Episode 190 – Sometimes The Waveforms Lie

- Welcome to episode 190 of the Microsoft Cloud IT Pro Podcast recorded live on August 7th, 2020. This is a show about Microsoft 365 and Azure, from the perspective of IT pros and end users, where we discuss the topic or recent news and how it relates to you. In this episode, Ben and Scott talk about Excel getting in the way of naming human genes, Azure resource manager deployment cleanup, and the Microsoft Authenticator app among other recent Microsoft Cloud news. Had to make sure it wasn't picking up my audio somewhere else because the waveforms can lie.

- The wave, okay.

- Well, you just kinda see the waveforms there. You don't know which mic it's coming from.

- The waveforms can lie. That's gonna become my new motto mantra.

- The waveforms can lie, not human genes are really dates.

- This is like, super fun because we all know that Excel makes the world go round. And,

- Absolutely.

- Excel not only makes the world go round. I mean, it's a database, it's a defacto kind of business driver. It does so many things that people don't think about in so many industries and so many businesses to the point that it impacts the way scientists on a global scale name human genes, so that they can continue their research, which is just amazing.

- I had not seen this article until you sent it to me this morning.

- It's an issue with the way that Excel automatically parses data. So, I'm sure we've all been there where you paste a number into Excel, or you Paste a string that has a number on it and Excel decides it is, something else. So, some genes have alphanumeric symbols, like there'll be a mix of uppercase alphas and a number such as MARCH1, which is short for membrane associated ring-CH-type finger 1. But, Excel doesn't know that MARCH1 is membrane associated ring-CH-type finger 1. It thinks that that is the 1st of March. So, it will change it into a date column with formatting that is appropriate for what you put in, which was MARCH1. So, it'll be 1-Mar, one March, right? And you go to the next column and the next column could be one April and then one May, but that's not what you were trying to do. You were trying to do another thing. So, you would think as a rational person, you would come back and say, "Okay, auto formatting is getting in the way of me putting my gene data into Excel so that I can do whatever manipulations or visualizations of the data that I want to there." Well, Excel does not offer the option to turn off auto formatting. And the only way that you could really avoid it is to remember that you'd have to change the data type for each individual column before you went and pasted that data in there. So, that would certainly be a way around it, but you'd have to teach every scientist in the world how to do this, that uses Excel. And that might not be the most scalable thing. So, how do you fix this problem? Excel, well can't be fixed, but you can fix the way or change the way that you name things to better accommodate the tools that your users use. So therefore, the HUGO Gene Nomenclature Committee or the HGNC has recently published new guidelines for gene naming, including that any symbols that affect data handling and retrieval like MARCH1, would fall into that category. They will now be renamed, so MARCH1 is gonna become MARCHF1, SEPT1, S-E-P-T-1, has become SEPTIN1 and a number of others along the way. So, as of right now, 27 genes have been renamed to accommodate this. And of course there will potentially be more.

- Huh?

- Yeah.

- So now do they have to go back and rename all these genes and all these different databases everywhere or is it just kind of okay going forward from this date, whatever date they actually renamed them, August 6th or whatever, it's going to be the new name and everything with the old name remains the old name?

- Well, like, unlike many things, you're gonna be in a period of time where you've got the old spreadsheets and the old databases and everything that have MARCH1 and MARCHF1. So, you've got to now potentially accommodate for both of them. But if you were sitting down and doing genetic research today, and you're following the guidelines from this standards body, you would go down the new path and you'd be a little bit safer.

- Maybe we should just stop using Excel as a database.

- Let's not be drastic.

- Oh my, can you imagine being the person at Microsoft saying, "Hey, you know this update I made to Excel, I just forced everybody to rename human genes." The stories they can tell their grandkids someday.

- Right?

- I don't even know where to go from here.

- Well,

- I think my brain's still on vacation. I got back yesterday morning. I woke my kids up at 4:30 a.m. to get on the plane and come home.

- Well, you made it.

