Weeknote 18/2020: Microsoft 365, the rise of the humans and some data platform discovery

Posted on By Mark Wilson
This content is 5 years old. I don't routinely update old blog posts as they are only intended to represent a view at a particular point in time. Please be warned that the information here may be out of date.

Some highlights from the last week of “lockdown” lunacy*…

Office 365 rebranding to Microsoft 365

For the last couple of years, Microsoft has had a subscription bundle called Microsoft 365, which includes Office 365 Enterprise, Enterprise Mobility and Security and Windows 10 Enterprise. Now some bright spark has decided to rebrand some Office 365 products as Microsoft 365. Except for the ones that they haven’t (Office 365 Enterprise E1/3/5). And Office 365 ProPlus (the subscription-based version of the Office applications) is now “Microsoft 365 Apps for Enterprise”. Confused? Join the club…

Read more on the Microsoft website.

The Rise of the Humans

A few years ago, I met Dave Coplin (@DCoplin). At the time he was working for Microsoft, with the assumed title of “Chief Envisioning Officer” (which was mildly amusing when he was called upon to interview the real Microsoft CEO, Satya Nadella at Future Decoded). Dave’s a really smart guy and a great communicator with a lot of thoughts about how technology might shape our futures so I’m very interested in his latest project: a YouTube Channel called The Rise of the Humans.

Episode 1 streamed on Wednesday evening and featured a discussion on Algorithmic Bias (and why it’s so important to understand who wrote an algorithm that might be judging you) along with some discussion about some of the tech news of the week and “the new normal” for skills development, education and technology. There’s also a workshop to accompany the podcast, which I intend to try out with my family…

Data Platform Discovery Day

I spent Thursday in back-to-back webcasts, but that was a good thing. I’d stumbled across the presence of Data Platform Discovery Day and I joined the European event to learn about all sorts of topics, with talks delivered by MVPs from around the world.

The good thing for me was that the event was advertised as “level 100” and, whilst some of the presenters struggled with that concept, I was able to grasp just enough knowledge on a variety of topics including:

  • Azure Data Factory.
  • Implementing Power BI in the enterprise.
  • An introduction to data science.
  • SQL Server and containers.
  • The importance of DevOps (particularly apt as I finished reading The Pheonix Project this week).
  • Azure SQL Database Managed Instances.
  • Data analysis strategy with Power BI.

All in all, it was a worthwhile investment of time – and there’s a lot there for me to try and put into practice over the coming weeks.

2×2

I like my 2x2s, and found this one that may turn out to be very useful over the coming weeks and months…

Blogging

I wrote part 2 of my experiences getting started with Azure Sphere, this time getting things working with a variety of Azure Services including IoT Hub, Time Series Insights and IoT Central.

Decorating

I spent some time “rediscovering” my desk under the piles of assorted “stuff” this week. I also, finally, put my holographic Windows 2000 CD into a frame and it looks pretty good on the wall!

* I’m just trying to alliterate. I don’t really think social distancing is lunacy. It’s not lockdown either.

Weeknote 9: SharePoint as a CMS, with a little Power BI to help visualise dynamic data (Week 6, 2018)

Posted on By Mark Wilson
This content is 7 years old. I don't routinely update old blog posts as they are only intended to represent a view at a particular point in time. Please be warned that the information here may be out of date.

2018 is flying by but the last couple of weeks have been exciting. After a period of working on short-term engagements (which can be a challenge at times), I’ve landed myself a gig on a decent sized Modern Workplace project that’s going to keep me (and a lot of other people) busy for the next few months. Unfortunately, I can only devote 50% of my time to it for a couple of weeks as I need to clear a few other things out of the way but that will all change soon.

One of those “things” is a project I’ve been working on to provide supplementary information to operators in a part of the critical national infrastructure (I wish I could be less cryptic but I can’t just yet – I hope that maybe one day we can create a case study…). It’s replacing a bespoke system with one built using commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) products, with a little customisation – and it’s been my first “software” project (cf. infrastructure-led engagements).

Basically, we’re using SharePoint as a content management system, receiving both static and dynamic data (the latter via a service bus) that needs to be displayed to operators.

All of the data is stored in SharePoint lists and libraries and then presented to a browser running in kiosk mode. The page layouts then use web parts to either display data natively, or we use Power BI Report Server (this solution runs on-premises) to create visualisations that we embed inside SharePoint.

And, because the service bus isn’t available yet, we had to demo the dynamic data arriving using another tool… in this case, SoapUI populating SharePoint using its REST/OData API.

It’s been an interesting project, not just because I’ve had to step back and focus on just the architecture (leaving others to work on the detail) but because it’s been software-led. I must admit I was nervous hearing status reports from the team about the page layouts they had created, or the webparts they were scripting, and I was thinking “but didn’t you do that last week?” but, once I saw it come together into something tangible, I was really impressed.

Yesterday was our first opportunity to demonstrate the system to our stakeholders and the initial feedback is positive, so that’s a really big tick in the box. Now we need to document the solution and get it production-ready, before progressing from what’s currently just a framework to something of real value.

Next week will be very different: I’m taking most of half term off work but Monday is the bi-annual risual summit, and I’m responsible for the Technology Track again.

Before then, it’s a weekend of kids football and cycling, plus Six Nations and Winter Olympics on TV. So I’m signing off now to (hopefully) watch Wales beat England at Twickenham!