Office 365 Evangelist

Want to apologize to you, my faithful readers, for not being able to get back to my Office 365 Build Out Lab blog series. I have been slammed with work, yes the job that actually pays me J, and have not had a chance to get back to my build out. This weekend has been extremely busy, my company, well I wish it was mine, got a great opportunity to assist a client who went Google and is now wondering why! So I have been working this weekend, between a few breaks and my BRONCOS WIN, on getting everything ready to WOW the client Monday afternoon. I also had to finalize my three presentations for the Cloud and Virtualization Live! Conference, the presentations were due on Friday and thankfully the speaker coordinator allowed me the weekend to complete.

I hope to get back to my build out with Office 365 vNext early this coming week, but I’m not promising anything. Again sorry for the delay, but the wait will be worth it!

The last two weeks have been very busy for me. I headed out to Orlando two weeks ago for the Microsoft Exchange Conference (MEC) and then last week I was up in Redmond for a Microsoft Partner Team event around Office 365. Tomorrow is the next Office 365 International User Group meeting. Neither of these trips involved me speaking. I did help out (well hang out) in the MVP area at MEC and answer questions and also help out at a few whiteboard sessions, but no official speaking engagements. Early last week I was approached by Mike Pfieffer (@Mike_Pfeiffer) to see if I could help lighten his heavy workload in December. Mike was an Exchange MVP, and I saw was because he was recently hired by Microsoft and Microsoft employees cannot be MVPs. He was set to speak at the Cloud and Virtualization Live! Conference in December and wanted to know if I could cover his three sessions. I jumped at the opportunity to speak at such a large and prestigious conference. Mike contact the conference coordinator for the conference and luckily for me they accepted me as a valid replacement for Mike.

I will be presenting at three session listed below:

CVW02 Exchange Hybrid Deployment Notes from the Field

CVW06 Deploying Single Sign On with Office 365

CVW10 Unified Communications in Office 365 using Lync Online

Please check out the conference and I encourage you to attend if you can. I look forward to speaking at and attending the conference. There are many great speakers and information that are a part of this conference.

First off want to thank all of the attendees to my first Lync to Learn Session about Lync to Phone! At one point I looked and noticed during my presentation that there were 116 attendees! The session was not without incident, had a couple hiccups with the Lync Meeting, probably not the best to do the session over my Lync 2013 client, learned that my secondary monitor was not able to share content. Luckily Josh and I connected early and found this issue out, so I was able to adjust my presentation to ensure the attendees could see and experience what I was doing.

I went over a very, very short slide deck, only 9 slides. The main portion of the session was demo related. I was able to show how to configure Office 365 to enable Lync to Phone and Voice Mail via Unified Messaging. All through the session I did my best to answer questions from the attendees that were posted in the IM portion of the meeting. I think that I was able to catch and answer the majority of the questions, if I missed a question please feel free to post it to the comments here and I will answer.

Here is a link to my short PowerPoint presentation. The session was recorded, so it should be available in the next few days on the http://community.office365.com site.

Next Thursday, September 20^th at 11am Mountain, I will be presenting a Lync and Learn session. This session will focus on the Office 365 Lync Online Lync to Phone Service. Lync to Phone enables dial tone to Lync Online via Jajah. I hope you can join the session and learn more about Lync to Phone, http://community.office365.com/en-us/blogs/office_365_technical_blog/archive/2012/09/13/lync-to-phone-overview-and-setup-lync-and-learn.aspx
Follow the link to read more about the session and download the Lync Meeting invite for the session.

About Lync and Learn: (From the Community Page, http://community.office365.com/en-us/wikis/administration/lync-and-learn.aspx)

Our Lync and Learn program allows Community members to present 30 minute to 1 hour Lync sessions to the entire Office 365 community. This is a great opportunity for anyone to gain valuable exposure, networking, and share their knowledge. Below is the list of past and upcoming Lync and Learn programs.

Today Microsoft and the http://community.office365.com site hosted an Office 365 Expert Discussion Series: Troubleshooting Issues with Sending and Receiving Email in Office 365. This was a great session that discussed the Do It Yourself (DIY) troubleshooting tool for Office 365, and other resources available to assist Office 365/Exchange Online administrators with identifying and correcting any issues with Email flow in Exchange Online. The Session was recorded so you can watch the recording and get some tips and tricks for self help with Office 365.

