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Yesterday, I was challenged by the Editorial Director for the Petri IT Knowledgebase, Jeff James, to take up the Ice Bucket Challenge, to raise funds and raise awareness of Motor Neurone Disease (MND), also known as ALS. Today at lunch time, I took up that challenge after donating to the the Irish Motor Neurone Disease Association.

Here is my challenge …

Should I have warned you that the language was not safe for work? Sorry! 😀

I now challenge the following people:

• Dave Northey, of Microsoft Ireland
• Claire Smyth, Microsoft MVP lead for UK & Ireland
• Sarah Cooley, the MVP lead PM for the Hyper-V team

Good luck folks!

BTW, that ice (yes, ice was in there) water felt like a kick in the chest, and I couldn’t breath for a few seconds.

Thanks to John for drowning me, and Michael for shooting the video, and the folks from MicroWarehouse for cheering me on!

Aidan Finn is planning to unveil his plan to rule the world next month at a special press event. Sources familiar with Finn’s plans tell us that the benevolent one is tentatively planning his press event for September 30th to detail upcoming changes to world domination as part of a plan called “Overlord”. This date may change, but the Overlord plan is currently in development and Finn plans to release a preview version of what will likely be named “Oh Sh1t! This is Really Happening” to the world on September 30th or shortly afterwards.

The early preview will give the world a first look at how traffic problems will be solved in Overlord. Missile-equipped drones will patrol motorways and dual carriageways, scanning for drivers who rest their chin on the steering wheel, hog the overtaking lane, or wait until the last moment to change lanes for the M9 on the Kildare M7. Finn is also planning to have drones patrol near schools looking for cars that are stationary for more than 1 second, but it’s not clear if this particular feature will be made available as part of the preview.

While Overlord is likely to be named “Oh Sh1t! This is Really Happening”, it’s unlikely that the ever handsome Finn will name his upcoming plan at his press event. Instead, Finn is said to be planning an overview of key new features of the new regime, with a preview ready for offenders and innocents. Finn is also building a separate combined version of his plan for each continent, and the gentle one may take the time to detail his work during his press event. Either way, Finns plan to rule is nearing completion and the amazing one will be ready to talk more about it next month.

Oh, and the Verge is reporting some stuff about Windows 9.

If you’ve not been hiding in a cave then you’ve heard of the Ice Bucket Challenge which is being used to raise funds for and awareness of ALS, known here as Motor Neurone Disease. The Editorial Director for the Petri IT Knowledgebase, Jeff James, took the bullet and has passed the challenge on to me.

Jeff, I accept your challenge. I’ll be doing it at work tomorrow at lunch time.

Maybe I’ve pissed you, the reader, off in some way. Maybe you’re one of the many vFanboys that I take fun in ridiculing? Or maybe you work in Microsoft and I’ve annoyed you one-too-many times. If you’d like to see me soaked and freezing my cajones off (it’s quite cold in Ireland lately) then please do me a favour, give generously to the Irish Motor Neurone Disease Association or a local version of that organisation that supports ALS or MND victims & families. Get your revenge, and dig deep!

Oh and be warned … I will be naming 3 people that I’ve already selected 🙂

In case you don’t know, Windows Weekly on the TWiT online channel is probably the biggest Windows “podcast” (it’s also a live show) on the net. It is hosted by Leo Laporte with top tech journalists Paul Thurrott and Mary Jo Foley. Last night, they discussed the recent patching issues and Mary Jo brought up my advice to delay deploying updates for 1 month – I normally try to watch live but I listened in the car this morning.

Go to around the 34 minute mark to hear for yourself

Leo didn’t like my advice – Leo also hosts Security Now and hears on a weekly basis about the various ways that computers can be attacked from Steve Gibson. Leo was worried about “zero day” attacks. Paul appeared to have a very pragmatic view on things, wishing that we didn’t have this problem in the first place.

So here’s my views on the discussion. I understand why Leo doesn’t like my recommendation. I don’t like my recommendation to delay release of updates for 1 month. But I’ve been seeing for the last 2 years how bad updates for Windows Server (and thus Windows client) and System Center have been. We’re seeing failures and release withdrawals almost on a quarterly basis. And these aren’t just niche scenarios like a shortcut to a font file in the wrong place on Windows 7 Home Premium. This is widely used designs, basic installs, and so on. To be honest, I see the approval of new updates from Microsoft as a bigger risk than malware at this point; releasing an untested update (if I was still an admin) to 100 VMs and 1000 desktops is sure to get me fired within 3-6 months when the business goes in the dark a couple of times because of bad updates. On the other hand, I’ve never had a malware breakout on a network I owned in my career – I’ve only seen malware get trapped by well-managed AV.

