Posts Tagged microsoft
The next step in productivity
Posted by Nick Bowyer in Office, Office 15, Office365 on March 22, 2012
When talking to customers about the advantages of “cloud” computing the story usually focuses around the cost of running their own email server vs a hosted exchange cost. The experience of not running your own IT infrastructure has its upside as well with the reduction of risk to your business with the enterprise level support you get with todays cloud providers.
The Microsoft Office 365 suite provides a great story, offering real value in a per user per month cost of Office 2010 and the “back office” products; Exchange, Sharepoint and Lync. The one story I still struggle with is the use of the Sharepoint component. Recently it proved to become easier when I linked it with a CRM deployment story, using Sharepoint as the common document repository for all customer data. This in my view is still selling the story of Sharepoint short, it doesn’t quite create a compelling reason for a customer to adopt the Sharepoint way of life. Sharepoint requires effort from the customer to set it up and architect the data it stores, more importantly it needs adoption by the end user to be a success and this part will in my opinion become easier.
The imminent release of Windows 8 excites me, not for the simple reason it is the “next version” of Windows, but the fact that it will fundamentally change the way in which people work. I believe the most important part of the Windows 8 story will be Office “wave 15” or the next version of the ubiquitous productivity suite from Microsoft. With the current version of Office 2010 (wave 14) and the release of Sharepoint 2010 we saw the introduction of Office Web Apps. This delivered an experience of Office 2010 to the browser, and for the most part it delivered. It provided users with the ability to work ad-hoc in a browser environment, if only to collaborate with others or simply for convenience the browser version of the Office apps allowed users to approach collaboration in a different way. This was much much more than a compete play against Google apps. The next version of Office will deliver the office experience to any user on any device, and by any device I’m looking at you iOS.
It would seem that the adoption of the Apple iPhone and later on the iPad was much to Microsofts dismay. In my time at Microsoft (2008 – 2011) I owned an iPhone and an iPad and was constantly frustrated with the way in which my fellow employees considered the device. Rather than just a competitor I saw it as an opportunity, another platform which Microsoft could deliver its productivity suite to. With the release of iOS 2.0 Exchange ActiveSync was licensed by Apple allowing a rich email experience on the iOS devices. This meant many “enterprise” customers were now able to consider the iPhone as a smartphone platform and indeed it became the CEO showoff device of choice.
I predict the next version of Office 15 will become available as a fully fledged “app” available on the iOS devices, both iPad and iPhone, this isn’t hard to guess as there are already apps for the Lync and One Note clients. It will be the browser version of Office Web Apps will take the connected touch experience to the next level. This isn’t necessarily something that will be driven by iOS but more by the touch driven interface of Windows 8. The Metro interface has been hugely successful on Windows Phone 7 and Windows 8 consumer preview. I predict Microsoft will introduce the Metro interface to iOS users in the next version of Office, by way of apps or web apps. Metro offers a clean touch experience that most users today expect from their smartphones. Taking away the clutter from tool bars and re-focusing the productivity apps for touch will see end users using their devices more. Both Apple and Microsoft are making changes to offer a more simplified experience to users of their desktop operating systems, OSX and Windows respectively. Apple are approaching it gradually by introducing features from their iOS platform to their desktop operating system with changes appearing in Lion and soon to be released Mountain Lion. Microsoft on the other hand are making a much bolder statement with the Metro interface from their mobile platform being the “default” for Windows 8.
Interfaces aside the constant connection to information will be the main driver for customers to choose a cloud solution. The Sharepoint story will make more sense with the next version of Office, further enhancing the experience for the end user. Users will expect to have the same experience on any device and be able to access their data from wherever they are.
Office 365 drops in price
Posted by Nick Bowyer in Cloud, Office365 on March 15, 2012
Today it was announced by Microsoft that they are to drop the price of the Office 365 products to new and renewing customers. The price drop is around 20% on all subscriptions listed on their site. This doesn’t come as a surprise, not long after the launch of the predecessor to Office 365 (BPOS) Business Productivity Online Suite, the price was cut in half. The explanation for the reduction in price is quoted by Microsoft to come from the increase in efficiency within the systems that run the platform, but its simpler than that…
Microsoft has made no secret of the fact that Google Apps is a target for their Office 365 offering and price is usually one of the biggest talking points when the two are compared. Even with a large customer spending many millions of dollars on IT infrastructure every year a dollar makes a difference. The price conversation just got a whole lot easier for Microsoft, throw in the total cost of deployment and you will find that there is little between the two.
