The last two weeks have been very busy for me. I headed out to Orlando two weeks ago for the Microsoft Exchange Conference (MEC) and then last week I was up in Redmond for a Microsoft Partner Team event around Office 365. Tomorrow is the next Office 365 International User Group meeting. Neither of these trips involved me speaking. I did help out (well hang out) in the MVP area at MEC and answer questions and also help out at a few whiteboard sessions, but no official speaking engagements. Early last week I was approached by Mike Pfieffer (@Mike_Pfeiffer) to see if I could help lighten his heavy workload in December. Mike was an Exchange MVP, and I saw was because he was recently hired by Microsoft and Microsoft employees cannot be MVPs. He was set to speak at the Cloud and Virtualization Live! Conference in December and wanted to know if I could cover his three sessions. I jumped at the opportunity to speak at such a large and prestigious conference. Mike contact the conference coordinator for the conference and luckily for me they accepted me as a valid replacement for Mike.

I will be presenting at three session listed below:

CVW02 Exchange Hybrid Deployment Notes from the Field

CVW06 Deploying Single Sign On with Office 365

CVW10 Unified Communications in Office 365 using Lync Online

Please check out the conference and I encourage you to attend if you can. I look forward to speaking at and attending the conference. There are many great speakers and information that are a part of this conference.

First off want to thank all of the attendees to my first Lync to Learn Session about Lync to Phone! At one point I looked and noticed during my presentation that there were 116 attendees! The session was not without incident, had a couple hiccups with the Lync Meeting, probably not the best to do the session over my Lync 2013 client, learned that my secondary monitor was not able to share content. Luckily Josh and I connected early and found this issue out, so I was able to adjust my presentation to ensure the attendees could see and experience what I was doing.

I went over a very, very short slide deck, only 9 slides. The main portion of the session was demo related. I was able to show how to configure Office 365 to enable Lync to Phone and Voice Mail via Unified Messaging. All through the session I did my best to answer questions from the attendees that were posted in the IM portion of the meeting. I think that I was able to catch and answer the majority of the questions, if I missed a question please feel free to post it to the comments here and I will answer.

Here is a link to my short PowerPoint presentation. The session was recorded, so it should be available in the next few days on the http://community.office365.com site.

Next Thursday, September 20^th at 11am Mountain, I will be presenting a Lync and Learn session. This session will focus on the Office 365 Lync Online Lync to Phone Service. Lync to Phone enables dial tone to Lync Online via Jajah. I hope you can join the session and learn more about Lync to Phone, http://community.office365.com/en-us/blogs/office_365_technical_blog/archive/2012/09/13/lync-to-phone-overview-and-setup-lync-and-learn.aspx
Follow the link to read more about the session and download the Lync Meeting invite for the session.

About Lync and Learn: (From the Community Page, http://community.office365.com/en-us/wikis/administration/lync-and-learn.aspx)

Our Lync and Learn program allows Community members to present 30 minute to 1 hour Lync sessions to the entire Office 365 community. This is a great opportunity for anyone to gain valuable exposure, networking, and share their knowledge. Below is the list of past and upcoming Lync and Learn programs.

It has been a pretty busy time for Office 365, and I am not even talking about the Customer Preview of the next major update of the service which includes the 2013 products. Wanted to take a few minutes to highlight a few of the new and improved features for the current version of Office 365.

Filtering for Directory Synchronization (DirSync)

This is a huge improvement, now Microsoft supports the ability to be able to filter what on-premises Active Directory objects are sync’d to Office 365. This has been a feature that many organizations have asked for, and now that it is available here’s a quick overview. Filtering allows the admin to filter out either OU’s, entire domains, or User Attribute filtering. Once filtered out, the objects contained in the OU, domain or containing the user attribute would not be synchronized to Office 365. A warning for this, most of you reading this and wanting this feature already have DirSync enabled and it is syncing all items from your domain/forest. By implementing filtering be careful, once you configure this an object that was originally being sync’d that then becomes filters out is treated as a delete (Soft Delete, read more later on in this blog) in Office 365. So if it was a user that had a mailbox the Office 365 mailbox is deleted and so is the user account.

On the Office 365 Community page Wiki page has been posted on how to configure filtering, http://community.office365.com/en-us/wikis/sso/configure-filtering-for-directory-synchronization.aspx

Soft Delete

This is another great feature improvement, think of this as a recycle bin for user accounts deleted from Office 365. This covers both online account and AD sync’d accounts. The great thing here is now when a user account is deleted online it is not lost and needs to be re-created, it can be restored. Here is the page about deleting and restoring accounts from the Online Help, http://onlinehelp.microsoft.com/en-us/office365-enterprises/hh534386.aspx. I recently ran into a need for this with a mailbox and blogged about restoring a soft deleted user and mailbox.

Password Change Notification for Outlook

With the August 2012 cumulative update for Outlook 2007 and 2010 users will now receive notification when using Outlook (2007 or 2010) to access their Office 365 mailbox will receive a pop-up warning that their password will expire. This applies for online accounts, and not Federated users using SSO with on-premise Active Directory. The time period to warn the users about the password expiration is defined by the admin. More information can be found here, http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2745588.

Office 365 Expert Discussion Series

The second edition of the Office 365 Expert Discussion Series is scheduled for August 30^th 8:00am Pacific Time. The topic is around Autodiscover and Outlook Anywhere. Highly recommend you join, I previously blogged about the first session in this series.

Lync to Learn Session

I am still waiting for finalization of my Lync to Learn session about the Lync to Phone service using Jajah. Currently we are shooting for September 20^th.

Office 365 International User Group August Meeting

The August meeting for the Office 365 International User Group is schedule for next Tuesday the 28^th at 8:00pm GMT/UTC. For the full meeting invite and the agenda head here.

Office 365 MVPs

Did you know that the majority of Microsoft Most Valuable Professionals (MVP) can be searched for and in some cases offer direct ways to contact them? Go to the Public MVP site and you can search for an MVP on any of the awarded categories.

Here is a picture I captured showing my fellow Office 365 MVPs!

Today Microsoft and the http://community.office365.com site hosted an Office 365 Expert Discussion Series: Troubleshooting Issues with Sending and Receiving Email in Office 365. This was a great session that discussed the Do It Yourself (DIY) troubleshooting tool for Office 365, and other resources available to assist Office 365/Exchange Online administrators with identifying and correcting any issues with Email flow in Exchange Online. The Session was recorded so you can watch the recording and get some tips and tricks for self help with Office 365.

On a side note, I recently was accepted as a member of The Grid. What is The Grid, well I think the below explanation from the FAQ on the site sums it up pretty well:

What is The Grid?

The Grid is a new community that brings together an exclusive group of Office 365 beta participants to facilitate knowledge sharing and learning among members to help each other get the most from Microsoft’s next generation of communications and collaboration services.

The reason I mention this is that I have volunteer for a Lync and Learn session around the new Lync to Phone service. It is tentatively scheduled for August 30^th at 10am Pacific time. Once this is finalized I will be tweeting and blogging about it. My plan it to expand on my two blog posts about Lync to Phone. Hope you all can come and join in on the session.

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.