Episode 179 – Azure Static Web Apps != Azure Static Websites

In Episode 179, Ben and Scott discuss some of their favorite announcements from Microsoft Build 2020 including Azure Static Web Apps, Microsoft Lists, improvements to Teams, and more! Transcript Email Download New Tab - [Ben] Welcome to Episode 179 of the Microsoft Cloud IT Pro Podcast recorded live on May 22 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, despite focusing on IT pros, Ben and Scott talk Build 2020 News, including Azure Static Web Apps, Microsoft List improvements to Teams and more. - [Ben] Now we're supposed to come up with some intro, we've ruined it. - [Scott] So... - [Ben] So build was this week. - [Scott] Build was this week. There was some fun stuff at Build. - [Ben] What do you say about them apples? How about them List? Or how about them Static Websites and Azure App Services. - [Scott] So those are actually pretty cool. - [Ben] They are spun one up the other day. - [Scott] Yeah? - [Ben] There were some, cool Build stuff. So we figured, why not talk about cool Build stuff? Because that's what all the cool kids are doing right now, right? - [Scott] There you go. Well, that's it. Why be trend setters when you can be trend followers? - [Ben] Exactly. It's way more easier to be followers. It's a lot less work. - [Scott] It is less work to be a follower. It's hard to gain followers. - [Ben] Although we've managed to do a decent job I think! - [Scott] There's always next week. - [Ben] There is always next week. I'm sure we could bomb it pretty quick. Kinda like that thing with your grades, right? You fail one test and your grade like drops in half and then it takes forever to recover. I bet you could do the same thing with followers. - [Scott] You could. Although I think grades are a little bit easier right now. I don't know how you're all handling it with homeschooling? But it seems like from what I've seen with my kids, and certainly my wife's school, they're kinda at the point where, I mean it's end of the year anyway. So, all grades were due last week that kinda thing. But it's really hit just that point where everybody has been doing this remote thing for a while, and you could have potentially had, like a month and a half to two months of a child that never showed up online, but they still turned in their work and did things, right? They never showed up to any of the online meetings or whatever it was. So what do you do like with those kids? They do the work, but was the meeting the participation? What does that look like? And how does that come through for grades? And it's a very interesting thing. So some of it's like, "They turned in the work. "Here's an A." Right. - [Scott] "At least they opened it up, that's a B. "They didn't look at it, they didn't turn it in. "Well, still kinda put 'em through, so that's a C." - [Ben] Yeah. So we've been talking to a bunch of our friends, 'cause we have friends in the neighborhood, friends from church, all of that, that their kids go to school and they're like, "I could never home-school." And, frankly, we don't envy them. Like the situation, you guys found yourselves in, is way more challenging than what we were in. Because my wife's been working with my kids all year, she knows exactly where they are, she has it all planned out, it doesn't really change anything. She's just continuing to work with them, and she knew exactly what place they all were and what they had to do to finish up and she can make sure there's the participation there 'cause she also wasn't working. Her work was her four kids and homeschooling, where you guys it's like, well we both still have to work, We have to try to help our kids keep learning, but yet we have absolutely no idea what our kids were necessarily doing in school or what the participation looked like. And you guys just kinda got thrown into the middle of it. That is like 100 times harder. - [Scott] Yeah, but I think-- - [Ben] I will stick to my opinion. - [Scott] Yeah, but I think compared to some households, like at least ours, we're pretty lucky. My wife's a teacher and she teaches grade school. So she's pretty close to the work that my kids are doing, 'cause I have one in grade school and one in middle school. Even for the middle schooler, 'cause my wife used to teach Middle School, she's got a lot of that kind of in her back pocket as well. So I've kind of made it through unscathed. - [Ben] I'm sure with your wife being a teacher, my wife and I got a good kick out of this. Again, not even with our kids in school, the CDC's recommendations for when kids go back to school this fall? - [Scott] No, what are their recommendations? - [Ben] Talk about something else I'm gonna have to find-- - [Scott] Oh, are you talking about that Venn diagram? The 123? - [Ben] No, like they literally CDC published a List of recommendations