Episode 350 – Take a look, it’s in a book, or in a Microsoft Learn exam - podcast episode cover

Episode 350 – Take a look, it’s in a book, or in a Microsoft Learn exam

Sep 07, 202336 min
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Episode description

In Episode 350, Ben and Scott talk about some of the ambiguity in features between several types of Teams channels, a new model that includes access to Microsoft Learn for those taking role-based Microsoft certification exams, and a simplified experience for creating and managing CDN endpoints using Azure Front Door for Azure Storage customers. Like what you hear and want to support the show? Check out our membership options. Show Notes Overview of teams and channels in Microsoft Teams Introducing a new resource for all role-based Microsoft Certification exams Open Book Microsoft Certification Exams | Interview with Microsoft's Liberty Munson Quick create Azure Front Door endpoints for Azure Storage accounts About the sponsors Intelligink utilizes their skill and passion for the Microsoft cloud to empower their customers with the freedom to focus on their core business. They partner with them to implement and administer their cloud technology deployments and solutions. Visit Intelligink.com for more info.

Transcript

Welcome to episode 350 of the Microsoft Cloud IT Pro Podcast recorded live on August 25th, 2023. This is a show about Microsoft 365 and Azure from the perspective of it pros and end users where we discuss a topic where recent news and how it relates to you teams, channels. It's one of Ben's recent frustrations with some of the feature ambiguity between the various types of channels available. Ben and Scott also talk about the new open book policy or Microsoft

learn policy for taking Microsoft exams. Finally, they wrap up with a new feature release near and dear to Scott's heart, giving you a simplified experience for creating and managing C D N endpoints for Azure storage using Azure front door. We need to have a segment, Scott. So on our podcast, we should start a Ben's weekly rant. Stop. It's your show. Like you can do whatever you want. Like I joined to provide color commentary so. Or to get me all riled.

Up, you wanna segment like I'll put some sound effects in there or something and we'll be good of. Ben's weekly rant. Do you know what Ben's weekly rant is today? I don't know why I didn't realize this before. Ben's weekly rant today. I feel like I should have known about this or I would've encountered this before. My weekly rant today has to do with an overview of teams and

channels and Microsoft teams. And to be fair, I actually have lots of rants about teams and channels and Microsoft teams and the way this has been implemented. But I had an interesting one that I hit today and I honestly don't know why I haven't hit this one before or why I didn't realize this before. Microsoft is all about shared channels for like private channels. 'cause you can do your own security on it. It creates its own SharePoint site, blah blah blah, blah blah, blah.

And did you like all the blah blah blah blah blahs And I loved it. I work with some contractors like I have a few contractors, different companies. I partner with all of that and we have started using shared channels because in that case a shared channel is nice. We set up all the A a D stuff and I share my channel with them so that they don't have to do all the tenant jumping stuff in order to get to content for a client that we might be working on together. Well, today I had such a right.

Makes sense. Very reasonable. That's what I thought. So today I had such a channel and all of a sudden I had a file and I'm like, sweet, we're done with this. Now I can share it to a client. It doesn't work because if you go look at the channel feature comparison, shared channels work great for external participant B two B direct connect, all of that. But guess what cannot be added to a shared channel. A guest user.

. You like wanna have your cake and eat it too. So. Right, but if my client is not set up for B two B direct connect and I don't wanna add with him and I wanna share a file with him that we've been working on in teams, I can't do it anymore. Now I have to go put it somewhere else or go back to, let me email you this file or something else. And I just get irritated by that today because I wanted to have shared channels for when I work with contractors where it's all hunky dory.

But I also wanted to be able to add a guest to it so that I could share a file with a guest, which seemed very logical to me. And they have this overview of this channel feature comparison table. And I think it just even reiterated to me how I would say discombobulated, the whole channel infrastructure and setup really is when it comes to teams. And I feel like you should not have to think this much or put this much planning into what type of channel do I want?

Like I should have, apps is another one. This is my other pet peeve. Like I can't add apps, I can't add planner if I wanna do task management in a private channel or a shared channel and I wanna use planner, I don't use planner for this reason, but if I did I should be able to add it. Like the differentiation between standard private and shared should absolutely be a security construct, not a, we have a list of 15 things and depending on what you wanna do before, you won't go create a channel.

You should go through this list of 15 things and figure out exactly what you wanna do and if for some reason what you wanna do doesn't work out. Tough luck. . Well I mean arguably sharing with an external guest is a security thing. Yes. Okay. So it, yes, it's a security thing but it's also not like shared channels should implement B two B stuff but I don't feel like it should take away other stuff. So I guess. It's hard. Yeah, it's it's, it's a balance thing like, and there's weird stuff too.

The the one I've run into with shared channels and I guess I always just thought it was like a gap and I didn't know why I didn't know it was documented was the analytics thing. Like if you ever play around with like team analytics, like I have a thing where we have a internal team where you, you know, we let like our field and technical communities come in and one of the KPIs we have is like, Hey, how much growth over time can we drive in this team?

Like how many posts can we drive? What are the types of engagement we get? How many members do we add month over month and interactions and things like that. And like it's a nightmare to, to get the data and put it together and I have to do a bunch of it manually and it's painful and it and it hurts. TE teams are just weird in, in general. I ran into another interesting one, in SharePoint.

So I, I was working on a project with someone and they had created some files like think like word documents, PowerPoints, things like that over in their OneDrive. Totally valid thing, right?

Like you create it in your OneDrive, like that's quite often like where documents start for me and then over time I take them and I either physically move them or I do the save as a copy thing and I save it into another site and then I just delete the one in my OneDrive so I don't have two copies of it and multiple things running around. So I'm working on this project with this person, I say Hey can you come and you know, I see you have these files in your OneDrive,

like they're pretty much canonical at this point. Like we've iterated on them, they're done, can you move them over to the team site so they're ready to go. Like I have a team site with a channel and that channel has you know, a folder inside the SharePoint site, things like that. So it's just go to this place in SharePoint and just do like bring the thing over there.

And the way that they thought to do that was to you know, do the thing where you could just add a new link in the SharePoint site and it creates URL file and they just made that point to the stuff in their OneDrive and I was like, I can see how functionally you thought that was the same thing but they're very different things. . I had never seen somebody use URLs in a SharePoint site that way.

And it was just, it was one of those moments where it's like oh users are gonna do weird things that you just can't account for. . Yeah they really do. I know and I think with all of this it's hard. Like I also feel for Microsoft in that respect, right? They created teams that created channels. Arguably they probably had no idea they were gonna do shared channels and private channels when they first stood up teams and then they had to try to shoehorn these in.

But I think that's where a lot of the frustration comes up is that as you add on these features, and we've talked about it before where that initial dependency on groups for security for planner, even when it used to be there for power BI workspaces kind of backed Microsoft into a corner with some of this stuff.

And it really is how do you get around some of the, it's technical debt, how do you get around some of that technical debt from when you first rolled it out to be able to implement these in a way that to be able to implement these in a way that they work and work for everybody. And I've seen like the planner one I is one I've seen a lot and Microsoft said like a year, year and a half ago. Yeah we're aware of it, we're working on it,

we wanna get planner everything. But a year, year and a half is a long time. Personally I've gone out and found workarounds. Like I said, I don't use planner, I use Jira because Jira gives me a lot more flexibility to be able to actually pin tasks to any type of channel no matter which one it is because I got tired of waiting for Microsoft to do, it continues. To be a tough space to work in. You're moving at the speed of the cloud.

Yeah, so there's my rant but I would also say for those of you that are looking at all these channels, like go look at this channel feature comparison before you stand them up. And unfortunately again to the dismay of end users don't even know to look at this, right?

Like what happens if you have an end user go spin up a certain type of channel and put a bunch of content in it and build out a SharePoint site and six months down the road they need to do something that you can't do in that specific type of channel. You can't convert it like at that point in time you're doing a channel to channel migration. I don't even have any good advice. Like do you go tell people to look at this overview before they spin up channels?

