Office 365 Evangelist

My bad! The reason I had trouble with the Unified Messaging/VoiceMail setup for my Lync to Phone service with Jajah is because at some point I switched my tenant domain, company.onmicrosoft.com to Shared in the Exchange Online admin portal. This single setting caused me to spend about two weeks in my free time, which is very precious, troubleshooting why I could not get VoiceMail configured.

The first thing you should verify when setting up UM for Office 365 Exchange online is that your tenant domain is set as Hosted:

Here is the setup I did to enable UM/VoiceMail for Office 365 Exchange Online:

1. Launch the Exchange Online Management Portal, navigate to Phone and Voice on the Left hand menu
2. Under the UM Dial Plans select New

1. Give the plan a name, enter 11 for the extension digit length, select SIP URI for the Dial Plan URI type and enter 1 for the Country/Regional code (all these settings assume you are setting this up for U.S. Jajah service) Select Save

    

2. Double click on the newly created Plan under the UM Dial Plans section

    

1. You can choose to further “Configure UM Dial Plan” but it is not required. You can also change the UM Mailbox Policies, I choose to change some of the setting like the PIN length and requiring PIN reset

1. After configuring the UM Dial Plan you then need to navigate to the Users & Groups in the Exchange Management portal and double click on the user you want to enable (should have already been setup for Lync to Phone). Expand the “Phone and Voice Features”, Highlight Unified Messaging and select “Enable”

1. Click on the Browse button and select the UM Dial Plan you created previously, click Next

    

1. Choose how to setup the PIN for the user and then click Finish
2. Now you should be all setup for VoiceMail with the Lync to Phone service

The user can dial their own DID number and hit * button once the VoiceMail greetings begin and enter the PIN to personalize the VoiceMail system. I hope this helps you in setting up and using the Lync to Phone service.

Today we had the Office 365 International User Group meeting. Luckily, we were able to find some topics to discuss! J The majority of the meeting centered around the new Office 2013 Release Preview/Office 365 (who would’ve thought!) More about that in a minute.

I started out the meeting by completely avoiding the big pink elephant in the room and decided to talk about a new feature in Office 365 production right now, Lync to Phone via Jajah. I did a quick demo on the settings within Office 365 Exchange Online and Lync Online as well as the Jajah website. One think I pointed out is that while I am logged into my Lync client connected to my Lync Online account inbound/outbound calls works great but I am unable to have calls forwarded to voicemail using Exchange Online UM. Also when not logged into Lync Online calls to my number result in a fast busy signal. One of the members of the group, John Palmer (@citriusjohn) mentioned he had the same issue. His suggested fix is what corrected my problem, the Office 365 Tenant domain needs to be set as Hosted in the Exchange Online Admin Portal to make it Authoritative. Once I made the change for my Tenant domain both VoiceMail and Subscriber Access worked perfectly. So go ahead, give me a call at area code 72 zero 45 two 2439, most likely you will hit my voicemail as I am rarely signed into Lync for that account. I will be following up with another blog on the settings for Lync to Phone Voicemail setup in the next day or so.

So back to the Pink Elephant! The group discussed the new Office 365 Portal while I demo’d my preview environment. I think am pretty sure the majority of the attendees had already created their own tenant in the customer preview. We all went over the new portal and tried to point out new features. One of the cool new features I really like is the ability of the user to control the 5 devices they have installed/run the new Office 2013 from as part of the Office 2013 subscription based licensing.

The Next major portion of the meeting was dedicated to a PowerPoint presentation around the Click to Run Office 2013 new installation method. This PowerPoint was provided to the MVP community last week. It explains how Microsoft is moving away from MSI installations for Office to on-demand installation. I hope to be able to share the full PowerPoint deck, just waiting on full authorization (the information is not covered by the MVP NDA but not sure if I can distribute the deck). We had some great feedback on how this new deployment model will affect existing IT departments and how we all need to realize the field is moving and we need to move with it. Another great feature of the Click to Run (C2R) is the manner in which the new Office 2013 apps such as Word, PowerPoint, Excel, etc can run side by side with the legacy 2010 apps. This makes the adoption and migration to the latest versions much easier for an IT department as well as end users.

