Kurt Shintaku's Blog

Watch this video to learn about recent Office 365 enhancements and innovations, including a wide array of new capabilities that empower our customers to collaborate more effectively than ever before. In this February update you’ll explore:

• iTunes and RSS Availability
• OneDrive Update
• LinkedIn Learning Office Courses
• Microsoft Staff Hub
• Free Stock Photos
• Office.com Homepage
• Data Loss Prevention

Viewing/listening options:

• YouTube
• iTunes (HD Video) (Audio Only)
• RSS (HD Video) (Audio Only)

Are you attending RSA Conference 2017?

Join Microsoft, February 13–17 in San Francisco, where you will learn about our unique view of threat intelligence, the investments we’re making into a secure platform, and how Microsoft fits into your security portfolio.

Here are some of Microsoft’s speakers at this year’s RSA Conference:

• Protecting and defending against cyber threats in uncertain times
  Brad Smith, President, Microsoft Corporation
  Tuesday, February 14, 8:35 AM–8:55 AM
• Advances in Cloud-scale Machine Learning for Cyber Defense
  Mark Russinovich, CTO Azure, Microsoft Corporation
  Tuesday, February 14, 3:45 PM–4:30 PM
  
  ALSO
  
• How to Go From Responding to Hunting with Sysinternals Sysmon
  Mark Russinovich, CTO Azure, Microsoft Corporation
  Tuesday, February 14, 1:15 PM–2:00 PM
• A Vision for Shared, Central Intelligence to Ebb a Growing Flood of Alerts
  Dan Plastina, Partner Director, Threat Protection, Microsoft Corporation
  Tuesday, February 14, 1:15 PM–2:00 PM
• Learnings from the Cloud: What to Watch When Watching for Breach
  Sara Manning Dawson, Principal Group Program Manager, Microsoft Corporation
  Wednesday, February 15, 2:45 PM–3:30 PM
• Critical Hygiene for Preventing Major Breaches
  Mark Simos, Director Business Development Analysis, Microsoft Corporation
  Tuesday, February 17, 10:15 AM–11:00 AM
• Securing the Making of the Next Hollywood Blockbuster
  Joel Sloss, Senior Program Manager, Microsoft Corporation
  Wednesday, February 15, 1:30 PM–2:15 PM

Don’t forget to visit our boot at North Expo #N3501:

• Microsoft Expo Booth – North Expo #N3501
  https://www.rsaconference.com/events/us17/expo-sponsors/exhibitor-list/2966-Microsoft

For more information, visit:

• Microsoft @ RSA Conference 2017
  https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/security/rsa

Dow you own a Surface Pro 3/4?  Do you find that you need an extra USB port for your mouse and another device a lot? 

Check out this little $12.99 adapter that connects to the USB 3.0 port of the Surface Pro – and doesn’t block the power port – and provides the following additional ports:

• USB 3.0 port
• USB 2.0 port
• SD card slot
• microSD card slot
• microUSB charging port
  (only for boosting power to the adapter)

Purchase this $12.99 adapter here:

• Surface Pro Hub Adapter/ Card Reader, High Speed USB 3.0 Transport and USB 2.0 port – $12.99
  https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B01MFCZDRQ/

Azure Active Directory & Office 365 as a whole has a massive, globally-distributed model leverage Microsoft’s cloud footprint.

As a result, Microsoft is able to absorb attacks across a very large surface area, mitigating denial-of-service attacks against authentication – keeping customers operational, even during DDoS attacks.

As a global organization with a significant Internet presence and several prominent Internet properties, Microsoft is a large and common target for hackers and other malicious individuals.  In fact, for the last several years, Microsoft has been continuously and persistently under some form of cyber-attack.  At just about any given time, at least one of Microsoft’s Internet properties is experiencing some form of denial of service traffic.  Without reliable and persistent mitigation systems that can defend against these attacks, Microsoft’s services would be offline.

This document talks generally about different types of attacks and how Microsoft defends Office 365 and its network against those attacks. Office 365 uses defense-in-depth security principles to protect against internal and external risks.  The network–the communication layer between clients and Office 365–is one of the biggest targets of malicious attacks.

