Day Four.
In what seems like the blink of an eye, we enter the 4th day of our challenge to create a new product in a week (read more about the challenge here).
Leon M (Commercial Lead & Project Co-Conspirator)
It’s all been about the tech so far (for obvious reasons). Until now my role in the project has mainly been consultative: talking about the customer requirements, helping the team to understand the issues and challenges – that kind of stuff.
Now I actually have to do something. Good start – I get an email from our illustrator with the initial outline of our Cloud Winch graphic concept. Love it. Give the green light to move forwards with the design.
Next it’s about messaging and putting the main product page together. I’m pretty confident of the product positioning, I feel like I understand the audience and the problem pretty well. I have a few chats with partners, customers and a random guy who I just connected with on LinkedIn to listen to the way they speak about, and understand, the problem themselves. I think we’re all on the same page – but I get some interesting insight that might be useful for later.
The purpose of this product is to make the step of moving file storage into the cloud – which might ordinarily feel like quite an intimidating step – into something that can be done quickly and easily. Therefore I think the main essences we need to get across with our messaging are: simplicity + confidence. One of the ways we do that is by making Home Drive -> OneDrive migrations feel like they’re a simple, even mundane, day-to-day mechanical process: The Winch.
Quick sales call. Manage to shoehorn Cloud Winch into the chat. Potential project for 11 separate sites for the near future. Will get back to them in a week or so once we get the giant scissors out to cut the ribbon on this project.
Website is coming together. Looking a bit grey though.
Bit better.
Illustrator delivers early!
Nailed it! One of my favourite commissions so far. Gotta do a quick plug, we work with Jamie Sale www.jamiesale-cartoonist.com and he’s super. Top bloke as well.
Back to the real world. Start putting together 4 new knowledge-base articles to help guide Admins through using Cloud Winch. Lots of TBCs and placeholders so far. Hopefully will become clearer soon, but we wanted to make sure that guidance is baked into the product itself so I pass-over the placeholder page URLs for now to the devs so they can add them to the client. Back to the website. After faffing with trying to remember how to do Pattern Fills with Photoshop – something I have learned-forgotten-relearned about 4 times now over the years, I’ve pretty much finished the product page now.
I’ll take that. Think it’s looking pretty good for now. Very happy with the pun Hauling SaaS, lol. Such a nerd. Back to Adam for an actual update…
Adam C (Architect & Project Lead):
Head down with the team today! Not had a chance to make many notes but there’s been lots of progress. We now have a client that automatically:
- Turn off the tenancy wizard flag
- Create AllUsers classification with two rules (Object = User and Mail IsPresent)
- Creates AD application
- Applies XML relevant for this setup
- Creates O365 application
- Add XML for import and inbound so it joins based on mail matching
- Create CI application so the portal can find and manage users
- Sets up the initial Sync profile
- Configures the tenancy settings to correct version and puts the dashboard to the modern dashboard
- Downloads the very latest version of SPS (identity agent) and installs the service/puts files in appropriate places
- Adds MSMQ and adds the queue with correct ACLs
- Gets the counts needed for AD
- Automatically add the TenancyGuid/ConnectorGuid/RegionSettings all based on the API response
- Automatically kicks off the first identity sync
So yeah, pretty great progress so far. Just reduced a faffy 60 minute process down to a couple of clicks and a couple of minutes. This clip shows the full end-to-end process to prepare about 200 users.
