SMB Ignite stuff, and other news

Big week here at ITProMentor.com.

Ignite is happening, so that’s always fun. Currently hanging out with the Re365 crew to watch the keynote this morning!

My own Ignite session, which I recorded with Microsoft’s David Bjurman-Birr, is also live now, and posted in a few places, but most notably ebedded within this TechCommunity blog, which is a complimentary written practical guide to leveraging Microsoft 365 to help meet the CIS Basic Controls. I also launched my school this week, SquareOne Security, which goes into deeper detail on the same topic, especially helping Small and Mid-sized businesses, and the Service Providers who serve them, to better secure their apps and infrastructure leveraging these important cloud-based management tools.

Also up on the blog today is a piece of news that I have been trying very hard to keep quiet (as I have been participating in a co-design process): Microsoft 365 Lighthouse–which, as you can probably guess, is similar to Azure Lighthouse (the long-awaited multi-tenant view for Microsoft 365 management)!

And closely related to this, we can now look forward to having some Microsoft Defender data available in the Microsoft 365 Business Premium subscription. We have been wanting this for a long time, to make Defender a viable replacement for traditional third-party AV solutions which all provide centralized feedback. Of course, once we have the multi-tenant view featuring this threat information, it will be even more attractive to the IT Providers who manage multiple customers. This should be available in tenants sooner than the Lighthouse dream, which is still in earlier stages of development. For more SMB content from Ignite (there is a lot of it this year) see here: https://adoption.microsoft.com/virtual-hub/smb-firstline-industry/

This is all still early days here, but it shows that Microsoft has been listening, and they are committed to making Microsoft 365 Business Premium the go-to cloud solution for the SMB.

In other ITPM news, the Microsoft 365 Business Premium Migration & Configuration Guide is now available in German! How crazy is that?! This actually happened last month, but I didn’t get a chance to announce it. Well, better late than never. And I gotta tell you, it’s even better than the (current) English version. A big Thank You to Thomas Stensitzki, a fellow MVP, for pushing this thing to the next level! Moving forward, this guide will be a team effort as we keep it up-to-date with the latest features and changes. As well, we will work to get this out on Kindle and print (similar to the German edition). More to come on that, later.

Have a good week at Ignite, everyone!