Bill Baer /bɛːr/

_Everything you can imagine is real. _ **-Pablo Picasso ** Last week at Microsoft Ignite we continued to build on the momentum of our 2018 SharePoint Conference in May - sharing the latest news, announcements, and investments we’re bringing to SharePoint Online as your intelligent and engaging intranet in Office 365. In addition to delivering innovation to bring you an intelligent and engaging intranet, we’re also continuing our journey to introduce a new dimension to your intranet through SharePoint spaces.

Innovation in the cloud drives tremendous business value, and it delivers new capabilities to the IT professionals who work tirelessly to support, configure, administer, and secure their organizations’ content and services. Office 365 empowers you to support sophisticated requirements for security and compliance, to manage day-to-day operations, and to maximize the value of Office 365 to people in your organization. We’ve built Office 365 with global scale, exceptional reliability, and support for compliance across industries and geographies on top of intelligent security that keeps your service and content protected and private, we give you granular and dynamic controls so that you can manage access and distribution of your organization’s sensitive information.

Join us at the SharePoint Virtual Summit, for the live-stream coverage of the opening keynote at SharePoint Conference North America on May 21, 2018. At this free online event, you will hear from Microsoft Corporate Vice President Jeff Teper and General Manager Seth Patton as they share the latest product innovations and roadmap across SharePoint, OneDrive, Yammer, Microsoft Teams, and Office 365. See live demos illustrating how you can transform your workplace and learn how to tap into rich experiences across your intranet to inform and engage people.

Last month we announced open beta for the next generation of the SharePoint Migration Tool with new capabilities to include support for SharePoint Lists, programmatic destination site creation and more. Today we’re pleased to announce this version (v2) of the SharePoint Migration Tool is now generally available. The SharePoint Migration Tool is designed to simplify your journey to the cloud through a free, simple, and fast solution to migrate content from on-premises SharePoint sites and file shares to SharePoint or OneDrive in Office 365.

Attending SPCNA? Come learn about hybrid scenarios with SharePoint and Office 365 in a post-conference workshop. As an attendee of the workshop you’ll receive a $500.00 Azure Pass, a complete SharePoint Server 2016 environment and an Office 365 Tenant that you can use to build your skills and complete hands on labs, both while at the workshop and even after the event. If you’ve already registered for the conference you can add the workshop to your registration by creating a new workshop-only registration at http://sharepointna.

In March 2017 we introduced device-based policies for SharePoint and OneDrive, that enable administrators to configure Tenant-level policies. Device-based access policies for SharePoint and OneDrive help administrators ensure corporate data is not leaked onto unmanaged devices such as non-domain joined or non-compliant devices by limiting access to the content to the browser, preventing files from being taken offline, printed, or synchronized with OneDrive. On September 1st, 2017 we continued to evolve our conditional access investments to address the ever-changing security landscape and business needs by introducing new levels of granularity with conditional access that allow administrators to scope device-based policies at the site collection level.

Security is at the heart of what we do… Microsoft has been building enterprise software for decades and running some of the largest online services in the world. We draw from this experience to keep making SharePoint and OneDrive more secure for users, implementing and continuously improving security-aware software development, operational management, and threat-mitigation practices that are essential to the strong protection of your services and data. Today we’re pleased to announce a new resource center where you can get the latest news on our security and compliance investments for SharePoint and OneDrive in addition to presentations, free training, eBooks and more.

In January we announced General Availability of our SharePoint Migration Tool [https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/SharePoint-Blog/General-Availability-of-the-SharePoint-Migration-Tool-amp/ba-p/143689], designed to simplify your journey to the cloud through a free, simple, and fast solution to migrate content from on-premises SharePoint sites and file shares to SharePoint or OneDrive in Office 365. Based on our continuous learning and experience from Microsoft FastTrack and feedback from you, we’re pleased to announce new capabilities available in the SharePoint Migration Tool through our new open beta.

In May 2017 we unveiled our plans [https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/SharePoint-Blog/Introducing-the-new-SharePoint-Admin-Center/ba-p/70294] to simplify SharePoint administration through delivering an administrative experience that’s intuitive, intelligent, and simple. Since then we’ve made available the new admin experience as Preview for customers who have enabled Targeted Release at the Tenant level. In the next several weeks in our preview we’ll be introducing new updates on our journey to deliver an administrative console designed to help IT achieve more, so their users can achieve more.

When it comes to security your best line of defense is one that is reactive versus one that is proactive; however, how do you know how you’ll respond to a security incident if one hasn’t yet to occur…that’s where Attack Simulator in Office 365 shines, it’s what sets the security solutions we provide apart from other cloud services. Attack Simulator is designed to put you ahead of curve and keep you in front of the proverbial 8 ball.