Episode 188 – Are You Inspired Yet?

- [Ben] Welcome to episode 188 of the Microsoft Cloud IT Pro podcast recorded live on July 23rd, 2020. This is a show about Microsoft 365 and Azure, from the perspective of it pros and end users, where we discuss the topic of recent news and how it relates to you. In this episode, Ben and Scott review some of the news coming out of Microsoft Inspire around Microsoft 365 and Azure, including blob storage, Data Flex, and Microsoft lists. Happy Thursday, Thursday.

- [Scott] Yeah, Thursday, you made it to another one. Are you feeling inspired yet?

- [Ben] I am feeling very inspired, not only by Inspire being inspiring or providing inspiration, is that what Inspire is supposed to do is provide inspiration?

- [Scott] Yeah. In fact, it is, it is supposed to inspire Microsoft partners to go out and build awesome things.

- [Ben] But I also just had a five-day, six-day, something like that, vacation up in Michigan on the beach, on the lake, paddle boarding and kayaking. And I barely have any cell phone signal up there. So I, frankly just pretty much ignored my phone for five days. It was also an inspiring and relaxing experience.

- [Scott] Yeah, that sounds like you're living the dream. You're not missing much back here, like heat, global pandemics, all the fun things.

- [Ben] Yeah, I frankly have no idea what's going on in Florida right now. And I don't care, I'll figure it out when we get back home.

- [Scott] That's the spirit.

- [Ben] Because now I'm back in Michigan recording on my Bose headset. So if my audio is a little off. I am hanging out at my parents for a couple more weeks, have a wedding coming up while we're here and all that. But people probably do not care so much about my inspiring personal life. They probably care more about the inspiration coming from Inspire this week, which I got back from vacation to a flood of news that I've been trying to catch up on.

- [Scott] Yeah, quite a bit of news. So as Microsoft has been doing for many of their events lately, they've published their book of news. This time it didn't go out as a book, but it's a website. You get the table of contents, go ahead and browse through it. And you can take a look at all of the announcements around things like Azure, Microsoft 365, certainly business applications, or biz apps like dynamics play a large part in the partner ecosystem. So there's a specific section for that as well as security and compliance, then it wouldn't be a partner conference without partner enablement. And then some, a little bit about sustainability initiatives and things like that that are coming up or in a process now. But if you're interested in what happened at Inspire and you normally go, I shouldn't be interested in Inspire because that's the partner conference and I'm not a partner, or maybe you work for a partner and the relationship side of Microsoft and its partners isn't relevant to you day to day. A lot of these announcements, aren't about how to sell things in the partner ecosystem. They really are functionality within the platform and to a certain degree material changes in functionality. So you'll see some quite a bit of movement on the Teams and Microsoft 365 side, there was a bunch of Azure announcements from Azure stack HCI integrations and improving some of the hybrid flows that exist today. Some networking enhancements, a bunch of stuff around discs. There was a little bit around storage, even developer tooling got some announcements in there with some announcements from Hashi Corp, bringing things forward. So I would encourage you if you deal with Azure, or Microsoft 365 to at least go through, read through those sections and see what functionality A is coming, B is available today and has GA'd or C, is both been announced as coming and is available for you to play with in the form of maybe like a public preview.

- [Ben] Yeah, this Inspire was interesting because I feel like, at least in previous years it has been much more partner focused news. And I felt like this year, it was almost like another mini, I don't know if I want to go so far as to say a mini Build or a mini Ignite, but there was a lot more just Microsoft 365 Azure news that really applies to everybody that came out this year, I guess more so than I felt like came out previous years around Inspire.

- [Scott] Yeah, I think that's fair. And that certainly feels right. I would have to think that a lot of it has to do with the marketing engine. And if you're spinning up all this marketing for partners, why not use it to market to the broader world as well? Especially if you're lighting up features that apply to the broader world. And I think you'll potentially see more of that just during pandemic times as they don't have those opportunities to get out and about so much.

