I suppose. But obviously there must be demand for it and people are requiring this for their frontline workers to obviously give them the tools they need to get the job done with the minimal costs. We’ll make sure a link is in the show notes so you can review that see if any of that may be of relevance. See to you what your thoughts you sell any frontline licences out there, Brendan?
Brenton Johnson 7:54
Yeah, actually the frontline losses, so it was really good because it gives you an option. Mobile Device Management the frontline workers, so you might want to use Intune to manage a device rather than the office 365 run of the mill MDM, the field worker may not need office, which means they don’t really need a Microsoft 365 business. So Microsoft 365 f one. I don’t know what the price of it is, it’s certainly a lot less than a full business premium or business. Microsoft 365 business gives you that mobile device management on the device, it gives them access to teams, it gives them a bit of SharePoint and a mailbox and everything that they need. They get directory, Azure Active Directory p one, which is pretty cool.
Robert Crane 8:49
And yeah, they basically give you the prices the Microsoft 365 is in US dollars Microsoft f1 will be $4 per user per month. The F three will be $10 Which has obviously more functions and features and the office 365, again, will be $4 per user per month. So that’s the office 365 f3. So the prices are there. And I think like I said, the $4 one is a, probably a great start out for, you know, a lot of people who really don’t need that, you know, their desktop beyond licence. So yeah, sorry about that. What else were you?
Brenton Johnson 9:23
Scott says, Yeah, just looking at the differences, you know, between their front line one front line three, the f1 and the f3. f3 comes with Windows 1083. And virtual desktop rights, which I think that’s probably a bit of a nod to Windows virtual desktop, perhaps being more of a thing. With some of these portable devices. A lot of frontline workers are on terminals or on tablets. You know, they’re replacing organisations or replacing their written log books with digital ones are using iPad apps, but I think Microsoft seeing a larger vision here, that the frontline workers not going to just be using some simple app that they’ll actually need more powerful tools. And this really enables all of that and gives organisations a surety around a direction if they want to go down that path of building out a dynamics environment. They can use Windows virtual desktop in the cloud, they can connect their tablets to it, you know, five g around the corner, get some pretty good connectivity. There’s really no reason why as frontline workers should be second class citizens anymore.
Robert Crane 10:33
It’s very interesting. And I think Microsoft obviously has done this research and it’s targeting these markets. I especially like, again, the really, really cheap option the complete mobile worker, I suppose without some of the other heavy native services but the f3 with more functionality and those other additional licences, I think is a good move. So we’ll basically show the details are in the show notes tab. Look at also on the grapevine I hear from people at Microsoft that the windows virtual desktop is in great demand more and more especially larger companies are using the VDI environment to spin up as a replacement as they’ve made users going work remotely. So the windows virtual desktop is, again a really, really big thick, especially in the enterprise. So if you haven’t looked at that, go in again and spend a little time learning about what that is. Now, one of the other things I think that was really interesting was that Microsoft Teams has reached its third anniversary, I read an article that says I think they’re up to over 44 million active users per day. I’m sure that’s much much more as each day progresses and the blog post here that will link will have a number of new features that are coming to it. We have the background blur on iOS so young Brenton can join us on these podcasts with a black background blur from wherever it is. Interesting that’s coming iOS, I’m sure will be not far off from My Android as well. I also like the, there’s a there’s an interesting demo about basically a team’s connected camera that bill had matter on on a helmet. And I think the other one, which I don’t know if it’s gonna work or if it’s cool or whatever, but I like the push to talk, walkie talkie. So basically, you’ll have a phone where you can basically push that and use it like a walkie talkie on a common channel. The advantage of that is if you’re in, for example, a datacenter or somewhere and you need to, you know, communicate with somebody can do some do so with teams, but you no longer have the limit of the radio frequency distance. So again, some really cool stuff coming out and teams is more and more coming every day. Three years is not much for a product that’s beginning to really dominate its market is that red?