On a side note, I recently was accepted as a member of The Grid. What is The Grid, well I think the below explanation from the FAQ on the site sums it up pretty well:

What is The Grid?

The Grid is a new community that brings together an exclusive group of Office 365 beta participants to facilitate knowledge sharing and learning among members to help each other get the most from Microsoft’s next generation of communications and collaboration services.

The reason I mention this is that I have volunteer for a Lync and Learn session around the new Lync to Phone service. It is tentatively scheduled for August 30^th at 10am Pacific time. Once this is finalized I will be tweeting and blogging about it. My plan it to expand on my two blog posts about Lync to Phone. Hope you all can come and join in on the session.

So Today was a good day! I am right now sitting in the San Antonio airport waiting on a flight back home to Denver, but earlier today I got a chance to take a tour of the Microsoft Datacenter in the area! This opportunity was part of a joint event between Catapult Systems and Microsoft around Cloud Services. I spoke about Office 365 and the journey to the cloud, and a Microsoft Azure specialist talked about the Azure services. After we completely bored the audience we were all taken on an in-depth tour of the very impressive Datacenter. Very, very impressed with the facility overall and the team in charge on its care and management.

As a Microsoft Partner, I am under a companywide NDA, and to gain entry to the facility I had to sign two additional documents, one being another NDA; so at this time I am reluctant to provide any details of the tour, but am working with Microsoft to determine what I can say about the tour and will update this post with public information I can disclose. I will say this again, very impressed with the facility, the cleanliness, the attention to detail and the overall scale of the site!

One cool piece of information that was talked about in the Azure session was the information about the upcoming Azure Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) offering coming later this year! After seeing the Datacenter I know this will be a huge success and a great way for companies to expand to the cloud and take advantage of Microsoft massive investment in Cloud Computing!

Hopefully more to come about the datacenter itself, just waiting on a few lawyers, Marketing people and the planets to align!

UPDATE:

I found some small tidbits that I am allowed to say about the datacenter from the Microsoft Site, http://www.globalfoundationservices.com  The GFS is the branch of Microsoft that designs, builds and runs the datacenters around the world for Microsoft.  here is a good overview about the San Antonio, TX dataceter,

http://blogs.technet.com/b/jweston/archive/2008/04/15/article-on-microsoft-s-san-antonio-s-data-center.aspx

The San Antonio, TX Datacenter covers almost 500,000 square feet of space.  This datacenter along with the other datacenters contain over 200 properties, or services, for Microsoft.  Really think of the GFS as the datacenter provider and the various online properties like Bing, Hotmail, Office 365, Azure, etc as tenants in these massive datacenters.  Really the GFC datacenter locations are actually just collocation facilities  for the over 200 online properties of Microsoft.

Sorry I can’t give you all the meaty details, but want to ensure I stay within my NDA.  I will say this, while the San Antonio datacenter was great to see, it is only a Gen 2 datacenter.  Microsoft is already rolling out Gen 4 datacenters that truly are module in every aspect!

The month of May is going to be a busy for me with three speaking engagements in three different states. First up next week I will be traveling to Phoenix to speak at the Cloud Intelligence Conference Phoenix 2012 This is a one day mini-conference May 8^th, I will be speaking about the Value of Office 365 for the Enterprise. This conference has a pretty impressive lineup of speakers, if you are in the Phoenix area I highly recommend you make plans to attend. While out in Phoenix I will also be pretty busy making the rounds with the local Microsoft reps and client visits to help support the newly opened Catapult Phoenix office!

Next up will be the following week in San Antonio, TX. I will be speaking about Office 365 and You Journey to the Cloud at a Microsoft Executive Cloud Briefing and Datacenter Tour. Yes that last part is really cool; Microsoft is providing a tour of one of their Datacenters! I am really looking forward to talking about Office 365 but truly more excited to check out the datacenter.

Rounding out the month I will be presenting at the 4^th Annual (I believe it is the 4^th, I have presented at the past 2) Rocky Mountain Tech Trifecta May 19^th. I will be speaking about Office 365 Hybrid Deployment with Exchange 2010 SP2, highlighting the advancements with the new Hybrid Wizard. This is a free event and I highly recommend it. They are running a promotion for registered attendees to tweet about the event and the winner will receive an Xbox 360 Kinect Star Wars Limited Edition bundle. So go register, tweet and attend and you could be the lucky winner of the prize!

