The Yammer Roast

2nd of September, 2018 / / No Comments

Taking my inspiration from Comedy Central, the Yammer Roast is a forum in which we can directly address resistances around Yammer, its role, and past failures in retrospect.
Some of my clients have tried with Yammer and concluded that for various reasons it’s failed to take hold. For some the value is clear and it’s a case of putting a compelling approach and supporting rationale to sponsors and consumers who remain sceptical. For others, they are looking for a way to make it work in their current collaboration landscape.… [Keep reading] “The Yammer Roast”

Building a Serverless Application in AWS using React and Claudiajs

29th of August, 2018 / / No Comments

With the introduction of Function as a Service capabilities in Azure (Web Functions) and AWS (Lambda) it has become possible to build applications which don’t use any servers in the cloud.  This has many advantages from an operational perspective

  • No server management
  • Flexible scaling
  • High availability
  • No idle capacity

In addition to this we can easily leverage all of the components that the cloud computing providers have built to improve the way we process and manage data.   … [Keep reading] “Building a Serverless Application in AWS using React and Claudiajs”

Using Azure Cognitive Services Language Text Translation with PowerShell

28th of August, 2018 / / No Comments

Introduction

Over the last few months whilst developing my Voice Assistant for Microsoft Identity Manager I’ve been leveraging a number of the Azure Cognitive Services. Each one has its own nuance as they all appear to be in differing iterations of maturity. My first hurdle when looking to leverage one, is the examples provided. Often the samples are in languages I’m not fluent in and pretty much always there is no examples of using PowerShell and the awesome Invoke-RestMethod call to interact with them.… [Keep reading] “Using Azure Cognitive Services Language Text Translation with PowerShell”

Automating Azure AD B2B Guest Invitations using Microsoft Identity Manager

27th of August, 2018 / / No Comments 
Update: Oct 30 '18 
Also see this post that adds support for Microsoft's updates 
to the Microsoft Graph to include additional information 
about Azure AD B2B Guest users.

Introduction

Earlier this year Microsoft released the Microsoft Identity Manager Azure AD B2B Management Agent. I wrote about using it to write to Azure AD in this post here. As detailed in that post my goal was to write to Azure AD using the MA. I provided an incomplete example of doing that for Guests.… [Keep reading] “Automating Azure AD B2B Guest Invitations using Microsoft Identity Manager”

IT Service Management (ITSM) & Operations – Overview of the Availability Management Process

25th of August, 2018 / / 1 Comment

Background

In many cases ITSM Availability Management Process is overlooked due to other frontline processes such as incident, problem and change management. I have provided a summary of this availability management process and significance below. I hope that the information is useful for your organisation in order to define and implement the process.
Objectives:

  • Availability management has to ensure that the delivered availability levels for all services comply with or exceed the agreed requirements in a cost-effective way and enables the business to satisfy its objectives.
… [Keep reading] “IT Service Management (ITSM) & Operations – Overview of the Availability Management Process”

SharePoint Integration for Health Care eLearning – Moving LMS to the Cloud

21st of August, 2018 / / No Comments

Health care systems often face challenges in the way of being unkept and unmaintained or managed by too many without consistency in content and harbouring outdated resources. A lot of these legacy training and development systems also wear the pain of constant record churning without a supportable record management system. With the accrual of these records over time forming a ‘Big Data concern’, modernising these eLearning platforms may be the right call to action for medical professionals and researchers.… [Keep reading] “SharePoint Integration for Health Care eLearning – Moving LMS to the Cloud”

Cloud PABX with On-premises PSTN connectivity

20th of August, 2018 / / No Comments

Sometimes my consulting engagements require creative thinking on how we can deliver Skype for Business services based on the customer needs and timing of suitable products becoming available to the market. In this case my customer wanted Skype for Business online with enterprise voice with  Telstra calling for Office 365. At the time the Telstra PSTN calling plan was not generally available. Business issues and time constraints required the business to implement a new greenfield solution within a week.… [Keep reading] “Cloud PABX with On-premises PSTN connectivity”

Removing blockers for Cloud PABX with On-Premise PSTN for Skype for Business Online.

20th of August, 2018 / / No Comments

Overcoming obstacles to migrating to Cloud based enterprise voice solutions is achievable through clever design options. Some enterprise business infrastructure managers may feel that their legacy voice environment is restricting the migration of voice services to cloud based offerings like Skype for Business or Microsoft teams. However, Microsoft offers a variety of design options for enabling PSTN connectivity for Office 365 accounts or Skype for Business accounts with your on-premise Skype for Business Server deployment. Microsoft Cloud PBX with PSTN access through a Hybrid Skype for Business on-premise deployment can provide a migration strategic vision.… [Keep reading] “Removing blockers for Cloud PABX with On-Premise PSTN for Skype for Business Online.”

The Present [and Future] Landscape of Data Migrations

17th of August, 2018 / / 1 Comment

A rite of passage for the majority of us in the tech consultancy world is being a part of a medium to large scale data migration at some stage in our careers. No, I don’t mean dragging files from a PC to a USB drive, though this may have very well factored into the equation for some us. What I’m referencing is a planned piece of work where the objective is to move an entire data set from a legacy storage system to a target storage.… [Keep reading] “The Present [and Future] Landscape of Data Migrations”

Deploying Azure Functions with ARM Templates

16th of August, 2018 / / 1 Comment

There are many different ways in which an Azure Function can be deployed. In a future blog post I plan to go through the whole list. There is one deployment method that isn’t commonly known though, and it’s of particular interest to those of us who use ARM templates to deploy our Azure infrastructure. Before I describe it, I’ll quickly recap ARM templates.

ARM Templates

Azure Resource Manager (ARM) templates are JSON files that describe the state of a resource group.… [Keep reading] “Deploying Azure Functions with ARM Templates”