Author: directorcia

Office 365 plans – Exchange

The next in a series of blog posts on the differences between the plan offerings in Office 365.

 

Product

1 – Lync

2 – SharePoint

3 – Exchange

4 – Enterprise Suites

5 – Small Business Suite

6 – Office Web Apps

7 – Office 2010 Professional Plus

8 – Kiosk Suites

 

Feature

Exchange Online
Kiosk

Exchange Online
(Plan 1)

Exchange Online
(Plan 2)

Mailbox size

500 megabytes (MB)

25 gigabytes (GB)*

Unlimited**

Outlook Web App
(regular and light versions)

Yes

Yes

Yes

POP

Yes

Yes

Yes

IMAP

No

Yes

Yes

Outlook Anywhere (MAPI)

No

Yes

Yes

Microsoft Exchange ActiveSync®

No

Yes

Yes

Exchange Web Services

No***

Yes

Yes

Inbox rules

No

Yes

Yes

Delegate access

No (cannot access other users’ mailboxes, shared mailboxes, or resource mailboxes)

Yes

Yes

Instant messaging interoperability in OWA

No

Yes (requires Lync Online or Microsoft Lync Server 2010)

Yes (requires Lync Online or Microsoft Lync Server 2010)

SMS notifications

No

Yes

Yes

Custom retention policies

Yes

Yes

Yes

Multi-mailbox search

Yes

Yes

Yes

Personal archive

No

Yes

Yes

Voicemail

No

No

Yes

Legal hold

No

No

Yes

*25 GB of storage apportioned across the user’s primary mailbox and personal archive

**25 GB of storage in the user’s primary mailbox, plus unlimited storage in the user’s personal archive. Refer to the personal archive section of this document for further information regarding unlimited storage in the archive

***Direct access to Kiosk user mailboxes via Exchange Web Services is not permitted. However, line of business applications can use Exchange Web Services impersonation to access Kiosk user mailboxes

 

All subscriptions include organization-wide capabilities such as journaling, transport rules, and premier anti-spam and antivirus filtering via Forefront Online Protection for Exchange.

 

User subscriptions are not required for conference rooms and shared mailboxes. These special mailbox types do not have login credentials—instead, licensed users with the appropriate permissions manage them via delegation.

 

Office 365 Suite E1 = Exchange Online Plan 1

Office 365 Suite E2 = Exchange Online Plan 1

Office 365 Suite E3 = Exchange Online Plan 2

Office 365 Suite E4 = Exchange Online Plan 2

Office 365 Suite P = Exchange Online Plan 1

 

Exchange online has messaging limits (refer to http://help.outlook.com/en-us/140/dd630704.aspx#RecipientLimits). Summary:

 

These limits are applied to every e-mail message.

 

Message size limit   The maximum total size of an e-mail message. The total size includes the message header, the message body, and any file attachments.

Note   An e-mail client may limit the size of an individual file attachment to a value much less than the message size limit. For example, in Outlook Web App, the maximum individual file attachment size is 10 MB.

Limit = 25 MB

File attachments limit   The maximum number of file attachments allowed in an e-mail message. Even if the total size of all the file attachments doesn’t violate the message size limit, there is still a limit on how many attachments are allowed in the message.

Limit = 125 attachments

Subject length limit   The maximum number of text characters allowed in the subject line of an e-mail message.

Limit = 255 characters

Multipart message limit   The maximum number of message body parts that are allowed in a MIME multipart message.

Limit = 250 parts

Embedded message depth limit   The maximum number of forwarded e-mail messages that are allowed in an e-mail message.

Limit = 30 embedded messages

 

Recipient and sender limits

 

Recipient limit   The maximum number of message recipients allowed in the To:, Cc:, and Bcc: fields.

Limit = 500 recipients

Message rate limit   The maximum number of e-mail messages that can be sent from a single e-mail client per minute. The client is identified by the user account.

