Office 365 Technical Blog

New Ignite Webcast - SharePoint Online, External Sharing End-to-End

JoshT_MSFT — Fri, 17 May 2013 17:39:00 GMT

To sign up for this webcast please download and save the attached calendar invite below where you will find the Webcast Meeting information.

Ignite Webcasts are online sessions led by Microsoft Office 365 Product Managers, Engineers and Support staff. The Ignite webcast series addresses Office 365 technical subjects and scenarios and is beneficial to anyone who wants to increase their knowledge of the Office 365 suite. View the Ignite Site for more information about Ignite programs and webcasts. You can view past Ignite Webcast sessions and materials here and be sure to see upcoming Ignite Webcasts on the Ignite Events Page.

SharePoint Online has a revamped experience for sharing documents, folders and sites. Users can now share with people outside the company using Guest Links (anonymous) and External Access (authenticated) invitations. And there are key controls for IT administrators to comply with their company’s business preferences, with granular controls unique to individual business units. In our latest Ignite webcast we will share and show the new experiences for sharing, permissions, access requests, external invitations, and how IT can flexibly manage the experience end to end. This is a great opportunity to join Microsoft employees and other Office 365 users for a productive discussion.

Our webcast will be led by Mark Kashman. Mark is a Senior Product Manager on the SharePoint team focusing primarily on SharePoint Online and SharePoint Mobility – Microsoft’s business collaboration platform in the Cloud. He has worked at Microsoft since 2000, starting with the Academy team – whose focus is on internal training and readiness for the Microsoft Field – then worked for a few years building an asset management solution built on top of SharePoint 2007 before moving to the SharePoint team and into the SharePoint Online role. This is a great opportunity to join a discussion with our Microsoft presenters. Bring your questions!

Remember, to sign up for this webcast please download and save the attached calendar invite below. We are excited to see you there!

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Presenters: Mark Kashman - Senior Product Manager on the SharePoint Team

Date/Time: Thursday May 23rd, at 10:00 AM Pacific Time. (1 Hour presentation)

Live Meeting Information:
.........................................................................................................................................
Join online meeting
https://join.microsoft.com/meet/v-joshto/F00T8BQY
Join by Phone
+14257063500
+18883203585
Find a local number
Conference ID: 27579341
Forgot your dial-in PIN? |  First online meeting?    _[1033])!]

Audience:

Office 365 for professionals and small businesses
Office 365 for enterprises

The new Office Garage Series: Automating User Provisioning in Office 365

cwatson — Thu, 16 May 2013 08:00:00 GMT

This week our hosts, Jeremy Chapman and Yoni Kirsh, address one of the most visible changes to the new Office desktop apps: the sign in experience for the service. Jeremy and Yoni draw out the identity architecture on the Perceptive Pixel Interface (PPI) to show the main options. Then they demonstrate how to get users into an organization's Office 365 identity store and how to grant specific users access to Office 365 services. You'll see how to do all of this manually or by using scripted automation solutions with Windows PowerShell cmdlets. They catch up with the Trustworthy Computing Lead for Office, Keith Yedlin, to talk about security and show the single sign on experience with Active Directory Federation Services (ADFS). In this week's XStream install, Yoni takes on the water as he tries to install Office 365 ProPlus before a wakeboarder takes a spill. Watch this episode.

Friendly URLs with Office 365 - Grid User Post

JoshT_MSFT — Wed, 15 May 2013 19:12:00 GMT

The Grid is full of Office 365 experts that are brimming with great information. The Grid User Post blog series will expose some of The Grid's best content to the entire Office 365 Community. Are you interested in contributing to The Grid? Click here to apply.

Our latest Grid User Post comes from Loryan Strant. You can view the original post here.

One of the small challenges faced by organisations adopting Office 365 and other Microsoft Online Services offerings is the loss of custom URLs and naming conventions that their staff have become familiar with.

For example where previously an organisations URL for SharePoint may have beenhttp://intranet internally and http://intranet.contoso.com externally – this was only possible through the use of Alternate Access Mappings (AAM) in SharePoint.

In the world of Office 365 and SharePoint Online this URL becomes https://contoso.sharepoint.com which is somewhat easy to remember if you were successful in securing a tenant domain that resembles your organisation name. However, tenant domains on Office 365 are consumed on a first-come-first-serve basis. That may mean that while Contoso in the US registered for Office 365 first and now has https://contoso.sharepoint.com, Contoso Australia would have to choose a different URL – possibly https://contosoau.sharepoint.com orhttps://contosooz.sharepoint.com. Either way it’s not ideal.

Where this gets a bit confusing is adding in URLs for Outlook Web Access –http://mail.office365.com or http://www.outlook.com/contoso.com. Then add Dynamics CRM Online with https://contoso.crm5.dynamics.com.

All of these URLs can be a bit much to deal with for the average user who just wants to get on with doing their job and not have to remember all these URLs.

