Windows Explorer and modern SharePoint interface

One of abilities that I thought Microsoft had removed from the new or ‘modern’ SharePoint interface was the ability to open a document library using the Windows Explorer file manager. Turns out that feature is still available as you can see from the above image.

You’ll find View in File Explorer option in the top right of a Document Library under the All Documents option. However, as with the previous Open in Explorer option, it is only available if you are using Internet Explorer. The reason it doesn’t appear in other browsers is because it uses an Active X control.

When you select the option a new tab will open in a browser and you’ll see the ‘classic’ interface.

A few moments later the Document Library will open in Windows Explorer as you can see above. You can now drag and drop files directly into the library using Windows Explorer as you could previously.

So the ‘trick’ to opening a Document Library with Windows Explorer using the new SharePoint interface is to once again use Internet Explorer and then select View in File Explorer from the All Documents option in the top right of the library.

Anonymise Office 365 report information

Office 365 has recently added a huge number of detailed reports you can access from the Office 365 Admin portal. You not only get graphical information over time but you also get detailed user information as you can see above from an email activity report.

However, let’s say that you want to see the trend of this information without the specific user details. That is, we want to see the information but we don’t want to see which individual user this applies to. Can we anonymise the reports?

With Office 365 you sure can. Here’s how.

Go to the Settings option in your Office 365 Admin console.

Select Services & add-ins from the menu that appears as shown above.

Scroll down the screen until you locate the Reports option and select that.

Turn On the option to anonymise the data at the top of the screen and then select Save.

You’ll see the message confirming this change and also letting you know that it may take a few minutes for the anonymised data to flow through to the admin reports.

Select Close to continue.

After a short while, if you again look at the details of the Office 365 reports you’ll see that users now appear as simply a random string. Now someone can view the reports without resorting to finger pointing!

Need to Know Podcast–Episode 115

Newly crowned Microsoft MVP and I speak with MVP Grant Paisley about Power BI. Grant shares with us his insight into this Microsoft tool that can be used to analyse just about any sorts of data to give you a visual dashboard of information quickly and easily We also cover the latest updates from the Microsoft Ignite conference and all the changes that are happening in the Microsoft cloud.

You can listen to this episode directly at:

http://ciaops.podbean.com/e/need-to-know-podcast-episode-115/

or subscribe via iTunes at:

https://itunes.apple.com/au/podcast/ciaops-need-to-know-podcasts/id406891445?mt=2

The podcast is also available on Stitcher at:

http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/ciaops/need-to-know-podcast?refid=stpr

also now on Soundcloud at:

https://soundcloud.com/marcy-marc-2/episode-115-grant-paisley

Don’t forget to give the show a rating as well as send us any feedback or suggestions you may have for the show.

Resources

@angrykoala– Grant Paisley

@marckean – Marc Kean

@directorcia – Robert Crane

Angry Koala

Microsoft Power BI

Corey Sanders at Ignite

Bulk Ignite session downloader 1

Bulk Ignite session downloader 2

Microsoft Ignite

Microsoft Ignite on demand

Microsoft Ignite YouTube channel

Introducing the Office 365 launcher

Microsoft Staff Hub for deskless workers

New OneDrive Preview sync client

OneDrive announcements

Answering common questions with Office 365 Part 3

This is the third article in a series of typical customers questions around Office 365. These questions were part of presentation I did with two other resellers at the Australian Microsoft Partner Conference in 2016. You’ll find the first part of the series here:

Answering common questions with Office 365 Part 1

Answering common questions with Office 365 Part 2

The question for this article is:

My team has to manage a lot of documents for a lot of clients and we have trouble working effectively with this information when you also combine it with data from email and other sources. How can Office 365 be used to allow my business to be more effective with the information we are producing?

There are so many ways that this question can be answered with Office 365. Consider the following as simply an overview of what is possible.

The most important thing to appreciate about Office 365 is that all the information you put in there is searchable. The results from any search are ‘security trimmed’. That means you only see results that you have access to view.

For most users Delve provides a single pane of glass across nearly all of your Office 365 services.

How can I find people and information in Office Delve?

I have written articles about the importance of Delve but this one probably sums up things best:

Delve should be the centre of your Office 365 universe

Delve is available across all Office 365 suites and if you haven’t as yet looked at it then start here:

Introducing Office Delve

What is Office Delve?

How does Office Delve know what is relevant to me?

Also importantly, you can get Delve on your mobile devices:

Introducing Office Delve Mobile Apps

as well as you Windows 10 desktop:

Delve on Windows 10 app

Most Office 365 users also get a personal location called OneDrive for Business in which they can store all their documents.

What is OneDrive for Business?

They will get around 1TB of space into which they can store and share their personal files. This means they can move information stored on their local desktop, PC, USB drives, etc into a secure location that only they have access to and that they can share from with others, inside and outside the organisation if they want. It is important to note that OneDrive for Business is not designed as a file server replacement, it is designed for personal use. SharePoint Team Sites and Office 365 Groups are more the locations for information that needs to be shared with a teams of people.

There are many other products that do personal file sharing but here’s an overview of why OneDrive for Business is a superior technology.

Why OneDrive for Business

Given that Office 365 is much more than just emails and file storage I’d recommend you review my article:

Where to put data in Office 365?

to give you a better idea of what all the options are.

