Welcome to episode 358 of the Microsoft Cloud IT Pro Podcast recorded live on October 20th, 2023. This is a show about Microsoft 365 in Azure from the perspective of it pros and end users where we discuss the topic or recent news and how it relates to you today. Ben and Scott have a few new gadgets to help them with their Microsoft teams meetings as well as Amazon drops.
Just a few dollars on the Microsoft 365 Cloud suite. Finally, we wrap up with the end of office 2016 in office 2019, clients being able to connect to Microsoft 365 as well as some speculation around office versions in the future. And Microsoft 365. Scott, I did look in blueberry so I know we had talked about this before.
We have more listens than what shows up in blueberry because there's um, Spotify stuff that I don't think all those stats make it in and Google and YouTube and all those but Blueberry, our official download number over 356 episodes was 1,000,456 downloads.
Not too bad. Look how far you've come. It. Averages almost 3000 downloads an episode if you average it out, which means some of our older episodes must have way more downloads than I realized 'cause I don't go back and look at some of those old ones. Some of them do. If you remember back when we used to have conferences and things like that, it was all used to do. That's. True. We did get a bunch. Oh and I think we've messed up our stats once too.
We did Ignite one year and we did release like 16 shows. Episodes in a month in. Like a week. I felt like I was editing podcasts every night. Like back in the Airbnb. Like, like conferences are hard y'all. But we don't do those anymore. We should. We need to go to another one. There's some coming up Scott. There's, I tried to go remember Live 360. We did that one a few times down in Orlando. I tried to get in that one this year. I didn't make it but I am going to Miami in February for the
community days. I think it's one of the community days Once. Yes. I might try and bummer ride off you and head down to Miami and check that one out too. Well. You might have to bummer ride off AC 'cause I might bummer ride off ac We can carpool, we can have a party in the car. Mm. Do you know what kind of episode we could record with me, you and AC in the same car for five hours? You throw the Tesla on autopilot, just go just. Shoot the breeze about whatever for a few hours. Oh man.
Mm-Hmm That would be interesting but no we should, we'll figure it out. I think I put in my all the stuff for uh, hotel and all that so I'm sure we can figure something out before. We get too deep into it. I need to shame you a little bit. So be before we hopped on you, you were singing the Baby Shark song because I I've you have little kids because. You said do and I said Baby Shark. But then I said Jamie Tart and you said I don't know what that is 'cause you've never seen Ted Lasso.
I have never seen Ted Lasso. And that's disappointing. So I need anybody who listens to this episode to go out and come over to the dawn to to yield Mastodon and find Ben what's your master on handle? I. Don't know. It's Ben Stitching something. I think it's at Tech social dot Where is it? Oh it's done here. It's on our video. Ben Stitching at Tech Hub Social. . There you go. Good job . Thanks. I'm glad we had that there just to like help you along a little bit. Actually no. So if you're.
Listening to this episode and you've seen Ted Lasso and you are of the mindset that I think most of us are that Ted Lasso is a wonderful and delightful show that everyone in the world should watch at least once if not two or three times. Just to wrap your head around everything that's going on, please go and Mastodon toot at Ben and let him know how much he should be watching Ted Lasso. And I'm missing out on, I think I actually have,
so I got a new phone I should look. Do I have Apple? Oh no I don't. I did not get a free Apple tv. I'd have to go subscribe to Apple TV to binge it or something. . I got Arcade and News with my new phone but no tv. Wow. And I don't have tv. Yeah, I got rid of the Apple one. I was not using enough of the features of Apple one to subscribe to all of it. So I'm back to a la carte versions of my Apple subscriptions. Something.
Look on some of your friends' Plex servers that they've given you access to something like that. Something since I brought up phone. I got some new gadgets this week too. Should we talk about new gadgets? You got a new gadget? I got two new gadgets. It's your show we've talked before about backup internet. Right? Like how I have my redundant internet Xfinity and at and t. Yep. And you just fail over everything through that. Wonderful. Through that UDM Pro. Yep. Your UDM Pro from ubiquity. Yep.
