Simon May's Blog

Devices, Services, Life

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Resources for IT Apprentices

Today I went to talk to a group of IT Apprentices at QA’s centre in Birmingham, thanks for a good day guys and especially to Lorette who organised the day.  If you aren’t sure what apprentices are then you should find out more about IT Apprenticeships, however this is probably mostly being read by the folks who were there so here’s my deck from the day and some links to some of the things we looked at.  Remember all these resources are free.

Cloud to it as
View more presentations from Simon May.

Free Trial of Office 365

Free trial of Windows Intune

Free trial of Windows Azure

And here too is my previous deck from another apprentices session

Cloud for IT Apprentices
View more presentations from Simon May.

Resources for IT Apprentices

You BETT ya! (or why I went to an education fair to meet IT Pros)

You BETT ya! (or why I went to an education fair to meet IT Pros)

I spent much of last week at the crazy busy BETT education fair at Olympia showing people Office 365 and meeting some very interesting techies working in schools, collages and universities all over the country.  I had a lot of misconceptions about the type of IT Professionals working in education before I got there, most were blown out of the water and my thoughts reset.  I’ll get a video of the Office 365 stuff out later this week…

Scale was the first thing I wrongly assumed.  I thought that schools would be small, but it’s the opposite.  Mail administrators in schools face a battle of provisioning hundreds of mailboxes each year, archiving old ones and constantly managing their users and storage requirements.  AD DS administrators face the same but with the added complication of load as every student logs on 4 , 5, 6 times a day as they move between classrooms.  Those AD DS servers are taking a battering folks and they need to be up to the job.

I was expecting lots of people to be stuck in the dark ages – and some are – but many are not.  Schools are readily adopting cloud technologies to cope with the scale and flexibility they need to provide.  Many have rolled out Windows 7 or are planning to do so in September.  Many are using Hyper-V to virtualise (the ones who aren’t are very actively looking to ditch Vmware because of cost), application virtualisation and VDI and RDS are hot technologies too as schools look to make it easier to rollout application updates.

Saving money is high on the agenda as you’d expect so using virtualisation, cloud and making their infrastructure easier to manage are top of the agenda.

Security is paramount.  Firstly they have lots of kids doing the Bring Your Own Computer thing and it’s causing infections and virus outbreaks a plenty – except those schools that have deployed NAP (Network Access Protection).  Secondly I was showing off a bunch of slate devices and the critical thing there is that they can be encrypted preventing anything that the kids do with them such as taking pictures with the web cams from falling into the wrong hands.

There are lots of people doing clever things with Windows 7 and much of what’s used in the class room, like digital white boards and interactive projectors are useful in the board room or the meeting room.

The best thing though was that there was a palpable enthusiasm for using technology to help reduce cost and more importantly help our kids to learn in better ways.  It seems education is a space full of early adopters and a good segment to watch for ideas.

You BETT ya! (or why I went to an education fair to meet IT Pros)

Connecting Office 365 and FOPE

Office 365 Beta gives you automatic access to Forefront Online Protection for Exchange to protect the mail flow into your Office 365 environment.  We recently released a guidance document that includes some of the known issues and some of the scenarios for more advanced mail flows.  The document discusses the following scenarios in depth but there’s also a video available if that’s more your cup of tea.

Fully hosted scenario—Email flows exclusively through the cloud (Internet), without any interaction with on-premises servers. For more information, see Fully Hosted Scenario.

Shared address space with on-premises relay scenario—Email is hosted partially in the cloud (Internet) and partially on-premises, and mail flow is controlled on-premises.

Internal mail flow scenario—Both the sender and the recipients are within the same organization, and the organization has mailboxes both in the cloud and on-premises. However, unlike the previous scenario, not all mail is controlled by the on-premises mail server. In this scenario, email is sent between the cloud and the on-premises server without being sent to the Internet and FOPE skips all filtering operations.

Outbound smart host scenario—FOPE acts as a smart host, redirecting outbound mail to an on-premises server that applies additional processing before delivering mail to its final destination. However, incoming mail goes straight to the Exchange Online servers without passing through an on-premises server. You may want to consider this option for your organization if you have an on-premises application or other compliance solution you use to filter outgoing mail and you also want the benefits of FOPE edge, virus, policy, and spam filtering.

Inbound safe listing scenario—Email is sent inbound through FOPE to Microsoft Exchange Online from a trusted organization. In this scenario, FOPE is configured to skip IP address filtering on inbound mail sent from IP addresses specified in a safe list. You can also configure FOPE to skip policy and spam filtering.

Regulated partner with forced TLS scenario—Forced inbound and outbound transport layer security (TLS) is used to secure all routing channels with business regulated partners.

There’s no way to get access to the Office 365 Beta right now but you can get a BPOS trail if you’d like to see how exchange online works.

Connecting Office 365 and FOPE

You should connect your Active Directory to the cloud

Sound scary?  Well it’s not, but it’s critically important in spurring cloud adoption in your organisation and therefore a set of key skills for IT Professionals.  We have a technology toolset called Active Directory Federation Service (ADFS 2.0) that uses a set of secure protocols like SSL and Public Key encryption to provide Single Sign On to applications that are not hosted inside your network.  It doesn’t even require a physical connection between your Active Directory Directory Service (AD DS) and the application, or even for you to dangle your AD DS on the internet like tasty shark bait.  In fact you don’t even have to place your AD DS into a DMZ.  All this means you can provide secure single sign on…but why would you and how do you?  (hint the how is at the bottom).

Lets take a look why.  What are the applications that your users use most frequently and easily?  Probably Word, Excel, PowerPoint…then probably some line of business apps (LOB).  How do people sign onto those LOB apps?  If you’re in a good place then they don’t need to, they just launch the app and get signed in automatically but if you aren’t then they probably need extra user names and passwords.  How many helpdesk calls does that create?  What perception of IT services in your organisation does that create?  I know, I’ve been there….the answer is usually lots of calls, poor perception.  That user experience can be better with simple AD authentication for the application.

The pain not having single sign on with a cloud application can be extreme.  Imagine this scenario:

You should connect your Active Directory to the cloud

But with ADFS 2.0 in place all that has to happen is that the user remembers their Windows password and logs in.  Just once and it’s far more secure because your organisation is in charge of the password reset policy, the complexity policy and most importantly – because they don’t have to remember lots of passwords they stop writing them down on their desks.

We’re pretty serious about this being a major piece of the cloud for the IT Professional, so much so that both @deepfat and I took two days out a week or so ago for offsite training on how to build ADFS 2.0 infrastructures.  It’s not all that complex either…once you have an understanding of PKI.  But to make it even easier you’ll find whitepapers that take a step by step approach to the technology just here: Single Sign-On from Active Directory to a Windows Azure Application Whitepaper .  Not only is this essential for Azure it’s also essential to know for the best possible Office365 integration.

You should connect your Active Directory to the cloud

Why not Gmail?

I was just surfing about our sites as you do and happened across this rather interesting little video that covers some of the reasons that Outlook is better for business than Gmail.  As an ex Gmail user I wasn’t thinking about this stuff when it was just me using Gmail on my own but it’s hard to see how it can work well in a corporate environment.  The amount of time a PA needs to be able to see resource availability or to securely (or in a SOx compliant way) access someone else’s info is frequent enough that they’d surely get pretty frustrated pretty quickly.  The need for BES servers to be on premise and for remote wipe to be a pain in the butt must cause lots of pain for IT Depts too.  Anyway the video walks through some scenarios quite nicely and only takes a couple of minutes.

Why not Gmail?

Why not Gmail?