The May meeting of the Office 365 International User group is scheduled for May 28th! Brett Hill will be doing a presentation on Riverbed’s Cloud Accelerator Product.
Hope you can join the meeting! Please also pass this along to anyone you think would benefit from the meeting.
On the 26th we had our March meeting of the Office 365 International User Group. I have been very busy at work lately, well busy is an understatement, I have been slammed! Thankfully I was able to secure a speaker for this meeting last week while at the Austin, TX airport. Darrell Webster (@DarrellCWebster) graciously agreed to present on Interactive OneNote and SharePoint Social, thank you Darrell. His presentation was very interactive and showed how OneNote is not just a personal note taker and repository, but a very strong collaboration tool for internal and external projects. Darrell did a great job including the audience with an interactive demo of OneNote. Darrell then showed off the new Social aspects of SharePoint, what was great about his presentation is that all that he showed could be done on-premises with SharePoint but more importantly with SharePoint Online. We learned about how to follow users, posts and even documents. The latter is something that is very cool, now you can follow a document and get a message that someone has updated the document.
If you missed it, here is a link to information about the Windows 8 OneNote App working with Office 365, http://blogs.office.com/b/microsoft-onenote/archive/2013/03/21/update-to-the-onenote-windows-store-app-now-available.aspx
Darrell brought up some great functionality with OneNote that he recommended that be included in our future meetings once our Office 365 IUG Tenant is upgraded to Wave 15. Speaking of upgrades, we had a good discussion about the upgrade process and the feeling is that Microsoft does not have this process down to perfect. Several attendees mentioned issues with their upgrades resulting in issues from mail delivery issues (mainly specific to forwarders) to upgrades taking much longer than stated and resulting in a Tenant being in mixed mode, Exchange Online gets updated but Lync and SharePoint still on the previous version. One issue that was identified is to ensure that a customer has updated their Office 365/Exchange Online MX record, http://community.office365.com/en-us/wikis/manage/office-365-administrator-task-wiki.aspx#MX%20Record.
We also had some other good discussions on the new Service Descriptions that have been moved to TechNet, http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/jj819284.aspx I actually did a quick poll and found most attendees liked the new format and location versus the previous Wave 14 Word files. We did discuss that while the new location makes it easier for the Service Descriptions to be updated, it is hard now to provide them to a client. I noticed during the discussion that it was brought up you can create your own TechNet download, I missed the link during the discussion (long story, my Lync client died trying to present, so I lost the IM conversion) but found this blog post that talks about it, http://blogs.technet.com/b/office_resource_kit/archive/2011/07/29/build-your-own-book-of-technet-articles.aspx
Good news! For the second meeting in a row I remember to hit that elusive record button. If you missed the meeting or would just like to relive the magic, here is the link, http://sdrv.ms/16iLWE4
The March meeting of the Office 365 International User Group will be March 26th at 1pm Mountain Time, 8pm UTC/GMT. The link below has the meeting info for you to add to your calendar. Looking forward to another great meeting.
Well if you have any interest in Office 365 you know that yesterday, the 27th, Microsoft announced the next version of Office 365 went General Availability (GA). You can watch the recorded launch from yesterday here: http://vts.inxpo.com/scripts/Server.nxp?LASCmd=L:0&AI=1&InitialDisplay=1&ClientBrowser=0&ShowKey=12696 I have an issue with the launch event as it was pretty much client focused and did not really touch on the Services, Exchange, Lync and SharePoint improvements with the 2013 versions.
The meeting started with a short discussion and then I went into a full demo/walkthrough of Office 365 GA. I tried to cover everything from the main portal, Exchange, Lync and SharePoint administration. I also covered the licensing changes. Here are the Plans/SKUs available http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/business/compare-office-for-business-plans-FX102918419.aspx The biggest questions with the new SKUs of Office 365 for me are around SharePoint Online, Here is a good resource for the differences between Small, Medium and Enterprise plans, http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/office365-sharepoint-online-enterprise-help/sharepoint-online-software-boundaries-and-limits-HA102694293.aspx#_Toc343676266 Here is a blog post about launching the new Exchange Online http://blogs.technet.com/b/exchange/archive/2013/02/28/announcing-the-new-exchange-online.aspx
We then had some discussions and ended up with me demoing the https://onramp.office365.com site. This site combines a Solution Alignment Workshop (SAW) and a readiness assessment for Office 365. We discussed some issues that one member was having with trying to send Delegated Administration invitation from his partners Wave 14 Tenant to a client’s Wave 15 Tenant. This appears to be an issue currently and we all will be monitoring it moving forward.