Brenton Johnson 12:44
Well, it’s unbelievable. Like, you know, slack invented the category. You know, to Microsoft went to slack and said, We’d locked by you. They said some stupid amount of money. Microsoft said now we can build it cheaper than that and the amount of integration is going to be too odd for you on it months later they come out with teams and people will like oh wow, this is so close to everything we need already. And over the last three years, it’s it’s certainly got better and better and you know, just these sort of specific use case stuff that they’re building into it are really locked that sort of central place for work where everyone can go to the same place and office 365 and do work together bringing people out of Outlook and bringing them into teams from a you know, an outlook which is a primarily an individual based thing to attain, which is a collaborative. I just really like how how hard this has been pushed by Microsoft. And now that all this stuff is happening around the background. I think there’s a lot of businesses that are a lot better off because of that push and because of the push to the the partners out there going out talking about or getting people comfortable with Getting people familiar with new ways of working? And yeah, you know, like that walkie talkie is a great, great use case, again, in the sense that, you know, radio frequencies aren’t encrypted. And yeah, if you have a police scanner, you can listen to all of that. So having something that Yeah, is is reliant on on something other than distance. And here are the wives is much better. So they really lock it Oh, I want to keep saying the development of the product. And I think the biggest challenge for it’s going to be keeping that simplicity and that ease of use while they continue to add all these features in.
Robert Crane 14:40
I’m going to show you there’s lots and lots of really cool features coming in the short term and think about think about how many team servers they must be running now in Microsoft data centres and how much they’ve had to spin up to reach demand with children, working from home using teams for teaching and education and now all these employees working with teams as well. It’s pretty good. pressive when you think about it for this, you know, this load that’s come on in such a short period of time to basically be able to accommodate that and more so going forward. So again, have a look at this blog post really interesting stuff, which is coming with teams and lots of features in there, I think that you’d be really excited about. Now one of the other things that I will mention in here is the Microsoft 365 business voice will be available in the US from the first of April. So the voice is basically a package of the Cloud PBX, the PSTN calling licence plus a calling plan from Microsoft. So this is bundled together and will be available in the US it’s already available in the UK and Canada. We are seeing some licencing availability now in Australia. We won’t have this voice playing for a little while, but there are some licencing that will allow you to incorporate third party providers in Microsoft 365 business so we can see the march towards a fully integrated teams with Microsoft 365 business was really exciting. I think this is going to be a huge thing. In the SMB, it’s another great opportunity for partners to jump on and use to be able to spin up a complete phone system from Microsoft without the need to basically provision anything special just add a licence, and everybody uses teams as their front end. So this is gonna be pretty darn impressive, I think when it’s coming out. Now the other one to keep us moving along key is that Windows 10 has finally reached 1 billion devices, 1 billion monthly active users take them a little while longer than they expected. But 1 billion still a pretty impressive number. Isn’t it, Brendan? Hi. Yeah, yet?
Brenton Johnson 16:38
Yeah, it doesn’t. It blows your mind. Like he can’t understand the scale of a billion. Until you think about it in terms of I probably need to Google this, but it’s something like a million is if you count one second at a time. You know, when you count a million, it’s like seven, eight minutes old. Something or whatever, so nine days, and then if you count to a billion is 34 years. So it’s it’s a huge amount of of people, you just you cannot humanly get your brain around it very easily.
Robert Crane 17:18
I’ve noticed also too that in the current situation Microsoft has also said that it’s going to delay pushing out feature updates. And I’m going to push security updates, obviously to limit bandwidth for people in the background as well. So you’ll be getting still be getting a security update feature updates, obviously, hopefully, when things calmed down a bit, we’ll be able to get those are flowing through as well. It’s still a billion is a very, very impressive number. All right, what other things have you got your sleeve that we can talk about before we get diving deeper into?
Brenton Johnson 17:49
Ah, yeah, so I’ve been undergoing some Intune training via YouTube with the Australian guy An American guy and it’s really really good really valuable information in there you know little tips and tricks and war stories in there
Robert Crane 18:15
about a time you invest I mean, you know, is it you know, ah
Brenton Johnson 18:18
the videos the videos are around 40 minutes average Joe suppose no one’s an hour and a half you know those sorts of things is two hour one, but those go through each of the areas. So, you know, like I was doing iOS with the apple configurator the other day and we’ll have some problems with it. So went back and watch that video and realise you applied the serial numbers into Intune before you can enrol it with Apple configurator. So I have that I’ve already done this before, but for whatever reason, I didn’t I forgot that step. So you know, just best practices. They got one on nine file move there and So I’ll probably sunk on an iPhone seven look on YouTube now, I’ve sunk of quite a few hours into getting through immersive videos now. And it’s Yes, it’s all that other stuff that’s not necessarily in the docs, like, Oh, this is how we do this. And we still have to run PowerShell for that. And you’ll have to apply this to users not devices, or vice versa. It does work and, you know, you gotta have the right a three licence windows a three licence for this and all those sorts of things. So I might actually try and reach out to these guys and try and get one of them on the podcast probably save our second Steve Hosking. Do you know
Robert Crane 19:40
me on honestly asking? Yeah, I know. Well, we still have it. Yep. Knowing well.
