Talking Cloud with Office 365 MVP Loryan Strant

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Office 365 MVP Loryan Strant

From: Australia

Time as an MVP: 11 months

How did you get started in community?
I first started by giving back to the BPOS TechNet forums as I saw a great many questions unanswered. Shortly afterwards I started a blog and became engaged in many more community outlets.

What technical community or communities are you most active in (where can people find you)?
The Office 365 Community site (https://community.office365.com) is where I would spend most of my community time, as well as on LinkedIn group discussions.

What's the best technical tip you have today for implementing a cloud deployment?
Back in the BPOS days there was an RSS feed that allowed you to subscribe to alerts for system
issues/outages and planned maintenance notifications.This wasn’t originally available in Office
365 but it was recently implemented under the Service Health section in the Microsoft Online
Portal.

The great thing is you don’t actually need to authenticate against Office 365 to subscribe
(once you know the URL) so it can easily be incorporated into dashboards or other RSS viewers
such as the one in SharePoint Online.

You can read more at BoxFreeIT:
https://www.boxfreeit.com.au/Productivity/how-to-know-when-office-365-will-be-offline.html

When considering using the Cloud, what do you tell people if they aren’t sure about
moving to the Cloud?
Think about what you want to achieve – then choose the right technology. Also make sure
you engage a partner to help you – they generally know more about the technology than
you as they work with it all the time.

Do your research and check the forums. Not everything may be possible straight out of
the box – you may need a 3rd party solution to get you that final step of the way. There are
lots of them out there which make your life easier.

You already have been using the Cloud all day every day, and have for a long time. The
pros definitely outweigh the cons, and 9 times out of 10 it’s better than what you’ve got
now or can do yourself.

Do you have a blog/website link to Cloud related Tips or deployment stories you
would like to share?
I’m now blogging for both business and technical professionals on
https://thecloudmouth.com/ and, until recently, I was also blogging at
https://www.bpossibility.com/. We also have a case study posted at
https://www.paradyne.com.au/chelgrave/ with a Cloud deployment I worked on.

Speaking from your experience, what words of advice do you have for new MVPs?
Connect with fellow MVPs, work together, and keep helping the community.