Microsoft Ignite New Zealand, 2016: Josh’s round-up
By Josh Hand, Cloud Architect
This year’s Microsoft Ignite conference was filled with lots of great sessions. The keynote kicked things off with a wide range of technologies being showcased from bots you can use to easily interact with Azure, through to a lie detector that harnesses machine learning and everything in between like an 84″ Surface Hub running Universal Windows Platform Apps, and of course a Microsoft HoloLens demo.
I attended a wide variety of sessions that covered Azure, Office 365, Windows Server and Skype for Business. The speakers were very knowledgeable and I particularly enjoyed Ben Armstrong’s sessions (Ben is a Principle Program Manager at Microsoft for Virtualization). His first session covered ‘What’s new in Windows Server 2016 Hyper-V’, which included Shielded Virtual Machines, Credential Guard, Host Resource Protection, ReFS and Powershell Direct. The second was ‘Windows Containers Internals’ and covered the advantages of Containers, what Docker on Windows looks like, Windows Containers and Hyper-V Containers. The last session ‘Deploy, configure, and remotely manage Nano Server’ covered off what Nano server is, why you would use it, how to deploy it and the Nano server recovery console. The sessions had a good balance between slides and demos and were really informative.
Additionally, I do a lot of work with Skype for Business so it was interesting attending Jason Collier’s session on Skype for Business troubleshooting and Jeff Schertz’s session on Voice and Video for Office 365, to see the product from their point of view. With my passion for automation I couldn’t miss Neil Perteron’s session on Azure Resource Manager Deployments or Mark Rhodes’s session on deploying, managing and automating Office 365 services with Powershell.
If you’ve ever thought of attending Ignite in the past and haven’t I would highly recommend it. Not only do you get to attend great technical sessions presented by knowledgeable speakers, but it’s a great chance to meet or catch-up with like-minded people in the industry.
By Josh Hand
