CIAOPS Office 365 PowerShell online course now available

I’ve been working hard recently building a lot of Office 365 content that I plan to offer online. The first of these projects is now public:

PowerShell for Office 365

You can go, sign up and take the the course immediately. It is based on my original eBook from a while back but has been updated with the latest information.

Each lesson contains a short video tutorial, downloadable course notes and a quiz to test your knowledge. You can also ask questions and provide feedback to gain even more knowledge.

I am aiming to improve and extend the course over time, so please let me know what you’d like to see n future updates to the content.

As I mentioned previously, I am starting to add more and more of these online courses which you’ll find at:

http://ciaops-academy.teachable.com/

So take a look at what’s there already and keep an eye there for new material coming REAL soon!

Office 365 PowerShell Webinar

I am currently working with Dicker Data on producing a number of training webinars around Office 365. The next one will be on Managing Office 365 with PowerShell which will show you the basics of administrating you Office 365 tenants from the command line. importantly, it will show you how to automate these tasks to reduce the time required will deliver more consistent results.

The webinar is next Wednesday the 8th of July from 11am – 11.45am (Sydney Australia) time and is free for anyone to attend.

If you do want to attend simply pop you email address below and subscribe and you’ll immediately be emailed the connection details for the Skype for Business meeting. Your email address will also be automatically added to the list of my upcoming Office 365 email newsletter due for release soon.

I hope to see you at the event.

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Revised bootcamp notes publication now available

As I detailed a while back I have now updated my Bootcamp products offering to include:

1. Latest version of my Office 365 bootcamp notes. This OneNote notebook is something I use everyday to capture information about Office 365. It is my reference ‘bible’ covering everything from Exchange to Sharepoint, Delve to Single Sign on as well as troubleshooting, best practices and a range of PowerShell scripts and third party solutions that work with Office 365.

2. Latest version of my Azure bootcamp notes. This OneNote notebook contains my daily brain dump about Azure. It contains links, information, tutorials and more. Again, this is something I use everyday and update constantly.

3. Exam cram notes for the Office 365 70-347 and 70-346 exam. It contains information and links to help you pass the exam. It also has a number of practice exam questions to give you an idea of what might be covered in an exam.

4. Five (5) supporting Office 365 checklists and templates that you can use for your Office 365 implementation. These documents are in various Office formats (Word, Excel, etc).

There are two ways to get access to this material:

1. You can join my Cloud Business Blueprint community via:

http://www.cloudbusinessblueprint.com/members-sign-up/

where you’ll get immediate access to the latest versions plus heaps of other unique on demand training, cheat sheets, re-brandable content, articles AND access to the members forums to converse with other cloud resellers.

2. You can purchase the existing Office 365 bootcamp notes via;

http://www.e-junkie.com/ciaops/product/488325.php

for AU $148. This purchase will also entitle you to a 12 monthly subscription for updates to these products (generally updated monthly).

Also, given that the 74-325 Office for SMB exam has been superseded I have made the OneNote exam cram notes I created for this available for free download with all my other free material at:

http://www.ciaops.com/downloads

If nothing else, those bootcamp notes are going to provide a centralised and searchable way to locate just about anything to do with Office 365 and Azure. This will save you inordinate amounts of time and easily pay for your outlay. You’ll also get free updates for to all of these for 12 months once you purchase. Like I said, I use these notebooks EVERY DAY.

If you want some testimonials about these bootcamps and information provided visit:

http://www.ciaops.com/bootcamp/

Please support this material so I can continue creating more.

Review of Office 365 Nation 2014

Although I am still recovering from the jet lag, my vision has cleared enough now that I can pen my thoughts on Office 365 Nation 2014 recently held in Seattle.

The event was put together by Harry Brelsford and in another way is really SMB Nation 2014, however this time the theme has been ‘rebooted’ to focus on Office 365 and the cloud.

The first thing I must do is thank Harry for the opportunity to conduct four formal and one informal session. You can download the slides from the my formal presentations here:

T106 – Coming to grips with SharePoint

T107 – The Business of Yammer

T108 – Level up with PowerShell for Office 365

T109 – Lync the red headed step child

unfortunately, there are no slides for my informal Azure session as it was mostly demos and actually went for over two hours! Thanks to all who stayed late to listen to my thoughts.

The next thing I need to do is thank everyone who attended my sessions. The first two were quite late at night, which after a long day, I appreciate you coming along and being an enthusiastic and attentive audience. I also appreciate all the great feedback and questions received in all sessions. And I really appreciate that you laughed at my jokes, corny as they were!

One of the high points of the conference for me was the number of people coming up to me in the hallways letting me know that they read my blog and perhaps a particular post I wrote had helped them. Publishing a blog can be lonely at times, sure you get blog comments but it is so fulfilling for me as a content creator to actually have someone say that what I have created has actually helped them face to face. It makes the whole creation process worthwhile and gives me the energy to continue doing the blog regularly and improving the quality and depth of what it contains.

With over two thirds of attendees attending SMB Nation for the first time it was brought home to me how many are still struggling to find their feet in this new cloud world. Everyone in attendance appreciates the cloud is here and that Office 365 is a great option but they are struggling with how to integrate that into a successful and profitable business for themselves.

The biggest reason for this struggle in my option is that fact that most vendors are still pushing the ‘Managed Service Provider’ (MSP) mantra which I believe doesn’t make a great of sense in this cloud-first world for many. It can play a part, but these days it is only a small part in a cloud business. However it seems to me that too many people have become too locked into things only working in that MSP way and from where I sit, the world is now a very different place.

In saying that, I’d really like to see business models and ideas come to the forefront that challenge that traditional notion so much so that I think I’ll post a few articles on business very soon, so stay tuned for that.

In short, I believe the path to success in many ways requires a completely new way of thinking. You don’t have to totally abandon your existing business model but you do need to challenge it. You do need to start thinking outside the box and challenge the conventions to find what works best for your business. This is where most struggle I believe. They are trying to put the round peg of the way they have always done things into the square hole that is cloud services. So to provide more light on that I promise to do some follow up posts focused on business for people.

I think that this conference had a some very high quality speakers and none more so then Tom Moen from Microsoft. I am so glad I attended his sessions and got to meet the man. I learned a lot about technology and presentation techniques from him. That alone made my whole trip worthwhile.

Of course the real value in these conferences is the hallway networking, sitting down with peers over breakfast, a coffee, dinner or a drink. It was fantastic to catch up with old acquaintances and past SMB Nation attendees. However, it was also fantastic to make so many new connections and talk with others whom I had never met before about their business and the challenges of the cloud. This is also where I learnt a lot and I appreciate every one of those interactions.

So in summary, it was a long way to travel but a real benefit for myself. I thoroughly enjoying presenting my sessions and listening to some other outstanding ones. However, most of all I enjoyed the peer to peer networking and the opportunity to be at the kick off for many along a journey to successful cloud consulting.

My hope is that Harry’s event becomes the pivotal one for SMB cloud resellers as it was for SBS resellers all those years ago, because there really isn’t anything I have seen that speaks specifically to the SMB IT reseller in the cloud space now. These are the people that manage technology for the gigantic number of small businesses out there that power the economy. If SMB’s can grow then the economy as a whole grows and everyone benefits. For that to happen SMB IT resellers need to retool their skill portfolio and a focused conference like this provides no better way to achieve that. So if you haven’t jumped on board the Office 365 Nation train, then I’d recommend it is time you did.

Well done Harry. Well done SMB Nation team. Well done everyone who attended. I’m keen to come back next year and I hope I’ll get the nod to speak again.

Enable litigation hold for all Exchange Online mailboxes using PowerShell

If your Office 365 plan includes the option for litigation hold then it is generally best to turn it on for all mailboxes from day 1. The quickest and easiest method of doing that is via PowerShell.

Here’s the one line command you need to achieve that:

get-mailbox | set –litigationholdenabled $true

Of course, it won’t automatically enable any future mailboxes your create but all you need to do is run the same command again.

Are you coming to Office365 Nation?

From September 26 to 28 I’ll be in Redmond Washington, USA speaking at the Office 365 Nation conference. What will I will I be talking about? Here’s a list of my sessions:

T106: Coming to Grips with SharePoint Online

SharePoint is the heart and soul of Office 365 and major differentiator from the competition. It is a business that allows solutions to just about any business pain point, but how does it achieve this? Without a solid foundation in the fundamentals of SharePoint you are not going to be able to explain to customers how it solves their business needs. This course will help you understand everything in SharePoint Online, including OneDrive for Business, from the ground up, then how to demo it to clients and build solutions to help their business. If you want to stand out from the crowd then you need to know SharePoint and you need to attend this course.

T107: The Business of Yammer

Social is changing the way that business works today. It is fast becoming the de facto method of working for employees entering the workplace and it is something that is now part of Office 365 via Yammer. However, what is Yammer? What can it do? How do you make the best use of it even for small businesses. This course will take you through the basics and help you firstly understand why implanting social into a business is so important and then how to use the tools and abilities of Yammer via Office 365 to achieve this for clients. Collaborating is key for smart business in the future and this course will arm you with the knowledge to take advantage of this and be an expert in the field.

