Azure news this week as heard on the ‘Need to Know‘ podcast. No more pay as you go Microsoft is eliminating the pay-as-you-go option for new Azure customers using MPSA (Microsoft Products & Services Agreement) starting February 1 this 2017. In case you don’t know, the Microsoft Products & Services Agreement (MPSA) is a simplified agreement that provides more flexibility, it consolidates purchasing of Microsoft cloud services, software and Microsoft Software Assurance. It has a Purchasing Account structure that allows for more flexible purchasing options and more control of purchases. You also get multi-year duration options with price protection. More info. Azure…
Category: Azure
Azure News 2017 – Week 1
Azure news as heard on the latest Need to Know podcast – Episode 125 Re-Org/re-structure chances at Microsoft Microsoft is planning a big reorganisation of partner and services groups starting Feb. 1 will affect the company’s sales, partner and services teams. This “One Commercial Partner” announcement is a continuation of Microsoft’s “One Microsoft” campaign kicked off under CEO Steve Ballmer back in 2013. The original idea of that push was to break down divisional silos and build more synergies across teams inside the company. Microsoft is combining its Enterprise & Partner Group (EPG) & Mid-Market Solutions and Partners (SMS&P) businesses. Chris Weber who…
Azure News 2016 – Week 52
Azure news below as heard on the need to know podcast Episode 124: Microsoft Azure Storage Import/Export Announcements Azure Import/Export Service enables transfer of data in and out of Azure Blob Storage by using hard drives filled with your very own data sent to Microsoft. Rather than waiting for ages till your data copies over the network, you can send your disks instead. Recently Microsoft have announced some improvements to this service. Microsoft have announced the general availability of Azure Import/Export Service in the new Azure portal. In the Azure Ibiza portal, you can: Manage import / export jobs across all storage…
Azure AD – SSPR, SSPC & MFA
SSPR (Self Service Password Reset), SSPC (Self-service password change) and MFA (Multi-Factor Authentication) are all features of AAD (Azure AD). Both MFA and SSPC are part of Azure AD Premium P1 & P2 editions as explained here. SSPR however requires Azure AD Premium or Basic explained here. First things first, follow the requirements listed here for AD Connect. You then need to make sure all the password reset stuff is all setup in Azure AD. To get to the Azure AD portal, logon to https://manage.windowsazure.com/@trusbron.com notice the domain at the end? Change this domain with yours. Even if you don’t have an Azure subscription…
#AzureAD Pass-Through Authentication and Seamless Single Sign-on | UX
My original post walked you through setting up Pass-Through Authentication & Seamless Single Sign-On. However, the following short video will walk you through the user experience after implementing and deploying #AzureAD Pass-Through Authentication and Seamless Single Sign-on.
AD Connect pass-through authentication & SSSO
This post walks you through two things: an upgrade of an existing AD Connect installation converting from ADFS to pass-through authentication Turning off ADFS setting up pass-through authentication and single sign on Recently Microsoft announced the new Azure AD Pass-Through Authentication and Seamless Single Sign-on. It’s a way of signing in to AAD (Azure AD) and AAD services using on-prem credentials as a reputable replacement to ADFS. This also includes any any third party apps all like Concour or SalesForce as well as custom apps. You can use AAD Premium to setup SAML 2.0 authentication to any custom app that supports claims…
Azure News 2016 – Week 49
Azure news this week below which is also heard on the Need to Know podcast http://ciaops.podbean.com. What might be the biggest news of the year is the new Azure AD Pass-Through Authentication and Seamless Single Sign-on (details here). It’s a way of signing in to AAD (Azure AD) and AAD services using on-prem credentials as a reputable replacement to ADFS. This also includes any any third party apps all like Concour or SalesForce as well as custom apps. You can use AAD Premium to setup SAML 2.0 authentication to any custom app that supports claims based authentication. This is essentially ADFS as…
Automatic MP3 tagging
A requirement for my business was to capture information for every song I had. The information required was the Composer (the person/s that wrote the song), the Year and the Record Label. I have over 13,000 songs and doing this on a manual basis would be an administration nightmare. So I used my PowerShell skills and set out to achieve what I found was a very reliable manual process, but turned into an automatic process. The most reliable process that I can find to date is: To grab the Record Label information from iTunes and a site http://staff.australian-charts.com/ to be used as…
Dropbox in PowerShell and as Windows Service
Dropbox comes in handy as a way of distributing files across systems. You can easily get files to a whole fleet of computers and then use PowerShell to automate tasks. If you ever wanted to run Dropbox as a Windows Service so it starts with Windows before a user logs in, follow the instructions below. But first you need this tool srvany Delete the Dropbox service: sc delete “Dropbox Service” Run the following command: sc create Dropbox binPath= “C:\…\srvany.exe” DisplayName= “Dropbox Service” Choose properties on Dropbox service > Click on tab “Log On” > Click “This account“, and select the appropriate account in order…
Azure Advisors
Microsoft Azure, what is it? Many people don’t know exactly what it is. It’s basically a set of servers hosted by Microsoft in state of the art datacenters around the world, the hardware is what Microsoft have full control over, but it’s everything on top of the hardware which is available to the public. Things on top of the hardware are things like hypervisors and VMs (virtual machines). On top of this there is a multitude of services, most of which – PaaS & SaaS – which is managed by Microsoft. No matter what you use in Azure, there are…
Marc Kean 
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