I wish I could recommend approving MSFT updates for near-instant deployment, as Leo has suggested. But I cannot – I’ve heard of and reported on too many failures. And any business that needs to rely on their IT cannot take risks.

Paul has it right; Microsoft management is pushing releases (patches, rollups, full product milestones) faster than they should be – and testing is taking second place. I know that technical people that I have great respect for in Redmond are embarrassed by what is going on. Unfortunately, it’s going to take something really bad for Satya Nadella to undo the damage that is happening under his watch, that I guess is probably his doing.

Leo (not that you’ll ever read this), I completely understand your point of view. I used to be a person who said “get the updates out within a week”. But because of the events of the last 2 years, I respectfully have to disagree with you.

BTW, you can take the approach I recommended using SCCM ADRs and tweak it so you create ADRs to approve “critical” updates more rapidly. That will give you a middle ground for security updates, but the risk is yours to measure and take. This is a management decision!

How I laughed back in 2003 when I read that Munich was “dumping” Windows to migrate all servers, desktops and productivity software to Linux and open source. At the time I was deploying an XP and Windows Server 2003 network in a German group, headquartered in Munich. I saw up close, how dumb some local IT people could be (hello Marco of HVB and Hypo Real Estate IT! – another case of “I told you so” muppetry).

You see, the Munich city government decided to dump all Microsoft software. Everyone, other than penguin huggers, told them that they were nuts. If you value productivity and collaboration, you go with Microsoft. Even a college student, educated with an open mind instead of brainwashed by a “son of Linus”, can tell you that off-the-shelf software that you pay for is cheaper to buy and own than free software that you have to customise and maintain.

And that’s the lesson that Munich has learned in the last 10 years.

Firstly it took from 2003 until 2013 for Munich to complete the migration. Sounds mad, right? The whole story is mired in secrecy, political rhetoric, and bullshi1t marketing. What we do know is that employees are complaining that they cannot get work done. They can’t figure out Linux workstations. Their productivity software is inferior to Office. And what they produce is incompatible with their customers/suppliers/partners.

Oh well! I guess Munich can find some open source scheiße to use over the next 10 years to migrate back to Microsoft. Or maybe they can hire a giant consulting firm that will cost too much.

I do not know what the root cause of my location-specific outage last Friday was. I know that my Vodafone Ireland broadband at home was affected. I also know that Sky Ireland broadband was affected. But others internationally and the ISPs at work had no issues. It was all very strange … and the problem appears to have sorted itself out today (the following Wednesday).

Anywho, business (and sarcy posts) as normal!

Well done, Simon! You win this award because you:

• You asked someone else to do your searching even when the answer is easy to find.
• Even when I responded with a LMGTFY response where the first 5 links gave you your answer, you still wanted me to do the clicking and reading for you.
• And then you go uppity about it

Heck, 2 of the links were written by Microsoft, one by me, one on Hyper-V.nu and one by Thomas Maurer. We community contributors spend a lot of time writing this stuff. Please don’t expect us to read it to you too.

You can lead a horse to water but you cannot make him drink.

I am live blogged this from the video stream.

No – I am not at the event. And yes, my coverage will be sarcastic as usual. It would be boring otherwise 🙂 This is an event for social networking with partner head honchos who are there for a big party. That’s not my scene apparently. So I am here at the office, watching the keynote live and live blogging. I expect lots of “cloud and devices and experiences and all that jazz”. Expect Nadella to use lots of big words and images.

We open with a pointless video of people climbing hills and herding sheep. Now there’s a story of immigrant buskers who block the way on Grafton Street in Dublin. Feckers! They play the opening song. The sound mixer should be shot – no bass. This performance goes on for quite a while. After 16 minutes, they wrap up.

Phil Sorgen (‎Corporate Vice President – Worldwide Partner Group, Microsoft) comes out. Live. Wow, he’s usually recorded – see the awful Azure on Open videos.

Microsoft corporate VP, Phil Sorgen

He talks about the partner awards. Boring. No blogging here. There’s a sparkler in the ceiling. Not quite fireworks.

Partners came in from over 130 countries. He is giving us a sense of where Microsoft is headed. The goal of the conference is to show partners how Microsoft will grow their business and why they should invest in more Microsoft solutions.

Office 365 is their fastest growing business ever. We’ve seen that here, with Ireland being a leader in market penetration for Microsoft, with a lot of credit going to my colleagues in MicroWarehouse.

