Tuesday 26 September 2017

Conference Day 2

Another full day today.  I am leaving the hotel at 7.30 in the morning and getting back around 7 so nearly 12 hours and the conference center is huge.  Its split across multiple buildings and can take 15 minutes to get from one end to another so sometimes location does factor into what talk you go to as if your first preference talk is at the opposite end from your current talk there is just no way to get to it in time.

The first talk I went to was 

How to make Hackathons great. 


The presenter of this wanted to get people in the room that had done hackathons to lead this talk but people were reluctant so he shared his ideas and by the end people had opened up.

There was no magic solution and what we are doing currently seems to go well with what was suggested.

The notes I made were as follows

Elements of a hackathon
  • Idea pitch
  • Team formation
  • The hack
  • Result presentaion
  • Mentoring - important role, subject matter expertise, technology, architecture, legal, marketing and business - for complex topics consider a technology mentor per team
  • Jury - Provide different perspective and viewpoints, gives feedback
  • Follow up
  • Staffing
  • Materials
  • Duration
  • Catering

It's important to create a safe environment - don’t records, don’t log details of people suggestions, make people feel safe they can contribute

Pitch - short concise present the pitch 1-2 minutes

Mix of skills, teams should be made of people with different skills and needs. Devs, designers, subject matter experts, etc

Use a framework - SCRUM - AGILE like approaches with micro sprints are quite successful

Preparation matters - Plan resources that are going to be needed at the start.  Whiteboards, flipcharts, wifi, software, venue etc

 1/3 or 1/2 ration of people with ideas to support staff - this number includes catering, registration, facilitation

Time management - make sure things keep on track

Floor Comments

Hallmark cards - typically run day sessions to cater for people with family life
The most important thing they found is getting the buy in from the top as it will take people out of work

One company bought in some local students to join in to bring in fresh ideas



Collaboration in the Office Apps


So this one went on about how people are working more collaboratively, typically coming together at conception to brainstorm ideas then going away to work on bits individually, checking in as a group to see how things are progressing, maybe going away again and then coming back together at the end

Again they pushed teams to help with this but the big take away was that collaborative working that we can do today with office online apps is coming to all versions of Outlook

Very soon people will be able to co-author on all versions of office PC, MAC, Android, IOS etc.  
Chat intergrationi is built into office so you can chat to other people you are working with while you collaborate.

Showed an example where in the comments section of an office doc he added a @someone and that notified the user on their phone that there was  document that needed their comments on.  This was done via a mobile app (i assume office 365) when the original requester logged back in to the document they got an updates that showed them what changes had been made

This functionality is dependent on the data being stored on one drive or sharepoint online - this can be done with team sites easily


Drive Yammer usage and adoption across your organization


So there were two main takeaways from this the first is that to drive yammer within our organization it needs to be driven from the top.  The content that gets sent out from the CEO or HR currently via emails and is very static if that was moved to yammer and it was encouraged for people to feedback on it that should be all the catalyst that is needed to drive yammer.  From there awareness will grow and people will hopefully start to use it themselves

The other one was teams vs yammer and that turned out to be fairly simple

Teams is for Team based communication where your audience is targeted and yammer is for a wider audience where people are necessary targeted.


The Microsoft teams team has a yammer group.  They use it to get feedback on the product from Microsoft employees.  It's the easiest way to get community feedback
Microsoft have an all hands live Q&A.  They gather questions ahead of time using Yammer and then discuss them live
They even it broadcasted live with Skype Broadcast

Virgin trains example
Good way for remote workers to keep in touch with their organisation
They had a message to say that not enough people were buying from the train shops.
Lots of ideas shared on yammer and employees were posting their success stories on yammer



 Thinking inside the box - Containers in Azure


Notes from session

Containers make things easier
It has to be Developer driven
Rapid deployment
Reproducible configurations on any cloud
Immutability - just deploy a new container over the top

Service separation - micro services, can pull large applications apart and create containers for the parts
High Availability
Scalable
Reduced costs - more containers on same hardware

Azure offers
Container instances - designed for small task based applications that run,  perfrom a task then shut down
Container services - full container service
Container registry - container hub for storing container instances

Docker engine - lets you run containers
Docker client - CLI to the docker engine
Docker Image - application template to be deployed multiple time

You can layer images, for example  windows > IIS > application

Saw a demo
Used visual studio to build an asp .net core application
Created new project, web application and was a check box to enable docker support



 Azure Customer Stories
26 September 2017
13:36
Azure.com/stories
Carmax - faster response to 16 million customers
Move to a dev / ops model
Reduce storage costs and gain scale

Gave them access to azure services such as redis cache they didn’t have to build themselves
Very easy to stand up new environments so if something didn’t work they could rebuild at very little costs and time


Azure Customer Stories 


Went through some Azure customer stories
https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/case-studies/


Bainshark
Rapidly growing video content, maxing out data center storage
 Moved videos to azure and benefited from adaptive biutrate streaming
Azure content delivery network increased video performance

Urban refuge

With azure you can build apps for android, ios and windows simultaneously using visual studio tools for xamarin https://www.xamarin.com/visual-studio

Generali
Backup 
Using Azure Site Recovery
Savings of 65%


Protect and control your sensitive emails with new office 365 message encryption capabilities


Existing encryption solutions are cumbersome due to having to distribute key especially as people started to consume email on multiple devices

Classify the content - how private is this data, then apply the relevant protection to the classification

Office 365 message encryption vision - anyone on any device in any email client

Microsoft now offer email protection in their outlook clients

User sends from outlook webapp to a 3rd party using gmail.  Creates the email and hits the protect button
By default it selects the  default template that encrypts the email and the recipient can only read the email not forward it on.  The user can change the level of protection they want from a number of drop downs.. You can even create your own templates

The recipient receives a wrapper email saying that someone has sent a protected message
The wrapper email can be customized by the sending organization.  This is just a normal email  so you can read this anywhere

There are two options to either use a one time pass code or to sign in with a federated service, Microsoft accounts, gmail and yahoo are currently federated

Once authenticated the email and attachments are then displayed in a web page with the allowed reply, forwarding, print, copy paste options

If the account isnt federated then the user clicks on the one time passcode link and gets emailed the passcode which they enter and can they view the email in a portal

Also works on outlook for macs outlook for IOS - no portal required when using outlook app

To turn this on you do need to run a powershell commandlet
In a few months it will be alwayws on for new tennants

Using mail flow you can force these policies to be on

If you want to use your own keys this is possible, place the key in the azure key vault and fire up Azure information protection.  If you do this then only you will have visibility of your keys.

There may be issues around compliance where companies cant see the email due to it being encrypted and stored on a portal



and to finish off

Some people were consuming the sessions in a break out area where this massive screen had the content from some sessions playing simultaneously and you could get a headset and tune into the audio of the session.  Useful if you didnt want to walk or wanted to flick between sessions




For the evening meal at the hotel I went with the Brisket 



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