Office 365 Plans

Licensing with Office 365 is a bit different than normal on-premises software. With Office 365, rather than purchase a SKU, you subscribe to a Plan. A plan represents a set of services the user of that plan receives. In the early days of Office 365, the plans and the ability to move between them was problematic. If you took out a small business type plan and then wanted to move that subscription up to an Enterprise plan – you couldn't. It was all a bit messy. Then MS did two things: they simplified the plan structure, and enabled you to mix and match with the plans.

The new plan structure for Office 365 contains 6 separate plans:

• Office 365 Business Essentials
• Office 365 Business
• Office 365 Business Premium
• Office 365 Enterprise E1
• Office 365 Pro Plus
• Office 365 Enterprise E3

The Office 365 Business/Pro Plus plans are just the on-Prem fully installed set of Office software products. This includes Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, Publisher and One note). The Pro Plus plan adds Access. These plans are a way of subscribing to Office, versus outright purchase. These two plans just include the software – there's no on-line services or server software. These plans appeal to organisations that are looking to spread the cost over time. Once nice aspect of these plans is that you can load Office on up to 5 systems (e.g. laptop, desktop, home, etc).

The Business Essentials and Enterprise E1 plans are, in effect, online Office (including the Office Online Apps, plus and Exchange mailbox, file and storage space, plus both SharePoint and Lync. The E1 plan has a few added features appropriate to larger firms, such as compliance, BI and enterprise management of applications.

Finally, the Business Premium and E3 plans are the combination of the first two: full office plus mail, SharePoint, Lync. The E3 plan as above gets a bit more.

For fuller details of precisely what each plan offers, see https://products.office.com/en-gb/business/compare-more-office-365-for-business-plans.

What this now means is that any organisation can mix and match any of the plans. The restriction is that a a given subscription is limited to 300 seats of less of the business plans. So you could give the Business/ProPlus subscription to the road warriors who need off line access, while giving Business Essentials to in-house staff could use Office in the cloud. This offers a lot of flexibility.

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Enabling Email Signatures with Office 365–a PowerShell Solution

Like many folks, I use Outlook pretty much exclusively for my email. One nice feature is the ability to set a ‘signature’, text that is added to the bottom of each email I author and send. The signature can contain pretty much anything you want , including your phone numbers, your Lync ID, etc.
Ben Norcutt has just published a nice article on how you can use PowerShell to set email signatures with Office 365. You can see the article and the PowerShell scripts here: http://4sysops.com/archives/add-a-signature-to-office-365-emails-with-powershell/

Technorati Tags: PowerShell,Office 365,signature

Finding Office 365 Cmdlets–It shouldn’t be this hard

I’m working on some courseware for Office 365, Microsoft’s online office product. I have a small business subscription - www.reskit.net, for example is the hosted SharePoint external facing site, and you can get me at tfl@reskit.net. I love the product as it was pretty easy to setup, and works well in practice.

Last week, in preparation for an upcoming training course I began documenting how to get it all setup. I have the cmdlets on MY local workstation, but need to show delegates how to find, install and use them on their systems. I spent several days trying to find these cmdlets – and even went so far as opening a support call with Microsoft, although 2 days later I’ve still had no reply.  But after some considerable amount of effort, I’m sorted. Let me show you how I , finally, got things sorted:

I started at the MS Online Portal and click on the Setup/Overview which brings up this window:

 

Easy, you might think, just click on Learn More link for Module For PowerShell (highlighted above). Ok – So I click on this link and get this:

 

The page has moved. Nothing new, you might say, as Microsoft does this thing all the time. But good on Microsoft for pointing out where the content was moved to! I figure things have changed in Microsoft’s haste to get the new versions of Office 365 out and it may take a while (Ed: 3 weeks??) for the first page to point to the right place. But the redirect link is better than a 404 – so I click that redirection link and get this:

Hold on. I wanted the Office 365 cmdlets not the Azure AD cmdlets. Now it may well be that it’s Azure that ultimately manages O365’s AD. But how do I know? What I am looking for is not what I’ve found. Heck, if I wanted Azure cmdlets, I’d have searched for Azure in the first place, not Office 365. And worse, these have been relocated too! But  there’s a relocation link so maybe not al is lost.

