A new job can be daunting. There’s lots to learn, a new office to navigate, and likely – you don’t know anyone in the offices! This is why I make a point of chatting with people I don’t know. You never know who needs a new friend, or the great outcomes you may experience just by saying, “Hello!”
Imagine this; you go to the staff canteen at lunch time with some colleagues – the same group you eat with every day, and sit down as a group. That’s when you notice someone sitting by themselves at the table in the corner.
This happened to me!
But, rather than allowing this scene to play out, I excused myself from my group of friends, and decided to go over to this new person and introduce myself.
The person I said “Hello!” to was a girl named Laure, and it was her very first day here at Cisco Meraki. We got to chatting, and it turns out that she happened to be a sales rep covering part of the same area I cover in Belgium!
Here at Cisco Meraki the whole sales cycle goes; “See, Try, Buy”. The “See” part is the most important part! If you bungle an online demo of our products, the customer may not want to “try” the product and will likely not want to “buy” it! During your basic training when you start, you receive an intensive two week training course on our products and how to demonstrate them.
Laure had been through this training, but with so much pressure put on this part of the process, it’s quite nerve-wracking the first few times you do some “live” demos to customers. As a Systems Engineer covering the same area, I offered to join her on her first call in case she needed any help or to answer any technical questions that might come up.
Looking back on Laure’s first demo, it definitely wasn’t the easiest demo experience. She did great, of course! But the customers kept throwing technical questions at Laure just as she was getting in to her flow each time. This is where I would jump in to help out and provide some extra demos for the features we were being asked about. After an hour, as the technical aspects came to a close, I left the meeting to join another call so that Laure could discuss the commercial side of the deal.
Later, I arrived back at my desk and Laure had put a really nice note on my computer screen to thank me for helping her. When we ran into each other later in the day, she was still so thankful and told me she had learned a lot while watching me lead portions of the call as well.
And, to think, all this transpired just because I said, “Hello!”
This wasn’t the first time I have randomly approached someone to say “Hi!” to over lunch though! A while back, while at lunch, I met Kim – who has become a really good friend of mine. Kim has always been there for me – from chatting about everyday life to helping me when my fiancée and I needed a lift to France to organize bits and pieces for our wedding last June!
Kim and I have now started to organize social events for other people in the office as well – everything from cheese and wine tasting evenings, to weekend trips away to explore and experience new places.
It is crazy to think that one word has led to such an incredible friendship for us, and has enabled us to create an amazing social community in our office as well!
Our leaders at Cisco are dedicated in hiring the right people for our teams; this doesn’t just mean that they are technically great at what they are needed to do – which everyone is – but what it really means is that they are a great fit for the Cisco culture as well.
One of the best things about working here is that everyone helps each other out and you are truly part of the team. I’ve never worked anywhere where I have felt so included and part of the family – and here at Cisco, we have “family” all over the globe! 😀 There is always someone willing to help if needed and nothing is too much trouble. We all have the single goal of aiding in Cisco’s success. It doesn’t matter which team you are on, so much as it matters knowing that you are ALL part of a larger team – Team Cisco!
So, don’t be afraid anymore! Say, “Hello!” to someone today. Smile to everyone coming on to the elevators. See how you can help your co-workers out (especially our new hires!) and – you never know! You just may make a new friend.
Are you ready to say, “Hello?” and join us at Cisco? We’re hiring!
Concerts, festivals, sports. It’s all about the connecting with the music, the game – watching the same thing at the same time. So naturally, fans want to join the connection and share, post, and tweet. But if 25,000 other people are doing the same thing on a shaky network, all you’re going to get is a drained phone battery because you’ll be trying to connect in vain.
Entisys360 says…
That was Live Nation’s problem. They operate thousands of events every year all around the world. Live Nation wanted to let customers enjoy and share the event, not stare at their phones in frustration. And the demand for a better digital connection at venues was getting louder, fast.
So they asked us for a solution that would keep fans connected and engaged, to bring Wi-Fi to large spaces, and create options that keep fans in front of the event, not in line for the bathroom or snacks.
We helped Live Nation make sure their customers got some satisfaction. But we couldn’t have done it without Cisco access points and network hardware, our behind-the-scenes stars. Now, fans can do more than share selfies. They can order food from their seat. Or even upgrade their seat, all from their smartphone.