If your website is hosted externally (ie. not on Office 365) and happens to be on cPanel then you’re in luck as you can use a combination of subdomains and 301 redirects. What is a redirect? Redirects allow you to make a specific web page or URL redirect to another page or URL and display the contents of that page. In a nutshell if we create a subdomain of intranet.contoso.com and create a redirect to point it to https://contoso.sharepoint.comthis will allow the user to type in one URL and have it end up at another.

For Paradyne I have created a series of redirects to make it easy for our staff:

Friendly URL	Redirects to
http://crm.paradyne.com.au	https://paradyne.crm5.dynamics.com
http://intranet.paradyne.com.au	https://paradyne.sharepoint.com
http://webmail.paradyne.com.au	http://mail.office365.com

Why can you not simply use a CNAME in DNS to achieve this? Because when a CNAME hits the Microsoft web server that is providing the relevant service the URL it will ask for is the original friendly URL. Because Microsoft doesn’t know abouthttp://intranet.paradyne.com.au it won’t know what to do with the request.

When all the redirects have been put in place within your cPanel environment, you must then create A records in DNS to point all of those friendly URLs to the IP address of your web server – as it is doing all the redirecting. Author's Note: this is not officially supported by Microsoft, meaning if you run into issues you cannot call Microsoft to help you.

The downside of this means that a bit of traffic goes through your web host, but these days data is all but free so it shouldn’t make an impact.

The upside means that users don’t have to remember different URLs and domains for each of the services they want to access – just the word in front of your domain name.

(An alternative method would be to use a friendly URL of http://www.contoso.com/intranet/and re-direct that instead, which means no DNS entries required. The choice is up to you.)

New Ignite Webcast - Office and SharePoint App Model

JoshT_MSFT — Fri, 10 May 2013 21:33:00 GMT

Updated 5/16: Thank you for attending this Ignite Webcast. If you missed it, don't worry! You can view the webcast recording here and below, and you can download the Webcast Presentation at the bottom of this post. Be sure to look out for our next Ignite Webcast sessions here.

(Please visit the site to view this video)

To sign up for this webcast please download and save the attached calendar invite below where you will find the Webcast Meeting information.

Join us for our next Ignite Webcast on the Office and SharePoint App Model. Be sure to join us to learn about Apps and the Cloud App Model, Office and SharePoint Store and how to get started right now. This is a great opportunity to join Microsoft employees and other Office 365 users for a productive discussion.

Our webcast will be led by Ali Powell. Ali is a managing Architect for Microsoft Consulting Services. Ali has been a delivery resource in Microsoft Consulting Services (MCS) in the Americas for Enterprise Services for seven (7) years. He has served as an Application Development Consultant and Architect for customers including Boeing, Wolters Kluwer, Toyota, Hawaiian Airlines, and Disney. This is a great opportunity to join a discussion with our Microsoft presenters. Bring your questions!

Remember, to sign up for this webcast please download and save the attached calendar invite below. We are excited to see you there!

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Presenters: Ali Powell – Managing Architect for Microsoft.

Date/Time: Thursday May 16^th, at 9:00 AM Pacific Time. (1 Hour presentation)

Audience:

Office 365 for professionals and small businesses
Office 365 for enterprises

The new Office Garage Series: Anatomy of Office Software Updates in Click-to-Run

cwatson — Thu, 09 May 2013 08:00:00 GMT

This week adventurous hosts go deeper on how software updates really work for the new Office. They attempt to demystify what’s different compared to the Office Professional Plus 2013 MSI install and explain the optimized update service for the Office 365 ProPlus Click-to-Run install. They also explain how the service works in cases where you might want to test, validate and publish updates either on premises or use the default Office content delivery network (CDN) and see how to go beyond default settings. Plus, Jeremy talks to Jefferson Criddle from the Office engineering team and Yoni gets behind the wheel in a Ferrari F430 Spider to see if he can beat Sydney, Australia traffic in today’s XStream Install. Watch this episode.

Office 2013 on Demand via Office 365 - Grid User Post

JoshT_MSFT — Tue, 07 May 2013 14:12:00 GMT

Our latest Grid User Post comes from Darrell Webster. You can view the original post here.

You are going to a meeting to deliver a proposal to a potential client. You’ve confidently gone to that meeting “Device-Commando-Style,” meaning you’re carrying only the proposal and your smartphone. “Weapon and Ammo,” no tablet, no notebook. Your intention was to make a brief visit and leave the proposal with your client.

While reading through the proposal with your client, you both agree to make a change to the document. Your client agrees to let you use their computer to make the change. You could alter the document by logging into SharePoint Online, where it is saved, and use Word Web App from directly from the browser. But the change requires a few more features than what’s available in the Web App.

You need to use ‘Find and Replace’ to correct the business name.
You want to save the altered document as a PDF to give an electronic copy to your client.
You want to maintain version control, keeping the altered version with the original.

Enter Office on Demand

Office on Demand “provides online access to full rich Office desktop applications, including Word, Excel, and PowerPoint, when you’re using a PC that doesn’t have the latest version of Office installed locally.” – Extract from “Use Office on Demand“

Watch how Office on Demand works in the video below. This demo was recorded on my wife’s Windows 7 Home Premium laptop, currently running Office 2007. Rather than set up Office 2007 and connect it to my Office 365 account and SharePoint resources, I used Office on Demand.