So I click on the link but that just takes me back to the parent node in the table of contents! I’m not going to repeat my rant about the lousy skins MS have foisted on hapless users and how poor the decision to scrap the Class skin was and how hard the TOC now is to use. But even putting that to one side, pointing to a TOC parent doesn’t make much sense.  But then I look carefully at the resultant page:

 

Notice the little note (highlighted above) that says the cmdlets have been renamed. Why couldn’t the very first page on the Online Portal have mentioned this? Or on then first redirection (these content has moved and has been renamed). So the mystery is getting closer to being solved.

So off I go, download these ‘new’ cmdlets (which don’t sound like what I need, but I’m willing to try). But when I try to install the cmdlets, I get told it needs the MSOID Client. So I find that, install it, and try to install the cmdlets again. Whoops – it turns out I need the old .NET framework (I am working on Server 2012 for all these demos). And for reasons best know to some pointy haired boss, the 3.51 Framework has been removed, by default, from Server 2012. So I search out the ISO image, and do the magic incantation:

Add-WindowsFeature NET-FrameworkCore –Source d:\sources\sxs

With that loaded, I try to install the Cmdlets again, the installation succeeds. So off I go looking for the Azure AD cmdlets – but there aren’t any. The module loaded was NOT named Azure (as the web pages seemed to indicate I needed), but MSOnline (which of course is what I wanted all along). But they work. HORRAY. But it took days of effort and following what looks like very incorrect links – I just wanted Office 365 stuff, not Azure, or a lesson in MS product naming (i.e. Office 365 is Azure, except when it isn’t, etc., etc.)

Note to Microsoft: you really need to do a better job here. Please fix the original page to a) point out the right cmdlets, b) point out the renaming and c) that there are pre-reqs and where to find them. Finally, please put the renaming front and centre – especially when what was renamed wasn’t actually renamed. Folks (and I know I am not the only one) get confused with stuff like this.

Summary: It’s taken 4 days of looking and searching to find something that doesn’t sound right, but ends up being so. It really shouldn’t be this hard. I wonder if the new Office 365 exams will test the skills that are REALLY needed to install these cmdlets?

Technorati Tags: Office 365 cmdlets

Microsoft Begins Shipping the Lync Mobile Client

For those of us in the Lync world, the release of a Lync client for mobile phones has been long awaited. Although Microsoft released Lync 2010 to the market over a year ago, there has been no mobile client up till now. The lack of a mobile client has been a point some Microsoft competitors have been quick to jump on. But starting earlier this week, the client is slowly rolling out on 5 key platforms (Windows phone, iPhone, iPad, Android and Nokia Symbian).  Thus far, Microsoft has only released Lync for the Windows Phone – the others are shown as ‘coming soon’ on the Mobile Clients for Microsoft Lync web page.

Microsoft cites 4 key features of the new Lync mobile client:

• Join conferences with a single touch - no access code or pin number is required.
• Stay connected, while controlling your availability – you can see who's available at a glance and connect over IM, email or a call. You can also set your own status and notification settings so you can stay in touch while protecting your "off-work" time.
• Communicate with others using a single, consistent identity. The Call-via-work feature allows outbound calls using your Enterprise Voice number, making it easier for others to recognize calls from the Lync mobile client.
• Connect with confidence through channel encryption, transport layer security (TLS) support, and perimeter/internal network protection that help safeguard your communications.

To the dismay of some, there is no VOIP client – all phone calls to/from the device have to be made over the cellular network, but Call from work and One Number reach do make that a little less expensive.  It appears that the Call via Work feature will not be shipped with Android.

Like so many things Microsoft, the client is not something you can just load from the relevant store and have it work – you do need some work on your Lync implementation and need to install the latest cumulative updates (CU4 in particular) to get the necessary services up and running that support the motile client.