So I am trialing a new failover. I was looking in our neighborhood Facebook group and someone was asking about internet and somebody made the comment that did you know T-Mobile's five G home internet is available in our area now. So I went on the website and sure enough I can get T-Mobile five G home internet and they have like a 15 day trial period. So I went ahead and signed up and I'm testing it out and I actually got the five G modem today so far. I'm impressed.
I'm curious to try it over the next two weeks and see how it fluctuates. But I set it up on my desk, it's like right here. So it's within two or three feet of a window. 'cause I say put it in a window. Not super fond of that but it's close enough. It's on my desk . It's on the opposite corner of the house from what they say it should be. 'cause you can put in your GPS and they say this is where the strongest signal's coming from. All of that now.
I was like I can't put it on the other side of the house 'cause I need to plug it into my UDM pro. So it's gonna have to be in my office. We'll see how this does. I did a speed test. I get 270 megs down and like 60 to 70 megs up on the five G and it's only 50 bucks a month. So it's cheaper than at and t. My speeds are like three times faster down and like six times faster up. So just initial speed tests. It's I'm impressed. I will say we'll have to see how it goes. You.
Are lucky enough to live in an area that has cell phone signals. I do not live in the boonies by any stretch. Like I live in the. Burbs. No you don't live in the boonies. I've been to your house. Yes. And over here at the beach where I live, there's a bunch of crazy people who think that they're getting radiation poisoning from cell phone towers. So there are absolutely not enough cell phone towers to go around.
I'm lucky that if I get a bar of cell phone signal at my house, which is fine with me 'cause to me like it's actually a bug that cell phones allow you to do phone calls. Like really they're just internet communicators, right? Like like it's an internet. It's an internet computer in my pocket. So the less phone calls that I can get the better. But I could never do five G home internet or anything like that. I will say I've been super happy with fiber since going to that.
Like if you get the at and t fiber in your neighborhood that they've been rolling out here in Jacksonville, like that's all good stuff. 80 bucks a month for symmetrical. Gigabit is perfect. I actually can't take advantage of this symmetrical gigabit 'cause I too am using a unify router and the Unify router I have caps out at 700 megs. Oh that's disappointing.
I would switch to that if I could but we have been promised at and t fiber for like a year and a half in our neighborhood that it's coming. You'll see contractors and I don't see anybody and my at and t here is only like 50 down and 10 up. So five G it is, although I will say Verizon so it's kind of funny. My five G is T-Mobile. Our cell phone is Verizon. I only get one bar of Verizon where we live and I get like four or five bars of T-Mobile for my five G. Yep. Different.
Bands. Well and it might be a bigger antenna. So the. Thing you'll have to watch out for is prioritization. Yes. The backhauls. My understanding is for a lot of like the home internet LTE things 'cause you're on the same towers as consumers, right? Once you're at the tower it's all just QOS and and prioritization within the service to figure out what's going on. So like you mentioned variability five G home, internet, we're LTE home internet doesn't really matter.
They're kind of subject to the same constraints as say like cable internet customers where all of a sudden everybody comes home and you're all on at the same time. And because you're all sharing the same outbound node that you, you could run into contention issues or something like that there. But yeah, I'd I'd be interested in hearing how it it goes for. You. I am too. I wanna do some tests at different times throughout the day. Like you said this evening like 7:00 PM or 8:00 PM what am I
getting? And I watched some reviews and people said they consistently, they rarely dropped below about 200 but like middle of the night like 2:00 AM 3:00 AM when nobody's on, they were getting up to 600. So I'm not gonna wake up at 3:00 AM to test but I'm curious to see how it does during the day. And then my other gadget I got this week Scott, we've talked about pucks before, right? You've have like the jobber puck and the five 10. Yeah I've.
Got it right down here in front of me if I unroll it and bring it up. Yeah I had one of those and it died. I picked up a new one and I've been impressed with it. I don't know what it sounds like to everybody else but I got one of the poly sink 20 plus pucks ish puck ish devices. It's more of a bar. It's a bar ish. I don't think mine reaches up high enough to get it on camera. No my cable's too short. It doesn't.
So I will say it's like a team certified one but it is apparently team certified for old teams and not new teams because it does not work with new teams to like hang up or answer phone calls. the mute works half the time. I mean that's reassuring. So what is it? It's the psyc 20 plus. The psyc 20 plus here I can throw. You mean the PSYC 20 plus USBA personal Bluetooth smart speakerphone.
