Information about SharePoint, Microsoft 365, Azure, Mobility and Productivity from the Computer Information Agency
I recently completed a 60 minute webinar based around my book “Getting Started With PowerShell for Office 365”. Thanks to SMB Nation that webinar is now available for public viewing on YouTube at:
You can also find a copy of the slides on Slideshare at:
However, you’ll find much more detailed information in my eBook:
which you can obtain directly from my site:
or from other eBook sellers like Amazon for less than AU$5.
I thank SMB Nation for the opportunity to present and those who attended.
99 years ago Australian and New Zealand (ANZACs) forces went ashore on the Gallipoli peninsula in Turkey. For 9 months they remained their fighting a desperate battle against a determined enemy defending their homeland.
In the end the ANZACs were withdrawn and went on to fight with distinction in Northern France and forge a legion that we celebrate today.
April the 25th is the day that we in Australia remember and celebrate all of those brave and committed individuals who served and continue to serve our country.
May their deeds and commitment continued to be remembered and celebrated through the ages as the greatest embodiment of what it means to help your mates without question or requirement.
If you are interested in learning about the sacrifice and history of the ANZACs in northern France during World War 1 check out my website:
We shall remember them.
I’ve been talking a lot lately about how collaboration is the key requirement going forward for successful teams and businesses. I’ve also highlighted my belief that Microsoft stands alone in understanding what collaboration with technology is all about.
The heart of this understanding has been SharePoint for many, many years, however what I see coming down the pipe, especially from a product like Yammer integrated with Office 365 simply blows me away when I think about the future of collaboration.
If you want an idea of what this all about and why I am so excited by what I see coming take a look at this Microsoft Garage video.
What it demonstrates is fundamentally how Yammer will be seamlessly integrated across every Office 365 product. It also demonstrates to me that Microsoft is the only business that is truly integrating ‘social’ into the enterprise for large and small businesses.
I honestly can’t wait until these updates start hitting customer tenants and I can start helping them change the way the way they work to become more productive with a tool like Office 365. If you want a differentiation point between the Microsoft cloud offering and what the competition is doing watch this video and tell me you don’t agree.
*** Please see this update – https://blog.ciaops.com/2014/09/installing-office-365-pro-plus-on-rds.html ***
Office 365 Pro Plus on a RDS (Terminal Server) is a very common question I see all the time. A while ago I wrote an detailed article around the licencing of Office 365 Pro Plus in an RDS environment. You can read the full blog post if you want to as it is still valid, but in summary what it says is that if you purchase Office 365 via a web console, that is either via the Microsoft console or via the Telstra portal here in Australia that product is NOT licensed to run on any type of RDS environment. The only way that you can run Office 365 Pro Plus in an RDS environment is if Office 365 was purchased via an Open agreement (basically volume licensing). That is basically the same as it is with other versions of Office, RDS is only supported with volume licensing.
With that answered, next question is normally about actually installing Office 365 Pro Plus in a RDS environment. The challenge is the software you get from Office 365 is ‘click to run’ which won’t install on a RDS machine. So how do you actually go about getting Office Pro Plus onto a RDS machine when you have Office 365 via Open?
Strangely enough, it is exactly the same as when you have normal Office, you need to purchase Office Pro Plus software and Volume License key that allows the installation. For reference see the following document;
Licensing Microsoft Office Pro Plus Subscription Service in Volume Licensing
which says:
How do customers get access to Office Professional Plus 2013 media for use with RDS deployments?
Customer must have access to Volume Licensing Service Center (VLSC) and Volume Licensing keys to install and activate Office Professional Plus 2013 media on network servers for RDS scenarios with Office 365 ProPlus licenses. Access to media and keys in VLSC vary among different Volume License agreements, such as Enterprise Agreement and Open. Depending on your agreement type and previous Office license purchases, you may have access to Office Professional Plus 2013. If Office Professional Plus 2013 media and key are not available to you, a Volume Licensing partner may assist you with the purchase of an Office Professional Plus 2013 license to support your rights to deploy Office software on a network server with RDS role enabled.
Thus, if you have only purchase Office 365 via Open you will also need to purchase one Office Pro Plus media and key via Volume Licensing to actually support the installation.
This of course is an additional cost on top of any Office 365 licenses purchase which many resellers fail to factor in. They then get a nasty surprise when they attempt an install using ‘click-to-run’ and it doesn’t work. They get an even nastier shock when they discover they have to purchase one additional Office Pro Plus license to do the RDS installation. But by far the worst is when they have to go back to the customer and ask them for more money to cover this or swallow the increase themselves.
I hear lots of bitching an moaning about this from resellers but in all honesty it is the same as it for most other versions of Office. You can’t install Office Pro Plus in an RDS environment with a retail version of Office Pro Plus, you again need to purchase the media and key via volume licensing.
Now, I appreciate that there is an extra cost and it would be nice to get the media an key as part of Office 365 Open, and that may well come down the track, but you do have the additional benefit of being able to install Office 365 on in an RDS environment that you once couldn’t. Time to look at the cup half full guys I think.
The secret is knowing what you can and can’t do and hopefully after reading this post it will have answered these questions which without doubt are the most common I see.
If you purchase Office 2013 Professional Plus on a PC (OEM) or off a retail shelf there is no downgrade rights. This means you do not have the right to install Office 2010 instead. However, under certain volume licensing programs if you purchase Office 2013 Professional Plus you do have that right. This is one advantage of using volume licensing.
Now in the Office 365 world, if you purchase a plan that includes Office Professional Plus for the desktop what happens? If you purchase that plan via a console (either the Microsoft console or the Telstra console here in Australia) you do not receive any downgrade rights because it is effectively like a retail purchase. However, what happens if you purchase Office 365 via Open licensing?
