Microsoft Intelligent Communications Announcement

There was a big announcement today about Microsoft Teams and Skype for Business.

The big announcement is that Microsoft is uniting the Microsoft Teams and Skype for Business to bring together a new vision of intelligent communications.  Microsoft Teams is a core Microsoft’s vision for communications and bringing the Skype for Business capability into this solution will further enable communication within groups and teams of people.

So, what are some important facts?  This is what I picked up from the reference items below:

• Skype for Business is not going away; Skype for Business is being incorporated and will remain a key solution for Microsoft.
• Microsoft Teams will evolve as the primary client for intelligent communications for Office 365.
• Skype for Business brand will not be removed, and that brand will be surfaced up in the Microsoft Teams client.
• The integration of Skype for Business Online capabilities to the Microsoft Teams user experience will not occur immediately.  Features such as Cloud PBX and voice capabilities to Cloud PBX will not occur until late CY18.
• Skype for Business clients will remain supported for a long-time, so customers have time to transition.  Running both Microsoft Teams and the Skype for Business client will remain supported.  Customer administrators have control and choice of how to transition users to this new experience.
• Microsoft recommends to start using the core capabilities of Microsoft Teams sooner than later to prepare yourself for this transition.
• They are bringing together “conversation can be captured, transcribed, and time-coded, with closed captioning and voice recognition for attributing remarks to specific individuals”.  From what I can tell they are leveraging services used to support the new Microsoft Stream service with this.  Brilliant!
• Skype for Business Server will still have another on-premise release due out in CY18 H2.

References
Announcement - https://blogs.office.com/en-us/2017/09/25/a-new-vision-for-intelligent-communications-in-office-365/
Intelligent Communications - http://skypeandteams.fasttrack.microsoft.com/
FAQs - https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/MicrosoftTeams/faq-journey

Office 365 Secure Score and Information Security Planning

Introduction
Office 365 customers are provided a highly security solution for business productivity.  Microsoft ensures that the Office 365 service is secure and demonstrates this commitment through many of the third-party accreditations it receives.  Yet that is only half the battle as the customer who manage the Office 365 tenant shares in that security responsibility.  There are a tremendous amount security features and capabilities that are available to Office 365 customers that require configuration and management.  Customers frequently miss they too have a security responsibility to manage and continuously monitor their tenant.  In this blog I will discuss:

1. The new Office 365 Secure Score analytics tool.
2. Office 365 Information Security Planning.

Microsoft is invested in providing a safe and secure productivity cloud solution for your end users.  A clear differentiator for Microsoft is that they provide you plans, frameworks and tools that help you plan and continually monitor your security risk with Office 365.

Office 365 Secure Score
Microsoft has released “in preview” a new capability called Office 365 Secure Score.  This is a new analytics tool that can review the configuration of your tenant and make recommendations (based initially on 77 different factors).  Think of it as a “credit score”.  The higher the score, the more controls you have configured into your tenant.  The goal is to create a score that is aligned to your business requirements which do not impact your user experience.

Features of this capability are:

• There is a summary panel that provides you your score and when you last ran it.
• There is a modeling tool that allows you to do analysis to determine if you introduce more controls how those new controls will impact your score.
• There is detailed information about each control it evaluates and the risk that it mitigates.
• There are remediation instructions for each control that you introduce and how it would impact your end users.
• There is a score analyzer that allows you to measure your performance over time.  You can download the scores from the reports and make them part of continuous monitoring program.
• New controls will be introduced into the tool as new features are added to the service.

Plan for Office 365 Information Security
Since I have discussed this new Office 365 Secure Score tool that helps you continuously evaluate your security position, it is also worth mentioning there are several new Office 365 Information Planning worksheets you should review (see references below).
What these references will do is provide you direction on how you can utilize and configure all of the Office 365 security features (several new ones). 

