Microsoft Technology Community

Last updated: January 30, 2023
Audience: IT Staff / Technical

This Community of Practice exists to collaborate about the implementation and management of Microsoft technologies.

 

Membership

Membership is open. You can join or leave via a Groups Service group. Membership in this group automatically adds you to a mailing list: ms-tech@uw.edu.

Meetings

Recurring monthly meetings have two common elements:

-Presentation or facilitated discussion topic
-Discovery sharing

The meeting is intended to recur on the 3rd Wednesday afternoon of each month from 1:30 to 3:30pm at Odegaard 220.

Here is our schedule for 2020 with those dates which are not the 3rd Wednesday italicized:

  • January 15, 1:30-3:30pm              Intune
  • February 19, 1:30-3:30pm            2019 Ignite Summary
  • March 18, 1:30-3:00pm                Azure SQL (Teams Remote only)
  • April 15, 1:30-3:30pm                   Canceled (UW COVID-19 restrictions)
  • May 20, 1:30-3:30pm                    Azure VNET / Site-to-Site VPN / ExpressRoute
  • June 17, 1:30-3:30pm
  • July No Meeting
  • August 19, 1:30-3:00pm
  • September 16, 1:30-3:00pm        Azure Containers
  • October 28, 1:30-3:00pm
  • November 18, 1:30-3:30pm
  • December 16, 1:30-3:30pm

Topics will be added to the dates once we confirm presenters.

Presentation Topics

The presentation or facilitated discussion topic element will alternate in focus:

-Odd numbered months primarily have content provided via a partnership with Microsoft, with community input on what topics are desired.
-Even numbered months primarily have content provided by UW-IT and other IT units.

You can expect facilitated discussion about the presented technology, with focus on challenges specific to the UW and exploration of recommended solutions. Discussion may cover a Microsoft technology, an existing service offering, design proposals or changes, unmet needs and gaps in provided services, or pending new capabilities that need additional input.

Community members are encouraged to propose topic ideas and vote on topics they are interested in. You don’t have to present if you propose a topic. More info about how to review topic ideas, vote, and propose them is below.

Discovery Sharing

The discovery element will leverage a 1-2-4 report out mechanism to share out a couple key things:

-Current issues experienced or recently discovered solution
-What Microsoft technology or service are you interested in hearing more about?

The 1-2-4 report out mechanism starts with you reflecting on your own, then sharing your thoughts with another person, then moving to a group of 4, the group of 4 then reports the top item or two to the facilitator. Depending on time, there may be short follow-up discussion on discovered items.

Using UserVoice to Propose and Vote on Topic Ideas

We really want this community to provide broadly valuable topics, so we’ll regularly ask you to provide input on topic ideas via a UserVoice forum:

https://ontheroa.uservoice.com/forums/251114-ms-technology-community

If you are unfamiliar with UserVoice, here is a short intro to provide some context.

UserVoice allows you to login or remain anonymous. You can use your UW NetID via the Google logon option. Each Uservoice forum gives a user a set number of votes. You pledge those votes to topic ideas, up to a maximum of 3 votes to a single topic idea. You can also suggest new topic ideas, and we encourage you to do so.

Our UserVoice forum has two categories:

to clearly delineate who is intended to provide a given topic. This will help us to target topics to specific months.

We will factor your input into the choice of scheduled topics.

Microsoft Teams

The Microsoft COP also has a Teams instance that is used to get feedback from the group and well as to delve into topics or continue discussion within the COP.  Sending a request to ms-tech@uw.edu will add you to the team.

Mailing list

By joining this community, within 24 hours you are automatically added to the ms-tech mailman list.

The purpose of this mailing list is to facilitate interaction within the community. We will send community announcements, but you should feel free to share interesting news, discoveries, frustrations, or appeals for help about MS technology.

Mailing list expectations and norms

  • This list will allow anyone on it to post, i.e. this is a two-way mailing list without moderation.
  • Let’s try to keep our communications positive—there isn’t anyone who doesn’t like to bash Microsoft or even specific UW-IT services occasionally, but the community exists to collaborate, so let’s try to keep focused on how we can move forward.
  • If there is what we consider abuse, we’ll step in and moderate individuals.
  • Please do not cross-post to multiple mailing lists. There are a number of reasons this is poor etiquette, but the leading one is that someone will inevitably respond to your email but won’t be on this mailing list. Lots of responses like this make it difficult to manage the list. Instead send separate emails, one to each mailing list. And please accept our appreciation in advance for doing so.

As partners in helping provide meeting content and solutions, there will be Microsoft employees on this mailing list. Those Microsoft employees are expected to not forward or share mailing list posts outside the list without first getting the sender’s permission.