Introduction to Azure

I have blogged and done plenty of presentations about different Azure services (i.e. Azure SMB File Shares recently), but when I looked through my list of YouTube videos I didn’t have a basic video that provided just an general overview of what Azure is.

So I took some content from a recorded webinar and packaged it up to the video you’ll see above and at:

What is Azure?

It runs for about ten minutes and hopefully provides a good resource for those who are still trying to understand what Azure is all about.

From there, I’d suggest you take a look at my online training academy which has a few courses on Azure but probably the most relevant one is:

Introduction to Azure

which has about 19 lessons that are aimed at giving you basic information about some of the most relevant features of Azure for IT Professionals.

You can also search all my blog posts on Azure using the Azure tag. The results of that are:

CIAOPS blog Azure posts

which you can use now or any time in the future as I aim to continue to tag each article which deals with Azure.

If you are still struggling with Azure, don’t hesitate to contact me with your questions and I’ll do my best to help shed some light on what at times, I understand, can be somewhat confusing. If you’d also like to see me write or present about something in Azure just let me know and I’d be happy to make it happen. All you gotta do is ask.

Questions about Office 2016 via Office 365

Here are some common questions that I see out there about Office 2016 via Office 365.

Q. Am I required to upgrade from Office 2013 on my desktop to Office 2016 if my Office 2013 was installed from Office 365?

Yes, however you have 12 months to complete that transition. That means you must upgrade your Office 365 Office 2013 to Office 2016 by the 22nd of September 2016. After that date any existing Office 365 Office 2013 installation will reverted to “reduced functionality mode”, basically read only.

Q. Will existing Office 2013 installations from Office 365 automatically be upgraded without user interaction?

No. Users will not have their version of Office 2013 on the desktop automatically upgraded to Office 2016 without their input. Typically, they will need to upgrade from the portal or via an administration installation using the Office 2016 Deployment toolkit.

However, according to the Office 2016 Q and A:

If your admin does not manage your installations and updates an automatic upgrade will occur for Office 2013 users. When your automatic upgrade is ready for you to install, you’ll receive a notification that appears on the menu bar in one of your Office applications (for example, Word, Excel, PowerPoint, or OneNote). When this notification appears follow the steps to update to the current version of Office.

If your Office 365 for business admin manages your Office installations your admin will need to manage your updates to Office 2016.

This is along the lines of the Windows 10 upgrade process. Notification will be received that an Office update is available but users will need to follow the steps in the notification to upgrade.

Q. Can you downgrade from Office 2016 to Office 2013 with Office 365?

No. Only Volume Licensing of Office directly has downgrade rights. Office 365 purchased via Open does not provide downgrade rights for Office.

Q. Can I obtain Office 2016 from Office 365 from DVD media or downloading an ISO?

No. Office 2016 from Office is deployed using ‘Click-to-run’ technology that delivers software directly from the Internet. An administrator can use the Office 2016 Deployment toolkit to create deployment repositories on a network if required.

Q. Can I install Office 2016 from Office 365 in a Remote Desktop environment (i.e. on a Terminal Server)?

Yes, provided you have Office from Office 365 under an E (Enterprise) SKU. If you do then you use the Office 2016 Deployment toolkit to do that. For more information about Office in an RDS environment see my previous post:

Installing Office 365 pro Plus on an RDS server – updated

Q. When can I get access to Office 2016 software from Office 365?

The ability to install the latest software is being rolled out across Office 365 tenants in a staged manner. If you wish to ensure have access to the latest Office 365 abilities ensure you have Office 365 First Release enabled. You will then find Office 2016 preview available to first release tenants.

To find out when your tenant will receive Office 2016 from Office 365 review:

How do I update Office to Office 2016 using Office 365 for Business?

The table before from the Office 2016 wiki details when the upgrades are available depending on your version of Office 2016

Office 365 plans or versions	Upgrade timeline	Default Update branch	More Information about how to upgrade
Office 365 Business plans (Small Business Premium, Business, Business Premium)	Available now for new installations. Automatic upgrades will occur in Q4 of 2016.	Current Branch	See How do I update Office to Office 2016 using Office 365 for business?
Office 365 ProPlus SKU(Enterprise, Midsize, Education)	Planned for the first quarter of 2016.	Current Branch for Business*	Where can I find information about updating Office 365 ProPlus to the Office 2016 version? ProPlus can be configured to use Current Branch if desired. See the Configure the update branch to be used by Office 365 ProPlus* section from here.
First Release	Available now.	First Release for Current Branch for Business	More information about First Release for Office
Office 365 Home, Personal, or University.			How do I get my Office 365 upgrade to Office 2016? Note this does not apply to business products.

For more information about the different update branches or how to deploy a specific branch see Overview of update branches for Office 365 ProPlus.

Thus, if you are on an Enterprise SKU of Office 365 you will not typically see Office 2016 being rolled out until early 2016 according to the above table because these SKUs are automatically on the Current Branch for Business update regime. You can however, shift Enterprise licenses to the Current branch update regime so that they will receive an update to Office 2016 before the end of the year. If you want it earlier than that you will need to be on first release.

To configure the update branch for an Office 365 ProPlus installation, you can use the latest version of the Office Deployment Tool or the latest version of the Group Policy Administrative Templates files (ADMX/ADML) for Office 2016.