You want to automate but not sure where to start or what tools to use or even what processes can be automated and if the thing you want to automate is even automatable. Does it offer an API? If it does, is there an SDK? Are there samples of what can be done? What has been done? How much can be done? A lot of questions typically bog down the process, mire you in indecision and eventually you give up!
Fortunately, if you have Cisco UCS in your Data Center you are already more than halfway to the serendipitous realization that automation is within your reach. How can I be so sure? I have been working with Cisco UCS servers for many years and I have watched the tools I use to automate evolve into powerful allies in my quest to manage my Data Center at the push of a button or by the sound of my voice.
Too frequently we think, “Oh it’s just a couple clicks, or a quick entry at the command line.” But really if you do something more than once you should automate it. Automation can provide consistency in outcome as well as more efficient issue mitigation. But the question still is how can you get started.
Pythagoras is said to have claimed that “choices are the hinges of destiny.” I don’t know about destiny, but in the data center world, you definitely want to have multiple options to choose from. They can help tailor a solution to your specific situation, which is especially important if you’re upgrading to higher speed links.
Ethernet switches with multi-rate 40G/100G ports provide flexibility for such scenarios. What if you’re upgrading your switches now, but can’t upgrade the servers until later? Maybe the servers are not available yet, or maybe you’re not getting the entire budget right away.
With 40G/100G ports on your top-of-rack switch, you can use 4x10G breakout cables to connect your existing 10G servers. Then, when you upgrade the servers to 25G, all you have to do is replace the 4x10G breakouts with 4x25G breakouts. Pretty easy, isn’t it?
Or, if you replace your leaf switches and spine switches at different times, dual-rate ports allow you to upgrade each side separately.
Rapid urbanization in both developed and emerging economies is exerting pressure on their urban infrastructures—to provide services, make information available across city agencies and with citizens, and carry out processes more efficiently. Governments face the challenges of shoring up physical facilities and systems to make these capabilities possible, often with the added pressure of tighter budgets and static levels of private-sector investment.
McKinsey Global Institute research found that the current pace of infrastructure investment would be insufficient to support initiatives in cities worldwide over the next two decades. Rather, $3.7 trillion in investments in economic infrastructure is needed every year from now until 2035.
If cities are to address the gap between needs and resources, public- and private-sector institutions must collaborate. Together, they must innovate and fund creative solutions to allow cities to effectively deliver citizen services. Public-private-partnership models have certainly been the norm when it comes to financing physical infrastructure in cities—such as toll roads, bridges, airports and hospitals. The next wave of investment in cities is around IoT-enabled infrastructure to digitize urban services. Examples of this include a city-wide smart parking rollout, smart lighting, safety and security and citizen engagement solutions through Wi-Fi-enabled kiosks set in downtown environments and other such connected solutions.
Recognizing this need, Cisco has co-created the City Infrastructure Financing Acceleration Program. The program oversees $1 billion in debt and equity capital that is made available to cities and to operators of urban services to creatively finance smart city technology. Cisco will provide flexible financing through Cisco Capital and will work with private equity fund Digital Alpha Advisors and with pension fund investors APG Asset Management (APG) and Whitehelm Capital, to facilitate faster and more affordable funding options for cities around the world.
Cisco’s $1 billion investment will enable flexible payment solutions via Cisco Capital, equity investments under public-private partnerships, and partnership structures based on the cost savings and sharing of future revenue streams enabled by the new, smart infrastructure. With this increased flexibility, Cisco intends to make investment more attractive and extend the options for cities to adopt “as-a-service” solutions that address their toughest challenges.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IZ5rn-exHFs
The City Infrastructure Financing Acceleration Program will give city leaders the ability to deploy cutting-edge technology with minimal initial investment. It will also enable cities to more closely tie the cost of financing to the desired outcomes of their smart infrastructure projects. Whether reducing energy usage, easing traffic, or boosting public transportation ridership and revenues, cities are given the proof of commitment they want from technology partners that they must trust with the health of their most critical urban services. Revenue sharing can additionally expand cities’ future operating budgets with revenue streams from new services offered via secure digital infrastructure.
“Whitehelm is delighted to support long-term investments in smart city infrastructure,” said Gary Withers, CEO of Whitehelm Capital. “We see significant potential benefits for citizens and governments when services can be delivered more efficiently and tailored to the needs of citizens and their cities.”
