Microsoft BPOS Updates for November

Microsoft are constantly improving BPOS and adding new features each month, and November is no different.

Mailbox Access Permissions

Powershell commandlets are being added to increase the range of mailbox permission settings that can be done by BPOS administrators including:

• Full Mailbox Access
• Delegate Send As
• Send On Behalf

These provide capabilities including:

“up shared mailboxes, granting “send as” permissions for administrative assistants, and enabling full mailbox access for third party applications, such as archiving applications and fax servers”

No more opening a ticket with support!

The CMDlets are:

Add Mail Permission

Remove Mail Permission

These will require an update to the Transporter/Migration tools which will be downloadable from MS Download Centre once the update is deployed across all datacenters; this should be completed by early December.

Bulk User Management

A new set of CMDlets for bulk adding and removing users have been added too. These will also rely on the updated Transporter tool being made available. The CMDlets are:

• · Add-MSOnlineUser
• · Set-MSOnlineUser
• · Remove-MSOnlineUser
• · Get-MSOnlineUser

Sharepoint Auditing

Admins will soon be able to view data and reports on site collection activities including:

• items added
• changes to permissions
• documents viewed

Having access to this information can help track the utilisation of the Sharepoint investment within the company and so will be very useful. Companies will be able to see how users are interacting with the system and identify any areas that need improving or conversely, which areas are a roaring success

Partners on Invoices

Customers who use a Partner of Record will soon see that partner named on their invoices. From a Partner’s point of view, this is a great addition as it helps solidify the relationship between the Partner and the customer and reduces any confusion as to points of contact for support etc.

Once again, the updates have given BPOS an even stronger message and this, coupled with this week’s price cuts, should definitely see an increase in BPOS takeup.

The full MS Online blog post is here.

Bechtle & Windows 7 in CRN

As I’m sure you’ve guessed from my blog, I quite like Windows 7 Thus I’ve been very active in talking to our customers about Redmond’s latest OS and how it can help them. We’ve been working on a number of early deployments since July and this week saw CRN (computer Reseller News) publish an article on one of them

You can read the article over at:

http://www.channelweb.co.uk/crn/analysis/2252314/opening-windows-4870698

Deploying Windows 7 has helped this customer in so many ways, it’s a really great example of the power that Windows 7 holds!

Computer Weekly Blog Awards

I’ve just discovered that I’m in the running for Best Blog in the “Company / Corporate – Large Enterprise” category at the Computer Weekly Blog Awards 2009

I’m very happy just to be on the list but it’s be even better to win it…especially as I’m up against people such as Tech Crunch, Twitter, Google, the BBC and the Guardian! To that end, you can vote for me here:

http://www.computerweekly.com/Articles/2009/09/20/237826/it-blog-awards-2009-company-corporate-large-enterprise.htm

Any and all votes are greatly appreciated…thank you!

Cheers

Rich

 

Exchange 2007 & Server 2008 R2

Windows Server 2008 R2 doesn’t support Exchange 2007. That is a fact and it has caused confusion, consternation & anger among many of Microsoft’s customers and indeed partners (I can confirm that!).

The big question was “Why"?”…as when Server 2008 R2 was released in September, Exchange 2007 was the current version. While Exchange 2010 is almost upon us it is still unlikely that companies will instantly move to the new version…particularly on something as important as their email infrastructure. So that meant either:

a) Customers stayed on Exchange 2007 and Server 2008

b) Customers had a mixed Server 2008/2008 R2 environment

and, aside from the technical aspect, many people viewed it as a cynical ploy by Redmond to force them to upgrade. The message alongside Windows 7 is “Deploy with Server 2008 R2, they’re better together” (which is true!) but then it seemed a little like “Gotcha! Now you’re got R2…you’ve got to buy Exchange 2010”. While that wasn’t the case, that’s how it seemed to customers and really-that’s what matters. Vista wasn’t anywhere near a terrible as a lot of people say it is…but it didn’t do very well did it…and that was because of user perception.

Now however, that’s all changed! This post on the Exchange Team Blog (You had me at EHLO) reveals that:

“In the coming calendar year we will issue an update for Exchange 2007 enabling full support of Windows Server 2008 R2”

They say that customers spoke, Microsoft listened and the change is happening…brilliant

Good work Microsoft!

Thanks to @JohnFontana for the tweet that flagged this up…

Exchange 2010 Licensing Considerations

Exchange 2010 is now in the price files so you can all go out and buy it There is a lot of information about the technical differences, but not so much about the licensing changes…so let me change that

Replication Licensing

The current “Local Continuous Replication” is being replaced by “Mailbox Resiliency” in 2010; Mailbox resiliency requires 2 active instances of Exchange 2010…and thus 2 licences.

As a one-time exception, customers with Exchange 2007 and Software Assurance (SA) on Select, Enterprise Agreement, Open, Open Value, Campus & School get:

“One complimentary Exchange Server 2010 Standard license for each datacenter where the customer has at least one server licensed for Exchange Server 2007 Standard with active Software Assurance as of November 1, 2009.”

