SBS Essentials review

Not a bad little review from Paul Thurrott over at the Winsupersite on SBS 2011 Essentials. I have to agree with him that SBS Essentials is effectively incomplete until the release of the Office 365 integration module. There was talk that it would be released at the Microsoft world wide partner conference in July but nothing materialized. Paul says in his article:

“Sadly, it won’t ship until the end of the year”

which I certainly hope is not true but I do have some faith in the fact that Paul probably has better sources than I.

In that case I would have to say the waiting another 3 – 4 months for the Office 365 module for SBS Essentials is really going to throttle its take up in my opinion. The whole premise of this server was the fact that it would interface directly to the cloud and without that it is really a bit of a lame duck at this point. Sure I know that you can do the integration to Office 365 manually but without the dedicated module it kinda makes SBS essentials a car that is missing a wheel doesn’t it?

Office 365 Exchange Online Connected accounts

One of the really nice things that you can do with Office 365 Exchange Online is configure your Exchange Online mailbox to receive from your other external email accounts.

To do this first login into your Office 365 console via https://login.microsoftonline.com. Then select Outlook. You should then see your mail box.

Go to the top right of the window and select Options (which is just under the user name).

From the menu that appears select See All Options. You should then see a screen like:

You should be on the Account option. To the right you’ll see the Connected Accounts button, select this.

Select the New button.

Enter an email address and password, then press the Next button.

After a few moments the account should show as being connected (if additional information is not required).

When you are returned to the Connected Accounts screen you should see your account listed. You’ll also note on the right the option to change the Default Reply Option.

Mail from the connected account will now start appearing in your Office 365 Exchange Online email box (as well as in the original external mailbox).

Email archiving in Office 365 – End User

In my previous post I showed how to enable archiving for an Office 365 Exchange Online user. Now, we’ll have a look at what the end user sees.

With archiving enabled when a user opens their desktop Outlook they will see an addition Archiving folder as shown above in Outlook 2010.

and the same when they login to Office Web Apps.

Users can now drag and drop whatever emails they wish into this archive, however creating an automatic archiving policy is more challenging.

In Outlook 2010 the normal way to manage archiving is to right mouse click on an Outlook folder and select Properties. However, when we now do this with Exchange Online archiving enabled we see a window like shown above. There is now no longer an option to archive locally, all we see is the default policy “Use Parent Folder Policy”.

The next problem is where can I set these policies? Turns out each user has to so this from Outlook Web App (there are other ways buts let’s just follow along with the user example for the time being).

From here select Organise Email and then Retention Policy as shown above.

You can then select the Add button to add a retention policy to this mailbox.

When you do you’ll see a list of standard policies as shown above. All you can do here is select a policy and press the Add link. When you have finished press the Save button.

To change or add policies you’ll need to use Powershell which I’ll cover in a later post.

if you now revisit Outlook 2010 folder Properties, Policy you’ll see there is additional policy you just enabled to select from.

So in summary:

– Once email archiving is enabled a user can manually move items into that folder in Outlook on the desktop or Outlook Web App

– There are no specific archiving policy applied but it can only be enabled from Outlook Web App.

– To create or modify retention policies you are going to need to user Powershell.

What do you get with email archiving enabled? For any plan that includes Exchange Plan 1 the user gets a total of 25GB mailbox shared across the primary inbox and the archiving area. Otherwise the user gets 25GB for their primary mailbox and an “unlimited” archiving area.

A default quota of 100GB is set on the personal archive. In the unlikely event that the user exceeds this quota a call to Office 365 support will be required. Administrators cannot adjust this quota up or down.

Email archiving in Office 365

One of the major benefits of Office 365 Exchange Online is that (with certain plans) you receive an effectively unlimited email archive. In this post I’ll cover how to set it up on the back end and then in the next post what it looks like from the end user side.

Enabling archiving via the office 365 Admin console.

Ensure you are on the Admin page. Then select Manage under the Exchange Online heading.

Select the email box you wish to enable archiving for from the list of mailboxes. Then click Details.

You will notice in the list if any users already have archiving enabled (in this case Lewis Collins).

In the window that appears scroll down to the Mailbox Features and expand.

Click on Archive from the list and then select Enable.

You can set whatever name you wish for the archive. Normally it is recommended to leave the default name.

When complete press the Save button.

You will be returned to the list of mailboxes and you should see that user enabled for archiving.

When the client logs into their mailbox either in Outlook or Outlook Web App they will see a new archive folder.

I’ll cover more on the user end experience of Exchange Online Archiving in the next post.

Failed to create configuration database for MOSS

Working with a test Windows 2008 R2 server with SQL 2008 R2 installed, onto which I was trying to install Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 (MOSS). Every time I tried I get the error:

“Failed to created the configuration database”

during the setup and configuration wizard.

However, when I looked in the SQL manager the configuration database was there.

