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”

Skype Integration with Lync Server and Lync Online

3rd of June, 2013 / / 19 Comments

Skype integration with Lync has been teased since the first public beta preview of Lync 2013 in July 2012. Microsoft mentioned it in Lync 2013 Preview TechNet documentation (no longer available) and in a blog post by the Lync team UPDATE: Skype and so much more: Why we’re so excited about the new Lync which implied it would be available at launch. Lync 2013 became publicly available without Skype integration which was a bit disappointing after being talked about as one of the many features.… [Keep reading] “Skype Integration with Lync Server and Lync Online”

Office Web Apps Server – just say no to Windows Update Automatic Updates

21st of May, 2013 / / 1 Comment

Office Web Apps Server 2013 is a standalone Microsoft product that is leveraged by Lync 2013, SharePoint 2013 and Exchange 2013 for web based document viewing and editing using the WOPI (Web app Open Platform Interface) protocol. Office Web Apps Server used be called Web Application Companion (WAC) and that is what all of the Lync 2013 pre-release software and documentation called it. In my opinion, Office Web Apps Server is a very confusing name as Exchange Outlook Web App (or Access) has owned the OWA acronym since 1997 with Exchange 5.0 SP 1.… [Keep reading] “Office Web Apps Server – just say no to Windows Update Automatic Updates”

Outlook Anywhere NTLM SSO with UAG 2010 KCD

17th of May, 2013 / / 8 Comments

Outlook Anywhere can be configured with two authentication methods – Basic and NTLM. Outlook Anywhere NTLM authentication has always been a bit of a tricky beast when using a pre-authenticating reverse proxy like TMG or UAG. The benefit it can bring is that a user signed on to a domain joined computer with a domain account can get seamless SSO (Single Sign On) without entering a password. This can happen if the user is on the corporate network or if they are remote using Outlook Anywhere (RPC over HTTP) and cached credentials.… [Keep reading] “Outlook Anywhere NTLM SSO with UAG 2010 KCD”

UAG 2010 – Problems with Custom Trunk Ports and Failing Redirects

10th of May, 2013 / / 1 Comment

UAG 2010 prior to Service Pack 1 Update 1 did not support publishing trunks on custom ports – only 80 and 443 were supported. That meant each UAG trunk required a separate IP address per trunk. With SP 1 Update we could publish UAG trunks on custom ports on a single IP address, although it doesn’t seem many people actually did this. For a customer recently where UAG 2010 was required with 5 trunks, there was an existing network architecture restriction that required the UAG servers to use public IP addresses.… [Keep reading] “UAG 2010 – Problems with Custom Trunk Ports and Failing Redirects”

Publish Lync 2013 Including Mobility and Office Web Apps with UAG 2010

6th of May, 2013 / / 11 Comments

Microsoft Forefront TMG (Threat Management Gateway) has been the primary way Lync Web Services have been published in the past. With the untimely demise of TMG, the only Microsoft product (other than IIS) with reverse proxy functionality is Microsoft Forefront UAG (Unified Access Gateway). TMG will continue to be supported until 2015 for mainstream support and 2020 for extended support. If TMG is not already installed however, technically it cannot be used for a new installation.… [Keep reading] “Publish Lync 2013 Including Mobility and Office Web Apps with UAG 2010”

An Overview of Server Name Indication (SNI) and Creating an IIS SNI Web SSL Binding Using PowerShell in Windows Server 2012

18th of April, 2013 / / 7 Comments

One of the frustrating limitations in supporting secure websites has been the inability to share IP addresses among SSL websites. In the day, there were a few ways to solve this limitation. One, you could use multiple IP addresses, binding a SSL certificate to each combination of an IP address and standard SSL port. This has been the best method to date but it is administratively heavy and not necessarily a good use of valuable IP addresses.… [Keep reading] “An Overview of Server Name Indication (SNI) and Creating an IIS SNI Web SSL Binding Using PowerShell in Windows Server 2012”

SharePoint Online 2013 – Setting Default Account for Organization Browser

6th of April, 2013 / / 26 Comments

Earlier this week I have received a requirement to make use of the SharePoint OOTB Organization Browser that needs to set the default root account to be a specific user…well, there are plenty of blogs on using custom JS in MOSS or Sharepint 2010 for this purpose – glad that this hasn’t changed in SharePoint 2013. But this is SharePoint Online which adds some challenges:

  • The username is no longer in the format of Domain/LoginName
  • It is using claims based authentication through ADFS

Below are the steps you can follow to set the default account on the SharePoint Organization Browser.… [Keep reading] “SharePoint Online 2013 – Setting Default Account for Organization Browser”

SharePoint Online Web Service Authentication using WCF Client-side behaviour

24th of March, 2013 / / 9 Comments

With the release SharePoint in 2013 and the ever increasing numbers taking up the SharePoint Online offering, it’s a good time to start looking at some of the challenges when moving to these platforms.

SharePoint has traditionally been a presentation technology with its own unique SharePoint development model utilising SharePoint designer and custom Web Part development. With the latest release, SharePoint 2013 that development model has been challenged by a new autonomous development model where the complexities and constraints of SharePoint as a development and deployment platform has been replaced by a service oriented integration platform for multiple independently hosted applications.… [Keep reading] “SharePoint Online Web Service Authentication using WCF Client-side behaviour”

Use SkyDrive Pro as a SharePoint Content Replicator

12th of February, 2013 / / 9 Comments

What’s in a name?

SkyDrive Pro might be the worst named of all of the products to come out of Microsoft in a while. I sometimes think about the meetings that must happen in Redmond, Developers on one side of the room and Marketing on the other.

Marketing: “Yeah it’s just like SkyDrive where you can store all your files but more corporate because it links to SharePoint”
Development: “Huh? But it doesn’t have anything to do with SkyDrive”
Marketing: “Yeah but SharePoint is moving to the cloud and SkyDrive is in the cloud so it’s the same isn’t it?”… [Keep reading] “Use SkyDrive Pro as a SharePoint Content Replicator”