129 episodes

A Modern Workplace Podcast covering all things Microsoft 365 with Kevin McDonnell (the grey), Al Eardley (the hat), Garry Trinder (the beard) and Luise Freese (the princess) chatting every two weeks about the latest Microsoft 365 news and then picking a topic each week with guests joining us at times as well. If you would like to appear on the show, please drop us a line using the form at https://www.greyhatbeard.com/upcoming-shows. We’d love to hear from everyone, especially if you’re not an MVP and would like to be heard more in the community.Check out our YouTube channel to view the shows as well as our biggest conference sessions and some Bitesize guides as well - https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCCbalP0tGZ1kyD1A0GQeVDQ

GreyHatBeardPrincess Kevin McDonnell

    • Technology

A Modern Workplace Podcast covering all things Microsoft 365 with Kevin McDonnell (the grey), Al Eardley (the hat), Garry Trinder (the beard) and Luise Freese (the princess) chatting every two weeks about the latest Microsoft 365 news and then picking a topic each week with guests joining us at times as well. If you would like to appear on the show, please drop us a line using the form at https://www.greyhatbeard.com/upcoming-shows. We’d love to hear from everyone, especially if you’re not an MVP and would like to be heard more in the community.Check out our YouTube channel to view the shows as well as our biggest conference sessions and some Bitesize guides as well - https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCCbalP0tGZ1kyD1A0GQeVDQ

    Show 72 - Community journey with Femke Cornelissen

    Show 72 - Community journey with Femke Cornelissen

    Does community matter? Hell yeah! This week, Femke Cornelissen joins us to chat about the importance of community to her journey to becoming a Technology Evangelist at Wortell in the Netherlands. We chat about her jump from marketing to SharePoint Consultant and how chatting at Ignite helped her realise the power of community.

    Want to get more involved in the community? Check out these great events already booked in for this year that we are involved in.

    8 March - Microsoft Ability Summit 2023 - Home (eventcore.com) 
    13 April - Community day event Netherlands - link coming soon
    22-24 May - Collab Summit - European Collaboration Summit (collabsummit.eu) 
    2-4 May – M365 Conference - https://m365conf.com/   
    13 June - Community Days | Viva Explorers Belgium 
    15 June - aMS Berlin - 15.06.2023: Call for Speakers @ Sessionize.com 
    Experts Live 
    25 May  - Experts Live - Netherlands
    18-20 September Experts Live - Prague
    20-22 June - EPPC - European SharePoint, Office 365 & Azure Conference (sharepointeurope.com) 
    21-22 June - Commsverse - The Microsoft Teams Conference 2023 
    5 Aug - Scottish Summit - Microsoft Cloud community Event 
    18-20 September -  Location | Experts Live EU 
    27th September 2023 - CollabDays Bletchley Park 2023 | Collabdays 
    13-14 Oct - South Coast Summit - South Coast Summit – A Microsoft Cloud Technology Conference 
    15-16 November - Microsoft Ignite - Home - Microsoft Ignite Information Home Page 
    27-30 Nov - ESPC- European SharePoint, Office 365 & Azure Conference (sharepointeurope.com)

    Photo by William White on Unsplash

    • 54 min
    Show 71 - Viva Connections with Anoop Tatti

    Show 71 - Viva Connections with Anoop Tatti

    Garry and Kevin are joined this week to talk Viva Connections with Anoop Tatti (https://aka.ms/anoopt), covering what Viva Connections is, why you would use it and how you can build it out with the usual distractions along the way!


    Viva Home
    Announcement - https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/microsoft-viva-blog/more-options-coming-soon-for-the-viva-connections-desktop/ba-p/3644419
    How to set up Viva Home - https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/viva/connections/edit-viva-home
    Great video by Darrell As A Service on how to set up Viva Home or not - Your new Viva Connections landing page? - YouTube

    PnP Samples:
    https://github.com/pnp/AdaptiveCards-Templates
    https://github.com/pnp/sp-dev-fx-aces

    • 1 hr 4 min
    Show 70 - a review of 2022

    Show 70 - a review of 2022

    This week, Kevin, Al and Garry (sadly Luise couldn't make it last minute) look back at 2022 to pick our favourite tech news of the year and our own personal highlights. Kevin even decided last minute about what everyone's focus was for 2023 so there are some late panics in the show that are worth sticking around for!

