Improve your collaboration capabilities by using Cisco’s Spark Board

Cisco released the Spark Board. It is a collaboration room device for your collaboration spaces or legacy video conferencing rooms. It transforms your Cisco video sessions to collaboration sessions based on the Cisco Spark platform.

• Use Case: Connect virtual teams and enable them for modern collaboration
• Goal: Consistency, simplicity, and reliability of experience across the Cisco Spark endpoints
• Key capabilities: Meeting, calling, messaging, white boarding, sharing
• Security: End-to-end encryption of the collaboration session
• Devices: mobile devices, laptops, smartphones, tablets with the Cisco Spark app
• Type of offer: Cloud Service Subscription model based on Cisco Spark

For more details and an intro video of the Spark Board take a look on Cisco’s website >>here<< and the data sheet of the Spark Board specs >>here<<.So if you are already using a Cisco Video Infrastructure, considering to go for cloud offers to enable you for a more flexible, agile, service-oriented and operation expenditures (opex) approach you could consider to built a hybrid cloud model to combine the best of two worlds: the Cisco video conferencing solution on premise/hosted and Cisco Spark.

Microsoft announced the availability of their cloud services in German Data Centers

Maybe you’ve already heard or read about it: Microsoft now announced that their cloud service offering can be provided by data centers located in Germany.

• For details please visit the official website >>here<<,
• for background how it works in Germany in regards of compliance, laws etc. you can find some explanation on the Microsoft Politik website >>here<< and
• for gain some understanding what or where are the differences, please check out one of many Channel 9 Tech Summit 2016 presentation which explains the differences in regards to Azure >>here<<

In my opinion this is a great step forward in the right direction. Especially for Microsoft customers from Germany requiring services within Germany due to privacy protection topics, compliance, laws and etc.  I’m looking forward that more and more customers in Germany will adopt these cloud services to benefit from using them.

Exchange Server Role Requirements Calculator v8.4 released

To calculate your Exchange Server Role Requirements you can now use the latest version of the Exchange Server Role Requirements Calculator >>here<<. It supports you in planning your Exchange Server Deployment based on your requirements.

Further details on how to use the calculator you find in the link in the description of the above linked webpage.

Additionally you can check requirements >>here on TechNet<< or >>Exchange (2013) Deployment Assistant<<.