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Microsoft is constantly updating and improving services; it’s a hallmark of Office 365. The constant Office 365 updates are great for me, providing new content and tips to share with you on a regular basis.
The Microsoft Exchange team recently made significant improvements in moving on-premises email from Exchange to Exchange Online. Here’s a breakdown of the new Exchange migration options for Office 365.
Read moreThis is a blog post I never thought I'd write, and just a short time ago, I couldn’t have imagined it would be something that you'd want to spend 10 minutes reading. Turns out “the cloud” really does keep us on our toes.
Recently I’ve seen some new features in Office Pro Plus, and they are pretty cool. I’m just as surprised as anyone to be interested in PowerPoint and Word updates, but stranger things have happened I guess. In this blog post, I will go into detail on recent Office Pro Plus updates. I’ll talk about some new features I discovered and how they're improving the Office product.
Read moreOn November 2, Microsoft introduced “Microsoft Teams,” a new collaboration suite within Office 365. Office 365 already has several different “collaboration” tools available, so what’s new about Teams and why do you need another way to collaborate?
In this blog post, I’m going to break down what I know about Teams so far by addressing common questions and what the future holds for Teams and other collaboration tools in and out of Office 365.
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Read moreIdentity management is a huge part of any organization's migration into “the cloud.” Sure, you can move your email, your IM and presence, your document libraries, maybe even your voice and video services into Office 365. But unless your organization is very small, identity management will still take place in your own on-premises Active Directory.
Since the introduction of Office 365, and even before that with the ironically named “BPOS,” Microsoft has had several different solutions for cloud identity management. These solutions have ranged from bad to confusing. The solutions that have been easy to use have lacked good functionality, and the solutions with enterprise functionality have been difficult and costly to deploy.
Read moreThere are a few very compelling reasons to move to Office 365, and in my opinion, Office 365 Groups are at or near the top of that list. Office 365 Groups combine resources from across Office 365 in ways that are not possible on-premises to give end users interesting new functionality.
Originally, Microsoft envisioned Office 365 Groups as resources that did not need much, if anything, in the way of administrative control. The idea was that end users should be able to control their collaborative experience without pesky admins getting in their way. This, of course, is a ridiculous concept that Microsoft has since corrected. Now Office 365 administrators have the controls necessary to ensure Groups are being used in accordance with organizational data usage policies within their Office 365 tenants.
Read moreWith the impending release of Windows Server 2016, we will soon have a new version of AD FS available to use with our various cloud deployments. I thought this would be a good time to start looking at the new features and functionality of Active Directory Federation Services (AD FS) in the new version of Windows Server.
In this post, I’m going to introduce three new features to AD FS in Windows Server 2016: The upgrade process, improved auditing, and the AD FS rapid restore tool. In a future blog post (after Windows Server 2016 is released), I’ll dive into the specifics of setting up and using each of these features.
Read moreMulti-factor authentication has been available, at least for users with administrator roles assigned, in Office 365 since June 2013. The problem is that there is a confusing warren of options and configurations that greatly affect the MFA experience an Office 365 user will, or will not, see. In this blog post, I will explain what configurations you need and what MFA experience you will get based on those configurations.
Read moreEncryption is hard. There is really no way around that fact.
One of the great benefits of Office 365, or any cloud product, is that these complex solutions are deployed and maintained for you by those who are best qualified to make them work. The downside to having someone else deploy and run your IT solutions is the lack of control you have over your information. You don’t really know who has access to your information when you’re moving it to the cloud.
Read moreGenerally, I write about Exchange and Office 365 topics, but recently I’ve been doing more work in the Skype for Business Online area. That is still Office 365, but it’s an area I haven't paid much attention to in the past. Until the release of the E5 license with Cloud PBX, I don’t think there was a reason to pay attention to Skype for Business Online. It was really only good for IM and presence, and there was nothing to configure or set up there.
With the recent release of the Cloud PBX features, I’ve been spending a lot more time thinking about Skype for Business Online, so I figured I would start writing about it, too. In this post, I’m going to look at some of the upcoming Cloud PBX features.
Read moreMicrosoft has been busy releasing features for Exchange Online over the last couple of weeks, so I thought this would be a good time to talk about three new features: Focused Inbox, Outlook Mentions and Certificate Based Authentication.
Focused Inbox is a feature that came from Microsoft acquisition of Acompli in December 2014. Focused Inbox has been a part of the iOS Outlook app since it was launched shortly after Acompli was brought into Microsoft.
Read moreOffice 365 Groups (that’s Groups with a capital “G”) are a newish feature of Office 365 that allow for collaboration across several different cloud applications. Office 365 Groups are the cloud only evolution of Site mailboxes, a technology introduced with Exchange and SharePoint 2013 that gave users a single place to access data stored on both Exchange and SharePoint.
Since those days, Office 365 Groups has grown to include significant functionality. The problem has been that, at least until recently, there was no native migration path to transform your on-premises distribution lists into Office 365 Groups other than manually recreating them. In this post, I’m going to walk you through the process of migrating on-premises distribution lists into Office 365 Groups.
Read moreSecurity and compliance are big concerns for corporate customers moving to Office 365. As such, Microsoft is putting a lot of resources into ensuring that customers have the tools they need to ensure their data is kept securely and compliantly.
Recently, I went through the new Security and Compliance Center in Office 365 and wrote about the features and functionality that existed there. One section of the Security and Compliance Center that I did not dedicate much space to was a new feature called “Supervisory Review.” Today I plan to circle back and take a look at this new functionality in Office 365.
Microsoft recently announced a new DAG copy activation feature that will be available in Exchange 2016 CU2, but before we talk about that, I’d like to do a quick refresher on how database copy activation works currently and will continue to work for Exchange 2013 and 2010.
Read moreOffice 365 is a collection of online services that allow organizations to use Exchange, Skype for Business, and SharePoint in the cloud. In the nearly five years that Office 365 has been available most of the organizations using Office 365 have used it just like that; for Exchange or Skype for Business or SharePoint in the cloud. Some organizations are using more than one of those services, but for the most part they are still using them separately.
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