Monday, November 30, 2015

Microsoft PowerApps

Microsoft launched the new PowerApps, an enterprise service for innovators everywhere to connect, create and share business apps with your team on any device in minutes. And PowerApps helps anyone in your organization unlock new business agility.


Access PowerApps here: https://powerapps.microsoft.com/en-us/

Get to know more on the Official Microsoft Blog : Introducing Microsoft PowerApps

This is a great news for Developers and IT Pros to utilize latest innovation from Microsoft that address today's Business needs and improve IT Agility.

Office 365 Groups Overview, Administration and Roadmap in a NutShell

After the launch of Office 365 Groups most Organizations started their transition from traditional Distribution Groups to new Office 365 Groups. Microsoft team started to introduce new innovations to Office 365 Groups on the move and extended their Roadmap, Office 365 Groups has evolved from it initial stages and now have tighter integration capabilities with multiple Microsoft product line providing more enhanced features than ever before. Administrating Office 365 groups is now simplified with rich set of granular controls for management.



To know things in a nutshell, review the new Microsoft Ignite Australia 2015 session by Christophe Fiessinger MSFT.

View here: Office 365 Groups Overview, Administration and Roadmap

Update:

Your One stop resource with Support Articles to to create and manage Office 365 Groups



Access here: Office 365 Groups

Update:

New Support Articles published on Office 365 Groups

Multi-domain support for Office 365 Groups - Admin help

Make Office 365 groups public or private

Update:

Check out the latest innovations for Office 365 Groups.

Office 365 Groups now supports eDiscovery, litigation hold, dynamic membership and more!

Update:


Access Microsoft Ignite 2016 session below to know more on Office 365 Groups


Watch here: Explore the ultimate field guide to Microsoft Office 365 Groups

Update:

Latest updates to Office 365 Groups Administration

What’s new in Office 365 Groups administration—June 2016 update

Update:

Office 365 Groups Guest access is coming to all customers starting September 2016, Access the essential Admin help below

Guest access to Office 365 groups - Admin Help

Also review another great announcement related to Office 365 Groups below

New capabilities in SharePoint Online team sites including integration with Office 365 Groups

Update: 

Recently Microsoft came up with the plan of Automatic creation of Direct reports groups in outlook, and due to feedback received from Customers around the world, instead of making this update to roll-out globally, now this update applies to Customers that have received either message center post MC94808 or message center post MC98024.

Access the Related Support Articles below,

Automatic creation of Direct Reports groups in Outlook

Manage automatic creation of direct reports group - Admin help

Access this below Office Blogs post to know the recent significant enhancements made for Office 365 Groups

What’s new in Office 365 Groups for April 2017

Update:

Introducing Groups in Outlook for Mac, iOS and Android

Update:

Review the below documentation to know how you can configure Office 365 Groups settings using Azure AD cmdlets.

Azure Active Directory cmdlets for configuring group settings

Update:

New Feature Announcement: PowerShell support of Allow/Block guest access based on Domain list

Update:

Long waited Automated Expiration for Office 365 Groups is now available in public preview. With this new feature you can set an expiration timeframe for any Office 365 group you choose. Once that timeframe is set, owners of any groups set to expire will be asked to renew them if they still need them. Groups that aren’t renewed will be deleted. And using the “Soft-delete of groups” feature, any group that was not meant to be deleted can be restored within 30 days by the group owners.

Note: The Office 365 groups expiration feature is available in public preview for Azure AD Premium customers. This feature will require Azure AD Premium License when it GAs.

Access the Official blog post here to know more: Azure AD Automated Expiration for Office 365 Groups is now in Public Preview

Support Article here: Office 365 Group Expiration Policy

Update: 

Azure AD Expiration Policy for Office 365 Groups is now Generally Available.
Office 365 groups expiration can be configured from the Azure Active Directory portal, as well as programmatically via Azure Active Directory PowerShell.

Access the Support Article here: Configure the expiration policy for Office 365 groups

Read the Official Announcement post to know more: Azure AD Expiration Policy for Office 365 Groups is Generally Available.

