Daily Archives: 16/03/2015

Cloud/Hybrid/On premises News

Office 2016, Skype for Business, Delve. Some big announcements to start the week with

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Seems like Microsoft likes to keep us busy this start of the week. Office 2016 for desktop, Skype for Business and Delve were basically released today. The first two are in technical preview for developers and IT pros, while the global roll out for Delve started today for all Office 365 subscribers. Let’s take a brief look into this new software and services.

Office 2016 is particularly exciting, because there is a bunch of new features that most IT folks are waiting for. Data Loss Prevention policies are already available with Exchange Online, OneDrive for Business and SharePoint and starting with Office 2016 there will be some DLP policies also available for Word, Excel and PowerPoint. On the other side, Outlook says good bye to the RPC based connections and will implement a more internet firendly MAPI over HTTP. In the meantime, multi-factor authentication will be available in Outlook (but also in all Office applications) through the integration with ADAL (Active Directory Authentication Library).  Continue reading

Cloud/Hybrid/On premises Directory Integration Exchange

ADFS in a resource/account forest scenario

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Handling identities in a hybrid cloud is often no easy task. Configuring ADFS with Office 365 and Azure should not be difficult. Generally speaking using the cloud is not necessarily rocket science. However, things can get very complicated depending on the on the server infrastructure a company already has in place when deciding to move to the cloud.

A very common scenario is using resource forests and account forests in the same organization. Typically the resource forest is configured for some services, like Exchange or SharePoint and the account forest contains account information for client login. Many larger organizations have opted for such a scenario a while back and probably nowadays they want to move some workloads to the cloud. The big question for identity folks is, how should directory synchronization and identity federation be implemented in a resource/account forest scenario?  Continue reading

News

10 cool features that will come soon to Office 365

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Office 365 is a cool cloud service because it is constantly updated with new features that commonly emerge based on customer feedback. To be sincere, this is typical for the most global cloud providers, but here is a list of 10 cool new Office 365 features that will be soon available to all subscribers.

1. Add external collaborators to your Yammer conversations

This is for the moment not possible, but many customers said that they want to add their vendors, partners or customers to Yammer conversations. This new feature will be available soon and this will make it possible to add external collaborators to new Yammer discussions, existing Yammer discussions or even private messages. This will bring enterprise sociability to a whole new level.  Continue reading