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Technology is not only improving people’s lives but is also making work easier in many sectors. On top of that, we have all witnessed how the pandemic has accelerated digital transformation. Launching technology-driven initiatives to enable remote work and distance learning, online shopping and more. For most organizations, this shift was not possible without cloud technology. Cloud is here to stay, and to stay ahead of competition and on top of customer demands, more organizations need to shift to cloud computing. But the only way to truly succeed with cloud, is by embracing it fully across your entire organization. And this is more then just technology. This also means that people and processes need to align to the strategy as well. ...

“It works on my machine” - a phrase that every developer has uttered, at least once in his or her career. Containers are the solution to the problem of how to get software run reliably when moved between computing environments. From a developer laptop to production environments, or from on-premises environments to cloud environments. By packaging all the required dependencies together with the application, you ensure that it can run in every environment. That is one of the reasons that container deployment is so successful nowadays. They also give you the portability to run exactly the same workloads across different cloud providers. You see that a lot of enterprises are heavily investing in multi-cloud environments. Gartner forecasts that by 2022, more than 75% of global organizations will be running containerized applications in production. ...

Thursday, July 3rd was our last Azure Thursday before summer break! This time, we had the following awesome speakers: Patrick van den Born & Rick Stijnman | Deploying Windows 10 Enterprise multi-session with Azure DevOps, Terraform and Packer DevOps, Scrum, infrastructure-as-code, AVD, and cloud: what do they mean to the sysadmin? Many organizations are on the eve of, or already busy with, the migration from a traditional management or project organization to an agile approach, but what does such a transition entail? ...

On June 23, we organized another Global XR Talks! This time we had the following awesome sessions: Fields of Light In this session, Milan will talk about light fields, what are they, what are they useful for, how do they work and what hardware and software solutions are there currently. Speaker: Milan Pollé Extended Reality NFTs: The Future of Art Learn all about Extended Reality NFTs. What is an NFT? How can an NFT be XR? How do I make an NFT? This talk fills you in on all things XR NFT related including information on environmentally friendly NFT blockchains. Speaker: Victoria Del Castillo ...

Thursday, June 3rd was Azure Thursday again. This time, we had the following awesome speakers: Yusuf Yusuf | Monitoring & Debugging Distributed Systems in Azure The development of containers and container orchestrator has made it easier for people to develop distributed systems. Distributed systems have the benefit of making an application more scalable and reliable. But when something goes wrong within that system, it becomes more difficult to pinpoint and fix the issue compared to a standard single system. In this session I will demonstrate how with the help of Azure Monitor, you can not only detect and diagnose issues, but also visualize performance. ...

On May 26 we had an awesome Global XR Talks again! We had the following sessions: XR Session 1 - VR/AR Rehabilitation: It’s Not Only About Healthcare An immersive talk on the great initiatives of VR/AR smart solutions for rehabilitation goals. The new rehabilitation is a must: fast, measurable, techy oriented, and goals achieved. In this session, you will learn how to develop the architecture of solution aimed to help the targeted group to reach healthcare goals with existing solutions. ...

Thursday, May 6, we organized another Azure Thursday again. This time, we had the following speakers: Sarah Maston | Project 15 Project 15 from Microsoft (aka.ms/project15) began when Sarah Maston realized that solutions and skills of the commercial solutioning world could help scientific projects be accelerated. She realized this after a safety platform she had invented for safe schools had a new use case of anti-poaching. Additionally, what was the real difference in the prevention of loss from a store from preventing the loss of a pangolin. ...

On April 21st we had an amazing Global XR Talks again! We had the following session: XR Session - Building WebXR Apps for the HoloLens Microsoft recently released the Chromium version of Microsoft Edge for HoloLens. This means that a lot of Web APIs that weren’t previously available now can be used, like the WebXR Device API for example. By building a simple game, I’ll show you how you can use WebXR and other APIs on the HoloLens. ...

On April 1st, we had our first Global XR Talks special! This was all about the release of Microsoft Mesh. A panel of industry experts discussed this amazing technology and all the functionalities it has to offer. With hot new information straight from Microsoft and well known Microsoft MVPs, host Jesse McCulloch and a brilliant lineup of speakers (Simon Skaria, Dorrene Brown, René Schulte, Ivana Tilca and Joost van Schaik) are joined by our own Saskia Groenewegen and Alexander Meijers for an hour of inspiration and innovation. ...

April 1st was Azure Thursday again! This time, we had three amazing speakers and sessions: Jonah Andersson | Things to Consider Before Migrating Old .NET Applications to Cloud Jonah Andersson shares her past experience and important lessons learned about migrating and developing old .NET applications to the Azure cloud. Find out how that project turned into a fiasco not because of Azure but of other factors. Never make the same mistakes. ...

Today we publish our first episode of Walking with the RD’s! Together with my fellow Microsoft Regional Directors from the Netherlands, Marcel de Vries: CTO of Xpirit, Maarten Goet: Director at Wortell, Maarten Eekels: Chief, Digital Officer and Managing Partner at Portiva, and Andre Carlucci, Global Director of Application Engineering at Kinley, we will do a monthly walk where we will discuss various business related topics. In this first episode, we will talk about the following topic: ...

