Archive
Microsoft and AzureCon delivers! Love it! – #Azure, #AzureCon, #EnvokeIT, #IoT, #SaaS, #PaaS
I really love the way that Microsoft and Azure delivers! It’s so amazing with all the PaaS and SaaS offerings they now have on top of the traditional IaaS delivery. There is no other cloud provider out there that delivers anything near it! I’m amazed and so happy to be a part of this journey!
If you didn’t have the time to look at AzureCon you have a lot of great videos and topics to go through!!
Here is a short overview of the many great things released and presented:
- General Availability of 3 new Azure regions in India
- Announcing new N-series of Virtual Machines with GPU capabilities
- Announcing Azure IoT Suite available to purchase
- Announcing Azure Container Service
- Announcing Azure Security Center
Watching the Videos
All of the talks presented at AzureCon (including the 60 breakout talks) are now available to watch online. You can browse and watch all of the sessions here.
Announcing General Availability of 3 new Azure regions in India
Yesterday we announced the general availability of our new India regions: Mumbai (West), Chennai (South) and Pune (Central). They are now available for you to deploy solutions into.
This brings our worldwide presence of Azure regions up to 24 regions, more than AWS and Google combined. Over 125 customers and partners have been participating in the private preview of our new India regions. We are seeing tremendous interest from industry sectors like Public Sector, Banking Financial Services, Insurance and Healthcare whose cloud adoption has been restricted by data residency requirements. You can all now deploy your solutions too.
Announcing N-series of Virtual Machines with GPU Support
This week we announced our new N-series family of Azure Virtual Machines that enable GPU capabilities. Featuring NVidia’s best of breed Tesla GPUs, these Virtual Machines will help you run a variety of workloads ranging from remote visualization to machine learning to analytics.
The N-series VMs feature NVidia’s flagship GPU, the K80 which is well supported by NVidia’s CUDA development community. N-series will also have VM configurations featuring the latest M60 which was recently announced by NVidia. With support for M60, Azure becomes the first hyperscale cloud provider to bring the capabilities of NVidia’s Quadro High End Graphics Support to the cloud. In addition, N-series combines GPU capabilities with the superfast RDMA interconnect so you can run multi-machine, multi-GPU workloads such as Deep Learning and Skype Translator Training.
Announcing Azure Security Center
This week we announced the new Azure Security Center—a new Azure service that gives you visibility and control of the security of your Azure resources, and helps you stay ahead of threats and attacks. Azure is the first cloud platform to provide unified security management with capabilities that help you prevent, detect, and respond to threats.
The Azure Security Center provides a unified view of your security state, so your team and/or your organization’s security specialists can get the information they need to evaluate risk across the workloads they run in the cloud. Based on customizable policy, the service can provide recommendations. For example, the policy might be that all web applications should be protected by a web application firewall. If so, the Azure Security Center will automatically detect when web apps you host in Azure don’t have a web application firewall configured, and provide a quick and direct workflow to get a firewall from one of our partners deployed and configured: Read more…
Finally – Citrix Workspace Cloud is GA! – #Citrix, #WorkSpaceCloud, #DaaS, #SaaS, @EnvokeIT
This is something that we at EnvokeIT have been trying out for quite a while and really enjoy, it’s a great service that will simplify a lot for many service providers and customers. Contact us at EnvokeIT if you have any questions or if you need assistance on your journey to the cloud!
Now your business can take advantage of Citrix Workspace Cloud, the fastest and easiest way for IT to enable business productivity with secure apps, data, device management and more.
I’m pleased to announce the general availability of Citrix Workspace Cloud, the industry’s simplest way to build and deliver a complete workspace without compromise.
Now, you can easily combine virtual apps and desktops, mobile apps and device policies and data – securely delivered from any cloud or infrastructure you choose – whether on-premises, off-premises or both in a hybrid model.
Workspace Cloud is Revolutionary
Over the past 18 months, the team has been busy engaging with customers, partners, industry analysts, media, Citrix Technology Professionals, ISVs and alliance partners around the world as we built Workspace Cloud.
The general reaction has been consistent: Workspace Cloud is unlike anything else and comprehensively addresses the biggest challenges in workspace management.
The cloud-based management and control plane accelerates deployments. The choice of infrastructure locations provides the flexibility partners and customer’s demand, and the comprehensive set of workspace services that are always up to date ensure you can meet the broad set of IT use cases.
