Category Archives: Office 365

Microsoft releases Office 2016 for ‘mobile-first, cloud-first world’

Microsoft Office 2016 devices croppedMicrosoft has promised to ‘re-invent productivity and business processes’ for the mobile and cloud-first world, with its new Office 2016 for Windows. It has also unveiled new additions to Office 365 and made Office 2016 for Mac available as a one-time purchase.

The latest version of Office is designed to make optimal use of Windows 10, with better collaboration and tighter security. The productivity applications within the suite have been updated to make them more cloud friendly, with changes to Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, OneNote, Access, Project and Visio to make them more collaborative in nature, according to Microsoft.

One reported change is that groups of employees can now work on a single Word document and view each other’s comments as they are written. The new system now includes Skype for Business so that users of any new Office app can chat, screen share or video chat directly from their documents. Another new feature, enabled by Skype integration, is the ability to simultaneously co-author documents. In October Skype will be available on Office Online, according to Microsoft.

“The way people work has changed dramatically, and that’s why Microsoft is focused on reinventing productivity and business processes for the mobile-first, cloud-first world,” said Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella.

These latest changes are a ‘big step’ in transforming Office from familiar but individual productivity tools to a connected set of apps and service designed for collaboration and teamwork, according to Nadella.

The security protection for business customers has been beefed up, according to Microsoft, with built-in data loss prevention features designed to cuts the risk of data leaks. New multi-factor authentication will secure the access of those outside the corporate network. Enterprise Data Protection, promised ‘later this year’ will help business to secure the process of sharing corporate content across application and cloud locations.

The delivery of future Office desktop application updates is to change, says Microsoft, so that Office 365 subscribers receive new features and capabilities continuously.

Other new tools include an analytics from Office Delve, a personal work analytics (Delve) and additional charts and formulas for Excel.

“The Office 2016 apps run beautifully on the best Windows ever,” said Kirk Koenigsbauer, Microsoft’s corporate VP for the Office Client Applications and Services. “The Office 2016 apps simplify collaboration and remove barriers to team success.”

Microsoft signs GE in massive cloud deal

General Electric has signed up to use Microsoft's cloud software

General Electric has signed up to use Microsoft’s cloud software

Microsoft announced this week that it has signed up long-time tech partner GE to its cloud-based productivity software in a multimillion dollar deal.

The move will see GE deploy Microsoft’s cloud productivity suite Office 365 to GE’s more than 300,000 employees in 170 countries.

Jamie Miller, senior vice president and chief information officer of GE said: “As we deepen our investments in employee productivity, Microsoft’s innovative approach to collaboration made Office 365 our first choice for providing scalable productivity tools to our employees worldwide.”

GE said it will integrate a number of its line of business applications with Office 365 and deploy cloud-based email and Skype for Business calling and meetings, real-time document co-authoring, and team collaboration.

“Microsoft and GE share many values in common — openness, transparency, data-driven intelligence and innovation — all of which are driving forces behind Microsoft’s own mission to help people and organizations achieve more,” said John Case, corporate vice president of Microsoft Office. “As one of the most innovative companies in the world, GE understands what it takes to unleash the potential of its employees. We’re delighted GE has selected Office 365 as the productivity and collaboration solution to empower its global workforce.”

GE and Microsoft are longtime technology partner. The two companies have even set up a joint venture together – Caradigm, a company that develops and sells a healthcare technology platform for clinical applications and population management.

Nevertheless, the deal comes at a critical time for the company and is in some ways a validation of Microsoft’s goal of turning its business around from a number of strategic stumbles and focusing on its core strengths in software and the cloud. Earlier this month the company reported it would write off its entire Nokia acquisition and shed about 7,800 jobs in the process, mostly from its phone business.

Office 365 migration provider SkyKick scores $10m

SkyKick bagged $10m this week and is strengthening its capabilities beyond cloud migration

SkyKick bagged $10m this week and is strengthening its capabilities beyond cloud migration

SkyKick, a cloud migration specialist turned cloud service management provider, secured $10m in funding this week, which the company said would be used to accelerate product development and broaden its portfolio.

