Tuesday, September 30, 2014

PowerCamp Power Guest–Tom Arbuthnot

On Oct 18/19th, I run the next PowerShell PowerCamp – a 2 day PowerShell jump start event. Over the course of 2 days, I run through the basics of PowerShell – from Cmdlets/Objects/Pipelines, through formatting, the ISE, the language and its syntax, functions and modules, and Desired State Configuration (DSC). You bring your laptop and while I’m lecturing, you are banging out PowerShell to manage a set of VMs you bring along!
As part of the event, I always try to get another guest speaker, who I ask to talk about PowerShell in general. What are the things they have learned (which attendees will have to to)? What are their best practices? For this event, I am pleased to announce we will have the presence of Tom Arbuthnot, a superstar Lync MVP and Lync Consultant (and a Lync MCM!), and a great PowerShell evangelist. Tom’s spoken before at these events, and his talks are good and very entertaining.
I still have a few places left on this event – so if you want a great jump start to PowerShell, or to review the basics and more, then contact me at DoctorDNS@Gmail.Com !

Thursday, September 18, 2014

Azure for Longer Term Backup

I’ve been teaching the AOTG (Ahead of the Game) partner training around the UK, and shortly in Eire. It’s been very interesting talking to Microsoft’s SMB partners and looking at how they sell and utilise Azure. One of the Azure Products this training is advocating is Azure Backup. Last week, when I was teaching this in Manchester, one delegate pointed out that the big downside to Azure backup was that there was not much of a retention period and as such was not helpful to the delegate’s customers.

Fast forward a few days, and the wish has come true. I had a conference call this morning with the Azure backup who told me that this request had been heard loud and clear and is now in place. He pointed me to the blog post at: http://azure.microsoft.com/blog/2014/09/11/announcing-long-term-retention-for-azure-backup/

Sure enough, you can get all the backup you need (well all reasonable backups!). And the maximum retention period is 9 years, as the blog post explains.

One word: Awesome!

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