Stay tuned for more updates...

Sunday, November 29, 2015

Microsoft Ignite Australia Sessions On demand

Microsoft Ignite Australia 2015 conference, completed earlier this Month and now the session videos are available on demand in Channel 9.  Lot of great stuff from Microsoft on their latest innovations sparking towards the future of IT.



Access Sessions here : Ignite Australia 2015

Office 365 Customer Security Considerations Workbook now Available

Microsoft team recently released the new Customer Security Considerations (CSC) workbook as an addition to the rich set of available resources for Information Security and Compliance.  The CSC workbook is designed to provide you with information on key security and compliance features to consider when adopting, deploying and managing Office 365.



You can access the Office 365 Service Trust Portal and Select Trust Documents and download the workbook and the usage guide.



Review the Official Blog here: Announcing Office 365 customer security considerations preview

If you are new to Service Trust Portal, review the below Support article to get started.

Review here: Get started with the Service Trust Portal for Office 365 for business, Azure, and Dynamics CRM Online subscriptions

Sunday, November 22, 2015

Troubleshooting Azure AD Application Proxy Guide now Available!!!

Microsoft Azure AD Application Proxy team recently published a Whitepaper, for troubleshooting Azure AD application proxy. This acts as a complete guide and provides full overview of all the capabilities around Application Proxy troubleshooting



Additionally read through the values and benefits of using Azure AD Application proxy through the eyes of an EMS Blackbelt.

Update:

Now read the new guidance from Microsoft on Security considerations when using Azure AD application proxy


Access here: Security considerations when using Azure AD application proxy

Update:

Get to know more on Azure AD Application proxy through the Azure AD Mailbag series

Azure AD Mailbag: Azure AD App Proxy

AzureAD Mailbag: Azure AD App Proxy, Round 2

Update:

New enhancements or Azure AD Application proxy in 2017

We’ve made the Azure AD App Proxy even better!

Stay tuned for more updates...

Top 5 Announcements for Office 365 !!!

Last week was quite a great week for Office 365, Microsoft team made various new significant announcements for Office 365 and also few more on other related platforms like Azure, Enterprise Mobility, SharePoint and Skype for Business.



This post is written to list out the Top 5 announcements made last week for Office 365

Office 2013 modern authentication public preview program got renamed to the Office 365 modern authentication public preview. Also now Modern authentication for Office 2013/2016 Windows client are now GA.

Archiving of Third Party data like facebook, twitter etc. in Office 365 was announced earlier this year and now available in Preview

Microsoft Team announced new Security and Compliance capabilities to Office 365, including Advanced Threat Protection, Customer Lockbox and Advanced eDiscovery, which integrates Equivio. Customer Lockbox and Advanced eDiscovery will be available for customers to purchase starting December 1, 2015.

Microsoft Graph (formerly “Office 365 Unified API”) reached GA as announced during last week Microsoft Connect() Developer event.

Finally,Enforcing Office 365 identity in Yammer is now available and Administrators can configure federated identity in Office 365 to achieve single sign-on (SSO) capabilities for all services in Office 365, which includes Yammer. Also Microsot team is removing the Yammer SSO and directory synchronization (DSync) tools, starting December 1, 2016.

Saturday, November 21, 2015

Raise your Voice in Office 365 UserVoice !!!

Microsoft is making innovations on the fly, day by day, and stay to update with all of these innovations are quite challenging, By accepting consisting feedback from customers and responding to their queries Microsoft team has over come this challenge and enhanced the adoption ratio.


Office 365 is one key area, where these fore said innovations are occurring at a rapid rate and to get feedback from customers "Office 365 User Voice" forum was launched. We could see lot of feedback posts and discussions are now available on various topics and I wrote this post today to bring this to readers attention. If you have not come across this yet, Its time for you to  utilize the same and share your feedback to Microsoft.