(Please visit the site to view this video)

When to use Office on Demand

On a PC that you don’t use regularly (you don’t want to use up one of your 5 permissible subscription licenses, for example).
On a PC where you don’t have admin rights to perform an installation (you’re using a borrowed computer, for example).
On a PC at home if your IT administrator has disabled your ability to manage your installations (you’d like to install Office, but this option is not available).

Extract from “Use Office on Demand“

Requirements

The computer you launch Office on Demand from must be running Windows 7 or 8.
Supported Browsers: Internet Explorer 9 or higher, Mozilla Firefox 12 or higher, Apple Safari 5 or higher, or Google Chrome 18 or higher.
Office on Demand doesn’t require admin rights on the computer. It streams to the logged in users User folder.
- i.e C:\users\username\Microsoft Office 15

Steps

Log into the Office 365 – portal.microsoftonline.com
Select SkyDrive from the blue top menu.
Select Use Office on Demand
Choose Word, or the application you want to work with.
Choose Run when prompted to download “office_en-us.exe”
Office prepares and streams Word to the computer.
Sign into Word with Office 365 account, to view recently opened documents, display your document “Places” in the Open document menu.
Choose the SharePoint place named after your Team Site e.g. SmartStuff.
Locate and open your document in SharePoint Online.
Change and Save your document.
Sign Out.

Tip: Sign into Office

Once the Office application has streamed down to the computer, sign into it using your Office 365 account. There are a number of benefits when you sign into Office.

Most Recently Used List (MRU) Documents and Places – You can view recently opened documents. Your document “Places” can follow you, showing the common and most recent places you have saved documents.
MRU Templates
Office Personalization
Custom Dictionary
List of Connected Services
Word Resume Reading Position – Open to the last place you were working on the document.
PowerPoint Last Viewed Slide

Office on Demand, another clever use of Click-to-Run deployment technologies.

- Darrell Webster | nz.linkedin.com/in/darrellwebster/ | @DarrellCWebster

Are you a Developer looking for Office 365 directory APIs?

Edward Wu Msft O365 — Mon, 06 May 2013 18:42:00 GMT

We know that many of you have been looking for APIs that support development of applications that leverage the Office 365 directory. Yeah, we’ve had PowerShell – not a true programming interface – that admins can use to automate repetitive data handling tasks. Until now that was the best we could make available.

GOOD NEWS! I am happy to announce that we just released the Windows Azure Active Directory Graph API which will enable you to develop directory enabled apps that work with Office 365 tenants.

Q. Why is it called Widows Azure Active Directory (AD) Graph API – why not Office 365 Graph API?

A. Because Azure AD is the core directory for Office 365 and many Online services beyond Office 365, including Intune, Dynamics CRM, and many more applications that will be coming online.

Here’s some general information about the Graph API.

We based the Graph API on standards such as REST and OAuth 2.0 (for authentication).
This is a REST based interface – which means it’s simple to construct your queries and actions using simple HTTP GET, POST, DELETE and PATCH operations. This is the direction the cloud is going. Many IaaS and SaaS vendors have implemented REST interfaces as the programmatic way to access their solutions. Think of the Graph API accessible via REST as similar to on-premises directory being accessible via LDAP.
OAuth 2.0 – a well-established and broadly adopted specification for how applications and users can authenticate to cloud applications.
Why do we call it the Graph? Because directory data is represented as nodes in a Graph, with edges, connected Nodes, with representation of relationships between certain data sets. Most importantly, it sets the stage for how we want to think about data (all kinds of data) in the cloud, and relationships between the nodes of data.

What can you do with the Graph API? Very similar to on-premises applications that access to on-premises Active Directory, many applications now need to securely connect to customers’ cloud directory (Windows Azure Active Directory). Use cases include people pickers, security group lookup, user provisioning, user/group management, password reset – all of these must be able to look up directory data such as managers, direct reports, and users’ thumbnail photo’s.

I’m Ed Wu, Senior Program Manager with Azure Active Directory. I started working on Office 365 in 2007. I recently moved over to the Azure team to work on Active Directory for the cloud. I’m going to post several more blog posts over the next few weeks with information about how easy it is to write code using the Graph API, some code samples, how to authenticate and authorize application access, and other cool use cases. Here are the topics I’m currently planning

Getting started with the Graph API – making your first Query
Making your app available to O365 customers
Advanced Graph calls using Odata filtering
Graph Write Operations
Graph Differential Queries

Here are a few pointers to more information about the Graph API.

MSDN Graph http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/hh974482.aspx
Sample Apps: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/hh974459.aspx
And the Graph Explorer: https://graphexplorer.cloudapp.net/

Sign in and leave a comment below to ask questions and let me know what you think. I’ll drop by a few times a week to answer the questions I can.