- [Ben] Yeah, so definitely go check out the book of news. 'Cause there's no way we're going to talk about all of it today at the time we have, but we figured we'd go through and pick out some of our favorites. Some of the ones that are maybe most applicable to our audience, or maybe just the ones everybody is talking about after Inspire like another product rename.

- [Scott] Another product name.

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- [Scott] I have a feeling that we're going to spend a good amount of time on Microsoft 365 stuff. So why don't we start with a couple of the Azure announcements, 'cause those are quick hits to get through, and then we can dive into all of that product rename that you mentioned.

- [Ben] Perfect, sounds good. So which Azure one would you like to start with?

- [Scott] So there wasn't a ton of Azure news, like we said, news comes when news comes. So there's a couple of things that have happened in regard to migration. So specifically tooling, like Azure Migrate has been continuing to have new features added to it over time. So initially Azure Migrate started out and it could assess VMware environments and it was targeted at those and potentially bringing VMware customers over to Azure. And then they added hyper V support over the last couple of months, I believe, probably the last six months or so. They've done things like added support for importing your own inventories. So if you have a physical inventory and maybe you don't want Azure Migrate tooling to actively assess it like go out and interrogate the performance counters on my servers, things like that. You just wanted to give it a CSV file that said I've got this server with this name, it's got this much CPU, this much RAM, tell me what the equivalent or right size thing would be in Azure and how much it's going to cost me or my pricing agreement. They've added functionality like that. At Inspire, they announced the ability where they've added another kind of import mechanism. So now you can import and create assessments using uploaded configuration management database data. And they've also included support for those AVS assessments, those Azure VMware solution assessments. And then they've worked a little bit on the assessment engine itself and some of the recommend or the recommendation engine, I guess, and some of the pieces that come out of there. So you'll see that it's a little bit more holistic and able to give you a better sense of where you should land on the other side. And over time, I think you'll continue to see improvements in there. Another thing that was announced very recently, I believe this one was pre Inspire, but they did mention it at Inspire, again is Microsoft has support for shared discs with virtual machines now. So you can do things like spin up a disc in Azure that now you can attach to or mount multiple virtual machines at the same time, which enables you to do things that you haven't been able to do in the past. Like maybe a traditional fail over cluster because it required that cluster shared volume. Some of those workloads are now ready to go and they would have support natively in the operating system. And you're not doing any weird workarounds on the backend to fake having a shared disc. It's just a native capability and ready to go.

- [Ben] Interesting, so I missed this one. This one is not then spinning up like an Azure file share or creating a disc and doing a traditional SMB share of it. But it's having a, say physical virtual disc, you essentially have that virtual disc file. And you can attach that virtual disc straight to two different VMs in Azure.

- [Scott] Correct. Yeah, so this was originally talked about like in the way back when, it went into preview, like early in 2020, but I don't know that, like you said, in your case that a lot of folks have heard about it or necessarily know that it's there, but it recently, very recently GA'd so it GA'd on July 17th.

- Okay.

- That's a cool thing 'cause if you talk about it potentially in the context of Inspire, like, Hey, we have this exciting new enhancement. Well, it's actually been out for a long time, but now not only is it out, it's also out of preview. So GA carries all those benefits of supportability and potentially SLS and all the other things that come with it.

- [Ben] Right. Which you really want if you're using something like this for a SQL cluster that has failed over, you really probably want to be on a supported feature, supported functionality, if something would go wrong with that SQL cluster.

