Tag: SharePoint Online

Categories
Documentation Office 365

SharePoint Online Service Descriptions – Hidden Gem

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

2014-10-18_14-37-52

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

SharePoint Online versus On-Premise (v15)

If you’re looking for a comparison of the SharePoint Online offering that’s a part of Office 365 broken down by product SKU with what is provided for with SharePoint 2013 Enterprise for your on-premise implementations, you can! Microsoft released this in the form of an Excel Web App as a link off of the SharePoint Online service description on TechNet located here:

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-US/office365/fp123607

But then you think to yourself, what if I need to be able to download a copy and work through it in Excel on my desktop machine, no problem, you can either click on the Excel looking icon on the bottom of the page aforementioned or you can click on the below link to pull down a local copy:

http://bit.ly/1ekEeMT

Happy comparisons!

Categories
Migration Office 365

Office 365 Dedicated – Content Migration

Interestingly enough, but if you’re using SharePoint Online in Office 365 in a dedicated environment there are opportunities for content migration from onPrem to the cloud by providing copies of content databases to Microsoft. Or at least you used to have that option as described in this document:

SharePoint Online Content Migration Policy – Office 365 Dedicated Plans – January 2013 – http://download.microsoft.com/download/0/4/0/04054360-DC5E-4AB8-B3AB-6BF01BB3946C/SharePoint%20Online%20Content%20Migration%20Policy_Office%20365%20Dedicated%20Plans_Jan%202013.docx

If you’re looking to have a backup copy of your data perhaps or looking to move off of Office 365 Dedicated, the cut off for having content databases pushed out of Microsoft’s system is 15 April 2013 as stated in the documentation:

Starting April 15, 2013, Microsoft will no longer process outbound migrations for SharePoint Online dedicated plan customers. Outbound migrations will instead be accomplished by third-party independent software vendor (ISV) solutions, just like Inbound migrations are today.

Microsoft states that they are doing this for a number of reasons to include:

ISVs provide an effective solution for migrating content out of your SharePoint Online farm, just like for inbound migrations. Using an ISV solution has the following benefits:

  • Reduces technical requirements and complexity involved in successfully attaching the data to an on-premises SharePoint farm.
  • Frees up customer change windows for deployment of configuration changes and custom solutions.
  • Removes the risk and inconvenience of a USB drive shipment.

For information about using ISV solutions for content migration, see the SharePoint Online Content Migration by Third-Party Solutions Policy document, available to customers on the Customer Extranet site.

Overall the document is an interesting read regarding the SharePoint Online 2010 Dedicated service offering that is a component of Office 365 and outbound data migrations. Just remember however that you do have an impending deadline in April if you wish to utilize Microsoft’s outbound data migration service.

Categories
Cloud Office 365

Office 365 and Lync for Mac

Recently I started doing a little usability testing of SharePoint Online within Office 365 with my MacBook Pro running Mac OSX Lion (10.7.3) and figured, “While I’m here, why not pop open the Lync client to be able to keep in touch with colleagues working on solutions?”
So I double tapped the command button to bring up Alfred and typed in “Ly” to bring up the Lync client.

So once the Lync client was up and looking pretty on my screen, I put in my credentials, figuring that my e-mail address and user ID were probably both my e-mail address. So I clicked “Sign In” and spin baby spin… the color wheel of Appledom went forth to conquer, only to sit and time out, not connecting, not discovery the SIP server of Microsoft’s Lync servers, not allowing me to find my connected colleagues. I sat and wondered, “Strange, my Windows Lync client discovers Office 365’s Lync servers, albeit it takes a little while, but it finds them, why can’t the Mac client?”

First things first – yes, I’m using my own domain name entry that’s redirected the DNS Name Servers to Microsoft’s so as to let them handle the DNS components.
Second thing – yes I’ve got Microsoft Office 11 running with Service Pack 2 and I’ve loaded the Office 365 sign-in tool to assist with some of the login.

So back on the ranch… while sitting there waiting for a while I wondered, “Is this a known bug, did I forget to read an FAQ?” The answer would be yes, I missed the memo.

Microsoft has a nice little article on the Downloads page for Mac software from Office 365 that points to this article:
Set up Lync for Mac 2011 for Office 365 – http://onlinehelp.microsoft.com/en-us/office365-smallbusinesses/hh534384.aspx

Basically it details the following:
Use your e-mail address / Cloud ID for both the User ID and the E-mail Address.
Click on Advanced and then put in the Microsoft Lync internal and external server settings as:
sipdir.online.lync.com:443
Go back to the sign in page and click sign in and you’re good to go.

Wondering why it is that the Mac Lync client can’t perform discovery while the Windows version can without any configuration… granted, the autodiscovery process for the Windows client seems to take a while… perhaps it’s time to do this on the Windows client for zippy login?