In Episode 186, Ben and Scott talk through several scenarios around the use of Azure Synapse, Forms Recognizer, and Azure Cognitive Search.

- Welcome to Episode 186 of the "Microsoft Cloud IT Pro Podcast," recorded live on July 9th, 2020. This is a show about Microsoft 365 and Azure, from the perspective of IT pros and end users, where we discuss a topic or recent news and how it relates to you. In this episode, Ben and Scott dive into some work Ben has been doing lately, involving Azure Synapse, Cognitive Search and Forms Recognizer. I don't know how many of our listeners follow American football. Did you see the news from the American Football League or the NFL? Technically the National Football League, but they only play in America, so I don't really know why it's national, although, international, I don't know. Anyhu, did you hear the news from them yesterday?

- I did not.

- NFL teams will be forbidden from post-game interactions within six feet of each other and jersey exchanges between players will be prohibited during the 2020 season. The reaction from the NFL fan or NFL players, "Aren't we going to be touching each other's jerseys "during the game?" Kind of pointless to prohibit interactions and jersey exchanges after the game. Or this is a perfect example of the NFL thinking in a nutshell. Players can go engage in a full-contact game and do it safely, however it is deemed unsafe for them to exchange jerseys after the game.

- Yeah.

- Let that one sink in, because you hear stories about what happens in those games. I'm sure those players are getting spit on and get spit in their face when they're under those piles. My random tidbit for the day.

- Yeah, I don't know what to tell you about that one. Just a little bit of just logic that does not flow through that app.

- Yeah. Okay, so there's my random tidbit for the day. We'll keep it short, we won't go on a 10-minute side topic. We've been doing that the last few weeks, only about Max stuff.

- Oh, we could keep going about Max stuff.

- We could keep going about Max stuff. We could turn into the "Microsoft 365 Apple Podcast."

- Yeah, we could talk about how apps crash and eat up the GPU in wrong ways and just all sorts of things.

- Or we could talk about running betas.

- We could talk about running betas and things that go on there as well. No one should run a beta on their daily driver, but here you and I are. But you go further than I do, you do the operating systems on your laptop and PCs as well. I'm not that brave.

- Yes, I have not done my operating system yet on this go around. I have learned my lesson after the last two or three. I'll probably wait another week or two.

- But you did your watch.

- I did my watch.

- Why?

- It's like, 'cause what harm can it do on a watch?

- What harm can it do? Let's go back and pull up the thread. Hey Scott, isn't it annoying how I can never update the watch 'cause I have to reset it every time? What harm could it possibly do? Pushing two and a half gigs over a crappy Bluetooth LE connection, yeah.

- It only takes four hours to update and then once it updates, it doesn't have enough space to install the next update.

- You should not do that. Your phone, your iPad, sure, you can back up and restore those. That's your other problem with your watch, is you have to take it in for service if you wanna step back in an iOS version.

- Or if you wanna go backwards. True

- Yes.

- I can always do a restart though after I upgrade, once I reset it, just to go to the next beta version. All right.

- That is one way to live your life, for sure.

- On the edge, or being very patient while my watch updates. I mean, I figured with my watch, what do I? It really has to keep time. If I get different notifications, all of that, to me my watch was less risky because there's really nothing I could lose on my watch. I mean, I suppose I could break it, but I'm not gonna incur data loss if a beta version on the watch goes bad.

- Yeah, but you won't be able to track how many times you've stood up.

- See, I don't stand up. Like this is me sitting and this is me standing up. My watch can't really tell, 'cause I stay the same height, no matter what. For all of you that are listening on audio and couldn't see the video.

- I am trying to help you out here and you just refuse, you're obstinate.

- I am. Other people have told me that, or I'm just stubborn. I'm a firstborn, I am stubborn. As IT professionals in the cloud era, sometimes it feels like we don't speak the same language as the rest of the organization. So when stakeholders from finance or other departments start asking about a specific project or teams that Azure costs, they don't always realize how much work is involved in obtaining that information, sifting through cluttered CSVs and a complex, massive metadata in order to manually create custom views and reports. It's a real headache. On top of helping you understand and reduce your organization's overall Azure spend, ShareGate Overcast lets you group resources into meaningful CostHubs and map them to real world business scenarios. This way, you can track costs in the way that makes most sense with your corporate structure, whether it's by-product, business unit, team or otherwise. It's a flexible, intuitive and business-friendly way of tracking Azure infrastructure costs. And it's only available in ShareGate's Overcast. Find out more on sharegate.com/itpro. So back to cloud news, Azure. Should I talk about Azure? I was doing an interesting project this last week 'cause I was looking for projects, and this one popped up and I figured, kind of like my Apple beta watch, why not? What could go wrong?

