Today we are featuring a post about our Grid user of the week, Tristan Watkins. I asked him some questions about his background and experience with Office 365, the Office 365 Community and The Grid. I'll leave the rest of this blog post to Tristan to talk to us in his own words.

By: Tristan Watkins

Let me introduce myself. I'm the Principal Infrastructure Architect at Content and Code, a Microsoft Gold Partner in the UK. We've been awarded the UK Partner of the Year for 2010 (across all technologies) and have been finalists or winners of global awards for our SharePoint work over each of the last three years. I’d be happy to answer your questions. 

How did you get started working with Office 365?

We've been making big investments in Office 365 since it was BPOS. To date, I’ve been primarily focused on developing our Lync Online and ADFS 2.0 offerings but I’m involved in many things pertaining to our Cloud Services. We recently completed our internal ADFS 2.0 and Lync Online rollouts. Exchange Online is up next, although I’m more focused on helping our clients plan their deployments, especially with ADFS 2.0.

What is your favorite Office 365 feature?

I think the one thing that’s impressed me the most is that we could plug in our Polycom CX5000 videoconferencing unit to a Lync user’s laptop and have instant, 360-degree videoconferencing, with no on-premise infrastructure other than this lamp-sized device that sits in the middle of a meeting room table. I would have expected these capabilities to be out of reach without an on-premise Lync infrastructure, but it’s USB connected, plug-and-play and it just works. The out-of-the-box Lync videoconferencing is great as well but this takes it to the next level and I’m amazed that we can achieve it with such a meagre investment.

What about Office 365 excites you the most?

It’s hard to name one thing, but if pressed, I suppose I’d have to say Lync Online’s low barriers to adoption. It opens up the technology to so many users who wouldn’t be able to take advantage of it on-premise. The federation capabilities are fantastic as well - especially when you work in a tight-knit technical community such as that emerging for Office 365 or the SharePoint community where I have been focused for most of my IT career. It’s a great way to get or stay in touch with my peers.

Why should someone join The Grid?

It’s very easy to set up a feed to the grid from your blog and it provides another channel for sharing findings, gathering feedback and getting help, as the community builds real world knowledge with Online Services.

The Grid User of the Week is a series written by The Grid community manager. You can view previous posts here. Learn more about the Grid  here.

Are you an elite Office 365 user? Do you want to be a part of the Grid and be our next user of the week? The Grid is open to anyone who passes our screening test. Anyone can take the test, but only a few will be invited to join The Grid. If this sounds up your alley, click here to apply.