Posts in Office 365
Deploying Office Online Server for Exchange 2016 – Part 2

Your new OOS farm can be connected to any version of Exchange from 2007 to 2016. Connecting OOS to any version of Exchange previous to Exchange 2016 just allows users to open documents from OWA within the browser. That is not a terribly compelling feature, and I don’t recall ever deploying WAC for a customer to be used for just Exchange. The few times that I have connected WAC to Exchange, it was intended to be used for Lync or SharePoint and just connected to Exchange “because it was there”.

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Deploying Office Online Server for Exchange 2016 – Part 1

One of the new features of Exchange 2016 is the inclusion of “Modern Attachments”. Modern Attachments are not attachments at all, but links to Office documents that are stored within SharePoint sites but presented to look like attachments within email messages. Modern Attachments are a great step forward in that they allow users to continue to use attachments in the way they are used to while removing those files from your Exchange 2016 servers.

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RBAC in Exchange Online Part 2 - Scoping admin roles

In the first article in this series, I coved the basic GUI based ways that you can use RBAC in Exchange Online to allow users to control their own contact information in Exchange Online and to allow you to designate administrators with limited sets of rights.

In this article, I’m going to show you how to really use RBAC. We’re going to dive into PowerShell and see how to do things like give an administrator rights to manage a specific sub-set of your users.

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RBAC in Exchange Online - Part 1

A common request I get while doing migrations into Exchange Online is to assist customers in setting up permissions so that they can limit administrator's rights and scope to control Exchange Online. The solution for this problem is Role Based Access Control (RBAC), and it can be a little confusing to setup.

In this article I am going to start into the easier, GUI based options for setting up RBAC in Exchange Online. If you're looking for the more advanced RBAC controls, skip ahead to Part 2.

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Access Control Policies in AD FS for Windows Server Technical Preview

With the next version of Windows Server, presumably called Windows Server 2016, we’ll be getting a new version of AD FS. I would love to call this new version AD FS 4.0, but Microsoft has not confirmed that name yet. Whatever it ends up being called, the next version of AD FS is going to contain some significant improvements. In this post I want to look at one of those improvements, Access Control Policies.

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Enterprise Social in Office 365: Part 3 – Office 365 Video

Office 365 Video is a new service in Office 365 designed to store and play your organization’s video content. Think of Video as an enterprise version of YouTube. Video is built on top of SharePoint Online and Azure Media Services (AMS), with an assist from Yammer. All Office 365 tenants in either the “E” (enterprise) or “A” (academic) SKUs have Video available with no additional licensing costs.

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New Features in AD FS for Server 2016

As we approach the release of Server 2016, we can also look forward to a new version of AD FS. With the release of this new version of AD FS, we can expect some new features. It’s still early, as I expect Server 2016 to be released in early calendar year 2016, but let’s look at three new features for this version of AD FS.

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Enterprise Social in Office 365: Part 2 – Yammer

Yammer is an Enterprise Social Networking product that was launched in 2008 by a former PayPal executive, and acquired by Microsoft is 2012. Since being acquired by Microsoft, Yammer’s development has been moved into Office 365. All of the other Enterprise Social features of Office 365 we will talk about in this series are smaller features of some other product. Yammer is currently a standalone product that was developed independently of any of the other Office 365 products. It is, of course, Microsoft’s stated goal to tie Yammer into all the other Office 365 products.

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Enterprise Social in Office 365: Part 1 - Introduction

Office 365 is a huge collection of enterprise services, and it is only getting bigger. One consequence of this constant growth in services is an overlap of functionality. An example that I have been noticing recently is Enterprise Social features. Microsoft’s drive to enable “Enterprise Social” has resulted in a significant number of Office 365 features providing group collaboration functionality. More and more I am hearing customers ask “Should I be using distribution lists, Groups, persistence chat, or Yammer?”

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Planning Executing and Maintaining your Migration to Exchange Online

Greetings IT professional. Since you have taken the time download this document, I am going to go out on a limb as assume you are in the early stages of planning a migration into Office 365. The good news is I have completed lots of migrations for all kinds of organizations moving to Office 365. I have very methodically and carefully made tons of mistakes on the road to Office 365. Today, I am going to explain those mistakes so that hopefully you can avoid repeating my mistakes and maybe even make a few new ones.

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Encryption in Exchange Online Part 5

Now that we have the basic three templates working, let’s circle back and talk about that “advanced features” button we saw earlier. In your Office 365 portal go into Admin > Service Settings > Rights Management and select Manage in the center dashboard. You will be redirected to an Azure website (no need to log in again) where you will see a dashboard that looks like this

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