- We made it. 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.

- Let's talk about some Azure stuff since,

- Azure stuff,

- Yes.

- or Event stuff?

- Since your brain is fine, Event stuff.

- Since my brain is fine. What's event stuff?

- What's event stuff?

- What's event stuff? Ignite. That's about all. Ignite, it's coming. And we will not be there live in-person because there is no live in-person, which we already knew. However, it's gonna be September 22 through 24, which is three days, but it's 48 hours straight of streaming Ignite presentations. So, similar to how they did Build, jump on and just watch Ignite for 48 hours. Although I'm guessing in there, there's gonna be replays of sessions so they can get various sessions and various time zones and, all of that. So, you won't need to try to figure out how to stay up for 48 hours if you want to watch it all.

- That is genuinely the intent, is not to have you, Ben, staying up for 48 hours, but providing coverage for a potentially worldwide audience.

- Yes, however, we will be live from our homes where there is no lines for food and no lines for restrooms.

- Yeah.

- And,

- I'm trying to figure out, do I broadcast from the desk or the couch? What's the optimal situation there?

- See I was going for the pool. I might just go sit up by the pool, kick my feet up, listen to the waterfall trickle, in the 95 degree Florida heat. That's the disadvantage, right? Although it was gonna be in New Orleans this year.

- Which also would be hot.

- Which also would be hot. But unfortunately here by having it go virtual, it does not allow us to escape the heat that is usually associated with Microsoft Ignite. We are still gonna be attending Microsoft Ignite in the sweltering heat of the Southern United States.

- Yeah, well, you cannot get away from that one.

- All right, enough about that one. We also have GlobalCon coming up too. That was the other event I was gonna say. The Collab365 guys, Mark Jones, the whole team over there are doing GlobalCon3 that I'm doing some stuff for. There's a, Power Platform day coming up that I have a Power Platform fundamental session at, and then they're doing a full five-day conference later this year and I don't have the dates off the top of my head even though I should.

- GlobalCon

- Con.

- 3.

- is,

- Yes.

- September 8 through September 11.

- So, my whole month of September is just pretty much gonna be conferences because Mark Rackley is still planning on doing his conference as well. Last I have heard at the end of September, shortly after Ignite.

- You have not escaped conference season.

- We have not. We just have escaped traveling for conference season, but that's all the conference events news I have. ♪ Tu tu tuli ♪ Yeah, most of it's all virtual. So enjoy virtual conferences from the comfort of your own home, without the flights, the lines for the bathroom, the lines for food, and sleeping in hotels.

- Those are all the fun parts of conferences.

- Yeah, okay.

- I'm running out of conference shirts to wear.

- I see you're wearing a conference shirt today,

- I am.

- Because that's,

- the way it goes. And I've had to go back to regular T-shirts and things during the workweek and, it's getting rough.

- I don't have many. Did I tell you this story when we walked past one of the Microsoft Stores a few months back when Microsoft Stores were still a thing? My daughter saw the Microsoft sign on the store and said, "Hey daddy, that's what's on all of your shirts."

- Yeah.

- Oops.

- Yeah, we gotta get you some new shirts.

- Apparently, okay. With that, should we talk Azure stuff now?

