The new Office Garage Series: Recap of the Garage Series Live! Show with Paul Thurrott and Early Adopters

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This week our hosts, Jeremy Chapman and Yoni Kirsh, recap the Garage Series Live! where they discussed and demonstrated the new Office with author and tech journalist, Paul Thurrott, early adopter customers, and Office engineers. They were joined Patrick Wirtz from the Walsh Group, Marvin Correa from Sephora, and Sebastian Stein from HhpBerlin along with Jefferson Criddle and John Hoegger from the engineering team. This hour long special episode was filmed live on April 3rd.

Add an ICS reminder to your calendar to tune in each Wednesday 9am PST. We redirect the www.microsoft.com/garage link each week to go to the latest episode.

Jeremy: Coming off the great race where we showed how Office Click-to-Run can integrate with existing software and image distribution tools, we changed gears dramatically to present a live episode of the Garage Series with friends from early the Office adopters program, Paul Thurrott and the Office engineering team.

Yoni: Yes, we spent the last 5 episodes showing what is possible and how to think about some of the major differences in the new Office, but now we're diving a bit deeper into practice. If you haven't had a chance to see the last 5 episodes, check them out:

Jeremy: This one of the first times we've had early adopters of Office 365 wave 15 technologies, as we've only really been in market with them for a little over a month. Paul, Patrick, Marvin and Sebastian were awesome to work with and really brought a wealth of adoption experience to the show. They were all looking to deal with the trend of users bringing in their own devices, multiple devices per user, high demand for touch, evolving mobility requirements, providing Office services to seasonal workers and improving communication services across Windows and non-Windows devices.

Yoni: Right, and Paul challenged himself and us to have him appear as a skydiver or in a clown suit in an earlier winsupersite.com post. This was to pay homage to our first ever XStream install, where we install Office within 90 seconds of free fall. You can see the result, which provided one of the more comic moments of the show  and my favorite tweet: “World, I can die now. For I have seen everything. @thurrott+jumpsuit@office garage” -Travis Lowdermilk
 
Our thanks to Skydive Snohomish for outfitting Paul for the day.

Jeremy: Paul also arranged for a special recording of Windows Weekly where he quizzes Leo Laporte to see if he can provide the right answers to the most commonly misunderstood questions about the new Office as a service with Office 365 ProPlus. We didn't quite capture the true outcome as we intro'd Paul on the show, so watch to see how Leo really scores out of 5.

Jeremy: Paul was great and offered a lot of wisdom and insight about the rationale for going with the new Office. And we had a great conversation with our early adopters and each brought a unique perspective. Patrick from the Walsh Group is really close to the software delivery and update management aspects with the new Click-to-Run clients. Sebastian brought his insights about the architecture and delivery options for the desktop service at HhpBerlin. Marvin had some great end user stories about which scenarios really shined at Sephora in their pilot. And Yoni brought some incredible demos of Office touch enhancements, Lync across multiple platforms and automating Click-to-Run delivery with System Center Configuration Manager 2012.

Yoni: It turned out that our whole group was using System Center to deliver new Office desktop apps to their users. I wanted to point out that the first two demos were truly live, but the Configuration Manager demo was sped up a bit due to timing considerations - so we could see the install working quickly. Our Office engineers, Jefferson Criddle from the setup side and John Hoegger from test also talked to the design goals and changes to the new Office to support the user-based model, faster delivery and integration with enterprise tools.

Jeremy: We ended with a round of trivia to challenge the knowledge of our guests in an East versus West trivia fight. Part of the fun of live broadcasting was that I had the director talking in my earpiece telling me to speed up that section and in this case, it also meant I didn't declare the winner of the competition - the East couch. Congratulations Paul, John and Patrick!

Yoni: Of course we also had live Q&A rolling in during the broadcast about:

  • Office Telemetry required logging permissions (A: write permissions should suffice),
  • Organizational versus Microsoft IDs (A: Office 365 ProPlus uses Org IDs),
  • how to access Office 365 ProPlus apps from a pre-upgrade tenant (A: download install package using ODT until tenant is upgraded),
  • install counts per user (A: 5 total PCs and/or Macs),
  • where Click-to-Run is offered (A: everywhere accept Volume License versions of Office) and
  • does Click-to-Run streaming installation work on non-Windows platforms (A: no, those platforms do not yet support application streaming).

Jeremy: We didn't have enough time to discuss what our early adopters are doing next. The Walsh Group is deploying Office 365 ProPlus using Click-to-Run and expects to be done by June 1 while working on their transition plan to Exchange, SharePoint and Lync in a hybrid configuration. They've seen their deployment times reduce by 50% for each release of Office starting with Office 2007. Sephora is extending their Office 365 footprint with other departments. HhpBerlin are planning to fully-transition to Office 365 ProPlus over the next two years as they grow their business and are looking forward to integrate all kinds of devices with the rich Office experience.

Yoni: It was an awesome show. Many thanks to our great guests, Paul Thurrott, Patrick Wirtz, Marvin Correa, Sebastian Stein, Jefferson Criddle and John Hoegger.

Jeremy: Next week we have a special in store, where we subject Yoni to  High-G aerobatics, to see whether Office can install before he loses his lunch. Of course, we'll talk about meaty topics like downloading and configuring Office 365 ProPlus bits using the Office Deployment Tool as well. I can't stress enough about how excited I am for aerobatics and this particular XStream install. You'll have to tune in next week to see what happens.

See you then,
Jeremy and Yoni

 

More Resources:

Garage Series for IT Pros Archive of previous episodes

Office 365 ProPlus Trial

Office TechCenter on TechNet

Office 365 TechCenter on TechNet

Skydive Snohomish

Follow @OfficeGarage on Twitter

 

About the Garage Series hosts:

By day, Jeremy Chapman works at Microsoft, responsible for optimizing the future of Office client and service delivery as the senior deployment lead. Jeremy’s background in application compatibility, building deployment automation tools and infrastructure reference architectures has been fundamental to the prioritization of new Office enterprise features such as the latest Click-to-Run install. By night, he is a car modding fanatic and serial linguist. He first met Yoni Kirsh, founder of the Australian-based deployment services company Fastrack Technology, back in 2007 at a Microsoft customer desktop advisory council. Yoni's real-world experience managing some of the largest Client deployments for the Asia Pacific region has helped steer the direction of the new Office. Additionally, Yoni is an aviation enthusiast and pilot. Both Jeremy and Yoni are respected technical speakers and between them have over 20 years of experience in the deployment and management of Microsoft Office and Windows clients. They are also leading experts in the transition to Office as a service.