Here are features I talk about a lot:

• Federated Authentication (ADFS) and ADFS Client Access Policies.
• Two-factor Authentication with Office 365 MFA and integration with third-party 2FA (smart cards, PIV, CaC).
• Data Loss Prevention for Exchange Online, SharePoint Online, OneDrive for Business and Skype for Business Online.
• Rights Management Service (RMS) Exchange Online, SharePoint Online, OneDrive for Business and Office 365 ProPlus.
• Office 365 Message Encryption (OME) and S/MIME support.
• eDiscovery, Legal Hold and Retention policies for Exchange Online, SharePoint Online, OneDrive for Business and Skype for Business Online.
• Advanced eDiscovery with text analytics, machine learning and predictive coding.
• Exchange Online Inactive Mailboxes.
• Data spillage and deletion methods.
• Permissions management.
• Service usage reports.
• Customer Lockbox
• Office 365 MDM and Exchange ActiveSync policies.
• Intune MDM advanced features for Exchange Online, SharePoint Online, OneDrive for Business and Skype for Business Online.
• Office on the Web (OWA) client policies for data sync and attachment downloads.
• Exchange Online Protection.
• Advanced Threat Protection for Exchange Online.
• Office 365 Advanced Security Management.
• Azure AD usage and audit reports.
• Exchange Online mailbox auditing and administrator auditing reports.
• SharePoint Online usage audit reports.
• Rights Management Service (RMS) audit reports.
• External sharing policies for SharePoint Online, OneDrive for Business and Skype for Business Online.

There are a lot of features available to customers and planning is required.

In Closing
It can be daunting to see the amount of information security features that a customer has available to them in Office 365.  Customers need to plan and develop continuous monitoring plans to evaluate their risk in the Office 365.  Microsoft, unlike many of the cloud vendors out there, provide comprehensive solutions to help you plan and measure your risk.

Reference
Office 365 Secure Score Announcement - https://blogs.technet.microsoft.com/office365security/new-security-analytics-service-finding-and-fixing-risk-in-office-365/
Take a systematic approach to security and information protection with Office 365 - https://blogs.office.com/2016/07/27/take-a-systematic-approach-to-security-and-information-protection-with-office-365/
Plan for Office 365 security and information protection capabilities - https://support.office.com/en-US/article/Plan-for-Office-365-security-and-information-protection-capabilities-3d4ac4a1-3920-4ff9-918f-011f3ce60408?ui=en-US&rs=en-US&ad=US

Advanced eDiscovery with Equivio

Introduction
About a year ago Microsoft made an announcement for the acquisition of a company called Equivio with the plans of incorporating it into Office 365.  Equivio or Office 365 Advanced eDiscovery is now available and is part of the new E5 suite.

Advanced eDiscovery with Equivio provides organizations the ability to perform eDiscovery analysis across significant volumes of unstructured content using machine learning, relevance/predictive coding and text analytics.  This will enable organizations to tactically search through emails, documents, files and instant messages that are stored inside of Exchange Online, SharePoint Online, OneDrive for Business and Skype for Business Online.  Advanced eDiscovery achieves this by removing duplicate files, reconstructing email threads, identifying key themes and data relationships.

Enterprise organizations are presented with a real eDiscovery challenge today.  They have significant volumes of data they need to go through.  Today with Office 365 (depending on your plan) a user could have unlimited email storage, along with 1 TB of personal OneDrive storage plus SharePoint Online collaboration data they use.  An organization can use Office 365 eDiscovery tools to find data across Office 365 however that could produce a significant amount of data.  That significant amount of data can be exported but it will need to be reviewed file-by-file by lawyers.  That review of data will have a significant cost to the organization.  Organizations are looking for solutions that can prune, pair-down and identify the most relevant data.  Office 365 Advanced eDiscovery with Equivio can assist with this.

Let’s review the new Office 365 Advanced eDiscovery.

At a High Level

At a high level, there are several key features of the new Advanced eDiscovery (Equivio).

