On the SPOT - Technology Podcast

Recorded November 30, 2017

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In today’s On the SPOT News Brief, Jay Leask and Craig Jahnke journey from Microsoft’s announcement that Delve is Dead (or at least the functionality is going to be integrated elsewhere) to Amazon’s AI consulting program, from Apple’s “I am Root” issue to IoT child-proofing, until we end presenting a perspective on all the Net Neutrality “hype” that neither of us really agree with.

TOPIC FOR THIS WEEK

Microsoft kills Windows 10 app Delve

Seems kind of like a click bait title because while Microsoft is killing only the Windows 10 app, it is integrating the technology into other places as part of the operating system.

Microsoft Azure is growing faster than AWS backed by big brands

If you’ve been to any of the conferences you’ve seen the big brands behind Microsoft’s latest case studies.

Companies are using multiple Cloud providers to avoid being locked into any one provider.

Amazon unveils AI consulting program for cloud customers

Trying to make it easier for you, trying to give you expertise by gaining access to theirs.

Major Apple Vulnerability Lets Anyone Log Into Macs Running Its Latest Operating System

Jay’s wife just asked me about this one actually, their school system runs on Macs, which is annoying for him because I can’t troubleshoot them at all.

Anyone one running latest Apple operating system can log in as the root user (highest admin level rights) without using a password.

Child-proofing the Internet of Things | EurekAlert! Science News

A one year project funded by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC), NSPCC, the Family Online Safety Institute, and the Micro:Bit Educational Foundation, researchers from Lancaster University.

Pro-Neutrality, Anti-Title II

The author explains why the graphic going around about Portugal was fake

Talks about the cost of regulation

Points out there is no evidence of “wide spread” mismanagent of internet access by ISPs

That ISPs are “motivated to maximize the number of end users. That means not cutting off sites and apps those customers want”

Unrelated: if you haven’t seen it, apparently Comcast stated very clearly that they wouldn’t take advantage of the loss of Net Neutrality, but immediately after FCC announced their plans, Comcast deleted that post

Closing the show, Jay reveals Dinosaur, literally means terrible lizard and we find out that Craig cannot pronounce the word “paleontologist”.We appreciate you joining us today, and if you have a topic you want us to discuss ping us on Twitter to let us know!

Recorded November 22, 2017

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In today’s On the SPOT News Brief, Jay Leask and Craig Jahnke discuss Thanksgiving, SharePoint Saturday Chicago and MIcrosoft Teams, but mostly this is an introductory discussion on Net Neutrality and how the FCC’s recent announcement will effect your life.

But first, November listens are 750% up from October (150 unique listens prior to this episode, versus October’s 20) — which isn’t saying much, but I’m excited about it!

SPSChicago – 12 Sessions, 100 attendees, and full rooms.  Tracks were Office 365, Microsoft Teams, AI and Big Data.  Feedback was that it really liked it.

Microsoft’s Skype for Business Shift to Teams Could Be 3 Year Transition

Microsoft is using a newer infrastructure for voice and video that’s shared with the consumer version of Skype

Plan to achieve feature parity before calendar-year 2019

Current Skype for Business solutions are expected to work at least until Oct. 2020

Net Neutrality

What is it about?

Jay’s Take: Net Neutrality ensures that if you pay for internet access you get access to all of it. Liberal, Conservative; Professional, Amateur; Foreign, Domestic; Rich, Poor; Your ISP or their competitor. Net Neutrality give you the ability to get to it all.

Craig’s Take: He agreed with Jay, but doesn’t know if it is as simple as that.  So much of what I have seen has come from the user’s side basically saying people good and corporations are bad.   I think there is some grey area there. If ISP’s are able to charge more for bandwidth hogs, they will be able invest more in innovation and open the door for competition.

Arguments against Net Neutrality

* Portugal took down Net Neutrality and is starting to see content-based tiers from ISPs.

The laws that Net Neutrality are guaranteed by are draconian and meant to keep the giant phone conglomerates from being able to take over.

If you are supplying resources, such as the backbone that the internet is on, by rolling back on Net Neutrality you enable ways to recuperate expenses based on uses.

ISPs believe that heavier users of the Internet should pay more. This extra money could be used to increase the bandwidth of the Internet for everyone and drive prices down (Phil for Humanity).

