Microsoft Office 2013 Client Connectivity to Office 365 ends

In this post I like to inform you about and upcoming change regarding Office 365 client connectivity. Microsoft announced this already in the past and reminds admins via the Office 365 admin center about the upcoming change.

This might be subject to change anytime so please monitor your Office 365 message center to stay informed about this if it is relevant for your client infrastructure.

Based on the Office 365 ProPlus – Updates page (see link below)

Starting October 13, 2020, it will be necessary to have Office 365 ProPlus or Office perpetual in mainstream support to connect to Office 365 services.
Source: https://cdn.pixabay.com/photo/2016/07/28/23/39/cottage-1550083_960_720.jpg

What does this mean?

I.e. Office 2013 client connections to Office 365 (SharePoint Online, Exchange Online, OneDrive for Business …) will run out of support and won’t be supported after 13. October 2020. Office 2016/2019 connections are supported till October 2023. That’s why you should plan and migrate towards Office 365 Pro Plus/Office 2016/Office 2019 to be able keep your Office client connectivity to Microsoft Office 365.

Conclusion, opinion and summary

I recommend to plan, test and execute your Office client upgrade journey to a support Microsoft Office before the above supportability deadline in case your clients run Office 2013.

Additional resources

Anrufe in Microsoft Teams klingeln bald auch auf zweitem Gerät

[DE] In diesem Beitrag geht es um ein neues Features für Microsoft Teams, welches im September 2019 ausgerollt wird. Microsoft Teams erhält ab diesem Monat ein sehnsüchtig erwartetes Feature, den “Secondary Ringer”, oder “Sekundärer Rufton” (DE).

Der “Sekundäre Rufton” erlaubt das Klingeln bei einem Anruf auf zwei Geräten. Das ist sehr praktisch, wenn ich das Headset auf dem Schreibtisch liegen habe und mich jemand anruft. So kann ich einstellen, dass es sowohl auf meinem Headset und auf dem Lautsprecher meines PCs klingelt.

Bislang sehe ich bei abgesetztem Headset nur eine visuelle Benachrichtigung für eingehende Anrufe. Somit kommt mit dem “Sekundären Rufton” ein zweites auswählbares Ausgabegerät hinzu.

Quelle: Screenshot Teams Einstellungen \ Geräte \ Sekundärer Rufton
Source: Microsoft Teams – Secondary Ringer [Microsoft 365 roadmap update item 51089]

Zusätzliche Ressourcen

How to gain insights on Microsoft 365 adoption?

In this post I describe where you can start to get more details (figures!) about the Microsoft (Office) 365 adoption at your company.

There are many different ways to gain insights. But if you rolled out different Office 365 services at your company there’s already quite a lot of valuable data. Where? Well, you know all the admin dashboards in the different Office 365 admin centers, right? So, these dashboards are good start to see what’s adopted but what about a more holistic view?

Source: https://pixabay.com/illustrations/statistics-graph-chart-data-3411473/

Of course you, could build a new dashboard in PowerBI by attaching different data sources, Graph API etc. But why not utilizing available tools? Is there any?

Microsoft 365 usage analytics

Yes, there is and it delivers you the following information:

  • Adoption overview report
  • Product usage report
  • Storage used report
  • Communication report
  • Collaboration report
  • Office activation report
  • Access from anywhere report
  • Individual service usage reports
  • Individual service user activity reports

What do have to do for this?

There is not much to do.

  1. Enable Microsoft 365 usage analytics [see link at the bottom]
  2. Navigate and utilize the reports in Microsoft 365 usage analytics [see link at the bottom]
  3. Read the reports
  4. Apply measures to drive adoption in the spaces where it is required
  5. Review monthly
  6. Go back to 3. [infinite loop / continuous [adoption] improvement process –> learning never ends ;-)]

Conclusion, opinion and summary

Before you start to build your own reports you might want to start with what’s available at your fingertips! I had the chance to test and it’s ready within minutes. So, you can view report data. What you finally need to do is to check what information you receive and conclude your next steps to drive adoption in weak areas by adequate measures, e.g. awareness campaign, training/education or other means of communications to drive adoption of Office 365 services within your company (as needed).

