Tag: Planning

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
Documentation SharePoint Weekly

Monday Morning Bytes…

Wake Up Bits…

It’s Monday morning, 10 January 2011… do you know what your group policy objects are configured to that may potentially affect the end user experience between SharePoint 2010 and your Office 2010 client users?  If not, no need to sweat, Microsoft recently published a document on Group Policy for Microsoft Office 2010 (7 January 2011). It’s fairly well written, weighing in at a whopping 1.9 MB (303 pages) for the DOC file (where’s my light and low Cal docx edition???).

The document finely articulates the different capabilities of the Office system, describing the policy object settings and what their effects on the Office client family and SharePoint products and technologies are. Included in this document is information that pertains to the SharePoint Workspace product as well as the administrative templates that are associated with the product.

For instance, with regard to the Contact Card, there is an option to “Configure presence icon” with three options – Display All, Display some, Display None (page 161). While this might seem trivial, it’s definitely something to keep in mind when you’re working in an environment where you want to show presence and you have populated your SIP address or made it available to the User Profile Service for consumption.

So while knowing how the group policy objects within your Active Directory based domain are important, there are definitely individuals new to the SharePoint career that have been tasked with implementing SharePoint Foundation Server 2010 to begin assisting with a proof of concept, pilot or perhaps a full on collaboration system that has requirements that can’t justify the procurement of SharePoint Server 2010’s Standard or Enterprise licensing. Or perhaps you’re not a SharePoint Administrator / IT Pro at all and you’re looking for some additional documentation to help with planning and pushing forward with developing an implementation guide, then you’ll definitely want to pick up Microsoft’s updated “Getting Started with Microsoft SharePoint Foundation 2010” document (Originally Published November 2010, updated 7 January 2011).

The document provides great detail to assist in the planning phase of an SPF 2010 implementation and points out the key differences and features that have been removed from the Windows SharePoint Services version 3 platform.

Good morning, happy reading and good day!

Categories
Documentation

Fresh SharePoint 2010 Content in 2011

A few new documents have been released from Microsoft for SharePoint Products and Technologies here in 2011, though they aren’t yet showing up in the TechCenter. I found this out only due to the fact that Isaac Stith (aka @mrisaac) made note of an updated Capacity Planning guide that wasn’t listed in the TechCenter feed.

These recently published documents this first week of January 2011 include:

1/3 – SharePoint Foundation Server 2010 Deployment Guide
1/4 – Capacity Planning for SharePoint Server 2010
1/4 – Planning for Sites and Solutions for SharePoint Server, Part 1
1/4 – Planning for Sites and Solutions for SharePoint Server, Part 2
1/4 – Planning for Server Farms for SharePoint Server 2010

Also something that was snuck in at the end of the year that may be helpful for all the IT Pro Individuals out there – Microsoft has released a Help File doc that contains all SharePoint Server 2010 content on TechNet through 12/17/2010 here:

Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010 IT Pro Content – CHM

There’s also a SharePoint Foundation Server 2010 document available here:

Microsoft SharePoint Foundation Server 2010 IT Pro Content – CHM

Happy reading!