Built for small to medium sized businesses with up to as many as 300 employees and available worldwide today, Microsoft 365 Business includes the Office 365 suite of productivity and collaboration tools, in addition to device management and security tools to protect company information across Windows 10 PCs, mobile devices, and apps. This integrated solution is designed to simplify IT for small and medium sized businesses.
Also, the general availability of three new business apps—Microsoft Connections, Microsoft Listings, and Microsoft Invoicing—which join Microsoft Bookings, Outlook Customer Manager, and MileIQ to create a suite of capabilities that help small businesses grow and thrive. These apps are now available in Microsoft 365 Business and Office 365 Business Premium for customers in the U.S., U.K., and Canada.
Laslty, Microsoft StaffHub, an app to help Firstline Workers manage their workday, is now included in Microsoft 365 Business and Office 365 Business Premium subscriptions.
Become a modern workplace
Today’s modern, global workplace is moving in a new direction, which brings with it major opportunities and challenges for all businesses. Businesses have to meet the needs of a five-generation workforce, deal with an increasingly complex cyber-threat setting, and innovate quick enough to meet evolving customer expectations.
All the while, small and medium sized customers want solutions that are easy to manage and maintain. Often times, small business owners find technology options to be complex and costly, leading many to settle with a patchwork of services or opt out of investments altogether. These approaches compromise business productivity and open the door for security vulnerabilities, which could be a reason why 43 percent of all cyber-attacks last year were targeted at companies with fewer than 100 employees.
Safeguard your business
Microsoft 365 Business is made to provide the productivity tools and security services businesses need in a single, simple-to-manage product. It safeguards company information, extending security across users, apps, and devices. It ensures that PCs are up to date, helping to prevent vulnerabilities in security that cyber-thieves often exploit. In addition, it provides protection for company information across devices, with the capability to delete company data from lost or stolen devices.
Empower your people
Microsoft 365 Business delivers productivity and collaboration tools that businesses need in order to help their employees be the most productive that they can possibly be. It includes the suite of Office 365 productivity and collaboration apps, including Word, Excel, and PowerPoint, as well as Outlook for email services, SharePoint and OneDrive for sharing files with customers, co-workers, and suppliers, and Microsoft Teams for chat-based teamwork and collaboration.
Simplify your IT management
Microsoft 365 Business is designed to make the management of technology for businesses and their IT partners simpler and less costly. It offers simple setup and management, so business owners and their teams can dedicate higher amounts of their time and energy toward building their businesses as opposed to constantly worrying about logistics. You can set up new employees, configure device security policies, and manage user identity and access, as well as ensure all your people are on the most up-to-date versions of Windows 10 and Office, all from a single console. On top of all of these points, the single per-user, per-month subscription streamlines costs and simplifies management.
Acquire customers and nurture business growth with three new apps
Three new apps are also available with the purpose of helping small businesses gain new customers, increase revenue, and accelerate billing and receivables.
Microsoft Connections enables businesses to send marketing emails that showcase their brand and drive sales.
Microsoft Listings helps businesses acquire new customers and build their brand by getting their business listed on Facebook, Google, Bing, and Yelp.
Microsoft Invoicing provides estimate and invoicing tools that help accelerate payment and manage cash flow.
These new business apps can all be managed centrally from the Business center. They build on top of three apps from Office 365 that are already available:
Bookings simplifies the process of scheduling and managing customer appointments.
Outlook Customer Manager provides simple customer management for small businesses, right within Outlook.
MileIQ offers a smarter way to track mileage, with automatic mileage logging, easy classification as business or personal, and comprehensive reporting.
Give Firstline Workers the tools they need to do their best work with StaffHub
The global workforce in comprised mostly of Firstline Workers; they are the heart and soul of many small and medium sized businesses. StaffHub is an app that is purpose-built to help Firstline Workers manage their workday, allowing business owners and employees to easily create and manage schedules, assign and complete tasks, and communicate with each other.[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row]
[vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text]
Risk Analysis for EOL Hardware & Security
One of the biggest benefits of modernizing business with the latest technology is that it is always changing - and updating. However, this means that companies constantly need to analyze their software, hardware, and security to see when certain products need to be updated, and how they should go about doing so. Many of the technologies businesses are using today go to end-of-life after six and twelve months, meaning risk analysis is vital to keep business disasters at bay.
