Thursday, November 27, 2014

Integrate Lync with Your Avaya Environment - Webinar

Get ready to attend the next upcoming webinar from Perficient,Inc. on Integrating Microsoft Lync with Avaya to take your end yours Telephony experience to the next level if you use both of these products within your Organization.


This session is scheduled for Wednesday, December 3, 2014,1:00 p.m. CT and presented by Keenan Crockett MCM, a senior solutions architect and Lync team lead, and Jason Sloan MCM, a lead technical consultant, will be covering a variety of topics, including:
  •     How to plan for audio conferencing
  •     Click-to-call functionality
  •     Lync softphone/hard phone options
  •     Simultaneous ringing endpoints
  •     Importance of voicemail
  •     High-level understanding of Lync call admission control planning

Review this Official Blog post from Perficient to know more : Upcoming Webinar: Integrate Lync with Your Avaya Environment

Identity Management Is Easy in Office 365

Today spent some time in watching Teched Europe 2014 videos and came across various excellent recorded sessions and each are best at explaining each important aspect of the Microsoft Technology. As usual I started with Office 365 Sessions and found the Identity Management Session by Paul Andrew Technical product manager from Office 365 team is really an awesome session explaining the current Identity Models available with Office 365, the session is bundled with rich information on Identity Management covering all aspects of each Model in detail and provides viewers with adequate knowledge to choose the best one for their requirement.



I am writing this post today to share this to learning to readers and refer them to view this must watch video session available on demand from Channel 9 and get to know more on Identity Management with Office 365.


 Access the session here: Identity Management Is Easy in Office 365

Sunday, November 23, 2014

New Update for Yammer Sign-in !!!

I am writing this post with reference to the latest announcement made by Microsoft team on new Yammer Sign-in feature which allows users to access Yammer with their Office 365 credentials and to work across Office 365 applications with ease. This is a great milestone on the Office 365 roadmap for Yammer



Many Organizations adopted Yammer and started to use this as their Official Enterprise Social networking medium and this new feature adds more benefit for customers to access yammer with a single Login with their Office 365 Credentials and switch between Yammer and other O365 Applications at ease.

Microsoft team updated that Office 365 sign-in for Yammer will follow a phased release schedule between December 2014 and March 2015.

Below are the two key requirements for this feature to work,

  • Yammer Enterprise is activated in a network’s Office 365 Admin Center
  • Yammer single sign-on (SSO) is not enabled.

Yammer SSO is still enabled by most of the Organizations, where the relaying party trust setup between Yammer and ADFS making the SSO to work smoothly, but still we have dependency on Token Sign-in cert renewal and regular federation metadata updates with Yammer Service, failing on this part affects Yammer Login and also when you are enabled for this SSO model this new feature will not work because when we go for this new Sign-in mode we are now dependent on the same Office 365 Sign-in credentials\Identity and not a separate identity as with SSO for Yammer.  For normal Organizations who does not have complex requirements this new feature is a good option to make a switch, for Large Enterprises with Complex requirements Yammer SSO is recommended.

Access this Office Blog post her : Use your Office 365 credentials to sign in to Yammer

Review this Office Online Post to know more: Office 365 sign-in for Yammer

Participate in the YamJam to know more on this with live updates.

Thursday, November 20, 2014

Get Ready to Upgrade your SHA-1 Certificates!!!

Believe most of you are aware that SHA-1 SSL certificates are going to be discontinued by Microsoft after 2016. As we all know that SHA-1 is the commonly used certificate and most of the websites out there in the Internet are using this Cert and also this is the common Certificate that is used inside most of the Organizations.


I am writing this post today to refer and remind you up on this critical update to begin your Cert upgrades to supported SHA-2 SSL certificates proactively and point you to the vital resources well written and available in the community by Technical Experts and vendors for better understanding on the topic.

MVP Jeff Guillet has recently written an Excellent blog post in WindowsITPro explaining in-depth information on Microsoft's decision to discontinue SHA-1 SSL certs and potential impacts that will arise if we continue to use this and how long you have time to get the certs upgraded, the behavior that you will experience over time and references to other Critical resources and tools that can help you to get things moved on.


Review here: Is Your Organization Using SHA-1 SSL Certificates?

As you read in the above article Google is taking the lead to notify users when they use SHA-1 Certs beginning with Chrome 39 starting this November 2014 and below Symantec article is well written to explain this in detail showing us the future experience with every upcoming version of Chrome till Q1 2015.


Review here: Google’s SHA-1 Deprecation Plan for Chrome

Below Online Tool from DigiCert is quite good to Identify the affected Certs in your domain at ease and begin your update


Access here: DigiCert® SHA-1 Sunset Tool

Above resources are well enough to get the required information on the topic and you can still look out for more in the external community for further reading. Hope soon we all get the certs updated to avoid any last minute hassles affecting end user experience.

