RunAs Radio

How do you build a data warehouse in Azure? While at That Conference in Wisconsin Dells, Richard sat down with Michael Blumenthal to talk through a particular case study. Michael talks about the early days of Azure, and how for this particular project, Azure was used only as a VM host - entirely an Infrastructure-as-a-Service solution. Using SQL Server and Integration Services, the system gathered data from a number of disparate systems and loaded into separate databases. Then the consolidation! Great stories about making the cloud work!

Ready for a new version of Desired State Configuration (DSC)? Richard chats with Don Jones about the second version of DSC, although it's bundled as part of The Windows Management Framework 5.0. Don discusses the evolving nature of server management and DSC's role in it, and how the tools need to improve to manage your scripts and configuration files. The conversation also turns to testing, and the tool Pester on GitHub as the ideal way to do testing for PowerShell. Don also suggests that if you're new to PowerShell, the ideal way to learn it is in the context of DSC - it gets you focused on a few key capabilities that can provide a ton of power!

How do you provide granular administrative privileges to junior administrators? Richard talks to Mark Minasi about the idea of Just Enough Administration (JEA). And it's not just for junior administration - the conversation dives into this idea that administrators should be domain users most of the time, and only elevate their privileges for specific tasks. JEA helps you organize privilege sets for those tasks so that you have no more capability than necessary. Administrator accounts are the hot new exploit vector, it's time to lock them down! Check out Just Enough Administration on TechNet.

Is ITIL still relevant in a cloud-centric world? Carroll Moon says yes! Richard talks to Carroll about his work building out the service management infrastructure of Office 365 and how those learnings can apply to your organization as it moves to the cloud. Carroll focuses first and foremost on monitoring - until you can see how your applications are operating in real time, other DevOps-type improvements are hard to quantify. And the instrumentation needed should be going down to the client, just monitoring servers is not enough. Getting great monitoring working on your apps means involving development - there's no getting around that. You can read Carroll's entire blog post series on Service Monitoring on Axelos.

How do you filter spam and malware for your mail server? Richard chats with Peter Schmidt about Exchange Online Protection (EOP). Remember Forefront? This is where the product went, into the cloud. As an Azure product, EOP is available when you use Exchange Online - but you can also put it in front of your on-premise Exchange server at a stunning price of one dollar per user per month. Peter discusses the spam and malware filtering, but EOP also offers mail proxying in general so that your mail has a place to live when your server is down. This is the first step to moving your mail to the cloud, check it out at Exchange Online Protection.

Are you ready for Windows 10? Richard chats with Mark Minasi about the impending release of Windows 10. Mark talks about the new features of Windows 10 that will make you happy you're upgrading, including Universal Apps (no really, they're good!), the new store mechanism and the new browser - Edge. This leads to a conversation about managing updates, browser compatibility and keeping your business environment stable. Not everything will be ready in July, but the upgrades will be ongoing through the rest of 2015, so keep your eyes open!

Desired State Configuration and SQL Server? Richard talks to Patrick Curran about using DSC for more than just setting up a web farm. In fact, Patrick uses DSC to set up an entire SharePoint infrastructure - including SQL Server! And that is the tricky bit, since SQL Server isn't quite as PowerShell friendly as IIS. Patrick talks about battling the SQL PowerShell bits which sometime install, sometimes not so much - ultimately you're better off using SQL internal scripting for a reliable install. Lots of interesting thoughts about taking DSC to the max!

Does your organization need Yammer? Richard talks to Chris Poteet about the whys and hows of Yammer. The conversation starts out on the why of Yammer - what does this tool bring to the table? There are lots of pseudo-social-media products out there for the enterprise, but they only work if people use them. But Yammer's approach makes it familiar and easy to have conversations within the organization that can be searched and shared. Chris then digs into the install process: There almost isn't one! Totally cloud based, you sign up to Yammer with your business email and things pretty much start happening from there. Check it out!

How does Microsoft use SharePoint? Richard chats with MS IT SharePoint Server owner Jared Shockley about how Microsoft uses SharePoint internally. As it turns out, Jared has been part of the team moving Microsoft SharePoint sites into Office 365 - according to him, 93% of the on-premise sites are now in the cloud! The last 7% represent the tricky bits. Serious customizations are the main issue, and the mechanisms for customizing SharePoint on-premise are very different from SharePoint in Office 365. Jared talks about evaluating projects for rewriting - SharePoint isn't the only choice these days!

An update on Windows update? Richard talks to PFE Robert Smith about the announcements coming out of build around how Windows will be updated going forward. No more rollups! Well, almost. The conversation digs into the on-going evolution of updating Windows, the lack of Service Packs (and their meaning), rollups, hotfixes, and so on. As Terry Myerson said on stage at Ignite, for unmanaged environments, updating is going to be far more automatic. If you run a strict update environment with WSUS, nothing needs to change, expect that hotfixes will now appear in the Windows Update Catalog. So things are getting better!