Azure Active Directory Synchronization Tool: Password Sync as Backup for AD FS Federated Domains

9th of July, 2014 / / No Comments

Kloud has helped many Australian businesses leverage Microsoft cloud services such as Office 365, Intune and Microsoft Azure and most have implemented Active Directory Federation Services (AD FS) to provide a highly available Single Sign-On (SSO) user experience. In mid-2013, the Windows Azure Active Directory Synchronization Tool was updated to support password synchronisation with Azure Active Directory, which provided an alternative way to leverage on-premises authored identities with Microsoft’s cloud services.

Password synchronisation is a feature of the Azure Active Directory Sync Tool that will synchronise the password hash from your on-premises Active Directory environment to the Azure Active Directory.… [Keep reading] “Azure Active Directory Synchronization Tool: Password Sync as Backup for AD FS Federated Domains”

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”

The Next Version of Forefront Identity Manager Is Coming in 2015

18th of May, 2014 / / No Comments

There has been a lot of speculation about the next version of Microsoft Forefront Identity Manager.  For those who follow Microsoft’s product roadmaps, a number of Forefront products have been cancelled by Microsoft.  Here is a brief list:

  • Forefront Protection 2010 for Exchange
  • Forefront Protection 2010 for SharePoint
  • Forefront Security 2010 for Office Communication Server
  • Forefront Threat Management Gateway 2010
  • Forefront Unified Access Gateway 2010

 

Other products in the Forefront family have been renamed and become a more integrated part of another product.  … [Keep reading] “The Next Version of Forefront Identity Manager Is Coming in 2015”

DirSync and Distribution Group Self Service Management

6th of May, 2014 / / 2 Comments

If you’re an Office 365 Exchange Online customer and currently utilizing Directory Synchronization (DirSync) to synchronize between an on premise Active Directory and the Azure Active Directory you’ll be all too familiar with the limitations that are imposed around the management of distribution group membership. Namely an Exchange online user specified as the owner of a distribution group will not be able to manage the membership of that group through the standard Outlook Address Book interface as detailed here

In the background, if we think about this in relation to DirSync functionality, the group is being pushed from the on premise Active Directory to the Azure Active Directory in a one way sync.… [Keep reading] “DirSync and Distribution Group Self Service Management”

Switching Between Office 365 Plans

4th of May, 2014 / / 2 Comments

​One of the challenges with earlier versions of Office 365 was the inability to switch plans.  Once you set up a tenant, there were certain aspects of the tenant which could not be changed.  For example, if you set up a small business tenant with 10 users, you could not increase the size of the tenant beyond the 25 user limit.  There was no way to convert a small business tenant into an enterprise tenant.  This meant that a small business growing rapidly might exceed the capacity of its Office 365 tenant.… [Keep reading] “Switching Between Office 365 Plans”

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”

Exchange 365 – Transport Rules & Distribution Groups

29th of January, 2014 / / No Comments

One of our customers is transitioning from on premise Exchange 2010 to a hybrid Exchange 365 (wave 15) environment and user management for Office 365 done through on premise Active Directory. Customer had quite a few transport rules setup up which needed to be migrated. This worked fine except for the rules using a “redirect the message to” action using a distribution group.

The error displayed in Exchange 365 generated is: The transport rule can’t be created because TR-Marketing@Company.com,… [Keep reading] “Exchange 365 – Transport Rules & Distribution Groups”

How to Link Existing Visual Studio Online with Windows Azure

6th of January, 2014 / / 4 Comments

I was trying to link my Visual Studio Online (formerly Team Foundation Service or TFS Online) tenant to my Windows Azure subscription and stumbled through some items that are not well documented. The main problem I ran into was that Visual Studio Online only used Microsoft Accounts and in my case my Windows Azure subscriptions are setup using Office 365 accounts and not Microsoft Accounts. The next problem I ran into was that account owner set on my Visual Studio Online wasn’t the account I thought it was so I need to find a way to update the account owner before I could proceed.… [Keep reading] “How to Link Existing Visual Studio Online with Windows Azure”

Wave 15 Shared Mailboxes in a Hybrid Configuration

8th of August, 2013 / / 1 Comment

Notes from the Field

I have been working on a customer site for some time now and have recently been migrated to Wave 15 of Exchange Online.

It was brought to my attention during the week, that since the migration, Shared Mailboxes which were created via the Exchange Online EAC could not receive external email. Shared mailboxes which were created in the on-premise environment and then migrated to Exchange Online are working as expected.

Note: The support staff have already created the Shared mailboxes using the Exchange online EAC and these mailboxes already have significant amounts of mail contained within.… [Keep reading] “Wave 15 Shared Mailboxes in a Hybrid Configuration”