George Gilbert from Wikibon. We're on the ground at Spark Summit 2015. We're with Justin Langsteth, CEO and founder of Zoom Data. So tell us a little bit about where the inspiration for Zoom Data came from and its unique value add. Yeah, the inspiration came from looking at this big wave of big data technology that was starting to evolve in Hadoop and NoSQL and all that on the back end. And I realized that for the first time in 40 years like SQL Database wasn't the obvious place to put your data anymore. And then on the front end we saw Apple with the iPad and touch interfaces and realized that the desktop computer wasn't necessarily the kind of future interface for humans to interact with data. So we realized both the back end and front end of BI was being disrupted simultaneously and it would be a great opportunity to get into the fresh company in a blank sheet of paper architecturally and figure out what is the best way to actually build the way for humans to interact with all this big data. Okay, so that's a great way of sort of telling us what the catalyst was. Now tell us a little bit more. You're appealing to the business user, maybe starting from the business analyst, going further out into the business community, but that data has to come from somewhere. So where are you getting it from and who are those users collaborating with? Yeah, I mean the data is in all kinds of places. Most enterprises have data in legacy databases, they've data in flat files, they've data in S3 or Amazon cloud, they've data in a Hadoop, they've data in MongoDB or all these NoSQL places, and then they have data in Salesforce.com or Google Analytics. Data is just spread all over the place right now and traditionally you try to ETL that into a single data warehouse, but what people are realizing is that's becoming impossible and we've built a technology based on Spark that can natively connect through to all those underlying repositories and then pull the data only as needed into Spark and try to push as much of the work as underlying data storage as possible and then use Spark as a layer that kind of smooths it all out so that it can be enjoined or fused together to be presented to the end users. So Spark in this particular case sounds like a high-performance execution engine and in the case of Spark running in the cloud, let's say the Databricks cloud, there's some extra value add where with traditional business intelligence tools there's a whole lot of work that goes in with other roles to make it easy and pretty. So how do you leverage this Databricks cloud or other Spark clouds to do that? So traditionally the kind of BI business intelligence world we work with data modelers and then ETL people who would build these data models and ETL and they'd set up the BI tools so there's a lot of steps and usually like a year at least of work before an end user could actually get a dashboard. So we're seeing that timescale obviously shrink really dramatically and what's interesting with Databricks and the notebook support they have in Databricks cloud is that machine data scientists or kind of more advanced code savvy data analysts they can use these notebooks to build up data pipelines to traditionally what you think of as data wrangling or ETL or machine learning or data enrichment or stats or all these kind of stuff and they can kind of do that in the notebooks and then we've integrated directly with Databricks cloud so it zoom data spins up in a little docker container within Databricks cloud and then we've hooked up the metadata so that anything that a user or a more advanced user has created in Databricks cloud a data set or advanced machine learning algorithm that then is automatically pushed into the zoom data metadata so the less technical more businessy type people can just use zoom data but they can get native pre-setup access to all those great artifacts and systems that the more advanced people have set up and as long as the business users trust the person who set up that model they don't necessarily understand how that model works they can leverage it in their business analysis. Okay sounds clearly very powerful but give us like a concrete example when you know you might be a retailer with the point of sale data you might have your inventory data yeah what it what it when you talk about those artifacts and the the metadata what is it that gets passed from the notebook who's the sort of more data science guy yeah or the data modeling guy and how does that then populate and simplify the work of the zoom data user yeah it's a it's a couple things so it's the table definitions themselves so the tables and fields and that data may have come in to spark or Databricks cloud from any number of places and then wrangled or transformed in those notebooks so the end results of that are clean wrangled data that's in tables so that metadata is pushed into zoom data and then zoom data doesn't make a copy the data though it reaches into Databricks cloud to actually execute the queries on that then also like machine learning algorithm so if I build a machine learning algorithm maybe it's a fraud detection algorithm and I build this algorithm I test it as a data scientist I can then deploy that through zoom data directly so that the less people technically don't necessarily understand how this fraud is actually being detected they can still fraud score the transactions as they're either historically being looked at or even in real-time through spark streaming so in real-time would spark streaming be feeding a zoom data dashboard yeah so sparks Kafka or spark streaming or kinesis we support lots of different real-time stream engines and either this day zoom data can accept these streams directly and do continuous processing through zoom data which is based on spark streaming or you can stream the data directly into a fast data store like a mem SQL or something that's really really fast and you can like have zoom data just typically tail that data store and simulate real-time visualization against data that's being loaded into something else without even passing through zoom data directly and so how is your uptake been now you were featured at a sparks meetup which is you know quite high praise what's the awareness and how are customers gravitating to now yeah we're really seeing a lot of people being interested in zoom data especially to embed it in other applications because a lot of people are building data-driven applications or data-driven services or they just have another application that needs reporting or dashboarding or charts or something in it and they don't want to have to kind of use legacy 10 or 20 year old technology if they're building a new system that's going to go last from 10 20 years from now and so they really like the way we've architected the system the way it's built on spark handles real-time and on the front end just how we've built a really rich JavaScript SDK that can be embedded our visuals and other modern JavaScript applications without i-frames without any flash or it is kind of old stuff and so we're really getting a lot of uptake for these people who want to embed white label zoom data or embed it into other applications but leverage this whole stack of stuff that's under the covers okay just in length as CEO and founder of zoom data this is George Gilbert on the ground it's spark summit 2015


Welcome to Microterrorz, scary stories for kids, where it's always the spooky season, full of chills, thrills, and spine-tingling spooks. Microterrorz are family-friendly frights for those ages 8 and up, and while our stories are for younger years, we are still talking about things that go bump in the night, and some children may not be able to handle what others can. Parental consent is recommended. Now for tonight's Microterrorz. The Wolf's Paw The Criely Brothers dreaded hearing the news. Their father, Ernest Criely, had been found dead next to the body of an immense, great wolf. The search lasted hours before the disturbing scene was uncovered. Ernest, who had shot the beast to death, was missing his head, yet victoriously gripping the severed claw of the wolf in his hand. It was Claude Alborn who brought the news to Ernest's two boys, Henry and Oscar. They were alone at their home when Claude came knocking. Somber and regretful, Claude Alborn explained to the young men what had happened. Claude was an old friend of their fathers, so it was only fitting that he would have been the member of the search party to relay the news. Claude told the Criely boys about the wolf and how immensely large and powerful it was. He told them Ernest was a hero because when the wolf was opened up for examination, they found the remains of an old woman, as well as a young girl inside of its belly. He saved more lives from being lost to the wolf, Claude said. The wolf is dead because your father was able to bring it down.  I know he was of you. Claude reached into a brown satchel that he carried around his body and pulled out something unexpected. The wolves severed paw. The wrist portion had been cauterized to a hardened black medium, as did the area that once held one of its four digits. The paw itself was larger than Claude's hand and covered in gray fur. He had this in his grip, Claude said. I knew your father well. This was a trophy, a validation of his conquest. Claude extended the paw to the boys. Henry and Oscar looked at one another briefly and then Henry reached out to accept it. He would want you to have it as a way to remember his final act in this life, Claude said, choking up. He wiped a tear from his face and opened the front door. I'll send my daughter in the morning with a meal for you. I'm so sorry. Henry. Claude walked out the door and just before he closed it, he looked at Henry and Oscar once more. He smiled, seeing Ernest in their eyes, their stance, their sorrow. I wish Ernest could see you one last time. Claude closed the door and it latched with a click. Henry and Oscar looked at one another. They were two young brothers who were all alone now. The orphanage would come for them any day. Suddenly the wolf's paw twisted like a serpent within Henry's grip. The startling nature of it caused Henry to drop the grotesque appendage. It clumped on the floor and rolled over. One of its three remaining claws bent and cracked until it was flush with the underside of the paw. Henry and Oscar were speechless and unnerved. A post mortem spasm? Oscar asked his brother. Henry wasn't sure, but it was all he could think of as well. They both remembered stories their father had told them about his successful hunts in the woods. Sometimes, even after death, there were still signs of life. It was shortly after midnight when the knocking started. Henry sat up in bed thinking at first it was just a dream. He looked over to the other bed in the room. Oscar was sitting up with a candle lit at his side, holding one of their father's old Stetson hats in his hands. He caressed it like one would a lap dog. Henry heard the knocks again. They were coming from the front door. Do you hear that? Henry asked his brother. Oscar didn't respond. He just admired the hat, falling deeper and deeper into his memories. Oscar, Henry called out again in a loud whisper, but Oscar wasn't with it. Henry crawled out of bed, lit a candle of his own, and crept through the house until he reached the front door. The knocks were louder the closer he got to the door. They were unnerving. Why so late? Henry wondered. He reached