Dean Suzuki's Blog Site

Dean Suzuki's Blog Site https://docs.microsoft.com/archive/blogs/deansuzuki/feed.xml Daily Helping Our Customers To Achieve More (Twitter: @DeanMsft) Tue, 16 Apr 2019 05:00:28 GMT en-US hourly 1 Threat Intelligence: Protecting Yourself Against Cyberattacks https://docs.microsoft.com/archive/blogs/deansuzuki/threat-intelligence-protecting-yourself-against-cyberattacks Thu, 22 Jun 2017 20:22:42 GMT https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/deansuzuki/?p=516

To view the recording of this webcast, click here. Here is a link to a preview that we created. For more information on Office 365 Threat Intelligence, please see the following links:

Threat Intelligence Announcement (here)

]]> Under the Radar: What's New at Microsoft https://docs.microsoft.com/archive/blogs/deansuzuki/under-the-radar-whats-new-at-microsoft Tue, 30 May 2017 22:30:38 GMT https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/deansuzuki/?p=495 Each day, I am blessed to have the opportunity to help our great customers solve their business challenges to achieve more. It seems like everyday Microsoft releases new capabilities and features. In my customer conversations, a common question is: "How do I keep up with all these new features and capabilities?" Thus, the webcast called "Under the Radar" was born. On "Under the Radar", we highlight the top 3 or 4 features that Microsoft recently released that can help you improve your business. You can view the first episode free (here). On this episode, I'm joined by my colleagues from Patriot Consulting (Joe Stocker and Rob Fegan).

]]> Expand Communications Beyond Meetings: Episode 1 https://docs.microsoft.com/archive/blogs/deansuzuki/expand-communications-beyond-meetings-episode-1 Tue, 23 May 2017 23:29:36 GMT https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/deansuzuki/?p=475 Each day, I am blessed to have the opportunity to help our great customers solve their business challenges to achieve more. I have worked with customers who have asked how to enable collaboration for their teams across geographies and timezones. In a traditional meeting scenario, all the participants had to go to a conference room to meet. With Microsoft's collaboration and communications technology, we can expand these possibilities and enable people to collaborate with people around the world easily with our Skype For Business technology. These meetings can include audio, video, and content (Powerpoint, whiteboards, shared computer desktop). To help explain how this works, my colleague, Karan Mehta, and I recorded a video (see here).

Please follow me on Twitter (@DeanMSFT) and subscribe to our MTC Youtube channel (https://aka.ms/mtcyoutube) ]]> Journey To The Cloud (Part 1) https://docs.microsoft.com/archive/blogs/deansuzuki/journey-to-the-cloud-part-1 Thu, 04 May 2017 05:49:26 GMT https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/deansuzuki/?p=455 Each day, I am blessed to have the opportunity to help our great customers solve their business challenges to achieve more.

I was recently working with a customer and they wanted to develop a plan to move the services in their data center to the Cloud. Because of this request and others from customers who are looking into the same question, I asked my teammate, Tom Fuchs (@Tkfuchs), MTC Cloud Architect Extraordinaire, to help me record a video series called "Journey to the Cloud" where we walk through a process of moving the services in your Data Center to the Cloud. We just finished the first part which provides an overview of the "Journey to the Cloud". It can be found on our MTC Youtube channel (here).

In this first episode, we

Set the foundation and describe what is the Cloud and why customers are moving to it.
Lay out the different types of Cloud Services (IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS) and relate it to Pizza (One of my favorite foods).
Outline five steps in moving to the cloud.

We will be recording short videos drilling down into each of the five steps in the upcoming weeks. Stay tuned!

[I also wanted to Thank Our Awesome MTC Studio Team: Kevin Palys for his amazing video wizardry and Karla Ramirez for leading the program planning. Thanks]

]]> Moving your Telephony to the Cloud (Part 2 - Hybrid Voice) https://docs.microsoft.com/archive/blogs/deansuzuki/moving-your-telephony-to-the-cloud-part-2-hybrid-voice Thu, 20 Apr 2017 12:00:15 GMT https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/deansuzuki/?p=435 Each day, I am blessed to have the opportunity to help our great customers solve their business challenges to achieve more. In the previous post, I shared how I was working with a customer to provide telephony in the Cloud with Office 365. These capabilities (Cloud PBX and PSTN Calling) are great if your users are located in the countries that Microsoft provides these services. Currently, Office 365, provides telephony in 5 countries (US, UK, France, Spain, Puerto Rico). As I worked with the customer, they shared that they have offices in Asia. To support the customer's offices in Asia, we proposed a Hybrid Voice Architecture.