Brenton Johnson 19:45
Yeah. So he’s got I don’t at all and Adam grace from Texas, I believe.
Robert Crane 19:52
Yeah, well, if you can know that you want to do that. Otherwise, I can certainly reach out to him behalf of the podcast and get him to come on and talk about it. So That’s good. Good to know. Yes, I do. I’ll have a look at that stuff that Steve’s done. But yeah, if he’s done it, I highly recommend that you invest the time and have a look at it. Now what about this last link that we’ve got here that you put up about the Microsoft VPN? What can you tell us about that?
Brenton Johnson 20:15
It’s quite interesting, actually. So this, this came across my LinkedIn feed, I follow all the Microsoft people on LinkedIn and talking about trying to run Microsoft on VPN, because even though Microsoft’s very cloud transformed company, like Marsanne across if not all enterprise companies, they have a lot of on premises resources that they can’t, that they need access for our VPN. Now, when you have 150,000 employees or whatever, you know, trying to manage 150,000 people connecting to a VPN can be really tricky. They talk about how they did it, they said at this time, there’s probably 50 to 60,000 People on their VPN at any one time they’re saying one of the key case of their success was they worked with Windows team and fixed up the internal VPN client in Windows ran better. And they also do split tunnelling. So anything that’s office 365, or cloud or whatever, that all gets sent off through the internet, and then they only send that absolute critical, the VPN only stuff over the VPN. They say if they didn’t have that implemented three years ago, when this whole thing hit, they would just not have been ready for. And it would have been a different story, but because they’ve invested in their infrastructure, you know, that they talk about how they use, I think open VPN protocols and that to keep it all happening. It’s just really fascinating, right? So definitely check it out if you’re particularly interested in how to do VPN at 60,000 user
Robert Crane 22:00
Well, again, there’s a lot to be learned from these, these sort of things. So again, we’ll put the link in the show notes so that you can review that a lot of information there. We don’t want to overload people, we know that they’ve got a lot on their plate generally, and they’re making adjustments and working from home and that can take a bit of time. So we want to get that information to you. We wish everybody the best. We hope that again, you’re safe, you stay safe and that we aren’t subject to these conditions for too much longer. We will continue to give our best effort to get more information to you and interviews. Hopefully people are available now rather than travelling all over the place. You can stay in contact with us he had at into k podcast on Twitter and Facebook. Feedback at need to know cloud on the emails. And I am at contact is anomaly I’m at director CIA. What about yourself, Brendan, what are you
Brenton Johnson 22:52
at contact Brenton on the twittersphere if you need if you come into my office, I’m not there. So yeah It’s best to get me via digital means.
Robert Crane 23:03
Excellent. All right, well, like I said, I will take this opportunity to thank you again for listening to the podcast. We hope you all safe. Remember that if you do have any questions, feel free to reach out to us, I’m sure that we can answer. Also, we understand in this environment, people do suffer from being separated from their normal work environment. So again, if you do feel that you want to just reach out to us for a chat, by all means, feel free to do that. I’m certainly open to do that. So any of those contact details, and we’ll reach out and we can run something to have a bit of a chat. And again, hopefully, give everybody the solace that I need at this point in time. So I think that’s all for me. Before we get into our interview, what about yourself, Brent, anything else?
Brenton Johnson 23:42
No, I just echo your thoughts. Completely.
Robert Crane 23:47
All right. Well, thank you very much, everybody, and let’s get into our interview for this episode. Welcome along to this interview, and I’m joined by Tim O’Neill from Dicker Data, welcome along to
Tim O’Neill 24:01
Robert, thanks very much.
Robert Crane 24:03
Well, for those listening, we do have a bit of a unique situation. Tim is probably a little bit different from most people we’ve interviewed, he’s not into the, the technical deep dive side of it. He’s not actually selling a product. He’s a distributor. So a bit of a unique view on the market out there. So before we launch into that, Tim, why don’t you just give people a bit of an intro, who you are and what role you feel?
Unknown Speaker 24:29
Yeah, sure. So I work for a distributor in Australia called tick data. We proudly are the largest Australian owned distributor in Australia and and my role is, I lead the CSP programme, but also, more specifically lead lead the modern workplace programme here in Australia for ticket data.
Robert Crane 24:48
So why don’t we start there with the concept of the modern workplace so what do you see is the Transformation or the need for the modern workplace in the workplace out there today, what’s the messaging? What’s the reason that, you know, this is something that Microsoft’s taken to market?
