Chris

There's only one datacentre I know with this hot / cold aisle solution 👀

Last quarter I rolled out Microsoft Copilot to 4,000 employees. $30 per seat per month. $1.4 million annually. I called it "digital transformation." The board loved that phrase. They approved it in eleven minutes. No one asked what it would actually do. Including me. I told everyone it would "10x productivity." That's not a real number. But it sounds like one. HR asked how we'd measure the 10x. I said we'd "leverage analytics dashboards." They stopped asking. Three months later I checked the usage reports. 47 people had opened it. 12 had used it more than once. One of them was me. I used it to summarize an email I could have read in 30 seconds. It took 45 seconds. Plus the time it took to fix the hallucinations. But I called it a "pilot success." Success means the pilot didn't visibly fail. The CFO asked about ROI. I showed him a graph. The graph went up and to the right. It measured "AI enablement." I made that metric up. He nodded approvingly. We're "AI-enabled" now. I don't know what that means. But it's in our investor deck. A senior developer asked why we didn't use Claude or ChatGPT. I said we needed "enterprise-grade security." He asked what that meant. I said "compliance." He asked which compliance. I said "all of them." He looked skeptical. I scheduled him for a "career development conversation." He stopped asking questions. Microsoft sent a case study team. They wanted to feature us as a success story. I told them we "saved 40,000 hours." I calculated that number by multiplying employees by a number I made up. They didn't verify it. They never do. Now we're on Microsoft's website. "Global enterprise achieves 40,000 hours of productivity gains with Copilot." The CEO shared it on LinkedIn. He got 3,000 likes. He's never used Copilot. None of the executives have. We have an exemption. "Strategic focus requires minimal digital distraction." I wrote that policy. The licenses renew next month. I'm requesting an expansion. 5,000 more seats. We haven't used the first 4,000. But this time we'll "drive adoption." Adoption means mandatory training. Training means a 45-minute webinar no one watches. But completion will be tracked. Completion is a metric. Metrics go in dashboards. Dashboards go in board presentations. Board presentations get me promoted. I'll be SVP by Q3. I still don't know what Copilot does. But I know what it's for. It's for showing we're "investing in AI." Investment means spending. Spending means commitment. Commitment means we're serious about the future. The future is whatever I say it is. As long as the graph goes up and to the right.

Visual representation of encrypted VPN traffic in the UK during 2025. *Chart is not real data*

New blog post: How to manage Direct Routing phone numbers in Teams Admin Center voxaro.co.uk/2025/01/24/how…

How Blockchain Delivered Lifesaving Connectivity After HurricaneHelene #CryptoDaily w/@WorldMobileTeam x.com/i/broadcasts/1…

🎞️ #ConnectingTheDisconnected 📺 Live premiere: 21:30 UTC, 10.12.2024.

The entire Windows 365 Link OS shell is a WebView, including the OOBE, initial login screen, CTRL+ALT+DEL menu (!), and the actual RDP session. It's literally a Chromium OS. everything is chrome in the future..

Not a great day for Microsoft Azure in Europe azure.status.microsoft

Has anyone had any updates or acknowledgment from Microsoft about the Teams Call Queue/address book issue? It has been ongoing for over a month!

Is it too early to tell people with M365 E5 licenses that they are already licensed for MS Defender for Endpoint? 😬

@MarkVale83 100% I don't see how they recover from this. Who in their right mind would renew? LinkedIn is going to be unbearable these next few months that's for sure!

@WeakestLync This is it isn't it. For this issue to break the entire world over and over again begs the question of how this was t picked up in QA...

Crowdstrike - At fault Microsoft - Have a duty of care to their customers to prevent this happening again and ensure customers (especially end users) can recover easier.

@MarkVale83 Well...... bit too late for that! Say someone fell out with the UK Take out UK South + UK West Azure and you take down our ecomomy and public services.

@WeakestLync Or perhaps governments should legislate that one vendor can't over expose an industry to excessive risk. When all eggs are in one basket and the basket breaks, the world stops

@MarkVale83 Must be something they can do. EDR software must be a huge attack surface now. Keys to the kingdom within. There's also the small issue of not testing updates properly and then pointing and shooting to the whole planet. 🤣 Staging updates probably sensible path for customers.

@WeakestLync What can they do though that's practical? They would literally have to rewrite the entire windows OS stack to mitigate this type of issue. End users aren't going to be able to do any recovery options. iDRAC/iLO port for PC? Probably a strong validation case for MS Cloud PC

@MarkVale83 My thought today was: "Having to manually fix Windows Servers must be a huge inconvenience, but how do you fix all of your end user devices? What if you're global, 1000s of users with 100s of offices and few IT resources close by? That must absolutely suck!"

@MarkVale83 Not at all. There must be a better way to allow EDR software to protect Windows without it being able to brick the whole planet. Plus a better way for end users to recover Windows clients without bitlocker keys & local admin passwords.

Congratulations @CrowdStrike on taking a massive CORE dump on the entire world... 🔥

Don't assume because it's a multi-billion dollar company, they won't **** something up. Take the cautious root. Fast track only when needed. Pointing and shooting to everything has never ended well.

What a lovely day for the IT industry.

@MaxSanna @tomarbuthnot I personally have gone from deploying / supporting over 50 SfB environments working on it every day to 3 in the last 4 years. You just can't operate at the same level of expertise when you don't touch it very often. The knowledge is still there but it's fading away.

@MaxSanna @tomarbuthnot The biggest risk deploying SfB now is the talent pool of engineers & consultants. Yes lot's of people can deploy it and do the admin still. But what if you hit a really complex issue deep in CLS & Logs. This does happen with SfB! MS support aren't great or quick either!

Skype for Business Server Roadmap Update 🗺️ SfB Server 2015 and SfB Server 2019 both reach end of support October 14, 2025. This is the path forward for those who want to stay on SfBS. 🔵 Cumulative Update (CU)—CU8—for Skype for Business Server 2019 due H2 of 2024 🔵 CU8 will bring Persistent Chat to Skype for Business Server 2019 and complete the final phase of the Modern Admin Control Panel. 🔵 Skype for Business Server Subscription Edition (SE) will release third quarter of CY 2025. Before SfB Server 2015/2019 end of support 🔵 SfB Server SE will be code equivalent to Skype for Business Server 2019 CU8, plus any released hotfixes 🔵 SfB Server SE will support an in-place upgrade from Skype for Business Server 2019 🔵 Skype for Business Server SE requires subscription licenses or licenses with active Software Assurance for server and user licenses 🔵 Skype for Business Server SE will be supported under the modern lifecycle support policy #skype4b More on the blog here: techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/skype-for-b…