SkyKick specialises in migrating Microsoft productivity apps (Office 365, Exchange, etc.) and data into the cloud, and the company recently pivoted into the rest of the lifecycle by offering cloud app and permission management as well as backup and restore capabilities (which are only available in the US for now).

The $10m in funding brings the total amount secured by the firm since its founding to just over $17m, and will be used to expand sales and marketing as well as product development efforts.

“We are excited to usher in the next era for SkyKick—a global software company delivering cloud management solutions for partners,” said Todd Schwartz, SkyKick co-founder and co-chief executive.

“Cloud usage is expected to double in the next three years, and the average IT partner will soon have over 5,000 customer cloud touch points to administer, which can be incredibly complex and time-consuming for solution providers to backup and manage.”

The move to broaden its portfolio comes at a time of increasing saturation in the Office migration environment. Microsoft itself already offers a number of free cloud migration tools and there are a few others developed by third parties like SkyKick, so its ability to develop and offer strong capabilities relevant for post-deployment lifecycle needs is essential to its future growth.

Microsoft to open two cloud datacentres in Canada

Microsoft is adding two cloud datacentres in Canada

Microsoft is adding two cloud datacentres in Canada

Microsoft is opening two cloud datacentres in Canada, the company said this week. The facilities, one in Toronto, Ontario and one in Montreal, Quebec, will deliver Azure, Office 365 and Microsoft Dynamics to local customers.

The company said the datacentres would help companies and organisation in highly regulated sectors like healthcare, the public sector, higher education and financial services overcome data storage and compliance regulations.

“Companies and organisations that have to adhere to data storage requirements and compliance standards can now take advantage of the advantages offered by Microsoft services here in Canada,” said Microsoft chief operating officer Kevin Turner.

Turner said the announcement speaks to Microsoft’s “deep and growing commitment” to Canada and its public and private sector organisations.

“Now customers will be able to enjoy the benefits of all commercial cloud services on their terms across Canada.”

This is Microsoft’s first big cloud datacentre push since the company announced the launch of Azure in Australia last year. Lately, however, Microsoft has seemed more focused on bolstering its position through hybrid cloud, announcing Azure Stack – a series of updates and architectural changes (more microservices) to its server and cloud technologies aimed at blending the divide between Azure and Windows Server.

Microsoft Ignite 2015: Top News & Announcements

This week I was fortunate to be able to attend my first-ever Microsoft Ignite 2015 Conference in Chicago at the McCormick Center. Me and 23,000 of my closest friends. We all gathered in one of the most cavernous buildings I have ever been in to see what Microsoft would unveil. We were not disappointed. Satya Nadella, Joe Belfiori and Gurdeep Singh Pall brought us insight into what was to come and began to showcase the innovation being delivered in the latest Microsoft miracles—miracles to empower IT Pros in companies all over the globe.

Microsoft IgniteIt quickly became apparent that Microsoft has made significant strides reinventing productivity for people and organizations. All of the new and upcoming Office 2016 features will enable successful companies to create effective communication flows between folks on premise and tele-workers. From my perspective, how can individual productivity not provide collective value from the co-creation feature available in Office 2016. Quite literally, you see folks type letter by letter, word by word from anywhere in the world. Gone are the days of email for this effort, painstakingly waiting for Jim to respond and then email it to Jennifer. In today’s new IT Integrator world, this means we can share documents with perspective customers via Skype for Business and mark them up live, with the customer adding to the flow real-time, in the actual Word document, not just on a whiteboard. Enable Track Changes and you can see what each contributor is doing and then merge the changes at the end.

This leads to faster turnaround on important Statements of Work, BAAs or other sales documents, speeding the rate of close on a particular opportunity.