• Near-Duplicate Detection – With large volumes of data there will documents that are the same or have be nearly the same.  Instead of having multiple people review different versions of the same document, it is more efficient to group same/similar documents together and have a single person review those documents.
• Email Threading – Allow reviewers the ability to focus on the unique text of an email thread versus having to focus on all the duplicative text in an email thread.
• Themes – Will help reviewers by grouping (or clustering) related documents for added context.
• Predictive Coding – This capability will allow the Advanced eDiscovery solution to automatically identify relevant data.  Advanced eDiscovery has a machine learning component that can be “trained” using a sample set of data.  Once “trained” the system can make relevancy decisions across all the data in the case.

These features will become more apparent later within this blog.

So what is the relationship between all Office 365 eDiscovery Solutions?

Advanced eDiscovery with Equivio works in concert with the eDiscovery capabilities already delivered in Office 365.  You will still use Office 365 eDiscovery to initially search content sources.  Once the searches have been completed, you will use the new Advanced eDiscovery (Equivio) to perform analysis on that data.  Here are some of the major solutions.

• Exchange Online In-Place eDiscovery – This capability has been in Exchange Online for a while.  Administrators have the ability to perform eDiscovery across mailboxes, place items on legal hold, data export, etc.
• Skype for Business Online eDiscovery – Is enabled through Exchange Online capabilities.
• SharePoint Online and OneDrive for Business Search / Hold / Export – SharePoint Online has capabilities to discover, hold and export data natively in that service.
• eDiscovery Center in SharePoint Online – Is an eDiscovery portal solution that allows for you to create and manage cases for eDiscovery, legal hold and data export across SharePoint Online, OneDrive for Business, Exchange Online and Skype for Business.
• Compliance Search – In a new capability that works with Exchange, SharePoint, OneDrive for Business and Skype In-Place eDiscovery.  Specifically, Compliance Search has no limits on the number of target mailboxes that can be searched.  This is especially important if you have an organization larger than 10,000 mailboxes and you want to perform a search across the entire organization.  Once you have identified the data in Compliance Search, you have the ability to manage legal hold, data export, etc. though the respective In-Place eDiscovery capabilities previously mentioned.

Knowing these solutions, where does Advanced eDiscovery with Equivio play in? 

Advanced eDiscovery with Equivio can be used after you complete a Compliance Search.  It is very common that the results of a Compliance Search could yield a lot of data depending on the scope of your search.  However, not all that data may not be relevant to the case.  Organizations need tools that will help them identify only the relevant data.  When there are significant volumes of content, it is not realistic that hundreds of thousands of files will each be read.  This is where Advanced eDiscovery with Equivio can help.

Simple Scenario

A common scenario would be that an organization wants to ensure that the amount of data being provided meets the minimum required by a court.  The organization wants to make sure that they provide the most relevant data and they have a significant amount of data they need go through.

First we go to the Compliance Admin Center >> eDiscovery and then create a case.

 

Then in the eDiscovery case, we have the ability to search across Exchange Online, SharePoint Online, OneDrive for Business and Skype for Business Online.  Once you have your queries defined, you can then click the “Analyze with Equivio Analytics” link.

 

A screen will come up for you to confirm sending the data over for that query to Equivio for preparation.

 

Once the preparation is completed, you need to click on the “Go to Equivio Analytics” link back on the Compliance Admin Center >> eDiscovery screen.  You then need to create a Case in Equivio and associate search results you just sent over.  Here is an article for the past few steps just described - https://technet.microsoft.com/EN-US/library/ms.o365.cc.customizeexportwithzoom.aspx. 

Once that is done, you can configure near-duplicates, email threads, themes and text that should be ignored configurations.  Here is an article with more information on these configurations as there is a lot of detail to this which can impact the Equivio analysis - https://technet.microsoft.com/EN-US/library/mt297882.aspx and https://technet.microsoft.com/EN-US/library/mt297873.aspx. 

Once you have your configurations complete, press the Analyze button.

