RunAs Radio

What's a company intranet look like in 2018? Richard chats with Susan Hanley about her work helping companies find value in their internal information management systems - after all, it's where you keep a lot of company value! The conversation starts out with a discussion around search, the bane of most intranet implementations. Sure people want Google, but do they really? The indexing system that Google relies on doesn't make sense in an internal website. Susan points out that today's modern intranet is typically in the cloud, taking advantage of great tools like Office 365. That helps with search, but it starts with culture - does your organization value finding existing things? Without culture, the tech can't save you!

SQL Server keeps getting smarter! Richard talks to Erin Stellato about Query Store and Automatic Tuning. First introduced in SQL Azure, these features showed up in SQL Server 2016 and improved substantially in 2017. Erin describes Query Store as a kind of black box for databases, similar to an aircraft, but you don't need to wait for a crash to value the data stored in it. Query Store is a real-time record of the queries happening in your database, along with the query plan and what caused the query to wait. This leads to a ton of tuning opportunities, including automated tuning, where SQL Server will recommend indexes and other performance features for itself!

SharePoint has never been more manageable! Richard chats with Andrew Connell about his experiences around using the latest programming models for SharePoint and how they stick to more standardized client-side development models that are easier to secure, audit and don't mess with your servers quite so much. The conversation starts out with a discussion around the Office 365 APIs and the programmability they bring to Office 365 as a whole, while also sticking to good secure standards - this is the stuff that Microsoft itself depends on! Andrew talks about how the cloud-first approach to SharePoint has strengthened and simplified SharePoint on-premises, so we all benefit!

How does Office 365 help teams collaborate? Richard chats with Tony Redmond about his insights into Microsoft's on-going effort to make Office 365 the most efficient place for people to work together. Tony talks about two primary hubs of team work - collaboration around email and collaboration around chat. The chat product is, of course, the new Office 365 Teams. The conversation dives into how different people like to collaborate in different ways, and that Office 365 has carved out spaces so that all those styles of collaboration can work together. Some conversations are best suited to Teams, some are best suited to Outlook, and you don't have to choose one or the other. Just don't store files in email!

Your company is sold on the idea of data analytics, but is it ready for it? Richard talks to Jen Stirrup about her experiences getting organizations started with data analytics, which means really focusing on the quality of the data that a company is collecting. Jen discusses her process of figuring out how data is collected, how often it needs to be corrected and how much gets missed and stays incorrect inside the data stores. The conversation also explores the other locations of important data for analysis like weblogs. As Jen says, some data problems are business puzzles and some are business mysteries - and it takes different tools and techniques to answer them!

Desired State Configuration now works boths ways! Richard talks to fellow Canadian Nik Charlebois, a Microsoft Premier Field Engineer, about his work building ReverseDSC. The open source tool is available in the PowerShell Gallery and opens the door to a ton of interesting possibilities. Nik talks about how his work as a PFE is made much easier when he can use ReverseDSC to create a copy of the configuration of a system he is trying to troubleshoot so that he can explore and experiment with no risk. But there's so much more that ReverseDSC can do, especially when you start thinking about continuously deployed infrastructure - creation, deployment, testing and debugging of infrastructure all facilitated by ReverseDSC!

How do you make your work visible to your team, your division, your entire organization? Richard talks to Dominica DeGrandis about her book 'Making Work Visible' and the challenges that IT folks have showing workloads and flow. The discussion turns to the Kanban board, both digital and physical. Dominica talks about methods for identifying work items, showing them flow and making it easy for everyone to see the huge scope of work the average IT team handles.

Office macros need security? Yes! Richard chats with Karim El-Melhaoui about the issues around Office macros. With default settings, VBA macros in the Office suite are incredibly powerful and are an effective malware vector. While Microsoft has some built-in capabilities to warn users about enabling macros, modern malware makers have been socially engineering users to bypass those protections. You can go heavy handed and disable macros with group policy, but what if you need them? Karim talks about some of the latest features coming in the Windows 10 Creators Update to provide more granular security for Office macros. But maybe it's time to move away from them entirely?

Data analytics has evolved - have you kept up? Richard chats with Andrew Brust about the revolution taking place in data analytics in general and Microsoft efforts in the space specifically. Andrew talks about how tools like SQL Server OLAP Services renamed to become Analytics Services, and then moved into the cloud. Not that you need to be in the cloud to do analytics - there are plenty of on-premises tools as well, but it sure does help to be in the cloud. Data analytics workloads are very bursty and well suited to the utility computing offered by the cloud. Lots of links in the show notes, check them out!

Can SQL Server be part of a DevOps practice? It has to be! While at Connect in New York, Richard sat down with Michael Upton to discuss the role of SQL Server in the DevOps practice and the tooling that can make your life easier. The conversation digs into the hard bit - not destroying data. Michael works at Red Gate, who have been building SQL Server data management tools for decades. And they know you can't afford to lose data, so the process of updating has to be done carefully. It can be done, and the effort is worth it - your database can also continuously deploy!