Category: Uncategorized

Azure datacenter locations

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If you want to know where Azure datacenters are located in the world take a look at this page:

http://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/regions/

If you want to know which services are available in those centres take a look at:

http://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/regions/#services

If you do a lot of Office 365 demos like I do, it makes sense to build a clean virtual workstation in a datacenter that is near the Office 365 datacenters. For me that is in Singapore which equates to Southeast Asia when running up an Azure virtual machine. That way you get the best experience possible between Office 365 and workstation, which is why this configuration is great for demos (apart from the fact that you can run them anywhere and on any machine that has Internet connectivity).

I’m sure there’ll be more regions soon, so stay tuned to those pages for all the details.

Brisbane workshop special surprise

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As I have mentioned previously here I am conducting a 2 day workshop in Brisbane on Office 365 (Friday 7th of November 2014) and Azure (Saturday 8th of November 2014). Places are still available for the workshop and you can get all the information about the event here:

https://blog.ciaops.com/2014/10/brisbane-office-365-and-azure-training.html

I am however happy to announce that as an added bonus for attendees of this workshop VMVault will be taking us through their NextDC B1 Datacentre. The tour lasts about an hour and you’ll get to see all the facilities of a modern data centre with expert tour guides on hand to answer all your questions.

This is a fantastic opportunity not to be missed and I thank Radek from VMVault for making this available to attendees.

Image courtesy of stockimages at FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Next lock screen for Android by Microsoft Garage

Here’s something a bit different from Microsoft, a screen lock for Android phones. Who’d though eh? An indication of the fact that Microsoft is becoming more platform agnostic, which of course displeases pure Windows people (you can never please everyone right?). But hey, more software the better right? Certainly for Microsoft!

Problem is that I can’t get in here in Australia on my device. Hopefully down the track when they make it available outside the US where I believe it is limited to currently.

If you want it, see if you can download it from:

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.microsoft.next

and let me know what you think.

HERE maps for Android

In my experience the best nav app is Here from Nokia (yup, even better than Google Maps in my books). Going forward HERE isn’t part of the Nokia Microsoft bought, it is remaining a separate entity.

I use HERE maps on my Nokia Windows Phone 8.1 extensively (unsurprisingly) and was very pleased to discover that they are now offering HERE maps on Android devices for free! You can download it from this location:

http://here.com/beta/android/?lang=en-US

but don’t stop there, you can find plenty of additional apps (especially for Windows Phones) here:

http://here.com/download/?lang=en-US

So, if you are like me and you love all the HERE stuff then take a moment to ensure you have them all on your devices and sign up for a free HERE account to link them all together.

Disabling Windows Phone 8.1 screen wake up

One of things that I found enabled when I updated my Windows Phone to 8.1 was the screen ‘wake up’ feature. Basically, this allows you to double tap the screen and it will come to life.

Great idea, but for me it seemed that I was always turning the phone on accidentally. That is no good for optimising the power usage of the device, so after persevering with it for a while I decided that I would prefer to have it off and save the power. If I need the phone, it is easy enough to turn on with my ham-fists.

So here’s how to disable the ‘Wake up’ screen feature as it is buried a few layers down.

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From the initial screen navigate to Settings. In my case I have pinned that to the top right of my phone start screen.

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Scroll down the option Settings.

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Towards the bottom you will find Touch. Select this.

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Then set the Wake Up option at the top to Off.

With this set my phone is back to having me turn it on to use which is what I want because I want to maximise the power available to my phone throughout the day.

We have reached the bottom

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We all knew it was coming but this announcement from Microsoft:

Moving forward, all Office 365 customers will get unlimited OneDrive storage at no additional cost.

proves that we have finished the race to the bottom when it comes to storage.

What it means is that all Office 365 customers, home and business, will soon have unlimited storage capacity in their OneDrive. Here’s what the article says specifically about OneDrive for Business:

For OneDrive for Business customers, unlimited storage will be listed on the Office 365 roadmap in the coming days and we will begin updating the First Release customers in 2015, aligned with our promise to provide ample notification for significant service changes.

So we’ll have to wait a few months until we see it in Office 365 for Business but it will be worth the wait. My only question is whether the same unlimited storage will also apply for Team Sites as well as OneDrive for Business? Sure hope it does, but time will tell.

For providers who already don’t offer unlimited free storage there probably won’t be much option but to match this or risk being uncompetitive in the market.

Storage is only the first in a long time of resources that will ultimately end up being free thanks to the commoditisation of the cloud. Roll on I say.

You can read the full blog post from Microsoft here:

https://blog.onedrive.com/office-365-onedrive-unlimited-storage/

Image courtesy of audfriday13 at FreeDigitalPhotos.net