One of the basic functions of an IT administrator supporting an application is to control permissions and access to the data within that application. When an organization makes the move to cloud services, this process becomes far more important and considerably more complicated as you can imagine.

In this blog post I’ll explore what Role Based Access Control (RBAC) is, how it works in Office 365, and why an add-on management solution might be the answer for some organizations.

Since the dawn of time (if the dawn of time was in 2011), assigning licenses in Office 365 has been a pain. It has never been complicated, but it has also never been a pleasant experience.

You've always had two options to either manually assign licenses to users from the Office 365 Admin portal or use PowerShell to bulk assign the license to large numbers of users. In the first couple of years of Office 365 when most of the customers were small, I primarily just manually assigned licenses in the portal. As larger customers started moving into Office 365, I relied more heavily on PowerShell scripts to assign licenses to Office 365 users en masse.

Office 365 is Microsoft's premier cloud service, and the clear leader in the "back office" server cloud offering market. If your organization has not moved to Office 365 yet, it's a safe bet that someone within your organization will be making a strong push to get you there soon.

One of the main concerns that I hear from a customer who is hesitant to move to Office 365 is security. How do you know if Office 365 is secure? What are best practices configurations for Office 365 security? Is "the cloud" safe?

In this blog post, I'm going to give you a quick rundown of the top security features of Office 365 and some pointers on how your organization can use these features to ensure that your data is safe.

In today’s corporate environment, security and compliance always need to be top of mind for IT leadership. There are many pitfalls that can occur from a security breach or a compliance violation that can end up costing organization millions of dollars, and CIOs their jobs. That is why most IT organizations are looking for automated tools to help them keep one step ahead of any security compliance issue. 4ward365 is a solution that has those security watchdog capabilities built-in for Office 365 and Azure AD.

In some ways moving to Office 365 can help alleviate the worries of security compliance. Microsoft has world class security and compliance configurations that have been proven in some of the largest organizations on the planet. They have the best engineers in the world constantly working to protect the data in Office 365.

Microsoft introduced a new product, or at least a new SKU, at Inspire (the new name for the Microsoft partner conference) called Microsoft 365. This new product is a combination of two existing products, and the first "cloud" version of Windows 10. In this blog post, I'm going to look at Microsoft 365. What it is, what it costs, how you'll use it, and if you want it at all.

In my last blog post here, I wrote an introduction to Azure Resource Manager (ARM). ARM is the toolset Microsoft has added to Azure for provisioning and controlling resources in Azure.

ARM has the tools to help you develop scriptable virtual machines deployments within your own tenant, but the process is not necessarily as simple as you might think. In this blog post, I’m going to walk through my process of learning to create a simple machine template, and deploying it to my own Azure tenant. Hopefully over time, I will grow this process into a larger project that works for more complex deployments.

Various tools diagnose and troubleshoot problems with Autodiscover, a web service in Microsoft Exchange Online that enables mailbox admins to configure user profile settings.

Azure Resource Manager (ARM) is Microsoft's platform for deploying and managing resources within Azure. ARM allows you to build resource deployment templates using PowerShell and JSON scripts to build repeatable and consistent deployments in Azure.

I figure it's time for me to learn how this whole Azure thing works, and the best way for me to get it all straight in my mind is to be able to explain it to you. Some of what I cover in this blog post may be a little basic, so if you’re already using ARM effectively you might want to skip to the next blog post.

When you create a new mailbox in Exchange Online, that mailbox comes with specific settings, features, and protocols enabled. As an Office 365 administrator, you have the ability to go back and modify these settings later if—for instance—you don't want users to have their default mailbox size limit set at 100 GB, or if you want a specific retention policy applied to that mailbox.

If you'd like to take the next step with such customizations and have them automatically applied to mailboxes, then this is the blog post for you. The Office 365 roadmap shows that Microsoft is in the process of making enhancements to mailbox plans.

Back in September of last year, I wrote an article about Multi-Factor Authentication for Office 365. Since the cloud refuses to stand still, it looks like it’s time to update that post with some new information.

The original problem of Office 365 not being a single application, but instead a collection of applications, still exists. The Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA) story for the individual parts of Office 365 is, unfortunately, still disjointed and inconsistent. It will most likely be years before Microsoft can build all of the services within Office 365 into a consistent and operational framework, if such a change could even happen.

For most the last 25 years or so, most people with “office” jobs have relied on email as their primary communications tool at work. During that time, Microsoft has added many ways for groups of people to collaborate within their email clients. Distribution lists, public folders, shared mailboxes, resource mailboxes, site mailboxes, and now Groups each give end-users different functionality. How does an organization decide which of these options to use? When are shared mailboxes the best choice?

I once read an interview with a NASCAR driver who said, "When there is a wreck on the track ahead of you, all you can do is aim right at it and hope for the best." The interviewer was taken aback. They asked why they would drive straight at the wreck. 

The driver replied, "When a car going at 200 miles a hour wrecks, there is only one place you know it's not going to be when you get there; wherever it is now." 

Somedays I feel like that with Office 365. The only place I know it's not going to be tomorrow is where it is today. As an IT professional, that means there will be need for our experience, but only if we put in the effort to know where Office 365 is going to be tomorrow.