Kurt Shintaku's Blog

Download Always Be Closing: The ABCs of Sales in the Modern Era – An essential sales strategy guide featuring best practices and thought leaders.

Learn how organizations can set their sales teams up for success with this free e-book: Always Be Closing: The ABC’s of Sales in the Modern Era.

Taken from the introduction:

A better way to sell: cloud, mobile, social, big data

A…B…C… When we think of the abc’s, perhaps even more so than the popular sales mantra “always be closing,” we think of getting back to the basics. The alphabet is a foundational lesson we learn early on and internalize to the point where we hardly even notice it as we move through our days, no matter how ubiquitous it is on our lives.

In naming our latest ebook, we wanted to convey this deeper message beyond “always be closing.” From the chalkboard illustration on the title page to our subtitle “the ABC’s  of Sales in the Modern Era,” this ebook is all about finding our way back to the heart of sales with technology that is helpful without getting in the way.

The sad truth we face with the complexity and pressure in today’s market is a  salesperson can only spend about 22% of their time actually selling1. Even if a  salesperson closes 100% of their deals, they’re only able to do this with less than a  quarter of their time. This is a problem.

So how do we solve it? We need technology that doesn’t waste a salesperson’s time — that actually helps salespeople do their jobs better, improving their productivity while enabling them to meet today’s customer expectations and the dramatically different buying process.

In this ebook, we tackle the issues facing sales today head on, incorporating changes  and developments in the market that your teams need to understand. I’m incredibly excited not only to introduce this brand new ebook, but also the next generation of  sales productivity from Microsoft.

• DOWNLOAD: Free eBook, “Always Be Closing: The ABC’s of Sales in the Modern World” (3.1MB, 50 page, PDF)
  https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/dynamics/always-be-closing

[Thanks to my coworker, Rodney Campbell, for forwarding this]

We are getting close to the first drop of public preview of Skype for Business Mac client.

This Friday, April 22nd the Skype for Business product team will be delivering a broadcast on the Mac Client preview.

• What: Learn about the Skype for Business Mac Client preview
• Who: Skype for Business group
• When: April 22nd at 9:00 am PST
• Where: Skype Meeting Broadcast – http://aka.ms/SfBcast
• Will this be recorded: Yes, it will take a couple of weeks and then it will posted on the Skype channel.

(Source: Learning IT Together http://blogs.technet.com/b/learningittogether/archive/2016/04/19/skype-learn-about-the-skype-for-business-mac-client-preview.aspx)

A blog post the other day (Email Safety Tips in Office 365) details a new Safety Tips feature of O365 which provides an additional layer of protection via a warning to the user in an email that is marked suspicious, or a reassurance when a message is safe.

This feature is unique in that only Office 365 & Exchange Online Protection can integrate with the Outlook client to provide this level of transparency. 

Folks evaluating other solutions like mail gateways or 3rd party filtering solutions should understand how these capabilities can help uniquely protect their organization by simply involving the end user in the process of determining the threat at the time the email is viewed by the user. 

SOCIAL ENGINEERING THREATS
For example: Automated threat filtering is fine if threats are emailed as part of an attachment.  But what if the threat is written, i.e. the ‘threat’ is simple social engineering encouraging a user to send vulnerable data to the attacker – posing as someone in an authority position like IT?  These are the things that Safety Tips can help flag to the end user.

For the more technical, the blog below details the under-the-hood changes to EOP that make some of this possible.

• BLOG: How antispoofing protection works in Office 365
  https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/tzink/2016/02/23/how-antispoofing-protection-works-in-office-365/

JP Morgan recently release a 50-page note to their clients around the state of cloud computing in the Enterprise.

The note summarized the results of a survey of 207 CIOs of large Enterprise companies -specifically those CIOs with a budget of $600M or more.

J.P. MORGAN: INDISPENSIBLE ENTERPRISE VENDORS FOR CLOUD COMPUTING

One of the survey questions asked was:

“Which IT mega-vendor will be most critical and indispensable to your organization’s IT environment in the future, and why?”

