Blogging comes to Delve

The more I see of Delve in Office 365 the more excited I become. Why? Firstly, Delve is HUGE point of differentiation between Microsoft and its competition. Secondly, it provides powerful yet simple insights for average users into the vast array of information sources they have in Office 365. Delve quickly integrates information from SharePoint, OneDrive, Email, Yammer and more in a single pane of glass and prioritises that based on your interactions. It also allows you to not only view your Delve but the Delve of others in your team to see what they are up to.

Delve is also become the central location for information about you in Office 365. It contains your profile information, who you are and what you do in the business. One of the options that you can now incorporate in your Delve profile, as you can see above is a blog. This new Delve blog features replaces the old one from SharePoint and provide a much easier way of creating and sharing your thoughts.

When you select the Start Writing link, Office 365 will take a minute or two to set up your blogging platform. From what I can see it creates this a dedicated SharePoint Site Collection at:

https://tenantname.sharepoint.com/portals/hub/loginname

In a short order of time your blogging platform is read and you can create your first post. The editing platform is currently very simple (which is great) and very, very reminiscent of the new Office product, Sway (also coming to Office 365 soon). The easier it is, the more likely people will use it. All editing is now done directly in the browser (or the mobile app).

You basically create a title and add a banner. Then you type some text for the body as well as featuring a document from SharePoint that is embedded in your post if desired. This potentially allows you to use more detailed formatting if you need. This is great since if you wanted to be really visual you’d include a PowerPoint or potentially a Sway when it come to Office 365.

You then Publish the post when you are ready and there you have your first blog article.

Posts will now show up in your Delve activity feed, as seen above, that will also be made available to others in your team via the magic of the Officegraph technology that is powering Delve.

One of the big advantages of Delve is that you will be able to blog on the go using the mobile Delve app. As yet I can’t see how to do that just yet, but I know it is coming. So you can be out on the road, snap some pictures, write some text and get that up onto Delve to share with your team. Magic!

To my way of thinking Delve is becoming such an important part of Office 365 because it offers a gateway to unlock the vast treasure trove of information and value that a business creates around all Office 365 services. Having all of that surfaced quickly and automatically for users based on its relevance to them is a huge boost to productivity and collaboration that has never before been available. Combine that with the ability to consume and create content on a mobile device demonstrates to me that Microsoft really does get the concepts of the new way of working, that is social and mobile.

My questions to you however are, do you get it? Are you using Delve for increased productivity? If not why? Delve is the key that unlocks all the power that the complete Office 365 product brings to a business and it is only going to improve. Embrace the new way of working today with Delve.

Farewell to SharePoint Foundation server

Although I spend 99% of my time working with SharePoint Online these days I still have a soft spot for SharePoint Foundation server, give my roots in Small Business Server (SBS).

Microsoft have confirmed a new version of SharePoint Server on premises but as you can see from the above tweet it would appear that the free version (Foundation) is being discontinued going forward. Not surprising really and something I have been telling people for a while.

The solution for SMB clients now is really Office 365 and SharePoint Online. It gives them access to the full enterprise suite of SharePoint at a low per month cost. For bang for you buck, it can’t be matched.

Farewell SharePoint Foundation server and thank you.

Office 365 Site mailbox admin access

SharePoint Site Mailboxes allow you to have a shared mailbox for each user of a Team Site in Office 365.

Previously, you could see all these by going to Outlook Web Access, selecting Settings and then Options and finally Site Mailboxes as it says in this article from Microsoft:

Site Mailboxes

But you know what? When I try that I don’t see the Site Mailboxes as an option on the left hand side any more!

Bummer. So how can you administer these mailboxes if you need to if you can’t do it from Outlook Web Access?

Your first option is to open Outlook on the desktop and then right mouse click your mailbox name at the top of the tree (usually your name or email address). As you can see from the above screen shot that will display a menu and from there you can select the option – Manage All Site Mailboxes.

That will open a browser, prompt you to login to Office 365 and then take you to the my site mailboxes page as shown above. You will see any Site Mailbox you have access to, be able to select and edit its properties.

The second option is simply to login to Office 365 and navigate to:

https://outlook.office365.com/ecp/teammailbox/teammailbox.slab

This will take you to exactly the same page as above.

Thus, if you can’t find the Site Mailboxes option in your Outlook Web Access to administer SharePoint Online Team Site Mailboxes you can use either of the above two methods to get to same destination.

I spoke too soon!