for the door knob, but his instincts sprung to life and told him not to open it. Instead, he shuffled to the window and looked outside. The night was darker than usual, as if to announce something strange and unnatural within its embodiment. In the soft glow of the candle he held, Henry saw someone at the front door, and that someone was the strange and unnatural thing the night had so ominously ushered in. It was a man of a strong build, dressed in familiar hunting attire, their father's hunting attire. The brown coat, the baggy pants, the rifle still slung over his back. However, his head was missing, cauterized black at the neck, just like the wolf's paw that clawed Alborn had brought into their home. Henry was startled. It looked like their father, but it couldn't have been. He was dead. There was no way this moment was real. Surely it was just a dream. The headless man outside continued to knock, each pounding of the door severing another nerve within Henry. He trembled, backed away from the window and rushed up the stairs to their bedroom. Oscar! Henry screamed upon his entry. The urgency in his voice was enough this time to rip Oscar's attention away from the old hat. What! Oscar asked, dazed but concerned. Father's head at the front door, Henry trembled. Oscar shifted himself to the edge of the bed. What do you mean? He's knocking on the door! His head is gone! Oscar confused his brother's fear for sorrow. He nodded sympathetically. I miss him too, Oscar said. I haven't been able to sleep all night. I've just been thinking about him and everything he'll miss out on, everything will miss out on. Henry shook his head. No, I'm not out of sorts, Oscar. Father is here at the front door. His head is missing, cauterized at the neck like that repulsive paw. Henry pointed to a small table opposite the beds where the wolf's paw lay, one of the digits still bent underneath it. A thought hit Henry at that moment. The claw had bent after Claude Alborn's departure. The last thing Claude said was that he wished their father could see them one more time. A wish. The claw curled after the wish, and that wish had now come true. Their father had come. The paw! Henry screamed, rushing for the cleaved limb. He grabbed it and held it in his hand, shaking it at Oscar. This paw is cursed! The stories of those woods are true, this thing is evil! Oscar stood from his bed and faced his brother. Both of them went silent, and then Oscar heard the knocking too. They were loud and reverberating through their small home. Oscar didn't know what to make of it. There has to be an explanation, Oscar said, something real and not of the arcane. Those woods were father-hunted. You've heard the stories Oscar, the magic, the evil that lurks within them. Oscar knew of the stories, everyone in their sleepy little valley did. The woods were tainted by a darkness that few understood. It was and had always been part of the land they lived on. Father, Oscar said in a breathy exhale, Henry could see his brother's expression go from confused to curious. There was almost a sense of relief in his stare. Henry shook his head. It's father, but he's all wrong, Henry said. The knocks grew louder with each strike. He's undead, a spook. But you're sure it's it him? Oscar asked, weakly. Henry Patela's brother wasn't grasping the severity of the situation. It wasn't their true father at the door. It was a spectral spawn, an evil, unnatural resurrection that shouldn't be. The knocks were now more frequent, louder and bolder. They became almost demanding of an answer, commanding the boys to let the obscure entity in. Henry couldn't take it anymore. He held the paw out in front of him and said, I wish father to rest in peace, to leave our plane and return to his. The knocks continued and the paw remained idle. Henry was sure it would have worked. His eyes widened, his lips trembled and his heart began to beat so fast that his chest felt pain. But then abruptly the knocks stopped. The silence that invaded their home now was overwhelming. Henry felt the paw writhe within his grip. The brother's watched as another one of its digits bent and cracked like snapping bones until it folded against the bottom of the paw. One claw now remained. Henry and Oscar breathed heavily, calming their nerves the best they could. Henry sat the paw down at the table and picked up his candle. He needed to make sure the ghoul at their front door was gone. Come on, he instructed his brother, creeping slowly and cautiously through the house. The wooden floor creaked underneath each footstep. Henry was the first one to reach the window. He peered out into the inky night and within the glow of his candle he saw nobody. Their headless father was gone, finally at rest. He's gone, Henry said to his brother, breathing a trembling sigh of relief. He turned around to comfort his brother, only Oscar wasn't there. Oscar! Henry stepped away from the window and into the main room of their home. Oscar! Oscar came out from the bedroom, holding his bedside candle and looking mournful, possibly even remorseful. In his other hand was the wolf's paw. The third and final claw was now bent. Henry went numb with fear. And then the knocking started again. Our story continues next time. We'll also have spooky games you can print out and play, like wicked word searches, mysterious mazes, and more. MicroTerrors.com is also where you can find us on your favorite social media and even send in your own scary story for us to tell. Plus, you'll learn more about our author, Scott Donnelly, who has other horrors for both young and old. I hope you'll join me again soon for MicroTerrors. Scary stories for kids.


things off for this AMA. Hello, everybody. Let me bring that down, that music down. Hello. And yeah, just adjusting screens and everything. Okay, we're good to go. Hello and welcome to the Microsoft 365 AMA where you can ask us anything, anything about Microsoft 365 and the products and services therein. My name is Christian Buckley. I am the office apps and services MVP and Microsoft regional director and also the Microsoft go to market director at Avpoint and we are live streaming across YouTube, Facebook. If you have a question that you would like us to tackle, please comment and we'll attempt to address it in real time and we're monitoring both locations. But other questions that we're going to be going through here have been gathered from various community pages, mostly from Facebook communities, which are very active. And with that, let me introduce the rest of our panel for this AMA. And we might have a couple other people joining in. I'm not sure they accepted they should be here, Neil and Sherry, but I believe they're going to be here. But with that, we've got Mike Nelson, a solution architect at Pure Storage in a cloud and data center management MVP based in Appleton, Wisconsin. We have Hal Hostetler, a senior field engineer with Roland Shore and Tower in Tucson, Arizona and an office apps and services MVP. Eric Riz, a principal consultant at Division IT and office apps and services MVP based out of Toronto, Canada, or Canadian friend. Canadian I think is the new way of pronouncing that. And then of course, Sharon Weaver founder and CEO of Smarter Consulting and another Microsoft regional director based in Lonexa, Kansas. Hello, everybody. Hey, I know it's good to be back and doing this again for those that have been that are sure about this. We were doing this on a weekly basis and work in life just didn't allow that to happen anymore. We did it for a year weekly. Yeah, crazy episode 61 episodes. Yeah. 61 episodes for episode. No, we do not. But thanks for asking. But I will double that salary for this this show. Time to renegotiate contract. Someone failed at that negotiation. That's not even swag. Nothing. Well, a lot going on like contract Mikey and you can, you know, pick it up from there. So one of the things I want to point out. So we have a Microsoft Inspire that's going on right now like keynote and stuff. In fact, I've got Satya on a screen kind of behind me over here. So those that are interested in sales and marketing, the partner alliance type stuff that's going on with Inspire this week, you can check that out. Of course, you can check out the recordings of that because you want to watch this live, obviously. Yeah, obviously. Yeah. He's going to be talking about, you know, the Windows 365 announcement, which is coming out. He's probably talking about it right now. But probably. Yeah. Well, very cool. And before we get underway, we do like to share the disclaimer here that again, we will do our best to answer the questions that you throw at us. We are experts. And I like to bring it back for this, so I could do the air quotes experts and a number of things. Of course, we don't know everything. That's why I was hoping that Neil will be here because he knows everything. Yeah, I want to meet. I want to meet my Christian going experts. Experts. So we have that going out. They are out there. Mike, you just keep searching. There's Neil. Hey. So his ears must have been kind of tickled or something that he heard us talking about him. And then he joins us. Hey, Neil. Hey, we're just saying that you know everything. So if there's any questions that we're stumped on. Hey, I've looked up now. 10% are on these ones. And so just for introduction, they're Mike Nelson. I said, that's not Mike. I'm reading down the list here. Where did I have? What happened to Neil? There he is. Microsoft senior. But it is his first day. I we have all done. Yeah, Microsoft senior program manager all the way from Texas, Dr. Neil Hoskinson, who as he says, doctor, he always he shows up only to be referred to as doctor. And so and doctor and doctor. All right. I think the doctor's frozen because he hasn't cracked a smile in a few minutes. I think so as well. So he may be back. But before we jump into the Q&A, as we do again, feel free to post your questions and we'll try to address live. But we always kick things off with and I now move over to the screen here. Our message center updates that Mike has meticulously gone through. And we are going to be enlightened now about what's new in the Microsoft message center. So Mike with that over to you. Hey, welcome back everybody. This is a section where I talk about what's in the message center. It's been a while, you know, so there's a lot to talk about, but I'm not going to hit all of them because there's just way too many. We're talking about since June 7th, I believe, was our last show. And you know how Microsoft rolls. They got just a boatload of changes that they dropped in there. So I just picked out a few that I'd like to highlight. The first one is coming from the department of, well, we thought it was a good idea. And excuse me, that's a teams update. So they had this idea that you'd be able to join a meeting using something called a digital meeting ID. They got a bunch of feedback on that and it turns out it wasn't such a good idea. What it basically was is it assigned every person or every attendee that was allowed to attend the meeting a customized digital ID that they could click on and it would enter them into the meeting. It was assigned to them specifically for that attendee. Now, this is really nothing new, right? But the problem came in when they would have multiples and I guess the coding and things like that just didn't work out that well in terms of it wouldn't allow other people with the same ID to come in, and that could