Office 365 Service Trust Portal

If you have not seen it, Office 365 has released a new portal inside of the administration area called the Office 365 Service Trust Portal. In the past to get access to compliance reports, organizations would reach out to the support or account team to gain access to reports. Now such reports as SOC 1, SOC 2, ISO 27001, etc. are available right through this portal.

If you are a US Federal Customer, and need access to FedRAMP reports associated to NIST 800-53, it is best to go directly to the FedRAMP web site and make a request for that information through their repository.

References

https://blogs.office.com/2015/09/15/announcing-the-office-365-service-trust-portal/

https://blogs.office.com/2015/10/21/announcing-the-enhanced-office-365-soc-audit-reports-with-new-trust-principles/

https://www.fedramp.gov/

https://www.fedramp.gov/marketplace/compliant-systems/microsoft-office-365-multi-tenant-supporting-services-including-azure-active-directory-leveraging-microsoft-azure-and-cloud-infrastructure/

New SharePoint and Office 365 Hybrid Search

I am super excited to see the new Hybrid Cloud Search coming. Why? A ton of reasons. The biggest for me are:

• Simplified On-Premises Deployment – If you have ever had to manage SharePoint on-premises before, the search servers require the most care and management. No more search crashing on you because you did not put enough resources to manage it. No more having to worry about timer jobs and full index crawls.
• No More Having to Run Search Servers On-Premises - Moving this entire search workload to the cloud will significantly make your on-premises deployments smaller and easier to manage.

Up to this point, the only way to achieve a hybrid search experience by setting up query federation with SharePoint 2013 on-premises with SharePoint Online. This really did not make your SharePoint on-premises deployments any easier. Now we can do away with that configuration.

Here are some specific technical considerations.

• You now have the ability with your SharePoint 2013 and 2016 on-premises farms to get the entire SharePoint search experience from the cloud. This is being termed as SharePoint Server with Cloud Search service application.
• Scenario: If you have not leveraged SharePoint Online yet, you can use this as an opportunity to remove all your SharePoint on-premises search servers and use the cloud.
• Scenario: If you have move some or a large portion of your SharePoint on-premises to the cloud, you now have the ability to get a unified hybrid search and that entire search experience is delivered by the cloud.
• Scenario: If you have specific reason (i.e. legal, compliance) that you have to keep some search servers on-premises, you can still do that have query federation (picture below) between your on-premises SharePoint and SharePoint Online.
• Hybrid search can go across the following content sources: SharePoint Server 2007, 2010 or 2013, File shares, BCS connectors*. This basically means that user in SharePoint Online can retrieve search results from all these locations.
• Recommend that you get your SharePoint on-premises to SharePoint 2013 or higher to get the most advantage of these features.
• Recommend you seriously considered using search from the cloud. Why? With the amount of data organizations is acquiring and maintaining, using an elastic cloud to deliver those search results will only make your life easier J
• Delve Search experience will also be supported as part of this new search experience. So Delve can find files not just in SharePoint Online, but also in SharePoint on-premises.
• eDiscovery and new SharePoint DLP capabilities will be able to go across SharePoint Online, SharePoint on-premises and OneDrive for Business. This is a big deal.
• Configuration with Azure AD is required. You will do this anyways as an Enterprise Office 365 customer.
• If you need to do customer IFilters, BCS connectors or Partner connectors, those will remain on-premises.
• Cloud will not support: Site collection level schema mapping, Custom security trimming, Custom entity extraction and Content enrichment web service.

Here is a high level logical architecture diagram

Getting the point across that this makes your on-premises deployment so much simpler. It is hard to argue that you SharePoint on-premises life will be made better.

References

https://blogs.office.com/2015/08/24/announcing-availability-of-sharepoint-server-2016-it-preview-and-cloud-hybrid-search/

https://channel9.msdn.com/Events/Ignite/2015/BRK3134

Outlook on the web

There was a major announcement for Office 365 Exchange Online customers this past week. Microsoft is changing Outlook Web App (OWA) to “Outlook on the web”. I have a couple ideas of why this was done from a marketing perspective. With this change to Outlook on the web, there was a release of whole bunch of new features and capabilities to come with it. Most notable:

• A new Action Bar to allow you to perform actions across mail, calendar, contacts and tasks much easier.
• The ability to Pin an email to the top of your mailbox. Man I love the idea of this feature and will use it a lot. See picture below…
• Sweep which is a new capability to allow you to manage emails from specific senders.
• New features to email to your archive folders easier.
• Several new features around views and reading panes to give you more flexibility like in Outlook rich client.
• New capabilities to for working with embedded images.
• Plus the mobile experience web has been enhanced. I have actually had to use this every once and a while. If you are on a mobile device and you do not have a mobile app installed, this is the next best thing. Several new capabilities have been introduced.

Public Announcement - https://blogs.office.com/2015/08/04/new-features-coming-to-outlook-on-the-web/

OneDrive for Business Sync Blocking

There have some features that I have been following closely and very excited to see that they are being introduced into the Office 365 service.

First there is a new announcement about new controls that are being added to OneDrive for Business and SharePoint Online. One of the biggest questions I have had from customers coming to Office 365 is how can document data be controlled such that documents are not synchronized to un-managed devices. Specifically this questions as in reference to the Document Sync capability which allows a user to press the Sync button on a document library that will sync all those files in that document library to a PC (and MACs). A new PowerShell command has been added that will allow administrators to block sync to all unmanaged PCs. I am really excited to see this become available for enterprise customers.

Announcement - https://blogs.office.com/2015/07/16/new-it-management-controls-added-to-onedrive-for-business/

Additionally there were some other announcements / reminders around enterprise control of data.

