Episode 188 – Are You Inspired Yet?

In Episode 188, Ben and Scott discuss some of the latest announcements from Microsoft Inspire, including NFS support of Azure Blob Storage, the GA of Microsoft Lists, and the announcement of Microsoft Dataflex and Microsoft Dataflex Pro. Transcript Email Download New Tab - [Ben] Welcome to episode 188 of the Microsoft Cloud IT Pro podcast recorded live on July 23rd, 2020. This is a show about Microsoft 365 and Azure, from the perspective of it pros and end users, where we discuss the topic of recent news and how it relates to you. In this episode, Ben and Scott review some of the news coming out of Microsoft Inspire around Microsoft 365 and Azure, including blob storage, Data Flex, and Microsoft lists. Happy Thursday, Thursday. - [Scott] Yeah, Thursday, you made it to another one. Are you feeling inspired yet? - [Ben] I am feeling very inspired, not only by Inspire being inspiring or providing inspiration, is that what Inspire is supposed to do is provide inspiration? - [Scott] Yeah. In fact, it is, it is supposed to inspire Microsoft partners to go out and build awesome things. - [Ben] But I also just had a five-day, six-day, something like that, vacation up in Michigan on the beach, on the lake, paddle boarding and kayaking. And I barely have any cell phone signal up there. So I, frankly just pretty much ignored my phone for five days. It was also an inspiring and relaxing experience. - [Scott] Yeah, that sounds like you're living the dream. You're not missing much back here, like heat, global pandemics, all the fun things. - [Ben] Yeah, I frankly have no idea what's going on in Florida right now. And I don't care, I'll figure it out when we get back home. - [Scott] That's the spirit. - [Ben] Because now I'm back in Michigan recording on my Bose headset. So if my audio is a little off. I am hanging out at my parents for a couple more weeks, have a wedding coming up while we're here and all that. But people probably do not care so much about my inspiring personal life. They probably care more about the inspiration coming from Inspire this week, which I got back from vacation to a flood of news that I've been trying to catch up on. - [Scott] Yeah, quite a bit of news. So as Microsoft has been doing for many of their events lately, they've published their book of news. This time it didn't go out as a book, but it's a website. You get the table of contents, go ahead and browse through it. And you can take a look at all of the announcements around things like Azure, Microsoft 365, certainly business applications, or biz apps like dynamics play a large part in the partner ecosystem. So there's a specific section for that as well as security and compliance, then it wouldn't be a partner conference without partner enablement. And then some, a little bit about sustainability initiatives and things like that that are coming up or in a process now. But if you're interested in what happened at Inspire and you normally go, I shouldn't be interested in Inspire because that's the partner conference and I'm not a partner, or maybe you work for a partner and the relationship side of Microsoft and its partners isn't relevant to you day to day. A lot of these announcements, aren't about how to sell things in the partner ecosystem. They really are functionality within the platform and to a certain degree material changes in functionality. So you'll see some quite a bit of movement on the Teams and Microsoft 365 side, there was a bunch of Azure announcements from Azure stack HCI integrations and improving some of the hybrid flows that exist today. Some networking enhancements, a bunch of stuff around discs. There was a little bit around storage, even developer tooling got some announcements in there with some announcements from Hashi Corp, bringing things forward.