- [Scott] Yeah, so shared discs, you mentioned like SMB shares and files. So if you think about shared discs versus files, shared discs is giving you that direct access to block storage. And it's specifically for being leveraged by multiple virtual machines, really, if you think about it, like in the context of Azure, it is for those clustered volumes that you potentially want to spin up there. So that lets you do things, like it's presented like any other shared volume. You can use Windows server fail over cluster manager. You got pacemaker, Corosync, whatever you need in there. If you're looking for that fully managed files experience and you are looking for SMB or NFS, then you would go to Azure files, which is a again, part of the storage service or potentially Azure NetApp files. But there was a little announcement there as well around the data plane, which could potentially make things a little bit easier for customers as well. And that's in the area of NFS. So Azure blob storage will have support for NFS 3.0, which will be a good enabler for specifically, like Microsoft calls it out in the announcements, specifically for read heavy workloads across a number of use cases, potentially targeting a number of verticals. So support for NFS 3.0 is going to be coming out in preview. So now you'll have this Azure storage is getting pretty interesting because it's the data storage plane like block-level storage for discs. It is also blobs, it's files, tables, queues, all those kinds of things, but it's also becoming more and more consolidated place for multiprotocol access for access to your data. So if I want to talk to blobs, that's my storage account. If I want to spin up NFS in my storage account and have support for NFS 3.0, 'cause I've got that workload that wants to target it, that's the same storage account, it's just a different endpoint that I hit or another protocol that storage supports data lake falls into that same thing as well. If you need hierarchical namespace support that is still fundamentally built on top of blobs and delivered on top of that same Azure storage service, you just connect to a different end point on it. I think the NFS one's pretty exciting because now you have more options where maybe you looked at Azure NetApp files and that wasn't the product for you. Maybe it was a pricing thing. Maybe it was a performance thing, whatever it happened to be. Now you've got a little bit more flexibility within the service there. So you'll have this tier of services for NFS, depending on the protocol that you require, the version of the protocol you require. Do I acquire NFS 3.0, 4.1? What's that look like for me? And what are the performance characteristics that I'm looking out looking for out of my dataset? Is it read heavy? Is it read/write equal? Is it write heavy? And then be able to target into specific services from there?

- [Ben] Got it. Hey Scott?

- Yeah.

- [Ben] It sounds like you've been spending a lot of time in Azure storage lately.

- Not me.

- Not you? Okay. None at all.

- [Scott] Like most of the Azure stuff that caught my eye. If you do Azure stack, there was some HCI stuff. There was a little bit about ADF and improving the integration runtime specifically bringing support for vantage vNets. But again, I think that one was announced slightly before Inspire, so folks might have seen that one already.

- [Ben] Yeah, it looks like I see some Apache Hadoop stuff getting GA'd in this month, July, 2020 and some other stuff, but that sums up the Azure stuff pretty well.

- [Scott] Yeah.

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- [Scott] So now onto your fun stuff.

- [Ben] Onto my fun stuff. Well, I'm going to start with this smaller one. We're just going to keep stringing people along and see how long they listen before we get to the rename. Dude, now I lost it. Microsoft lists are GA'd, Scott. Those went really quick through the preview to GA, which I don't know that I've still seen anywhere officially that these are just SharePoint lists, but with how quick they went from announcement to preview to GA and everything we've seen, it appears that it's just a new front end for SharePoint lists, but they are GA'd now. They have begun rolling out. And it's interesting with the Microsoft lists, they're rolling out to Microsoft 365 in July and available in Teams in mid August. So they're staging out the whole rollout and where you're going to have this Microsoft lists app to be able to go in and interact with the list. So currently I think it's, it is just Microsoft 365 and it's going to be the web version. So portal.office.com, go to your apps. You should see a list there as it starts to roll out to GA. Ironically, I have all of the preview stuff turned on in my tenant and I still don't have lists in my tenant. So I don't know what happened there, but they're rolling out to Microsoft 365 this month. And then you'll start having like the Teams app available in Teams to work with these lists sometime in August.

- [Scott] Yeah, which I think follows that general flow that you've seen with some of those releases lately where maybe like the native UI comes out on the SharePoint side and then a slightly tweaked version of that or a version that just fits better in Teams as a consumer of a SharePoint service picks that up just a little bit later.