Tried many, many things thinking it was a software compatibility issue with Windows Server 2008 R2 or SQL Server 2008 R2. Nope, not those those applications BUT I also had Office 2010 installed on the machine (since I was using it as a stand alone demo).

Problem turned out to be Office 2010, which I uninstalled and everything then worked fine.

Today’s lesson = MOSS and Office 2010 don’t work together on same machine.

How collaboration works in Office 365

Here’s the first part of an article I’ve just written from BoxFreeIT. You’ll find the link to the full article at the end

Microsoft takes a different approach to co-editing in Google Apps.

Collaboration – sharing information in different ways with colleagues, customers and suppliers – is one of the great attractions of cloud computing and has already started to reinvent how people work together.

Microsoft promises that collaboration is a central goal of its cloud productivity suite Office 365, but it has taken a different approach to co-authoring documents, one of the key pillars of collaboration.

Google Apps allows co-editing where two or more people can edit the exact same part of a document or spreadsheet. Microsoft allows users to co-author the same document, however they cannot edit the same paragraph. And unlike Google Docs, users do not see live updates from other users.

In its research Microsoft found that having multiple real-time edits happening on the one page was very distracting. Instead, co-authoring in Office 365 automatically locks the paragraph on which a user is working. Co-authoring users see updates only when the document is saved back to Office 365.

Many of the Office 2010 applications such as Word natively support co-authoring. This means multiple people can open Office documents via the desktop applications and work on them concurrently. This is all supported by default and when multiple people are working on a document each user receives notification of who is working on the document.

Once a document is refreshed, users will see parts of the document highlighted to show edits by others. A user can give exclusive access to a document by “checking it out”, a metaphor similar to borrowing a book from a library. Other users can only edit the document once it has been checked in again.

There are some limitations when it comes to co-authoring in Office 365. For example, it is currently not possible to co-author Excel spreadsheets on the desktop but it is through Office Web Apps. The reason is that Excel recalculates every time a user enters information which could change values throughout the spreadsheet.

The Office Web Apps version of Excel does not yet have all the features of the desktop edition but it does allow co-authoring. It is expected that all Office applications will support full co-authoring in future.

For more detailed information about Microsoft Office co-authoring take a look at this article from Microsoft.

To view the full article go to – http://boxfreeit.com.au/Productivity/check-in-check-out-how-collaboration-works-in-office-365.html

Microsoft Community Contributor Award

Received an email from Microsoft today:

Congratulations! We’re pleased to inform you that your contributions to Microsoft online technical communities have been recognized with the Microsoft Community Contributor Award.

The Microsoft Community Contributor Award is reserved for participants who have made notable contributions in Microsoft online community forums such as TechNet, MSDN and Answers. The value of these resources is greatly enhanced by participants like you, who voluntarily contribute your time and energy to improve the online community experience for others.

Firstly, I’d like to say to Microsoft for the recognition and secondly I’d like to tell you why I personally do this sort of thing.

Many years ago, over 15 to be exact, when I started my business I was pretty much alone trying to not only solve customers technical issues but also run my business. I can tell you there were plenty of times when I struggled and I mean really struggled.

Perhaps in some ways I thought I could do it all but more so I think I just didn’t know where to turn for help. These days, with easy access to the Internet, most people think that answers are just a search engine away. Yes they are BUT someone out there actually needs to spend the time documenting solutions and sharing their experiences.

I do it because I know the feeling of not being able to find the information and having the feeling that you are all alone in trying to resolve something. However, there are still times when I ask whether it is worth all the effort. A little recognition now and then goes a long way in supporting the people that actually create all the content that others search everyday.

So I do thank Microsoft for the recognition and suggest that if you do find someone out there that has helped you, make contact and let them know that their voluntary work has been worthwhile in at least one case. I have learnt that “community” is a very important concept, even in the digital age.

Office 365 Lync doesn’t supporting recording

One of the killer features of Office 365 is Lync (along with SharePoint) simply because it provides features that many businesses have never experienced including presence, chat and web conferencing. Lync is the successor to Live Meeting that came with BPOS (the previous incarnation of Microsoft Online Services).

Interestingly, it turns out that although with Live Meeting you can record meetings that feature has been disabled from Lync in Office 365. According to http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2433212:

At the release of Office 365, recording options will be disabled in the Microsoft Lync 2010 client for legal and privacy reasons. Because certain countries and nationalities require permission from all parties to record instant messaging (IM), audio, and video conversations, the Lync Online engineering team decided to remove this feature until a future update is released to address this. Recording options will be re-enabled after the update is released and deployed to Lync Online.

So the powerful ability of Lync to record all conversation through it has been disabled pending an update. I can understand the reasoning for this but I gotta say that being able to record meetings was one of the real selling points of Live Meeting in BPOS and not having it available in the Office 365 upgrade kind of puts a dent in that when speaking to prospects.

Like I said, I understand why it has been removed but I’d like to know how long it will be before that ability is restored. Another issue to add the list of things I hope they fix during the next update to Office 365.