Upon completion of the analysis, you can see the following results.  This will tell you how many types of files you have as well as information that shows you how much unique data there is.  The report has emphasis on identifying unique data.  Here is some more information about this report - https://technet.microsoft.com/EN-US/library/mt297878.aspx.

 

Once you have completed initial assessment of the data, we to determine the relevancy of the data.  The way this is done is by training the system (Equivio) to know how to identify relevant data.  This is enabled through the machine learning / predictive coding features of Equivio.  As you can see below, the initial Assessment has been completed and training need to be initiated.  Simply press the Training button.

Next you will go through a sample of the data selected by Equivio (commonly in 40 file batches).  Your analyst (knowledgeable with the case) will mark data as being relevant or not-relevant.  This marking of files will be used by Equivio to determine the richness of the data and will be to perform statistics.  For more details on this process, read this subset of articles - https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/mt303697.aspx.  In the screenshot below, the file was marked as relevant.

In the screenshot below, the file was marked as not-relevant.

Once enough data has been reviewed, you will see that training is complete and now it is time to complete Batch Calculation.  Press the Batch Calculation button.

Batch calculation will go through all of the rest of the files for you and apply a relevancy score.

Once Batch Calculation is complete, you need to review the findings on the Decide step.  This is the step where you need to decide how many more documents you want to review and how much it will cost for that review.  The objective is find an acceptable Cutoff point.  Why?  Because pulling out all of the data for legal review is not cost effective; especially when we are working with significant volumes of unstructured data.  An organization needs to find the right balance between discovering as much data as possible while at the same time reducing the amount of actual files a lawyer would have to review.  This saves real money when we are talking about significant volumes of data.

 

Let’s dig into this report a little more.

First, the “Review” is the percentage of files reviewed based on the cut-off point.  Second, the “Recall” is the percentage of relevant files in the review set.

In this specific example below, the total number of files in the collection being analyzed is 685,591 files.

The Richness is the total number of relevant files in the entire collection.  In this case the Richness was determined to be 5.20% of the files (or roughly 35,000 relevant files).

The number of documents Reviewed in this specific set is roughly 137,000 files (or 20% of the total files in the collection).

At this specific Review-recall ratio, the Cutoff Score is 7.42.  What does this mean?  During the training and batch calculation steps, each file was given a relevance score between 0 and 100; 100 being the most relevant. 

Here is the really important part of this analysis.  If lawyers were to review all files that have a Relevance score of higher than 7.42 (which is 20% of the total data) they would find 84.6% of the relevant files (roughly 30,000 relevant files).

In this example there is some simple cost analysis.  If it were to cost $1 to have a lawyer review each file, there is a cost of roughly $135,700 for that to be completed.  The $1 was set as something simple and is a configurable parameter.

You may then wonder, what would the cost implications be to review more data?  Equivio support this by allowing you to use the slider in the Review-recall ratio section.  In this specific example, if you drag that slide to review 28% of the data, Recall will increase to 90.4% of the relevant files being produced for lawyer review.  This does increase the cost to $189,900 for them to review those additional files.  This could be considered a cost effective decision depending on your organization’s risk profile.

You can again increase the Review of documents to 56% of the files, this will provide a Recall to 97% of the relevant files.  However, as you will see there is a cost of $384,700; which is double the cost.  At some point a determination needs to be made where is an acceptable Cutoff for your organization.  In this third case, you are spending twice the amount of money to review documents that have a very low relevance score.

 

If you want to do some additional testing based on the information in this report, there is a Test Relevance feature where you can test the rest of the data.  You can manually tag more data and perform more analysis - https://technet.microsoft.com/EN-US/library/mt303692.aspx.

The final step is to use the Export capability.  This will allow you to export all the files used in the case in Equivio.  Remember using this export removes all off the near-duplicates and consolidates the email threads.  This means using this tool, lawyers have less files to review and those files are grouped together.

 Can Advanced eDiscovery with Equivio be used with data outside of Office 365?

The answer is yes.

With Office 365 you have the ability to bring data from your premises solutions and pull them into Office 365.

