Month: October 2014

Categories
Ask Me Anything Community Chat MVP Reddit SharePoint

SharePoint MVP Experts AMA

If you haven’t heard yet, there’s an Ask Me Anything SharePoint MVPs Expert Chat taking place on October 29th at 1 PM EST. The panel consists of SharePoint MVPs across the spectrum (and the world for that matter).

So what’s that mean? If you’re curious about SharePoint 2010 or 2013 or perhaps SharePoint Online or the greater Office 365 platform, come on over and ask a question. You’ll just need to have a Reddit account before hand so that you can be ready to ask questions. More information on the location will be available on the 29th in the SharePoint subreddit – /r/sharepoint

Who all will be there you ask?

Continue reading “SharePoint MVP Experts AMA”

Categories
Office 365

Office 365 Customers to receive Unlimited OneDrive Storage

So this was rather unexpected… or perhaps I just hadn’t read the writing on the wall as Microsoft takes a cue from competitors to up their cloud storage offering. Starting with Home, Personal and Education Office 365 accounts, Microsoft will be offering unlimited storage for OneDrive for Office 365 customers.

It would seem that this will be starting out with consumer OneDrive accounts – based on the announcement, it’ll eventually be there for OneDrive for Business users (maybe?), or so it hints at in the blog post by the OneDrive team.

More details available from the OneDrive blog here: https://blog.onedrive.com/office-365-onedrive-unlimited-storage/.

So if you’re a Google, DropBox, Amazon, or Apple user and you’re looking to cut costs, maybe this is the time to go out and pick up an Office 365 Personal or Home subscription key card from Amazon.com. Yes, I realize it’s not instantaneous gratification and requires you to wait a few days for the card to arrive, but it saves a little cash that you can use toward that Surface Pro 3 that you were going to buy, right? 🙂

Categories
Documentation Office 365

SharePoint Online Service Descriptions – Hidden Gem

TL;dr – http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/office/dn788955

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So I should have posted this a while ago… back in December 2013 (http://www.sharepointdan.com/2013/12/29/sharepoint-online-versus-on-premise-v15/), but figured that it deserved some reminding to folks that might be looking for it…

If you’re like me and you get questions about SharePoint Online and how it compares to SharePoint On-Premises, you typically just start drawing from experiences – some that might be subjective, some that might be objective. Regardless, it’s not something that typically provides for an overarching analysis of services that SharePoint Online provides for thereby leaving you in a rut of sorts trying to determine what each different version of SharePoint and SharePoint Online provide for.

If you’re familiar with Microsoft, the SharePoint Product group released spiffy downloadable Excel spreadsheets detailing the different capabilities and feature sets of the different SKUs (Foundation, Standard, Enterprise) SharePoint for both the 2007 and 2010 versions. With SharePoint 2013, many of us were wondering where we could find something like this for the most recent version – sure there was the Office 365 service description but for those of us working with On-Premises deployments we didn’t know where would get this information.

This is available here – http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/office/dn788955

The Product Group snuck this in somewhere in fall of 2013 – I can say this because I was working with a client at the time and stumbled upon it in an update and was ecstatic 🙂

So what does this have? It’s got ever SKU of Office 365 as well as the On-Premises feature sets so if you want to compare what SharePoint Online has in E3 against what SharePoint 2013 Enterprise provides for you can do that comparison. The spreadsheet also has built in filters so that you’re able to choose the SKU you want and compare between SKUs easily.

If you decide that you want a full up view of the Service Description displayed through Excel Online, you can simply https://onedrive.live.com/view.aspx?cid=41e528b989881d4a&id=documents&resid=41E528B989881D4A!194&app=Excel&authkey=!AJTaHXrAwKrOd68&.

And what’s more if you want to download a copy of the spreadsheet for use later, you can simply click on the Download button within the Excel Online application to pull down a point in time copy. Mind you that similar to the Service Descriptions that overarch all of Office 365, these are updated regularly – the date of the update to the Excel file is displayed in the document in the upper left cell.

Happy comparisons!

Categories
Office 365

Office 365 Service Descriptions

TL; dr – http://www.office365sd.com

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One of the most common questions that I hear on a regular basis is, “How do I decide which Office 365 plan should I get? Just the small or mid-size business or do I need the E plan?”

Up until recently, if you were an organization that was running Active Directory on-premises and you were hoping to use the same password or federate your identity, I would have told you that you needed at least the Mid-Size business plan or one of the E plans. However, Microsoft has changed things up and more or less all of their business plans (not the consumer plans) now support the use of Azure Active Directory integration.

But wait, you’re still scratching your head asking the question, “But which plan do I need?” Without reading through the marketing information on the office.com site, I’d recommend you hop on over to the Service Descriptions to determine what really meets your needs and requirements.

“But Dan, that’s a lot of work…” True, you can go with the information that’s presented just at office.com and get up and running now and change things down the road plan wise… or you can go over to the Service Descriptions and figure out what you really need.

“But Dan, I don’t have time to hunt and peck for URLs…” Sure you do… no wait, you don’t. So head on over to http://www.office365sd.com.

Remember that the Service Descriptions are updated regularly so you probably want to bookmark that handy URL that Microsoft put out there for you to find the resource more quickly.

Categories
Certification

Azure and Office 365 Certification Opportunities

For those of you that are looking to get certified on cloud based products in the Microsoft stack – well there’s a great opportunity for you to get certified – for free.

Microsoft Learning is giving away 10k vouchers for individuals to attempt to gain an MCTS between now and the end of the year for the newly released cloud certifications for Azure and MCSA for Office 365.


Update 3 – And Microsoft is out of certification vouchers. For those of you that were able to attain one – good luck in your studies!

Update 2 – MS Learning tweeted me to let me know that they still have exam vouchers, seems that the initial message was incorrect. Get’em while they’re hot!

Update – They’re fresh out of exam vouchers – they went pretty quickly it would seem, good luck to those of you that were able to snag one!!!

If you’re looking for studying materials – I’d recommend checking out the learning objectives for each of the exams, available on their exam pages listed here:

Azure Certifications:
Developing Microsoft Azure Solutions – 70-532 – https://www.microsoft.com/learning/en-us/exam-70-532.aspx
Implementing Microsoft Azure Infrastructure Solutions – 70-533 – https://www.microsoft.com/learning/en-us/exam-70-533.aspx

Office 365 Certifications
Managing Office 365 Identities and Requirements – 70-346 – https://www.microsoft.com/learning/en-us/exam-70-346.aspx
Enabling Office 365 Services – 70-347 – https://www.microsoft.com/learning/en-us/exam-70-347.aspx

If you pass both Office 365 certifications, you’ll gain your Microsoft Certified Solutions Associate (MCSA) for Office 365 which can be counted toward the Microsoft Certified Solutions Expert (MCSE) SharePoint 2013.

For more information about getting a free voucher though, check out the Microsoft Learning blog here:

http://borntolearn.mslearn.net/btl/b/weblog/archive/2014/10/16/get-certified-on-microsoft-azure-or-office-365-with-free-exams.aspx