Author page: Adit Microsys

Hybrid computing skills should be a focus of IT pros maintaining SharePoint environments, given Microsoft’s current cloud emphasis.

That’s one of the ideas that emerged this week in a talk by Jason Himmelstein, an Office Services and Servers Microsoft Most Valuable Professional (MVP) and Todd Klindt, a SharePoint Microsoft MVP. They spoke on the topic, “SharePoint’s On-Prem Penalties: The Case for SharePoint Service in the Cloud.”

Microsoft this week rolled out new previews for organizations using its Azure Active Directory services.

The previews are notable for organizations trying to leverage Microsoft’s Azure Active Directory cloud-based authentication services with their on-premises Active Directory identity and access management infrastructures. To that end, Microsoft released a completely new offering, called “Azure AD Domain Services” on Wednesday. It also released previews of a few new Azure AD Application Proxy services.

Amid the slew of announcements at Tuesday’s AzureCon (a series of Channel 9 videos released by Microsoft outlining milestones and the future of the company’s enterprise cloud service), Microsoft revealed how its Azure Container Service will simplify the way organizations build, configure and manage clusters.

Specifically, Microsoft announced the Azure Container Service Resource Provider for the Azure Resource Manager (ARM) and released a preview of its new Azure Quickstart Templates, which are available for download on GitHub.

Microsoft quietly delivered a media bombshell of sorts this week as it explained that its Azure Cloud Switch solution was built with Linux.

“The Azure Cloud Switch (ACS) is our foray into building our own software for running network devices like switches,” explained Kamala Subramaniam, a principal architect for Azure Networking, in a Thursday blog post. “It is a cross-platform modular operating system for data center networking built on Linux.”