How do you engineer a customer experience? Richard chats with Chris Jackson about the role of the Windows Customer Experience Engineers - the folks at Microsoft who talk to people using Windows all over the world and advocate inside Microsoft to make those experiences better. A lot of Windows experiences are collected automatically via telemetry in Windows, but there are certain places where that telemetry doesn't work. Chris also digs into Deskop App Assurance, where Microsoft is actually helpi...
Dec 19, 2018•37 min•Ep 615•Transcript available on Metacast What's new in SQL Server 2019? Richard chats with Brent Ozar about his take on the latest version of SQL Server. Is there any more to do? Apparently yes! Some features are a bit more questionable, like Java support in SQL Server. But others make a ton of sense, including more analytics, more insights and better support for containers. It all depends on what you want to do with SQL Server. Brent talks about how the culture of DBAs is changing and how that is reflected in SQL Server itself. There'...
Dec 12, 2018•40 min•Ep 614•Transcript available on Metacast Device Management is evolving - are you? Richard chats with Jeremy Moskowitz about how device management is changing. From the good old days where Active Directory could do everything to the today where there is a huge diversity of devices, even versions of Windows, that cannot be domain joined - there are management solutions for everything. The question is, what makes sense for your organization? Jeremy talks through the different scenarios and options for traditional, hybrid and modern device...
Dec 05, 2018•32 min•Ep 613•Transcript available on Metacast How do you make the Internet of Things (IoT) secure and reliable? Richard chats with Microsoft Distinguished Engineer Galen Hunt about Azure Sphere, a comprehensive approach to IoT that provides security and the hardware, operating system and cloud services layers. The discussion digs into how microcontrollers (MCUs) permeate all technology in our lives, and that they will soon be a part of the Internet of Things, but only if they can be made safe. Azure Sphere starts with MCU hardware that has ...
Nov 28, 2018•32 min•Ep 612•Transcript available on Metacast Who advocates for operations folks in the cloud? While at Ignite in Orlando, Richard sat down with Rick Claus to talk about what it means to be an advocate, and how operations folks think about the cloud. A lot of cloud concepts, like containers, are driven by development - and yet ultimately, it all needs to be deployed, monitored and managed. Rick digs into how operations people are focusing more on those core competencies than any particular technology, and finding there's more to do, more op...
Nov 21, 2018•28 min•Ep 611•Transcript available on Metacast What's happening with VPNs in the Microsoft world? While at Ignite in Orlando, Richard sat down with Richard Hicks to talk about the on-going evolution of VPN access in Windows. There's been a number of products along the way, Richard talks about DirectAccess as the one most people know and love - but it hasn't had much work done on it in the past few years. Enter Always On VPN, which simplifies VPNs as well as broadening the VPN support for Windows and other platforms. There are some tricks to ...
Nov 14, 2018•34 min•Ep 610•Transcript available on Metacast The DevOps movement continues to grow - let's see the results! Richard chats with DORA chief scientist Dr. Nicole Forsgren about the State of DevOps in 2018 Report. And it's great news! Nicole digs into the rigorous reporting methodology used to develop the report, covering a broad chunk of the IT community - large and small companies using a huge variety of technology. More than half of the respondents fell into the high performing and elite categories, able to deploy changes to software rapidl...
Nov 07, 2018•35 min•Ep 609•Transcript available on Metacast The Internet of Things and Industrial SCADA controls are colliding - what happens next? Richard chats with Niall Merrigan about the security issues around industrial plants - factories, power stations, refineries and so on. There has been automation there for years in the form of Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA) systems - but their security models are pretty primitive, often relying on air-gap networks to keep hackers out. Meantime, inexpensive and powerful IoT devices offer new ...
Oct 31, 2018•40 min•Ep 608•Transcript available on Metacast What can Graph do for you? Richard chats with Jeremy Thake about his return to Microsoft, joining the engineering team at Microsoft Graph. Jeremy is focused on the developer experience, which leads to a detailed discussion of what Graph is all about and how it can help an organization manage rights between users, devices, and applications. This leads to a conversation about increasing the sophistication of security models within an organization by incorporating granular privilege controls provid...
Oct 24, 2018•36 min•Ep 607•Transcript available on Metacast And the battle is on - CloudOps vs DevOps! Richard debates with Dana Epp about what modern operations looks like. Dana points out that all too often, DevOps is purely a developer-driven initiative for automated continuous delivery pipelines - but there's more to DevOps than that! Meantime there's a group using the CloudOps term as an approach to not bothering with operations at all - let the cloud take care of it! What does the real value of operations looks like today? Do we have to decide betw...
