Office 365 and SharePoint Guide turns five

I am proud to announce that the CIAOPS Office 365 and SharePoint Guide has reached it fifth birthday!
So what is it? The Guide is a collection of technical and training material on all aspects Office 365 and SharePoint. It contains, documents, videos, OneNote notebooks, links and more all accessed via a SharePoint portal. At last count there was over 9 hours of videos and 1,500 pages of documentation, all of which is updated monthly with new and additional content.
In the Guide you will find things like:
– Study and preparation material for the 74-324 Administering Office 365 for SMB exam.
– Every CIAOPS publication
– Learning tracks to help you get up to speed on the products
– so much more
Guide subscribers also receive discounts on other CIAOPS items such as:
– Bootcamps / Training
– Consultation
So what do some of subscribers say?
I just thought I’d add my accolades to Robert Crane’s guide and remind all our members that Robert’s wealth of knowledge in all things cloud, experience and willingness to help is unmeasurable. All the useful tips in one place. Why wouldn’t you spend the $299 to subscribe to the guide? – Mike Hatfield (HIT)
“I can truly credit Robert for his training day and his SharePoint Guide (which includes Office 365 notes and information on the exams we require to continue or certification with Microsoft). I managed to pass with the highest score I have ever achieved in a Microsoft exam (900+)” – ( Rod Arthur, LAN Creation )
I also take this opportunity to thank every single subscriber for their support of my business but I’d especially like to thank my foundation subscribers who have been with me from the start. Without your faith in me this product would not be what it is today.
Special Birthday offer
Therefore to celebrate the Guide reaching the five year milestone I am going to make the following offer to every new subscriber during May 2013:
– Receive 10% off the normal purchase price of AU$299. Use the offer code 5YEARSNOW at checkout.
– Receive up to 1 hours remote consultation/training session free in a single session available until 30 June 2013 (Valued at > AU$200).
For ANY existing Guide subscriber, in recognition of their continued support, I will offer during May 2013:
– Up to 1 hours remote consultation/training session free in a single session available until 30 June 2013 (Valued at > AU$200).
Finally to ANYONE who recommends my Guide to someone who takes up a new subscription during May 2013 I will offer:
– 10% commission of the retail price (i.e. AU$29.90) for every converted referral. Thus, if you make 2 converted referrals you’ll receive AU$59.80, 3 referrals AU$89.70, etc, etc.
This applies ONLY until the end of May 2013 and don’t forget that the Guide is undated every month and includes all existing CIAOPS publications.
For more information about the Guide and to subscribe visit:

http://www.wssops.com

Once again, I thank all subscribers for their support of my business and I look forward to adding even more content in the coming year.

Additional SharePoint space for M and P plans not available yet

One of the really great additions to Wave 15 Office 365 SharePoint for all plans was the ability to add more SharePoint space beyond what you receive allocated per user. Where did I get that from? Here:

http://office.microsoft.com/en-au/office365-sharepoint-online-enterprise-help/sharepoint-online-software-boundaries-and-limits-HA102694293.aspx

Having just revisited that page after speaking with another reseller who had issues attempting to add space I note the above page says the following for P plans:

Additional storage for Small Business plans is not yet available.

and M plans:

Additional storage for Midsize Business plans is not yet available.

Problem for the reseller is that their customer needed greater space than the default and being told that it could be added went down the M plan route for the customer because of the cost savings over an E3 plan. Trouble is now that they need the additional SharePoint space and it can’t be added ‘yet’. That didn’t sit well with the customer or the reseller as the only option available with the space is an E3 plan and migrating from an M plan is not a simple upgrade of plans.

I am seeing a lot of confusion around what each plan does and doesn’t include. My recommendation is always E plans due to their flexibility. I would also recommend that if you go with either P or M plans check VERY carefully as to whether it exactly fits your needs now and into the future. Don’t rely on someone else, check it for yourself to avoid situation like the above.

Office 365 SharePoint Administration requires a license

One of the misconceptions I see is that people believe you need to assign every Office 365 user a license. It has been best practice to create an Office 365 global administrator assign them no license and then use that user to configure and manage Office 365. You can create as many of these ‘admin’ users as you want generally as they don’t consume a license.

I just tried that with the latest version of Office 365.

So I created a user called Tech Support and made them a global admin as shown above.

I then didn’t assign any licenses as shown above.

If I then login as the admin user I can go to Exchange Online administration as shown above.

I can also go to Lync Online administration, again as shown above.

But when I go to SharePoint Online administration I see the above error. I tried to add that Tech Support user as a site collection owner and that didn’t work either.

As soon as a assign a SharePoint Online license to that user as shown above,

I can access SharePoint administration.

So it would seem that to administer SharePoint Online I need to assign the user a SharePoint license but I don’t have to do the same for either Exchange or Lync Online?

That’s a little strange to my mind. I hope I’ve overlooked something obvious in all this.

