We’re almost one day into the new year and this is usually the time people look back at the past year and make their comments. As I have my piece coming up on TechTarget shortly, I will save you from doing it here! However, I do want to look forward a bit and tell you about some of the (cool) things I’ve been working on (which is also why it’s been a little more quiet on my blog these past few weeks…).

First of all, starting my new job at ENow has kept me quite busy. There’s always a learning curve when starting at a new place and I certainly had to learn a lot (still have to). As a result, I haven’t had as much time for writing as I would have liked. On the other hand, I’m pretty sure that the “Configuring and Managing Exchange Server 2013 High Availability” ebook has had its hand at why I have not written as much as I usually try to do. Nonetheless, I have prepared some things which I hope to be releasing in the next few days and weeks. Here’s a little teaser:

1. I am working on a comparative analysis of several 3rd party identity federation solutions that work with Office 365 (such as e.g. Celestix and Orka). It is not my intention to determine which one is better than the other, instead I wanted to talk about what each service/manufacturer does and how it works with and relates to Office 365 (and maybe walk you through the basic configuration). Given that Identity Management is a big part of the work I do with Office 365, I found this might be useful! Next to the aforementioned vendors, I also hope to include solutions from Ping Identity and OneLogin so that I cover a little more ground. Unfortunately I cannot cover all solutions that exists, but if you think I should take a look at another solutions, feel free to shoot me an email! If time permits, the first part should be available before the end of this week.

2. 2014 was definitely a year in which “Cyber Security” has had a lot of attention… More specifically, there have been a lot of “breaches”, the last one being the story of how Sony got attacked and sensitive information got leaked –apparently via email. Together with some other MVPs, I will be building a set of articles to discuss how these events relate to Exchange and how you can “harden” your Exchange environment. Even though Exchange is considered (and it is) to be “secure out of the box”, there are some additional steps you could take –IF your organization requires it. However, if you decide to take additional steps, it’s even more important that you do things right. And that’s the sweet spot we’re aiming for.

Lastly, I’m happy to announce that 2015 start off quite well. Earlier today I was presented with the MVP-Award for the third time in a row. I would like to take this opportunity to thank you guys for supporting me by reading my articles and interacting through comments. I look forward to many more interesting talks in the coming year!

Michael