Active Directory Synchronization for Office 365 and Azure has been a vital, but fairly straight forward, part of Office 365 migrations for almost 5 years now. DirSync was updated to Azure Active Directory Sync, and AAD Sync was updated to Azure Active Directory Connect. In this blog post, I’m going to cover everything you need to know about deploying the newest version of AAD Connect
Read moreJohn Oliver understands encryption
John Oliver recently did a piece on encryption explaining why it's a really bad idea for Apple to "help the FBI get into just this one phone".
He said it better than I have, so I'll just link to the piece. Watch it. It's important. You have 20 minutes to kill.
Read moreMobility & Office 365: How To Enable Your Mobile Workforce →
Find out how Microsoft Office 365 makes it possible for information workers, who were formerly required to work in an office building, to do their jobs from anywhere with an internet connection. O’Bryan covers the major features in Office 365 including:
- Groups
- Planner
- SharePoint Online
- OneDrive for Business
- Skype for Business
- Office 365 mobile apps
- Mobile Device Management (MDM)
- InTune
- Enterprise Mobility Suite (EMS)
Azure AD Connect 1.1 Filtering – Part 3
In Part 1 of this series, we covered the basics of setting up filtering for AAD Connect and the details of setting up domain filtering. In Part 2, we covered up the process of setting up OU filtering for AAD Connect. In Part 3, we’re going to cover setting up attribute filtering.
Read moreAzure AD Connect 1.1 Filtering – Part 2
Azure AD Connect 1.1 Filtering – Part 1
As DirSync evolved to AAD Sync, and AAD Sync evolved to AAD Connect, there have been significant changes to the way we accomplish tasks with these tools.
With the recent release of Azure Active Directory Connect v 1.1, Microsoft has made several updates to how various aspects of the process of syncing your on-premises Active Directory accounts into Azure Active Directory. There have been some pretty significant changes in a couple of areas, with one of those being sync filtering. In this series of blogs posts, I’m going to walk you through the options and processes for filtering your sync jobs.
Read moreEncryption in the Age of Innocence
I am an IT consultant. My job is to advise and inform organizations on how best to manage their IT infrastructure. In doing that job, I often talk about security and encryption. In lite of the current news about the “FBI vs Apple”, I’d like to talk about security and encryption here.
Read moreThe Confusing Case of Cross-Forest Delegation →
If you've even participated in an Exchange Online migration at almost any level, it's likely you've run into the issue of cross-forest delegation. You know that Exchange allows you to delegate rights from one mailbox to another, allowing users to access other mailboxes. When you do an Exchange hybrid migration, there are some special considerations you have to take to keep these delegated rights working. Depending on who you ask, you'll get all kinds of different answers about what works when. In this blog post I will explain the confusing case of cross-forest delegation, and what you can expect to work or not work.
Read moreMailbox Auditing for Office 365 – Part 1 →
Many Office 365 customers I talk to are concerned about how to audit changes to their organization’s mailboxes within Exchange Online. How do I track changes to the administrator roles in my tenant? How do I know if someone’s mailbox has been accessed by another person? How do I verify Litigation Hold is working? Read on and all shall become clear.
Read moreExploring Containers - Part 2: Hyper-V Containers
Containers are a new Microsoft technology coming with Server 2016 that functions like a virtual server, but are faster to deploy. You can read Part 1 of my Containers series here.
In Part 2 of this servers, we’re going to start looking at Hyper-V Containers.
Read moreExchange 2016 Sizing Guidance
The Exchange team, or more specifically Jeff Mealiffe, has recently published a blog post detailing the sizing guidance for Exchange 2016. The short version is there is very little changed in the sizing guidance from Exchange 2013, but let’s take a closer look just to make sure we’re all on the same page.
Read moreExploring Containers – Part 1
I like to think I am a fairly smart guy. More than that, I know I work with a bunch of really smart people. Given this, I found it interesting to find that pretty much no one on my team has any idea what “containers” are, what they do, or how they work. All we know for sure is that Mark Russinovich thinks they are a nifty new feature of Server 2016 and Windows Azure.
I decided it was time to figure this stuff out, so I dove into a search on Channel9. Here’s a Q&A I had with myself after I watched a few of those videos.
Read moreMailbox Anchoring in Exchange
With the latest Cumulative Updates for Exchange server 2013 and 2016 Microsoft has made a change to “Mailbox Anchoring”. What does this mean? Why did they do it? How will it affect me? Read on, and I shall attempt to explain.
Read moreDeploying Office Online Server for Exchange 2016 – Part 3
Welcome back. If you’ve read the first two posts in this series (Part 1, Part2), then your caught up. If not, I’d suggest you go back to those before proceeding on with this one. In this post, we’re going to talk about some new information about OOS, and some points I missed in the first two parts.
Read moreDeploying Office Online Server for Exchange 2016 – Part 2
Your new OOS farm can be connected to any version of Exchange from 2007 to 2016. Connecting OOS to any version of Exchange previous to Exchange 2016 just allows users to open documents from OWA within the browser. That is not a terribly compelling feature, and I don’t recall ever deploying WAC for a customer to be used for just Exchange. The few times that I have connected WAC to Exchange, it was intended to be used for Lync or SharePoint and just connected to Exchange “because it was there”.
Read more