For GreenPages, and our fellow IT Pros in their respective customer organizations, this is our collective opportunity to create better and more adaptable infrastructures. No longer are we burdened by hardware lead times and costs that blow up our budgets, just to add capacity for DevOps. The Microsoft Cloud makes it possible to create virtual datacenters on the fly, edit documents live, store them in the Microsoft Cloud and recall them from anywhere on a moment’s notice, and at a lower cost than ever before. I want to also highlight that this week at Ignite was not just about Azure, Office365, and Office2016. We also saw the walkthroughs on Skype for Business, Server 2015, Exchange 2016 and SharePoint 2016 in-depth for the first time. One word… Impressive.

 

Now, let’s talk about what Microsoft sees as the new online work experience.

Teams

Where work used to be a cube based, do your own thing and don’t lift your head (unless you smell food), it’s now a communal one. People still work individually on their own devices, in their own space, often on their own time, but now teams deliver projects more effectively to customers. With the foundation of new Office 365 Groups, they can work in communal, virtual teams, again anytime, anywhere. The ability to quickly bring people together to solve a complex business problem must be simple, lightweight, and allow team members to work the way they want to (much like the new millennial worker will or does want).  It is the ubiquitous team element that allows organizations such as GreenPages to listen to customers, take notes, create content, video, IM, tweet—and ensure our practices and our customers are part of the OneTeam approach driving collaborative context. As a Microsoft VTSP, I have access to their Office365 portal as my communication and knowledge base toolset. I have often lamented to customers during presentations that I wished Microsoft would release Office Delve to the consumer. Oh, what a great real time presentation of data; pertinent to what you are working on and a single pane of glass experience. Well, viola, we saw the preview of the Office 365 Group’s “hub” in Office Delve – not to mention that Delve has been released into production in Office365.  Also, I saw the ability to have group conversations in email, via Outlook 2016.

Human Mobility

Today, work is what we do, not where we go. My mission at GreenPages is to have helped develop a next generation VAR that ensures people can be productive wherever they are, using whatever device they have, therefore resulting in exemplary customer services to all of our customers. This includes both GreenPages’ employees and GreenPages’ customers. There are many, many reports that say 80% of time spent on phones and tablets is within native applications, so Microsoft presents us with the step-future approach and releases Word, PowerPoint, Excel, Outlook, OneNote, Skype, OneDrive, Yammer and more—across all devices and platforms. These newly deemed Office universal applications for Windows 10 are another great step on this journey. So, I immediately updated my Microsoft Surface Pro 3 to Windows 10 and Office 2016. So far so cool.

I am now a mobility monster. Maybe I should change my Microsoft Surface touch type keyboard to green. No… the whole thing should be green. I’ll show you a picture in my next blog.

Meetings

At GreenPages today, our meetings are as often ad-hoc as they are pre-scheduled, and there are very few meetings where everyone is in the room. Most meetings, even those with customers, include one or more remote attendees. But I live for body language; I need to see how the person is reacting to the information that I’m offering so that I can adapt to make sure they are comfortable with it. The physical queue is imperative for me. Virtual attendees don’t offer body language. They don’t offer queues and most of the time you hit it out of the park, but sometimes you miss that shift in the chair and don’t find out you were off base until a follow up from the customer crushing your record of successful delivery. I believe, as does Microsoft, that moving forward, every meeting scheduled in Office 365 will automatically be a Skype for Business meeting, so customers and fellow employees don’t have to do anything additional to make video meetings.  With Microsoft’s roll-out of the new Skype for Business experience, it’s easy to get a meeting up and running in a few clicks, and video just works. There’s no need for plugins or special software; it is part of the default experience. Now, add in great hardware integration across the Surface Hub, Skype Room Systems, and with vendors like Cisco, Logitech and Polycom and you can have smart meeting rooms on the fly.