Additional resources

Merger of Yammer and Office profile in Office 365

Microsoft announced that Yammer and Office profiles will be merged. Until today a user gets provisioned and logs into Yammer. This triggers the “creation” of its Yammer profile which is synced from the user’s Office profile. However, if a user changes values of his/her Yammer profile it is overwritten by the next Office profile sync to Yammer in case the Office profile was changed.

Source: https://pixabay.com/vectors/name-nameplate-shield-id-press-1714231/

What does this mean for my users?

Well, it means that the users’ profiles become one and will based of the Office profile. The Office profile becomes the “master” and sole profile.

So, the profile button in Yammer will disappear soon and than every profile value is based on the Office profile. Single profile instead.

How can you manage the merged Yammer/Office profiles of users?

Due to the fact that there will be only one profile left you’ll need to manage only the users’ Office profiles. Either a user can manage this within set limits on the Office 365 Delve profile page or by contacting your Office 365 administrator and support.

Conclusion, opinion and summary

To sum it up, you’ll manage user attributes via Active Directory. Either in you onpremise AD which is synced via AAD Connect to Azure AD and Office 365. Or in case you are cloud-native user attributes from Azure AD are used.

Depending on how much “self-serving” you allow users could make changes to the profile by using the Delve profile (page).

Additional resources

BitTitan White Paper – Migrate Microsoft Teams Tenant-to-Tenant

In a previous post I wrote about how you can migrate Microsoft Teams from one (source) Office 365 tenant to another (target) Office 365 tenant by using third party (3P) tools to ease and automate the migration process. BitTitan is one of the tools which can be used.

BitTitan published a White Paper regarding “Top Migration Considerations for Cross-Tenant Teams Migrations” which you can request and download to avoid typical pitfalls and get awareness on what limitations there might be. You can find the link to request the download of the White Paper at the bottom of this post.

[erik365] Migrate Office 365 Tenant-to-Tenant

Additional resources

SIP Trunk Provider Evaluation 2019 by the Eastern Management Group

In this post I like to highlight a SIP Trunk Provider Evaluation by the Eastern Management Group. I came across a nice article regarding the evaluation of (some) SIP Trunk Providers which was carried out by the Eastern Management Group.

In this study 29 SIP Trunk Providers were evaluated based on a survey. More than 3.000 IT managers were asked. As far as I could read the focus resides primarily on SIP Trunk Providers in the US and such with global reach.

Source: https://pixabay.com/de/vectors/statistik-umfrage-webseite-vorlage-1606951/

Conclusion, opinion and summary

In case your are about to plan your migration from ISDN to ALL-IP/SIP Trunks or you are considering to consolidate your SIP Trunk connectivity this study might provide you some insights and metrics to get to a decision on which SIP Trunk (Provider) to choose.

However, 29 SIP Trunk Providers are just a few. Depending on where you need a SIP Trunk you might need to research which are available at a certain world region, country and local area. As always on the market there are small and large SIP Trunk providers offering a different feature set for the SIP Trunk Services.

I recommend to take a closer look to what’s offered in detail and what SIP Trunk “architectures” are serviced, e.g. dedicated (physical) link vs. logical link (via existing Internet/MPLS connectivity), encrypted traffic support, clip no screening support, SBC support/compatibility (are there recommended SBCs/IP-PBX by the respective provider?), call authentication/authorization requirements…

Additional resources

New Microsoft Cloud Data Center Region Germany available

In this post I like to quickly inform about the availability of a new Microsoft cloud data center region in Germany. I was about to deploy a new cloud-based session border controller (SBC) and saw that the region “Deutschland, Westen-Mitte” is available on Azure.

Source: Screenshot showing the Azure Portal https://portal.azure.com and creation of a template-based Azure resource group

Additional resources