The Internet of things (IoT) seems to be everywhere these days. Anything from connected light bulbs and door bells to sensors that monitor and report the drying and curing of concrete in real time, there seems to be an IoT solution for every problem but IoT is so much more than just a sensor connected to a Raspberry PI. Microsoft’s Anthony Bartolo sat down with us at Ignite to explain what IoT is, why IT Pros should pay attention and how to get started.

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In this episode we talk with Program Manager Elisabeth Olson and Principle Program Manager Rob Lowe. They both work with the Azure Active Directory teams at Microsoft and they give us some amazing insight into how Azure AD works.

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Documentation is something we all rely on, especially in today’s rapidly changing cloud world where the only constant seems to be change. Perhaps I’m a little obsessive, but I constantly use Microsoft’s documentation to confirm things, even when I already know the answer. Like many people though, I never really considered what goes into making sure I have something to refer to and keeping it up to date with all the change going on. Nicolas and I had the pleasure of sitting down with Brenda Carter and Joe Davies from the Microsoft Documentation Team at Ignite recently to talk about how they do what they do, how you can help and what it takes to be a technical writer.

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Diversity and inclusion in tech was one of the powerful themes at Microsoft Ignite this year and I’m excited to see if get bigger every year. Nicolas had the distinct privilege of being able to sit down with Phoummala Schmitt, a.k.a Exchange Goddess to talk about diversity in tech, community and her new role at Microsoft. The episode was also sketched by the wonderfully talented Luise Freese.

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The Microsoft Tech Community was launched in 2016 and is an evolution of the Office 365 Network, extended to support the Azure; Windows Server, and SQL Server communities. Microsoft Tech Community brings together multiple communities in one central location to support discussions and best practice sharing across a variety of Microsoft products and services. We had a lot of fun catching up with Anna Chu at Microsoft Ignite last week to talk about her role at Microsoft, the value of community and what it takes to put on an event like Ignite.

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In this episode, Nic and Warren have a chat to the Perf Guy himself, Principal Lead Program Manager at Microsoft, Jeff Mealiffe. They talk about the evolution of Exchange and get Jeff to spill on which version he liked best! They also talk about Office 365 connectivity and the great things Microsoft are doing internally to make your Office 365 experience better.

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I recently started receiving a lot of emails from Azure AD Connect Health in one of my lab environments indicating that my AAD Connect server was experiencing high CPU usage:

I remembered seeing a tweet from fellow MVP Jeff Guillet about this - He's been tracking this for a while and as it turns out the issue is caused by a buggy Windows update for .NET framework. You can read all about it in the following posts on his The EXPTA {blog}:

• "Fixed" .NET Framework Updates Still Cause High CPU on AAD Connect Servers
• Azure AD Connect version 1.1.880.0 includes many updates

Upgrading to AAD Connect 1.1.880.0 fixed the issue for me.

The word DevOps seems to be everywhere at the moment, I can’t open LinkedIn without coming across a bunch of posts and articles talking about DevOps. What does it all mean, and more specifically why should IT Pros care about something that seems at first glance to be very much related to software development? I recently caught up with fellow MVPs Simon Waight and Michel de Rooij in an attempt to understand what it is and why it is something worth paying attention to.

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The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) has been on everyone's mind recently. GDPR became enforceable on 25 May 2018 and is a regulation in EU law on data protection and privacy for all individuals within the European Union. It also addresses the export of personal data outside the EU and aims primarily to give control to citizens and residents over their personal data and how that data is used. It seems a lot a organizations left their GDPR strategies to the very last minute - I received a lot of GDPR related email that week! What does it all mean and why should we care? We had the pleasure of talking to Tony Redmond about it recently.

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In this episode, Nic and Warren had the privilege of interviewing legendary journalist Mary-Jo Foley. Mary-Jo has been covering the tech industry for almost 3 decades and her career has included many highlights, such as interviewing all three Microsoft CEOs - Bill Gates, Steve Ballmer and Satya Nadella.

For more information on The Cloud Architects podcast, check us out on SoundCloud. We are also available on your favorite podcast app:

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