SkyDrive Pro desktop sync is part of Office 2013 Pro Plus

*** 22 May 2013 Update ***

SkyDrive Pro Windows client app is now available for free. See post:

https://blog.ciaops.com/2013/05/skydrive-pro-client-now-available-for.html

For details

***************

As more people start to use the new features of SharePoint Online from Office 365 I am seeing greater confusion around how to synchronize files from SkyDrive Pro to the desktop. If you haven’t already I suggest you have a look at my previous posts about SkyDrive Pro:

SkyDrive Pro Primer

A bit more on SkyDrive Pro

Even more on SkyDrive Pro

There is also a SkyDrive Pro video I did:

SkyDrive Pro Webinar – Preview

and of course there is a eBook I recent released:

Getting started with SkyDrive Pro

The synchronization of files from SharePoint Online 2013 to a Windows desktop can be achieved by what I call a SkyDrive Pro App. This is a small program that once installed, monitors for changes between the local Windows machine and SharePoint 2013. When it finds changes it does a sync.

What seems to be confusing many people is where you get this SkyDrive Pro app. At the moment this app is only part of Office 2013 Professional Plus as you can see from below:

So if you don’t have Office 2013 Professional Plus you won’t get the SkyDrive Pro app and you won’t be able to perform synchronization to your local desktop.

As you can appreciate this is a major limitation for people using the new SharePoint Online. Much like the consumer version of SkyDrive they should have made this SkyDrive Pro app available for free so that you didn’t need Office 2013 Professional Plus to get it. There are however rumours that the SkyDrive Pro app will soon be available for free and I certainly hope this is the case for otherwise it is going to stymie the uptake of SharePoint Online, especially for those not currently having Office 2013 Professional Plus.

Office 365 Small Business Plans now have https

I was noodling away with a recently set up Office 365 Small Business Premium (P2) plan when I notice the following on the default team site:

In the previous version of the P Plan all the SharePoint sites (internal and external) were http like so:

I haven’t as yet tested all the new plans but I would have to assume that all new Office 365 internal SharePoint sites now run using https! (if not leave a comment on this post so I can check).

Yet another improvement over the old version.

Getting Started with SkyDrive Pro for Office 365

For people who follow along with blog you will know that I have done some posts on SkyDrive Pro including:

Even more SkyDrive Pro info

SkyDrive Pro Primer

A bit more SkyDrive Pro info

I have taken these, added more information and published my next e-Book – “Getting Started with SkyDrive Pro for Office 365”, which is the first title I have done on the new version of Office 365.

Abstract

This book helps users understand the basic usage and operation of SkyDrive Pro which is part of SharePoint 2013 in Office 365 so they can be more productive. SkyDrive Pro is a location with SharePoint that users can save and share files with others inside and outside their organization. It examines the following components of SkyDrive Pro: Uploading, Creating, Editing deleting and recovering files. It will show you how to edit, create and view documents as well as share files with contacts inside and outside your organization. It will show you how to synchronize these files to your desktop. If you are keen to find out how to make the most of SkyDrive Pro for Office 365 then this book is for you.

You can purchase the book at all the usual locations but I certainly would appreciate you purchasing it directly from my site at if it is of interest:

http://www.ciaops.com/publications

All purchases continue to support the work that I do in providing other free content like this blog and my YouTube channel. So if you find benefit from what I offer please support me and help me to create more. You can also assist by letting other know about this and my other publications.

Keep an eye out for more upcoming publications on the new Office 36 from me.

Some Office 365 training resources

With the plethora of material becoming available for Office 365 I thought I’d add a few links of some stuff I found recently that looks useful. Unfortunately, I haven’t as yet worked my way through it, but I will. In the meantime, it is not really worthwhile keeping all of that to myself so here it is:
Office 365 Ignite training
Cloud Sales Training – SMB Partners
Office 2013 / Office 365 – System Integrator
Office 365 – Business decision Maker/Sales and Marketing/IT Professional
SharePoint 2013 training for IT Professionals

New SharePoint Online features in Office 365

Now that the new version of Office 365 has been released and I have had a chance to look through what is on offer I thought I’d do quick round up of what I’ve found so far when it comes to the new SharePoint Online.
1. The first major point is that from what I can see EVERY new SharePoint Online plan includes SkyDrive Pro. This means that EVERY SharePoint Online users will receive 7GB of personal storage space.
There is still plenty of confusion about what SkyDrive Pro actually is. If you haven’t already I’d suggest you take a look at my previous blog post about SkyDrive Pro for clarification. Also remember that SkyDrive Pro space DOES NOT count against other shared space in SharePoint.
2. The default amount of SharePoint storage remains the same. All plans basically get 10GB of shared storage with an additional 500MB of shared space per user. This have 2 users your shared space = 10 + 2 x 0.5 = 11GB.
3. On the storage side, one thing that has changed is that ALL SharePoint Online plans can now purchase additional space! Yes, even P plans can purchase additional space (previously, they couldn’t).
4. P plans (P1 and P2) limited to one private site collection and one public web site. This is the same as the old P plan.
5. The new M plan has a limit of 20 site collections and one public web site.
6. The E plans have a limit of 3,000 site collections and one public web site.
7. Public website storage limit on all plans is 5GB.
8. The file upload limit is still 250MB per file for all plans.
9. The P plans (P1 and P2) allow 500 unique external users per month. The M plan allows 10,000 and the E plans allow 10,000.
10. Limits on syncing content in SkyDrive Pro and other SharePoint libraries. Note the following limitations related to syncing libraries to your computer with SkyDrive Pro:
• You can sync up to 20,000 items in your SkyDrive Pro library, including folders and files.
• You can sync up to 5,000 items in other SharePoint libraries, including folders and files.