Office 365 Debut: Cloud First, Business First

Today marks what I think is a tipping point in your relationship with Microsoft, and with the core technology stack of your enterprise.

Earlier today, Microsoft announced the availability of Office 365 in its new, updated form, featuring the latest (2013) versions of Exchange, Lync, and SharePoint, as well as Office client applications, delivered as a service. We’ve all known that today was coming, so there's minimal hype and hoopla around the launch. But I (and others) have said for years “Microsoft really gets it right in v3” and, my friends, welcome to what is effectively v3 of Microsoft’s online service offerings for businesses.

As of today, you can sign up for all plans of Office 365 at Microsoft’s website. You can learn more about the plans on the Plan Comparison page.

Key Points about Office 365 That You Should Know

A lot has been written about Office 365. Today, to mark the launch, I’d like to boil things down to a few key points I think you must consider as you and your enterprise think about Office 365.

I think that you can distill everything there is to say about Office 365 into two statements:

OFFICE 365 reflects the total commitment of Microsoft to an entirely new way of approaching business: Cloud First

It’s nothing less than astounding that a company founded on making money by delivering software licenses for on-premise software has been re-tooled into a service-first company.

It’s clear that Microsoft stands to benefit hugely from moving us from traditional software acquisition models to a subscription-based approach. More consistent, predictable revenue streams are an obvious outcome.

More importantly, enterprises that have traditionally found numerous reasons to delay upgrades to their on-premise software will now be updated and upgraded automatically, bringing new features and capabilities faster to business users. This means that users won’t be stuck in the past (I still see far too many desktops running Windows XP and Office 2003), angry that their tools can’t do what they need them to do.

I’ve seen a lot of organizations decide “Microsoft’s stack can’t deliver x” when the reality was that it could, but not when they were stuck with years’ or decade’s old versions and corporate/IT inertia that prevented progress on that stack. Now, businesses will get given features, fast, which will increase satisfaction and loyalty (“stickiness”) and decrease losses to competing options.

Speaking of new features, Microsoft announced today that Yammer will be available today for Enterprise plans of Office 365, and that by June we’ll be getting Lync-Skype integration for presence, IM, and voice. A major update in four months is impressive! Not quite the 90-day cadence touted at the SharePoint Conference, but darned impressive and probably more palatable for customers.

To get us to their new world, Microsoft’s pricing is extremely aggressive. For larger enterprises with existing agreements with Microsoft, a few dollars per user per month. This will be more than recouped, as an investment, with decreased time spent by IT testing, validating, and upgrading versions, patching servers, etc.

And it becomes an operational, rather than capital expense, which will align better with business cycles and activities. This, too, will be good for Microsoft and its relationships with customers.

It’s now a cloud-first universe that we’ll inevitably be drawn into.

OFFICE 365 is a release that changes the role of IT: Business First

Office 365 delivers some extraordinary new capabilities and functionality for businesses and business users.

I’ve been working in the new version of Office 365 since its preview in July and I’ve been truly impressed—much more than I expected to be—with the experience. It’s darned peppy, performance-wise, and it immediately enables features that my business would not have had the human bandwidth to evaluate or deploy on our own.

Sure, most or all of that functionality can be delivered by on-premise deployments of Exchange, Lync, and Office, but at what cost from a money, time, and resource-drain perspective?

All of this is a big benefit to businesses if they let it be.

What Does Office 365 Mean for IT?

Some of the major blockers I’ve seen that have prevented IT from being able to deliver what their business really need have been removed by this version of Office 365. IT can, and should, now be empowered by Office 365 to focus on solving business problems with technology: finding the right combination of apps, services, platforms and connections that solve real problems, rather than being consumed with software deployment and patching and compatibility checking.

It’s now a business-first, rather than technology-first, universe for the core stack of software that most businesses rely on every day.

Next week, I will pivot the discussion about Office 365 and share the guidance I find resonating with customers, large and small, across industries and geographies.

Office 365 SharePoint hybrid – DO's and DON'T

As far as we can see, more and more clients are interested in “hybrid” these days – the idea of running some of their SharePoint sites in Office 365 (SharePoint Online), and some on-premises. For any organization where the I.T. group is thinking is “we like cloud, but not for everything”, the hybrid idea can be quite appealing. There can many reasons for hybrid – companies wanting to supplement their on-premises capability (perhaps for the “quick spin-up” that Office 365 offers, or to leverage particular features/functionality such as Power BI), companies doing phased migrations to the cloud, or companies with regulatory or data sovereignty constraints – hybrid can work well for these scenarios and more.

