Session I held at the Ignite 2018

Since we, in the company I work for, have rolled out 65,000 Office 365 licenses and are one of the most successful companies ever with Yammer and Teams, I had the great luck this year to be invited by Microsoft as a speaker to the Ignite 2018 in Orlando. Together with my colleague we held a total of 3 sessions and were interviewed in a podcast.

In the meantime the sessions are available on YouTube. The links to the videos can be found here:

Find out how one of the biggest retailers in Europe is using Microsoft Teams - BRK2366

With approximately 48,000 frontline workers spread across 5,000 stores around Europe, dm drogerie's employees communicate with each other by smartphone and Microsoft Teams. The introduction of modern communications tools based on Office 365 has led to a productivity increase felt by every employee and ultimately by our customers. We describe how we encouraged adoption by taking away the fears of colleagues who weren’t IT-affine and showing them the value to be gained from the new tools. Across the entire company, communications skills, team and project work has been taken to a new level. We tell the success story from the first pilot through the tsunami of demand to the roll out in production.

Build your communities using SharePoint and Yammer - BRK2076

Learn how SharePoint and Yammer bring together modern content and conversations to deliver a best-in-class community solution. Understand what's new and coming next for building communities across your organization using Microsoft 365. Leaders from Rolls Royce and DM share how to champion a community approach to business challenges for accelerated business transformation. Learn how you can empower community leaders to support a strategic approach to community management.

Success with Teams Customer Panel – Best practices for large scale enterprise - BRK2189

Learn from key customers about how they are moving to Microsoft Teams. This session includes real world guidance for planning, delivering, managing and driving adoption of Microsoft Teams at scale.

The Office 365 Secure Score

Keeping track how secure your Office 365 tenant is can be a bit of a hassle. To make it easier for you, Microsoft created the Office 365 Secure Score.

In this 4-minute overview of Office 365 Secure Score, you will learn about a new tool that helps you to automatically assess the security posture of your Office 365 accounts, data, and devices. You'll discover the security features and best practices available to you to implement based on your overall security and productivity goals.

Securing SharePoint 2013 connections via TLS - Part 2

Securing your SharePoint servers via TLS is mandatory these days. Learn how to encrypt your Site Collection communication and how to configure automated redirection to a secure connection.

Picture by Ondrej Supitar / unsplash.com

In part 1 I showed you how to secure a Host Named Site Collection with TLS. But a user can still open the site collection without encryption. To force a secure connection we’ll have to create an automated redirect from http to https.

Leave the unsecure binding

You might think it’s a good idea to remove the http binding from the web application in IIS. But this would break your configuration, so don’t do that. Instead the binding is necessary for IIS to know which web application handles the request. From here the URL Rewrite module we are about to configure will take over.

First things first

To create a redirect we need an IIS extention called URL Rewrite which isn’t part of the regular IIS installation and cannot be found in the Windows installation either. Instead you must open a browser and download it from the official IIS support site http://www.iis.net/downloads/microsoft/url-rewrite

This post is

Securing SharePoint 2013 connections via TLS - Part 1

Securing your SharePoint servers via TLS is mandatory these days. Learn how to encrypt your Site Collection communication and how to configure automated redirection to a secure connection.

Picture by Ondrej Supitar / unsplash.com

Using SSL/TLS to secure your webservers has always been a good idea, not only since three letter agencies are eavesdropping on everybody’s Internet communication. Preventing hacking and information lost is also on the IT-Professionals to-do list for a very long time.

Which certificate do we use

There are a few ways to get a new certificate for the Internet Information Server, but all in all in breaks down to the simple question: Do I need a trusted certificate or not.

If you plan to publish your site to the web I’d suggest you get yourself a trusted certificate from a certificate authority. There are a lot of different certification companies out there and all of them are happy to take your money.

If you plan to stay in a local network, you could consider using your own Public Key Infrastructure (PKI). But this however might be shooting a little too high. Especially if you only have a few servers to secure and no other plans to use the PKI.

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My two cents | Microsoft Office for iPad

On yesterday’s Microsoft Press event it was announced that Office is coming to the iPad. It was a rather small event and overall it was surprisingly quite short as well. That nothing else was shown at the event might be a dignify to the importance of this announcement. First Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella came on stage and said few words about the strategy Microsoft has for the future in cloud computing. Minutes later Julie White, the Office general manager, took on and showed the press the new Word, Excel and Powerpoint version for iOS devices.

None of Apples leaders showed up at the press event. However CEO Tim Cook was giving his virtual Congrats via Twitter to Satya Nadella and his team for the Office on iPad launch.

Welcome to the #iPad and @AppStore! @satyanadella and Office for iPad
— Tim Cook (@tim_cook) 27. März 2014

In return Nadella answered the message from Cook with a Tweet of his own.

Thanks @tim_cook, excited to bring the magic of @Office to iPad customers #cloud4mobile
— Satya Nadella (@satyanadella) 27. März 2014

This is the true excitement behind the launch. With Cook at Apple and Nadella at Microsoft the two big players in the field are taking actions to harmonize their relationship. Could you imagine this event with Jobs and Balmer? Yep, you would only need to add popcorn to the equation.

Privacy settings in SharePoint

Not only since it became clear to the public how deep the NSA digs the rabbit hole, privacy has always been a great issue in Germany. There is even a law that makes it mandatory for enterprises to assign personnel to make sure the company doesn’t violate privacy laws.

As an IT-Professional in Germany you therefor must meet the requirements to implement SharePoint in a manner that complies with these privacy laws. Keeping track of all the settings can be painful. Lucky for us, Microsoft has published an article on TechNet how to manage the most important privacy features in SharePoint.

TechNet article: Managing privacy (SharePoint Server 2010)