Month: March 2014

Office 365 ProPlus Click-To-Run updates

Carlos A Lopez (Twitter: @CLopezDC) Office365 ,

By default, Microsoft Office 2013 products deployed via Click-to-Run are kept up to date automatically. Click-to-Run will automatically check for updates in the background.

Each Click to Run release has a new version number. Users can find their current version by following these steps:

  1. Open any Office application
  2. Click on the File tab
  3. Click on Account (Office Account in Outlook)

The Click-to-Run version is displayed in the Click-to-Run Product Updates section.

Each user’s machine will apply the updates which are applicable to their Office product. If your version of Office does not contain an application, you will not receive updates to that application.

Interested in deploying multi-factor authentication for your business? It is now part of Office 365

Carlos A Lopez (Twitter: @CLopezDC) DirSync, Exchange, Exchange Online, Office365 ,

Multi-factor authentication is now part of Office 365 and available for all users. Any of the following may be used for the second factor of authentication.

  1. Call my mobile phone. The user receives a phone call that asks them to press the pound key. Once the pound key is pressed, the user is logged in.
  2. Text code to my mobile phone. The user receives a text message containing a six-digit code that they must enter into the portal.
  3. Call my office phone. This is the same as Call my mobile phone, but it enables the user to select a different phone if they do not have their mobile phone with them.
  4. Notify me through app. The user configured a smartphone app and they receive a notification in the app that they must confirm the login. Smartphone apps are available for Windows Phone, iPhone, and Android devices.
  5. Show one-time code in app. The same smartphone app is used. Instead of receiving a notification, the user starts the app and enters the six-digit code from the app into the portal.

For more information about Multi-Factor Authentication for Office 365 please read the TechNet article Multi-Factor Authentication for Office 365

Is your on-premise exchange availability higher than Office 365?

Carlos A Lopez (Twitter: @CLopezDC) Exchange, Exchange Online

during my past positions and while I was supporting and maintaining infrastructures, I was always concerned about meeting the internal SLA and keeping track of the uptime and availability of the services.

Office 365 is just making our roles in the IT shop a lot easier. It is well-know that Microsoft is investing heavily in its SaaS offering, and they invest deeply in infrastructure upgrades to ensure a highly available service to Office 365 tenants.

Microsoft had released information that measure availability as the number of minutes that the Office 365 service is available in a calendar month as a percentage of the total number of minutes in that month. Microsoft called this measure of availability “the uptime number”. Within this calculation Microsoft included their business, government and education services finding the subsequent worldwide uptime number for Office 365 for following quarters:

  • Q3 – 2012: 99.98
  • Q4 – 2012: 99.97%,
  • Q1 – 2013: 99.94%
  • Q2 – 2013: 99.97%

I need to clarify that based on Microsoft documentation it is possible that individual customers may experience higher or lower uptime percentages compared to the global uptime numbers depending on location and usage patterns.

Just take a look on what ITIL Availability percentages really means for a 24/7 services.

Availability %

Downtime per year

Downtime per month*

Downtime per week

99%

3.65 days

7.20 hours

1.68 hours

99.50%

1.83 days

3.60 hours

50.4 minutes

99.80%

17.52 hours /

1051.2 minutes

86.23 minutes

20.16 minutes

99.9%

(“three nines”)

8.76 hours /

525.6 minutes

43.2 minutes

10.1 minutes

99.95%

4.38 hours /

262.8 minutes

21.56 minutes

5.04 minutes

99.99%

(“four nines”)

52.6 minutes

4.32 minutes

1.01 minutes

99.999%

(“five nines”)

5.26 minutes

25.9 seconds

6.05 seconds

99.9999%

(“six nines”)

31.5 seconds

2.59 seconds

0.605 seconds
99.99999% (“seven nines”)

3.15 seconds

0.259 seconds

0.0605 seconds

After seeing this data, let’s think for a minute which processes do we have in place to guarantee the SLAs of our service delivery and answer the question, is your on-premise exchange availability higher than Office 365?