Todd Young

FOPE Service Update

Todd Young_MSFT — Mon, 16 May 2011 18:31:09 GMT

Just in time for the upcoming Office 365 General Availability the FOPE team has released a service update to the FOPE service.

The new changes you can see in the product are:

A change in the process for validating domains. Instead of creating a CNAME record, you create a TXT record in your DNS zone. This is an improvement to the way you are asked to prove the ownership of a domain, and provides greater security. This only affects you if you add a new domain to your service. It does not affect customers who have already validated their domains. For more information, seeValidate and Enable Domains.
Support for five additional languages in the product UI: Danish, Swedish, Norwegian, Finnish, and Russian
Filtering settings on the Company tab that provide Office 365 customers with information about their service plan. For more information, seeView Service Subscriptions.
The ability to filter unwanted bulk mail (such as advertisements and marketing emails). For more information, seeBulk Mail Filtering in FOPE.

Microsoft Announces FOPE 11.1 Release: March 31st 2011

Todd Young_MSFT — Thu, 17 Mar 2011 17:35:03 GMT

Today Microsoft published the following announcement for FOPE and Office 365 Beta customers:

Welcome Office 365 Beta Customers

Forefront Online Protection for Exchange (FOPE) is the email protection solution for all Microsoft Office 365 beta mailboxes. Use the FOPE Admin Center to configure additional spam protection settings, define policy rules to the needs of your business, and control routing of emails. This release adds the ability for you to sign in to the Administration Center directly from the Exchange Control Panel by clicking the FOPE link on the Mail Control tab.

There are some slight differences in functionality for Office 365 Beta users compared to FOPE standalone users. For more information see FOPE in Office 365 Beta Feature Differences

FOPE Standalone Customers

FOPE 11.1 adds a number of improvements including the following:

- More control of mail routing to enable cross-premise scenarios including outbound smart host and safe listing through the FOPE connectors feature.

- Force TLS for inbound and outbound mail using FOPE connectors

- Delegated administration experience that allows third-parties to manage FOPE for your company.

For more information see FOPE 11.1 New Features.

FOPE for Office 365 Beta Ships (Links to videos and content)

Todd Young_MSFT — Tue, 30 Nov 2010 09:46:00 GMT

The FOPE team just shipped a new set of features for those folks involved in the Office 365 Beta. You can find all the new videos we posted and content in the links below.

Videos

Documentation

Microsoft Office 365 Beta Features

New FOPE Forum on TechNet

Todd Young_MSFT — Wed, 17 Nov 2010 22:12:13 GMT

New Customer Forum for Microsoft Forefront Online Protection for Exchange (FOPE)

The FOPE team has created a TechNet forum for FOPE. Customers can now access the FOPE TechNet Forum and ask questions specific to the FOPE product.

At this time, the forum is only in English.

FOPE Team Ships new Videos for Service Providers

Todd Young_MSFT — Fri, 12 Nov 2010 20:03:00 GMT

The FOPE Content Publishing team shipped a new video today for service providers.

If you're a service hosting reseller with an SPLA, watch this video to learn how to manage your Forefront Online Protection for Exchange customers in the FOPE Administration Center. This video demonstrates how to log in, find your customers, add a domain, and add new user from your customer's organization. TechNet Edge features more videos about FOPE, so look for those too or look on the Resources tab in the FOPE Administration Center.

If you're a service hosting reseller with an SPLA, watch this video to learn how to place orders and provision FOPE services for the companies you manage by using the Services Provider Licensing Agreement portal site. This video demonstrates how to log in to the portal and how to start or change activation requests. It also shows how to find more help if you need to change seat count, switch customers to BPOS or move entire organizations. The TechNet Edge website features more videos about Forefront Online Protection for Exchange, so look for those too.

Learn more about the Services Provider Licensing Agreement program on Microsoft.com at http://www.microsoft.com/hosting/en/us/licensing/splabenefits.aspx.

Learn more about the FOPE Administration Center on the TechNet Library at http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff714976.aspx.

For online services activation issues or pre-sales questions, contact the Online Services Partner Program at ospp@microsoft.com.

Ozzie and the Cloud

Todd Young_MSFT — Fri, 12 Nov 2010 00:35:28 GMT

Ray Ozzie Retires

Microsoft has had some significant changes in the last year, especially in the cloud computing arena.