Tim O’Neill 25:10
I think that the first thing we need to do is really kill that myth that modern workplace is just m 365. Because it’s it’s, it’s really not modern workplaces is exactly as it sounds. It’s, it’s the solution that that the Microsoft is bringing to market around the new way that we’re working. And I suppose, yeah, while we’re talking about covert 19, and everything that everyone is facing around the world, we’re starting to work remotely. And so what is that solution? What is the way that we need to support our end users around that modern workplace? So obviously, it’s, it’s we need to look at their security, we need to look at make sure they’ve got, you know, email and, and, and teams and all those things that they need, but what else do they need? What are they do they need things around dynamics and things around Azure? it’s it’s it’s really looking At the fact that under this whole digital transformation concept, we’re working differently. And if we’re working differently, we need to be able to support our end users differently.
Robert Crane 26:12
I think part of it is that we need an modern platform, as you mentioned, to take full advantage of a lot of these cloud bi services, the ability to work anywhere, as you’ve mentioned, because we’ve come from an environment where people have been on prem for so long, they’ve got servers, they’ve extended and extended and extended. And again, given the current situation where people you know, have to work from home almost all of a sudden, this modern workplace this concept makes sense. But as you say, it’s a much broader spectrum than again, just a new PC or just you know, Microsoft 365. Now, obviously, you spent a lot of time with resellers out there, they are the ones that are interfacing with the clients directly so you’re not selling to clients directly or going through typically an MSP client, how are you finding, you know, their approach to going out and talking to their customers about the modern desktop? Are they armed? And are they educated? And are they up to speed enough to sell this confidently? Do you think in the market,
Tim O’Neill 27:14
I think we have three buckets, which is frustrating, it’s best, we have that bucket of people that that have sold on prem most of their life, and are trying to move into this, this new way, by still selling the way they sold on prem. Then we have that that group of guys that are very transactional. And really just saying, I’m going to sell you an office 365 licence or an M 365 licence, and I’m going to look at something else. And then you get that smaller group that I think is starting to really get the right skills and the right weapons in their target bag and they’re going out to market and doing and actually doing this well. But I would say, Rob that probably out of the the partners that I deal with, in Australia, a very small percentage would be in that, in that, that they will well prepared and ready to take on the discussion and talk about it. It’s, it’s really as a small group,
Robert Crane 28:19
I think one of the interesting things we’re going to see, amongst many interesting things in the near future is there, especially in Australia, who we are going to, we’ve already experienced $1 shock for dollars fallen quite dramatically against the US dollar. I think we’re going to see a lot of those transactional prices increase because of the weakness of our dollar that’s going to be very hard for those transactional people to get back to customers. And basically, so we have to increase the prices because of these things, especially given the the environment that those customers are also in as well. I think now, those people that do have the skills Is there a common? Is there a common thing in there? Is there a common trait? Are they a certain size? Or do they sell to a certain demographic? Is it? Is it random? Or is there sort of key attributes you could pull out and share with us that you find with these people who are, you know, basically getting around the modern desktop experience?
Unknown Speaker 29:23
I think you get that you get that group of people that fall into that, you know, if you do what you’ve always done, you get what you always got. And, you know, I’m comfortable in my business, and I’m comfortable with where this is travelling, and I’m just going to go down this road. I don’t think there’s there’s a a type of partner that actually gets it, I think, or size for that matter. I think what it is, is that there are a group of partners that are looking at what is happening in the marketplace, and they are saying what we’ve done doesn’t isn’t going to work in the future and we need to treat Transition quickly. And it’s those very small group of partners that actually decide to put their hand up and invest in their time and invest in what is happening in the market and are willing to look at taking that to market. And it really is. There’s not even an age group. Yeah. Because I’ve got I’ve got, I’ve got partners who are in their 20s and mid 30s, who are doing it and then I’ve got partners in their 60s who saying I need to change and I need to move and adapt to the to where we’re heading. But I don’t think there is that I think, the partners that I that, that take the time to listen, the take the time to take on board or what what they’re learning about. I think they’re the ones that are really starting to adapt.
Robert Crane 30:47
It is interesting, I think that you’re right, I don’t see a particularly common trait that you can tie it down to, I think it’s a an awakening moment of transformation moment where it just clicks in They get it and like they see the the change that needs to make or the direction they need to take. And, again, I think the other thing is they appreciate they can’t do this immediately, overnight, they need to prioritise it, they need to make that investment. So where do you see that these customers the good cast, the good retells, where are they making these investments? Where do you think are the key things? I mean, obviously, is it things like education, they’re doing more courses? Or are they creating marketing material? You know, where are they making those investments that differ from the way they would have been doing it on prem? In your experience?
