Office 365: AD FS 2.0, Single Sign-On, and Bandwidth Cost

In preparing my organization for adopting Microsoft's cloud-based solution Office 365, the big topics posed initially are networking, internet bandwidth utilization, and client expectations.  Since we want the client experience to be as user friendly as possible, we will be federating with Microsoft Online.  This will both ease identity management as well as provide single sign-on capabilities for our user base.

In terms of determining our networking and bandwidth needs, I offer the following very helpful links:

Microsoft Remote Connectivity Analyzer

https://testconnectivity.microsoft.com/

 

Plan for Internet bandwidth usage for Office 365

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/hh852542.aspx

 

Lync 2010 and 2013 Bandwidth Calculator

http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=19011

 

Office 365 Fast Track Network Analysis (North America)

http://na1-fasttrack.cloudapp.net

For the SSO strategy employing AD FS and DirSync, I strongly recommend the following MVA (Microsoft Virtual Academy) primer:

Identity Management with Office 365

Then, to get deeper understanding, see the following whitepaper and diagram:

Office 365 Single Sign-On with AD FS 2.0 whitepaper

 

I found that the above really helped the initial planning work.  There is so much more to do, but this should get most folks started.

 

-josetheadmin