Purchasing Additional SharePoint Online Storage for Office 365

20th of August, 2014 / / 3 Comments

There are a number of different options for customers to purchase Office 365.  In the U.S.A. and the majority of markets, customers can purchase Office 365 directly from Microsoft via MOSP (Microsoft Online Subscription Program).  This is the most common way for small businesses to purchase Office 365.  Customers can purchase licenses using a credit card.  There is no minimum license quantity for MOSP.  Customers pay for Office 365 via an automatic monthly subscription.

In Australia, Telstra has a syndication agreement with Microsoft. … [Keep reading] “Purchasing Additional SharePoint Online Storage for Office 365”

Securing Emails Outside of Your Organization With Office 365 Message Encryption

3rd of August, 2014 / / 1 Comment

​For those of you who have been concerned about email security for a number of years, you may remember a solution from Microsoft called Exchange Hosted Encryption (EHE).  This was a cloud based service which allowed organizations to encrypt emails according to certain defined rules.  For example, you could encrypt emails where the intended recipient was outside of your organization and certain keywords or regular expressions where detected such as a credit card number.  This was a very useful service for protecting emails sent to ANY user, regardless of the relationship with the user’s company. … [Keep reading] “Securing Emails Outside of Your Organization With Office 365 Message Encryption”

Unable to Administer Office 365 Using PowerShell with Multi-Factor Authentication

3rd of August, 2014 / / 2 Comments

Back in February, Microsoft announced the release of multi-factor authentication.  This feature allows IT administrators to dramatically increase the security of Office 365 by requiring a second factor of authentication to access the service.  This feature is very simple to configure and use.  It is far simpler to configure multi-factor authentication for Office 365 than it is to enable an equivalent solution on premises.  To learn more about multi-factor authentication, I recommend the following blog post:

http://blog.kloud.com.au/2014/04/16/protect-your-identity-in-the-cloud-with-multi-factor-authentication/… [Keep reading] “Unable to Administer Office 365 Using PowerShell with Multi-Factor Authentication”

OneDrive for Business Redistributable Installer using the Office Deployment Tool for Click to Run

25th of July, 2014 / / 18 Comments

I’ve recently been working with a customer to deploy OneDrive for Business where Office 2010 is deployed in the SOE (OneDrive for Business is included as part of Office 2013). One of the issues that we faced is that unlike with the old SkyDrive Pro application, there is no offline or redistributable installer package for OneDrive for Business. When deploying to thousands of devices using a tool like SCCM, this is a problem.

There are two obvious ways to install OneDrive for Business:

  • “Click to Run” through Office 365
  • Upgrade the SOE Office version to Office 2013

While it is possible to scour the Internet and download what appears to be a deployable package, it is actually nothing more than a Click to Run stub loader that executes the Office 365 ProPlus installer.… [Keep reading] “OneDrive for Business Redistributable Installer using the Office Deployment Tool for Click to Run”

RDS and Shared Computer Support for Office 365 Pro Plus

15th of July, 2014 / / 1 Comment

There is no denying that the workplace is moving towards a multi-device world.  The majority of information workers (IWs) now have an average of 3 – 4 devices per user.  This can include a PC, notebook, tablet, and phone.  The problem is that Office Professional is licensed per device.  This means that organizations planning to deploy Office Professional have to purchase additional copies of Office to run on these different devices.  For most organizations, this is prohibitively expensive. … [Keep reading] “RDS and Shared Computer Support for Office 365 Pro Plus”

End User Access To Spam Quarantine in Office 365

13th of July, 2014 / / No Comments

One of the ​features of Office 365 which gets very little attention is Exchange Online Protection (EOP). EOP is a Microsoft cloud service which protects Exchange Online in Office 365 from spam and viruses. EOP is a built-in capability of Office 365. There is no additional license required to use it.

Emails which EOP detects as spam are trapped in a quarantine area. Users were notified that email was quarantined by an automatically generated email message from EOP.… [Keep reading] “End User Access To Spam Quarantine in Office 365”

Failure Upgrading DirSync with a Remote SQL Instance

10th of July, 2014 / / No Comments

I’ve just recently come across an issue when performing the upgrade procedure for the Microsoft Azure Directory Sync tool with a remote SQL database. The procedure seems simple enough at first glance and is documented here.

To break down the process it is only a few simple steps:

Install the new dirsync –

Dirsync.exe /fullsql

Click next on the upgrade wizard until complete

Run Powershell –

Import-Module DirSync

Run the following PowerShell cmdlet to update the backend database –

Install-OnlineCoexistenceTool -UseSQLServer –SqlServer <ServerName> -Upgrade -Verbose -ServiceCredential (Get-Credential)

The Issue

This particular issue will occur during the upgrade procedure on the PowerShell step Install-OnlineCoexistenceTool with the following error –

VERBOSE: Running InstallOnlineCoexistenceTool in Upgrade mode.… [Keep reading] “Failure Upgrading DirSync with a Remote SQL Instance”

Azure Active Directory Synchronization Tool: Password Sync as Backup for AD FS Federated Domains

9th of July, 2014 / / No Comments

Kloud has helped many Australian businesses leverage Microsoft cloud services such as Office 365, Intune and Microsoft Azure and most have implemented Active Directory Federation Services (AD FS) to provide a highly available Single Sign-On (SSO) user experience. In mid-2013, the Windows Azure Active Directory Synchronization Tool was updated to support password synchronisation with Azure Active Directory, which provided an alternative way to leverage on-premises authored identities with Microsoft’s cloud services.

Password synchronisation is a feature of the Azure Active Directory Sync Tool that will synchronise the password hash from your on-premises Active Directory environment to the Azure Active Directory.… [Keep reading] “Azure Active Directory Synchronization Tool: Password Sync as Backup for AD FS Federated Domains”

Do It Yourself Cloud Accelerator – Part II BranchCache

2nd of July, 2014 / / 2 Comments

In the last post I introduced the idea of breaking the secure transport layer between cloud provider and employee with the intention to better deliver those services to employees using company provided infrastructure.

In short we deployed a server which re-presents the cloud secure urls using a new trusted certificate. This enables us to do some interesting things like provide centralised and shared caching across multiple users. The Application Request Routing (ARR) module is designed for delivering massively scalable content delivery networks to the Internet which when turned on its head can be used to deliver cloud service content efficiently to internal employees.… [Keep reading] “Do It Yourself Cloud Accelerator – Part II BranchCache”

Education institute improves productivity and reduces costs with Microsoft Azure and Office 365

12th of June, 2014 / / No Comments

Customer Overview
Principals Australia Institute (PAI) provides quality professional learning, leadership development and support to principals and school leaders. PAI’s programs and services help build effective, inspirational and sustainable leadership in Australia’s 10,000 government, Catholic and independent primary and secondary schools.

Business Situation
PAI expressed a desire to improve productivity, manage costs and reduce overall risk to its business. Kloud worked with PAI IT staff to provide a roadmap towards a set of IT reforms that delivered on these goals.… [Keep reading] “Education institute improves productivity and reduces costs with Microsoft Azure and Office 365”