Overall a great meeting! The group is growing slowly, but I believe that with the new updates by Microsoft around Office 2013 and Office 365 that our membership will grow. We talked at the end about our members, the core of the group, be able to present on new features and functionalities and I have already received one member willing to present next month. Also up next month will be a recap of TechEd Europe by Martina Grom (@Magrom) and a recap of the Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference (WPC) 2012 by Loryan Strant (@thecloudmouth).

If you are interested in presenting at one of the meetings please let me know. The team and I welcome presenters around anything Office 365 and encourage you to step up and help the community out. Please keep updated about the group at our website, http://www.office365union.com and please join in the next meeting and pass the word along about the group!

Good news, Microsoft’s Office 365 now has new functionality for Lync Online, this is called Lync to Phone. This service is currently available in the US and the UK from Jajah, here is a video explaining the service (a video is worth a million words!) I decided I needed to check this service out and decided to add it to my Office365Evangelist.com Office 365 Tenant. This blog post will explain my experience with signing up, setting up and using the Lync to Phone service with Jajah and Office 365.

Here is a link to the setup instructions I used, http://onlinehelp.microsoft.com/en-us/office365-enterprises/hh781536.aspx

One of the first things needed is licensing in Office 365, a new Lync Plan 3 SKU has been created for Lync to Phone. My understanding is that the Lync Plan 3 will also be included with the E4 license, and is mentioned in Jesper_Osgaard’s (@WizOfOzDK) blog post here, http://blogs.technet.com/b/lystavlen/archive/2012/07/05/lync-to-phone.aspx

A little background, I have been paying around $34 per month for my Office 365 tenant. With my Office 365 MVP award one of the very nice perks that comes along with this is that I receive 20 E3 Office 365 licenses. I have applied to get these licenses applied. Very nice that Microsoft grants MVP’s these licenses, among other very nice perks!

The Lync Plan 3 is now available to purchase or trial. I went ahead and added the 25 trial licenses to my tenant.

The next step is to sign up for the service from Jajah, https://voice4lync-us.jajah.com/registration I went with the 2500/month minute plan, as I am sure I will not exceed that and didn’t want to spend the extra out of pocket money for the unlimited plan. As noted on the page this is a North America (U.S. and Canada) calling plan and after registration I could have added international plans as well, but I choose not to since I do not need or would use it at this time. Jajah provided a promotion where the first month of service is free!

After getting my number purchased from Jajah (see below) the next step is to activate it.

To active the number I had to update Jajah with the user information for the number and then also update the user to reflect the number assigned as the Office number. Since I use Identity Federation in my lab I had to update the user’s properties in Active Directory and the force a DirSync.

After forcing a DirSync I then had to update my account in the Lync Online Management Portal.

The Lync Online Management Portal changed a bit when adding the Lync Plan 3 licenses.

Selecting Users then my user I just needed to add Jajah – North America and the Lync Phone number auto-populated based on my previous update of the user account adding the Jajah number to the Office Number field.

Editing my User account:

And that is it. I now am able to receive and place calls from my Lync client connected to my Lync Online service. Pretty cool indeed! I am working on the Exchange Online Unified Messaging/VoiceMail configuration. Ran into some issues with this and I am working with Jajah to ensure I get this setup correctly and once completed will follow-up with another blog post.

Last week in Toronto was the Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference (WPC). While I did not attend in person, I watched the majority of the Keynotes via the Digital WPC site. My company, Catapult Systems, was well represented at the conference and our sales, marketing, and executive do a tremendous job of ensuring that they make our Microsoft contacts feel like MVP’s at their own conference. The Catapult team does a great job meeting with the key Microsoft people during this week and ensuring Microsoft knows we are “The Microsoft Consulting Company”.