TechNet has some great coverage of hybrid configuration process (start with Hybrid for SharePoint Server 2013), but folks who are new to the landscape (especially less technical types) are often surprised by what you actually “get”, and what you don’t, in hybrid mode. Search is a particular area where you get a certain deal – and this may or may not match up with what users are expecting. This post started out as an exploration of that, but we realised that some folks might appreciate some background on hybrid before that.

In many ways, hybrid looks SO SIMPLE! I mean, as TechNet shows, you have some sites in Office 365 and some on-premises – frankly, my mother could probably architect this stuff, right?

In reality of course, there’s a HUGE amount to consider for a hybrid deployment! In a straight comparison of “100% on-premises”, “100% SharePoint Online” and hybrid, I think most would agree that hybrid is the most complex option. After all, you have to do all the on-premises planning (e.g. planning the SQL layer, planning for service applications etc. etc.), in addition to understanding how you will configure and use Office 365. Also, hybrid typically requires extra on-premises configuration (DirSync, maybe ADFS, and maybe reverse proxy infrastructure). And if you’re doing any kind of customisation, there is complexity there around how you build for on-premises vs. SharePoint Online (or perhaps your customisations need to always work in both) – the list goes on.

Hybrid – what you DO get

So, hybrid isn’t necessarily the magical solution it sounds like it could be. That’s not to say it’s not the right solution for you/your client – as an aside, it is for my current client. But it’s not a turn-key solution where you set “Mode = hybrid” and Office 365/SharePoint magically sets things up and all aspects of your deployment are covered. Instead, SharePoint hybrid really covers three areas:

• Search
  • Being able to search across both environments (with caveats – see later)
• BCS
  • Being able to access data in on-premises applications/systems from Office 365
• Duet integration (SAP)
  • Being able to access data in on-premises SAP from Office 365

And that’s really it.

It’s true to say that some aspects of SharePoint can easily be made to work in a way which suits hybrid – My Sites, for example, can be made to exist only in SharePoint Online (if that’s the preferred option) by redirecting the My Site host to the URL in the cloud.

But otherwise, that’s basically what hybrid looks like.

Hybrid – what you DON’T get

So now let’s think about what you don’t get through “native support” – in other words, things you will need to plan for and spend time implementing yourself.

You don’t get:

• Any kind of global navigation
  • A key issue here is the “Sites” page (where a user can find to links to”bookmarked” sites/documents i.e. things they have followed) – if a user follows a site/library/document in on-premises, that will NOT show up in the Office 365 sites page!
• Any kind of global site directory
  • Indeed, SharePoint 2013 no longer has an out-of-the-box site directory of course, it was removed from the product
• A joined-up social/newsfeed experience (if you are using SharePoint social rather than Yammer) across Office 365/on-premises – there are numerous issues here, but essentially any activity such as likes, comments, follows etc. in on on-premises environment will not appear in the newsfeed in SharePoint Online
• A great search experience
  • Instead, search results are displayed in separate blocks from Office 365/on-premises – more on this later
• Any kind of auto-deployment/synchronization of:
  • Branding
  • Master pages
  • Any other customisations packaged as (sandbox) WSPs
  • Taxonomy/Managed Metadata
    • There are numerous considerations here – all related to having two Managed Metadata Service Applications (one in Office 365 and one on-premises)
  • Content types
    • (And if you’re wondering if you can leverage the Content Type Hub, by “chaining” together an on-premise CT Hub with one in SharePoint Online – no you cannot)
  • Document templates (e.g. MyCompanyProposalTemplate.docx)
  • Many aspects of configuration:
    • e.g. Search settings (best bets, search suggestions, search schema such as managed properties etc.)
    • e.g. List and library settings (workflow, versioning settings, policies etc.)
  • Many aspects related to apps
    • Apps available in the App Catalog (because you cannot share an App Catalog between SPO and on-premises)
    • App settings (e.g. whether apps can be installed from the Store)
    • Apps which are being monitored
    • Authentication of provider-hosted apps across SPO and on-premises usually requires some planning
  • Some aspects of user profiles
    • Custom properties
    • Sync across Office 365 and on-premises profiles (i.e. you need to separately configure sync from AD to both locations)
  • [… and no doubt there are lots of other things to add to this list too]

Hopefully you get the idea - in summary, there really is only a minimal link between your Office 365 tenant and your on-premises SharePoint environment (covering search, BCS, etc.). If you need something in both places - and you often do – you’ll need to take care of that yourself.

