Archivo de la etiqueta: cloud

Exchange 2016, Microsoft

Exchange Server 2016: Improved Features and Functionality

In October of last year, Exchange Server 2016 became available. This was big news and, in case you missed it, I wanted to bring it back to your attention now that it has some market adoption. Unlike previous versions of Exchange, this one was forged in the cloud. Read this technet blog post to get a nice overview. Some of the highlights of new capabilities include:

  • Better collaboration
  • Improved Outlook web experience
  • Search functionality
  • Greater extensibility
  • eDiscovery
  • Simplified architecture
  • High Availability

 

If you’re looking for extensive details, visit the Microsoft Exchange Server 2016 product guide.

If you have any questions around Exchange Server 2016, please reach out and we’ll be sure to get them answered for you.

 

By David Barter, Practice Manager, Microsoft Technologies

Disaster Recovery, vCloud Air

Using the Cloud for Disaster Recovery

Here’s a short video I did discussing how we’ve helped clients use the cloud as a disaster recovery site. This can be a less expensive option that allows for test fail over while guaranteeing resources. If you have any questions or would like to talk about disaster recovery in the cloud in more detail, please reach out!

Using the Cloud for Disaster Recovery

Or click to watch on YouTube

 

By Chris Chesley, Solutions Architect

 

Backup, Barracuda, Microsoft, Office 365

Barracuda’s New Essentials for Office 365

Barracuda has recently released its new Essentials for Office 365 offering. In the past, I would get questions from customers about wanting to back up Office 365 to be able to control it themselves and not rely on Microsoft. I unfortunately never had much to tell them. You’re option was to go through Microsoft. Barracuda is now offering single email recovery without recovering the entire mailbox, associated attachments recovery, and conversation recovery. Barracuda has heard customers and delivered on those requests in a great way. If you’d like to hear me discuss Office 365 in more detail, check out a webinar I recently did.

Essentials for Office 365

 

Would you like to hear more from David around Office 365? Download his webinar, “Microsoft Office 365: Expectations vs. Reality“

 

By David Barter, Practice Manager, Microsoft Technologies

Microsoft Azure

Microsoft Azure Prices Being Cut by up to 17%

At the end of last week, Microsoft announced it will be reducing prices for it’s Dv2 instances by up to 17% next month.

Blair Frank did a write-up on Computerworld:

Good news for businesses using Microsoft’s Azure cloud platform: their infrastructure bills may be shrinking come February.

Microsoft announced that it will be permanently reducing the prices for its Dv2 compute instances by up to 17 percent next month, depending on the type of instance and what it’s being used for. Users will see the greatest savings if they’re running higher performance Linux instances — up to 17 percent lower prices than they’ve been paying previously. Windows instance discounts top out at a 13 percent reduction compared to current prices.

 

To read the rest of the post to get complete details, click here.

 

 

 

Microsoft, O365

Pitfalls of Microsoft O365 Migrations Part 3: Mobile Devices & Help Desk

Here is the 3rd and final part of my video series around common pitfalls of Microsoft O365 migrations (you can watch part 1 here and part 2 here). In this final installment, I dive into the mobile side of Microsoft O365 as well as how your help desk factors in.

 

Pitfalls of Microsoft Office 365 Migrations Part 3

 

Or watch the video here.

Interested in learning more about Microsoft O365 Migrations? Download David’s recent webinar, “Microsoft Office 365: Expectations vs. Reality“

 

By David Barter, Practice Manager, Microsoft Technologies

Microsoft, Office 365

Pitfalls of Microsoft O365 Migrations Part 2: 3rd Party Utilities, DNS, & Management Tools

Here is the second part of my video series around issues & operational considerations of Microsoft O365 migrations (you can watch part one here). In this video, I  cover 3rd party utilities, DNS, and other management tools. Keep your eyes peeled for part 3 coming soon!

If you’re looking for more information around O365 migrations, I recently held a webinar with a couple of my colleagues that takes a deep dive into the topic. If you have any questions or comments, be sure to leave them in the comment section below.

Microsoft O365 Migrations Part 2

 

Or click here to watch the video.

 

Interested in learning more about Microsoft O365 Migrations? Download David’s recent webinar, “Microsoft Office 365: Expectations vs. Reality“

 

By David Barter, Practice Manager, Microsoft Technologies

Microsoft, Office 365

Pitfalls of Microsoft O365 Migrations Part 1: Mailbox Size, Spam Filtering, & Address Change

There are several pitfalls that organizations experience when doing Microsoft O365 migrations. This is the first part of a three part video series where I outline some of the most common pitfalls I’ve seen organizations run into. A lot of people don’t fully understand how much your IT deficit has impact on your ability to migrate data. In this first video, I discuss Mailbox Size, Spam Filtering, & Address Changes. If you’re looking for more information around O365 migrations, I recently held a webinar with a couple of my colleagues that takes a deep dive into the topic.