At WPC 12, Catapult was named the Worldwide Systems Management Partner of the year! This is a very nice feather in the cap! Catapult has been award Partner of the year four times for several categories. Catapult is a great company, a great Microsoft partner and I am very happy and proud to work for them. Here is a link to an article from the Redmond Partner Channel Magazine touting Catapult as the 7^th most competent Microsoft partners in the world, 3^rd in the US! http://rcpmag.com/articles/2012/07/01/microsofts-most-competent-partners.aspx

Back to the WPC 12 recap, the entire conference contained very positive news overall for Microsoft for Partners. Microsoft greatly values their partners and this is the time they show their love! One big announcement for the Office 365 platform is that Microsoft will now allow partners to fully re-sell and bill customers for Office 365 (The Office 365 Open Program). This has been something that many of the partners that work with SMB (Small and Mid-Sized Business) clients. I think this is probably good for the SMB partners and customers, but for Enterprise clients and Partners I do not see the fit. For one it will require a consultant company like Catapult to take on the burden of billing and collections from the clients and still being responsible to pay the up-stream bill from Microsoft. Also most Enterprise clients are not going to fully out-source the entire IT services. An SMB client might want to totally get out of the IT business and this is the benefit to the SMB partners, they can bundle into the direct billing pricing some managed services to fully take over the IT department for the client. There are other reasons why direct billing might not work or be available to Enterprise clients but I apologize I cannot divulge at this time due to my MVP and Catapult NDA agreements.

One other great announcement for partners around Office 365 revolves around Partner of Record (POR) fees. A little background, a Microsoft partner like say Catapult, which is a Cloud Accelerate Partner, and does the implementation for Office 365 is able to be set by the client as the POR the Partner receive points on the client’s license revenue from Microsoft. Prior to the announcement at WPC, a Partner received 18% of the license revenue the first year and 6% for the subsequent years. What Microsoft announced at WPC is that the first year Partner revenue is increasing based on the size of the client deployment. For deployments over 150 seats the first year revenue is increasing to 20%, 500 plus seats to 22% and 2,500 plus seats to 23%. This is a very good deal, it incentivizes the Partners to chase and work with larger clients for Office 365!

Microsoft has stated that they feel Office 365 will eclipse SharePoint as the fastest growing offers in the history of Microsoft! This is huge, and this means that Microsoft is taking the gloves off in the fight for the cloud versus Google (if you haven’t seen it, SlingRock, a Catapult company, created this great Video to explain the difference between Google Apps and Office 365). Basically Microsoft has put the Cloud as the number 1 priority for the upcoming fiscal 2013 year with Office 365 and Azure in the public cloud and Server 2012 and System Center (which can also manage Public Cloud) in the private cloud space!

Oh and did I mention the new Windows 8 client, which will be RTM in early August so customers on an EA agreement will be able to download it then. For the general consumers, Windows 8 (and hopefully Office 2013) will be available in October. With Windows 8 client, Windows Phone 8, and the Wave 15 (SharePoint, Exchange, Lync and Office 365 next versions) this coming year, Microsoft has one, if not the, biggest launches/refreshes even! This coupled with the recent launch of Systems Center 2012 products and SQL 2012 basically means that almost every product in the Microsoft suite has be completely redesigned and launched within a calendar year!

And one more thing, Windows Azure, the service that now allows virtual machines to run in the cloud! I am working on setting up my entire lab within Windows Azure and will be blogging about this!

Microsoft has setup an invite only press conference for Monday the 16^th and the rumor is that it will be announcing Office 2013, or Office Next! The launch of a new Blog post, Office Next really seems to support this! I am hoping the rumors are true, really want to see what the next version of Office has to offer and also very interested in how the Wave 15 (the next versions of Exchange, SharePoint and Lync) will be integrated and offered within Office 365!

