Information about SharePoint, Microsoft 365, Azure, Mobility and Productivity from the Computer Information Agency
As you can see from this video Microsoft is beginning to really push the Office365 message to customers.
http://channel9.msdn.com/Shows/TheOfficeBlog/The-Office-Show-Office-365-Part-One
And I love that they are finally talking about OneNote (which is a brilliant app).
I am always amazed at how many people are under the mistaken impression that something like Office365 (or Google Apps) can replace an on site network system (like Microsoft Small Business Server). In short the answer is no. Yet.
Office365 is designed to remove some of the ‘heavy lifting’ from on site networks by moving complex and hard to maintain applications like Exchange and SharePoint into a place where they can be managed by the people who designed and developed that software. However, even with those applications removed, local systems are still performing a lot of functions that the cloud cannot do well presently.
A good example is Windows Update Services (WSUS) which provide patch management for local machines. Microsoft does have a cloud product (Windows InTune) that does something similar but it is still in the early stages of development so it currently doesn’t have all the features the onsite equivalent has.
An very important phrase here is ‘currently’. The plan seems to be that Windows InTune will one day rival any onsite solutions (especially for small business), however it still has a way to go to reach parity. What many also overlook is the fact that cloud solutions like Windows InTune will improve far more rapidly than traditional on site software.
So even with Office365 and Windows InTune many small business have third party applications that depend on onsite solutions and infra structure. Those that use things like SQL will also eventually move to the cloud under something like Windows Azure but they won’t until developers rewrite their software to take advantage of the cloud offerings. Until they do, businesses will have to retain on site infrastructure.
Rather than believing that the cloud replaces everything currently on site you need to look at cloud technologies as reducing the requirements for on site equipment. With Office365 many business probably only need something like SBS 2011 Essentials, rather than the full blown SBS 2011 Standard. Think downsizing, not elimination. Yet.
As any business moves to the cloud they also need to carefully consider their connection to the Internet. Generally, most businesses have been able to get away with ‘consumer grade’ broadband. As they move to the cloud they must step this up to faster and more reliable pipes with redundancy. Most modern internal networks run at a speed of 1,000 Mb, while broadband typically only delivers 3 Mb consistently. Currently, you’ll never get the same performance but broadband speeds are always improving but they are not yet equivalent to on site speeds. Yet.
Finally, in all this talk of moving to the cloud, traditional things such as backup and security don’t magically disappear, they simply need to be re-thought and re-engineered. Just because your email moves to the cloud and Office365 does that mean you shouldn’t back it up? Certainly for me it doesn’t. I know that it is backed up at the data centre but since it is ‘my’ data I still backup regularly. Admittedly, this is still cumbersome and not totally automated as it is with on site situations. However, the key term again here is ‘yet’. It will come as demand increases.
So, in summary, can the cloud totally replace what you have with the your on site network? Almost certainly no. Will it? Almost certainly yes. The only question is when. In the meantime rather than thinking of eliminating think down-sizing locally when it comes to the cloud.
One of the biggest issues I currently see with Office365 SharePoint is the fact that it doesn’t allow you to directly open and view PDF documents in a browser. This has to do with browser file handling on the back end of SharePoint. I have previously detailed in my blog how to change that for on site SharePoint but in Office365 you don’t have access to this to make the change.
So, if you try and open a PDF stored in Office365 SharePoint you are only given the option to save the file locally. Given how common the PDF format is this is really something Microsoft should change in Office365 as soon as possible as it is causing plenty of people grief (including me).
I was faced with just this issue when working recently with a client using Office365 for secure storage and viewing of PDF documents. The solution devised was to use OneNote.
When you install OneNote on your system it also installs a Send to OneNote printer on your system. If you print using this printer the output not only ends up in OneNote but it is also indexed for searching (pretty neat).
Now if I print that same PDF document into a OneNote file saved on Office365 SharePoint I can click on the OneNote document and view the contents quickly and easily like shown above right in the browser. I agree that this would be a pain if you had lost of PDF documents but at this stage it is the best solution I have found.
For this client, being able to restrict user rights to these files was also important, so users were added to the standard Viewers group in SharePoint. According to the definition of the Viewers group:
“Members of this group can view pages, list items, and documents. If the document has a server rendering available, they can only view the document using the server rendering.”
