People forget, but Teams isn't Microsoft's only collaboration solution: Exchange combined with Outlook is by far Microsoft’s most mature and popular collaboration platform. In this episode, Mary Jo Foley talks with Directions' Rob Helm and Jim Gaynor about where Teams and Outlook overlap, integrate and compete -- and what it means for customers planning their collaboration strategies.

Microsoft licensing rules are written to favor customers that use Azure and penalize customers who run their Microsoft software on competitors’ cloud platforms, especially AWS, Google, and Alibaba. In this podcast, Mary Jo Foley and analyst Wes Miller discuss the extra licensing costs Microsoft customers face when they use non-Microsoft clouds to run their Microsoft workloads – including recent and upcoming rule changes that further increase the pressure to use Azure.

In this episode, Mary Jo Foley and Andrew Snodgrass discuss the advantages, limitations and workarounds of Azure-connected features in SQL Server 2022. They cover the activities you need to take, and other services required, for use of certain features. Final considerations before adoption are summarized as well.

Regulatory compliance is a challenge for most large organizations.  In this podcast, Mary Jo Foley and Directions analyst Barry Briggs discuss the headaches regulatory compliance creates for IT departments and the “good news-bad news” of new cloud solutions Microsoft offers to help.

In this episode of the Directions on Microsoft Briefing, Mary Jo Foley and Directions analyst Rob Sanfilippo discuss Microsoft’s case studies of its migration from the .NET Framework to .NET.  What were the benefits gained and lessons learned, what is missing from Microsoft’s narratives, and under what circumstances is it best to migrate to .NET?  Mary Jo and Rob also discuss the value of Microsoft case studies in general.

In this episode of the Directions on Microsoft Briefing, Mary Jo Foley and Directions analyst Jim Gaynor discuss recent Teams announcements, including what features are likely to launch, and which may not be generally available in the near future. They also discuss how to choose which Teams options are right for your organization as well as which new feature Directions’ customers mention wanting the most.

Description: In this episode of the Directions on Microsoft Briefing, Mary Jo Foley and Directions analysts Joshua Trupin and Rob Helm discuss upcoming end-of-life dates for Microsoft on-premises products that could catch many Microsoft customers by surprise. They also offer advice and guidance on how organizations can prepare to minimize the impact.

In this episode of the Directions on Microsoft Briefing, Mary Jo Foley and Directions analyst Barry Briggs discuss the uneven history of Microsoft’s cloud strategy, including what it got right and got wrong. They also discuss where the Microsoft Cloud is now headed and what that means for both its  customers and competitors.

In this episode, Direction on Microsoft co-founder Rob Horwitz takes on one of the biggest pain points for Microsoft enterprise customers: licensing. He explains why Microsoft licensing is mind-bogglingly complex and what makes compliance practically impossible. He also provides advice on how customers should approach their own Microsoft compliance challenges.

In this episode, Mary Jo Foley and Directions on Microsoft senior analyst Michael Cherry discuss who you should trust as speaking for Microsoft, and whether Windows 11 is the most secure version of Windows.