Global Knowledge February 2022

Microsoft round-up

Microsoft has revealed its latest plans for Dynamics 365 and Industry Clouds, with important new features for Teams also emerging.

Microsoft has published the Wave 1 2022 plans that detail the wide range of features it is adding to Dynamics 365 and its Industry Clouds in the coming months. Here’s just a quick flavour of some of the most significant developments for Dynamics 365:

• Dynamic 365 Sales: offering new developments that will enable sellers to collaborate using Teams from within Dynamics 365 in order to accelerate their pipeline, while allowing managers to track team performance and provide coaching to increase customer satisfaction
• Dynamics 365 Finance:launching the general availability of subscription billing to ensure organisations can thrive in a service-based economy, in addition to releasing the public preview of the tax audit and reporting service
• Dynamics 365 Human Resources:providing intelligent talent management capabilities that will enable companies to understand the skill set gaps in order to ensure the right people are in the jobs and to plan for future investments
• Dynamics 365 Intelligent Order Management:incorporating a brand-new returns and exchange management service directly integrated into e-commerce solutions. This service will enable customers to orchestrate journeys that minimise operational costs related to getting merchandise back on shelves and drive clear communication with their consumers
• Dynamics 365 Fraud Protection: delivering new capabilities that will allow operators of payment service providers to offer fraud protection as a service to their businesses, including those that have a multi-hierarchy business structure
• Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Insights:enabling early warnings around weather, natural disaster, and logistics risk signals, alerts and predictions. Other enhancements include the ability to collaborate with stakeholders via surveys, cases and Teams, and monitor and track sustainability metrics

The Wave 1 2022 plans also confirm how Microsoft intends to continue extending the scope of its vertical cloud packages which combine Azure, Dynamics 365, Microsoft Teams and Power Platform capabilities into cloud-based services tailored for specific vertical industries. Initially, Healthcare and Retail packages were announced in 2020, followed by offerings for Financial Services, Marketing and Non-Profit last year.

Microsoft’s latest announcements confirm a number of additional capabilities to the Healthcare package, including enhancements to Microsoft Teams to further bolster the patient experience while improving care team coordination.

There are also additions to the Financial Services package, including help to combat financial crime while facilitating security, compliance and interoperability of financial data.  

The Non-Profit package also sees a range of updates, in particular greater emphasis on tooling, APIs and connectors to ensure seamless interoperability.

However, the most significant development sees a brand-new vertical cloud package for Sustainability, which is designed to help companies take better control of their environmental initiatives. It incorporates an extensible SaaS solution that provides comprehensive and integrated sustainability management for organisations. Importantly, it will automate many manual processes, enabling organisations to record, report and reduce their emissions more efficiently.

Meanwhile, Microsoft continues to enhance the Teams communications and collaboration platform at a rapid rate, which is no surprise given that recent figures indicate it now has over 270 million monthly active users. Important new features include:

• The ability of users within organisations using Teams to chat with external Teams users who just have personal Teams accounts. Teams callers can connect with personal Teams account holders for one-to-one calls or for group calls
• Users can mute notifications while on Teams calls to ensure they can better focus during meetings and events 
• A new policy will automatically send recently created Microsoft Teams meeting recordings to the recycle bin after 60 days in an effort to help administrators manage storage more efficiently (though it is possible for administrators to change this default expiration setting in PowerShell)
• During meetings in Teams Rooms with more than one video camera, users in the room can switch between cameras - by simply choosing from the list of available cameras. For Teams Rooms with multiple video cameras attached, administrators can also select a default camera from the device settings to be used when starting a Teams meeting or call
• The Walkie Talkie app in Microsoft Teams is now generally available, with a dedicated push-to-talk button on a wide range of Zebra mobile devices, as well as general availability on any iOS mobile device such as iPhones and iPads

The increasingly wide range of user applications and features that are becoming available in Teams, as evidenced above, clearly demonstrates how companies are now using the platform in ways that are absolutely pivotal to their ongoing operations.

VMware launches new Application Modernization Develop 2022 certification

The new VMware Certified Professional – Application Modernization Develop 2022 certification is looking to address the huge demand for Java developers with Spring experience.

Spring Framework is a Java platform that provides comprehensive infrastructure support for developing Java applications, with the focus on speed, simplicity and productivity. These features have made it a hugely popular framework, particularly in the area of enterprise software development.

