Moving to the Cloud (O365, Azure, AWS)

iLink typically partners with organizations like yours to work on the following types of projects:

· Moving to the Cloud (O365, Azure, AWS) — Assessment & Readiness check, Plan and Migration

· Application development, Modernization and Maintenance : Strategic partnership to help with the right build vs buy decision making and core expertise in multiple technology stacks

· BI, Analytics, Visualization and Data Management — BI Health Assessment, BI tool Evaluation/Selection/Migration, Creating custom BI Reports/Dashboards/Scorecards and BI Performance tuning & Optimization

· QA & Testing — QA Consulting, Domain/Functional/Specialized Testing services, Performance & Load Testing and Automated QA

· Mobile application development

· IoT — Device Connectivity and Management, Operational Insight, Advanced Analytics and Data Visualization

For more information about our services, please visit us @ http://www.ilink-systems.com/Services/Services-Overview

Please contact me at 425–869–8104 or reply to this e-mail to set up a convenient time to talk or meet. Thank you and I look forward to your response.

Office 365 SharePoint Migration

SharePoint Online delivers a single, unified location in the cloud where your people can easily cooperate with team members to exchange ideas and expertise, build custom team and project sites and solutions, finding organizational resources, or information search. You can also invite external users to view, share, and collaborate using extranet site groups. In SharePoint Online service, Instead of deploying and managing SharePoint internally, SharePoint Online gives you a complete hosted SharePoint experience. You and your business users have anywhere access to the rich collaboration, information management and business intelligence capabilities of SharePoint.

iLink helps Organizations Migrate from earlier versions of Microsoft Office, Collaboration and Communication Products to Office 365 to enhance their Productivity and Collaboration in a dynamic fashion.

Read More: http://www.ilink-systems.com/Solutions/Office-365-Solutions/Office-365-SharePoint-Migration

Lotus Notes to SharePoint and Office 365 Migration

Businesses migrate their Lotus Notes based Mail, Applications and Workflows to Exchange, SharePoint / Office 365 to transform an organization to become more agile, productive and cost-effective. Organizations are focused on making the most of their technology investment. Consolidating to a single vendor solution platform for email, collaboration, employee engagement within the organization has become a priority for most organizations that used Lotus Notes.  Increasingly organizations have started seeing Lotus Notes as an unnecessary expense that does not fit into their larger business strategy. Cost reduction through a single platform and readily available support for the platform from Microsoft are the drivers for organizations to migrate from Lotus Notes to SharePoint. This helps them avail improved functionality, attracting and retaining talented employees and becoming more nimble and connected. 

iLink has helped organizations migrate from Lotus Notes to SharePoint and Office 365. iLink has successfully used migration tools like the Dell OnDemand Migration tool, Quest, AvePoint, MetaLogix Migration Manager and Microsoft’s Online Notes Inspector (MONTI).

For More: http://bit.ly/1p3POrA

Integrate your application authentication with Office 365

Most of us working with Office 365 usually manage users through the O365 Admin Center portal. Did you know that Microsoft Azure Active Directory (AAD) is the directory store that is powering O365 for user management.

If you are small/medium business organization and would like to manage all your application authentication through a common solution, then should you not leverage this AAD? Well, you are already paying for the Office 365 service so why not leverage the AAD that you already have?

Now the common problem here is you don’t have direct access to AAD management from O365 Admin Center.
But if you have worked with Azure, you know that you can manage Azure AD from Azure Management Portal.
Now those are two different things – Azure Management Portal and O365 Admin Center.

What if you are able to link those two together? Can I then manage my O365 AAD through my Azure Management Portal?

Well the answer to both the above questions is the same - “Yes, you can.”  Now if I can manage my O365 AAD through Azure portal, then couldn’t I use it as a common authentication platform for my business applications? The answer is “Yes, you can”.

It is very easy to make this association if you don’t have an existing Azure account.
Login to O365 Admin Center and under “Admin” click “Azure AD”. You will be directed to a page to create an Azure subscription and follow the steps there to create an Azure subscription using your O365 Admin account. It’s simple and direct.

However there is another possibility – what if I already have an Azure account (a@live.com).
Also I have a separate O365 subscription (b@contoso.onmicrosoft.com). Can I link these somehow?

Well the simple answer is “Yes, you can”. But it’s a little convoluted process - not a simple one on one
matching. If you are stuck in a similar situation or would like to see the O365 AD associated with your Azure account, then here are the steps to associate your live account with your O365 account and access the AD associated with O365.

1. Logon to Azure Portal using your live account.
2. Click on New -> App Services -> Active Directory -> Directory -> Custom Create
3. Now select "Use existing directory" from the drop down as shown below:

4. Make sure you select the Check Box (in image above).
5. Now you will be logged out and redirected to Azure login.
6. Now login using your O365 Global Admin credentials.
7. Once you login, you will see a prompt asking to add your Azure account (a@live.com) as a global admin for O365 Tenant. Click Continue.
8. Now logout and login again using your Azure account.
9. Go to Active Directory in Azure Management Portal and you can see a new AD

I remember seeing the default O365 AD by the name "Contoso".
Well, if you don't like it you can always rename it to whatever name you prefer.

Now that you have access to O365 AD you can do a lot more from secure application authentication & single sign on standpoint.

More value out of Office 365 at no additional service cost! If you would like to integrate your applications into Office 365 AD for authentication,

Please feel free to reach out to us.

The evolved Office 365 Enterprise E5

Recently Microsoft announced that the Office 365 Enterprise E4 plan will be replaced by the new “E5” plan before end of this calendar year.