The message is clear, Microsoft are in the cloud game for keeps and the longer they remain there the better they will get at it. The support is second to none, I have been working through a few customer issues recently and think that it could put a lot of IT firms with SLAs to shame. The interface in Office 365 is slick and will only get better.
With Windows 8 and the next version of Office on the horizon the cloud strategy held by Microsoft becomes even more relevant, the integration with the desktop will become tighter and sooner or later cloud will become the way you work…
Migration from Office 365 P plan to E plan
Posted by Nick Bowyer in Cloud, Office365 on March 7, 2012
One of the things that impresses me with the cloud offerings from Microsoft is the great partner community dedicated to delivering the solution. In this blog I want to talk about the experience I had recently moving a customer from the P Plan of Office 365 to the E Plan. I talked about the reasons why this migration became necessary in my earlier blog post . In this post I will talk about the migration of the DNS records and the mail data, as we are deploying CRM Online we will not be transferring any existing Sharepoint configuration, rather bulk copy the files using explorer to the new Sharepoint structure.
Microsoft have their own reasons for creating two separate product offerings within Office 365, one of which is the Google compete aspect. The P plan is a direct competitor with Google Apps/Docs/Mail and is priced accordingly, it does however miss out on a few important features, SSL (secure) connection to Sharepoint Online, more than 25 users (50 users hard limit), no Active Directory integration to list a few. Microsoft don’t currently offer customers any tools to migrate from the P Plan to the E Plan and you can’t purchase E Plan licenses from a P Plan tenant. This is where a partner steps in to make life extremely easy, MigrationWiz have been at the forefront of providing cloud migration tools for a number of years now, my first interaction with them came when I wanted to migrate a customer from Gmail to BPOS – Microsoft Online Services back in 2010.
The experience with MigrationWiz has only become better since my last trial. The interface is slick and easy to understand and for around US$10 per mailbox it just doesn’t make sense to attempt to migrate any other way. I would suggest that Microsoft purchase MigrationWiz but then again I appreciate the neutrality provided by their current position. There are a few things you need to understand when performing such a migration and while simple to understand, they may interrupt your services and/or mail flow.
Understand your DNS, this has to be the most important part of the migration. I spoke earlier about DNS Records and in this case too you will need to make changes to these records. The DNS record allowing you to route mail and authenticate users is only able to be associated with one tenant of Office 365, so if you are migrating to another tenant as in this case you will need to plan when to move this record across.
Verify Domain process Office 365
You will get an error when you attempt this in Office 365 if the domain is associated with another tenant.
Domain verification error Office 365
I suggest that you choose a weekend to migrate your customer as the DNS changes may take up to 24 hours to complete. It needs to start with “releasing” or deleting the DNS record from the old tenant, this will initiate some hidden scripts which de-provision the record from the services in the back end. It is important to understand that at this stage you will still be able to access the user accounts using their tenant alias @.onmicrosoft.com . Email will stop at this time, you could employ the use of a “mail bagging” service, usually provided by your ISP, make some enquiries as it will prevent email from being dropped in the time you take to transfer the record to the new tenant. Changing your MX record at this time to the mail bagging service will prevent mail from being dropped. The domain name will take some time to be released from the old tenant, Microsoft advise this could be up to 24 hours, if after 24 hours it still won’t allow you to verify the domain in the new tenant then make a call to Microsoft Support and they will manually release the record. Once you have verified the domain in the new tenant of Office 365 you will then be able to redirect the MX record again, pointing it to the Office 365 servers. Again this should be completed on a weekend or an outage window of at least 24 hours.
DNS Settings for the Exchange Online service and Lync Online
I used the premium license of MigrationWiz as I wanted to make a couple of passes to migrate the mail. The other thing this allows you to do is perform a complete migration without interrupting any mail flow for the customer. At a cost of US$11.99 per mailbox it was only $2 more than the standard single pass license. Before I migrated any mail data I needed to ensure the mailboxes I was migrating to existed in the new tenant.
Having purchased the P Plan originally I had no Active Directory federation or synchronization to worry about, Microsoft gave me a couple of great tools to create the user accounts by way of uploading a CSV file with the usernames in it, this was exported from the old tenant of Office 365 using the free poweshell cmdlets, if you don’t know how to use Powershell i highly recommend you do as it will make life a lot easier. When importing the users from the CSV file you will need to change the user account ID to use the default tenant id @.onmicrosoft.com as the domain will not be verified yet.
This CSV file can then be modified and used in the MigrationWiz portal to configure the mailboxes you want to migrate. Credentials can be that of an administrator, as administrator accounts have access to all users mailboxes.