With the Hybrid Voice Architecture,

For the users in the countries that Microsoft provides Cloud PBX and PSTN calling, then you can provide telephony to those users entirely from the cloud.
For the users in countries that Microsoft doesn't provide telephony service, we need to integrate with local telephony providers to provide telephony for users in those countries. These users can still be in Office 365. However to provide phone service, we need to connect with local telephony services.

To connect to the local telephony services, we need to place some infrastructure on-premises that will connect Office 365 with the local telephony services. Microsoft provides multiple options to provide this local infrastructure.

Option #1: If you have Skype for Business or Lync 2010/2013 on-premises, then that infrastructure can be leveraged for the Hybrid Voice connectivity. Option #2: You can deploy Skype For Business infrastructure to provide the Hybrid Voice Connectivity. Option #3: Microsoft provides a set of 4 virtual machines that can be loaded onto Microsoft's HyperV environment to provide the hybrid connectivity. [Note, these VM's are currently only available on HyperV] Option #4: Third party partners have built appliances to provide this hybrid voice connectivity. For example, Audiocodes Mediant CCE appliance hosts the Skype Hybrid Voice components as well as interfaces for E1/T1, Analog, or SIP trunk integration. If you would like more information on designing a hybrid voice architecture for your company, please reach out to your local Microsoft team or Microsoft partner and ask for help in designing a Skype For Business Hybrid Voice architecture. I have also listed some additional resources below. Additional Information

Planning Hybrid Voice (here)
Deploying Hybrid Voice (here)
Audiocodes Mediant CCE Appliance (here)

]]> Moving your Telephony to the Cloud with Office 365 https://docs.microsoft.com/archive/blogs/deansuzuki/moving-your-telephony-to-the-cloud-with-office-365 Tue, 18 Apr 2017 12:00:54 GMT https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/deansuzuki/?p=345 Each day, I am blessed to have the opportunity to help our great customers solve their business challenges to achieve more. Recently, I met with a customer who had an aging phone system and they were looking to upgrade their phone system. They wanted to minimize on-premise PBX hardware needed and move to a cloud powered solution to provide telephony for their employees. Solution I sh

ared with them, PSTN Calling in Office 365. Microsoft provides telephony services from the cloud with Office 365. This enables customers to provide telephony for their employees from the cloud with no or minimal on-premise infrastructure required

This service is currently available in 5 countries: United States, France, UK, Spain, and Puerto Rico. Within minutes, you can acquire phone numbers for your employees. Also, you can port your existing phone numbers to Office 365. When users are using Office 365 PSTN Calling, they can make phone calls anywhere with Internet access with their Skype For Business client. If they are in the office, they can make calls and receive phone calls as normal. In addition, if they are working remotely or on the road, they can make and receive calls to their office phone number. This is a great business continuity capability. For example, a while back, the power was out in one of our offices, all our employees worked from home and took their calls from home. Our customers did not know the difference. The customers just called our employees and the call was routed to our employee's Skype For Business client. User can use their Skype For Business client with a variety of headsets. I have worked with headset manufacturers: Plantronics, Jabra, and Sennheiser. Or, if your users want a telephone handset, I have worked with Polycom, Audiocodes, and Yealink.

Polycom VVX 500 (here),

Audiocodes 440HD (here) or

Yealink T48 (here) Additional Resources:

What is Office 365 PSTN calling (here)
Locations where Office 365 PSTN calling is available (here)

]]> Planning Your Network for Exchange in Office 365 (Part 2) - Bandwidth, Latency, TCP Connections https://docs.microsoft.com/archive/blogs/deansuzuki/planning-your-network-for-exchange-in-office-365-part-2-bandwidth-latency-tcp-connections Sun, 16 Apr 2017 04:14:06 GMT https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/deansuzuki/?p=275 Each day, I am blessed to have the opportunity to help our great customers solve their business challenges to achieve more. Continuing on from my prior post: We are discussing the network impact of moving to Office 365 . In this session, we will investigate the bandwidth impact. Before Office 365, my customer's 15,000 users would connect to their on-premises Exchange servers across the LAN. After they transition to Office 365, those 15,000 users would be connecting to their e-mail by going out the customer's network infrastructure over the Internet to Microsoft's Office 365 Data Center. A key question is, "What is the bandwidth required on the customer's Internet connection to support this load?"