Let us try to understand what this means:

E5 – An evolution of Office 365 capabilities:

The new E5 will offer a set of new capabilities and features for enterprises. The major ones announced by Microsoft are listed below:

• Skype for Business Feature Enhancements:
Cloud PBX with PSTN Calling - This will provide people the ability to make and receive traditional phone calls in their Skype for Business client, and manage these calls with features like hold, resume, forward and transfer. Cloud PBX will be released for customers worldwide, with a configuration option for customers to use existing on-premises phone lines for inbound and outbound calling.
PSTN Conferencing - This will allow people invited to a Skype for Business meeting in Office 365 to join the meeting by dialing in using a landline or mobile phone. This traditional dial-in capability is in addition to simple, single touch join options on PC, smartphone and browser, and allows people to join an online meeting even in places with no Internet access. PSTN Conferencing in Office 365 will also allow people to add others to a meeting by dialing out.
This is something that we have been waiting for and finally it’s going to be available for all our enterprise customers and we are really excited!
• Enhanced Analytics:
New analytics features like Delve Organizational Analytics and Power BI Pro will be provided as part of E5 license.
• Advanced security features:
e-Discovery: Earlier this year Microsoft acquired Equivio and the new “Equivio Zoom” will soon be providing powerful e-discovery features to help customers meet legal and compliance challenges
You can read more about its capabilities here.
Customer Lockbox: This new capability offers organizations complete control over its contents such that if some Microsoft engineer needs access to certain content to resolve an issue, the same can only be done
by getting the explicit approval from the customer, In other words Use of the Customer Lockbox feature ensures that Microsoft engineer does not get access to the customer’s content without customer’s explicit approval.
Advanced Threat Protection (ATP): Exchange Online today offers EOP for email protection against spam, viruses and malware. As the attacks are getting more sophisticated day by day, the ATP is a new feature to provide
advanced security on top of EOP. The features include protection against unknown malware  and virus (using Machine Learning), Real time time to click protection against malicious URLs and rich reporting.

What about the cost?:

Well, there is no official word here. But given that E5 offers additional capabilities, the cost of E5 could be higher compared to E4.
If you are an existing Enterprise E4 customer, then it’s time to start thinking about the various options at your disposal – upgrade to E5 or move to E3 plus Cloud PBX.

Finally ask yourself the question “What is the business value versus the cost increase?” and you will know what to do.

Lotus Notes to SharePoint and Office 365 Migration

Businesses migrate their Lotus Notes based Mail, Applications and Workflows to Exchange, SharePoint / Office 365 to transform an organization to become more agile, productive and cost-effective. Organizations are focused on making the most of their technology investment. Consolidating to a single vendor solution platform for email, collaboration, employee engagement within the organization has become a priority for most organizations that used Lotus Notes.  Increasingly organizations have started seeing Lotus Notes as an unnecessary expense that does not fit into their larger business strategy. Cost reduction through a single platform and readily available support for the platform from Microsoft are the drivers for organizations to migrate from Lotus Notes to SharePoint. This helps them avail improved functionality, attracting and retaining talented employees and becoming more nimble and connected.

At a high-level an organization gets the following business benefits through migration from Lotus Notes to SharePoint or Office 365:

• Cost Reduction through reducing user training and improving user productivity
• Capability enhancement through SharePoint FAST search, Tight integration with Office 365 and Microsoft Office apps and SharePoint Workflow templates that provide faster workflows than Lotus Notes.
• Consistent and Easier Workflows - Enhanced Workflow Platform as Microsoft has a Workflow foundation that works the same way across a range of products.
• Long term business strategy – facilitating business goals such as innovation, agility, mobility, attracting and retaining talent, mergers and acquisitions. Microsoft products clearly score over Lotus Notes in fast tracking these business goals.

iLink has helped organizations migrate from Lotus Notes to SharePoint and Office 365. iLink has successfully used migration tools like the Dell OnDemand Migration tool, Quest, AvePoint, MetaLogix Migration Manager and Microsoft’s Online Notes Inspector (MONTI).

iLink’s Migration methodology typically comprises of the following:

• Pre-migration analysis
• Migration strategy focusing on key facets such as
  • Gaining access to SharePoint features such as managed metadata and document sets
  • Using native web services, connect to SharePoint / Office 365 sites
  • Preserving the look and feel of Notes applications and cover Notes forms to Microsoft InfoPath list forms
  • Moving Notes data to SQL Server tables
  • Discovering Notes databases, analyzing how they are used and determine which applications are unused, as well as those applications that will need development
  • Using a customizable rules-based engine, specify target locations and migration jobs, hundreds of which can be migrated
  • Inhabit lists, libraries, sites and subsites based on existing Notes infrastructure
  • Maintain data fidelity when migrating rich text and complex application data, as well as preservation of data including keyword fields
  • Choice of document destinations beyond lists and libraries, including wiki pages, basic pages, and content publishing pages
  • For applications requiring custom form layouts, migrate Notes documents to InfoPath XML documents

iLink has migrated Lotus Notes Mail, Applications and Workflows to SharePoint using Quest for a Global Chemical Distributor and a Healthcare Insurance Provider. iLink has migrated complex Lotus Notes Mail, Applications and Workflows to SharePoint using MetaLogix Migration Manager for a global online retail platform.

iLink has created some standard pre-migration analysis and migration templates apart from a comparison matrix of using various migration tools. Through these templates and a standardized migration methodology iLink provides a faster turnaround as well as qualitative migration and support to various customers who migrate from Lotus Notes to SharePoint and Office 365.