…

To read more, download the paper below:

• WHITEPAPER: Protecting Office 365 and Azure from DoS attacks
  https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=52667

Early this year, I had a customer ask me, “What’s that tool on your screen?”

I said, “Oh, that’s my bandwidth meter tool.  It tells me if my machine is actually doing anything over the network & at what speed. It’s called DUMeter.”

“Uh… can you send me a link to that?”

WHAT’S DUMETER?
DUMeter is a tool I’ve used for more than a decade since Windows NT 4.0 and it’s been exceptionally useful.

It provides a monitor that hovers over all your windows (even during PowerPoint presentations if you want it to) and tells you what kind of bandwidth you’re consuming.

MINI-MODE
In it’s “mini-mode”, it hovers at the top of the screen and is perfect for tablets & desktops.  It takes up very little room and tells you at any moment what bandwidth is being consumed either up or down.  There are two tabs that allow you to specific “traffic over the network” vs “traffic over the Internet”.

HISTOGRAM MODE
The usual view of DUMeter is a histogram that shows you the bandwidth consumed over time, both up & down.  It typically sits in the bottom right hand corner just above the System Tray but you can move it anywhere and it will (usually) stay in front of any other windows that appear.

APPLICATION/PROGRAM VIEW
This is my favorite:  It’s a view that shows you the bandwidth being consumed per-application.  Sure it’s nice to know if your machine is transmitting or receiving data, but what you really want to know is if the program you’re using is DOING ANYTHING.  This mode gives you a precise view of what application is consuming bandwidth… or not.

REPORTING
There is also great reporting available on how much bandwidth has been consumed per hour or within the last 24 hours.  You can create thresholds to ensure that you don’t exceed a certain amount of consumption if you’re on a limited plan, say over your cellular carrier.

There are two plans available for purchasing:

1. Single user: $29.95
2. Family Pack (5 installations) $59.90
   (I bought this because I have the DUmeter client on ALL my machines at home)

All in all, this is one of my favorite tools and hopefully you’ll enjoy it too.

• Hageltech’s DUMeter – Network Activity Monitor
  http://www.dumeter.com

<taken from the Windows blog>
Many of you have asked for more control over your data, a greater understanding of how data is collected, and the benefits this brings for a more personalized experience. Based on your feedback, we are launching two new experiences to help ensure you are in control of your privacy.

1. Microsoft has launched a new web-based privacy dashboard so you can see and control your activity data from Microsoft including location, search, browsing, and Cortana Notebook data across multiple Microsoft services.
2. We’re also introducing, in Windows 10, a new “privacy set up experience”, simplifying Diagnostic data levels and further reducing the data collected at the Basic level. These Windows 10 changes are being introduced in a Windows Insider build soon for feedback first and will be rolled out to everyone when the Windows 10 Creators Update becomes available.

IT PROS:
We also recognize organizations have different needs than individuals when addressing privacy. Learn more about what we’re doing to help IT pros manage telemetry and privacy within their organizations here.

For an explanation of these features, read the blog post, “Our continuing commitment to your privacy with Windows 10” below:

• WINDOWS BLOG: Our continuing commitment to your privacy with Windows 10
  https://blogs.windows.com/windowsexperience/2017/01/10/continuing-commitment-privacy-windows-10/

We’ve released a series of hotfixes for tax updates in 2016 that apply to:

• AX 5.0 (Microsoft Dynamics AX 2009)
• AX 6.0/6.1 (Microsoft Dynamics AX 2012)
• AX 6.2 (Microsoft Dynamics AX 2012 R2)
• AX 6.3 (Microsoft Dynamics AX 2012 R3)
• AX 7.1 (Microsoft Dynamics 365 for Operations)

The changes made and downloads are available here:

• BLOG: Dynamics AX – 1099 Tax Updates for 2016
  https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/axsupport/2017/01/10/dynamics-ax-1099-tax-updates-for-2016/

Do you have Visual Studio Team Services based developers?  Do you have Office 365? 

Microsoft Teams the new chat-based workspace in Office365 offers several services to enable work group collaboration. One way of enabling work group collaboration for developers is through a built-in integration with Visual Studio Team Services. Microsoft Teams paired with Visual Studio Team Services provides a comprehensive chat and collaboration experience across your Agile and development work.

