Earlier today we held the Junely (June Meeting but held July 2nd) Office 365 International User Group meeting. It was very well attended, at the high mark had over 40 attendees, love seeing more and more people attending each month! Next meeting would love to see 100+ attendees!
We kicked off the meeting talking about WPC (World Partner Conference) next week as well as doing a quick poll on Wave 15 upgrade status. Overall more people responded they have already been upgraded or have been notified about the upgrade that no information at all. Also several comments were made about the upgrade process went pretty smooth for them, this is good news and sounds like Microsoft is getting this process down!
Next up, Martina Grom (@Magrom) and Jethro Seghers (@Jseghers) gave a recap of TechEd Europe that happened last week. Martina commented on her interaction with some of the Yammer Technical experts and how they are working on bringing Yammer into SharePoint as the newsfeed replacement and other highlights from the conference. Jethro mention he focused on Intune at the conference and did a bunch of networking. Both Martina and Jethro talked about the Surface RT/Pro special pricing at TechEd and liked the way they did the ordering and shipping the devices. One drawback was the offer was only available for 12 countries, not covering all attendees.
Martina continued on as the next presenter talking about her company’s new application they have developed, http://www.delegate365.com/. This is a very very cool application that they have developed. The application is a website that allows companies to delegate Office 365 User and Exchange Online administrative functionality. This can be done much more granularly then with the included Role Based Administration. Delegation can be placed at several areas including OU, Domain and Location. All is done from the application website and does not grant the delegated admins any elevated privileges in the standard Office 365 portal. Use the link above to check out this great tool!
I had to then follow-up the great presentation my Martina and her team, tough duty! I presented about the new DirSync with Password Sync and Dual-Authentication (Two-Factor) available with Office 365 and Windows Azure Active Directory (WAAD). My presentation went pretty good, was able to show the majority of what I wanted, the demo gods were not completely on my side, but I managed to get through it ok. If you want to read more about DirSync with Password Sync and Dual-Authentication follow the links to my blog posts.
The meeting ended with some lively discussions on various topics from Lync Online PowerShell, Office Pro Plus installs and administration, upcoming conferences and several other topics. All around, like I said earlier, a great meeting!
Here is the recording of the meeting in case you missed it!