Episode 183 – Microsoft 365 Network Monitoring Goodness

In Episode 183, Ben and Scott go through some of the recent announcements for network performance recommendations and the general availability of Azure Files AD DS authentication. Transcript Email Download New Tab - [Ben] Welcome to episode 183 of the Microsoft Cloud IT Pro Podcast recorded live on June 12th, 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 that relates to you. In this episode, Ben and Scott, jump back into Microsoft 365 land, to talk about recent announcements around network performance recommendations from Microsoft, as it relates to Microsoft 365. They also spend some time in Azure talking about Azure files and active directory authentication. - [Ben] How was week one? You are one week in the books as a blue badge. - [Scott] I survived it. - [Ben] Remotely, so you survived it. What is the first week kind of like a first week, anywhere else where you just, I think I saw it. You were just watching a bunch of videos, and doing a bunch of learning and figuring out where everything is, and what you're supposed to do, and where you're supposed to find that and all that. - [Scott] Yeah. Yeah, I mean, you go to a new company, you get to learn the way they do things. - [Ben] Yep, exactly. And now, since you're in the Eastern time zone, and they're in the Pacific time zone, are your hours like 11 to eight? - [Scott] No. No, I'm primarily in my hours so far. - [Ben] You're just sticking your hours so far. - [Scott] So far, mostly. - [Ben] Perfect. All right. So essentially, we're now a blue badge. I have a question for you that I ran across on Facebook. I'm going to not say who it is or not say which Facebook group I saw it in, so said person could remain nameless. But I have a question for you, Scott. Do you know, or the question was anyone, does anyone know what is the best way to add WordPress plugins, for creating their own design in SharePoint 2019? - [Scott] Step one, uninstall SharePoint 2019 step-- - [Ben] install WordPress. - [Scott] Step two, install WordPress, yes. PHP and.net and com are not compatible. - [Ben] They don't work together, it made me laugh. - [Scott] You could certainly write your, well I dunno, maybe like your SPFx thingamajiggers and put them in I-frames or something. And those could be in WordPress right? - [Ben] And then pull in a WordPress site. Just put WordPress in an I-frame in SharePoint, in teams. - [Scott] . - [Ben] Bingo. - [Scott] It's all just code somewhere. - [Ben] Inception for Office 365 and WordPress. Now I was making breakfast this morning and I saw that, and it just gave me a chuckle. - [Scott] Indeed, yeah well. - [Ben] Yeah, I don't have anything else, I'm tired. It's been a long week, I'm going on vacation next week. - [Scott] Yeah. - [Ben] Yeah. - [Scott] Disney's open again. - [Ben] No, We are actually going up. We're going North now, we're going up to Georgia. - [Scott] Georgia is not North, it's still in the South. - [Ben] It is North for me. - [Scott] very true. - [Ben] As is just about everything. - [Scott] There we go, very true. - [Ben] Yeah, so we're taking out for a week and just getting away with the whole family. Some of my in-laws us, we rented a house and we're gonna go social distance somewhere in the woods, in Georgia. - [Scott] Excellent, we're thinking about doing the same, but we'll do it closer to when the leaves change. 'Cause Palm tree leaves don't really change color, but if you do go to Georgia or North Carolina or South Carolina, you start to get into leaves. That actually changed, so we're gonna do that more in like October, November. - [Ben] Got it, nice, I think we might, well, it's not a might actually later this year, we aren't gonna brave the airports too and fly up to Michigan to see my family. We bought plane tickets the other day. They were cheap. Nice thing is it's a direct flight from one small airport to another small airport with no layovers, no Atlanta, no anything. So we shall see how that goes. I will let you know how the airports are later the summer. - [Scott} Basket up. - [Ben] Yup. Well, so it was interesting when I booked the flights, they actually give you a, they put a disclaimer on there that based on how many plane tickets we're gonna sell, we may not be able to adhere to social distancing guidelines on the plane. And then they give you a check box. Do you want to be notified when this flight is over like 60% sold? So you can book these flights and then get notified if your plane is gonna be really full and if you can adhere to social distancing. And I'm assuming they'd let you cancel or reschedule if you're uncomfortable with a over 60% full flight, which just seems weird because the last time I was on a flight that had that few people. I don't remember the last time I was on a flight that had that few people. - [Scott] Yeah, that'd be a pretty interesting thing. - [Ben] So, I will let you know on that other news I'm just full of random tidbits of news. - [Ben] As IT professionals and 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 cost hubs 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 byproduct 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 Overcast. Find out more on sharegate.com/it pro. - [Ben] So I'm trying something else. I'm gonna do some self promotion. Could I do some self promotion at the beginning of our podcast. I'm I allowed to do that? - [Scott] Sure. As long as it's shameless self promotion. - [Ben] As long as it's shameless. So July 9, I'm gonna try something new, I'm gonna actually do a one day workshop, like all in teams for 20 people. And it's gonna be a combination of some videos. We'll have some live calls, some office hours, some resources people can download and it will be within teams from 7:00 a.m Eastern to 7:00 p.m Eastern time. And... - [Scott] 12 hours. - [Ben] 12 hours. But it's not gonna be that you have to be there for 12 hours. So 77 bucks, you can go sign up. I'm limiting it to 20 people. So I have enough time to give everybody attention and you can come in, watch the videos work through like challenges that I'm gonna have in your team in terms of configuring teams policies, and some of the team settings and messaging policies and all of that. And then you'll have resources you can download. And during those 12 hours I'll be available for chat for office hour type calls for some one on one calls and then you'll have access to everything for like 30 days after that. But I won't be actively monitoring that team's channel anymore - [Scott] Gotcha. - [Ben] So there is going to be a registration in the show notes because I need to make sure I have the URL, right? So go look at the show notes 'Cause I'm still getting the registration all set up and configured. But if you are interested in learning all about teams policies in a one day workshop and then have a bunch of resources to go take and do at your your own tenant and, or threaten your own tenant, Go click the registration link in the show notes and find out more. - [Scott] Very cool. - [Ben] And then maybe I'll do more. If people like it and I fill up, I can always do more workshops for 20 people, or I may expand it out and do one day or two day or three days on different topics. So if this isn't your cup of tea, let me know and we'll see what other workshops we can do. - [Scott] Just like that. You're so accommodating. - [Ben] Just like that. I am, I do it for the people Scott. All about the people. - [Scott] All about them, huh. - [Ben] Okay. All about, yes, Okay. We're gonna stop. Now we'll get into some real news. Do you wanna talk about, well that's real news. Do you wanna talk about other news? That's not my news. - [Scott] Yeah, how about network assessments? You wanna start there? - [Ben] Network assessments. So this one was interesting. And if you have been paying attention to conferences, this was actually initially announced back getting night. As I went back and dug through it. And I really hadn't seen anything else about it. And then Jeff Teper has recorded a keynote that has been playing at a few of the conferences going around. It was at the virtual marathon that I took part in. I think there was... What was the one in Europe? There was one in Europe, I think this past week. - [Scott] The European Collaboration Summit. - [Ben] Yeah. I thought they had a different name. But I know it's the... - [Scott] ECS. - [Ben] ECS, Okay. So there was that one, I think there was one other one. And then there's the Collab365 Summit that is their global Cantu. That's actually gonna be going on when this comes out. But in there Jeff Teper and I can't remember who else. Somebody else joined him for the keynote, but he talked about a network performance tool. And as you have, it's tied to Office or Office 365, Microsoft 365. And as you set up your offices in different locations, this tool can tell you about network performance in these different locations around the world or around whatever country you're in and what t