The answer can be found here:
Licensing Microsoft Office Pro Plus Subscription Service in Volume Licensing
Inside the PDF you will find:
Online Services Downgrade Rights In Online Services customers have access to the latest technology with the newest features and releases. As with all
Subscription Services, Microsoft generally offers only the latest version of the service at a time. Therefore, downgrade
rights are not available with Office 365 ProPlus licenses.
So, in summary, no matter where you purchase Office 365 Pro Plus from, it does not come with downgrade rights.
Full disclosure – the review unit was supplied by Mobilezap. You can find this device and others at the Mobilezap category pages.
How many times have you needed to charge your phone and you couldn’t find a power point? Or all the power points have been taken by others charging their devices (happens at conferences and at airports a lot). All you need is just enough charge to send that email or make that quick call but without a recharge you are stuck? We’ll here’s a great little gadget to help, the Veho Pebble Smartstick Emergency Charger.
Basically, you charge it up from a USB port prior to stepping out. Then you connect it to your device, with the huge variety of connectors that are provided. This will normally give you more than enough charge to keeping going through the day and get done what you need to do.
Obviously, it takes a while to fully charge the Smartstick but the idea is that you do that the night before from your PC or wall jack. You then throw into your bag as you head out and you’ll be pretty secure that you should be able to get through a whole day not needing to look for a charger.
The really great thing is that it comes with so many connectors that fit just about all your devices. It is small and convenient and quite stylish. It is a little bit heavier than you expect but that’s because it is a battery. However that is not a hindrance at all.
This is a really great travelling accessory and I’d recommend to anyone who have every had to scrounge around for a power point to do some ‘desperate’ charging. Adding one of these to your kit and topping it up before you leaves almost guarantees that you’ll never need to look for a power point during the day.
I see this so many times that it isn’t funny. People simply upload the contents of their network ‘S:’ drive to a single Document Library in SharePoint Online and then try and synchronize the entire contents of that to every desktop or to a network server and attempt to share it again from there.
This is a really, really bad idea simple because SharePoint Online is designed as a collaboration tool first and foremost rather than simply a storage location. Traditional on premise file systems are arranged in some structure and the argument I see from so many people is that they want all the benefits of the cloud BUT they don’t want to change the way they work to make the most of a tool like SharePoint Online.
You know what? If you are not prepared to change the way that you work with the tools then I would seriously question why you are using those tools at all.
Let me give you an analogy. Imagine you are using a paper based ledge to total up figures. You write values in one column, then the next and then you manually add them up and place the result in the third column. If you need to change any of the values in column one or column two you need to erase it, enter the new number, recalculate the result, erase that column and update it. Hard work.
Now what happens if I show you Excel? If you type the numbers into the first two columns again, manually calculate the total and type it into the third column. What have you achieved by using Excel? Nothing much, now have you? Excel allows you to create a formula that totals the sum of the rows automatically so that it updates if anything changes. How much easier is that? Heaps.
In the process of adopting Excel you have needed to learn more about what the tool can do and learn how to create and input formulas but the end results are well worth it, because now you know that you can apply that to every ledger you create. Small investment up front, small change in the way things are done results in huge productivity gains going forward. That is how technology works.
The same is true with SharePoint Online. Desiring SharePoint Online to work ‘exactly’ the way traditional files and folders works is like driving a high performance car in first gear everywhere. It is a waste of resources. If this is solely what you are looking to achieve with a move to SharePoint Online my advice is to read no further and look elsewhere for a solution. If you do that however, I’ll bet that sooner or later you’ll realize how limiting that decision will turn out to be, since storage is NOT collaboration and provides NO major productivity gains.
As I said initially, SharePoint Online is a collaboration tool, files and folders is just storage. Migration from files and folders to SharePoint Online means you should take the opportunity to look at how you have structured things and whether there is a better way to organize your information because at the end of the day it is all about FINDING your information now isn’t it? Tell me, how much data do you actually have in files and folders today that you use? How of much of it do you have no idea what it was ever for? And how often do you never find what you are looking for in there?
SharePoint is a way of approaching these problems from a different direction. This means that you (and only you) have to make decisions about how to arrange your information. SharePoint can help with the arranging but you need to decide HOW to arrange it. What is the outcome you desire? Simply replicating what you may have in traditional files and folders is simply using SharePoint Online in first gear, that is, a complete waste of time and effort.
So prior to any migration to SharePoint Online for you files and folders, stop and think about how to COLLABORATE with your data not simply store it. Ask how you end users WANT to access the information. Ask them what makes the MOST SENSE to them. In short make their job easier when it comes to working with information and there is no better tool for that than SharePoint. Like Excel, you need to invest a little up front but the rewards are HUGE.
If you are simply going to migrate gigabytes and gigabytes of data to one Document Library in SharePoint Online DON’T! If you are prepared to learn how to take SharePoint Online out of first gear and use it for COLLABORATION not storage then you will reap the benefits.
Stay tuned to this blog for more suggestions on how to migrate to SharePoint Online for collaboration and avoid the common mistakes.
In this episode I speak with the creator of Brightgauge Eric Dosal. Eric gives us his insights into running and MSP business, how important metrics and peer networking are as well as an insight into software development and the opportunities that abound for technical people.
Check out more of Eric’s information at:
If you own or are part of a managed service provider IT business then this is an episode you can’t miss.
You can find the episode at:
http://ciaops.podbean.com/2014/04/23/episode-58-eric-dosal/
or subscribe via your favourite app like iTunes:
https://itunes.apple.com/au/podcast/ciaops-need-to-know-podcasts/id406891445?mt=2
Remember, if you have a suggestion or want to appear on an episode simply get in contact with me.
CIAOPS 
