Office 365 Evangelist

With the GA release of Server 2012 and now the ability for TechNet subscriptions to download the RTM versions of Exchange 2013 I am building a new lab for Office 365 vNext to do a full Office 365 Hybrid deployment with Server 2012 and Exchange 2013 and the Customer Preview of Office 365 vNext. My first step was to get a public domain registered, O365VNext.com, and now have a forest/domain created on-premises, the DC is running as a VM in my Windows 8 Hyper-V environment (how very cool it is to be able to enable Hyper-V with Windows 8 and not need to either dual boot to Server 2012 or add anything else to my company laptop is great!). I installed the server VM to host the DC role and then added the Active Directory Directory Services Role. Below are the screen shots to setup a domain with Server 2012:

1. Selected a new Forest and created the Root domain name to match my new public domain registration.

1. Set the Forest and Domain functional level to Server 2012 and selected to add DNS server and set a DSRM password

1. Get a warning about delegation, I wish they would have fixed this as this is a carryover from 2008 R2; Microsoft should not warn this for a new Forest

1. Accepted the NetBIOS name and continued

1. Choose to accept the defaults, this is a lab and would recommend for production you might want to move the folder locations

1. Reviewed all the setting and configuration settings, Below is the output from the “View script” option

1. This is the script that can be saved and re-used for additional automated DC installs

1. After selecting from above, the wizard does a prerequisite check

1. Got some warnings, mainly around DNS, but got an “all prerequisites checked passed successfully, so I moved forward with install

1. Install in progress, notice the warning about Server 2012 AD default security settings
   

1. More progress warnings!
   
2. So I stepped away from my laptop and since the DC promo install automatically reboots the server I missed any further screen shots. I made came back to my VM at a login prompt, but now it defaulted to a domain login for the DC!
   

My new domain in now setup and the DC is functional. I am working on the next step, which is to get the Exchange 2013 Server installed and ready. This will be part 2 of this blog series. Be sure to check back and will continue with the deployment and setup for a full Hybrid Deployment using Exchange 2013 with the Office 365 vNext!

Being a Microsoft Partner and now an MVP it becomes very hard to discern what I can blog/talk about without violating my NDAs. So when I see something being publically available that I think is very cool and was first presented to me via NDA I get excited to be able to tell everyone. This is the case with the new Office Web Apps! I received an email on Monday from Microsoft talking about the new Web Apps being available via an Office 365 Service Update. To save myself from deciding what is public and what is NDA I decided to copy the email content below for you to read. The good news is the new features in Office Web Apps, the bad news is that IE 7, as previously reported, support has ended for Office 365. Really the issue with IE 7 has to do with new functionality and this update to Office Web Apps is the first thing that users of Office 365 with not be able to take advantage of.

Yesterday we had another great Office 365 International User Group Meeting. The primary presentation was by Robert Crane titled “SharePoint to the Cloud” Robert gave a very good overview of SharePoint, SharePoint Online Licensing and talked us through the changes and improvements coming in SharePoint 2013. I then took over presenting and went over how to implement filtering for Directory Synchronization (DirSync) with Office 365. This is a very cool newly support feature that allow a company to filter out Domains, OUs or user accounts that they do not want sync’d to Office 365.

The rest of the meeting was some good discussion on topics ranging from Office 365 utilization by service and what is the most used service in Office 365, Exchange Online was the clear winner here. We also discussed a bit about the new Windows Azure Service, think IaaS or Hyper-V in the cloud.

The next meeting is probably going to be on October 2^nd. Pushing it out a week as the last week of September is the Microsoft Exchange Conference (MEC) in Orlando, FL. I am attending this and several attendees requested for me to give a MEC recap at the next meeting. I will get the meeting scheduled solidified and ensure everyone has proper notice.

Thanks to those who attended, and if you didn’t, why not?

Not much, unless you consider the below items important:

• Enterprise Readiness – support for up to 500,000 Active Directory User Objects (up from 20,000)
• Recycle Bin Enhancements – Now the Recycle Bin and management of it will be available in the SharePoint Administration Center
• PDFs – PDF documents will open directly without requiring a download first
• External Sharing – Now you will be able to invite any external user to participate on your site, up until now they have to have an email with the live.com, msn.com or hostmail.com domain

Read more about these new features and improvements here!

Office 365 SharePoint Online – Enable External Access for a Site

Wanted to enable External User access for a SharePoint Online (SPO) site.  Figured this was a great way to learn for my upcoming Office 365 Microsoft Certificate Exams and also it would make a good blog post!

http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/sharepoint-online-enterprise-help/share-a-site-with-external-users-HA102476183.aspx is the help topic I just to assist me with creating this post.

Granting access to an internal SPO site allows Site Administrators to collaborate with users that are not a member of the same company and do not have a license for Office 365 SPO.  This allows sharing with external partners and customers with the internal SPO sites.

This is very different that enabling a Public Website via SPO.  Enabling external access for SPO sites allows the sharing of documents and complete sites with authentication by the external user.  A Public Website is just that, a publicly available site to everyone.

The first step to enabling external user access is to enable the External User access for the entire SPO environment.

By default External User access is not enabled.  You must first enable it for the entire SPO environment.

1. Sign into the Office 365 Portal as a full Organizational Administrator and launch the SharePoint Administrator center by clicking the Manage link

2. Choose the Manage Site Collections link

3.  In the Site Collections area, click on Setting and then Manage External Users

4. Click Allow and then Save in the External Users Dialog box (at a later time if needed you could also deny all previous allow External User access, by selecting Deny and save)

The next step is to enable External Access invitations is each site collection

This is done per site, so site collection administrators can control this feature at the site level.

1. As a site collection admin, login to the site collection you want to enable External access for

2. Click on Site Actions then Site Settings

3. In the Site Settings click on Site Collection Features

4. Click Activate for the External User Access on the Site Collection Features page (if this feature is active for a site, you can Deactivate here as well)

Inviting External Users

The SPO environment and Site Collections needs to be enabled for External Access before you can invite external users to a site.  What I found when walking through these steps is to allow for some time for the changes to replicate before sending an External User invite, I set this up yesterday evening but my invitations were not being added to the Site Members group.  This morning an invite worked perfectly and was added to the site members group.  Also at this time you can only invite external users with a @hotmail.com, @live.com or @msn.com.  Currently other email addresses are not supported but are planned to be supported is a future service update.

1. From a site you would like to invite External Users, Click Site Actions and then Share Site

2. From the Share Your Site dialog, enter the external users email address in either the Visitors or Members area and click Share

External User Experience

Here is what the External User will experience accessing your site

1. The External User will receive the below email

2. Clicking on the “Accept you invitation” link will take the user to the site, where they need to login

3. As my invited External Users is Windows LiveID user I choose the Hotmail side

4. I logged in with my (External User invited Guest credentials) and then I was able to access the site!

So there you have it, the steps to allow External Users access to internal SPO sites.  If you have an @hotmail.com, @live.com or @msn.com email account and would like to check out how this works from an External User standpoint send me an email at smcneill at office365evangelist dot com and I will send you an invite.