Very pleased to be able to say that I’ll be speaking at Microsoft Ignite the Tour in Toronto on January 8th and 9th, 2020! If you are in the area, hopefully you are registered as the event is currently waitlisted. If you are registered and going, I hope you will try to find me and say hi!

My sessions are:

• ADM20 - Addressing top management issues with user and groups
• ADM31 - Role-based access control in Microsoft 365: Improve your operations and security posture

My sessions are both on January 8th but I’ll be at the event both days.

UPDATE 1/14/2020: Deadline extended to July 15th, 2020 https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/skype-for-business-blog/oauth-2-0-and-third-party-application-id-timeline-extended-to/ba-p/482876

This is one of those posts that probably feels like it might be late. Microsoft announced way back in April that 3PIP phones would need to be updated due to a change in the Application ID because of the implementation of OAUTH 2.0. Everyone should be happy that Microsoft is focused on implementing new and improved security features. That said, this one has the impact that companies NEED to update the firmware of their handsets and take a specific action. This will be enforced starting January 15th, 2020. Yes, you read that right, that’s less than a month away.

This week, if you weren’t paying attention (maybe you’re just trying to get all the year-end stuff done so you can have a restful holiday), you might have missed two big things from Microsoft Teams.

First, Native Federation is now here! What is Native Federation you ask? It is the ability to have a chat with an external participant (think B2B) and have the same experience that you have with someone inside your organization. That means you get persistence of the chat from both sides. In addition, you can send emoji’s, Giphys, stickers and more! This has been a long time coming and it’s great to see that it’s here.

In my contuation of testing Microsoft Teams devices, I am doubling down on the Evolve 65t’s. I am one of those people who truly wants to like every device I test. I want to see the manufacturers bring high-quality products to market that give end users options.

After my last testing round https://cloudrenegade.us/2019/10/22/microsoft-teams-devices-comparison/ the one device that I just couldn’t get to test well was the Jabra Evolve 65t’s. I found that every time I would test them I would get a robotic voice or some other issue that arose as poor voice quality to the far end. It was interesting as I had been using this device as my mobile device for several months with no complaints from my wife or kids when I would either call them via Teams (I have an MTR in the house in which I call home to in order to maintain contact with the family) or via the PSTN. My wife would not put up with poor quality knowing I have many other devices to choose from so it was really bothering me that these tested so poorly.

In case you missed it, I’m speaking at Microsoft Ignite this year.

First up is on Monday, November 4th at 2:15pm EST. I’ll be leading a conversation around starting your own community event. After starting the Colorado UC User Group and helping found Comms vNext, I want to help others get started with community events in their local areas. Search for UNC1003 in the session catalog or you can click: https://myignite.techcommunity.microsoft.com/sessions/78939?source=sessions

Today, we’re going to try and show the real world results of various headsets. Most of this is in the video as the setup for the video is pretty much a blog post.

Before we get to that, I want to give a quick shout out to Tom Arbothnot who started the discussion on Twitter and has a blog post of his own coming out on this subject. If you aren’t following his blog, https://tomtalks.uk, go do that right after watching this video.

Nice little update today to the Microsoft Authenticator app for Android: the ability to backup your configuration! This has been something I have been wanting for the past month. Back in early August, an update dropped that created issues for me. I was experiencing high battery usage as well as apps such as Microsoft Teams and Outlook Mobile weren’t working properly unless I opened them and allowed them to re-authenticate. With the update that dropped today, the latter issues have disappeared thankfully! Time will tell if the battery issue is gone but I suspect it has.

This is just a quick tip of the day. Having just changed company’s, I was re-setting up my Outlook profile, you know, adding my signature, etc. when I remembered this setting about meetings that I believe everyone should set:

We’ve all had it happen where we get booked in back to back to back to back meetings, right? No, just me? Anyway, by utilizing this setting, whenever I book a meeting that is 30 min, it only books for 25. Instead of an hour, it’s only 45 minutes. This allows for some margin in my day which is critical to maintaining balance. It provides me a quick break between meetings to stand up and stretch, make a coffee, whatever else might be needed.

Or maybe it should be “ch-ch-ch-changes”? Either way, it’s true. I’ve moved jobs.

TL;DR - I, along with Chad McGreanor, have started Cloud Revolution. We’re a boutique, Microsoft focused cloud company with a desire to help companies revolutionize the way people communicate and collaborate!

Now, on to the rest of the story:

The past six years has been a whirlwind of change and adapt and I determined that it was time to move on. Over the past six years, I got to experience working alongside some of the best teammates I will probably ever have the pleasure of joining forces with. As a team we were bought and sold twice in two years which brings with it it’s own stresses and challenges. Throughout it all we triumphed in face of adversity. People moved on as they are apt to do and that change finally came to me.

Well, welcome to the home of my new blog. For the past 12 years (yeah, it’s been 12 years), I’ve blogged at https://phyler.wordpress.com. I never got into the branding thing too much besides representing myself well. There have been times where customers have shown me my own blog as a solution and I had to explain but overall, it was just a spot for me to vent.

There has been a lot happening in my life and it seemed fitting to re-brand. While working on another project (that will become public soon), the name Cloud Renegade came up and as I sat on it overnight, I realized that this was the right brand for me. As at least one of my friends knows, I’m a huge proponent of utilizing the Cloud as much as possible. I always enjoy discussing how the Cloud can help businesses in any number of ways.