It allows ISPs to charge those who use bandwidth-hogging services such as Netflix or bit torrent extra for using those services.

It will feed innovation by providing funding from these bandwidth hogs to “build advanced fiber networks” that enable new internet services

Arguments for Net Neutrality

Marvin Ammori of Huffington Post argues that without Net Neutrality regulations, an ISP can choose to block content on a whim, for example, if you use #comcastsucks as a Comcast subscriber, or #wishihadcomcast as a Fios subscriber,

Recorded November 16, 2017

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In today’s On the SPOT News Brief, Jay Leask and Craig Jahnke discuss SPTechCon, Cognitive Services, Compliance and GDPR, Salesforce and Google, Kaspersky Software, and the great Redwood Forests:

* SPTechCon recap: Held November 12-15, Jay got to attend (no booth duty!) the Washington D.C. SPTechCon, and had a blast. Presentations ranged from “What is Office 365 Groups” (I may have paraphrased the title) and “Tackling Adoption like a Service” to “Enhancing SharePoint with Azure Cognitive Services” and “Office 365 Compliance” (with Azure). It really had a little something for everyone and if you want to know more about any of the sessions reach out to the presenters and ask for their deck – not a single presenter Jay spoke with was unwilling to share. We <3 the SharePoint Community!

* Microsoft announces GDPR Compliance Dashboard: With GDPR falling hard on us in Q2 2018, everyone is trying to make it easy. To that end Microsoft has announced the Compliance Manager Preview, enabling you to ensure data security for regulations such as GDPR across all of Microsoft 365.

* Salesforce announces Google partnership: Frenemies once again, Salesforce has been suggesting Microsoft has fallen behind the eight-ball and adds Google to its list of cloud partners (You may recall in 2016 AWS was announced their preferred infrastructure partner). This may be posturing and publicity, or it may be a larger rift beginning to form, but either way, if you use Salesforce beyond it’s out of the box capabilities this may be important to you!

* Kaspersky Software denies malicious intent: The saga continues (not Star Wars, this time) as Karspersky responds to allegations that it was hacking NSA servers. Supposedly they were just doing their job, and when they realized they had classified content the immediately destroyed it. This will stick around for at least a few months as they are investigated and the repercussions of those findings come to light.

Similar to the usefulness of a fortune cookie, Jay closed the show with not only a dinosaur fact of the day, but an anecdote he heard at SPTechCon from Liam Cleary about the great Redwood Forests (yes, you’ll just have to listen to hear it). We appreciate you joining us today, and if you have a topic you want us to discuss ping us on Twitter to let us know!

Dinosaur Facts of the Day: The smallest dinosaur was 4 inches and weighed less than a chih...

This episode of On the SPOT, Community Edition, was recorded Saturday, October 14th, 2017, at SharePoint Saturday Cincinnati.

During this episode, Craig took some time out of the SharePoint Saturday festivities to sit down with Stacy Deere-Strole, founder and organizer for SharePoint Saturday Cincinnati and Owner/SharePoint Architect at Focal Point Solutions, LLC. Craig and Stacy discuss how Stacy came to found SPS Cincinnati, how she found her way into SharePoint and how others can become involved in the SharePoint community themselves.

Stacy can be found on LinkedIn | @sldeere | Blog

These On the SPOT Community edition episodes allow Craig and Jay to meet with community influencers around the globe at live events to discuss who they are, how they got there, what do they specialize in, and what tips they may have for other professionals who are interested in making their own niche in the space.

This episode of On the SPOT, Community Edition, was recorded Monday, November 13, 2017 at SPTechCon, the SharePoint Technology Conference in Bethesda Maryland, right outside Washington DC.

During this episode, Jay sat down with D’arce Hess, founder and President of DH Consulting LLC. Jay and D’arce discuss the conference, the topics D’arce will be presenting on at the event, the importance of branding in SharePoint and Office 365, and how others can become involved in the SharePoint community.

D’arce can be found on LinkedIn | @DarceHess | SlideShare

These On the SPOT Community edition episodes allow Craig and Jay to meet with community influencers around the globe at live events to discuss who they are, how they got there, what do they specialize in, and what tips they may have for other professionals who are interested in making their own niche in the space.