The results are somewhat lopsided, with Microsoft coming out the most significant choice of CIOs for cloud computing, with almost 4x as many votes as the next vendor, Amazon:

The survey results of J.P. Morgan’s 207 CIOs of large Enterprises for “Critical and Indispensible IT Mega-Vendors”:

1. 48.9% Microsoft
2. 13,0% Amazon (AWS)
3. 11.6% Cisco
4. 11.1% Oracle
5. 9.2% SAP
6. 4.3% IBM
7. 1.9% EMC
8. 1.4% Apple
9. 0.5% Hewlett Packard

J.P. MORGAN: VENDORS LOSING TO CLOUD COMPUTING
J.P. Morgan’s note also highlights “who’s going to lose share to cloud vendors” and the results of that question are similarly lopsided:

1. 26.1% IBM
2. 15.0% Hewlett-Packard Enterprise
3. 14.5% Oracle
4. 12.1% Dell
5. 11.6% EMC

MORE ON THE SURVEY
For more on this story and JP Morgan’s survey of these CIOs, read the following articles:

• TECHREPUBLIC: CIOs favor Microsoft Azure over AWS, according to new survey
  http://techrepublic.com/article/cios-favor-microsoft-azure-over-aws-according-to-new-survey/
• BARRONS: Amazon Seeing ‘Momentous’ Change of Guard as Public Cloud ‘Booms,’ Says JP Morgan
  http://blogs.barrons.com/techtraderdaily/2016/04/14/amazon-seeing-momentous-change-of-guard-as-public-cloud-booms-says-jp-morgan/

At the beginning of the week, we published Microsoft’s Windows Roadmap, in the same way that we’ve published Microsoft’s Server & Cloud Roadmap & the Office Roadmap.

The Windows 10 roadmap provides a snapshot of what we’ve recently made generally available, released into public preview, are still developing and testing, or are no longer developing.

For example, here’s a few items that we’re working on today from the “in development” list:

• Use Companion Device to Unlock your Windows PC
• Use your phone to unlock your Windows PC
• Enhancements to Microsoft Passport
• Windows Defender Advanced Threat Protection
• Cortana and Action Center integration
• Remote Display Experience
• …

For more, visit:

• INFO: Windows 10 Roadmap
  https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/WindowsForBusiness/windows-roadmap

Our Cloud roadmap is located here:

• INFO: Server & Cloud Roadmap
  https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/server-cloud/roadmap/Indevelopment.aspx

Our Office roadmap is located here:”"

• INFO: Office Roadmap
  http://fasttrack.microsoft.com/roadmap

[taken from the Visual Studio Blog]

Today we’re very proud to release version 1.0 of Visual Studio Code. Since our initial launch one year ago, 2 million developers have installed VS Code. Today, we’re excited to report that more than 500,000 developers actively use VS Code each month.

What started as an experiment to build a production quality editor using modern web technologies has blossomed into a new kind of cross-platform development tool, one that focuses on core developer productivity by centering the product on rich code editing and debugging experiences. Visual Studio Code brings the industry-leading experiences of Visual Studio to a streamlined development workflow, that can be a core part of the tool set of every developer, building any kind of application.

Getting to "1.0" over the last few months has been about more than features. We have worked with the community to further improve stability, fixing hundreds of bugs. And we’ve pushed hard on getting the best performance we can out of the editing experience.

VS Code was initially built for developers creating web apps using JavaScript and TypeScript. But in less than 6 months since we made the product extensible, the community has built over 1000 extensions that now provide support for almost any language or runtime in VS Code. Today, a broad range of developers from individuals and startups to Fortune 500 companies, including audiences completely new to Microsoft’s tools, are all more productive with a tool that fits comfortably into their current tool chain and workflow, and supports the technologies they use, from Go and Python to React Native and C++. With this great ecosystem in place, we’re now confident in declaring our API as stable, and guaranteeing compatibility going forward.

And we have strived to make VS Code 1.0 a great editor for every developer. VS Code is now fully localizable, and ships in 9 different languages, including French, German, Japanese, and Chinese. And, we have worked to make VS Code the most accessible of modern editors, with full keyboard navigation and support for screen reading and accessible navigation for visually impaired developers.