A single unified, global, and multi-tenant SaaS platform to create complete workspaces
People do their best work when they have immediate access to their work resources – the people, apps, and files they need at any specific moment or context.
While other vendors offer a ‘workspace’ that is nothing more than virtual desktops offered in their own cloud, Workspace Cloud makes it easy to deliver a people-centric, modern workspace located on-premises, off-premises or both in a hybrid model.
Easily compose workspaces containing apps, desktops, mobile and data. Workspace management allows you to use existing corporate Active Directory domains to add, remove or change the resources from one place once and on-demand – everyone and every resource in the workspace is updated.
Stay in control and retain choice for your infrastructure and cloud selections
Want to run your contractor applications out of Amazon, your productivity apps in Azure to be near their Office 365 data, and desktops on-premises? No problem. Workspace Cloud provides the only solution that allows you to select the best infrastructure combinations based on economics, performance, existing capacity, sovereignty, and expertise. This means the selection can be made on a per-service basis. This choice extends not only to your applications and desktops, but also to your data.
Workspace Cloud accelerates deployment and management through a SaaS-based control plane and securely communicates with your infrastructure through a simple cloud connector. Driven by a simple stateless, zero-touch management architecture. After a simple installation the connector is ready to provision resources, enumerate users from Microsoft Active Directory domains, and launch session requests.
Comprehensive portfolio of workspace services available as a subscription
Workspace Cloud subscriptions contains services that address the core use cases customers face every day and are available today. Start with one offering but easily add more based upon your expanding business needs.
The core services we’re announcing today include:
- Applications and Desktops Service – Deliver secure virtual apps and desktops to any device, and leave the product installation, setup, configuration, upgrades and monitoring to Citrix based on industry-leading XenApp and XenDesktop technology.
- Mobility Service – Provide cloud-based, comprehensive enterprise mobility management (EMM) — including mobile device management (MDM), mobile application management, and enterprise-grade productivity apps — for a secure user experience on BYOD or corporate devices based on XenMobile technology.
- Secure Document Service – Meet the mobility and collaboration needs of employees and the data security requirements of the enterprise with this secure enterprise file sync and sharing service based on ShareFile technology.
- Lifecycle Management Service – Accelerate and automate the design, deployment, and ongoing management of Citrix enterprise workloads with comprehensive lifecycle management. The service provides standardized, repeatable automation technology with a catalog of blueprints – assembled scripts that capture configurations, settings and other complex details into a single repeatable solution. Read more about this new technology here.
Continue reading more here!
//Richard
See how Citrix XenDesktop for Linux looks – #Citrix, #XenDesktop, #Linux, #EnvokeIT, #BYOD, #DaaS
This is one of the coolest things a part from the Workspace Cloud service that Citrix is working on. I’ve had the pleassure of trying this out and we at EnvokeIT have been doing a lot of tests of this Linux VDA tech preview.
Isn’t it great that both Microsoft and Citrix now seem to love Linux 🙂 (and yes, I manipulated these images so it’s not an official Citrix statement!)
So this little blog post is just going to show of the capabilities and how nicely this integrates with the Citrix XenDesktop architecture. First of all I’d like to say thanks to my colleagues Björn Bekkouche and Peter Smali for letting me use their lab environment!
Before we get into showing how it works and looks I must just highlight that if you have any questions about how we can assist you to deliver Linux-based Terminal Servers or VDI’s to remote users in a secure and optimal just contact us at EnvokeIT here or pop me an email: richard at envokeit.com.
This is great for all of you with Developers on Linux! Have them code from anywhere in a secure manner! They can run their Linux VDA in your datacenter, connect to it from an Receiver compliant device and code from them and you have your intellectual property secured internally instead of having them checking out Git repositories to their local devices etc.!
So what is XenDesktop for Linux? Well, to answer that really simple I assume that you have some basic knowledge of the Citrix XenDesktop architecture.. if you don’t then please read up on that a little before continue reading, one really good contribution to bulding your architecture is described in this Citrix Virtual Desktop Handbook or this Citrix XenDesktop – Blueprint. These contains a lot of valuable information that you shall think of and how to configure the environment to fulfill you use cases.
But overall think of the XenDesktop architecture of something like the following pictures (click to enlarge them). The first one shows the new model where we could run and take care of the VDA’s ourselves on-premise but leverage the Workspace Cloud service from Citrix so that we don’t anymore have to bother about the XenDesktop infrastructure components and the life-cycle management etc. of those. The second one is the more overall traditional architecture overview that you’d see of the different layers.