The risks
Security
Failing to update products coming up to end-of-life can comprise a company's security, making them more vulnerable to hacking
Efficiency
Having outdated IT will slow down your day-to-day business
Revenue
If companies are using products facing EOL, they can deal with revenue loss from lack of the proper productivity tools, cybersecurity threats, and more
After 15 years in the outsourced IT industry, Managed Solution has learned the best, fastest, and smartest way to help our customers justify infrastructure investment and scale with the right technology roadmap based on their unique needs. From professional services to cloud infrastructure to managed services and more, let us partner with you on an IT strategy that delivers results fast.
[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row]
[vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text]The security protocol that isvused to protect the vast majority of wifi connections has been broken, potentially exposing wireless internet traffic to malicious eavesdroppers and attacks, according to the researcher who discovered the weakness.
“Attackers can use this novel attack technique to read information that was previously assumed to be safely encrypted,” Vanhoef’s report said. “This can be abused to steal sensitive information such as credit card numbers, passwords, chat messages, emails, photos and so on.
Vanhoef emphasised that “the attack works against all modern protected wifi networks. Depending on the network configuration, it is also possible to inject and manipulate data. For example, an attacker might be able to inject ransomware or other malware into websites.”
The vulnerability affects a number of operating systems and devices, the report said, including Android, Linux, Apple, Windows, OpenBSD, MediaTek, Linksys and others.
“If your device supports wifi, it is most likely affected,” Vanhoef wrote. “In general, any data or information that the victim transmits can be decrypted … Additionally, depending on the device being used and the network setup, it is also possible to decrypt data sent towards the victim (e.g. the content of a website).”
Vanhoef gave the weakness the codename Krack, short for Key Reinstallation AttaCK.
Britain’s National Cyber Security Centre said in a statement it was examining the vulnerability. “Research has been published today into potential global weaknesses to wifi systems. The attacker would have to be physically close to the target and the potential weaknesses would not compromise connections to secure websites, such as banking services or online shopping.
“We are examining the research and will be providing guidance if required. Internet security is a key NCSC priority and we continuously update our advice on issues such as wifi safety, device management and browser security.”
The United States Computer Emergency Readiness Team (Cert) issued a warning on Sunday in response to the vulnerability.
“The impact of exploiting these vulnerabilities includes decryption, packet replay, TCP connection hijacking, HTTP content injection and others,” the alert says, detailing a number of potential attacks. It adds that, since the vulnerability is in the protocol itself, rather than any specific device or software, “most or all correct implementations of the standard will be affected”.
The development is significant because the compromised security protocol is the most secure in general use to encrypt wifi connections. Older security standards have been broken in the past, but on those occasions a successor was available and in widespread use.
Crucially, the attack is unlikely to affect the security of information sent over the network that is protected in addition to the standard WPA2 encryption. This means connections to secure websites are still safe, as are other encrypted connections such as virtual private networks (VPN) and SSH communications.
However, insecure connections to websites – those which do not display a padlock icon in the address bar, indicating their support for HTTPS – should be considered public, and viewable to any other user on the network, until the vulnerability is fixed.
Equally, home internet connections will remain difficult to fully secure for quite some time. Many wireless routers are infrequently if ever updated, meaning that they will continue to communicate in an insecure manner. However, Vanhoef says, if the fix is installed on a phone or computer, that device will still be able to communicate with an insecure router. That means even users with an unpatched router should still fix as many devices as they can, to ensure security on other networks.
Alex Hudson, the chief technical officer of subscription service Iron, said that it is important to “keep calm”.
“There is a limited amount of physical security already on offer by wifi: an attack needs to be in proximity,” Hudson wrote. “So, you’re not suddenly vulnerable to everyone on the internet. It’s very weak protection, but this is important when reviewing your threat level.
