Kurt Shintaku's Blog

Microsoft Teams has arrived to Office 365, bringing a chat-based workspace to your fingertips. See how Microsoft Teams can pull together everything you need to collaborate – schedule and conduct meetings, share notes and files, have threaded conversations – all in one place.

Hear from Emmitt Smith, Hall of Fame NFL Running Back, Businessman and Entrepreneur, on how to unlock the potential of teams and see a live demo of the new Microsoft Teams.

At this event, you’ll learn:

• How to make your team more effective and give them instant access to everything they need — right in Office 365.
• A new way to work in an open environment and how to be more productive working as a team.
• How other organizations are already using Microsoft Teams.

Event details:

• AGENDA:
  9:00AM Registration
  10:00AM Introducing Microsoft Teams
  11:00AM Customer Panel
  11:30AM The Art of Teams with Emmitt Smith
  12:30PM Lunch Reception and Hands on Demos
• DATE:
  April 25, 2017
• TIME:
  10:00 AM – 1:30 PM
• LOCATION:
  The Novo by Microsoft
  800 W. Olympic Blvd.
  Los Angeles, CA 90015
• REGISTRATION:
  https://www.microsoftevents.com/profile/form/index.cfm?PKformID=0x16570109853

“90% of CEOs believe that the digital economy will impact their industry but less than 15% are executing on a digital strategy” -MIT Sloan & Cap Gemini.  On Wednesday, March 29th join Microsoft online as we livestream from the Microsoft Campus and share actionable insights to add to your company’s digital transformation journey. The virtual event is open to all business leaders looking to learn how digital transformation is being applied across various industries and disciplines.

Join this event to learn about:

• New technology trends like artificial intelligence and blockchain that will affect the way your business operates and engages customers
• Strategies for keeping your organization secure against cyberthreats
• Customer-centric marketing in the new digital age
• The opportunities presented by the combination of LinkedIn with Microsoft

Be sure to stay engaged and connect with your peers! Follow us on Twitter @MSFT_Business and share your thoughts and questions during the event using #CXOsummit17.

Save the date and register to join us!

• DATE:
  Wednesday, March 29^th
• TIME:
  8:15am-11:30am PT / 11:15am-2:30pm ET
• REGISTRATION:
  https://vts.inxpo.com/scripts/Server.nxp?LASCmd=AI:4;F:QS!10100&ShowKey=37233

Avanade has written a nice blog post that talks to the frequent issue of “what Office 365 collaboration tool should we use for a given need”. 

They wrote a blog post that outlines 9 modes of communication & collaboration and how they appear to different generations in the workforce.  They also should what specific Microsoft Office 365 solutions meet these needs.

Read the full blog post here:

• BLOG: Microsoft Teams Supercharges Collaboration for Millennials to Boomers
  http://blog.avanade.com/avanade-insights/collaboration/microsoft-teams-supercharges-collaboration-for-millennials-to-boomers/

Download the slides here:

• SLIDES: Generational Preferences at Work
  https://1drv.ms/p/s!Ao0Dfn8MQdoAqpQqyK84azDdF_pkIw

Today Jeff Teper, CVP of SharePoint & OneDrive for Business, announced the SharePoint Virtual Summit, an online event similar to last year’s news-packed “The Future of SharePoint” event, taking place on May 16th, 2017. 

Taken from the announcement page:

At this year’s SharePoint Virtual Summit you’ll learn how to take advantage of SharePoint, OneDrive and the rest of the Office 365 collaboration toolkit to create a connected workplace, empowering you to securely connect to the people and content you need, to transform business processes, to inform and engage your employees, and to harness the collective knowledge of your organization.

Microsoft Corporate Vice President Jeff Teper will unveil the latest product innovations and roadmap. You’ll also hear from industry-leading customers on how they are leveraging these technologies as part of their digital transformation. Jeff will be joined by Microsoft Corporate Vice Presidents James Phillips and Chuck Friedman to discuss how Office 365— connected with Windows and Azure—is reinventing productivity for you, your teams and your organization.

• DATE/TIME:
  May 16, 2017 – 10:00AM-1:00PM (PDT)
• REGISTRATION:
  https://resources.office.com/ww-landing-sharepoint-virtual-summit-2017

Read more at the announcement site here:

• BLOG: Announcing the SharePoint Virtual Summit
  https://blogs.office.com/2017/03/21/announcing-the-sharepoint-virtual-summit/

With large enterprises deploying Azure Site Recovery (ASR) as their trusted Disaster Recovery solution to protect hundreds of virtual machines to Microsoft Azure, proper deployment planning before production rollout is critical. Today, we are excited to announce the Public Preview of the Azure Site Recovery Deployment Planner. This tool that helps enterprise customers to understand their on-premises networking requirements, Microsoft Azure compute and storage requirements for successful ASR replication, and test failover or failover of their applications. In the current public preview the tool is available only for the VMware to Azure scenario.

