The fight against email spam is an on-going battle for mail administrators and while cluttering up a mailbox with junk mail is undesirable, phishing campaigns can be a serious security issue. Those with malicious intent are highly motivated and their practices have evolved over the years; fortunately, the technologies available to protect against such attempts […]
Microsoft
Reimagine Your Business in a Digital-First World with Microsoft
The ability to stay on top of ever changing trends within your business environment is constantly a challenge. One facing many organizations today is that of digital transformation. Four key trends around digital transformation that we uncover in this latest guide, include: – Increased focus on the customer experience – Continued connectedness – this is […]
Azure DevOps: Predictability in the Cloud with Azure Automation
Why to automate anything should be obvious. In addition to efficiency, there are also considerations on consistency, repeatability, and predictability to programmatically carry out tasks. Considering DevOps, automation is an effective vehicle to minimal user interventions from both Dev and Ops for establishing application infrastructure, configuring run-time, and deploying a target application. This automation provides […]
Introduction to Microservices using Azure Service Fabric
Today’s Internet scale services are built using microservices. Example microservices are protocol gateways, user profiles, shopping carts, inventory processing, queues, caches, etc. Microservices can further be defined by: Is (logic + state) independently versioned, scaled, and deployed Has a unique name that can be resolved Interacts with other microservices over well-defined interfaces like REST Remains […]
Office 365 – Better Ways to Schedule Meetings w/ External Parties
When it come to scheduling meetings with external parties, it seems like we fail to leverage technology more times than not. While there are several options available to make scheduling meetings easier, we almost always fail back to the default “what times work for you” conversations. This is everyone, I see it with clients, with […]
A look at the new Cloud features for Skype4B in Office365
Beginning December 1, 2015, Microsoft will be officially rolling out a number of new features within Office365 that significantly enhance the Skype for Business workloads. These features have been in preview form for a few months now, but December 1 marks the date where it becomes generally available (GA) for all tenants within Office365, across the […]
Office 365 – Getting Closer To “True” Single Sign-On For Outlook
One of the Office 365 concepts that gets glossed over a bit is “single sign-on”, in particular when it comes to Outlook. Many will provide the statement that if you implement AD FS, then you have single sign-on. While it is true that AD FS provides single sign-on for some workloads, I’ve often argued that […]
Office 365 – Azure AD Connect: Did You Know?
Azure AD Connect is the synchronization tool formerly known as “Azure AD Sync” which was formerly known as “DirSync”. Regardless of what you call it, Azure AD Connect is the tool you’ll use to synchronize your on-premises Active Directory with Azure AD. With each name change, new features have been added to the product. Below […]
Azure: Did You Know? Azure Storage Explorer
This week at the Microsoft Connect() 2015 conference there were many new features and updates Microsoft Azure and rest of the Microsoft developer stack. Among these updates was the announcement of the all new Azure Storage Explorer being added to the set of Azure SDK tools. The Azure Storage Explorer is a stand-alone application that […]
Big News – Yammer Deprecating SSO and DirSync!
If you are a Yammer customer, you will know that the identity and directory synchronization has been separate from the rest of Office365. This means that you need separate servers and software installations to sync users from your on-premises AD and provide SSO capabilities to Yammer. If you are unsure about this configuration, check out […]
Innovation with Azure Machine Learning and Dynamics AX
On a call with Microsoft this morning, they referenced this public case study. I thought it was a really nice example of using a multitude of Azure services to innovate their business – Machine Learning, Mobile Services, IoT Hubs, and Dynamics AX. Check out the video below and the full description here – https://customers.microsoft.com/Pages/CustomerStory.aspx?recid=12792