Presenting at Microsoft Ignite 2022

I’m presenting at Microsoft Ignite 2022 in Seattle on the Top 10 Ways to Optimize Your Azure Environment. I’ll be discussing things like cost management, subscriptions, tagging, management groups, infrastructure-as-code, and deployment. I hope to see you there!

Blocking Spam Calls in Microsoft Teams

I seem to be getting an enormous number of unsolicited calls from spam sales people at my Microsoft Teams account at work. This is really annoying because it interrupts the meeting I’m on with simultaneous calls to both my laptop and mobile device, pulling the bluetooth headset between both. Well… although I can’t fix that […]

Changing Microsoft Teams Default File Open Preferences

Do you hate it when Microsoft Teams opens files in the Teams interface rather than the full application on your desktop? I do too. I can appreciate that sometimes you want to use the web experience, but mostly I find it clunky and only suitable for viewing the content. If I’m intending to edit, I […]

How Orbitz Implemented an Excellent Chatbot Experience (and why you should too)

I recently had a challenging hotel situation I needed to resolve. I had booked a hotel in Minnesota for a customer visit and had mistakenly selected the wrong date. This oddly enough happens to me more often than I’d want to admit. In any case… I showed up to the hotel, asked to check in, […]

Five Recent Cloud Refactor Scenarios

I’ve been seeing an acceleration of refactor scenarios that I’m seeing as companies are adopting cloud capabilities. In terms of scenarios with high value, I’ve often doubted refactor as a serious investment area. The reason is that it takes time, effort, and the monetary pay-off can be minimal. There are however scenarios that has immense […]

Thoughts on the T-Shaped Career

The T-Shaped Career analogy is a concept that much has been written on, often conveyed as a way to think about both the collaborative and the depth portions of a career. The idea of a T-Shaped career conveys a horizontal line (soft skills) and vertical line (hard skills). The diagram below describes this image of […]

Loop Components and Office… a Ways to Go

I’m excited about Loop Components and the future of collaboration… but, Microsoft has a ways to go with making these integrated. The first iteration of this I’m not sure I’m thrilled about. I’m a pretty regular ToDo user and an immediate issue I’m seeing is when I was trying to create a “Note to Self” […]

Listening to Feedback… Microsoft Teams “Mark as Read”

The Microsoft Teams product group has listened to feedback and added my new favorite feature. The “Mark as Read” feature allows you to take any conversation, especially a noisy one with a lot of stuff in it and “Mark as Read”. Been waiting for this one forever and really appreciate the feature being created. NOW… […]

M&A Strategy with Microsoft 365 / Office 365

I’ve been working with companies going through mergers and acquisitions for years. They are painful and take a lot of investment to get right. The better transitions are proactively managed on the tech side and include time and effort to improve the operational state of both organizations. As tech modernization has happened over recent years, […]

Cloud Governance Hit List

All cloud environments have inefficiency and waste, but those without cloud governance are really asking for it #msbuild … here are the things you must have to operationalize the cloud: * A team focusing on cost management analysis… they need to be empowered to find it, engage, and reduce. They WILL pay for themselves if you let […]

Nathan Lasnoski

Technology is at the heart of the transformation of modern society and business. I engage in innovation, artificial intelligence, disruption, and ethics under the lense that we only do this because people matter.