Upgrading to the New SharePoint Online

clake_MSFT — Fri, 03 May 2013 20:43:00 GMT

As we announced on February 27, the new Office 365 service is out of “Preview” and available to try and buy today. We received tons of actionable feedback resulting in new features customers want, improved performance, simple user experiences, more admin controls and the stability they expect. SharePoint Online (SPO) customers will soon be able to self-upgrade to the new SharePoint Online experience – a new user interface, global Office 365 navigation and a whole set of new features and supported scenarios. You can go here to read all about “What’s new in SharePoint Online–top 10.”

This article focuses on the coming upgrade experience for existing SharePoint Online customers. New customers will receive these features without any effort on their part.

What to expect during upgrade

Office 365 customers will be notified approximately four weeks prior to their upgrade and will have the opportunity to postpone for a minimum of two months.
Review “What’s new in SharePoint Online–top 10” to start to plan how your company will take advantage of the new SharePoint Online capabilities soon to be at your fingertips.
Evaluate whether content and sites are “old” or “unused” – and if so, consider removing content or even whole site collections that are no longer necessary.
Review the ‘Known Issues and Design Changes’ section below.
Upgrade individual site collections as outlined below at your own pace – one at a time, or all at once to save time.

You can learn about all the Office 365 service upgrade options at the broader Office 365 Service Upgrade Center, including what you need to know about Exchange Online, Lync Online and Office client..

Site Collection(s) Upgrade

SharePoint Online Site Collection Owners will be able to choose when to upgrade – on their terms. They will be able to ensure due-diligence testing before committing to the new experience. Once you know your sites are working properly, you can perform all these activities all at once with the Windows PowerShell for SharePoint Online.

Your tenancy is currently running on the new Sharepoint 2013 platform in a state we call “2010 Mode.” “2010 Mode” refers to the previous SharePoint 2010 user experience for the SharePoint Online service. We’re excited to soon offer you methods to migrate the user experience to “2013 Mode” – or what we’ve been communicating as the new SharePoint Online; we do not version SharePoint in Office 365 – it is simply evergreen as SharePoint Online.

Once you receive your upgrade notification and are ready to proceed, you can approach SharePoint Online upgrade in three ways:

Manually upgrade each site collection via the native admin user interface (UI) within each site collection’s site settings (Settings > Site Collection Administration > Site collection upgrade).
Test first, then upgrade – SharePoint Online will support the new SharePoint 2013 feature called “Upgrade evaluation site collections” which allows an admin and users to see your site’s content in a new, separate copy of the site collection running in the new SPO for thorough testing purposes. Once you are satisfied in your test results, you go back to the original site collection and commit to upgrade to the new SPO. Note, this evaluation site collection will be deleted, so any new artifacts you’re creating during testing need to be copied out before it is deleted.
- And you have the ability to do individual health checks to ensure the reliability of your sites with guidance on how to resolve those issues.
Upgrade in bulk after your thorough testing via Windows PowerShell – we’ve developed a unique ‘upgrade’ cmdlet to help admins be more productive in this work stream.
- To get started, download the SharePoint Online Management Shell
- For detailed documentation, see the article Introduction to the SharePoint Online Management Shell.
- To make it easier for the non-Windows PowerShell power users, we've designed a web-based tool named the Windows PowerShell for SharePoint Command Builder.
- Specific to the upgrade cmdlet (Upgrade-SPOSite), you can initiate the upgrade to enumerate across multiple site collections at once.

Note: for My Sites, there is only an action for the SharePoint Online Admin from within the SharePoint Online Admin Center, similar to the first bulleted action above “Manually upgrade” - navigate to the –my parent site, ex: https://contoso-my.sharepoint.com – not an individual’s My Site, and then enable site collection upgrade. Once upgraded, users will be automatically queued for upgrade the next time they visit their My Site. They will see a pop-up dialog box and they should leave the default selections as is and click OK.

To help plan and upgrade effectively, please see the new "Plan to upgrade your SharePoint Online environment to the 2013 experience" Office.com article for more detail.