Digital Alpha recently invested 10M GBP into Connexin, a UK-based, smart-city-solution provider that is building out Wi-Fi networks and offering urban services in Hull and has plans to scale to other municipalities.
The City Infrastructure Financing Acceleration Program not only serves the cities that will directly benefit from innovative financing options, but also influences more traditional financiers to look at smart city projects with a new lens – seeing these opportunities now with a focus on their potential return versus their perceived risk.
Two decades ago, the Internet was the shiny new object in the room. The Worldwide Web was just emerging as a new paradigm for communication and commerce, and the world brimmed with possibilities. Today, not only has the Internet fulfilled those nascent dreams, it has become the undisputed foundation of the digital age.
But now there’s a new paradigm in town—the Internet of Things (IoT).
For years, IoT has been growing up inside factories and oil platforms, in ships, trucks, and trains—quietly changing long-standing industrial processes. It has made its way into virtually every industry—agriculture, aviation, mining, healthcare, energy, transportation, smart cities, and on and on. IoT is no longer just the next phase of the Internet—it’s fundamentally reshaping the Internet as we know it.
Read why and how IoT is shifting the key components of the Internet in my new article in Network World.
Vulnerabilities discovered by Marcin Noga of Cisco Talos Talos is releasing seven new vulnerabilities discovered within the libxls library: TALOS-2017-0403, TALOS-2017-0404, TALOS-2017-0426, TALOS-2017-0460, TALOS-2017-0461, TALOS-2017-0462, and TALOS-2017-0463. These vulnerabilities result in remote code execution using specially crafted XLS files.
Overview
libxls is a C library supported on Windows, Mac and Linux which can read Microsoft Excel File Format (XLS) files ranging from current versions of XLS files down to Excel 97 (BIFF8) formats.
The library is used by the `readxl` package which can be installed in the R programming language via the CRAN repository. The library is also part of the ‘xls2csv’ tool. The library can also be used to successfully parse Microsoft XLS files.
Today we are delighted to announce that the Cisco Security Technology Alliance (CSTA) is adding 26 technology integrations to expand its partner ecosystem to over 140 partners representing 225+ product platform integrations. Some of these integrations are with net-new partners while others are with existing partners that have integrated with yet more Cisco Security products. The rationale for this continued growth in the CSTA ecosystem is simple – there is a need for collaborative security.
Customers have a choice of various point products in the evolving security market. These disparate systems, however, can result in reduced security effectiveness – reduced time to respond to security threats, increased risk and exposure. By integrating siloed security technologies into the broader Cisco Security architecture, security practitioners can achieve faster and more accurate threat identification as well as rapid response to security threats. CSTA provides an environment for security vendors to integrate with various Cisco APIs & SDKs like Firepower eStreamer, pxGrid, REST etc. across the Cisco Security portfolio to the benefit of our mutual customer security deployments.
Enterprise security is comprised of interdependent systems; no one product can achieve absolute security. By that same token no security solution exists in isolation. The more point security products interconnect with each other, share threat context, participate in an incident response framework, the less the risk of data breaches and security incidents. CSTA is an ecosystem where vendors integrate across a gamut of technologies – perimeter defense, intrusion prevention, advanced threat, sandboxing, cloud security and network policy, making it one of the largest security ecosystems out there. But the end goal isn’t size…it is increased security and decreased risk for our mutual customers. This is what makes CSTA a truly collaborative ecosystem.
What’s New:
Bringing 3rd Party Threat Intelligence into Cisco Next-Gen Firewall
Multi-Vendor Threat Event and Platform Management for Cisco Next-Gen Firewall
Cisco Firepower has new partner integrations to its highly-enriched threat event API, eStreamer. Exabeam, LogZilla, Qmulos and Verodin now utilize Firepower next-gen firewall and threat context to complement their native threat analysis capabilities. Furthermore, Cisco firewall customers can now use Firewall Platform Management solutions from Tufin, Algosec and Firemon for policy and configuration management with integrations built using the new Firepower REST API.
New Cisco pxGrid and Cisco ISE Technology Partners
New partners BluVector and WireX Systems that have adopted the Cisco Threat Grid API to obtain powerful intelligence on malware and have joined the Threat Grid ecosystem. This integration ecosystem simplifies threat investigation for our joint customers by incorporating Threat Grid threat intelligence directly into our partners’ platforms.
