Making an Office 365 calendar public

If you want anyone to be able to see your calendar by simply browsing to a web page and you are using Office 365 Exchange Online for your emails then simply follow this process.

Login to the Microsoft Online portal with your account details. Select Calendar from the menu options that appear across the top of the page. This will display your calendar as shown above.

Under the option My Calendars on the left, right mouse click on the calendar you wish to share (in this case Calendar).

From the menu that is displayed select permissions..

An options pane will appear from the right as shown above. The option should show Public Calendar Not shared currently.

From the pull down options select a calendar sharing option to suit your needs. In this case the selection is Full details.

Now select Save in top left of this pane to update your preferences and return to your calendar view.

If you then again right mouse click on the calendar you wish to share as before and again select permissions to reveal the pane, you will find two new hyperlinks as shown above.

The View Calendar link provides you a URL link you can send to an external contact they can enter in their browser.

When they do they will see a copy of your calendar (depending on the permissions you provided previously of course) as shown above. In my experience it may 10 – 15 minutes for a calendar to be accessible publicly via this URL as it obviously need to be ‘published’ securely in Office 365.

At this stage there does not appear to be a way to allow anonymous users to actually make changes to the calendar which may be handy in some circumstance. I am pretty confident that we’ll see that down the track very soon.

Getting started SharePoint videos

One of the most common challenges with SharePoint Online is actually getting started. That’s why I created these books:

which you can find over at my publications page. Purchasing one or more copies helps me to continue creating resources like these and my YouTube videos.

What I thought I’d start doing is take advantage of the playlist features in YouTube to start building lists of common videos to help people get up and running with SharePoint Online quickly.

That meant that I needed to create a few new videos which you’ll find here:

Uploading documents to SharePoint Online

Basics of working with Document Libraries

Basic calendaring in SharePoint

I have then combined these, along with an existing video, into a dedicated playlist:

Getting Started with SharePoint Online

where these, and the ones I add in future, can be played one after each other. This makes it a nice series you can get someone to work through to get them up to speed with SharePoint quickly.

The videos are generally 5 – 10 minutes and provide the main points you need to get up and running quickly.

As I said, I’ll keep working on creating new videos to add to this playlist as well as looking at developing new playlists on different Office 365 and SharePoint Online topics. Let me know what you’d like to see.

OneNote for Mac now opens OneDrive for Business notebooks

Another recent update Microsoft released, this time for OneNote for Mac, is the ability to open notebooks on OneDrive for Business in Office 365.
I know plenty of people that have been waiting for this.

Edit document directly in OWA

Here’s a handy little feature that has just been added to Office 365.

Let’s say that someone send you an attachment as shown above. if you now click on that attachment Office 365 will automatically show you that document side by side (provided of course it can be viewed in Office Online).

You’ll see the document on the left in Office Online and the email on the right. You can still download it to your desktop if you want.

At the top of the page you’ll also see the option to Edit a copy.

When you do it will create a new reply email on the right, take a copy of the attached document on the left and then place that copy into edit mode with Office online.

Once you have finished editing and adding anything you want to reply email, just press Send away it will go to the recipient.

Updated Office 365 plan selection flow chart

About a year ago I first published my Office 365 plan choice flow chart to assist with the selection of the best Office 365 plan for their needs.

Since then I have updated it a number of times to reflect changes and additions.

I’ve now updated it to version 3.2 and included:

– Stand alone PowerBI options

– Stand alone OneDrive for Business options

– Simplified existing M and P routes

– Updated product limit and features

– Included relevant links section

This flow chart is always a work in progress and is far from perfect so if you find any errors or omissions please let me know so I can fix them.

You can download it directly from:

http://www.ciaops.com/storage/o365-plan-choice.pdf

or from my free downloads page at:

http://www.ciaops.com/downloads/

Working with Exchange Online Shared mailboxes in OWA

On of the big advantages that Office 365 provides is the ability to create as many ‘shared mailboxes’ as you like. Typically these ‘shared mailboxes’ are used for common function like info@, sales@, support@ etc.