Known Issues and Design Changes

If you require access ot your site via SharePoint Designer you will find that after the upgrade SharePoint Designer 2010 will no longer function against the new environment. To address this change you will need to download SharePoint Designer 2013 and use it to manage your site going forward. (Download Sharepoint Designer 2013 here at no cost). Please review this KB article to get better insight into one scenario where you would see this issue manifest.
1. For new business solutions, we encourage you to review the new Cloud app model (CAM) to discover rich, new build and deployment methods.
Office 365 dropped support for Internet Explorer 7 (IE7) in October 2011 – please refer to the Software requirements for Office 365 page for more information.
If you have two public websites, one you created before this upgrade, and a new Public Website that is not yet in a published state – but showing in your SharePoint Online Admin Center. You can only have one live Public Website. To aid you in migrating your Public Website content, we will soon publish a migration app to help move your site from the old site collection to the new one; this will be published to the Office Store. Learn more here about the new Public Website innovation.
First time set up for “External Sharing” has changed. You now manage all setup steps from within the SharePoint Online Admin Center; one step to enable the intent to share externally, and then a second step to enable external sharing at the individual site collection level. We have also updated the overall sharing experience to make it super easy to share, for both inviter and invitee. Learn more here on how to manage external sharing for SharePoint Online.
Sandboxed solutions will get deactivated during upgrade. To restore this functionality, you simply have to reactivate them from within the solution gallery of the site collection to which they are deployed. You should also be aware of the new Cloud app model (CAM), where you can now accomplish more robust solutions beyond the confines of Sandboxed Solutions.
Custom master pages get reset once you commit to the new experience, meaning all custom elements get reset to their unbranded state. Master page component requirements may change between releases of SharePoint, and if you’ve developed custom master pages you should be aware that you may be required to update them manually before upgrading to the new SharePoint Online experience. Please review the “Branding issues that may occur when upgrading” article (phrased under the 2013 upgrade process which is relevant to this upgrade for SharePoint Online).
Note: many customers who found it necessary to create custom master pages in the past may now be able to take advantage of the improved out of the box (OOTB) master pages. They are faster - leveraging the new Minimal Download Strategy (MDS). We also made an extra effort to provide a more professional design by leveraging the new theming mechanism and color schemes. Please take a moment to review theming in this new release. We have also provided an excellent blog post on “Making the most of SharePoint 2013 when you upgrade”. This blog post gives great insights into the new page feature enhancements and how to take advantage of them:
1. If you customized your site using SharePoint Designer 2010, you will now be required to use SharePoint Designer 2013 to reapply any changes. If you are adjusting publishing pages (aka, a Company Portal design), you can also leverage other rich HTML tools like Dreamweaver, Visual Studio, etc. to create these types of pages using the new Design Manager component. For additional information you can also review Steve Peschka’s related blog post.
2. If you created a custom master page that you would like to maintain, you will have to rebuild the site. To do this you will use Visual Studio to load the custom master page, reconfigure your content and placeholders, and then recompile “for 2013”. You can then redeploy the updated site into your SharePoint Online environment.
3. If you uploaded a customer template as a Sandbox Solution, it will get deactivated as referenced in #5 above and you will have to follow the same procedure as above in 6b.
In addition to the items above, there are several known issues that were previously posted here that we are working to resolve. These issues are not broadly impactful and most have a corresponding knowledge base (KB) article with posted manual solution steps.
In the previous version there was an option to sign in a different user. This fuctionailty has been removed in this release. To accomplish ths same behavior in the new version you will have to sign out of all browser windows and close them. You can review this related Knowledge Base (KB) article for more details.

Test, upgrade, enjoy

The new SharePoint Online experience awaits you. Please take time to review the available documentation and the suggested steps to ensure a seamless transition for your company. Ensure you build in the right amount of time to test the new capabilities and look & feel before committing to it.

You are more in control than ever during your upgrade experience. With a little effort, you will be able to quickly determine the method that provides the right level of testing, allowing you to quickly move to the latest Office 365 has to offer. Let us know via the Office 365 Community forums how you are doing and what we can do to help.

Thanks,

The SharePoint Team

Discovering the most popular items in a document library in SharePoint Online - Grid User Post

JoshT_MSFT — Fri, 03 May 2013 08:47:00 GMT

Our latest Grid User Post comes from Corey Roth. You can view the original post here.

With the combination of analytics and search in SharePoint Online, there are great new features to help determine which content is most popular and it is available right from the ribbon UI of team site document libraries - the Most Popular Items button on the library tab. This can also be activated on your SkyDrive Pro library.

Click on it and you will be taken to a unique search results screen that shows you recent views and total views.

What’s nice is that you can then search and refine within the report to narrow down what you are looking for.

You can also click on the Popularity Trends link per each search result item to show an insightful graph of the usage of that file over time.

Behind the scenes, this report is powered by the Popular search result source. You can also use this source to look for popular items across your entire index . As a developer, the possibilities are quite interesting.

If you’re running or trialing SharePoint Online you will extract valuable insights from this report. Try it today.

View original post (may link to a third-party site)

The new Office Garage Series: Click-to-Run Customization and Deployment Deep Dive Parts 2 and 3

cwatson — Thu, 02 May 2013 08:00:00 GMT

In the new Office Garage Series for IT Pros, the last two episodes of the three part series for the Click-to-Run Customization and Deployment Deep Dive discuss workarounds, and integration and automation with software distribution tools.

In the second episode, hosts Jeremy Chapman and Yoni Kirsh, explore specific differences between the Office Professional Plus 2013 MSI and Office 365 ProPlus Click-to-Run install and potential workarounds for your Office configuration. They cover topics from removing and blocking applications from the Office suite, using multiple languages and disabling first run to changing update properties. Watch this episode.

In the third and final episode of the Click-to-Run Customization and Deployment Deep Dive, hosts Jeremy Chapman and Yoni Kirsh take the concepts from installing and configuring Office Click-to-Run in the first two parts and integrate those with software distribution tools like System Center Configuration Manager, Microsoft Deployment Toolkit and Windows Intune. They demonstrate the specific commands used with standalone software installation or part of the Windows imaging process and Jeremy tests whether he can stream Office to his car PC while WiFi-tethered with his phone before he crosses Seattle's famous floating bridge on Interstate 520. Watch this episode.