- Yeah, let's, let's talk some Azure stuff. So, there are some changes potentially coming to ARM, which could be beneficial to certain types of customers. So, when I say ARM, Azure Resource Manager, and this is a change to Azure Resource Manager itself, and specifically the way it handles some things around deployment history. So, if you go into ARM and you create a resource, like say, you go into the Azure portal and you want to create a virtual machine, you wanna create a virtual network, you wanna create a sequel database, a web app, a Kubernetes cluster, whatever it is, you're gonna next next, next your way through the blades and hopefully at this point, we all know you get to the end and you can say, "Hey, download this as a template, or go ahead and create it." And if you create it, what's happening is the template that was generated for you is actually being submitted as an ARM deployment and then that deployment runs at whatever scope it was submitted at. So, if you're in the portal, you're submitting your deployments at a resource group scope to go ahead and get those resources created, where they need to be. Well, there's a limitation for ARM history for, specifically for deployment history in that each resource group that you have can only have 800 deployments in it's deployment history. So, if there are 800 deployments and you go to do deployment 801, deployment 801 cannot run because there is no way to track the history for it, which can become problematic at times. And it's especially exacerbated if you're close to that number and you don't know you were close to it, cause it's not something you knew about or tracked, from a kind of scale and, and limits perspective. So, you could have been at say like 780 and gone and spin up this new awesome template you created that had a bunch of other links, templates and other things. And conceivably, it could get you pretty close to, close to that limit especially if you were executing templates that have things like looping in them, maybe you're doing copies of resources too. Do like a four I equal zero to nine kind of thing inside of a, inside of a template. So, what's happening here is, there's this scale limit that deployment history can impact your ability to actually execute a deployment. So, there's a way around this today and that's that you go and manually clean up deployment history. You say, "I know about this scale limit and I know I am someone who is approaching said limit. So, I'm gonna go back and clean out older deployments so that I can have room to, to do new deployments." So, what's happening is automatic deletions are coming to, to the Azure platform. I'll call it kinda like platform all up or ARM all up. And, what's gonna happen here is, and it's kinda in this stage where or what Microsoft is thinking today is that once your deployment history gets up to 775 deployments, they'll start deleting deployments to make sure that you stay under that number of 800, but, they think they'll leave about 750 or so, 750 years. So, therefore, yeah. So if you had there for you at 750 today, you get up to 775, 25 gets deleted, and then you always have this kinda wiggle room of, 25 to 50 deployments. So, that's gonna happen automatically, but, you might be a customer who does not want that to happen automatically, maybe use deployment history for other things, or you treat it as an honorable event and need to know when things were deployed and you can be the only one that can do that cleanup. And if that's the case, then that's okay too. You can opt out of automatic deletions directly through ARM itself, just by setting up a feature flag effectively on the resource provider in each subscription that you don't want this to happen to. So, there's in Microsoft at resources, there's a feature flag called disabled deployment grooming, go ahead and enable that and, you'll be kinda opted out of that whole feature set.

- Got it.

- I think the way it's worded, when I say automatic deletions from deployment history, people go, "Oh, no. Stuff is automatically gonna be deleted. I'm gonna lose data and what's happening to my resources and everything else." Nothing is happening to your resources, it is purely the history of the deployment itself and a legacy deployment that you probably for the most part don't need really by the time you're 700 deployments into a resource group. And this doesn't affect lots of customers. Like if you're like me, I'll almost never hit 800 deployments in a resource group cause I'm doing like lots of PFCs and testing. And if you think about even an ARM template that creates a VM and it's discs and all those things, that's still only one deployment. So,

- Right.

- you'd have to recreate that virtual machine 800 times before you ran into, or even knew that this limit was a thing.

- Yeah, and like you said, it would only be in the same resource group. Because lots of people,

- Correct.

- also have multiple resource groups. They're not putting all of their resources in a single group. So, it,

- Yeah.

- I honestly never knew about this limit. I did not know it existed. I was one of those that would have been in that boat where it's possible I'll maybe hit 800 after several years in a resource group, but I probably never would have hit it either. I had no idea it was there.

- I think it's one of those that particularly if you do kinda quote unquote at scale deployments across your estate,

- Right, like doing,

- and a price level.

- yes, you do run into it and especially think about maybe like you're hosting for somebody else or you're doing the MSP thing where you're hosting customer resources near subscriptions and you've got lots of churn and things like that. It's absolutely possible to get there and, I think, like if I was gonna speculate about it, it's something that when it hits you go, "Oh my gosh. What's going on? Like Azure's broken." When it's really you've hit a fundamental scale limit, which has always been documented, but we never thought about. You don't think about that as a scale limit, you think about the number of resource groups you can create, the number of cores you can have, the number of storage accounts, the number of VNets, what can you appear together?

