SharePoint (and Project Server) Shenanigans

I am a Project Server and SharePoint consultant but my main focus currently is around Project Server. I have been working with Project Server for nearly five years since 2007 for a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner in the UK, I have also been awared with the Microsoft Community Contributor Award 2011. I am also a certified Prince2 Practitioner. This article has been cross posted from pwmather.wordpress.com (original article)

The last day of the Microsoft Ignite conference I lined up three sessions, one on why trust Microsoft Enterprise cloud with your data, the next session was on auditing in Office 365 and the final session before we make our way home back to the UK was the Project Online / Project Server support.

The session on Office 365 and why trust Microsoft is a big topic and one with split views, Microsoft are working very hard to make customers data secure and also make the customers know their data is secure. There is lots of information on how Microsoft do this and the compliance standards etc. here: http://bit.ly/1ALekfP. I believe the data is probably more secure in the Microsoft cloud than it is in your own network – obviously there would be some exceptions to this for government / highly secure sites etc. Also a key take away from that session was that it isn’t the cloud that isn’t secure, it is the devices that the end users use each day (connecting to on-prem or cloud). Microsoft do monitor unusual activity from devices and make this information available to the admins.

The second session was on auditing options in Office 365. This covered the compliance center, the audit activity reports, the API available to for activity management and the centralised compliance auditing store. All the work Microsoft are doing around auditing shows how seriously they are taking security and how they are making this data available to admins.

The final session of the day was the Project Online / Project Server support session by Brian Smith. This was a great session and gave good insights on how the Project escalation engineers support project. Brian blogged about this session earlier: http://bit.ly/1zKFsR6

Time for me to head to the airport now to head home back to the UK. It’s been a great week here in Chicago with lots of things to understand and digest. Top marks for Microsoft, a great conference 🙂