- Yeah, what could happen here?

- I'm a modern desktop guy, what could go wrong if I start doing something related to development in Azure? Under the story, it's all working, absolutely nothing. But I spent a week. And by a week, I mean like a full week, like Monday I worked on it from 8:00 a.m. until 4:30 a.m. I almost worked on this for 24 hours, and then I slept for a while. But I got to play with Azure Synapse Analytics, which, in parentheses, formerly SQL data warehouse with a question mark. Oh no, that was the what is, it's the beginning of a, apparently I should have slept more last night. Anyways, Azure Synapse Analytics, Azure Cognitive Search, some of the different features in Cognitive Search, and then I tied that in with an Azure function, with Forms Recognizer, and kind of built out a demo lab-type scenario, leveraging all of those different tools. And actually, it was really interesting. I think part of the interesting thing about this one for me, is it's looking at all these Azure services, which under the covers, you're like, "Oh, that's modern desktop stuff. "They just rebranded it and made it user-friendly."

- Sure, that's one way to think about it.

- At least for some of it. So should I walk through the scenario that I built and then we can kind of talk about some of the tools?

- Yeah.

- Okay, so this is how it worked. I took some Azure Blob storage. So first of all, we have a storage account, Azure Blob storage. We've talked a lot about that. So I didn't include that in the whole line of processing, but in this Azure Blob storage, I created just Blob storage, upload some invoices to it, so some PDF invoices. And Cognitive Search has the ability to go index this Blob storage, so I set up the Cognitive Search, goes and indexes this. And you can do some different things with Cognitive Search in terms of how you extend that indexing process to pick up different data. So the way I did it is when the index ran, it incorporated a custom skill set which actually went off and called an Azure function. So upload invoices, run an index, call an Azure function with this custom skillset and this Azure function passed over the necessary information for Cognitive, or, not for Cognitive Search, for Forms Recognizer to be able to pick up these PDFs as they were getting indexed. So Forms Recognizer picked up the PDFs, did a bunch of processing and these PDFs doing Form Recognizer to pull out things like prices and invoice numbers and quantity and the total amount of data, so all that information you may wanna pull off an invoice. And then another part of the whole kind of search is knowledge store. So you can take these pieces of metadata and actually shove them out to enrich your search results or, in my case, I stored them as JSON files back in my Blob storage that you just go in and pick and choose key pieces of information. So I was saving like five different pieces of information pulled off of these forms via that custom skillset to JSON files in Blob storage. I think I ended up setting it just to once a day. My pipeline ran in Azure Synapse, that actually went in, picked up these JSON files via a data flow in my Synapse pipeline, pulled out the key pieces of metadata, did a little bit more data manipulation, did some string cleanup, did some converting from strings to integers or to decimals, and then pushed them into a SQL database or the Azure SQL pool that was in Azure Synapse. So end of the day, it didn't do a lot of the data warehouse aspects of Synapse or some of the analytics. This was kind of part of a bigger solution as well, that incorporated a bunch more into Synapse. And there's a bunch of things you could go do with that in Synapse from there, but that was kind of the gist of how all of those tools ended up tying together in the solution.

- Yeah, I think it kind of speaks to that ability to link services together and kind of build out the glue wherever you did it. And then you have a bunch of extensibility in there as well, right? Just to cross that stack to be able to, the thing you said you're not using potentially Synapse as a true data warehouse in that scenario, you know, you're kind of relying on the integration runtime and some other things, but you do have the ability to go there and build out query and everything else if you'd like as well.

- Right, and I think the other aspect of that is when you would start tying that in is if your Azure Synapse is your data warehouse, it speaks to a little bit of that ability to take things like invoices or order forms or other information that's coming in in like a file-based format, and actually add all of that information and adjust all of that additional information into your data warehouse. 'Cause for me, again, I was doing it with like two or three invoices. But think of some of these being companies that are getting invoices in hundreds or thousands or hundred of thousands a day, and wanna process all of this and shove this all into a big data warehouse. There's some functionality there when it comes to Synapse to really add massive amounts of data into that data warehouse from different files or different sources.