And as you see above this details the standard architecture wher you would have your Server or Desktop VDA’s in the resource layer hosting the desktops for your users to connect to, but they have all been Windows-based up until now!
Now with the Tech Preview we can actually install the Linux-based VDA on a Red Hat or Suse machine and access that through the SAME Delivery Controllers and StoreFront stores that also manage our Windows-based VDA’s.
And this is awesome! 🙂 We can leverage the already existing Windows-based architecture to just “hook in” our Linux-desktops as well and get users to conect through Receiver for Web, Receiver and even through the NetScalers if you need (works like a charm!!).
So as you can see here we have a nice little landing page for our entry points that are running different versions and access different environments etc.
So we have Peters entry point running one NetScaler version and theme: Read more…
Magic Quadrant for Enterprise File Synchronization and Sharing – #ShareFile, #Citrix, #EMC, #Box, #Microsoft
It’s not new but it’s something that I discussed the other day with a customer; who is the market leader when it comes to “corporate dropbox” solutions for enterprises? Gartner did update the Magic Quadrant for Enterprise File Synchronization and Sharing services/solutions and it’s a good read I must say.
You know I am a Citrix fan and a like their story and think that they from an overall virtual workplace offerings are far superior to the other players if you look across the stack from providing “legacy” services like Windows Apps and Desktop, Enterprise Mobility Management capabilities and all the network capabilities to provide the end-to-end service delivery. So it’s really nice to see that they are picking up in the ability to execute and are competing with EMC in the Leaders box!
I just hope that Citrix can stay int he lead and ensure that they price and capacity wise stay in synch with the up comers that are starting to offer really large storage capacity as a part of their cloud offerings. I still see that the capabilities and features of ShareFile are really great, and in some aspects others like Box, Microsoft and others are coming with nice features as well. So let’s see who will rule this market, but currently I think that ShareFile is a really strong player for enterprises but Microsoft will continue to grow and I just wish they add the additional features around security etc that enterprises often require so they can go into the bigger companies as well.
Source: Gartner (July 2014)
Market Definition/Description
This document was revised on 14 July 2014. The document you are viewing is the corrected version. For more information, see the Corrections page on gartner.com.
EFSS refers to a range of on-premises or cloud-based capabilities that enable individuals to synchronize and share documents, photos, videos and files across multiple devices, such as smartphones, tablets and PCs. File sharing can be within the organization, as well as externally (e.g., with partners and customers) or on a mobile device as data sharing among apps. Security and collaboration support are critical capabilities of EFSS to address enterprise priorities.
Beyond file synchronization, sharing and access, EFSS offerings may include different levels of support for:
- Mobility, with native apps for a variety of mobile smartphones, tablets, notebooks and desktops, as well as Web browser support.
- Security, for protection of data on the device, in transit and in cloud services (or servers), such as password protection, remote wipe, data encryption, data loss prevention, digital rights management (DRM), access tracking and reporting. Mature products ensure that files leaving the sharing location are DRM-encrypted and only readable by those authorized to access the data. Audit and compliance support are also present in complete products.
- Administration and management, including integration with an Active Directory and Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP) policy enforcement.
- Back-end server integration, e.g., with SharePoint and other corporate platforms. Integration is achieved through connectors (e.g., based on the Content Management Interoperability Services [CMIS] standard and APIs).
- Content manipulation, such as file editing, PDF annotations and note taking.
- Collaboration, such as cooperative editing on a shared document using change tracking and comments; and document-based workflow process support.
- Simplicity and usability, with optimized UIs and interactions, such as file drag and drop and file open in applications.
- Storage, i.e., cloud-based EFSS services often include cloud storage as part of the bundle to implement the EFSS repository. Software EFSS products, instead, may integrate with repositories on-premises or be implemented with a separate repository on-site.
Typical architectures for EFSS offerings are:
- Cloud: Corporate files are accessed via mobile devices, or shared and are stored in the provider’s cloud. Organizations that want to replace the personal cloud services adopted by employees with an enterprise-class alternative under IT control, while preserving the user experience and enhancing mobile collaboration, prefer the cloud method.
- On-premises: The remote access, synchronization and sharing component is deployed on-premises and integrates with corporate data repositories, without file replicas. This method is preferred by organizations under strict regulations about data storage.
