Hybrid Cloud Series - Episode One Webinar

Cloud Computing is now ruling the IT world, Hybrid Cloud is the most optimal one and the preferred one for Larger Enterprises and I have wrote more posts on this earlier when I start researching on this topic and you can check my Cloud Computing Section to review the posts shared earlier which will give you some insight on the topic.

Microsoft team is now concentrating on providing enhanced service to the customers with their new moto "Mobile First, Cloud First" and transformed the current IT industry to the next level and still continue to innovate more on both ends of the Market, This post is written here to share about the upcoming webinar from Microsoft Cloud Team on Hybrid Cloud scheduled on Thursday, April 17th, 2014 from 10:00 A.M. – 11:00 A.M. PDT. and this is the first webinar in series and we can expect more episodes in the upcoming days.

This Webinar is a quite a informative one and  must attended one as we are getting chance to listen on Hybrid Cloud concepts directly from the key people Microsoft Technical Fellow Mark Russinovich and Microsoft Corporate Vice President Brad Anderson leading their Cloud business.

Register here : Hybrid Cloud Series - Episode One

*This great session completed successfully sharing great information on the new innovation and the future of Microsoft Cloud Computing and its now available on demand for registered users, Also you can get to know what was discussed on the Webinar in a nutshell with the help of the below excellent Redmond Magazine post below.

Check here: Microsoft Execs Offer the Case for Hybrid Cloud

MEC 2014 Completed!!!

MEC 2014 completed successfully, Microsoft team made this event larger than ever before and announced few more innovations during these days and show cast their innovation and best practices guidelines to the experts around the world and also our own experts delivered sessions which added some more value to the conference we knowledge is shared across both ends of the Technology, soon the recorded sessions will be available for our visibility.

The latest EHLO blog post MEC 2014 wrap-up updates some more on this clearly, When you review the article Microsoft team has created an excellent documentary film " Exchange Through the Ages "  on the evolution of Exchange which is a must watch for all readers.


Additionally, Our MVPs who attended and delivered sessions this time in MEC 2014 started to write posts on their experience in their blogs and soon we can get more information from them one after the other, which will give us a idea where our Technology is marching towards and once the MEC sessions are available we can review them with some insight provided to us already by our experts.

Check the below posts from our MVPs sharing their MEC experience to readers.

This was MEC 2014 (in a nutshell) - Michael Van Horenbeeck

Microsoft Exchange Conference 2014 finishes on a high -  Tony Redmond

The colorful side of MEC 2014: All the stuff that makes a conference - Tony Redmond

 MEC RECAP – It was great - JaapWesselius 

MEC 2014 Wrap-Up - Michel de Rooij

MEC 2014 wrap-up by the numbers - Paul Robichaux

Below is the script to download the MEC 2014 sessions created by MVP Paul  Robichaux

Script to download MEC 2014 presentations

One more script to download the videos and slides


Download All Videos and Slides from MEC 2014 - MVP Peter Schmidt

Update:

* MEC2014 sessions are available for audience at Channel9, Lets review and experience the Technology, check out the below EHLO blog post on the same and access the Channel9 MEC 2014 section and start your learning.

MEC 2014 Recordings are here!

Deployment guide for Office 2013

Microsoft team recently released the Office 2013 Deployment guide, Office 2013 is on the move now and most Organizations already deployed Office 2013 on to their environment and few or in the progress of rolling out this new Office to the users, deployment of Office with this version is made simpler than traditional ways of installing the product and also we have more enhanced features available with this version when compared to its predecessors.
 

This guide is a must have for all Administrators who want to deploy and manage Office 2013.

 
Download here:  Deployment guide for Office 2013

New Features for Office 365 this week!!!

As everyone know now the entire Microsoft Exchange Community is available in MEC 2014 and this time Microsoft made it large as ever before by including sessions from various Experts around the world covering both ends of the Technology and more discussions on the product line taking it one step further in the IT world, with this being said today Microsoft team updated their Office blog with a new post covering the latest innovations for this week from the team for Office 365.

Microsoft now majorly concentrates on providing rich user and administration experience, and bringing up a unified platform where  users can get access to what they need from any of the application they use seamlessly and also key innovations towards the social networking making it a robust product with the future Technology.

This latest post covers some key features listed below adding more value to the product and these will be rolled out soon to customers and we can expect much more in mere future.