I mean there's some stuff as you as an admin that you can do with sensitivity labels or setting some standardization, turning certain channels off. But it's kind of a tough spot for end users to be in to have to know some of these requirements to pick the right channel if you let users do that in your environment. Yeah, end. Users are never gonna come over to this documentation. Yeah. Ever. It's like I'm gonna make the argument it doesn't happen if it's not on support, do microsoft.com.

They never find it and you know the s e O just isn't there for things like this versus like support Microsoft and even then, like you're still asking the user to take that extra step. I know I'm not gonna do it . No. Well and again it's not something I spent a ton of time looking at and thinking about until I hit this one so I don't know. But. Hey now you know for next time I. Do. And speaking of documentation, Scott, do you know who can start going to this documentation now in

learn.microsoft.com? There is a new subgroup, a new group of people that can start visiting said documentation. . I see what you did there. Do you like that? That was actually one of your Yeah, yeah. It would've been a good transition if I hadn't called out that I saw what you did there so I, I ruined it for you but it was one of your better ones.

That's okay. Yeah. So we've talked a bunch about certifications on the show in the past and I dunno about you like they're near and dear to my heart, right? Like I used to write books for these things. I certainly trained a bunch of people on 'em like it was my bread and butter for a little bit while a little while and I paid the bills.

But the role-based certifications for Microsoft exams, you know those things where you go to a Pearson View site or you know you do 'em at home and you sit there with your camera on and you got the moderator and they're like, show me what your desk looks like and you don't have any like paperclips or post-it notes on your desk do you? And then you know, your kid walks in behind you and you're disqualified from your test.

Those exams are now moving to a model where you will have access to [email protected]. So effectively the docs for the services that you're dealing with, like back to the example that we just had here where you were looking at a comparison of features in teams like that comparison was sitting over and [email protected]. So that stuff is now going to be available for test takers

directly through the testing interface. So you know, if you've ever sat down for a Microsoft exam, you know like your moderator comes over, they spin you up into this environment and it's, it's locked down and like all you're in is the exam environment now they'll have links in there where you can optionally open kind of a split view with a browser tab and go over to learn and search through learn and potentially get to the information that you need to to

which I think is good uh, for a whole bunch of reasons. One is Microsoft exams are notorious for testing you on the esoteric things that frankly you don't do day to day. It's like oh I'm going to show you a multiple choice answer and each one of those answers has a different set of parameters that all look very much the same

on a PowerShell commandlet. You're like I don't know, I haven't touched that PowerShell commandlet in two months and even if I had touched it I was gonna do GI help or something else on it to work my way through it and get it to where it needs to be. So now you can potentially leverage the docks uh, to go ahead and look that up. So I think that's all good. I think there's still limitations here. So one thing that I think I would struggle with personally is I don't like Microsoft search.

Like I don't think binging search is a great product and it doesn't return results with the fidelity that I want that I'm used to in other search engines like Google. Like I'm a, I'm a Google user and I'm used to queries syntax and Google and the way it returns things for me. So you're not allowed to go to Google and search and use a random blog, you're stuck to learn.microsoft.com and kind of the the builtin binging search that comes along with that.

The other thing that I think is going to potentially be painful and trip people up is the certifications don't get updated as often as the documentation is .

So there is a very real possibility that, again, I'll take that example of you're sitting on a multiple choice question and you've got four answers and they all have different PowerShell parameters that actually two of those answers could be right, but it turns out there's only one answer that's right for the test because maybe the parameters on that commandlet changed over time and the ones that are surfaced in the dock are what's right today.

But the real answer is what was right six months ago when this test was written thing. I think that's gonna be a struggle for folks as well.

I'm a big fan of this 'cause I've had the same thing to your point I like and I, I think this is gonna hit a lot more, at least for me when it comes to like PowerShell scripts or CLIs or like even some of the intricacies of maybe how things are named because that is what I do tend to rely a lot on the docs for I am also a very much a tab complete type person , I remember . 100%.