 

Additionally, third-party archiving solutions are being introduced that can feed data from other platforms into Office 365.  Once that data is in Office 365, it can be managed and just like any other file in Office 365.  Thus the data is now discoverable.

 

Conclusions

This is a really interesting solution that has been introduced into Office 365.  It will go a long way towards helping enterprise customers work with the significant volumes of data that they need to work with.

References

Announcement of Office 365 Advanced eDiscovery - https://blogs.office.com/2015/12/10/reduce-ediscovery-costs-and-challenges-with-office-365-advanced-ediscovery/

Exchange Online In-Place eDiscovery - https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd298021(v=exchg.150).aspx

eDiscovery Center in SharePoint Online - https://support.office.com/en-us/article/Set-up-an-eDiscovery-Center-in-SharePoint-Online-a18f8975-aa7f-43b4-a7d6-001d14744d8e

Compliance Search - https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms.o365.cc.compliancesearch.aspx

Prepare search results for Advanced eDiscovery - https://technet.microsoft.com/EN-US/library/ms.o365.cc.customizeexportwithzoom.aspx

Office 365 Advanced eDiscovery in TechNet - https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/mt303716.aspx - tons of articles that show how to execute this capability…

 

 

Skype for Business Online Cloud PBX Quick Introduction

Introduction

There are some extremely exciting capabilities that will be available with the upcoming release of Cloud PBX for Skype for Business Online. I work a lot with customers who have been evaluating Office 365 and one of the hardest discussions I have had with customers is around the Lync / Skype Enterprise Voice. Previously, if a customer was a Lync Enterprise Voice customer on-premises customers had to retain all the Lync capabilities on-premises.

What has changed?

Well this is no longer a limitation anymore and there are scenarios that enterprise customers seek are now supported.

What is powering this is the new Cloud PBX with on-premises PSTN Connectivity and Skype for Business Hybrid.

The following import scenarios can be supported:

Skype for Business Online with on-premises PSTN - In this scenario an enterprise organization can move all of their end users to Skype for Business Online in Office 365 and have the ability to use the new Cloud PBX with on-premises PSTN Connectivity that will integrate Enterprise Voice capabilities from existing on-premises PSTN investments. In this case end users will get all the capabilities such as IM, presence, web meetings, desktop sharing, application sharing, etc. from the cloud while using the on-premises PSTN to integrate Enterprise Voice capabilities.

Skype for Business Hybrid with on-premises PSTN – In this scenario enterprise organizations have the ability have some end users receive Skype for Business services from on-premises while other end users receive Skype for Business Online services from Office 365 using a regular hybrid configuration. Plus in this configuration you can use the new Cloud PBX with on-premises PSTN Connectivity to allow all of the end users to receive Enterprise Voice capability from existing on-premises PSTN investments. This is a very attractive solution for enterprise organizations that want to take a phase transitions to the Office 365.

Other Hybrid Scenarios with Exchange and SharePoint – Additionally there is extremely flexible options to integrate Exchange on-premises, Exchange Online, SharePoint on-premises and SharePoint Online with both of the scenarios listed above. I consider this a different type of hybrid where you can have a mix-and-match strategy of collaboration services spread across the cloud and on-premises based on your organizations transition strategy or long-term co-existence with the cloud. Microsoft vision in supporting enterprise organizations is impressive.

So how do you plan for this?

Well there are lots of really good resources that I highly recommend you start reading to prepare and plan for such a design. From these links, you can go deeper into design considerations for your enterprise organization. I recommend reading the following articles in this order.

Learning the Topology and Server Roles for Skype for Business – https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dn933894.aspx – First you need to sit down and learn all of the server roles and topologies needed for Skype for Business Server 2015 on-premises. Do not worry, this article is really straight forward to understand. This will be the baseline for your understanding of the on-premises dependencies you will have. Plus you should review these simple understand topology diagrams - https://technet.microsoft.com/EN-US/library/gg398095.aspx.