Now I mentioned Office 365 Groups as another location in which you can save your information. Office 365 Groups is great if you simply need an email distribution and single place to store common files. For a better idea of what Office 365 Groups are all about have a look at:

Office 365 groups: A quick tour of new user and admin experiences

If you then needs to add tasks to your collaboration you should have a look at Office 365 Planner:

Get started quickly with Microsoft Planner

However, if your needs exceed the functionality of both Office 365 Groups and Planner then it is time to consider SharePoint Team Sites for a fully blown ‘intranet’ style experience.

What is SharePoint

Getting started with SharePoint

Remember, that everything you put into a SharePoint Team Site is searchable, including the text inside documents. Team Sites allow you to create a hierarchical structure much like a file server but add in collaboration features like calendars, wikis, lists, etc.

You can get more functionality by using ‘metadata’ to tag your information to make it easier for your users to filter and sort.

Create managed metadata column

Set up metadata navigation for a list or library

The great thing is that you can customise your metadata to exactly suit your needs.

Another service available to Enterprise Office 365 Plans is a private video portal called Office 365 Video. In here you can place and share videos with your team. This is a great place for training resources as well as recordings from Skype for Business.

Meet Office 365 video

Manage your Office 365 video portal

You can also embed these videos directly into your SharePoint Team Site quickly and easily.

Another member of the Microsoft Cloud family is CRM. This allows you to manage contacts, sales, etc. but will soon also allow you to manage your financials thanks to the recently announced Dynamics 365.

Dynamics 365

Turning business process into business advantage for organizations everywhere

The big advantage these additional Microsoft Cloud products provide is the fact that access is governed by the same login users have for Office 365. This provides greater integration and management that few other services can match.

Another location that your team can collaborate together is in Yammer. Yammer provides an enterprise social network to share information publically which has so many benefits to the business. I’ve outlined many of these here:

The Business of Yammer

Don’t forget also that many Office 365 suites provide your users with the latest Office desktop software on their PC’s, Macs and mobile devices. They get at least 5 installation on each platform to ensure that everyone has the same version of the software. As an Office 365 subscriber you receive continuing free upgrades to this software automatically so you don’t need to worry whether everyone has the ‘latest’. They will.

Finally, Office 365 is also going to provide you the ability to automate your business process and information via a number of different tools such as:

Microsoft Flow

Microsoft Powerapps

SharePoint Workflows

In summary, Office 365 gives a lot of ways to manage and work more effectively with your information. It also provides you with the opportunity to improve the way you work today, become more effective and save time. It really is a single platform dedicated to better information management, accessed via a single login that is always constantly evolving and improving. In short, Office 365 is more than email and file storage, it is a full suite of productivity services to help your business better manage your information.

Watch out for the answers to more common questions with Office 365 coming soon.

Azure Site Recovery is cool!

I’ve been working on a new course for the CIAOPS Academy around all things Azure Backup.

Now because I’m not really an on-prem kinda guy any more, and also because I don’t have the physical equipment to do this, I never spent much time with Azure Site Recovery (ASR), which uses Hyper V replica technology. However, thanks to creating this course and including an ASR module I gotta say this Hyper V replica stuff is really cool!

The great thing with Hyper V replica is that you can do it directly between machine or via a cloud service such as Azure. Once you get the two locations replicated and synced you can do all sorts of fail overs. That allows you to easily spin up replacement machines in the backup location (such as Azure) as well as recover from these locations.

What really blew me away was how easy this was all to set up with Azure. Much, much easier than I thought. There is a three step wizard you follow through to get everything connected up. Then from there you have lots of disaster recovery (DR) and even migration options.

Thus, you can fail over a local Hyper V guest to Azure and then use that as a migration process to get that machine into the cloud. That is a really nifty way of moving whole VMs to Azure!

Now of course there is some leg work and understanding you need around Azure Site Recovery and Hyper V Replicas, but like I said, it is surprising at how easy it is to actually implement. I’d therefore suggest that if you are looking to provide DR services for businesses with local Hyper V guests or looking to migrate existing Hyper V guests to Azure VMs then you should take a look at Azure Site Recovery.

Of course, I’d also recommend you sign up for my Azure Backup online course to give you a quick start on all the backup options with, including Site Recovery. I’ve also got an option where you can sign up for the complete catalogue of my courses annually. One fixed price for access to every online course I create now and into the future. To find out more visit:

http://www.ciaopsacademy.com

By purchasing my online courses you give me the resources to build more.

Understanding Rights Management presentation

Understanding Rights Management—Robert Crane Docs.com

https://docs.com/d/embed/D25192795-0305-0957-9310-002126437846%7eMd4186d87-61d5-259a-4d26-00a8bd86cfff

I’ve uploaded a copy of my reset presentation on “Understanding Rights Management” to docs.com. You can view and download it via:

https://doc.co/1bDmLT/qcihGm

It provides you an overview of what Rights Management is, what features are available with Office 365 E3 or better suites as well as what the Azure Rights Management provides on top of the standard set of features.

Need to Know Podcast–Episode 114

Marc spends some time with Steve Luper, ‎Worldwide Technical Director, Azure Managed Partners at Microsoft talking Azure. Marc and I of course also give you our regular update on all the cloud news and events from Azure, Office 365 and more. don;t forget you can also provide us you feedback at feedback@needtoknow.cloud.