Introducing Message Analyzer, an SMTP header analysis tool in Microsoft Remote Connectivity Analyzer

Patricia Eddy - MSFT — Wed, 01 May 2013 22:39:00 GMT

Microsoft Remote Connectivity Analyzer is a web-based tool that provides administrators and end users with the ability to run connectivity diagnostics for our servers to test common issues with Microsoft Exchange, Lync and Office 365. The tool started as Microsoft Exchange Server Remote Connectivity Analyzer, and based on your feedback we've continued to add functionality to test connectivity with Lync and Office 365, and made other enhancements such as tests for Outlook Anywhere, Exchange Web Services, outbound SMTP, Office 365 Single Sign-On test, support for 10 additional languages and an improved captcha experience.

We're excited to announce Message Analyzer, a brand new addition to the Remove Connectivity Analyzer. Message Analyzer makes reading email headers less painful.

Figure 1: The new Message Analyzer tab in RCA

SMTP message headers contain a wealth of information that allows you to determine the origins of a message and how it made its way through one or more SMTP servers to its destination. To use Message Analyzer, all you need to do is copy message headers from a message and paste them in the Message Analyzer tab on the RCA web site.

Figure 2: Paste message headers in the Message Analyzer

Features of the Message Analyzer

Here's a quick look at what you can do with Message Analyzer.

View the most important properties and total delivery time at a quick glance.

Figure 3: View the most important header properties and delivery time

Analyze the received headers and displays the longest delays quickly for easy discovery of sources of message transfer delays.

Figure 4: Quickly detect where the longest message transfer delays occurred

Sort all headers by header name or value.

Figure 5: Sort message headers

Quickly collapse the sections that you don’t need.
All processing is done in your browser, and no private information is shared with Microsoft.
Useful for any header, whether generated by Exchange, Office 365, or any other RFC standard SMTP server or agent.

Note, we consider this feature to be in beta for the moment. Please send us feedback and we’ll continue to make improvements.

Check out this update to the RCA at testconnectivity.microsoft.com (short URL: aka.ms/rca).

Stephen Griffin & Scott Landry
On behalf of the entire MCA/RCA team
Follow the team on Twitter - @ExRCA

Introducing Office 365 tenant reports

JRG_MSFT — Tue, 30 Apr 2013 08:00:00 GMT

Audience: Office 365 Enterprise admins
Written by: Sanjeev Garg, Office 365 Senior Program Manager
Originally published to the Office 365 Preview blog.

As the administrator for the Office 365 service for your company, did you ever want to find out, how your users are using the services? How many users are active on email? Are there specific users who are receiving more malware than others?

You'll be able to answer these questions and more as we introduce you to the new reports we added in the next release of Office 365.

Navigating the reports

If you have not already done so, sign up for an Office 365 Consumer Preview for Enterprise account. When you login into the Office 365 Preview admin center, you’ll see reports in the left navigation menu.

When you click reports, you’ll see the overview page, which lists the available reports.. They’re grouped into categories. Each category contains a set of reports related to that specific area of Office 365. Click on a category to see a dashboard page or select any individual report.

Report dashboard

There is a report dashboard for each category of reports. Here’s a picture of the Protection dashboard.

Each dashboard has the following sections:

Main chart

The main chart is one of the most important charts in the category. You can interact with the main chart using the filters provided on the page. You can also use the time duration links below the main chart to view the report for different periods.

Related table

The related table is related to the main chart. In the picture above, the main chart (filtered inbound mail) shows the summary of the amount of email coming in, the related table (top recipients) shows the top 5 users receiving those emails. This helps you do a quick cause and effect analysis if you notice something unusual on the main chart. Related tables are provided only for those main charts that might require this additional insight.

Related charts

Related charts are related to the category you have selected. These charts show a trend for the metric they are tracking. If you notice something unusual in the related chart, just click on it to swap its position with the main chart. Then you can look at a larger view of the chart and interact with it using the chart controls provided. It might also have its own related table, which you can use to get additional information.

More related reports

These are additional reports related to the category you have selected. Click on the report title to see a detailed report view.

Using the reporting dashboard

Here’s how to answer some common administration questions using the reporting dashboard.

Are your users actively using email?
We consider a mailbox active if a user has logged in at least once in the last 30 days. To view if your users are actively using email, go to the mail dashboard and view the mailbox login activity report. This report shows you the number of active users and the number of inactive users at different levels of inactivity.

How much spam is your company receiving? Which users receive the most spam?
Most spam never reaches your users' mailboxes, but let’s say you want to find out how much spam has been filtered out by Exchange Online Protection in the last 60 days.

To answer this question, go to the protection dashboard, and review the filtered inbound mail report. Change the duration of the report to 60 days using the 60d link below the chart. Now look at the spam series. Do you see something unusual?

To view the spam in more detail, click on the inbound spam filtered report in the right column. This report will give you the different ways the spam is filtered. In the table below the chart you can see the top 5 users who are receiving the spam.