Clutter, New Outlook Web App feature for managing large volume of emails in the box by recognizing which email is needed and which is not, using the user input intelligently and cleanup the mailbox at ease with Office 365.

Enhanced document collaboration, where user can now attach files from One drive for Business either in the form of attachment link or as a direct attachment from One drive  and provide permissions for the documents and also now group editing is possible on the document saved to One drive and shared to users  from anywhere from anyone who have access and we can easily differentiate the one with the help of versioning and also you can do real-time co-authoring on a file with Outlook Web App without having multiple copies created.

Groups, a new innovation from Microsoft with the help of Yammer where you can have groups created anywhere in office 365 and manage the groups and the same can be available in  Yammer, Exchange and SharePoint with the help of integrating group membership across these products delivering a unified experience for users from any application they use.

OWA for Android phones, Now mobile devices is everywhere and to have a seamless experience for users to access OWA on their Android mobile devices released the new app today, Microsoft made the app already available for other mobile platforms and this innovation covers that you can now access your email anywhere in any smartphone device which revolves around the market.

Read the complete blog post here: The evolution of email

Official Announcement here : Embracing cloud-first, mobile-first communications

More about these features will be show cast by Microsoft team in MEC 2014 and we can expect more details on these once the sessions are completed from Microsoft and also from community members in the upcoming days, stay tuned...

Additional Bytes...

*One more new innovation from Microsoft team was getting released today named ENVI an Intelligent E-mail companion, check out more on this in the below EHLO blog post

Bringing predictive email to the workplace

SharePoint Online Management Shell

When it comes to Office 365 most of the Organizations utilize the benefit of Exchange Online, Lync Online, SharePoint Online bundled together with their Enterprise Subscription, and all these products supports both fully Cloud and Hybrid deployment model this the beauty of Microsoft product where they can function flexibly and also integrate with each other for rich experience and also Microsoft team  continue innovate all of their product line seamlessly which is an add-on benefit when you use all of these services and When it comes to Administration we can manage these environments from our own desktops with the help of Windows Powershell by installing the appropriate Online module at ease.

I have already covered about Exchange Online and Lync Online Powershell module in my earlier post, and today I am sharing about the SharePoint Online powershell module, yesterday Microsoft team published the updated version of SharePoint Online module and made available for download and you can install this same as the other modules to your machine and manage the SharePoint Online Environment.

Download here: SharePoint Online Management Shell

Access the below Office blog post for some more information,

Introduction to the SharePoint Online Management Shell

One more vital post from MVP Rene Modery with real time demo available below explaining the new cmdlets in action.

New options in the SharePoint Online Management Shell PowerShell cmdlets

Today is a Great day in Microsoft!!!

Today is a great day in Microsoft History, where they moved one step forward in proving that, they do what they say. As all of us know their Mantra now " Mobile First, Cloud First " and as a first step, today they released the long waited Office for Ipad and also the new Enterprise Mobility Suite to the consumer world by Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella after he came to this position in a short span of time. This clearly shows Microsoft now has a strong leadership team and consistently innovating their product line and much more is yet to come, which we can see from Satya's speech towards the Organization future Road-map and all this shows that they are going in the right direction to reach beyond their regular goals by making their consumers at all ends happy day by day in this empowered IT world.

There are more information available around and below is the collection of the key information updated today by Microsoft in their various blog posts, new feeds and Webcast session which takes you to the real time journey in seeing the future with Microsoft.

Satya Nadella: Mobile First, Cloud First Press Briefing - News Center

Satya Nadella press briefing webcast - News Center 

A cloud for everyone, on every device - The Official Microsoft Blog

Enterprise Mobility for Every Business and Every Device - In the Cloud blog 

Announcing the Office you love, now on the iPad - Office Blog

To get things in a nutshell review the latest WindowITPro post from our Rod Trent 

Deemphasizing Windows, Microsoft CEO Kicks-off Announcements for Office for iPad and EMS

*Office 365 free for a year for iPad owners (3 days only) - ZDNet

*Microsoft Office Goes Fully Free on iPhone and Android Phones - TIME

* Office for iPad | Training courses - Hans Brender's Blog

Microsoft New Enterprise Mobility Suite is on the way...