Just enough so that tab complete works but I don't know the whole commandlet name and to come into a test and remember it. So I see a lot of advantages to it here. But I also agree or I also think that you're not going to be able to rely on this to just go in and pass the exam without knowing your stuff for a couple reasons. One, there is still absolutely the exact same amount of time.

So if you were running into time limits before when you took these and now you're going to go try to look up all this stuff and learn to validate your answers, you're going to run out of time. And I had a professor that did this to us even in college, he would say okay this test open book everything. I don't care what you take in, you can take in all the textbooks, all your notes, you can take in anything you want to but if you don't know it you're not gonna have enough time to pass it.

And I wonder if even as some of these tests get updated, if Microsoft will start taking some of those approaches with these two where sometimes open book is nice or open learn in this case because you can go look it up but are they gonna start writing questions where it's not quite so black and white? And again I still think you're gonna have to know your stuff.

There's also gonna be a temptation to go in I think and validate that you're answering it properly which could cause you to run out of time. If you are in there and you're like, oh I don't really know, let me go look this up and then like 20 minutes later you find the answer that kills a lot of time in a test. So I still say you're gonna have to know your stuff but I like that it's available because that's how a lot of people work today. Most people don't have power show command.

Let's memorized this chart of team functionality or some of the skews on what's included in what licensing. I would venture to guess 95% of the people that do that on a day-to-day basis don't memorize it, they just know where it is. But you're also gonna have to get used to being able to just search using learn and not search using your favorite search engine of choice or relying on like

the community stuff. Like it's only gonna be the docs, it's not gonna be some of the forums and tech community stuff that's under learn either. 'cause there are some like blog posts and stuff that also all fall under that U R L. So it's not YouTube videos, it's also not GitHub repos, which is interesting depending on the examination that you're taking.

So one place I would say like having access to GitHub could be helpful would be some of the developer exams because lots of the samples for development are actually over on GitHub. Like the high fidelity samples that are gonna maybe get you to that answer sometimes. So T L D R is, you do have access to this but just because you have access to this, I don't having not sat and taken one in the new format yet 'cause like this was just released, I don't think this makes things any easier.

I think it potentially takes away some of the jitters and anxiety that might come with test taking but it doesn't take away from the need to still understand the material, the core concepts. Like you're still gonna have to study and do all of those things. 'cause even having access to learn means you still need to go know where and learn to look like am I looking up a conceptual thing? Am I looking up a how to thing? Is it more a referential thing?

And you're gonna need to know that. Yeah am I looking at the service docs? Do I need to go look at the calf or the WAF or some other weird place? Like all all that stuff kind of comes into play. You're also not gonna have access to other learn properties like Microsoft q and a and all that stuff as well. So uh, you know, just keep it in the back of your head. It'll be interesting. I think it is something that potentially eases things out. I do wonder how the proctors are gonna take it.

I don't know. Have you ever done one of the online Pearson exams like back when they shut 'em all down for covid and everything. Like sit at home and do it? Yes. For like not a renewal but a brand new. Right, but. Actually doing, no I have never done it.

Partly because I have way too much noise in my house and I've heard horror stories about proctors just like shutting it down as soon as they hear noise with all the family and kids I have home all day and the amount of tech in my office, like I literally have to go like sit on our bed in our bedroom or something to do it and even then kids can charging it. So I have never tried to do an at-home one. So that's a consideration is like background noise.

You have to be in a quiet place. Your desk has to be cleaned off. Like they ask to, hey can you like move your webcam down and show a picture of your desk. Like for me I have like a mirrorless camera up here. I have to unmount it and like wave it around uh, or I just go grab like a U S B webcam from the kids so you know I can pick it up and make it easier. Yeah. But the other thing that they watch for is like they're watching your body movement and your eyes and things like that.

And if you're looking to the side too much, if your eyes are flittering around, like they think you're getting into the mode where you're cheating, right? You could have somebody who wasn't there before and now they're in the room and they walked up behind you and they're over there. So I wonder how they're gonna do things like that. Like many of us are on, you know like multi-monitor setups, like I've got a 32 inch monitor in front of me.

