Recently I was demoing Azure Sentinel to a large organization, and someone asked me, “What if an attacker manages to compromise my system and disables Windows Defender?” Well…what if they do? How can we flag this, investigate and remediat? Why would someone intentionally disable anti-malware protection? I’ve written this blog to hopefully help you combat … Read more
Here at New Signature, we work with our clients on a wide variety of projects. They can range from one person for one week to eight consultants for several months. The challenge with this, from a project management point of view, is to consistently provide high-quality delivery and reporting while appropriately sizing the overhead and … Read more
So, you have Microsoft 365 at your fingertips within your organization, but are you using it to its fullest potential? In this month’s podcast episode, New Signature experts Rob Murry and Kat Memenza work through some timely modern workplace considerations that can help your team work easily, no matter where you are. Listen below as … Read more
We know from our own operational structure and because of the power of Microsoft technologies that you can experience success in a remote environment, and our goal at New Signature is to guide our partners to success. Microsoft Teams is the center of Office 365. If your organization is licensed for Office 365, you already … Read more
Five years ago, a co-worker told me he wanted to get an ALM certification. I stared at him and blinked. “What’s ALM?” “Application Lifecycle Management.” I don’t remember my exact reaction, but I was skeptical. I didn’t understand what that meant at the time. My focus was entirely on writing the best, cleanest code I … Read more
As we move toward a new year, Microsoft is gearing up for some changes and new features that will drive your business forward. Microsoft uses the Azure feedback tool, where you can leave feedback about Azure updates or features you’d like to see, to guide their developments. At New Signature, we aim to keep you up-to-date … Read more
At New Signature, we love tips and tricks that keep us moving along during our work day and make our experience even easier. We actually love it so much, that we developed a monthly podcast to talk about it. You can listen to Office Explorers any time! We are always here, keeping our ears to … Read more
With the importance of security being constantly pressed to IT leaders, it can sometimes be difficult to know where to start when it comes to day-to-day tasks that lead to effective security for your organization’s environment. As experts in modern workplace technologies, we do all we can to keep our customers up-to-date about the things … Read more
The end of year is here, so while you’re wrapping gifts, travelling, or relaxing at home, listen to Kat and Rob wrap up the best tips from the past six months, plus some fresh tips to help you start the New Year off efficiently and productively. Listen to hear more top productivity tips of 2019. You can … Read more
The exclusive New Signature podcast, Office Explorers, has been live and successful for a full year. Over the past twelve months, Rob and Kat have explored topics that relate to Office 365, from SharePoint and Planner, to security and updates from Microsoft Ignite. For the anniversary episode, Kat and Rob met with New SIgnature project … Read more
Remember this photo? Long story short: the Hawaii emergency agency password was written on a Post-it note and made it onto a photo that went viral on the Internet. Not the kind of notoriety, any of us are hoping for. But we witness this type of risky behavior daily across many teams and organizations – … Read more
Everyone is talking about DevOps. I’m sure you’ve heard it. One of the best definitions is: the union of people, process, and products to enable continuous delivery of value to our end users. What does that mean? What is value? How do we know we’ve delivered value? And why continuous delivery? Value Let’s start with Value. There … Read more
Losing information to a hacker is the worst nightmare an IT administrator can experience. Don’t be fearful, as Kat and Rob provide an informative webinar on security and compliance with Office 365. In keeping with the Halloween season, they go over: Who’s that in my directory? Using Active Directory to see any unauthorized users Zombie … Read more
Do you have any Office apps that just sort of hang out in your waffle icon, but you aren’t sure how to approach their use? Many users feel that way with Planner, but if you’re not exploring the organization and productivity-boosting aspects of Microsoft Planner, you could be missing out on some serious benefits. In our … Read more
Misconception: “My company isn’t a software company. We just write software to support the business, so we don’t care about going faster.” While your company might not be a software company — or a company that sells software in its product line, you can still largely benefit from DevOps. DevOps is all about efficiency in … Read more
Bill Gates has a rule of 3’s when it comes to productivity. He suggests that there be at least three ways to complete any task in Office to accommodate every work style. This month, New Signature experts and Office Explorers podcast hosts Kat Memenza and Rob Murray dive into the best everyday productivity tips to use … Read more
The Problem On a recent project, we were faced with the challenge of keeping data synchronized between an external data source that was constantly being updated and Dynamics 365, which was serving primarily as the database for an externally facing Dynamics Portal website. There were two goals in mind: Keep the strain on the source … Read more
There seems to be a fair amount of confusion around getting existing devices into the Apple Device Enrollment Program(DEP) or Apple Business Manager (ABM) portal. The official documentation seems to indicate that using Apple Configurator is a requirement, but it is just one way to achieve this. The problem with using Apple Configurator is that … Read more
Dynamics 365 for Sales is an integral tool for any organization. Having all the sales data in a central location is key to nurturing a relationship with your prospects and to ensure their experience is optimal even beyond the Sales Cycle. This will ensure your organization is setup for success and moving towards achieving your … Read more
In development, we all can agree that the user is most important. And what do users love? Features. It’s reasonable to assume that each of your users will want a new and unique feature at least a few times per year. Product owners guessing at what these features could be can cause backlogs to fill … Read more
In our previous blog post, Assembling Your Team, we discussed how to assemble an adoption team, who will help you drive adoption across the organization. The next big challenge is defining a business strategy, by identifying key business scenarios where the technology can play a role. This will help you win over your stakeholders and … Read more
In the latest Office Explorers podcast, Kat Memeza and Rob Murray dive into the world of Azure with New Signature expert, Evan Riser. Kat provides feedback from attending SP19 (SharePoint Conference 2019) along with an interview with Evan Riser, senior consultant in Infrastructure/Azure and Windows Server here at New Signature. In this episode you will … Read more
Let me ask you a question… Do you love football? I do and i use it in the workplace every day. What does this have to do with DevOps you ask? Well welcome to my brain … jump on the train and come along for a the ride or jump off now and take a … Read more
Occasionally, the need may arise to generate a new online archive mailbox for an Office 365 user. According to Microsoft, archive mailboxes become disconnected when they are disabled. The disconnected archive will be retained for 30 days by default and subsequently purged. In some cases, you may not be able to wait the 30 days … Read more
The customer service module within Dynamics 365 is a must-have for any organization that services customers. Now that includes every organization, doesn’t it? We will focus on three key areas within this article: (1) Queues (2) Automatic Record Creation (3) Service Level Agreements (SLA). Queues Queues are a great way to group work that needs … Read more
The retention policies in the Security and Compliance Center of Office 365 are a great and easy way to ensure data in your tenant is being protected. It is very easy to turn on protection for ‘All’, but businesses rarely mean ‘All’. It’s usually ‘All’ with some exceptions. These exceptions are where things get a … Read more
These are common phrases you hear around a business: “Why upgrade? It works fine just the way it is.” “If it ain’t broke don’t fix it.” “It is what it is. “ They are rooted in the key concept that the cost of changing is expensive. But the cost of not changing could be more … Read more
One of the most challenging aspects of our highly technological world, is adopting to change. With rapid increases in cloud technology, and productivity platforms, modern workers are being asked to learn new tools regularly. We understand the challenges of adopting technology such as Microsoft 365, so we’ve dedicated a blog series for outlining how to … Read more
Exchange Online (EXO) has a long list of features that delight end users and administrators alike. End users who were accustomed to the constant struggle of keeping mailboxes under quotas are a thing of the past in EXO with spacious 100 GB mailboxes and unlimited in-place archives. Administrators do not have to worry about storage … Read more
In our latest Office Explorers podcast, New Signature experts Kat Memenza and Rob Murray yammer on about all the amazing things you can do with Yammer. Office Explorers is the podcast where we uncover the latest and greatest with Office 365 and share it with you. This episode includes exciting news updates that you won’t … Read more
We’ll look at three features within the Lotus Notes email software and see how to achieve similar functionality using Outlook. This is the second post in a series that aims to smooth the transition from the Notes email client to Microsoft Outlook – you’ll find the first post in this series here. Email Stationery Like … Read more
If you’re reading this post, chances are you’ve already gone through the tedious process of decomposing your monolith into microservices, or at the very least, will be considering this approach in the near future. For starters, a solution that involves microservices that consume APIs looks like this: Figure 1: Clients directly communicate with microservice (image … Read more
In our recent webinar “Controlling Your Azure Environment: Governance for the Modern Enterprise” we touched on the five disciplines of cloud governance from Microsoft’s Cloud Adoption Framework. This blog post is the second in the “The Five Disciplines of Cloud Governance” five-part series expanding on those concepts. If you missed the first post in the … Read more
New Signature is pleased to announce the acquisition of Nebbia Technology: an award-winning Microsoft Azure DevOps consultancy focused on the delivery of solutions on Microsoft’s Azure platform. A Microsoft gold-certified partner and 2018 finalist for DevOps Partner of the Year, Nebbia brings a suite of exceptional competencies to the table, supporting our commitment to advancing … Read more
Git Branching Strategies As a developer I have felt the pain of long, complex, merges of code. Juggling which branch to apply a hotfix, which release is in production and how we patch it. Do we roll back the code, apply the fix, then roll forward? Make a branch, fix it, then release that? And … Read more
A few weeks back, my colleague Evan Riser and I held a webinar introducing the five disciplines of governance from Microsoft’s Cloud Adoption Framework. This blog post is the first in a series expanding on those concepts. If you didn’t get a chance to see the webinar, check it out here, but to quickly recap, … Read more
The release of Windows 10 version 1703 ushered in a new way of configuring policy for Mobile Device Management, through select Group Policy administrative templates (ADMX backed policies). However during testing of ADMX ingestion into Intune, I found a major blocker to their use. Currently, the ingested policies are not allowed to write to locations … Read more
If your email system is changing from Lotus Notes to Office 365, this post will help smooth your transition from using the Notes email client to using Microsoft Outlook. Let’s review the key features and settings for your first day with Microsoft Outlook. Using the Menu Ribbon First, if you have been using Word, Excel, … Read more
Kubernetes has been getting a lot of attention lately and it’s not hard to figure out why. In fact, the Kubernetes website provides more than 50 case studies of unique scenarios in which Kubernetes removed barriers for managing infrastructure and services while reducing the operational overhead and overall cost; all of which would not have … Read more
You’ve heard it before, probably a million times. “Developers must write unit tests.” Easier said than done. There’s the big monoliths, the ugly codebases, the mission-critical code that one really knows how it works. Well, it turns out that those ugly pieces of software that provide a lot of value are probably going to require … Read more
Over the past few months, I have been working on a consolidation project, where Company A (the Parent) acquired Company B (the Child). The consolidation activities included both an Active Directory migration between forests and moving the Child on-premises mailboxes homed on Exchange Server 2013 to the Parent’s Office 365 tenant. The focus of this … Read more
Consider There are a lot of things to consider when migrating from TFVC, a centralized version control, to Git, a distributed version control system. While it’s easy to think version control is version control, there are actually a lot of differences. Let’s walk through some of the things to consider after you’ve made the decision … Read more
Office 365 provides all your team needs to collaborate, communicate and work smarter across any device from any location. It can be overwhelming to keep up with all the new features that are being rolled out, but New Signature is here to help highlight those, while providing additional tips, tricks and education. Here are just … Read more
Looking back recently at both my professional career, as well as the daily life of some loved ones, I often ask myself what kept me in a bad situation soo long before I realized it was not for me? I was once the primary deployment engineer for a very large-scale financial organization. The Dev Org … Read more
One of my favorite things about what we do here at Nebbia is seeing companies experience a cultural shift as part of their DevOps journeys. A lot of our tasking can be tactical in nature, adding CI/CD pipelines, automating a test, migrating certain data, etc, but then seeing the ripple effects that those changes can … Read more
Remember when merge conflicts would regularly mess up the codebase? TFVC (or TFS), which is the world I come from, used to be a horrible experience for merging and branching project code bases. Git changed the way teams think of merging and branching. In fact, branching and merging are second nature to teams using Git. … Read more
Our newest episode of the New Signature podcast Office Explorers is live and is focused on all the high-level characteristics that make SharePoint Online great for your modern workplace team. Hosts Kat Memenza and Rob Murray join Oliver Bartholdson to discuss the important aspects of SharePoint and how it integrates with your technological environment as a whole. Learn more about: How SharePoint underpins Office 365 Enhancing productivity Empowering … Read more
Organizations exist that have a large number of mail domains in their on-premises Exchange environment set as accepted domains (let’s say 20+). As these organizations move to Office 365 using the Hybrid Config Wizard, they will likely notice a problem with the interface that does not allow them to verify domain ownership in bulk. The … Read more
Some years back, before Microsoft launched Azure cloud services, my study network consisted of three beefy servers living under the kitchen table at home; it was noisy! However, it did allow hands-on study and exploration of recent technologies in a safe environment. Now I have many more Virtual Machines in Azure than I could ever … Read more
Do you have a TFS upgrade on your priority list for 2019? Are you missing out on some of the latest features that TFS has to offer? Do you have a desire to be on one tool that could be used by Dev’s, QA, PM’s, PO’s, BA’s and/or stakeholders? Keep reading to find out why … Read more
You are formulating your company’s cloud strategy. Where do you start? There’s so much information out there! So many options – Which provider do I go with? What services fit my tech stack? How do I translate my and my team’s knowledge into this new world of THE CLOUD? Are we falling behind? I hear … Read more
A colleague and I set out to write three open source APIs that would all do the same thing, but each with a different design (monolithic, microservices, and nanoservices). Our reason for this was that we would have a set of APIs that can be used to give talks at various conferences, highlighting the good, … Read more
Implementing a CI/CD pipeline can be intimidating if you are used to a manual release process. I have heard the concern that tools like Azure DevOps are not flexible enough for more complex build procedures. Even the term pipeline certainly suggests moving in a straight line through your process, which doesn’t seem very adaptable. However, … Read more
The public cloud remains one of, if not the hottest topic, in IT right now. The chances are that if you’re not doing it, you’re thinking about it. When you are planning how you wish to adopt the public cloud, the biggest consideration for your business is security, and asking yourself how secure your infrastructure will … Read more
In this post I’ll pass along suggestions and tips based on my own experience that will help you answer the question: “How do I become an IT trainer?” Watch other trainers There are many free webinars available from companies promoting products or services. Watch several of them and note what you find engaging. And if … Read more
DevOps is a journey. While many people focus purely on releasing more frequently or adopting new tools, often the more important part of the process is the culture shift required to truly embrace DevOps principles. In my experience, Quality Assurance (QA) teams can be resistant to these changes. While it may require a change in … Read more
This past Christmas, my wife Sarah was kind enough to buy me what my heart truly desires – more tools. In this case, it was 20V DeWalt tools, including a drill and driver set. Of course I was delighted, but then, I saw which drill it was and my heart sank. I had the very … Read more
For any of us that have interacted with Microsoft Azure for any length of time, we know that at times there are actions or resources that are not fully configurable from the Azure Portal. When times like this occur one way to handle this is to jump to the Azure PowerShell modules to make these … Read more
Written by a team of New Signature project managers: Ana Huertas, Kobby Acquah, Louisa Morren, Edward Wong Escape rooms are metaphors for work and life, and contain many lessons that can help in each. For the Applied Innovation PMO team, we approached it as a vivid illustration of the challenges we face in Agile Projects, as well as a great team building experience. Join us on our journey to learn something … Read more
I am a numbers person, Microsoft Excel is where I prefer to do most of my work, and there is something about a properly formatted table that always makes me happy. So, it should not be a surprise that I love metrics – anything I can track, forecast, or plot. The tricky thing about metrics … Read more
“How can I help staff quickly adopt the new technology?” – the short answer is: planning, communication and adoption. Good visuals will help also. Let’s take a quick look at these key areas. Planning We all know the future starts with planning, and when we introduce new technology and systems, we need to plan for … Read more
When adding features to a project in Visual Studio, you can do so by directly referencing the libraries as individual dlls or a collection of dlls as a NuGet package. The advantage of using the NuGet package system is that it makes it easier to maintain the libraries. It notifies you if the added packages … Read more
Our New Signature podcast has hit the airwaves, and the second episode of Office Explorers is live. In this episode, hosts Rob Murray and Kat Memenza talk with modern workplace expert Varol Saatcioglu about Microsoft Teams and how it is changing the way companies function. They offer some great productivity tips and lots of other new features within SharePoint and Office … Read more
Transitioning to the Cloud is no small task. It is fraught with risk for any organization who makes the transition. At the same time, it is packed with an even greater amount of business value that an organization can extract when properly transitioned. When things go wrong, they are not immediately obvious, but usually are … Read more
We are truly lucky to work for an organization that is driven by values and encourages the unique development of every employee, which translates into the best experiences for our clients. But it’s not as though, here at New Signature, we are so moved by our dynamic culture that we would take the time to … Read more
Have you ever found yourself noticing a new feature within Microsoft Office 365 and thought to yourself, “Wow! Where did that come from?” or sit and wonder when your machine runs updates what exactly is happening? The experts at New Signature are here to help you stay up to date and educated on all the newest and more useful … Read more
At Nebbia Technology, while I have Software Developer as my title, more and more I realize that the value I bring to the table is as much communicating with clients as it is communicating with computers. While computers have a very strict way that is required to communicate with them, via code, the discussions I … Read more
Azure DevOps is a powerful tool for any organization, especially one dedicated to a robust CI/CD pipleline. Getting a working pipeline for a repository can take only a few minutes, especially if using a tried and true template. But what if instead of 5 or 10 pipelines, you want to set up a thousand? I … Read more
Staying up to date with every new feature that Microsoft rolls out for Office 365 can be time-consuming. New Signature works to keep our customers and curious learners in the know when it comes to neat tips and tricks, as well as important updates to your cloud-based collaborative environment. Recently, Microsoft has implemented some updates … Read more
I don’t come from an agile software background. Most of my professional experience has been part of standard waterfall based schedules and planning, where you have everything pre-planned out – a schedule showing “exact” start and stop dates for each task and quantified process to capture earned value against your performed work. Now, at Nebbia, … Read more
As a consultant who primarily deals with the Azure cloud and DevOps, I often get to meet software team stakeholders who, for a myriad variety of reasons, still haven’t migrated to the cloud. The fastest route to get an on-premises system to the cloud, is popularly known as lift-and-shift. [fusion_builder_column spacing=”” center_content=”no” link=”” target=”_self” min_height=”” … Read more
One of the benefits of regularly designing software systems here at Nebbia Technology is having the first-hand experience of what works and what doesn’t across a vast spectrum of technologies. With every project that we engage, our knowledge and insights gained from previous experiences allow us to deliver solutions that not only make technological sense, … Read more
How many places do you need to search to understand your company’s own software? I’m sure you have some kind of user-facing documentation or some form of presentable details that your users can work off of. That doesn’t describe your database schema. It doesn’t go into the API endpoints available for your partners wanting to … Read more
As Azure and DevOps consultants, we have the privilege of helping organizations deliver greater value by streamlining their processes. So how do we do that? By helping organizations become more Agile by moving them to the cloud, helping them build cloud-native apps, and introducing DevOps practices to refine the process and acquire meaningful feedback. Often … Read more
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On a recent engagement, I assisted one of our clients with configuring Azure DevOps pipelines for a cross platform Xamarin forms application. Due to the specific requirements of each platform, it is necessary to configure separate pipelines for Android and iOS. When we got to the Android pipeline, we ran into a bit of a … Read more
Ever since the inception of Team Foundation Server (TFS), there has been a need to harmonize its usage with ongoing portfolio management efforts by a PMO (Project Management Office) team going on in bigger companies. In the beginning, the only out-of-the-box way of integrating with tools used by PMOs was to use the Microsoft Project … Read more
I think it is safe to say that “DevOps,” “Automation,” and “Azure” (or insert your cloud of choice), are well beyond the buzzword phase and now a way of life for both individuals and organizations. Maybe you have successfully led your organization to achieve an ideal state, maybe you have been talking about it for … Read more
Join us Tuesday, November 6th at the Microsoft office in Tampa, Florida for our upcoming workshop: Azure Adoption Strategies! This will be an expert-led session that will include hands-on experiences with Azure, as well as discussions with our team and your peers related to ways that you can get to the Cloud successfully. There are a … Read more
PowerBI has a lot of power, no pun intended. Created primarily as a self-reporting tool to be used by the C-level suite as well as managers, it has grown and matured to the point where it’s edging out SSRS in capabilities. In fact, you can now embed PowerBI into end-user applications (“App Owns Data” as … Read more
Every day, developers are working to elevate your Office 365 experience with new features and the enhancement of the existing functionalities. At New Signature, we always have our ear to the ground to watch out for some of the most helpful and impactful developments in the Office 365 world. We are committed to relaying updates … Read more
We recently started a new project with a client who already has a DevOps mindset. It’s very refreshing to work with a team that values DevOps principles and appreciates the cultural changes that need to occur to deliver high-quality software frequently and consistently. We were pleasantly surprised when they mentioned that they value: Production-first mindset … Read more
Performance is a feature Recently a client of ours came to us discussing one of their systems and the millions of hits per day that they have to process. Through some fine tuning and a migration into Azure they’re handling that load just fine on their API cluster. I had a little free time and … Read more
You may be asking why this is important… let’s first discuss what Reserved Virtual Machine Instances are. As companies move to Azure it can be effective or necessary for them to maintain some workloads on virtual machines in Azure. This can often be due to 3rd party software that has to be installed on the … Read more
While many companies and teams see the value of assessing their DevOps capabilities, few understand the significance of an assessment as a living document, rather understanding it as an audit result. An audit is a yes/no answer to a compliance question against a checklist of some quality attributes. Through an audit you can usually demonstrate … Read more
When I started at Nebbia, my first time ever working for/with a technology company, I was thrown into this world with lots of terms I’d never heard before. One word that came up a lot in the beginning was “scrum”. For a little while, I just thought it was a funny word everyone was saying … Read more
When attempting to remove an archive mailbox, the deletion never occurs. This happens whether the object is cloud-only or synced over via AAD Connect. Additionally, there is no litigation hold or in-place hold. If there is a retention policy set to all mailboxes, the mailbox has been excluded from that policy as well. To correct … Read more
At Nebbia, I have seen many different companies, corporate structures, and cultures, and have learned from each one I’ve encountered. Every company has had some great qualities and some that could be improved. No company is ever perfect, and perfection is a goal rather than a destination anyway. It’s just the nature of the beast. Of … Read more
Lately, most of the companies I’ve been talking to recently have at least been thinking about microservices. Unfortunately, it’s very easy for this topic to lead into a tools and frameworks discussion. To avoid jumping into this trap, I made a point in a previous post that if you’re thinking about microservices, you need DevOps … Read more
One of Nebbia’s specialties is helping customers transition from using On-Premises TFS to utilizing VSTS in the cloud. The primary way that we accomplish this is via the Microsoft full fidelity migration tool that allows for all history, work items and code to be migrated to VSTS and look exactly as it did before the … Read more
Most don’t realize it, but the current trend is the third time that “cloud computing” has achieved preeminence, having failed twice before. Cloud computing has been with us much longer than most of us are aware – unless you are a historian, or has lived through it. I can only claim to have witnessed the latter … Read more
Having developed five VSTS extensions (one public one you can use right now, Test Charts), we at Nebbia Technology have learned a thing or two about building them. In fact, we’ve spent hundreds of hours building Visual Studio Team Server extensions. Because we are a DevOps-focused company, we have found a few different ways that … Read more
Imagine yourself in one of the following scenarios (if you have not been in one of these scenarios yet, I imagine you could be sooner than you think): You have just been told invited to implement DevOps at your organization You were just told invited to lead your company to the cloud by X year … Read more
Some code is boring. There, I said it. Most developers want to work on difficult challenges, or at the very least, interesting ones. So when a tool comes along that eliminates some of the tedious code that seems to be written again and again (and again) to do the same work, I embrace it. Because … Read more
Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery are often talked about as something that always go hand in hand. Teams often spend months and month trying to come up with the “perfect” mixture of tools and workflow so that they can finally start putting their theory into practice. Based on my conversations with many teams, the reluctance … Read more
Are you thinking about DevOps and attempting to understand the “lay of the land”? What about Azure or other cloud providers? How does DevOps play into Azure? How do cloud providers stack up against each other. More importantly, how does everything affect you? Undoubtedly, a changing process in your company, a new methodology/philosophy, a new … Read more
One of the developers at a client recently pulled me aside to ask me a fairly simple question: Hey Cliff, how do we grant access to QA to do read-only queries in our Azure DB instance for testing? My natural response was of course a tilt of the head and Why? Creating cloud-first software is … Read more
As organizations and development departments begin to move toward cloud first development practices, there are often situations where employees, with the best of intentions, pull up to the buffet that is Azure and start to decide what they want to put on their plate. They grab a little of this service and oooh some of … Read more
Here at Nebbia Technology, we interface with dozens of companies across many different industries. They are all using different technologies to get their work done, some new, some not so much. While there is no “right answer” in how much new technology you should integrate into your organization, we at Nebbia believe that new technology … Read more
Why the combination of our core capabilities make us a great partner for you. My 30 second elevator pitch on Nebbia Technology includes mentioning our three Microsoft Gold Competencies – DevOps, Cloud Platform and Application Development which directly relates to our three core capabilities – DevOps, Azure and cloud first software development. From there … Read more
Blockchain technology can be used to assist business relationships between two or more parties, without them having to rely on 3rd-party infrastructure to enforce a contract or provide a framework of trust. Such technology could diminish the need for lawyers, realtors and other professionals who provide the connective tissue in business and social relationships. It … Read more
Often people think of DevOps as just automation and tools. And, while they are an important part of the solution, they are not the driving force behind implementing DevOps at your organization. DevOps starts with people At its core, DevOps looks to bring people together, helping teams work closer to deliver value faster. This is … Read more
The following article was published by Microsoft Corporation on March 21, 2018 and was written by Kiran Madnani, Principal PM Manager, AIM India. Today, we are announcing the general availability of the next generation of alerts in Azure. With Azure Monitoring Services, you can set up alerts to monitor the metrics and log data for the entire … Read more
DevOps has a great momentum in the industry at this point, as can be seen by the growth of searches of topics related to it. Different from “ALM” and “Agile”, which are very generic terms which makes it difficult to filter out the noise, DevOps is unique and allows a more clear cut picture. Let’s … Read more
You’ve got the greenlight. Your team got the go-ahead to bring a handful of old dependencies up to date as part of your modernization efforts. They’ve all put in plenty of time working hard to make sure the public API wasn’t impacted. Several have even talked to other teams in the company to make sure … Read more
[fusion_builder_container hundred_percent=”no” equal_height_columns=”no” menu_anchor=”” hide_on_mobile=”small-visibility,medium-visibility,large-visibility” class=”” id=”” background_color=”” background_image=”” background_position=”center center” background_repeat=”no-repeat” fade=”no” background_parallax=”none” parallax_speed=”0.3″ video_mp4=”” video_webm=”” video_ogv=”” video_url=”” video_aspect_ratio=”16:9″ video_loop=”yes” video_mute=”yes” overlay_color=”” video_preview_image=”” border_size=”” border_color=”” border_style=”solid” padding_top=”” padding_bottom=”” padding_left=”” padding_right=””][fusion_builder_row][fusion_builder_column type=”1_1″ layout=”1_1″ background_position=”left top” background_color=”” border_size=”” border_color=”” border_style=”solid” border_position=”all” spacing=”yes” background_image=”” background_repeat=”no-repeat” padding_top=”” padding_right=”” padding_bottom=”” padding_left=”” margin_top=”0px” margin_bottom=”0px” class=”” id=”” animation_type=”” animation_speed=”0.3″ animation_direction=”left” hide_on_mobile=”small-visibility,medium-visibility,large-visibility” … Read more
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[fusion_builder_container hundred_percent=”no” equal_height_columns=”no” menu_anchor=”” hide_on_mobile=”small-visibility,medium-visibility,large-visibility” class=”” id=”” background_color=”” background_image=”” background_position=”center center” background_repeat=”no-repeat” fade=”no” background_parallax=”none” parallax_speed=”0.3″ video_mp4=”” video_webm=”” video_ogv=”” video_url=”” video_aspect_ratio=”16:9″ video_loop=”yes” video_mute=”yes” overlay_color=”” video_preview_image=”” border_size=”” border_color=”” border_style=”solid” padding_top=”” padding_bottom=”” padding_left=”” padding_right=””][fusion_builder_row][fusion_builder_column type=”1_1″ layout=”1_1″ background_position=”left top” background_color=”” border_size=”” border_color=”” border_style=”solid” border_position=”all” spacing=”yes” background_image=”” background_repeat=”no-repeat” padding_top=”” padding_right=”” padding_bottom=”” padding_left=”” margin_top=”0px” margin_bottom=”0px” class=”” id=”” animation_type=”” animation_speed=”0.3″ animation_direction=”left” hide_on_mobile=”small-visibility,medium-visibility,large-visibility” … Read more
“How can I access the OneDrive of a deleted user account?” was a question that arose on a recent training course. The question arose from the need to review OneDrive content of a departed member of staff. Office 365 allows you to delegate access to a deleted user’s OneDrive for Business to their manager. For … Read more
“How do I prevent Word from spellchecking PowerShell code in my training manuals?” is a question I asked myself the other day. I was in the process of reviewing a training guide for managing Azure with PowerShell and here is what my Word document looked like: pages of red error lines: The spellchecker is working … Read more
[fusion_builder_container hundred_percent=”no” equal_height_columns=”no” menu_anchor=”” hide_on_mobile=”small-visibility,medium-visibility,large-visibility” class=”” id=”” background_color=”” background_image=”” background_position=”center center” background_repeat=”no-repeat” fade=”no” background_parallax=”none” parallax_speed=”0.3″ video_mp4=”” video_webm=”” video_ogv=”” video_url=”” video_aspect_ratio=”16:9″ video_loop=”yes” video_mute=”yes” overlay_color=”” video_preview_image=”” border_size=”” border_color=”” border_style=”solid” padding_top=”” padding_bottom=”” padding_left=”” padding_right=”” admin_label=”Introduction”][fusion_builder_row][fusion_builder_column type=”1_1″ layout=”1_1″ background_position=”left top” background_color=”” border_size=”” border_color=”” border_style=”solid” border_position=”all” spacing=”yes” background_image=”” background_repeat=”no-repeat” padding_top=”” padding_right=”” padding_bottom=”” padding_left=”” margin_top=”0px” margin_bottom=”0px” class=”” id=”” animation_type=”” animation_speed=”0.3″ animation_direction=”left” … Read more
Serverless is picking up a lot of attention, and we are seeing it becoming very popular with our customers. Unlike architecture, it is much easier to explain its vast array of benefits with non-technical stakeholders. We like Azure Functions and Logic Apps for various reasons other than micro-billing and their abstractions over servers. Serverless is … Read more
As your organization moves technology forward, you may be faced with a lot of questions on how to start and the approach that you want to take to modernize your application portfolio. In most cases, coupling your App modernization strategy to the cloud will give you technology options and enable the agility that your organization … Read more
“Can I remove a scheduled report from the Office 365 Security and Compliance admin center?” was a question that arose on a recent training course. The short answer is, yes, you can, but not using the Security and Compliance center – let’s see why. If you try to delete a schedule using the “Delete Schedule” … Read more
The workforce is changing. We now have a multi-generation workforce, and their expectations are greater than ever. Businesses can no longer rely on training people to work in the ‘ways of the business’ – that simply limits the benefits that the newer generations bring. With increasing reports about personal autonomy and a gig economy, there’s a growing shift towards people having multiple jobs and seeking more autonomy in the way they work. Is your … Read more
DevOps isn’t a new concept to start-ups, but for larger enterprises, it’s historically been much harder to implement – some might even say a real headache. As a result, many have fallen back on more traditional approaches to getting new capabilities launched. But now with even greater choice of app deployment services becoming available, the … Read more
For many, stringing up holiday lights can be a hassle of tangled lights, rickety ladders, and blown bulbs. But at New Signature, we love to take everyday technology and transform it with innovation. Our holiday light extraordinaire, Chris Poplawski, has helped bring a new interactive light display to our Washington, D.C. and Toronto offices. For … Read more
So, you’ve just signed up for a Microsoft Enterprise Azure agreement. Your management team or business partners have told you that you need to reduce your dependency with on-premises datacenters. Your developers have been working on the next generation applications that will change the fortunes of the company, but have requested a large amount of … Read more
Knowledge is power. As the information technology sector trends more and more towards Software as a Service (Saas), consumption-based billing comes right along with it. The more visibility we gain into that consumption, the more intelligently we can make decisions about our investment. Setting up chargeback or showback is one of the most useful things … Read more
LinkedIn Lead Generation Forms are a new way to capture leads (People) directly into Marketo without sending them to a form embedded in a Marketo Landing Page or web page with embedded form. … Read more
WordPress is a beast with over 26% of the websites on the internet using it, and Azure offers a wizard for installing WordPress into Azure. Azure and WordPress are like two peas in a pod; in fact, Sunitha Muthukrishna has stated on Scott Hanselman’s Azure Friday webcast that about 25% of Azure Web Apps are … Read more
“How do I give a demonstration of all the Skype for Business Online features, while also using Skype to present the demonstration as a webinar?” This was a question a new trainer asked me last week. The challenge is that you cannot use the same copy of Skype to both deliver the webinar and demonstrate … Read more
A DevOps transformation is achieved by making organizational changes across People, Process, and Tools. A big part of the DevOps discussion is the concept of implementing a DevOps culture across organizations. Unfortunately, I often hear it as something that should just happen. “We will take care of the process and tools, you go and focus … Read more
One of the easiest ways to take control of your Azure expenses is to ensure that your resources — most notably VMs and Azure SQL databases — are appropriately sized. The Cloud Management Portal’s rightsizing feature makes this easy for you. The CMP uses the Azure Resource Manager to obtain the utilization and performance data for … Read more
Nebbia Technology will be delivering two workshops in October – the first will be 10/16 in Tampa and the second will be 10/18 in Ft. Lauderdale. This workshop is targeted toward Software Developers, Architects, Change Managers and/or Configuration Managers. The purpose of this workshop is to help customers set up and deploy their first assets … Read more
“What happens if you place an Exchange mailbox on legal hold that also has a retention policy applied to it – does the retention policy conflict with the legal hold?” this was a question posed to me on a recent training course. To answer this, we’ll look at the function of each technology and also … Read more
In a recent training session, an attendee posed the following question: Can you schedule recurring Skype for Business Online meetings for more than a year in advance? And if so, can this be limited by policy? The brief answer is: if you book the Skype for Business Online meeting in your Exchange mailbox calendar, then … Read more
Modern software development. It’s full of tools, frameworks, languages, and plenty of heady discussion about the pros and cons of each. You wonder from one day to the next whether your framework or stack of choice is sexy enough to keep you employed for the next few years, let alone the next decade. Yet through … Read more
From a purely technical and procedural standpoint connecting instances of Marketo and Dynamics CRM (DCRM) is straightforward, you follow Marketo’s perfectly acceptable documentation and install the solution in your DCRM instance, create the Marketo Sync user, select your fields to sync, and connect the two platforms. This is not to say that there isn’t some … Read more
Over the past few months, I have had a few customer engagements where there there has been a need for conditional release tasks in VSTS. What is a conditional release statement you ask? What if you want to run a task during your release but not every time you release? This is a functionality that is … Read more
Recently I needed a way to capture what was being worked on in the current sprint for one of our projects. I followed the instructions in this blog post on how to query by date or current iteration but I received this error, “VS402612: The macro ‘@CurrentIteration’ is not supported without a team context. If … Read more
[fusion_global id=”14720″] … Read more
Red Pill Or Blue Pill While setting up a new project on Visual Studio Team Services (VSTS), you are given a choice. The choice of source control. That choice provides the direction of how your code will be managed. In one hand, you have the blue pill. Team Foundation Version Control, or TFVC for short. … Read more
There are so many features in Microsoft Azure DevOps (formerly Visual Studio Team Services) that it can be difficult to wrap your head around what all they do and if you are utilizing the tool to it’s fullest potential. Phrases like “Stay connected from idea to release” and “Improve code quality and catch issues early” … Read more
Recently I needed a quick way to pull up information on a project, specifically hours worked and the PBIs that were “done” in that time frame as well as a list of new, approved and committed PBIs in Excel format. The easiest way to do this is if you already have Visual Studio installed and … Read more
There is often a question that I hear while on engagements with customers… Customer: Yes we definitely want the availability of the the cloud for our web front end applications but we don’t feel comfortable having our data stored in the cloud. What can we do to run our app in the cloud but keep … Read more
[fusion_global id=”14720″] … Read more
[fusion_global id=”14720″] … Read more
With the rise of new virtualization technologies using containers, people are starting to think more and more about using microservices in their organizations. It’s definitely a topic that has been getting a lot of attention. Many of the top technology companies have attributed some of their recent success to microservices. Some of these companies include Netflix, Amazon, … Read more
What is the Internet of Things? The Internet of Things, or IoT, is an umbrella term for the idea of connecting new types of devices to the Internet – devices that have not been Internet-connected in the past. For a home user, this might be their heating or lighting systems, whereas for a business, it … Read more
How fast does your website respond under typical user load? What would performance look like with a sudden 75% increase in traffic? Or 300%? Is the code you’re about to deploy going to improve or degrade performance of the website? What kind of difference will scaling out or up make to your website’s performance? If … Read more
Azure Functions open a door to new ways of solving business problems that are more focused or isolated in nature. A Function could be a simple task of sending an email when something happens or a more complex chain of dependent processes. The primary benefit is the ability to create small solutions without the need to build an entire web … Read more
As a DevOps consulting company, we are often asked by our customers to provide them with guidance about tools that will help them improve their software development process. Since we are a Microsoft DevOps partner and experts in Team Services, those conversations typically go in the direction on how Team Service and Azure can be … Read more
It was announced recently that Tesla surpassed Ford in market value. While some of that evaluation can be attributed to hype, that’s still real money that investors are pouring into a company that was born less than fifteen years ago. How did this startup surpass the value of a company with 100 years of growth and market … Read more
Esteban Garcia along with Heidi Araya, Jens Ostergaard, Curtis Michelson and Steven Granese will be coaching at Agile Orlando’s Coach Blitz on Tuesday, May 9th. Esteban specializes in Agile software development practices and DevOps and will be available throughout the day to answer questions and have discussions on how you can enable automation and software development best practices … Read more
Stories of widescale website outages caused by cloud datacenter failures have been in the news this past month. These outages have led many to lament cloud computing and ponder bringing services back in-house, as if running the websites on their own servers would somehow protect against having just one point of failure. These concerns are not related to … Read more
As I travel the southeast region of the US and deliver VSTS and DevOps training one thing has become abundantly clear… Companies are joining the race to DevOps. The auto race analogy actually works very well in the DevOps transition that is occurring in technology. There are many teams already racing, some are faster than others … Read more
The following question arose at a recent Office 365 administration course: “If we enable Skype meeting broadcast for our organization, can we restrict who can create new broadcast meetings?” Skype meeting broadcast is a new feature that enables your organization to move past the scale limits of regular Skype for Business Online meetings, potentially broadcasting … Read more
As a non-developer who appreciates easy-to-use tools, I was jealous of our technical team and how they could use Visual Studio Team Services to track work and manage their backlog. When our Software Architect, Mikey Cooper, suggested we use Team Services to track our Sales Pipeline I was immediately intrigued. Once he set it up … Read more
With the craze over building Single Page Applications (SPAs), companies have joined the movement and hired armies of front-end engineers with/without experience in back-end technologies. These new engineers that have brought about refreshing talent and new ideas to spur the growth. To accommodate the new talent, many of these companies have built what is known as “cross-functional” teams. Simply put, … Read more
What is the best way to recover an Office 365 user account that has been deleted? This was a question that came up in discussion during a recent training course. My response was that the approach to take depends, in part, on where the user account was first created. Was it created in Office 365 … Read more
Having been in the IT industry for over 20 years, I’ve seen a lot of the everyday issues that many other IT professionals are faced with. Over the course of my career, I’ve been tasked with many mundane tasks, as well as some challenging ones. Enter automation. Automation can be used for a number of … Read more
In today’s world of managing source code and DevOps across developer machines and ALM systems, it has become an absolute must to secure access to sensitive data. Items such as passwords, certificates, and cryptographic Keys. Managing the access to these assets on your own can be tricky at best and catastrophically insecure at worst. Luckily … Read more
Jeff Truman will kick off our first Azure webcast of 2017 on March 16th at 12 PM EST. He will provide a general overview of Azure, show Azure capabilities, provide an intro to the Azure Portal and ARM infrastructure as well as address typical security concerns with the cloud. He will also discuss hybrid … Read more
I loaded and reloaded, and yet the message stayed the same. 404, no access, can’t compute. Why wasn’t Trello working? I needed Trello. I use a program called Pomello to help track my productivity, and it won’t work without Trello. Like Pavlov’s dog, when I hear the clock winding noise as Pomello starts I get into … Read more
In our Cloud-first world, many organizations are starting to explore and use Microsoft Azure as an extension (or maybe even a replacement) of their data centers. Either way, if you’re on this Cloud adventure, you probably have at least a few Virtual Machines running in Azure. If you do, then you need to extend your … Read more
[fusion_global id=”14720″] … Read more
[fusion_global id=”14720″] … Read more
One question that comes up time and again from our customers: What should I log to Application Insights? Application Insights gives you an extraordinary amount of information out-of-the-box with just a few lines of code added to your server and/or client codebase. Exception and dependency tracking, average page view time, long-running queries, performance metrics, request statistics, availability measures… the standard … Read more
You have decided to go to try this new cloud thing, and you are starting to place workloads in the cloud. Then you start to wonder…. If I can’t touch the server or see it, how am I supposed to know if something goes wrong? This is where OMS comes in…. OMS stands for Operations … Read more
Project management requires a high level of organization, and the right technology can help take your projects from chaos to smooth collaboration. Within Office 365 specifically, you have several tools and systems from which to choose. What is the best way to build a solution for managing projects? There isn’t one easy answer – Office … Read more
For the last couple of years, there’s been a lot of talk around NoSQL. It’s an exciting new world that is unfolding from the good ol’ days of when SQL was the only data persistence in town. Don’t worry, I’ll cover what NoSQL is and how Azure can help you get there. What is NoSQL? NoSQL is a … Read more
I recently heard that if the rate of change outside of your organization is faster than the rate of change inside your organization you will likely be left behind. I think the same can be said for an individual. I know for a fact that if you told me 8 or 9 years ago that … Read more
In today’s world of distributed applications, having a cache solution that can scale with an application is a prerequisite for success. Caching in the AspNet world has typically been tied to the Application Pool and accessed through the HttpContext.Current.Cache object. When the Application Pool was recycled, so too was the cache. When moving a web … Read more
DevOps enables organizations to shorten cycle times, foster collaboration, accelerate feedback loops, optimize resources, and more. To accomplish all of this, we work with organizations to make improvements across people, process, and tools. As part of our customer engagements, one of the items that we focus heavily on is the ability to manage infrastructure as … Read more
In a recent training course on the features and productivity benefits of Office 365, a participant asked: “How many calendars could be opened at one time in Outlook 2016 on the desktop, and how many in the web-based interface (Outlook Web Access)?” The answer to the first part is that, by default, you can open … Read more
Quest Migration Manager for Active Directory can migrate limited Exchange attributes with the use of an XML file to assist with Office 365 migrations. Find out more here. … Read more
My hopes were high when Microsoft shipped the “Design Manager” with SharePoint 2013. It was touted as a tool for designers to simplify the process of converting HTML and CSS into SharePoint master pages. Unfortunately it never lived up to its expectations. In this post I’ll share three reasons why you should pause before using … Read more
A manager of a plant floor is dreaming. “Clairvoyance. Clairvoyance. Clairvoyance.” She wakes up in a cold sweat. Her husband turns to her, “Honey, what’s wrong?” She sighs, blurry-eyed, and stares at the ceiling hoping it will jog her memory. “I was dreaming about the plant floor. That I could see everything that was going on … Read more
Release Day used to mean weekends spent deploying the latest code, database changes, and website content. Release teams would huddle together in war rooms troubleshooting issues, deploying hotfixes, coordinating deployments, testing, fixing, and redeploying again and again. As the trend in development shifts toward more agile delivery and customers clamor for continuous deployment, this model … Read more
Question from a student on my training course: When an Office 365 Group is deleted, is data recovery possible? Office 365 groups are great for collaboration and sharing data within a team, but what happens to that data if the group is deleted? Is that data still available?” This was the question posed by a … Read more
There is a lot to learn from your Enterprise Agreement (EA) contract from Microsoft, and we can help you make sense of it all. And sometimes, there are key indicators within those reports that may help you to adjust your usage and save money. What are the most important parts to review in my EA … Read more
What is the RightSizing feature? New Signature’s Cloud Management Portal (CMP) has a RightSizing feature that analyzes Virtual Machine (VM) and Azure SQL Database performance and determines which VMs and Databases are over-sized, under-sized, or right-sized. CMP provides a specific SKU recommendation for over-sized and under-sized VMs and databases. Across most of our customers who … Read more
One of the benefits of New Signature’s Cloud Management Portal (CMP) is the ability to reduce costs and rein in your Azure usage expenditures. Learning the best ways to organize and track your Azure resources is the first step in managing your Azure consumption and spending. What are chargeback and showback, and how does CMP … Read more
The New Signature Cloud Management Portal (CMP) for Microsoft Azure (https://portal.newsignature.com/) provides financial governance and VM performance/cost optimization for enterprises with a Microsoft Azure Enterprise Agreement (EA). We have a number of enterprises actively using our CMP. Some of these customers have entered into a new EA after their EA had expired. For new EAs … Read more
This is the second in a bunch of posts I have in my head around UI automation testing. Go back and read the first for some more background on why I like this topic. I promise this one is a quicker read. Fluent Interfaces are what all the cool kids are doing these days. If … Read more
One common strategy that may be missed during set-up of the New Signature Cloud Management Portal (CMP) is to determine a governance strategy so that there is control over data access and usage from the start. Users can be configured for access to only specific Azure Accounts and Subscriptions. How do I determine the roles … Read more
One of our core values at New Signature requires us to “promote trust and credibility”, and as part of that, we take the security and access management of your data as seriously as you do. When you import your data into the Cloud Management Portal (CMP), it’s important to feel secure in the way it … Read more
Today, during the Connect(); event, Microsoft announced the availability of their high-fidelity TFS to VSTS migration tool. This tool allows users that are running the latest version of TFS to migrate all of their data into Visual Studio Team Services. Nebbia Technology was involved in migrations using this new tool as part of a Private … Read more
Log Analytics is a service in Microsoft Operations Management Suite (OMS) that is a software-as-a-service (SaaS) solution that gives the possibility of data collection and analysis in any on-premises or cloud environments. It provides real-time and historical machine data insight with a simple and powerful search function and custom dashboards that will analyse workloads, logs … Read more
Last year it was reported that more than 160 million customer records were compromised, and that each breach had a cost/business impact of three million dollars. Plus, it’s estimated that on average there was a gap of 229 days between infiltration and detection. That’s more than seven months of undetected compromised information and data exfiltration. … Read more
The New Signature blog will play host to a series from a Senior Learning & Adoption Associate. Working as part of our learning team brings with it many questions for business IT-stakeholders and end users just like you. In this series, we will bring forward some of the most commonly asked questions and highlight the … Read more
Most of us take pride in getting a good deal for the money we spend and become mavens to pass that wisdom to friends, family and the Internet in general. Armed with mobile devices, we have become expert comparison shoppers; which is impacting the bottom lines of retail giants. When we so aggressively practice the … Read more
By default, the Windows 10 (1607 in the example images below) user profile picture shows a blank person picture. This can be changed by having a group policy pull down a picture from Active Directory and set it for the user for each workstation they log into. There are two major steps that this involves: … Read more
Nebbia Technology is pleased to announce our upcoming DevOps Workshops throughout the Southeast. This workshop is all about DevOps integration with Microsoft Azure and streamlining Application Delivery with Visual Studio. This workshop will be targeted toward Architects, Development Managers, Infrastructure Managers, Senior Developers and IT Professionals but all are welcome to attend. The DevOps workshop … Read more
Making a transition to Office 365 should not be viewed as just email and database migrations, but more of an experience to enable productivity and flexibility. The process is overwhelming to many of our clients, especially moving off of a platform that they have experienced for decades. A common question we encounter is “What do we … Read more
Esteban Garcia along with Mark Kilby, Jens Ostergaard, Curtis Michelson and Steven Granese will be coaching at Agile Orlando’s Coach Blitz in early 2017. Esteban specializes in Agile software development practices and DevOps and will be available throughout the day to answer questions and have discussions on how you can enable automation and software development best practices … Read more
Today’s disaster recovery strategy is not just about getting your IT systems back up and running as fast as possible, it’s about creating the backbone of a comprehensive risk management strategy. Whether a business runs a consumer-facing e-commerce website, processes financial transactions or is part of a B2B supply chain, customers, partners and employees expect … Read more
Yammer now has the added functionality of external groups, to go along with external networks and external messaging. When should you use each option, and what are the implications? We will see below that a major differentiator is the scope of the access given to the person who is external to your organization. It should … Read more
Have you ever noticed how some people have pictures in Exchange Online (or Outlook/Skype), but not in SharePoint or Delve? It turns out, this is expected! Background Microsoft has some sync functionality to synchronize a user’s profile picture between Exchange (which is where Outlook and Skype pull your picture from) and SharePoint (where Delve pulls … Read more
Now that SharePoint 2016 is here, you’re probably wondering if Microsoft fixed all the issues with AppFabric. The short answer is “not really”, but there is one change that’s helpful. What’s Better in 2016? With SharePoint 2013, the first activity I would perform after installing SharePoint was to patch AppFabric. In 2013, the version of … Read more
If you haven’t had a chance to explore New Signature’s free webinar series around Azure Site Recovery, now is a great time to catch-up before the next installment on Thursday, August 18 at 10 a.m. Eastern Time. Webinar #1: Protecting Your Data and Keeping Your Business Going Disasters don’t have to be disastrous. With Azure … Read more
On August 10, New Signature’s Events team wrapped up a three-part series around Microsoft Identity Manager (MIM), Microsoft’s most-recent newest Identity Manager program. The series was an introduction to the tool, strategies to deter identity theft, and a vital look at how the product functions as part of a hybrid cloud and on-premises solution. Chapter … Read more
For several years now, major vendors have promised a “digital” revolution, as organizations begin to transition away from either analog systems (including paper!) and to systems that, even if they were collecting data, were doing so in a silo, unconnected to the larger business, or in formats that couldn’t be shared with the broader organization. … Read more
Data is the lifeblood of every company, regardless of industry, sector or vertical. It is information about your customers, your employees and virtually everything that keeps your business running. So why are so many companies so loose with it? It comes down to management and communication between HR and IT departments, implementing the right technology, … Read more
In my last blog, I discussed some compelling reasons why companies should consider upgrading to SharePoint 2016. But the fact is, not all companies are able to fully move to the cloud. For these types of organizations, a great option is to create a SharePoint hybrid environment, which leverages both a SharePoint Server on premises … Read more
Cloud computing makes businesses faster, better and more agile. But it doesn’t make IT planning less complex. On the contrary, to truly capitalize on the opportunities of the Cloud and turn IT into a driver for growth and transformation, it requires organizations to be more strategic in their IT approach. Using solutions and infrastructure in … Read more
Microsoft is a market leader and innovator in the development of cloud computing for the enterprise. Their sheer velocity of software updates and brand new solutions is impressive: they have shifted from three- to five-year implementation cycles for on-premises software to a cloud delivery model where new releases and updates arrive weekly. Customers are reaping … Read more
If you are using or intend to use Microsoft’s Recovery Services to protect your infrastructure from disasters, it is important to understand the workloads Microsoft officially supports and some specific characteristics of each one of them. Before that, a summary of supported workloads (on-prem to Azure): Active Directory Active Directory (AD) is the base for … Read more
As Windows begins to transition to modern, “Universal” applications (that are often designated as such by the acronym UWP for Universal Windows Platform) over legacy Win32 applications, sometimes simple tasks take on added complexity. To wit, a common request I’ve heard is “How do I get a Universal App to startup each time I login?” … Read more
Microsoft’s public cloud provides the opportunity to transform the way we work today. Microsoft’s Office 365, Azure, Dynamics 365 and Enterprise Mobility + Security can globally connect us and improve how we collaborate and use data. These cloud platforms offer customers the opportunity to become more agile in operations and create new customer experiences. It has … Read more
What you’re doing wrong, right now & how to fix it. … Read more
In addition to ALM/DevOps Consulting, Azure Consulting, Custom Development and Product Development, Nebbia Technology also has a variety of training courses available. The three training courses currently listed on our site include Visual Studio Team Services, Test-Driven Development with Visual Studio and Microsoft Test Manager. We also have the ability to create customized training for … Read more
Nebbia Technology Founder and Chief Technologist, Esteban Garcia, has received the 2016 Microsoft MVP Award for his contributions in the Visual Studio and Development Technologies technical communities during the past year. This is the fifth year that Esteban has received the Microsoft MVP Award and he first received the Microsoft MVP Award in 2012. Microsoft … Read more
The basics – AWS Scenario In my previous article, I have spoken about the possibilities of leveraging multiple cloud providers at the same time, for the sake of high-availability and disaster recovery. Today I want to take a look at some details on how the technology works. In my scenario, I have two simple virtual … Read more
When I first came to New Signature, my first week consisted of meeting after meeting with various people within the company, and two messages seemed to carry through as a general theme in nearly all of these discussions. First, New Signature emphasizes great customer service and makes sure that shows through in every aspect of … Read more
The new RightSizing feature for our Cloud Management Portal (CMP) provides an analysis of your Azure VMs and determines if the VMs are sized appropriately based on the historical performance metrics that are collected for the VMs. We support both v1 “classic” Azure Service Manager VMs and newer Azure Resource Manager VMs. This is an … Read more
As more and more end users work remotely, IT professionals are faced with increasing help desk calls due to passwords expiring. In the following example, users connect to a corporate network through a third party software that does not initiate the VPN connection prior to Windows login. Due to the investment made in the VPN … Read more
The new cloud world gives us a sense of infinite power and capacity. It never sleeps, and never goes down. This is true most of the time. However, every cloud provider has had some time offline in the last few years. Independently of the size, there is always a possibility for catastrophe or human failure. It is … Read more
If you’re protecting files on your Windows Server with Microsoft Rights Management Services (RMS), then you need to know how the rights assigned by RMS relate to the NTFS permissions already in place on the file. To explore that relationship we will use the example of one Word document that is both protected by RMS and … Read more
The promise of the Internet of Things (IoT) is huge. According to recently published research from IDC, we will see the market grow from $655.8 billion in 2014 to $1.7 trillion in 2020. By the same year, Gartner anticipates that over 20 billion connected “things” will be in use worldwide. Their projections make it clear: … Read more
Recently I had the opportunity to work on an enhancements project for GSC mobile app. This app is built with Xamarin technology to be multi-device, multi-platform and available in the various App stores. Read more about Green Shield Canada success story. As a new designer/UX consultant coming onto the project team, I had to ramp-up … Read more
Let’s say that you’ve upgraded System Center Configuration Manger ConfigMgr 2012 to Configuration Manger 1511, and everything is running smoothly. Now, for the first time, you’re ready to do an in-console upgrade to Configuration Manager 1602 or any future release. Within the Configuration Manager console, you navigate to Administration > Cloud Services > Updates and Servicing node … Read more
Client Relationship Management (CRM) software has been available to lawyers, accountants and consultants for over two decades. Many firms purchased and installed CRM software but are still struggling to realize its promised potential. They are drowning in inconsistent, incomplete and incorrect data, while struggling to justify paying maintenance for underutilized software. Looking back, they wish … Read more
Last week I had the honor of representing New Signature at the 10th Annual Microsoft Executive Women’s Retreat (http://msftexecwomensretreat.com/) in Philadelphia, PA. Now in its 10th year, this invitation-only event assembled the most dynamic and engaged women from the East Coast and beyond. This year’s theme, Celebrating Growth, was inspired by the growth mindset and … Read more
Next, in this series about System Center and enterprise monitoring, a subject that is one of the most common reasons companies give up on System Center: Operations Manager is too noisy. That is certainly a fact when you think about the out-of-the-box experience. The first contributing factor is how SCOM was designed. Unlike your typical SNMP/Ping … Read more
Imagine Thor or Ironman. Or even Arrow or the Black Widow. Alone, they may be powerful, but together, they’re much more: The Avengers! That’s what I think when I look at the System Center family, which has combined different technologies to create a holistic management solution. System Center 2012 was a milestone in Microsoft’s system … Read more
Microsoft has just released version 1.6 of its Advanced Threat Analytics (ATA) product, with some key improvements over the previous version, including the new ATA Lightweight Gateway role. What is Advanced Threat Analytics? Microsoft ATA is an on-premises security solution that aims to limit the damage that attackers can wreak on your network. The first element of … Read more
In the last 16 years, Microsoft came a long way developing its management products. The first chapter in this story started with a solution System Management Server (SMS). It was a case of love or hate; very hard to configure and operate. The reason behind SMS being the first [Configuration] management tool seems to be, … Read more
Recently I came across an issue that had me losing my hair. During a recent project, I built a corporate Windows 10 image for a customer to be deployed with Configuration Manager. The corporate image had several customization steps to accomplish various tasks such as changing the start menu layout, removing consumer apps and customizing … Read more
What is Multi-Factor Authentication? Multi-factor authentication, or MFA is quickly becoming a widely-adopted option for advanced identity management and security. Multi-factor authentication (MFA) is a method of authentication that requires the use of more than one verification method and adds a critical second layer of security to user sign-ins and transactions. It works by requiring … Read more
One of our recent clients had a very interesting problem – they are a multi-national corporation with offices in very remote regions of the world, and they needed a way to connect all employees in these remote regions with a unified SharePoint Intranet and Collaboration experience. Most remote regions are far from large cities and … Read more
This week marks the beginning of a major transformation of SharePoint Online. On April 6th, Microsoft announced that changes were coming to the SharePoint Online document library experience. For some organizations this change will be welcomed, as it brings the UI more in line with OneDrive for Business and the rest of the Office 365 … Read more
We are excited to announce that Esteban Garcia will be doing a Redgate DLM Workshop the Friday before SQL Saturday #524 South Florida at Nova Southeastern University in Ft. Lauderdale, FL. As a Redgate Certified Partner, we are looking forward to delivering this DLM workshop on Database Continuous Integration. If you are ready to do … Read more
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As a review of my previous blogs, ExpressRoute is a coordinated effort between the client, a Microsoft partner, an ExpressRoute provider and Microsoft. The diagram below depicts the flow of the process of establishing an ExpressRoute solution in Office 365, CRM or Azure. Using a qualified Microsoft partner can streamline the process of enabling an … Read more
Last week New Signature participated in a panel discussion at Microsoft’s Ft. Lauderdale SQL 2016 Roadshow. The topics presented included ways to modernize an organization’s data platform and how to think about big data as it pertains to an organization’s current data architecture. Presenters introduced the new SQL 2016 features, including real time operational analytics, … Read more
My previous blogs discussed what a Microsoft ExpressRoute solution is and a deeper dive in the technology. Once an organization is ready to move to ExpressRoute, they must prepare for it. This blog will discuss some key points on preparing for an ExpressRoute initiative. One of the main decisions to make with ExpressRoute is what … Read more
Companies are looking to upgrade their Windows 7 SP1 or Windows 8.1 devices to Windows 10. There are now many methods to do this beyond the typical wipe and load scenario. Windows 10 offers an in-place upgrade method from Windows 7 SP1 (Pro or Ent) or Windows 8.1 (Pro or Ent) to Windows 10 Enterprise. … Read more
Let’s get started! Get started? I don’t even know what Azure AD B2C is!? Well, head on over here and read up. It’s OK, we’ll wait. Now you’re really ready? Assuming you’ve already got an Azure subscription, we can get started right away. If you don’t have one yet, you can create a free trial. OK, now … Read more
What is it and why do I want to use it? What is Azure Active Directory B2C? Azure Active Directory (Azure AD or AAD) B2C is a cloud-based identity service for consumer-facing applications; B2C stands for “Business-to-Consumer”. It is an identity management service that can use either your customer’s social accounts (currently Facebook, LinkedIn, Google+, Amazon, or Microsoft Account) or locally managed accounts. Azure AD … Read more
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If you are considering a move from SharePoint 2007 to SharePoint Online or SharePoint 2013, there are a few “gotchas” to consider in addition to the general migration planning activities associated with any SharePoint migration. This post will explain the issues related to the site homepage format. Web Part Pages Each site homepage in SharePoint … Read more
Digging Deeper in ExpressRoute Technology In my first blog, I discussed what Microsoft ExpressRoute is at a high level and the value it can bring to organizations. The best way to explain ExpressRoute is with the Microsoft diagram, below. One key point to understand with ExpressRoute, is that you need to use an ExpressRoute connectivity … Read more
As computers have shrunk in size, at each iteration, experts have declared “they are now small enough”. As mainframes shifted to mini-computers, which were in turn displaced by the PC, many partners and vendors were caught unprepared for the next wave of smaller, more personal computing. Today’s landscape is no different: many enterprises are still … Read more
Meet the New Signature Experts: Mark Pierce, Vice President at New Signature with a specialty in Unified Communications. Mark will be offering insight into Microsoft ExpressRoute through a four part blog series. Stay tuned for the Microsoft ExpressRoute Series. What is Microsoft ExpressRoute? ExpressRoute is a solution that several of our clients have been waiting … Read more
AAD Connect 1.1 brings the latest iteration of sync cycle scheduling mechanisms. The old days of .config files, scheduled tasks and sync exe’s are replaced with a more familiar PowerShell experience. —— Quick Tip: Looking to run a cycle manually with the new version? Open PowerShell on the AAD Sync server and run this: Start-ADSyncSyncCycle -PolicyType … Read more
When a new user registers for the New Signature Cloud Management Portal for Microsoft Azure (CMP), they need to supply a Microsoft Account (previously called a Live ID). They will then be asked to authenticate with this Microsoft Account from https://login.live.com. Once authentication is successful, https://account.live.com/ will ask for authorization of CMP to access your … Read more
Office 365 Groups are similar to traditional email distribution groups, in which members see messages sent to the group. The difference is that an Office 365 Group supports additional collaboration through access to other parts of the Office 365 service, including a dedicated: Calendar Location for file storage Shared OneNote notebook Each of the above features are specific … Read more
Cloud Infrastructure – Operations Management Suite – Azure Automation In previous posts I described some basic characteristics of the OMS Suite as well as some specific features of the Log Analytics solution. In this post, we will delve into the IT Automation component. Azure Automation In 2009 Microsoft acquired Opalis as the first foray into … Read more
Have you installed the February 2016 release of Azure PowerShell, and now you can’t find your shortcuts? Adin Ermie, Senior Consultant at New Signature, posted an article called Oh Where, Oh Where, Did My Azure PowerShell Go? about this newly discovered bug! … Read more
Cloud Infrastructure – Operations Management Suite The Alerting feature In my previous post, I gave an overview of the Operations Management Suite and the basic process of setting up the agent. In this post, I will describe the OMS Alerting feature, one of the most requested improvements of the log analytics solution. As one would … Read more
Microsoft announced Yammer seamless activation in Office 365, but what does that mean? Starting February 1st and over the next few months, Yammer will be activated and accessible in the Office 365 app-launcher. Wait, what’s Yammer? An Enterprise Social Network that enables employees to share content, collaborate and break traditional silos in an open forum. … Read more
Microsoft continues to add value to its Office 365 suite. This time with a project management application for the masses. Office 365 Planner is the latest productivity tool that makes management of team tasks a snap. Office 365 Planner is back ended by file sources in SharePoint or One Drive for Business and organized with … Read more
There’s no doubt that this weekend’s blizzard had a significant impact on businesses along the 95 corridor, with some analysts saying that the economic impact of the storm could total nearly $1B. In order to avoid these types of losses, many companies are investing in technologies that allow their employees to work from home during inclement weather. While telecommuting has its … Read more
Operations Management Suite Series In this series of posts, I will explore some basic concepts of the Operations Management Suite and its new features as they are made available to the general public. The Problem With the rapid growth of the cloud, there is great need to update strategies, tactics and operations regarding monitoring the … Read more
What is an Office 365 Group? In a nutshell, an Office 365 Group is a collaboration accelerator. It is similar to a traditional email distribution group, since all members see messages sent to the group. However, an Office 365 Group supports additional collaboration through access to other parts of the Office 365 service, including dedicated: Calendar Location for file … Read more
On January 21st, New Signature lead a lively Introduction to Office 365 E5 webinar. New Signature’s Chris Sheridan talked through all the new components of the E5 SKU and answered questions from the crowd. The Office 365 E5 SKU provides a new enterprise-wide licensing option that includes the full Office 365 suite (including Skype for … Read more
OneNote is the perfect tool for making and sharing notes, and in this post, we’ll see how easy it is to use OneNote within Skype for Business meetings to capture detailed, multimedia notes and share them with your team. Once your Skype for Business meeting has started, click on the blue circle with an image … Read more
Azure AD Application Proxy Overview Included in Azure AD Premium subscriptions Allow users to access internal web-based applications from outside the network without adding internal Web Application Proxy infrastructure Does require a Windows Server 2012 R2 server to run Azure AD Proxy Connector Configuration option that allows all DNS and certificates to be handled by … Read more
IT has long had the desire to remotely, securely, discretely, and definitively remove data from a company device, mobile phone, personal machine, or anything else for that matter. This type of functionality has seemed to be within reach in recent years with the advent of numerous Mobile Device Management and remote management solutions. Industry buzz … Read more
I encountered an error when trying to recover a Hyper-V virtual machine from DPM 2012 R2. The recovery job would recover the complete amount of data for that virtual machine, but then the recovery job would fail right after. The error says “The VSS application writer or the VSS provider is in a bad state. … Read more
When booting a Dell PowerEdge Server with a RAID Controller, I came across an error that I’ve never encountered before. Upon booting the server, during POST, the server says “There are offline or missing virtual drives with preserved cache. Please check the cables to ensure that all drives are present. Press any key to enter … Read more
There are many good mechanisms available to notify, report and authenticate/approve changes made by FIM before they are synchronized (FIM Service, for example.) However, there is no mechanism for doing this in FIM Synchronization natively. Many options discussed online are from the perspective of a ‘classic’ MIIS designer, often contained with compiled DLLs. This method … Read more
Working in the enterprise IT Solutions Industry for the past 10 years I have been a witness to how the overall industry has evolved. Its interesting to see the evolution of technology from a necessary evil (as a burden on the bottom-line) is to being treated as a strategic partner by the Management team to … Read more
I frequently talk to c-level executives across various business lines, and there is often a disconnect between the CIO/CTO/CFO and the CEO/CSO/CMO sides. Put simply: both sides value the idea of “Social” differently. For many individuals on the former side, the word “Social” conjures up three important words: not business related. Whether it is posed … Read more
This post is for those in the trenches of Identity and Access Management and it’s a shout out to a great partner, Software IDM. How many of you have looked at the operations logs in Microsoft Identity Manager (MIM) and tried to determine what changes happened to a particular account over the past week? How … Read more
As organizations move to Office 365, consideration must be given to the governance plan and the associated administrative workloads. Organizations are spending many hours writing scripts and provisioning Office 365 mailboxes. They are subsequently managing Office 365 licenses, email addresses, user locales, litigation / in place-hold settings and out of office replies. Office 365 settings … Read more
Do you remember that nursery rhyme from when you were a child, that went something like “to market, to market, to buy a fat pig”? Well, seeing as we’re in the digital age, and Microsoft Azure is the leader in the Cloud space, this nursery rhyme needs a more modern twist. Adin Ermie, Senior Consultant … Read more
The race to the cloud has been gaining momentum with every passing year and there is collective awareness of the trans-formative power that Nexus of Forces (Mobile, Social, Cloud and Information) has in the digital business era. Even though more and more companies are embracing the cloud solutions, they are relying on old ways to … Read more
Identity and access management is required for all organizations. As long as you have people and data, you have to address Identity and Access Management. It may be a simple solution or perhaps one that requires an investment. Perhaps government and industry regulations are causing a lot of complexity for you. What do I hear … Read more
On Tuesday, December 15th, Nebbia Technology will host a Visual Studio 2015 Launch event at the Microsoft office in Birmingham, Alabama! You are personally invited to join us in our celebration of the launch of Visual Studio 2015! To celebrate we are hosting an educational event that will provide you with an opportunity to … Read more
Originally posted here by Phil Bartholomew, New Signature (formerly InfraScience) The following article puts forth that Healthcare providers are “falling short with Identity and Access Management”. Read Article Within the Healthcare sector, you will often see generic accounts being used by multiple people with no way of knowing who is truly accessing sensitive data. Students and contract … Read more
Does Microsoft Identity Manager 2016 include a Management Agent for my applications? When discussing Microsoft Identity Manager (MIM) 2016 with clients, one of the top questions I get has to do with whether or not MIM includes a connector (Management Agent) for a particular application. I understand the question, but the answer lies with the … Read more
What is Microsoft Identity Manager (MIM) 2016? To start, it’s actually not a new Microsoft technology. It’s a rebranded technology with many added features, such as privileged access management (PAM). Let’s take a look back. In July of 1999, Microsoft acquired Zoomit Corp; a meta-directory solution provider. Microsoft branded the solution Microsoft Metadirectory Services (MMS). (Read … Read more
Sometimes you want to deploy all of Office 365, and sometimes you don’t. The need to deploy individual components of Office in an a la carte manner may arise from a number of scenarios. Maybe you are executing a phased rollout of the office products, or perhaps you are only licensed for some components and … Read more
I recently ran into an issue at a customer site installing and configuring ADFS 3.0 on Server 2012 R2. With help from the Microsoft Support team we were able to resolve rather quickly. Below is the issue and the steps we followed to resolve said issue: Planning and Prerequisites Following the guidelines listed on TechNet, … Read more
Navigation plays a key role in the design of any website, and SharePoint should be no different. It should provide users with a simple and obvious method of locating content that is relevant to the the site, regardless of where the content resides. In SharePoint, designing and maintaining an intuitive navigation structure can present a problem to site … Read more
The security landscape has changed dramatically, particularly in the last 3 years. Today we are experiencing a revolution in cyber-threats. No longer motivated by mischief, cybercriminals today are well-funded organizations out to steal intellectual property and disrupt your business. It is imperative that businesses have access to tools and technologies that will allow them to … Read more
New Signature’s, Adin Ermie, recently post a blog on his site about a recent discovery that was made on the New Signature team. They found when attempting to deploy Office 365 ProPlus with System Center Configuration Manager, by following this TechNet article (https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dn708063.aspx) it doesn’t work. It fails to detect the installation has completed. To read … Read more
All IT departments should have an fundamental goal to be their company’s Hero! They should be loooking for opportunities to make the technology gods stand out to the executive team with thoughtful solutions that could save the company thousands and thousands of dollars (hopefully). There have been significant innovation turning points in the last several … Read more
Directory Synchronization with Office 365 is a solution almost all enterprises take advantage of to make their journey to the cloud a slightly less bumpy one. It simplifies the admin and end user experience by ensuring a user’s groups and information are identical in the cloud as it in in your on premises Active Directory. … Read more
For the past thirty years, most enterprise information technology shops have had a regular cadence for changes to the software environment they manage: updates are approved, plans are drawn up, and large “migrations” or “deployments” take place over the course of multiple months. That is now changing. This process has never been a particularly friendly … Read more
Have you upgraded to Windows 10 and noticed that your Outlook is no longer finding the proper settings to connect to your Office 365 email? Does your configuration just hang on the “Searching for mail server settings…” screen? I ran into this issue recently and discovered that there’s a known issue with Windows 10 and … Read more
Have you ever come into the office to find that your critical line-of-business app fails to connect to your SQL server? After further investigation, you may find that your domain-joined is no longer on a “domain network” but is now on a public network. This will cause problems as a public network profile will also … Read more
A customer recently asked a question about a third party security add-on to cover a perceived gap in the Office 365 security model. The scenario? They wanted to get a list of all the types of files that had been shared, and with whom, for the entire organization. More security is better, right? In this … Read more
In a previous life, I ran an IT group for a consulting company in NYC. For many years admittedly, as long as my phone system didn’t fail or my users weren’t complaining I really didn’t pay much attention to it. My solution was like any one of a 100 other hosted VoIP providers running Cisco’s … Read more
In any organization of a reasonable size, security quickly becomes a problem. It’s not simply a matter of preventing malicious actors, but also of ensuring that regular folks (like you and me) do not trip and bring down a critical system through a simple mistake. As recently as 2013, I have seen innocuous reply-all storms … Read more
You may have been using Microsoft OneNote for some time without realizing it has a built-in backup system, or that each Notebook has its own recycle bin. In this post we’ll explore how to make use of both those features. You may also be interested in our earlier posts in this series. How does the OneNote recycle bin … Read more
Anyone trying to install Skype for Business has or will soon realize there is no single .msi based install for it. If you already have an msi based Lync 2013 install there is an update (KB2889923 (32 bit)) that will install Skype for Business. Lync 2013 needs to have a few prerequisites installed for the … Read more
RMS, Azure RMS, and IRM, are playing a critical role on the DLP front and are securing content inside and outside of organizations across the globe. The main purpose of these solutions are to ensure the recipient of content is the only individual who can access that content and they can only do so according to … Read more
Adin Ermie, Senior Consultant at New Signature, is our resident System Center Cloud and Data Management expert. He posted a great article on how to resolve the issue of getting SCOM to connect to OMS. Adin first encountered this issue when trying out the System Center Operations Manager 2016 Technical Preview 2. Adin recently received the TechNet Technical … Read more
Tracking emails in Dynamics CRM Online is not a new feature. It’s a fairly run-of-the-mill capability in all good CRM platforms and allows insight into invaluable details of the sales conversations and historical data for a given customer. Whether that’s a glimpse into previous communications, or what deals were missed (and why), or new products that are … Read more
Azure Backups are a great way to secure machine data for servers, workstations, laptops and anything running a Windows operating system. All you need to do is install an agent, connect it to Azure vault storage, identify what you want to backup, set a schedule, and you are off. It’s that easy. There begins to … Read more
“Were you happy with your Experience?” We hear it all of the time and there is good reason for it. Think about your experience in a restaurant where you were not happy with the service. Businesses today utilize phrases like “happy customers are repeat customers” or “customer satisfaction is job one”. Simply put, if you … Read more
A reserved IP is just another term for a VIP, except it isn’t necessarily tied to
a cloud service when it is created. Originally reserved IPs had to be prior to deployment of your cloud
service. That has since changed and you can now reserve IPs before or after deployment.In this article
we will discuss the reserved IP options in Azure, converting an existing Dynamic VIP deployment to
static, and investigate a 'multi-VIP' deployment which has the default VIP plus
additional VIPs assigned to it.
Okay, so Microsoft’s latest desktop operating system, Windows 10, launches tomorrow, July 29th, 2015. Why should you care? I would love to rattle off a list of the helpful features, but in fear of diluting the significance of what is direly important, I’ll instead give you the one reason that makes it critical you start … Read more
Microsoft recently released the Technical Preview 2 of System Center Operations Manager 2016: https://technet.microsoft.com/en-US/library/dn997273.aspx
In this article New Signature’s Senior Infrastructure Consultant Adin Ermie continues his overview series on new capabilities and incremental improvements.
Microsoft recently released the Technical Preview 2 of System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2016: https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/dn705350.aspx and https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=46910
New Signature’s Senior Infrastructure Consultant Adin Ermie provides an overview of new capabilities and incremental improvements.
SharePoint 2013 is slick. No really. It’s pretty snazzy. I’ve worked with SharePoint technologies for a decade now, and when I first saw the technical preview for SharePoint 2013, I felt such relief. Virtually all of the things that annoyed me about previous versions were finally resolved (with the exception of Windows Explorer View…Grrr). From … Read more
Persistent Chat is a Microsoft Skype for Business (Lync) role that lets you create topic-based discussion rooms that persist over time. These rooms allow users to communicate and collaborate with a group of people who have a common area of interest. Sharing ideas and information by posting in real time along with maintaining those messages … Read more
Everyone at New Signature strongly believes in the importance of using Microsoft’s platforms, products and services internally. Using the tools and technology we implement for our customers ourselves every day helps us find new and innovative approaches. This includes deploying new tools from other Microsoft partners that help New Signature make our own processes more … Read more
Recently, New Signature has been asked to speak at a regional conference focusing on Predictive Analytics: Success in Healthcare. When I mentioned this topic to friends and colleagues, beyond the initial curious look, the first question I’m invariably asked is, “What is that?” Generally, I answer their question with a question, “How long does it … Read more
Since the launch of Microsoft Lync 2010, Microsoft has been steadfast and committed in their journey to bring enterprise grade unified communications services to Office 365 and provide the same great feature set that we have come to know in the On-Premises world. Today, Microsoft has taken the first major step toward bringing that dream … Read more
Google’s mobile algorithm update, christened “Mobilegeddon” by the internet community, has now been in effect for a little over a month and a half. While Google was nice enough to give advance warning of their mobile-friendly ranking update, it didn’t stop companies from sending their development teams into a frenzy in an attempt to convert … Read more
As data is stored more frequently in Office 365, there is an increased need for enterprise mobile apps to access this content. The more data being stored in SharePoint Online, OneDrive For Business, and Dynamics CRM Online, the more Enterprise use computing power in the cloud. How can you secure enterprise mobile apps to access all of … Read more
The apocryphal idyllic town of the early twentieth century lacked a singular item across many houses: locked doors. Since most thieves could just as easily break a door or a window (or a screen) the lock didn’t provide much beyond annoyance for home owners. These days, door locks can be jimmied in a matter of … Read more
With the release of “Office 365 for Exchange Professionals,” a small group of Exchange experts have come together to fill a gap in the marketplace. The book aims to help administrators and managers of Microsoft Exchange email servers as they consider, implement and finally manage a relationship between their on-premise Exchange servers and Microsoft’s cloud-based … Read more
If you’re one of the lucky ones to begin using Office Delve, your first question is often, “How did it know I wanted that document?” The process appears magical in the way of any advanced technology. Your second question, which may occur weeks later, is much more mundane: “Why did Delve choose that title?” The … Read more
Last fall, Microsoft launched Clutter as a feature in Office 365 Exchange Online to help manage the large amounts of non-spam email that we receive on a daily basis. Leveraging the Office Graph functionality (built on Azure Machine learning), Clutter learns your email habits and helps to make sure that important emails stay in your … Read more
Introducing a new service is always risky. Over the past few years we’ve seen several large scale launches of “novel” types of applications that enable “new user experiences” only to see them heat up, burn out, and crash hard. The combined weight of some of these experiments, from multiple technology providers, has led many office … Read more
In earlier blog posts we looked at some of the versatile ways to use the OneNote application that is part of the Microsoft Office suite. Today we will review some practical integration between OneNote and Outlook. Following are a few tips on getting the best out of the relationship between the two products. Tip One: … Read more
While attention is on the new release of Skype for Business at the moment, Microsoft has quietly released updates for Lync Server 2013. The update fixes a number of lingering issues along with a few fixes that could help you get ready for Skype for Business, and an update to Lync Web App to Support Chrome on OSX. You … Read more
On April 21, 2015, Google will release a mobile-focused update to its search algorithm. You can read the official announcement on The Google Webmaster Blog. While the announcement has sparked much speculation, there are a few things to keep in mind: With this update Google is “expanding our use of mobile-friendliness as a ranking signal.” … Read more
Bad customer service, it seems, is endemic. We’ve all experienced it and often chosen different paths because of it. One of the bigger frustrations for customers comes when they work with a large organization — one that has the resources and the executive sponsorship to ensure a good experience, and yet doesn’t. Earlier this week … Read more
If you have used the Version History option in OneDrive to review or restore previous versions of a file, you may have noticed that the times shown use PST. If you are not in the PST time zone then you probably wish to change this. Unfortunately it is not possible for your IT department to set … Read more
A workflow detailing the process of installing Windows RT Applications from HockeyApp onto a local device (PC/Tablet) using Powershell scripts. HockeyApp: What and Why? HockeyApp is a web-based platform that allows developers to distribute beta versions of applications on iOS, Android, Windows, and Mac OS. The platform also allows for collection of live crash reports, user … Read more
Businesses require tools and technologies to provide effective management, security, and compliance capabilities across a multitude of devices while providing the highest levels of security and user satisfaction. Enterprise Mobility can help organizations meet their regulatory compliance requirements by providing data protection at the device level, at the app level, and at the data level. … Read more
As more and more businesses realize the value of offloading key messaging technologies to Microsoft Office 365 cloud services, the complexity in cloud migration deployments tends to increase as well. I wanted to share an interesting scenario with those of you who are currently looking to move to Office 365 but are unsure of the … Read more
Suppose you have a Ruby on Rails website with ActiveAdmin, hosted on Heroku. The site has hundreds of thousands of records, and you want to download them all as a CSV. You setup a CSV definition in ActiveAdmin, but there’s so much data that it takes longer than 30 seconds to generate the CSV and … Read more
Listen to our Founder and Chief Technologist, Esteban Garcia’s take on How to Succeed in Agile on this episode of Hallway Conversations. Esteban spoke with the hosts, Phil Japikse, Stephen Bohlen, and Lee Brandt, about how companies are getting into Agile practices, measuring progress, tools, doing things “right”, and much more. You can listen to … Read more
Have you ever felt like there should be an easier way to find documents that are relevant to your job? You perform a search, peruse the local file share or maybe even pick up the phone to ask a colleague where to find it. Chances are you end up finding what you’re looking for, but … Read more
While working on a recent project to determine why a client’s SharePoint 2013 application was performing so poorly, we came across an interesting bug with the Distributed Cache, ultimately caused by AppFabric. AppFabric is used to cache a lot of different information in a SharePoint 2013 installation, but the issue we are looking at today … Read more
One of the neat features of Office 365 is the ability to use instant messaging (IM) capabilities within the Exchange Online Office Web App (OWA). Customers can leverage their existing Lync on-premise deployment to provide this functionality. To integrate on-premise Lync Server with Exchange Online, administrators must first configured a Shared SIP Address space. Next … Read more
Managing mobile resources and assets for a cross platform enterprise solution can be tricky. Read more to find out our recommendations for tackling this problem. Use Shared Portable Class Library for Resources For a MvvmCross project like the one we developed for Green Shield Canada, mobile resources are managed separately in each platform. For Windows and Windows … Read more
A few months ago I was approached to investigate using Azure Active Directory for accessing Cloud-based applications. The original ask didn’t specify what applications, or include any guidance as to how to enable this functionality, so it was a bit of a loaded task. Luckily it was much easier than I originally thought. To start … Read more
In Lync online, the web management tools make it very easy for you to update the options for a user to adjust items such as allowing audio and video, allowing recording or controlling content sharing. In one off settings, updating these items via the web page is very simple as it is just a drop … Read more
At New Signature, we have been involved with Office 365 and Exchange Online planning and migrations of all sizes, from the 2 person small business to the largest enterprise shops. One of the items that has always come up during those engagements was the fact that there was no way to migrate email messages that … Read more
It seems like a new story pops up every week about sensitive data being compromised in the workplace. So much so that there are various websites one can visit to see if they have been breached. Leaked passwords and emails, hacked documents (see Sony, Target, etc.). As business integrates with the digital world, more and more bad … Read more
System Center Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM) is a great tool for managing virtual machines once you have more than 2 or 3 hosts. It exposes a lot of tools and resources that are hidden or not available when managing machines at the base Hyper-V level. However, it may require you to rethink some of the ways you … Read more
If you’re having difficulty running tasks on iOS, here’s a solution that will stop your system from hanging up. The trouble with iOS… You may be having trouble implementing workflows on your iOS-based enterprise app built with something like MVVMCross. For example, when trying to log out, the iOS workflow might go something like this: … Read more
Some servers incorporate the functionality to remotely control their power even when they are shut down within the operating system. Such a method of access is often referred to as “out of band” or OOB. The OOB card on a Dell server is called an iDRAC, and in this post we will cover how … Read more
If your app needs to support multiple languages, make sure you take the following cross platform behaviour into account when you’re setting expectations with your clients: 1. Design the user experience according to native platform behaviour Windows phone requires restarting the device for the language to take into effect. Currently it has a defect where … Read more
Join Nebbia Technology’s Chief Technologist, Esteban Garcia, at this Thursday’s Azure Cloud DevCamp event at Microsoft’s Tampa office. Esteban will cover Data (SQL, Blob, Big Data w/ HD Insight). Come and learn how to leverage the cloud for all your data needs and much more! Learn how to build and move apps to the cloud … Read more
Card sorting is a low-tech method designed to assist in evaluating the information architecture of a site. During card sorting sessions, participants are generally instructed to organize topics into categories that make sense to them. Card sorting can be conducted and a variety of ways that could include note cards, pieces of paper, or more … Read more
Out of the box, Drupal 7 and 8 provide support for microtagging using RDF. What does this mean, why should you use it, and how can you customize it to model the objects on your site? … Read more
Have you ever wanted to have a maintenance page for a website or system running in Azure, which gets ‘activated’ automatically when your site is down? We set out to accomplish this task for one of our clients. Background One of our clients is running a website built on SharePoint 2013 in Azure. The topology … Read more
If you want to carry out electronic discovery of data, known as eDiscovery, in your Office 365 environment, you will need to carry out a series of steps to enable it, since it’s not enabled by default. Following is an outline of the five steps needed to begin enabling eDiscovery in Office 365; further details can … Read more
This post continues our series on Microsoft OneNote by looking at its use on the iPad. Part of the Microsoft Office suite of applications, OneNote enables you to make flexible, multi-media notes for meetings, projects and study, for example. A version of the OneNote application is available free from the iPad App store. To use … Read more
SharePoint 2013 has now been in the wild for two years, and with that amount of time comes a LOT of updates to it. A common question I’m asked is “How do I get to the latest version of SharePoint” for clients or projects that are setting up a brand new SharePoint Farm and want … Read more
Microsoft released the preview iteration of it’s new Office Sway product, and we’ve had a few days to play around with it. The product itself is not difficult to use, but we’re still working out exactly how to build complex artifacts with it. The premise seems to focus around making ideas and content more easily exploratory … Read more
The Microsoft Experience Center (MEC) is an immersive experience designed to show sales, marketing, operations, and other productivity workers how Office 365 products such as Lync, SharePoint, Dynamics CRM, and Yammer work together to create a seamless collaborative working environment. They are also a great way to demo these environments with robust sample data and example … Read more
The Office deployment tool is designed to give network administrators additional options when deploying versions of Microsoft Office. In this post we will look at using the Office deployment tool on a remote desktop server to deploy Office 365 applications (e.g. Word, Excel, and PowerPoint) for use by multiple users. This approach is called “shared … Read more
Sometimes there’s just no saving current operating systems or procedures. In these instances, companies need to be willing, aware and ready to move their assets to more appropriate environments. Migration policies and procedures can help increase the effectiveness of these transitions, thereby making corporate infrastructure more efficient and accessible while utilizing a means of movement … Read more
Today’s blog focuses on how you can define email aliases if you have users in an on-premise Active Directory (AD) synchronized with Azure AD and Office 365. An alias email address is a secondary address that is attached to a mailbox so that email sent to that alias address is delivered to the mailbox. For … Read more
The presence of cloud computing assets in the enterprise environment ensures that organizations are able to provide links to critical infrastructure and generate lines of communication to integral members of target audiences. Such opportunities make cloud computing an ideal option for generating return on investment while also providing personal interest in security, safety and user … Read more
Microsoft’s Enterprise Mobility Suite can be a great tool for Mobile Device Management (MDM) in a medium or large organization. MDM is a solution to an emerging trend of employees using their own devices, such as tablets and phones, to access work data. This trend is referred to as BYOD, or Bring Your Own Device, … Read more
One of the most common requests received by a SharePoint admin or content owner is to create a new site for a staff member. Automating this process has been covered in detail already, and others have extended the solution to accommodate custom site templates. In the process of implementing this solution however, I found that … Read more
Since WPC, the world has been abuzz with some new functionality introduced into Azure – the ability to create a SharePoint farm from scratch with the click of a button. It sounds great, but there’s a lot you need to know. So let’s dive in! Overview of SharePoint Server Farms in Azure To start … Read more
When assisting our customers in migrating to online services such as Office 365, deploying Active Directory Federation Services (AD FS) is often a topic of conversation as an option to maintain a single sign-on experience. Deploying AD FS without a proper environment assessment and planning may have you in a bit of trouble. AD FS … Read more
The addition of Azure Rights Management features to the Office 365 service makes accessible something that was previously complex. With Rights Management Services you can protect your documents and decide, and enforce, what others can do with them, even after they have left your possession. Rights Management Service, or RMS, works with Microsoft Office documents … Read more
A common miss in requirements is the back button. How you design this button has tremendous impact on how users navigate within your mobile app. It’s one of those things that seems intuitive and easy to grasp until you dig into it and find out that none of the platforms you’re targeting agree on a … Read more
A few years ago, an initiative called Move the Web Forward was launched to help developers and technical folks get involved with creating standards for web technologies. The project links to various methods and projects to give back to the web community. One of those suggested projects involves W3C Working Groups. The groups are made … Read more
This post is the first in a series of articles covering useful and new features within Microsoft’s OneNote application. OneNote comes as part of the Microsoft Office suite, and is sometimes overlooked by people looking to use better-known software in the suite such as Word or Outlook. However, OneNote is a powerful application in its … Read more
This summer, I presented several workshops on requirements gathering and I kept finding myself focusing on six critical considerations. As it turns out, asking the right questions to the right people to get the right information you need to design your technology solution turns out to be much more challenging than many organizations expect. However, … Read more
With any new version of Windows, rumors tend to leak well in advance of the software bits being available for preview. Over the past few months the next version of Windows (codename: Threshold) have started to firm up and what has become clear is a big focus on Modern Apps. As we discussed earlier, Modern Apps are … Read more
When you need to troubleshoot issues with wireless networks, Wifi Explorer is a great tool to use. Below is a screen shot that shows some of the functionality of the product. I’ll be referring to the details in that screen shot for the examples in this blog post. The top part of the picture shows … Read more
Creating symbols in Balsamiq allows you to make the most out of your custom components. Symbols are maintained in one central location, ensuring that all wireframes that reference them are always up-to-date. Learn how to leverage this tool in your Balsamiq wireframes by following these simple steps. Symbols are to Balsamiq what CSS is to … Read more
Can you hear that? Off in the distance, someone is talking about you. And if your company has yet to invest in social media monitoring, then you’re likely missing out on the conversation. The growing realm of social media has transferred “word on the street” to “word on the web”. Companies can hear what the world … Read more
Creating HTML email templates can seem like a lesson in navigating minefields, due in part to the many various email clients and systems that process emails. In this article, I’ll focus on tips for creating responsive email templates in Microsoft Outlook. How Outlook Works If your newsletter subscribers or clients are in an office setting … Read more
We’ve all been there before: a customer or colleague has sent an email a few hours ago and runs into you in the hall, asking “Did you get my email?” Of course, this question is somewhat absurd: the email was in all likelihood delivered within seconds and in most cases one has either simply not read … Read more
When trying to access SharePoint content with OAuth you need to have an Authentication Server. With SP2013, this Authentication Server can only be set up in the cloud in Azure. This Authentication Server must also be Microsoft’s implementation of the authentication server called AZURE ACCESS CONTROL SERVICE (ACS). Before I dive into details though, here … Read more
I recommend a handy free tool from Solar Winds called “IP address tracker” that allows you to easily build a database of the IP addresses in use on a network. Every device on a modern network will likely have an IP address, which is a number that identifies and locates it on the network. If … Read more
Last week I wrote a post on how to manually install the Azure Guest Agent on an Existing VM, but it appears that this only works if the VM is not in an Availability Set. Microsoft posted a workaround for this, but it looks like a few things don’t work 100% with their script. I’ll … Read more
This is the fourth in a series of posts regarding the retention, protection, deletion and auditing of email data in Office 365. In this post we will look at journaling in Exchange Online under Office 365. The configuration of Journal rules can be made under the Compliance Management area within the Exchange admin center in Office 365. Journaling is the … Read more
Back in February, Microsoft released a VM Agent for Azure Virtual Machines. The most basic tool this enabled, was adding BG Info to the background on all your VMs, but there’s more advanced functionality available for it today (such as installing antivirus), and promises of even more greatness to come in the future. The only … Read more
Office 365 ProPlus is the version of Office that comes with Office 365 Enterprise E3 and E4 plans. Office 365 ProPlus is a full version of Office and includes Access, Excel, InfoPath, Lync, OneNote, Outlook, PowerPoint, Publisher, and Word. When you deploy Office 365 ProPlus, it’s installed on the user’s local computer using the same … Read more
Microsoft Lync is an enterprise unified communications platform on which users can make a phone call, keep track of their contacts’ availability (aka presence), send an instant message, and start or join an audio, video, or web conference. Call Quality Methodology (CQM) was introduced by Microsoft in 2014 to provide a new troubleshooting and service … Read more
When planning to deploy Office 365 it is very important to review your existing network configuration, including your proxy server, to ensure optimal configuration. Very often you will need to make changes to network configuration, and as a subset of this proxy server configuration, in order to deliver the best experience to your company’s end … Read more
The Windows Azure Pack is a collection of Microsoft Azure technologies available to Microsoft customers at no additional cost. It runs on top of Windows Server 2012 R2 and System Center 2012 R2 and, through the use of the Windows Azure technologies, enables you to offer a rich, self-service, multi-tenant cloud, consistent with the public … Read more
Microsoft is constantly sharing rich content on Office 365 and three recent posts really caught my attention because they use short format video to provide really great insight into a topic that many of my customers are interested in: data protection in Office 365. Microsoft has invested $15 billion to build its massive cloud infrastructure … Read more
Responsive design has been touted as the ideal solution for delivering web content to mobile devices. While this may be the case for simple content like web pages, blogs or wikis, for most enterprise applications involving robust information management tools, attempting to implement responsive design can create more problems than it solves. … Read more
New Signature has helped hundreds of companies leverage Microsoft cloud services such as Office 365, Dynamics CRM Online, and Windows Intune and many of them have opted to leverage highly-available Active Directory Federation Services (AD FS) to provide their end-users with a Single Sign-On experience and in some cases to meet specific business or security requirements. … Read more
Microsoft has released Azure Machine Learning and you can sign up today to be notified when it is available to the public to try. As CEO of New Signature, I am always asking my finance, sales and operations teams to come up with predictive intelligence based on New Signature’s large stores of historical data. But … Read more
Microsoft has introduced a new capability in preview as part of Azure Site Recovery that allows you to replicate virtual machines from your primary site directly to Azure, instead of your own secondary site. In the event of an outage at the primary site, the service orchestrates the recovery of virtual machines in Azure. It … Read more
Jake Zborowski, Microsoft group product manager for Office 365, wrote a great blog post last week on the launch of the Office 365 for business public roadmap. As Jake writes, “The Office 365 for business public roadmap provides you with a way to learn more about upcoming updates before the change comes to your service. … Read more
If you aren’t using a password synchronization tool with Office 365, such as Windows Azure Directory Sync with Password Sync, Office 365 will randomly generate temporary passwords. This works out fine if the person using the mailbox is setting up their own account in Outlook and on mobile devices. Since ForceChangePassword attribute defaults to true, they are … Read more
About six months ago I was tasked with implementing Single Sign-On for Yammer, leveraging Active Directory Federation Services (ADFS) as the Token Provider. The setup of it was fairly straight forward, following the instructions provided on the Yammer Success Center.Of course, after we implemented SSO with Yammer, there were a few gotchas that I’ll highlight … Read more
In a previous post we discussed the Future of Portals. Now here is how we build them to support this vision of the future. In my opinion the reason why responsive design has been so popular and continues to be the first option for many people, is that it is a single application to maintain. … Read more
This is the third in a series of posts regarding the retention, protection, deletion and auditing of email data in Office 365. In this post we will look a retention tags, retention policies and how they are used in Messaging Records Management (MRM). Why use Messaging Records Management (MRM)? Messaging Records Management is normally used to … Read more
Learn from four experts at Mercer, Tangerine and imason as they discuss the secrets that have made their companies leaders in social collaboration. Benchmark your company on June 23rd when imason presents The Great People-Powered Business Test, an interactive webinar where four experts showcase the four secrets of collaboration success that have made their companies … Read more
When setting up site collections in SharePoint 2013 (and SharePoint 2010) you can set up a ‘hosted’ / ‘tenant’ environment – which essentially means you create your own version of Office365/SharePoint Online but on your own servers in-house. This means that you can partition your SharePoint Web Applications and give your users the capability to … Read more
When opening a document using a Microsoft office application, e.g. PowerPoint, that is licensed through an Office 365 subscription, you may be prompted to re-authenticate with your email address and password. This is normal and is part of the way the service ensures the software is licensed and used appropriately. However if you are using … Read more
Sounds easy enough, but it turned out to be a little more challenging than I had originally anticipated. Twitter recently updated their API and now requires authentication on every request, using OAuth. It’s actually fairly simple once you know what it’s expecting, so I thought I’d share. The following steps should help you Tweet from … Read more