We now get the people, devices, application, data push. Expect him to talk about the new cloud license bundles including Intune, Azure RMS, and Azure AD Premium.

Oooh they are pushing a cult of personality thing with Nadella – quiet but confident. Oh my, Nadella is not talking today. He’s not on stage until Wednesday. That’s a bad move. Good sales: sell your story at the start because that’s the part of the conversation that people remember most.

Long gap – boring video and quotes. My life is not changed.

Now comes out Scott Guthrie – the man that runs the server business (including Azure), taking over from the recently promoted Nadella. Will this be a flood of Azure announcements like at Build?

Yes, new features will be announced and demo’d this week.

A large amount of big and small partners offering services on Azure, including legacy competitors.

The Microsoft cloud is the only one that delivers on each of the three circles:

Hyper-Scale or cloud-scale is not just the size of the data centre, but the local regions. Two new regions in the USA. Now there are 17 regions around the world. 2 times more than AWS, and 5 times more than Google offers. No one else comes close. You can run your apps closer to your customers than ever before.

A region contains up to 16 data centres clustered together. Each is the size of an American football pitch (52 yards by 120 yards – 2 passenger airplanes). Up to 600,000 servers can run in a region. This gives Microsoft a huge scale of economics, and allows customers to scale up/down with confidence based on need. Microsoft plans to differentiate based on enterprise support and hybrid cloud functionality, versus the only 2 competitors: AWS and Google.

Azure government cloud for the USA: a dedicated instance run by US citizens with clearance. Means nothing to non-USA governments.

Hybrid cloud is unique to Microsoft:

ExpressRoute ensures SLA and privacy over a private network

InMage was bought by Microsoft for providing DR replication from Hyper-V and vSphere to Azure. Huh!?!?!? News to me!!!! Will this solve the problems of Azure Site Recovery? From Mary Jo Foley http://www.zdnet.com/microsoft-acquires-disaster-recovery-solutions-firm-inmage-to-strengthen-azure-7000031490/ and from Peter Egerton http://blogs.microsoft.com/blog/2014/07/11/microsoft-acquires-inmage-better-business-continuity-with-azure/?wc.mt_id=Social_MSC_Announcement_DI. Looks like the product will be merged into ASR. Not a fix then.

Just tweeted by Mary Jo Foley: Microsoft Azure Continues to Deliver Rapid Innovation in the Cloud

Now on to a demo by Scott Gu. He deploys a SharePoint farm of multiple machines from the gallery using a template in the new portal. This includes domain controllers. This is cool – kind of like a VMM service template. Checking the HA box makes each tier highly available.

Deploy a server farm in minutes. You can do this sort of thing with VMs of your own. We see SAP, Oracle, Riverbed, and Barracuda in the gallery – Azure Certified Program where ISV partners can upload a VM to be in the gallery. Riverbed offers some nice optimization for latent network connections!

Azure is on Open as of August 1st. Distributors have pricing since July 1st. The customer can use their Azure credit on any Azure service. There automated alerts to the customer and the partner of record (must be recorded) if credit is running low.

Now on to Power BI. *yawn for me* James Philips comes out to demo. Not the first time that I’ve seen this exact demo. Time out for me. Bob Duffy (Irish MVP) and Carmel Gunn are the only people on this planet who can do an interesting demo of this stuff.

Back to Scott Guthrie. Azure Machine Learning Service is launching today. This is a future prediction service based on data. And that’s that from Scott. Now for more “life changing” videos. Some fashion dude – yawn.

Brad Anderson, Corporate VP for Enterprise Client & Mobility (moved from the server group) enters the stage. No tight t-shirt to flash his “guns” today.

Expect lots of enterprise mobility suite. How we work has changed. New graduates are always on and expect personalized surfacing of data. Today’s employees waste 1 in 5 days searching for information. They are bringing in personal devices (even if BYOD is banned). They want to use apps of their choice. They want to have mobile working in a workspace that suits them.

Freedom increases risk. 3.1 million smartphones were stolen in the USA last year. Lots of corporate data there. I think he said 1.4 million were lost. That’s more data.

Microsoft is focusing on the end user experience. MSFT wants to give users the apps and devices that they love, but to keep the business secure.

Champion speed talker, Julia White is out on stage. I make fun – I hear she’s a great 1-1 interview. She normally talks Office. Now she’s starting with CRM Online, using a Windows touch app. There is some data browsing via Delve (uses Azure Machine Learning to show you information that you might be interested in, instead of you searching for it). Now some OneDrive for Business in O365. Note the 1 TB of data. Then some collaboration in Word Online. Some “Tell Me” to show the user how to do something in Word Online. Some security is need for the doc: so Azure Recovery Services will protect the doc wherever it goes. The destined customer will be restricted with what they can do with the doc.

