RunAs Radio

SharePoint custom solutions are powerful - but how do you get them into the cloud? Richard talks with Christina Wheeler about her work moving complex on-premises SharePoint applications into the Power Platform that includes Office 365, Power BI, Power Apps and more. Christina talks about the cultural shift that happens both to her and her customers as the cloud becomes a compelling option for business. That cultural shift opens up a world of best-of-breed options for CRM, CMS and other tools - all that can be integrated together with the Power Platform. SharePoint still plays a role, but evolved!

What are SQL people concerned about at the end of 2019? While in Las Vegas at SQL Intersection, Richard hosts the semi-annual question and answer session for SQL at the end of the conference. Panelists include Bob Ward, Kim Tripp, Paul Randal, Brent Ozar, Glenn Berry, Kevin Farlee, Pam Lahoud, Pedro Lopes, Ben Miller and Tim Radney. Questions around SQL Server 2019, SQL in the cloud, new clustering services, challenges around working with developers and more!

Happy New Year! It's 2020 - the future is here! What is the career of an IT Professional going to look like in this decade? Richard flies solo, pulling together a summary of the past few decades and how they will shape this new decade just starting. Don't expect any crazy predictions - the IT industry moves carefully, with logical progressions. In some ways, you can expect more of the same - more computers that people rely on, more security challenges, and more of the new technology being used in new ways we may not have considered. Your fundamental skills are still useful and important - keep improving them!

How do you share company data outside of the company? While at Ignite in Orlando, Richard talked to Joanna Podgoetsky about Azure Data Share, a new tool specifically designed to make it easy to share data outside your organization in a controlled and measurable way. Joanna talks about the various Azure data sources you can use to share data, and how to provide access to it for individuals and applications as well as being able to measure who has accessed the data.

You know about DevOps - but what about MLOps? While at Ignite in Orlando, Richard talked to Damian Brady about how Machine Learning projects need to go through the same kind of lifecycle as any other software project. Damian emphasizes how important good instrumentation is for MLOps - because it can be hard to tell how well a given machine learning model is working. And good instrumentation often involves development, so get with your devs and talk through how you're going to measure success!

Python and SQL Server together? Julie Smith says yes! Richard chats with Julie about the strengths of Python in various tasks around databases including ETL. Julie talks about the tooling available for doing data extraction, transformation and loading - you can find existing Python implementations on most tasks you need to do! And as of SQL Server 2017, Python is directly supported, so you can call Python code from within T-SQL. And that's just the beginning - wait til you see Python in data analytics and visualization!

Gene Kim is out with a new book - The Unicorn Project! Richard chats with Gene about his latest book - a fictionalized story of an organization struggling to build software that is critical to the survival of the company. The conversation explores a core aspect of The Unicorn Project known as the Five Ideals. Think of these ideals as a Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs when it comes to teams building software - this is how you do it!

Are you managing your infrastructure with code? Richard chats with Josh Duffney about his current toolset for writing infrastructure as code, including PowerShell, Chocolatey and Ansible. Ansible is an open-source project from Red Hat that includes some retail components if you need them. Josh dives into the playbook model, how Ansible helps make testing that infrastructure code easier, and the challenge of using virtual machine based application deployment in the modern world.

Collaboration continues to evolve - how do you do it? Richard chats with Heather Newman about the tooling and techniques that have changed over the years to let teams work together remotely and in-person. SharePoint has been around a long time, but do you remember Groove? Heather talks about her current favorite stack including Teams, Planner, OneNote, OneDrive and SharePoint, all working together under the Office 365 banner. It's a great time to collaborate!

What is Microsoft 365, and why do you need some? Richard chats with Stephen Rose about the superset that is Microsoft 365, encompassing Office 365, Windows, InTune and more. Stephen talks about how Microsoft is organizing the products that work together with the cloud to be productive, making it easier for folks to put them to work and take advantage of all the features. This includes the latest incarnation of Windows Virtual Desktop, allowing any device to act like a high-end Windows workstation - check it out!