(Before moving to Office 365)

(After moving to Office 365) To address this question, I would recommend the following approach

Step 1: Measure the network usage against the on-premise Exchange servers
Step 2: Estimate the bandwidth usage with the Exchange Bandwidth Calculator
Step 3: Move some pilot users to Office 365 and measure the bandwidth

Step 1: Measure the network usage against the on-premise Exchange servers If you have the network diagnostics tools, measure the current network usage against the on-premise Exchange servers. This is going to be a rough estimate because there is client to server traffic, server to server traffic, and server to Internet traffic. You would like to isolate the client to Exchange server traffic and estimate what that utilizaton is. Step 2: Estimate the bandwidth usage with the Exchange Bandwidth Calculator Microsoft has an Exchange Bandwidth Calculator (Overview here ; and Download here) that can help estimate the bandwidth usage of Outlook clients connecting to Office 365. The calculator has 4 tabs.

(Tabs at the bottom of the calculator. Select Input)

(On the Input tab, enter the parameters for your environment) It maybe difficult to determine the various e-mail usage profiles of the user's in your organization. So if this is the case and as a conservative approach, I model all the users in the Very Heavy Profile and focus upon that profile. The key points here are to determine the number of e-mails sent/received each day and profile of meetings for a high profile user in the company. For example, in my sample customer, we modeled a high e-mail user and assumed that all 15,000 users were at that profile. This would yield an estimate that would be more conservative. On the next tab, Client Mix, you add a row for each site and the number of users at that site. Although the latest version of Outlook in the calculator is Outlook 2010, many of my customers are running Outlook 2013 and Outlook 2016. Use the Outlook 2010 setting in those scenarios. OA-Cached stands for Outlook Anywhere Cached mode.

(For my example, I put 15,000 users) After filling in this information, scroll over to the right to see the bandwidth impact

(In my example, the calculator is estimating 82.78 Mbits download and 20.83 Mbits/sec upload Internet bandwidth required. The maximum latency is 320ms. TCP Connections Another key point is 72000 TCP connections is estimated. Need to check your firewall to make sure that it can support the estimated number of connections. For additional information, please review

Network Planning for Office 365 (here), (here)
Microsoft Mechanics video on Office 365 Network Planning (here)
Office 365 URLs and IP Address (here)
Great Ignite 2016 session on Overcoming Network Blockers for Office 365 (here)
Another Great Ignite 2016 session on Plan Performance and Bandwidth for Office 365 (here)

]]> Planning Your Network for Exchange in Office 365 (Part 1) https://docs.microsoft.com/archive/blogs/deansuzuki/planning-your-network-for-exchange-in-office-365-part-1 Fri, 07 Apr 2017 12:00:21 GMT https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/deansuzuki/?p=216 Each day, I am blessed to have the opportunity to help our great customers solve their business challenges to achieve more. I recently was working with a large health insurance provider (15K+ users) and they were looking at moving their email from running on Exchange servers on-premises to Exchange in Office 365. After moving to Office 365, their users will no longer be connecting to their Exchange servers on-premises but will be connecting over the Internet to Office 365 to access their e-mail. This will have an impact on their Internet network infrastructure. So, they were prudently concerned over this change and wanted to discuss how to plan for the change.

