Recently I've been working on a project to package about 1500 applications for distribution through SCCM. To gather the information I need, I wrote a 50-question survey for a few hundred people to answer. The challenge was to get this survey to a large audience and turn the results into actionable information.

There are a variety of services available online for running surveys. This customer is using Office 365, so I wanted to make use of their existing resources. Today, Office 365 has two solutions for running surveys:

Conditional Access is a premium feature of Azure Active Directory that allows administrators to specify conditions under which users can authenticate into other cloud services. With conditional access, you can specify that a certain set of users can only authenticate to specific applications from specific IPs for example.

The hard part about conditional access is that it takes a lot of work to configure and test the policies. Ensuring that you know how a policy is going to affect your users is critical. In this blog post I’m going to look at a new tool in the Conditional Access line that helps with this problem. "Azure-Active Directory-Conditional Access-What If" gives administrators a new way to test Conditional Access policies to see what the effect of applying those policies will be.

There are several general practices that can help improve the chances of rolling out Microsoft Exchange updates successfully.

Administrators apply updates to correct issues, but there are times a patch itself will break the system. There is no single way to update and -- if things do not go as planned -- recover Exchange. Every organization has different versions and configurations for the messaging platform. Every Microsoft patch is different.

Some administrators let the memories of a bad patch linger and put off Exchange updates. Here are some tips to make this necessary chore less of a traumatic experience.

There are many ways you can manage and control the way your end-users connect to Office 365. Intune, and Azure Active Directory Premium are add-on feature sets for your Office 365 subscription that give you advanced controls for managing client access scenarios, but some customers want a lower level of control that they can implement without having to buy add-on licenses.

In this blog post, I am going to explore some new Client Access Rules that have recently been added into Exchange Online.

When disaster strikes and the Exchange Server crashes without a valid backup, an admin can make things far worse by making a hasty attempt to get the platform back online without careful planning.

Don't rush in and start immediate repairs with the command-line tool eseutil. While eseutil is a powerful tool for Exchange database repair work, use it wrong and it can make matters worse. Admins must understand the different functions of eseutil and when their use is appropriate.

The 70-345 exam for Exchange Server 2016 requires a significant investment of time and energy. Before you step onto the certification path, make sure there is a payoff down the road.

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.