For the Monday, February 10th meetup we will welcome Corry Watson. Corry will be discussing building conversation bot applications in Azure. These are very popular and in-demand applications these days, so join us to get the scoop!

Please RSVP for the meetup so we can best plan for food and drinks!

Title: Who’s turn is it anyway?

Abstract: Bot Framework has seen some significant changes in the past few years that allows developers to build robust conversational flows that can be applied to a multitude of conversation outlets. In this talk we’ll dive into Bot Framework v4 specifically, peek under the hood of how everything comes together when it comes to building automated conversational flows. Our focus will be diving into some code as well as delving into the various Azure services/configurations that are needed to get a Bot running in Azure. We’ll cover controllers, adapters and dialog components. With building conversational flows, the ability to understand what the user interacting with the bot is trying to say is paramount to the bot’s success, enter LUIS (Language Understanding Intelligent Service). We’ll take a look at how LUIS can be leveraged to help the Bot determine the intent of the user interacting with the Bot. We’ll also dive into Azure to see how the Bot’s are deployed and how multiple channels can be configured in order to interact with the Bot’s through various interfaces (Slack, Twilio, etc). Within Azure, we’ll discuss the other various services that can be leveraged while building out Bots (App Insights, Cosmos DB, Sentiment Analysis, etc). We’ll get hands on with code throughout this talk to demonstrate how bot’s are planned, configured, built and ultimately deployed.

Speaker Bio: My name is Corry Watson. I was born and raised in Columbus, Ohio. I attended Bishop Ready High School on the west of Columbus (Westside Best Side!). I then attended The Ohio State University where I studied computer and Information Science. After college, I started my career as a developer working for Cardinal Solutions (Now Insight). From there I did my stint in the enterprise world, working for Nationwide Insurance for 6 years. Since then, I have made my way back home to Insight (formerly Cardinal) and am enjoying my time back! My wife Liz and I have been married for 4 years, we live in the UA/Hilliard area, just west of the Scioto River. We are expecting our first child this coming June, so if you hear any Dad jokes during the talk, just know that I am getting myself prepared for fatherhood.

Join us and other technology user groups for our annual combined holiday party.

When:

Friday, December 20th from 6-8pm

Where:

Improving Enterprises

One Easton Oval, Suite 175 · Columbus, OH

RSVP:

Central Ohio Azure – 2019 Holiday Party

Friday, Dec 20, 2019, 6:00 PM

Improving Enterprises
One Easton Oval, Suite 175 Columbus, OH

2 Members Attending

Join us and other technology user groups for our annual combined holiday party. Activities: Good times with fellow geeks – think Ping Pong, Board Games & more. Giveaways? Yes, thanks to our sponsors, we’ll have some sweet raffle prizes. Giving Back: In the spirit of the holidays, we’ll be hosting a food drive to support the Mid-Ohio Food Bank. Plea…

Check out this Meetup →

Activities:
Good times with fellow geeks – think Ping Pong, Board Games & more.

Giveaways?
Yes, thanks to our sponsors, we’ll have some sweet raffle prizes.

Giving Back:
In the spirit of the holidays, we’ll be hosting a food drive to support the Mid-Ohio Food Bank. Please refer to their guidelines of what items of donation are acceptable. We will do raffle tickets to draw prizes – as you walk in, you get a raffle ticket. And each item you donate earns you another additional ticket, thus increasing your chances of winning. We appreciate your help towards a good cause.

Anything to Eat/Drink?
Glad you asked. Good food & beer .. it’s the Holidays after all.

Who’s Coming:

Our community is combining with these outstanding sister groups to put on this event.

• Central Ohio .NET User Group
• Columbus App Dev User Group
• Buckeye SharePoint User Group

For Monday, October 14th meetup we will once again welcome Sriharsh Adari. Sriharsh joined us in March and we’re excited to have him return to COAzure! Sriharsh will be sharing guidance related to two very popular topics – data and security. This is sure to be another great session with a lively discussion!!

Please RSVP for the meetup so we can best plan for food and drinks!

