TL;DR

To study for MS-900 Microsoft 365 Fundamentals: Go here
To learn how to actually look after Microsoft 365: Go here

The call for help

It seems like longer, but it’s actually only 10 weeks ago that I answered a call for help from Generation Tech, a charity that provides a telephone helpline for older people in Ireland who have trouble with tech.

They only originally intended to provide the helpline during COVID lockdown when everyone had to do things online that they would otherwise do in person, but it proved so popular that they decided it had to keep going post-COVID. Because of this they needed to automate as much as possible, since the manual processes they were using weren’t going to be workable on a permanent basis.

UPDATE - After I’d talked to people in Microsoft about this, and possibly as a result, they removed the no data loss guarantee from the docs, so back to Service Bus it was :)

I currently have a requirement for a highly available multiple region message bus with at-least-once delivery to Azure Functions.

The usual way of doing this would be to use Service Bus with active replication. In other words, you set up queues/topics in two regions and clients send two copies of each message, one to each region. The receivers then read messages from both regions and keep a log of messages already received to avoid duplicate processing.

Following up from the NIDC launch event on Friday night, it seems there’s some confusion about what sort of talks we’re looking for and what should go in the talk synopsis when you’re submitting. In particular, some people are deciding not to submit talks on the (incorrect) assumption that theythey’re technical enough, or just because they don’t know what to fill in on the submission form. So here’s my take on it.

If you’re going to #HackTheHub this weekend, you’re probably considering using cloud AI/ML services to get a bit of a head start.

Azure of course has a whole heap of services for Artifical Intelligence, Machine Learning and bots, and a pretty generous free plan to get you started.

However, if your plans are grand enough that the free plan might not cover your needs, just get in touch with me via the #HackTheHub Slack (or find me on the day) and I’ll kit you out with enough extra free processing to get you through the weekend.