“Additionally, it’s likely that you don’t have too many protocols relying on WPA2 security. Every time you access an HTTPS site … your browser is negotiating a separate layer of encryption. Accessing secure websites over wifi is still totally safe. Hopefully – but there is no guarantee – you don’t have much information going over your network that requires the encryption WPA2 provides.”
There’s likely to be a delay before the vulnerability is used to actually attack networks in the wild, says Symantec researcher Candid Wuest. “It’s quite a complex attack to carry out in practice, but we’ve seen similar before, so we know it’s possible to automate.
“Small businesses and people at home should be concerned, but not too worried,” Wuest added, advising most users to simply apply the updates to their software as and when it becomes available.
The most important lesson from the weakness, he said, was that relying on any one security feature is risky. “You shouldn’t be trusting one single point of failure for all your security. Don’t rely on just your wifi, use a VPN or secure connection for anything important.”
Different devices and operating systems are impacted to differing degrees based on how they implement the WPA2 protocol. Among the worst hit are Android 6.0 (Marshmallow) and Linux, due to a further bug that results in the encryption key being rewritten to all-zeros; iOS and Windows, meanwhile, are among the most secure, since they don’t fully implement the WPA2 protocol. No tested device or piece of software was fully immune to the weakness, however.
The international Cert group, based at Carnegie Mellon University, informed technology companies of the flaw on 28 August, meaning that most have had around a month and a half to implement a fix. The Guardian has asked Apple, Google, Microsoft and Linksys the status of their patches. Google said: “We’re aware of the issue, and we will be patching any affected devices in the coming weeks.” Microsoft said: “We have released a security update to address this issue. Customers who apply the update, or have automatic updates enabled, will be protected.” No other vendor has replied at press time.[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row]
Microsoft Inspire (formerly Worldwide Partner Conference) gathered 16,000 attendees from around the world last week in Washington DC. At the event, Microsoft reaffirmed its commitment to its partners and its mission to “empower people to be more productive”. To kick off an exciting week, CEO Satya Nadella made five major announcements during the first vision keynote, including the introduction of Microsoft 365.
Commitment to security and transparency
During the vision keynote on day two, President and Chief Legal Officer Brad Smith provided updates and affirmation of Microsoft’s commitment to security and privacy. Smith promised dedication to security, saying, “Technology for technology’s sake isn’t particularly valuable. Applying technology towards solving human problems is where you unlock the value”. Smith presented a four-part integrated approach to confront ever-evolving cybersecurity threats: Platform, Intelligence, Partners, and Policies. With the cloud being bigger than ever before, Smith says every business has a digital opportunity. Microsoft has committed “new energy, new focus, new resources” to responding to security threats faster and better than ever before. These cloud principles and improved security features in Microsoft 365 will give partners better end to end security management. Better security and transparency help Microsoft and its partners build trust, and “move technology forward without leaving people behind”.
Microsoft 365 is a new solution that combines software, management, and security options into a single subscription. Partners can choose from two solutions, Microsoft 365 Enterprise and Microsoft 365 Business. Both options provide productivity and security capabilities and a cohesive experience across applications and devices, while simplifying delivery and management for IT.
Includes Office 365 Business Premium, security and management features for Office apps and Windows 10 devices, upgrade rights to Windows 10, and a centralized IT console
Help your customers protect against breaches, detect breaches, and respond to breaches with a comprehensive security solution. This playbook focuses coverage on Microsoft products and services that play a critical role in securing this environment. Download the playbook here.
Microsoft recently announced its new hero offer called Secure Productive Enterprise (SPE). SPE provides the latest technology across Windows, Office 365, and Enterprise Mobility + Security (EMS). Frankly, it couldn’t come at a better time as businesses and consumers are increasingly aware of cybersecurity concerns. Here’s what partners can expect in terms of security capabilities from the innovative Microsoft stack and how they can leverage those capabilities to serve customers.
Conclusion
Inspire was surely an inspiring week for the partners who attended. With continued advances in the cloud and a better way for partners to build a modern, cohesive, and secure work environment with Microsoft 365, it should also be an exciting year.
Managed Solution is in the top 1% of Microsoft Cloud Service Providers worldwide, and a premier partner aligned with Microsoft’s mission to empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more.
Download our Cloud Comparison Calculator to receive access to the latest in cloud pricing aggregation, your all up cost of on premises vs. a cloud hosted solution
Throughout the Technical Previews, we’ve seen tremendous customer and partner excitement around Microsoft Azure Stack. In fact, we’re speaking with thousands of partners this week at our Microsoft Inspire event. Our partners are excited about the new business opportunities opened up by our ‘One Azure Ecosystem’ approach, which helps them extend their Azure investments to Azure Stack, to unlock new possibilities for hybrid cloud environments. In that vein, today we are announcing:
Orderable Azure Stack integrated systems: We have delivered Azure Stack software to our hardware partners, enabling us to begin the certification process for their integrated systems, with the first systems to begin shipping in September. You can now order integrated systems from Dell EMC, HPE, and Lenovo.
Azure Stack software pricing and availability: We have released pricing for the pay-as-you-use and capacity-based models today, you can use that information to plan your purchases.
Azure Stack Development Kit (ASDK) availability: ASDK, the free single-server deployment option for trial purposes, is available for web download today. You can use it to build and validate your applications for integrated systems deployments.
Azure Stack promise
Azure Stack is an extension of Azure, thereby enabling a truly consistent hybrid cloud platform. Consistency removes hybrid cloud complexity, which helps you maximize your investments across cloud and on-premises environments. Consistency enables you to build and deploy applications using the exact same approach – same APIs, same DevOps tools, same portal – leading to increased developer productivity. Consistency enables you to develop cloud applications faster by building on Azure Marketplace application components. Consistency enables you to confidently invest in people and processes knowing that those are fully transferable. The ability to run consistent Azure services on-premises gets you full flexibility to decide where applications and workloads should reside. An integrated systems-based delivery model ensures that you can focus on what matters to your business (i.e., your applications), while also enabling us to deliver Azure innovation to you faster.
In its initial release, Azure Stack includes a core set of Azure services, DevOps tooling, and Azure Marketplace content, all of which are delivered through an integrated systems approach. Check out this whitepaper for more information about what capabilities are available in Azure Stack at the initial release and what is planned for future versions.
Hybrid use cases unlock application innovation
Azure and Azure Stack unlock new use cases for customer facing and internal line of business applications:
Edge and disconnected solutions: You can address latency and connectivity requirements by processing data locally in Azure Stack and then aggregating in Azure for further analytics, with common application logic across both. We’re seeing lots of interest in this Edge scenario across different contexts, including factory floor, cruise ships, and mine shafts.
Cloud applications that meet varied regulations: You can develop and deploy applications in Azure, with full flexibility to deploy on-premises on Azure Stack to meet regulatory or policy requirements, with no code changes needed. Many customers are looking to deploy different instances of the same application – for example, a global audit or financial reporting app – to Azure or Azure Stack, based on business and technical requirements. While Azure meets most requirements, Azure Stack enables on-premises deployments in locations where it’s needed. Saxo Bank is a great example of an organization who plan to leverage the deployment flexibility enabled by Azure Stack.
Cloud application model on-premises: You can use Azure web and mobile services, containers, serverless, and microservice architectures to update and extend existing applications or build new ones. You can use consistent DevOps processes across Azure in the cloud and Azure Stack on-premises. We’re seeing broad interest in application modernization, including for core mission-critical applications. Mitsui Knowledge Industry is a great example of an organization planning their application modernization roadmap using Azure Stack and Azure.
Ecosystem solutions across Azure and Azure Stack
You can speed up your Azure Stack initiatives by leveraging the rich Azure ecosystem:
Our goal is to ensure that most ISV applications and services that are certified for Azure will work on Azure Stack. Multiple ISVs, including Bitnami, Docker, Kemp Technologies, Pivotal Cloud Foundry, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, and SUSE Linux, are working to make their solutions available on Azure Stack.