 

Microsoft O365 Migrations Part 1

 

Interested in learning more about Microsoft O365 Migrations? Download David’s recent webinar, “Microsoft Office 365: Expectations vs. Reality“

 

By David Barter, Practice Manager, Microsoft Technologies

application development, Azure, Microsoft

Microsoft Blog: The cloud for any app and every developer

The below is an excerpt from a recent post on the Microsoft Azure blog by Nicole Herskowitz.

At Microsoft, our vision for Azure is to enable every developer to be able to create, deploy and manage any application in the cloud, regardless of the tools, technology, architecture or platform they prefer. We continue to innovate in delivering services on Microsoft Azure, often in close partnership with leading innovators across many technologies, to ensure open source and third party offerings have first-class support on Azure. Today we’re announcing new technologies and capabilities that advance our mission to make Azure the preferred cloud for any app and every developer — from back-end cloud services to higher level platform services, to the development process itself.

For building highly scalable back-end services in the cloud many developers are turning to microservice architectures. The independent nature of these microservices offers superior application lifecycle management, performance at scale, 24×7 availability and cost efficiency compared with traditional monolithic architectures for service based apps. Today, we’re announcing the public preview of Azure Service Fabric, Microsoft’s platform for developing and operating microservice-based applications. Service Fabric also brings new innovations to microservice development with support for reliable, stateful services for low-latency partitioned data access at scale, and the Actor programming model which drastically simplifies building high-scale microservice applications.

We’ve already seen strong interest in Service Fabric with over 300 customers and partners already building on the platform during the private preview. With the availability of public preview in Azure, you can now explore the scale-out potential of Service Fabric combined with dedicated Visual Studio tooling. Today, Service Fabric is available on Azure and will extend to Windows Server, Linux and other cloud providers next year providing application portability and hybrid scenarios. To get started, download the SDK, check out our getting started videos and documentation and deploy your application to a cluster live in Azure.

For developers who want to build powerful, enterprise grade web and mobile apps that connect to data in the cloud or on-premises, Azure App Service is a highly productive platform for building scalable apps in .NET, NodeJS, PHP, Python or Java as well as engaging mobile apps for iOS, Android and Windows. Azure App Service is one of our most popular Azure services used by more than 60% of customers to host over 700,000 apps. Building on this success, today we announced new capabilities in Azure App Service including:

  • Single sign-on using EasyAuth across all app types making authentication easy, everywhere
  • Code-free interface and data design for rapid development of data-driven Node.js apps
  • API app innovations extended to all app types, eliminating the need for an API gateway

 

To read the entire post, click here.

 

Interested in learning about common migration problems with Microsoft Office 365? Download our latest on-demand webinar.

 

Microsoft, Office 365

Microsoft Office 365: Expectations vs. Reality

There are many benefits to implementing Microsoft Office 365 including reducing capital expenditures, the ability to scale your business quickly, and simplified licensing. There have also been increased features and functionality such as Yammer, Delve and Skype for Business. Keep in mind, however, there can be some challenges associated with Office 365 implementations. Organizations need to take the proper measures to prepare for quality migration  and management of this critical suite of end user productivity services.

I’ll be hosting a webinar on 11/18, with my colleagues Jay Keating and Geoff Smith, to cover strategies for migrating and supporting mobile workforces. If you’re considering implementation, I highly recommend you register. Below are some of the topics Jay, Geoff and I will be covering:

  • Office 365 capabilities and use cases
  • Microsoft Cloud IaaS (Azure) considerations
  • Hidden challenges of migrating to Office 365
  • Licensing, version control, & AD Premium & Office 365 E3 issues
  • The ugly side of post-migration user support
  • SLAs, Quality of Service, and accountability challenges
  • Security, confidentiality, and compliance pit falls
  • Having the CFO talk – risks, benefits, costs

Register now for David’s upcoming webinar, “Microsoft Office 365: Expectations vs. Reality.” Bring your questions, as there will be a Q&A session at the end of the webinar!

 

By David Barter, Practice Manager, Microsoft Technologies

Azure, Microsoft, Office 365

Bringing the Cloud to Life with the Microsoft Experience Center

It’s oftentimes difficult to get a legitimate user experience when viewing a canned demo. That’s why I’m a big fan of the Microsoft Experience Center. It’s a mobile kit that operates out of the cloud through an Office 365 instance. This allows users to get that legitimate experience of interacting with Microsoft productivity solutions (while having access to experts to answer questions and provide guidance)  because it’s not a prepared environment or running over faster internet. It’s running over whatever the building you’re in is providing so that you can get a real understanding of what the experience will be like accessing these applications from the cloud. Watch the video below where I discuss the Microsoft Experience Center in more detail, including the process, benefits, and key takeaways you’ll leave with.

If you’re interested in learning more about Microsoft Office 365, I’ll hosting a webinar on November 18th entitled, “Microsoft Office 365: Expectations vs. Reality. Strategies for Migrating & Supporting Mobile Workforces. Register here!

This video is also available on GreenPages’ YouTube Channel

 

 

By David Barter, Practice Manager Microsoft Technologies