Initial State: Outlook Users connecting to Exchange servers on-premise

Next Step: Outlook Users connecting over the Internet to Office 365 [Side note: This is a important consideration for customers looking at moving to Office 365. I would highly recommend meeting with a Microsoft engineer or Microsoft partner who has experience in moving customers to the cloud. Microsoft Premier Services also has a network assessment offering to examine your network for Office 365.] In this blog, I wanted to summarize some of the key things to consider: Outbound web proxy: Do you require all outbound Internet traffic to go through web proxies? Office 365 communication can be severely impacted by requiring it to go through web proxies because of the following considerations

Multiple, Persistent Connections: Most web traffic (browsing the Internet) is short lived connections. However, Outlook opens multiple connections per user and keeps them open (persistent). Many customers' web proxy architecture are not sized to handle the number of connections required when Outlook is moved to Office 365. For example, if a company has 15K users and Outlook opens 3-10 connections per users, then that would be 45K to 150K connections. If the users are on Outlook all day, then those connections would remain open all day. If the web proxy closes those connections, then the user may receive a message pop-up stating that the Outlook has lost connection to the server.
Encrypted Traffic: Communications between the users and Office 365 is encrypted. For example, Outlook, Skype For Business, and SharePoint encrypts traffic from the user's computer to Office 365. Thus, the web proxy won't be able to inspect the traffic passing through it since it is encrypted. One of the key value propositions of a web proxy is to inspect the web traffic. Since the communications is encrypted, customer's won't receive this value from having the Office 365 communications traffic go through the proxy.

Current State: All Internet traffic goes through web proxy

Recommended State: In most scenarios, I would recommend directing traffic that is going to Office 365 to bypass the web proxy. This is part one in this series and will explore other considerations in the upcoming posts. For additional information, please review

Network Planning for Office 365 (here), (here)
Microsoft Mechanics video on Office 365 Network Planning (here)
Office 365 URLs and IP Address (here)
Great Ignite 2016 session on Overcoming Network Blockers for Office 365 (here)
Another Great Ignite 2016 session on Plan Performance and Bandwidth for Office 365 (here)

]]> Enabling Your Conference Rooms for Modern Collaboration https://docs.microsoft.com/archive/blogs/deansuzuki/enabling-your-conference-rooms-for-modern-day-collaboration Thu, 06 Apr 2017 15:47:08 GMT https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/deansuzuki/?p=186 Each day, I am blessed to have the opportunity to help our great customers solve their business challenges to achieve more. Last week, I worked with an great R&D company that was looking to transform their conference rooms to enable collaboration across their many offices. This is a common scenario and in fact, studies have discovered that 97.5% of conference rooms only a projector/display and speakerphone.

To help solve this business challenge, Microsoft has released version 2 of the Skype Room System (SRS). SRS enables customers to plug in their existing projectors/displays and speakerphones. Add a camera. And transform the room into a Skype Meeting Room that enables people in the room to collaborate with anyone on Skype for Business. Since Skype for Business runs on PC, Mac, IOS, and Android devices, it opens up the scope of collaboration from just the people in the conference room to people working anywhere on almost any device. [Also, on my last post, our partner, Citrix, extends the reach of Skype For Business to Linux and even a Raspberry Pi ] The great thing about the Skype Room System (SRS) is that with a single touch, users can join a meeting. One of common pieces of feedback that I get from my customers about traditional videoconferencing systems is that they are difficult to use. With Skype, users just need to tap the meeting on the display to join the meeting.

In the picture below, I have setup the Logitech Smartdock with their ConferenceCam Connect. This is a great solution for small huddle rooms. The Skype Room System can be combined with other cameras to support larger rooms as well.

For more information, please see Skype Room System Technet (here) Logitech SmartDock (here)]]> Running Skype For Business With a Thin Client or on Linux with Citrix https://docs.microsoft.com/archive/blogs/deansuzuki/skype-for-business-with-a-thin-client-or-on-linux Fri, 31 Mar 2017 15:56:29 GMT https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/deansuzuki/?p=156 Each day, I have the opportunity to help our Awesome customers solve their business challenges with Microsoft solutions. A couple weeks ago, a large insurance company asked me how to provide Skype For Business to their agents. They support their agents with a thin client using a Virtualized Desktop Infrastructure (VDI). Fortunately, we can meet this customer's requirements working with our great partner, Citrix. With Citrix solutions, we can provide Skype For Business through thin clients. Another common request that I get is how to provide Skype For Business to users with Linux machines. Again, working with our partner, Citrix, we can provide Skype For Business for people using a Linux desktop. As a result of this requests, I reached out to our friends at Citrix and recorded a webcast showcasing the integration of Skype For Business with Citrix. You can find it here. Also, more information can be found here.

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