These requirements are spelt out in yet another TechNet article: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/hh690988.aspx. You will need to do some work against your DNS servers to ensure automatic discovery and sign-in works properly. Although this is pretty straightforward, it is work that needs to be planned for and carried out. If you are an Office 365 user and Microsoft is managing your DNS, the work appears to be already done. I host DNS externally to Office 365 but it took me just a few minutes to adjust my DNS settings as needed. You also have to install and configure the mobility service (in CU4), and update your voice policy to support use of the mobile client.

One important gotcha that might be easy to overlook: You need to include certain (new and additional) SAN entries on your key servers. In particular you need to adjust SAN entries on the certificates in your Director pool, your Front End Pool and the reverse proxy. If you use public certificates for any of these systems, you may have to buy an updated certificate for the RP system. 

In closing, it’s worth noting that the mobile client does NOT provide 100% of the features of the Lync desktop client.  You can see a good comparison of the various clients at: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/hh691004.aspx. Some features that are NOT provided by the mobile client (as documented in TechNet) include:

• Caching multiple users account information on the same device
• Modify Contacts List
• Tag contacts for status change alerts
• Control privacy relationships
• Log IM conversations in Exchange/Outlook
• Use dial-in audio conferencing
• Transfer a call
• Call a response group
• Support E911
• Client side IM archiving and client side recording

I can’t wait to get my hands on the client and to use it against my Office 365 account (tfl@reskit.onmicrosoft.com). From all I’ve heard from those who have the client – it does what it says it does and thus far appears stable and resilient. I look forward to using the client - As an iPhone user, I will have to patient. After all – I’ve been waiting 14 months or so for this client a few more days wait is not the end of the world! It will make a nice Christmas present!

Just when you think it’s safe to move to the cloud

I currently use those very nice people at CobWeb for my email service. I have a singe user account, utilising Exchange 2007 (2gb mailbox) which costs a mere £6.00 a month.  The service from CobWeb, for mail, has been outstanding – not a single noticeable glitch in over a year. It took a couple of days to get mail flowing when I first signed up, due to long DNS, but that was quickly resolved. Since then, it’s been flawless. And that’s the level of service that I guess I expect. Not being able to get to my mail is, as someone who is self employed, simply bad news!

I’ve been playing with Office 365 and am very impressed with the overall service – for not much more money than I currently pay, I could move up to a 25gb mailbox (not that I actually need such a large mailbox, but it’s the principle!), and get SharePoint and Lync thrown in. It’s Lync that is especially interesting – the new Lync client is so good, that I’m tempted to move just for that!

Then I read this: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-14851455.

While this explains the downtime, I suppose you could argue that a couple of hours downtime is no big deal especially as it took place overnight. But look at the Office 365 service’s reliability record since GA at the very end of June – it was down briefly in August, then again this week. In just over 2 months of live service, two outages in 2 months. 

Of course, Microsoft is not alone in having challenges. Google had an outage this week as well. And in April, Amazon’s infrastructure failed taking down a number of sites, including Foursquare.

So is this latest outage just a bit of teething/growing pains on the part of Office 365 or something else? I remember the trials and tribulations Demon had in the very early days – scaling massively a service that’s growing massively is very hard work! So, I suspect it’s a combination of factors. Certainly, developing and delivering scalable and highly reliable solutions, especially to Internet scale, is just plain difficult. Things that probably shouldn’t go wrong do – at least until there’s enough experience to make those problems a thing of the past. So I feel that at least a goodly portion of the ‘blame’ must lie in growing pains – which one would expect (hope) die off.  Certainly taking the latest and greatest versions of the software has risks. Cobweb is still running Exchange 2007 while O365 is using Office 2010 and related servers. But the features are so much better, I hear you say!

In my view, Microsoft released Office 365 a tad early. The outages, the problems with federation with Live, and of course the still missing PowerShell cmdlets for Lync Online and SharePoint online do not make for a perfect story. And I’d really have liked to see a full voice solution in terms of Lync online (but I know that such a feature is likely to reveal a number of challenges both technical and legal). The  outages (yesterday’s and the one in August) and lack of tools would have been noteworthy but not complaint worthy had the service still been in beta.  Maybe Microsoft should have considered a longer beta? I certainly think another 6 months would have been appropriate and might have enabled Microsoft to get better at running this vast service.

