Dux Quax with Loryan Strant: Office 365, Teams, and Tech Summit. Oh My!

Hey everyone! Dux here with another edition of Dux Quax. This time, we caught up with my good friend and Microsoft MVP Loryan Strant. Read, watch, or both below to see what he had to say about the world of Microsoft Office 365, Teams and more!

Dux: Hey everyone. My name is Dux. Boy, it’s been an exciting first day so far, here at Tech Summit. With me is Loryan. Loryan, why don’t you introduce yourself?

Loryan: All right, buddy! I’m Loryan Strant. I’m a Office Service and Services MVP, and I live and breathe Office 365.

Dux: Are you serious about that? You live and breathe Office 365?

Loryan: If most of wardrobe is made up of Office 365 branded clothing, I used to actually have signs up in my home office.

Loryan: My personal tenant, I email my wife on Office 365.

Dux: What does your family think about that? That’s kind of crossing the lines if you may.

Loryan: Not really.

Dux: No?

Loryan: It means that I have better interaction with my kids, with my wife. She used to be a change manager, worked with me as well. We’re a whole family of Office 365.

Dux: Boy, I won’t be surprised if Microsoft hires you one day.

Loryan: The whole family. They’ve got to come.

Dux: There you go.

Loryan: It’s a whole Partridge Family thing.

Dux: Loryan, let’s talk about Tech Summit. What do you think so far?

Loryan: I think it’s fantastic. There’s a lot of great content. There’s a lot of things that people didn’t get a chance to see from Ignite that’s being delivered here. I think people are seeing the convergence of Office, of Microsoft technology. Yeah, great buzz. [INAUDIBLE 00:01:14].

Dux: The keynote this morning, with Rob and Julia, was phenomenal. They show very practical applications of what the cloud can do, and the possibilities, especially here in Australia.

Loryan: The thing is, we are so used to having the three-year life cycle, the upgrades, all those kind of things, that we forget that now, with this new cloud, agile world, we can go, power apps, plus flow, I have a workflow solution that gets rid of paper forms. It can be done in a day.

Dux: The beauty of this, when we talk about intelligent cloud, the conversations not limited to moving data to the cloud, moving VMs to the cloud. It’s a given, but now we’re talking about advanced workloads, like cognitive services, AI. Going back to Office 365, Graph, Groups.

Loryan: Groups is the killer app.

Dux: Teams. Talking about teams. You have sessions on Teams, here, right?

Loryan: I’m delivering a session on Groups and Teams. Friend or foe? Trying to explain to people how they work together, things to be wary of, and I’m also delivering a session for Microsoft, which is the Teams architecture, infrastructure, security, compliance, and admin.

Dux: If you live and breathe Office 365, I’m going to test you right now. To everybody watching, there, can you pitch Office 365 Groups, what it is, why it’s important, and why they should embrace it?

Loryan: Office 365 Groups is a collection of services that allows you to spin up instant collaboration. It’s simple. People don’t have to remember SharePoint, Outlook, OneNote. They just go into their Group, and everything is available for them. It’s end-user-driven, it’s self-service, it’s simple. That is the key.

Dux: It’s the keychain that holds all the collaboration communication tools together in Office 365 for a… I was going to say, for a team, for a group. What would I call it? A posse, right?

Dux: I’m going to call them posse right now.

Loryan: I’m going with container of people, but that doesn’t sound so well. I think posse, we’ll go with that.

Dux: Posse or tribe. Right?

Loryan: True, tribe.

Dux: As long as there’s no new product called Office 365 Tribe or Office 365 Posse, we should be good.

Loryan: We should be. We’ll see what happens next year, at Ignite.

Dux: What do you recommend? How should people get started with Office 365 Groups, to experience it?

Loryan: The first thing is, don’t be afraid of it. One of the things that people do it, they turn off Office 365 Groups. They say, “No, we don’t understand it. We’re not going to do it.” The first thing is, give people the ability to collaborate, create their groups the way they want to, not just how the corporate overlords and governance guys want to do it.

Make sure you’ve got the right solution to actually manage it. Microsoft does a great job of providing a whole bunch of PowerShell scripts, and tools, and admin controls, but Microsoft only ever goes, really, 80-90% of the way. There’s always the need for a solution to take it that extra step further. Also, think about, are they departmental groups? Are they functional groups?

It’s not just one size fits all. Ultimately, you’ve got to provide a way for people to get quick and easy access to the groups, as well.

Dux: As a first step, really simple, baby step, move your Outlook distribution list, or a change distribution list, to Office 365 Groups. There’s great guidance on that. Just look it up, but other than that, boy, I can’t wait for all the other sessions, all the conversations we’re going to have here at Tech Summit. Loryan, if people want to connect with you, how can they connect with you and look you up online?

Loryan: Easiest way would be on the Twitterverse. I’m @LoryanStrant, L-O-R-Y-A-N-S-T-R-A-N-T.

Dux: We’ll put his handle here, so you should see it right now.

Loryan: That is the best way to get in contact with me. I’m quite fast on the thumbs.

Dux: Loryan, as always, it’s a pleasure.

Loryan: Pleasure, thank you.

Dux: Until the next episode, stay tuned. We’re here at Microsoft Tech Summit in Sydney. Bye!