Tuesday, 11 August 2015
Wednesday, 6 May 2015
Friday, 17 April 2015
Value of Adding a domain to Office 365 (way more than you might think)
Adding a domain name to your Office 365 is a key part to making your People Centric Enterprise work. Its pretty simple to do, but it will give your firm a unified email domain while still working with Office in the Cloud. No more having to either maintain a an on-site Exchange Server or have to give people a gmail or hotmail address for your business.
Its technically easy to do, as the video shows, but its worth thinking about how this all fits in the new People Centric Enterprise.
Your domain name is more than just a company name, it should be a brand, a personality and identity that reflects something about what you want to tell the world. By being able to assign all your users names with your domain, the same domain as your web page, you create a Cloud based identity. Users can see that your web page, your Office 365 and your email and Lync are all part of a single surface that they can contact from any device anywhere.
Having a single domain that for the web site and the internal messaging and collaboration builds a sense of unified working, where the people are not being made to fit in to boxes. Rather your domain becomes a large tent where your workers, your partners and your customers can find ways to communicate, learn and share around your business.
Labels:
Cloud,
DNS,
Domain,
email,
Office 365
Monday, 13 April 2015
Ravello looks amazing
This the demo but can the cloud really be this easy? I am registering for a demo and will see.
Friday, 27 March 2015
The world of a SharePoint professional is about to change
SharePoint IT generally involved a great deal of infrastructure and server specification, build and test. This can be very time consuming, and it was my experience that from the first requirements gathering to build would often take months. My own way of working was to create a virtual machine of SharePoint and work with the client early on, to provide Agile designing.
But over time this caused its own problems. My virtual machines would generally not use AD, they would have a express database, and I would use the some server admin account to run all of the Server Accounts, making for a less than robust account. So over time I would use a better VM provided with AD, DNS, and SQL, but this itself became something of a project. I could copy the boxes over but to build them in client environments was not a full dev box task. From an initial requirements gathering to a running system kept taking months.
The best way was to get a company that already had SharePoint and then start doing the requirements gathering, but this meant that the organization had to commit to SharePoint before really knowing what the use case would be, not very likely. Office 365 solves these problems nicely. You can get the client a demo site with 25 to 250 users in a matter of hours or days at the most and be working in a preparation project in the first week. But this does not mean that technical skills are not longer needed, its just that they are moving more to things like connectivity, sync, app development, security and identity management.
That is why I have included the video above, it is part of one of the new skills every SharePoint IT pro needs now, creating AD FS integration between existing legacy AD on-prom and Azure AD running your SharePoint 2013. Even if you never do this in your job you need to fully understand what is involved and the risks involved. Previously AD was just there, you worked with what you had as a SharePoint expert. But today you need to be more aware of how AD works, and the problems of integrating existing ADs, and all their potential problems, in to the Cloud.
But over time this caused its own problems. My virtual machines would generally not use AD, they would have a express database, and I would use the some server admin account to run all of the Server Accounts, making for a less than robust account. So over time I would use a better VM provided with AD, DNS, and SQL, but this itself became something of a project. I could copy the boxes over but to build them in client environments was not a full dev box task. From an initial requirements gathering to a running system kept taking months.
The best way was to get a company that already had SharePoint and then start doing the requirements gathering, but this meant that the organization had to commit to SharePoint before really knowing what the use case would be, not very likely. Office 365 solves these problems nicely. You can get the client a demo site with 25 to 250 users in a matter of hours or days at the most and be working in a preparation project in the first week. But this does not mean that technical skills are not longer needed, its just that they are moving more to things like connectivity, sync, app development, security and identity management.
That is why I have included the video above, it is part of one of the new skills every SharePoint IT pro needs now, creating AD FS integration between existing legacy AD on-prom and Azure AD running your SharePoint 2013. Even if you never do this in your job you need to fully understand what is involved and the risks involved. Previously AD was just there, you worked with what you had as a SharePoint expert. But today you need to be more aware of how AD works, and the problems of integrating existing ADs, and all their potential problems, in to the Cloud.
Tuesday, 24 March 2015
Office 365 and Domains
n our personal life most of us are more than happy to have email accounts that end in googlemail.com or hotmail.co.uk or apple.com. It actually makes it easier for people to find us, they need to only learn our prefix. The problem is few of us have our names as googlemail accounts, we end up using cute phrases or putting numbers at the end of our names.
When you get an Office 365 account you get a domain inside of the onmicrosoft.com domains.
This means if you register something like loveworks as your company name you will get emails and logins that end loveworks.onmicrosfot.com and your emails will be of the form <username>@loveworks.onmicrosoft.com.
