MVP for 2014

I am happy to announce that Microsoft has again recognized me as a Most Valued Professional (MVP) for 2014. This now makes my third award in a row.

I thank Microsoft for the recognition as well as the support they have provided over the last 12 months. I also thank all those people out there who continue to support and recommend what I do, and especially those that read this blog. Without you I wouldn’t be recognized with this award.

I look forward to a bigger and better 2014.

All in the name

As you may well know I have written a number of books that are available on my site or from places like Amazon. One of these is:
Getting Started with SkyDrive Pro for Office 365.
I recently received a very poor review from PL1 Pgrmr that reads:
Not what it purports to be: I found this book to be totally corporate oriented. When I bought it, my thought was to understand Skydrive and how it works better. This book fails on all counts. After skimming it, I was sorry I even bought it. Stay away unless you are in a corporate environment.
Now my first reaction, especially to the review title, has annoyance as I certainly believed that both the title and the description were valid. However, upon reflection I can see where the problem lies.
Office 365 has a Home Edition that also includes SkyDrive but the consumer version NOT the Pro version. So this person would seem to have Office 365 Home Edition and was looking for information about SkyDrive, bought my book and was disappointed because my book only covers the business versions of Office 365.
So here we have a great example of how inconsistency in products confuses end users:
1. Office 365 Home is NOTHING like Office 365 for business
2. SkyDrive Pro is NOTHING like consumer SkyDrive
Now I do understand that Microsoft is trying to unify its products and brand all under one cloud banner but it is still very confusing for end users. Even I had to stop and look at this from the point of view of someone who has purchase Office 365 Home and wants information on SkyDrive and how easily it would be to confuse my book on Office 365 Business and SkyDrive Pro.
It is so easy as technology people who understand the differences between products like SkyDrive and SkyDrive Pro to overlook the fact that the vast majority of end users struggle to differentiate the products. It also highlights how you have to really, really specific with these cloud offering to ensure you are targeting exactly the right audience.
No one is at fault here, it is just confusion around the product editions. I have now updated the description on Amazon to indicate my book doesn’t talk to the Office 365 Home edition and I have left a comment for the reviewer indicating what I believe is where the confusion lies.
My book NEVER attempted to cover consumer SkyDrive and in the first few pages (which I am sure you can view via a preview it does say:
It is important not to confuse the consumer edition of SkyDrive and SkyDrive Pro
and
This means it covers material that is applicable for Enterprise Office 365 Plans and well as for the Small Business and Professionals Plans. It will not cover the consumer version of SkyDrive.
However, I do understand how someone using the Office 365 Home edition could still be confused, yet I think the title of the review is a little harsh but I accept that is what happens when you publish publically.
So what’s the point of this post? I suppose it is to say always ensure that you avoid confusion in the minds of consumers when it comes to your products. If there is confusion there will be frustration like that experienced by the reviewer and myself as an author both expecting different content from a product of the same name, that being Office 365. That frustration results in negative sentiment when in fact each product provides a great solution for home users and for business. It is unfortunate that they are so dissimilar but share a common name.
Oh well, I need to update that SkyDrive Pro book anyway.

CIAOPS Virtual Technology Meeting–December

The final CIAOPS Virtual Technology meeting 2013 will be held on Wednesday December the 4th at 4pm Sydney time. You can register for free now at:
https://ciaops1213.eventbrite.com.au
This meeting will feature a presentation by Windows Server MVP Boon Tee focused on connecting on premise servers to Office 365. Here, in broad strokes is what Boon will be covering:
1. Integrating Office 365 into the network.

a. WS2012E R2 features
b. How it fits together
c. Using ProPlus
d. Migration

– i. From SBS
– ii. From POP3/iMAP
– iii. MigrationWiz

2. Bug check

a. Essentials only DC or integration will break.
b. Unscheduled Server Backup after reboot
c. GPO setup
d. Licensing

The meeting will the usual swag of news, information and discussion so I hope that you’ll come along and join with us for this last meeting before Christmas and let me know what you’d like to see in the coming year.
I hope to see you there.

Enable Yammer integration in Office 365

A while back Microsoft bought Yammer and since then has been working hard to integrate it into Office 365. If you have an Enterprise Office 365 plan you should now have the ability to enable this integration.

Here’s a brief outline of how to complete this integration.

Login to your Office 365 portal as an administrator. At the bottom of the second column on this page you should see Included services. Select this.

That will now display the above option to the right. Select the link – Yes, activate Yammer Enterprise for my network.

You’ll then be taken to a screen where you can select which domain you wish to activate that on from the pull down list at the top of the screen.

Then select the Activate Yammer Enterprise button below.

The configuration will now commence. As noted this process could take 1 to 30 minutes to complete.

Look out for future post of the Yammer integration with Office 365 as I think this is another HUGE opportunity with the product.

Adding additional SharePoint storage for Office 365 P plans

All SharePoint Online plans provide the ability to add additional storage. In the Small Business plans this can be a little hard to locate. Here’s a quick overview of what you need to do.

Login to your Office 365 tenant as an administrator and select Manage and purchase licenses from under the licenses heading at the bottom of the page.

Click on purchase services at the top of the page and then Add under your Small Business plan on the right under the price.

Select optional add-ons item under user license at $XX.XX

Add your storage and complete the purchase.

Now you should be able to assign additional storage to your SharePoint Online site in the Small Business plans.

Adding space is slightly different for M and E plans and I’ll cover that in an upcoming post. Also, the story is a little different for plan in Australia so beware.

Office 365 Power BI

Here’s a nice video showing the features of Power BI (Business Intelligence) for Office 365.

<img src="http://lh3.ggpht.com/-6DOXCrysYbY/Uo69N0It2uI/AAAAAAAAOj4/yfRSfSCg-Gw/video88ae20cb05d0%25255B12%25255D.jpg?imgmax=800" style="border-style: none" galleryimg="no" onload="var downlevelDiv = document.getElementById('895fa86c-920a-4f11-a6ce-0b5f1369da9a'); downlevelDiv.innerHTML = "

http://www.youtube.com/v/jCl8MrNifVo?hl=en&hd=1“;” alt=””>

In essence it allows you to easily report on large data sets. There are plenty of really good examples of this already like:

<img src="http://lh3.ggpht.com/-99RSHIrJ1nQ/Uo69Org-VvI/AAAAAAAAOj8/cN0CBmhYqz4/video46108484fa0d%25255B9%25255D.jpg?imgmax=800" style="border-style: none" galleryimg="no" onload="var downlevelDiv = document.getElementById('55245746-cc31-47c0-81a9-f21d96164776'); downlevelDiv.innerHTML = "

http://www.youtube.com/v/KD9GlZGF9rY?hl=en&hd=1“;” alt=””>

No matter how small a business they can benefit from improved data analysis. Great thing is most already have the tools like Excel and Office365.

What really impressed me in the first video is the natural language queries that were performed towards the end of the video. Honestly, take a look at that and tell me that isn’t firstly really cool and really handy, especially for those no-IT type business owners.

There is so much opportunity around BI in the market and so few resellers seeming to grab it. Even down at the SMB level, BI is huge so if you are wondering how to make money as a reseller in the cloud look at getting into BI for your clients. In simple terms, BI helps customer understand their business by allowing them to quickly analyse their data. You won’t regret it I’ll bet.