Interesting Vulnerability in Office 365

Stumbled across this interesting link today regarding Microsoft Office 365, http://adallom.com/blog/severe-office-365-token-disclosure-vulnerability-research-and-analysis/

Its expected that all software has inherent flaws as its impossible to code for every possibility without many iterations. The scary aspect of this problem though is that as organisations move towards Cloud based solutions for storing business critical and sensitive data, the likelihood of data being stolen increases dramatically. 

The 'Old World' corporation stored data within their own organisational boundaries, this in itself added a 'castle wall' where a hacker had to get past the corporate firewall before security could be breached. even exploiting a credential did not necessarily mean a hacker had access to any data.

Vulnerabilities will continue to be found and exploited of many years to come (just look at patches for the software and OS versions we all use everyday) and possibly there is a case for storing sensitive intellectual property within the companies walls.      

Single Label Active Directory configuration

Its recently come to light that many of the new Microsoft products will not support configuration in a Single Label Active Directory (SLD), this configuration is where Active Directory domains and DNS name is simply named ‘Customer’ rather than ‘Customer.Com’ or ‘Customer.local’ - this is a fairly common practice for older Active directory implementations where the AD design may not have followed best practise.

  

The following products don’t work well/at all with an SLD

·         Microsoft Lync server, does not support SLD’s http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2379369/en-us

·         Microsoft Exchange 2010, supports currently but does not like SLD’s http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2269838/en-us

Renaming the SLD to a proper namespace will not work, Migration solutions like the ones from Quest Software are the only valid way to migrate a non conformant SLD domain into one that will be supported with modern Microsoft server products http://support.microsoft.com/kb/300684/en-us, as many Microsoft server products will not function after a domain name change to fix the above problem.  

At the current time there is no solution to this issue other than to use a Migration solution such as Quest Migration Manager for Active Directory.

With the release of Windows 2008 R2, Microsoft have prevented the creation of Single label Directories which will help in the future http://technet.microsoft.com/de-de/library/ee681710(WS.10).aspx.

Microsoft RIP KIN, you never really lived

On techcrunch today you may see that the Microsoft KIN is to die shortly, 'She' never really lived, was a Smart phone without apps on an expensive data contract. Microsoft, your competitors are eating your lunch.
http://www.mobilecrunch.com/2010/06/30/microsoft-puts-down-the-kin/

Microsoft Bing vs Google

Microsoft Bing was released recently to limited fanfare, some tech sites raved about the quality of results while others had a more of a ‘We’ll see’ attitude. Interesting is that Google appears to be very worried about Bing, not ‘just’ standard worried but really very concerned http://www.tgdaily.com/content/view/42847/140/ and I understand why; http://blindsearch.fejus.com/ runs comparative searches across Google Search, Bing and Yahoo and the results are very interesting; the site results are anonymous though it is an Microsoft employees web page.

The searches I ran gave one vote for Bing and one Yahoo and none for Google, which leaves me wondering what formula Microsoft has finally got right in their search algorithms. Onsite with customers earlier this week I had the opportunity to see other IT professionals using Bing search and augmenting the results with a Google search for comparison so Bing is making its way across the tech community.

Personally I believe Microsoft have not got the UI sorted yet, Google search is basically a text search page and contains no distraction, the images decorating; Http://www.bing.com don’t appeal to me, but then Microsoft have a history of over the top images and colours. I prefer the bland Google experience as I go to search - I know exactly where the search box is.

I find the Google search window to be less intrusive, I am not sure of the reasons but the Bing search frame below, jumps out as not being ‘Clean’. The feeling to me as a layman seems to be that Bing is pushing me somewhere (There is no advertising), odd?

Maybe the background image will become Prime advertising real estate, Coca-Cola anyone?

Sort your product out Microsoft?

Finished reading an article on Microsoft and their new free virus scanning software, which is about to come out of beta and realised its just another case of a behemoth company that has no idea of marketing and brand.

Link is here: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/8095932.stm and in this article Microsoft are talking about the discontinuation of Live OneCare, a Microsoft product that didn’t succeed against Symantec. History is littered with Microsoft technology that doesn’t succeed, yet, time after time Microsoft will try and build a product after x iterations. Microsoft pushed into online markets and search in the 90’s starting with their Microsoft Network, which became MSN, then Live Search and now Bing. Where did that strategy get them? they weren’t fast enough and didn’t understand the market, letting Google capture the search and ad market. Interestingly their loyalty scheme where the vendor and customer get discounts by shopping through adverts, didn’t seem to work either to buy market share from Google.

For a company the size of Microsoft, branding and direction must be difficult, but, humans and especially not the technology led iterations, get used to familiarity, using Yahoo mail or AOL mail because thats the mail client they are used to, rather than move to a better mail solution for example.

Same with favorite web sites, people use Google for search because its familiar and we know what the page will look like every time. When Microsoft come out with a new and improved search, they just wasted the 100s’ of millions of dollars used for marketing their last search brand and its not getting them closer to Google. Google is part of the vocabulary of almost every single human on this planet and it is all because their search was nice and simple, returns relevant results and doesn’t change every two years. Will Bing be part of the internet vocabulary in two years time? lets wait and see - I will wager that there is still a branding change to come, Zune maybe?

A company has to have key proficiencies - this is where all marketing, development and research focus should be placed, not throw money at a challenge to make it work, which incidentally is exactly how Microsoft has made the Xbox 360 as successful as it is.

A straight-out flawed product that MS executives knew was faulty at the time of release - fixed by throwing $ 3 billion US at repairs, if only all companies could be this grossly inefficient and still succeed eventually with customers continuing to support them by buying their products.

The way Microsoft market and sell leaves much opportunity for 3rd party vendors to move in and improve what MS does, but the position is not a comfortable one as MS will always build anything that looks profitable once they have viewed the sales of their niche partners, fair enough - its all competition but generally what MS will build is no match for a third party product and their marketing spin will still shutdown customer spending until Microsoft are ready, ILM 2.0?, Microsoft Systems Center Virtual Machine manager, Microsoft VDI broker etc.