Just finished presenting my session for Office 365 Saturday here in Redmond. My session topic was Office 365 Hybrid Deployment with Exchange 2010 SP2. Overall the session went good, had some good questions and discussion with the audience. The only negative is that I only had 5 attendees in the room. I attribute the low number not as much to me or my topic specifically, but rather that much of the content and attendees are SharePoint focused. I am still very glad I came to present and feel it has been very worthwhile as I have met many new people and had great ad hoc discussions around infrastructure related Office 365 topics.

You can download my slides here

I am working on my presentation and lab environment in preparation for the Inaugural Office 365 Saturday Event this Saturday, February 25^th, in Redmond, WA. I was very honored to be selected as a session presenter for this event! My session is dealing with an Office 365 Hybrid Deployment using the new Hybrid Wizard with Exchange 2010 Service Pack 2. I have previously blogged about my experience with implementing this solution here. What I have been doing is getting the proper slide deck ready for the session (trying very hard not to give a death by PowerPoint presentation) and ensure my LIVE slash lab environment is up to snuff and ready for demonstration (my goal for the majority of the session).

I have friends in the SQL and SharePoint community and have seen the explosion of the “Saturday” events for both technologies. If you are not familiar with these type of event here is a quick intro:

1. They are Free – Supported by companies within the technology by sponsorship
2. They are local – The event organizers present the Saturday events at numerous location throughout the US and the world
3. They bring in the best speakers to talk about the technology
4. They are great for networking – again these are local events
5. They are constantly evolving – it is not the same event from location to location; each event is an event onto itself with local input to the speakers, session and criteria and is constantly being updated based on the technology enhancements
6. They are Free – did I mention this? Completely free for the attendees

So back to this Saturday, a new organization has popped up to bring Office 365 to the masses, http://office365saturday.org/ Go check them out, and if Redmond is too far away for you to attend this Saturday, you can vote on the next location for Office 365 Saturday.

If you are a SQL admin/user please go here to learn about SQL Saturday, http://www.sqlsaturday.com/

And for the SharePoint Saturday org, please go here http://www.sharepointsaturday.org/default.aspx

As mentioned all these organizations rely on the help from the community, sponsors and vendors, helping cover the cost of such great events. Even if you don’t have the time to attend an event but believe in the service and the availability of the training, please review the sites and if appropriate let the sponsors know that you appreciate them making these type of events possible!

February 9, 2012; it was a great day for the Microsoft Cloud community and users! Cloud Fest Denver was today and it was a great event! The crew that put on this event was outstanding; I was really impressed with the number of attendees at the conference today. It really showed that Cloud computing has companies interested and that the future is bright for the Cloud. My session, ‘Office 365 Value for the Enterprise’, was well attended and the interaction from the audience showed me that Cloud computing and Office 365 is very much front and center in the minds of IT and management.

My session was meant to be a more high level session, but as I encouraged and took questions from my audience, it delved into more technical details and process, and that these items are high on the minds on the IT management and technical users in the field. My session was 70 minutes, and it could have easily gone another 70 minutes with all the great questions and interaction from the audience. I really think that if it was not for my session running up against the lunch break that we would have had to be kicked out from our room. I totally appreciated the participation and appreciate that the audience asked questions so I could assist them as a whole in understanding how Office 365 provided value to the enterprise. The Audience was very well educated, the questions asked were, for the most part, questions I had expected and tried to answer to the best of my knowledge.

I always learn when presenting, or more to the pint consulting. I know this sounds funny; I should be the one educating or expertly directing a project. But truthfully, as a consultant and speaker, there is no better way to learn than by being in a new organization and talking to clients to understand their specific needs and wants. I have found that while I might do my best to know the service or product I am implementing, seeing and hearing the needs of each client makes me learn more about the service or product. Each situation is unique, and when I go into a consulting engagement I find that my overall knowledge helps, I still learn from the client. This then makes me a better consultant.

So today I hoped I helped users and companies with information about Office 365; I learned by the questioned asked what are the issues and barriers from a company moving to Office 365. Why is implement Single Sign-On (SSO) with ADFS? Why setup a Hybrid Deployment? Why move to Office 365? What changes with my users’ experience when moving to Office 365? I try to anticipate questions and prepare for questions that my presentation will involve. But there is no substitute for actually presenting in front of an audience that is facing the challenges and real world questions of a move to the Cloud.

I want to truly thank the attendees for spending their time in my session. I hope you learned from me, because I definitely learned from you!