Unknown Speaker 31:37
I think education is a is a massive part. There needs to be that commitment to actually invest in some into some education, take some time out of the office, or working with with their clients to actually invest in themselves, to learn about those products to actually learn what they need to do and how they do it. But I think it’s a combination and you’ve talked about marketing and You know, and I, and I think one of the things that, that we do with with some of our partners is we actually take them on a journey of how do we productize this solution? How do we put a solution to market that is actually going to meet the requirements of this modern day management. And I, and there’s probably only 10% of my partners that are willing to take that time out and do it. invest the time and and for some of them may be an investment for six months. I’ve actually workshopping this actually coming up with the ideas coming up with the margins, looking at what segments they want to be in, what new segments do they want to be in? How can I take this product to market? How can they make sure that it’s hitting the right the right balance of where they need to be? And that process is quite phenomenal. Now, just for an example, Robert, we are I’ve got one partner, and we started we work with him over a six month period. When we first started working with them. They’d sold three tents, I think they had about 30 sits under management. We went through this process, we came with not just one product isolation, but actually had three levels of support that what they are able to offer, into their into their existing customer base. And over the following three months, they went from transacting about $150 a month to $19,000 a month Australia, just by actually coming to that point where they go, we’re going to invest, this is what we’re going to do. And this is what we’re going to move forward. And we’re going to start offering something modern to our existing bags.
Robert Crane 33:37
So that would seem to indicate that obviously the customer base the end users are obviously ripe, they’re keen, they’re obviously looking for these sorts of solutions. They’re at least open to these. And I think that’s one of the fallacies many resellers fall into I think Well, my customer never asked for this. They make assumptions that the customers are going to need this or the customers are going to want these And then again, the customer doesn’t know what they don’t know. And I think part of it is presenting this wider range of services and wider things that you can do with tools like agile CRM, all the stuff you’ve mentioned. So, I mean is that again a key thing is is embracing that change embracing these options and then taking that messaging out to customers who are probably I would suggest going to be much more receptive than the many resellers think.
Unknown Speaker 34:27
I think that I think sometimes resellers don’t take the time to actually show the true value of a product. They get excited about getting that sale and I can see the the buying signs and I can see that the customer wants to go ahead and they drop short on on where they’re heading. I had a my first sales manager that I ever had used to always say over and over again to me. Doesn’t matter whether you’re buying or selling someone someone’s buying and someone Selling. And and I think sometimes we just don’t take the time to actually give the customer all the information about this product. What can it actually do? How can it actually help protect them? How can it actually help improve the productivity? It’s, it’s over the last over the last week. We’ve been working remotely now for the last week with kovat 19 in Australia, and the amount of calls that I’ve got from partners who wrote me up and said,
Tim O’Neill 35:36
You know what, we’ve talked about 365. We’ve talked about teams or we’ve talked about this. I’ve got customers I need to do now and I don’t know what to do. It’s becoming a very topical topical situation and, and, and it really is that time to, to,invest in this products.
Robert Crane 36:01
I think also to part of the failure I see. And we’ve seen this in a lot of workshops we’ve run together, is the technical people are very good at technical things, they can, you know, generally set bits and bobs and tick things and understand what these things are. But what I found a significant skill deficit has been around converting the technical to something that a customer can understand. So a good example is things like what’s the benefit of office 365 ATP to an end user, not in technical terms, but in terms that they can understand and make sense for their business. I think that’s where a lot of people again, they’ll look at all the speeds and the feeds and they’ll take it on and maybe they go deep enough, but they don’t invest in that analysis, and look at it and then translate that into something of customer needs. And something like DLP. Data Loss Prevention is another really good example where it would speak to I would think the majority of customers in this day and age. With all the legislation we have about protect data and converting that into customer speak. I mean, would you say that, again, that is a key success feature are these these retailers who are successful are able to take what is a largely very technical product, which has a lot of features and translate that into real value meaning for our customer legacy inside the business,
Unknown Speaker 37:21
you know, no one wants to feel stupid, and no one wants to ask, what might be considered silly questions and, and I think you hit the nail on the head, you know, if you can take a product like m 365. And excuse the expression but damage down to everyday language. I think that’s a real key and, and you and I, we are we’ve done a lot of workshops together and, and we talked about Delve, you know, and we talked about Azure. And we’ve given that, you know, Azure has been my on demand Data Centre. That makes sense to me that that’s a simple concept for me to understand. So I absolutely think that if You can do that you really going to not only just get that concept across quickly, but then people are going to start to realise how awesome they can use this. And I think that’s a that’s a real key part. And it doesn’t really matter, you know? It you and I’ve talked about, you know, my wife and, and, you know, her understanding of lots of concepts and she has a PhD in molecular biology but but sometimes I need to put things about when we talk about teams or, or M 365, or office 365 into concepts that you can understand in everyday life. And it makes so much makes it so much easier.
