Not sure why I thought of this today, but it’s a classic. Since some monks practiced canon law, I suppose they were lawyers in their own way… #humor

Microsoft experienced an extended world-wide 365 outage yesterday which appears to have been caused by some bad code which, unfortunately, they couldn’t role back successfully. Eventually, Microsoft says they re-routed folks to alternative infrastructure and users were “experiencing relief.”

The Register reports on a UK survey that purports to establish that kids perform more than $5,000 per-year in IT services helping their parents work remotely. $673 of that was for “security” services. I don’t know whether I feel more confident in the security knowledge of the kids or of their parents.

For those who want (or need) to keep Exchange on-premise Microsoft recently announced that there would be a new version of Exchange server in late 2021. That’s the good news. The bad news is that you’re going to have to pay for it like the cloud. Microsoft plans to price it only as a yearly subscription, so if you thought you were going to use it to reduce your annual Microsoft tribute payment you’re out of luck. More info on this and the next version of retail office here. #

Actually, the iPhone of its day. This is a Curta mechanical calculator developed by Curt Herzstark in Vienna, Austria. It fit easily in the palm of your hand and was able to perform addition, subtraction, multiplication and division. The progeny of Leibniz’s Stepped Reckoner, the Curta used a combination of gears invented by Leibniz along with a crank on the top which moved numbers into the machine and was also used to select which mathematical function to use. Herzstark thou

Microsoft announced at Ignite today that Teams would be getting breakout rooms, a feature longed for by Teams users and already in competitors like Zoom. In addition to breakout rooms, Microsoft announced improved search and an increase in team membership. More information here. #Microsoft #Teams

This is really fun and an amazing technical accomplishment.

According to this article, Microsoft has introduced a set of Azure services that expose the functionality of Teams using a combination of Azure web services and SDKs. Azure Communication Services allow you to control central Teams functions like Chat, SMS, and Calling, as well as administration and call management. Being able to tap into the functionality of teams using a REST web service is a huge step forward for anyone who is looking to embed communications into their appl

Google’s Area 120 internal incubator has recently released a competitor to the various cloud spreadsheet/database combo applications that have been around for a while now. Tables, looks and feels a lot like Airtable and allows you to create various “workspaces” that have one or more tables in them. These tables, in turn, can be related to one another with a common column. Each table is similar to a spreadsheet in that it has rows and fields, which are generally the same as co