Some of the features that enable this tight integration can allow developers to stay up to date with alerts for work items, pull requests, commits, and builds. This functionality is enabled through a connector inside the Microsoft Teams service. Each Connector event is its own conversation, allowing users to be notified of events they care about and discuss them with their team members.

Read more here:

• BLOG: Integrating Visual Studio Team Services with Microsoft Teams
  https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/premier_developer/2017/01/17/integrating-visual-studio-team-services-with-microsoft-teams/

Attention Office 365 admins—Do you have users still running Office 2013 ProPlus? If so, please read on…

If your organization has deployed Office ProPlus from your Office 365 subscription, you may still have some users who are running Office 2013 ProPlus. Not only are these users missing out on the new capabilities in Office 365, like Groups and Skype for Business, but there is something more important for you to be aware of…the end of mainstream support for Office 2013 ProPlus.

As of February 28th, 2017, Office 2013 ProPlus will no longer be covered by mainstream support. Users running Office 2013 ProPlus will still receive critical security updates, but they will no longer receive product updates for new features that are added to the service. There is no automatic way to move from Office 2013 to Office 2016; however, Microsoft is here to help you transition to 2016 so you get access to mainstream support, as well as the latest features the service has to offer.

Here are the steps you should follow:

1. Get familiar with the Office channel release model. Office 2016 is shipping in multiple channels. These different release channels allow you to control who in your organization gets the latest release, based on your needs.

The First Release for Deferred Channel (FRDC) enables you to configure (per user) a group of early adopters. This group will get the latest and greatest features four months in advance of a Deferred Channel (DC) release. Premier Support escalates any cases related to the FRDC build directly to the Office engineering team, so that issues can be addressed prior to the DC release.

The DC is made available only a few times a year (instead of every month) and is best for organizations that don’t want to deploy the latest features of Office right away or that have a significant number of LOB applications, add-ins, or macros that need to be tested. This approach helps to avoid compatibility issues that can potentially stall deployments.

Start testing FRDC now, if you plan to roll out the DC June release. TechNet has more information about channel release models.

2. Determine which of your users are still running Office 2013. Upgrading from Office 2013 to Office 2016 is not an automated process. If you are an Office 365 admin, you need to determine which of your users are still running Office 2013. Once you have identified these users, you will need to uninstall Office 2013 and reinstall Office 2016 for each of them.

3. Start a group of users on the First Release builds. This group could include the IT team or early adopters, and gives them an opportunity to get comfortable with the new capabilities and test any LOB integrations that are critical to your business.

If your users find any potential issues, they can open a CSS support incident. We actively monitor First Release tickets to more quickly escalate issues to the product engineering team.

4. Contact the FastTrack Center to get assistance for your Office 365 ProPlus deployment. They will provide assistance to help you upgrade 2013 clients to 2016 and ensure you are on the latest service managed client. You can review the FastTrack Benefit Overview to learn more about how to work remotely with Microsoft specialists to get your Office 365 environment ready for use, as well as to plan rollout and usage within your organization.

The FastTrack Center can provide you with assistance in testing, repackaging, and distributing Office 365 2016 ProPlus or help you to validate your deployment approach with a Microsoft engineer. To request assistance, go to the FastTrack site, select the Services tab, and submit the Request Office 2016 ProPlus Upgrade Assistance form.

I was recently directed to set of tools for Surface that I’d not seen before.  Looks like we just published them today.

This download location stores all the right tools you need as a IT Professional when you want to deploy, manage and secure a Surface device in your organization.

• Cisco_EAP_Supplicant_Installer_v1.zip
• Surface_Data_Eraser_Installer_v3.1.9.msi
• Surface_Deployment_Accelerator_v_1.96.0405.msi
• Surface_Diagnostic_Toolkit_v1.1.8.0.zip
• SurfaceDockUpdaterSetup.msi
• SurfaceUEFI_Configurator_v1.0.25.0.msi
• SurfaceUefiManagerSetup.msi
• SurfaceWOL.msi

Grab the tools here:

• DOWNLOAD: Surface Tools for IT
  http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=46703