How Post Foods, Bazaarvoice, REA Group and GSMA Closed the Office 365 Identity Gap

There’s no question: Microsoft is making major waves with Office 365. We’ve recently shared insights on the blog highlighting that Office 365 is becoming one of the most commonly deployed apps across our customers. And as we’re talking with more leading enterprises migrating to Office 365, we’ve built some recommendations around addressing the common identity and mobility management challenges associated with Office 365, including tips on how to close the identity gap.

Tip 1: In order to authenticate users to Office 365, you need to first create and maintain their information – and there are a variety of ways to do so with Office 365. We chatted with Simon Thorpe, one of Okta’s resident Office 365 gurus, to learn more about the decision-making process for choosing the right tool for your business.

Simon recommends IT leaders start with a few high-level questions to determine the right tool for each IT environment, which depends on the type of Active Directory environment a business has. Start with these to help you decide which identity tool is the best fit for your business:

1. Is your Active Directory environment fairly simple? Single forest, single domain? If there are multiples of these, are they well integrated together? If so, you can get away with the DirSync family of software. If not, you might need to engage a partner who is an expert in identity management and plan a deployment of MIM.

2. Is the data in your Active Directory consistent? Do most user accounts have email addresses? If you have multiple domains, do users in those domains have a UPN (user principal name) that matches your Office 365 user domain? If so, once again the DirSync family of software should suffice. If not, you’ll need to look at the time to deploy and configure MIM.

3. Does all the information you need in Office 365 come from different places? Do you need to get email address for users from one domain, while their department and title from another? Do you need to get manager information from Workday but the username from Active Directory? Does information about users actually live in an LDAP server? In this case you most likely need to deploy MIM, but Microsoft is adding some features in AADSync over the coming months that might help.

We’ve also gathered a few customers from across the globe to help share next steps and lessons learned in deploying Office 365 across their organisations. Tune in to one of our upcoming webinars – taking place this week and early next – below to learn more about Post Foods, Bazaarvoice, REA Group and GSMA all use Okta to close the identity gap with Office 365:

1. Modern Identity Management: How Post Foods & Bazaarvoice Closed the Office 365 Identity Gap
Wednesday 4/1 at 11am PST | Registration
- Justin Reneau, systems engineer, Bazaarvoice
- Larry Woods, infrastructure solutions architect, Post Foods
- Ed Sawma, director of product marketing, Okta

2. Modern Identity Management: How REA Group Closed the Office 365 Identity Gap
Thursday 4/2 at 11am ACT | Registration
- Damian Fasciani, head of technology, REA Group
- Sean Race, senior sales engineer, Okta

3. Modern Identity Management: How GSMA Quickly Deployed Office 365 to Thousands of Users
Wednesday 4/8 at 11am GMT | Registration
- Kiroopan Maheswaran, senior infrastructure engineer, GSMA
- Chris England, director of business development & marketing EMEA, Okta

Each will cover real-world solutions and customer best practices, as well as an overview of Microsoft's Office 365-specific offerings and common identity and mobility challenges that come with deploying Office 365. And if you can’t catch these sessions live, be sure to visit https://www.okta.com/integrations/microsoft-office-365/#overview for the recorded versions and additional resources.