Oct 17, 2018•33 min•Ep 606•Transcript available on Metacast What's an IT Community and why should you be a part of it? Richard chats with Michael Bender about being a part of a larger IT community. Michael talks about how often IT folks are so head-down in the day-to-day crises of operations that they don't have the cycles or interest to connect with others in their profession. But it's a trap! Engaging with the community is a source of support, information and opportunities to make your work better, help your career growth and to open doors to the new t...
Oct 10, 2018•33 min•Ep 605•Transcript available on Metacast What does a data analytics solution look like today? Richard chats with Trey Johnson of Zap about how data warehousing and OLAP have evolved into the modern data analytics solution. The cloud is the biggest shift for data analytics, changing what it means to Extract, Transform and Load. Trey talks about the focus being far more on extracting and loading across different SaaS products, and transformation being a rarer option. Whether you're starting a new greenfield analytics solution or looking ...
Oct 03, 2018•32 min•Ep 604•Transcript available on Metacast Spectre and Meltdown are still out there - are you protected? Richard chats with Susan Bradley and Wayne Small about Spectre and Meltdown, a set of vulnerabilities found in Intel, AMD, ARM and other CPUs. Since the public announcements in early January, there have been an on-going stream of patches to mitigate the vulnerability - but at the expense of performance and in some cases, stability. The presumption that all patches are good is significantly challenged by Spectre and Meltdown. What are ...
Sep 26, 2018•42 min•Ep 603•Transcript available on Metacast What's new in Configuration Manager world? Richard chats with Johan Arwidmark about the latest for Configuration Manager - but starts out with a discussion around Windows Update. Of course, anyone immersed in configuration cares about the problems with Windows Update, and Johan talks about the testing they're doing that often results in needing to wait for fixed to updates before they get deployed. Report your problems - they will get fixed faster! Then into a discussion about the Cloud, and the...
Sep 19, 2018•30 min•Ep 602•Transcript available on Metacast Control what gets onto your PCs! Richard chats with Sami Laiho about the latest thinking around application whitelisting. For years we've worked from the blacklist model of allowing anything onto PCs and running anti-malware software to remove the bad stuff. But there's so much bad stuff today, it's impossible to keep up. Whitelisting has gotten simpler with better versions of AppLocker and approaches that allow you to more easily control what applications live on PCs. And it defeats the vast ma...
Sep 12, 2018•35 min•Ep 601•Transcript available on Metacast Hey, it's episode 600! Let's celebrate! While down in Redmond at the residence of Kim Tripp and Paul Randal, Richard turned on the recorder and this bit of silliness emerged. Technical content? Not so much. Cursing? Yeah, a bit of that. But it's been 600 episodes - thanks for listening!
Sep 05, 2018•40 min•Ep 600•Transcript available on Metacast Ready for a chuckle? Richard chats with Mike O'Neill about a number of stories from his work as a Premier Field Engineer for Microsoft. While it's best to always be kind, some of these mistakes, especially the security ones, are shocking... Mike talks about offices where everyone was a domain administrator (including every ex-employee too!), keeping passwords secure in paper envelopes, and many more. You can't know everything, but if these stories are any indication, it's still worthwhile to ask...
Aug 29, 2018•34 min•Ep 599•Transcript available on Metacast Ready to migrate some storage? Richard chats with Ned Pyle about his work on the Storage Migration Service, which is part of Server 2019. You can get an insider preview of Server 2019 today, and with a couple of extra clicks, start experimenting with this cool tool to help you migrate file server content, that is files, rights, metadata and all the details onto Server 2019. Ned talks about the pain of manual file server migrations - what if you could make it like a Physical-to-Virtual migration ...
Aug 22, 2018•33 min•Ep 598•Transcript available on Metacast Computers and water don't mix! Usually. Richard talks to Ben Cutler, one of the team leading Project Natick - building subsea data centers. Ben talks about the history of Natick, starting with the first tests off the coast of California, and the phase 2 project happening now in the Orkney islands. Speed of deployment is one advantage, as is reduced latency by being able to put data centers close to customers. But the focus of Natick is first and foremost environmental - what is the least environ...
Aug 15, 2018•38 min•Ep 597•Transcript available on Metacast The month of July 2018 was an especially hard one for updates to Windows - and has prompted an important letter. Richard talks to Susan Bradley about her open letter to the leaders of Microsoft talking about the problems that Windows updates are causing for consumers and IT Professionals alike. There were 47 updates in July, and many of them had significant 'side effects' to Windows workstations and servers - even Microsoft products. Susan talks through the issues and offers some potential solut...