Robert Crane 38:44
I think you’re right, I think that a lot of resellers get lost in you know, their own technology in their own products in their own day to day and I think it takes the skilled person to step back and again, simplify it. for people to understand and that is a real skill that is again not something to be minimised. Now, I think given the current global situation with the Cova 19 situation that that has never been more than four you’ve now got, you know, customers who know they have to work from home. But what does that mean? What do I have to get what, what’s involved and how quickly can I get it and those skill sets and I think we can do this, if you had the education at the school ready to roll out ready to go. But I think this again, he’s gonna be one of these seminal moments where I like to call 2020 which I did at the beginning of the year, the Pocky for so many reasons, and I’m proving to be unfortunately very correct, but it’s really at this point in time we are now he’s gonna create this complete delineation and move so much stuff to working remotely and using these sort of products like teams like stream Microsoft 365 working remotely as well. And I think that unfortunately, a large percentage of the the base, the partner base, has probably been tinkering around at the edges, they really haven’t, you know, got the the gloves on and gone in deep to really understand it and bring it into their business. They’ve just seen it, as you’ve mentioned, as a transactional way to generate a few additional revenue items here and there. So, again, I think this is such a key item. And I suppose that you can look at every threat as an opportunity and say, Well, this is a huge opportunity to go to market and offer this service and potentially get some others who aren’t moving fast enough a lot moving quick enough for customers. So you know, what’s the the demand that’s coming in for you that you’re hearing from partners? Are you getting a lot more calls now with partner saying, you know what, we really need to do this stuff and we need to make it happen tomorrow. Can you help us? Is that the sort of thing that we’re hearing?
Unknown Speaker 40:54
Absolutely. We’re hearing two things. One thing is I’m hearing from partners are calling me and saying You know, I’ve got I’ve got businesses laying people off, I’ve got businesses who are just folding up and closing because they can’t operate. And then we’ve got those businesses who are partners are coming to me and saying, I need to do this now. I’ve got businesses I need to set up a from home, and I don’t know what to do, what do I do? And I I honestly believe that we’ve got two things happening. The first thing we’ve got happening is we’ve got that that response that we need to act on urgently, and and help partners get their customers up and running. But I think the second thing is, I think the modern workspace in Australia is changing and I think it’s changing dare I say for good. I think we’re gonna see in the future, a lot more remote working. And and this is this is that pivotal moment in time that we’re the we’re seeing that change happen before our eyes.
Robert Crane 41:55
I think you would agree that what we see is generally been a hesitancy A lot of people are very conservative with their approach to technology, I want to keep my file explorer, I want my files on my local drive, I want everything the way it was I want, you know, word 2003 instead of, you know, 2016 or whatever. But when you get in a situation that we’re currently in, where you have to change, you have not got an option here we have to change, then I think it does force people to make that change opens their eyes. And like I said, I think that this is going to cause a massive shift and people are really going to realise that hang on, you know, this wouldn’t be possible before or we couldn’t have done this or we hadn’t been forced to change this would have and now I’ve got more flexibility and look what we can do. And other than that, so I think you’re 100% right. In the way the approach people are going to look at these when they step back and review it. And we are very lucky that a lot of businesses are able to do that. And to obviously keep going. But I think again, this is where this the it provides There is that key cog. I mean, they talk about essential services medical people, yes, absolutely fireese ambulance drivers fantastic. But again, the it is become such an important layer in the infrastructure, every business in every country these days that there’s that opportunity, but you have to make sure that you are current with the technologies and you’re able to provide that and, and this certainly is going to drive that demand. And we’re seeing that worldwide, not just in Australia. So, again, it’s really gonna make the difference as you say, Now, because this is happening and let’s say that we take it to be your partner, who has been a little bit tinkering around the edges and may not be sure what sort of advice or what sort of support can your organisation yourself provide for these sort of people? Are you giving them any guidance? Are they you know, how can they when they come to you for help? What can what can you do for them?