cause problems with someone who has multiple devices, things like that. So they'd have to create a new user, a new attendee, and so on and so forth. So it really didn't work out that well. So right now, they are not moving forward with that and they will be evaluating this feature and get back to us later. I still have to say, we've talked about this in the past, but I do, I actually like that Microsoft, where they'll roll something out and they then get that feedback. There's that whole argument of whether they should have received, they've gotten the feedback before they do something. However, it sounded like a good idea at the time, hence the department name. But the fact that they are quick to go in and look at the feedback and pull back on something rather than going all in, I think it's a good thing. Yeah. Yeah. I think they need to widen their testing base a little bit before they do things. But again, I think, and this is my opinion, they implement so many features and so much functionality into M365 that pretty much it's just kind of like a steamroller. It just keeps on going and going and going and keeps on pounding out new features and people just can't keep up with them. So I think they're really focused on speed a little bit too much, but that's just me. All right, moving on. This is actually from a really cool department. The department that is so 80s. So now you can edit your workbooks with ActiveX. ActiveX. Wasn't that like 80s? Wasn't that like the early 90s with, you know, Internet Explorer was big thing, ActiveX? Well, now for whatever reason, they decided to delight, and this is the verbatim here, delighting our customers with faster, smoother and frictionless experiences in Excel for the web as an uncompromised goal across the Excel team. With this in mind, we've recently added support to open and edit workbooks with ActiveX form controls and other legacy art objects in Excel web. I'm not really sure where they're going with this.   I'm not really sure. So answer me this, do my old Nintendo 64 cartridges now work with Windows 11? Is that a thing? I think my Activision ones will. Yeah, those gold laser discs, they're relevant again. Exactly. You need a special dongle adapter, Christian. Oh yeah, for a lot of things, that's applicable to a lot of problems. All right, so there goes our G rating. All right, from one of my favorite departments comes from the department of play that funky music. We are now getting a music mode for teams. Hey, hey, I saw that. Yeah, the new feature release will be used to transmit high fidelity music. They'll be able to conduct online music lessons, transmit music performances and other non-speech content. I so see people using this just for music on hold, but there's so much more you can do with it. So there's not a lot of restrictions around it because pretty much it's all based on bandwidth, right? That's the big thing. But what's really kind of interesting is that you need, you know, it gives a whole bunch of things that echo cancellation, noise suppression, gain control, all that other kind of stuff. You know, when you're transmitting, like if you use OBS, you have that ability. Well, they're starting to incorporate that in teams, which I think is really cool. Does it have the dongle option for my zone? Yeah, yeah. You just plug it right in there, Christian. Okay. And speaking of Christian, any details here on that? I'm particularly interested. Is this going to be another situation where it's just a matter of time before they shut me down, like Instagram when I play music and others can hear it and there's a copyright issue and it takes 10 seconds before you're done? They got to have a DRM thing, right?  And I was kind of surprised that they played it to the 400 and some attendees that were on that call. So I mean, everybody's looking out for that now and people have to be careful with what they do. And I think that, you know, even Microsoft makes that mistake. Yeah. All right. Speaking of Christian, that's what I was trying to get to. The department of it, it's all about making Christians life easier. Teams. It seems to be the department. That's easy. Well funded. Yes. Well funded. Real-time messaging protocol, RTMP, streaming support is coming for custom endpoints and teams. What does that mean? That means that you will be able to stream directly to YouTube, LinkedIn and Facebook directly from teams. And you will no longer need an intermediary to handle that for you. So that is actually coming. And the only concern I have here is because some folks, when I looked this up, some folks were concerned about bandwidth, right? And I can understand that. That's a valid concern. Yeah, absolutely. Because I don't know how refined or how tuned Microsoft is going to do this when they introduce it, where you have other third parties that have really had a lot of time to figure that out. And, you know, I'm cautious about that. So, yeah, I know that there's been a lot of discussion. People like I use Streamlabs OBS. So OBS, really popular open source broadcast software that allows you to pull in the various feeds. And, like, I'm not using Teams NDI for this because I'm using one machine to be both the organizer, the producer of this event, as well as a participant. And so that's why I show up in the little box up in the top, just over a blocking half of Neil's face. But it's all right. Just parted your hair, Neil. So to cut out the middleman and be able to do all of that natively, I'm very excited to see performance is the major issue. That's what we don't need more of, is more features jammed into Teams and making it more bloated than it already feels. It's just a massive resource hog. But then again, running separately, running OBS, that eats up a lot of the bandwidth and things as well. So that'll be interesting to look at. Does it replace the need for OBS? It's like, no, for people that are looking to do more advanced builds and flies and animations and other things, then certainly they'll continue. Those folks will continue using that. Why would, this is the number one question I've seen, you know, people say, well, why would I want to, if I've got a meeting, why would I want to live stream that? And here's a great example. There's plenty of things that we're doing where we want to have an internal meeting where we might, like a company might, like my company might decide, hey, support personnel want to walk through problem resolution of a common issue that they're seeing with customers and do that as a live stream and then capture and record it and post it. Can you just post it as a recording? Yes. But do you want to have live with live interaction? Do you want to have that as an option? Sure. You can do a live stream for a restricted audience.  So, yeah. And speaking of bandwidth, you know, Microsoft does have a department that's called, we think bandwidth is cheap. And the reason why I say that is because in teams, they're actually going to start allowing paging in the large gallery view. And they will allow you to view up to 98 video streams. You know, that's a nine and an eight, okay? Currently, they support up to 49 videos, but 98.  But at the same time, you're chewing up a lot of bandwidth. And, you know, if you add presentations to that and video and audio and everything else, it gets a little rough. Some of us can't afford it, you know, like Dr. Neal. Dr. Neal has a very large budget for his bandwidth, so he can afford things like that. Mike, when you say paging, do you mean like, you know, paging Dr. Sutton? Paging Dr. Sutton? Or I rarely get a chance to use that reference, so I want to see if anybody picked up on it. Oh, Briss, I love it. So keeping up with the Joneses, team meetings is getting auto recording, which every other thing has had for a while. They're finally getting around to it. Okay, cool. It allows you to automatically set that a meeting's going to be recorded. I'm a huge advocate for that. Make it a manual process to not record. Because those meetings, those are an important information asset for an organization. Yeah, yeah. And I would automatically, with that, I would turn on transcription as well. So that you make it, you could turn it off, but you make that a manual intentional process, turn off recording, turn off transcription. Right. So we do have, for those that have clients who are not in love with the, or have various reasons for not having their sessions reported, it is a pain. So whatever you do, Microsoft, I know you're listening. Doctor, please make sure that this process is easy, seamless, and very obvious. Because part of the issue of recording is that the person who created the meeting has to be the one who gets the record button or something in that organization. So it's not always easy. Yeah, but the auto record function has to be set in the meeting itself when the meeting is created. So it has to be a switch that's turned on. When the meeting is created. And that there's no way to set it up, kind of like a template type deal, which I wish it was, but it's per meeting. Does the admin still have the ability to make that the default setting so that any time I open up a new meeting, it's on, and then I have to turn it off. Right, right. Yeah. Right, what I was thinking about was Who said that? What I was thinking was for a particular meeting series, it could be an interesting situation because you've got, for us, some clients who, based on the series, some individuals may attend, others may not. And depending on who's there, you may not be able to record it just based on the obligations of the user. Just uninvite those people, Eric. What's the problem? And they're the ones who have to be there to read their feedback. Yeah, Eric, that's where I was going. I know the business group I work in at Microsoft, we have a strong policy that we do network calls calls to a customer or partner facing. There's a variety of reasons for that. Compliance is one. However, if the partner or the customer sets the call, then they can record it because it becomes their IP at that point. So there's various policies like that. So I think having it defaults always on and you have to remember to turn it off is kind of a challenge. Unless you get kind of reminders, hey, these people outside your organization, or the usual kind of compliance to things you get pop up in Outlook. So it's a difficult, there's no one size fits all. Basically, I think in that scenario. Okay, so from the Department of Clarity doesn't necessarily mean simple. And we're moving away from teams and to my most favorite subject, SharePoint, lie. So update it from SharePoint. Updates for Microsoft Teams connected team sites. So what's happening is when you create a team in Microsoft Teams, a SharePoint team site will be automatically get created in tandem. And you are also able to connect any existing SharePoint team site to a new team in Microsoft Teams. These are called Microsoft Teams connected team sites. They're saying for private channels and Microsoft Teams, a SharePoint team or a SharePoint team site automatically gets created and is known as a channel site. So these teams connected team sites and channel sites are managed differently than your typical SharePoint team site. So they actually said, excuse me, in the top of the announcement, they said, we have updated the content below for additional clarity. No, that is not, that is clear as mud. Okay. So if you read the entire message that came across, it's very confusing. So I'll just leave that out there for the show. It is very simple, Mike. So there's a Microsoft Teams plural site and a Microsoft Teams site.  