Today I read this new post from ZDNet from our Microsoft veteran Mary Jo Foley, where she updated about the upcoming release of Office for IPAD suite along with the new Enterprise Mobility Suite from Microsoft team for centrally managing iPads, iPhones, Android devices, Windows devices and more in a single window targeting the Large Enterprise Customers. MDM is now everywhere in today's IT world and every Organization is bound to use mobile devices for accessing Corporate data and Applications on the move along with this now BYOD is on the top of it, where Organizations now allow users to bring their own devices and access the data anywhere on any device, this puts some overhead on the current setup and management where we need to concentrate more on regulatory compliance and Information Security.

To address the above said challenges Microsoft other product vendors have developed strong MDM  and MAM solutions that can manage these devices from one central location, but not all of them met the requirement from one to another as customer requirement varies from one another.

With this new Enterprise Mobility Suite Microsoft is planning to go one step further in making it a strong MDM solution that can address most Organizations needs and we can expect an update on this by tomorrow Webcast from Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, check the ZDNet post below to know more. We can see that Microsoft is reach out like ever before and innovation goes beyond imagination.

Access here:  Microsoft to unveil Enterprise Mobility Suite alongside Office for iPad

*Read this below TechNet Blog post from Microsoft Brand Anderson Corporate VP updating about the future of Enterprise Mobility.

Success with Enterprise Mobility: The Evolution of Enterprise Mobility

New Vulnerability issue with Microsoft Word!!!

Microsoft team released their latest security update where a hacker can gain control over your system when you access a RTF document using MS-Word which is a specially crafted with the vulnerability that will allow remote code execution during the access and cause potential threats, Microsoft team published a Security Advisory Bulletin on this issue and also released a support KB article that contains the fixit which disables opening RTF content with Word. Proper fix will be published soon with the monthly security updates as updated in the bulletin.

Access the Security Advisory here : Microsoft Security Advisory (2953095)

Access the MS KB here : Microsoft security advisory: Vulnerability in Microsoft Word could allow remote code execution

One more good fix available from WindowsITPro 

Blocking RTF Format Files in Word 2013 Using GPO

Update:

Microsoft team addressed this issue in this week patch Tuesday (8th April) along with other vulnerabilities, more information is available in the below Security Bulletin

Microsoft Security Bulletin Summary for April 2014

Microsoft Exchange Server 2013 Hybrid Deployment Help File!

Recently I was reading few articles on deploying and managing  Exchange 2013 Hybrid Environment and as I already manage a Hybrid Exchange 2010 Environment  sooner or later we would need to upgrade to the new version both On premises and Cloud as everyone on the future Road-Map, so while reading I started to  review most of the information available in TechNet and various other great resources available from the community. While collecting the resources I came across this beautiful Help file on Exchange Server 2013 Hybrid deployment on a Russian Exchange forum, This help file is a collective Information of articles available for Hybrid deployment in the TechNet along with few vital notes from the author which really makes it a good read and must have document when you start reading about Exchange 2013 based Hybrid deployment.

I am sharing this Help file for your knowledge and you can start reading this from today because it contains collection of required information under a single window and available for offline viewing in PDF format. I will be soon starting to write some vital posts on Exchange Hybrid deployments which will give you required knowledge to deploy and manage the Hybrid Exchange Environment.

Below is the download link for the file obtained from http://www.exchangeFAQ.ru and documented by Pavel Nagaev . 

Download: Microsoft Exchange Server 2013 Hybrid Deployment Help file

Note: Since this Help file is a cumulative collection of information obtained from TechNet I would request you to review the TechNet articles for Exchange 2013 Hybrid deployment post reading this help file to get new updates as the article keeps updated with the new enhancements and changes made in the product which is a known fact.

Access TechNet here : Exchange Server 2013 Hybrid Deployments

Microsoft System Center: Network Virtualization and Cloud Computing E-Book

When it comes to Virtualization now the hot topic is not about virtualizing servers now its about Virtualizing networks which we term as Network Virtualization and in today's IT world Cloud Computing is everywhere when you move to Cloud whether its a Hybrid or a private or even a Public cloud Networking plays a major role and today we can see the word SDN (Software-Defined Networking) often because its a software driven world now and we don't much rely only on the hardware devices which were used for network communications as before and we have much simplified environment design made with the help of these new Technologies and you can refer my Virtualization and Cloud Computing section on the blog to know more on these topics.

Today I am sharing this new Free E-book published yesterday by Microsoft press on Microsoft Sytem Center which is a must one for us to read and inhere they provide you some in depth view on how the new Hyper-V Network Virtualization works and assisting their SDN strategy.