The additional licences that you receive under this offer all included SA that expires at the same time as your originally purchased licence.

As an additional offer, if your Exchange SA expires between November 1st 2009 – November 1st 2010 you can renew just the SA for the original licence, and that will also renew the SA for the 2nd additional licence However, after that the licences will need to be renewed separately.

The original MS post is here.

Microsoft BPOS Price drop

Microsoft BPOS (Business Productivity Online Suite) has been available in the US for over a year, the UK for 6-7 months and is appearing in more and more countries all the time.

It offers online versions of:

• Exchange
• Sharepoint
• Live Meeting
• Office Communications

and has been seeing great success in all areas. Today Microsoft have announced something that will surely lead to even greater adoption…a price cut

Pricing was previously:

Exchange = £6.69

Sharepoint = £4.85

Live Meeting = £3.01

Office Communications = £1.67

BPOS Suite = £10.04

it is now:

Exchange = £3.35

Sharepoint = £3.51

Live Meeting = £3.01

Office Communications = £1.34

BPOS Suite = £6.69

All pricing is per user per month.

The suite which includes all the online products above is now the same price as Exchange on it’s own!

While BPOS has always represented great value for money, price is often a big consideration for customers…especially in these times of economic recalibration. I believe that these price cuts will really drive an upsurge in BPOS adoption…which is good for everyone!

You can download the announcement document here.

Microsoft Semblio

Microsoft Semblio is a new iteration of their development platform which utilises .NET and WPF (Windows Presentation Foundation) and is specifically targeted towards the educational market.

Semblio can be used to create information rich, graphically engaging, immersive learning materials using a wide range of multimedia, all aimed at enhancing the learning experience for students (and indeed, the teaching experience for teachers!). As it is based on the .NET Framework:

“it works across software, services, and learning management systems.”

However, it isn’t just for developers. The Semblio assembly tool, which will ship with Office 2010, will:

“allow multiple content types to be combined into a single, rich, multimedia presentation, all in a single, familiar, and easy-to-use Microsoft Office-like application”

This has got something of a Web 2.0 “mashup” stle about it and will certainly be familiar and more engaging for students than more traditional methods. This next screenshot shows the kind of interactivity that can be expected:

Using the slider to increase/decrease the temperature and seeing the effects on the water…

Benefits:

This can either mean that schools will have the ability to create exciting learning materials in-house as well as making it easier for partners to create such materials too. You can:

• Increase the value of your content by enabling educators to customize materials to their specific requirements.
• Engage today’s students and foster exploratory learning with packaging and arrangement of dynamic, interactive, and rich instructional material.
• Improve efficiency during content creation by enabling nontechnical subject matter experts to participate in the content creation process
• Reduce the cost of going digital by creating your content once, then delivering it to all customers regardless of platform.

To me this looks like a great new addition to the Office suite of products and also a great addition to schools, for students and teachers alike. Having been on visits to various schools this year, it’s clear that they’re much more advanced that back in my day (!) and can sometimes rival corporations when it comes to technology adoption.

VLE’s (Virtual Learning Environments) such as Moodle, and products such as Sharepoint have made big changes to learning over the past few years; and I can see Semblio really making a mark. These interactive lesson modules delivered in Moodle accessed via Sharepoint would give a great experience for students at home/learning remotely.

I’d be interested to hear what people involved with Education think about this…be it students, teachers, IT managers, suppliers, coders etc

Get Started:

Download the Semblio SDK.

Download Visual Studio 2008

Get familiar Service pack 1 of .NET 3.5 platform

Get familiar with WPF

If you want to get more in-depth, grab the programmer’s guide here.

Other Links:

Semblio: How it works

Semblio Blog

MS BPOS Connectivity Test

The Microsoft Online (BPOS) team have released an excellent tool, which measures the upload/download speeds of your connection to show how it would fare with using BPOS services.

This tests the speed of your connection:

This looks at the routes:

This analyses the capacity:

Details:

This tool helps you understand the quality of the Internet connection between your environment and Microsoft Online Services. It does not measure your environment compatibility with Microsoft Online Services. The tool performs three tests:

• Speed: This test measures your actual download and upload speeds, quality of data, and TCP efficiency. It uses TCP/20000 for download testing and TCP/20001 for upload testing.
• Route: This test validates your connection quality, including packet loss, latency, round trip, and ISP peering points. It uses Internet Control Message Protocol (ICMP).
• Capacity: This test measures your potential maximum download and upload speeds. It uses UDP/8090.

 

Thoughts:

Potentially this is going to be very useful when speaking to customers about BPOS, as one of the big worries that many people have is there connection not being good enough. They worry that suddenly throwing all their internal email, as well as Sharepoint uploads/downloads could be too much for their existing networks; this could be an easy way of showing exactly what it can and can’t handle. The reason I say “potentially” and “could” is this:

The results seem to be aimed solely at VOIP traffic for using Office Communications Online (OCO). However, it still shows them that their bandwidth etc is, so it’s definitely useful but it would be nice if it had a separate answer for each of the products.

