Category: Office365

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Microsoft begin Office 15 Technical Preview


The latest edition of Microsoft’s flagship Office Suite has entered the Technical Preview stage. Currently known as “Office 15” (being the 15th “wave” of productivity products”*) the current beta edition has been released to selected customers, of course under NDA.

PJ Hough, Corporate Vice President of Development, Office Division said:

“Office 15 is the most ambitious undertaking yet for the Office Division”

and also:

“With Office 15, for the first time ever, we will simultaneously update our cloud services, servers, and mobile and PC clients for Office, Office 365, Exchange, SharePoint, Lync, Project, and Visio. Quite simply”

This second point appears to indicate that there will no longer be a gap between new editions, and thus features, arriving on-premise and them being available to cloud users…a view which ZDNet’s Mary Jo Foley seems to share:

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If this is the case then it’s good news for partners & customers alike.

There will be a public beta in the summer so only 5 or so months to wait to see what’s going to be in there:

  • Will there be a “Microsoft Accounting”?
  • Will there be an Office Suite that includes Visio and/or Project?
  • Will Word easily allow centralised building blocks for document creation?

Check out the Office blog post here:

http://blogs.office.com/b/office-exec/archive/2012/01/30/quot-office-15-quot-begins-technical-preview.aspx

*Well actually the 14th as they skipped 13 for reasons of superstition. So Office 2007 = Wave 12 and Office 2010 = Wave 14

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Blackberry Cloud Services Launches for Microsoft Office 365


This is great news. Microsoft’s Office 365 Online Services can once again play nicely with RIMs Blackberry mail service.

“BlackBerry Business Cloud Services is available at no additional charge to Microsoft Office 365 Enterprise Plan subscribers. This secure service, hosted by Research In Motion (RIM), directly links Microsoft® Exchange Online with BlackBerry smartphones to offer reliable, mobile access to synchronized email, calendar, contacts, tasks and memo pads.”

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The previous iteration of Microsoft Online Services had a chargeable BES (Blackberry Enterprise Server) element hosted by MS which, after a little while became free of charge.

In the run up to Office 365 being launched, the decision was made that RIM would take over hosting the Blackberry services which seemed sensible to me. The odd part is that Office 365 went live in July 2011 but RIM said it would be at least 6 months until they were ready.

This led to a scenario where many people were “waiting until BES arrives” before genuinely evaluating Office 365, particularly in the mid-market space. It’s great to see that this is available and will give our teams another great thing to talk about with our clients Smile

Go and find out more info here:

http://us.blackberry.com/business/software/cloudservices/

and/or grab the Technical PDF, which compares the different flavours of Blackberry Services here:

View the Feature and Technical Overview

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Nokia & Microsoft Office 365


I today received an email from Nokia telling me that the “1st Nokia Partner Network Event” is imminent on the 23rd November 2011 at The National Space Centre, Leicester

I’ve never been aware of Nokia particularly having partners of the sort that would have events like this…as their business isn’t really the same as Microsoft, Adobe, SAP, HP etc., so it surprised me a little.

There are 3 breakouts:

  • Retailers/Online
  • B2B Dealer
  • IT Reseller

and it’s the 3rd one that caught my eye due to the first 2 sessions:

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So not only are Nokia making a huge play in the consumer arena with Windows Phone 7, it seems they’re going to start introducing their devices into the corporate space, by playing on some of the enhancements found within the recent Mango update. That update brought full support for Microsoft’s Office 365, their cloud based Exchange/Lync/Sharepoint offering, allowing WP users full access to Sharepoint lists and document libraries.

I’m keen to see where Nokia’s involvement with Office 365 takes them, us as partners and Microsoft too. That said I don’t think I’ll be able to attend the event…anyone out there planning on going that can take notes for me? Smile

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Office 365 London Taxi


Office 365 Taxi

Microsoft’s Office 365 is taking over London!

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Microsoft Office 365: SharePoint Online New Features


Microsoft are committed to adding new features into their Cloud offerings and over the last week and a bit have been upgrading SharePoint Online to include some great new things:

BCS (Business Connectivity Services) – This enables companies to connect to external systems from within SharePoint. For more info, check this TechNet page – http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sharepoint/ee518675

Windows Phone 7 “Mango” Support – Enables newly upgraded Windows Phone users to access Sharepoint Online lists and document libraries.

