What does it mean to have application automation? While at ChefConf in Austin, Richard sat down with Jessica DeVita to talk about Habitat, an open source project driven by the folks who created Chef to bring automation to the application itself. As Jessica explains, most applications are dependent on a given infrastructure to provide scaling, security, reliability and all of the other services that make a good application. But what if those elements were part of the application itself, and the infrastructure could change? That's the promise of Habitat. It's still early days, but well worth a look!

How do you manage the security of documents around individual applications on a mobile device? Richard talks to Simon May about Microsoft InTune Mobile Application Management (MAM). MAM allows IT folks to specify security privileges on an app-by-app and document-by-document basis. The identity role is handled by Azure Active Directory, and the entire Office 365 suite is supported - but so are products from Adobe, FoxIt, SAP and more. Documents can be time-limited (very spy novelish!) and even have individual parts of a document (like a paragraph) have different privileges. This looks to be a lighter-weight way to allow bring-your-own-device to protect corporate documents while leaving personal content alone. Check it out!

A whole other area of Windows Server 2016 to dive into - Hyper-V! Richard chats with Aidan Finn about the coming features for Hyper-V in Server 2016, starting with the ability to host older VM version in 2016: You're no longer forced to upgrade immediately! But you'll want to upgrade, because there are some awesome new features, including being able to map GPUs into specific VMs. Aidan also talks about rolling cluster upgrades, where you're able to take your 2012R2 clusters and upgrade them instance-by-instance to 2016, and only after they're all done, upgrade to new functionality. The feature list continues with the role of Nano Server and new security features - have a listen!