Recorded October 25, 2017

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In our first On the SPOT News Brief, Jay Leask and Craig Jahnke talk about some past and upcoming travel, bring you the news, and introduce a couple of new podcast formats to the On the SPOT Podcast:

* The News Brief is meant to be a simple, weekly episode where we each pick a couple of news articles to talk about, things we think are topical and timely in the technology industry. As always, our goal is to inform technology and business leadership, so the articles will hopefully fit here.

* The Community Edition brings our traveling hosts together with technology community influencers, both those well known and those often only found behind the scenes. Why? Because these people have know the pulse of technology and they know what technologists want. The Community Forum is geared towards technologists who are looking to make a name for themselves and business leadership who want to understand how to identify them.

For news, Craig brought us information about hot (and cold) IT career trends and the latest from Amazon’s consumer edition technology solutions:

* 7 hot IT career trends: Analytics and AI, business and soft skills, hybrid technology/business roles. Technology is changing and so are the biggest needs in supporting it. But don’t forget, when one thing gets hot, another thing goes cold: development teams in silos are the big one, and we have spoken about it in every-single-episode of the podcast.

* Amazon Key: Amazon has announced a new Prime member service which comes with a technology kit including a smart lock and an internet enabled camera. Amazon is hot on the heals of Walmart who announced a similar service in the past month. But why is this important? See if Jay and Craig can convince you why this consumer news is worthy of the business professional (and not just for our own front doors).

If you can get past the technology issues Jay had while recording, we hope you’ll like the News Brief series. We look forward to seeing you next week!

This week’s dinosaur fact: meat eaters, known as theropods, are actually named for their clawed/hooked feet, not for what they eat! I can’t believe we forgot to include this in the recording!

This edited podcast was recorded Saturday July 28, 2017. Hosts Jay Leask and Craig Jahnke jump right into some news and then kick off our show with guest Matt Wade, Cloud Services Lead at H3 Solutions and founder of icansharepoint.

On the SPOT Episode 3 is here! #spotpodE3 <– join in the conversation

In today’s episode we cover:

* News (starting at 2:30)

* Interview with Matt Wade (starting at 9:50)

News (1:00)

* 12 ‘best practices’ IT should avoid at all costs – CIO Magazine

* Tell everyone that they are our customer <- you want to be partners with the business

* Say “No” or “Yes” to requests <- this can be done, but these are the resources and what it costs

* IT charge-backs <- leads groups to use freeware or go around IT

*  Booze Allen Hamilton developing business application for the Halo Lens (5:35)

Interview with Matt Wade (9:50)

Matt Wade | H3 Solutions | @thatmattwade

The below is the transcript of Jay and Craig’s conversation with Matt Wade, the answers are his own words.  This is an edited version of the full conversation.  The full 45-minute version of the interview can be heard here:

Who is Matt Wade?

Matt Wade:  So, I’m an engineer turned SharePoint geek. I started my career in 2009 as a mechanical engineer working for the Nuclear Navy, designing some mechanical systems on nuclear reactors going into a training platform and a little bit of work on, we probably seen it in the news lately, with the Gerald R. Ford class carrier. The first carrier going out is Ford and like kind of cool to follow the news because that was something I worked on pretty directly and I did a bunch of mechanical stuff surrounded by a lot of really smart people.

We had an issue where it was just hard to find stuff and SharePoint came out, SharePoint 2007. My dear old friend came out on our internal network which was fully classified. We had made it a very minimal internet access for most of the time that I worked there and rolled out and I kind of started playing around with document libraries, metadata, that kind of thing. And we had documents that we used as resources that dated back to before my parents were born. So, being to organize stuff by project name, component type, classification, year, and doing just whole sort filter group making views like– it was a really powerful tool for us. We had one central repository for all of our documents internally that were like issued and published but this was more of a local wrist of lengths that pointed to that and I just added our metadata to it and we were blowing up at the time.

We had like 15 people in my team and we tripled in size within a couple years. So, the fact that we had new people coming on and we have this new website that people could use, really worked out but I say 45 people– our network was 15,000 across the world from Honolulu to actually the British Isles. And the IT team had a whole bunch of work basically they needed to do for adoption stuff and th...

Recorded Saturday July 18, 2017. Hosts Jay Leask and Craig Jahnke provide a bit more detail about themselves and kick off our show with guest Dux Raymond Sy, Chief Marketing Officer and Public Sector CTO of AvePoint, Inc.