Maybe a partner allows a specific customer to read the doc … but they cannot print, copy, or forward the doc to another partner. No more price lists or quotes shared with competitors!

In Ourlook Online, there are groups of people to enable discussion. I think these are Yammer groups – yup they are. Now PowerPoint app on an iPad.

Now a new feature: integration between EMS and Office 365 – MDM of the Office apps on a mobile device. The demo is a restriction of app usage and where data can reside. Only IT approved apps are offered when she tries to open a file. She tries to send an Office file using the native iOS app – the paste/attach option is blocked. The Outlook app allows a paste/attachment. Julia finishes up and back to Brad.

Julia showed the user experience. Brad wants to talk about the IT perspective. Start with the device itself. Put in policies, e.g. password policies, jailbreak restrictions. Enable users to bring devices in, but automate deployment like Wi-Fi configuration. Deploy apps in wrappers/containers to isolate corporate apps/data from personal apps/data. Microsoft goes beyond devices, and protects the file itself (RMS) wherever it goes. Embedding access rights into the file restricts who can access the file and how they can use it. Now on to a demo of EMS.

Intune is first. We can see the policies for things like Samsung KNOX or WiFi and VPN, app retrictions, and encryption policies. App restrictions include things like copy, paste, save as, and so on. He demos an email policy. Require encryption, prevent jail breaking, and require an unlock pin/password.

He talks about Azure RemoteApp now. It’s an easier way to deploy traditional apps to Windows, Android, MacOS and iOS than standing up RDS by yourself. Demo gods strike this down 🙂

Identity is provided by Windows Azure AD Premium. This powers SaaS apps. Cloud App Discovery allows you to ID SaaS apps being used by users without IT involvement. Discovered apps can be brought under management of IT – synchronize identity and control access to services, e.g. block access when the user leaves the company. Another usage: track user logins based on time and geography – you can force a user password reset or enable 2-factor authentication if a password has been phished.

And that’s Brad done. More quotes and videos to make you cry. I’m crying, alright. Is this Sesame Street?!?!?

Corporate VP of Office Division, Jone Case comes out to talk about the end-end commercial cloud.

The whole is greater than the sum of the parts. This is a big thing that most of MSFT field and partners fail to see. This isn’t about point solutions; it’s about the entire integrated solution that gives users a joined up experience, and IT an easier deployment and management experience.

27 million downloads of Office for iPad apps so far. CRM Online will come into Open licensing in this fiscal year (before July 2015).

Product is just half of the story. Successful cloud partners engage on every part of the customer’s journey. There was an IDC study of successful of O365 partners. One UK partner makes £6 of services for every £4 of “software” sold in an O365 deal.

A new program, Cloud Solution Provider, for partners to own the tech and SaaS invoicing via a single monthly invoice to customers. Rolling out through select partners in 48 countries over the next 12 months.

The faster that customers get to usage of the product, the more likely that they are to renew and develop new services leads for the partner. O365 will be improved to allow automated provisioning. MSFT to do a partner attach for every new deal they sell directly – competencies are CRITICAL for this.

Signature Cloud Support is announced for partners. This is a unique tier of support for gold partners for Azure, Intune, Office 356, and Dynamics/CRM. Sounds like there’s unlimited break/fix support in this program.

Partners need to stay engaged with the customer to get the annuity kickback from the customer. IMO, this is also a chance to get additional services. Wow – half are opening the renewal information emails, and only 15% are clicking the link to see the information. PARTNERS – this is easy money and you are losing it!!!

So called “door swinger” easy opportunities:

22 million W2003 installations out there need to be upgraded before July 2015. There is a $6 billion business there.

Gavriella Schuster, GM Worldwide Partner Marketing and Programs (MPN). She’s in charge of that God-awful site.

Training is a blocker for partners to embrace the cloud. In September there will be 3 new partner cloud competencies. Partner success with customers will be a key piece of the entrance. MSFT are investing in 4 areas to enable investment:

1. The first year of silver fee is being waived.
2. Those who use the product internally, have 3 times the sales volume. Internal usage rights for O365 and Azure are increasing between 25% and 200% depending on your cloud competency levels.
3. Unlimited cloud support for O365 and Azure through the Signature Cloud Support program
4. 10% reduction in all on-premises competency fees.

COO Kevin Turner, one of the most divisive people in MSFT takes the stage. Didn’t he used to have a moustache?