Increased Browser Support – Now officially supports both IE9 & Google Chrome browsers

Recycle Bin Self Service – Self service ability to recover sites from a collection’s recycle bin

External Sharing Live ID support – Office 365 admins can now invite external users to a site collection and they sign in with their Windows Live ID

Of those, the addition of BCS is far and away the biggest and should make Sharepoint Online suddenly a viable option for a whole new set of organisations.

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Office 365 Blackberry Beta Available


Microsoft Office 365, their updated online services offering, added many new features over the previous version known as BPOS. The big changes included using the 2010 servers (rather than 2007, making Office Pro Plus available as a monthly subscription and removing Blackberry Enterprise Server (BES) functionality.

The latter wasn’t as well received as all the other changes and was due to RIM (Research in Motion, the developers of Blackberry) taking charge of that piece of the infrastructure. BPOS has just changed to offering the BES functionality free of charge and business continuing on that platform (while they prepped their existing infrastructure such as upgrading from Office 2003) can still use the Microsoft provided BES functionality. Companies taking up a fresh Office 365 subscription and/or upgrading from BPOS to the new offering however, are not able to take advantage of hosted Blackberry Enterprise Server at this current time…from Microsoft or RIM.

This has kept a number of customers from migrating over to Office 365, especially as RIM stated it won’t be available until December 2011! There is now good news and bad news:

Bad News: RIM now say it will be January 2012

Good News: There is now a beta of the service available

To get the beta service up & running:

To enable your Microsoft Office 365 for BlackBerry service:

  1. An administrator must login to http://portal.microsoftonline.com and click on Setting up email on mobile phones under Resources
  2. Click Enable Hosted BlackBerry® services from Research In Motion®
  3. Agree to the information sharing agreement
  4. From the Microsoft Online Services Admin Overview, click Manage under Hosted BlackBerry® services from Research In Motion®
  5. Once the open beta is live you will be able to configure and activate desired BlackBerry devices

Once that is done, and you click on “Manage” in your Office 365 portal, you will be redirected to:

http://www.blackberry.com/beta/businesscloud

to nominate your company for participation in the beta.

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Lync Online & Lync Translator


I’m sure you already know what Lync is but just in case you don’t:

Lync is $1,000,000,000.

Lync is On-Premise.

Lync is Online.

Lync is Awesome.

Lync is Multi-Lingual.

It does:

  • Instant Messaging
  • P2P Voice Calls
  • Presence (are they free, in a meeting, on lunch etc)
  • Video Conferencing
  • Web Conferencing
  • Desktop Sharing
  • Presentation Sharing
  • VOIP Calls

and loads of other things too, like collaborative whiteboards & polls.

Microsoft Lync 2010.png

However, this post is about a specific add-on for Lync and what to do if you’re having problems with it & Lync Online.

Lync Translator:

This is a great feature that I saw demoed at the Worldwide Partner Conference (WPC) this year in LA and it does what it sounds like – it translates your Lync IM’s from 1 language into another!

You choose your language:

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Then choose the recipient’s language:

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Then Voila:

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It of course will translate when they reply too, allowing 2 people without a common language to have a conversation, be it personal or business.

It companies with offices across the world this could be invaluable. Not only that, as Lync allows you to federate (i.e connect) with other companies this could be used for communicating with customers and partners too!

Getting it working with Lync:

Translator is an add-on for Lync which can be downloaded from:

http://www.microsoft.com/download/en/details.aspx?displaylang=en&id=26136

and a quick, simple install to get you started.

However I ran into this issue:

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I thought this was due to me using the Office 365 Lync Online but I was told via Twitter that it does work. It was a Snr Program Manager with the UC team in Redmond, Tom Laciano AKA (@TomLCSKid) who had tweeted me and he was also kind enough to help me further with some troubleshooting.

It turned out to be quite a simple step but I’d never have come up with it myself:

· Look in IE’s Trusted Sites (Tools/Options/Security/Trusted Sites/Sites) and make sure there’s an entry for http://ConversationTranslator.cloudapp.net.

