As an admin for Office 365 for professionals and small businesses, you’ll need to perform a variety of tasks in Office 365 to keep your organization running smoothly.  We’ve created a new training course with four videos that walk you through some of the most common admin tasks.  Refer to this course when you need a reminder about how to: Create a new user and assign admin permissions so that others in your organization can help you with admin tasks. Change user information, delete users, and restore users after they’ve been deleted. Remove a license from a user and assign it to another user. Buy more Office 365 licenses. Change your password and reset forgotten passwords, for yourself and others. You can find a link to this training course on the Office 365 Video Training Courses Wiki page.   If you have suggestions for other Office 365 training courses, send an email  to crsfeed@microsoft.com .

Audience: Office 365 for professionals and small businesses Office 365 for enterprises     To join this Lync and Learn Session  please Download and save the calendar invite at the bottom of the blog post. Join us on  Thursday December 20 th , at 10:00 AM Pacific Time  and  view the Lync online meeting information below.  We are excited to see you there!  Lync and Learn is an online session led by Office 365 Product Managers and Community  Grid members .  Lync and Learn sessions address different Office 365 subjects and scenarios and is beneficial to anyone who wants to learn more and expand their knowledge of the Office 365 suite. View past Lync and Learn sessions  here .        Office 365 provides convenience in the cloud through a great set of productivity and collaboration tools. In this Lync and Learn session, Kelsey Epps will provide some convenience of his own through helping us set up Office 365. We’ll get back to the basics and dive into setting up Office 365. In this Lync and Learn Webcast we will cover the following:  Sign-up for the trial Adding a domain and verifying it DNS records Create Users and Assign licenses Setup Desktop PC for User Accessing Office 365 Services from the Desktop and Internet Purchasing Additional Licenses Open a service request Kelsey Epps is a Senior Systems Engineer with a background in Microsoft Clustering, Exchange Server, Lync Server and Windows Server. Download the calendar invite below and join us on December 20th at 10:00 AM Pacific Time for this great session.   Interested in being our next Lync and Learn presenter?  Learn how to join the Office 365 Grid  and become an Office 365 Lync and Learn presenter. ——————————————————————————————————————————————————— Presenter: Kelsey Epps , Technology Consultant with HP and Concepps Group, and  Office 365 Grid member . Date/Time: Thursday December 20 th , at 10:00 AM Pacific Time . (1 Hour presentation) ·         Live Meeting Information: Join online meeting https://join.microsoft.com/meet/v-joshto/F00T8BQY Join by Phone  +18883203585          Find a local number   Conference ID: 27579341    Forgot your dial-in PIN?  |    First online meeting?      [

  by Brian Petersen, MSFT SharePoint Online provides users the ability to map a network drive to a document library allowing a user to navigate to and open files directly from Windows Explorer. This blog is intended to direct users to a Knowledge Base article that’s been published to help not only setup and configure mapped network drives, but also address common issues and steps to resolve.  In the More Information section of this blog you’ll see a link to the KB Article, but you’ll also see more details around the most common scenario we see in support.  Note This blog and the KB article do not apply to Microsoft Office 365 for professionals and small businesses.   More information: The Knowledge Base article entitled “How to configure and to troubleshoot mapped network drives that connect to SharePoint Online sites in Office 365 for enterprises” can be found here: KB2616712 . Ensure all the steps are completed in the KB, but also note the comment about the cookie expiring in the first set of solution steps. The comment in the KB states “Be aware that the cookie will eventually time out”. Certainly, having the WebClient started in your client machine’s Services, along with adding your SharePoint site to the Trusted Sites Zone of your Internet Explorer browser, are both important solutions to Mapped Drive issues. However, you will continue to encounter an Access Denied error periodically – mainly after rebooting the computer or when you haven’t logged in (authenticated) to SharePoint Online over an extended period of time, generally 8 hours., One common scenario is when a user locks the computer at the end of the workday, returns the next day, and logs in to their work computer. If that worker tries to access the mapped drive he or she will get the following error. Path is not accessible. You might not have permission to use this network resource. Contact the administrator of this server to find out if you have access permissions. Access Denied. Before opening files in this location, you must first add the web site to your trusted site list, browse to the web site, and select the option to login automatically’ The user receives this error because the session cookie  for SharePoint Online has expired and must be “refreshed” in order to successfully access the mapped network drive again.            