More Technology Partners Under the (Cisco) Umbrella
The Cisco Umbrella & Investigate ecosystem also expands with the inclusion of partners like Digital Shadows, Exabeam, and LogRhythm. These integrations not only help organizations manage, prioritize, and mitigate IOCs, but they also provide mechanisms to automate several threat lifecycle workflows, effectively improving both mean time to detect and response to threats, as well overall SOC efficacy.
New Splunk Apps and McAfee pxGrid/DXL Integrations Now Shipping
Perhaps we should do these announcements more often, because there is a lot to absorb here. But we like to shine the light on our new partners because multi-vendor integration and openness is key to successful and effective security deployment.
For even more details, read through the individual partner highlights below.
Happy integrating!
More details about our new partners and their integrations:
[1] New Cisco Threat Intelligence Director (CTID) Integrations
AlienVault’s Open Threat Exchange (OTX) is a free and open exchange of cyber threat information with a large community of security professionals and malware researchers from all across the world, sharing millions of threat artifacts. CTID customers can now receive monitoring and actionable insights that leverage the full scope of OTX threat intelligence to help make sense of what attacks are impacting their systems. With OTX and CTID, security teams can respond quickly and with confidence.
EclecticIQ Platform is a Threat Intelligence Platform (TIP) that empowers threat analysts to perform faster, better, and deeper investigations while disseminating intelligence at machine-speed. The EclecticIQ Platform can be connected to CTID so Cisco customers can operationalize the intelligence and improving security effectiveness.
Infoblox Threat Intelligence Data Exchange (TIDE), part of ActivetTrust, is a threat intelligence aggregation platform that can distribute curated Infoblox and 3rd party threat for consumption on Cisco security platforms via the CTID. This integration enables Firepower customers to maximize the value of Infoblox’s high quality, actionable threat intelligence.
NC4’s Cyber Defense Network™ for Financial Service (CDN/FS) solution takes a series of steps to improve the effectiveness, efficiency and timeliness of cyber defense for both the financial services industry and its members. The CDN/FS solution is tightly integrated with FMC and CTID and enables defensive actions to block access to malicious sites and content.
ThreatConnect arms organizations with a powerful defense against cyber threats and the confidence to make strategic business decisions. Built on an intelligence-driven, extensible security platform, ThreatConnect provides threat intelligence aggregation, and analysis and automation for security teams at any maturity level and can share threat intelligence with CTID.
ThreatQuotient delivers an open and extensible threat intelligence platform (TIP) ThreatQ to provide defenders the context, customization and collaboration needed for increased security effectiveness and efficient threat operations and management. The ThreatQ platform integrates with CTID allowing for the operationalization of a wide range actionable information.
[2] New Cisco Firepower Integrations
AlgoSec automates and orchestrates network security policy management on premise and in the cloud. Cisco customers can deliver business applications quickly and easily while ensuring security and compliance. Algosec Firewall Analyzer (AFA) collects and audits policy and configuration information from Cisco ASA and Firepower firewalls, switches and routers.
Exabeam is a UEBA platform that helps detect and respond to insider threats by quickly analyzing the behavior of every user on the network for unusual activity that increases business risk. With built-in collectors from systems including badge readers, USB drives, print servers, email, etc., Exabeam can collect and apply machine learning to insider threat activity. Exabeam now integrates with Cisco Firepower.
FireMon solutions deliver continuous visibility into and control over network security infrastructure, policies, and risk. FireMon Security Manager is a policy and risk management solution that can collect policy and configuration information from Cisco Firepower and ASA.
LogZilla provides real-time network insight with its network operations platform. LogZilla collects data through its custom plug-in leveraging the new Firepower eNcore estreamer client supporting the entire API’s schema. The plug-in streams fully qualified event data with all available context directly to LogZilla
Qmulos leverages Splunk to capture security-relevant data on a continuous basis in IT GRC ConMon environments. Qmulos now offers Splunk technical add-ons (TAs) that enrich Cisco Firepower event data, providing compliance IA controls. Customers benefit from improved security, risk, and compliance visibility, and a significant reduction is compliance resources when compared to legacy methods of doing IT Compliance with IT GRC tools that lack scale.
