Office 365 Wave 15 upgrades are starting down under

I am beginning to see more and more Australian Office 365 tenants being upgraded to Wave 15.

Because many of the Office 365 tenants are provided through Telstra most customers will only receive a notification of an upgrade if they login to the admin console of Office 365. It is my understanding that no direct emails will be sent to administrators and the like.

This could mean that you wake up one morning and find everything has turned a shade of blue. The impact for emails should be minimal but with SharePoint the story is different.

Users will see a banner appear at the top of their SharePoint sites prompting that the interface should be upgraded to SharePoint 2013.

You need to beware of the fact that:

1. Eventually all Office 365 tenants will have to upgrade to the SharePoint 2013 interface. So you can’t stay on the old look and feel indefinitely.

2. When you do it will mean a completely different look and feel.

3. Some custom SharePoint items may ‘break’.

4. You need to upgrade all your site collections.

5. The upgrade process time will depend on how large your existing SharePoint sites are.

6. Once you upgrade the interface to SharePoint 2013 you can’t roll back to SharePoint 2010 look and feel.

So if you have (or support) an Australian Office 365 Wave 14 tenant and you want to know when it is schedule to be upgraded make sure you login to the administration portal on a regular basis. Also, don’t forget that some of the biggest changes you and end users will see is with SharePoint, so the advice here is to be proactive and be ready.

Disabling SharePoint Designer access in Office 365

SharePoint Designer is a free tool from Microsoft that allows you to make modifications to SharePoint sites. It can allow you to make changes down to the code and HTML level. That is great if you know what you are doing, however if you don’t you can cause irrevocable damage to SharePoint.

In most cases, this means you want to keep users away from using SharePoint Designer, however Office 365 by default provides the option to download SharePoint Designer right from the console as you can see:

It is located in the Software section of all users Office 365 portal under the tools & add-ins.

As an administrator it is possible to disable this. Here is the procedure.

From the menu on the left hand side select service settings.

From the menu across the top select user software.

At the top of the page you’ll find the option to Manage user software through Office 365. In this section you can uncheck SharePoint Designer and then press the save button. You’ll also notice that you have the option to prevent users from also downloading Office and Lync (if it is part of their plan).

The next time a user accesses their console and goes to Software and tools & add-ins they will see a message:

The administrator has disabled SharePoint Designer 2013 installations. Contact your administrator for information about how to install SharePoint Designer 2013.

Unfortunately, this is not the only way that a user can download SharePoint Designer. They can of course download it directly from the Microsoft download site here:

http://www.microsoft.com/en-au/download/details.aspx?id=35491

So what can you do if users download SharePoint Designer themselves and attempt to modify SharePoint? Luckily, SharePoint has the ability to disable operation within individual SharePoint site collections. Unfortunately, if you have multiple site collections (M or E plans generally) then you’ll need to make the following changes on each site collection.

In the top right of the window press the ‘cog’ icon to reveal the above menu. From this select Site Settings.

In the bottom left, under Site Collection Administration, select SharePoint Designer Settings.

Unselect all the options listed. By doing so you will remove the ability for ALL users (administrators included) to use SharePoint Designer on this site collection.

You will note that by default only Site Owners and Designers can edit sites using SharePoint Designer. Most users are only Site members, so they “shouldn’t” be able to using SharePoint Designer on a site. However, if you want to 100% sure that NO ONE can use it then uncheck all the options here.

Press the OK button to save and changes made. You will be returned to the Site Settings page.

The following Microsoft Support Article provides more information as well:

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2592376

CIAOPS Podcast–Episode 54

In this episode I’m joined by MSP Jim Hunton who speaks about the challenges of IT Providers and managing passwords. Jim shares his experience and his findings as what he has found works best for his business and his customers.

You can listen to this podcast and subscribe to the series at:
http://ciaops.podbean.com/2013/06/18/episode-54-jim-hunton/
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).

Setting Office 365 password expiry from the console

With the latest version of Office 365 it is possible to alter the password expiry policy for the whole organization directly from the Administration console. To do this complete the following.

Select passwords from the options across the top of the page.

You can now enter a value for Days before passwords expire which can be from 14 to 730 and Days before a user is notified that their password will expire which can be from 1 to 30 days.

If you want to set a users password to never expire you will still need to use PowerShell and the details on achieving that can be found here:

Setting a Office 365 users password to never expire

And of course don’t forget to press the Save button after changing any values.

A different way to look at Outlook Web Access

If you access your Exchange Online mailbox in Office 365 from a browser using http://mail.office365.com you’ll see something like the above default view. This happens because Outlook Web Access detects you are using a browser on a desktop and formats the display as such.

What you may not be aware of is that on other devices, say a tablet or a mobile, Outlook Web Access will format the screen differently automatically.

If you want to see this on your desktop you can ‘fool’ Outlook Web Access by appending the following to the URL:

?layout=twide

thus, the complete URL in this case will become:

https://pod51041.outlook.com/owa/?layout=twide

When you do so you should see the above layout designed for a tablet. The menu items are further apart, there are nice big buttons at the bottom of the screen and so on.

Now if you instead append:

?layout=tnarrow

you’ll see the above layout which is how it would appear on a mobile device.

So by just adding a few additions to the end of the Outlook Web Access URL you can see how it will appear on both a tablet or mobile without leaving the comfort of your desktop.

Office 2013 Touch/Mouse mode

Here’s something you may not have known about Office 2013.

In the Quickstart menu at the very top of the screen you will see a down arrow that allows you to customize this menu. On that menu you’ll find an option Touch/Mouse mode.

If you add that item to the Quickstart menu you’ll now see a new button appear that looks like a pointing finger. Pressing that reveals the two menu options shown above.

If you select the Touch option the Office interface, including the Ribbon Menu is optimized for touch (i.e. the spacing between the buttons increases).

If you then select Mouse the interface will return to the original spacing.

Thus, you can easily toggle between touch and mouse depending on how you are using the device. Really handy for hybrid devices like the Microsoft Surface Pro and is available in all Office 2013 applications.