On October 18^th, Steve Ballmer announced that Ray Ozzie was transitioning out of Microsoft. In a conversation with a friend about the departure of Ray Ozzie, I was asking how Ozzie did in filling Bill Gates’ shoes as Chief Software Architect (pretty impossible shoes to fill if you ask anyone). Ozzie is renowned in the software industry and one of the most significant impacts he had at Microsoft was to push the company toward cloud computing. He said that really, nobody was talking about the cloud until Ozzie came in and set the vision in his Internet Services Disruption memo of 2005. Ballmer said that this memo started “stimulating thinking across the company and helped catalyze our drive to the Cloud”. Since then Microsoft has made some significant advances including introducing Windows Live, the Business Productivity Online Suite (BPOS), which includes Exchange, SharePoint, OCS, Live Meeting, Forefront. These show great promise for medium and small businesses where you can get set up for $10 per user a month or $3 per month for the “deskless worker” suite (which is what I paid this morning for my double short latte).

Azure

One of Ozzie’s pet projects was Windows Azure. Bing Social is one of the things that I think he may have envisioned in 2005, but could he have envisioned the sheer power of the scenarios it enabled? Bing Social was implemented using Windows Azure. There is code there that harvests the wrold's Twitter and Facebook status updates, counts the hits and serves up the “Hottest Social Topics”. It was something that was created by a Microsoft developer in a matter of a couple months after he wrote the prototype. He was able to go from idea to launch of one of the world’s largest cloud services (it updates 500 Mil+ status posts per day) in about 12 weeks. And, as the posts from Twitter and Facebook grow, Azure scales with it automatically. Go ahead, play with it. It's pretty cool.

I’m floored by that app, mostly by the way in which it was created. When people talk about “the power of the cloud” it now has real meaning to me. It means whatever worldwide internet-scale app I can think of can become a reality in a matter of weeks, not months or years.

FOPE Content Update

Todd Young_MSFT — Fri, 05 Nov 2010 22:27:00 GMT

The FOPE content team published some new updates and improvements to the FOPE content on TechNet (and the Download Center) recently.

One of the noticeable improvements we made is revamping the content architecture of the FOPE Spam Quarantine Mailbox content based on feedback we recieved from our readers. This is content created for FOPE end users, as their primary interaction with the FOPE service is through the quarantine mailbox and quarantine notices they receive in their inbox.

We also made some architectural changes to the FOPE Setup and Provisioning content to make it easier to find in a search query and easier for you to navigate. And we published new information about the Browser Support Matrix.

We are committed to making continual improvements to the content based on feedback we recieve from readers like you.

We’ve been working on a lot of new content that will be available to Office 365 Beta users, so stay tuned for those updates

When Cloud Services Replace People

Todd Young_MSFT — Fri, 05 Nov 2010 22:15:00 GMT

In my last blog post I asked why there is fear associated with moving to the cloud. Some of the responses I received from IT professionals, both in the blog comments and in personal conversations had to do with fear amongst IT-Pros who have invested a lot in their education and training who feel that their profession is becoming commoditized. However, some of the more interesting cloud scenarios come into play with larger organizations that have a significant investment in their existing infrastructure and custom tools. These orgs can utilize cloud services in a mixed environment where, in the case of Exchange, they can host some of their mailboxes on premises and expand to have some of their mailboxes hosted in the cloud. They can scale their organization infinitely as more users are added to the organization by putting them in the cloud, while maintaining complete control of mail flow through a centralize gateway using a smart host. You can also imagine similar mixed scenarios with hosted documents and file shares like Sydrive.

These are a couple examples of how on-premises + cloud services can help organizations improve their COGS through mixing in online services. Managing these cross-premises mixed mode environments is one of the challenges that will keep current network administrators actively employed and intellectually engaged in the challenge of deploying and maintaining these solutions. One of my past managers once told me that, “Computers aren’t going to replace people until they can actually solve problems.” Intelligently designing architectural solutions to make the most of current investments and opportunities in cloud efficiencies is one of those “problems” that are going to keep the best IT Admins gainfully employed for a while. And, you can rest assured that once they program a solution for that problem, or everyone has moved 100% to the cloud, there will be another problem ahead that needs an intelligent creative solution.

Is cloud computing really more secure, more reliable and cheaper? Then why the fear?

Todd Young_MSFT — Thu, 07 Oct 2010 22:19:00 GMT

A recent article, Tale of Two Clouds by the Educause Quarterly, discusses cloud computing, and how the University of Washington chose to move to a cloud model. It is an excellent article that clearly outlines the business problems, market factors and decision-making process that the UW IT department went through before deciding to make the switch to the cloud. As a UW alumni I am familiar with the environment and intrigued by problems identified by the UW, especially the perceived risks they associate with cloud computing.