The announcement of the VMware Certified Professional - Application Modernization Develop 2022 will certainly spark a lot of interest. This industry-recognised certification will validate your expertise in major features of Spring and Spring Boot, together with your ability to apply Spring’s features to quickly build and deliver production-ready applications.

It is the latest of VMware’s Application Modernization certifications, all of which are intended to gauge the knowledge of developers using specialised frameworks or administrators with responsibilities for emerging technologies, such as Kubernetes and containers.

If you are interested in this new certification, then ideally you should have six to 12 months of experience with Spring Framework and programming experience. You should have a good understanding of the major features of Spring and Spring Boot, including configuration, data access, REST, AOP, auto-configuration, actuator, security and Spring Testing Framework to build enterprise and microservices applications.

Assessment is via an exam which will be divided into six sections to test your knowledge. These are:

• Spring Core (understanding Java Configuration, Properties and Profiles, the Spring Bean Lifecycle and Aspect-Oriented Programming)
• Data Management (basic knowledge of Spring JDBC and Transaction Management with Spring)
• Spring MVC (utilising Web Applications with Spring Boot and REST Applications).
• Testing (testing Spring Applications and advanced testing with Spring Boot and MockMVC)
• Security (explaining basic security concepts and using Spring Security to configure Authentication and Authorisation)
• Spring Boot (explaining and using Spring Boot features and Spring Boot Properties and Autoconfiguration)

As mentioned above, the demand for Java developers with Spring experience has never been higher. Obtaining this new certification could allow you to take advantage of this and open up new career opportunities in this fast-moving area.

Latest training and technology updates from AWS

A round-up of the latest developments from AWS including digital badges available for storage professionals, a range of new courses for running containers on Amazon ECS and details of the fastest instances in the cloud.

New digital badges for AWS Storage

Interested in demonstrating your AWS storage knowledge and skills to an online audience? There’s some great news for you: digital badges are now available for the Block Storage and Object Storage Learning Plans on AWS Skill Builder. The focus for Block Storage is Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS), whilst Object Storage addresses the Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3).

AWS Skill Builder offers a range of Learning Plans related to various cloud computing skills, each with a clear set of outcomes for you to achieve. Freely available, the Learning Plans and related assessments can be taken anywhere, anytime.

What is the attraction of digital badges? They offer you the opportunity to share an industry recognised credential on social media and your CV, thereby providing current and future employers, recruiters and clients with trust and confidence in your AWS storage-related skills.

The badges are distributed and managed through Credly, the industry-leading badging platform and are available to everyone who scores at least 80% in the assessments associated with Learning Plans.

You will need an AWS Skill Builder account to take the courses and assessments, and a Credly account to claim any earned badges.

New courses

Firstly, let’s take a look at Running Containers on Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS), a series of four digital courses intended for cloud architects, developers and DevOps engineers who want to run enterprise-scale containerised applications on Amazon ECS.

The series is made up of:

• Building Enterprise Architectures in Amazon ECS teaches you how to make infrastructure choices to support containerised applications running on Amazon ECS at an enterprise scale. This includes scoping requirements based on your application and selecting the best architecture to support it
• Managing the Application Lifecycle in Amazon ECS covers how to select the best method for building an Amazon ECS environment, how to select the best deployment options for your application and manage your application pipelines throughout your application’s lifecycle
• Managing Applications at Scale with Amazon ECS addresses how to manage applications running at an enterprise scale on Amazon ECS. This includes determining the correct scaling strategy for your application and implementing a scaling strategy that is both resilient and high-performing
• Observe, optimize and troubleshoot Amazon ECS helps developers and cloud architects learn how to gain observability to their applications running on Amazon ECS. You’ll discover how to collect metrics, logs and traces at system and application level, and use this to identify and correct problems

AWS has also announced two new digital AWS IoT Greengrass courses aimed at business decision makers and technical audiences. They are:

• Getting Started with AWS IoT Greengrass: a foundational course that outlines factors you can use to determine whether you should process data at the edge or in the cloud. It also provides an insight into features that can benefit your business and help you gain an understanding of Greengrass core concepts like components and the deployment process
• AWS IoT Greengrass: Utilizing Data: an intermediate-level course that reviews how to collect, aggregate, filter and send data locally, and how to manage and control what data goes to the cloud for optimised analytics and storage

Details of all of our AWS training courses can be found at:   Amazon Web Services (AWS) Training Courses | Global Knowledge

Amazon EC2 X2iezn instances now available

Finally, AWS has revealed that its memory optimised Amazon EC2 X2iezn instances are now available.