That's right. Whatever. Can't we just call it, can't we just call it Microsoft Teams for business? I think that would really simplify the whole thing for everybody. Microsoft Teams for Business Pro and Pro Plus. Yeah. Yes, exactly. So, Mike, was there something in that update that said something about the permissions being switched over to Teams administrators or something like that? Yes. Yeah, it's being switched over to Teams administrators. It actually says it's making small updates to the viewing and management experience of Teams connected team sites and channel sites to simplify the end user experience. But they're actually making it so you have to go in and site classification and site permissions and go in and change things there. All kinds of crazy stuff. Yeah. It's not, it's not, it's not easy. It just makes me think of like George Orwell. I just listened to, I did a 1984 book, audio book on my trip back from Minnesota last week. And so I keep hearing that just like, you know, just to add to it at the end of that statement, whatever, how complex it is that you talk about and then just say, for simplicity. It's like, I used to always joke like, no matter how horrible it sounds and be like, but we'll do it for the children. Exactly, for the children. It's all for the children. It's all for the children. Don't forget world peace, Christian. No world peace. I never forget world peace, Eric. You know I'd never forget that. All right. So one last department we got a hit up today is the when is a web app, not a web app times two. And what I mean by that is they actually are now allowing for the installation of a web version of both OneDrive and Microsoft lists as a progressive web app, a PWA. And I don't know if you know what that means, is that means basically if you've used any of the apps from Microsoft where you download this bunch of code and when you download the bunch of code, it basically opens up in a kiosk web browser. It doesn't really look like a web browser, but it actually is a web browser. And it's really kind of weird to me because I'm like, okay, you can open up OneDrive and Microsoft lifts in a browser. So why do you have to have this PWA? Why do you have to have this progressive web app? It doesn't make a lot of sense to me, but they're saying you can do this in Microsoft Edge, Google Chrome, Firefox, or other browsers that support PWAs with the exception of Safari Mac users. Sorry, after you install the web version of OneDrive or Microsoft lists as a PWA, you can launch it from your desktop and it'll work with the same way it does in your web browser. So why not just use the web browser? Why do you need this PWA? I'm not getting this. Anybody else get this? I'm not getting that. I just like how passionate you are about it. That's the best part. The hands start to go. Somebody's got to be the person. I've got to be that guy, Riz. I've got to be that person that stands up and just goes, what? I just don't understand why it matters what the political affiliation of your web apps are. Yeah. Nice segue there. And with that, and once again, there is, oh, you said that was your last one. Last one plus a little announcement. The last last one. Yeah. So the last thing I wanted to add here is I don't know if anybody's noticed, but if you have the ability to go in your M365 admin centers and take a look at the purchase services, I don't know if you've ever gone out there and just took a look at the different services that you can buy. They've changed the UI now. You used to just list them as little cards, kind of like Kanban cards, but now they're, you know, you got to pick on a category and all that other kind of stuff. I think it's harder to use than easier. But the thing is, is that there's a bunch of stuff out there now that they've added for free. And one of the free things that I enabled was you can actually get M365 audio conferencing adoption promotion. It's called the M365 audio conferencing adoption promo. And what it does is it enables, it gives dial-in numbers to join meetings and dial out to bring participants into a meeting. It's a free, a free promotion thing. And it's kind of cool because once I checked it and enabled it, now when I go into Teams, it gives me all of these phone numbers and stuff that people can use to connect to my meetings.  They're allowing free trials for communication credits and things like that. So I think they're really trying to push that maybe their whole, you know, telephone, you know, the phone system, the PBX and the cloud thing, isn't really kind of generating enough revenue. And they want to really push this.  It's not a free trial, it's a promo. So they have a couple free trials of other things and other basically free services that are just free no matter what. So on that, it's not that they're not making money on it, it's that they're just they're really doubling down on some of those pieces and really pushing that. In fact, again, we've got Microsoft Inspire that's happening this week and part of that is Microsoft's their fiscal year which begins on July 1st. They're starting to lay out all of their FY22 plans and a major metric for Microsoft sellers is around the meetings and the telephony portion of that. The hardware and meetings and that piece of it because Microsoft has seen a lot of competition in that area and so they're shoring up their pricing and their plans and making it more enticing for people to go and try and use those capabilities. So yeah, so that's a major part of the push for FY22. So yeah, check it out. Well, thank you, Mike, for that and once again for everybody that's watching as we do as we run through the message center updates, these are the only message center updates that you need to think about. There's nothing else. There's nothing else of importance because if there was, Mike would have included it because he did not include it. Therefore, they are irrelevant to your life. So that's official from Mike Nelson. It contact information to be shared. Okay, move along, move along, move along. Should I use the disclaimer again? Okay, the disclaimer is up once again for that previous statement. All right, back into it. Okay, there we go. All right, let's jump in with some questions here. We've got a few and we've got, wow, we have an hour to go through this. And so once again, if you're watching on the live streams on Facebook or YouTube and you have a question, you'd like us to tackle that, feel free to comment and we'll attempt to address those questions. But with that, are there any questions that you'd like to kick off with that we've just started number one and run through? Anybody have from the list that we have that was shared? No. All right, we'll just jump right in and see what happens. Yeah, and just so everyone knows in the audience, the main reason for that is because Christian just got us the questions like an hour ago. Well, I want the responses to be natural. The surprise, the shock on your face to be legitimate, not staged. So with that, let's kick off with question number one. So all of these questions. Didn't it say that you just kind of forgot? Isn't that what the email said? Did you guys get there where you said you kind of forgot? Okay, I just wanted to clarify that. It's been what a month since we did the last show. And yeah, I had all that time to add questions in and yet I forgot until the last minute. It happened. After 61 shows, you forgot how this works? Is that what you're saying? Just a few weeks and kind of. Yeah, I forgot to put reminders in my calendar. So that's my own excuse for myself is that I live and breathe by my calendar and I just neglected to put the reminders in. So I have corrected that or will correct it shortly. All right, so with that, so again, these questions that come from predominantly from various Facebook groups, the community sites that are out there, as well as from unanswered questions out on the Microsoft Tech community. Question number one comes from Rick. He says, so I have a request form with maybe three or four different sections, patching, writing to individual SharePoint lists, all connected on a number or record ID. What is the best way to have four different forms on one screen without over cluttering? So some aspects of the forms are conditional based on responses, et cetera. So what's the best way to have four different forms on one screen? Well, I don't know if you guys know this, but there's a new feature on modern pages where you can have collapsible sections. So one of the options would be in the new modern page to simply create a form in each section and then have it collapsed by default. And it would look very nice. And I missed that in the updates. I'm so sorry. Also, PowerApp would probably be a good choice. You could do a link to every single form with a little buttons on the modern pages. You can do a button that takes you directly to a URL. That'd be an easy way. I mean, it's kind of a UI question more than anything. Yeah. If you're not on the modern, I mean, you can also do that hypertext. If you're not on the modern, you should be on the modern and don't talk to me, because my only answer to you right now would be like, let me talk to you about how I can modernize that for you. Okay. Yeah, you might. You're on mute. No, I was saying talk to the hand. Don't talk to me. He's saying don't talk to me. Talk to the hand. All right, question number two from Robin. And this comes from Microsoft Teams for Education Community. I'm switching to digital planning and using OneNote as my app. You can't go wrong there using OneNote as that app. On many OneNote pre-made planners, I see where it says to open in OneNote 2016 before using on your iPad. Does anyone know why? What is the impact? I also want to create some new template pages to add to the planner I buy. Should those also be made in OneNote 2016 before opening on my iPad or Mac? So what's the purpose? I don't know if there's anything that's unique to the iOS, Mac OS. Yeah, so it depends on what they're talking about. I can tell you there's multiple. I've had to deal with this over the last couple of years. There's multiple versions of OneNote. There is OneNote that's built into Windows. There's the OneNote browser app. And then there's the OneNote with the version numbers. And the OneNote that have the version numbers have a lot more features and functionality. And I believe some of the templating options are not either not as easy or don't really work as well in the browser app as they do in the version tab. Why would you want to though open it first within the native app before using it on your iPad? It does work better if you open the app first. I don't, it's something weird about OneNote. Like I actually have OneNote, the client app installed on my computer. It's one of the few client apps I still use because I get a lot more functionality out of it. But if I have the app opened first and I've already synced to that OneNote notebook in the app, I get, it works better and it works in a way that I can't, it just doesn't do the same in the browser app. So is it just, so yeah, if you just open up straight in the browser, open up on the device, is it just that it's not done that full sync? Well, yeah, and if you think of it this way, so OneNote is a binder, right?  