August 29, 2019

New Beginnings

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.

August 6, 2019

Microsoft Teams and Call-me Back Changes

Was tipped off to this from a friend. For a long time, we’ve had the Call-me back feature as part of Teams. Microsoft has stated it would change several times over the past year or so, but it looks like it is finally going to happen:

Customers have been provided a complimentary dial-out capability that will end on November 30, 2019. Beginning December 1, 2019, each Audio Conferencing subscription provides 60 minutes per user per month that can be used to dial out to non-premium numbers in ANY of the Zone A countries as described in this document. Your tenant dial-out minute pool size is based on assigned licenses and not purchased licenses. This benefit is applicable to Audio Conferencing monthly subscription licenses and does not extend to Audio Conferencing pay-per-minute licenses.

July 30, 2019

CapitalOne, AWS and what we should learn (or really know) about Public Cloud

I’m sure you’ve heard all about the CaptialOne hack by now. The interesting part is that the records were stored on AWS. You can read more about that here. Why is this interesting? Number one reason is that AWS wasn’t the issue but the hack has highlighted the fact that while AWS and other public Cloud providers (i.e. Microsoft and Google) provide the infrastructure, you still need to be responsible about the applications. No different than when you run on-premises, you are still responsible for the configuration of the applications and devices.

July 25, 2019

Microsoft Teams Adoption and the Impact of Emotions

Lately, I’ve found myself studying the science of Adoption and Change Management (ACM). Mainly because Microsoft Teams is a pretty big foundational shift from how we’ve done things in the OCS/Lync/Skype world in some ways. In other ways, we’re faced with the same ACM struggles as OCS/Lync/Skype of simply getting the users to understand the software and how it can improve their lives.

I had two things happen to me today that compelled me to write this article. In both cases, the events brought up and out emotions from me (even if I do joke that my emotions like my taste buds are dead, yes, I like spicy food, but I digress).

April 26, 2019

Resource Accounts in Microsoft Teams and how they affect Auto Attendants and Call Queues (new, maybe?)

**UPDATE 7/24/2019: **The new license model has been released. Please reference https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoftteams/teams-add-on-licensing/virtual-user for guidance.

This might be one of those classic “Adam” moments. Maybe this has been this way and I’m only waking up to it now. That said, I have found in life, that if I have a question or a view, I’m usually not the only one who has it. So here goes.

Had someone bring this link up to me recently (HT to Randy, he’ll know who he is): https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoftteams/manage-resource-accounts

April 8, 2019

Speaking at ConvergeOne 2019 Iowa Tech Summit

I’ll be speaking at the ConvergeOne 2019 Iowa Tech Summit in Des Moines on April 17th. I’m going to be talking on Microsoft Teams and it’s impact on Digital Transformation. Here’s a quick snippet on the topic:

Microsoft Teams is impacting the way companies work. From the mindset of Cloud First, Mobile First, Microsoft has established Teams as the hub for Collaboration. In this presentation, we will look at five ways that Teams is enabling Digital Transformation and give some thoughts on how it could impact your organization.

December 18, 2018

Microsoft Teams Tip Tuesday - Give more context!

This tip is somewhat based on last week’s tip. When posting a conversation into a Microsoft Teams channel, give as much context as possible. If you are posting a link, tell what the link is about, don’t just post the link. Also, tag people if you want them to see it specifically. Many times, we post things in a Channel and it ultimately just becomes a large “junk” drawer of content. There is a lot of valuable information in the channel but we can’t find it easily. By giving context and tagging people, it becomes easier to search for the information.

December 11, 2018

Microsoft Teams Tip Tuesday - Add a Subject to a Conversation

This is one that has become pretty common to many of the Teams that I am a part of and I have seen it documented by a few others but felt like it needs more publicizing.

If you are starting a new conversation, add a subject to make it more engaging. This really helps if you have multiple conversations going on in a Channel. This is super easy to do. Right below the “Start a new converstation” where you would type, there is an icon that has an “A” with a pencil on it:

December 4, 2018

Meetings location in Microsoft Teams

I’m sure some of my blog readers remember back when OCS or Lync came out we’d get a brand new CHM file that we would comb over looking for what was new or changed. Everything at the time had that new tech smell. It was awesome. I’ll be honest, learning something new about a technology never gets old for me. This blog post is a perfect example of why. I was doing a walk-through of a presentation I was going to help with and the speaker had a slide in there that caught my eye. I literally said “wait, stop, go back to the previous slide!”. As I read it, my eyes were opened to something I didn’t know and it took me back to those days of reading the CHM for something new.

June 11, 2018

Comms vNext Thanks!

By the time you read this, it will be Monday morning. I wanted to take just a moment to thank everyone who made Comms vNext 2018 possible.

First and foremost, I want to thank the community and everyone who showed up. Without the community and folks desiring an event like this, we would never have attempted it.

Second, I want to thank the speakers and the volunteers who worked tirelessly to make the day so special. In no particular order: