If you're like me, your Outlook Calendar is the first thing you look at every morning and the last thing you look at before heading off to bed - days seem to get more and more busy and we need some way to organize and schedule our daily lives. For many of us though, the calendar functionality built into Outlook is something we all take for granted. In this episode, we'll talk to Julia Foran who is a Program Manager on Outlook Calendar and works on the server-side features that are consumed by the Outlook clients. We talk about Ignite announcements and some of the improvements coming to Outlook Calendar. Julia Foran is a Principal Program Manager on the Office 365 calendar platform and is responsible for maintaining service quality and innovating new calendar scenarios. A core objective of her team is to identify existing features that can be improved, and do the necessary backend work to improve the experience. Feel free to connect with Julia on LinkedIn at https://www.linkedin.com/in/juliaforan/ Click the icon below to listen.        

With the explosive growth of cloud services, many organizations suddenly find themselves having to manage multiple cloud environments, either intentionally or by coincidence due to mergers, acquisitions or other such events. With Azure and AWS being two of the most popular choices, we talk to Azure MVP Mike Pfeiffer who is also AWS certified about the parallels between the two services, things to consider when running two clouds and discuss if multi-cloud makes more sense as a transitional state or long-term mode of operation. Mike is a twenty-year tech industry veteran and entrepreneur. He's worked for some of the largest software companies in the world, including Microsoft and Amazon Web Services (AWS), and has launched two successful consulting businesses since 2003. Today, Mike is founder and Chief Technologist at CloudSkills.io, a cloud training and consulting firm. Feel free to connect with Mike on LinkedIn(https://www.linkedin.com/in/mpfeiffer/), Twitter (https://twitter.com/mike_pfeiffer) or at https://cloudskills.io Click the icon below to listen.        

Data warehousing is a massive topic! We've all heard of data lakes, data swamps and big data in general, but what does it all mean? We sat down with Melissa Coates (a.k.a SQLChick) in an attempt to gain an understanding of this complex topic and definitely learned a thing or two in the process. Melissa Coates is a data architect with a focus on data warehousing, data lake, and business intelligence solutions in the cloud. Melissa is the owner of Coates Data Strategies, she produces training courses to help data professionals be successful deploying technologies with the Microsoft data platform. She also provides technical writing and consulting projects related to Azure and Power BI. You can follow Melissa on Twitter at https://twitter.com/SQLChick) Click the icon below to listen.        

Adoption is top of mind for many organizations at the moment - be it adoption of a particular workload (like Microsoft Teams) or cloud services in general. Warren and Nic sat down with the always entertaining Tracy van der Schyff to talk about the difference between adoption and consumption and the concept of user empowerment. Facilitating the evolution of human capabilities – Tracy's passion is to empower people and therefore training and change management lie close to her heart. Her Mission is to positively impact WHAT and HOW people create, she believes that what we design or create, designs / creates us back (Ontological Design). It is about enabling others to serve themselves better, expand their possibilities, increase their capacity to learn, act more effectively and better design their future.. You can follow Tracy on Twitter at https://twitter.com/tracyvds Click the icon below to listen.        

Nic and Chris catch up with Philip Griffiths about next-generation WAN being delivered over the internet, how perimeter security is not everything and the challenge of working in a global networking company. Click the icon below to listen.        

Nic catches up with Darrell Webster (aka Darrell as a Service) to talk about cloud adoption messes, infrastructure challenges, people challenges, how to change rollout practices towards cloud adoption and so much more. Darrell is an Office 365 productivity and collaboration specialist for Adopt and Embrace. He relishes the opportunity to help individuals, teams and organisations to unlock the value in Office 365. He is active in the Microsoft Technical Community and firmly believes that the Community IS the expert. Darrell also helps to co-ordinate an online publication and Live show called RE:Office 365, where thought leaders share their stories, opinions and guidance regarding Office 365. His community efforts have been recognised with the Microsoft MVP award since 2013. Follow Darrell on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/darrellwebster/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/DarrellaaS Blog: webster.net.nz and contributing to regarding365.com Click the icon below to listen.        

Microsoft Inspire recently wrapped up in Las Vegas and in this episode, Nic catches up with Michael Van Horenbeeck to talk about his experience at Microsoft Inspire. Michael talks about his role as a Microsoft Partner and the value of attending Inspire. Michael Van Horenbeeck specializes in a variety of products and services from the Microsoft 365 product stack, more specifically within Enterprise Mobility + Security, Azure Active Directory, Office 365, etc. He is one of the handful experts in the world to hold both the Microsoft Certified Solutions Masters for Messaging certification and the Office Apps & Services MVP award at the same time. Over the last 18 years, he has worked with various technologies and solutions from different vendors, mainly focusing in the area of Security, Messaging, Collaboration and Intelligent Communications. He works with customers around the globe, helping them to design, implement, migrate, consolidate and secure various solutions and services based on Microsoft's M365 offerings. You can also find him speaking at several international conferences such as Microsoft Ignite, TechSummits, Mobile Workplace Conference. Follow Michael on Twitter at https://twitter.com/vanhybrid This episode is also available as a video recording: https://youtu.be/XjoMUXaJtXI Click the icon below to listen.        

With Microsoft Ignite 2019 fast approaching, the Community Call for Content is now open and closes on August, 4. In this special episode, Anna Chu (a.k.a The Community Khaleesi) takes us through the types of submissions being accepted and walks us through the process. Are you interested in presenting at Ignite 2019? If so, Anna's tips will help you put together the best possible submission, increasing your chances of success! Anna Chu is a Senior Product Marketing Manager at Microsoft responsible for working across the Microsoft Tech Community and MVP communities to engage with the IT Pro audience. This involves driving partnerships between engineering and marketing that influence product roadmaps and leading community strategy to enable best practice sharing between customers - in turn facilitating a natural feedback loop between the people who build Microsoft Office products and services and the people who implement them. Click the icon below to listen.        

Ever wondered about the scale of Exchange Online or what it takes to manage a service at that scale while constantly deploying new features? Microsoft's Brent Alinger gave us a tour of Building 31 (a.k.a Exchange Central) on the Microsoft campus and sat down with us to talk about the humble beginnings of the service and how it has grown and matured since then. Brent Alinger is a member of the Microsoft Exchange product group. He is responsible for product servicing and updates to in-market releases. Brent has more than 20 years' experience working with Exchange, Messaging Platforms and Directory Services. If you have questions about how features are delivered across O365 or Enterprise releases, Brent is the person to talk to.. This episode is also available as a video recording on YouTube: https://youtu.be/VZ_h5LQfltw Click the icon below to listen.        

July 1 every year is a big day for the MVP community - Its renewal day for MVPs and we also get to welcome new MVPs into the community. Nicolas, Warren and I are humbled to have been renewed and to be part of this amazing community for another year. In this episode, we had a lot of fun catching up with Anna Chu (a.k.a The Community Khaleesi) to talk about being an MVP, the MVP summit and got a sneak peak into Ignite and Ignite The Tour coming up later this year. Anna Chu is a Senior Product Marketing Manager at Microsoft responsible for working across the Microsoft Tech Community and MVP communities to engage with the IT Pro audience. This involves driving partnerships between engineering and marketing that influence product roadmaps and leading community strategy to enable best practice sharing between customers - in turn facilitating a natural feedback loop between the people who build Microsoft Office products and services and the people who implement them. You can follow Anna on Twitter https://twitter.com/_achu Click the icon below to listen.