Plantronics connect to smartphones via Bluetooth PC max via BT 600 dongle works with teams certified Zoom and more black. Yes. That one one only. I did the USBC one, not the USBA one. Gotcha. Because all my stuff is USBC but it's, I've had it for a couple days. I have run into this so I have devices all over my office. Like we've talked about the NEAT display, the NEAT frame and the NEAT board and some of those. Yep. But they can only be signed into one tenant.
I have lots of calls where I need to be signed into a different tenant to do the phone call and all these teams dedicated devices that only support one tenant.
I was jamming AirPods into my ears and frankly I get tired of AirPods after like four or five hours of phone calls and we, I can do stuff with the road cast, I can use my podcast setup but then I have to sit right here like having a good speaker phone puck thing so I can stand up and wander around the office and some of that I decided to pick up a new puck ish, a new bar. We'll call it a bar. I'm still happy with my jabra. Your jabra puck. Five 10. Yeah that. Is cheaper than uh Psyc.
Until that that one goes and and gives out on me. We'll see. Yeah I think the Jabra pucks usually go for 75 80 $5 US then it looks like you're psyc 20 depending on what you do the 20 or the 20 plus between one 10 and one 30. Yeah. The other one I wanna try is there's the team certified Microsoft speaker. So they have the USBC speaker. Okay.
And then the other one is Logitech, I believe it's Logitech has a Thunderbolt hub that also has a speaker built into it. Speaker microphone, all the, all that good kind of stuff. We should do hardware reviews Scott. We need a separate podcast just for hardware reviews and maybe someone would actually send us stuff to review instead of having to buy it all ourselves. . Because you got hardware too this week. I have not ordered mine yet but I know a lot of people have ordered these.
You got a new teleprompter? I. Did. So I ordered an El Gado prompter which is like, like you said, it's a a teleprompter but it's got the typical el gado flare and that it's quote unquote for for streamers. So it's a teleprompter with a built-in nine inch monitor that runs over display link.
So it's just one USB cable to power and display the monitor, which in and of itself is kind of interesting 'cause usually when you buy a teleprompter you're basically paying for the glass and then the housing and then you've got to come and supply a, a monitor or a tablet. And when I say like monitor, I mean like a field monitor maybe for like a camera or something like an HDMI field monitor or some people go with iPads or things like that.
But then you have this whole thing where you have to, you can't just throw something on that monitor on that screen. You actually need to mirror it and kind of flip a mirror because you're going up into a piece of glass that's then coming down and being re reflected back to you. So unless you wanna see everything upside down and backwards, you have to find a way to flip that signal around.
And what Alga has done is it looks like they made theirs in such a way that the monitor is permanently mirrored and flipped already. So you don't have to worry about any of that. Like you don't have to do anything. So for me that's kind of turnkey like like that makes it way easier. You don't have to go out and spend 200, $300 on even a cheap teleprompter and then another a hundred or 200
something like that to get a monitor for it. Like you, you can really get into like this 700 to a thousand range pretty quickly with a teleprompter. Uh, and the rate kind of monitor set up. So yeah, I ordered one of those. Should be here in a couple weeks. They were on back order. They sold out pretty quick. Yeah they did. I am looking forward to that one just to see how it goes. Although I'm gonna have to change my whole desk setup again and . To.
Redo it. Find a way to make all that work. Yeah. Yeah. I'm curious to see what you think. I have one of the, a teleprompter I've had for a while, I'm not using it. It was, they're big, it's heavy and like you said, I have a standalone monitor for it that it was the one everybody recommended but it doesn't fit super well and I've always been, it's nice if I can get it set up right but more often than not I just get frustrated with it.
And I like the whole all in one thing with the elga where it's just kind of built to work and throw it on a tripod or an arm or something and good to go and the price is reasonable, it's like 280 bucks but the cost of teleprompters and monitors, to me it was way cheaper actually than I thought it was gonna be given the cost of if you're gonna do other teleprompter options. So.
