I have long been interested in encryption. I started off my IT career in the United States Marine Corps where I had a Top-Secret security clearance and frequently worked with classified message traffic. During this time, I learned a lot about the rules of encryption and security. Most of what I learned, however, is that encryption is incredibly hard to do correctly.
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 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 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 MoreSome of the more observant of you may have noticed the new link to a “Store” section of my site, where there is currently a single txt file available for an insane price. Obviously my plan is not to trick people into spending $99 for that, then parlay all that cash into a huge txt file empire. Today seems like as good a time as any to share my plans, so here we go.
Read MoreMoving to Office 365 means a pretty big adjustment. Administrators who were used to doing things one way are going to have to make adjustments as their organizations migrate their infrastructure into Office 365. One of the areas where new Office 365 administrators often feel most in the dark about is changes in their environment.
Read MoreOffice 365 Video is a new service in Office 365 designed to store and play your organization’s video content. Think of Video as an enterprise version of YouTube. Video is built on top of SharePoint Online and Azure Media Services (AMS), with an assist from Yammer. All Office 365 tenants in either the “E” (enterprise) or “A” (academic) SKUs have Video available with no additional licensing costs.
Read MoreYammer is an Enterprise Social Networking product that was launched in 2008 by a former PayPal executive, and acquired by Microsoft is 2012. Since being acquired by Microsoft, Yammer’s development has been moved into Office 365. All of the other Enterprise Social features of Office 365 we will talk about in this series are smaller features of some other product. Yammer is currently a standalone product that was developed independently of any of the other Office 365 products. It is, of course, Microsoft’s stated goal to tie Yammer into all the other Office 365 products.
Read MoreNow that we have the basic three templates working, let’s circle back and talk about that “advanced features” button we saw earlier. In your Office 365 portal go into Admin > Service Settings > Rights Management and select Manage in the center dashboard. You will be redirected to an Azure website (no need to log in again) where you will see a dashboard that looks like this
Read MoreIn the first two articles (Part 1, Part 2) in this series, I gave a very basic explanation of how a couple of different types of encryption work and introduced the first two type of encryption in Exchange Online. In part three of this series I am going to talk about Office 365 Message Encryption.
Read MoreIf you’re reading this, I’m going to go out on a limb and assume you’re familiar with the internet. You know it can get pretty darn harry out there. Any information you put out there can be taken from your control at any time. You don’t have to be a bad guy to want to keep you information private. Whatever your reasons, your interest in keeping your data to yourself may be a factor inhibiting you from moving to Exchange Online. In this article I am going to explain the different type of encryption you can use in Exchange Online, and how best to employ each of them.
Read MoreAnyone who has ever done an Exchange Online hybrid deployment can tell you that process can be frustrating. Before the Hybrid Configuration Wizard the process was long and complicated with too many steps and too many places to make a small mistake. With the advent of the HCW the process became much more of a “black box” where the guy doing the deployment really didn’t know what configuration changes were being made, so misconfigurations became very hard to troubleshoot. Add on top of all that the fact that you, and the person doing the deployment really have no control or visibility into the Microsoft side of thing, and a hybrid deployment quickly turns into a difficult task.
Read MoreA couple of weeks ago I published a script that assists with switching your Office 365 authentication method from federated to managed and back again. After playing with the script for a while, I have realized that I had made a couple of incorrect assumptions about the rep-requisites for this script.
Read MoreMicrosoft has done a great job of ensuring that hybrid Exchange Online/Office 365 tenants have almost all of the features and functionality of on-premises Exchange Server deployments, without the need for running and maintaining their own servers. However, there is still one major gap companies consistently run into as they move to a hybrid Exchange Online/Office 365 environment: distribution list (DL) management.
Read More