Unknown Speaker 43:56
It’s It’s interesting, I actually spent the weekend Putting together a resource library around office 365 m 365. Team security, a whole range of things to make it available for my team to start sharing with partners. Each partner is different each partner has customers that are different, but each partner is looking at how they how do they really allow their their customers to be able to work remotely and to work in a different environment. So it’s it’s really important that, you know, a partner is able to go to the distributor, and actually say, I need help and, and this is what I need to do I need to understand how to do and I’ve been on I’ve been on conference calls today with partners and their own customers taking them through that process. So what we’ve really tried to do at Dickie data, is we really focus in on how can we as a distributor, provide the support structure around the the partner And around their, their end user. So, you know, we’ve done things like taking her after our support to a 24, seven support to be able to support the partner. So it’s really about I suppose a bit of a knowledge transfer, helping you with the customer and at the same time transferring that knowledge to you as to what you can do in the future.
Robert Crane 45:21
So I think the one of the things I would suggest to you and I think it’s great that you’re providing that I think this is what again, one of these sort of characteristic traits we see of many it providers, they they tend to look at the environment is alone gun, yes, they have peers, yes, they have distributors, but they very much take it all upon themselves. They’re not really into asking for help or, or reaching out until it’s desperate until it’s too late until it’s, you know, again, the fact that we’re all basically beyond the point where it really makes a difference. I think, the secret would be is that you need to reach out early. You need to be Doing this as soon as possible and coming up with a plan and moving forward for today, tomorrow, six months, a year because that timeframe is going to be different. But again, would you be encouraging people to say look, yes, okay, we need to make a plan, we need to reach out early if we need help. Let’s put up our hands and ask for it rather than trying to batten down the hatches and hopefully ride it out until you know, we get to the other side where everything will be the same. Is that a fair statement? That you know from your point of view?
Unknown Speaker 46:28
Absolutely. And and look, my philosophy around this actually comes from my grandfather and my, my grandfather used to tell a story about a boy that would walk down to the wharf and he saw four silver pieces on the ground. He picked them up. And as he’s walking down down the jetty, he saw six gold coins at the bottom of the water. And there was an old man there and he said, I’ll hold your silver coins for you while you dive down and, and get the gold. And he said, No, no, no, that’s fine. I can do it. And he put his hand in his pocket where he had the silver coins, dived into the water that couldn’t pick up The gold coins, because he had to move something at the bottom of the ocean and end up losing both lots of coins. So I think, you know, the thing is, is that data we see ourselves as an extension of your business. And we want to support you on that I work with you and be part of be part of your team rolling that out. And I think, you know, that’s, that’s a really key part of, of what we’re seeing today in our ecosystem around the market supply.
Robert Crane 47:33
But also, would it be fair to say that, you know, somebody can’t come to you and in absolute desperation, and wanted all their own way, obviously, there has to be some alignment between you know, what is the direction what can we provide and in this new modern environment, not, you know, selling more servers not doing that sort of thing. So there does have to be a transformation by the partner if they are looking to get this, this sort of support.
Unknown Speaker 47:59
Absolutely. And that’s I suppose that’s the key part of transformation isn’t that, that you transform first so that you can help others to transform?
Robert Crane 48:09
I think that’s exactly right. I think that is really part of it is the world has changed and is changing more so every day, but is very different from even the last round of workshops that we did a couple of weeks ago. And we sort of brought this up. And we tried to make people aware that we could end up in the situation that we are in at the moment, but again, it has changed so dramatically, even a couple of weeks, and it’s going to change dramatically, even more so going forward. So let’s let’s just again, pause on the situation now. And when it all comes down, when we get back to inverted commas, you know, normal and you can have a drink and you go to the beach and all this stuff. We can’t do it the moment. You know, what do you see is going to come out the other side of this. I would suspect that there’s going to be a lot of partners who probably aren’t going to make the cut. Why can I survive necessarily because I they’re not getting revenue from customers who may have again, I may have filed as well but they haven’t transformed that ready to move in this environment. And what do you see is the the result once the bushfire as cleaned up all the dead wood there what what do you see on the other side of all this team?
Unknown Speaker 49:21
A very different ecosystem to what we see today. I think we’re going to see partners that are that have been forced to transform themselves and are transforming their customers. I see a very different working environments what we see today. And I think it’s the, the scary part a little bit is, is that little bit of unknown of what’s not out there at the moment.