Again for a smaller company this might be fine, but for a larger firm or a firm with more established presence on the web you might want to use an existing domain, or register a new domain so your users can got to a URL like loverorks.com rather than loveworks.onmicrosoft.com. This is probably a minimal step for users who are moving to Office 365 and here is the easiest clearest video I have found to do this:
Now say you are an even more mature company with an existing Active Directory on premise and lots of applications running using your Active Directory. You still want to use Office 365 for mail, messaging and collaboration but you want to keep your existing Active Directory and manage your identities on AD. This makes things much more complex. You can sync your identities between the on-prem and Office 365.
I will cover steps to do this in later blog posts.
For now let me say this is something you really need to think about. If you can live with a separate AD in the cloud and your users have two logins and two passwords to remember its probably best to live with it. By synching your on-prem AD to Azure AD used by Office 365 you are inviting a lot of work. If you only have less than 100 employees, or a lot of contract workers who never get in your AD, or no onsite AD then its best to keep everything in the Cloud.
Sync can be great and this is an amazing features of Microsoft, but its worth thinking that millions of people have email addresses in the cloud that they use everyday, without worrying about online sync. It might be good to start thinking Cloud-First, keeping things off premise as much as possible.
When you get an Office 365 account you get a domain inside of the onmicrosoft.com domains.
This means if you register something like loveworks as your company name you will get emails and logins that end loveworks.onmicrosfot.com and your emails will be of the form <username>@loveworks.onmicrosoft.com.
Again for a smaller company this might be fine, but for a larger firm or a firm with more established presence on the web you might want to use an existing domain, or register a new domain so your users can got to a URL like loverorks.com rather than loveworks.onmicrosoft.com. This is probably a minimal step for users who are moving to Office 365 and here is the easiest clearest video I have found to do this:
Now say you are an even more mature company with an existing Active Directory on premise and lots of applications running using your Active Directory. You still want to use Office 365 for mail, messaging and collaboration but you want to keep your existing Active Directory and manage your identities on AD. This makes things much more complex. You can sync your identities between the on-prem and Office 365.
I will cover steps to do this in later blog posts.
For now let me say this is something you really need to think about. If you can live with a separate AD in the cloud and your users have two logins and two passwords to remember its probably best to live with it. By synching your on-prem AD to Azure AD used by Office 365 you are inviting a lot of work. If you only have less than 100 employees, or a lot of contract workers who never get in your AD, or no onsite AD then its best to keep everything in the Cloud.
Sync can be great and this is an amazing features of Microsoft, but its worth thinking that millions of people have email addresses in the cloud that they use everyday, without worrying about online sync. It might be good to start thinking Cloud-First, keeping things off premise as much as possible.
Tuesday, 9 September 2014
Office 365 brings it all together, finally
SharePoint Online as part of Office 365 is the Enterprise product I have been waiting for since 1999. Finally all the benefits of web, single location, access anywhere, shared community standards and online storage along with security and resiliency are in one place.
Make no mistake about it, this is going to be the Microsoft's biggest impact on the economy since Office and Windows 95. With Office 365 it now possible for any firm, no matter how small, to start, on day one, with Enterprise level content management, VOIP, IM, and collaboration. (I wrote this in 2014 and clearly stand by it now)
The cost of starting a new business has just gotten a great deal smaller, and the ease that existing businesses can reconfigure themselves, collaborate with outside organisations, and to bring in contractors and prosumers is now a fraction of what it was.
Labels:
Cloud,
Office 365,
SharePoint
Tuesday, 24 June 2014
A Windows with Linux under the hood
Opps update is that is story is now invalid, MS is out of this business.
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Actually for some time I have been predicting a MS-Linux machine of some kind. Windows, once the backbone of MS business, is becoming less and less important in a world dominated by multi-channels and Cloud, and as Windows is less and less important as a core product it becomes a difficult to maintain mass of legacy code. I have to be frank that I have given up on Windows, but I still work extensively with Microsoft. The two are no longer a contradiction. I think the X2 Android Microsoft phone could be the first step for a generation of new devices, that offer the UI experience of Windows Metro but via HTML, running Linux, Unix and Android under the table.
Monday, 28 April 2014
Basic SharePoint 2013 Build
A fairly good introduction to SharePoint 2013 build I found, go for a learner but this is not how you will set up a proper farm.
After you learn this take a look at this blog post which tell you more about Service configuration. A lot of sites use Service Configuration wizard, but its best to get the powershell scripts for Service Configuration, which you can get here.
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