The new instances are powered by 2nd generation Intel Xeon Scalable processors with an all-core turbo frequency of up to 4.5 GHz, that AWS claims is the fastest in the cloud.

Furthermore, they are capable of delivering up to 55% better compute price performance than X1e instances. They are an ideal solution for electronic design automation (EDA) workloads as well as relational databases that benefit from high single-threaded processor performance and a large memory footprint.

Deployments of the new product type will range from the x2iezn.2xlarge configuration (8vCPUs, 256GB of RAM, 25Gbps of bandwidth and 3.17Gbps of Elastic Block Storage-optimised bandwidth) to the top-end x2iezn.12xlarge and x2iezn.metal versions (48vCPUs, 1,536GB of RAM, 100Gbps of bandwidth, and 19Gbps of Elastic Block Storage-optimised bandwidth).

New research flags major talent management concerns for 2022

Recent Gartner research has revealed that talent management is the top emerging concern for executives in 2022, whilst our new study highlights potential ways of addressing such concerns.

According to Gartner’s latest ‘, company executives are particularly concerned about their ability to deliver satisfactory value propositions to employees, leading to subsequent difficulties in both hiring and retaining talent.

Indeed, the talent-related concerns outstrip other major worries such as supply chain disruptions and inflationary pressures.

The cold reality is that many organisations are continuing to struggle with questions related to a timeline for returning employees to the office and developing new working models, including remote and hybrid, in a way that satisfies their workforce.

Given this backdrop, the lack of an adequate talent strategy can lead to a talent and skills drain, resulting in disruption to workplace culture and a shortage of skilled workers to deliver on strategic initiatives, such as digital transformation.

The concerns around appropriate skills are echoed in an earlier Gartner study of HR leaders which revealed that their number one priority in 2022 would be to build critical skills and competencies.

Worryingly, of the 339 HR leaders involved in the survey, 47% reported not knowing what skills gaps their current employees have, while 40% said they can’t develop skill development solutions fast enough to meet evolving skill needs.

Moving forward, effective learning and development programmes should form a major part of any talent strategy. They can be used as a competitive edge when hiring, particularly if potential employees are offered the opportunity to gain industry recognised qualifications. They are also an integral part of career development initiatives, helping employees establish a sense of value within the company and fostering loyalty, ultimately resulting in increased staff retention.

The importance of talent management as a key priority for organisations and the need to ensure that learning is aligned with an organisation’s key business priorities are themes that are also addressed in our new report entitled ‘Learning & development in the new normal’.

The study was undertaken with a view to gaining better insights into the changing L&D structures for employees in companies in the wake of the Covid pandemic. Among the key points to emerge are:

• Organisations are open to newer L&D avenues – in particular virtual classes and customised training content
• L&D programmes should be designed to enhance employee efficiency, create a talent pool and increase employee retention
• L&D programmes should be geared towards meeting an organisation’s business goals

Revealingly, most of the corporates (71%) participating in the research have adopted live, trainer-led virtual training sessions and nearly half of these (49%) have adopted personalised on-demand digital modules.

The respondents indicated that the main benefits of online training modules were the fact they are available at all times (83%) and not constrained by location. Employees can access the modules from anywhere and learn at their own pace (61%). They can also have their queries answered by experts through personalised interaction (38%).

A major conclusion of the study is that online platforms are here to stay, with 78% of respondents agreeing that digital will be the main mode of imparting training for years to come.

To access the full report, including details of the current state of L&D, the impact of online platforms and likely L&D budget trends, go to:

https://www.skillsoft.com/resources/learning-developmentn-the-new-normal-pg9558a1

And whilst on the subject of new research, if you are currently exploring the potential use of online platforms within your organisation, then a new report from the Fosway Group is well worth a read.

Using its Fosway 9-Grid, the company has undertaken an independent analysis of the learning systems market in Europe. The results are based on the performance, potential, presence, total cost of ownership and overall trajectory of over 50 vendors, covering both learning systems suites and specialist applications.

More details can be found at:

https://www.fosway.com/9-grid/learning-systems/