600,000 partners in 190 countries. Microsoft are making progress on transforming and are proud of what they have done so far.

Everything is on the table. For example: partnering with old competitors such as Oracle, releasing apps on Android and iOS before Windows.

More personal devices and services across all platforms. Ugh, they had to drag up Cortana (The Curse Of Zune).

To succeed we have to continually change and evolve. The old world of license-attach is not enough. The world has moved on, and we have to go with it. MSFT has 90% of PC market share, but the opportunity for total device share is HUGE (positive spin):

When you only have 14% of the total device market share (the 90% of PCs included) you have to have a challenger mindset. We have to think like a market disruptor. We have to differentiate from the competition, with clear delivery of the message. We have to know ours and the competitor solutions. We have to have speed: deploy fast, succeed fast and fail fast (and learn from the mistakes fast).

Great tweet I just saw:

The 5 key trends for mega-growth are:

$191 billion market opportunity by 2020 in the cloud. MSFT is at the front of this charge. Get in on Azure now. O365 is running over the objectors. “This is the year of Azure and CRM Online acceleration”. I believe the Azure line. I’ve heard the CRM online line before, so I am sceptical of the latter.

A customer can go to the cloud on their terms (hybrid) if they have AD and System Center completely deployed.

There’s a big push on Office 365 Pro Plus.  “This is the year of Azure”.

Over the last 2 years, MSFT has ate VMware’s lunch, with Hyper-V continuing to grow and VMware losing share. Hyper-V is 4x cheaper with better technology. He calls out VMware partners to come on stage to be baptised 🙂 LMAO.

Here are the current and planned regions, data centers and nodes in the MSFT cloud in the next few months:

Mobility is a force behind the Internet of Things (IoT). Windows Phone has 91% growth YoY. The other metrics are not impressive.

Now they play some video that we cannot see.  Mary Jo Foly tells me that it’s a third party Surface Pro 3 review video. Sigh! Partners do not have a distribution channel for this device and it has no place on stage at a partner conference.

At this point I am getting sleepy and I am losing interest in this overlong keynote. I’m going to stop typing until something new is said. Where’s the Oscars orchestra when you need them?

Good bit: Microsoft will not provide encryption keys to government (US or any). They will not disclose data to the US government that is stored in another place. They will not engineer backdoors. They will (and have) gone to court to fight the government.

53,000 partners transacted in the Microsoft cloud, up over 100% year on year. IDC says that cloud partners make MORE MONEY.

Selling it is only the start – deploying and using it is the key piece. For example, Most System Center customers only using OpsMgr and ConfigMgr.

Microsoft will compete at the low end. For example, there will be $99 Windows tablets and $199 Windows laptops in the market in the USA for this Christmas.

This Toshiba looks like a machine with the new install type. There was over 20GB free on the 32 GB Toshiba Windows 8.1 tablet that I handled recently.

Microsoft will compete with partner/competitors in a competitive and respectful way, not the old way of Ballmer.

“Apple – great company” – Kevin Turner. Windows is too … cos Apple use it to make Macs.

And that’s the end of 3.25 brutally long hours. I am glad I am not there because I would have to have a butt-ectomy from sitting on awful conference seats.

I am back in action as of today after a week in Finland, where I was photographing bears and wolves along the Russian border.

I am sore and mosquito bitten after 5 x 15 hour overnight shifts sitting in hides deep in the Taiga forests and bogs of Finland. But it was worth it.

Alpha female wolf from the local pack 

Brown bear passing through the forest

 A brown bear reflecting on his options

These are just the rough edits done on my un-calibrated laptop. I’ll be doing real edits on my PC and posting to my photography blog and to my Flickr stream in the coming days.

Yesterday (July 1st) was that my Microsoft Most Valuable Professional (MVP) award either expired or was renewed. Thankfully, my status as a Hyper-V MVP was renewed by Microsoft, as confirmed by the below (edited by me) email that arrived in yesterday afternoon:

A lot of work goes into my efforts, either here on my blog, writing for the Petri IT Knowledgebase, answering questions on forums, or presenting. This is a nice recognition for those efforts, and quite honestly, it is a career changer thanks to the access to information that we MVPs get … and should share with the community.

My efforts are only made possible thanks to the support of friends and family, the flexibility of my employers at MicroWarehouse, those in Microsoft who value the MVP program, and other community members who give me opportunities in webcasts, podcasts, speaking at events, and so on. Thank you all!

Here’s looking forward to a very interesting and eventful FY2015 (Microsoft financial year runs July to June).