A member of the Office 365 International User Group, Alan Byrne (@AlanMByrne) sent me an email late last week about a new Reporting Service he has created for Office 365 called Cogmotive Reports, (@Cogmotive) I have checked out the service and found it to pretty cool. It is in Beta right now and you can sign up for a 30 day trial. Cogmotive Reports gives out detailed online reports via the website that can also be downloaded via CSV or PDF format. The reports available right now center on Exchange Online. You are able to see the mailbox sizes, Mailbox growth, Active Sync access plus many many more. Below is the Dashboard Cogmotive Report for my Office365evangelist.com Tenant.

As you can see I don’t have a bunch of users nor is my mailbox used extensively. I mainly use this tenant for Demoing Office 365 for clients or when I do speaking engagements. Also I have a public website via Office 365 SharePoint online, http://home.office365evangelist.com. Currently there are no reports listed for Lync or SharePoint online. I will talk to Alan about his plans for including more reporting options for the SharePoint and Lync Online. I know from reading the website that PowerShell is the main engine he uses to collect the information and currently Exchange Online is the only one of the three services that has rich PowerShell support.

I would encourage you to check out Cogmotive Reports and give it a trial.

Today I received my MVP Award package in the mail. The award and certificate are great and I also got a MVP ID card. The only issue is the on the certificate and the ID card my last name is spelled incorrectly. This is a common occurrence for me, my last name has 2 “L”‘s in it, but most only spell it with 1. Never fear, I sent my MVP Lead an email and explained the error and she is going to ensure the system gets updated and send me out a new certificate and ID card.

The July Meeting of the Office 365 International User Group has been scheduled for July 24^th at 8pm GMT/UTC. Below is the Meeting invite, please add this to your calendar and plan on attending the meeting. Tentatively I am planning on talking about the new Lync to Phone service for Office 365 Lync online. If you have any suggestions or recommendations for other topics to be covered in the meeting please let me know!

This morning I received a great honor! I received an email from Microsoft stating I had been awarded as an MVP for Office 365! This is truly a great honor and I greatly appreciate it. If you are not familiar with what the Microsoft MVP program is you can get more information about it here: http://mvp.microsoft.com. From the MVP website, this is what it describes as the overview of MVP:

The Microsoft Most Valuable Professional (MVP) Award is our way of saying thank you to exceptional, independent community leaders who share their passion, technical expertise, and real-world knowledge of Microsoft products with others.

It is part of Microsoft’s commitment to supporting and enriching technical communities.

Even before the rises of the Internet and social media, people have come together to willingly offer their ideas and best practices in technical communities. At Microsoft, we recognize the vital role these individuals play in the adoption and advancement of technology—and in helping our customers do great things with our products.

This was the inspiration for the Microsoft MVP Award.

Nearly two decades ago, we awarded 37 technical community leaders as MVPs. Today, there are more than 4,000 MVPs worldwide. They represent more than 90 countries, speak over 40 languages, answer more than 10 million questions a year, and are awarded in almost 90 Microsoft technologies—reflecting the breadth of our products and our global communities.

While I am not provided with the exact qualifications that qualified me for the Award, I do know that Microsoft awards MVP for past performance, specifically the previous year. While it is no secret I have sought out the award, what I really think helped be awarded is my work in and with the Office 365 community. I have done numerous speaking engagements about Office 365, assisted/answered thousands of questions on the Forums of http://community.office365.com and also have co-founded the Office 365 International User Group. http://www.office365union.com.

I look forward to taking advantage of this award by being able to work closely with Microsoft and other MVP’s on Office 365! I also will work even harder in the Office 365 community to educate, evangelize and assist in any way I can! The MVP Award, as I mentioned, is based on past performance and it must be re-earned each year.

Soon I will have access to the MVP logo, and will be able to display this prestigious logo on my web presences!