for going back to school. And it was absolutely absurd. Like you look through it and you're like, obviously the people that wrote this for the CDC have never been in a school before. It was like, no, I mean, it had things on there from their recommendations like, "No eating in the cafeteria. "Everybody eats lunch at their own desk. "All the hallways have to be one way hallways. "All the desks in the classrooms have to be at least "six feet apart." It was, here it is. I found it. I delayed enough while I was talking. - [Scott] "Considerations For Schools." - [Ben] Oh, this doesn't actually have the List though. I am going down that link rabbit trail of one link to the next link, but it stays in the same site, never actually gets you to the source. But yes, it is... Like you read through it and you're like, "Maybe you could get high schoolers to follow that?" But, like Grade school, Elementary school, I don't see how you can ever manage to do that in a school. - [Scott] I think they'll have to come up with some interesting, like workarounds. And ultimately, they're gonna have to do things that businesses are doing too. Potentially considers staggered days, so, maybe, as child in a class where you might have gone five days a week, you might only go two days a week to that class in person, because they're staggering through the rest of the school or whatever it happens to be. And certainly a lot of that stuff will change with lunchtimes, where you do your work, how much you're at your desk versus just randomly roaming the halls and things like that. And then the consideration becomes, certainly age and things like that. You're probably not gonna get a, two year old to wear a mask all day. But once you're into some of those grade schoolers, and certainly up from there, it's not so much about, "Can they do it?" It's like, you're just gonna have to do it. - [Ben] Yeah, it'll definitely be interesting. Maybe they can use Microsoft Lists to track everything that is going on. - [Scott] Maybe they could use-- - [Ben] That was a terrible segue. How was that for a horrible segue? - [Scott] Maybe they could use Microsoft. What is Microsoft List? - [Ben] What is Microsoft List? So apparently, I thought Microsoft Lists were just an improvement on SharePoint Lists. You dropped a bombshell on me this morning, saying, "I watched a 20 minute YouTube video, "that is the source of all things truth, "and Microsoft Lists or not SharePoint Lists. - [Scott] Well, that's not what I said. I said, "So Microsoft Lists are really just SharePoint Lists "when it's not telling anybody." - [Ben] Oh, is that what it was? - [Scott] That's what I said. - [Ben] I misheard. I need more coffee. - [Scott] Yeah, and there was pre-coffee, so. - [Ben] That was pre-coffee? Okay. That makes sense, I get that. That yes, they're SharePoint Lists. - [Scott] Except I think they announced it in a very confusing way, 'cause they don't really talk it. They talk about how it's the evolution of SharePoint Lists, but at no point do they actually say it's SharePoint on the back end, but then you start to go and look at the way things are created and you go, "Huh, that's interesting." Like, I got to create a new List and it asked me to pick a site to put that List in. And then all of a sudden, it's, "Hey, let's go use that List in SharePoint "or use it in Microsoft Teams, "and we're back to just a List," Which is cool. I've always thought Lists were very powerful things. And certainly it's better to have more functionality and more UI and things like that. I was a little confused when I saw an article on The Verge, about Microsoft Lists and it talks about how, "Hey, this is this great new thing." But it's not SharePoint anymore. And it's more like Airtable and I was like, "Hold on, dial it back." - [Ben] Okay. - [Scott] You read what the marketing folks gave you. - [Ben] Right. I was gonna say, so the first problem here was you went to The Verge and do you read. Those two things, I went to the Microsoft website, and I looked at pictures. And I didn't get any of that because I looked at pictures. There was was like, "Oh, it's just new SharePoint Lists." So I missed all the dramatization around it, because I was just looking at pictures and like you said when you look at it, and when you're looking at the pictures and diving into it, it like to me I just kind of was like, "Oh, it's a SharePoint Lists." Because it has all the same buttons, it has all the same... It does have an updated look and feel and it has some new functionality. But if you've been doing SharePoint Lists for long enough, it's a SharePoint List With new lipstick on it. - [Scott] Interesting, now that you've got Lists directly integrated into Teams, now Teams is not only your hub for chats and tasks and kinda yammer all the things they've been putting in there, now,...