When the SharePoint 2013 updates start getting rolled out to your SharePoint Online sites, you will notice some changes and improvements to the external sharing capabilities in SharePoint Online: The experience for managing external sharing (for example, turning it on or off) has been streamlined and simplified. Site users will also have more options for how they choose to share content. They can: Share sites or documents with external users by requiring them to sign-in to the site. Share documents with anonymous users through the use of guest links Finally, the sign-in experience for external users who receive invitations to access or view content on SharePoint Online sites will be updated to make the experience a bit more straightforward. Managing external sharing in Office 365 Enterprise Plans In Office 365 Enterprise plans, SharePoint Online admins will be able to manage external sharing centrally from the SharePoint Online admin center.  On the Settings page in the SharePoint Online admin center, admins can turn external sharing on or off globally for the entire tenant, or they can choose to allow only specific kinds of external sharing (e.g., allow sharing only with sign-in). One key change coming for Enterprise plans is that admins can also centrally manage external sharing for individual site collections directly from the SharePoint Online admin center. They can choose to turn external sharing on or off for one or more site collections or they can control which level of sharing is allowed for specific site collections.     SharePoint Online admins with Enterprise plans will also have the option of using Windows PowerShell cmdlets in the SharePoint Online Management Shell to perform tasks such viewing a list of all external users or bulk removing external users. For more information about configuring and managing external sharing in Office 365 Enterprise plans, see Manage external sharing for your SharePoint Online environment.     Managing external sharing in Office 365 Small Business plans If you have an Office 365 Small Business plan, the admin experience for managing external sharing is even more streamlined. You have a simple on/off switch in the Office 365 Service Settings for the external sharing feature. You can also use the Remove individual external users link to remove external users so that they no longer have access to sites or content that has been shared with them.   For more information about managing external sharing in Office 365 Small Business plans, see Manage sharing with external users . Sharing content.   Sharing content For site users, the option to share is easy to discover and use. You can use the Share command to quickly invite users to access a site. You can send invitations to any email address. Invitation recipients can sign in using a Microsoft account or a Microsoft Office 365 user ID.   The process for sharing documents with users by requiring sign-in is the same (although you would click the Share command from the document’s menu).     For more information about how to share sites or documents, see Share sites or documents with people outside your organization .    Thanks for reading!   Laura SharePoint IW Content Team

