Free 74-324 Exam Voucher offer (AU Only)

I am happy to announce, through the generosity of Microsoft, that I have a limited number of FREE vouchers (valued at over $200) for exam 74-324 Administering Office 365 for SMB. These exam vouchers expire on June 30 so you’ll have to be quick.

To be eligible for a free voucher all you need to do is purchase any of the following items:

– 74-324 Administering Office 365 for SMB Exam Cram notes

– Office 365 bootcamp notes

– Office 365 and SharePoint Guide

Unfortunately, this offer is only available to people within Australia and expires on June 30.

Once you purchase a product, contact me via email (director@ciaops.com) with a date on which you plan to sit the exam and I them provide you with the discount code you can use when you register.

So, if you want to get Office 365 certified before June 30 be quick to take advantage of this offer as free vouchers are limited.

New exam for Office 365 for SMB coming

The current 74-324 Administering Office 365 for SMB will be replaced by a new exam 74-325 Administering Office 365 for SMB in the very near future. This new exam will be based on the latest Office 365 release (Wave 15).

There is a new Jump Start live broadcast covering the new features of O365 & what’s needed to pass the 74-325 (not yet published) exam. This live event will be a demo-rich training targeted for IT Pros on administration of Office 365. Topic will include migration, deployment, Lync, Exchange and SharePoint.

Course Outline

Here’s the link to signup

http://www.microsoftvirtualacademy.com/liveevents/O365-SMB-Jump-Start?CR_CC=200226329

CIAOPS Podcast–Episode 53

In this episode I speak with Microsoft CRM Leon Tribe about how a customer relationship system can improve business operations. We also speak about the opportunity CRM can provide resellers. Also, if you want to learn more about what Microsoft is doing in the CRM space I commend this episode to you.
Leon Tribe – http://www.twitter.com/leontribe
Blog: http://leontribe.blogspot.com
You can listen to this podcast and subscribe to the series at:
http://ciaops.podbean.com/2013/06/04/episode-53-leon-tribe/
You can support this podcast via http://donation.ciaops.com and by visiting our new sponsor PROXPN. Visit proxpn.com/podcast and use the offer code CIAOPS for a 20% discount off your new account.
Don’t forget all the other previous podcasts at
http://ciaops.podbean.com
and appreciate a like over at
http://www.facebook.com/n2kpodcast.
Remember if you want to be a guest please contact me (director@ciaops.com).

Office 365 bootcamp notes now available for purchase

Probably the handiest reference I have created when it comes to Office 365 is my bootcamp OneNote notebook. I am basically in there every day updating and adding information I find about Office 365.

Until now, this notebook was only available to my Guide subscribers and those who attended my bootcamps. It is now however available for purchase directly from the CIAOPS publication page.

The single download zip package includes:

– Office 365 bootcamp notes (55MB)

– 5 supporting Office 365 files and checklists

– 4 x PowerPoint 2010 74-324 exam cram slide presentation decks

– OneNote 2007 74-324 exam cram course notes

The Office 365 bootcamp notebook contains over 100 pages of information, links, how to’s and real world troubleshooting tips. You can view the contents here.

I honestly believe that you’d be hard pressed to find a more comprehensive amount of Office 365 information in a single location. If you are working with Office 365 I’d be surprised if the notebook doesn’t save you time while the supporting files and checklists will make any dealings with customers much smoother.

Don’t forget that if you want access to always update OneNote file you’ll need to subscribe to my Office 365 and SharePoint Guide, which you can do at http://www.wssops.com.

Best blog posts from May

Once a month I take a look back over what I find the most interesting posts from the same month in previous years. Here’s what I found interesting when I delved into the archives.

2012

Doing SharePoint no favours – https://blog.ciaops.com/2012/05/doing-sharepoint-no-favours.html

In this post I highlight how, in my opinion, Microsoft had ‘dumbed’ down SharePoint on the Office 365 P plan far too much. They had left out or hidden many of the best features of SharePoint. Doing that, I didn’t think, would really drive the adoption of SharePoint. I am glad to say things have changed with the new (Wave 15) version of Office 365 and P Plans.

2011

Locked SharePoint site – https://blog.ciaops.com/2011/05/locked-sharepoint-site.html

One issue that does arise with SharePoint sites on premise when a backup fails is that the site becomes locked. This is because it is put into ‘read-only/locked’ mode while the backup is taking place. This post details how to unlock a site after something like this happens.

Erky Perky – https://blog.ciaops.com/2011/05/erky-perky.html

This post details how all updates to SharePoint 2010 need to have a manual command line operation run to complete. If you don’t run this then you are not updating your SharePoint 2010 site.

2010

SharePoint 2010 on SBS 2008 – Yes but why? – https://blog.ciaops.com/2010/05/sharepoint-2010-on-sbs-2008-yes-but-why.html

After a series on posts on how you can get SharePoint 2010 Foundation running on SBS 2008 I step back and look at the business reasons why this is probably not such a good idea.

Sweat – https://blog.ciaops.com/2010/05/sweat.html

Here I look at the fact that success is all about working beyond the average. If you want to improve your physique then you need to exercise. Likewise, if you want to improve your business you need to work hard. Simply doing the same every day leads to mediocrity and places you and your business at risk.