T108: Level up with PowerShell for Office 365

PowerShell is the THE tool for IT Professionals to administer and a mange Office 365. It provides access to many settings that are not available in the GUI. It provides faster deployment and management of just about all aspect of Office 365, from Exchange to Lync and SharePoint. To truly be a skilled Office 365 professional, you need to know and user PowerShell. This course will provide you exactly this skills. You’ll learn not only how to set up a PowerShell environment to connect to Office 365 but you’ll also learn some of the handy scripts you can use to make administration so much easier. If you want to manage Office 365 better and faster then this is course for you.

T109: Lync: The Red Headed Stepchild

Too often Lync is overlooked when it comes to Office 365. However it is a very powerful service that provides key benefits in Office 365. This course will firstly help you understand what Lync is and why it is so important to businesses large and small. You’ll learn how it is the easiest tool to pitch to decision makers and therefore the key service you should be using to leverage the complete Office 365 suite. If you want to convert more Office 365 stakeholders you must know Lync.

I’m luckily to be speaking at an event with many distinguished and experienced presenters who are aiming to provide IT professionals and business leader key information about how Office 365 and Microsoft cloud products are changing the way that business is conducted and opening unprecedented opportunities.

You can of course still register for the event at:

https://www.regonline.com/Register/Checkin.aspx?EventID=1573788

and to learn more about the conference visit:

http://fall2014.smbnation.com/

so if you are interested in what I believe is some fantastic content I encourage you to register today.

If you are attending the in the area during these dates I always love to catch up with people and understand how they are taking advantage of products like Office 365 and Azure, so feel free to reach out to me and organise a time to meet. It’ll be a packed few days but I’m sure we can squeeze something in.

Hope to see you there.

Creating a SharePoint Online site collection

After recently showing you how to delete a SharePoint Online site collection via the web console and PowerShell the next step is obviously to show you how to create a new site collection.

Via the Web console

Login to the Office 365 web console as an administrator. Then in the top right select the Admin menu option and SharePoint from the menu that appears.

This will take you to the SharePoint admin center as shown above. This will show you all the site collections you currently have. The SharePoint admin center is only available if you have a M or E plan. It is unfortunately not available if you have an Office 365 Small Business plan.

From the Ribbon Menu across the top of the page select New then Private Site Collection from the menu that appears.

This will open a new dialog window as shown above. Enter the following for your new site:

Title – What name will appear across the top of the home page.

Web Site Address – The URL suffix you want to use when navigating to the site. best practice is to keep this as short as possible and devoid of special characters.

Template Selection:

– Language – as required

– Select a template – select from the options available along the tabs across the top. In most cases you will simply select Team Site under the Collaboration tab but you can select whatever template you wish including ones you have created yourself previously.

Scroll down for more options.

Adjust the Time Zone and set the site collection Administrator. Next set the amount of storage (in MB) you wish the new site to have in Storage Quota as well as the Server Resource Quota value.

When complete, press the OK button to create the new site collection.

You should now see in the top right corner of the screen a message letting your know that the site is being created as shown above.

You should also see the URL of the new site collection appear in the list with a green spinning animation at the end indicating that it is current being created.

Once the creation process is complete you will see the NEW icon displayed next to the hyperlinked URL.

You should now be able to navigate to the URL of the site as the site collection administrator you configured earlier. Don’t forget you may need to configure other users access to this new site if required.

Via PowerShell

You’ll need to connect to Office 365 PowerShell and SharePoint Online via PowerShell firstly.

Run the command:

get-spowebtemplate

to get a list of all the site templates that are available within your tenant.

Here we are going to use the Team Site template whose name is STS#0

Run the command:

new-sposite –url https://<tenant-name> –owner <site collection admin email> –storagequota <size in MB> –resourcequota <server resources> –title “<site name>” –template <template>

In this case

new-sposite –url https://ciaops365.sharepoint.com/sites/demo2 –owner admin@ciaops365.com –storagequota 5000 –resourcequota 30 –title “Demo2” –template STS#0

The PowerShell window will now pause until the site creation is complete. If you now look in the SharePoint admin center via the web console (refreshing the browser may be required), you should see the site being created as shown above.

After a few moments the site will be created as before and the PowerShell window will return to a prompt.

You can force the PowerShell script to return to the command prompt without waiting until the site collection is created by using the:

-nowait

at the end of the creation line.

So there are the two methods of creating a new SharePoint Online site collection in M and E plans using both the web console and PowerShell.