If you have used or are still kicking the tires of the Office 365 Preview and Project Online you may have noticed that you can have up to 3 PWA instances.  The first one is provisioned for you as the …/Sites/PWA instance, and you can then either use the New > Private Site Collection with Project Web App option to add a new site collection with PWA, or you can use the Project Web App > Add option to add the feature to an existing site collection.  Once you have used all three your SharePoint admin center may look something like this: The red bar in top right signifying that you have used all your available PWA instances.  In the preview we have seen that customers wanting to start afresh with a clean PWA have deleted the site collections and then still not been able to re-use this apparently deleted PWA instance.  The reason behind this is that the instance isn’t gone – it is in the recycle bin – and you could actually recover it if you needed to.  So how should you remove a PWA instance if you want to recover the quota to re-use somewhere else?  We have this documented over on the Office site (thanks Sonia! – and if the link isn’t live it soon will be…) and the key take-away is that you should use the Project Web App > Remove option.  This removes the feature from the selected site collection and gives you back one of your quota instances.  But what if I have already deleted the site collection?  The answer to that question is covered on the link given too – but I’m also going to cover the steps here as well as introducing the concept of administering your SharePoint Online instance via PowerShell. So my scenario is that I have deleted two of my site collections that had PWA instances – so still see that I have used my quota of 3 – what do I do next?  For the first recovery I will use the option to restore my PWA and then remove properly.  So looking in my Recycle Bin from the ribbon I can see my two sites (if I had deleted more than 30 days ago they would be gone anyway – and my quota would have been returned) – and I select the first one and click Restore Deleted Items – and then click Restore on the next dialog..   In my testing the restore took just a few minutes – but my PWA was pretty empty.  Once it was back I could select the site collection and use the option Project Web App > Remove, and then click Disable in the next dialog to disable this feature (and we really are sorry to see you remove PWA…). After this completes, which again for me was just a minute or two, I can see that I now have 1 PWA instance available to re-use – and I still have the …/Sites/PWS site collection.  This is important to note – I have disabled PWA which deleted all Project Web App data, including project plans, timesheets and resources – but I still have any pure SharePoint content that may have also existed in that site collection. For my remaining PWA instance that is still in the recycle bin I am going to take a different approach – and thanks to my colleague Stefan Schwarz for coming up with this workaround.  PowerShell is a tool that can be used across many and probably nearly all current Microsoft products.  For current Office 365 there is a good article at https://onlinehelp.microsoft.com/en-us/office365-enterprises/hh124998.aspx and for the commands we are interested in you will also need the SharePoint Online Management Shell from https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=35588 You will also need to install the Microsoft Online Services Sign-in Assistant as noted in the first article. I prefer using the ISE for PowerShell – so I start this up and then load the SharePoint Online cmdlets using import-module Microsoft.Online.SharePoint.PowerShell (installed from the link above) then connect to my SharePoint Online instance using Connect-SPOService and entering my Tenant admin url and then my credentials.  This isn’t just your tenant url but your tenant admin url – for example mine is https://BlogFodder-admin.sharepoint.com . I can then use the command Get-SPODeletedSite to see what is in my recycle bin: and to completely remove it I can use another PowerShell command – Remove-SPODeletedSite, along with the Url of the site I wish to remove – and to be extra cautious I can use the –Confirm parameter to give me that last chance to change my mind – and I then even get another last chance with the Permanently removing site dialog… Once this completes then I did notice it took a couple of minutes and a refresh or two before I could see my available PWA instances count go up to 2. Remember, the Remove-SPODeletedSite  isn’t just removing the Project stuff – but will completely delete everything to do with that site collection.  But hey – it was in your recycle bin so I guess you thought you could do without it.  Again, the link to the Office site gives a good breakdown of the options to use and what the consequences of your actions will be. The SharePoint Online Management Shell isn’t a total replacement for the SharePoint admin center UI – for example you can’t administer PWA instances and features – but it may offer some useful features such as user administration.  Another good reference to help understand the differences between the Office 365 and SharePoint Online PowerShell commands is https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/fp161388.aspx .  I can see that the PowerShell stuff for Project and SharePoint online will be generating a few more blog posts. Thanks to Jean Donati and Sonia Atchison for feedback on this article – and Doug Welsby for running into the problem and getting us thinking about documenting the issue – and Stefan Schwarz for the PowerShell commands.

​Wondering about the new feature you see at the top of your new SharePoint Online, Office 365 site, or SharePoint 2013? Here’s a hint – think about a library when you can store all your work-related documents and files, a bit like SkyDrive but for your business content…   Start here: What is SkyDrive Pro?   Note: This post was previously published on the Get the Point blog for SharePoint end users, which will be retired in January 2012. https://sharepoint.microsoft.com/Blogs/GetThePoint/Lists/Posts/Post.aspx?ID=684    

Alex Burton, a Project MVP, has published a series of posts titled Building your first Project Server app on the EPMSource blog. The app is named Publish All; it publishes all enterprise projects for the PWA instance where the app is installed. The Publish All app is developed by using the Project Server JavaScript object model (JSOM) with “Napa” Office 365 Development Tools, and can be deployed to Project Online and to an on-premises installation of Project Server 2013. The blog series includes the following parts: Part Zero–The introduction Part 1 – Getting Started – Setting up a development environment Part 2 – Getting the basic app up and running Part 3 – Taking the app to the next level Part 4 – Submitting to the app store Alex has even gone so far as to add a support page for the Publish All app, at https://epmsource.com/2013-apps/ . It looks to be a very useful series. For more information about the Napa tools, see How to: Create a basic app for SharePoint by using Office 365 Development Tools on MSDN. For information about using Visual Studio 2012 with the JSOM for Project Server, see Getting started with the Project Server 2013 JavaScript object model .

