Office 365 ProPlus Adding Passive Authentication

There has been a change I have been waiting on that. On the Office 365 Public roadmap it is called “Office 2013 client update to support passive authentication using SAML” - http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/products/office-365-roadmap-FX104343353.aspx.

What is this announcement?

Office 365 ProPlus / Office 2013 will be getting a modification to support 2FA authentication scenarios. This is enabled through the Active Direct Authentication Library (ADAL).

Why is it so important?

There are many customers who require 2FA to authenticate to the Office 365 service. For Office, the Outlook rich client typically comes up a lot because customers want to ensure that users using Outlook use 2FA to receive email. With Outlook today there are scenarios that organizations can implement to ensure there is 2FA with Outlook, however the better long-term solution is to have Office modified to support 2FA directly.

Specifically Office 2013 is changing such that is can support “passive authentication” scenarios in the same way a browser does.

This will enable is a cleaner solution with Office 365 MFA. More importantly it allows for additional support scenarios for organizations who use smart cards (PIV, CaC, etc.) to authenticate to the Office 365 service using the Office 2013 rich client.

What are some facts you should know?

Private Preview Release – Office 365 customers who are in the private preview program can have access to this.

ADAL Authentication – As I mentioned earlier, Office 2013 will be adopting passive authentication in the same way a browser authenticates. If you have AD FS implemented with Office 365, the user will authenticate through that federated trust relationship with Office 365. If you organization requires a second form factor (2FA) for authentication, the user will be required to provide it. A nice side effect of this is Outlook no longer needs to have direct access to the user’s password. Please read this blog for more details on the authentication process - http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/products/office-365-roadmap-FX104343353.aspx.

What Clients are impacted? - Word 2013, Excel 2013, PowerPoint 2013, Lync 2013, Outlook 2013, Publisher 2013, Visio 2013, Access 2013, Project 2013 and OneDrive for Business Sync Client.

Will this work with AD FS Only? – Please review information about other STS providers: http://blogs.office.com/2014/01/30/the-works-with-office-365-identity-program-now-streamlined/ and http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/jj679342.aspx

Office 2010 Support? – No. This solution is for Office 2013 and Office 365 ProPlus.

References

New Announcement – Office 2013 update for SAML and 2FA Auth - http://blogs.office.com/2014/11/12/office-2013-updated-authentication-enabling-multi-factor-authentication-saml-identity-providers/

Original Announcement - http://blogs.office.com/2014/02/10/multi-factor-authentication-for-office-365/

SAML 2.0 Announcement - http://blogs.office.com/2014/03/06/announcing-support-for-saml-2-0-federation-with-office-365/

Outlook Connectivity with MAPI over HTTP Announcement - http://blogs.technet.com/b/exchange/archive/2014/05/09/outlook-connectivity-with-mapi-over-http.aspx

Office for Android Table

I have to say this has been an extremely active time for Office 365. A significant announcement was announced that Office for Android Tablet is being announced for preview - http://blogs.microsoft.com/blog/2014/11/06/office-everywhere/.

Microsoft has made good on its vision to provide Office across all major mobile platforms. Office is now available on iPhone, iPad, Android Phone, Android Tablet, Windows Phone and Windows tables.

This is amazing.

Organizations can now empower their employees to remain productive where ever they are at without compromises.

MDM for Office 365

There was another major announcement recently for Office 365. This past week Microsoft announced that is was adding a new solution called MDM for Office 365 is being released. To date many organizations utilized Exchange ActiveSync (EAS) policies and sometimes other third-party MDM solutions to protect business data on mobile devices connecting to Office 365.

With this new announcement, organizations will now have the ability to provide even more protection of their business data on mobile without having to rely on other solutions.

The new MDM for Office 365 will be available in Q1 of 2015.

Devices: MDM for Office 365 will provide organizations the ability to manage email and documents across iPhone, iPad, Android Phone, Android Table and Windows Phones.

Data Protection: When you learn more about it, you will be impressed with the approach. Typically other MDM providers have enforced data protection through a container and even custom applications within those containers. Many times the feature set offered is limited. In the case of MDM for Office 365, protection is enforced within the applications that users use. For instance Office is now available across all major mobile platforms. Customers can set up protection within Office such that business data is protected and cannot leave the application. End users can remain highly productive without having to learn something new.

Device Lock: There are several new features being added as well such as Pin lock and jailbreak detection.

Device Wipe: Plus enhanced features are being added for device wipe for not just email but also documents. The nice thing about the wipe policy is that it will only wipe company owned data, and not impact a user’s personal data. This is extremely important in a BYOD world no one should have their personal files impacted when they go from one company to another.