- [Ben] Yeah, so, because it's not available in any of my tenants yet, I haven't actually had a chance to play with it myself. So I can't talk to my experience. We'll have to do another episode when I can actually play with it and get some experience with it. And another one that they've, it's been out there for a little while, I've seen stuff about it, they snuck it into Inspire as well. That's now available in public preview is the universal print solution, which is a Microsoft 365 cloud print solution. Essentially enabling you to take your printers in your office buildings and schools, wherever your corporate printers are, integrate those into your Microsoft 365 Azure AD. So that now your Microsoft 365 users can print to those corporate printers securely over the internet from wherever they may happen to be. With everybody working from home, it's cool. Unfortunately, hopefully you don't actually need the printouts because you can print them from anywhere, but obviously the printers that are going to be sitting in your office building or your school or wherever you are, and you're going to still have to go get those pieces of paper off the printer.

- [Scott] That is the rub, right. Trying to find out where the printer is and what that looks like.

- [Ben] So, and I've seen like different printer manufacturers. And I know, I think Google has something similar to this where you can go connect over the internet to print. Now you can bundle it all right in with Microsoft 365. So again, just in this, it could even come in handy too if you have multiple buildings, I guess, and your buildings are not wired together, or you have a bigger campus. And for some reason you don't have a local LAN connection to all these printers that doesn't just have to mean you're printing from home to your corporate office, but printing to different locations. Or if you have different offices in different states and you need to print something out for somebody in a different state. I mean, I can see some use cases here and there for that as well.

- [Scott] Oh yeah, yeah.

- [Ben] But it's available in public preview. Go check it out, see if you want to get it set up. And then we have the product rename. We'll talk about this one now.

- [Scott] Are you ready? Have you prepared yourself? You feel like you're ready to go?

- [Ben] I've wrapped my head around this Common Data Service. Well, so there's two announcements wrapped in one. One is the new product, one is a rename of the Common Data Service. So now there is a new product out there called Data Flex. And the Common Data Service is now Data Flex Pro.

- [Scott] Microsoft Data Flex Pro.

- [Ben] Microsoft Data Flex Pro.

- [Scott] Yeah, you gotta watch out for those names.

- [Ben] So, and this is part of the Power platform kind of, because it's that underlying data store. I wish it would have been Power Flex. Doesn't that sound like a cool name?

- [Scott] Product naming is a hard thing. We'll leave it at that.

- [Scott] Yes, but this one is interesting. I don't even know where to start. Where should I start with this one? Data Flex, let's just start with Data Flex. So this is now going to be included with, it sounds like select Microsoft 365 plans. I don't believe this is actually going to be available with all of them. And did they announce which? Is it all of them or did they announce which ones it would be a part of? That was one thing I did not.

- [Scott] I believe they did announce which ones they will be a part of. It was... So they have a whole landing page on Power apps for it. So you can understand Data Flex Pro,

- [Ben] Unless you want to keep talking. okay, you look for it. So the Data Flex landing page is, if you look at the URL, it's actually the Common Data Service. But what Data Flex does is it brings that Common Data Service into Microsoft 365 at a lower licensing tier. And you're not going to get all of the CDS functionality because that's going to be additional Data Flex Pro license. But what does included version of Data Flex does is it brings the chat bot functionality into Teams. And it allows you to use Data Flex, which is a Common Data Service relational database type data structure to be used for your Power apps, but only Power apps built in Microsoft Teams. So at this point in time, Data Flex really is a Teams-based relational database CDS data storage for everything in Teams and-

- [Scott] It is fairly siloed. I mean, it is siloed right now, not fairly siloed. It is siloed into Teams, so effectively what they're saying is, and what you're saying is if I spin up a set of tabular data inside of Data Flex, and I expose that data through Teams, and I also want to maybe expose it through like a little wizard inside of Power apps, that Power app has to run and renders through Teams as well.

