Azure Active Directory Guide

I might have mentioned it before, but I’m really stoked by Microsoft Azure and the things you can do with it. The amount of functionality currently present is stunning (granted some of it is in a preview state). Now there are other clouds that can deliver many of the same features, and the basic services like virtual machines can be delivered by pretty much anyone, but the combination of it all… Well, I like it. Both from the developer perspective, and the IT Pro side of things.

I have worked extensively with different Azure teams for the past year and a half, and I have been thinking to myself that I should write down some of my learnings and put it online. There are a lot of good sources on Azure already online, and I don’t want to just repeat the official docs, so it needed to be something more interesting than that. Since the breadth of Azure encompasses a lot of different technologies I’m certainly not qualified to write about everything, and I didn’t want it to be random un-related Azure "stuff" either, so I decided I had to be more focused.

A lot of what I do with Azure in my day job comes back to there being one central foundation for so much of it, and that part is Azure Active Directory. So, how about a guide on Azure Active Directory? I’m sure there are at least five other people than myself interested in that 🙂 The Azure AD teams have a lot of good stuff in the pipeline so I should be able to keep myself busy for a while as it trickles into public previews and eventually GA.

I’ve previously done multi-part series directly on this blog where I’ve maintained an index post, and added different pieces as I’ve went along. If you’re following in an RSS reader it’s very readable and nice, but it doesn’t feel as cohesive as one might like. After all, there is a reason the MSDN library is built in a strict hierarchical manner instead of random rants spread out over time. As such I have set up a separate site for this purpose:
https://aadguide.azurewebsites.net
The "raw" site is on GitHub:
https://github.com/ahelland/AADGuide

You’ll probably prefer the first link, but you can approach it the way you like it.

This does not mean I’ll be abandoning this site yet, even though the posts have become more infrequent, it just felt more right releasing it this way. Visual Studio might not be what you would normally call a blog utility, but I’ve used it as such for building out the initial content 🙂 (All content is written in Markdown.)

I’m not saying everything Azure AD is there yet; after all it is a work in progress, but I’ve written down some starter content and I’m actively working on producing more. You just don’t have an idea how much Azure AD actually includes before you start lining up the articles you’d like to write! The guides will be directed both towards the IT Pro crowd on how to value-add Office 365, Virtual Machines, etc. as well as developer articles on how to integrate apps with Azure AD and use it as an identity back-end.

To start things off I would like to point you in the direction of an article that I originally started out writing as a blog post for this site, but ended up re-working slightly and turn into an entry in the Azure AD guide instead:

Azure AD Join in Windows 10
http://aadguide.azurewebsites.net/aadjoin/

From the enterprise side of things this fills a gap compared to the consumer oriented setup of Windows 8.x, and I find myself liking this feature quite a lot so far.

I hope you like it, and don’t stop giving me feedback or questions in general.

Windows 10–Getting Ready for MDM

One of the big selling points of Windows 10 is the convergence of form factors and “one OS to rule them all” seeing Windows 10 desktop and Windows 10 phone merge together in some way. This started in Windows 8.1 where both device gained support for OMA DM, but there were still slight differences between the two.

With a new OS we obviously want new enterprise features as well, and MDM is also one of the areas where the intention is to go further. I have played around with the Windows 10 technical preview for desktop, and a preview build for phones should be imminent. My intention is to play around with MDM for both of them real soon, as well as other enterprise related features in due time.

While we all get ready for some hands-on Microsoft has updated their documentation:
Preview Specifications:
https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee941641.aspx
CSP reference: 
https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/hardware/dn920025(v=vs.85).aspx

The first link contains a bunch of links to pdfs, and the one’s you’ll want are MS-MDE and MS-MDM.

I’ll get back to you once I’ve got some more details lined up Smilefjes

Sunsetting of EAS MD Online

It feels like forever since I’ve blogged, but maybe that’s just because it’s been like two months since I last posted 🙂

I haven’t been lazing around in the meantime, and I’ve been working on a lot of things, but they haven’t necessarily been stuff that can be blogged about. I hope to get around to things like Windows 10 MDM soon (the necessary bits from MSFT aren’t available yet), and since the Office 365 APIs went GA two days ago I’ll probably take another stab at those in my lab. I’ve also been doing so much Azure lately I don’t know where to start, but I’m still not sure what fits into the theme of my blog in this department.

Anyways, I just though I’d do a quick update on the status of EAS MD Online. The desktop version of EAS MD is alive and well on GitHub in an open source form. The online version is still up there, but it hasn’t been receiving much attention from anyone for a long time. It’s basically just been left there since the cost of running it has been negligible. I have thus made the decision that I will sunset this service, and shut it down at the end of November.

If you have a valid reason why this would cause you pain you’re obviously welcome to shoot me an email, but I can’t guarantee the outcome 🙂