Information about SharePoint, Microsoft 365, Azure, Mobility and Productivity from the Computer Information Agency
Google+ hangout with Amy Babinchak, Susan Bradley, Dana Epp and me on Office 365 security. Thursday 10am Sydney.
I encourage you to come hangout too at http://www.scorpionsoft.com/hangout. You can watch the stream live via YouTube at that time, and can interact with us through questions on Twitter at the hashtag #askauthanvil.
I am happy to announce a special combination of CIAOPS content in Brisbane on Friday the 26th and Saturday the 27th of October in conjunction with SMBITPro – Brisbane.
On Friday the 26th I’ll be conducting an Office 365 Bootcamp and then on Saturday the 27th I’ll be running a SharePoint spotlight session.
Both days will be held at Kedron-Wavell Services Club, 375 Hamilton Rd, Chermside, QLD 4032 from 9am. Entry price is $299 inc for both days and includes meals, parking, refreshments, WiFi, etc.
Details of the event including registration can be found at:
http://ciaops261012.eventbrite.com.au/
If you use the promotional code EARLYBIRD prior to the 21st of October you’ll receive a $50 discount off the entry price! SMBITPRO members receive special discounts, the details of which they can obtain from their local committee.
I am expecting places to fill quickly so I suggest that you book your place early to avoid disappointment.
If you want to learn more about the Office 365 product, how to administrate it and how to profit from it (if you are a traditional IT reseller) then you’ll be please to know that I am now running two Office 365 training bootcamps in Sydney and Melbourne:
http://ciaops0912.eventbrite.com.au/ – Thu 27th September, Sydney
http://ciaops1012.eventbrite.com.au/ – Wed 3 October, Melbourne
places are filling fast, so I suggest that if you are interested in attending that you book. The cost is only $249 dollars and includes a full day’s training, meals, course notes, etc.
In broad strokes the bootcamp will cover the following agenda;
– Clouding computing providers (features, benefits, opportunities)
– Office 365 from Microsoft and Telstra
– Office 365 pricing and components
– Preparation (checklists, gotcha’s)
– Office 365 plan differences
– Sign up process
– Configuring
– Domain name allocation
– Exchange Online
– Lync Online
– SharePoint Online
– Office Professional Plus via Office 365
– Client deployment
– Hybrid deployments
– Integration with existing networks
– Migration
– Troubleshooting
– and more
The focus of the bootcamp is not only in providing real world hands on experience but also to assist resellers in passing the recently announced 74-324 Administering Office 365 for Small Business exam which is a requirement of the Microsoft Small Business Competency.
After attending the bootcamp you’ll not only have much greater experience and understanding of how to deploy the Office 365 product but you’ll also have a number valuable tools to make the whole process much easier.
I am happy to announce that I’ll be conducting an Office 365 Bootcamp on the 27th of September at North Ryde RSL in Sydney. Details of the event including registration can be found at:
http://ciaops0912.eventbrite.com.au/
The cost is $249 inc GST which includes all meals, parking, Wi Fi access, course notes and more. If you use the promotional code EARLYBIRD prior to the 1st of September you’ll receive a $50 discount off the entry price!
I am expecting places to fill quickly so I suggest that you book your place early to avoid disappointment.
Although it is not a recommended option you could use SharePoint as a file storage repository and have those files sync’ed to a local desktop using SharePoint Workspace. There are of course limitation around this, however as I have found out recently, determining these limits conclusively has proved to be very, very difficult. What follows, I believe, is the most reliable information that I have found about those limits.
To achieve the maximum amount of data that can be sync’ed to a local desktop you should firstly use SharePoint Workspace 2010 with Service Pack 1 installed. When you do you can go into the backstage area of the SharePoint Workspace 2010 Launchbar and select Info. There you will see:
So the very first limit you need to be aware of is that the total number of files you can sync in SharePoint Workspace 2010 across all workspaces is 10,000.
Now if you click the Learn about File Limits button you receive the following:
which doesn’t really tell you much about the file limits now does it?