Available reports

Here’s a complete list and description of the reports available for each category.

Mail

These reports are about your mailboxes. This category includes the following reports:

Mailbox login activity

Shows the number of active and inactive mailboxes. A mailbox is considered active if a user has accessed it at least once in the last 30 days. Inactive mailboxes are grouped by the number of days since the mailbox has been accessed.

New and deleted mailboxes

Shows the number of active mailboxes, and the number of mailboxes created and deleted. A mailbox is considered active if a user has accessed it at least once in the last 30 days.

New and deleted groups

Shows the number of groups created and deleted.

Protection

These reports focus on how the Exchange Online Protection is protecting your users from all the bad stuff out there. You can also use these reports to fine tune your configurations for Exchange Online Protection. This category includes the following reports.

Filtered inbound mail

Shows inbound mail traffic, based on how the mail is filtered, such as spam, virus, and transport rules.

Top recipients

Shows a list of the mail recipients who have had the most mail delivered to them.

Filtered outbound mail

Shows outbound mail traffic, based on how the mail is filtered, such as spam, virus, and transport rules.

Top senders

Shows a list of the mail senders who have sent the most mail.

Inbound spam filtered

Shows what spam was detected, sorted by spam filtering type.

Top spam recipients

Shows a list of the mail recipients who have received the most inbound spam.

Inbound malware detection summary

Shows the inbound malware detections, grouped by action.

Top malware recipients

Shows a list of the recipients of the most inbound malware.

Top malware

Shows a list of the most frequently detected malware.

Outbound malware detection summary

Shows the outbound malware detections, grouped by action.

Outbound suspicious filtering summary

Shows outbound suspicious detections by spam filtering type.

Rules

Transport rules allow you to apply messaging policies to messages in the transport pipeline. Actions such as redirecting a message or adding recipients, rights-protecting messages, and rejecting or silently deleting a message can be taken on messages that match conditions you specify. The following reports show you the summary of the transport rules detected in the inbound and outbound email in your company.

Inbound rule summary

Shows the transport rules detected in inbound mail, grouped by severity.

Top inbound rules

Shows a list of the transport rules detected most often in inbound mail.

Outbound rule summary

Shows the transport rules detected in outbound mail, grouped by severity.

Top outbound rules

Shows a list of the transport rules detected most often in outbound mail.

DLP

DLP is an abbreviation for Data Loss Prevention. You can establish data loss prevention policies for your company to prevent sensitive data from being sent out of your company thru email. The following reports will show you a summary of DLP policies detected in the inbound and outbound email in your company.

Inbound DLP summary

Shows the data loss prevention (DLP) policies detected in inbound mail.

Top inbound DLP

Show a list of the data loss prevention (DLP) policies detected most often in inbound mail.

Outbound DLP summary

Shows the data loss prevention (DLP) policies detected in outbound mail, as well as overrides (the user has sent the mail anyway despite DLP detection) and false positives (the user reports that a DLP detection was not a real detection).

Top outbound DLP

Shows a list of data loss prevention (DLP) policies detected most often in outbound mail.

Inbound DLP rule summary

Shows the data loss prevention (DLP) policies detected in inbound mail, grouped by severity.

Top inbound DLP rules

Shows a list of data loss prevention (DLP) policy rules detected most often in inbound mail.

Outbound DLP rule summary

Shows the data loss prevention (DLP) policies detected in outbound mail, grouped by severity.

Top outbound DLP rules

Shows a list of data loss prevention (DLP) policy rules detected most often in outbound mail.

What do you think?

Leave us a comment and let us know what you think of these reports and what other reports you’d like to see.

Introducing Facebook and LinkedIn Connect

Patricia Eddy - MSFT — Mon, 29 Apr 2013 20:21:00 GMT

We are always trying to enhance the Office 365 experience for our users from the first time they log in. One of the key challenges that our small business and student users experience when they start using Office 365 is that the contact information for people they often communicate with is stored in services such as LinkedIn and Facebook. So today, we are introducing a feature that will allow our users to connect to LinkedIn and Facebook and download their connections from these services to Office 365.

Manage all your contacts in one place

With Connect, you can now manage all your contacts in Office 365 when you connect to Facebook and LinkedIn and download the contact information of your connections and friends. You can link contacts across LinkedIn, Facebook and your corporate directory to view all information about a person together. You can edit or add information that you have about them. With the power of Connect and contact linking, we provide you the most consolidated set of information at your fingertips.

Keep your contacts and connections in sync

Have your connections updated their contact since you last communicated with them? Don’t worry. We update the contact information of your connections several times a day so that you always have the most up to date information.

Download pictures of your contacts

Your Office 365 experience will come to life with pictures of your connections from Facebook and LinkedIn profile pages.

Communicate with your contacts and connections from Office 365

With all the contact information for your connections in LinkedIn and Facebook synchronized with Office 365, you can now send emails and lookup phone numbers and other information that they have published.

LinkedIn integration is available worldwide to all users and Facebook integration is available to small business and student users in the US. We are working hard to enable this for our users worldwide. To learn more about Facebook and LinkedIn Connect, visit these links: Facebook, LinkedIn .