You can’t open a ‘shared mailbox’ directly, however a user with an Exchange Online license can open it via Outlook either on the desktop or via Outlook Web Access (OWA).

Firstly, navigate to a users Outlook Web Access by logging into the Office 365 portal.

In the top right corner select the users name (in this case Alex Darrow) and from the menu that appears select Open another mailbox…

Enter the email address of the mailbox to be opened (in this case (info@ciaops365d10.onmicrosoft.com). You of course need the rights to open the mailbox before hand.

This will then open that mailbox in a new browser tab as shown above.

This is all well and good if you only need to work with the ‘shared mailbox’ occasionally. What happens if you want to interact it with a lot directly from your browser?

In that case, return to Outlook Web Access and right mouse click on the name of the mailbox, which is directly above Inbox (here Alex Darrow). From the menu that appears select add shared folder…

As before, enter the email address of the shared mailbox and press OK when complete.

In a matter of moments that shared mailbox will appear below all the other folders of the primary user mailbox. Now, provided you have the rights to can also drag and drop email into or out this mailbox to your primary mailbox.

To remove this shared mailbox from you OWA, simply right mouse click on it and select removed shared folder.

So, working with ‘shared mailboxes’ is just as quick and easy as using Outlook on the desktop in Office 365.

Configuring an Office 365 end users desktop for Office 2010

I am proud to announce that I have just published the one hundredth video to my YouTube channel.

This video provides a walk through of how to configure an Office 365 users desktop if they have Office 2010 by downloading and installing the Office 365 desktop setup client. This desktop setup is only required for those with Office 2010 or 2007 but not 2013.

The first YouTube video I posted to my channel:

http://www.youtube.com/directorciaops

went up on 31 August 2008 so it has only taken me 6 years to reach my century! However, I did start even earlier here:

http://www.youtube.com/saturnalliance

but don’t maintain that channel any more.

I hope you enjoy this latest video and I look forward to creating the next one hundred. If you have any topic suggestions or walk throughs you’d like to see me do then my all means contact me or leave a comment on this post.

Office 365 users personal blog

I’ve done a series of posts about blogging with SharePoint Online. You can find the previous posts at:

Blogging with SharePoint Online

Posting SharePoint Online blog articles

Both of those articles have focused on Team Site blogs. However, what you may not realise is that every SharePoint Online user has the ability to create and publish to their own personal blog.

The SharePoint Online personal blog is provided via OneDrive for Business however users go to their Newsfeed to enable it.

By default, a users personal blog does not get automatically created. To create their blog they need to visit their Newsfeed from the menu along the top of their web portal.

From the menu on the left hand side they simply select Blog under About Me.

In the top right of the page they will probably briefly see an indication that their blog site is being created as noted by the Working on it… message.

In a matter of moments the new personal blog site will be created and the page will display the location.

So where does the blog site actually get created? Well, if you have a look at the contents of the users OneDrive for Business site (by selecting the Cog in the top right hand corner) and scrolling down to the bottom of the page you will see a subsite called Blog as shown above.

The URL of this new personal blog site is:

https://-my.sharepoint.com/personal/_/Blog/

which you can now post articles to via the browser or via the desktop which I covered in previous posts.

If the user returns to their Newsfeed they will also find that they have been configured to automatically ‘follow’ their blog so updates will appear in their Newsfeed.

If you look at the permissions for the newly created user blog, you will see that by default Everyone except external users (i.e. other Office 365 users) can view the content in the blog.

However, there is an exception to this. The information dialog above the permissions notes – Some content on this site has different permissions from what you see here. If you select the Show these items hyperlink for more information

you will see that blog Comments have different permissions. If you now select manage permissions

you will see the difference is that other Office 365 users have the ability to add comments to any blog post by default (since they have Contribute rights here).

This means that when an Office 365 user creates a personal blog by selecting the menu option in their Newsfeed, they are able to publish posts that all other Office 365 users can not only view but also comment on.

The personal blog is something that I believe should be encouraged within a business and you can see it easy for users to setup and publish to. Importantly, all the information that is published in blogs is index by SharePoint Online and can be found using the search facilities. That is why it is so valuable. rather than having people take notes, have them blog the information.