Kurt Shintaku's Blog

The Office 365 ROI calculator is an online tool that uses the details you provide about your company, including number of users and the type of solution you need to implement.

It calculates your ROI based on default values taken from the Forrester Total Economic Impact (TEI) report.  Use the following steps:

1. Provide a few basic details to get started.
2. Choose View calculations to see how much you can gain by implementing Office 365.
3. Click “Download ROI Report” to get a PowerPoint document entitled, “Office 365 Value Report Executive Summary – COMPANY – DATE.pptx”.
4. Go to https://resources.office.com/total-economic-impact-microsoft-office365-enterprise.html for details behind the calculations.

• RELEASE: Office 365 ROI Calculator
  https://products.office.com/en-us/business/roi-calculator

Earlier this month, Microsoft & Steelcase announced a partnership for the “development of Technology-Enabled Spaces designed to boost creative work”.

• https://www.steelcase.com/press-releases/steelcase-microsoft-announce-development-technology-enabled-spaces-designed-boost-creative-work/

Quote:

“Microsoft and Steelcase believe that the future of work is creative. In order to drive growth, agility and innovation in the future, we must embrace the need for transformative ideas and harness creative potential at work.
Learn more at: http://surfac.ms/steelcase”

A high-level summary:

1. We will establish a broad focus on integrating the best of the Microsoft Surface family with Steelcase’s products and office space solutions.
2. Specifically, we jointly announced five “creative spaces”, described as ‘an immersive ecosystem that brings together place and technology to help people generate new ideas and move them forward.’
3. Creative Spaces are available to visit at Steelcase WorkLife Centers – currently open in NYC and Grand Rapids, MI – with additional locations coming later this year
4. Select Steelcase dealers are now able to resell Surface Hubs
5. Finally, much more is in the works include technology-enabled workplace solutions, leveraging Azure IoT

Here are a few key links if you want to learn more:

• Steelcase site: Microsoft partnership  – https://www.steelcase.com/microsoft-steelcase/
• Microsoft Surface for Business Site: Steelcase partnership – https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/devices/business/steelcase
• Windows blog – https://blogs.windows.com/devices/2017/03/06/microsoft-steelcase-unlock-creativity-work/

Do you own a Surface device?  Have you ever wondered:

• What was Connected Standby?
• What is Modern Standby?
• Why is there only one Power Plan (Balanced) on Surface devices?
• How to unlock all Power Plans on Surface devices

Check out the tutorial here on the SurfaceTip web site:

• How to Unlock Power Plans on Surface Devices
  https://surfacetip.com/how-to-unlock-power-plans-on-surface-devices/

Coming webinar on Office 365 adoption:

• WEBINAR: Microsoft’s CIO on Office 365 Success
  Wednesday, March 22, 2017 at 10 a.m. PDT / 1 p.m. EDT/UTC
  Microsoft CIO Jim DuBois will share insights on how to enable digital transformation of your organization through Office 365 adoption. In addition, Simon Denton of Mott MacDonald will explain how he used FastTrack resources to help his company increase productivity by moving to Office 365. And we’ll demonstrate many of the adoption resources at fasttrack.office.com.
  Register: https://aka.ms/adoptionsuccess

Also new blog post on adoption of Office 365:

• New Office 365 adoption resources, webinar with Microsoft CIO Jim DuBois
  https://blogs.office.com/2017/03/07/new-office-365-adoption-resources-webinar-with-microsoft-cio-jim-dubois/

To enable customers to more easily adopt OneDrive for Business, we’ve launched "Make the Switch" for OneDrive for Business, a combination of OneDrive for Business Quick Start guides and “Make the Switch Guides” to help empower the end user while they switch from Box or Google Drive.

View the documentation here:

• Switching from Box to OneDrive
  https://support.office.com/en-us/article/Box-to-OneDrive-for-Business-b7f3c899-edb7-44ab-bc3f-0a37e9f1a7fa?ui=en-US&rs=en-US&ad=US&fromAR=1
• OneDrive for Business Quick Start
  https://support.office.com/en-us/article/OneDrive-for-Business-Quick-Start-a1397e56-61ec-4ed2-9dac-727bf8ac3357?ui=en-US&rs=en-US&ad=US

The above snapshot summarizes what “Azure AD: Tenant Restrictions” does:  It prevents external parties from using your corporate network to access their own Office 365 services (like Exchange Online’s URL outlook.office.com, which is used by everyone) to potentially leak data.