To my way of thinking this means that because Office Web Apps (viewing) is installed by default with every Office365 SharePoint account people in the Viewers group will automatically see the OneNote file displayed in a browser. However, because Office Web Apps is considered “server rendering” as noted above, they won’t be able to open the file in a local copy of OneNote.
As you can see from the above screen shot, firstly, trying to edit the OneNote file in a browser fails as expected as they don’t have write permissions as Viewers.
But if you go to the document library and display the properties for the OneNote file you’ll see that there is not the option to save the document locally or open in a local Copy of OneNote.
However, it is also important to note that if people can view a document they can always take a copy (even if they take a photo of the screen). The above screen shot shows that they can simply right mouse click on the printed PDF inside the OneNote file and copy and paste it elsewhere.
However, overall I think this isn’t a bad solution for viewing PDF’s in a browser but honestly it is a solution to a problem that should never exit to my mind. I understand why Microsoft have denied the ability to open PDF’s in a browser (given the fact that PDF documents can launch javascript locally, which can do nasty things). But honestly, the PDFs as such a standard these days and people expect them to open directly in a browser, I feel it is doing more harm than good to Office365 by prevent this.
+1, Microsoft please allow PDFs to open directly in the browser OR allow me to make that decision in my setup.
I’ve just finished penning a piece called:
Why Office 365’s small business plan may not suit small business
over on boxfreeit.com.au.
Let me know what you think.
SharePoint on Office365 allows 50 extranet users by default. What is an extranet user? Basically they are users that can that can have access to a SharePoint site (i.e. subsite only) without the need to have an Office365 license, however they are a full user of that site just like a standard Office365 user. The restriction is, that they are limited to accessing just that site.
These extranet users are not enabled by default, so the first thing you will need to do after you have created your SharePoint site is to go into the Office365 admin console for SharePoint and select Settings option and then Manage External Users from the sub menu as shown above.
You will then need to select the option to Allow as shown above and Save the settings.
You then need to go into the Site Actions, Site Settings then select Site Collection Features from under the Site Collection Administration section. One of the options is External user invitations as shown above. If that features is not Active then press the Activate button to enable it.
To invite an externals user now select Site Actions again and select Share Site from the menu that appears.
Now simply enter the email addresses into the desire site groups and press the Share button.
If you haven’t correctly enabled Extranet users you will see a message displayed in this box as shown above telling you that “Invitations to users outside your organization are currently disabled”. If so check the above enabling steps.
If the invitation is sent successfully you should see a message like that shown above indicating that the users will be added to the site once they accept the invitation.
The external user should receive an email like shown above inviting them to join the SharePoint site.
The link will take them to a page where they can select to either connect using a Windows Live Id or a standard Office365 login. If the user doesn’t already have a Windows Live Id they will be able to create one via a link shown on the above page.
Once they have logged in they will have access to the SharePoint site.
If you now look at the securities for that group which you added the external user to you will find them listed by the email address as shown above.
They will now be treated as a normal SharePoint user for that site.
Can you have more than 50 extranet users? Yes, but you need to purchase an additional license for each one after the first 50 I believe.
The elephant in the room when it comes to ‘cloud computing’ is generally security. However, it is important to keep some perspective here amongst all the pariahs. Most systems today, servers, desktops and mobile devices are connected to the ‘cloud’ and are as such subject to exactly the same risk. However, I would ask as to which systems have more resources dedicated to security and monitoring? An SBS server inside a business or the servers running Office365 maintained my Microsoft? Clearly it would have to be those of Microsoft. Importantly, this doesn’t eliminate the risk of these systems but having servers and systems maintained by Microsoft would certainly reduce the risk to security.
When you run an internal SBS system you are totally dependent, normally, on a single Internet connection. If that fails for any reason then your connection to the outside world is severed. I f the same situation happened with Office365 workers could be up and operational again using wireless Internet cards or be allowed to work from home. Thus, there is a much higher dependency on your Internet connection if you select to run an on site network like SBS. With Office365 people can work where ever they have Internet connectivity, whether that be in your offices, at home, at a local coffee shop, the airport lounge or wherever.