So you're going to that individual binder and you're working that individual binder. But in the client app, you can actually have the collection of like your most frequently used binders. So it's a little bit easier to navigate. Some of the features and functionality are better. You can still get the ribbon. So there's things in the client app that you just don't get quite so much in the browser. If you're just opening and typing, the browser is perfectly fine. But if you want some of that kind of more advanced control over it, I find that the client app is a lot better. And opening ahead of time just makes everything seem to sync and work better. Right. Yeah, I would agree with that. I've used, I use the desktop almost exclusively. And the biggest, I mean, and this is just a pet peeve that I just cannot let go of, is that every time you put a URL or a link, a hyperlink inside of OneNote, it automatically creates it. It's a hyperlink and you cannot turn it off. It's always a hyperlink. You cannot turn it off. It's just, I mean, and the user voice votes on that is like coming up on like literally the hundreds. And they're still not changing that. So yeah, they listen sometimes, Christian. So what do you mean it remains as a hyperlink? So you add in a URL. And if you copy and paste or link, even do a web clip or something like that, it puts a URL into OneNote and you can't like do remove hyperlink. So you can't copy the copy. If you ever want to copy and paste it, you can't.  It wants to open that link and you don't want it to. So just like an Excel or Word, you right click and say remove hyperlink, right? You can't do that in OneNote. It's always a hyperlink. Yeah, that is kind of a pain. The one last thing I was going to say that. So I use the desktop version of OneNote. And one of the reasons is because I have between the three main tenants that I go between and the multiple devices that I use, I can sync up and have from my desktop version. I'll go and open up and I can actually see from one pane. So one application, those OneNotes that are coming from my work, my community stuff, my personal stuff, like from three different tenants all in one place and sync up with those things. And there's still some AD stuff that's a bit quirky, time to time with syncing the folders and signing out of one profile in to make sure the sync is there. But, you know, once you have that link in place with all those having everything in one place, one application to work from. So I live and breathe inside of OneNote. So these questions are in OneNote in front of me. Excellent. All right, let's see. Again, anybody watching on the live stream or listening in, feel free to ask questions. And we'll get to them as soon as we can. With that question number three from Harry. Hello, everyone. I'm in a hybrid environment. Do all the user accounts have to be in the local AD? Do all the user accounts have to be in the local AD? It depends. I mean, this is really a vague question again. He says that he's in a hybrid environment. I don't know what that means. It could mean a couple of different things. But, I mean, in a normal situation, you can have local accounts and AD together if you're using LDAP. If you're just restricted to AD only, then no. And what do you need the... What would these accounts be used for? I mean, if it's an M365 service, then yeah, you can invite guests to use services. There's... We need more information. And as I said, these questions, folks, are raw from the interwebs. So we don't have the ability to do any follow-up there. So if anybody that posted these questions happens to be listening in and has additional detail, we're happy to dig in a little bit deeper on something like this. Yep. All right. Question number four may be similar. Valeria says, does anyone know how to solve the problem of we almost ready on my sites? Don't use my sites. Prom solved. Maybe upgrade to the most current version of SharePoint or get to SharePoint online, where my sites are no longer there. Do you know what that issue is? Is there like an error message? Is there something... Well, that's when they're building your site. They have a little... I don't know if you can remember, they used to have a little Gears or whatever, or they had... I don't remember, but it was when it was building the site. Yes. Please wait while we get your site ready, kind of thing. Now there was, along a while ago, there was a scenario where that that message was perpetual. And I termed what it was. It was to do with a process or a time of job or something that would be stalled or broken. But that was a long, long time ago for SharePoint on-prem. We're talking like 2013 days, latest probably. There was a resolution for it, but I forgot it was, but if you're running a modern version of SharePoint on-prem, modern as it can be, and you're patched up to date, you shouldn't have any issues with that scenario. If it's just the fact that that thing pops up that you're concerned about, then I'm sorry you can't get away from that. Unless you programatically create the OneDrive sites or MySites for people. Yeah, what were MySites retired? It depends on what you're going to call it. Sorry, Sharon. No, I was just thinking when they were retired probably... 2013? 2013 to 2016, because they replaced it with all the Delft stuff. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, the only other thing I can think is you could delete the MySite. If it's just one offending MySite, you could delete that MySite and let it reprovision and see if it fixes itself. Occasionally, if we had one corrupted MySites, because something in provision correctly would just delete it and let it recreate itself and try again. But yeah, there was an open issue quite a while ago. I just don't remember how we fixed it. We'll just stop using MySites. Was the initial advice that it was given? Okay. Upgrade. All right. Well, let's jump to question number five. Dev asks, hoping that someone will have something similar to Sol, we have a regular company-wide meeting or presentation that we're hoping to use teams for because some bright sparks started the thing on Facebook Live and we've been fighting to bring it back to teams for a year and a half. Yep, that happens. If one person schedules this meeting, then they are the presenter or ranger for the meeting and only they can do breakout rooms and so on. But in real life, these presentations are made by different staff members each time. It's a regular slot in the week, open all, but with different presenters. My question is, how do we make it scheduled and regular without one person being tied to being the meeting arranger? That's a great question. And it's an excellent question. Yeah, you know, the work around that, the only way that I've seen, and maybe somebody has a better technical answer for this, but is that for recurring meetings, it's held on everyone in the organization schedule as a placeholder meeting. And as we get colder to that individual, then an invite specifically for that event is sent out. That's how we resolve that. So everyone has it on their calendar, but it's clearly marked in parentheses placeholder so that it's blocked down near calendars and then there's just another invite coming out. And it's just part of our culture then know to look for the actual invite for that one meeting. That's what our company does as well because it also saves a lot of time, especially when you just, you send out the placeholder without reply requests and everyone gets it. And then when you actually send it out with the meeting, you get the reply request, whether or not they're going to attend. And it helps from an administration standpoint. Any other technical guidance on that or anything else anybody's used? No, we've run into this quite a bit and ultimately, yeah, whoever sets up the meeting is the one that has to do a lot of the pieces of it. You can promote people to presenter during the meeting. So if you know in advance like who's going to be presenting, you could go in there and set it up and promote them and things like that. But I mean, it gets really messy, really fast. Do I agree? Like if it's going to be different people every time, I would probably agree with that solution and just put a placeholder on there. You can schedule an Outlook meeting without scheduling a Teams meeting. I think sometimes people forget that. They think it's all one and the same. But you could schedule an Outlook meeting that has that placeholder with the intent that whoever's going to be presenting at that meeting then creates a Teams meeting that they send out to whoever's invited whatever is convenient for them prior to the meeting. Well, this kind of goes back to the old issue that is around if someone creates an Outlook meeting, recurring Outlook meeting and that person is no longer if they leave the company or they're on vacation or whatever, they have to turn over the brains for that single meeting to someone else or else the other folks can't change the meeting, alter it, add people, do anything like that. It's just same premise with setting up a Teams meeting as well. You still have to have that person who created it or someone who has delegate rights. Right? Does that work in Teams? So they have delegate rights for Teams? That's a great question. Specifically around doing the rooms, the breakout rooms, can you, if I've gone and set it all up, does the next, can you delegate that off? Yeah, it's basically broken. Not that I have found yet. No. I have looked and asked and watched and the answer that I know is that no, you cannot, it's whoever is the actual creator of the meeting is the only person that can manage the breakout rooms.  Like it's just done. We've been in that situation and essentially what we had to do is the other person had to create the meeting and then send out a new link. So no, you cannot, as far as I know up till now you cannot make changes that, but I will tell you Mike, this is a great time to bring up the conversation of this is such a good reason why you should be using group calendars and SharePoint calendars and not personal calendars for stuff like that. So if you have maybe a corporate meeting or a meeting that's dedicated for a certain department, if you're not using group calendars for Office 365 groups or you're not using SharePoint calendars, those are places where you can put things like meetings on a calendar it's not limited to one individual. It's for anybody who's part of the group or anybody that's part of the SharePoint site can then have access to that and it lives outside of an individual and that's a really good reason to set up a team, a group or SharePoint calendar and put those types of activities on that calendar and then allow people to subscribe to that calendar so they can see it on their own calendars as opposed to having an individual put that on their calendar and sharing it out. We actually have a calendaring question coming up. Another one. So yeah, it's actually looking back over the 61 previous episodes that we've done almost every month there was something about a week I should say was something around calendars. It's a popular question. Talk a lot. I talk about calendars a lot lately. I'm doing a presentation on time management twice in the next 30 days. Well, well, let's so that we'll get to that. That one is the next question after this this one. Number six. Shria says hello everyone. We need suggestions on PowerApp's mobile app. The code in my app start does not get executed if the mobile app is not closed each time I use it. For