During our Azure Thursday meetup on March 4, we looked back at the Ignite conference together with some different people over the globe and debate the highlights and new announcements! Confirmed guests are: Seth Juarez Lars Klint Suzanne Daniels Watch the recording You can watch the recording of the stream here: https://youtu.be/Js7mF4-JXlw

Our Azure Thursday meetup was a huge success again! This time, we had the following speakers and sessions: Rory Preddy | Programming for Accessibility Building accessibility into the planning stages of programming can eliminate barriers to participation and create an inclusive environment for people with disabilities. Programming for diversity serves as an unquestionable indicator that your software embraces the diversity of your users and cares about their safety and comfort. ...

One of our clients supports several retailers, both local and global, in how to acquire, engage, and retain their customers. They achieve this by providing strategy, tools, and tactics around this. These services are provided to the customer in a digital way. The customer can use web portals, a variety of different services, and can get valuable insights in their data. To bring their services to the next level, and to address the requirements that their customers are having now, and in the future, they decided to take advantage of using the cloud. By leveraging cloud native services, they are able to provide their customers with a set of secure services and give real time insights in data. ...

Cloud skills are becoming more popular every day! A lot of organizations are embracing the cloud for their applications, infrastructure, Machine Learning and IoT solutions. And this will grow significally in the next years! This also means that (Microsoft) IT professionals need to update their skills as well. In this article I will give an overview how you can get started updating your skills and be ready for all the Azure work that is coming in the near future! ...

Yesterday we had a very interesting Azure Thursday meetup again. We had the following speakers and sessions: Scott Hanselman | Part II: Moving a 17 year old legacy blog platform to the cloud Scott’s blog is super old. The tech is super old. Scott is super old. What happens when he tries to move the whole Hanselman online mess to Azure? Let’s talk to him and find out. This is part II in this saga we started last July. Scott will tell us how he succeeded and everyone knows the part II in the saga is even better than the first one. ...

The AZ-303: Implementing Microsoft Azure Architect Technologies is published. This book is written together with Brett Hargreaves, he updated the original AZ-300 book that was published a year ago. What you will learn Manage Azure subscriptions and resources Ensure governance and compliance with policies, roles, and blueprints Build, migrate, and protect servers in Azure Configure, monitor, and troubleshoot virtual networks Manage Azure AD and implement multi-factor authentication Configure hybrid integration with Azure AD Connect Find out how you can monitor costs, performance, and security Develop solutions that use Cosmos DB and Azure SQL Database Table of Contents Implementing Cloud Infrastructure Monitoring Creating and Configuring Storage Accounts Implementing and Managing Virtual Machines Implementing and Managing Virtual Networking Creating Connectivity between Virtual Networks Managing Azure Active Directory (Azure AD) Implementing Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA) Implementing and Managing Hybrid Identities Managing Workloads in Azure Implementing Load Balancing and Networking Security Implementing Azure Governance Solutions Creating Web Apps Using PaaS and Serverless Designing and Developing Apps for Containers Implementing Authentication Developing Solutions that Use Cosmos DB Storage You can order the book on Amazon using this link: https://amzn.to/2KzaMyJ

My new book: Azure DevOps Explained is just released! I’ve written this book together with Amit Malik, and Stephano Demilliani. It is aimed at developers, solutions architects, and DevOps engineers interested in getting started with cloud DevOps practices on Azure. What you will learn Get to grips with Azure DevOps Find out about project management with Azure Boards Understand source code management with Azure Repos Build and release pipelines Run quality tests in build pipelines Use artifacts and integrate Azure DevOps in the GitHub flow Discover real-world CI/CD scenarios with Azure DevOps Table of Contents Azure DevOps Overview Managing Projects with Azure DevOps Boards Source Control Management with Azure DevOps Understanding Azure DevOps Pipelines Running Quality Tests in a Build Pipeline Hosting Your Own Azure Pipeline Agent Using Artifacts with Azure DevOps Deploying Applications with Azure DevOps Integrating Azure DevOps with GitHub Using Test Plans with Azure DevOps Real-World CI/CD Scenarios with Azure DevOps You can order the book on Amazon using this link: https://amzn.to/3oOixPu

Please tell us about your own role with Capgemini I have multiple roles at Capgemini at the moment. I work as a CTO for Microsoft technologies, which means that I am responsible for the strategy and vision we have around implementing Microsoft technologies at our customers. Next to that I am a cluster lead for the Custom Software Development practice, where I am mostly responsible for business development and sales. At last, I am involved in our Cloud Center of Excellence, where I work as a cloud solution architect. ...

Why did you want to become an MVP? The Microsoft community helped me to become the Microsoft professional that I am right now. I wanted to give something back to the community and help others to learn and become a better professional. This is the main reason why I wanted to become an MVP: sharing knowledge with the community, learn from the community, and grow both professionally and personally. What do you love the most about being an MVP? ...