So for me to look in like one corner to the other corner, like my head is going all the way back and forth, right? Right. And I could be looking at something else even though there's only a wall behind me and there's really nobody or nothing there. So I wonder how they're treat that piece of it. 'cause it sounds like they're still gonna have the online moderators and, and that makes sense to me for for the at-home exams at least. So we'll we'll see how some of this stuff goes.

But all in all I think it's good stuff. Yeah, it does only apply to the role-based exams and not the fundamentals. Yes, the role-based and the specialty exams. So things like Azure administrator, Azure developer, M 365 administrator, that stuff, those are all role-based exams and then you've got like networking, a V s exams, A V D, things like that are all specialties.

Yeah, to your point too, I think even if you're reading on learn right your eyes tend to flitter, you tend to just get different facial expressions. If you're reading learn much like you would be cheating. So that will be interesting. I think I was thinking through this as you were talking to, I think my strategy and what I would recommend people do I think is go take the exam just like you normally would. Like don't look up, learn as you're going through it, go through answer the questions.

The ones and I do this already, the ones you're not sure of, I mark 'em to go back and review later. So I think I'd go do the whole exam, mark the ones that I wanna review later and then come back and if there's time hit the ones I wanna review and look up, use, learn to see if I can help solidify those answers on the ones I wasn't sure of the ones I wanted to review versus trying to pull up learn as I'm going through each one of 'em. We'll.

See, I think it'll work better at home for most folks in this model. Like the other thing that I uh, comes to mind is most Pearson locations are pretty trashy . Like they're in random places sometimes, right? Like hey go to this weird office building in the back of this office park and the door is locked and and it's like a skeevy place and you're like, uh, I don't know about this.

Or they're in like college labs or things like that where there's a bunch of other tests and tests taking going on. Like I wonder about the infrastructure sometimes I think it was easier if it was just a shutdown down componentized thing. But now if you need to get out to the internet you're dependent on internet access the whole time. Like oh how quick can I browse through this? And and what's that look like? The machines you take exams on at appears and Exam Center are all like crappy

thin clients. They're not like beefy machines like you have at home. So they run the exam software slow enough that I bet they don't run the internet any faster. Like when it comes to rendering in a web browser or things like that. I might have to go try and sit one just to see how it goes. Go figure one out Scott. We can compete on an exam. Indie, Do you feel overwhelmed by trying to manage your Office 365 environment? Are you facing unexpected issues that disrupt your company's productivity?

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Did you have We had a couple other kind of interesting announcements. Oh I've got YouTube videos playing in my tabs now as I click through 'em. did you want to talk about one of your announcements this week around storage accounts? Yeah. We can talk about one of mine. So something that I've been working on with some of my partners over in Azure networking is improving the experience for our C D N customers.

I don't know if you've paid attention to the C D N space at Microsoft and kind of what's been going on there, but there's a couple different resource providers for CDNs. Like there's Microsoft CDN and then within Microsoft C D N there's classic C D N, there's Akamai, there's Verizon. And at one point there was an offering called Front Door Classic. Uh, well it was called Front Door at the time Azure Front Door.

And then that became Azure Front Door Classic and now there's Azure Front Door Standard and Premium. And we never really kept up with all that stuff on the storage side. Like many of our customers have ended up in a space where you know, they're, they're potentially relegated if they want to configure things through the Azure portal to leveraging like the classic C D N Akamai C dmm which is gonna be deprecated and and has been announced as gonna be retired in the next couple of years.

So I want to like we set out on this kind of journey to see if we can improve the process for customers there and by improve it, not just hey let's make sure we're modernizing and giving customers access to

like the right tool for the right job but also simplify the process. Like it, it was kind of an interesting thing for me as product manager to sit down and look at an existing experience that like I had nothing to do with originally in in storage and go like, oh yeah, this is kind of like not the greatest experience for customers. It's kind of complicated. It takes in excess of 20 clicks to create a C D N endpoint .