Content co-creation

One of the more exciting things we saw in the Office 2016 Public Preview release was Content co-creation. In theory and practice, I tried this once my upgrade was complete. All Office content is by design and default saved to, and shared from, OneDrive or OD4B. This content can be created and edited with real-time co-authoring in Word 2016. Also, email attachments are a thing of the past with Outlook’s new attachments that are simply shared from the cloud, much like you would share a link from Microsoft SharePoint.

I think this is an unprecedented period in Microsoft history. A full on charge at the Cloud, better yet the Microsoft Cloud and finally a rich Office package that makes the cloud seem like it is the hard drive on your desktop, laptop, tablet, Ipad, Surface or Mac. It was a very exciting week, and this just begins the build up to WPC in Orlando this year. I am sure more is to come from this next evolution.

Have you been dragging your feet leading up to the Windows Server 2003 End of Life date? Read David’s whitepaper to get a better idea of migration options available to organizations.

 

By David Barter, Practice Manager – Microsoft Technologies

Box hires ex-Microsoft exec to bolster business in France

Jeremy Grinbaum,  regional vice president for France and southern Europe, Box

Jeremy Grinbaum, regional vice president for France and southern Europe, Box

Box has hired former Microsoft cloud sales exec Jeremy Grinbaum to lead the company’s commercial expansion efforts in France and southern Europe.

Grinbaum, who will be based in Box’s Paris office, has been broad on board as regional vice president for France and southern Europe to drive the cloud storage incumbent’s business in the region, which includes setting up a local sales team.

“We are seeing significant traction in France and southern Europe as businesses in these regions begin to adopt cloud systems to drive efficiency and collaboration,” said David Quantrell, senior vice president and general manager of EMEA at Box.

“We are excited to accelerate our growth in southern Europe, and Jeremy’s leadership and expertise are exactly what we need to drive the adoption of Box’s content and collaboration platform.”

Before joining Box Grinbaum spent the past few years as a senior sales executive at Microsoft, focusing on the company’s cloud services including Yammer and Office 265. He founded a cloud-based collaboration start up in 2007, PersonAll, and has also held senior sales roles at Google, IBM, and TRSB.

“France and southern Europe are moving quickly in the adoption of new technologies. Enterprises are looking for solutions that will allow them to move off of expensive, legacy architecture and create more agile and iterative environments for employees,” Grinbaum said. “I am excited to join this innovative company and play a role in helping organizations transform the way they work.”

Last month Box revealed its quarterly results to the public for the first time, which showed promise. Billings in the fourth quarter of fiscal 2015 were $82m, a 33 per cent year on year increase. But the company has over the years spent hundreds of millions of dollars bolstering its sales and marketing efforts, accumulating a significant amount of debt in the process, so it’s likely Box’s main focus will be on delivering the return shareholders are looking for from its southern European expansion.

Microsoft “Office 365 Video” Release – Common Questions Answered

Office 365 VideoIn late November, Microsoft announced that first release customers would have access to Office 365 Video – a YouTube type video service in Microsoft 0365. Previously, video in O365 has pretty much been a load it to OneDrive and/or SharePoint online and “let ‘er rip” service. Customers could use the local video tool of their choice to watch their own videos but were not able to treat it as a viable social media entity like YouTube. For many users, the biggest detriment originally was that there was no organization or even ways to spawn that video online, let alone share or comment on it, so it really was not a great alternative to YouTube. But if I want a Microsoft-centric solution to promote my business within the ever expanding Microsoft Cloud model, then what do I use for a native solution without a ton of development time? Microsoft believes Office 365 Video is the answer.

Below, I answer some common questions around Office 365 Video:

 

Which Office 365 plans are required to get use this new offering?

Office 365 Video is included in the Office 365 E1, E2, E3 and E4 subscription plans (and the corresponding A2, A3 and A4 plans for Academic customers). To date, this is only for commercial customers and does not apply to SLED or FedGov (yet).

 

Do you have to incur additional costs for Azure Media Services consumption?

