Using an iPad with Office 365

Here’s the first part of an article I’ve just done for BoxFreeIT.

One of Microsoft’s major selling points for its cloud productivity suite Office 365 is that you can work on your data anywhere you have internet access. But how well does Office 365 work on one of the biggest mobile devices – the Apple iPad?

The thing to remember with Microsoft Office 365 is that it will run better on Microsoft technologies, such as a PC running Internet Explorer. However, Microsoft claims the platform is compatible with technologies from other providers.

Office 365 is composed of three major components; Exchange for email, SharePoint for file management and collaboration, and Lync for communication. Let’s take a look at each one of these components separately and how they function with an iPad.

Probably the easiest component of Office 365 to configure for an iPad is Exchange Online. Provided you don’t have a cheaper “kiosk” licence you will be able to connect your Office 365 emails to your iPad in a matter of minutes. You simply need to go into the iPad’s mail settings and add an Exchange email account using your Office 365 credentials.

Once configured you can send and receive emails with all the standard functionality Exchange emails enjoy on an iPad. It is also possible to work with your emails via a browser and Outlook Web App. However, this is where things start to become less fully featured.

Because an iPad uses Safari as a browser rather than Microsoft Internet Explorer the environment isn’t as “feature rich”, as Microsoft would say. You can certainly log into your Office 365 portal and work with your emails but the experience is far more basic.

You can read the full article at:

http://boxfreeit.com.au/Productivity/using-office-365-on-the-ipad.html

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.

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

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.

What I learned about Office 365 customers

I recently had the privilege of attending the Microsoft Australian Partner Conference. In one of the sessions they brought two Office 365 customers onto the stage to speak about their experiences. Although it is only a very small sample what they said, I believe, resonates at a much greater levels. Here’s what I learnt:

1. Smaller customers are doing their own IT work. When asked whether they were using managed services from their new IT providers or simply using ad-hoc services, both said they couldn’t see much need for managed services. Why? Because most of the basic technology skills are pretty common or easily found using search engines, few are willing to pay for basic IT services.

What does that mean for your traditional IT reseller who believes managed services are the be all and end all? Simple, it ain’t. Traditional managed services will continue to work for those customers with legacy on site infra structure but if you want to sell cloud managed services you are going to have to rethink your business model, period.

2. Customers know what they want and more importantly want their needs taken seriously. The experience of one customer on stage demonstrated at how ‘old world’ most resellers are. The customer said they went through several IT providers and not one provided any option of moving to the cloud. When quizzed they all said it was a bad idea but didn’t really provide anything further than that. The client wanted to reduce their costs and complexity. They had done their research and they wanted to move to the cloud.

That should be a wake up call for traditional IT resellers. Your clients want to move to the cloud. They are doing their own research. They want to see at least the option worked into quotes. If you fail to do that as a reseller you look old, tired and obsolete. Worst of all, chances are the customer will go elsewhere.

3. The cloud delivers excellent solutions. Both clients where extremely happy and surprised at not only how well the process of migrating to the cloud went but also what additional functionality was available to them. The main reason for both customers initially moving to the cloud was for email but once they got into Office 365 they discovered the wealth of possibilities around SharePoint and Lync.

SharePoint and Lync represent the greatest opportunity for resellers to benefit from Office 365. Most customers have not seen what either product can do. There is also a wealth of additional consulting services that can be tied to each product that most customers are clambering in their business. SharePoint and messaging have been around for a while now so there is no excuse not to have some expertise in them. If you don’t then someone with the skills has the opportunity to step in and speak to YOUR customer in language that appeal to them. If this happens the chances are you’ll be more and more sidelined as the online relationship develops potentially to a point where you are no longer part of conversation.

I fully agree that two customers don’t make a majority but they are the saying the same thing I’m hearing and seeing from others out there. If you are a traditional reseller and you ignore this then you do so at your own peril, because at the end of the day you have no business without the customer.

Domain names in Office365 P Plans

With Office 365 P Professional and Small Business (P) plans you are required to switch the name server (NS) records to point to Office 365 hosted name servers. Office 365 Enterprise (E) plans do not require this.

Once the domain has been added to the P Plan Office 365 will automatically create all of the other DNS records (MX, TXT, SPF, etc) needed to run Exchange Online and Lync Online in the domain.

Once the domain has been verified in Office 365 you can create custom A and CNAME records using the Office 365 DNS management features. If you want to hosted email and instant messaging with Office 365 but host a web site with a third party you can accomplish this with Office 365 domain management.

Office 365 P plans only currently support creating custom A and CNAME records. You cannot create SRV, TXT, etc records with Office 365 DNS management tools at this time.

A good reference and how to video can be found at:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JQbdWXFTJfw

Domain help (E plans) – http://onlinehelp.microsoft.com/en-us/office365-enterprises/ff637610.aspx

Domain help (P plans) – http://onlinehelp.microsoft.com/en-us/office365-smallbusinesses/gg593305.aspx