Microsoft Intune: what, when, where, why, how

8th of June, 2015 / Lucian Franghiu / No Comments

Originally posted at Lucian.Blog.

Having worked with Microsoft Intune a fair bit recently, in some clever ways like to extended System Centre Configuration Manager to the cloud for multi-factor authentication purposes, I’ve come to find Intune quite handy. In most ways it can be considered SCCM in the cloud which isn’t necessarily a bad thing.

In this post I’d like to quick fire off a whole bunch of handy Intune facts, figures and maybe other f-words for commonly asked questions I’ve been asked about the product suite…

Microsoft Office 365 readiness assessment

1st of June, 2015 / Lucian Franghiu / 2 Comments

Originally posted at Lucian.Blog.

Okay, you have the green light and it’s time to get cracking deploying Office 365. Before a mailbox can be migrated, before even an account can be AADSync’ed, before you even provision the O365 tenant, there is the matter of checking if the existing infrastructure is ready to handle the great features of Office 365.

What is always recommended before the design phase of a project even starts is to conduct an Office 365 readiness assessment. Working on a project recently and having it fresh in my mind, I thought I’d put finger to keyboard (pen to paper) and jot down the key items to check.

There’s allot of IT companies out there who offer this discovery and assessment process which is great. As a handy reference point, here’s the approach I take, with the a focus on Exchange Online messaging as that’s what I’m pretty good at…

Skype for Business External Authentication

7th of May, 2015 / Arran Peterson / 13 Comments

Microsoft Lync/Skype for Business has revolutionised the way people can communicate and collaborate in the workplace. With light weight and portable form factors coming into their own, devices have enabled businesses to rethink their communication strategy. Lync not only enables users to communicate using great device form factors, but also from wherever they may be located. The sense of a roaming lync identity brings freedom to how people choose to collaborate and office spaces, desks and name tags mounted above them, seem like a necessity of the past.… [Keep reading] “Skype for Business External Authentication”

Connecting Salesforce and SharePoint Online with Azure App Services

26th of April, 2015 / Scott Scovell / 1 Comment

Back in November I wrote a post that demonstrated how we can integrate Salesforce and SharePoint Online using the MuleSoft platform and the MuleSoft .NET Connector. In this post I hope to achieve the same thing using the recently released into preview Azure App Services offering.

Azure App Services

Azure App Services rebrands a number of familiar service types (Azure Websites, Mobile Services, and BizTalk Services) as well as adding a few new ones to the platform.… [Keep reading] “Connecting Salesforce and SharePoint Online with Azure App Services”

The SharePoint Governance Puzzle

22nd of April, 2015 / Hassan Syed / 1 Comment

If you have been using or managing SharePoint then you would know how quickly content, customisations and their growth, if not properly governed, can get out of control. Today most organisations deploying SharePoint have realised this and have SharePoint Governance Plans or Policies defined for their deployments. A Governance Plan can just be a brief document focusing on what users can and cannot do or it may be a detailed framework governing every part of SharePoint from custom development to usage and maintenance.… [Keep reading] “The SharePoint Governance Puzzle”

EnableSkypeUI Where Art Thou?

19th of April, 2015 / Arran Peterson / 9 Comments

Are you missing the EnableSkypeUI from Lync Management Shell in Lync Server 2013?

If you have deployed a Skype for Business (S4B) client into your Lync Server 2013 environment you may see the following error upon login:

Skype warning on Start

There are plenty of articles about how to switch the client via Office365 Powershell, Lync Management Shell or the Registry, but if you’re scratching your head on how to get the new parameter “CSClientPolicy” here are some steps that may have been missed.… [Keep reading] “EnableSkypeUI Where Art Thou?”

How to implement Multi-Factor Authentication in Office 365 via ADFS, Part 5, the finale!

10th of April, 2015 / Lucian Franghiu / 10 Comments

Originally posted in Lucians blog over @ lucian.blog.

I know what you’re thinking: does Lucian really have to create another part in this long MFA series? In short, probably not, but I’ll have saved your index finger the thousands of years or scrolling you would have done to read the entire brain dump in a one page post.

So to explain this ‘epilogue’, if you will, on MFA, using X.509 SSLs for your second factor of authentication is a powerful means to automate and manage a process for your mobile and external users. This blog post will explain how to leverage an on-prem Microsoft System Centre Configuration Manager (SCCM) 2012 R2 deployment linked to Microsoft InTune to deliver SSL’s to mobile and external devices to use in MFA.

How to implement Multi-Factor Authentication in Office 365 via ADFS – Part 4

10th of April, 2015 / Lucian Franghiu / 2 Comments

Originally posted in Lucians blog over @ lucian.blog.

The final installment in the long series that’s taken me allot longer to get around to writing then initially I had thought. However, I hope it’s worth the wait and the solution that has been proven works well for you. Before I get into the technical aspects of the final piece of this MFA implementation puzzle, I’d like to make a quick shout out to all the awesome consultants at Kloud Solutions who helped both in the technical implementation but also with the initial design and work required to see this solution through- a big thank you!

In the previous blog post I went through essentially what an internal configuration of MFA would look like with everything ready for the ADAL component that was previously under NDA and preview only availability, is now generally available for testing. So let me quickly delve into that ADAL in Office 2013 and Office 365 component before an in-depth guide on how to utilize Microsoft InTune and System Centre Configuration Manager as a means to deliver SSL certificates to users and use those certificates as your second factor of authentication! Exciting as its been a long build up to get to this point with several moments where I was questioning whether this would work in the real world.. lets start..

Hybrid Exchange Connectivity with Azure Traffic Manager

31st of March, 2015 / Arran Peterson / 3 Comments

Does your exchange hybrid architecture need to have redundancy? How about an active/passive solution using Azure Traffic Manager elimating the need for a HLB device in your DMZ.

Currently there is a few topologies for configuring Hybrid Exchange with Office 365;

Single Hybrid Server
2+ Hybrid Server behind a load balancer
2+ Hybrid Server with DNS round robin

A simple solution to make a redundant Hybrid Exchange design without using a HLB is to leverage Azure Traffic Manager to monitor and service the DNS namespace configured in on-premises Exchange and Office 365 configuration.… [Keep reading] “Hybrid Exchange Connectivity with Azure Traffic Manager”

How to implement Multi-Factor Authentication in Office 365 via ADFS – Part 3

20th of March, 2015 / Lucian Franghiu / 4 Comments

Originally posted on Lucian’s blog over at lucian.blog.

In this blog post I’ll go into the configuration and implementation of Active Directory Federation Services v3.0 Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA). This is in line with a recent proof-of-concept project I conducted for a large customer in the FMCG sector. ADFSv3 MFA coupled with some new functionality that Microsoft is working on in Office 365, MFA in Office 2013 which will be covered by part 4 of this series, offers a fantastic solution to organisations wanting to leverage MFA by way of adhering to company policy or simply to further secure their users accessing Office 365 cloud services.

The good we secure for ourselves is precarious and uncertain until it is secured for all of us and incorporated into our common life

-Jane Addams