• Auditing capabilities are being expanded so that administrators can see how documents in OneDrive for Business and SharePoint Online. Now you be able to see download and read events along with a ton of other data points - https://blogs.office.com/2015/07/08/announcing-new-activity-logging-and-reporting-capabilities-for-office-365/.
• Remember that OneDrive for Business and SharePoint Online are integrated into the Office 365 MDM capabilities. So again, documents doing down to mobile devices can be managed through the Office 365 service - https://blogs.office.com/2015/07/21/explore-the-built-in-mobile-device-management-mdm-feature-for-office-365/.

Another new capability that was announced which I found really interesting is that OneDrive for Business can now have quota limits placed on it, just like SharePoint Online or even an Exchange Online mailbox. Why is this important? There are several compliance reasons why I have seen organizations wanting to limit the amount of data storage available to each individual user even though OneDrive for Business has a roadmap to provide unlimited storage. Most commonplace issue is data retention regulations or data storage policies. Even though OneDrive for Business an amazing solution that empowers end users, is it appropriate to store TBs of personnel video and music in a OneDrive for Business site? Depending on the company this may not be appropriate and quotas can be used as a way to control data storage.

As a SharePoint guy, I am super excited to see the features come into the service. I am now seeing concepts for data storage and control becoming consistent across Exchange Online, SharePoint Online and OneDrive for Business. This type of alignment is a key differentiator.

Office 365 Compliance Tools for Non-Microsoft Data

There was a really interesting announcement made for enterprise customers who are using Office 365. One of the biggest differentiators of Office 365 is its focus on provide enterprise ready compliance solutions. Today Office 365 provides rich solutions for retention, archiving, eDiscovery, and Legal Hold across Exchange Online, SharePoint Online, OneDrive for Business, Office Online and Skype for Business online.

So what is new? The Office 365 compliance features can now be used for archiving non-Microsoft data. Once the non-Microsoft data is archived in Office 365, the Office 365 compliance and eDiscovery solutions can be used on that data.

This will be enabled through partner solutions such as Actiance and Globanet. These solutions provide the ability to bring in data from such solutions as Twitter, Facebook, Yammer, LinkedIN, Yahoo messenger, GoogleTask, Cisco Jabber, Box, DropBox, etc. into Office 365. This is available because of the new auto-expanding archives solutions in Office 365. Remember that depending of on the plan purchased each user has unlimited storage in mailboxes. There is an import services that allows organizations to import TBs of data. These partner solutions take advantage of this import service.

Now when your compliance officer can do eDiscovery, retention and hold across Office 365 and all of this other non-Microsoft data. This is very exciting and very empowering.

Announcements

Announcing auto-expanding, highly scalable archives for Office 365 email - https://blogs.office.com/2015/06/03/announcing-auto-expanding-highly-scalable-archives-for-office-365-email/

Announcing archiving for non-Microsoft data in Office 365 - https://blogs.office.com/2015/06/30/announcing-archiving-for-non-microsoft-data-in-office-365/

New Office 365 Compliance Search Feature

Office 365 is adding a new solution called Compliance Search to the Office 365 Compliance Center. What this capability will allow you to do is complete an entire search for data across Office 365 (Exchange Online, SharePoint Online, and OneDrive for Business) without having to use the eDiscovery Center of SharePoint Online or the In-Place eDiscovery in Exchange Online.

Why is this being done? Organizations sometime require the ability to search across all data in Office 365. The new Compliance Search capability will provide organizations a quick solution to start searching for data. If case management is required, then the eDiscovery Center of SharePoint Online or the In-Place eDiscovery in Exchange Online should be utilized.

It is important to note that:

• There are no limits on the number of mailboxes and sites that you can search.
• There are also no limits on the number of searches that can run at the same time.
• There are different limits for eDiscovery Center of SharePoint Online or the In-Place eDiscovery in Exchange Online.
• The new Compliance Center allows for searching across a broad set of data and is not associated to eDiscovery Center of SharePoint Online or the In-Place eDiscovery in Exchange Online.
• Legal Hold and Case Management cannot be initiated from the search results of the Compliance Search. If Legal needs to be applied, you will need to re-query for the data in the eDiscovery Center of SharePoint Online or the In-Place eDiscovery in Exchange Online and then place the items on legal hold. In the public announcement, it states that over the next several months Legal Hold and Case Management will be added into the Compliance Search user experience.

Announcement - https://blogs.office.com/2015/06/17/introducing-compliance-search-in-office-365/

TechNet – detailed information on how to use this new capability - https://technet.microsoft.com/en-US/library/ms.o365.cc.ComplianceSearch.aspx

Office 365 First Release for Specific Users

A while ago Office introduce the First Release program. This was a new solution to allow forward leaning organizations to access new features as quick as possible.

There was a recent announcement that the First Release program was be modified to now allow customers to select specific end users to receive First Release features. This beneficial because new features will not be pushed to the entire organization, it will just be pushed to those users. This will organizations to do some review of these new features with some power users before it pushed to the entire organization. Organizations can customize their change management processes based on this.

It is worth noting that the First Release program is available to Exchange Online, SharePoint Online, Office 365 Nav bar and Office 365 Admin Center today. The First Release program for select users is not available for SharePoint Online.

Remember there are tons of way your organizations can get prepared for change. There is the:

• Public Office 365 Roadmap website
• Office 365 Public and Private Preview Programs
• Notifications through the Office 365 Admin Center
• Review the Office 365 Blog for announcements
• If you are a managed customer through Microsoft Consulting Services (MCS) you can get NDA roadmaps and planning

Announcement - http://blogs.office.com/2015/05/05/manage-change-and-stay-informed-in-office-365/