The Business Case for Microsoft Office 365

10th of November, 2014 / / No Comments

Businesses of all sizes and industries are considering adopting Microsoft Office 365. Some customers have a clear vision of the desired capabilities. Others have weighed up the options and identified that there are savings to be leveraged. Others still have heard the hype, but don’t know where to start.

Office 365, like any technology, offers a variety of solutions and risks to any business. Kloud has extensive skills and experience in Microsoft Office 365 and have assisted many commercial and public sector enterprise customers successfully navigate the journey onto Office 365.… [Keep reading] “The Business Case for Microsoft Office 365”

Start-up like a pro or fast track cloud in your enterprise. . .

30th of October, 2014 / / No Comments

As part of my job I regularly interact with IT and business leaders from companies, across a diverse range of industries. A similarity I see across most businesses is that they contain a bunch of knowledge workers that all need to interact both internally and externally with common parties (internal departments / branches, customers, suppliers, vendors and government / regulatory bodies).

So how do knowledge workers in today’s highly connected world collaborate and communicate? Aside from telephone and face to face communication, email is still the primary tool of communication, why?… [Keep reading] “Start-up like a pro or fast track cloud in your enterprise. . .”

Cloud Strategy – do you need one?

20th of June, 2014 / / No Comments

Today’s organisations demand that their services perform better, cost less, are more reliable and offer greater flexibility than ever before. With high quality and quickly evolving consumer technologies, the expectation of IT services in the workplace is that they now reflect the same calibre of tools available to people outside of the office.

With common perceptions that business IT capabilities are too far behind, many departments look to acquire and provision cloud services themselves, without involving the IT organisation.… [Keep reading] “Cloud Strategy – do you need one?”

The Bottom Line Value of Design

3rd of June, 2014 / / No Comments

There has been an ever-brightening spotlight put on design and its business value over the past decade. That attention has been earmarked by the sweeping successes of companies who invest in it. I’m not talking about just brand and interface, but a broader definition of design. I’m talking about design as informed planning and deliberate decisions regarding how something looks, how it works and how it makes you feel.

Now more than ever before there’s an electric bustle amidst the startup scene where design is considered critical, often playing an instrumental role in driving success.… [Keep reading] “The Bottom Line Value of Design”

The FIM User Experience

27th of March, 2014 / / No Comments

A recent post by my colleague Jamie Skella “What UX Isn’t” started me thinking about how UX applies to FIM. Throughout my career as an Identity Management Consultant, I’ve seen projects reach a point in maturity where stakeholders are walked through the tasks an admin or user will perform in the portal, and the average eyebrow height in the room rises exponentially.

Those of us working with Microsoft’s identity products for a while, are used to seeing the glitz and glamour of the Sync Engine console, previously the only interface available with the product, so when the FIM Portal was introduced with FIM 2010, it gave a “user friendly” interface to work with.… [Keep reading] “The FIM User Experience”

Office 365: To Federate or Not to Federate… that is the Question

5th of June, 2013 / / 8 Comments

Yesterday, Microsoft released a new version of their ‘DirSync’ utility (http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dn246918.aspx) which up until yesterday provided a basic ‘copy’ of your local Active Directory accounts (Active Directory Domain Service or ‘AD DS’) from your premises to the MS Cloud directory (referred to as ‘Azure Active Directory’) for Office 365 (and other Cloud apps such as Team Foundation Service (TFS Online).

This blog is written for those considering moving to Office 365 (or have moved to Office 365) but haven’t identified any other application in the organisation apart from Office 365 that requires Active Directory Federation Services and SAML/WS.Federation… [Keep reading] “Office 365: To Federate or Not to Federate… that is the Question”

Ideal Workloads for Cloud

17th of May, 2013 / / No Comments

Working in the fast changing world of IT, sometimes is good to stop, take a breather and reflect on where we are and how we got here. Cloud computing is certainly no exception and has had an enormous amount of hype over the past 5 years, but has it lived up to the promise?

Looking Back

I and many others at PDC 2008 listened to the announcement of Azure and the follow up communications as Microsoft went “all in” on the cloud.… [Keep reading] “Ideal Workloads for Cloud”

Publish Content to the Azure CDN with URLRewrite

23rd of May, 2012 / / 1 Comment

Content Delivery Network

A content delivery network (CDN) is a distributed network of servers that will cache and serve content from edge nodes closer to the user’s browser. By utilising this functionality websites can offload much of their static content delivery to those servers saving valuable web processing and bandwidth for core business related activities and giving the user a better online experience.

A CDN should be considered for delivering content for Internet workloads that exhibit:

  • Static or slow changing content
  • Content shared by many users
  • Geographically dispersed users
  • Ad-hoc or irregular usage (and therefore don’t get the benefit of the browser cache)
  • Expensive or saturated bandwidth connections

One or more of these characteristics is an indicator that a CDN may be a worthwhile investment, but the investment need not be a large one.… [Keep reading] “Publish Content to the Azure CDN with URLRewrite”

Cloud Revolution – The Blind Entrepreneur

6th of December, 2011 / / 1 Comment

[Following from Cloud Revolution]

Profitable since the first quarter, 375 million page views per month, $4 million in annual revenue, 75 employees and $30 million in venture funding. Certainly sounds like a successful business, and it is.

I Can Has Cheezburger has leveraged the initial success of that hit web site by launching hundreds of other similar but slightly different sites based on the original. Many of these sites fail to attract traffic and are shut down within weeks, but every now and then one works, like “Fail Blog” or “Totally looks like“.… [Keep reading] “Cloud Revolution – The Blind Entrepreneur”

Cloud Revolution – The Late Night Scientist

6th of December, 2011 / / 1 Comment

[Following from Cloud Revolution]

It’s late at night in January and an email just arrived that has someone very excited. A medical student has won an auction, but this is no eBay auction, it’s an Amazon EC2 instance auction. She has been preparing for this moment for over a year and will make or break her post-doctoral research paper.

She is continuing the valuable work done by her predecessors in the field of on Parkinson’s research and its relationship to dopamine levels in the brain.… [Keep reading] “Cloud Revolution – The Late Night Scientist”