Q. How will Office 2016 fro Office 365 updates be handled going forward?

Office 2016 from Office 365 will move to a similar update methodology approach that Windows 10 has adopted. This means that updates (security and features) will be pushed out on a regular basis via a number of different update ‘branch’ offerings. Different SKUs will be on different ‘branches’ as detailed in the above table. To better understand how Office 2016 updates are going to function review:

Overview of update branches for Office 365 ProPlus

and this video from Microsoft:

Q. What other information is available about Office 2016 from Office 365?

Prepare to update Office 2016 Pro Plus to the Office 2016 version

Q. Can I have both Office 2013 and Office 2016 from Office 365 on the same machine?

No.

Q. Are any Office 2013 applications removed during the installation of Office 2016 that are not upgraded?

Yes. If you have InfoPath from Office 2013 ProPlus installed it will be removed during the upgrade. It will however still be available for download from the software section of the Office 365 portal.

SharePoint Designer 2013 will also be removed during the Office 2016 upgrade process. It again can be installed from the software page in the office 365 portal.

Versions of Visio Pro 2013 and Project Pro 2013 will also be removed from the computer during an upgrade. You won’t be able to reinstall them after the Office 2016 installation. You will need to install the 2016 versions of Visio Pro for Office 365 and Project Pro for Office 365 on a computer with the Office 2016 version of Office. This removal only happens when you manually update to Office 2016. It is recommended that you wait for the automatic update to update all office applications on the desktop, including Visio and Project.

See – “We need to remove some older apps” error for more information about existing apps being removed during the Office 2016 upgrade.

Q. Do users have be local administrators to install Office 2016 from Office 365?

Yes. Per:

Deploy Click to Run for Office 365 products

Users must be local administrators on their computers to install Click-to-Run for Office 365 products.

If users in your organization are not local administrators on their computers, you can use one of the following methods to install Click-to-Run for Office 365 products for users:

Have an administrator log on to the user’s computer and install Click-to-Run for Office 365 products.
Use a software distribution product, such as Microsoft System Center Configuration Manager.
Use Group Policy computer startup scripts.

Using a template to migrate a SharePoint library

In a recent post I showed how to:

Create a template from a Document Library

In the above video I take that one step further and show you how to import this template into a completely different site collection. This could also be in a separate unique Office 365 tenant if desired.

The process is basically to create a template, including the content if desired, from the source library. You then download the template that this creates and upload to the destination Site Template Gallery. Once there you can create a new library based on this template. When you create the new library it should also contain the content from the source location if you selected that initially.

This is a quick way to not only copy the structure of a library from one location to another, also potentially the content.

New Power BI available July 24

Along with Delve I think Power BI is going to be one of the most influential applications in Office 365. The good news is that Microsoft just announced the new Power BI, which has been in preview for a while now, will become generally available on July 24th 2015. You can read more about the release here:

http://blogs.microsoft.com/blog/2015/07/10/over-500000-unique-users-from-45000-companies-across-185-countries-helped-shape-the-new-power-bi/

The above video gives a quick overview of what Power BI can do and how it can be used in a business. Best of all, the basic version of Power BI is free!

The next piece of the puzzle after this will be the Office 365 content packs that allow you to surface all sorts of Office 365 analytics directly into Power BI and create amazing dashboards. Can’t wait!

Office 365 Video now supports embedding

Hopefully you know that Enterprise Office 365 suites have a video portal facility built right in, kinda like YouTube for the Enterprise.

I wrote a post a while back on Office 365 video embedding. It was a bit of a hack to be honest since Office 365 didn’t at that stage expose the HTML embed code. That’s all just changed!

If you now look in the top right of any video in Office 365 you see the Embed link as shown above.

Selecting that will open a new dialog that provides the embed code. Simply copy this.

Go to the location in SharePoint where you wish to display the video, edit the element, select the Insert tab at the top of the page and then select the Embed code button right of the Ribbon menu.

Paste the embed code into the box that appears. Immediately, you should see a display of he video below as shown above.

Select the Insert button to save the changes. Then save the element you are editing.

Now the video should be visible in the element as shown above (here, just a normal page).

The answer to your very next question is that at this stage is, no, you can’t publically (i.e. without an Office 365 login) share videos from Office 365 video, even using the embed code. However, as I understand it, that ability is coming so stay posted for updates.

Office ProPlus User Activation Management

One of the most common requests I hear from Office 365 administrators is the desire to manage each users desktop Office software deployments. Until now only the user could do this in their own portal, but now if you go into the Office 365 admin portal as an administrator and select an active user,

you’ll see a new option on the right called Office installations.

If you then select the Edit hyperlink.

You’ll get a window like the above slide out from the right. In there you see information about the installations of Office desktop software for that user. You will also have the ability to de-activate those installs, just like a user can do on their own via their portal.

A nice addition for administers of Office 365.

Here’s a short video from Microsoft on the feature.

Office 365 video explained

Here’s a nice video from Microsoft that explains how Office 365 works and how it goes about streaming video down through Azure Media Services.

Getting Started with Azure course now available

As I detailed back in January I have now made available my Getting Started with Azure training product. You can find it on my publications page at:

www.ciaops.com/publications

The product is not designed a comprehensive deep dive but as a way for those with little knowledge about Azure to get up and running quickly. The course contains:

– 12 video tutorials

– A 70 page manual that includes material not covered in the videos

– A number of free Azure publications

– Links to other material, documentation and training

and us available for only AU$120

I have pulled together information from many different sources and distilled the essentials of what you need to get started using Azure.

You can download the table of contents that includes a listing of video lessons to see what the product covers.

This product will continue to be updated over time and your single purchase will provide you will all the updates at no additional cost.

I think this produce will provide the short cut many are looking to understand how they can start using Azure and what it is capable of.