The hybrid search experience

Search is high on that list of things which get “interesting” for hybrid. After all, your SharePoint sites are split across (at least) two environments, but you’ll usually want users to be able to search across all content easily – without having to go to two different search engines. Providing a global search can certainly be done, and if you’re new to this area there are several options (all of which require some configuration to be done in the on-premises environment at least):

• Outbound hybrid – search center in on-premises environment brings in results from Office 365
• Inbound hybrid – search center in Office 365 brings in results from on-premises environment (requires a supported reverse proxy device)
• Two-way hybrid – both search centers can display results from the other environment

Configure hybrid Search for SharePoint Server 2013 is the best place to start on TechNet.

In all cases, there are limitations - most folks don’t realise that there is no way to “merge” the search results together. There are two possible options:

1. Add a Promoted Result (i.e. a “best bet”)
2. Add a Result Block
3. [OK, so you can also transform the query and therefore change the results – but this doesn’t help in merging the search results.]

The Result Block approach will probably be the most common. But both this and Promoted Results are poor for the client who is expecting to “just search across everything and show me the most relevant things!” This is what the Result Block approach looks like (Office 365 Result Block in red, results from on-premises content in blue):

In other words, it’s very much like a “federated” search experience – the search is executed in two stages:

• The local SharePoint environment is searched and results returned
• The query is also “sent” to the remote SharePoint environment, and results returned

The page then loads and shows both sets of results (assuming some items match in both places). But this experience can raise some questions:

• How many results should be shown (from each source) on page 1?
  • HINT – you’re only allowed a maximum of 10 for a Result Block anyway :)
• What about paging? What happens when I go to page 2?
• How can I easily see more results from both sources?
• How do I determine which results are more relevant, from the local or remote environment?
• Are there any options for seeing the results in a more integrated way?

In my next post, I’ll talk about some options for merging the results – including how you might do it, caveats around this, and so on. But hopefully this post provides some background information on hybrid before then. If it sounds like I’ve painted a negative view of hybrid, that’s not my intention. It can work great, but I think it's worth noting these considerations - I do find many folks have expectations that don’t necessarily match how the bigger picture works in practice.

Roadmap for SharePoint 2013 Search and why Metadata matters?

Enterprise search is one of the non-quantifiable benefits that comes with many inherit deficiencies. This is because of the human element attached to it and our tendencies to perceive and allocate things differently on our mental nodes. It is more than running queries into the search box and getting results based on keywords and metadata, but it is more of discovering contents that we did not know we were necessarily looking for. Probably, this is the reason some of the experts term it as both art and science. While enterprise search is a broad subject in itself, the interesting elements are the advancements product companies are making to provide connected search experiences and managing information governance. In this piece, I am going to share some interesting developments.

Last year, my article “Fast Search Drives Enterprise Productivity” focused on SharePoint 2013 Fast search features and benefits. This year I would like to share some valuable takeaways from a recent webinar conducted by Microsoft and Concept Searching. The webinar was themed around “Why Metadata Matters in SharePoint 2013 and information governance” and hosted by Cem Aykan (Senior Product Manager of enterprise search at Microsoft) and Don Miller (V.P commercial accounts at Concept searching).

Roadmap for SharePoint 2013 Search

Cem Aykan, Senior product manager of enterprise search Microsoft took us to a tour of enhanced search feature in SharePoint 2013 bringing forth some contextual developments in search landscape. Here are the highlights:

Autocomplete predictions assist contextual searching

Providing similar experience as in google, the autocomplete predictions would assist users with relevant suggests. Unlike universal search engines, the new suggestions are categorized to fit well with user’s queries based on their likings and preferences. This is a great leap towards creating a connected search experience apart from saving time and allowing repeat search in as easier way as possible.

Personalized search is all about discovery

Significant development in SharePoint 2013 powered by Fast search features would now allow users with more personalized and contextual search results. This personalization would allow better room for discovery, which is one of the crucial components of today’s enterprise search. Searchers do not often get what they search or either because they don’t know standardized vocabulary or perceive things differently in different occasions. The search term and search results would thus vary because of diversity, perceptions and unstructured query terms used by the searcher. To tackle this, the new search results would now extract significant cues from searchers profile, inferring more about their preferences, likings and patterns, thereby showing results that are contextually personalized.

