Friday, February 3, 2017

2007 Products Nearing End of Support

I saw that there was a reminder going around that some software was coming end of extended support in Calendar Year 2017.  For instance:
  • Office 365 ProPlus client using 2013 rich client is coming to an end 2/18/17.  This means you need to finish your transitions to Office 365 ProPlus 2016 client as soon as possible.
  • Exchange 2007 will be ending 4/11/2017.
  • Office 2007, Project Server 2007, and SharePoint 2007 are also coming to end of extended support.  I still see customers with SharePoint 2007 sitting out there.
  • OCS R2 (2007) has a little bit more time, 1/9/18.
I just call this out because in my mind, these 2007 releases was the first year where you could start seeing Microsoft’s vision of bringing together Exchange, SharePoint and OCS into a single collaboration platform.  That little presence “jellybean” was the start of something great.  Seeing what we have now with Office 365 where productivity is delivered as a SaaS service where Exchange, SharePoint, OneDrive, Skype, Office, Groups, Teams, etc., etc. are delivered in a fully integrated and seamless user experience brings a smile to my face. 

Here are some references:https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/lifecycle/selectindex
https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/3198497/office-2007-approaching-end-of-extended-support
https://blogs.technet.microsoft.com/exchange/2016/04/11/exchange-server-2007-t-1-year-and-counting/

Advanced Threat Protection adds URL Detonation and Dynamic Delivery

Every time I think there is something cool that is released, some even more interesting is going to be released into Office 365.  Let’s focus on Advanced Threat Protection (ATP).  Back in November there was announcement made that ATP was being expanded to protect Office, SharePoint Online and OneDrive for Business; I blogged about it here - http://www.astaticstate.com/2016/11/new-atp-features-for-office-sharepoint.html

Well there are some more features being released to ATP that are truly exciting.

First URL Detonation is being added.  What this will do is protect you against links to files.  If a user clicks on a link like below, what ATP will do is scan the file for anything malicious prior to providing the user access to the file.  This is in addition to what ATP already does with the Safe Links feature (checking the reputation of the URL).


Second, Dynamic Delivery is being added to the Safe Attachments feature.  What this will do is continue to send an email to a user which the attachments are being scanned.  The user will see a stub in Outlook telling them that their attachments are being scanned, and once scanning has been completed, they will be provided access to the email attachments.  Users will not have to wait as long now for getting their emails that are going through Safe Attachment analysis.
If the user clicks on the stub, they will be given a progress of the analysis.
It is truly existing to see these types of features being released in the ATP service.

Reference
https://blogs.office.com/2017/01/25/evolving-office-365-advanced-threat-protection-with-url-detonation-and-dynamic-delivery/