On the SPOT Episode 2 is here! #spotpodE2 <– join in the conversation

In today’s episode we cover:

* News (starting at 2:30)

* Interview with Dux Raymond (starting at 17:10)

* Coming Next Episode – What to use within Office 365(starting at 47:35)

News (2:30)

* Microsoft Inspire

* Microsoft Introduces Microsoft 365 [ Kirk Koennigsbauer via the Office Blog ]

* Major Announcements at Inspire [5 Announcements at Inspire ]

* SharePoint Online and OneDrive increased MAXPATH (256 Unicode code units to 400) and added support for # and % in the filenames! [ Shout out to D’Arce Hess Bill Baer via Microsoft Tech Community ]

* Verizon hacked for 14 million users [ ZDNET / The Hacker Daily ]

* GSA Bans Kaspersky Lab Software [ Reuters ]

* Google Glass is back in the Augmented Reality Game with the Enterprise Edition [ Google via Alphabet subsidiary X ]

* Chinese Scientists teleport an object into space [ Futurism ]

Microsoft AI for Earth Program to tackle environmental issues [ Windows 4 Tech ]

* Elon Musk says AI poses an existential threat to human race [ NPR ]

* Surface Phone! [ Blasting News / The Sams Report ]

Interview with Dux Raymond Sy (17:10)

The below questions paraphrase Jay and Craig’s side of the conversation with Dux, the answers are his own words.

You’re a very inspiring speaker, you bring a big personality and high energy to the room. How do you do it?

I’ve been in this business over 20 years now, and I feel like we need some energy and we need some vibrance in the tech ecosystem, so why not? The way I look at it is we’re in an exciting field, so going up on stage, dancing, singing, shouldn’t be out of the ordinary. The way I think about it is edutainment, the way I think about it is how I learn. If I’m engaged I will learn, although I realize that one cannot overdue it, because if you overdue it it will be cheesy or you’ll loose your credibility,

We’re excited to release our inaugural episode, the first of hopefully many, of On the SPOT. Thanks for listening, and don’t hesitate to let us know what you think!

Episode 1 with Asif Rehmani

Recorded Saturday July 1, 2017. Hosts Jay Leask and Craig Jahnke introduce the podcast, themselves, and kick off our first show with guest Asif Rehmani, Founder and Chief Executive Officer of VisualSP.

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In today’s episode we cover:

* A bit about us

* News (starting at 4:35)

* Interview with Asif Rehmani (starting at 16:23)

* Coming Next Episode – Microsoft Inspire Recap (starting at 51:29)

News

* Office 365 turns 6 [ @mkashman ]

* Microsoft releases Communications Sites [ Office Blogs ]

* iPhone turns 10 [ ZDNet ]

* Google Docs Phishing Scams [ CNET ]

* 2.5 million people fall victim to Ransomware  [ Tech Republic ]

* Artificial Intelligence (AI) to combat malware in Windows vNext [ Engadget ]

* InnSpire builds a computer into Ethernet Cables [ ZDNET ]

Editors note: Jay called it InnCable in the show, which is actually the product name

Interview with Asif Rehmani

The below questions paraphrase Jay and Craig’s side of the conversation with Asif, the answers are his own words.

Can you tell us a bit about you and how you got into SharePoint?

Asif: I got thrown into SharePoint, I didn’t choose to be here; but a lot of people have the same story, where they’re like “Oh here’s a thing called SharePoint, figure it out, do this document management or search or something for us, for our company” and then “oh yeah, you have these other 10 things as well”. This was a common theme when I was starting out and within the first 5 years, so back in 2002 is when I started out, and a lot of people were getting throw into this thing called SharePoint. I got thrown into it by a company I was consulting for at the time, who wanted to get into Document Management and had no other way of doing it and Microsoft was proposing they use SharePoint. It was a horrible product, in SharePoint 2001, if anyone remembers, but it became a lot better in SharePoint 2003 and from there it kept on getting better and better and better … [2007] was the ultimately the year it became what it is right now. Because SharePoint 2003 was also fairly bad, if I may say so bluntly, and 2001 was horrible. That’s how I got into it.

You say you entered SharePoint begrudgingly, are you happy with the direction you’ve come?

There is, of course, a reason I’m still going very strong with SharePoint. Just because it began with a really rocky start, that doesn’t mean it ended that way, of course.