You will probably find out there on the Internet different information about the maximum local storage of SharePoint Workspace being 2GB. However, does that mean 2GB in total or 2GB per synchronize workspace? Thus, if I have a SharePoint document library that has 3GB of files, can I synchronize all that in one workspace? (i.e. is the 2GB a hard limit or a ‘recommended’ limit) Or do I have to split that library into 2 x 1.5GB SharePoint sites and sync these as different workspaces? Or, because the total file limit exceeds 2GB will I be able to sync at all?
I can tell you that I have spent many, many hours trawling trawling for definitive answer and I think I have finally found it:
SharePoint Workspace cannot synchronize any files that are larger than 1 GB. Additionally, SharePoint Workspace will stop synchronizing any shared folder that exceeds the following limits: More than 5000 files or a set of files that exceeds 2 GB in total size.
I found this at:
This seems to mean that the total I can synchronize in any SharePoint Workspace is 2GB. Thus, from my scenario above, I would need to split my 3GB of files into 2 x 1.5GB SharePoint sites and sync these independently with SharePoint Workspace.
Thus, in this case,
The SharePoint Workspace shared folders (which are each linked to an independent SharePoint site) could contain no more than 5,000 files and 2GB in size each. Thus, I think I could store at a maximum:
Office 365 Partners – 5,000 files and 2GB data
Cloud – 5,000 files and 2GB data
Customers – 5,000 files and 2GB data
WSSOPS – 5,000 files and 2GB data
giving me a total of, across all SharePoint Workspace 2010 shared folders:
Total = 20,000 files and 8GB data
However, my understanding that SharePoint Workspace has a total limit of 10,000 files across all shared folders as mentioned above (which is below the 20,000 limit I calculated above). Although from what I have read this is not a ‘hard’ limit, just a limit beyond which you may start seeing recurring errors.
This to me seems to be as conclusive as I can find and I of course acknowledge that SharePoint Workspace was never designed for this capacity. It is aimed at taking small components of SharePoint offline rather than being a total offline sync tool or backup facility. However, I am certainly getting more and more questions about doing exactly this with SharePoint Online.
*** Update ***
So the idea that SharePoint Workspace is limited to 2GB because of a ‘shared folder’ limitation is incorrect it turns out. A ‘shared folder’ in SharePoint Workspace actually doesn’t refer to a SharePoint site all!
A ‘shared folder’ is actually one you set up with SharePoint Workspace on your desktop and share that directly with other users!
So back to the original question. If I have a SharePoint site with > 5GB of data including document libraries of > 2GB are there any issues with sync’ing?
It turns out that there appear to be NO LIMITS! I ended up working with Microsoft support and this is what they found:
“I have had one more tests, I expanded the site to 5GB (which contains a document library in 2 GB size) and sync it so SharePoint workspace. It is still successful.”
“However, currently I haven’t found any article mentioned the size limitation for SharePoint workspace (has file number limitation). And based on my test, a SharePoint site exceeds 3GB(even 5GB) can be successfully synced even though there is a document library exceeding 2 GB. Which indicates 3GB (or 5GB) is not the size limitation for a SharePoint workspace. However, it may depends on the client\server performance of specific environment. You may have a test on your environment to get an accurate result.”
It now seems that if you sync SharePoint Workspace directly to a SharePoint site there is NO LIMIT on how large that site can be and for it to successfully sync locally.
How mind blowing is that? I always though SharePoint Workspace had a hard upper limit, but no it appears not! With that in mind what a fantastic cloud based sync’ing tool it makes! Even though I have read that you SHOULDN’T use SharePoint Workspace as a backup tool for SharePoint it certainly appears that you can based on the above testing.
Now, I get the impression that even though the tests indicate there are no limits I’ll bet that if you do go to these extremes and get issues Microsoft will say that SharePoint Workspace isn’t recommended to be used in that manner. From my tests, it certainly appears it can be, however buyer beware I guess as I can’t find it documented anywhere as to what the actual limits are.
If you are looking to achieve such large offline sync’ing of data with SharePoint Workspace you need to keep in mind a few things:
– SharePoint Workspace is not free, it is an add on product that comes with Office 2010 Professional Plus but can be purchased independently.
– Has a number of limitations around the maximum number of files and data that can be sync’ed locally. This appears to be 10,000 files in total across all SharePoint Workspaces, 5,000 files and 2GB of data per Workspace.