- Oh yeah, for sure. It's an interesting kind of piece of functionality when you start to think about having not only the query engine and kind of data warehouse sitting out there ready to go, but the ability to also do some of your ETL within that service as well. So having like the hook into, like in your case, Blob storage, to go out and get the PDF, and then having that engine that can drive it through Forms Recognizer and ultimately get that data back to you in that structured fashion.

- Yeah, so it was kind of fun. And I think one of the, throughout this whole experience, I actually spent a lot more time in the Azure Cognitive Search service, which actually used to be Azure Search, because why can't we just keep names the same for a little while? Just a teeny, tiny bit. And there is a lot of stuff that you can do within that Azure Cognitive Search service, from the whole AI enrichment and processing these different text files or different image files and really sending them through, again, like a Forms Recognizer or the image recognizer or tying in sentiment analysis, tying all of these different functionalities in through Cognitive Search, and then the whole custom skillsets and knowledge store along with it give you lots of different options for how you can process data, how you can analyze data, what you can do with the information that the search service picks up beyond just, like for me, coming from a typical SharePoint search index or SharePoint search experience, the search runs, it picks up metadata and that's kind of it. It's either on or off and you can do things with metadata and best bets and all of that from the SharePoint aspect. And I know there were some ways with some of the search API to enhance Microsoft search, but just the power of Azure Cognitive Search and all the different ways you can tie it in to really expand, enhance and do different things with search, was really kind of cool to play with.

- Oh, yeah. You know, even outside the expansion, I think I've always found it to be very interesting, the things that you can kind of pick up and run with inside of those engines without having to be a programmer or somebody who needs to go in and read the APIs to consume them. I've seen solutions built out around Cognitive Search where you might do things, like I was playing around with one a couple of weeks ago where, same thing, Azure Blob storage as an ingestion engine for pictures, like just JPEGs, PNGs, things like that. But anytime a new picture was uploaded, before it could be displayed, ultimately on the website it was going to, it had to go through Cognitive Search which has, again, that recognition engine within it. So it can scan the image for you and tell you like, "Hey, is this image work appropriate?" Or, "What is this an image of?" So in this case, like if it's in an image of a beach, is it a racy image or is it just a picture of like the sand and the water? And if it's not a racy image, then go ahead and move it over here so that it can be displayed on a website, in a gallery, and things like that. And in that case, all it took is just an engine to kind of call a Cognitive Search, which is a really simple logic app which just was watching that Blob storage in a specific container to pick up new files as they came in. New file would come in, be processed, and then, you know, based on that yes or no answer, is it effectively, like, safe for work? Go ahead and send it down one of two paths.

- I would agree, that's kind of what stuck out to me as I was even building this out, is, again, it was a little bit more of a demo lab-type scenario, but even the whole Forms Recognizer, I ended up using some Python in the back end, but like to train the model is maybe 40 or 50 lines of Python, and the whole Azure function to go in and process forms that are uploaded was a couple of hundred lines of Python. I mean, the Azure functions, you just use a lot of the visual studio code and the templates in there. Other than that, it was really just a bunch of JSON documents to define different things and define the different processes. So from a pure development standpoint, once I kind of wrapped my head around some of the formatting and how some of this all fit together and how it all worked together, I didn't consider much development. And coming from the IT Pro side and being able to write PowerShell and back in the day, I did write C# and I've written JavaScript off and on here and there, it didn't feel like this was a development-heavy-type scenario or process to implement. Do you feel overwhelmed by trying to manage your Office 365 environment? Are you facing unexpected issues that disrupt your company's productivity? Intelligink is here to help. Much like you take your car to the mechanic that has specialized knowledge on how to best keep your car running, intelligink helps you with your Microsoft cloud environment because that's their expertise. Intelligink keeps up with the latest updates in the Microsoft cloud to help keep your business running smoothly and ahead of the curve. Whether you are a small organization with just a few users up to an organization of several thousand employees, they want to partner with you to implement and administer your Microsoft cloud technology. Visit them at intelligink.com/podcast. That's I-N-T-E-L-L-I-G-I-N-K.com/podcast for more information or to schedule a 30-minute call to get started with them today. Remember, intelligink focuses on the Microsoft cloud so you can focus on your business.