Download the E-book here: Microsoft System Center: Network Virtualization and Cloud Computing

Analyzing Office 365 Mailbox Migration Performance

Today Microsoft team released the new script named AnalyzeMoveRequestStats.ps1 for analyzing the mailbox migration performance with Office 365. When it comes to Hybrid deployment moving the mailbox to and fro from On premise to cloud is a regular task and when you migrate your On premises environment to Office 365 the initial painful thing is the mailbox migration which will take ages if you don' t have the right configuration as guideline by Microsoft.

Moving mailboxes is now become a bit easy with Exchange Server 2013 where you can move a set of mailboxes as batches and manage the migration at ease and generate reports on the migration once completed. With this being said, this new Script from Microsoft is a add-on that will provide clear analysis report on the Mailbox migration status with the current environment over which Administrators can take appropriate action on getting things fixed at the right time to make the migration a smooth journey.

The latest EHLO blog post published for this script clearly explains how to read the details from the report along with the major gotchas to watch for when we plan for migration and much more in a nutshell

Access this post to download the script and know more : Mailbox Migration Performance Analysis

Also review the Exchange Online Migration Performance and Best Practices TechNet article to know more on the factors that will affect the migration in detail

Exchange Online Migration Performance and Best Practices

Along with this Blog post and TechNet review the below TechTarget post from our renowned MVP Steve Goodman on troubleshooting slow mailbox moves with Office 365, out there for a while which I read long back and sharing the same here for your additional knowledge.

Check here: Simple ways to troubleshoot slow mailbox moves to Office 365

Windows Azure becomes Microsoft Azure!!!

Microsoft team continue to innovate new enhancements to their product line as ever before, along with this now re-branding of their products are happening at a faster rate too, recently they renamed their Cloud based Storage Solution the popular "Sky Drive" to "One Drive" and now they planned to rename their Cloud Platform "Windows Azure" to "Microsoft Azure" they rename this for a good reason as the name implies that only Windows based platforms are supported on Azure wherein we can even run Linux and various other application Platforms on Azure and this really make sense to their decision. This is the hot topic that's going around in the IT World and we can soon expect the official announcement from Microsoft.

I am sharing this information here from my end to you after reading the latest ZDNet post from none other than our Mary Jo Foley.

Read the full post here: Microsoft to rebrand 'Windows Azure' as 'Microsoft Azure'

Update:

Here comes the Official Announcement from Microsoft team on the MSDN Blog as follows, Windows Azure will be renamed to Microsoft Azure, beginning April 3, 2014

Check here: Upcoming Name Change for Windows Azure

What's behind Office 365?

When it comes to Cloud Computing the very first thing comes to our mind is Office 365, Microsoft's largest cloud based offering which now dominates the IT Market and most Organizations have migrated to Office 365 and some are leveraging the benefits by deploying a Hybrid based solution that gave them the flexibility to manage both the environments seamlessly.

What is behind Office 365 ? was the question that remains with most of us, we all know that they are the same set of servers we use On premises with respect to Lync, Exchange and SharePoint. The High Availability and Site Resilient design along with their strong DataCenter Architecture that spans across the world and seamless integration among various product line at ease and bundled together with their service offerings makes them unique amongst their competitor products in the Cloud Market.

Microsoft always Innovate new things and with Office 365 its now more than what we could expect and you can refer my earlier blog posts under the office 365 section to know more on the present and the future road-map. In today's post I am going to reference you to the latest SharePoint Conference 2014 session on our topic in which the architecture behind Microsoft Office 365 is revealed for customers and you can take a look at how things are designed and working behind the walls of Microsoft Office 365 datacenter and the rich customer experience they provide along with much more information for IT Pros to know and stay one step a head in understanding the reality behind the product they support and how things actually work, at end of the day nothing is hidden and as always Technology is meant to be shared.
 
Download the presentation here: A behind the scenes look at Office 365 for IT Pros Presentation

Access the Video session here : A behind the scenes look at Office 365 for IT Pros

Certificate Planning in Exchange 2013

Just before few minutes Microsoft team published the new EHLO Blog post which is continuation in series of articles published for Exchange Server 2013 namely Load balancing, Namespace planning , Client Connectivity and now its on Certificate Planning. Ross written this post using various scenarios which will cover the requirements for SSL cert names that needs be there based on the Organization's Infrastructure design and how they can utilize the new features with Exchange Server 2013 and also address how you need to carefully choose the right cert names if you have a Co-existence environment and also expand across different sites and adopt High availability and Site resilience.