The mailbox migration status in the MigrationWiz dashboard
As you can see from the screenshot above, the console in MigrationWiz is clean and easy to understand, mirroring the experience had within the Office 365 environment. The status of the migration can be seen at a glance and any errors are easy to identify and fix. The beauty of using a cloud to cloud service is that my bandwidth isn’t used, all the data is transferred direct from one data center to another. Be aware that the migration does take some time therefore I would recommend using the premium license of MigrationWiz that allows you to make more than one pass of the mailboxes, the first, a week before the migration date and once again after the MX records have been migrated. Contacts, Calendar and email folders are migrated using this method and users will not notice the difference when they connect to their new mailbox.
The last thing to remember is that the user’s passwords will need to be changed. I this case I logged into every account and changed the users passwords via the portal. This was fine for the 20 user accounts I was migrating, however the Powershell cmdlets I mentioned earlier could have easily achieved the same result allowing you to set a default password for the new accounts. The auto discover record will allow the devices to automatically redirect the connection to the new mailbox.
I hope this has shown how easy a migration can be once you have chosen a cloud service, with the tools made available by Microsoft and more importantly by the partner community it can be achieved in a few easy steps.
Cloud concern?
Posted by Nick Bowyer in Cloud on February 2, 2012
Recently the press in New Zealand and around the globe have been all over a man called Kim Dotcom and his case relating to the “Mega conspiracy” and the Megaupload site. The press the world over love the fact that Megaupload was widely regarded as the place to store your illegally downloaded movies and music.
More recently I watched a discussion on TVNZ Breakfast between Petra Baghurst (presenter) and the editor of Computerworld magazine (journalist) about the Megaupload case and more generally the topic of cloud computing. I watched in disbelief as the editor of Computerworld, Sarah Putt, managed to give what I consider a poor explanation of cloud computing and its associated risks. When I considered people with little or no knowledge of cloud computing would be watching I became concerned that the Megaupload fiasco would have a negative impact on cloud computing uptake within businesses in NZ.
Having built and then sold cloud computing solutions now for over 10 years I thought I would spell out the reasons why Megaupload and its issues couldn’t be further from the truth behind cloud computing.
When Sarah talked about the FBI in the USA deleting the user data from the Megaupload website she failed to talk about a couple of key aspects which would put someones mind at ease. Instead she made a statement which left the impression that everyone’s data could be deleted at any stage by the FBI or any government agency without notice from ANY cloud service. This simply isn’t true.
Lets get one thing straight, cloud computing is a BIG bet for most technology companies and we aren’t talking small companies either. Microsoft, Google, Amazon are some of the leaders in the cloud computing push with many others following. The big companies all have big legal teams, these teams have been working with governments for years to better understand the regulatory requirements when it comes to hosting customer data and understanding complications that arise when its hosted offshore. In short, if there was ANY risk that any of the big players would end up having their customer data deleted by the FBI overnight, they simply wouldn’t have attempted to provide the service in the first place. Furthermore these service providers all spell out in plain english the regulatory requirements for their customers:
http://www.google.com/accounts/TOS?hl=en
http://www.microsoft.com/download/en/details.aspx?id=13602
I liken it to an owner of a Gallardo holding Lamborghini responsible when they break the speed limit. When was the last time you posted a speeding ticket to the manufacturer of your car?
Understanding your legal requirements as a consumer of cloud services is the first thing you should do before deciding to move.
The other very important thing I was amazed Sarah Putt missed was the fact that in most cloud scenarios a user is able to gain access to their data when they aren’t connected to the internet. Google may currently fall short in this area, however when using the likes of Office365 in conjunction with Sharepoint workspace, a user has an offline cache of their data from which they are able to make a local backup at any time. There are many more cloud services that provide an offline cache such as Dropbox etc. And lets not forget the fact that Outlook provides the ability to work offline, giving users access to their email, contacts and calendars when they aren’t connected to the internet/email service. This serves as piece of mind rather than a requirement of a cloud service and I use the term “dis-mount strategy” to talk about the ability to recall your company data from the cloud should your situation change. Another great product that allows seamless “dis-mount” from the cloud is Exchange 2010. Exchange 2010 has been architected to co-exist with Office 365, allowing customers to maintain a local Exchange server for email while utilizing the cloud for additional email capacity.
At the end of the day as with any business decision due-diligence needs to be undertaken before using a cloud service and this includes what to do in the event that you need to recall your data from the cloud. In most cases the risks will be mitigated especially when choosing to use a product from a reputable brand with a strong market presence and a good roadmap for future releases.
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