- I haven't played with the Form Recognizer. What does the Form Recognizer look like when it comes to, like in your case, you mentioned you're processing PDFs. So that means you need to have a, you know, in that case, those invoices, you probably have a fixed invoice format or kind of a, every invoice that comes in was issued by your company, so they all look the same, so that invoice numbers always in the same location, customer address, customer account number, whatever they happen to be, all those things are there. But typically, you have to go through some type of labeling process so that the engine, in this case, I think Forms Recognizer, can go ahead and extract that information. What does labeling look like in the Recognizer days? Like I've used like some enterprise tools in the past, certainly, where you kind of pull up, run OCR on a couple of files that you have out there already, and then, you know, they'll give you like a nice, gooey kind of drag and drop around. Does Forms Recognizer have the same kind of thing?

- So Forms Recognizer comes back as a JSON document.

- But you have to do define the template, right? Like what are the labels that you want to extract from the document?

- It's all AI training. So have you played with the AI Builder in Power Platform at all? Have you seen that?

- I've seen demos of that, I haven't had an excuse to go in and play the--

- Essentially what this one does to train a, so you take some sample data. So like you said, you have a standard invoice and maybe you have, in this case, you only needed five of them. It may vary based on how clear it is. As it typically is in these lab-type scenarios, is you make it very easy for the process to train and to learn about it and all of that. So I had five invoices, five PDF invoices, all the same format, just with different values on them. And you submit them to the Form Recognizer AI builder, and you essentially just say, "Here's my five invoices, "go process them and learn what they look like." And it goes and does it all in the background. So I was just looking through my files here that I have for it. It's just like an HTTP. The Python is essentially doing like an HTTP post to a website and saying, "Uploading the five files from my local computer." And it goes and does all the learning. So I'm not doing, at least the way I did it, and there's probably multiple different ways you could do this to make it more elegant. There was no label defining or anything, I let the Forms Recognizer figure everything out.

- So it does the extraction and then you're just kind of picking and choosing fields out of there?

- That's exactly it. So it comes back, so then when you actually would do like a real invoice, it comes back with a huge JSON document and it has key value pairs in it, it has words. So let's say in an invoice you have, let's say the company name is in like three different places, it'll actually go through and say, "Okay, we found this company name in three different places. "Here is the path to where it is in the JSON document." So it'll give you like three different paths where it's at the whole row five or line two row five, et cetera, et cetera. So the way I did it is, you know, your invoices are gonna be standard. So once I got the first response back, I could go through the JSON and say, "My quantity is always going to be line five, "field two, column seven." And I knew that defined path where my final price for the quantity where the item number was always going to be. It would be a little bit more work to be able to go through. And let's say you had an invoice where you had like 10 different line items on it, and then another invoice that had three different line items on it, and another invoice that had seven different line items on it. And if you wanted to go pick out all those different line items, you'd have to kind of expand on this a little bit because all that data would be in there, but it all has different paths to access it within the JSON document. Or if somebody like adds text to your invoice, it can mess up what's farther down and you actually would have to do some of that or to find like your different key value pairs on the JSON document and then figure out where your different references to your different prices are. So again, based on how complex or how much these documents vary, when you let the model do all the training, there's some work to processing those JSON documents appropriately to pull out all the right information you want.

- That makes total sense.

- Yeah, it all just comes back. You don't really define it, you dump it in and it gives you everything back, and then they leave it up to you to go process the result, to get what you want out of that result. They'll even break up words. So for instance, let's say your company is trying to, so your company name has three words in it, it's division. Microsoft office products, and then further down in your line items, you have Microsoft Office, you have Microsoft SharePoint, you have Microsoft Exchange. It'll even break it down where it sees, "Okay, here's all the different places in your document "just the word Microsoft appears." Even though Microsoft may be in a whole bunch of different forms and fields and columns and rows and all of that. So you can even do things like figure out how many times does a certain word appear within a document and where are all those locations where it appears.

- Yeah, I think that's that beauty of having cognitive services behind you, is you get not only the extraction piece with something like Forms Recognizer or Cognitive Search, whatever they're calling it today, but you also pick up all the other cognitive services pieces, like LUIS, that language understanding intelligence service, and that gives you all the natural language processing, which then leads you into things like having word breaks and stemming and all that functionality there automatically. So like in your case, you could have it go back into cognitive services again, and then run it through the same kind of processing I was talking about with the images, right? Like find these words that are forbidden or that are not allowed, or that I really do want in the service or things like that. Say you're running something where I'd like, my customers can post to a forum, but I wanna make sure that things get checked before they go in, and you don't want that to be a human interaction.