Integrated Administration: From an administrative perspective, MDM for Office 365 is integrated right in the administrative experience of Office 365. Administrators do not need to bounce around to other third-party applications nor do they have to spend the time trying to configure them together. MDM for Office 365 is simply just built into the service. Administrators will have access to a full set of reports as well through their reporting center.

InTune: Finally, organizations can easily upgrade to advanced MDM with InTune. With InTune there is advanced mobile application management, integration with System Center and advanced mobile device policy.

Please review these announcements: http://blogs.office.com/2014/10/28/office-365-latest-innovations-security-compliance/ and http://blogs.office.com/2014/10/28/introducing-built-mobile-device-management-office-365/.

SharePoint and Office Apps

Introduction

There truly is some new exciting releases that were part of 2013 release that were targeted for developers. In regards to development for SharePoint Online and Office 365 there are a bunch of new advancements that will allow for more development.
Back in 2004 I started to build Office and SharePoint solutions. I built a solution on InfoPath 2003, SharePoint 2003, BizTalk 2004 and K2.net 2003 that would integrate in a VAX mainframe with Office (solution was finalist at MS Worldwide Partner Conference). At the time I saw a vision how Microsoft was bringing together their enterprise solutions and I loved it. I stuck with it and saw the waves of SharePoint 2007 and 2010 change the industry.
Now with SharePoint 2013 and Office 2013, I have seen tremendous advancement in giving developers platforms to build solutions and supporting more flexibility to rapidly design, build and publish apps in a way I have never seen Microsoft do. I see significant strides in enabling developers to do SharePoint and Office development is rapid fashion. For me personally, the vision has completely come together.

• There are multiple options for developing solutions (Visual Studio, Napa, SharePoint Designer, SharePoint UI) providing me choice in how I can architect my solutions.
• SharePoint / Office have APIs and services that provide common interfaces making it extremely easy to integrate and to have consistency in design.
• The cloud is providing us flexibility in the delivery of software.

In the past I used spend a lot of time writing detailed blogs to explain solution architecture, design considerations, assumptions, etc. This time around Microsoft has actually written a series that has done a fantastic job at explaining this - http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/office/apps/jj220030.aspx. This is required reading as far as I am concerned. Solution architects and developers can really use this information them make decisions on how to design and develop their applications. I highly recommend reading every article in the series.
In this blog will capture some of my notes and salient points you should know.
I will be focusing on SharePoint Online and Office 365 development.

SharePoint Apps

It is still possible to do SharePoint development the way many of you know how to do it today on-premise. You can do full trust and farm based development. There is definitely a need to continue to support these sort of high-end, deeply integrated solutions. However full-trust does have limitations:

• I personally feel that sometimes developers jump to0 quickly to full-trust based solutions versus looking at the longer-term solution.
• Cloud based SharePoint Online in Office 365 does not support this.

Initially Sandboxed Solutions, Silverlight and REST services were available to facilitate development in SharePoint Online. Sandboxed Solutions supported a limited set of server-side SharePoint code. What many people found out is that yes it was possible to create SharePoint solutions but there were gaps in development options.
With the new release of SharePoint 2013 in SharePoint Online several new solutions have been provided for us other than just Sandboxed Solutions / Silverlight.

• Client Side Object Libraries - From an App Dev perspective one of the biggest improvements you will see is around Client Side Object Libraries. Specifically .NET and JavaScript libraries have been introduced and can be utilized with SharePoint Online. Client libraries are very robust and provide APIs to work with BCS, lists, libraries, workflow, etc. This also includes new remove eventing models, new mobile development, etc. Here is a reference to those libraries - http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/office/apps/jj220040.aspx.
• REST Services - As well there is expanded support for REST services with more API support and new OData support. As you will see, this investment is the foundation for the new SharePoint Apps.
• Hybrid – It is not possible to create hybrid solutions with BCS, Search and REST services that unify data across both environments.
• Extending to Office – We will talk more about this later. There were many reasons why the SharePoint product was created by Microsoft. One was to provide a server in which Office could be delivered from. It initially started as a way to deliver and manage Office documents. With Office 2007, 2010 and 2013 clients we have seen direct integration with document library features. This vision was immensely expanded with Office Web Apps. Now with Office Apps, SharePoint and Office can be unified from a custom application perspective. Very exciting as I really think this is uncharted territory.
• The New SharePoint Apps Model – I cannot emphasize how important this is. If you want an overview of it please review this - http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/office/apps/fp179930.aspx. Apps can he hosted in SharePoint Online, hosted in Azure (auto hosted apps) or hosted on other platforms (Provider Hosted apps). SharePoint Online hosted apps are limited using HTML and SharePoint JavaScript which is very powerful. I would really challenge a developer to start building your SharePoint Online custom solutions there. Auto Hosted Apps is as it sounds, server side code you write is provisioned and executed out of Azure while still utilizing SharePoint to deliver pieces of the solution that the developer is building. Provider Hosted apps can be hosted in on-premise SharePoint, custom .NET applications, ASP.net, Java, PHP, LAMP, etc. It really does not matter where the app lives as long as it can use the API and REST services to integrate. With these new client libraries and OData support we are empowered to do this.