Raise your voice here: Customer Feedback for Microsoft Office 365

Saturday, November 14, 2015

Vision eBook - Protecting and Empowering Your Connected Organization

Microsoft Enterprise Mobility team published a great e-Book for readers, to know how to Protect Identities, Devices and Company Information in Today’s Device-Centric World.



In Today's cloud connected world, its essential to know how to move your workloads to cloud and also allow users to utilize the benefits of latest technology innovations, without compromising security and this e-Book is worth reading to know more on this topic and begin your journey with Microsoft Enterprise Mobility Suite (EMS).

Update:

I recently came across few more vital resources on the topic and referenced below for your reading as an add-on read.

Download: Managing Access and Help Protect Corporate Email Data on Mobile Devices

Download: Deploying Enterprise Solutions for Protecting Email Data on Mobile Devices

EMS Architecture Poster: Enterprise Mobility Poster



Tuesday, November 10, 2015

Overcome Throttling issues with Office 365 for your PowerShell Scripts

I am writing this post today to point you to the latest Exchange Team blog post, explains how to overcome throttling issues when running PowerShell cmdlets for large numbers of users in Office 365.




Its quite common that we generate reports or apply changes to large number of users in Office 365 as a part of Operations and need to wait for hours to get the results. We all know about the throttling limits that exist with Office 365 and sometime the script breaks and makes us to start from the scratch. Finally, Microsoft team published a blog post to overcome this issue.

By using the the help of Script blocks and Invoke-command cmdlet we can construct PowerShell Scripts that returns the required data without much issues on time and also a great PowerShell script "Start-RobustCloudCommand script" is shared to us that makes our job a lot easier.

More information is available in the below EHLO blog post,

Review here: Running PowerShell cmdlets for large numbers of users in Office 365

I have personally used this script for a recent requirement to disable clutter for a large set of users and it did worked well.

Here is the example,

Set-ExecutionPolicy Unrestricted

$cred = Get-Credential

$session = New-PSSession -ConfigurationName Microsoft.Exchange -ConnectionUri https://ps.outlook.com/powershell -Credential $cred -Authentication Basic -AllowRedirection

$importresults = Import-PSSession $session 


$Mailboxes = invoke-command -scriptblock {Get-mailbox -resultsize unlimited | select-object -property Displayname,PrimarySMTPAddress,Identity} -session (get-pssession)

$cred = get-Credential

.\Start-RobustCloudCommand.ps1 -Agree -Credential $cred -recipients $Mailboxes -logfile C:\temp\out.log -ScriptBlock {Set-Clutter -identity $input.PrimarySMTPAddress.tostring() -enable:$false} –interactive

This guidance is great and it will reduce some of our support cases related to throttling.

Get ready to Manage and Administer Office 365 better

Office 365 Administration mainly relies on the Admin Center and PowerShell, When Managing Office 365 via the Admin Center its is quite complicated as new features added day by day the Admin Center is now having various options made available in different areas and we need to navigate to multiple locations to manage things related to a single task. Also when it comes to reporting we require some additional innovation from Microsoft which can make the reporting lot easier and effective which  suits our needs and we don't require to invest on 3rd party providers.



To address the above said needs Microsoft team is revamping the Admin Center with new UI and enhancements which makes the Administrative experience a lot more easier and also new reporting capabilities are added including new usage reports across Office 365 workloads. Office 365 Admin Center Preview gets this soon and also upcoming Power BI Content Pack for Office 365 admins is a new add-on that will take the reporting capabilities to next level.

Office 365 Admin app also gets new features added to make administration a lot easier on the go, where ever you are with few clicks on your mobile.

PowerShell is the next reliable Administrative tool to manage Office 365 workloads, Automation relies here to make your management experience a lot easier, Microsoft team is giving additional guidance and resources to this key area along with the above said innovations.

All of this is covered with real time demo in the recent Microsoft Mechanics video series by Lawrence Chiu, Sr.Product Manager, Office 365

Review the Official blog post here: Office 365 admin updates—from portal enhancements to PowerShell

We can expect a lot more enhancements  in the upcoming days. Stay tuned...