I'm looking forward to that one. I've, I've never really done a teleprompter in my setup but as a permanent work from home employee who still has no line of sight to even going on a business trip to meet my coworkers in person, uh, I'm always looking for ways to even take that virtual
connection to maybe something a little bit more real. So, so even in this setup I have now, like if folks are watching on YouTube or something like that, like my monitor sits, my monitor sits in front of me and then my camera sits above my monitor. So it's great. Like I've always got like forward looking. Yep. But I'm never looking at you kind of thing. So I'm excited to see kind of how that goes and if it can drive some different behaviors in me or responses from
folks that I do have meetings with like that. Yep. That's the reason I've thought about it. And I'm the same way, like my camera's right if you're watching it, my camera's up here where my team's window is, tends to be down here.
So I have the same thing as, as much as I try to keep looking at the camera, especially when you're talking, my tendency is to drop my eyes down to see your hand motions, to see your facial reaction And then I'm not looking at the camera so I did it before and I really like it for teams meetings. If it's just two or three people, when you start getting into teams meetings where they're sharing the screen
, that's when it gets a little hard. 'cause like you said, it's a nine inch, I think I looked at the resolution, it was like 10, was it a 10 24 by 7 68 or. It's not even that. It's like 10 24 by six something by. Six something. So it's not like a full, I mean again it's nine inches. You don't necessarily want it to be a 10 80 p or anything at nine inches. But when you're doing just phone calls or like recording the podcast, it's great for keeping that eye contact.
Where I did struggle with it was like I'm in a meeting, I wanna use a teleprompter, I'm gonna be looking at people but the screen is so little. So I'm curious to see what you think and how close I could get it to me and how visible like stuff on that screen will be.
I'm hoping that as a display link monitor, it's basically just A-U-S-B-C monitor that that you're hooking up to and given native support for monitors and every major operating system, right, like Windows and Mac, oss and even Linux should be fine with this as long as it can do the handshake. Is that the way I see lots of folks use teleprompters in that meeting model is they tend to like drag their meeting window over to the teleprompter. And I'm just thinking, well why do I have to drag it over?
Why don't I just mirror it all the time and let it run through from like my main monitor and then I I should be fine for the most part, right? Because I'll still have the big content in front of me.
Like I've still got a massive 32 inch monitor in front of me and then I'll have my prompter either up here and maybe I'll bring my, 'cause I can bring my monitor down another four or five inches on my desk so I can actually just position my teleprompter so it is directly in front of me and then I can be looking up and if I have to look down occasionally then so, so be it. It'll be okay. But I'm looking forward to trying it out. If you mirror, it mirrors the resolution though too, right?
So your 32 inch monitor would be running at like some wacky. That's fine. It's macOS. It's doing all the crappy scaling stuff. It does anyway. So. It's doing all that. Anyways, , it was cool to see that they built into display link to, because I have had that problem. That was one thing I encountered with my other teleprompter. So it did act as a monitor but you get on things like the Mac Mini or some of those computers that don't support multiple displays. Yep.
And the teleprompter starts to fall apart because if you're doing it in that scenario where it's another monitor, it's another monitor and it takes away from how many monitors you can have on your desk . So by doing display link and building it all right in that helps to resolve any of those issues with a computer that doesn't natively have support for another monitor on top of what you already have. Because display link kind of works around all of that by having that built right in as well. It.
Does nifty little turnkey solution. Yeah. So um, should be shipping in early to mid-December. So maybe by the time I've done with the Christmas break I can come back and give a review on that one. All right, so you know, who else bought some gadgets or spent some money this past week or is going to be spending some money? I have a question. Yes. If you had to buy a million licenses for Microsoft 365, how much would you spend on that?
A million licenses. What version? What are we talking about? What e threes. I wanna enable the basic productivity suite. So give me email, give me SharePoint, give me teams, give me office applications on the desktop and uh, on the web. But maybe I don't need co-pilot. What about. Security? Do you need EMS? Do you need EMS and Intune and some of that or just the office suite for productivity? You're not worried about security.
I mean I'm probably worried about security. If I'm buying a million licenses, I'm probably an enterprise customer. You're gonna probably do, so you're gonna do like Microsoft 365 EMS. So $37. So what does that come out to? $37 million. I mean the math is pretty easy, right? 1 million times $37 37. And then if I want to buy it for several years, let's see. I wanna go to, I I want, I wanna go to five years. Five years times 37 million is what? 150? No eh, almost 200 million. Right? All.