Tufin provides Security Policy Orchestration solutions to streamline the management of security policies across complex, heterogeneous environments that include Cisco ASA and Firepower. Tufin automatically designs, provisions, analyzes and audits network security configuration changes – from the application layer down to the network layer – accurately and securely.
Verodin is a Security Instrumentation Platform (SIP) that allows Cisco customers to continuously challenge and improve Cisco security products by safely executing multi-staged attack behaviors without the risk of impacting production systems. Customers learn how people, processes, and technology will perform under fire. Verodin tests Cisco Firepower to optimize policy and prove effectiveness. Verodin additionally tests AMP with real malware and Umbrella’s DNS blocking.
[3] New Cisco pxGrid & ISE Integrations
CloudPost protects business-critical IoT devices and systems. The CloudPost platform ties device identity with behavioral analytics so organizations using pxGrid and ISE can accelerate segmentation projects by automating device grouping, trusted peer and flow identification, and device-specific policy generation.
The DB Networks platform provides detailed continuous assessment of database infrastructure non-intrusively and in real-time. By analyzing database accesses that deviate from the model of normal application behavior, database attacks and insider threats are immediately identified and Cisco ISE is alerted to take Rapid threat containment action via pxGrid.
Securonix SNYPR is a next-generation security analytics platform that transforms big data into actionable security intelligence. Built on a Hadoop big data security lake, SNYPR combines an open data model, log management, SIEM, UEBA and fraud detection. SYNPR integrates with Cisco ISE via pxGrid to obtain network context and take Rapid Threat Containment action.
TriagingX’s TXEcosystem protects endpoint systems and datacenter servers against zero-day attacks without requiring patches. TXHunter automatically launches an investigation on endpoint system and datacenter server for security breach incidence and can take a Rapid Threat Containment action via Cisco pxGrid.
WireX provides context into security alerts, delivering months of in-depth visibility. The integration of WireX Systems Incident Response Platform with Cisco pxGrid and Cisco Threat Grid, stream lines incident response processes and enables security teams to reduce response and remediation times.
Mosyle Manager is an MDM designed exclusively for the K-12 segment customers. Mosyle Manager is integrated to Cisco Identity Services Engine (ISE) to show all device details to schools’ technology leaders so they can better manage and control all the network policies based on device information.
Envoy Visitor platform modernizes guest sign-in, letting one collect guest information, capture their photos and have them sign legal documents. Envoy Visitors works with Cisco ISE to easily provide Wi-Fi network access to visitors and employees. It securely provisions network access with context-aware policies.
ALEF NULA develops 802.1X productivity utilities which are now integrated with Cisco ISE. AleFIT MAB Keeper allows the management of certain authentication settings without needing access to the configuration GUI of ISE. AleFIT Office Locator provides 802.1X authentication status details which helps in troubleshooting.
[4] New Cisco AMP Threat Grid Integrations
BluVector has integrated its machine learning based network intrusion detection with Cisco Threat Grid to provide detailed threat intelligence about sophisticated cyber attacks and enable analysts to defend and respond to those detections.
WireX provides context into security alerts, delivering months of in-depth visibility. The integration of WireX Systems Incident Response Platform with Cisco pxGrid and Cisco Threat Grid, stream lines incident response processes and enables security teams to reduce response and remediation times.
[5] New Cisco Umbrella & Investigate Integrations
Digital Shadows Searchlight has integrated with Cisco Umbrella its ability to provide outside the perimeter context related to phishing attacks in order for organizations to take action and prevent employee damage and exfiltration of sensitive data.
Exabeam Incident Responder automates security investigations through the Umbrella Investigate API. Customers can automate phishing attack response and suspected phishing email review, therefore reducing the manual effort of Security Responders. To further automate the sharing of intelligence, Incident Responder can push additional unwanted domain information into Cisco Umbrella via the Enforcement API and block access to specific domains.
LogRhythm’s Threat Lifecycle Management Platform integrates with Umbrella. Umbrella Investigate sends threat intelligence about domains, IPs, and file hashes to LogRhythm’s AI Engine, providing additional context to prioritize alarms. Closing the loop, malicious domains and IP addresses found by LogRhythm can be added to Umbrella to be automatically enforced globally.
As CTO for the collaboration group at Cisco, I get asked this question all of the time – are you guys committed to a multi-vendor environment with Microsoft?
