Office 365 and Domains

n our personal life most of us are more than happy to have email accounts that end in googlemail.com or hotmail.co.uk or apple.com. It actually makes it easier for people to find us, they need to only learn our prefix. The problem is few of us have our names as googlemail accounts, we end up using cute phrases or putting numbers at the end of our names.

 When you get an Office 365 account you get a domain inside of the onmicrosoft.com domains. 

This means if you register something like loveworks as your company name you will get emails and logins that end loveworks.onmicrosfot.com and your emails will be of the form <username>@loveworks.onmicrosoft.com.


Again for a smaller company this might be fine, but for a larger firm or a firm with more established presence on the web you might want to use an existing domain, or register a new domain so your users can got to a URL like loverorks.com rather than loveworks.onmicrosoft.com. This is probably a minimal step for users who are moving to Office 365 and here is the easiest clearest video I have found to do this:

Now say you are an even more mature company with an existing Active Directory on premise and lots of applications running using your Active Directory. You still want to use Office 365 for mail, messaging and collaboration but you want to keep your existing Active Directory and manage your identities on AD. This makes things much more complex. You can sync your identities between the on-prem and Office 365.

I will cover steps to do this in later blog posts.

For now let me say this is something you really need to think about.  If you can live with a separate AD in the cloud and your users have two logins and two passwords to remember its probably best to live with it.  By synching your on-prem AD to Azure AD used by Office 365 you are inviting a lot of work.  If you only have less than 100 employees, or a lot of contract workers who never get in your AD, or no onsite AD then its best to keep everything in the Cloud.

Sync can be great and this is an amazing features of Microsoft, but its worth thinking that millions of people have email addresses in the cloud that they use everyday, without worrying about online sync.  It might be good to start thinking Cloud-First, keeping things off premise as much as possible.

Office 365 brings it all together, finally

SharePoint Online as part of Office 365 is the Enterprise product I have been waiting for since 1999.  Finally all the benefits of web, single location, access anywhere, shared community standards and online storage along with security and resiliency are in one place.

Make no mistake about it, this is going to be the Microsoft's biggest impact on the economy since Office and Windows 95.  With Office 365 it now possible for any firm, no matter how small, to start, on day one, with Enterprise level content management, VOIP, IM, and collaboration. (I wrote this in 2014 and clearly stand by it now)

The cost of starting a new business has just gotten a great deal smaller, and the ease that existing businesses can reconfigure themselves, collaborate with outside organisations, and to bring in contractors and prosumers is now a fraction of what it was.

A Windows with Linux under the hood

Opps update is that is story is now invalid, MS is out of this business.

,BR /> Actually for some time I have been predicting a MS-Linux machine of some kind. Windows, once the backbone of MS business, is becoming less and less important in a world dominated by multi-channels and Cloud, and as Windows is less and less important as a core product it becomes a difficult to maintain mass of legacy code. I have to be frank that I have given up on Windows, but I still work extensively with Microsoft. The two are no longer a contradiction. I think the X2 Android Microsoft phone could be the first step for a generation of new devices, that offer the UI experience of Windows Metro but via HTML, running Linux, Unix and Android under the table.

Basic SharePoint 2013 Build

A fairly good introduction to SharePoint 2013 build I found, go for a learner but this is not how you will set up a proper farm.

After you learn this take a look at this blog post which tell you more about Service configuration. A lot of sites use Service Configuration wizard, but its best to get the powershell scripts for Service Configuration, which you can get here.

Powershell to restore a site collection without changing the existing security group members

Recently I had an requirement to update a wiki site collection from live, using PowerShell backup and restore, to a training environment.  The requirement further stated that the memberships of the existing training site should be kept.

Though this seems like an fairly easy requirement it turned out not to be something that could be done with Backup-SPSite and Restore-SPSite code, so I developed the code below, which works in a test environment I created.

Add-PSSnapin Microsoft.SharePoint.Powershell

$oldm = Get-SPuser -Web "http://win-l31vicrc3b5/" -Group "Team Site Members"
$oldo = Get-SPuser -Web "http://win-l31vicrc3b5/" -Group "Team Site Owners"
$oldv = Get-SPuser -Web "http://win-l31vicrc3b5/" -Group "Team Site Visitors"