I finally remembered to record the meeting, https://skydrive.live.com/redir?resid=646120BC9624B358!21088&authkey=!AExxZbY1AHZqols. So for those of you that were unable to join live you can watch the meeting!
The next meeting of the Office 365 International User Group has been scheduled for February 28th at 2pm Mountain time, 9pm GMT/UTC. Select the link below to get the meeting invite added to your calendar so you won’t forget to join us. This meeting had to slide from its normal Tuesday day and about a week later due to the Microsoft MVP Summit being held in Redmond the week of the 18th and my attendance at the Microsoft Partner Advisory Council (PAC) for Office 365 and Intune the 25th through the 27th. Now as most of you know, my fellow MVP’s and I are bound by a very strict NDA (Non-Disclosure Agreement) pertaining to any and all information that is shared with us as part of the MVP program and I am under a similar NDA for the PAC. But I think the timing of the meeting could be very advantageous to any information that is related to the MVPs or myself at the PAC meeting that we are allowed to publicly share.
Just a little bit ago I created a new Yammer group. This Yammer group is tied to the Office 365 International User Group (IUG), but the association is loose and you don’t have to be a member of one to join the other. Here is the link to the Yammer group, https://www.yammer.com/office365iug I am a novice with Yammer, while I use it, within my company Catapult Systems and some interactions with Microsoft groups, this is my first time creating and managing a Yammer group. So I ask forgiveness up front if I mess things up or am not able to respond immediately to requests and questions J I do look forward to helping out the Office 365 Community via another avenue that Yammer provides!
Several of the Office 365 IUG founders discussed having a presentation on Yammer at our next meeting. We all agreed it was a good idea and I am going to reach out to my Microsoft contacts to see if we can get a Program Manager or other top-level Yammer representative to present to the group. I encourage your input and suggestions for the subject matter for the IUG, please email me at (sean dot mcneill at catapultsystems dot com) or send me a tweet at @S_McNeill. This group was created to help the Office 365 community and with your help we all can benefit from an open and creative group.
Side Note, Microsoft made some changes to the way Domains are added and managed in Office 365 for Enterprises, Loryan Strant (@thecloudmouth) has posted a great blog detailing the changes, http://thecloudmouth.com/2013/01/31/changes-to-the-way-office-365-manages-domains/ recommend this!
Yesterday we had our first Office 365 International User Group meeting of the year. This meeting happened to fall on the date that Microsoft released Office 2013 for consumers. The name that Microsoft choose for the “Home” version of Office 2013, “Office 365 Home Premium”, is a bit of a bone of contention with me a several others. We discussed this at the beginning of the meeting. The issue I have with the name is that it creates great confusion on what is actually the product being purchased. Really the Office 365 Home Premium is the ability to install Office 2013 on up to 5 devices for a yearly subscription price of $100. The confusion is with the TRUE Office 365 Cloud Based Services from Microsoft; Exchange, SharePoint and Lync online as well as the ability to install the latest Office Suite. The Home Premium version does not include any of the services and is just the Office 2013 suite with up to 20GB of SkyDrive storage. I really do understand what Microsoft direction is, subscription based software for consumers, but couldn’t they have choose CloudOffice, OfficeStream, etc and not invade on the Office 365 name?
Side Note, I sent an email to the Office 365 MVP community Distro List (we had a previous thread going on about our distain for the name and the confusion we see it causing. My email went something like this:
“Since we all like acronyms, instead of fighting with the Home Premium name, how about we rename the true Office 365 that we all know, support and advocate for: Microsoft Office Virtually Everywhere: MOVE to the Cloud!” What do you think? I like it, probably should trademark it!