Gosh, I find this a frustrating question. Why is that? Because most (not all, but almost!) customers we sell to also have Microsoft products in them. In fact, it’s hard for us to even imagine a customer environment that is entirely Microsoft-free. So really, the better question to ask is: What mixes of Microsoft and Cisco products do you support, and how do you support integration with each of the products in the Microsoft portfolio?
Cisco is investing more today in integration with Microsoft technologies than we have ever done before.
When put in those terms – when I look at what we’re doing today, I feel confident in saying that Cisco is investing more today in integration with Microsoft technologies than we have ever done before. Let’s take them one at a time.
Active Directory: Perhaps the most ubiquitous product in the Microsoft portfolio. At Cisco, we have no equivalent. As a result, we’ve invested heavily in the last few years to make AD a central part of our products, especially Cisco Spark. We’ve built a directory sync engine that integrates with AD, treating it as the source of truth and syncing its contents with our Cisco Spark cloud. We use AD for SAML-based SSO when users sign in to Cisco Spark.
Exchange: Second only to AD in its pervasiveness in our customer environments. Since Exchange is where people go to schedule meetings, we’ve invested heavily in making it a central part of our meetings solutions. Cisco Spark supports integration with Exchange on-prem and O365, making sure it is the source of truth for when meetings happen. Our first hybrid offering was calendar integration with Exchange.
Outlook: WebEx Productivity Tools integrate natively with Outlook, allowing users to schedule WebEx meetings with a single click. Today, this represents the most common way people schedule WebEx meetings. Cisco Jabber supports click-to-call, presence, and click-to-chat integrations into Outlook, and similar functionality is on the way for Cisco Spark as well.
Word, PowerPoint, Excel: The bread-and-butter of Microsoft‘s productivity tools are a centerpiece of our content strategy for Cisco Spark. It supports native rendering of these files within Cisco Spark.
These four are particularly important to us because Cisco doesn’t offer alternatives to these, and consequently, we work to make them essential parts of our solution. Indeed, we recommend customers deploy these in concert with the rest of our portfolio.
Our philosophy has always been that we will support customers that want a mixed-vendor environment.
Where things get more complex is with the next two on the list, Skype for Business and Teams, as these products compete directly with us. Our philosophy has always been that we will support customers that want a mixed-vendor environment where Cisco’s Collaboration products (video, Jabber, Cisco Spark, calling) are deployed alongside other vendors’ conflicting products. Interoperability has always been a major source of investment for us.
Skype for Business: S4B is the best example of our commitment to interoperability. S4B clients can join Cisco meetings hosted on-prem or in the cloud. In the cloud, we support SIP dial-in including explicit support for S4B and Lync clients for application/screen sharing and video interoperability. On-prem, we’ve gone a step further. With our significant investment in the acquisition of Acano, we also support the ability to join S4B meetings, providing the best possible experience for users on our endpoints. We support voice, IM, and presence interoperability between S4B on-prem and Jabber/UC. We do all that using interfaces that Microsoft makes available to us, typically ones it formally supports through APIs or protocol interoperability.
Microsoft Teams: As Teams is relatively new, we are currently exploring what level of interoperability is possible. Microsoft only recently released its API previews and our engineers are assessing – so stay tuned. Microsoft has yet to enable calling and messaging interop for O365, but if they do, we would be most interested to leverage it.
All this is just the beginning. As customer adoption of Microsoft’s newer products – like OneDrive and Teams grows – we’ll use supported APIs to make them work with our portfolio. I hope you can see that here at Cisco we’re committed to Microsoft integration. Indeed, though we compete in the marketplace, it’s hard for us to imagine a world without them.
Looking back on Laure’s first demo, it definitely wasn’t the easiest demo experience. She did great, of course! But the customers kept throwing technical questions at Laure just as she was getting in to her flow each time. This is where I would jump in to help out and provide some extra demos for the features we were being asked about. After an hour, as the technical aspects came to a close, I left the meeting to join another call so that Laure could discuss the commercial side of the deal.
This wasn’t the first time I have randomly approached someone to say “Hi!” to over lunch though! A while back, while at lunch, I met Kim – who has become a really good friend of mine. Kim has always been there for me – from chatting about everyday life to helping me when my fiancée and I needed a lift to France to organize bits and pieces for our wedding last June!
Outlook: