Here’s a couple of good videos that gives you an overview of how Office365 will work with SBS Essentials.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jVQz3KufpwQ
This first video shows you how you can manually set up the integration between SBS Essentials and Office365. At the moment, this is the option you’ll have to use until the Office Integration Module (OIM) for Office365 becomes available.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a4O4LZ6UFEg
This video shows you the current (pre-release) Office Integration Module (OIM). It has some nice features and integrates nicely with SBS Essentials. Importantly, it doesn’t provide any AD synchronization, it simply allows you to easily administrator Office365 from the SBS Essentials console.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k2-dVLwYraU
This video shows you how to integrate your custom domain with SBS Essentials. You will note that the Office365 servers need to become your DNS name servers. This means you’ll have to use Office365 to edit or add any records you have for your domain. The video shows the example of setting up the remote access URL on Office365.
If you are planning to install SBS Essentials and integrate it with Office365 then I’d suggest you take a few moments to have a look at each of these videos, after which you should have a much better idea of how it all integrated together.
Office365 goes live
Yeah! Office365 is finally here and everyone can enjoy the benefits of upgraded versions of Exchange, SharePoint and online communications using Lync. if you missed it, I recently ran a 60 minute Office365 for SMB webinar (mainly focused on the Australian market) that is available for paid download if anyone is interested at:
http://www.pagebloom.com/content/product/o/92160/p/1103227
In the webinar I speak about the fact that I consider Lync and SharePoint to be the two greatest opportunities for the SMB market. Firstly, neither produce really has much exposure to SMB clients. This means there is a whole raft of business issues that can be addressed by these products.
Lync allows SMB businesses to benefit from remote and teleworking, which not only improves productivity but also employee retention as they work more flexible times and reduce unnecessary travel to name but two benefits. SharePoint now allows the ability to create intelligent forms, thereby reducing paper but also allows viewing and editing of Office document via a web browser using Office Web Apps.
There will obviously still be teething problems with Office365 but I would expect to see the service continue to improve at a very fast clip. Now all I’m waiting for is the next version of Windows InTune.
Office365 for SMB webinar
Confused about Office365 and how it work in the small to medium business (SMB) segment? Then this introductory webinar is for you. In it you’ll learn more about Office365 capabilities and more importantly how these map to the SMB market.
You’ll learn things like:
– How Office365 will be licensed
– What the capabilities and options of the licenses are
– Picking the right Office365 options for the SMB environment
– The real world implementations of Office365, good and bad
– and much more.
The webinar is on Tuesday the 28th of June from 10am – 11am (Sydney, Australia time) and only costs $29.90 ex GST. The material covered in the webinar is aimed specifically at the SMB Market so you’ll learn about integration with products like Small Business Server.
To sign up with a credit card visit:
http://www.pagebloom.com/content/product/o/92160/p/1103227
otherwise contact director@ciaops.com to arrange alternate forms of payment.
Thinking about Office365 – Part 1
As the public release of Office365 draws closer I’m going to start doing more posts on Office365 and the impact for small to medium businesses. I’ll try and provide a balanced view, the good and the bad as I see it. However, remember at this stage please remember that Office365 is still in beta and the things can change. Caveat emptor.
So let’s start off with the proposed subscription plans. The major two SKU’s for SMB will be the P and E plans (the K is for Education) as shown below.
From (http://360on365.files.wordpress.com/2010/11/e-family-plans.jpg?w=450&h=342)
Now the P plan is aimed squarely at the SMB market and contains a number of points to note. The most important as far I can see:
– No advanced SharePoint features such as Visio, Forms and Excel services. However Access services is included.
– Doesn’t include the ability to sync Active Directory via ADFS. This leads to another observation I have around SBS 2011 Essentials in a forthcoming post.
– A single SharePoint site to which you can’t add additional space, aside from what you get with user licenses. It does have a number of templates and quick design features not available in other plans.
– No Office Professional Plus subscription. Thus, people on these plans will need to furnish their own version of Office on the desktop typically. It does however come with Office Web Apps allowing you do some work with Office documents in a web browser.
– No advanced Exchange options such as archiving and legal hold.
– Limit of 50 users.
– ‘Community support’. That seems to indicate help is only available via forums and blogs. That is probably a very good things for resellers as it provides a real opportunity for them to step in and handle support for a customer.
– However, most importantly, it is my understanding that you can’t easily upgrade from P to E plans.
The apparent redeeming feature of P plans will be they are cheap (apparently around $6 a license). Looking at what you get for that amount of money it certainly represents value to many smaller businesses.
However, to my of thinking the E plans are a much better bet as you can not only easily upgrade as required but you can also mix and match. Thus, power users can get E3 plans (including Office Professional Plus) while road warriors can have the E1 plans. The E plans also allow customers to integrate their Active Directory via ADFS if they want (although I wouldn’t be recommending that in the SMB space for reasons I’ll make clear in a future post).
