UralTalk

Come March 20th, it will be springtime for those of us in the Northern Hemisphere. This is an exciting time with new possibilities and opportunities, and it excites me to bring some of the features in the Microsoft 365 Roadmap to you. The ones shown below were handpicked based upon feedback I get in the field: Office 365 Groups: naming policy in Azure Active Directory: Status : Launched - March 19 " Administrators can configure a policy for appending text to the beginning or end of a group name and email address for groups no matter where a group is created (e.g. Outlook, Planner, Power BI, etc.). Administrators can also configure a list of specific blocked words that can’t be used in group names, and rely on the native list of thousands of blocked words to keep their directories clean. " Notes : This is a good feature to have. Every client of mine asks about governance in Teams. Groups is the backbone, and it adds to a growing number of control points. ...

Recently, I was asked for possible solutions to enforce VPN connection to access Office 365. This seems odd at first, for this is against one of the tenets of Office 365, accessing service from anywhere and on any device. But then there is always a certain use case that needs to be addressed. In this case, the customer had deployed Office 365 and federated using ADFS, a textbook deployment with 2 ADFS server farm, and 2 WAPs in the DMZ. Within the Microsoft 365 world, Intune and Conditional access would enable for enforcing policies. However, that will also require the customer to acquire additional licenses beyond O365 E3, which my customer did not want to do. I compiled some of the possibilities with ADFS to enforce VPN connectivity. Although I do not recommend anyone to bypass the features, I want to share this out to get some feedback from the community, to see if this is such a common scenario, or if anyone implemented any of these or other cost-effective solutions...

As a hands-on practice area lead, I get to deliver projects both directly as an architect, and indirectly as an Engagement Manger. In one recent project, one of my Higher Ed clients wanted to setup attribute-based filtering. The matter got escalated to me and I helped the client in setting this up. I documented the process to my client and thought there may be others who may find this helpful as well. In this article I will not be going into what  AADConnect  is and how to deploy the same. I will assume that you already know about  AADConnect  and possibly have deployed the same as well. One of the features of  AADConnect  is the ability to filter objects that are synched to Azure AD. The default and the recommended configuration are to sync all objects in all domains in the configured forest. There are cases, however, that requires us to filter the objects to be synched.  AADConnect  provides the following filtering options: Group-base...