– Individual files > 1GB can’t be synchronize but SharePoint Online already has a current restriction of 250MB per files so in Office 365 250MB will be the limit per individual file.
– There are other third party solution that can be used to achieve this functionality.
So you can if you really must be beware of the current limitations around SharePoint Workspace. SharePoint was designed as a tool to be used ONLINE rather than merely being something that you sync locally and use OFFLINE. However, I get the feeling that going forward we will see more of this offline ability but for now beware the limitations.
Looking through the new Office 365 beta and look what I found! Public Folders seem to now be Office 365. Wow, not 100% sure how all this works yet but that should make Office 365 more enticing for businesses who have been big Public Folder users and have shied away from moving to Exchange Online.
Experience has found that allowing up to 72 hours for the issue to resolve itself can be frustrating if time constraints are upon you. In many cases the response from support to this issue will be to simply wait until the situation is rectified. There is however something that can be done to potentially resolve the issue.
Information about resolving this can be found in the post:
http://www.cloudusergroup.at/post/2012/04/30/hop-count-exceeded-possible-mail-loop-in-office-365-beheben.aspx
which is in German (so you’ll need to use browser translation), however the summary is:
If the affected office 365 tenant is an E plan then you can you can log into the FOPE control panel to check the entries. To login into the FOPE control panel, firstly log into the Office 365 tenant as an administrator.
Select the Manage link from the Exchange section on the Admin Overview page.
Select Mail Control from the list on the left of the page. Then on the right you, under Additional Security Settings, you will see Forefront Online Protection for Exchange. Click the text Configure IP safelisting, perimeter message tracking and e-mail policies.
The Forefront administration console will launch in a new browser.
From this console select Administration then Domain from the menu bar.
This will display the list of domains. You should only see the domains that you have configured for the tenant (as above) however, there may still be a duplicate domain as shown from the original blog post above.
If there is an incorrect entry there you can update FOPE with a Powershell script.
$ LiveCred = Get-Credential
$ Session = New-PSSession ConfigurationName Microsoft.Exchange ConnectionURI https://ps.outlook.com/powershell/ -Credential $ LiveCred Basic Authentication AllowRedirection
import PSSession $ session AllowClobber
set AcceptedDomain Identity -OutboundOnly $true
set-AcceptedDomain identity -OutboundOnly $false
You then need to wait about 1 hour and recheck the FOPE entries again. All things being well the duplicate entry should have disappeared. Once the duplicate entry has disappeared then emails from outside the organisation should be received correctly.
It is important to realize that access to the FOPE control panel is not available to users of the Small Business and Professional Plan (P Plan). In that case you can still use the above Powershell commands to clear any duplicate domains.
You will also find that Microsoft has created a knowledge base article covering these issues:
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2495882
the resolution in the article is to contact FOPE support to resolve the issue. I also found the following Technet Blog
http://blogs.technet.com/b/hot/archive/2012/02/03/moving-domains-from-bpos-s-to-office-365.aspx
that also contains similar information.
There is currently not a lot out there in the market however the place to start is the recent Office 365 Jump Start range of videos. There are 18 videos in total and can all be downloaded for off site viewing. There are also some older Office 365 Jump Start videos for IT Pros that are also helpful and free again.
Microsoft has also just released some e-learning courseware for the 70-323 Administrating Office 365 exam. There is a cost for this and I can’t provide any recommendation having not used it. It would expect to see some e-learning for the 71-321 Deploying Office 365 become available soon.
Next, you have use the Microsoft Virtual Academy which currently has the following Office 365 courses:
There is also plenty of other training material on other technologies in there, all for free.
As for books well I have read the following from MVPs Loryan Strant:
Microsoft Office 365: Exchange Online Implementation and Migration
and Brett Hill
Working with Microsoft Office 365: Running Your Small Business in the Cloud
Both are not specifically aimed at content for passing exams but still offer plenty of information that will help.
Finally, there are the Office 365 Virtual Labs for IT Pros, again free from Microsoft. This will allow you to get you hands dirty in a full virtual environment. This is especially handy for the SMB types who probably don’t have the infrastructure to implement Office 365 Federation.
I’m sure as time goes on there be lots more becoming available so stay tuned.
CIAOPS 