Even if the E3 plans are around the $25 mark per user I feel they represent better value and flexibility to most progressive small to medium businesses looking to take maximum advantage of all the features Office365 can provide.
For this reason, I’ll be focused on selling E plans (especially E3 with Office Professional Plus) across every business I deal with. P plans certainly have their place but I don’t like the fact that they appear to lock you into a solution that won’t allow more options.
Watch out for more posts on Office365 coming soon.
Office365 public beta now available
You can now get your hands on Office365. Sign up today at:
http://www.microsoft.com/en-au/office365/online-software.aspx
View the press release at:
http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/features/2011/apr11/04-17Office365.mspx
and don’t forget who to call when you need help with Office365 (especially SharePoint), that’s right me (director@ciaops.com).
Essential viewing
On of the things that I’m currently hanging out to see is how SBS 2011 Essentials integrates with Office365. The above video which is part of a number of training on SBS 2011 Essentials I reckon is really worth a closer look because it provides an important insight into not only the Office365 integration but also the swag of other addins that are coming soon. The rest of the training can be found here:
http://blogs.technet.com/b/sbs/archive/2011/04/12/content-content-and-more-content-part-1.aspx
Why is this important? It demonstrates to me that Microsoft is committed to making SBS 2011 Essentials a relevant product for the market but it also demonstrates to me that they GET what is happening out there with technology. What do I mean by this? I mean that fact that world is all about apps now rather than web sites. Many products are delivered directly via their totally encapsulated ‘application’ without the need for the browser. The app manages everything from installation to management and even updating. This is exactly the model Microsoft appears to be going down with the addins for SBS 2011 Essentials.
I also like the look of the Windows 7 Phone integration which allows plenty of directly control of your network right from a mobile device. Now of course all of this is blue sky mining until it becomes available but if you are interested in how SBS 2011 Essentials will connect to the cloud and how easy it appears that is going to be then I’d recommend you take a moment and have a look at this video.
April release of CIAOPS SharePoint Guide
The April 2011 version of my SharePoint Operations Guide is now available for subscribers. In this month’s edition you’ll find out how to change the passphrase on a SharePoint farm which is really important if you are now using SBS 2011 Standard. Why? Because it is installed with a random passphrase and if you need to repair the installation of SharePoint Foundation 2010, and you don’t know the passphrase then you’ll have no option but to uninstall and reinstall SharePoint Foundation 2010. Yuk!
You’ll also find some information about Office365, especially in regards to SharePoint online.
I’m also please to welcome along a number of new subscribers who have received my Guide after signing up to my upcoming SharePoint bootcamp. When you sign up you’ll get a whole days hands on training PLUS a 12 month subscription to my Guide. Even better, if you sign up now the subscription won’t start till May, so you’ll get 13 months of the Guide.
Would you believe that next month marks 3 years of the Guide? Who’d thought, all those years ago that it would grow to what it has become today? Not me that’s for sure. So I take this opportunity to thank all my subscribers for their continued support.
Office365 Ignite training – Day 3
Today started off with information around Forefront Online Protection for Exchange. It now has the ability to not only view information but also make changes including things like white listing and creating email signatures. This will be quite handy and makes things more flexible than they currently are.
In Australia there will be an Office365 ‘P’ SKU which is aimed at small business and most likely designed to work with SBS 2011 Essentials. Personally, I can’t see myself ever recommending that option for customers.Why? It is simply too limiting. The ‘P’ SKU for example, doesn’t allow AD synchronization via Dirsync, it doesn’t have the provision for email archiving, it is limited to 50 licenses in total, doesn’t include Office Pro Plus, limits the amount of SharePoint storage and so on. To my mind the biggest appeal of Office365 for end users is going to be the version of Office Pro Plus they can download and install on their machines.
Another major point is the fact that Office 2003 will not be supported. This means Outlook 2003 won’t even be able to connect to Exchange Online under Office365. Given that Office 2003 is approaching almost 10 years I really think it is time people upgrade to Office 2010, but something to be aware of when doing migrations.
Interestingly, Office365 passwords can be 7 to 16 characters in length. We asked why there is an upper limit but no one seemed to know. This is sort of a bummer as many have been schooling customers to use pass phrases or more than 16 characters. Hopefully that will change before Office365 goes public.
As for the SharePoint stuff well there wasn’t too much I hadn’t already seen already having access to the beta. However, there were plenty of interesting questions thrown up by attendees which adds to the knowledge base.
So, was it worthwhile to take 3 days out of my business to learn about Office365? Definitely. Will I have to do more research and testing? Yes, but I happy to do this as I see Office365 being big and there are not many people out there with the skills, especially in the SBS world. Much of the information I learn about Office365 will find its way into my Cloud Guide (currently part of my SharePoint Guide). As Office365 grows so too will this information but focused on the SME market.
Finally, please remember that everything I mention here is still about a product that is yet to be released and is subject to change. However, I am really liking what I see and can’t wait to start tying it into SBS 2011 Essentials for starters.
CIAOPS 