example, each time I get new emails to approve something and when I open the app for the first time it takes me to that particular screen. But the next time if I want to improve another request so the app is still open see a second request the app still shows the previous state or the last approved screen. This happens when I don't exit the app completely. How do I manage app start on mobile apps? No clue on that. The only thing I know about approvals is we have found in general for the cut for the clients that I have that use PowerApps and use approval processes across the board that we're finding a lot better usage if they add the approval app in teams that the approval app in teams crosses approval processes for everything PowerApps Power Automate everything and you can add it into your teams. When you do that you can see all your approvals in one place. So I don't know about the starting and stopping of the PowerApps in the mobile app but I can tell you that if you add the app approval apps in teams so you just go to teams go to the dot dot dot type approvals pin it to your bar you will see approvals anywhere you are requested to do an approval across all apps anywhere in the M365 environment and that's been really nice for a lot of our clients. Okay. Yeah I know that I have no experience with mobile app development but I know that in past lives I mean there's usually you know a command that basically like to force close after the completion of that workflow state or that it there's some kind of you know like a refresh that's done of the app even in the background but yeah I don't know we don't have to ask a mobile dev person so but I like that solution of moving stuff to teams we're all moving to teams it's all moving that direction anyway so why fight it people. Yeah. Okay question number seven from Ariel if I want new employees to automatically have certain shared calendars as soon as their user is provisioned without manual intervention how do I do that and what calendar type do I need so shared personal calendar teams calendar SharePoint calendar etc. I just did this I actually just proved out this entire use case a couple of weeks ago to make sure that it was doing what it was supposed to be doing so if you Sharon let me just point out that if you didn't blog it it didn't happen I know I blog but I'm going to tell you my time is getting more and more limited but I do it's a good one to blog so what happens what the best way to handle this is you can either do dynamic groups or you can do manual groups but if you want no intervention at all you can use a dynamic active directory group push that to an m365 group and then as people are dynamically added they will also be added to certain m365 groups if you have calendars enabled on that group when people are added to that group they will automatically be registered and have access to the group calendar the only limitation is anything prior to them starting will not be added to their calendar it's only things going forward but they will immediately be subscribed to the calendar anything that's in there they will be able to see it they'll have access to the shared calendar and then any new events that are added to that calendar after they start will also be sent to them to add to their own personal calendars you get all that I'm just I'm taking copious notes here I put I said a note down here Sharon will blog about this it's in the notes Sharon I'm just reading it I mean I just typed it but it's it's in the notes it's a great blog one of the gals that works with me her and I did some separate research and we proved it out and it absolutely works and so yeah I think that would make a great a great blog to push out very cool all right let's jump to number eight Tia says I want to send email to a group of users using Power Automate Workflow this is a custom group created specifically for the sub-site of a website when I try to access the group list for emails in the flow it gives only groups that are defined at the website level or Azure AD how could we access groups defined at the sub-site level for the workflow any suggestions or solutions is appreciated I'm awful don't use sub-sites always a simple solution yeah I mean you really shouldn't be using sub-sites anyways yeah anything else to add on that so there's not so much a how to do it but what should you not do the architect to use the best practice which is not sub-sites yeah that sounds good move along all right question number nine from Emer so this is an Azure question I'm creating application in-site alerts how do I make the notification configurable like email recipient in the email body so uh this is there's a bunch of different solutions for this question by definition inside of application insights you cannot alter the email recipients it's automatically set to the administrators of the subscription okay so by definition if you if you inside of the application insights blade as they call it nager if you're inside of that blade and you set the alert there then you have no path to do what you want to do however there are a couple different alternatives that you can do to that everything that you said inside of application insights from an alerting perspective is actually done inside of monitor and azure monitor and azure log analytics as the back end okay and you can recreate those alerts for application insights in one of those either monitor or log analytics and there you can define anyone to send those emails to and you can pre-define the body of the alert as well or modify the body of the email as well you just can't do it inside of the native application insights there's and I actually found a power automate function a flow that will automatically take the alert from application insights and then bring it through a flow to send it to whoever you want to send it to and change the email subject and content however you want so instead of having to go into monitor and recreate that alert which is already defined in application insights or go into log analytics and do the same thing you can just go into power automate attach that flow to that alert and you know add the recipients and change the email and all that kind of stuff right inside of there it's just that easy folks yeah I mean you have a couple of you know it really is because you just you have a couple alternatives that you can't if you can't do it in one place you can do it in three other places but I do want to stress that all of the alerting that comes out of Azure comes from log analytics and I mean literally anything that you can do from alerting inside of a blade for a particular feature you should be able to go to log analytics and create the same alert but you're just doing it a different way you're doing it be a query into the what they call the graph api rather than you know doing it natively inside of the the blade itself I will say that there is probably a dozen other ways to do this you could use you know you could use things like Azure functions you can use event grid you can use all these other functionalities that's in Azure to do all this but to keep it simple what I would do is I would you know if you if you have never worked with Power Automate or you want to give it a try or you have I would go out and do that that's the easiest otherwise get it to monitor recreate the alert and send it to whoever you want now this is not my world but is monitor provide kind of a dashboard view of all the notifications that you've set up yeah so monitor monitor does that log analytics is the back end that generates the queries you know that's actually you know you can go in there and you can create create what they call cusco language queries against everything that happens in azure against every log every everything that is trapped from an event and monitor is kind of like the front end of that so monitor will surface that and monitor also provides other functionality I mean it provides things like recommendations and all this other kind of stuff and you can set up your alerts in there and do all that all that but again the heart of it is log analytics is the back end so the reason I asked is just from a governance standpoint I mean I'm always concerned about hey if there's 10 different ways to go and create the notifications yet then I have to go look in 10 different places to find those notifications to make changes or to see or somebody leaves an organization and changes a role or something to find out where all that stuff is what's the best way to manage that and I would default to the process that yeah that has that overview right and I think that I think that application insights is missing the boat on this I mean they need that option to alter that and not just send to administrators but they haven't I mean that's just something they haven't implemented but for any type of alerting in Azure I go to monitor first because you know that's that that should be the de facto place for anyone who deals with that if they deal from a security aspect and not just like an event aspect but a security aspect you should be using security center which also ties into monitor but it's focused all on security and compliance and all that kind of stuff cool stuff all right so here's a kind of a this is just it's a more softball question but but it might it has an interesting discussion Christine says anyone else here using teams for therapy sessions and specifically group therapy sessions you're familiar with that therapy right Christian you're familiar of course I have several therapists and we all with all of them use teams though I was wondering what tips and advice you have I've been using it and will be attending a feedback group in my workplace looking for others experience and expertise also just curious if there are groups people in this if there are people in this group using it for this purpose so one thing I will say is that during the the height of the pandemic and the lockdown at least here in the US I mean I you started to see user group sessions just popping up that had no topic that the purpose was just for people to connect and have that side of things and I so I thought that was very much an alignment with with this idea and what are some best practices there so one great thing about that is that well I see certainly I have connections around the world and all these different user group invites from around the world and of all these things that I don't participate in but I started just dropping in more and more with different user groups couple times South Africa some of the Northeast down in Australia New Zealand dropping in on some of these calls just so I could see and hear friends and and make new friends you know and just just talked about what's going on and so that was very therapeutic to have those connections and and some of them even specifically stated like we're not talking about work it's like what else is going on tell me about family and personal connections and that kind of stuff and and that was it was great to have those those sessions I know if anybody else was doing the same thing and any other best practices that you would share the the thing that we did was a company tried to implement a lot of this right trying to get people to socialize more and the problem from a best practices standpoint don't make them too big and I mean because we had a lot of folks that were it turns into like talking over each other and can't understand what somebody's trying to talk about and and getting