That was it. I added that in and BOOM – I was off IMing in various languages with ease Smile

So if you get a similar error – make sure that step above is completed first off…

Hope that helps someone out there…

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Skype will come to Microsoft Office 365


Microsoft’s recent $8.5 billion purchase of Skype is close to being officially completed (pending international anti-trust go-ahead) and it’s first appearance will be in Office 365, Microsoft’s just launched cloud offering.

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Kurt Delbene, MS Business Division President said:

“Office 365 will be the lead offering along with the client that should drive parity”

Client, in this case, means Office so does that mean there will be a separate “Skype” component in Office 15 or, more likely, will “Lync” simply connect to both?

Talking of the next version of Office, Mr Delbene had some info on that too.

Talking about when we can expect the next version of Microsoft’s desktop productivity suite, he said:

“We’re typically in a 2 1/2 year cycle”

which would put Office 15 (as I’m calling it for now) at June-December 2012. I’m not too sure about that as it is likely that will be the release schedule for Windows 8 too…I feel that trying to promote new versions of their 2 biggest products at the same time could be tricky.

Although if my prediction that Windows 8 will have a much bigger consumer focus is right,that could make it easier for Redmond’s marketing teams. Predominantly push Windows to consumers and predominantly push Office to enterprises…do you think that could work?

Wikipedia, via Neowin, also tells us that:

“notable changes in Excel include a tool for filtering data in a storm, the ability to convert Roman numerals to Arabic numerals, and the integration of advanced trigonometric functions. In Word, the capability of inserting video and audio online as well as the broadcasting of documents on the Web were implemented”

For more info, head over to the Seattle Times sites here.

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Microsoft Enterprise Agreement: Updated for the Cloud


Microsoft’s top level licensing model, the Enterprise Agreement, has recently been overhauled to make it more cloud friendly…which is a good thing for organisations looking to adopt this new model now, or in the future.

What is an Enterprise Agreement?

The Enterprise Agreement (EA) is Microsoft’s highest level model, for companies of 250 seats and above. It requires an Enterprise Wide (EW) licensing commitment, includes Software Assurance (SA) on all licences and offers the best discounts.

The common way for an organization to licence under the EA is with the “Professional Desktop”, comprised of:

  • Windows OS
  • Office Pro Plus
  • Core CAL

The Core CAL itself is a bundle, comprised of:

  • Windows Server CAL
  • Exchange Server CAL
  • Sharepoint Server CAL
  • SCCM Client ML

With the exception of Windows Server & SCCM, all these products are now available online via Office 365 and Intune.

If a company with an existing EA wanted to take advantage of these products, they would be on top of their existing Professional Desktop licences, as they are required to maintain the Enterprise Wide commitment. This would mean double licensing, not an effective use of budget and of course, not the way customers want to do things.

So in a very quick move, Microsoft have produced an amendment to their Enterprise Agreement terms making it possible for organizations to “mix & match” between online & onsite licensing.

Product LineUp

Windows OS –> Windows Intune

Office –> Office 365 E3 or E4

Core CAL –> Core Bridge

Enterprise CAL –> ECAL Bridge

What’s a Bridge CAL?

Bridge CALs are a new licensing item that bridge the gap between the CAL suites and their closest online relatives.

For the Core CAL offering, the bridge CAL covers the organization for:

  • Windows Server CALs
  • SCCM Client MLs

thus completing the Enterprise Wide commitment, without duplicating any functionality and keeping them compliant with the contract terms.

Example

The following diagram gives a good example of how the online and onsite licensing models can co-exist within an organization.

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There are certain differences when it comes to the Software Assurance benefits available with Online products too, for example:

Windows Intune does NOT give

  • Training Vouchers
  • TechNet Subscriptions

There are a variety of different combinations possible when it comes to these licensing scenarios, some more complex than others! I have left out a fair amount of information from this post as I don’t want to cause confusion, however if you have a specific scenario I would be more than happy to help Smile

It’s great to see Microsoft making such changes as this and at such a good speed. Many people criticised Microsoft for taking too long to update their licensing models to accommodate the changes brought about by Virtualisation and, while that may be true, Redmond are definitely ahead of the curve this time!

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