Certificates play a vital role with any Exchange deployment and every admin should be aware about the various certificates available for usage and how they vary from one another and which one to choose for the correct requirement etc. and to begin read the TechNet blog post referenced below explaining on the topic descriptively.

Check here: Digital Certificates and SSL

If you read the earlier blog posts in the series you will clearly have more idea on how Exchange Server 2013 supports new deployment features and also simplifies most of the requirements in terms of both cost and architectural simplification without compromising High Availability and End user experience.

You can additionally refer the blog posts where I referenced to my own blog posts under Exchange Server section pointing to the Original posts when they released with additional contents to read to make you gain some more information on the topics which puts you one step further to know things more clear with the past an the present.

Check the blog post here: Certificate Planning in Exchange 2013

Refer my earlier blog post to know the importance of SSL Certificates from Symantec which is an add-on read to know more.

Check here : SSL Certificates Live Infographic Poster from Symantec

How to setup Multiple Office 365 Tenants in a Single Active Directory with Steve Goodman!!!

I recently read this excellent post from our renowned MVP Steve Goodman on Search Exchange Forum in TechTarget on Using multiple Office 365 tenants with a single Active Directory and this reading puts you one step beyond the traditional reading we do for managing and implementing Office 365. I would call this is a good and a must read for every Office 365 Administrators to know things out of the box when we face new challenges during a complex design requirement of a customer per his current Infrastructure setup and to know what needs to be looked out first to complete his requirement through adequate knowledge and successfully implement a solution which meet their current standards and also pay way for future upgrades.

let's get in to our topic, one more key feature with Office 365 now is the support for Multiple Tenants with Single Active Directory, there are scenarios where customer Organization is split across different regions and they required to manage different locations separately and have seamless experience without any network overload and do not interested in changing their present setup for new implementations. In this scenario, some customers still prefer to have multiple Office 365 Tenants and ready to deploy additional servers if needed and spend some additional cost but their end motive is we should not re-architect their current setup and should not cause any impact to the End user and Business Experience. Though this is possible there are some caveats to look for and Steve wrote this excellent blog post to show you how things will work when you go for such model and what you should do as an Administrator when working on such projects.

Check the article here : Is a single Office 365 tenant better than using multiple tenants?

Additional Bytes:

You need to know one more key feature which is made possible with Office 365 Hybrid deployment for customers using Multiple SMTP domains using the right version of On premises Exchange Server 2010/2013 products on their environment for Autodiscover, which is an add-on read and I missed to blog about this on time and sharing this here.

Microsoft team made a recent innovation with Exchange Server 2013 and Exchange Server 2010 SP3 RU1 or later, wherein you have the new Autodiscover domain feature, which typically assist Hybrid customers who are using multiple SMTP domains in their environment to save cost by removing the requirement for having all the SMTP domains on the SSL cert which was previously a  mandate requirement and with this releases you can utilize the feature and setup one of your Primary SMTP domain as the Autodiscover domain name and the rest of the domains will be added automatically and configured to use the Primary SMTP domain for autodiscover settings when you run the HCW and this really a great deal for most of the Hybrid Customers.

I got this update from our renowned Office 365 MVP Sean McNeill on his blog. 

Refer the post here to know more: Office 365 Hybrid Configuration with Multiple SMTP Domains

Also read the below ExitCodeZero blog post on this feature with additional information,

Using the Autodiscover Domain feature to enable multiple SMTP domains in your hybrid configuration

Finally, With the latest release of Exchange Server 2013 SP1 we have now support for Multiple Active Directory Forest with Office 365 Hybrid deployment, check my earlier blog post on the same.

Review this TechNet blog post below to know more on these topics and get your Q & A addressed.

Multi-Forest and Multi-Tenant scenarios with Office 365

Update:

Steve started to write another Excellent series on Setting up a multi-forest hybrid Exchange deployment this year 2015, review this series to know more.

Access here : Setting up a multi-forest hybrid Exchange deployment

These are great Innovations with Office 365 for now and we can expect more in the upcoming days.

Update:

If you are looking to know how to Migrate mailboxes and service settings from one Office 365 tenant to another, the below blog post will be the best source to begin.

Access here: How to migrate mailboxes from one Office 365 tenant to another

Stay tuned for more updates...