Toni Pohl

From time to time (yes it’s almost that time of the year again, when we use this opening statement)… user’s have difficulties to connect to a SQL Azure Database with Power-BI. So I decided to post this article as a brief hint (and as reminder for myself), how to connect from Power-BI. First of all, allow the connection with TCP port 1433 to your client IP address in the Azure portal at https://portal.azure.com. Click “Add client IP” and add it to the firewall settings of the SQL server as in this sample here. ...

As covered in our blog post “Some snapshots around MVP Summit 2016”, we enjoyed the Microsoft MVP summit very much. We met many friends from all over the world and talked about various topics. One talk ended in a very international podcast production, recorded at the famous Channel 9 studios in Redmond made by Aurélien Prévot (MVP from France), including Christophe Fiessinger (Microsoft Corp.), Martina Grom (RD and MVP from Austria), Adis Jugo (MVP from Croatia), Luc Labelle and Sébastien Levert (both MVPs from Canada). Follow this link here: ...

Last week Martina and I have been speaking at Unity Connect in Haarlem in the Netherlands. Unity Connect is an IT conference about Office 365, SharePoint, Exchange, Skype, Yammer, and Azure and took place from 16th to 18th November 2016 in the beautiful city of Haarlem. We arrived on Tuesday evening and entered the stunning inner city of Haarlem with so many cool restaurants and bars. The banner picture of Unity Connect just gives a brief impression of the beautiful buildings in that small town. The conference location was in Philharmonie Haarlem which is actually a concert hall but a very cool event location. With the inner city and the hotels around the corner, this event is - besides the conference offerings - one of my absolute favorite places to go in this region. ...

The European SharePoint Conference took place in Vienna from 14th to 18th November 2016. We took this occasion to meet our friends from the Office 365 community in our home town Vienna for an informal come together aka #SharePintVienna. Right after the MVP Summit week in Redmond, we invited about 60 persons and more than 40 came to our come together at “TheRoom” near the city center for some drinks and dinner on the 14th November. See some snapshots of the evening in this Sway. ...

Each year, Microsoft invites members of the MVP program and the RD program to their headquarter in Redmond, Washington state. This year, the MVP Summit took place from 7th to 10th of November. As in the previous years, for Martina and me this event was a great occasion to come to Seattle area, to connect with other MVPs and Microsoft product managers and to provide feedback on Microsoft technologies. We met friends and colleagues from all over the world. ...

End of October, Martina and I have been at SharePoint days Conference (SPD) Slovenia. This was our first SharePoint conference in Slovenia in the beautiful small town of Bled which is just across the southern border of Austria. The location was very close from our home town Vienna (about 4 hours drive) and very close to our second home in Villach. SPD Slovenia took place from 24th to 25th October 2016 at Hotel Kompas in Bled. IMHO, Bled is in maybe one of the most beautiful regions in Europe with a small lake and surrounding mountains. There were 5 tracks and about 50 sessions, presented in English, see more about this great event at SPD Slovenia. ...

Today, one day after the US presidential elections, there’s an interesting read about coming together in IT industry in blogs.microsoft.com by Brad Smith, President and Chief Legal Officer at Microsoft. Moving forward together: Our thoughts on the US election (My) very short extract: “…And like so many Americans, regardless of who we supported through our vote, we strongly share the view that this is a time for the nation to come together…” ...

Nice numbers of our two Office-AddIns “TagCloud Generator” and “Like for Outlook”. Both Apps are available in the Microsoft Office Store. TagCloud Generator is a simple to use tagcloud generator for Microsoft Word (working with Word 2013 and above) and delivers an overview of a document rapidly. Like for Outlook enables users to send a Like with one click and works in Outlook 2013 or later, Outlook 2016 for Mac, Outlook on the Web. ...

Need the new OneDrive (and SharePoint) Next Generation Sync Client on your computer? Download the bits directly from here: Update 02. Nov. 2016: Download-Link replaced. Follow this following link to get the latest version of the NGSC client, since Microsoft is currently updating the client almost daily… https://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=823059 If you have an older version installed, this will be automatically overwritten by the new client. The NGSC client supports OneDrive for Business and SharePoint Online. ...

Recently, Microsoft launched the Microsoft Regional Directors website at rd.microsoft.com. Finally! Our CEO, Martina Grom, was awarded as Regional Director in 2015, see here. So we are more than happy that there’s now a place where Microsoft informs officially about the Regional Director program. Check it out at rd.microsoft.com. Since it’s not well known, what the Regional Director award is about, there’s a FAQ list at rd.microsoft.com/FAQ. The most frequently asked questions are, if Regional Directors (RD’s) are employed by Microsoft, how they are selected or if they are also MVP. The FAQ’s answer these questions clearly, see the statements summarized here: ...