August 2021 – The SharePoint Interface

It's Alive ... ALIVE!

I had the good fortune of presenting at SharePoint Fest Chicago 2021 at the end of July (about a month ago). I was initially a little hesitant on the drive up to Chicago since it was the first live event that I was going to do since COVID-19 knocked the world on its collective butt.

Although the good folks at SPFest required proof of vaccination or a clear COVID test prior to attending the conference, I wasn’t quite sure how the attendees and other speakers would handle standard conference activities.

Thankfully, the SPFest folks put some serious thought into the topic and had a number of systems in-place to make everyone feel as “at ease” as possible – including a clever wristband system that let folks know if you were up for close contact (like a handshake) or not. I genuinely appreciated these efforts, and they allowed me to enjoy my time at the conference without constant worries.

Good For The Soul

I’m sure I’m speaking for many (if not all) of you when I say that “COVID SUCKS!” I’ve worked from my home office for quite a few years now, so I understand the value of face-to-face human contact because it’s not something I get very often. With COVID, the little I had been getting dropped to none.

I knew that it would be wonderful to see so many of my fellow speakers/friends at the event, but I wasn’t exactly prepared for just how elated I’d be. I’m not one to normally say things like this, but it was truly “good for my soul” and something I’d been desperately missing. It truly was, and I know I’m not alone in those thoughts and that specific perception.

Although these social interactions weren’t strictly part of the conference itself, I’d wager that they were just as important to others as they were to me.

There are still a lot of people I haven’t caught up with in person yet, but I’m looking forward to remedying that in the future – provided in-person events continue. I still owe a lot of people hugs.

Speaking Of ...

In addition to presenting three sessions at the conference, I also got to speak with Paul Schaeflein and talk about SharePoint Online Performance for a podcast that he co-hosts with Jeremy Thake called the M365 Developer Podcast. Paul interviewed me at the end of the conference as things were being torn down, and we talked about SharePoint Online performance, why it mattered to developers, and a number of other topics.

I’ve embedded the podcast below:

Paul wasn’t actually speaking at the conference, but he’s a Chicagoan and he lived not-too-far from the conference venue … so he stopped down to see us and catch some interviews. It was good to catch up with him and so many others.

The interview with me begins about 13 minutes into the podcast, but I highly recommend listening to the entire podcast because Paul and Jeremy are two exceptionally knowledgeable guys with a long history with Microsoft 365 and good ol’ SharePoint.

CORRECTION (2021-09-14): in the interview, I stated that Microsoft was working to enable Public CDN for SharePoint Online (SPO) sites. Scott Stewart reached-out to me recently to correct this misstatement. Microsoft isn’t working to automatically enable Public CDN for SPO sites but rather Private CDN (which makes a lot more sense in the grand scheme of things). Thanks for the catch, Scott!

References and Resources

Conference: SharePoint Fest Chicago 2021
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention: COVID-19
Blog: Paul Schaeflein
Blog: Jeremy Thake
Podcast: M365 Developer Podcast

It's Coming!

The arrival of Windows 11 is imminent – that much you are probably aware of. If you didn’t know, well, now you do …

Windows 11 promises to do everything that Windows didn’t do before. It’s been “redesigned for productivity, creativity, and ease.” I have no doubt that it will bring some new capabilities and features with it, but I’m not entirely sure how far the changes will extend.

Because I’m part of the Windows Insider program (I suspect many of your are, as well), I’ve been getting regular OS updates that have extended beyond standard Windows Updates for some time now. In fact, the Beta Channel that I’ve been keeping my machines in gives me early access to Windows 11 builds, and I did get an obvious Windows 11 build installed on my laptop just a couple of days ago.

I didn’t, however, get the same build on my primary workstation. After a little checking, I realized my primary workstation had been “demoted” to the Release Preview Channel within the Windows Insider program:

The Release Preview Channel gets you features and fixes in advance, but it doesn’t get you Windows 11.

It wasn’t immediately clear to me why my primary workstation had been recategorized. I had to read through some old email to understand what had happened.

Do You Trust Me?

The reason for Threadripper’s demotion can be best summed-up this way: it was as an issue of trust.

More accurately: Microsoft couldn’t detect an active Trusted Platform Module (TPM) within my system, and so I didn’t appear to meet the minimum hardware requirements for Windows 11 seen below:

Platform security is an important topic and a concern of mine, but I need to be forthcoming with you: in the past, I really didn’t care too much about what TPMs did or how they worked. I knew that they were present in a lot of hardware (particularly laptops). If anything, that TPM hardware caused me headaches on systems that I simply wanted to setup without the need to “secure boot.” It seemed like it was never as easy to simply install an OS on hardware that included a TPM as it was on other hardware.

TPM hardware has matured over time (we’re on v2.0), and if you want to install Windows 11, you’re going to need to turn that TPM on, so you should learn a little about it.

TPM Time

It seems that TPM chips do quite a bit. If you want to turn on Windows Bitlocker these days (a good idea), the TPM chip gets involved. In essence, the TPM chip is your crypto companion, essentially enabling the encryption of information you might wish to pass across the net or store on your system. I’m sure it does more than just crypto, but that fact alone earns my respect. What a lousy job!

As you folks who follow me on this blog know, The Threadripper was built about a year ago. It naturally has a TPM module, but I hadn’t enabled it. While browsing net posts, I learned that Asus had been hard at work on BIOS updates that would enable the TPM modules for DIY folks (like myself) more easily, make them more visible, and allow them to upgrade to Windows 11. So, I did things the Asus way and rebooted my system with a USB drive that had an updated firmware image on it:

… and got my system BIOS up to v1502. It was a piece of cake, and when I went back to my Windows Insider settings (post-upgrade), it looked like I was sitting pretty:

But most importantly, it made the presence and the function of the TPM on the mainboard visible:

So if you want to be Windows 11 ready and ensure a smooth experience, make sure your TPM is visible in the system:

Because you know Windows is going to look for it!

References and Resources

Microsoft: Introducing Windows 11
Windows Experience Blog: Introducing Windows 11
Microsoft: Windows Insider
Post: The Threadripper
Wikipedia: Trusted Platform Module
TechRepublic: How to activate TPM 2.0 and Secure Boot in Windows 10
Microsoft Docs: Trusted Platform Module Technology Overview
Microsoft Docs: Bitlocker Overview

Month: August 2021

It's Alive ... ALIVE!

Good For The Soul

Speaking Of ...

References and Resources