Exchange Online Archiving

Throughout the whole document, the term “personal arhive” has been replaced simply with “archive”, such as here:

Office 365 Virtual Labs for IT Pros
Not really new content, but still extremely useful: a few virtual labs that help you to learn more about how to configure ADFS, Directory Synchronisation, Federation, Exchange Online, and SharePoint Online

Using Shared Mailboxes with Office 365
Article in Windows IT Pro, by Tony Redmond

Transform the way you work  -  online live demos of Office 365
All over May, there will be free live demos of Office 365 presented by Microsoft cloud specialist partners

SharePoint Online Search
A few quirks of SharePoint Online Search (Office 365 for Enterprises) explained

FISMA becomes latest security certification for Office 365
“Today, we’re pleased to announce Office 365 was granted the authorization to operate under the Federal Information Security Management Act (FISMA) by the Broadcasting Board of Governors. FISMA is important to our customers because it creates a process for federal agencies to certify and accredit the security of their information management systems. IT solutions with FISMA certification and accreditation have federal agency approval for their use in line with the level of security established by that agency.”

The Office 365 Trust Center
Information on data privacy, data storage locations, compliance, and security.

After having installed the App from the AppStore, I started to add a site:

After adding the URL (e.g. http://teamsite.sharepoint.com), and the corresponding User Name and Password that I use to access Office 365 (leaving Domain empty), I was prompted by the familiar Office 365 authentication dialog.

I entered the required details again (maybe I would not have had to enter it into the Colligo Briefcase dialog at all, as these don’t seem to work with Office 365′s special authentication mechanism?), and the app began synchronising my content straight afterwards:

As you can see, lists and libraries are shown in the left-hand navigation bar. Selecting the drop down at the top, I could also switch to a subsite.

What if you don’t want to synchronise a particular list/library, or not all of its views? Opening the list/library’s menu, you can deselect either option:

Inside a list/library, you can switch in between views. However, the only column that was always displayed was “Title”, none of my other columns showed up here

It took me a while to figure out that if you press on the <> bar in between the navigation and the content area, you can expand the latter, and thus see additional columns!

Selecting an individual item, I could see all properties:

Documents can be shared as attachments, and of course also be opened in other apps that support the doc’s format

This is as far as I got with testing the app. I’ll slowly use the app more and more, once I’ve got more to report I’ll do a follow-up posting.

Storage Update for SharePoint Online Enterprise Plans
Tenant storage quota limit increased to 25 TB (terabytes). Additional storage can be purchased for $0.20 per GB per month

http://www.xstran.com/solutions/
Fellow Office 365 MVP Loryan Strant’s company’s (one of them) website. Currently three great tools are available, namely
- Exchange Federation Discovery Tool (allows you to see which of your contacts support Exchange calendar sharing)
- Lync Contact Migrator (provides users with the ability to migrate their Lync contact list easily between accounts, profiles and even organizations)
- Office 365 Mobile Admin (allows administrators to perform simple user management functions from the palm of their hand by using their phones)

http://www.testmyoffice365.com/
Loryan and his team also developed this helpful website that provides you with some information on your DNS settings, and if they’ve been configured properly for use with Office 365 (also read his blog post)

Three Office 365 books have either just been released or will come out within the next few weeks, all 3 have been authored by MVPs. They are:
- Working with Microsoft® Office 365: Running Your Small Business in the Cloud by Brett Hill from http://www.office365answers.com/
- Office 365 – Exchange Online Implementation & Migration by Loryan Strant (yes, the same guy! No, he’s doing nothing else besides Office 365) and David Greve
- Microsoft Office 365 für kleine Unternehmen (in German) by Martina Grom

Office 365 Helper Scripts  (Microsoft Download Center)
“This package includes a number of helper scripts created during Office 365 deployments. The following pages describe the script, the intended action and associated arguments to successfully run the script. The assumption is that the user executing these scripts has administrator-level Office 365 credentials.”

