RunAs Radio

How can Viva Insights improve personal productivity and the productivity of the team? Richard talks to Karoliina Kettukari about the role of Viva Insights - starting with that daily email you likely already get. Karoliina talks about folks using M365 leaving traces of their work and how Insights puts that information to work. Insights help you be more productive by helping you block out time for m...

Are you ready to turn off your last exchange server? Richard talks with Tony Redmond about the recent announcement by Microsoft around management tools for Exchange Hybrid. Tony discusses how organizations that migrated Exchange to Office 365 are stuck with one last server: The server that hosts management tools. The management tools move to a workstation, but they are PowerShell only. And the pro...

How does healthcare function in the cloud? Richard talks to Lynn Langit about her work helping healthcare-related workloads move into the cloud. Lynn talks about how lift-and-shift is a great starting point - it stops analysis-paralysis and gets a baseline on costs in the cloud, which helps plan high return-on-investment activities around workloads. The conversation digs into the visualization cha...

What happens when your neighbor starts a war? Richard chats with Sami Laiho about how his work has changed since the conflict between Russia and Ukraine began. Sami talks about splitting the active directory infrastructure of companies that have offices in both Finland and Russia. The conversation dives into the complexities of making two AD solutions from one - splitting admins, FSMO roles, etc....

What are the technical skills that the modern IT Pro needs? Richard chats with Sonia Cuff about a recent blog post that digs into the array of technical skills she sees today. Many are old standbys, like networking and server configuration. And the cloud is undoubtedly an essential part of the current skill set. But there are newer aspects to explore, like source control for scripts and Infrastruc...

In Las Vegas, once again, this is the Q&A session from the SQL Server & Azure SQL Conference in April 2022. Richard moderated questions and answers from SQL luminaries, including Bob Ward, Buck Woody, Pam Lahoud, Bradley Ball, Des Fitzgerald, Davide Mauri, Rie Merritt, and Kevin Farlee. The conversation ranges over Azure SQL migration, new features in SQL Server 2022, challenges in scaling, reliab...

How can backups protect you from ransomware? Richard chats with Karinne Bessette about how backup technology has responded to the need for ransomware protection. Whether it's intelligent backup tape systems that automatically pop out tapes so they won't overwrite or other air-gap strategies for backups, you need to have a backup you can rely on to recover from a ransomware attack without paying th...

Can we move away from Active Directory? Richard talks to Travis Roberts about the prospect of moving organizations off of Windows Active Directory and solely onto Azure Active Directory with Microsoft Intune. Travis talks about the critical aspects of Windows Active Directory - NTLM and Kerberos. Can your organization live without them? That means file shares and printing for most places. Microsof...

How do you manage the sprawl of Teams? Richard chats with Erica Toelle and John Gruszczyk about the governance of Teams, starting with allowing a bit of sprawl in the first place - people give up on tools that are too locked down. You have to leave room to explore! But once folks engage with Teams and the sprawl gets a bit out of control, there are tools to help you protect people and information...

We all have those problem WiFi devices - how do you fix them? Richard chats with Ryan Woodings about Tonic, the latest product from MetaGeek that helps you analyze WiFi traffic by the device to understand its problems. Ryan talks about tracking WiFi-specific information, including what AP a client is connecting to and all the intimate details of WiFi connection negotiating. Tools like Tonic can id...

How do you keep your SQL queries fast? Richard chats with Monica Rathbun about her approaches to SQL Server query tuning. Monica starts with defining the problem - how do we know that the database is the performance bottleneck? The conversation dives into measuring query performance and the power of Query Store, but only on SQL Server 2016 and above, so get upgrading! Entity Framework is a standar...

Ready to flex your Bicep? Richard talks to John Downs from Azure Fast Track about configuring Azure resources using Bicep. John talks about Azure Resource Manager (ARM) being the under-the-hood way to create Azure Infrastructure-as-a-Service, but folks don't enjoy working directly in the JSON that makes up an ARM template. Enter Bicep, a domain-specific language that generates the JSON for you. To...