Right. What if I wanted to spend a billion dollars over five years? What? What would you give me? A. Billion dollars over five years. So that's what 250 million a year? Yeah. Give or take divided by a million. You're spending $250 per license, right? Yeah. What do I get? 200 You get like everything so 'cause. Oh. Sweet. So I've done the math. Amazon gets everything then everything. 'Cause I'm spending like 200 ish. Yeah, I'm like 200 ish a month right now for what I have. And that's an E five.
It's Veeva, it's in, it's the Intune suite. It's the Veeva suite. It's an E five, it's a cloud pc. Is that everything? I feel like there's other stuff in there that I have too. I feel like. You can throw like Dynamics and glint and. You can't get dynamics. You can throw all of it in there. But if I added on copilot, so if I added copilot onto what I have right now, I'd be in that ballpark of 250 without doing any of the extra dynamic stuff.
Oh that includes Vizio. Yeah. That doesn't include Dynamics, that doesn't include project. So you'd be like the core productivity suite with all the add-ons without Dynamics project, any of that type of stuff. But it would include co-pilot for $250. I did not do that math. That's fascinating. I think it's always interesting to see how these things go through.
So a a Amazon which has a bunch of different and slightly connected but slightly disparate products that it does in the productivity space. So things like work mail, work docs, there's what's the meeting app chime? Yes. So there's this kind of like suite of things that kind of almost sort of goes together that Amazon owns and it looks like they're getting away from that a
little bit. Uh, so, so there's this week Amazon and and Microsoft announced an approximately $1 billion deal over five years to pick up about a million licenses. Oh. I did my math wrong. It's 200 million, $200. Sorry I did my division 200 million. Yeah. You were thinking four. And five. Yeah, I was thinking four. But still. You were on a roll. I wasn't gonna stop you. That's still everything I have. Maybe you take away Veeva because it's Veeva and you throw in copilot instead
any anyways. Yeah this is, it's definitely an interesting move Talking to people that I have known that have various, I've known a few people that have worked in different aspects of Amazon before and the things they say about those internal apps, they're not particularly rave reviews, we'll just leave it at that . Those aren't internal apps. Those are Amazon's apps. Like you can go as a customer and you can buy some of those things as well. They just happen to work.
Mail and work docs and chime. They just happen to be the Amazon offerings. So I view this as nothing but goodness. Like if it deepens the integration aspect of things. So a a while ago, about a month or yeah I think it was just a couple months ago, a month or two ago Amazon and Microsoft also announced that the, the ability for office to run on VDI clients. Like that's been pretty constricted over time in licensing and things like that. Mm-Hmm .
Hey sure you can do Azure virtual desktop or you can do Microsoft 365 with the cloud PC or something like that. But your ability to really go outside the Microsoft ecosystem and run those on other hypervisors at scale, like good luck navigating spa licensing and getting somebody to sign off on it for you kind of thing. It's been generally hard but there wasn't an announcement just a little bit ago, like within the last few months that Microsoft was also going to open up
licensing for the M 365 app suite. So your desktop apps, word Excel, outlook, things like that. Yep. PowerPoint. To run inside of Amazon workspaces and be fully ready to go within that infrastructure. And that's even in contrast to some of the offerings that come out of like Google or things like that. Just the other big kind of hyperscalers that are out there and kicking around. So it kind of generally like leads to a bunch of goodness for customers.
Like hopefully for Amazon employees it makes it a little bit easier to collaborate given if you might have like outside people that you work with. Like Excel makes business go around , you know it's very hard to do things in in open office or Libre or things like that. It's just not working so you need like office. So that's all good. And then the portability of licensing for for VDI customers I think is also a big one.
Like it's very easy to sit down and say like Oh I want to do streamed desktops like thin clients for my users. But then you feel very like locked into the Microsoft ecosystem and having that portability and licensing is good to see there as well. I wonder if this will even lead to, again the articles are not, I mean there's not a lot of details. Microsoft nor Amazon have waited on this. This is a lot of reportedly over a million.
But like are they gonna end up using intra ID for like their IDP or do they end up using something like Okta for that?
