Azure Heroes: Mentor

This article will go over the Azure Heroes: Mentor digital badger I received by Microsoft.

I’ve been mentoring 4 students the last year, and it’s been one hell of a ride. Lot’s of work but also lots of fun and knowledge sharing.

Three of the students are doing an Network/Economy degree, and their 2 projects are on PowerApps/PowerPlatform (with a big follow up of our amazing and very talented freelance HR-and-so-much-more-than-HR-guy Frank Vanhamel – thanks for making this happen btw Frank!) and one on the Modern Workplace. The project on the Modern Workplace is a non technical one, which makes it even harder. I’m a technical guy and even though I’m doing some technical presales, following up on technical projects would be much easier. But the students are doing one hell of a job! They have to document and give a presentation on how organizations or corporations can move to a Modern Workplace, in a more sales related way. It will be interesting to see what the end result will look like! But I’m sure they will ace it!

My other student is one who has been actively involved in Modern Workplace projects. And for him I have scoped a very good project. We are moving a lot of organizations to a Modern Workplace with Microsoft 365 (Intune + O365 + MCAS + MDATP + …) and because of this move they are in need for solutions for their ‘leftover’ on-premises environment. Let’s say they have some servers left on-premises (Print Servers, PKI, AD, …) but we take away the need to manage them or to update them (SCCM for example). How can we fill the gap and make them more Modern? Of course there are multiple scenario’s here. We can leave their leftover servers on premises, but then we need to have a solution to manage them (config, updates, …) – Azure ARC can do this for example. We can lift-and-shift their leftover servers to Azure – but that would be a very expensive option. Or we can optimize them and look for better solutions before moving them to Azure (IaaS to PaaS to SaaS).

His project exists of 3 phases:

• Phase 1 was the setup as-is on-premises (AD – Print Server – SQL Server – Monitoring – GPO’s for laptops – Backup – …).
• Phase 2 was the research phase. Research on all possibilities and presenting them to a fictional customer with a beautiful presentation and giving advise on which path they should take.
• Phase 3 was working out the optimization phase. I wanted him to do the optimization plan and look for better solutions in stead of doing a lift-and-shift to Azure. What I wanted him to achieve:
  • Active Directory to Azure Active Directory Domain Services
  • Print Server > Cloud Print solution (Universal Print / Printix)
  • SQL Server > PaaS offering in Azure
  • Nagios monitoring > Azure monitoring
  • Laptops managed with GPO’s on-premises > Intune managed Azure AD Joined devices
  • Veeam backup solution > Azure Backup
  • Fileshares > Sharepoint Online
  • Exchange On-Premises > Exchange Online

It has taken up a lot of my time but it has been so worth it! Spreading my knowledge and teaching him new stuff is amazing. His interest in the Microsoft ecosystem is huge. He had zero Cloud knowledge before and he’ll be a semi-pro already when he finishes school. I wish him all the best, and it would be even more awesome if he starts working with us.

He’s my Padawan. I’m his Jedi Master.

1. What is this Azure Heroes thing?

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