So what’s to be done. Certainly, as the BBC article points out, “the number of high profile failures have dented confidence in cloud computing”. But I do believe that eventually, MIcrosoft and the rest of the cloud vendors will get it right and we will see cloud computing as an everyday thing. I suppose it pays to be cautious. I’ve put on hold my plans to move my business email to Office 365, but I’m watching things carefully.

 

Technorati Tags: Office 365

Office 365–A nice E-Book and an update on PowerShell Support in Office 365

Microsoft released Office 365 to General Availability at the end of June 2011. It’s been a couple of months since that happened and I’ve just noticed two things.

First my good friend Katherine Murray has released a free eBook from Microsoft Press. You can find details of the book here. And to download the book, just click here. The book is 299 pages long and covers the full set of features contained in the shipping version of Office 365. One small omission, IMHO, is that there is no coverage of PowerShell for administering Office 365. Having said that, MS Press have indicated that updates to the book “will become available in the future” – so perhaps we’ll see more PowerShell Coverage soon. Having said that, the book looks complete and I am keen to work though the contents learning a bit more about, in particular, SharePoint! Good job Kathleen.

Following on from that, the announcement of the book encouraged me to look again at the use of PowerShell in Office 365. Frankly, I’m somewhat disappointed – the situation hasn’t really changed since I wrote about it in April. At present there is support for a set of general Office 365 cmdlets, which my good friend Jan Engil Ring has described in his blog here. As you can see from that blog post, you can download the Microsoft Online Services module from Microsoft as either 32-bit or 64-bit. There is also support for Exchange online – the code I used my April blog post still works just fine – and gives you 229 cmdlets to manage Exchange online.

Sadly, there is no PowerShell support for either SharePoint Online or Lync Online. IMHO, this is just another indication that Office 365 shipped before it' was really ready. Hopefully we’ll see these cmdlets emerge soon – but there is nothing official other than they ‘will come later’.

In summary, Office 365 is maturing, with some good documentation and some limited PowerShell support. With a bit of luck, the additional PowerShell cmdlets and support will come sooner rather than later – I’ll be sure to blog when I find it!!

Technorati Tags: Office 365,PowerShell

Office 365 is released

On June 28th, Microsoft released Office 365 – their office software as a service product. I previously blogged about the product in mid-April - http://tfl09.blogspot.com/2011/04/getting-started-with-office-365.html. During the latter stages of the beta, Microsoft did continue to tweak the product but what they released is more or less what I blogged about in April.

Network World has an article on the product which examines how Office 365 stacks up against Google’s Google Docs. It concludes that Office 365 “will likely attract a big audiencef, since a huge number of businesses already use Microsoft products already.

Office 365 is sold on a range of price points – or plans. The cost ranged from US$6 to US$27 per month per user, depending on what services you contract for.  This compares with Google App’s price point of US$50/year.

I like Office 365 and have enjoyed using it during the beta. I recently did a neat demo with it, talking from Luxembourg (at a client site) to two pals – one in Singapore the other in Thailand. All of us were on wireless LANs and the performance was darn good.

The Network World article notes that MS did not address any of the limitations of Offfice 365, but that said – the product as it stands is not bad! I look forward to seeing a lot more hard evidence about the overall quality of the product as we start to roll it out.

Technorati Tags: Office 365,Microsoft

Microsoft’s CloudPro Twitter Hour

As I posted last week, on Friday, Microsoft has an hour long twitter conversation around the cloud. The basic idea was that Microsoft and a few MVPs (I was one) would hang out on Twitter, and answer questions around the cloud and the cloud technologies. The hour came and went – and it was an interesting experiment, which I hope Microsoft will continue with. I lost count of the number of tweets but it was around 150 for the hour. The questions came from a range of sources. I do have the source data (well everything I captured and want to make a CSV file from it – give me a bit of time to write the PowerShell scripts to do it .

