Dead easy to break SharePoint Online

So our brand new SharePoint Online is up. I decided to try the thing out a bit from a user perspective.

When logging in to the account and viewing the available  site collections I could see three available site collections.

-          The old site from BPOS

-          A new site under netconzent.sharepoint.com

-          A my Site-site collection

First thing I did was log into the old BPOS site. Ugly thing  from when playing around with BPOS. I decided to delete it so I went to Site Settings and selected the option to delete the site. All well, I thought. The site disappeared.

But, when going back to the admin interface in SharePoint Online, the site collection is still there. Now there is an option to delete a site collection from the SharePoint Online admin interface. When trying that, well, one get an error message from SharePoint Foundation. So, there is now a dead link there that cannot be deleted. And it still consumes the allocated disk space that was assigned to it.

Ok, so I thought I’d try out the new Site collection under netconzent.sharepoint.com. Turns out Microsoft has generated a Team Site for us, nice, but it is in Swedish. I want it to be in English. So I wanted to delete it.  Learning of my first mistake I now did that using the SharePoint Online admin portal.

When doing so one gets a warning stating that one will not be able to create any new sites or site collections until there is a new one created using that top-level name netconzent.sharepoint.com. Fair enough, I can do that, I thought.

So I deleted the site and then went for the action to create a new site collection. Somewhere around here one would guess there is an option to create that top-level site that was required. But no. One can only create sub-level site collections on the form of netconzent.sharepoint.com/sites/xyz. So I did.

Now obviously, since there is now top-level site collection the sub-level cannot be created.

And by that, 10 minutes of using and performing two actions the SharePoint Online is now broken.

In my admin interface I now have three links to site collections.

-          The new site (that just sits there being “created” – broken

-          The old BPOS site – broken

-          The new My Site, haven’t used it yet so still working, I guess.

Now after going in circles for a while I finally managed to create the top-level-site collection and then also the new sub-site eventually popped into place. It did take some trixing and waiting.

However the old BPOS-site, still there and still broken.

MS Sales Requirements

We ran into an interesting twist of being Office 365 partner today. Comes down to timeing.

When becoming a sales partner for the Office 365 program, the organization is granted 250 seats free licenses for internal use. Super stuff!

There is though a condition to this, one has to sell at least 50 licenses in one year to keep these free licenses. Fair enough.

However, the twist is that the “one year” doesn’t have anything to do when signing up for the program. It is associated with the organizations MOSPA agreement.

So we went through all the steps to become Office 365 partners and completed that January 20. However our MOSPA is up for renewal April 30. So we have about three months to fulfill the requirement rather than the announced one year.

So, if your organization is into these programs, don’t just run into them and try to get started as early as possible. Sometimes it is better to not be an early adopter. J

New gTLD's - good or bad?

From today it is possible to register your own gTLD at http://www.icann.org/. It will cost you a lot of money but you get your own gTLD to use as you like.

So what is this good for and who benefits from it?The generall idea is that the limitations of the currrent systems make a lot of domains occupied and a many companies with similar names or letter combinations in different regions cannot all have their of organisation name as domain since it is taken by someone else.

What are the dangers?Well, given the still strong business of dodgy companies registering domains, and now perhaps gTLD's, that belong to others for phishing or pure black mailing purpouses, it is probably going to be even worse in this regard when they get a whole new spectrum of TLD's to work with.
It i also probably going to be very costly for all companies that have strong international brands that will be forced to protect their brand as a gTLD without actually using it.
The third issue is that internet users are probably going to have an even harder time to identify ligimate sites and organizations giving a larger spectrum for shady businesses to act in.

Can one mittigate this?
Yes, by using organization validated digital certificates or EV certificates. This will prove to the web site user what organisaton is actually behind a web site and who one is actually interacting with. This takes the digital certificate beyond the everyday usage of encryption and actually utilize the potential of the digital certificate.
http://www.expertssl.se/

Monitor SSL Certificate Expiration

If you have a lot of SSL Certificates for different sites and solutions, there is quite often a lot of work involved in keeping track on when they expire.

I was trying ot the APM from Solarwinds (http://www.solarwinds.com/) and it actually does work. One can download a free trial from their web site.