HOW TO: Build an Intranet with SharePoint Modern Sites (Part One)

July 27, 2018
SharePoint logoWith the wide variety of updated features available through Office 365, organizations can now create robust, beautiful intranets right out-of-the-box. In contrast to SharePoint classic sites, SharePoint modern sites have a clean interface, are responsive and adaptive to mobile devices, and offer significant performance improvements.

In the past, many intranets were built as a single large site collection with multiple levels of sub-sites underneath. The modern infrastructure can be flatter, with each department as its own site collection, but connected together through a SharePoint hub site.

Key features of a modern hub site — which make it an ideal starting point for an intranet — include:

  • Cross-site navigation:  consistent top navigation among associated sites
  • Content roll-up:  aggregated news and content among associated sites
  • Consistent look-and-feel: a common theme / branding for associated sites
  • Scoped search:  search content within associated sites

Now let’s walk through the process of creating a new, modern intranet in SharePoint. (Note that for the sake of length and readability, we’ll be publishing this process in three parts here on the blog. The entire guide will be available as a handy download, however, once the series has concluded!)

To start, create a new SharePoint site using a modern communication site design.

Creating a new SharePoint site

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#AzureGovMeetup Recap: Best Practices for IT Governance in the Cloud

July 26, 2018
One of the biggest roadblocks to government digital transformation is the lack of effective IT governance. Unresolved concerns including privacy, security and organizational silos that limit data sharing and analysis continue to pose hurdles for agencies.

Last night’s Azure Government Meetup in Washington, D.C. featured a stellar lineup of industry-leading experts who shared insights and strategies on achieving effective IT governance in areas including identity, portfolio and records management.

If you missed it, you can catch the replay here.  Read More…

How to Enable TLSv1.2 in Jenkins for SMTP 

July 20, 2018
Jenkins logoA few months ago, we worked with a client to migrate websites from on-premises to Azure. As part of this migration, Jenkins was set up to do the Continuous Integration/Continuous Delivery. During the initial setup, we checked out Jenkins email notifications and they were working fine with their internal mail server.

One fine day, an email comes from the client stating that emails from Jenkins were not coming at all. Well, that’s strange…

The Diagnosis

I like troubleshooting quite a lot and the rule of thumb is to first ask what changed? While the initial diagnosis was going on, the client mentioned that their network team made upgrades to the mail server and now only TLSv1.2 & TLSv1.1 were supported. Earlier, Jenkins sent email using SSL. (Yep, you guessed it right…using the -Dmail.smtp.starttls.enable=true parameter.) Read More…

AIS Wins 2018 Microsoft US SI of the Year at #MSInspire

July 17, 2018
Microsoft US SI of the Year Award at Microsoft Inspire
AIS won the 2018 Microsoft US SI of the Year award for Azure Performance at Microsoft Inspire in Las Vegas. The award recognizes AIS’ work in Azure consumption values, as well as our success as the #1 United States Co-Sell Partner in the Microsoft Co-Sell Initiative. With over $26 million in Azure consumption and over $12 million in total contract value, AIS assisted Microsoft in retiring over $1 million in Azure goals.

Microsoft generated more than 11,000 co-sell wins with partners like AIS during the past 12 months, equating to roughly $5 billion in contract value through the channel. The figures are the result of Microsoft’s newly-formed One Commercial Partner (OCP) roll-out, designed to drive deeper collaboration between internal direct sellers and partners.

Microsoft described the OCP-driven co-sell program as the “largest sales transformation” in decades.

“In less than a year, AIS partnered with the OCP team to conceive and deliver our co-sell offerings with market-leading results,” said Larry Katzman, AIS Vice President of Marketing and Sales. “We leveraged our Cloud Adoption Framework, which is a collection of services we’ve delivered multiple times while helping our clients adopt Azure. We also included our Legacy Modernization offerings.”

AIS will be expanding our co-sell offerings to include our Office 365 and Dynamics 365 adoption programs in the coming year,

“Congratulations to the OCP Team and the AIS Marketing and Sales Teams for turning the OCP vision into a reality so quickly,” said Tom O’Connell, AIS Managing Partner. “This is only the beginning. We built a solid pipeline and see even better results in FY19.”

AIS Team Members Accepting Award

2018 Microsoft US SI of the Year Award

We can do this for you too! Check out our service offerings here.

What is Azure Data Lake? An Introduction to the service & related data questions

July 13, 2018

Azure Data Lake logoFirst Things First…What’s a Data Lake?

If you’re not already familiar with the term, a “data lake” is generally defined as an expansive collection of data that’s held in its original format until needed. Data lakes are repositories of raw data, collected over time, and intended to grow continually. Any data that’s potentially useful for analysis is collected from both inside and outside your organization, and is usually collected as soon as it’s generated. This helps ensure that the data is available and ready for transformation and analysis when needed. Data lakes are central repositories of data that can answer business questions…including questions you haven’t thought of yet.

Now.. What is Azure Data Lake?

Azure Data Lake is actually a pair of services: The first is a repository that provides high-performance access to unlimited amounts of data with an optional hierarchical namespace, thus making that data available for analysis. The second is a service that enables batch analysis of that data. Azure Data Lake Storage provides the high performance and unlimited storage infrastructure to support data collection and analysis, while Azure Data Lake Analytics provides an easy-to-use option for an on-demand, job-based, consumption-priced data analysis engine.

Now that we’ve established what Azure Data Lake is, let’s take a closer look at these two services and where they fit into your cloud ecosystem.
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