Good to see that Microsoft is committed to sustainability in their data centers as seen in the session “Inside Azure Datacenter Architecture with Mark Russinovich” from the last BUILD conference. There are a lot of interesting facts to learn about the Microsoft Azure data centers, as e.g. “Microsoft signed the largest corporate deal on solar panels for Virginia in the US in history, good for 257 Megawatts”. The goal is to reach the 100% energy use from renewable energy. ...

On July 1st, the Microsoft MVP Award Program announced new and renewed MVPs. We at atwork are happy that our MVP’s have been renewed for their community contributions for 2018-2019! The MVP Award is Microsoft’s way of thanking outstanding community leaders based on their actions to share knowledge and technology in all possible ways, from speaking engagements to supporting others in communities. An MVP is awarded for contributions over the previous year. See more abut the MVP program at mvp.microsoft.com and learn about the award categories here. ...

Workflows really help to standardize and to solve business processes. This can be done with Microsoft Flow in Office 365 or with Logic Apps in Azure (which is the same engine). Often, I see questions, if it is possible to call an Azure Logic App from another Logic App. Does his work? Well, see this quick sample. In workflows, it’s usually a clever idea to simplify steps as much as possible. So, each step could be implemented as one independent Logic App. ...

Yesterday, on June 20th, the Insider Dev Tour (see insiderdevtour.com) took place in our home town Vienna. It’s a roadshow for software developers in the Microsoft universe delivering the latest news about Windows, Azure, Office, Graph, AI technology and more. I enjoyed being part of the event along with my fellow MVP colleagues and the Windows Development community. The content was more or less pre-defined and included demos and code-focused overviews of the new developer technologies coming out of Redmond. The topics included building native Win32/XAML apps and Progressive Web Apps, how to connect with new ecosystems using the Microsoft Graph and Windows Timeline (my session), how to add AI (Artificial Intelligence) into your projects, and how to bring your experiences into the next dimension through Mixed Reality and more. ...

Socialmediatoday.com published a cool Infographic about what happens in the Internet in one minute. According to this report, about 187 Emails are sent, almost 500K Tweets are made, almost 1Mio. Facebook Logins are taking place, 3.7Mio. Google Searches are done, many Millions of messages are sent and 375K apps are installed from the Google Play and the Apple App Store in just one single minute. See it here: socialmediatoday.com: This is What Happens in an Internet Minute ...

When creating a new Azure subscription, the Azure Role-Based Access Control (RBAC) permissions must be defined for users to be able to work with the subscription. But, Office 365 Admins can get permissions automatically – if you define it as here! They key you need to enable that is called “Global admin can manage Azure Subscriptions and Management Groups” in the Azure Active Directory management in the Azure Portal at https://portal.azure.com/#blade/Microsoft_AAD_IAM/ActiveDirectoryMenuBlade/Properties. See the following screenshot. ...

Microsoft provides a bunch of cloud services, tools, and resources that provide tools for developing an intelligent Bot service. To get started, check out the free “Developer’s Guide to Building AI Applications” eBook and download it here! Azure Bot Service provides tools to build, test, deploy, and manage intelligent bots all in one place. The free eBook by Anand Raman and Wee Hyong Tok can be downloaded from Download the Developer’s Guide to Building AI Applications after providing your name and email address in the short form on the web page. Afterwards, you can download the Developer’s AI Guide. The book was published by O’Reilly and is available in PDF format. ...

Office 365 is a wide service and offers a lot of functionality if you have the corresponding license acquired. So, one frequently asked question is: What happens in Delve if a user has no Office 365 license assigned? See it here. And the answer is: Delve works for all users in Office 365 (in an AAD). The following user Raul has no Exchange license in Office 365. So, this user has just one license plan set. ...

When working internationally, you can now use three time zones in your Outlook calendar. See how to configure this helpful feature here quickly. The default time zone in Outlook matches your current geographic location. This is based on the time zone configured in the Windows Control Panel. So, to add up two more time zones in Outlook, open the Files / Options / Calendar and select your second and third time zone as in the following screenshot. ...

This week, from May 28th to 30th 2018, European Collaboration Summit (ECS) took place in the Rheingoldhalle directly on the beautiful Rhine bank in Mainz, Germany. We enjoyed the community conference together with about 1,600 IT-colleagues and we had a blast! ECS (#collabsummit) is the largest community-driven conference in Europe in 2018 with a focus on Microsoft’s cloud services Office 365 and Azure. ECS is a three-day community event, based on the previous SPC Adriatics community events that took place formerly in Zagreb, Croatia, from 2012 to 2017 and more community events, see more details at the FAQ’s. Moving the ECS to Germany, the organizers - see Contact - could enlarge the event immensely. So, the ECS 2018 event and the setup was amazing, see details at Schedule. ...