I would like to second here and really focus in on the New SharePoint Apps Model. I think this is great way to move forward. When I was consultant building customer applications on SharePoint 2003, 2007, and 2010 I would find that way too often well intentioned developers would quickly jump to building code for complex business operations and running them on SharePoint directly. Yes you have the power to do this because SharePoint is a platform. However in many cases good software design would have moved those processes off to another resource to run that code. Moving to the new SharePoint Apps model is really going to force developers to decouple their code and create the application layers they should have been doing from the beginning.
This is really where the industry is moving. Creating hosted applications and services that companies can quickly purchase without having own a complex on-premise deployment is what companies seek. This also goes for homegrown custom solutions created internally, build up you custom applications and then manage / deliver them to end users through SharePoint. Yes I know there are exceptions and it totally depends on the context of the solution you are creating. However I see the new SharePoint Apps model as a landmark change for SharePoint. With SharePoint Apps you can build applications on other platforms and then use all the services and API to integrate them. I see environment where companies procure or build solutions which just “hook into” SharePoint Online. SharePoint basically because the corporate portal from providing applications and these applications can leverage a customer’s existing investment in SharePoint. It really is truly exciting. Embrace it. Change for the right reason is good J
To help get your head wrapped around this, I highly recommend you read the following three articles:

• What you can do in an app for SharePoint - http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/office/apps/fp179899.aspx
• Three ways to think about design options for apps for SharePoint - http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/office/apps/fp179889.aspx
• Hosting options for apps for SharePoint - http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/office/apps/fp179887.aspx

Here are some other good reads as you start investigating SharePoint Apps:

• New permission considerations - http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/office/apps/fp179922.aspx
• Managing Apps - http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/office/apps/fp179922.aspx
• Host Webs and App Webs - http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/office/apps/fp179925.aspx
• Chrome control - http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/office/apps/fp179934.aspx
• UI Guidelines - http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/office/apps/jj220046.aspx
• New UI Callouts - http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/office/apps/dn135236.aspx
• Development Get Started - http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/office/apps/jj163230.aspx
• Deployment Options - http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/office/apps/fp179933.aspx

Office Apps

From an Office perspective, I personally believe this is one of the areas where I think even more attention needs to be given. Building applications for Office has complete changed in Office 2013; the game has changed. If you recall the days of doing VSTO (Visual Studio Tools for Office) and all the hard work you had to do, those days are gone. The new Office Apps model takes on the same approach as SharePoint Apps.
How has the game changed? Now in you build applications in Office using HTML5, JavaScript, CSS, Rest Services and XML. Yes that is a total change. Now your developers are empowered to using development technologies that many organization have in house. The development is light weight and if you have any sort of web development experience, you will have a starting point for building Office Apps. It is basically a webpage that is hosted inside of an Office client application and it supports the ability for that web application and Office to communicate with each other.
Below probably one of the simplest high-level diagram that explains how Office Web Apps work. Basically a manifest is deployed into Office which knows about the externally hosted application and then provides the ability for the two solutions to integrate with each other. Office Apps can work with ASP.net, PHP, Java, etc. using these client based APIs. You have the flexibility to build Office Apps in the new Napa and Visual Studio.

You can build Office Apps in Word 2013, Excel 2013, Outlook 2013, Outlook Web App (OWA) 2013, PowerPoint 2013 and Project 2013. This really opens the realm of possibilities for apps that organizations of typically avoided because of the older complexities of doing Office development. Remember – it is very common in a business work place that Information Workers user Office at some point in their day. It is even arguable that many people spend several hours a week in Office. In many cases business processes are initiated or people need to go do “something” somewhere else.
For example:

• A user may receive and email, they need initiate a business process. How about providing an automated step to use the data in the email to initiate that business process.
• A user is building a data model in Excel and they need to pull in data using a set of control parameter. How about provide an app that can go retrieve that data and then move it into Excel.
• A user is building a Word document which needs data from various locations. How about an app that review that data and move it into the word document.
• A user is building a project plan and needs rates for users based on their classifications but that sort of information is managed in other financial systems. How about an app that can retrieve that data.
• A user needs to create a Word document and when finished that document needs to be submitted to another system. How about create a simple solution to move that document to that other system.