Which is kind of crazy because really all you're doing is using the portal as like an arm template expression generator like we've talked about in the past. Like how do you simplify that, how do you make it quicker? So we cut it down to just a handful of clicks and you can deploy and manage your endpoints for a storage account.

So for Blob as origin or for a static website as origin or both if you want to, you can basically go into the portal on a storage account and there's a blade in there that's now called Front Door and C D N and you just pump in a name for your front door profile and you choose a couple options like do you want a web application firewall and and some other security constructs like do you wanna enable edge caching and things like that. And you just click the button and it deploys and it

just kind of goes, which is super slick. Like it's all good now. Now we have a unified management experience where you can come in. So if you're a customer who's managing uh, blob is origin under Azure front Door standard or premium or you're using any of the classic C D N constructs like Microsoft C D N, classic Akamai, Verizon, things like that, you have a one-stop management experience from within the storage blades.

And if you want to like we don't do C D N as a a hobo service or a hosted on behalf of thing like you have a full access to front door and the associated C D M profile. So if you want to do other things in front door like okay great, I created my C D N endpoint and I spun things up but now I need to know go customize that. I wanna bind a custom domain, I wanna do custom ss, SS l, all that kind of stuff.

I want to go look deeper at the features in the web application firewall and customize the the rule sets, the core rule sets associated with that. You have full access to that because the front door resource sets provisioned is something that lives in your subscriptions, you manage, you maintain, like we give you kind of the best experience for what you need as a storage customer in the storage side.

But if you need more than that you just hop over to the, you hop over to the other side and go to your front door resource and you can manage everything through there as well. So I think it's really like a best of both worlds kinds of things And now that there's more native integration from our end from the storage side with Front Door, I tend to look at that as a little bit of like forward looking thing as well. Like what other kind of integrations can we build in to make things better for

storage customers. Like you know I mentioned like custom domains, you can do custom domains in storage today but you can't do custom SS s L on a storage account. But if you front your storage account with front door, front door does both custom domains and custom S S L. So like is there a better native integrated experience that we could have there to guide customers in like hey if you need a custom domain without SS S L go this way.

If you need a custom domain and SS SS l go over here to this other service 'cause it's the best thing and by the way it's natively integrated. Got. It. So this isn't necessarily adding any new SKUs or any new pricing or any of this. This is just taking those existing Azure front door standard and premium SKUs and creating some tighter integration between that and your blob storage. And our old C D N experience didn't even have front door in it.

So if you were just coming over to storage you wouldn't have known that front door even existed or was an option for you unless you actually went out and did it from the front door side and came over. So now you kind of have this holistic view where you can start in front door and come to storage or you can start in storage and get to front door and have all that functionality between both stacks. Got it.

I am gonna add this to my list and actually play with that 'cause I'm actually working on redoing my website right now as a static site hosted in Azure blob storage. So I might have to go throw Azure front door in front of it and then maybe go ask you for some Azure credits. .

Front door's. Interesting. It's, it's, I had kind of lost sight of it being in storage Uhhuh , it was good to get back up to speed on it like the last time I looked at front door, you know they had maybe like 150 pops and they didn't have as much of the rich WAF functionality and some of the other things like it's actually kind of come a long way. They've got like 192 plus pops today. They've got way better controls around caching and cash purge.

Having a single front door endpoint with like multiple blob storage origins is super easy. Now we also took the time to make sure that it works with kind of all storage account types. So you know we have some like new endpoint types with these Azure D N S zone accounts in in preview today. And even though that stuff's in preview like hey we baked it into this experience and it's ready to go.

So I'm very happy with the way it turned out and as you called out in the chat like hey look at the author of that blog post. I've been in Azure storage for like three years and I'm kind of happy like this is the first feature that like I got to not only support and like help engineering build out but I own it and launch it and it's the area of storage that I own. So that's kind of fun too. Congratulations on that achievement.