But could this even potentially lead to tighter integrations between the office productivity suite and ID and some of the AWS stuff and because they're so they're gonna have so much stuff on Microsoft 365 other almost hybrid cloudish improvements to make things easier for Amazon to work in AWS and Microsoft 365 that will lead to additional improvements for clients being able to improve their multi-cloud, hybrid cloud choice of cloud, et cetera.
We'll see things to speculate about and it does say it could be over a million so that could tie into our licensing. The other thing I wonder Scott is that's a lot of people, is Microsoft throwing some services in there? Like are they really paying that much just for licensing or is that some migration boarding ramp up services as well? They're included in this reported $1 billion. Microsoft doesn't have much of a services org these days. .
Well in that case if you're at Amazon and you need help with your migration, gimme a call add. We're intelligent right now. We helped Amazon migrate. We can help you too. No, I don't know that I would want to come anywhere close to that. I would not have nearly the capacity or bandwidth to take anything on like that. Do you feel overwhelmed by trying to manage your Office 365 environment? Are you facing unexpected issues that disrupt your company's productivity?
Intelligent is here to help much like you take your car to the mechanic that has specialized knowledge on how to best keep your car running Intelligent helps you with your Microsoft Cloud environment because that's their expertise. Intelligent keeps up with the latest updates on the Microsoft cloud to help keep your business running smoothly and ahead of the curve.
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So Amazon gets some new stuff. Why don't we keep talking about office? So okay quick reminder for folks that office clients are continue to go away. So we are today as we're recording on October 20th, 2023 and about a week or so ago on on October 10th, uh, a little bit more than a week I guess the office clients like legacy office clients. So Office 2016, office 2019 including Office 2019 for Mac. They all have ended their official support cycle for connecting to Microsoft 365 and Microsoft
365 services. So from here on out, if you have willfully decided that you are going to run a legacy office client, I'm, I'm gonna refer to it as an a legacy office client or or just one of these older office clients and you begin to encounter issues with your connectivity to things like I don't know you're in Outlook and you can't connect to Exchange online. It might not be an outage on Microsoft's side.
It could be that they've just changed something and you are not on a modern client that is actually supported and ready to ready to go for those things. So if you've been kind of like biting the bullet on upgrading, I know there's lots of organizations out there that end up like licensed for these things, which it just takes them a long time to get around to going to all the clients and doing all the things.
It is time to start prioritizing that stuff because once this is done and you're kind of through this round of migration, there's also the long-term support, long-term servicing channel clients rather the LTSC clients and those clients are a couple years into their life and it's actually not that far away. It's October, 2026 when the office LTSE 2021 client goes offline and not goes offline but isn't supported anymore. Right. Falls outta support. Yep. Falls outta support.
So yeah time to get some of those legacy clients moving if this is something that potentially impacts you. Yeah. So I'm curious, is there gonna be like an LTSC 2020? I mean they've been on the well two to three years, is there gonna be an LTSC 2024 'cause we're too close to the end of 2023 for there to be a new one this year. you would think they'd. I don't know. You would think they'd have to come out with a new one either before 2026, like 2024 or 2025.
We shall see One never knows what the, what the office folks are thinking when they license new versions. Yeah and I get it. They're like they're always gonna have to keep some version of this around because you very much have air gapped computers in certain industries computers that can't reach the internet that need these one-time purchase boxed, well maybe not one-time versions like boxed versions. Like will these go to subscriptions? 'cause I was looking at,
I compare this to uh, SharePoint. 'cause SharePoint also has some stuff ending, well 2013 ended support earlier this year. But I've been talking to some clients that do still have on-prem and I was talking to one about the subscription edition SharePoint subscription edition and did some digging into licensing of it.
And it appears that while it's a one-time purchase, and this is just from what I could decipher from documentation if you want, once you purchase it, if you want to continue to use it, you're required to have software assurance with it essentially turning a one-time purchase into a subscription edition. And if you ever quit paying for software assurance for it, you're no longer technically allowed to be using it.
Which it seemed a little bizarre. I'm not a hundred percent sure on that, but I wonder if they're gonna do something similar with like office for the desktop where it's still taking a one-time purchase but turning it into a subscription via software assurance. Yeah, you just found the article I found about it.