- Right.

- What does that tell you? You don't think about how many deployments you can do.

- I wonder if Azure has hit a point in it's age that a bunch of people were just starting to hit this over the last several months and they were like, "Huh, maybe we should do something about this." You kinda get that feeling.

- I'd imagine it's been there a while. It's probably been exacerbated by some other behaviors of tooling over time. Let's take like imperative deployments, for example. So, the CLI and PowerShell, it used to be,

- Yap.

- for a lot of those commands when you would fire them off. And when I say used to be, I mean years ago that they want an execute deployments, they would just call a raw REST API on the backend inside of [email protected] and spin up and do what they need to do, but lots of CLI tooling these days, so, if I think about like the Azure CLI, if I go and create a new VM through the CLI today, I just do the easy,

- The easy VM.

- The easy VM create.

- Yap.

- That actually executes the deployment on the backend. It didn't used to do that, but it does it today. So, I think you see

- Got it.

- a lot of deployments, driven that way as well. It's kind of a nicety in that it addresses, a scale limit of Azure, in a pretty easy way and it gives customers a way to opt out as well. So, we talk about that a lot, right? Like what are the admin controls on day one? I would say kudos in this case for having an admin control on day one. It might be opt in, but I think opt in, in this case is a good behavior cause it allows you to keep deploying, which is probably what you actually wanted to do. And if you want to, you can opt out and manage yourself.

- So, I have a question. When you do different automated deployments, are deployments always done in serial or could they be in parallel? And could you still hit this limit if you tried to do too many parallel deployments into the same resource group.

- So, you can do deployments in parallel and you could still hit a limit. And I think that goes back to what I said about maybe you have a template that has a linked template in it, and maybe you're doing a copy action and have some kind of looping or something like that going in there. So, those are numbers and I'll make sure that I have the link to the docs article in the show notes, but they specifically talk about in there, and make sure you read kind of all the notes that are in there. So, as of today, the starting number would be 775, the ending number would be 750, but those are subject to change. So, I think it's kind of, let's implement the features, see what happens and iterate on it. And now there's a tool in place that if that number does need to change, like, okay, oops. It should have really been 750 and 725, that number can be dialed over time.

- Got it. And it does say here in that same note that if you hit the 800 limit and a deployment fails, it'll automatically kick off that process right away.

- Yes.

- So that you could go retry your deployment then, which let's be honest. That's what a lot of people do. I know I do it. If my deployment fails, the first thing I do, unless it's a very obvious error is I go retry it like two or three minutes later and see if that works, which with this in place now if it's because of that 800 item limit, retrying your deployment again, a little bit later should work just fine.

- Yap, oh, one other thing that we should call out with this one is there's also some functionality. You can do template validation. There's an API for template validation. There is also the ability to do what ifs against ARM templates now. Both of those because it kind of has to submit the deployment, just not execute it. Those could potentially trigger those deletion events as well for you. And when I say validated deployment, keep in mind that validation also occurs when you're just creating resources through the Azure portal. Again, when you get to that last step of that blade and you see kinda like the little Knight Rider bar, sometimes moving, the dot, dot, dot slipping across the screen, it's validating your template, that the portal as effectively like an ARM template expression generator just generated for you and got it to where it needed to be.

- So, it's possible that validation would even trigger the deletion. So, by the time you actually clicked create your deletion would have taken place

- Yes.

- and you'd be good to go.

- But I think it's important you recognize that the behaviors are there and again you decide what you want to do as a customer to ensure that either the data is in place or you've got a copy of it especially if you need that deployment history for, for audit or just for historical purposes, right? I wanna understand kinda change over time at a resource group and application life cycle or whatever it happens to be.

- Yeah, very nifty and something I had no idea existed before.

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- Sure, not that what we talked about had anything to do with Azure AD, but Azure AD is fun.