As I read through my notes, the following items were discussed:

1. What is the cloud and what are the economics of the cloud and what’s there and not there. The answers were predictable – some definitions of what the cloud was (and the need for public cloud vs. private cloud). Lower cost was seen a key driver if not the key driver.
2. Security in the cloud - both in general and with respect to US Patriot act. The architecture provides good provision against most risks and there is an SLA with financial penalties. And Simon May provided a great link to an article around hosted data and exposure to the Patriot act (see http://bit.ly/fj5BbE). It goes some ways to addressing the concerns.
3. Office 365 - now that it's in more public beta, there's more interest for sure. The questions looked at what features were there and a couple of things learned so far (e.g. no PowerShell cmdlets for SharePoint Online or Lync Online!).
4. Training and the Future of the IT Pro. It’s clear, to me at least, that the IT Pro does not go away in this drive to the cloud. There continues to be work to be done to facilitate the cloud – IT Pros do not have to worry too much just yet. As for training, well this needs to evolve and training providers need to evolve too.

I understand from talking to the organisers that another event like this is being planned. What did you think? Comments please!

Technorati Tags: Twitter,Cloud,CloudPro,#CloudPro,Lync Online,Exchange Online,SharepointOnline Office 365

Getting Started with Office 365

It’s been an interesting week. After months of waiting, I managed to finally get myself onto the beta of Office 365. Office 365 is Microsoft’s latest software as a service offering, which is currently in beta. It consists of Office, Lync, Exchange and SharePoint. The latter three are hosted services where you use a client to access the hosted resources; Office can be consumed either locally (with cloud based document storage), of via the Office web apps (i.e. office in the browser).
It’s taken a few days to get myself up an running, but that’s mainly lack of time! While the setup and installation was simple, I’m still getting to grips with the basics and with working around some of the initial issues. The basic opinion so far is highly positive.
For me, the office component of Office offers little advantage to me – although the cost is highly attractive. I’ve always used Office (i.e. Word, Excel, PowerPoint) locally anyway – and have enough computing power to always run local clients. But I can see how attractive this might be for many small businesses (and not a few bigger ones too).
The basic signup process was simple – a few web pages and the Office 365 account was created, and I was able to logon to the main portal, which looks like this:

From this portal page, you can do all the tenant management actions along the panel on the left, and configure the services with the middle panel. Along the centre top and right hand side is simple help and access to help resources. All in all, a simple and clean interface into Office 365. Setting up the individual services was relatively straightforward, but if you are going to get value out of SharePoint, you have to know SharePoint a whole lot better than I do at present.
The Office 365 Exchange part – well it’s just a hosted Exchange server. The speed is good – it’s really very much what I’d have expected. It does have PowerShell Cmdlets. To get to these is very simple, as follows:

# First Get credential for site
$cred = Get-Credential  tfl@yourOffice365domain.onmicrosoft.com
# Next create a new PS Session
# Use a hash table to setup parameters to new-pssession
$Office365 = @{ ConfigurationName = "Microsoft.Exchange"
                Connectionuri     = "Https://ps.outlook.com/powershell"
                Credential        = $cred
                Authentication    = "Basic" 
                AllowRedirection  = $true}
$s = New-PsSession @Office365        
# Note: you see the session being redirected to your site
# Next Import the remote session
$Results = Import-PsSession $s

# And away you go. Here are some things to try:
# How many cmdlets returned?
$Results.ExportedFunctions.count 

# What mailbox cmdlets do we have gcm *.Mailbox
# Get mail boxes and statistics
Get-Mailbox Get-Mailbox | Get-MailBoxStatistics