That said, the above does point towards something else…currently OCO only contains the Presence and Instant Message (IM) features. I’ve heard on the grapevine that VOIP calls will be coming to OCO but this is the first definite sign that this is underway

Being able to use Office Comms Online for Voice calls will be a huge selling point for customers as the on-site version (Office Communications Server (OCS)) can be quite tricky to install and get running correctly. Normally I’d guess we’ll see this in the US first and not here for a while but the URL for this tool is:

http://speedtest.emea.microsoftonline.com/

Note the EMEA (Europe, Middle East & Africa) part…looks like we’ll be getting it pretty soon too…I’ll see what further info I can find out from MS

As Paul from Worktivity points out in the comments, if you’re outside of EMEA the links you need are:

For the APAC region: http://speedtest.apac.microsoftonline.com/
For America’s region: http://speedtest.microsoftonline.com/

Thanks to @worktivity who’s tweet alerted me to this…

Accessing Zune Marketplace in UK

As you can see from my previous post (here) I am now a huge fan of Microsoft’s Zune 4.0 desktop software. However being in the UK means that a lot of the features are unavailable to us…mainly the Zune marketplace.

Zune Marketplace:

The Marketplace is where you can preview and purchase songs, videos, apps, podcasts, games and more.

As you can see in the screenshot above, it’s got pretty much everything you could want:

• New releases
• Top Songs
• Top Videos
• Topical/focus sections

and you can split it down into genre, which then gives you all the above but specific to that kind of music.

The video section is similar and also lets you purchase movies.

Above is the Zune App section of the marketplace, which looks pretty great. If I actually had a Zune HD, I’d definitely be loving this!

Anyway I digress slightly. You’re quite probably wondering how this is possible-what with me residing in England and Zune Marketplace being US only…well let me tell you.

UK Access

I was having a look around the internet to see what I could find on accessing the Zune Marketplace from outside the US and I came across this blog. Here the author, Ian Blackburn, details how to get initial access to the Marketplace; and it’s much simpler than I would have thought.

You simply change your PC location to “United States” via “Region & Language” in Control Panel.

The next step is being allowed to download things. To do this, you simply need to log into Zune Marketplace with a Live ID that is set to US location.

I changed my Live ID location and it worked. I was in Marketplace and downloading a free track from “People Under the Stairs”…brilliant However, when I tried to download something a few minutes later, it said that “marketplace wasn’t available in my location” and blocked me from downloading anything

The way I found around this was to download HotSpot Shield (available here) which masks your IP address. This gave me proper, full access to the Marketplace as well as Zune Social; plus little things such as syncing my proper play count…and the big one – enabling me to download things once again! The only downside I’ve found to Hot Spot Shield is that it places banner ads at the top of web pages which is a bit annoying; however I can put up with that…

Over at Bbits, Ian ponders how one would purchase things from Zune…and I agree with his theory. As the Zune marketplace users Xbox points as currency, one should be able to redeem a code against the LIve ID used for Zune and be able to download freely, without worrying about a US address/credit card etc. I haven’t tried it but if I do, I’ll let you know Another thing I’m going to investigate is getting a Zune Pass…but that’s for another day.

So there you have it, a relatively easy way to access the Zune marketplace from the UK, or indeed anywhere else…have fun!

Microsoft Licensing Changes

Microsoft licensing is an ever changing world and there have been a few changes recently that I think you could do with knowing.

Removal of Grace Periods:

Previously, all Microsoft licence programs gave customers a 30 day grace period on Software Assurance (SA) renewals…but not any more.

There is no longer a grace period for the following programs:

• Enterprise Agreement (EA)
• Enterprise Agreement Subscription (EAS)
• Select
• Select Plus
• Open Value Perpetual
• Open Value Subscription
• The exceptions are:

  Open Licensing (OLP)

• Schools Agreement
• Campus Agreement

This doesn’t impact current agreements so current customers will still receive a grace period until the end of the contract they have at the moment.

Change of Channel Partner:

The Change of Channel Partner (CoCP) forms are used when a customer wants to move their agreement from one reseller to another and applies to all agreements except OLP. They currently take 30 days to process which, in my opinion is too long so when I heard there was a change coming-I was cautiously optimistic…however I was also wrong!

The CoCP forms now take 90 days to be processed, which is frankly ridiculous. That is 1/4 of a year just to change resellers and I don’t think it is in the interests of resellers or customers. It is due to an “increasing volume of CoCP forms” but I can’t believe there are so many forms flying around that a company the size of Microsoft can’t process them in less that 3 months.

The form is about 1 side of A4 and contains very few details so I struggle to see why it takes so long. I can only assume it’s done as a manual process and that makes it slower…so I suggest making it do-able online. Either:

1) A customer does it via MCLS/VLSC

2) The reseller does it via those or another tool. It is then emailed to the customer for verification.

Bada-Boom, Bada-Bing, job done

If anyone from MS can explain why it takes so long, please do.I think this is possibly the part of dealing with Microsoft that infuriates me the most!