So I got a call about a job involving office 365, possibly troubleshooting for domain users from recently acquired companies transitioning to a new domain or possibly more business admin number crunching type of scenarios, the person wasn’t exactly sure. Either way I figured it would be a good idea to start to understand office 365 and understand modern deployments of outlook as it would appear the days of the exchange server being a physical box deployed on location are numbered. Turns out that this was helpful for studying server regardless of any situation involving accrual of capital that might possibly incur (which may be needed at some point this year if i’m to continue studying technology as unfortunate as may view the responsibilities of being a person that’s working (working obviously meaning a person performing a task while incurring some sort of monetary benefit, clearly not a person of free will doing something because they really enjoy what they do)) due to the number of questions i’ve seen in testing scenarios involving Azure and the lack of discussion in any documentation I’ve come across. Specifically I’ve noticed this issue with the trusts required involving ADFS and with server you’re obviously clueless as to the actual end user scenario support situations that you may need to support. We just how to configure a lockdown policy on your browser, desktop and possibly set you up with some shared folders, right?
For starters I found this training video to be tremendously helpful and informative on a lot of levels, its quite long but worth a view if you’re into these sorts of things.
He gets into the ADFS situations and when considering Azure deployments I guess this is more practical that considering blanket deployments that look more like virtualization rather some thing currently in practice such as exchange server cloud deployments,
which appears to be what 365 is doing in some cases, particularly with small businesses and im assuming there are several examples of enterprise deployments of this solution. As to why a small business would just use gmail, exchange and google drive is beyond me but
im sure there are people that feel the premium hosting service is worth it to have the @company.com or what ever their reason is.
Maybe we could get on with attempting to understand ADFS and how it works since it seems like we are seeing so much technical jargon and not much for a high level overview of what a modern exchange deployment might look like in an enterprise environment.
- Required reading (a good place to start?)
- ADFS deployment guide
- web application proxy (ie cloud based exchange servers)
- these are listed links but just click through that first one….
- this might be better
Interesting, no mention of outlook or exchange server in any of those, what’s going on here guys? It’s too easy to use to be true? I think some people are worried that may be the case. However I’m still confused about the end user experience because I’ve watched several videos about this on youtube and the end user experience seems to be awful. Which is both a good thing and a bad thing however the video below makes it seem as if you can’t deploy and email solution through group policy (I have my doubts about this because good admins should be able to figure out how to deploy install packages)
Perhaps we could get back to understanding how to setup ADFS/DirSync and I may have found something solid here, at least for a place to start understanding this tech.
That is actually turning out to be a really solid series and is very clearly demonstrating the knowledge gaps present between client support roles and server support roles. In a client support role most things are black and white but if you start to follow this you quickly realize that for a server test to pose questions about how to set up a cloud environment the questions could get really complex really fast and there are a lot of other topics to cover that could possibly be more relevant while this is important to have a really solid foundational understanding of. At least I think that’s what’s being said?
That’s all for now, we learned a little about future cloud deployments, how testing works and gained a very confused understanding of
modern exchange deployments.
xAFTERHOURSx 
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