With the next version of Windows Server, presumably called Windows Server 2016, we’ll be getting a new version of AD FS. I would love to call this new version AD FS 4.0, but Microsoft has not confirmed that name yet. Whatever it ends up being called, the next version of AD FS is going to contain some significant improvements. In this post I want to look at one of those improvements, Access Control Policies.
Read moreEnterprise Social in Office 365: Part 3 – Office 365 Video
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 moreNew Features in AD FS for Server 2016
As 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 moreGaining Global Admin access to an abandoned tenant
By 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 moreEnterprise Social in Office 365: Part 2 – Yammer
Yammer 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 moreEnterprise Social in Office 365: Part 1 - Introduction
Office 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 moreLimited Admin Roles in Office 365 Part 2: The Return
It’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 morePlanning Executing and Maintaining your Migration to Exchange Online
Greetings 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 moreHeading to Ignite
As I’m sure you know by now, Microsoft has combined all their product conferences for Exchange, SharePoint, Lync, Windows Server, and others into a single big even next week in Chicago. I’m packing up my bags and getting ready to head out for a week of sessions and parties.
Read moreIBM Verse: An Office 365 competitor?
We all have specific ideas of what to expect from certain companies, right? Some companies invoke images of trendy over-priced laptops. Other companies may invoke images of ridiculously overpriced “watches”. Maybe I am thinking of the same company twice there…
So what do you think of when I say “IBM”? First thing that comes to mind for me is a very “Mad Men”-esque scene of a smoke filled room filled with 50 women behind typewriters.
Read moreEncryption in Exchange Online Part 7 →
In the first six parts of this series (Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6), I’ve covered the basics of encryption, BitLocker, TLS, Office 365 Message Encryption, Information Rights Management, and S/MIME. In part seven, I’m going to wrap the discussion of encryption within Exchange Online by providing a quick summary of each option and giving some examples of the best circumstances in which to use each.
Read moreEncryption in Exchange Online Part 6 →
S/MIME is “client to client” encryption. S/MIME is the only client-side option available in Exchange Online to allow Outlook or OWA clients to encrypt messages from creation to delivery. That’s not to say that email normally leaves your PC in plain text. Depending on what client you use, and how you connect to Exchange, in-transit encryption mechanisms such as TLS protect messages en route to Exchange. However, that protection is removed once messages reaches Exchange and other protection is then used, like BitLocker to protect data at rest in the database.
Read moreEncryption in Exchange Online Part 5 →
Now 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 moreEncryption in Exchange Online Part 4 →
Active 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 moreExchange Cumulative Update process
With 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.
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