You have the option of having Azure Stack delivered and operated as a fully managed service. Multiple partners, including Avanade, Daisy, Evry, Rackspace, and Tieto, are working to deliver managed service offerings across Azure and Azure Stack. These partners have been delivering managed services for Azure via the Cloud Solution Provider (CSP) program and are now extending their offerings to include hybrid solutions.
Systems Integrators (SI) can help you accelerate your application modernization initiatives by bringing in-depth Azure skillsets, domain and industry knowledge, and process expertise (e.g., DevOps). PriceWaterhouseCoopers (PwC) is a great example of an SI that’s expanding their consulting practice to Azure and Azure Stack.
Orderable integrated systems, free single-server kit for trial
Azure Stack has two deployment options:
Azure Stack integrated systems – These are multi-server systems meant for production use, and are designed to get you up and running quickly. Depending upon your hardware preferences, you can choose integrated systems from Dell EMC, HPE, and Lenovo (with Cisco and Huawei following later). You can now explore these certified hardware solutions and order integrated systems by contacting our hardware partners. These systems come ready to run and offer consistent, end-to-end customer support no matter who you call. They will initially be available in 46 countries covering key markets across the world.
Azure Stack Development Kit (ASDK) – ASDK is a free single server deployment that’s designed for trial and proof of concept purposes. ASDK is available for web download today, and you can use it to prototype your applications. The portal, Azure services, DevOps tools, and Marketplace content are the same across this ASDK release and integrated systems, so applications built against the ASDK will work when deployed to a multi-server system.
Closing thoughts
As an extension of Azure, Azure Stack will deliver continuous innovation with frequent updates following the initial release. These updates will help us deliver enriched hybrid application use cases, as well as grow the infrastructure footprint of Azure Stack. We will also continue to broaden the Azure ecosystem to enable additional choice and flexibility for you.
I look forward to hearing what everyone does with Azure Stack!
Achieve IT infrastructure cost savings of at least 50%
Call Southern California’s most trusted name in cloud at 800-208-3617 for real time pricing and a cost benefit analysis for Microsoft’s Azure and Amazon’s AWS.
With the Application Insights JavaScript SDK you can collect and investigate the performance and usage of your web page or app. Historically we have offered onboarding through manually adding a script to your application and redeploying. Manually adding the script is still supported, but recently we have added the ability to add client-side monitoring from the Azure portal in a few clicks as well.
Enablement
If you have enabled Application Insights in Azure, you can add page view and user telemetry. You can learn how to switch on server-side monitoring in our documentation.
1. Select Settings -> Application Settings
2. Under App Settings, add a new key value pair:
Key: APPINSIGHTS_JAVASCRIPT_ENABLED
Value: true
3. Save the settings and Restart your app in the Overview tab.
The Application Insights JavaScript SDK is now injected into each web page.
Last week, the Managed Solution team joined thousands of other Microsoft partners for Inspire – Microsoft’s annual world partner conference in Washington D.C. As a premier partner, Managed Solution is in the top 1% of Microsoft Cloud Service Providers worldwide and fully aligned with Microsoft’s mission to empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more.
It is the one time of year when Microsoft invites partners from around the world to celebrate this past year’s successes, unveil changes with insights, and offer best practices with advice for how to empower customers and enhance end user experience in a digital world.
The week is composed of a daily keynote by a Microsoft executive, followed by hundreds of learning sessions. Several topics are discussed, such as: How do you bring out critical thinking and creativity in the workplace? How do we create dynamic teams that come together to service a customer in different ways?
As a complete, secure, and intelligent solution to empower employees, Microsoft 365 now rolls together Office 365, Windows 10, and Enterprise Mobility + Security into a single secure package to help end users be more productive while increasing protection.