First meeting of the Office 365 International User Group
Sean McNeill has written a summary of the first meeting

Singapore energy firm saves US$80,000 from server-related costs with Office 365
3 small sucess stories from Southeast Asia

Why I decided to take the exam

Simply said, I wanted to show that I have experience with managing information, and the CIP seemed like a very good choice as it’s an exam that covers all important areas of Information Management. Additionally, I wanted to learn a bit more about some of these areas (records management, e.g.), and preparing for the exam would give me a good reason to look at these in more detail. The exam doesn’t go too much into detail, more breadth than depth. If you want to get certified in an area with more depth, there are of course the other certifications provided by AIIM, for e.g. for ECM, ERM, etc.

How I prepared for it

The most important thing I was “using” during my preparation (and also the exam) was experience. Having worked in IT for several years, and specifically in some of the areas covered by the exam, most of the content wasn’t new to me, and I already had a very good basic knowledge of the majority of topics.

In addition to that, I went through the videos at first, and later onwards worked my way through the slides (can be requested if you’re an AIIM member).

The Exam

The exam consists of 100 questions with either one or multiple possible answers (have a look at the test exam), for which you have 120 minutes to complete. Some of these questions are fairly easy, anyone who has been working in the information management area for a while should have no problems answering these (I basically selected the answer and clicked “Next” within seconds). For the majority of questions, it’s important to have gone through all relevant topics (videos and/or slides) in detail, it’s definitely not enough to just know the topic roughly. There were a few topics that I only browsed through during my preparation, only to realise during the exam that the question asked goes much more into detail, and that my knowledge was insufficient. For some I could still deduct the right answer, for others I had to guess (after narrowing down my choice)’ and for one I had absolutely no clue at all… So, just because you think you know a topic, don’t assume that you know it well enough! I would categorise the last group of questions as “best practice questions”. You are given a small scenario, and you need to decide how to best proceed. These are the questions I thought about the most during the exam, as the answer is not immediately clear, and I felt that you need to have a certain amount of experience to answer these (for 1 or 2 I really thought about how I would go about it).
I think the difficulty of the exam is about right. It’s certainly not too easy, so browsing through the slides ones is not enough (unless you have many years of experience, then you might still make it). But it’s also not too difficult, with the right amount of experience and preparation it should be possible to pass the exam without any trouble.

Would I recommend the exam?

That largely depends on your job scope and experiences, and if you think that it would provide some additional value to your personal profile. The quality of the exam itself is certainly quite good, and there are definitely benefits for oneself just from preparing for it.

Beginning of April, I received the following email from Microsoft, informing me that ‘ve been awarded Microsoft Most Valuable Professional (MVP) for Office 365:

Sehr geehrte(r) Rene Modery,

herzlichen Glückwunsch! Wir freuen uns, Ihnen den Microsoft® MVP Award 2012 verleihen zu können! Diese Auszeichnung wird an herausragende, führende Mitglieder der technischen Communities verliehen, die ihre wertvollen praktischen Erfahrungen mit anderen Menschen teilen. Wir schätzen Ihren außerordentlich bedeutenden Beitrag in den technischen Communities zum Thema Office365 im vergangenen Jahr hoch ein.

What is the MVP Award all about? Microsoft describes it as:

We seek to recognize the best and brightest from technology communities around the world with the Microsoft® Most Valuable Professional (MVP) Award.

These exceptional community leaders come from a wide range of backgrounds. They are teachers, artists, doctors, engineers, as well as technologists, who actively share their high-quality, real-world technical expertise with the community and with Microsoft.

With the MVP Award, we thank these inspiring individuals for representing the voice of thousands in the community through the powerful and independent feedback they give us, and for helping our customers maximize the potential of their software.”

