Technology Archives

Azure Active Directory Identity Management

Microsoft Office 365 is widely used in many organizations. If you are an administrator for your Office 365, you are likely to be familiar with the Admin Center to look at user accounts and monitor activities. But do you know all the account activities were pulled in from Azure Active Directory in the cloud and are only displayed in the admin center? If you've got Dynamics, Exchange, SharePoint, or any of the Microsoft software that is in the Cloud, it's going to be using Azure Active Directory as its Identity Manager in the back end. There are a couple different approaches to manage identity in Azure Active Directory. Identity Sharing- As an admin, you may be familiar with creating Active Directory trust to different organizations, so you can authenticate across organizations or different servers across organizations. However, you don't have that ability with Azure Active Directory. In Azure AD, it's called ...

Red Level2023-02-16T16:01:34+00:00

Michigan Needs to get Incentives Right When Competing for Tech Jobs

Jobs are important - everyone agrees about that. Since technology jobs tend to pay well, add to the tax base, and encourage the creation of even more technology jobs, government officials across the country have gone to some great lengths to attract them to their states or cities. Broadly speaking, there's nothing wrong with that; the investments politicians make in encouraging tech companies to set down roots pay off over time, and communities benefit over the long term as a result. As the saying goes, the devil is in the details - and sometimes the details make all the difference. What happens when an incentive package creates an unequal playing field, placing local business at a disadvantage? What happens when a new corporate arrival proves disruptive to the business ecosystem - say, by driving many existing businesses out of business? Or what if a particular incentive package is just perceived by the public as being ...

David King2023-02-16T16:01:55+00:00

IT- Not Just Infrastructure Solutions and Services

Rethink IT- and Really Put it to Work What does technology do for your business these days? Without a doubt, it does a good job handling a variety of essential, routine functions: record keeping, reporting, communicating. You might ask yourself, though, if it is fulfilling it's potential in actively working for your business-and getting it to do so might require a bit of rethink. Forrester Research has already done a lot of deep thinking about exactly that. They advocate for the title of "Business Technology" (BT) as a replacement for " Information Technology." The idea is that IT no longer simply supports business activities, it has become a vital business activity in itself, and has an essential role to play in winning, serving, and retaining customers. The Forrester "Business Technology Agenda" is Red Level's road map for successfully making that transition. Like all modern companies this requires a shift-from traditional IT infrastructure and services into ...

David King2023-02-16T16:01:57+00:00

TEDxDetroit: One room, 2500 people – and a million great ideas.

How many big ideas, inspiring stories, and cool performances can fit under one roof? I’d have a hard time coming up with a solid answer, but if yesterday’s TEDx at the Fox Theater is anything to go by, the answer is “a lot.” This year, Red Level joined a cross-section of forward-looking area companies—manufacturers, technology firms, venture capitalists, marketing agencies and more - in sponsoring this annual gathering of bright minds and great talents. Amazing new automotive concepts like Elio Motors and musicians and poets like Ahya Simone and Darius Simpson really wowed our audience this year. I’ve been involved with TEDxDetroit for six years, helping to organize each annual event - and, not incidentally, trying to make sure that as many people as possible in our region know about it. I’m happy to say that it’s been working, and working well. 300 people attended the first TEDxDetroit event in a college lecture hall six years ...

Red Level2023-02-16T16:01:58+00:00

Technology Takes The Lead In Detroit’s Rebirth

As we all know, Detroit has taken its share of hard knocks in the last few decades. Not so many people know, though, that Detroit’s resurgence is already well under way. In fact, there is a special group led by my friend @terrybean called 313DLove that is coming together today to celebrate all things Detroit. Technology-based businesses are also helping lead the resurgence of Detroit. Through our sponsorship of the Detroit Regional Chamber’s Detroit Regional Policy Conference 2015, Red Level was able to get a firsthand look at how a host of technology-driven companies are creating jobs and economic growth in Detroit and throughout Southeast Michigan. At the conference, we were able to demonstrate how some of the leading-edge technologies we work with can empower local governments and nonprofit organizations – and we were able to see the important contributions that local universities, organizations, and other companies were bringing to the table. The Chamber describes the Detroit ...

Red Level2023-02-16T16:02:00+00:00

IT: What To Know Before You Grow

Your business is growing? Great. That's always a good thing, right? It is- until you suddenly find that the work you've got on your plate has gone beyond your capacity to perform it. Even boom periods create challenges for upcoming companies. You may suddenly find you need more people, more equipment, and more space to handle that welcome upward trend. But apart from investing in laptops or workstations for new personnel, many companies don't factor in the need for new technology, until the point that they abruptly learn that they need it. The truth is that company can outgrow its tecnology infrastructure in the same way it outgrows its physical premises. What was “just right” for a five-person shop is unlikely to be adequate for fifty, let alone five hundred. While you may be able to get by with a too-small office for a while by having people work at ...

Edward Aube2023-02-16T16:02:00+00:00

Game-Changing Technologies: Here Comes The Next Wave

If you’ve been in the workplace for any considerable length of time, you’ve already seen how technological changes have had the power to rapidly and radically transform the way business is done. No matter your age, chances are a multitude of sweeping changes have already taken place in your lifetime. Some have been immediately and obviously significant and transformative – and others have taken place almost unnoticed. Think about it for a moment: Twenty years ago, fewer than a third of America’s small and medium-sized businesses had adopted email. Your “powerful” new desktop computer – if you had one - probably had eight megabytes of RAM and a 1-gigabyte hard drive. If you sent an email, you probably did it through a dialup connection to America Online or CompuServe. As primitive as these things sound now, they were game-changing technologies and they had enormous ramifications for business. If there’s anything ...

David King2023-02-16T16:02:01+00:00