MK IT Pro User Group meeting – November 2019

Oh yeah, we finally managed to gather the troops together. After running around, like busy bees, watching "million" hours of great and high quality material from Ignite 2019, the short wrap up was prepped and ready for presentation.

The usual suspects involved, Gorana and Vladimir, and me-self :) we got together on a cloudy afternoon, to discuss what's new in Microsoft Cloud. :)

We did a overview of major announcements, referred to great session from Microsoft Ignite, on topics of Azure and Microsoft/Office 365. While Gorana maintained focus on Microsoft Teams, I was concentrating on news around Azure, with focus on the Satya Nadella keynote, most of the infrastructure and security announcements.

Well, did not manage to cover all the topics/news/announcements of course, but still it was a fun journey. :)

Till the next time, December 2019, to wrap up the year.

Cloud Solution Provider Disti Bootcamp (Microsoft and Ingram Micro, June 25th- June 26th)

With cooperation of the local office of Microsoft, we held 2 separate events for our Kosovo and North Macedonia Partners.

The first event, was held at the Kosovo Innovation Center (ICK) on June 25th, and the second one, in North Macedonia, at Ingram Micro Offices, on June 26th.

Topics discussed were the changes in Microsoft Partner Program, held by my colleague Marija Gjorgjievska, with emphasis on migrating to the new Partner Center and how to become an Indirect CSP Re-seller.

On both events, I did a session/overview on Microsoft Cloud Services - what's new and what's going on. Emphasis was on Managed Solution Provider model, achieving transformation and growth by adopting the cloud economy model, end of life of Windows server 2008/ SQL Server 2008 and Microsoft 365.

Link's to the presentations can be found here - both for Kosovo and North Macedonia Event.

Global DevOps boot camp (#GDBC) (June 15th)

Just as last year, in cooperation with the local Microsoft .NET Community group, we have organized the Global DevOps Boot camp 2019 event. Kudos to Vlatko Ivanovski, who was driving the process.




A group of 40 enthusiast gathered on Saturday, to take part of this years challenge. this years "theme" was "You Build It, You Run It" (https://globaldevopsbootcamp.com/). 




People behind the event, introduced new concept this year, evolving around the 3 important phases of DevOps projects:

• Detect. Get insights into how your system behaves to make you and your users aware of any anomalies.
• Respond. Connect with your users to make sure users are aware of the issue.
• Recover. Action remediation to get your system back into operation.

The bootcamps will kick-off with an exclusive keynote from Niall Murphy (Director of Engineering for Azure Cloud Services and Site Reliability Engineering), followed by a local keynote - by Vlatko Ivanovski - which will go deeper on the challenges you’ll face during the day, and then get stuck in to the challenges in the hackathon.

It was a fun day with activites, challenges, bunch of people that dug in into the problems at hand. Can't wait for nest year

Microsoft & Cisco Event (March 12th, Tirana, Albania)

As part of our activities in the region, we held a mini conference on March 12th in Tirana. this was a joint Ingram Micro, Microsoft and Cisco event, focused on networking, security and interconnectivity.

 I did a presentation on Microsoft Azure Network and its capabilities, ability to either running workloads in the cloud or enabling hybrid connectivity between the on-prem and cloud datacenters.

Copy of the presentation can be found here