Cloud PABX with On-premises PSTN connectivity

20th of August, 2018 / / No Comments

Sometimes my consulting engagements require creative thinking on how we can deliver Skype for Business services based on the customer needs and timing of suitable products becoming available to the market. In this case my customer wanted Skype for Business online with enterprise voice with  Telstra calling for Office 365. At the time the Telstra PSTN calling plan was not generally available. Business issues and time constraints required the business to implement a new greenfield solution within a week.… [Keep reading] “Cloud PABX with On-premises PSTN connectivity”

Removing blockers for Cloud PABX with On-Premise PSTN for Skype for Business Online.

20th of August, 2018 / / No Comments

Overcoming obstacles to migrating to Cloud based enterprise voice solutions is achievable through clever design options. Some enterprise business infrastructure managers may feel that their legacy voice environment is restricting the migration of voice services to cloud based offerings like Skype for Business or Microsoft teams. However, Microsoft offers a variety of design options for enabling PSTN connectivity for Office 365 accounts or Skype for Business accounts with your on-premise Skype for Business Server deployment. Microsoft Cloud PBX with PSTN access through a Hybrid Skype for Business on-premise deployment can provide a migration strategic vision.… [Keep reading] “Removing blockers for Cloud PABX with On-Premise PSTN for Skype for Business Online.”

IaaS Application Migration – Go Live Decision Responsibility Model, High Level Run Sheet and Change Management Life Cycle

9th of August, 2018 / / No Comments

Go Live Decision Responsibility Model

A go-live decision model helps to assign accountability to key project stakeholders in order to make decision to proceed with go-live on an agreed date or not. Below is an example responsibility model that will guide to create a required decision responsibility model.
Decision.jpg

High Level Run Sheet

A run sheet is a list of procedures or events organised in progressive sequence to execute the required agreed outcome. Below sheet is an example that can be used as part of application migration to cloud.… [Keep reading] “IaaS Application Migration – Go Live Decision Responsibility Model, High Level Run Sheet and Change Management Life Cycle”

IaaS Application Migration – Governance, Escalation & Warranty Period Model

28th of July, 2018 / / No Comments

What is Governance and Escalation Model – IaaS Application Migration Project

A governance model is the mechanism used by the project management to translate the elements of the governance framework and policies into practices, procedures, and job responsibilities within the boundary of the project. An escalation plan is a set of procedures set in place to deal with potential problems in a variety of contexts. Example: Project team need to reach out a key stakeholder in the program to make a decision of a go-live/roll-back.… [Keep reading] “IaaS Application Migration – Governance, Escalation & Warranty Period Model”

Scheduled Runbook Tasks at background to automatically back up VMs with tag@{backup = 'true'}

26th of July, 2018 / / No Comments

I always like to create some automation tasks to replace the tedious manual click job. This can be very helpful for customers with large environment. In this blog, I want to share the Azure Runbook which I made to run at the Azure background and automatically back up the VMs with tag@{backup = ‘true’}. This can standardize the VM backup with certain backup policy and automatically audit the environment and make sure to back up the required computing VM resources.… [Keep reading] “Scheduled Runbook Tasks at background to automatically back up VMs with tag@{backup = 'true'}”

Microsoft 365 ATP: Anti-Phishing Policy/Sender Domain Hygiene (Lessons from the Field)

24th of July, 2018 / / No Comments

I was recently working on a project implementing Microsoft Advanced Threat Protection (ATP) on Office 365 services for one of our clients and have come across a few lessons learnt that hopefully might become useful for others out there & also looking into this great new feature from Microsoft!
LESSON 1: ATP Anti-Phishing Policy Not Working due to existing Spam policies
We created a new ATP Anti-Phishing policy where we added a bunch of Executive team users to protect them from being impersonated by attackers under “Add Users to Protect” setting.… [Keep reading] “Microsoft 365 ATP: Anti-Phishing Policy/Sender Domain Hygiene (Lessons from the Field)”

The 5 ways to migrate from Skype for Business to Microsoft Teams

19th of July, 2018 / / No Comments

Microsoft recently published a technet article outlining the different ways to migrate away from Skype for Business to Microsoft Teams. The article currently contains 5 different migration methods. Lets take a closer look at each of them, and how they might be used within your organisation.
The 5 migration methods
They say good things come in three’s, but in this case they come in five! Five different methods of moving from SfB to Microsoft Teams. When it comes to migration planning, choice is a good thing
5-migration-methods-teams
 
Migration Method 1: Skype for Business with Teams Collaboration
Ok, so you have a Skype for Business deployment right now, and are looking at moving to Teams.… [Keep reading] “The 5 ways to migrate from Skype for Business to Microsoft Teams”

Measure O365 ATP Safe Attachments Latency using PowerShell

19th of July, 2018 / / 1 Comment

Microsoft Office 365 Advanced Threat Protection (ATP) is a cloud based security service that is part of the O365 E5 offering. Also can be separately added to other O365 subscriptions. Now a lot can be learned about ATP from here. But in this post we’re going to extract data corresponding to one of ATP’s primary features; ATP Safe Attachments.

In short, ATP Safe Attachments scans documents for malicious content and can block these attachments depending on the policy configuration.… [Keep reading] “Measure O365 ATP Safe Attachments Latency using PowerShell”

IaaS – Application Migration Management Tracker

11th of July, 2018 / / No Comments

What is IaaS Application Migration

Application migration is the process of moving an application program or set of applications from one environment to another. This includes migration from an on-premises enterprise server to a cloud provider’s environment or from one cloud environment to another. In this example, Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) application migration.

Application Migration Management Tracker

Having a visual IaaS application migration tracker, helps to clearly identify all dependencies and blockers to manage your end to end migration tracking.… [Keep reading] “IaaS – Application Migration Management Tracker”

SharePoint site template error : IsProduction field is not valid or does not exists

9th of July, 2018 / / No Comments

Introduction

In this post I will be talking about exception “IsProduction field not accessible or does not exist”. In our case we had saved an existing site as site template in solution gallery and created a new site collection from saved site template but it was breaking with the below exception message.

Error message:

“The field specified with the name IsProduction is not accessible or does not exist”.



Background

The idea of using Site templates feature in SharePoint OnPrem helps with saving site as template and reusing the site template to pre provision the standard site elements in new site collection such as list, libraries, views, workflows, logos, branding and other elements for different department.… [Keep reading] “SharePoint site template error : IsProduction field is not valid or does not exists”