- Hybrid: The user and device authentication, security and search mechanisms are implemented in the provider’s cloud. Files and documents are kept in their original location, or can be in third-party clouds. Organizations that want to simplify mobile users’ access to corporate data through the cloud, without creating data replicas in someone else’s cloud, prefer the hybrid method.
There are two types of EFSS offerings:
- Destinations — Stand-alone products with file sync and share as a core capability, which represents a new purchase for an organization.
- Extensions — File sync and share capabilities added, and wrapped around established products or applications — e.g., for collaboration, content management or storage. Organizations can use extensions as part of the broader platform (see “Destinations and Wraparounds Will Reshape the Enterprise File Synchronization and Sharing Market”).
Continue reading here!
//Richard
#VDI Calculator v5 is Now Available with Major New Features – #IaaS, #Storage, #BYOD via @andreleibovici
This is awesome! Great work by @andreleibovici!
I am happy to announce the General Availability of the new VDI Calculator v5. This new version is the single biggest release since I started delivering the calculator. I have completely re-architected the way the calculator works, allowing multiple types of desktops to be configured in a single calculation for a single solution.
All existing features have been retained and will work in the exact same way you are used to, but you now have the ability to select different options for different types of desktops or desktop pools.
As an example, you may choose Desktop Type 1 to be a ‘student’ desktop using Linked Clones with 10 different pools; conversely you may choose Desktop Type 2 to be a ‘professor’ desktop using Full Clones with 5 individual pools. This new calculator gives you much more granular control over your calculations eliminating repetitive tasks when sizing larger environments.
To enable multi-desktop pool calculations just select ‘-’ and ‘+’ in the top bar menu.
Another additional feature is what I call ‘Ask for Help‘. During the application session when you select the Update option a new screen will show up asking if you would like to be contacted by VDI solutions vendors that can help reduce costs, improve performance or improve manageability of your VDI solution. If you are interested…
Continue reading here!
//Richard
#XenMobile Mobility promotion from #Citrix – #EMM, #BYOD, #XenDesktop
XenMobile mobile device management (MDM) or enterprise mobile management (EMM) capabilities for the price of Software Maintenance!
Personally I wonder if this is a move triggered by VMware’s acquisition of AirWatch where Citrix now is kind of pushing it’s MDM solution out the door to really get some more market, and at the same time push VMware to give their new MDM capabilities away together with Horizon View…
This is an interesting and good action, thank you Citrix!
XenApp and XenDesktop Platinum Mobility Promotion
Promotion effective From January 31, 2014 to September 30, 2014
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The XenApp and XenDesktop Platinum Mobility Promotion is a limited-time promotion that offers new or existing XenApp or XenDesktop Platinum customers with perpetual licenses current on Subscription Advantage (SA) the ability to receive FREE XenMobile MDM edition licenses or get 20% off XenMobile Enterprise licenses with the purchase of first year Software Maintenance for all licenses obtained via this promotion. For either XenMobile promotion options, the maximum number of discounted licenses customers can purchase is based on the total number of XenApp and XenDesktop Platinum licenses owned. XenMobile MDM edition provides key device-level security capabilities for users accessing XenApp and XenDesktop desktops and apps on mobile devices. The mobile device management (MDM) solution lets you:
XenMobile Enterprise edition supports the next step in your EMM strategy by complementing the device-level security capabilities of XenMobile MDM edition with app-level security features. These include:
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Continue reading here!
//Richard
#Amazon WorkSpaces – “#VDI” cloud service – #VDI, #BYOD
This is an interesting offering from Amazon! I however don’t like that everyone talks about the “VDI” concept all the time.. this is based on Windows server with Desktop Experience and not a client OS.
Amazon WorkSpaces is a fully managed desktop computing service in the cloud. Amazon WorkSpaces allows customers to easily provision cloud-based desktops that allow end-users to access the documents, applications and resources they need with the device of their choice, including laptops, iPad, Kindle Fire, or Android tablets. With a few clicks in the AWS Management Console, customers can provision a high-quality desktop experience for any number of users at a cost that is highly competitive with traditional desktops and half the cost of most virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) solutions.