Applies to: Administrators of Office 365 for enterprises and Office 365 for professionals and small businesses Author: Suzanne Girardot, Office 365 writer   If you’re an Office 365 admin, you can now reset your own password without having to submit a service request. You can ask another admin to reset your password, but when you’re the only admin in your organization, or no other admin is available, you can reset your own password. On the Office 365 sign-in page, click Forgot your password? and follow the instructions.   To reset your own password, you must have already provided an alternate email address and mobile phone number that can receive text messages. For instructions on how to add this information to your user account, see Create or edit users . Note : You need a mobile phone that can receive text messages for password reset only if one or both of the following applies to you: Your organization has a custom domain that you’ve set up to use with Office 365. Your Office 365 account is synchronized through directory synchronization. You can get more information about resetting your admin password in Reset your administrator password . If this doesn’t work to reset your password, submit a password reset request via our New Service Request wizard .  

Microsoft Support will be presenting a series of webcasts called the  Office 365 Expert Discussion Series ,  to showcase our tools and content that can be used to help make your Office 365 experience better and help solve common issues more quickly.  During our latest Expert Discussions Series, we will demonstrate some new diagnostic capabilities that are available for troubleshooting Office 365. The areas that will be covered by the diagnostics are related to DNS, ADFS, and DirSync troubleshooting. We will also b e demonstrating how to use Fix IT Center Pro to diagnose a broad range of issues using the automated diagnostics from Microsoft Support. Join us  on Thursday, November 29th at 8:00 AM Pacific Time  for this webcast. The duration of the meeting is planned for 1 hour. After the meeting concludes a recording of the session will be published to this blog post and the  Office 365 YouTube channel . Microsoft Support will be monitoring the Office 365 Expert Discussion  Forum  and  Wiki  as well as the Community closely for this topic for a week after the event to answer any questions about the live session. Be sure to view our past Expert Discussions  here .  To sign up for this webcast please  download and save the calendar invite below  where you will find the Lync invite and all other Office 365 Expert Discussion information.  We are excited to see you there!  —————————————————————————————————————————————————————————— Presenter : Steve Justice , Principle Escalation Engineer from Microsoft CSS and other Microsoft Support Team members. Date/Time:  Thursday November 29th , at 8:00 AM Pacific Time . (1 Hour presentation) Online Meeting Information: ……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….. Join online meeting https://join.microsoft.com/meet/v-joshto/F00T8BQY Join by Phone +14257063500     +18883203585       Find a local number Conference ID: 27579341     Forgot your dial-in PIN? |   First online meeting?     [!OC([1033])!] ……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….. Audience: Office 365 MVP and  Grid Members  and open to anyone who is interested in Office 365 Expert Discussions. 