The integrated Azure Media Services usage does not incur additional cost to customer; videos stored in Office 365 will count against SharePoint Online team sites pooled storage. This is a doubled edge sword. Video format is key here, and without an education on what is a good frame rate to upload versus another you can easily run through your space allotted in those team sites.

 

What Office 365 workloads do I need for Office 365 Video to work?

Office 365 Video requires SharePoint Online. Once Office 365 Video has been rolled out to your users per the license model above, Office 365 Video will be enabled.

 

When will Office 365 Video be available in my cloud environment?

Customers who have opted into First Release should have seen, or will start to see very soon, Office 365 Video appear. Deployment beyond First Release, to standard deployment tenants, is targeted to complete worldwide by early 2015.

 

Can I turn off Office 365 Video for my subscription?

Yes. You can disable and enable it from within the SharePoint Online admin center.

 

Will Office 365 Video be available for the Office 365 Business SKUs (formerly the Small Business plans)?

No

 

Will Office 365 Video be available for the Office 365 Dedicated plans?

No

 

Hopefully this helps clarify some of the details around this announcement. If you have any other questions, reach out and I will be more than happy to answer them for you. socialmedia@greenpages.com

 

By David Barter, Practice Manager, Microsoft Technologies

ATTENTION: Important Information About Microsoft Ending Extended Support!

By Rob O’Shaughnessy,Software Licensing Specialist, Pre-Sales Technical Support

There are only a few months left before Microsoft ends its Extended Support for Windows XP, Office 2003 and Exchange 2003. On April 8, 2014 Extended Support will cease to exist. At this point you should be making arrangements to upgrade to the latest editions of Microsoft products so you can continue to receive the necessary support that Microsoft provides. If you’re looking to upgrade, here are some paths for you to take.

Windows XP Professional: Microsoft offers an upgrade price through volume licensing that allows Window XP Professional to upgrade to Windows 7/8 Professional. It’s worth noting that if you are running an older PC, you may want to test to see if it is compatible with the newer versions of Windows.

Exchange 2003: Microsoft doesn’t offer an upgrade price for Exchange; however, they do offer two options to get the latest edition of Exchange in your environment. The first is on-premise licensing of Exchange 2013. This would be loaded and managed locally and MSRP for Exchange Server is $708. In addition, each Device or User accessing Exchange would also require a Client Access License that starts at $68 for the Device Cal and $78 for the User Cal.

The other option to purchase Exchange is through Microsoft’s Cloud known as Office 365. Known as Exchange Online, this off-premise subscription license provides the same Exchange experience as on-prem but without having to have a lot of the local infrastructure in place. There are two options: Exchange Online Plan 1, which is $4 per User per Month and Exchange Online Plan 2, which adds enterprise features and is $8 per User per Month.

Office 2003: Similar to Exchange, Office doesn’t offer an upgrade price and also like Exchange, Office can be purchased as a volume license or through Office 365. The MSRP for Office Standard through volume licensing is $380 a license and for Professional Plus it’s $508. If you prefer the subscription-based model, Office Professional Plus can be purchased through Office 365 for $15 per User per Month. Office 365 requires a minimum of a year for the subscription. If you need to upgrade both Exchange and Office, Microsoft provides an Office 365 Plan that includes Office Professional Plus, Exchange Plan-2, SharePoint Plan-2 and Lync Plan-2 for $20 per User per Month. There are several volume licensing agreements and Office 365 Plans to choose from.

Last, although still a ways away, Windows Server 2003 R2 extended support will be ending on July 14, 2014.

 

If you are looking for assistance, here is how GreenPages can help:

Licensing: Our top notch licensing desk can assist you in understanding all the nuances of Microsoft volume licensing as well as Office 365. We can work with you to find what program fits best for your organization, help mitigate costs, and ensure your compliancy. We can run license history reports to make sure you’re appropriately licensed and review all the various licensing changes in products such as Windows, System Center and SQL.