WorkSpace Bundles
Amazon WorkSpaces offers a choice of service bundles providing different hardware and software options to meet your needs. You can choose from the Standard or Performance family of bundles that offer different CPU, memory, and storage resources, based on the requirements of your users. If you would like to launch WorkSpaces with more software already pre-installed (e.g., Microsoft Office, Trend Micro Anti-Virus, etc.), you should choose the Standard Plus or Performance Plus options. If you don’t need the applications offered in those bundles or you would like to use software licenses for some of the applications in the Standard Plus or Performance Plus options that you’ve already paid for, we recommend the Standard or Performance bundles. Whichever option you choose, you can always add your own software whenever you like.
| WorkSpaces Bundle | Hardware Resources | Applications | Monthly Price |
| Standard | 1 vCPU, 3.75 GiB Memory, 50 GB User Storage | Utilities (Adobe Reader, Internet Explorer 9, Firefox, 7-Zip, Adobe Flash, JRE) | $35 |
| Standard Plus | 1 vCPU, 3.75 GiB Memory, 50 GB User Storage | Microsoft Office Professional 2010, Trend Micro Anti-Virus, Utilities (Adobe Reader, Internet Explorer 9, Firefox, 7-Zip, Adobe Flash, JRE) | $50 |
| Performance | 2 vCPU, 7.5 GiB Memory, 100 GB User Storage | Utilities (Adobe Reader, Internet Explorer 9, Firefox, 7-Zip, Adobe Flash, JRE) | $60 |
| Performance Plus | 2 vCPU, 7.5 GiB Memory, 100 GB User Storage | Microsoft Office Professional 2010, Trend Micro Anti-Virus, Utilities (Adobe Reader, Internet Explorer 9, Firefox, 7-Zip, Adobe Flash, JRE) | $75 |
All WorkSpaces Bundles provide the Windows 7 Experience to users (provided by Windows Server 2008 R2). Microsoft Office 2010 Professional includes Microsoft Excel 2010, Microsoft OneNote 2010, Microsoft PowerPoint 2010, Microsoft Word 2010, Microsoft Outlook 2010, Microsoft Publisher 2010 and Microsoft Access 2010.
#Windows #Azure Desktop Hosting Deployment Guide – #RDS, #BYOD – via @michael_keen
This is great! Have a look at this guide!
Hello everyone, this is Clark Nicholson from the Remote Desktop Virtualization Team. I’m writing today to let you know that we have just published the Windows Azure Desktop Hosting Deployment Guide. This document provides guidance for deploying a basic desktop hosting solution based on the Windows Azure Desktop Hosting Reference Architecture Guide. This document is intended to provide a starting point for implementing a Desktop Hosting service on Windows Azure virtual machines. A production environment will need additional deployment steps to provide advanced features such as high availability, customized desktop experience, RemoteApp collections, etc.
For more information, please see Remote Desktop Services and Windows Azure Infrastructure Services.
Continue reading here!
//Richard
Organizational Challenges with #VDI – #Citrix
And yet another good blog post by Citrix and Wayne Baker. This is an interesting topic and I must say that the blog posts still goes into a lot of the technical aspects, but there are more “soft” organisational aspects to look into as well like service delivery/governance model and process changes that often are missed. And as Wayne also highlights below and that’s worth mentioning again is the impact on the network that also was covered well in this previous post: #Citrix blog post – Get Up To Speed On #XenDesktop Bandwidth Requirements
Back to the post itself:
One of the biggest challenges I repeatedly come across when working with large customers attempting desktop transformation projects, is the internal structure of the organisation. I don’t mean that the organisation itself is a problem, rather that the project they are attempting spans so many areas of responsibility it can cause significant friction. Many of these customers undertake the projects as a purely technical exercise, but I’m here to tell you it’s also an exercise in organisational change!
One of the things I see most often is a “Desktop” team consisting of all the people who traditionally manage all the end-points, and a totally disparate “Server” team who handle all the server virtualization and back-end work. There’s also the “Networks” team to worry about and often the “Storage” team are in the mix too! Bridging those gaps can be one of the areas where friction begins to show. In my role I tend to be involved across all the teams, and having discussion with all of those people alerts me to where weaknesses may lie in the project. For example the requirements for server virtualization tend to be significantly different to the requirements for desktop virtualization, but when discussing these changes with the server virtualization team, one of the most often asked questions is, “Why would you want to do THAT?!” when pointing out the differing resource allocations for both XenApp and XenDesktop deployments.
Now that’s not to say that all teams are like this and – sweeping generalizations aside – I have worked with some incredibly good ones, but increasingly there are examples where the integration of teams causes massive tension. The only way to overcome this situation is to address the root cause – organizational change. Managing desktops was (and in many places still is) a bit of a black art, combining vast organically grown scripts and software distribution mechanisms into an intricately woven (and difficult to unpick!) tapestry. Managing the server estate has become an exercise in managing workloads and minimising/maximising the hardware allocations to provide the required level of service and reducing the footprint in the datacentre. Two very distinct skill-sets!