Hopefully you are seeing the potential. Since users do spend a significant amount of time in Office, why not use Office as a launch point enhance the business productivity experience.
If you are interested in getting started and learning about Office Apps, there are a ton of really good resources that are available to you. Please review the following:

• Must read staring from root http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/office/apps/jj220060.aspx
• What is Office Development - http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/office/apps/jj220082.aspx
• What can an App for Office do - http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/office/apps/jj220082.aspx
• Runtime - http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/office/apps/jj220082.aspx
• Development basics - http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/office/apps/jj220082.aspx
• Development Details - http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/office/apps/jj220077.aspx
• Scenarios: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/office/apps/jj220082.aspx and http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/office/apps/fp161012.aspx
• Device requirements - http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/office/apps/jj220082.aspx
• Creating your first Office Apps - http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/office/apps/jj220065.aspx and http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/office/apps/jj220075.aspx
• Common tasks - http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/office/apps/fp142243.aspx
• Publishing - http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/office/apps/fp123515.aspx

SkyDrive Pro Sync and SharePoint 2010 Workspace

Introduction
Here is an important distinction I have had to discuss with customers lately about SharePoint 2013 in Office 365 and SkyDrive Pro.

One of the new features of SharePoint Online is SkyDrive Pro. One solution feature of this is the new Sync capability. This Sync capability is actually available in all document libraries.

However this new SkyDrive Pro Windows Sync capability is different than the previous SharePoint Workspace 2010 solution. Additionally the new SkyDrive Pro Windows Sync capability only works when Office 2013 is installed.

SkyDrive Pro Windows Sync Client
Let’s discuss a little more.

Specifically there is this new Sync button up in the top right hand corner in SharePoint Online or SharePoint 2013 on-premise.



This will provide users to work with files locally out of their file explorer like below.



The SkyDrive Pro Windows Sync client which facilitates this is installed with Office 2013.

Why is this important? If a customer has Office 2010 installed on their client, they will not be able to use the new SkyDrive Pro Windows Sync client. However this does not preclude the end user from working with content offline. The end user will have to use SharePoint 2010 Workspace client will does work with the new SharePoint Online and SharePoint 2013 on-premise.

SharePoint 2010 Workspace
It is really important to note that SkyDrive Pro Windows Sync client does not replace, or is not an updated version of, SharePoint Workspace 2010. Both of these solutions are different but they provide a similar end result, allowing a user to work with documents when they are offline.

Additionally you still also have the ability to connect Outlook to SharePoint Online to work with documents offline too.

References

• What is SkyDrive Pro - http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/sharepoint-server-help/what-is-skydrive-pro-HA102822076.aspx
• Sync a library to your computer - http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/support/sync-a-library-to-your-computer-HA102832401.aspx?CTT=5&origin=HA102822076
• Overview of SkyDrive Pro in SharePoint Server 2013 - http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dn167720.aspx

Office 365 and Office 2013 Preview

As many of you know Office 2013 Preview is available in Office 365. You have the ability to go create your own free tenant to start playing with Office 365 with Office 2013 Preview software. Go here - click here
Additionally, if you like to get a high-level overview of some of the new features and capabilities that are available in the preview – I recommend that you review these short high level articles about many of the new capabilities.

• Office 365 Preview - http://www.microsoft.com/office/preview/en/office-365-enterprise
• Exchange 2013 Preview - http://www.microsoft.com/exchange/en-us/exchange-preview.aspx
• Lync 2013 Preview - http://lync.microsoft.com/en-us/Pages/Lync-2013-Preview.aspx
• SharePoint 2013 Preview - http://sharepoint.microsoft.com/en-us/preview/sharepoint-benefits.aspx
• Office Pro Plus Preview - http://www.microsoft.com/office/preview/en/office-365-proplus
• Outlook 2013 Preview - http://www.microsoft.com/office/preview/en/outlook-2013-preview
• Word 2013 Preview - http://www.microsoft.com/office/preview/en/word-2013-preview
• Excel 2013 Preview - http://www.microsoft.com/office/preview/en/excel-2013-preview
• PowerPoint 2013 Preview - http://www.microsoft.com/office/preview/en/powerpoint-2013-preview
• OneNote 2013 Preview - http://www.microsoft.com/office/preview/en/onenote-2013-preview
• Access 2013 Preview - http://www.microsoft.com/office/preview/en/access-2013-preview