up on all kinds of tangents so you really want to keep them smaller and focused and I think that that works out a lot better especially if you're dealing with with uh you know and I'm assuming from a group therapy it's going to be much smaller group which is a good thing but and the other thing is visuals it was very important for us to have visual to be able to see people to be able to see them in their natural surroundings in their houses and you know see their kids running behind them and their dogs and their you know whatever else that was very important I would think from a group but have group therapy aspect too it's just the same thing it's the actual you know see the person not just you know do audio only type of type of scenario yeah I think sorry go ahead oh sorry Sharon I was just gonna say we from the Microsoft Stump in my my organization Microsoft obviously is Azure and we've done a lot of work and now my organization in the CXP organization as a whole to share experiences and do kind of what we call the culture club is kind of the adaptation of this and the culture club has a various different things we have meditation sessions we have coffee chat talks just 15 minute meetings you just drop in you sing comma comma comma comma for me yeah sorry sorry go ahead but we also extended it to other things we did a we did what we call a share my failed where people brought their failures to the table I presented them one just a few weeks ago and where I you know I failed and I screwed up and how did I learn and understanding and I kind of share that knowledge with people what if you have nothing to share what if you have nothing absolutely zero to share then you fail Christian you don't recognize your failure you're in denial you're in denial you're in denial you're in denial you're in denial and we do we know the other session we do is we do we do this in behind the screens where people share their hobbies and interests again I did a session last week which actually I hope if you can see this but I do I do laser engraving this is a marine call batch laser engraved on wood I got a new laser engraver which I'm practicing working with which actually burns the hell out of wood I realized these five times more powerful than my old one so and but those are the kind of things we did we've been doing in all kind of various different scenarios in different contexts to get people connected and you know it's almost been about two years now since we had an offsite in my team so a lot of lack of face to face this makes it hard yeah that I mean really to add on to that I was just gonna say I think whenever you do virtual groups you need to be very specific about when you're meeting why you're meeting have topics have activities planned like if you know if you have a handful of people breakout rooms have been instrumental for a lot of the the group sessions that I've participated in where basically if you have a facilitator I mean it's no different than in person you know facilitation is kind of an art and I think it's really important to have a facilitator that has a structured time and agenda and activities and if you're going to use breakout rooms to kind of break people down into smaller groups you know do that and facilitate that and I think if you do those types of things it's super helpful I'm sure in the therapy you know in that industry if you're talking about like you know clinical therapy then it's about governance and rules and policies and what you're allowed to do and what you're not allowed to do but I I just think being specific at a facilitation level really helps things to kind of move along and people don't feel like they're just kind of there to do nothing yeah well and specifically to a question too from a therapy standpoint it's one of the reasons why I like I mean teams is a great app with that and and so that you can have if it's a one-on-one or even a small group and have the tabs and have shared resources all there in the history there of what was shared and so it's even when we're not in person talking you know the therapist or the facilitator of the team discussion can you know there's still the chat that's going on until the next session and so you can even add notes in and hey next time we're together I want to go cover this topic or hey there's this new tool like our company uses Headspace and so you can have a link to the Headspace and the descriptions hey we're going to walk through different tools that are now available to the organization and have that as a tab within that then private you know chat there so you know I think teams is a great way to facilitate those types of discussions whether it's open or whether it's you know one-on-one all right question number 11 Eslum says what are the limitations for creation of workflow rules and power automate for a global admin there's a quick question just what are they come on Sharon spit it out why are you holding back it's actually a very complex answer it really is and the reason why I say that is because power automate has it has all kinds of different permissions that are required depending on what you want to do so it has different levels it's not like you know just if you have permissions to create an automate a flow that you can do everything inside of the flow you can't necessarily and it requires different accounts it requires an automation account number one to actually do everything inside of the flow so you have to have the permissions to create the automation account all that other kind of stuff so it's not an easy answer well depending on what you want to create and so specifically we're talking about a global admin the global admin for the creation of workflow of rules and so yes a global admin can do anything right the problem is is that the problem that I've run into is that a global admin creates it and then somebody wants to go and modify the flow they can't or they want to change something in the flow they can't only the global admin can do it so you really want to avoid having the goal it's kind of like root if anybody's been raised on Linux or the Unix world like I was I ate it every day for years oh yeah so did I it's that solid brand cleans the crawl and scrapes it yeah Linux anybody who's raised even on IBMs okay Q-SYSOPPER and root are two things that you just never logged in as and there's a reason behind that global administrator is another thing that you just usually never logged in as unless you absolutely need it that's usually reserved because you have you basically have root permissions to the entire Azure and that's you know that caused all kinds of problems it's better to have a service account that has all the power automate functionality that it needs at a global admin level that is not a global admin and I believe that's a actual best practice is to create that service account to do that and then we just log in with that service account when we're creating the workflows or editing the workflows that it's a it's got global admin rights to do what it needs for the workflow but not for the other things correct they only draw back to that is that account needs power automated licensing so depending on what subscription you have because power automate isn't free okay I mean some of the things are free but and just as a tip I suggest that if you're going to create a service account like that I always recommend that you give it the power ops on the limited license which by the way is now half the price that it used to be at a at a low $20 month because by doing that you can do power apps and you can do all of the things in power automate you need to do I think that was a pretty good answer Christian all right question number 12 I think that's pronounced is that Kaley it's my guess Kaley Lee yeah yeah I have a question about assigning tasks in the web version of Outlook in office 365 I see you can create a task but you can't see who it is assigned to I know the answer to this one okay so this requires a little storytelling no so Outlook on the web and going forward all of the versions of Outlook are switching to use to do as their consolidated task management so you used to have a separate task entity inside of Outlook that kind of coordinated task management you don't have that anymore and that's reflected now in the web but it will be reflected everywhere eventually what happens is when you click on that task button you're actually being you're being directed to do kind of in a modified version so the tasks that are created in the task section of Outlook are only tasks for you whereas when you click on to do you can open it up and you can create lists in to do to use and you can then share and assign those tasks and if you do it that way you can see what the task is who it's assigned to who's shared with that list in addition you can actually set up things like recurring tasks and all of the fun things you used to do in Outlook but you just have to do them in a separate new list in to do and I like the to do app on my computer because then I can see it you can see it on your phone it really it integrates well across the board but I use the to do app on my computer because it pulls all of those tasks into one place in addition it also pulls them into teams under the tasks app which I'm going to be doing a session on at commsverse in September so yes it's changing I added a couple links to that effect in the chat thank you so much yeah I will for those that are looking for that by the way so anything that we have if we have links to share so I will be doing a summary blog post out on buckleyplanet.com you can find it there with any of the links and then if there are any of course follow-up blog posts like Sharon's going to do on a previous question then I'll also provide a link to that other blog post there as well I'm sure she'll get on that right away as well so yeah that is a that's a great I know that it's evolving the thing I'm waiting for is that to do integration through tasks in one one note in one note because that's the like the last you know refuge of hidden tasks that get forgotten things that you flag there and I know that there are different integrations across you can push that over into you know outlook notifications but it's just it's not a clean integration I just want it to have to open up the to-do just like it does now within outlook for the web and just have that modified panel of tasks that are created as you flag them within your notes and it just automatically pops up and then shows up in a related list in to do that's what I'm waiting for there so that's there is a there is a I don't know what the road map is long term the timing of an 80s but again it's part of that long term tasks in Microsoft 365 roadmap and will eventually be that way cool all right let's see question number 13 lucky 13 mun mun better way to pronounce that I don't know I have deleted a site in SharePoint 2016 but still my US ULS log is capturing its entry any idea why it is looking for a deleted site because there's a connection from one site to another or an app to the site that's still operating need to know more about the ULS log entries to understand what it's trying to achieve though yeah without the the data from the log anything could be happening okay I don't know what else to say yeah what is what is the event I mean ULS logs are pretty comprehensive put it in the most mode filter down to the event ID or filter down to the correlation ID you know well that's pretty