Limit = 30 messages per minute

Recipient rate limit   The maximum number of recipients that can receive e-mail messages sent from a single cloud-based mailbox in a 24 hour period. After the limit has been reached, messages can’t be sent from the mailbox until the number of messages sent in the past 24 hours drops below the limit. The recipient rate limit applies to messages sent to recipients inside and outside your organization. For more information, see Bulk E-Mail and Daily Recipient Rate Limits.

  • Microsoft Live@edu   Limit = 500 recipients per day
  • Office 365 for professionals and small businesses     Limit = 500 recipients per day
  • Office 365 for enterprises   Limit = 1,500 recipients per day

Installing the SBS Essentials Office 365 module

Microsoft recently announced the open beta of the Office 365 Integration Module for SBS 2011 essentials. In a nutshell this allows you to easily provision and manage your Office 365 accounts from your SBS 2011 Essentials server. It does not provide the ability to do Single Sign On (SSO). It will however provide the ability to sync local account passwords with those in Office 365 PROVIDED the account names are identical.

 

In this post I’ll run through the installation of the integration module on SBS 2011 Essentials.

 

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Once you have downloaded the software to your SBS 2011 Essentials server double click on the file to launch. Select Yes to install the feature pack.

 

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Click on I Accept to accept the license agreement. Remember this is still beta (pre-release) software.

 

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Allow the update to install on your server.

 

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When complete you will need to reboot your server.

 

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When the server has rebooted launch the SBS 2011 Server dashboard. On the front page at the bottom you will see a link Set up Microsoft Office 365 Integration. Click this to continue.

 

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This will run the integration wizard. By default, the wizard will assume that you have not already obtained an Office 365 license. If you do already have an Office 365 license simply click the option I have a subscription for Office 365 at the bottom of the screen before proceeding.

 

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If you proceed without selecting the option indicating you have an Office 365 subscription you will be taken to the page that allows you to select which subscription you may wish to purchase or trial.

 

It is interesting to note here that clicking any of these options takes to a page that runs javascript which can’t normally be displayed in the browser on the server due to security restrictions. Also, it appears that it takes you to an international subscription page for Office 365 which is not how you obtain licenses for Office 365 in Australia for 25 seats and under.

 

Thus, the best advice would seem to be make sure you have already obtained your Office 365 subscription prior to running this module and check the option in the previous step.

 

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If you proceed after checking the option that you already have an Office 365 subscription you will see the above window prompting you for an administrator login for your Office 365 account. Enter the appropriate details and press the Sign in button to continue.

 

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The details will checked and the system configured appropriately.

 

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When successfully complete you should see a screen like shown above. Press the Close button to complete the wizard.

 

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When you now view the SBS 2011 Essentials console you should see an additional Office 365 button at the top right of the dashboard. Clicking this should display a screen like shown above with information about your Office 365 subscription.

 

I’ll more details on how to use the Office 365 Integration Module with SBS 2011 Essentials in upcoming posts. However, remember that it is still beta software and the final product may differ from what is shown here.

Migrating early to Office 365

Here in Australia Telstra is offering existing BPOS customers the ability to upgrade to Office 365 early. Most BPOs customers should have already received an email inviting them to do just that. The first step in the process is to complete the early consent form here:

 

Telstra early migration consent form – www.telstra.com/business/office365consentform

 

There is also information at:

 

www.telstra.com/business/office365migration

 

However, two worthwhile documents that provide checklists on the migration process are:

 

Early Transition Guide – http://g.microsoftonline.com/0rmcm00en-us/5040

Administrator checklist – http://g.microsoftonline.com/0rmcm00en-us/5003

 

Importantly, remember that Exchange Online in Office 365 doesn’t support Outlook 2003. That means that anyone using BPOS with Outlook 2003 will need to migrate before hand. That’s why those checklists are good as they give you things you need to be aware of prior to any migration.

It’s more than that

Recently, I have had so many people contact me and ask how can I make SharePoint “look like a drive letter” or say “I want my users to navigate a whole SharePoint site through Windows Explorer”. It parallels the concept that people want to simply ‘dump’ all their static file share data (which hasn’t probably been touched for centuries) up into SharePoint and use it like a big disk.