Another reason cited by many for desiring on site servers is because they ‘know where their data is’. If that is important to your business then that is what you should do but let me give you another real world analogy so we can look at this in perspective. Is it possible for you to ask your bank to see your money? I doubt it. We all trust the modern banking system, that whizzes money around the globe in ones and zeros, to store this valuable resource. Trusting our money to banks provides a significant amount of benefit doesn’t it? It allows up to withdraw cash fro any ATM in the world. IT allows us to pay our bills from the privacy and comfort of our own homes any time we like. It provides us to a range of financial services that once was only the domain of the well to do. Sure you can keep all your money at home (on-site) but that makes things so much harder that for most people it isn’t really worth considering is it? Most people appreciate the significant amount of benefit they receive, with minimal risk, for utilizing a bank so why is you data any different?
Following along with this analogy, most people still retain some cash locally for convenience and so it can be the same with data. The cloud is not an all or nothing strategy, especially in the Microsoft realm. Given some of the larger sizes of files and information in makes more sense to consider a hybrid strategy for your technology needs. We all know that bandwidth is not the same everywhere we go, however we all know that it is not getting slower. The SBS family is not limited merely to SBS Standard there is also SBS Essentials which is an onsite server that integrates closely with Office365, providing on site storage as well as access to all the features and functionality that Office365 provides. It is possible to do with the more onsite based SBS Standard system but if you have Office365 doing all the heavy lifting for Exchange, SharePoint, etc why would you need to replicate those features on site as SBS Standard does?
Importantly, in comparison between two potential offerings we should consider the feature sets. Now Office365 doesn’t claim to do everything that SBS 2011 Standard does. Things such as SQL, patch management and third party applications are not currently handled by Office365 however that doesn’t mean there isn’t other options (especially from the fast developing Windows InTune for example). However, when you consider the core products such as Exchange for email and SharePoint for collaboration the biggest difference is the products that come with Office365 are the enterprise versions and importantly they are available from a single license. SBS 2011 Standard by comparison only contains the Standard editions of products like Exchange and SharePoint which lack features like legal hold and form services. Again, it seems to demonstrate that Office365 is offering more benefits than SBS 2011 standard.
In today’s business environment flexibility to meet changing conditions and competition is important. SBS 2011 Standard requires a significant up front cost to implement and then continued ongoing maintenance. This means if you implement this and your business started to grow dramatically you’d have to invest more to scale up. Office365 by contrast (especially the enterprise SKU’s) provide a far more flexible solution. If you only need 5 licenses this month, that’s all you need to pay for. If however you need 10 next month you can scale up. If a certain group of users don’t need all the power of Exchange then you can allow them to use the reduced functionality and costs of the kiosk workers licenses. With Office365 all you need to worry about is what features individual needs rather than guessing what features your whole business may need and being somewhat limited to that after the fact.
Unless you are an IT business your aim should be minimize the amount money that you spend on technology to provide you with business advantage. It means you also want the most flexibility and greatest range of features for your investment and on balance one would have to conclude that Office365 fits this bill much better than traditional on premises SBS. This doesn’t mean that Office365 is the solution for all businesses and it doesn’t mean that there things that Office365 can’t do. What it does mean is that Office365 should be taken seriously as an option for even the small businesses that once only considered on site servers like SBS. Every business need to make its own decisions about risk and reward in regards to what works best for them, however the important thing is to these decisions based on solid information not the opinions of a vocal minority.
Much like how many “Friends” on Facebook you have or how many “people” are following you on Twitter Microsoft and Google are engaged in a numbers game to highlight the size and adoption of their online service.
A recent blog post from Microsoft claims:
“1 person is signing up to try Office 365 every 25 seconds”
Not bad in the few short weeks that it has been released eh? Any of these sort of figures has to be taken with a grain of salt but it certainly does point to the growing adoption of commercial cloud services by all sorts of businesses.
http://www.ciaops.com/bootcamp
but it is running on Wednesday the 17th of August in Sydney at North Ryde RSL Club from 8.30am – 5.30pm. I’ll be covering all about Office365 and how to integrated into networks (especially SMB style networks).
What I am also considering is running the content also as an online webinar series over a few sessions. You could attend live or just view the recordings. I’d also make the recordings available to those attending the full day’s bootcamp.
If you are interested in an online bootcamp let me know how you’d like to see it run. Would 8 x 1 hour sessions be better than say 4 x 2 hour sessions? I’m all ears, so please contact me via (director@ciaops.com).
CIAOPS 