More specifically, tenant restrictions gives customers enhanced control over access to SaaS cloud applications. Admins can now restrict employees using their corporate network to only being able to use Azure AD identities in tenants they have approved.

Taken from the Enterprise Mobility and Security Blog:

Companies that want to move their employees to SaaS apps like Office 365 are sometimes worried about opening their networks to information leaks. If users can access Office 365 with their corporate identity, they can also access these same services with other identities.

Before cloud services, network admins could simply block access to unwanted apps or websites by blocking their URL or IP address. This is no longer an option with SaaS apps, where a single endpoint (like outlook.office.com) is used by all consumers of the SaaS app.

Our solution for this common IT challenge is Tenant Restrictions. This new feature enables organizations to control access based on the Azure AD tenant the applications use for single sign-on. For example, you can use Tenant Restrictions to allow access to your organization’s Office 365 applications, while preventing access to other organizations’ instances of these same applications. 

Visit the Enterprise Mobility & Security blog for more details:

• BLOG: New enhanced access controls in Azure AD: Tenant Restrictions is now Generally Available!
  https://blogs.technet.microsoft.com/enterprisemobility/2017/01/31/new-enhanced-access-controls-in-azure-ad-tenant-restrictions-is-now-generally-available/

Flow now makes it easier for power users to create Flows that can be used and maintained by others within their organization, amplifying the impact of their automation efforts.

Taken from the announcement post:

Today we are announcing the preview of Team flows. Team flows make it possible for multiple people to own and manage a flow together, and, if someone leaves an organization, the flows they created can continue to run. This is a much-awaited feature that is one of the most voted-on ideas on our ideas forum.

Users can now collectively author and maintain a flow. The following features are supported today for all owners of Team flows:

• Read, update or delete flow
• View history and debug flow
• Add or remove other owners
• Add or remove connections that the flow has access to

Team flows will show up under the new “Team flows” tab in the Flow portal:

For more on how to manage your own Team Flows now, read the announcement post here:

• BLOG: Announcing the Preview of Team Flows
  https://flow.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/team-flows/

The Visual Studio 2017 Launch Event is tomorrow!

We’re excited to announce that Visual Studio 2017 will be available for download on Tuesday, March 7, 2017! Join us online for a two-day virtual event celebrating 20 years of Visual Studio and our latest release.

• On March 7, watch our live stream with Julia Larson, Brian Harry, Miguel de Icaza, and Scott Hanselman as they share the newest innovations in Visual Studio, .NET, Xamarin, Azure, and more. After the keynote, Microsoft engineers will lead interactive technical demo sessions to help you get the most out of Visual Studio 2017 and the rest of our tools and platform.
• On March 8, we’ll help you get productive even faster by hosting a full day of live interactive trainings. Make sure to Save the Date for both days and sign up for the March 8 training now.

Check out the agenda & choose the training that best fits your needs:

• Tuesday, March 7: Keynote and Demos
• Wednesday, March 8: Virtual Training

To register, visit:

• EVENT: Visual Studio 2017 Launch Event is tomorrow! (Online)
  https://launch.visualstudio.com/

Microsoft Coprorate VP, Jeff Teper and Senior Product Manager, Bill Baer, are coming to Los Angeles to keynote “SharePoint Saturday”, a SharePoint centric event produced by the SharePoint community.

Check out the sessions being delivered at the event:
http://www.spsevents.org/city/LosAngeles/LosAngeles2017/sessions

Taken from web site:

SharePoint administrators, end users, architects, developers, and other professionals that work with Microsoft SharePoint Technologies will meet for the SharePoint Saturday Los Angeles event on April 8th, 2017 at the Westside Conference Center Pepperdine University located at 6100 Center Drive , Los Angeles CA.

DATE:
April 8, 2017

LOCATION:
Westside Conference Center Pepperdine University, 6100 Center Drive , Los Angeles CA 90045

REGISTRATION:
http://www.spsevents.org/city/losangeles/losangeles2017

Apparently both Google & the makers of Firefox have a preference when it comes to antivirus:  Windows Defender

From a Google Chrome Engineer:

• Google Chrome engineer says Windows Defender “the only well behaved AV”
  https://www.onmsft.com/news/google-chrome-engineer-says-windows-defender-the-only-well-behaved-av

From a Firefox’s engineer.

• Disable Your Antivirus Software (Except Microsoft’s)
  http://robert.ocallahan.org/2017/01/disable-your-antivirus-software-except.html