- It was Azure. Though Azure wasn't the word for that point though. We could also talk about blue butterflies because that also has Azure in the name.

- Yes, so what's going on with Azure AD?

- So, with Azure AD this is one that I don't know when this rolled out, but I noticed it and I was trying to figure this out until you mentioned it to me this morning is Authenticator, the app if you're doing like authentication with MFA or with password list or any of that. It is now auto locked by default, which means you have to unlock it to do any authentication. And I hit this to be fair. I'm running on iOS 14 and I don't know if this is iOS 14 or if this is the Authenticator app, but just within the last probably week or so, I would go to login Office 365 and get the prompt to go select the proper number. I'd open up the authenticator app from the toast notification and it would say that the Authenticator app was locked. It had an unlock button that didn't actually work and it just got me frustrated and I wanted to throw my phone against the wall. And what I actually had to do was close the authenticator app, open it, not from the toast notification, and then I could unlock it and then I could click the number and then it would authenticate my face again. So, there were two face authentication things in there, which honestly get kind of annoying. But if anybody else is experiencing this, this is apparently a new auto lock feature that they have recently rolled out within that Microsoft Authenticator app.

- So, what this is called is App Lock. And as you said, enabled by default. You said you didn't notice when it came out. Basically this week.

- I was on vacation.

- Yeah, so if you've updated your authenticator app over the course of, what are we on now, we're on Friday, some day in August. Friday, August 7th. This was announced on Monday, depending on App Store roll-outs, where you exist, kind of in a global rollout through like iOS, or through Apple's App Store or Google Play, things like that. It might take a second or two to hit you. Now what's happening here is, if App Lock is enabled in the app, like you said, any notification you receive, you also have to provide your biometric. If a biometric's available or a pin, because there might be legacy devices out there that don't have biometrics. They don't have any kind of fingerprint sensor, they don't have face ID authentication, whatever happens to be based on device.

- Yeah.

- There's a specific version. This is coming out for, iOS 4 so, it's 6.4.22 kinda +2 to be on that train. It's in test flight. I've had it on some accounts for a while now. I think a lot of the crash units that you talk about is potentially iOS 14.

- That's my assumption.

- And kinda bringing that together. There's a lot of memory issues in beta 3 and beta 4 and you're probably seeing a lot of that kinda crashiness potentially affecting you inside of there. So, if you have a device that has biometric capabilities and they're enabled and you have a pin or anything else like that enabled on your device, if you don't have biometric, this is a feature that is going to be turned on automatically. So, a little more friction, but arguably makes you more secure as well.

- Right, and they do provide a way to turn this off too. Once you're into your authenticator app, you can go into your settings and you can disable App Lock. If it has been enabled by default. Again, probably not best practice, like you said, I would leave it on. Do you have so many one time passcodes in there if somebody ever got your phone and, figured out a whole bunch of stuff and then wanted to use your authenticator app, this just gives you an extra layer of security, protecting those MFA keys, the notifications. Again, the only downside like for me is because I do passwordless. I already have to provide a biometric once I click on the number. So, now I have two biometrics in the number auto login without a password.

- Yeah, it depends on the ecosystem and kinda what you're in. So, for iOS like you and I both have Apple watches as well. So, one of the places,

- Yeah.

- that I've noticed the memory constraint is I've gotten pretty used to when I get a push notification for, when a Microsoft Authenticator login attempt, and I'm used to just going and clicking approve on my watch and then kinda my risk goes the other way and my watch goes back to sleep. Whatever's going on with the App Lock thing and I'm on an older Apple watch. So, that might be it. It might be a memory constraint thing there. I've noticed that logins are far less reliable that way when I'm using my watch. I really need to kinda bring my watch up and click the button and be looking at it the whole time. And hopefully it doesn't crash or just fail to communicate with my phone for some reason, cause it's across the house, cause I forgot about it, and, why I find an Apple watch is janky, or whatever it happens to be.