Wednesday, November 19, 2014

Office 365 Security - New MVA Courses now Available

Microsoft team is doing great in terms of providing excellent product and technical training in the recent years and Microsoft Virtual Academy Courses are on the top priority in the available resources list, which provides more insight on each product to the core with excellent walk-through training sessions and labs, to add further to the list Courses available for Office 365 and to provide more insight on the latest Microsoft Security enhancements with Office 365, three new Courses launched recently and now made available in Microsoft Virtual Academy website.


Office 365 Security & Compliance: Exchange Online Protection

Topics covered: 

01 | Introduction to EOP

02 | EOP Architecture

03 | How Does EOP Handle Spam?

04 | Exchange Transport Rules

05 | Reporting & Message Trace

06 | Mail-Flow & Connectors

07 | Data Privacy

Next Steps | Recommended Resource


Encryption in Office 365

Topics Covered:

01 | ​Introduction to Encryption in Office 365

02 | Information Rights Management

03 | Office 365 Message Encryption

04 | S/MIME


Data Loss Prevention in Office 365

Topics Covered:

01 | Introduction to Data Loss Prevention in Office 365

02 | End User Experience

03 | DLP Policy Management Fundamentals

04 | Under the Hood: Sensitive Content Detection

05 | DLP Reporting and Customization

Recommended Resources & Next Steps

Access the Office Blogs post to know more : Microsoft Virtual Academy courses—Office 365 security

*Also these videos are Available in Channel 9 for download on demand.


Deployment guide for SharePoint 2013 E-Book

Microsoft team recently released deployment guide for SharePoint 2013, its now available for free download from Microsoft download center.

This book provides deployment instructions for SharePoint 2013. The audiences for this book include application specialists, line-of-business application specialists, and IT administrators who are ready to deploy SharePoint 2013.


Download here:  Deployment guide for SharePoint 2013

Thursday, November 13, 2014

Exchange Server CUs and RUs are delayed !!!

I am writing this post a bit late and I believe everyone is aware about the latest update from Microsoft team that Cumulative updates for Exchange Server 2013 and Roll-Up updates for Exchange Server 2010 and 2007 scheduled for this November are delayed until December 2014.


Review here for complete update : November Exchange Releases delayed until December 

This is a good move from Microsoft where they proactively identified the issue and delayed the CU/RU release and saved valuable time of most of the customers before they identify and come up with this as before and I hope the final release will be a standard bug free one. Keeping my fingers crossed...

Update: 

Microsoft team released the Updates this December, review my below related post.

Exchange Server Updates now Available !!!

Tuesday, November 11, 2014

Clutter Reaches GA !!!

Microsoft team made another significant announcement today, the most awaited feature on Microsoft Road-map for Office 365 powered by the new Office Graph, "Clutter" roll out started for all the O365 business customers.


Read the complete announcement with a video demo on this great feature through the below Office blog post.

De-clutter your inbox in Office 365

See how clutter works below,

Use Clutter to sort low priority messages in Outlook

Get to know how to administer clutter feature as an Admin

De-Cluttering everyone’s inbox

Additionally, read the below excellent write ups from Tony Redmond MVP for more insight on this topic.

Clutter arrives to impose order on Office 365 mailboxes

FAQ: Answers to common Office 365 Clutter questions

Lync becomes Skype for Business !!!

Microsoft never stops innovation and today they made a significant announcement on next version of Lync, Microsoft re-branded next version of Lync as "Skype for Business" which is quite catchy, as per the announcement we can expect the product release in first half of 2015.



Here is the extract from the announcement:

In the first half of 2015, the next version of Lync will become Skype for Business with a new client experience, new server release, and updates to the service in Office 365. We believe that Skype for Business will again transform the way people communicate by giving organizations reach to hundreds of millions of Skype users outside the walls of their business.

This is really a great news and I am happy to share this to you along with other community members and I am all set to welcome the next version of Lync Server aka Skype for business

Review the Official Blog here: Introducing Skype for Business

Read the below ZDNet post for more updates.

Access here: Microsoft rebrands Lync as 'Skype for Business'; readies 2015 releases

I will continue to update this post once I get more information on this topic, stay tuned...

Wednesday, November 05, 2014

Getting started with PowerShell 4.0 - Jeffrey Hicks

PowerShell Guru Jeffrey Hicks MVP recently wrote a whitepaper for PowerShell Newbies to begin with PowerShell 4.0 basics and its available for free download from Veeam.com and this is a must one to have handy for every IT Pro who wants to learn and work with PowerShell.



Additionally, You can register yourself to the new E-Learning Course from Jeff though WindowsITPro scheduled for Wednesday, November 12th and try to Enroll by today and SAVE 15%

Register here: Getting Started with PowerShell 4.0

*Refer my PowerShell Section in the blog  to access all other related resources available for further Learning. Happy Scripting...