Exploring Exchange Online: Assign your own domain

Today’s exploration of Office 365 took me to Exchange Online. One thing one for sure wants is to use once own domain(s). And the twist is that we host all our domains on our own DNS servers.

Assigning a domain that you already own, turns out to be dead easy.

I just logged into the portal at portal.microsoftonline.com and selected the Domains option in the left-hand menu.

Then adding the domain and select to activate it for Exchange Online and Lync Online.  Once that was done i was presented with the DNS-records to add to the DNS-zone.

I entered the records and waited for 30 minutes. It was stated that it could take up to 72 hours but who can wait for that long to check?

Then I logged into the Exchange Online web mail and tested to send email and also tested to send a mail to that mailbox.

Bingo all done! Super easy.

Next step will be to explore migrating mailboxes. Will be fun J

Exploring SharePoint Online: Site Template Solutions



So today I decided to explore the common task of using site template solutions. Previously it has been a common task to create a site and then save it as a template, download that template, upload it to another farm and then create a new site based on that template.

Creating the site templateIn a vanilla setup of a SharePoint Foundation I created a small Support site. Just a simple thing with the following content:

1)      A document library

2)      A Customer list

3)      A Task list

I also created the custom column Customer in the document library and task list creating them as lookups from the Customer list selecting on Company. For each component I created a new view to be used on the front page and then added them as web parts to the front page web part page.

There after I connected the web parts so when one select a task in the Task list the relevant documents in the Document web part and the relevant Customer data in the Customers web part was filtered out.

Pretty easy stuff not using any fancy things or custom solutions.

I also deactivated all site features and saved the site as a site template.

Getting the site to my SharePoint Online instanceAfter downloading the WSP to my desktop and then adding it to my Solutions gallery at netconzent.sharepoint.com I activated the solution.

Then I went to the All site content page and selected to create a new site. No problems so far. The site template could be activated and shows up in the list of templates.

Bam!!!

Well that didn’t work out very well.

Turns out that in the SharePoint Online instance several of the basic features that are native in even SharePoint Foundation has been removed. This is all very well explained here:

 http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/sharepoint-online-enterprise-help/why-do-i-receive-an-error-when-i-try-to-create-a-new-sharepoint-online-site-based-on-a-site-template-created-in-sharepoint-foundation-or-sharepoint-server-HA102737442.aspx

The error in my case happens to be for reporting services that isn’t even used in the solution but even so is included in the WSP.

Lesson learnedOnly sites that are created in SharePoint Online can be migrated into SharePoint Online using the solutions gallery and web site template mechanism.

This will be a major challenge for anyone migrating an on-premises application to SharePoint Online and will require a lot of testing and manual hands-on stuff when doing so.

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.

No more PFX

In the light of recent attacks the CA’s has recommended that resellers should no longer provide the service of supplying certificates as PFX-files.

PFX-files include both the public and the private key and to many customers it has been simple to order a certificate as a PFX-file in order not to have to go through the CSR-file generation. This however has turned out to be a risky practice. The business has now recommended that suppliers should not provide this service anymore.

Hence ExpertSSL has now removed this from the portfolio.

www.expertssl.se