It's kind of fun seeing your name at the top of all that but can you get Azure front door pricing cheaper? Like if I go do this I'm gonna have to make sure I stay on the standard plan because there's no way I'm paying for the premium one. stick around and watch the space and we'll see what I can do. You'll. See what you can do. Alright there's your next i I sent you after your next project because I mean the standard one isn't bad right? $35 a month for something like this.

But yeah that premium one at 330 a month, that starts to get a little steep for my lowly little website. Hopefully I don't need anything in there. I think most folks like if you're just starting out you don't need premium to be brutally honest. Like the things that it adds in, you know is there really value add for there? Like do you need a web application firewall on day one? Do you need additional DDoS protection between like what Azure,

beyond what like Azure Standard DDoS? Like probably not, right? Right. Especially if you're talking about like a blog or even like a simple like company website like like your website intelligent.com like likely doesn't need a bunch of those features. Like those features are there for the folks that need them and Standard does do a whole.

Lot Yeah about production. Like I wouldn't need private link, I wouldn't need threat intelligence, security analytics, you know, especially if you're hosting a static website, right? Like there's not a whole lot that it's public already so you really don't have a lot of threat detection you need or security stuff. It's just a bunch of H T M L files. Maybe you care about somebody getting in there and somehow changing your files.

But I would agree like you look through the premium features and hosting a static website blob storage, you can probably get away with most of 'em with just that standard skew of front door and even. Like web static websites in storage are super basic things where I would say like for most folks, like you know you should start probably unless you know you really need it. Like you should start with Front Door Standard.

I go the other way with things like static websites, like you probably think you wanna start simple, but uh, from what I do with static websites and what I see many customers doing,

frankly storage isn't always the right tool for them. I I get, I'm supposed to sell more storage but I, I would almost, I would caution you and potentially guide you towards other services like Azure static web apps where it has rich native integrations with GitHub actions and all those kinds of things out of the box, right? I think about like most static websites are actually statically generated based on other content like things like Hugo and Ghost and all that. Yeah.

So you have to run through like a build process if you wanna do that with a static web app just on storage. There's a ton of bootstrapping that you need to go do on your own. And if you just started out with back to that conversation about the right tool for the right job, if you just started out with Azure static web apps, you would potentially be in a better place 'cause it has all those integrations

natively from day one and you don't have to do all that heavy lifting. We. Should go back and talk about those 'cause those have changed quite a bit too. I know like Blob storage used to be the way. Blob storage used to be the way, that's another area in storage that I look after. But now it's those Azure static web apps have gotten. I don't know that it's the way for everybody these days anymore.

I'm very mindful of like in Azure we have multiple services that do the same kinds of things and just from what I see customers doing and from what I know that you probably do like you're probably like a Hugo or a ghost person kind of thing versus a I'm gonna open VS code and just actually manually write some H D M L here. I am actually using, now I'm completely blanking on the name of it. I'm not using either of those. I am using, oh my Edge just crashed on me. , we'll just call it a day. Yes.

It to do too much. Why. Am I blanking on the name of it right now? But yes, I looked at a bunch of 'em. I'm not using Hugo or Ghost. It's a newer one that came on the scene that I actually like better 'cause it's not it, it just made sense to me. That's the thing with the static website generators, right? You just pick one that makes the most sense. But. I think the key word there is generator. Yes, there's static web apps and then there's statically generated websites.

I absolutely use a generator. I think that's the distinction. So once you start to get generator in the name, like you might wanna be looking at something else. Yeah. So you go Pelican uh, it's in here. We'll come back with that one. I'll throw it in the chat, we'll throw it in the show notes. But I actually do have a meeting at four o'clock so I should probably call it a day with that. All right. Well as always thank you and we'll chat again next week. Alright.

Thanks Scott. We'll talk to you next week. Yep. Thanks Ben. If you enjoyed the podcast, go leave us a five star rating in iTunes. It helps to get the word out so more IT pros can learn about Office 365 and Azure. If you have any questions you want us to address on the show or feedback about the show, feel free to reach out via our website, Twitter, or Facebook. Thanks again for listening and have a great day.

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