Everybody knows that test environments are a very good idea, providing a safe place to try new features or configuration changes to products, develop scripts and tools, or provide training for your staff. Office 365 is no different, but a lot of customers that I talk to don’t maintain a test environment at all. And many of the IT pros that I talk to also don’t have their own person tenant for testing and training.

For traditional on-premises infrastructure the reasons for not running test environments are usually cost-related. Sadly, it is very common for IT teams to not have the resources such as hardware or virtualization capacity to build a separate environment that is a meaningful representation of their production environment. Continue reading → How to Create a Test Environment for Office 365

Since Microsoft  announced the general availability of Office 365 Secure Score we the community have been giving them a lot of  feedback on how it could be optimized for our needs.  It seems that Microsoft have listened…two requests that came up regularly were that organizations wanted Secure Score to award points in situations where a control was being met by a third party product and the ability to ignore a control because it was not relevant to them. Based on this feedback  these two options are now available.

Continue reading → New Office 365 Security Score Features

Microsoft is squishing its major biz products into a single solution called – wait for it – Microsoft 365, CEO Satya Nadella announced at Inspire, Redmond’s annual event for businesses that flog its wares.

Office 365, Windows 10, and enterprise mobility and security, will be peddled in two flavours: Microsoft 365 Enterprise and Microsoft 365 Business, Nadella said. The latter, which adds device and licence management from a single location, will be available for preview on August 2.
Continue reading → Microsoft drops Office 365 for biz. Now it’s just Microsoft 365