With more than 100 million commercial monthly active users of Office 365, and more than 500 million Windows 10 devices in use, Microsoft is in a unique position to empower employees to be creative and work together, securely. To address the commercial needs from the largest enterprise to the smallest business, Microsoft 365 Enterprise and Microsoft 365 Business were introduced.
General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR)
Meeting the requirements of the European Union’s landmark General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) by May 25, 2018 is a pressing topic for many organizations worldwide. In Microsoft’s effort to provide customers with helpful GDPR compliance resources, they have been hosting webinars and discussions around how the Microsoft Cloud, including Office 365, Dynamics 365, Azure, and Azure data services, Enterprise Mobility + Security, and Windows 10 can help customers on their GDPR compliance journey. They have backed up their commitments through their contracts and by sharing their experience, as well as other partners’ experiences, with their audiences along the way.
Satya Nadella, CEO of Microsoft, discussed the advent of the intelligent cloud and intelligent edge. It is his belief that soon everything will become multi-device and AI will be intrinsic in every application built. Nadella spoke about the four main goals of digital transformation: the empowerment of employees, the engagement of customers, the optimization of operations, and the transformation of products.
“We’ve just skimmed the surface of how much support – sales tools, product training, case studies, sales teams, etc. – Microsoft has created to help its partners succeed. Today, MSPs around the globe are struggling with some of the same issues that we do. Addressing those issues is precisely why SNAP & Stratogator have such a bright future, not just in the U.S.” - Susan Kuruvilla, CEO, Managed Solution
Two New Tools to Optimize Cloud Spend & Operational Efficiency
With Microsoft's “all-in” strategy to help customers move to the cloud, the Microsoft Inspire conference was the perfect opportunity for Managed Solution to launch two new tools that empower MSPs to govern their cloud adoption, as we move towards digital transformation, and ensure their customers are receiving the best price for these cloud instances. Chairman and Founder of Managed Solution, Sean Ferrel, launched and demoed these tools at Booth #103 on the exhibit floor at the conference.
1. SNAP: Cloud Service Marketplace that evolves with the market and offers new services, bundles, and SKUs for your cloud sales organization. Customize and offer the selection of cloud services that your team needs to drive customer sales.
2. StratoGator/AzureGator: Cloud Service Brokerage Platform where aggregation of top tier cloud providers in the Infrastructure as a Service (IAAS) space will be compared against one another based on three pillars: cost, management, and reporting. Providing a user friendly centralized marketplace for Channel Partners allowing them to reduce overhead by 30-40%.
Ferrel also shared how these tools provide the customization MSPs need to support and sell to their customers both within and outside the cloud. These tools finally give the managed services provider the control they need and their customers want over their Microsoft products, streamlining their ability to align with the changes and vision of the tech giant.
“Microsoft is super-successful right now, yet still changing. That's an indication that they're future-focused and have a vision for where this is all headed. They're not complacent which inspires us to continue to innovate.” - Tina Rountree, Director of Sales, Managed Solution
Transformed Through Digital Technology
During Microsoft Inspire, partners shared stories around the ways that they are using Microsoft solutions to improve their communities as well as bring about positive change in the world. Working closely together allows us to build and go-to-market with innovative solutions for the long-term journey for our customers – as Nadella stated in his remarks, we create a strong local impact that ultimately has a profound global impact.
“With increasing digitization, where every part of our society and economy is being fundamentally transformed because of digital technology, the opportunity is greater than ever before," Nadella said, relating his vision back to his partner audience. "Being in this industry, being in this [Microsoft partner] ecosystem, the opportunity is tremendous.” -Satya Nadella, CEO, Microsoft
Recent updates for security and compliance include enhancements to Microsoft Defender, eDiscovery, Advanced Data Governance, Advanced Security Management and expanded support for Windows Information Protection. Read on to learn more about these updates.
Enhancements to threat protection visibility and controls
Office 365 Exchange Online Protection (EOP) and Microsoft Defender were designed to keep your organization protected against cyber-attacks while supporting end-user productivity. The Office 365 team continues to enhance both EOP and Defender by offering deeper insights and more flexible controls. This month, we are introducing the following new capabilities:
Threat Protection status report—New reporting for Defender and EOP that adds visibility into malicious emails detected and blocked for your organization. This supplements the recently introduced reports in the Security & Compliance Center for Defender Safe Attachments.
