The summer holidays might have got in the way of recording in July, but Jay and I got together this week to record the latest episode of All About 365 with Jay and Steve and this week, we’re talking about the user experience for remote workers accessing Office 365.
The idea for the episode came from the response to the tweet below.
To stress this yet again. If you make your workers VPN into the office, and then go through a proxy server to access #Office365 you are DOING IT WRONG.
— Steve Goodman (@stevegoodman) July 6, 2018
This provoked a response mostly in agreement, but some great points were made about how this can be difficult for some people to achieve. It’s true – some organizations choose to deploy cloud solutions in the same way they’ve deployed on-premises apps in their datacentres. Treating access to SaaS applications like Office 365 as if it’s an employee accessing YouTube isn’t necessarily the best idea, especially if that means remote workers have to VPN into the corporate network before they can do anything and then when they access Office 365, they have to go via a proxy server designed for restricting access to the Internet back in the days when the only time employees accessed services on the internet was on their lunch break (if they were lucky!).
Now, of course – many organizations do have to restrict access to Office 365 and ensure only the right people can access data in their tenant. It’s a common requirement, and a well trodden path a few years ago, prior to wider deployment of multi-factor authentication, Azure AD joined machines, conditional access (and more!) was to make sure devices connected from a known set of IP addresses. That model is one that those who aren’t blessed with the full Microsoft 365 suite is unfortunately one that some are stuck with, so in this episode we talk about some of the potential solutions to this – like using proxy services designed for Office 365 and solutions like Citrix.
To hear us discuss all that and more (it’s a longer episode today!) take a listen. You’ll find Episode 14 above, and at our our podcast site, on iTunes, Spotify, TuneIn Radio, Stitcher and you can subscribe with your favourite podcast app using the feed.
We’ll be recording over the next week and if you are going to Microsoft Ignite you’ll find us recording LIVE three times during the week in the official podcast studio. If you’ve got any suggestions for what you’d like to hear on the next shows, let us know. You’ll find us on Twitter as @SteveGoodman & @jaywynn