    Microsoft Viva Goals brings purpose and alignment to the employee experience
    Set Team and Company Goals | Microsoft Viva
    What New Terms Like 'Goblin Mode' Reveal about Work in 2023 (microsoft.com)

    Teams Toolkit Overview - Teams | Microsoft Learn
    Build Microsoft 365 apps that help keep employees in the flow of work

    Introducing Microsoft Syntex - Content AI in the flow of work - Microsoft Community Hub
    Microsoft Syntex, Content AI | Microsoft 365
    Shared channels in Microsoft Teams - Microsoft Teams | Microsoft Learn
    Entra, Purview, Priva, & Viva: Microsoft's New Move to Naming Products (synergy-technical.com)
    Microsoft Viva Sales | Microsoft Viva
    Introducing Mesh avatars for Microsoft Teams in Private Preview - Microsoft Community Hub
    Microsoft will start charging for some Microsoft Graph Teams API calls starting July 5th 2022 | The thoughtstuff Blog
    Introducing the Microsoft Graph Developer Proxy community preview - Microsoft 365 Developer Blog
    Microsoft Teams Premium licensing - Microsoft Teams | Microsoft Learn
    ChatGPT: Optimizing Language Models for Dialogue (openai.com)

    • 1 hr 6 min
    Show 69: Careers in IT with Will Rowe

    Show 69: Careers in IT with Will Rowe

    No news this week as we had a slightly shorter recording so we have included some links below. However, instead we have a cracker of a show with Will Rowe from MS-Talent, talking about the current job market in Microsoft IT related roles, the impact of hybrid, why people are moving and even blue back hair (yes really).


    Careering out of control - Will's own podcast with even more adviceTech layoffs - https://www.geekwire.com/2022/report-amazon-to-cut-10000-corporate-and-tech-jobs-making-largest-layoffs-in-its-history/Leading women in tech urge schoolgirls to take on the UK's... - NCSC.GOV.UKCulture of learning at Crayon https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/microsoft-learn-blog/crayon-strengthening-a-global-company-during-the-pandemic-with-a/ba-p/3262746Building OKRs into your businesshttps://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/microsoft-viva-blog/how-to-build-okrs-into-your-business/ba-p/3670976Customizing F5 debugging in Teams Toolkit for Visual Studio Code - Microsoft 365 Developer Blog
     Replace ngrok with your own local tunnelling service Breaking changes for the Microsoft Graph Insights API   - Microsoft 365 Developer Blog
    Events:
    Still time to sign up for ESPC 22 - European SharePoint, Office 365 & Azure Conference (sharepointeurope.com)Photo by Ben White on Unsplash

    • 1 hr
    Show 68 - part 2: where Yammer excels over Teams

    Show 68 - part 2: where Yammer excels over Teams

    A very brave Emily Mancini tackles the subject of Yammer and when it excels for organisations over Teams. The chat with Luise, Al and Kevin takes in the different use cases around Yammer and Teams, how you can help adoption, why you should consider both and a lot lot more. There were certainly opinions this week!

    • 46 min
    Show 68 - part 1: Power Platform updates and end of a Microsoft era

    Show 68 - part 1: Power Platform updates and end of a Microsoft era

    This week, Kevin, Al and Luise were joined by Emily Mancini to talk about the latest news with Power Platform updates, great eBooks about Viva via Mark Rackley, new devices (with live demos!) and the end of an era in Microsoft related journalism as Mary Jo Foley leaves ZDNet after 16 years. This led to a slightly diverted chat about what we were up to 16 years ago - can you guess?

     
    Power Platform Oct 2022 Updates - https://powerapps.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/whats-new-power-apps-october-2022-feature-update/
    Viva eBook - https://query.prod.cms.rt.microsoft.com/cms/api/am/binary/RE56FRU
    Viva Admin features https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/microsoft-viva-blog/announcing-new-microsoft-viva-it-admin-features/ba-p/3650475
     The Presenter + and Microsoft Audio Dock
    Sara Fennah’s Presenter+ review https://teamsqueen.com/2022/10/25/first-look-at-microsoft-presenter/
     End of an era for Mary Jo Foley https://www.zdnet.com/article/mary-jo-foley-looks-back-on-a-momentous-16-years-of-covering-microsoft-for-zdnet
     Events
    Garry keynoting FinJS London - https://buff.ly/3gs7IE7
     Viva Explorers Day https://communitydays.org/event/2022-11-12/viva-explorers-community-day-uk
     M365 Chicago Microsoft 365 Chicago Virtual Event (m365chicago.com)
     ESPC - https://www.sharepointeurope.com/conference/schedule/
     

    • 47 min

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