No, no, no and NO! If you are going to simply use SharePoint as a storage location for all the ‘crap’ you have on a hard disk then you are much better off with something like Box.net. SharePoint is a collaboration tool, it includes features that static file shares have. To name but a few:

– Check in/check out
– Version control
– Filtering
– Meta data
– Tagging
– Ratings
– etc

Most resellers seem to simply want to ‘dump’ a customers data into SharePoint and run away. These are exactly the same people who bemoan the lack of opportunity and revenue afforded by the ‘cloud’. The idea is to help your customers understand the new features that SharePoint has and help a customer incorporate these into their business, and (shock, horror) get paid a consulting fee to do it!

There is just so much more to SharePoint that people fail to realize. Like any tool you need to learn about to get the most from it. Why do people use < 10% of the functionality of other Office applications like Word, Excel, etc? Because they never venture past the default menu options (that’s why the ribbon interface was invented to try and expose all the features).

Sure you can use SharePoint as a big disk and map it to a drive just like you used file shares back in the 15th century. But hey, how about you actually spend some time and learn what SharePoint (and other Office products) can do and really improve your productivity? It may even help you and your customers get your job done quicker and easier. How novel!

Installing SharePoint Services SP3 on SBS 2008

Here’s a little video I’ve just done on installing Windows SharePoint Services SP3 on Small Business Server (SBS) 2008.

Good business

Here’s an email that Office 365 users in Australia recently received in conjunction with the outage that was experienced in April.

 

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Nothing is perfect and Office 365 is still in its infancy but I for one am heartened to see that the right thing has been done and customers affected have been duly compensated (as Microsoft provides a financial guarantee on its service level agreement). It would have been nice for this to have come out earlier but hopefully it will not need to again.

Who you know


I recently reached what many may believe as only a minor milestone but upon reflection is quite important to me. What was that event? I needed to get more business cards.

Sounds pretty routine but when I stopped and thought about it I realized that it was more significant than I first imagined. It meant that I had managed to hand out my business card to over 1,000 people since the last printing. That’s a lot of people in anyone’s language. Of course it has taken me quite a while to accomplish this but it was much faster than the time before. Why was that? Because I’d learnt a very important lesson.

At my core I’m a technician. I like to build things and solve problem. The issue is in trying to achieve this, other people get in the way. They take away your focus, present you with alternate points of view and generally make things harder. For years I always believed that the better technician I was the more work would come my way as people sought out my superior skills. In some ways this works up to a point but beyond that you need to develop other skills.

The power of any network grows exponentially based on the number of nodes connected. Thus, one fax machine is pretty useless but two connected together start making sense. Continue adding fax machines all connected together and pretty soon they become an invaluable business tool. The same applies with personal contacts. As the old saying goes, ‘it is not what you know, it is who you know’.

Two books that really helped me shape the way I go about networking these days are “The Tipping Point” by Malcolm Gladwell and  “Linked” by Albert-Laszlo Barabasi. In essence, they explain the power of networks and the components that make them up. The challenge was now to start applying those principles to business.

The details of that applications goes well beyond the scope of a single blog post like this. It was the subject of a recent presentation that I gave and I’m happy to pass along a copy of the slides from that presentation IF you connect up with me via Linkedin, Facebook, Twitter, etc.  My main argument is that social networking represents a huge opportunity for everyone’s career, no matter what it is. Opinions from people like Seth Godin, Tom Peters and so on just can’t be ignored and I for one have to agree with the statement that it is the one things that has really propelled my business to the next level.

However, social media for business is not a set and forget strategy. It is something that requires settings goals, monitoring and adjusting but the potential leverage it provides is phenomenal. As with most technologies we find available via the Internet, you can take advantage of the huge value of leveraging independent of the financial resources you have.

My new aim is to get rid of the new pile of business cards I now have in even quicker time. How am I going to do that? Take what I have learnt and ramp it up even more. I’d encourage you to do the same and if you ever want to discuss with me your strategy or how I use social networking to maximum effect, you should by now know how to contact me.