Migrations & Professional Services: As a dual gold-competency Microsoft Service provider, GreenPages can assist you with the migration to a new client platform. This can include services to perform the following:
• Upgrading client computers from Windows XP to Windows 7/8
• Upgrading Office from 2003 to 2013
• Installing and configuring System Center technologies to incorporate upgrades to the latest technologies and implementing automated patching, remote control, software deployment, and Operating System Deployment (OSD)

Upgrading client operating systems and office packages can be the tip of the IT Iceberg. Let GreenPages help implement a lasting lifecycle management infrastructure for your environment.

When it comes to messaging, there are a number of scenarios to evaluate including
• Upgrade Exchange 2003/2007/2010 to Exchange 2013
• Migrate from Exchange to Office 365

Whether an on-premises upgrade is in your forecast, or you are ready to seize the opportunity to move toward a hybrid cloud environment and migrate to Office 365, GreenPages can help with these and other Microsoft projects.

Microsoft Extended Support Ending 4//2014

On April 8, 2014 Extended Support will cease to exist. Fill out this form and a GreenPages Representative will contact you with more information around how GreenPages can help with licensing, migration, and professional services challenges!

Moving Email to the Cloud Part 2

By Chris Chesley, Solutions Architect

My last blog post was part 1 of moving your Email to the Cloud with Office 365.  Here’s the next installment in the series in which I will be covering the 3 methods of authenticating your users for Office 365.  This is a very important consideration and will have a large impact on your end users and their day to day activities.

The first method of authenticating your users into Office 365 is to do so directly.  This has no ties to your Active Directory.  The benefits here are that your users get mail, messages and SharePoint access regardless of your site’s online status.  The downside is that your users may have a different password than they use to get into their desktop/laptops and this can get very messy if you have a large number of users.

The second way of authenticating your users is full Active Directory integration.  I will refer to this as the “Single Sign On” method.  In this method, your Active Directory is the authoritative source of authentication for your users.  Users log into their desktop/laptop and can access all of the Office 365 applications without typing their password again, which is convenient. You DO need a few servers running locally to make this happen.  You need an Active Directory Federation Server (ADFS) and an Azure Active Directory Sync Sever. Both of these services are needed to sync your AD and user information to Office 365. The con of this method is that you need a redundant AD setup because if it’s down your users are not going to be able to access mail or anything else in the cloud.  You can do this by hosting a Domain Controller, and the other 2 systems I mentioned, in a cloud or at one of your other locations, if you have one.

The third option is what I will refer to as “Single Password.”  In this setup, you install an Azure Active Directory Sync server in your environment but do not need an ADFS server.  The Sync tool will hash your user’s passwords and send them to Office 365.  When a user tries to access any of the Office 365 services, they are asked to type in their password.  The password is then hashed and compared to the stored hash and they are let in if they match.  This does require the users to type their password again, but it allows them to use their existing Active Directory password and anytime this password changes, it is synced to the cloud.

The choice of which method you use has a big impact on your users as well as how you manage them.  Knowing these choices and choosing one that meets your business goals will set you on the path of successfully moving your services to the cloud.

 

Download this free ebook on the evolution of the corporate IT department

 

Think Office 365 is a Maintenance-Free Environment? Not So Fast …

Guest Post by Chris Pyle, Champion Solutions Group

So you’ve made the move to Office 365. Great!

You think you’ve gone from worrying about procuring exchange hardware and storage capacity, being concerned about email recovery plans, and having to keep up with the constant maintenance of your exchange server farm and the backing up your data, to relying on Office 365 to provide virtually anywhere-access to Microsoft tools.

Sounds pretty good, and we won’t blame you if you’re thinking that your move to the cloud has just afforded you a maintenance-free environment, but not so fast.

While the cost-savings and convenience it may seem like a no-brainer, what many administrators often forget is that the cloud itself doesn’t make email management any easier – there are still a ton of tasks that need to be done to ensure usability and security.

