Office 365 Video is a new service in Office 365 designed to store and play your organization’s video content. Think of Video as an enterprise version of YouTube. Video is built on top of SharePoint Online and Azure Media Services (AMS), with an assist from Yammer. All Office 365 tenants in either the “E” (enterprise) or “A” (academic) SKUs have Video available with no additional licensing costs.
Read MoreAs we approach the release of Server 2016, we can also look forward to a new version of AD FS. With the release of this new version of AD FS, we can expect some new features. It’s still early, as I expect Server 2016 to be released in early calendar year 2016, but let’s look at three new features for this version of AD FS.
Read MoreBy this point in time, many organizations have tried Office 365. In cases where they created a tenant to test with then left that tenant to sit for several years before making the decision to migrate into Office 365, often time I find the organization no longer has a global admin account for that tenant. This causes two problems
Read MoreYammer is an Enterprise Social Networking product that was launched in 2008 by a former PayPal executive, and acquired by Microsoft is 2012. Since being acquired by Microsoft, Yammer’s development has been moved into Office 365. All of the other Enterprise Social features of Office 365 we will talk about in this series are smaller features of some other product. Yammer is currently a standalone product that was developed independently of any of the other Office 365 products. It is, of course, Microsoft’s stated goal to tie Yammer into all the other Office 365 products.
Read MoreOffice 365 is a huge collection of enterprise services, and it is only getting bigger. One consequence of this constant growth in services is an overlap of functionality. An example that I have been noticing recently is Enterprise Social features. Microsoft’s drive to enable “Enterprise Social” has resulted in a significant number of Office 365 features providing group collaboration functionality. More and more I am hearing customers ask “Should I be using distribution lists, Groups, persistence chat, or Yammer?”
Read MoreIt’s de ja vu all over again. Limited admin roles have appeared in my Office 365 tenant again, hopefully they are here to stay.
Organizations using Office 365 now (or soon will if your tenant has not been updated yet) have the ability to give an administrator admin rights to Exchange Online without allowing them rights to SharePoint Online.
Read MoreGreetings IT professional. Since you have taken the time download this document, I am going to go out on a limb as assume you are in the early stages of planning a migration into Office 365. The good news is I have completed lots of migrations for all kinds of organizations moving to Office 365. I have very methodically and carefully made tons of mistakes on the road to Office 365. Today, I am going to explain those mistakes so that hopefully you can avoid repeating my mistakes and maybe even make a few new ones.
Read MoreNow that we have the basic three templates working, let’s circle back and talk about that “advanced features” button we saw earlier. In your Office 365 portal go into Admin > Service Settings > Rights Management and select Manage in the center dashboard. You will be redirected to an Azure website (no need to log in again) where you will see a dashboard that looks like this
Read MoreActive Directory Rights Management Services (AD RMS) is a system that allows users to apply Information Rights Management (IRM) protection to content, such as email messages and Office documents. Once content is rights protected it can only be used by specific individuals in specific circumstances, depending on the template that is applied to the content.
Read MoreWith the release of Exchange 2013 Microsoft has adopted a new update process. It’s been almost two and a half years that this update process has been in place, and there is still a considerable lack of understanding in the community about the process. There is so little understanding that I’ve seen conversations between several different groups of really smart Exchange experts this week that included tons of misinformation and misunderstanding. In this post I am going to try to clear up all the questions and lay it all out for you.
Read MoreIn the first two articles (Part 1, Part 2) in this series, I gave a very basic explanation of how a couple of different types of encryption work and introduced the first two type of encryption in Exchange Online. In part three of this series I am going to talk about Office 365 Message Encryption.
Read MoreIf you’re reading this, I’m going to go out on a limb and assume you’re familiar with the internet. You know it can get pretty darn harry out there. Any information you put out there can be taken from your control at any time. You don’t have to be a bad guy to want to keep you information private. Whatever your reasons, your interest in keeping your data to yourself may be a factor inhibiting you from moving to Exchange Online. In this article I am going to explain the different type of encryption you can use in Exchange Online, and how best to employ each of them.
Read MoreIn Mid-2014 Microsoft introduced a new encryption technology to Office 365 that they code named “Fort Knox”. Fort Knox is a blob encryption technology that is applied to SharePoint Online and OneDrive for Business, and as I am primarily an Exchange guy I was not really aware of Fort Knox until recently. After taking a look at this technology, I think it is a pretty nifty bit of security that Office 365 customers, and potential Office 365 customers, should know about.
Read MoreAnyone who has ever done an Exchange Online hybrid deployment can tell you that process can be frustrating. Before the Hybrid Configuration Wizard the process was long and complicated with too many steps and too many places to make a small mistake. With the advent of the HCW the process became much more of a “black box” where the guy doing the deployment really didn’t know what configuration changes were being made, so misconfigurations became very hard to troubleshoot. Add on top of all that the fact that you, and the person doing the deployment really have no control or visibility into the Microsoft side of thing, and a hybrid deployment quickly turns into a difficult task.
Read MoreWhen I migrate customers to Exchange Online I always recommend they maintain an Exchange hybrid server. There are several reasons for this recommendation; it’s much easier to manage SMTP addresses with an Exchange server on-premises, and it’s much easier to get your mailboxes back out of Office 365 if you maintain a hybrid server. To me, one of the great advantages of Office 365 is that I have never felt Microsoft was trying to “trap” customers in the service. They have always made it fairly easy to move mailboxes in and out of Office 365.
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