- Oh yeah, you could absolutely do that. And you start seeing how, like, we've seen some of the rumblings about Project Cortex. And what Project Cortex is gonna do, it's gonna go through your entire environment and pull out key phrases and do like some stuff with metadata. And this is where it was like, "I can kind of see where maybe they might be using "some of this on the back end." Because you can use like the Azure Cognitive Search to go pull out keywords and to enhance your search index on the back end so that you can have additional metadata and additional information about these files in the search index, based on what they pulled out of the AI functionality and out of these different models. Like in your instance with an image where you throw a bunch of images up into Azure storage, you send them through the Azure Cognitive Search, it does the image recognition, and then it doesn't, maybe it doesn't even push those out to a database, but based on that image recognition and the machine learning and the AI, it takes that metadata and puts it right back into the search index. So now you automatically have additional metadata about all of your images, purely based on image detection and what was found in those images. Or like this, I can pull out all the metadata about my invoices and put it right back into that search index to use within whatever front end is pulling from my search index, as you're searching through all of your files or all your information, wherever that may be stored. Again, it kind of goes back to how you can extend this with skillsets, with the AI, with knowledge store, all off of that Cognitive Search, or you just leverage these to make your search indexes even better.

- Yeah, I mean it's all kind of sitting there just ready to go.

- Yeah, it really is. And again, I figured it out. If I can figure it out, anybody can figure it out, right?

- Yeah, so a lot of this is based off of an MCW, right? A cloud workshop?

- Yes.

- I'd imagine it's the Synapse and the solution cloud workshop?

- Yes, and I don't know if it's out there yet. Some of this stuff may still be getting reviewed.

- I don't know if the one that you're banking improvements to is out there, but potentially what we can do is put a link to, so we've talked about MCWs in the past and, you know, how they come with trainer guides and student guides and presentations, and obviously this is the hands-on lab component. So I'll put a link to the MCW for Azure Synapse Analytics in the solution, just to the kind of canonical Microsoft repository for that, and then folks can just watch it for updates and the monthly or quarterly drops, whatever they are that come into it. So when some of this new stuff that you're talking about comes over, they would see it immediately. So just go to GitHub and sign in and then you can watch that repo.

- Yes, keep an eye on that repo, and some of this stuff should make it over there at some point in time. Outlook add-ins are a great way to improve productivity and save time in the workplace. And Sperry Software has all the add-ins you'll ever need. The Save as PDF add-in is a best seller and is great for project backups, legal discovery and more. This add-in saves the email and attachments as PDF files. It's easy to download, easy to install and Sperry Software's unparalleled customer service is always ready to help. Download a free trial at sperrysoftware.com, S-P-E-R-R-Y-S-O-F-T-W-A-R-E.com, and see for yourself how great Save as PDF is. Listeners can get 20% off their order today by entering the code CloudIT. That's CloudIT, C-L-O-U-D-I-T, all one word at check out. Sperry Software, work in email, not on email. It was fun.

- You like learning new things, huh?

- I do. So if anybody wants me to learn new things for him and you have money to pay me to learn new things for you, I will gladly do it.

- Do you feel like an Azure expert yet?

- No, because I feel like with all of these, I just kind of scratched the surface of what you could potentially do with all of these services, especially Azure Synapse. So there's a lot there, 'cause really all I did with Azure Synapse in this one was a pipeline and then like a single action in the pipeline to go run a data flow, to pick up the JSON files from Blob storage and push them into a SQL database. And there is so much more to Azure Synapse than just that little bit of a data flow that I did.

- You're right, that's one pillar of Synapse. But if you think about Synapse as an all-in-one compute, potentially ETL engine with, like you said, the IR or the integration runtime and pipelines, things like that. I think in Synapse they're called Synapse pipelines 'cause why call them the same thing in every place? But you've got the query engine with Synapse SQL, so that's just, you know, regular T-SQL and kind of your potentially on-demand compute for query, which is kind of cool. One of the ones I always forget Synapse has is a built-in Spark integration. So if you're doing a patchy Spark, it's all kind of there and ready to go. And then what's the fourth one? Studio, that's it.

- Yes.

- Yeah. Synapse Studio kind of pulls it all together and puts it all in one place for you. Now, the issue with some of those, potentially just for folks that are not a big issue, but you should be aware of it, is that things like Spark and pipelines and Studio are still in preview.

- I think this is a bug, because there were three or four of us all looking at it and nobody could figure it out, is Synapse pipeline. So I said I was pushing all of these Form Recognizer data into Azure Blob storage. In Synapse pipelines, you can trigger off of new files appearing in Azure Blob storage. So what I really wanted to do is actually just trigger this so anytime new invoice data shows up in Azure Blob storage, it triggers a pipeline that goes and sucks that data out of that JSON file and pushes it into a SQL database. And that trigger off of Blob storage was throwing errors about being unable to view. It was like, "Enable access the permissions "on the Blob storage." And there are a bunch of requirements around, accounts have to have such and such permission on the Blob storage to be able to pull up the data, and we cannot get that trigger off of new Blob storage to work, so we just ended up doing it off of a scheduled timer. And it's interesting because parts of Azure Synapse are identical to the interface and data factories, and you can do the same thing in Azure Data Factory, where you can trigger off Blob storage. And trigger off of Blob storage and Azure Data Factories worked great, go plug it in, let it run, and it was doing everything we needed to, but as soon as you pulled it into Azure Synapse Analytics, it all fell apart. And we were comparing them and trying to figure it out. And I think again, like you said, that's preview, so that may just not quite be working properly, Either there's a bug there, or I just didn't do it right.

- I wonder, so there is kind of a weird thing with, in that case, so you've got Synapse, which is running under a managed identity, and you're attempting to access Blob storage across the management plane and the data plane. So you want the management plane so you can do things like enumerate storage accounts near subscription and be able to maybe like view containers within Blob storage. So that kind of comes through one API end point potentially, and then you've got the actual enumeration of blobs within storage. So when you're using managed identities and you're hooking up certain services, sometimes the service level firewalls start to act a little bit weird. So you would think like, "Okay." In this case, I've got Synapse running, and I went and added the managed identity for Synapse to--

- To Blob storage.

- To my Blob storage, is like a storage blob contributor, whatever it was, whatever data plane role you wanted to give it. Sometimes you have to take a look at the firewall. So you might say like, "Hey, I allow all access from all networks." In the case of your storage account. But if you go in and flip that to selected networks, then you'll get the checkbox for the exceptions to allow trusted Microsoft services to access the storage account. And in some cases, you do need to have that turned on. Yeah, never made sense to me why you have to turn it on, but it is there.

- Yeah, if I have time off to go back and play with it, 'cause it was odd too, because I could go in. So when you set up the triggers, it obviously asks you to go through and pick the Blob storage account, the container, the folder, all of that. So when I set up the trigger, everything worked. Like you can go in, set up the triggers, say, "I wanna look through my Azure subscription to find it." I could pick the subscription, the resource group, the storage account, the container, put in the folder path and the last step of the trigger actually shown me, "Here's all the invoices that are already in your path "that we see. "So when new ones are gonna get added, we'll trigger." So all of that worked. Synapse, at least when I was using my account to set up the trigger, could see and validate the entire path end-to-end and then I could connect to like, like there's a test connection button there, all of that works. But then when it actually comes to running, you go upload an invoice and it triggers the actual trigger. I think it was the trigger that triggered it, but then once the trigger triggers and it goes and tries to grab the file after the trigger triggers, it couldn't actually get up. That's when the air got thrown, was after the trigger fired.

- And it's that whole trusted services thing in Azure. They're not always trusted when, they're not trusted in the way, you know, like we think of trust. And Storage happens to be a weird one when it comes to that. So some services are potentially more trusted than others.

- Oh no, sorry. It wasn't when it triggered, it was when I tried to activate it. I could flip it all the way through and then the final step was activating the trigger. And when I activated it, it threw the air, so it never actually triggered. Had to correct that. Make sure we get our information right. Come on, Scott. Make sure I say the right stuff. No, it was when I tried to activate the trigger. The final step was disabling or enabling the trigger, and I could configure it all, I just couldn't actually enable it without getting an error. Took me a minute there, but that was my, I literally spent a week figuring all that out and learning all of it and documenting all of it and creating this lab. So it was fun, a little departure from my normal work. But in these times, I will admit, work has slowed down for me a little bit, so as different projects come up, I am expanding my horizons in what I've been doing and learning just to make sure work continues to provide food for the table.