It’s all quite straightforward although the remoting aspect of this means it breaks PowerShell’s Get-Help at least to some degree. The remote session to the server is very much limited (don’t enter the PSSession – even exit is disallowed!). You run all the cmdlets from the local PowerShell console. I’ve not seen PowerShell cmdlets for SharePoint or Lync yet, but I expect they will work in a very similar manner. One further thing you appear NOT able to do is run New-Mailbox to create mailboxes. At least, I’ve not managed to. The documentation does not specifically mention creation of mailboxes by PowerShell, but that may be an oversight or just documentation in production. I’ve got a test script that fails – which is a by product of the restricted session configuration object being used (Microsoft.Exchange).
SharePoint is not a product I know all that well yet. I can use it in a basic way, but I’ve got no real experience either managing or designing SharePoint sites. With Office 365 you get a single ‘vanity’ domain (i.e. Internet facing), as with BPOS, which is nice. I can see small businesses wanting to use this for their ‘shop front’. Ad of course, you get lots more available ‘inside’ your organisation. I definitely need to work more with this, but it looks like a good implementation. Shame their cmdlets are not be available yet. I would hope that Microsoft would ensure these are working before sending Office 365 to the masses, but we may not be that lucky.
Lync was a doddle to install – just download and run the client, login and away you go. In my case, it was marginally more complex to logon as my domain account is a pure local account, separate from the Office 365 account. But with a tad more typing, I was logged in. Enabling Federation was simple, but turns out there are two big gotchas that I came across.
1. First, “Public Internet Connectivity” only  includes Microsoft’s Live Messenger (aka MSN messenger) – AOL and Yahoo are not enabled and so far as I can tell there is no XMPP gateway features either. So that means no XMPP federation with Google, etc. And the time it takes to get federated even to MSN is slow – It’s been two days now and I’m still waiting to  be able to access Live Messenger users. Fuller PIC federation would have been nice.
2. Second, Open Federation does not  work initially with existing Lync customers until they do additional work on their Edge architecture. While you can indeed open federate from your Office 365 account, and you can get it to work, if you try to federate with any partner that has on-premise Lync, it initially fails. They need to do some more configuration to enable a new hosting provider. My good pal Tom Arbuthnot pointed me to a great post from my other old buddy Russ Kaufmann that some how I’d missed. Basically, if you are running on-premise Lync, Office 365 appears as a hosting provider, and your account there does not appear to be just another open federated domain.  Russ argues that this is because Microsoft “doesn’t seem to know how to implement their own product”. He might think that, but I couldn’t possibly comment. The good news is that Russ has a fix which is to run New-CSHostingProvider to add a new service entry for Lync Online. See http://infrastructurehelp.wordpress.com/2011/03/15/office-365a-serious-flaw-with-lync/ for the details and Russ’s views.
I would have hoped that this is just a ‘feature’ of the beta, and gets fixed for RTM. Russ is right that I, as a hosting tenant, should have my domain treated for open federation just like any other domain, and not hindered by virtue of being hosted at Microsoft. If I, as an Office 365 Lync On=Line user, want to federate with someone that has enabled open federation, I should be able to do that without more admin work on their part. 
But now that we know that, I can just get all my contacts to open up their edge servers and we can move past it. As I said, I hope MS can fix this by RTM, as I tend to agree with Russ! But then I usually agree with Russ!
The other components of Lync Online, like conferencing and peer-peer audio seem find. Once Tom and I got his Edge server sorted out, we were able to IM, he’s in my contacts list and I can see presence. We tested peer-peer IM, audio and desktop sharing. It all worked as it’s supposed to. The audio quality, once I got my mike plugged in correctly, was excellent. We did not test video only due to lack of camera at my end. I will be testing this during the week.Sadly, like SharePoint Online, I can’t find any cmdlets yet for Lync Online.
All in all, Office 365 looks like compelling. The price plans (a subject for another blog post!) look very interesting. I am almost certainly going to move a secondary domain onto it and use it to learn more about the suite.  I’ll be writing more in the coming weeks, particularly with more details on the PowerShell cmdlets for Lync and SharePoint once I get hold of them.
And if you fancy trying things out, you can get me, at least for now, on Lync as:
tfl@cookham.onmicrosoft.com. Feel free to IM me and help me test this out!

Technorati Tags: PowerShell,Office 365,Lync Online,Exchange Online,SharePoint Online.