…

Read more of the announcement here:

• VISUAL STUDIO BLOG: Visual Studio Code 1.0!https://code.visualstudio.com/blogs/2016/04/14/vscode-1.0
• DOWNLOAD: Visual Studio Code 1.0
  https://code.visualstudio.com/Download
• FEEDBACK: VS Code UserVoice
  http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkID=533482

This 19-page document provides an overview of the various encryption technologies that are currently available or recently announced for Office 365, including features deployed and managed by Microsoft, and features available to and managed by Office 365 customers.

This document also discusses some common customer concerns regarding their data, and how encryption protects customer data in those scenarios.

Here’s a summary of it’s contents:

• Encryption of Customer Data at Rest
• Volume-level Encryption
• File-level Encryption
• Skype for Business
• SharePoint Online (including OneDrive for Business)
• Files in SharePoint Online
• List Items in SharePoint Online
• Advanced Encryption
• Encryption of Customer Data In-transit
• Advanced Encryption with Customer-Managed Key
• Key Management
• Exiting the Office 365 Service
• Customer-managed Encryption Technologies
• Azure Rights Management
• Office 365 Message Encryption
• Transport Layer Security
• Risks and Protection
• Office 365 General
• Office 365 Multi-tenant
• Office 365 Government Community Cloud

Grab the document here.

• DOWNLOAD: Data Encryption Technologies in Office 365 (PDF, 1.2MB, 4/6/2016)
  https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=51690

Azure Active Directory Identity Protection is in public preview.  Identity Protection is a new feature of Azure AD that gives organizations around the world a previously unavailable level of security for their cloud identities.

Azure AD Identity Protection offers the following capabilities

• Detection of identity-based security issues using our signals intelligence, experience, and algorithms.
• Support investigation of risk events and users flagged for risk.
• Support for in-line remediation and management of risk events.
• Harnesses the power of Azure AD Conditional Access policies and real-time risk evaluation to auto-remediate leaked-credentials before they can cause harm.

Read more about the solution here:

• ANNOUNCEMENT: Azure AD Identity Protection is in Public Preview
  https://blogs.technet.microsoft.com/ad/2016/03/02/azure-ad-identity-protection-is-in-public-preview-whoop-whoop/
• OVERVIEW/DOCUMENTATION: Azure Active Directory Identity Protection
  https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/documentation/articles/active-directory-identityprotection/

From our Devices Specialist, Toni Bollinger:

 “I highly encourage you to subscribe to this communication as it provides you with the latest information on updates being released.”

REGISTER FOR SURFACE IT PRO BULLETIN
Keep up with the latest announcements, guidance, resources, and events. Sign up for the Bulletin.

• https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/dn903161

RESOURCES FOR SURFACE’S LIFECYCLE
Explore the technical aspects of Surface and learn how to plan for, deploy, manage, and support Surface devices in your organization.

We present the device lifecycle to help you find tools, step-by-step guides, and other resources to help you get started.

• Explore
• Plan
• Deploy
• Manage
• Support

SURFACE FOR IT PROS BLOG
Your source for the latest news and tech tips for Microsoft Surface.

• http://blogs.technet.com/b/surface/

If you’re an end user with Office 365 E3, E4, or E5, you get access to Office 365 Pro Plus.

And here’s the links for getting that software, assuming you have authenticated access into Office 365.

INSTALL OFFICE
https://portal.office.com/OLS/MySoftware.aspx

• Install Office 365 ProPlus with the new 2016 apps (32 or 64bit)
• Install Office 365 ProPlus with the 2013 apps
• Install language accessory packs

MANAGE/DEACTIVATE INSTALLS
https://portal.office.com/Account#installs

• Deactivate Office, Project, Visio

TOOLS & OTHER APPLICATIONS

• Office 365 Support and Recovery Assistant
  https://configure.office.com/sara/SetupOP.exe
• InfoPath 2013
  https://g.microsoftonline.com/0BX20en/1468
• Dynamics CRM for Outlook
  http://download.microsoft.com/download/E/F/D/EFDF4716-418C-4E17-B544-4B94E59A877E/CRM2015-ClientOnlineInstaller-ENU.exe
  (Setup instructions: https://g.microsoftonline.com/0BX20en/759)
• SharePoint Designer 2013
  https://g.microsoftonline.com/0BX20en/1471