What do SysAdmins want for Christmas? Richard chats with Rick Claus and Joey Snow about their favorite gadgets for SysAdmins. From the gadgets that help us at work to the toys that make us happy at home, it's a shopping spree of goodies! Share this episode with your loved ones to give them ideas on what to get you for Christmas, you impossible-to-shop-for SysAdmin!

Links:

• DalStrong Call of Duty Knives
• PhotoStick Omni
• Permatrack
• Dr Zzs LED Shop
• Bluetooth Beanie Hat
• Rosewood Block
• Star Wars Ice Cube Blocks
• Ember Temperature Control Mug
• Edge Lit Acrylic
• Reel View
• Galaxy Tab S8
• Floppy Disk Coaster
• AstroReality
• Satechi USB Headphone Stand
• Anker LC40 Flashlight
• LG Laser Projector

The pandemic has put a lot of stress on teams - how do we make them stronger? Richard talks to Stephanie Donahue about strengthening teams and communities as we emerge from the pandemic. Steph talks about the water cooler and happy hour conversations lost the past couple of years and the value they once provided and should again. Does that mean going back to the office? What are the alternatives? Maybe the new tools can help, or we should just have lunch?

Links:

• Weak Ties BBC Article
• Chris Voss Negotiation Training
• Viva Insights
• Meta Quest Pro
• Viva Engage

Recorded October 25, 2022

How are Azure and AWS Billing different? Richard chats with Corey Quinn of Screaming in the Cloud about his experiences experimenting with all the other clouds. Corey talks about his concerns around the security issues with Azure this past year - not the problems themselves, but how Microsoft handled them. The conversation also digs into using Cognitive Services and being unsure what things will cost until the end of the month. What about GCP and Oracle as well? Corey has tried them all and has thoughts!

Links:

• Last Week in AWS
• Cognitive Services Computer Vision

Recorded October 26, 2022

Why do you need Azure Stack? Richard chats with Sarah Lean about the capabilities Azure Stack HCI brings to your organization. Sarah describes the three flavors of Azure Stack, including Hub, Edge, and HCI - short for Hyper-Converged Infrastructure. While all the options act like a part of Azure, they are optimized for different needs, but primarily focus on putting Azure-style compute closer to where you need it, perhaps as part of a machine learning solution, IoT, and so on. Azure Arc plays a role in giving you a broad view of your cloud assets, Stack assets, and regular on-premises resources also!

Links:

• Azure Stack HCI
• Azure Arc
• Azure Stack HCI Pro 2
• FastTrack for Azure

Recorded October 24, 2022

What can SQL 2022 do for you? Richard chats with Bob Ward about the upcoming release of SQL Server 2022 and its evolution toward data anywhere. Bob talks about running SQL on edge devices, on-premises, in containers, virtual machines, and, of course, in the cloud. The management tools like Azure Arc make it easy to take care of all the places your SQL data can now live - and let you be the data administrator you can be! Check out Bob's latest book on SQL Server 2022 and all its hybrid data capabilities!

Links:

• SQL Server 2022
• SQL Server 2022 Revealed
• Microsoft Purview
• Azure Role-Based Access Control
• Azure Data Lakes
• Azure Arc-Enabled SQL Managed Instance
• Azure SQL Managed Instance
• Microsoft Intelligent Data Platform
• SQL Server 2022 Preview

Recorded October 26, 2022

What is the state of scripting in your organization? Richard talks to Christina Wheeler about Robotic Process Automation (RPA) and its role in the array of tooling in M365 to take existing scripting and wrap it into modern automated workflows. Christina talks about how Power Automate for Desktop can work with an Excel macro to further automation to make an entire process hands-off or reduce the number of touches you need to make. It can be a bit messy at times, but there are lots of tools, and there is always Teams to put a collaborative UI over top of it. Automation has never been easier!

Links:

• Robotic Process Automation
• Power Automate Desktop
• CONA Services
• Azure Logic Apps
• Office Scripts
• Power Canvas Apps
• MS Learn
• M365 Developer Platform
• UiPath

Recorded September 10, 2022

The return of Two Grumpy Old Men Complain about Windows! Richard chats with Paul Thurrott about a year of Windows 11 - the good, the bad, and the meh. Paul talks about the bits of Windows 10X that became Windows 11 and how simplifications in Win11 may annoy power users but are beneficial to regular folks. But nobody benefits from the ads on the desktop - except Microsoft. The conversation turns to the hardware side of the world and the soon-to-be-announced ARM-based Windows laptop. After all, there are already ARM servers in Azure, so when do we get a new generation of great workstations?

Links:

• Thurrott

Recorded September 8, 2022

How can Viva Learning improve your team's productivity? Richard chats with Ulrika Hedlund about how the latest generation of tools from Microsoft helps measure productivity and focus on learning opportunities. The M365 platform can show where employees struggle with tools that lead to learning opportunities - and then measure the results! Ulrika talks about the various kinds of learning needed within an organization, including compulsory learnings for regulated industries, standard corporate training, and then moving more into productivity and industry-focused knowledge. Viva Learning and the related tools make it easier than ever to build custom learning materials that can make learning more specific to your company and fun as well!

Links:

• Microsoft Productivity Score
• LinkedIn Learning
• Viva Learning
• Learning API for Viva Learning

Recorded August 9, 2022

How do you make manageable Infrastructure-as-Code? Richard talks to Joe Duffy about his open-source project called Pulumi, helping you build Infrastructure-as-Code solutions in almost any language for virtually any cloud platform or service. Joe talks about how infrastructure folks are headed down a similar path to developers from a few years ago, needing better source control, testing, and tooling for their infrastructure. And these are solved problems in the development space. By taking advantage of developer tooling, you can make Infrastructure-as-Code that is reusable and modular so that you can solve complicated problems like security implementations once. Then, when changes need to happen, they're made in one place and easy to propagate to all your projects.

Links:

• Pulumi
• VSCode

Recorded September 6, 2022

What can GitHub do for your PowerShell scripts? Richard talks to Barbara Forbes about using GitHub and PowerShell together. Barbara first discusses the fundamentals - using GitHub as your source code repository for PowerShell. It takes some time to learn, but you can start just using it for yourself. Things get more complex when multiple people start to work on the scripts, but they also get better. Then the conversation turns to the fun stuff - using Github Copilot to help you write your scripts, incorporating GitHub Actions to automate testing and deployment. PowerShell code is code and should have all the protections and power tools that GitHub provides!

Links:

• PowerShell on GitHub
• Visual Studio Code
• GitHub Skills
• GitHub Flow
• GitHub Copilot
• GitHub Actions
• Pester
• PSProfiler
• Barbara's Blog

Recorded August 3, 2022