- Yeah, and now you get some new skills.

- And now I have some new skills. So if anybody needs some IT developer, AI, Azure skills.

- Some stuff.

- Some skill. Was that "Napoleon Dynamite"? Skills, when he has skills? Both staff skills and--

- I don't know, 'cause this is gonna get me in trouble, but I've never seen "Napoleon Dynamite."

- Oh, Scott? Scott. Scott.

- I told you, it was gonna get me in trouble.

- Okay, the meat of this podcast is done, for anybody that is still listening. Now, Scott and I are gonna go talk about "Napoleon Dynamite" for the remaining time.

- I might have to go, maybe I'll take that away as my homework and next week we can do Scott at the movies.

- You are missing out, in an odd sort of way. You really should go watch "Napoleon Dynamite."

- Noted.

- And then it would make a lot more sense too when everybody in Jacksonville is talking about the Jags quarterback being Uncle Rico.

- I don't know what that means, but I've never heard anybody in Jacksonville talk about.

- You have not heard? I'm completely blanking the quarterback's name.

- Wow!

- Jacksonville. Although if you're not following, Minshew. Yes. I mean, it made the "LA Times" news with a picture of Uncle Rico from "Napoleon Dynamite" and Gardner Minshew, and like they came with the actual van from "Napoleon Dynamite" to Jacksonville and did a whole meet-and-greet thing with Uncle Rico in his van and Gardner Minshew and all of that.

- Yeah, no.

- All right.

- I know none of it, like, that might as well have been gibberish. That's probably what my wife thinks I sound like when I talk about what I do at work.

- People have just stopped asking me what I do at work.

- Stuff.

- Unless they already know what I do at work, and then they ask what I've been doing related to what I do at work. But if they don't know what I already do at work, they just don't even bother asking what I did today. Because, same thing, that's just all gibberish. If this is still going, you can probably end it here. That can be the end of our actual podcast episode. End of the aftershow where Scott needs to go watch "Napoleon Dynamite."

- All right. Well, thanks Ben.

- You're welcome. Thank you, go enjoy the rest of your weekend in hot, muggy Florida. If you enjoyed the podcast, go leave us a five-star rating on iTunes. It helps to get the word out so more IT pros can learn about Office 365 and Azure. If you have any questions you want us to address on the show or feedback about the show, feel free to reach out via our website, Twitter or Facebook. Thanks again for listening and have a great day.

Sponsors

  • Sperry Software – Powerful Outlook Add-ins developed to make your email life easy even if you’re too busy to manage your inbox
  • ShareGate – ShareGate’s industry-leading products help IT professionals worldwide migrate their business to the Office 365 or SharePoint, automate their Office 365 governance, and understand their Azure usage & costs
  • Office365AdminPortal.com – Providing admins the knowledge and tools to run Office 365 successfully
  • Intelligink – We focus on the Microsoft Cloud so you can focus on your business

Show Notes

About the sponsors

sharegate_logo_2018_600x300 Every business will eventually have to move to the cloud and adapt to it. That’s a fact. ShareGate helps with that. Our industry-leading products help IT professionals worldwide migrate their business to the Office 365 or SharePoint, automate their Office 365 governance, and understand their Azure usage & costs. Visit https://sharegate.com/ to learn more.
SperrySoftwareLogo Sperry Software, Inc focuses primarily on Microsoft Outlook and more recently Microsoft Office 365, where a plethora of tools and plugins that work with email have been developed. These tools can be extended for almost any situation where email is involved, including automating workflows (e.g., automatically save emails as PDF or automatically archive emails that are over 30 days old), modifying potentially bad user behaviors (e.g., alert the user to suspected phishing emails or prompt the user if they are going to inadvertently reply to all), and increased email security (e.g., prompt the user with a customizable warning if they are about to send an email outside the organization). Get started today by visiting www.SperrySoftware.com/CloudIT
Intelligink.com Logo Intelligink utilizes their skill and passion for the Microsoft cloud to empower their customers with the freedom to focus on their core business. They partner with them to implement and administer their cloud technology deployments and solutions. Visit Intelligink.com for more info.