Indeed while moving mailboxes to the cloud may be efficient and provide cost savings, it doesn’t mean administration ends there. Not by any means.

Not to worry, for starters Office 365 admins looking for a faster and easier way to handle mail administration tasks have a number of tools at their disposal, such as our 365 Command by MessageOps. 365Command replaces the command line interface of Windows® PowerShell with a rich, HTML5 graphical user interface that is easy to navigate and makes quick work of changing mailbox settings, monitoring usage and reporting (and did we say you don’t need to know PowerShell?).

From our users who manage about 1 million mail boxes we see the most effective 365 administrators break down maintenance and tasks into daily, weekly, monthly, and quarterly buckets. Breaking down tasks this way simplifies work-flow, and the best part is that this can be easily implemented into your routine and should heighten the value and success utilizing Office 365.

Here are best practices for getting started:

Daily: Mailbox Administrators are constantly responding to any addition, change, and removal requests for their Office365 accounts. The most common are daily tasks that are quickly resolved, for example “forgot my password”, “need access to folder X”, “executive Y is on maternity leave, can you forward her files”, and so on:

  1. Modifying Passwords

  2. Modifying Folder Permissions

  3. Mailbox Forwarding

  4. Creating Single and Shared Mailboxes

Weekly: Weekly task groupings are geared toward helping Administrators keep a watchful eye on growth and scalability, security, speed and access. For example, checking for new devices that are being added to mailboxes, comparing them from previous weeks, and verifying that the user did indeed add a new device, and not incurring a potential risk of theft or fraud:

  1. Review Top Mailbox Growth by Size

  2. Review Office 365 Audit Logs

  3. Review Mobile Security

  4. Review Shared Mailbox Growth- (shared mailboxes only have 10GB limit!)

  5. Review the exact location of their servers and their mailboxes within the Microsoft data centers

Monthly: OK, now you’re cooking with gasoline — with those annoying daily tasks and cumbersome weekly tasks out of the way, top-level Administrators turn their full attention to security and access, which we can never have a lapse in attention:

  1. They run reports and lists of all users last login date. They are checking for people who may no longer be employed with the company, thus eliminating the need for that mailbox and its associated cost from Microsoft. Or if there is limited use, they could move the end user to a less expensive Office 365 SKU, again reducing their overall O365 costs.

  2. From a security standpoint, they are running reports to see who is forwarding their mailboxes to external mailboxes, such as sending their email to their home email account (Gmail/Yahoo/ Hotmail, etc.)

  3. Review password strength and the passwords that are set to expire on a monthly basis, ensuring their mailboxes are safe and secure.

  4. Review mailbox permissions, and review who has Send As privileges in their organization. They are confirming with the end user that they allowed these people to have the ability to send email as them.

  5. Review which employees have Full Mailbox access privileges. They confirm with the end user that they do want those additional users to have full access to their mail and calendar.

Quarterly: See how easy this is now? You’ve cleared out the clutter, and made sure every box on the system is secure. You’ve taken the steps to keep the system running fast and true, with consistent access and performance across the enterprise. Now kick back, light a fat stogie and do some light clean up and maintenance:

  1. Group Clean Up, review all email groups to ensure they have active members, as well as review which groups have people in them that are no longer employed, or contractors that are no longer involved, which groups aren’t being utilized, etc.

  2. Review the Edit Permissions list.

  3. Review Non Password changes in 90 days.

Conclusion

Just because you’ve moved to the cloud it doesn’t mean management and maintenance of your mail boxes stops there. Many of these best-practices would require the knowledge of PowerShell, but who wants to deal with that? Save yourself lots of trouble and find a tool that will manage these activities, streamline your work-flow and jump-start your productivity.

Chris Pyle headshot

Christopher Pyle is President & CEO for Champion Solutions Group. He is also an active member of Vistage International, an executive leadership organization, and is a Distinguished Guest Lecturer at Florida Atlantic University’s Executive Forum Lecture Series.