Title: How to Implement Azure Data Platform security

Abstract: One of the major concerns customers have when setting up cloud based data platforms is security. 84% of organizations believe that traditional security doesn’t work for cloud. In this session, we will review how key Azure Data Platform resources can be secured when setting up an Enterprise Data Platform in Azure. We will review questions regarding network security, open ports, secure client connections, firewall, and limitations around VNET rules and Azure Active Directory across services. In the process, we will also review SQL security features like threat detection, vulnerability assessment, and encryption options. You will leave this session with a good understanding of detailed security options available for Azure data Platform components.

Speaker Bio: Sriharsh Adari is a Cloud & BI Architect & Evangelist. He has around 16 years of experience helping customers with setting up Data Platforms. Over the past few years he has been helping customers to migrate on-premise data workloads onto Cloud Data Platforms – Azure, AWS. Sriharsh is passionate about all things related to Data, Big Data and Business Intelligence.

For the Monday, July 8th meetup we will conduct a hands-on solution architecture meetup! COAzure has held these a few times over the past couple of years, and the feedback continues to be very positive. As Azure is an ever-changing platform, there are many new services to explore. Therefore, it is time to do it again!

Please RSVP for the meetup so we can best plan for food and drinks!

The goal of this meeting’s activity will be to learn more about the various Azure services, and how to use them together to architect a solution in Azure. We’ll provide a few technical case studies and application/system requirements, and then you’ll work as teams to research various Azure services and decide how to use those to propose an architecture for the system.

Each team will have a little over an hour to come up with its solution architecture, drawing them up on large sheets of paper. We’ll have experienced Azure architects available to answer questions and provide guidance. Bring your laptop so you can research the many available services. We’ll end the meeting with each team sharing its solution with the whole group, and then review the actual architecture that was implemented in Azure.

You do not have to be experienced with all the Azure services, just interested in learning.

For Monday, May 13th meetup we review many of the exciting Azure-related announcements from the recent Microsoft Build conference.  While we will not be able to cover everything, we do plan to discuss many topics, such as Azure Functions, AKS, Bots & Cognitive Services, and IoT.  If there is something you found especially interesting and would love to share it with the group, please let us know and we’ll get you a slot at this meetup.

We will look forward to seeing everyone and discussing all the excitement from Build!!

Please RSVP for the meetup so we can best plan for food and drinks!

For Monday, April 8th meetup we will once again welcome Michael Meadows to the Central Ohio Azure User Group. Michael brings an extensive set of experience as developer and architect on a wide range of critical solutions. We’re thrilled Michael can once again join us, this time sharing his experiences with Azure Cosmos DB and Azure Functions.

Please RSVP for the meetup so we can best plan for food and drinks!

Title: Cosmos DB By the Firehose: A Crash Course
Microsoft powers many of its global scale applications with Azure’s Cosmos DB. It offers unlimited scale, push-button global distribution, low latency, and very little compromise. This talk will introduce you to Cosmos DB and its interfaces, and show you how easy it is to get started with Azure Functions. We will also explore some advanced features, and discuss the tradeoffs of Cosmos DB versus traditional RDBMS systems.

Speaker Bio: As a principal software engineer at Insight Digital Innovations, Michael helps companies get the most out of Azure PaaS services. Lately, he has been specializing in micro service architectures (Azure Functions, Service Fabric, and Kubernetes), and distributed storage platforms.

For the Monday, February 11th meetup we will welcome back Michael Meadows to share his insights on containers and microservice architecture in Azure. These are two very popular topics for organizations moving to the cloud for the first time, or those looking to build new cloud-bases services.

Please RSVP for the meetup so we can best plan for food and drinks!

Title: Modernizing Apps with Containers & Microservices in Azure

Abstract: Moving from traditional application architectures to a true microservice environment in the cloud has some clear advantages, but getting there can seem complex to those not familiar with containers and microservices. The first step on this journey is understanding containers and how they can pave the way toward application modernization. This talk introduces the audience to the technologies that underpin that path in Azure: Azure Container Registry, Azure Kubernetes Service and Azure Container Instances. Attendees will also learn some concepts of microservices and how they relate to containerization.