• The Deployment Planner can be run without having to install any ASR components in your on-premises environment.
• The tool does not impact the performance of the production servers, as no direct connection is made to them. All performance data is collected from the VMware vCenter Server/VMware vSphere ESXi Server which hosts the production virtual machines.

For more information on the Public Preview or to download the tool, visit:

• BLOG: Public Preview of Azure Site Recovery Deployment Planner for VMware
  https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/azure-site-recovery-deployment-planner/
• DOWNLOAD: Azure Site Recovery Deployment Planner
  https://aka.ms/asr-deployment-planner-doc

Damn. I missed this.

Apparently, the Azure Active Directory engineering team did an “Ask Me Anything” (AMA) on Reddit On March 9th from 10AM-1PM PST.
https://blogs.technet.microsoft.com/enterprisemobility/2017/03/02/first-ever-azure-ad-ask-me-anything-ama-march-9th-10am-1pm-pacific/

Here’s a few of the many, many questions they answered:

• “ETA on Azure Active Directory Domain Services in ARM?”
• “Any cool new AAD-Joined device features in the pipeline?”
• “When we can expect self service reset to be available from the windows lock screen?”
• “Why doesn’t the Authenticator App say what you are trying to authenticate?”
• “I have O365 and have just purchased EMS/Azure AD Premium, what should I do next?”

Yeah, I’m ticked I missed this and even more ticked I didn’t get to share it with y’all before it happened.

Here’s the archive of the AMA for your own viewing:

• REDDIT: AMA Azure Active Directory Engineering Team:
  https://www.reddit.com/r/AZURE/comments/5y9a1h/ama_azure_active_directory_engineering_team/

Here’s the video from the product team about Azure Active Directory:

Taken from the registration site:

Customers and employees quickly judge the health and relevance of organizations based on their application experience.  Because of this, it’s never been more important to ensure that the most stunning, innovative and insightful applications are being designed, released, maintained and continuously improved.

Microsoft technologies support a holistic environment that can succinctly deliver the most intelligent applications, streamlined operations, and an IT platform that allows you to create a new breed of applications. Being able to successfully combine DevOps, mobile + web application development, and intelligence can produce truly innovative applications that can drive these successes and gain/maintain customer and employee loyalty.

This event will provide you with the insight to optimize your development, IT operations, and data departments, turning them from cost centers into innovation centers. Let us help you enable a robust application platform that can support your next generation of innovative applications.

WHO SHOULD ATTEND

Sr. Development, IT and Data Professionals who are interested in identifying how they can move their organization forward by implementing DevOps practices, tools and adoption of the newest application architecture and functionality that can differentiate their organization from their competitors.

We suggest that you forward this to your colleagues who would be working with you on implementing this transformation.

Please note:  This is ‘NOT’ a hands-on lab boot camp.

• DATE/TIME:
  Irvine – March 28th
  9:00 AM – 4:30 PM 
  (Other cities listed here)
• LOCATION:
  Microsoft Office – Irvine
  3 Park Plaza, Suite 1600
  Irvine, CA 92614
  (Other cities listed here)
• REGISTRATION:
• IRVINE – March 28th
  https://www.microsoftevents.com/profile/form/index.cfm?PKformID=0x136171242ea
• OTHER CITIES – Various Dates
  https://www.microsoftevents.com/profile/web/index.cfm?PKWebId=0x353610aa38

Have you received the new Outlook “Focused Inbox” through Office 365 Updates?  Having problems adapting to it and wanna disable it?

For Outlook 2016 (Windows)

• Select View tab
• Unclick “Show Focused Inbox” button

For Outlook 2016 (Mac)

• Select Organize tab
• Unclick “Focused Inbox” button

For Outlook Web App (Online)

• Select “Settings” gear
• Navigate to “Display Settings” –> “Focused Inbox”
• Select “Don’t sort messages”

Build and connect intelligent bots to interact with Microsoft Teams users naturally through chat.

Or bring your existing bot from another channel, and add Teams-specific support to make your experience shine.

Or if you are just looking for a way to simply extend your team by integrating with custom tools and services in a secure manner, check out our new Custom Bots feature.

• Getting Started with Bots for Microsoft Teams (preview)https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-teams/bots

Taken from the UserVoice site for Microsoft Teams:

For those who want to be able to format text on the fly or collaborate on code, Markdown has finally arrived. Now, you’ve got a quick, easy way to perform the following actions:

• Add asterisks to either end of some text to make it bold
• Underscore the beginning and end of some text in order to make it italic
• Add a tilde before and after your text to strike through
• Add a double pound sign (##) before your text to create a Header
• Type [text](URL) to create a hyperlink within a message
• To start a bulleted list, preface your text with an asterisk (*) or a hyphen (-)
• To start a numbered list, preface your text with
• To create a block quote, just add a right-hand bracket (>) before your text

Even better, our markdown syntax includes support for code:

• To add an inline block of code, start and end the block of text you want to add with an `
• To add a multi-line block of code, preface your text with “` and then paste it into your compose box

Please let us know how it goes and keep adding more suggestions here!

Suphatra

Twitter: @skprufo