Kloud Solutions — MAPA 2014 Winner

6th of September, 2014 / / No Comments

Kloud is thrilled to announce we will take home 2 gongs as part of the 2014 MAPA Microsoft Partner of the Year Awards. We were named both Microsoft’s Cloud Solutions Partner of the Year as well as Collaboration and Content Partner of the Year. The awards, won in the face of tough competition, were awarded for a range of customer solutions, including the Coles intranet portal, mycoles and the Spotless mobility app, MyWork. Both innovative solutions empower workforces by enabling anytime, anywhere access and closely align to Microsoft’s mobile-first, cloud-first strategy.… [Keep reading] “Kloud Solutions — MAPA 2014 Winner”

Mobile platform increases productivity for integrated services company

25th of August, 2014 / / No Comments

Customer Overview
Spotless Group is an Australian owned, managed and operated provider of integrated facility management services. With operations across Australia and New Zealand, the Group’s 33,000 employees deliver millions of service hours a year across hundreds of specialist services to industry sectors including:

  • Health
  • Education
  • Leisure, Sport and Entertainment
  • Defence
  • Government
  • Resources
  • Business and Industry (AU) (NZ)
  • Laundries

Business Situation
Spotless service workers and supervisors (employees and sub-contractors) generally work at customer locations rather than offices.… [Keep reading] “Mobile platform increases productivity for integrated services company”

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”

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”

I Keep Getting Prompted to Authenticate in SharePoint Online!

9th of July, 2014 / / 5 Comments

Every once in a while I come across a problem which is vexing and irritating and equally, an absolute joy when it is finally resolved.

The Scene

This particular issue had been on-going for some time with one of my customers with reports coming in from various people saying that they were being prompted to authenticate when opening an Office document in SharePoint Online. “I’ve already logged in so why do I keep getting these prompts?!”… [Keep reading] “I Keep Getting Prompted to Authenticate in SharePoint Online!”

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”

Do It Yourself Cloud Accelerator

6th of June, 2014 / / 2 Comments

This intro is unashamedly lifted from a Microsoft article but I couldn’t say it any better: “The cloud has enormous potential to reduce operational expenses and achieve new levels of scale, but moving workloads away from the people who depend on them can increase networking costs and hurt productivity. Users expect high performance and don’t care where their applications and data are hosted” Cloud is a journey, to get there takes more than just migrating your workloads to the cloud.… [Keep reading] “Do It Yourself Cloud Accelerator”

SharePoint Online Storage Improvements in Office 365

4th of May, 2014 / / 1 Comment

The following new features are now available in SharePoint Online as part of Office 365:

◦ A 1 TB site collection limit for OneDrive for Business and team sites
◦ Infinite tenant storage scale

1 TB site collection limit increase for OneDrive for Business and team sites

A 1 TB will let you create large team document centers that teams can use without needing to introduce multiple websites and unneeded complexities. All SharePoint Online site collections can now have up to 1 TB of storage allocation.… [Keep reading] “SharePoint Online Storage Improvements in Office 365”

Secure File Sharing with OneDrive for Business

16th of April, 2014 / / No Comments

Many customer today find it convenient and useful to store their files in the cloud.  There are many companies who provide solutions in this space such as Microsoft (OneDrive), Dropbox, and Google Drive.  The benefits of cloud storage are:

1) Easy access to your files from any location and any device

2) Reduces the risk of data loss if your device is lost or stolen

3) Cheap and easy to use

The downside of cloud storage is that it requires that your device is connected to the Internet in order to access your files. … [Keep reading] “Secure File Sharing with OneDrive for Business”