- Yeah. I haven't used my watch.

- There are things like that. Honestly, I think after a while you just get used to like I need to keep my phone around me and it's another thing and I can see a lot more organizations now that all of a sudden this becomes a public default. If you didn't know App Lock was there before you might see more organizations going and turning it on and enforcing it through MDM solutions.

- Yeah, and I, so I haven't used my watch in a long time because with the whole passwordless and click the right number, it doesn't actually work on the watch. The watch just has approve or deny. It doesn't give me my three numbers,

- and,

- Yep.

- the option to select the right one. So, I'm already used to using my phone for all my authentications. I just need to keep looking at my phone a little bit longer or look at it sooner to get that initial App Lock unlock,

- Yep.

- verification.

- It's all kind of like in TestFlight and it's been out there and doing things. So, the flow that I have found to be successful, I don't know if this would work for you is because I am wearing the watch and watch notifications are delayed a little bit behind what comes into your phone or they never come at the same time, right? Sometimes I get it on my watch. Sometimes I get it on my phone first. I kinda wait for that notification to come through both my watch and my phone and then I pick my phone up, open it because if I accidentally opened the notification on my watch, then the notification isn't on my phone anymore. And it's kind of a chicken egg scenario. So I gotta make sure like, yes, I got the notification, click and open the notification. So, that's what opens the authenticator app. Because if I just go in straight up open the authenticator app too sometimes for whatever reason, I don't get the push notification. And then I've gotta go back to my sign in and say, send it to me again and just elongates that login process. And if you have a lot of logins, it's kind of annoying.

- Yeah. You know what they need to add to the authenticator app, complete side topic, personal rant here. I use the authenticator app for all of my MFA. It is really long to scroll through. I need to search at the top. So, I can quickly type the first couple of letters of one of my logins instead of having to scroll down through 20 of them.

- Yeah, there's an answer for that. Like, don't use the,

- Don't use the Microsoft,

- Don't use the authenticator app.

- I hope you use any one of, anything else out there. 1Password, LastPass, Authy.

- Authy, yeah.

- Yeah.

- Tune in your answers. Just go do something different.

- In this case, that is the answer, right? I think the Microsoft Authenticator app is perfectly fine for Microsoft accounts, but to be brutally honest, I would not use the authenticator app if I didn't have to. Like in the case of some Org ID accounts, if I could get by with having like a standard QR code out of that, being able to do an OTP or something else with another app, I absolutely would.

- Yeah.

- Kind of like authenticator was not built for these kinda of a login flow. It was built for, these kinda core principles of story of Microsoft accounts in here first and foremost, and then let's make those as secure as possible. And that doesn't always comport kind of an easy going login flow like a password manager app would have,

- Right?

- Right.

- If I think about 1Password, I get to login to say Twitter with 1Password and Twitter needs OTP and all those other things, I'm gonna say, "I wanna log in with this account. It's automatically gonna click the sign in button for me and it's automatically gonna populate my code on the very next screen. And all I have to do is click a button." All right. That's just so much easier.

- Yes, maybe I should move all mine to 1Password instead of the Microsoft app. Goals to do someday when I have time.

- It's good to have goals.

- It is good to have goals. Should we talk about one more piece of news that has nothing to do with Azure that I just found really interesting this week?

- Sure, one more.

- Okay, one more. This one snuck out in a Microsoft announcement. So, Microsoft does, this was not their monthly. Microsoft does monthly team updates. This was taking your communications to the next level with new offerings and Microsoft Teams. It was buried like a sentence in here, but then Tom Arbut, is that Arbut, not? I don't know how to pronounce his last name. He's just Tom. Came out with a little more detailed article based on the sentence where in the first 1/2 of 2021, Microsoft has announced that support for SIP phones will be available. And the blog post mentions Cisco, Yealink, Polycom and others, where this is, somehow some way that details are yet to be announced about. Older SIP phones, are going to be supported when doing voice. I think maybe Vail is, maybe just regular phone calls. Details are still fuzzy, but enable those to be connected to your whole Microsoft Teams voice environment, where you're not necessarily going to need the Microsoft Teams supported hardware devices. You'll be able to somehow do this with older devices. So, companies that are maybe looking to leverage phones that maybe had done Cisco in the past, or just have a bunch of old phones, don't have to go out and buy a whole bunch of new Teams phones. It sounds like, and again, a lot of details still to be released, they'll be able to use existing phones and connect them to Microsoft Teams some form or fashion. Tom has some theories, we had some theories. Right now, it's all just a lot of theories of how this will be accomplished.

