Category Archives: Lync Online

Office 365 as a SharePoint Learning Platform

Want to learn about SharePoint core list and library functionality in your own playground?

I’m doing two SharePoint 101/Intro to SharePoint talks this week. One for a local company’s internal user group and another longer one for the Minnesota SharePoint User Group. One was 2007-centric while the other was 2010-centric. As I go through the content, it never ceases to amaze me how a basic understanding of the core concepts of lists is invaluable to working with SharePoint – regardless of the version and how many of the wiz-bang features you are implementing in SharePoint.

So, that brings me back to a topic I’ve been meaning to raise for a while now in regards to Office 365. Unless you’re in the IT department at your company or have connections, you may not have easy access to a ‘sandbox’ where you can try out different SharePoint capabilities without potentially effecting production data. Yes, there was definitely ways you can do and try some things, but at the end of the day, you want to play around and production generally isn’t the best place to do that.

Enter Office 365. With the current version of SharePoint Online offered, the comparison to on-premises functionality is pretty good, especially when talking about the core features I’m talking about. Yes, there are differences, but if your intent is to get a baseline understanding of Lists, Libraries, Views, Columns, SharePoint Designer (SPD) capabilities, out of the box and SPD workflows, and more – SharePoint Online is a great place to do it.

I don’t want to get into the detailed feature comparisons in this article, but P1 is analogous to SharePoint Foundation while the E3 plan is closer to the SharePoint Server/Enterprise features.

It’s REALLY easy to spin up an account and have a SharePoint site ready to play with. You don’t have to have your own domain name (.com address, etc.) or really anything else to get started.

Office 365 is FREE for a 30 day trial, so you don’t really have any excuses. If you want to keep your site around, you can pay as little as $6/month (for a single user) or ~~$10~~ $8/month (also a single user, in the E1 plan, which you can downgrade to when your E3 trial ends). Thinking about that as training costs – it’s nothing. Now, you have your own private (and supported) environment where you can try things out without needing to bug IT for a site, list or whatever AND when you put something cool together you can easily show it to your boss or co-workers.

Now, you’ve got an Exchange email account and a Lync account you can play with as well (topics for another day…). The Exchange account doesn’t need to be configured on any client devices if you don’t want – it can be fully accessed via the O365 web interface which could be useful if you’re experimenting with SharePoint workflows and don’t want to clutter up a real mailbox.

If you do want to add a real domain name to the account, it’s pretty easy as well – the O365 documentation is pretty helpful. Only note I’ll make here is to not use a domain name that you are currently using as a Windows Live account as there may be some conflicts there – another topic for later.

So go get the trial of either the Small Business (P1) or Mid/Enterprise (E3) plan and get started now. It’ll make you a better SharePoint user. Don’t forget to read my previous post about picking your domain name before signing up… Smile

*Just a day after I wrote this Microsoft went and added/changed some things – namely they LOWERED the price of the Enterprise licenses which makes it even harder to decide between the two. Find out more HERE

Office 365 – ‘Domain’ Names

Just a few little tidbits to keep in mind when creating an Office 365 account, for trial or other reasons. When signing up for your account, you are asked to define a ‘New domain name’ (at the bottom of the image)

I find this a little confusing because most of us identify a ‘domain name’ as your sites main URL – like “idubbs.com”. What the registration is asking for isn’t the same thing. Being part of Microsoft’s ‘cloud’ offering, Office365’s domain name is “onmicrosoft.com”. They are asking for a subdomain name to use and be unique on their environment. The ‘real’ domain that you’ll likely be adding to the site later can also be used to log on, but so will the ‘domain’ name you are specifying at registration time. You may change your ‘real’ domain names, but your ‘onmicrosoft.com domain name’ will never change.

If you follow the What’s this link, you’ll get a little more information:

So – WHAT we’re talking about should now be fairly clear. The trivia that I’d like to call out is the following:

At present, domain names can only be used for a single account/site one time. If you create a trial account and then close it, you can’t create another account with the same domain name.
Domain names cannot be moved between the ‘major’ plan levels. For example, you can upgrade from E1 to E3, but you can’t take a domain from P1 to E1.
Domain names cannot be edited or changed. They stick forever.
Even if you add a real domain name to your account, the 365 domain name is still used in a few places. I can’t remember the other one I ran into, but the first place – that I still see from time to time, bugs me and is public facing – is when you send a Lync meeting link. It looks something like:
https://meet.lync.com/[YourUnchangeableDomainName]/
[SomePartOfYourName]/[SomethingTotallyRandom]

So, if you’re really creating a test trial, don’t use a name that you might want to use for real. In fact, use something almost completely irrelevant if you want. It would look better in that Lync URL than something that might seem dated or just wrong.

When you create your actual 365 account put at least a little thought into the domain name, even though it will mostly be behind the scenes. Think about how your marketing department might react to an old brand term showing up in that Lync URL when sending meeting invites and links to your customers.

Office 365 – The New Business Essentials

I recently attended a conference session about resources and tools available for new business owners. While a lot of the conversation what about raising seed and venture money, one topic was about the tools and services that are essential to a new business.

They listed a lot of the things that you would expect: A phone number, a good place to get business cards and a business address (see below). Being in the technology field, I was thinking along different lines. They didn’t mention a domain name, email and a website, though I hope it was just assumed.

I would argue that with the release of Office 365, this is also going to be a small business essential tool. Office 365 is going to be a simple, inexpensive tool that can meet the core email and website needs while being chock full of so much more potential.

Sign up for Office 365
Get yourself a domain name and configure your Office 365 account to use it for email and public-facing site. You may need some guidance or assistance with this, but it’s a lot less than setting up your own servers and there are a LOT of resources to help – online and other.
Build your public-facing site. This can be as simple or complex as you’d like to make it, but with the template and tools available, you can be up in minutes.
Now, go about your business.
In the meantime, start to look at all the other capabilities you have:

Lync Online – Conduct your online meetings without needing another services like GoToMeeting, etc…
SharePoint Online – Store and share your documents and other content. MUCH more later as you learn about SharePoint’s capabilities…
Exchange Online – Primarily your email, but so much more than the basic accounts you had in the past. Manage your calendar and resources and sync them from multiple devices.
and so, much more…

To be fair, during the session they did also mentioned DropBox, and GoToMeeting. Dropbox may still be a useful tool, depending on the devices you’re using, though Office 365 is going to fill a lot of that capability as well. GoToMeeting is fully surpassed by the Lync Online capabilities and integration that Office 365 offers.

So, if you ask me – I wouldn’t start a business without spinning up a Office 365 site as one of the first things.

Notes and References:

The conference I was attending was the MHTA Spring Conference. They did a fantastic job. If you’re in the Minneapolis, MN area and can attend I highly recommend it. MHTA is the Minnesota High Tech Association.

Grasshopper Virtual Phone System – This could be useful as an alternative to giving out your cell number to anyone.
GotPrint.com – Yep, you need to have business cards and these are certainly inexpensive.
A P.O. box – Don’t want to be using your home address, but I prefer the UPS box option that allows for a real address with no ‘P.O.’ and notification when stuff arrives.