The UW decided to go with a mixed services model with Microsoft and Google providing their mail, server and application services. The university platform includes the coexistence of Microsoft' Outlook Live and Google Apps for Education Edition mail services. And for application and sharing they offer both Microsoft's Skydrive and Google Docs. Their reasons for having a mixed offering on campus are to encourage competition, provide students and faculty with choice, mitigate the impact of service cancellation and enabling collaboration with people outside the university. Their challenge was to wade through a hot topic and make a decision for their organization where, "There is no consensus on which single system would be preferable, with strong partisans on both sides". One of the favorite quotes from the article (which perhaps only an English Major could appreciate) was, "We launch our flotilla of technology platforms into the Straits of Collaboration, navigate the shoals of Delusion Pass, and hope we can hold a tight formation while drifting between the Scylla of authoritarian inflexibility and the Charybdis of infinite complexity and cost."

As a proud American, I support the decision to provide both platforms and encourage competition in the marketplace. With 45K+ students and 20K+ faculty and staff, they represent a large portion of the market and to limit choice would be, well, limiting choice. In the end the market will decide what the superior service platforms are based on usage of the best features.

The thing that got me thinking about this article and asking questions was the section that discussed their perceived risks with implementing cloud services. From an institutional view they saw these as the risks:

Operational risk — service or business failures "cloud use for business-critical functions grows, starting with e-mail and calendaring, the institution must take a strong interest in assuring that the service will be there when needed, both on an immediate basis (service interruptions) and on a long-term basis (service termination). "
Financial risk — surprise support or integration costs. "One concern is that a high-touch support model could eliminate any future savings from cloud computing for basic services."
Compliance risk — failure leads to liability costs and reputation damage "the biggest concern is unauthorized disclosure or contamination of sensitive or confidential information. "

The odd thing is that these are all risks an organization has when they are hosting their own servers and applications, and, in fact the risk is minimized through cloud services. For example, an organization that hosts their mail, share and application servers on premises is still faced with these same risks. However, rather than having a company like Microsoft make sure their servers receive regular software upgrades, are free from viruses, continually supplied with power and cooling, are free from environmental threats, can scale to support a growing user base, etc., they have to train and employ their own IT staff to do this 24-7, 365 (even on Christmas day).

Maybe from a security perspective there is a perception that it is not as safe to send your data over the internet to a data center across the state as it is to send it on the intranet to the building next door. And from a service termination standpoint, I saw plenty of cloud hosting companies that offered free space on the Web that suffered the fate of the dot com bubble. But this shouldn't be a concern for companies like Microsoft and Google, especially when you consider that your on-premesis servers use standalone software produced by the same or similar companies.

As a writer for Forefront Online Protection for Exchange (FOPE), Microsoft's cloud mail filtering offering I'm very interested in the answer to the question.

What is it? Why the fear?

New Outlook Junk E-mail Add In Announced Today

Todd Young_MSFT — Fri, 03 Sep 2010 20:48:00 GMT

Today the Forefront Online Protection for Exchange (FOPE) team announced to customers that they are shipping a new Outlook Junk E-mail Plug in on Sept 10th.

The new plug in works on Outlook 2007 and 2010. It adds a button to your Outlook toolbar that allows you to report junk e-mail directly to the FOPE team.

This is the text from the announcement:

The Microsoft Junk Email Reporting Add-in for Microsoft Office Outlook lets users report junk e-mail to Microsoft for analysis, allowing for targeted reduction in volume and impact of junk e-mail messages. This reporting add-in is an upgrade to the pre-existing Junk E-mail Reporting Tool version 1.1 for Microsoft Office Outlook 2003 and offers the following benefits:

· One-click reporting that allows users to select junk e-mail and submit it for analysis to Forefront Online Protection for Exchange.

· Option to select and submit multiple e-mail messages with a single click.

· Automatically moving selected e-mail messages to the Junk E-Mail folder.

· Multi-language support.

· Options to send submitted e-mail messages to a Bcc address.

The Microsoft Junk E-mail Reporting Add-In for Microsoft Office Outlook will be available for download on 9/10/2010. To download the add-in from the Microsoft downloads page, click here.

For more information, see the user guide in the Microsoft TechNet Library.

If you need help, contact Forefront Online Protection for Exchange Online Technical Support. In the United States and Canada, you can call toll-free (866) 291-7726 or dial direct (204) 927-2299. Outside the United States, call the Universal International Freephone Number 800-0000-0060.

For our privacy policy, click here.

Using the FOPE Directory Synchronization Tool in a Non Exchange Environment

Todd Young_MSFT — Mon, 16 Aug 2010 23:06:47 GMT

Some of you have been asking how to use the FOPE Directory Sync tool in a non Exchange environment. I wrote a wiki topic about this today that you should check out.

Using the FOPE Directory Sync Tool in a Non-Exchange Environment

FOPE TechNet Wiki Topics

Todd Young_MSFT — Thu, 12 Aug 2010 23:36:00 GMT

There are a bunch of new TechNet Wiki topics about FOPE (Forefront Online Protection for Exchange)

Take a look at these topics by searching for the FOPE Tag.

Or, you can look at my wiki topics by going to the Todd Young tag.