-Krish Gali, Senior Program Manager

New Ignite Webcast - Office 365 Midsize Business

JoshT_MSFT — Fri, 26 Apr 2013 14:45:00 GMT

Updated 5/2: Thank you for attending this Ignite Webcast. If you missed it, don't worry! You can view the webcast recording here, and you can download the Webcast Presentation here. Be sure to look out for our next Ignite Webcast sessions here.

(Please visit the site to view this video)

Ignite Webcasts are online sessions led by Microsoft Office 365 Product Managers, Engineers and Support staff. The Ignite webcast series addresses Office 365 technical subjects and scenarios and is beneficial to anyone who wants to increase their knowledge of the Office 365 suite. View the Ignite Site for more information about Ignite programs and webcasts. You can view past Ignite Webcast sessions and materials here and be sure to see upcoming Ignite Webcasts on the Ignite Events Page.

We are excited to announce our next Ignite Webcast on Office 365 aimed at Midsize Businesses. This webcast is targeted towards IT Administrators/generalists and Midsize businesses (up to 250 employees) that want to learn more about the recently launched Office 365 service aimed at this important customer space. We will be discussing how Office 365 gives you Anywhere Access, Collaboration tools, Easy IT, and Trusted Service. This is a great opportunity to join Microsoft employees and other Office 365 users for a productive discussion.

Our webcast will be led by Nick Caw. Nick has worked with Microsoft's Office 365 since its launch and will provide the offering details and insights into existing customer usage. This is a great opportunity to join a discussion with our Microsoft presenters. Bring your questions!

Remember, to sign up for this webcast please download and save the attached calendar invite below. We are excited to see you there!

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Presenter: Nick Caw - Business Development Manager, Office 365 Partner Team.

Date/Time: Thursday May 2nd, at 9:00 AM Pacific Time. (1 Hour presentation)

Audience:

Office 365 for professionals and small businesses
Office 365 for enterprises

Office 365 Small Business Premium: No IT expertise required

JRG_MSFT — Wed, 24 Apr 2013 08:00:00 GMT

Author: Jon Orton_MSFT
Originally published to the Office 365 Preview blog.

Small businesses don’t have IT departments. Most don’t even have a dedicated IT person. So they need software that is simple to set up and maintain. With that in mind, we’ve designed Office 365 Small Business Premium to be a preconfigured solution that you can manage without technology expertise. This allows you to focus on your business, rather than technology.

Simplified administration

The Office 365 Small Business Premium Preview has a new web-based management portal specifically designed for organizations with less than ten users. This interface is distinct from the one used by Office 365 Enterprise customers, who have IT environments that are much more complex. The settings that only apply to large organizations are removed from view, leaving a simple, clean interface that is easy to understand and navigate. You can access this portal by clicking “Admin” in the Office 365 navigation bar.

The admin dashboard lets you manage users, licenses, and domains, as well as edit common settings for email, calendar, sites, instant messaging, conferencing, and mobile access. There is no need to wade through detailed administration screens to perform common tasks. Simplified settings pages, like this one, make it easy to configure your service:

These pages are specifically built for small businesses, and have simplified controls, such as on/off sliders, that make them easier to use than their enterprise counterparts. We’ll be adding more of these settings pages throughout the Preview. If you have suggestions for a setting that you’d like to see us include, post a comment to let us know.

Built-in spam and virus protection

Nobody likes to waste time dealing with spam, and nobody likes cleaning up a computer that has been infected with a virus. For small businesses, these problems can slow down productivity or even bring it to a complete halt. Office 365 gets these nuisances out of your way with built-in defenses against spam, viruses, and phishing scams. Forefront Online Protection for Exchange, a premium anti-spam and anti-malware service, is included in Office 365. It uses multiple filters and scanning engines to help protect your organization from email-borne threats. No configuration is necessary to start or maintain the filtering technology.

Security and reliability

One of the best things about using Office 365 is that you can enjoy the benefits of a cloud service that has been built to meet the requirements of the world’s largest organizations. Office 365 offers the highest standard of physical and digital security for your data. It is compliant with key industry standards and regularly verified by third parties. Even if your business has no requirements relating to ISO-27001, EU Model clauses, HIPAA-BAA, or FISMA, knowing that Office 365 qualifies for these programs and certifications provides you with confidence that the service is being operated well.

You can also enjoy peace of mind in knowing that the service has been designed for robust uptime, with a financially-backed 99.9% service level agreement. From the Admin section of the Office 365 portal, you can view the service health dashboard to see both current and historical service status.

To guard against the loss of data in the case of a large-scale disaster, your data is hosted from geographically-distributed datacenters with continuous data backup. These robust disaster recovery capabilities used to be beyond the reach of nearly all small and midsized organizations.

In summary, Office 365 Small Business Premium is an easy-to-use service with built-in security, protection, and reliability. The back-end capabilities are the same as those used by the largest businesses in the world, but you don’t need to be an IT expert to deploy or use them.