In a previous post I spoke about how Office 2016 preview was available to tenants if you had enabled First Release. I also highlighted the fact that it would be nice to control which users get the latest features rather than everyone.

Well, well. The above video and this blog post:

http://blogs.office.com/2015/05/05/manage-change-and-stay-informed-in-office-365/

details how Microsoft is enabling exactly that! I can’t see that as yet in my tenant but it can’t be far away. If you have the feature this is how to work with it.

Office 365 release options

Just what you need when you need it! Well done Microsoft.

Office 2016 available to first release tenants

The most common method of deploying Office from Office 365 subscriptions is via the Office 365 portal. To do so you select the Cog in the top right and from the menu that appears you select Office 365 settings.

From the options that appear on the left you select Software.

You then see Office 2013 and you select the Install button to kick off the Click to Run install.

BUT, if the tenant has the First Release option enabled and you scroll down a bit you’ll see that you also have the option to install the Office 2016 Preview!

Potential issue here is that if an end user decides to install the Office 2016 Preview then it REPLACES the existing Office 2013 (i.e. no side by side install).

Now Office 2016 is not currently supported by Microsoft (as it says) which may mean it is not a good idea for an organisation. ~~Problem is, I can’t see how to disable this option for end users without turning off First Release (which would remove other features you may want) or disabling Office installs completely.~~

Hopefully, there is a PowerShell command or some option I have overlooked that allows administrators to disable the option for installing Office 2016 Preview. I understand that people on the First Release program want to see the new stuff BUT not sure whether administrators want their users running Office 2016 just yet! At least until it is out of preview.

~~If you know how to disable the Office 2016 Preview option without disabling First Release or Office downloads in general I’d love to hear.~~

Update – I spoke too soon (the ability to control which users get first release features is rolling out as we speak. More in my updated blog post).

More OneDrive information from Ignite

As I mentioned in a previous post, OneDrive news from Ignite, I am very happy to report the goods news revealed about OneDrive for Business. One of these improvements that can’t come soon enough for me is the selective sync as you see in the above screen shot from the session:

I Sync, Therefore I Am: A Deep Dive on OneDrive Sync capabilities and Roadmap

The great thing about this session was some more information from Microsoft but by far was the questions and answers towards the end. It was great to hear so many of the burning questions I’ve had about the sync client asked and then answered. Well worth a listen if you want more answers about OneDrive for Business.

The above screen shot taken from the presentation also gives us some more information around when the next generation sync client will be released.

I am happy now that the roadmap for OneDrive for Business is much clearer and I can’t wait to get my hands on the new sync client.

Stay tuned here to more updates from Ignite.

OneDrive news from Ignite

I’ve been catching up on the sessions from Ignite and one of the sessions I have been most keen to see is:

A File’s Future with OneDrive for Business – BRK2192

Why? OneDrive for Business sync client is currently, probably unfortunately, the weakest component of Office 365. I see a lot of frustration out there with clients when they hit the limits of this application. These can be overcome and minimized with some tuning but the sync software currently doesn’t really support they way many customers believe they should work with the cloud. Most want (inappropriately in my opinion) to sync everything from the cloud to every desktop. Like it or not, that is how they expect to work and at the moment the OneDrive for Business sync client struggles to support this.

As you can see from the above slide the OneDrive for Business team recognise that the sync client basically hasn’t met client expectations and fixing this is currently their highest priority.

(click image to enlarge)

The good news as shown on the roadmap above is that we can expect to see a next gen sync client in Q3 2015 with the final release before the end of the 2015 year.

(click image to enlarge)

The other exciting news is that before the end of the year the currently maximum limit of 20,000 file being synced will be removed, the maximum file size that can be synced will increase to 10GB and selective syncing of files from within a Document Library will be available.

There are a few other sessions on OneDrive at Ignite that I’ll be working through and reporting back what I find so stay tuned. However, I think the news is very positive now for OneDrive for Business in general. Yes, many of the changes coming have been a long time in materialising but the good news is that they will be with us shortly.

The news from Ignite has been very positive and the improvements Microsoft are being to Office 365, Azure and like are truly amazing. I’ll report on more of these as I work through all the content. Kudos also to Microsoft for making the content from Ignite readily available so quickly to review on demand. I certainly wish I could have attended in person but in some ways having access to the on demand content makes it even easier to stay up to date.

To view the sessions from Ignite visit:

https://channel9.msdn.com/Events/Ignite/2015