Plan Skype for Business Hybrid – https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/jj205403.aspx – In this article you will learn all the considerations for planning a Skype for Business Hybrid configuration with Office 365. Depending on the specific configuration you have you may have to introduce some updates into you Lync server farm that is on-premises.

Exchange and SharePoint Hybrid Scenarios – https://technet.microsoft.com/EN-US/library/jj945633.aspx – This is another really good resource that will walk you through the supported configurations and capabilities available with Skype for Business on-premises and Skype for Business Online with Exchange on-premises, Exchange Online, SharePoint on-premises and SharePoint Online.

Planning and Deploying Cloud PBX with on-premises PSTN – https://technet.microsoft.com/EN-US/library/mt455212.aspx – This article explains the major considerations for planning and configuration of Cloud PBX for on-premises PSTN. It has some important discussions such as what features and capabilities of Enterprise Voice that are available, solution benefits, performance / networking considerations, deployment considerations, and major steps you need to take to complete the configuration. The major steps are:

• Enabling users for Enterprise Voice capabilities.
• Assigning a Voice Routing Policy to your Skype for Business on-premises deployment.
• Moving Skype for Business users to Skype for Business Online. Requires Azure AD sync to be configured and ADFS configuration.
• Enable users for Cloud PBX.

This has extremely good information.

Plan for hybrid voice with no on-premises server deployment – https://technet.microsoft.com/EN-US/library/mt605227.aspx – Finally read this article if you have already deployed 100% to Skype for Business Online and you want to add Cloud PBX with on-premises PSTN support to your configuration. Really this article builds off all of the other information that you read about in the previous articles.

Conclusion

In conclusion Microsoft and empowering organizations to transition to the cloud in an extremely flexible manner. The new Cloud PBX with on-premises PSTN is yet another example of this flexibility and I am excited to see customers take advantage of this soon.

Skype for Business Online Release Coming

Skype for Business Online is coming around the corner. As many of you know, Lync Online is transitioning to Skype for Business Online. Skype for Business Online will start rolling out on April 14^th!

If you read the recent announcement (http://blogs.office.com/2015/03/16/get-ready-for-skype-for-business/) you will know that Skype for Business Online is new solution that delivers on top of the enterprise capability Lync Online. The user experience is enhanced and consistent. I can even say from my personal experience, I have not missed a step as part of the transition.

Enterprise customers may however want to delay pushing the Skype for Business Online client to end users until the organization is ready from a change management perspective. That is not a problem. There are two ways you can control this. First, remember you as the administrator can control where your desktops receive their Office 365 ProPlus updates from; thus you have the ability to delay these updates. Second, there is policy available through PowerShell that will control what client is presented to the user Lync or Skype for Business. More information is located here - http://blogs.office.com/2015/04/01/whats-new-in-skype-for-business-and-how-you-can-take-control-of-updates/

Skype for Business Announcement

There was a big announcement this week that Lync is being rebranded as Skype for Business. Please review the following announcement for the exact details - http://blogs.office.com/2014/11/11/introducing-skype-business/.

What are my takeaways?

• In H1, Lync will transition its brand to Skype for Business.
• Skype for Business will be available through Office 365 and/or customers can deploy Skype for Business on-premises. Customers who have Lync on-premises today, “No new hardware is required” is required to support this transition.
• The user experience will begin to merge such that Skype for Business has a similar experience to Skype.

This is very similar and consistent change that Microsoft did to OneDrive and OneDrive for Business brands. These are very similar solution offerings however there is a different offering for consumers and business. As a result of this change there is a pretty common user experience between OneDrive and OneDrive for Business. OneDrive and OneDrive for Business are not the same implement. OneDrive for Business is specific to Office 365 only. OneDrive for Business has enhanced features to support enterprise business scenarios (supported through SharePoint Online). Customers who are 100% on-premises still have the ability to deploy OneDrive for Business within their SharePoint 2013 on-premises deployments.