On June 24th, Microsoft hosted a “Beyond Build and Ignite” event at our local MTC office. The event was well-attended by clients looking for additional information on top of the hours of video content available from the last month’s Ignite event.
In addition to Perficient being one of the sponsors of this event, I was given the opportunity to present as part of the “Cloud Productivity” track. Keeping with the “beyond” theme, my session was titled “Exchange Online: After the Migration… Now What?”.
The idea around this session was that Exchange Online offers a number of features that aren’t always deployed right out of the gate. In many cases, it makes perfect sense to wait on the enablement of these features until the mail migration is completed and implement them as part of a “phase 2”. You likely already own these “phase 2” features and I’ve identified them in the presentation slide deck below.
Session Description
Below was the published session description:
Now that you’re not spending your time patching mail servers or worrying about disk space issues, maximize the value of your Office 365 licensing by implementing some of the advanced features that you already own. In this session, learn about some of the “phase 2” features that can make your users more productive and provide for a more secure messaging environment.
Session Summary
After a quick review of some of the constraints as to why you can’t light up all the features during the initial mail migration, we discussed that post-migration you now have time to tackle that list of items that always seem to get pushed aside.
With these “phase 2” features, I like to categorize them as one of three areas:
- Secure Endpoints
- Strengthen Compliance
- Protect Sensitive Data
Secure Endpoints
Here we have the new Office 365 Mobile Device Management (MDM) and multi-factor authentication (MFA). The Office 365 MDM solution is a nice upgrade from legacy ActiveSync policies and provides for more granular control with features like “selective wipe”. The MFA feature is one that will see great benefit from the Outlook client change to “modern authentication” and allows you to use your mobile device as a security token for the second-factor.
Strengthen Compliance
In this section, we discussed how eDiscovery can be delegated out and offloaded to your internal legal or compliance officers. We also discussed some of the common misconceptions around technologies like litigation hold, in-place hold, retention policies and retention hold. When discussing the topic of PSTs, about half the room admitted they had PSTs in their environment (the other half has them too, they just don’t know it). We talked about some strategies for addressing PSTs and how the new Office 365 PST Import Service can assist.
Protect Sensitive Data
We wrapped up the “phase 2” discussion by talking about ways to secure the data in Office 365. While technologies like Information Rights Management (IRM) are really there to keep the honest folks honest, it still is a feature worth enabling in your environment. We also discussed the Office 365 Message Encryption option and how Data Loss Prevention (DLP) is more than just protecting against SSNs and credit cards being sent via email. If you’re not familiar with the “Document Fingerprinting” feature in DLP, I suggest that you check it out.
Phase 3?
Finally, we wrapped up with some of the other features in Office 365 that may require additional licensing. So things like Azure AD Premium and the Enterprise Mobile Suite (EMS). We also discussed one of the most recent additions, “Advanced Threat Protection” (ATP), and how it can protect against malicious URLs in email messages.
Slides
If you would like the slides from the presentation, I have made them available for download: JoePalarchio_BeyondIgnite_Presentation.pdf
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