2009

Distractions– https://blog.ciaops.com/2009/05/distractions.html

If you are frustrated that you aren’t getting things done then I would suggest you examine whether you are permitting distractions to syphon you time and productivity away.

Complaint handling – https://blog.ciaops.com/2009/05/complaint-handling.html

Does your business have a formal process for handling complaints? Most businesses treat complaints with contempt, however they are some of the greatest sources of feedbacks and can easily be converted into raving reviews. However, to do this you should have a formal process in place.

2008

Why people don’t use SharePoint – https://blog.ciaops.com/2008/05/why-people-don-use-sharepoint.html

My thoughts on why people don’t use SharePoint and what can be done to overcome this.

The relationship bank – https://blog.ciaops.com/2008/05/the-relationship-bank.html

Dealing with others requires a relationship and in this post I share my thoughts on how you can ensure that your relationships can have greater than normal chance of success.

Some perspective on SkyDrive storage

I’m starting to see people get a little agitated about SkyDrive Pro storage so I thought I’d answer some of the most common queries to provide a little balance to what seems to be a bit of unfair ‘Microsoft bashing’ in my opinion.
1. Some seem to think that SkyDrive consumer (i.e. http://live.skydrive.com) is 25GB of storage. If you sign up today it is actually 7GB, just like SkyDrive Pro. Those that current have 25GB where probably grandfathered when SkyDrive consumer was upgraded a number of years ago. However, if you sign up for SkyDrive consumer today you will only receive 7GB for free.
http://windows.microsoft.com/en-au/skydrive/compare
2. Unlike SkyDrive consumer, SkyDrive Pro does not allow you to purchase additional storage. However, you can purchase additional shared storage for all SharePoint Online plans which you never used to be able to. For example, in in the previous version of Office 365 P plans you couldn’t add storage to SharePoint Online but now you can. Again, and improvement Microsoft has enabled after feedback. I will however point out that although you CAN purchase additional storage for all plans now on some plans it still remains unavailable as I detailed in an earlier blog post:
https://blog.ciaops.com/2013/04/additional-sharepoint-space-for-m-and-p.html
However, I am sure it isn’t far away for those plans.
3. When Microsoft upgraded SkyDrive consumer they looked at how much storage existing users were using and found that 99.94% used less than 7GB:

You’ll find information about the reasoning on this blog post:
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/b8/archive/2012/04/23/the-next-chapter-for-skydrive-personal-cloud-storage-for-windows-available-anywhere.aspx
It is therefore totally reasonable in my mind that SkyDrive Pro should initially be set at the same free limit (i.e. 7GB), given they are also looking to make then consistent under the same brand.
4. In the previous version of SharePoint Online users had 500MB (yes MB!) of personal storage for only the Enterprise plans. The version of Office 365 increased that to 7GB for EVERY user on EVERY plan. That is and increase of 1,400% in one upgrade!
5. Microsoft is still in the process of upgrading existing users from the previous version of Office 365. This a HUGE under taking across large numbers of users in large numbers of countries. I am sure they are going to offer the ability to upgrade storage capacity for SkyDrive Pro but please allow them to at least get everyone on the same platform!
6. It is hard for me to understand how multiple users in an organization can have > 7GB of personal files unless they are large images or videos. In that case I would be saying that should that information REALLY be saved into SkyDrive Pro? if such users REALLY needed to have everything in the cloud I would be suggesting using SkyDrive consumer for things like large static images and videos and SkyDrive Pro for Office documents. You can run both quite happily together on a desktop and have information syncing to both locations if desired.
7. To me the biggest limitation of SkyDrive Pro and SharePoint Online is the current 250MB maximum file size rather than the 7GB SkyDrive Pro limit. SkyDrive Pro consumer is 2GB per file in comparison, however I expect Microsoft to raise the limit for SkyDrive Pro and SharePoint Online in the very near future.
Again, remember, if needed you can generally add to SharePoint Online shared storage so if you REALLY wanted those large files in SharePoint Online, and users already have 7GB in SkyDrive Pro, simply purchase additional shared storage and secure it with standard SharePoint security so only required users can access.
Conclusion
So in summary, yes having the option for additional SkyDrive Pro storage, beyond 7GB, would be nice but I’m sure it isn’t too far away. However, this is not really a limiting factor when looking at SharePoint Online as there are alternatives and work-arounds.

Guide discount only lasts till end of May

The birthday discount on my Office 365 and SharePoint Guide only lasts until the end of May (that’s less than 7 days now). After that it will return to its normal price.

So if you have been considering purchasing the Guide remember to read this post to get the details and discount codes:

https://blog.ciaops.com/2013/05/office-365-and-sharepoint-guide-turns.html

Linking social network contacts in Office 365

These days people have most of their personal contacts in social media accounts like Linkedin and Facebook. The good thing about many Microsoft products these days is that they provide the ability to link to these. This is also the case for Office 365.

If you login into your Office 365 portal and select People from the menu across the top.

In the lower left you’ll find a link Connect to social network. Press this.

You should now see a list of social networks you can connect to. Elsewhere I have seen Facebook also appear in this list but for some reason I am only seeing Linkedin on my tenant.

Press the Connect link.