- [Ben] Right, it's not going to work like if you've done SharePoint embedded Power apps, or if you are just accessing Power apps on your mobile device or via the web, it's just not going to work there. Part of this I like is the fact that it enables chat bots to now, I feel like it lowers the barrier of entry to chat bots a little bit. And that might be part of what Microsoft was going for with this announcement. Because when you look at the Power platform, you have Power apps, you have Power Automate, you have Power BI, and then you have Power Virtual Agent, which is that chat bot functionality, Power Virtual Agent was the only one of those four that actually required CDS to get any functionality. So unless you were paying for a plan in your environment, that included CDS, you were eliminated from using Power Virtual Agent, even internally in Teams developing those chat bots by changing this licensing and introducing this additional Data Flex SKU, it really lowers that barrier of entry for your chat bots, for a lot of people that are using Teams that maybe want to implement a chat bot for something like a help desk within Teams, or for people just looking up generic HR information, paid holidays, vacation time, because that's what everybody always cares about. Having this lower barrier of entry to that really helps with the chat bot and maybe helps gain some adoption there and lets people really see what they can do with chat bots. Especially if they're in that Microsoft 365 ecosystem, and maybe haven't ventured into those more advanced plans to get CDS. It also gives you that additional data storage. If you do want to do those Teams-based Power apps. And I haven't found in here, is this just if you build an app for Teams, 'cause there's a couple of different ways to do Power apps in Teams, one, you can build a Power app and actually surface it down the left side as a pinnable app, down that left hand side navigation, or you can put Power app tabs in a team. So that it's one of those tabs across the top is a Power app. I would, I don't know if it's gonna work both places or if it's only going to be like that, I'll call it a pinnable app on the left side of your Teams client. I'm not sure which one it is.

- [Scott] Based on some of the animations and things they put around about it, some of the storyboards and all that they do look like they'll be pinnable Power Apps. So your stuff that shows up in the left or where you have like Power apps as the high level icon on the left hand side of the Teams client, click on Power apps, and then they'd be available in there.

- [Ben] And yeah, that's about all we have to go on. Because these are going to be available. So the new Power apps features will be available in August in public preview. And the Power Virtual Agents features will also be available in August and public preview. So starting about a month, well, no, not even a month. By the time you hear this, it's going to be August. This is going to come out right around the beginning of August. You should be seeing this start to roll out to tenants in public preview about the time this podcast comes out, did you find which plans are going to include it, or if it's going to be all of them?

- [Scott] So, as far as I know, they didn't exactly announce it. So there's an initial statement in all the blogs. It reads: the new Data Flex, Power apps, Power Automate, and Power Virtual Agents functionalities in Teams are coming soon to select Microsoft 365 and office 365 users for no additional cost. So that's certainly like the little, not telling you much 'cause what is a select plan? And what does that look like? They did give some additional statements to some additional news organizations. Here's a little bit more expansion there. So the new features or these new features related to Power apps, development and Power Virtual Agents chat bot creation are powered by Microsoft Data Flex in Teams and provide enterprise relational data stores with rich data types to Microsoft 365 users. They are now included for free with select Microsoft 365 and Office 365 licenses. And we already heard that part, but that include Power apps and Power Automate. So what that sounds like is if you have a license that already had Power apps and Power Automate inside of it in some way, shape or form, you'll potentially have access to Data Flex in some of these things. Maybe, kinda, sorta.

- [Ben] And that's almost all of them. 'Cause I think all the-

- [Scott] That would be quite a few.

- [Ben] I think about the only ones that don't have it, are the ones that are essentially like the enterprise business apps pro I can't remember what they renamed, enterprise business apps, where you're essentially licensing just Word, Excel, all of that for the desktop. I don't think those include any of the flow in Power automate stuff. And maybe like the frontline worker plans don't include those. I can't remember off the top of my head. But it does sound like based on that, that they will come to quite a few of them.

- [Scott] Yes, I think you'll see it seeded in a lot of the plans.

