Ignite is Microsoft’s major conference for new announcements and training aimed at IT professionals. This year Ignite took place in Orlando, Florida the week of September 25th. I wasn’t able to make it to Orlando to be onsite for the conference this year, but it’s not that difficult to follow new announcements from Ignite from anywhere in the world.

In this blog post I’m going to give an overview of some of the announcements from Ignite around identity and authentication management for MS cloud services that caught my attention. I learned a lot by watching recorded sessions, hopefully I can pass some of that on here.

If there is anything consistent about Office 365, it's change. Not only do the services that you use all the time change constantly, but there are also new services added to Office 365 on a regular basis. Microsoft wants to build Office 365 into a complete business productivity suite, and they are doing that by making sure all your bases are covered.

Of course, the downside to this constant evolution of Office 365 is that someone needs to invest the time and effort into learning what the new services are, and what they do. The good news for your organization is that you work there, and you’re taking the time to read this blog.

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?