Following the recent worldwide Project Ignite tour my colleague Jan Kalis organized as well as presentations at events like SharePoint Conference 2012 last week, please find below a summary of frequently asked questions (FAQs) about Microsoft Project Online I have been asked by customers and partners. Before I start please note that this is a journey and I’m sure you have plenty more questions and yes we will have plenty more answers and content to help you understand the value of Project Online and how it can bring value to your organization. Also please note that the 8 questions below are not sorted in any specific order, and yes if you have additional questions please leverage the Project Online forum on TechNet . Delivers full Project Portfolio Management (PPM) in the cloud Yes Microsoft Project Online delivers full project portfolio management capabilities in the Office 365 cloud. Project Online delivers all key scenarios/functionality expected from a PPM solution such as demand management , resource management, financial management, time management, collaboration & social, etc. As mentioned during the Ignite tour the product team only built and shipped one product called Project Server 2013 which gets delivered in different channels like online in Office 365 or on-premise like TechNet & MSDN subscribers. So yes there is full PPM functional feature parity in Online and on-premise whether you want to be firing on all 12 cylinders with a maturity level 3 or if you are just starting with a PPM system. We are also working on document that will be published on TechNet that describes some of the technical differences. Achieve on-premise to Online migration A very common request from many customers, how can I move to Project Online from my existing PPM system whether it’s an older version of Project Server or whether it’s from a online competitor? Again we will provide guidance, but at a high level you can either do it manually once depending on the amount of data, or you can automate the process using third party tools such as: FluentPro Cloud Migrator Pro ( Want to test-drive Project Online? How to migrate data from on-premises to Online? ); please also remember that you will also have to migrate the SharePoint content to SharePoint Online (plenty of tools available today to help you achieve this, BING them!). Connect Online to on-premise Line Of Business Apps Moving to Project Online does not isolate you from your mission critical on-premise line of business applications such as an ERP, CRM, ticketing, etc. SharePoint Online and Project Online provide a very rich extensibility model to help you connect the two world regardless of your needs. It could as simple as leveraging existing API such as OData or CSOM, or you could leverage Business Connectivity Services for instance. We are working on whitepaper that will get published early next year that will demonstrate the integration (how to push data from on-premise to Online and how to retrieve data on-premise from Online) and provide starting points to enable it. Track using ODATA and customize using CSOM In an Online world we cannot give you direct database access for obvious security reasons! and hence the protocol/mechanism to access all your beloved PPM data (yes including timephased data) is via the OData protocol. To build apps and do any custom code the API of choice is CSOM, please check the Project & SharePoint Software Development Kit (SDK) on MSDN to learn about each. Preview is for temporary use only (see Preview FAQ ) The preview has been available since July 16th 2012, when Steve Ballmer disclosed the new version of Microsoft Office (which Project desktop, Project Server and Project Online is part of!). The Preview is free but it’s for temporary use only until the commercial service is available, you read the Preview FAQ and navigate to the very end which says: “the Preview will expire approximately 60 days after the next version of Office becomes available in your market. As the date approaches, you will receive notifications in the Office applications alerting you to the pending expiration. Once the Preview has expired, the applications enter read-only mode, which means that you can view or print documents only, it isn’t possible to create new documents, edit, or save them. You must uninstall the Preview version of Office before installing a newer version of Office.” So yes, please kick the tires, try it out, check out some some of the cool new scenario and features (I love this one …: Microsoft Project Online on Xbox ) but please remember that at the end of the Preview all the data will be lost unless you save it locally. With that in mind and specially with a PPM system, a lot of learning and processes needs to be put in place before a production rollout, so treat this as a free proof of concepts environment! Office 365 is an evergreen service. Customers need to stay current What started with a Preview in our Office 365 worldwide data centers (aka a beta/pre-released version of Project Server 2013), and since the RTM announcement last month and the availability of the products on TechNet/MSDN/Volume Licensing/Trials, the online service has been updated with the RTM products during the past month. So yes it’s a Preview offer but with the latest version of the product! Yes we are still all learning and we are continuously updating the services until it’s ready for general availability (GA). So back to my point earlier, please try it out because it contains the latest fit and polish not to mention the latest bug fixes. In the end, one of the key value of online is that it will always have the latest and greatest version of Microsoft’s PPM, and that includes Exchange, Lync, SharePoint, Office, hence think of the “evergreen PPM”! Azure VM (IaaS) vs. Project Online (SaaS) Azure Virtual Machine (VM) which a preview was disclosed last May, is an upcoming offer from the Windows Azure team which will give you the ability to purchase CPU, memory, and storage in the cloud to run your application in a virtualized environment such as  SharePoint and Project Server for instance. As announced last may, SharePoint 2010 is supported on Azure VM (see SharePoint Deployment on Windows Azure Virtual Machines ), and yes Project Server 2010 will also be supported initially and later 2013 will be. The question one need to think about is whether to go with Infrastructure as a service (IaaS) or other options such as software as a service (SaaS) or partner hosted or on-premise. Bottom line, Microsoft PPM is about choice and we will provide plenty of options to deploy and use it! Again we are working on a white paper and guidance on these options and how they can fulfill your needs today and tomorrow. Use the Project Online Forum and Wiki for Questions & Answers As mentioned at the beginning of this post, I’ve only covered a few question above and I’m sure you have a few more based on some the answers provided above and also based on other Project Online questions you might have so from this point forward I want you to start leveraging the following resources to get answers: Project Online forum , yes it’s monitored by Microsoft product experts, by Microsoft support personnel, by Microsoft Project MVPs and many others so don’t be shy, it’s free! Project Online Preview Wiki Portal , going forward our wiki will get richer and richer with key service information. Other valuable Microsoft Online resources : Steve Ballmer’s letter on October 9, 2012:  TO OUR SHAREHOLDERS, CUSTOMERS, PARTNERS AND EMPLOYEES Global Foundation Services (and their blog ) Office 365 Trust Center (check out the industry standards for instance) Service Updates for Office 365 for enterprises (check out monthly updates)