The other two teams which tend to get a hard time during these types of projects are the networks and storage teams – this usually manifests itself when discussing streaming technologies and their relative impacts on the network and storage layers. What is often overlooked however is that any of the teams can have a significant impact on the end-user experience – when the helpdesk takes the call from an irate user it’s going to require a good look at all of the areas to decipher where the issue lies. The helpdesk typically handle the call as a regular desktop call and don’t document the call in a way which would help the disparate teams discover the root cause, which only adds to the problem! A poorly performing desktop/application delivery infrastructure can be caused by any one of the interwoven areas, and this towering of teams makes troubleshooting very difficult, as there is always a risk that each team doesn’t have enough visibility of the other areas to provide insight into the problem.
Organizations that do not take a wholesale look at how they are planning to migrate that desktop tapestry into the darkened world of the datacentre are the ones who, as the project trundles on, come to realise that the project will never truly be the amazing place that the sales guy told them it would be. Given the amount of time, money and political will invested in these projects, it is a fundamental issue that organizations need to address.
So what are the next steps? Hopefully everyone will have a comprehensive set of requirements defined which can drive forward a design, something along the lines of:
1) Understand the current desktop estate:
Microsoft is progressing quickly! – SkyDrive Pro updated to 25GB and improved sharing – via @BasvanKaam
I must say this once again, Microsoft looks to be on the right track when it comes to getting back as one strong supplier of services in the future/present “BYOD” world. As I wrote in my post #Microsoft – On the right track! – #Windows, #BYOD, #Citrix now Microsoft is actually targeting to solve many of the gaps that we see with today services for BYOx scenarios. For instance how to manage what you want on top of the device (Azure, Intune, SkyDrive, Work Folders etc…) in a controllable fashion and not a full managed device that costs you a fortune to manage… and ShareFile, Box and others are great solutions that have many features that SkyDrive doesn’t have. But there is one thing that they all lack (or please enlighten me!!):
Encryption at rest on Windows, OS X and Linux OS’s/distributions, here all providers are leaning on that you already have hard drive encryption like BitLocker etc. But who manages that then? Can you then say that your service is “BYOD-compliant”? I wouldn’t say so… It’s not only SmartPhones and Tablet devices that we loose… but here Microsoft and SkyDrive may be the first to come with encryption on at least Windows 8.1 devices and somewhat manageable…
But again back to the announcement from Microsoft and SkyDrive:
Microsoft announced today that it is giving business users more storage space and a better way to share files across multiple devices. As first reported by TechCrunch, through its SkyDrive Pro accounts, employees will now receive 25GB of storage to start out with, a sharp increase from 7GB — and even this capacity can be increased to 50GB or even 100GB. Additionally, using SkyDrive’s Shared with Me view, users can share files with their friends and co-workers securely and in real-time.
According to Microsoft Senior Product Managers Mark Kashman and Tejas Mehta, the new storage space limits will be available for both new and existing customers.
This certainly makes the service standout among its competitors, namely Dropbox and Box. It was only about a week or so ago when the latter heralded in the launch of a new pricing plan aiming to increase the number of small businesses using its service. For personal users, Box also wound up doubling the amount of free storage they received.
Here’s how you can figure out the overall storage for each user:
With Office 365, you get 25 GB of SkyDrive Pro storage + 25 GB of email storage + 5 GB for each site mailbox you create + your total available tenant storage, which for every Office 365 business customer starts at 10 GB + (500 MB x # of user(s)1).
While Dropbox, Box, and Hightail certainly are some of the popular services out there today, SkyDrive isn’t something to be trifled with either. Through its integration with the Surface, Windows Phone, and other Microsoft products, along with iOS and Android devices, it has the potential to be a very powerful service.
As for the new sharing feature, just like you would perhaps see in Google Drive or any other cloud storage service, SkyDrive Pro is now offering a Shared with Me view that lets you take a shared document and view, edit, re-share, download, and more — all as if it were in your own storage bin.
But Microsoft isn’t stopping there, as it is adding several minor, but interesting enhancements to SkyDrive. The company has also increased the overall file upload limit to its SharePoint Online service to 2GB per file. Files placed into the recycle bin will now remain…
Continue reading here!
//Richard
The IT Melting Pot! 