What's coming in the next version of PowerShellGet? Richard chats with Sydney Smith about PowerShellGet in general and version 3 specifically. Sydney talks about how PowerShellGet appears like a command in PowerShell but is a separate module installed by default with PowerShell and is getting more features and some breaking changes. But version 3 also includes some compatibility features so that y...

What can Chocolatey do for you? Richard talks to Gary Ewan Park about the latest version of Chocolatey, including Chocolatey for Business. Originally a free, open-source product for application management primarily targeted at software developers, Chocolatey has evolved into a modern software automation product for managing software deployment on workstations and servers. Gary talks about keeping...

Is Azure Arc a crucial part of bringing the cloud into your organization? Richard talks with Microsoft CVP Erin Chapple about how Arc helps with digital transformation. Erin discusses the challenges of adding the cloud into an organization from a governance, regulatory, and security perspective, how Azure Arc provides oversight and control for those issues, and more. The conversation also gets int...

How do you secure your email transport? Richard talks to Gareth Gudger about the various additional protocols and approaches essential to transporting email. Gareth reminds us that SMTP, like the Internet, was not designed with security in mind, so we have to add layers to try and improve things. It is an acronym soup of SPF, DKIM, DMARC, MTA-STS, and DANE - but every acronym gets a definition! Su...

Windows Virtual Desktop is now Azure Virtual Desktop! Richard chats with Jen Sheerin about how Windows Virtual Desktop has evolved to become Azure Virtual Desktop - it's much more than a name change! Jen talks about how AVD is fully integrated into Azure, using ARM for configuration, tied in with Insights, and all the other Azure products you count on to manage, monitor, and maintain infrastructur...

It's 2022, time for a new version of SQL Server! Richard chats with Bob Ward about Microsoft's latest release of their ubiquitous database. The conversation starts out with a little bit of history of how SQL Server has evolved over the decades - and how there's still a need for a database in organizations, but the feature set has changed. Bob talks about making hybrid really work, whether it's an...

How does Microsoft Viva work alongside your Intranet? Richard talks to Tracy van der Schyff about her recent projects integrating Viva into existing intranet infrastructures. Tracy explains that Viva, specifically Viva Connections, does not change your Intranet but does assist in organizing access to various aspects of your Intranet with dashboards and the SharePoint App Bar. This leads to a conve...

The Internet Explorer 11 desktop application retires and goes out of support on June 15, 2022. Are you ready? Richard talks to Joel Hawks about what retirement actually means - the IE11 icon disappears, and only the Edge browser remains. But IE is not gone, it runs inside of Edge instead. Joel talks about getting away from depending on IE at all, by going through an evaluation process of web appli...

It's 2022, how do you manage your client machines? Richard chats with Julie Andreacola about modern client management. Julie talks about how the pandemic accelerated the need for modern client technologies, including being able to provision and configure computers that will never be in the office. The conversation digs into Windows Autopilot and Microsoft Intune compared with more traditional depl...

Back in Las Vegas and in person, this is the Q&A session from the SQL Server & Azure SQL Conference in December 2021. Bob Ward, Anna Hoffman, Buck Woody, Bradley Ball, Tim Chapman, Pedro Lopes, and a host of other great SQL speakers fielded questions from an audience of database professionals and developers - and the questions are wide-ranging! Links: SQL Server and Azure SQL Conference

What's a security audit, and why do you need one? Richard talks to Paula Januszkiewicz about auditing security, technical reviews, and so-called penetration testing. Paula talks about needing outside experts who focus on the scope of exploits out in the world today to help make sure all aspects of your company's systems are reasonably secure - there is no such thing as perfect security! The conver...

Getting your Public Key Infrastructure right can be tricky - and getting wrong can be very bad. Richard talks to Richard Hicks about the right way to go about setting up and operating a PKI infrastructure in your organization. Different from the public certificates you use for websites and servers, Richard focuses on how to use certificates to authenticate and authorize users and devices. Tools li...

2021 was a tough year for security - how can we do better in 2022? Richard chats with Jess Dodson about working to get better at information security in your organization. Jess talks about the log4j exploit as a great example of "what don't we know" - and the need for a software bill of materials as part of your configuration management database. Having a list of the libraries that internal applic...