Restore-SPSite "http://win-l31vicrc3b5/" -Path C:\backup\back.back -Force
$newm = Get-SPuser -Web "http://win-l31vicrc3b5/" -Group "Team Site Members"
$newo = Get-SPuser -Web "http://win-l31vicrc3b5/" -Group "Team Site Owners"
$newv = Get-SPuser -Web "http://win-l31vicrc3b5/" -Group "Team Site Visitors"

foreach ($spuser in $newm){Remove-SPUser -Web "http://win-l31vicrc3b5/" -Identity $spuser -Group "Team Site Members" -confirm:$false}
foreach ($spuser in $newo){Remove-SPUser -Web "http://win-l31vicrc3b5/" -Identity $spuser -Group "Team Site Owners" -confirm:$false}
foreach ($spuser in $newv){Remove-SPUser -Web "http://win-l31vicrc3b5/" -Identity $spuser -Group "Team Site Visitors" -confirm:$false}


foreach ($spuser in $oldm){Set-SPUser -Web "http://win-l31vicrc3b5/" -Identity $spuser -Group "Team Site Members" -confirm:$false}
foreach ($spuser in $oldo){Set-SPUser -Web "http://win-l31vicrc3b5/" -Identity $spuser -Group "Team Site Owners" -confirm:$false}
foreach ($spuser in $oldv){Set-SPUser -Web "http://win-l31vicrc3b5/" -Identity $spuser -Group "Team Site Visitors" -confirm:$false}

write-host "Done"

AvePoint's DocAve 6 makes SharePoint administration better

Adding a user to large set of Document Libraries is now a snap

Over the years working with SharePoint some of the main user issues I get are these:

1. Can I manage the columns of folders in dozens of sites around the Enterprise?
2. Can I add a user to a large number of sites easily?
3. Can I move a large number of document libraries from different site collections in to one site collection, or the other way around?
4. Can I turn on versioning with a single click on every document library in the farm.

Using SharePoint Central Admin there are no ways to do this, you have to create complex PowerShell coding which is time consuming and frankly its hard to find PowerShell scripts.  Now I love PowerShell myself but it not really what you want your admins doing all day, you want them giving your users value.

That is why I am so excited about AvePoint's DocAve 6, which gives you a central admin UI, separate from SharePoint central Admin, that allows you to do these kinds of things, and many more.

Moving content from one site to another is easy with DocAve 6 rich UI

In my initial set of tests on DocAve 6 running against a SharePoint 2010 Foundation farm on a VM I was able to easily add and remove users from a large set of document libraries in one go, manage column of a large group of document libraries, and move content from a document library in one site collection to another.

This is really the right tool to be managing Central Admin for a large Enterprise estate.

A good case study, and one I see all the time, would be situation where each project got its own site collection with a template.  Now each site collection has edited its template so that the same information is encoded different between different projects.

With DocAve 6 its possible to clean up the document libraries, to make them more consistent and to clearly she what columns different teams have created.  You can also move all the document libraries in different site collections in to one managed site collection, making things more central.

SharePoint 2013 major disruption in UI and UX

SharePoint 2013 Team Site in Office 365 is a major change in UI, making a more tablet friendly simply design

 One of the most striking things about SharePoint 2013 is simply how it look.  The new SharePoint is a radical brake from all earlier UIs.  SharePoint 2013 UI is more tablet friendly and simpler, with larger objects and less clutter.  SharePoint is also reducing the number of objects the confront the user.

SharePoint 2010 Team Site has most of the same features as the 2013 site, but is fully grounded in the PC world or mouse clicks.  Imagine trying to manage this thing with a finger.

I am finding SharePoint 2013 much easier to work with than SharePoint 2010, and a greater improvement over 2010 than 2010 was over 2007.

SharePoint 2007, while the UI changes between SharePoint 2007 and 2010 were in large part cosmetic, SharePoint 2013 is a real change in how people will be able to interact with SharePoint.

I think it would be a major mistake to think this is just a skin deep transformation, which it is easy to think.  Working with the new SharePoint 2013 you quickly see that it is mostly the same as 2010 under the hood.  But the new UI also comes with a new App model, new RESTful web services interface that returns JSON and ATOM, new JavaScript API model for cross domain communication.

Microsoft is embracing disruptive web technology from places like Google, Twitter, Facebook and the start-up culture of open interfaces.  Things are going to change a great deal, SharePoint silo nature may change for something more like Twitter.

A use case for SharePoint 2013 App Model

There probably is a heavy temptation for managed services providers who host large data centers that are sold as Clouds, to continue to develop Full Trust Web Parts even when going to SharePoint 2013.  Web Parts are what coders are used to, they may have a large library of existing Web Parts as WSP files that run in full trust.  This is possible, and it means working pretty much as you always did.