Enhanced quarantine capabilities—Now all emails classified as malware from both EOP and Defender are quarantined. This builds upon the existing quarantine experience by allowing administrators to review and delete emails from quarantine.
New Defender Safe Links Policy features—Four new features build upon the Safe Link policies.
Per-tenant block list—Provides the administrator the ability to block specific URLs.
Email wildcarding for domains and handles—Enables you to save time by writing partial domain/handle names.
Split Safe Links policies—Allows Safe Links policies to be customized for specific user lists in the organization, including groups, individuals and divisions.
Expanded character limit for URLs—Enables blocking/allowing URLs with longer character lengths.
Additional details on these new features can be found in the Microsoft Tech Community, as well as on the EOP and Defender product pages. EOP is offered across our enterprise E1, E3 and E5 suites. Defender is offered as both a standalone SKU or as part of E5.
New features streamline your compliance process using Office 365
Businesses around the world must be able to keep and protect important information and quickly find what’s relevant to continue to meet legal, business and regulatory compliance requirements. At Microsoft, we know how demanding and complex compliance can be and have recently released several new eDiscovery and Data Governance features in Office 365 to support your compliance needs. These features include:
Optical character recognition in Advanced eDiscovery—Extracts text from image files or objects within the files, significantly reducing the amount of manual remediation work required to analyze image files.
Rights management (RMS) decryptionin Office 365 eDiscovery—Automatically decrypts RMS-encrypted email messages at export time when you choose the MSG Export option.
Unified case management—Provides a consistent user interface spanning the eDiscovery capabilities in Office 365, from core to advanced, which helps to reduce potential human errors by streamlining eDiscovery case definition and eliminating several steps in the process.
Visit the Microsoft Tech Community for more details about the new eDiscovery features. Unified case management and RMS decryption are included with Office 365 E3. Optical character recognition is included with Advanced eDiscovery in E5.
Announcing general availability of Supervision capabilities in Office 365 Advanced Data Governance
Many organizations have the need to perform supervision of employee communications. This need stems from internal security and compliance guidelines, or from regulatory bodies such as the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA). In both cases, failure to have a demonstrable supervision process in place could potentially expose organizations to liability or severe penalties.
To address this need, we’ve released the new Supervision feature in Office 365 Advanced Data Governance. Supervision covers not only email communications, but also third-party communications streams, such as Facebook, Twitter, Bloomberg and many more. Visit the Microsoft Tech Community for more details about the general availability of Supervision.
Supervision is part of Office 365 Advanced Data Governance, which is available as part of Office 365 E5 or the Office 365 Advanced Compliance SKU.
Windows Information Protection now supports Office desktop applications
In August, we announced our support of Windows Information Protection (WIP) for Office mobile apps on Windows tablets and phones, to help prevent accidental business data leaks while letting users maintain control over their personal data by designating content as “work” or “personal.” We’re pleased to announce we have expanded support for WIP to include the Office 365 ProPlus desktop versions of Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, OneNote and Skype for Business. This will help provide more comprehensive protection of your business data on Windows 10 devices. To read more about WIP, check out our Microsoft Tech Community blog.
SIEM connector—now available for Office 365 Advanced Security Management
A year ago, we announced a way for you to get greater visibility and control over Office 365 with Advanced Security Management (ASM). Since then, we have added new features to help you better determine shadow IT activity. We also enhanced control over third-party appsconnected to Office 365. After these updates, we started hearing that some of you were looking for a way to export alerts to other systems that are integrated into your existing workflows. Today, we are releasing a solution that supports centralized monitoring of ASM alerts with your security information and event management (SIEM) software. Integrating with an SIEM allows you to better protect Office 365 while maintaining your organization’s security workflow, automate your security procedures and correlate between your cloud-based and on-premises events.