So off my soap box and onto the meeting. In this blog post announcing Office 365 Home Premium (there’s that name again) Steve Ballmer states the real Office 365 for business on the new services will be available on February 27th. This means to me and most of the rest of everyone that Office 365 Wave 15 services based on the 2013 Server versions, Exchange, SharePoint and Lync Online, will go GA then. This is great news and falls right in line with what Microsoft has stated back in October/Novemberish that it would go GA (General Availability) in the first Quarter of 2013.
Brett Hill (@BrettHill) gave the group a good recap of the Office 365 Ignite + sessions he attended in Redmond last week. Some of the highlights I took from his recap is that Microsoft is looking to enable a DirSync version capable of syncing passwords from on-premises (via the Hash File, not the actual passwords) with Office 365 as well as other ways to get users accessing the services faster. He also talked about the synergy between Office 365 and the Office 2013 suite. Brett said while he found the information very informational he did miss the demos and labs of previous Ignite training sessions. Many thanks to Brett for giving us this recap.
I took the stage next and talked about how the Office 365 Wave 14 to Wave 15 Service Upgrade process will be done for existing Office 365 customers. A good overall resource for this is the Service Upgrade Center. I talked this in a previous blog post as well. The overall story about the Service Upgrade Process is it will involve minimal impact to the IT department and end users as well. This is done specifically to counter the BPOS to Office 365 Migration/Transition that many customers struggled with previously.
We ended up the meeting talking about various topics related to Office 365. I really appreciate the energy, questions and support I get from this group and the way everyone is very open to help out and assist others and truly support the community as a whole. For those Sports fans out there you may be aware of a show on ESPN called PTI (Pardon the Interruption) a fast paced show that jumps from topic to topic. Well at the end of each show the two host get “reprimanded” by a fact check on all the false and wrong statements, luckily for me we had no fact checker for the meeting as I messed up several times! Luckily the group members were there to ensure my false or incorrect statements were corrected!
Again I want to Thank all that attended the meeting and hope to see you all in next month’s meeting!
Happy New Year all! The next meeting of the Office 365 International User Group will be January 29th at 2pm Mountain Time. Below is a link to the Meeting information to get it added to your calendar. Hope you can join the meeting and encourage you to pass the word around to anyone who is involved with Office 365.
This week we had a very good Office 365 International User Group meeting. Rene Modery (@Modery) and Matthew Hughes (@Mattmoo2) gave a recap of the Microsoft SharePoint Conference 2012 in Las Vegas. Rene kicked things of talking about how SharePoint 2013 was built with the Cloud in mind. He also covered a bunch of information relating to the way Microsoft Manages SharePoint Online, he provided numbers of servers and databases and detailed how Microsoft monitors and tests out the SharePoint online systems to ensure uptime, reliability and makes automation a key initiative. Matt then talked about the conference, the level of speakers and sessions and how our users feel about the two. Matt also talked about the benefits of a conference the size of SharePoint beyond just the sessions. How it allows people to network, to talk with experts, to have fun along with all the learning opportunities.
Martina Grom (@Magrom) then gave a recap of the Microsoft BUILD conference help in Redmond in October. She bragged a bit about the two devices she received, a Nokia Lumia 920 and Microsoft Surface RT! J She then gave a great overview of the new Office Apps. She talked about how developers can now write code to be integrated with the Office 2013 suite and Exchange and SharePoint on-premises as well as the online versions. She talked about the new Office Store that adds to the already Windows Phone Store and the Windows 8 Store that now give developers and users as well many choices to publish, find and install apps.
Both Rene and Martina had PowerPoint decks for their presentations, I will work with both to get them uploaded to the User Group Site, www.office365union.com.
The group then engaged in several ad-hock discussions around such things as Google vs Office 365, MigrationWiz migration tool and Wave 15 of Office 365. This was another great meeting and a good way to wrap up the year and prepare for another big year for Office 365 with the coming of Wave 15 (2013 product sets) and other cloud goodness!
Hope you all have a very wonderful Holiday Season and the best to you and yours!
The next meeting of the Office 365 International User Group meeting will be December 19th. Click the link below to add this to your calendar. The initial plan is to have a recap of the SharePoint and BUILD conferences as they relate to Office 365. Please join us for this meeting and pass this along to all that you think would be interested in learning more about Office 365!