- Yeah, I think it opens up some, even some interesting possibilities beyond physical hardware as well, because there's also virtual SIP devices and, a bunch of other things out there. So, if it is standard SIP, then all you need is, like you said, basic or kinda phone functionality. So, I need the ability to ring, dial and answer. SIP would accommodate that. Again, like you said, as long as you can get the authentication, go and do what you need to do. So, not only is this potentially an opener for for existing devices that are modern, but maybe don't support Teams but do support SIP. So, Yealink, Polycom, those would certainly fall in there. You also have those older Skype for Business phones that needed firmware updates and things to work with Teams through Cloud gateways,

- Yeah.

- and potentially that all goes away too. Like some of those older Skype for Business phones could be a possibility for you to get on to your voice with those as well.

- Right, and Tom even calls that out because those originally, like it says the Skype for Business the three PiP, IP phones were gonna be supported for Teams until July 31st of 2023. So, like another three-ish years. But this blog article kinda removes that supported date and they're gonna be supported beyond 2023. So, this is one of those

- Yeah.

- cases where, there was actually a depreciation date that was announced and they said, "No, we changed our mind. It's gonna be later." Kind of like InfoPath and SharePoint designer.

- There's probably a little bit of calculus here that with global pandemic and potential downturns and things like that, our customers spending money on devices or do they have the money to spend on a device? So, if I'm on a legacy system that I knew was going to be deprecated in two years anyway, was I thinking about potentially upgrading it? Maybe, maybe not.

- Right.

- And even if, I was thinking about upgrading it, I probably haven't executed that yet. And do I now have the funding to make that happen or has that been diverted in another way? So, it seems like kind of a win-win, right? You get to continue to march down the path of, Skype for Business retirement and, you don't put this burden of a, of a large capital expenditure on customers to go and purchase new devices.

- Yeah, and I've talked to them clients that are like, "You know what? We'd love to do Voice in the Cloud. We're doing Office 365, we'd love to do Teams." I mean, you look at a lot of those phones. A lot of those phones are upwards of $300, the current Teams phones. And if you have 100 employees and, for some reason they'll need physical devices, because that still can be a thing that's $30,000 on new phones and to your point, they may not have that money and now they're like, "Oh, well, if we wait another six months, we can use our existing phones. We don't have that initial $30,000, $40,000 price tag to upgrade all of our hardware. Oh, we just have the licensing and we just keep using the phones we have." It helps a lot with user training. It helps a lot with that upfront cost. It might be some potential inroads to try to get some more people on the whole enterprise Voice and Office 365, Microsoft 365 as well.

- Yeah, it seems like it's a good one all around, but the devil will be in the details and implementation and all the other things.

- Right, how this is actually going to work

- Yeah.

- once that's rolled out.

- Which doesn't appear that it will be known until potentially closer to the middle of 2021, right? Cause you got H1 2021 in there.

- Yes, although they don't, I'm assuming that's calender H1 and not their fiscal H1.

- Yeah, it would be calendar.

- Yeah, so that's about it. We got a little long today, a little long winded, but it was good. I mean, it's good to be back in the office, recording on a real mic again.

- It's the little things.

- The details. So, yes. Go enjoy your week, enjoy your weekend. Enjoy Florida in August. And we'll talk to you next week.

- All right, thanks Ben.

- 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.