This is a great honor for me, showing me that my contributions to the Office 365 community were both useful as well as recognised. In addition, it means that I will work harder to contribute even more to the community, and also provide more (hopefully generally useful) solutions in the future. And lastly, I am also working on learning more about Office 365 in areas that I do not know enough about yet (mostly Exchange).

Exchange Online

SharePoint Online

You create a site in your Office 365 environment. You create a template from it (.wsp file), which you then also want to use in your “regular” SharePoint 2010 environment. You add this site template to your site collection’s solution gallery. However, when you try to create a site based on that template, you get errors telling you about missing features (as for example experienced by Marc D. Anderson).

What happened? SharePoint Online uses several features which aren’t available in normal SharePoint 2010 installations. Additionally, some features are only available in the P1 plan and site templates from these cannot be used in the E plans (the opposite is true as well). You can’t deactivate this features in the SharePoint Online UI, and you can’t use PowerShell to quickly connect to your Office 365 environment and deactivate them that way, so you’re stuck.

The Workaround

What it does

This PowerShell script takes a solution file (.wsp, your site template), extracts its contents (with the help of cablib.dll, taken from the WSPBuilder project site), updates the ONET.XML file by removing any relevant feature references, and repackages everything back into a solution file.

How to run it

You need PowerShell, the script (and cablib.dll), and a solution file. Open a PowerShell shell, and execute office365stupdater.ps1 <file>, where <file> is the location of your solution. Afterwards, if all went well, you can find an updated solution file in the same folder (named Updated-originalfilename.wsp)

Where to get it:

Script only: http://modery.net/content/20120320/office365stupdater.ps1
Script with cablib: http://modery.net/content/20120320/office365stupdater.zip

I still can’t create sites, there are still some features missing

First, check if you have any custom features that are active on your SharePoint Online site. Did you install any custom solutions that have active features? Do you have these solutions/features also in the target environment?
If you found any other SharePoint Online specific features that aren’t already listed in the script, please let me know

Not all functionality is working!!

Some functionality is really only available on Office 365. For example, the “Create a new shared document using the Office Web Apps” functionality on the Team Site won’t work in regular environments.

How can I help?

Review the code. Test the script. Found anything that can be improved? Please let me know!

The changes are as follows:

Open PowerShell, connect to Office 365 (Connect-MsolService), and test the following cmdlets:

Get-MsolUser

“The Get-MsolUser cmdlet can be used to retrieve an individual user, or list of users. An individual user will be retrieved if the ObjectId or UserPrincipalName parameter is used.”

So, we’ve got a list of all users right now. Let’s try to export it to a CSV file that we can then open with Excel

Get-MsolUser | Export-Csv c:\allUsers.csv

If we open the file allUsers.csv now, we get to see all users in our Office 365 environment, together with lots of additional attributes

We’re just interested in the ones with licenses, so let’s filter a bit:

Get-MsolUser | Where-Object {$_.isLicensed -eq "TRUE"}

Great! We’ve now reduced the list to only those users for which the attribute isLicensed is set to True. Meeting Rooms don’t need a license, thus they don’t show up here.

Next step: exporting this list (in my case only 1 user) to Excel:

Get-MsolUser | Where-Object {$_.isLicensed -eq "TRUE"} | Export-Csv c:\licensedUsers.csv

A combination of the two code snippets above, this one here grabs all users, filters them, and exports the result to a CSV file. Opening that file, we can see the list of all users, however also with all attributes

As a last steps, let’s reduce the results further by only displaying the UserPrincipalName attribute/column/property in our CSV file:

Get-MsolUser | Where-Object {$_.isLicensed -eq "TRUE"} |
Select-Object -property "UserPrincipalName" | Export-Csv c:\licensedUsers.csv

(After filtering, we then proceed to select only the UserPrincipalName property of all our users before exporting them.

References:

Using the Where-Object Cmdlet
Using the Select-Object Cmdlet
Using the Export-Csv Cmdlet 
Windows PowerShell cmdlets for Office 365