much it so it's looking for a deleted site I mean like I don't know if the had the ULS logs are refreshed there I mean one if it's deleted if it was just nearly deleted is it still you know in the system is it still you know waiting to be properly you're removed from the system so the reference is still relevant there because it's still alive if you were to go back in and restore it within 10 days for example so so there's going to be history until it's come you know entirely removed from the system yeah and it depends on like you say you know when you say it's looking for a deleted site what's looking what is it trying to achieve because obviously all sites as you know all sites will get you know periodic time the jobs will go do and do user profile sync refreshes all that kind of stuff is going to be a whole bunch of jobs that do that so if we can narrow it down to the actual activity that's trying to take place against that site or what call is being made to that site then we can do a much better job of narrowing and understanding what the problem is if there's indeed even a problem likely what is if it's not a time if it's a time of job and the site's matters is deleted in the in the changelog the time of jobs will ignore it and won't do anything but they accept the deletion time of job which actually deletes the site itself if the if it's a call maybe there's a workflow somewhere that's related to that site maybe there's you know something like a content distributor application dot sp document web that kind of thing that's trying to move content to that site there's a whole whole bunch of reasons why there could be a reference to a site that's been deleted and understanding what's actually trying to try to happen what action is trying to take place will help us narrow in that help them help us solve the problem you know you know in a better way than just fishing all right question number 14 Martin says hi all I'm wondering if there is a way to get a daily or weekly summary of my meeting participation with joining and leaving time maybe with PowerShell or PowerApps I need to book my working hours quite exactly in its time consuming to go through all the meeting charts where at least the start and end time is visible one by one and teams meetings from external companies do not even contain this info the chat is not available anymore after the meeting ended so is there a way to go in for an individual and get a daily or weekly summary of every meeting that they've participated in and their start and stop times I mean every meeting has a downloaded report but I know I've done a Power BI report based on outlook but you would still have to manually update the times I think it'd be a cool thing though what a great idea for a product that would be a cool thing like specifically for yeah for like time card systems I'm not familiar if there are any third party apps that do this today please comment let us know I'm writing this down yeah because this that would be a cool feature to have if I could go and get a daily summary of you know hey Christian here were the nine teams meetings that you participated in your join time and you leave time in a number of minutes that that equals so I get that summary maybe with the with the subject the topic of each of those meetings just at a very high level that would be a an interesting thing you know this would be a great question for like John and Ed over at TIGRAF to see if it's you know captured and see if they've they've come across that scenario I can't believe that this would be a a new question that we've not ever been asked it is in the team's admin user activity report that's what I was looking to see if it's actually here and it is there's a there's a user activity report that essentially for every user is that per meeting or is that per user over the course of the day it tells you it tells you the total and it tells you every single meeting that you've participated in and the duration so you can look at it from the user level of all of the meetings not meeting by meeting I think you could do both well I mean one thing I mean we know the data is captured so yeah it is captured so therefore yeah I mean there would probably be a way to do it I don't know the easy way to do it but it is actually getting tracked inside of the usage report for teams admins so surely that could be surfaced in a Power BI report or something easy yeah and so if it's available there then it should be available via the API and to be able to go in and or the graph yeah build that to the graph API yep yep there it is okay yeah yeah now Martin you just need to go build it so yeah we admire that that problem okay number 15 Thorsten we would like to contact all members of one channel via email is that possible and how channel email email you have an answer to this you just right click on the channel and get email link yes absolutely I know the answer Thorsten didn't know the answer to that but yes so it's right there natively within the UI to do that yeah you just click the dot not right click sorry you click on the channel click the little dot dot dot and there's a get link to channel and it will give you the link that you can there's an email address and a link if that is enabled if that is allowed by the admin so if you're not seeing it it may not be allowed for your team or for your org and so talk to your teams admin or your global admin the other option is in why is this as via email the other option is to in the teams chat to simply at mention the team or the channel and you can also do that as well yeah depending on the type of communication that of course if you're trying to reach them why send an email just do an announcement right in within that channel depending on what you're trying to do if they're subscribed to emails that mentioned them then they will also get an email as well yes just taking a note there all right question number 16 Bradley I'm currently in the run of migrating all my data on Windows Server 2019 standard from HDD to SSD storage how much of a difference will it make in terms of hosting websites on IIS which has their asset files located on the SSD drives that's a very open-ended question it depends on the assets for the individual yeah I mean you've got to think about websites and how they operate and the number of things that come into play here you know if you say you know start from the moment first user hits a website there's all bunch of stuff that goes into the background obviously retrieving the assets originally from the SSD is going to be faster than a regular you know spinning platter hard drive so there's speed gains there in both in terms of latency and bandwidth assuming the machines can operate that you know let's let's assume it's a virtual machine and it's got the right buses and the right connectivity to the device that's kind of a secondary point but but then consider how the website operates you know most websites that are well written or are based on the right platform will have significant caching structure behind them so once the data is retrieved from the asset you really would have to reconsence or once the assets retrieved from the disk you'd really have to go back and get it again it should be in a cache somewhere hopefully so there's a there's a lot of things that you know initial hit will probably be faster likelihood is there'll be some performance gains elsewhere overall going SSD versus spinning disk is a is a good move generally for improving bandwidth and latency but the actual you know the determination of how much will it improve is very kind of based on user experience and testing okay great answer yep okay question number 17 we got four minutes here I think we can not get a couple more number 17 Shana says I still not do not see the webinar option in my teams it is not blocked by the organization any idea why question I feel like we need a captain a there used to be this show called captain obvious or whatever you know thank you doctor was a doctor science thank you doctor science where he gave obvious answers to questions and I feel like this is one of those it's because it's not there yet yeah so that's where I highly recommend that you sit down pen a letter on good old fashion paper to your state senator and something darn it will be done about it there should be a legislation yes not available yet I mean I feel like if it's not there you know if once the rollout window is completely done if it's still not there maybe open a ticket to Microsoft but it's yeah talk to us in three months and see let us know if this is still an issue thank you question number 18 Nora says need to help I did not delete my Microsoft team and I'm trying to restore it so someone else did that's the interpretation there so I cut and paste these questions folks so the restore button doesn't allow me to is there any way I can get my group back and know who deleted it I only know it was at 107 a.m. please help so at 107 a.m. somebody went in and deleted Norris's team the audit logs will will tell it who if she has access to them she doesn't assume she can raise a request from referential support organization to get that data so Neil where are you from you're from originally what what part of the UK Manchester in Manchester do you have a lot of women named Norris I just was wondering no I just just Apologies just just Apologies to Norris I'm just I was surprised that you went there right away with I was like Oh, okay. Just make sure I mean, I I misheard I apologize it's okay Okay. Yeah. So, um, yeah. So that's so the audit log would be the first place to go in and see who deleted what I mean, that's interesting too like has the restore button but it's not restoring Why would that be the case? Maybe they're not an owner Maybe it's been deleted, deleted That was my thought too because they wouldn't would they not they would not see the option to restore it if they didn't have permissions for restore my first thought was that it got fully deleted Yeah, that's my guess my guess is it got deleted and then it got fully deleted and they would likely have to open a sport ticket with Microsoft to restore it and even then there's a window for that Yep. There's a window there's a caveat and just block out a couple vacation days to be on the phone with Microsoft support Yes, maybe even a week Well, that's a Hey, guys, we're at we're at time really appreciate everybody for participating and my device is talking to me over in the window there but really appreciate everyone for joining and again, thank you for all those that watch the recording or watching on the live stream on Facebook or out on YouTube Of course, we'll be back next month that will publish out the date so I would highly recommend that you subscribe out on YouTube to just go search for collab talk on YouTube and get the notifications there there's plenty of other interviews that are out there I will be doing a full summary blog post on buckleyplanet.com where it will have embedded the recording and every question so every message center update that was provided and every question that we covered and any links that we shared with each other here during the discussion we'll be a part of that as well and with that just follow the hashtag of M365AMA and we'll be back next month so thanks a lot everybody and I guess get back to our normal work day whatever we were doing before if we were doing things before yeah, let's go do those things we'll see you everybody later see ya bye