Office 365 Custom Branded Log-in Pages

One of my favorite Office 365 teams had a really cool announcement yesterday I have been waiting on.

Over the years, many customers have wanted to have custom branded page when a user logs-in. This was important for branding but even more important because I had customers wanting to put custom disclaimers to users when logging in to Office 365.

In the past the only way to achieve this was through making modifications in ADFS to introduce a new page as part of the log-in process. This was commonly done to add-in other form factors for authentication. The drawback of this approach was that it first required federation and not all Office 365 customers are using federation; they use cloud based IDs. Second, this required additional custom work on the organization’s ADFS deployment. This new change removes this requirement.

This new sign in page is actually a feature that has been available to customers who are Azure Active Direct (AD) Premium customers and now this feature is being provided directly to Office 365 customers without requiring a purchase of Azure Active Direct (AD) Premium.

Now this solution is available to all Office 365 customers, regardless if you are federated or using cloud based IDs. The configuration of this will be available off of the Office 365 Admin portal.

The user experience will be that user will see the Office 365 standard log-in screen, however once they enter their UPN, the user will be directed to the custom branded page.

The announcement was made here - http://blogs.office.com/2015/02/17/sign-page-branding-cloud-user-self-service-password-reset-office-365/

Here are the details adding a custom branded Sign In and Access Panel Page - https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/azure/dn532270.aspx. All the technical details are locating here to give you an understanding of the page elements you can edit and how to apply those changes.

Another note they made in this bog, which is good is this log-in branding can be coordinated with the recent announcement for theming here - http://blogs.office.com/2014/09/02/personalize-office-365-experience-selecting-themes/.

InfoPath Forms for SharePoint Server 2016

If you have read my blog over the years, you will know that I was heavy into InfoPath. There was a small update to this InfoPath announcement made last year - http://blogs.office.com/2014/01/31/update-on-infopath-and-sharepoint-forms/. SharePoint Server 2016 will include InfoPath Forms Server 2013 on-premises. This is just a reminder that if you have InfoPath dependencies, and you want to upgrade to the next version of SharePoint on-premises, InfoPath is supported on SharePoint Server 2016. Additional there is continued support of InfoPath on Office 365. The lifecycle support for InfoPath has not changed. Please review the referenced blog for all the details.

Office 365 Workload Specific Administration

I have to say, I am super excited about a new capability that is going to be released into Office 365 Administration. On the Office 365 public roadmap blog (http://roadmap.office.com/en-us), it was announced that a new capability called “Workload-specific admin roles” is being released.

For organizations that have been on Office 365 for a long time, they will truly be excited when this new feature has been released? The challenge has been as organizations have transitioned to the cloud, typically people such as the Exchange, SharePoint and Lync administrators have been completely separate people. The challenge has been when in Office 365, for those administrators to do activities they used to do, they would need global admin rights into the Office 365 admin console. This would give them rights to much more admin rights than they typically have had access to. There are ways to mitigate some things, however it was not a good.

With this upcoming release, admins can be broken out to the service they have responsibility for. Thus the SharePoint admin will only have access to SharePoint admin.

Office 365 Performance Optimization

I have say, one of the top five questions I am asked by enterprise customers who are coming to the cloud is “how will my bandwidth change”? For large organizations this can be a complex discussion on understanding how the organization accesses the Internet today and how they plan to change with time with the introduction of devices. With many of the organizations I work with, they have very specific controls to ensure that all inbound and outbound traffic is routed through their networks so they can properly inspect the traffic.

With all that said, there was a recent blog created called “Tune and optimize performance of your Office 365 connection” - http://blogs.office.com/2014/10/29/tune-optimize-performance-office-365-connection/. There some good information here if you are trying to figure out what is the bandwidth impact of Office 365 to your organization.

Network Planning and Performance Tuning reference - https://technet.microsoft.com/library/f97c2f06-0426-443d-8a16-d98abb0da252. This TechNet Article has been around for a long time and is updated on a regular basis. I highly recommend organizations read this as part of their evaluation when going to Office 365. Additionally there are calculators for Exchange, Lync and OneDrive for Business that you should review. There are network tools to analyze traffic, along with best practices and network planning activities.

Finally there is a new Microsoft Virtual Academy on Office 365 Performance Management located here - http://www.microsoftvirtualacademy.com/training-courses/office-365-performance-management. There are numerous modules in here with some really good facts. I really liked Module 7 which was a session on best practices on what some consultants have seen. In it they said there is no perfect number that can be determined before a deployment, however the most impact that they have seen is upwards to 20% new traffic and based on your Internet connection methods remote offices will be most impacted. Additionally I liked Module 8 on Configuring Firewall Whitelisting Planning because this is something that comes up a lot with customers whom I work with.

SharePoint Online Public Website Support Changing

There was a recent announcement that SharePoint Online is changing its support for public websites. I recommend that you read the following support article - http://support2.microsoft.com/kb/3027254

• Customers using public SPO sites today will be supported for next two years.
• Microsoft will be transitioning to third-party solutions. More information will be available in Jan 2015.

Office 365 GCC FedRAMP ATO

I am a little late on posting this huge news for Microsoft. Microsoft Office365 is the first cloud-based communication (including email) & collaboration service to obtain a FedRAMP Authority to Operation (ATO).
This is significant news based on the hard work we have been doing with US Federal customer to demonstrate our security and compliance.
For more information, please review the following:

• https://cloud.cio.gov/fedramp/microsoft
• http://blogs.office.com/2014/11/20/office-365-receives-fedramp-authority-operate-ato-hhs-oig/
• http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/government/blogs/cabine-level-agency-health-and-human-services-joins-other-federal-departments-to-improve-collaboration-productivity/default.aspx#fbid=-dkyTiA9gkE

New Office 365 GCC Service Description

There is a brand new service description on the Office 365 Government Community Cloud (GCC) service located here - http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/office-365-government.aspx

There is a lot of good initial detail on the Office 365 GCC service and why Microsoft created this service.