The NRMA engages Kloud to develop a group-wide intranet solution to improve usability and collaboration

5th of November, 2014 / / No Comments

Customer Overview

The National Roads and Motorists’ Association (the NRMA) is Australia’s largest member-owned organisation, with 2.4 million members across New South Wales and the Australian Capital Territory. In recent years the NRMA has expanded beyond its original roadside offering, to help members across a broad range of services, including NRMA MotorServe service centres, NRMA Emergency Home Assist, NRMA Travel, holiday accommodation through NRMA Holiday Parks and car rental, where NRMA owns Thrifty Car Rental in Australia and New Zealand.… [Keep reading] “The NRMA engages Kloud to develop a group-wide intranet solution to improve usability and collaboration”

Office 365 PowerShell and Modularised code.

5th of November, 2014 / / 1 Comment

I’m going to preface this article by saying “This is not a guide to resolve a specific problem, but rather a discussion on how to work through a problem/issue which requires a script to resolve”.

Often when you first look at some of these problems they seem incredibly difficult and you can rapidly end up down a rabbit hole you didn’t intend to. (I was going to quote Yoda during the Dark Side cave scene in Empire Strikes Back, but decided against proving myself to be of a certain techie stereotype.… [Keep reading] “Office 365 PowerShell and Modularised code.”

PowerShell and Office 365

2nd of November, 2014 / / No Comments

While there is a plethora of articles written about PowerShell, Hey, Scripting Guy!, where I regularly seem to end up at while trying to figure out how to do something new/different, I’m often asked about PowerShell when I’m working with customers. You see, if you’re like me, you’ve spent most of your IT life working in a Graphical User Interface (GUI). It’s comfortable, it’s often intuitive and you can click around ’till you find what you’re looking for if you’re not entirely sure.… [Keep reading] “PowerShell and Office 365”

Lync 2013 Basic Client – the forgotten client

28th of October, 2014 / / No Comments

I’ve had conversations with customers lately whom are looking to use Lync Server 2013 and currently don’t want to move their desktop SOE to Office 2013 suite with Lync 2013 Client. This can be a project in itself and one that IT Admins aren’t always prepared to look at. Whether this is because of the analysis needed to roll out the suite or they still are in an agreement that only allows them to Office 2010.… [Keep reading] “Lync 2013 Basic Client – the forgotten client”

Creating new Office documents for OneDrive for Business from another ASPX page

23rd of October, 2014 / / 1 Comment

Recently one of my clients wanted to add a new control to their widget dashboard that would give them access to OneDrive for Business functionality. As part of the control they wanted the ability to create new Word, Excel and PowerPoint files. These files would then be edited using Office Web Apps.

Our control has been written as a single page application deployed to the My Site Host of the Office 365 Tenant. It would then be accessed via an IFRAME on a non ASPX page.… [Keep reading] “Creating new Office documents for OneDrive for Business from another ASPX page”

Do It Yourself Cloud Accelerator – Part III Scaling Out

22nd of October, 2014 / / 3 Comments

There’s recently been some interest in the space of accelerating Office 365 SharePoint Online traffic for organisations and for good reason. All it takes is a CEO to send out an email to All Staff with a link to a movie hosted in SharePoint Online to create some interest in better ways to serve content internally. There are commercial solutions to this problem, but they are, well… commercial (read expensive). Now that the basic functionality has been proven using existing Windows Server components, what would it take to put into production?… [Keep reading] “Do It Yourself Cloud Accelerator – Part III Scaling Out”

Azure Active Directory Synchronization Services: How to Install, Backup & Restore with full SQL

21st of October, 2014 / / 3 Comments

Microsoft recently released the latest version of the Directory Synchronisation tool; Azure Active Directory Synchronisation Services (AADSync). The “one sync to rule them all” is likely going to be your first choice for synchronising identities to the Microsoft cloud.

Installing and configuring the tool is relatively straight forward for the majority of deployments and this process is well documented at the Microsoft Azure Documentation Centre. If your organisation has a large number of identities (100,000+), Microsoft recommends deploying the AADSync tool with a full installation of SQL.… [Keep reading] “Azure Active Directory Synchronization Services: How to Install, Backup & Restore with full SQL”

Extending Yammer SSO to Support Users Without an Email Address

16th of October, 2014 / / 1 Comment

BY TONY DU, JOEL NEFF

Yammer Enterprise is offered through the Microsoft Office 365 Enterprise plan. Deployment of Yammer Single Sign-On (SSO) for Office 365 users with a valid primary email address is a relative simple and well documented process.

One of our customers had a requirement for Yammer as a social platform, however a large percentage of their workforce are not enabled for email services. In the ‘SSO Implementation FAQ‘ published by Microsoft, it suggests that it is possible to configure SSO support for user accounts that do not have an email address associated with them, however there isn’t any supporting documentation to go with it.… [Keep reading] “Extending Yammer SSO to Support Users Without an Email Address”

Add-AppvClientPackage Fails with Office 365 ProPlus C2R and App-V 5.0

15th of October, 2014 / / 1 Comment

I’ve been working a bit lately with Office 365 ProPlus Click to Run and recently one of my customers was wanting to deploy their C2R packages using App-V. The process itself is pretty straightforward and quite similar to the process described in my previous blog on building a redistributable package for OneDrive for Business using the Office Deployment Tool.

Using the latest Office 365 ProPlus package for September 2014 would seem like the logical approach and my configuration.xml… [Keep reading] “Add-AppvClientPackage Fails with Office 365 ProPlus C2R and App-V 5.0”

A history of DirSync and the new Azure AD Sync Services tool

14th of October, 2014 / / 3 Comments

Microsoft’s new Azure Active Directory Synchronization Services tool (AADSync) was released to General Availability last month on the 16th of September. Microsoft calls it the new “one sync service to rule them all”, enabling support for Multi-Forest synchronizations and AD attribute filtering, amongst other features that were previously only possible with a licensed version of Forefront Identity Manager (FIM).

With the latest release, I found this to be a perfect time to reflect on how DirSync has developed over the last few years, to look at what’s possible with the new tool and what we can expect in AADSync vNext.… [Keep reading] “A history of DirSync and the new Azure AD Sync Services tool”