But if you are like most managed service providers I know you have some kind of internal structure between your infrastructure providers who build and maintain the farms and the application and solutions providers who face the customers and develop SharePoint from a raw out of the box in to something more specific and rich for their needs.

This DevOps work has been traditionally very difficult to manage in SharePoint.  When you would develop a solution to run in SharePoint 2010 you would hand it off to a deployment management team who would have to review the code for security risks, and impact on the servers. Since the code would run in the Farm it had an Enterprise level impact. This would involve extensive documentation and review, and complex levels of support for your solutions.  In the end you would probably be dependent on a different department of the company to deploy your work but still own the risks if they made a mistake.

By adopting a SharePoint 2013 App Model you can move away from this.  Two teams, even if they work in the same company can concentrate on what they are best at.  Infrastructure can concentrate on meeting SLAs, providing backup and DR and applying patches.  

Solution providers can create partial trust solution that use .NET SCOM or REST and JSON to create rich interfaces that are hosted in other domains, perhaps even other server farms with different domain controllers.  You now no longer have the tight link between the people installing SharePoint farm and the developers of solution, in fact you can separate your teams so that one applications team can create solutions, potentially in PHP or Ruby or anything really, that work off more than one SharePoint 2013 farm.

And if your clients decide to not renew the hosting contract with SharePoint to go with Office365 or another vendor, you don't necessarily lose your applications business.  You can still provide your application solutions simply by changing the RESTful web link.  You can de-risk big SharePoint deployments by breaking hosting from solutions, allowing your customer the option to keep one if they are unhappy with the other.  

So it makes solid business sense even for established big players to embrace JQuery and RESTful and build App that run in separate domains using OAuth and OData to communicate with SharePoint, creating UI in HTML 5 and CSS 3 because after all we all hated SharePoint OTB UI (admit it).

The potential is perhaps even greater for smaller firms.   Now a smaller firm with a team of talented web developers who know about JQuery, mobile, tablets, RESTful, OData and rapid design can muscle in on a space that previously only the provider could have.  And I speak from hard earned experience when I say that the big guys will be more than happy to have third party code isolated in its own IIS server rather than installed on perm SharePoint farm.  

It also my experience that the culture that makes a first rate development and business solutions firm (agility, innovation, creativity and social understanding) is often different than what makes a first rate hosting firm (stability, precision, technical expertise, compliance and control).  With the App Model the the create web designers don't make anything you host on the SharePoint Domains and the systems admins are not going to dictate solutions to the creatives.  You can have a more comfortable distance between application developers culture and hosting culture, and we all know sometimes IT people don't play nice together.

Really it is worth taking the time to really think through the changes to the ecosystem that Cloud hosting of SharePoint and App solutions will bring.  SharePoint has had a series of evolutionary changes since 2003 and its made some of us lazy (looks down in shame).  New SharePoint releases were a matter of learning a few new features and services.  But the App Model is a much more revolutionary change and it will change the business model.

Be ready or you will lose. 

JavaScripts and Cross Domain in SharePoint 2013

The most exciting new feature in SharePoint 2013 for an old web developer like me is the embracing of JavaScripting, JQuery and open standards.  Now more and more of what is done will be done in JavaScript, a language almost all developers know, and less in C#

Microsoft Office embraces the concept of Apps

 

The concept of the app, a small piece of special purpose code sold or distributed on the web, is catching on to Microsoft.  The greatest thing about the new app model for Office and SharePoint 2013 is not only is it built on web standards like HTML 5, CSS and JavaScript, but it is sold and distributed in a business model people will easily understand: the app store.

 

You can buy an app on an app store, or have one developed to special task either inserted directly in to the tools you use like Excel or on SharePoint.

 

I personally am looking at Excel apps, as I think for Big Data this is going to be a killer app.

Apps model for Office and SharePoint 2013

Things are changing in the App world for SharePoint, Microsoft is doing what it does best, copying what other people have already made. And Office and SharePoint are embracing the App model based on open web standards.

Office 365 makes the iPad a work tool

 

We all know that iPads and Android tables are great.  But we also almost all have felt that these new tools sadly are not so useful at work.  I have found that Office 365 actually can bridge the gap, allowing me to use my iPads as a tool to create documents, wikis, lists and links in my iPad.

 

I am currently working with SharePoint in Office 365.  Though full use of Office 365 on iPad is not possible.  Office 365 needs Napa which does not run on any of the browsers, and you can't open Office documents.  But, if you configure you SharePoint site to open documents in browsers an Office 365 site will let you suddenly turn an iPad in to a enterprise productivity tool with all of major Office features.