My understanding with all this stuff is it still follows the server cal model like hey I need to deploy this so I need a server license and then Cal client access license to actually get like clients into the environment. So that is a one time purchase thing. Like great I need to purchase a server license to go ahead and and actually be able to run the bits and and deploy it the first time.
The subscription component is really the SA piece software assurance and bringing that forward and it's kind of implied in the name right? Like it is SharePoint servers subscription edition, it's not SharePoint server pay for a once edition. Right And get out. So you do have to be an SA customer to get that done.
And then so the thing was software assurances as a model that you're paying for and to get into, even though you've paid for the server license, if you choose not to renew your software Asser Assurance, then you're technically out of compliance with the license and you shouldn't be using that software anymore. Yeah and I wonder if we're gonna see something similar to office like are we gonna get an office desktop subscription edition?
Because their goal with SharePoint is that now they've gotten away from their years, right? It's just SharePoint subscription edition. So they just keep issuing and if you always have software assurance, you always get all the updates for it. So you just keep paying that and there's no longer these major version releases. It's just an ongoing on-premises version of SharePoint that you continue to update, maintain and pay for software assurances as long as you want to use it.
It's just not hosted in the cloud. Could we see something similar for office after the lt, whatever the acronym was for that LTC? Yeah, I don't know. It's the whole on-prem versus cloud thing is interesting. I'll say licensing too. I tried to do an ROI on an upgrade to subscription edition versus OnPrem or cloud that made cloud actually not seem so expensive. If you're talking about like three or four SharePoint servers with cals, with server licenses, with hardware, with software assurance.
There's a lot of little pieces in there. Yeah, licensing came out. You can buy like Office 365 for multiple years for especially if you're small, like for three or 400 people, go buy SharePoint online. Don't mess with subscription edition unless you really need it on-prem. And then you deal with the whole thing that we talked about the other week with AC and updates and SPFX and all that . Indeed. Am I on the H one or the H 2 20 23 edition of blah blah blah And how's that come through for me?
Exactly. Oh, gadgets office. I think that's about it for us. Today. Is that, does that wrap us up for today? That does. Alright, sounds good. Time flies when you're having fun. Nobody came to join us in Discord today. Scott. I'm kind of sad. I might cry. I'll leave this out there for folks. I am excited for some of the announcements coming at Ignite. So you,
you and I attended an internal Microsoft conference this week. Yes, I was speaking at it doing some sessions on storage for our roadmap and things like that. So I kind of live in that day to day, so, so I'm familiar enough with it, but you conned me into going to a couple other side sessions and round tables and things. So yeah, I'm, I'm excited to see quite a few things land in the next couple weeks across both Azure and Microsoft 365. There's definitely some stuff coming in.
We mentioned this last week in the whole lull before Ignite. There will be stuff to look forward to at Ignite. There's some announcements that hopefully are coming. I have also seen them pull announcements at the very last minute, like 30 minutes before Ignite starts. you never quite know but hopefully all these announcements, much of this stuff will come in the next, well by the time this gets released it'll be like a week away, two weeks away. Yeah, this should go out on November too.
And then we're targeting like the 13th, 14th there for Ignite. So folks should go sign up if they haven't signed up yet. It's free. It's free to attend virtually and even if you can't make the time slots or things like that, you should still go sign up and then you get access to the recordings and all that. You can catch up a little bit quicker maybe than even it gets published out to YouTube and, and all that kinda stuff.
There is still a slim chance I would be there in person but with how long information has been to get back to me on certain things, I don't know that it will be financially feasible if the opportunity even presents itself because I'm gonna be buying plane tickets and hotel room, not buying a hotel room, buying a plane ticket, trying to find a hotel room like two weeks before the conference . That is not a cheap prospect. We'll have to see. No, that one's not optimal at all.
So it may be hybrid this year Scott, but we really do need to get back to one of these in person. It'd be fun. I miss it. But with that, go enjoy your weekend, enjoy this nice weather and the air show is here in Jacksonville this week. Go enjoy the beach, the planes, the blue angels. It. Is. I'm looking forward to the Blue Angels. I haven't heard of 'em buzzing overhead or anything, so ready and waiting for that one as well. Alright. Sounds good. Well thanks. Enjoy your weekend Scott.
We'll talk to you again soon. Perfect. 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.