Robert Crane 49:50
I think probably the biggest unknown for most people is simply duration are we looking at, you know, a month, two months, six months, 12 months, you know, again, based on history, it could Roll out to be quite an extensive period of time. So I think that’s the biggest uncertainty and that’s what everybody’s trying to deal with. But, again, I would suggest on the other side, there are things that can be done, there are positives to focus on. We have to let obviously the government do what it needs to do and follow in their requirements of us. But there’s certainly things that we could do proactively to make sure that we can take advantage of getting through this but also getting advantage on the other side of this. So what would you suggest are the top couple of things that, you know, partners should be doing on their own to really put themselves in the best position to benefit from this and to, you know, survive the current situation we’re experiencing?
Unknown Speaker 50:46
I think they need to reach out to the to the distributor to see what support is available, or auto Microsoft. I know that Microsoft’s looking at the different ways that they can help support partners. At the moment, I think the second thing is that they need to be looking at some some, some guides, some, some sort of information that that helps them about what they can provide into their customer base and actually looking at things like m 365 as a whole. But I think I need to focus on the customer. And they really need to focus in on their customers need.
Robert Crane 51:24
Yeah, and I think you’re right. I think obviously the need at the moment is we need to get people working remotely, but that will then evolve into into to collaborate together and to share files. We need to have meetings together. We need to do presentations, we need to work with third parties. We need to get them on our meetings as well. How do we optimise that? How do we get the most from that? So there is a big opportunity there for an ongoing, you know, relationship with the customer. I also think too, that this is a point in time to obviously stand up show leadership and let people know that yes. You know, you have a strategy, you have a product you can deliver it you can give people surely in these times, I think that’s going to go a long way to I think a lot of people are looking to providers who, who have a definite strategy who can provide in these times, given the limitations given the challenges that are around there. I think they’re the things that a lot of people are looking for that that certainty when everything else is becoming largely uncertain, and that, again, requires a bit of discipline internally a bit of work. From my point of view, the other thing I would suggest on top of everything is obviously reaching out for help but look at this as an opportunity also for education. Again, there’s lots and lots of YouTube videos from Microsoft Ignite from the teams around Azure from the teams around Microsoft Defender ATP, there is so much learning in there that can be done that again, you hear the cry, I don’t have enough time I don’t have enough time will probably now you do have enough time to look at these so that on the other side, you are expected With these products, especially if you haven’t dedicated that time at sites, I think that part of that is allocating time for everybody in the business to make sure that they are across these information. I think Tim would agree with me that probably one of the best videos you can go and look at is the team’s video with Dr. Coleman from the University of New South Wales was in last year’s inspire on how he integrates his learning using teams and all the services into an environment 500 plus students. I think that’s a magnificent video and very inspirational. But I’ll make sure the link is in there in the show notes and I believe that you’ll have him on a webinar shortly.
Unknown Speaker 53:40
Yes, in a couple of weeks. We’ll have you on a webinar, which is going to be fantastic. I’ve actually got also john seek from his Microsoft Teams laid out here in Australia with Microsoft will be on that same way. We’ll be on a on a webinar as well. So we’re we’re changing the webinars up a little bit. Just to, I suppose respond to the climate that we’re seeing today to try and get some really good information out to our partners.
Robert Crane 54:08
Excellent. All right, well, I’ll make sure that I do get those links from Tim. And we could put those up for people who are interested in those. And I would highly recommend those as a source of education as well. I think deca provides a fantastic support for their partners, and we encourage you to get in contact with Tim. And with that said, How can people get in contact with you and also with digger data?
Tim O’Neill 54:34
Sure. So fire email is a very easy way. So I’m sure Rob that you could
Robert Crane 54:41
get put on my property near because you have a funny surname with an O apostrophe sometimes and not apostrophe sometimes. So all my
email address
is in there, and that people can refer to that any other resources you’d like to point them towards.
Tim O’Neill 54:59
Look, I’m going to send you a link Rob for you to share. This link. It’s six videos around teams was released by Microsoft on Friday in response to what we’re what we’re seeing here in Australia right now. So this is this will give, give your listeners something concrete, I can actually go and have a listen to and and hopefully hold on the lock. And obviously you know if they want to get in touch, I’m more than happy to help them out as well.
Robert Crane 55:28
So I’ll make sure all those details and links are in the show notes for this episode of work to get this out as quickly as possible to get the benefits out there for people take the opportunity to thank Tim for his time his insight. And remember, don’t be afraid to contact him directly to ask for any support. Again, it is challenging times we certainly in at the moment and encourage that you can also contact me as well for any other specific questions. I’m happy to to help people there as well. So once again, I will thank you him for his time on the Need to Know podcast and I will wrap up this episode. Until next time, thanks everybody for listening.
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