Aug 08, 2018•38 min•Ep 596•Transcript available on Metacast In April 2018, Microsoft re-organized the Windows division - so that there is no Windows division anymore. What does it mean? Richard chats with Paul Thurrott, who has made a career around Windows for years, about what happened with Windows division leader Terry Myerson, and what this re-organization means for Windows going forward. It's a new world!
Aug 01, 2018•39 min•Ep 595•Transcript available on Metacast OneDrive for Business continues to evolve! Richard chats with Stephen Rose about the announcements around OneDrive for Business at the SharePoint North America conference. Stephen talks about the improved support for photos taken via smartphones, being first-class citizens in OneDrive for Business - including using the amazing Office Len technology to make photos of whiteboards and documents (like receipts) super crisp and clear. The conversation also gets into getting those key 'known' folders ...
Jul 25, 2018•36 min•Ep 594•Transcript available on Metacast Where do you keep your secrets? While at Build in Seattle, Richard chatted with Andrew Cheung and Paul Yuknewicz about the latest features for Azure Key Vault. The conversation dives into what should go into the Key Vault beyond the obvious TLS certificate private keys. Any username/password combinations for services accessed by other applications can live there - really, anything with secrets. And as Andrew says, containers have secrets too - they can live in Key Vault!
Jul 18, 2018•33 min•Ep 593•Transcript available on Metacast Have you got containers in your operations? While at Build in Seattle, Richard chatted with Jessica Deen about the gamut of offerings that Microsoft has around containers. Jessica talks about the latest container features in Azure, including the Azure Kubernetes Service. But even more important than services is tooling, and the conversation dives into the Kubernetes Tools for VSCode as well as tools like Helm for helping you set up and manage your complete container system.
Jul 11, 2018•34 min•Ep 592•Transcript available on Metacast Self-Service Test Labs in Azure! While at Build in Seattle, Richard talked with Claude Remillard about the on-going evolution of Azure Dev Test Labs. Azure Dev Test Labs allows you to define a set of templates and services for building up a set of VMs for doing testing - or anything else you like. The set can have run limits, billing limits and more, so you can control costs as well as make sure things get cleaned up when done. Claude digs into using Azure Dev Test Labs for demos, training and m...
Jul 04, 2018•32 min•Ep 591•Transcript available on Metacast Data Warehousing is for everyone! While at Build in Seattle, Richard sat down with Matt Usher to talk about the latest version of Azure SQL Data Warehouse. Matt talks about how the cloud has made the barrier of entry for data warehousing trivially low - costs that are dollars per hour, so that you can afford to experiment at almost any scale. What can data warehousing do for you? Make your company more competitive and efficient!
Jun 27, 2018•35 min•Ep 590•Transcript available on Metacast Linux on Windows! While at Build in Seattle, Richard talked to Tara Raj and Sarah Cooley about Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL). While you've been able to run Linux in virtual machines and containers for a long time, WSL actually lets you run Linux in a command line inside Windows. Why would you do that? Sarah and Tara focuses on the biggest benefit, which is taking advantage of great Linux command line tools and scripts.
Jun 20, 2018•31 min•Ep 589•Transcript available on Metacast The Exchange story continues to evolve - how about an update! Richard chats with Gareth Gudger about his work with a variety of companies using Exchange both on-premises and in Office 365. Gareth digs into older versions of Exchange that are coming out of support (time to upgrade) and the announcements around Exchange 2019 - the features come to the cloud first, but we get them in our own data centers eventually. There are plenty of ways to operate mail successfully for your organization, and Ga...
Jun 13, 2018•32 min•Ep 588•Transcript available on Metacast SQL Server runs on Linux and in containers! Richard talks to Bob Ward about the on-going evolution of SQL Server and how the latest version literally has a common codebase between the Windows and Linux versions - feature-for-feature identical! The tooling is different, but the new SQL Operations Studio is built to be cross-platform, running on Windows, Mac and Linux! The conversation also dives into container strategies using Docker and Kubernetes, both on-premises and in the cloud. Lots of data...
Jun 06, 2018•33 min•Ep 587•Transcript available on Metacast What can you automate in the cloud? Everything! Richard chats with Dana Epp about how the tooling in Azure allows for automating a huge range of tasks, starting with Dana's personal focus - security. Dana talks about using automation to catch whenever security rules change anywhere, just for logging if not for direct action. The combination of Azure ARM Templates, Automation and Azure Functions is hugely powerful. The challenge is in managing that tooling, which leads to a conversation around so...
May 30, 2018•33 min•Ep 586•Transcript available on Metacast 
