Microsoft News – 23 April 2015

I’ve been really busy either preparing training, delivering training, on customer sites, or prepping my two sessions for Ignite. Here’s the roundup of recent Microsoft news for infrastructure IT pros:

Hyper-V

• Microsoft Announces Nano Server: A post by me on Petri.com
• Microsoft Announces Hyper-V Containers: A post by me on Petri.com

Windows Server

• The Deprecation of SMB1 – You should be planning to get rid of this old SMB dialect: This blog post summarizes the current state of this old SMB dialect in Windows client and server.
• Windows PowerShell equivalents for common networking commands (IPCONFIG, PING, NSLOOKUP): A VERY useful post.

Windows 10

• Windows 10 Security Innovations at RSA – Device Guard, Windows Hello and Microsoft Passport: More security.

Azure

• Leveraging Azure Site Recovery with SQL Always On Availability Groups for Disaster Recovery to Azure: A very good read on DR plans for SQL and multi-tier apps to Azure.
• Furthering Azure Security at the RSA Conference: New appliances and Key Vault partners.
• Docker Client for Windows is Now Available: Microsoft is making the Docker command line interface available on Windows starting with the Docker 1.6 release.
• Azure Premium Storage, now generally available: You can store VMs on SSD now.
• Integrate your on-premises infrastructure with Azure: A detailed interactive diagram.
• How to Force an Azure VM Shutdown: Use PowerShell for forcefully stop an Azure virtual machine.
• Azure AD Application Proxy now supports custom domain names: This has been the single biggest request from customers and Microsoft is excited to make it available.
• Docker Client Setup for Windows: A step-by-step guide.
• Azure Site Recovery with Hyper-V Generation 2 VM Support: In a limited preview at the moment, but a welcome addition.

Office 365

• What’s new: March 2015What’s new: March 2015: You can now preview Office 2016 for Mac, send information in Gmail messages straight to OneNote, preview your notes in OneNote for iPhone, capture web content more easily with OneNote Clipper 2.0, and more.
• Rights Management Services Analyzer Tool: se the RMS Analyzer tool to help you analyze the settings, configuration, and behavior of your Rights Management services (RMS) and the client applications that use RMS. The tool works with both AD RMS and Azure RMS. Users can check the RMS settings on their computers, then diagnose and fix any problems they are having with files or emails that are protected by RMS.
• Larger messages and Enhanced NDRs come to Office 365: Some useful improvements.
• Outlook for Android comes out of preview: That was quick!
• Microsoft Announces New Office 365 Security and Transparency Features: Unveiled at this year’s RSA security convention, Customer Lockbox will force any data access by Microsoft to be approved by customers.

Intune

• Conditional Access for On-Premises Exchange using Microsoft Intune: This blog post (originally published in December 2014) has been updated to include new Intune features introduced in April 2015.
• New Intune features coming over the next week for Android and more: A new April service update introduced several new features for Android devices plus much more.

Miscellaneous

• The Curse of Zune: Is Microsoft too Focused on the US Market? A post I wrote for Petri.com
• Digital Wars by Charles Arthur: A post I wrote for Petri.com
• Microsoft Irish data case raises critical issues for cloud computing: Notes from the RSA conference and the importance of independent encryption.