- [Ben] Yeah, and if you're a dynamics person, it does, because CDS was named to Microsoft Data Flex Pro like they do have some of those in here where says the Common Data Service has added over 1000 features and introduced support for Microsoft dynamics 365 and Power apps. We are pleased to announce that the Common Data Service has now been renamed to Microsoft Data Flex Pro. So as if you're used to hearing CDS with all of this stuff, and all of a sudden you stop hearing CDS and start hearing Microsoft Data Flex Pro on the dynamic side of it, it is because it appears that CDS in name will just completely go away. And you'll just have Microsoft Data Flex on that Teams side or Microsoft Data Flex Pro for CDS dynamics 365 and all the things where CDS was before. So that was, that'll be interesting. I'm interested to get my hands on it and see what I can do. I do have a couple of clients where I've done some Power app stuff and I'm like, this could be nice because there are times and people can criticize me for doing this where I have treated SharePoint lists like a database and SharePoint for my Power apps.

- [Scott] The horror! What have you done?

- [Ben] The horror, I just admitted to doing that. Because frankly they had Power apps and they're actually using these Power apps now in Teams, but they didn't want to do premium connectors and do Azure SQL and do all of that to really have a database. And SharePoint lists, frankly, were easy to do it with where it might make sense to start taking some of those apps that are using SharePoint lists currently that they're using in Teams and migrate them over to using Data Flex on the backend.

- [Scott] Yeah, that's a possibility.

- [Ben] It is, we will have to see once it comes out, once we get our hands on the public preview and then we'll find out what it GA's. I'm going to guess this would move through the preview and GA stage pretty quickly since it's just a little bit of a rebrand of CDS, we'll find out. What else was there, anything else in the book of news? I'm flipping through a book of news, there was some stuff about...

- [Scott] There was some security and compliance things that are coming out and ready to go. I believe there's also been some announcements around additional functionality in the identity space that can help partners. So if you think about things like Azure Lighthouse and the ability to do cross tenant management or true, like multitenancy across Azure active directory tenancies and then all those subscriptions that are underneath them, like they announced that Azure identity protection is going to be available for Lighthouse accounts as well. So you'll start to see like APIM and some other things light up in there. But yeah, all sorts of fun stuff. I would actually recommend that you go through the book of news and you're like, Oh, that sounds interesting. And really at that point, 'cause a lot of the links in the book of news, for whatever reason, they're pointing to like dead aka.ms links right now. So that's okay, don't get too frustrated, just like go Google, Bing, Duck Duck Go, whatever your thing is to go and find out more about it because the documentation right now for better or worse is spread all over the place. If you're interested in Microsoft 365, I would say probably head over to the tech community and go through the M365 blogs. If Azure is your thing, go to the Azure public blog or go look at the new updates to things like Azure documentation. Like that NFS thing that I talked about for blobs, that's not on the Azure blog. The link in the book of news to it is dead, but all the documentation is live on docs.microsoft.com. So you have to know to a certain degree that the feature you're looking for and where to go look for the information about it.

- [Ben] There was one Teams feature I saw that I wanted to mention briefly that I don't see in the book of news and that was Teams calling and meetings. You now have the ability on the desktop app on Mac and PC to go turn on the new Teams or the new calling and meeting experience, which when you start a meeting or a call automatically pops it out into its own window in Teams so that you can browse around to other aspects of Teams, other Teams chats, what have you, and keep your meeting or your call in its own window. So it doesn't do like the whole minimize it to a teeny tiny picture and picture type window, making it easier to multitask. Like none of us should actually be doing during our meeting and browsing around in Teams while you're on a meeting or a phone call.

- [Scott] Yeah, good call. I will put a link to that announcement as well in the show notes.

- [Ben] I turned it on this morning in mine, I haven't had a chance to try it yet, but that was a nice feature that I saw announced in the last day or two as well. So I think that about wraps it up, go look at the book of news, let us know if there's anything else you want us to cover. And with that, Scott, I will let you get to your day and I'm going to resume working on my vacation.

- [Scott] Excellent. Well, thanks, Ben.

- [Ben] All right, thanks Scott. Well talk to you later. If you enjoyed the podcast, go leave us a five star rating in 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.