Finding experts who are on it

Finding relevant experts for a topic becomes difficult in SharePoint, as people do not update their profile in SharePoint more often as they do in other professional social media sites. Hence, information worker find it increasingly difficult to get relevant experts on a particular topic. Thanks to the latest changes that extract crucial attributes about experts. This is done by following them throughout their conversations, activities, groups and so forth to glean as much insights as possible to have a tacit profiling of experts. This profiling helps in correlating and mapping searchers’ query terms, thus providing the right subject experts to their seekers i.e information workers.

One search center for all  

Since the integration of Fast search, people often wonder whether to use SharePoint’s 2013 native search capabilities, Search server express or the Fast search features. The good news is that the now the fast search feature combines capabilities of all the three and provides a single source of search.

Forward looking..

Cem Aykan, also gave preview of coming updates that would enable search drive connected experience. Here is the roadmap for the future:

-          Gleaning insights from social interactions

-          Visually Engaging and actionable results

-          Flexible on premise, cloud and hybrid

-          Consuming diverse content and signals

-          Advanced querying options

While these modifications prophesize to make SharePoint search more powerful in terms of providing connected experience, what’s more interesting is how product companies like Concept Search is taking it to a higher conceptual plane by enhancing SharePoint search features.

Don Miller, (V.P commercial accounts at Concept searching) highlighted some of the remarkable features of their products that enhanced enterprise search features and provided greater information governance and control. The most interesting aspects of it was leveraging of taxonomy and mapping structure to encapsulate content information using advanced statistical concepts rather than using manual interpretation of metadata tags.

The Path Forward

The human element of enterprise search makes it more complex and manual creation of taxonomies, categories and structures requires balanced perspectives. The automated approach bets on agreed upon Taxonomy and Mapping structure thus exposing it uncertain scenarios like managing tags and ensuring better discovery in a geographically distributed team set up with different language settings or encapsulating latest content addition. Lastly, quantified benefit of enterprise search.

Google Warns Local Businesses: You Have 3 Weeks to Save Your Places Listing

f you have your business set up on Google local pages, there are a couple changes that you should be aware of when it comes to verifying and updating your Google+ business listing.

You Have 3 Weeks to Save Your Google Places Listing

The most important change is that some business owners are being required to update and save their Google Place listings. Some business owners were confused about whether this email notification was spam, however it is coming from Google.

Affected users will have three weeks to save and confirm their Google Place listings. Jade Wang, Google Business Community Manager, explained:

We are making some changes to Google Places for Business and Google Maps so we can continue providing people with the best experience when they’re looking for local businesses. As part of this process, we’re asking business owners to review and confirm some of the information in their Google Places accounts so we can keep showing it to Google users. We know this will be a few extra steps for merchants, and we apologize for any inconvenience and thank you for your time.

We have sent business owners affected by these changes an email entitled “Action Required: You have 3 weeks to save your Google Places Listing”.

If you received this email, don’t worry. You simply need to login to Places for Business, review your business information, update it if necessary, and click Submit.

You’ll need to do this for all listings in your account by February 21 to stay on Google Maps. Otherwise, you’ll need to add your business information and undergo PIN verification using Google Places again.

Change to Google+ Local Page Setup

The second change is designed to make it a bit easier for new business owners when setting up their local listing.

When a business owner first creates or Google+ local page, they are required to verify their listing using PIN verification. Google is now making a change were business owner will now be able to see their Google+ listing features prior to verification [].

Important: business owners will still be required to complete the PIN verification before the listing will show up to all users, but it will make it easier to access some of the features while they wait. Business owners must remember that even though they can see the listing, that doesn’t mean anybody else can see it.

Verification can be completed by entering the PIN received either via a postcard and sent to the business address or via phone at your business number. If someone else has already verified, such as an employee who may no longer be with the company, you can simply do the verification process again.

If the listing has been created previously, you’ll still need to use the PIN verification in order to update and take admin control posting.

Wang explained:

If you’re creating a listing in the new Places for Business dashboard, now, you won’t have to wait to complete PIN verification before you can see the +page, for most businesses. Just follow the link from your dashboard to see the new page. You will be able to use Google+ social features on this unverified page, but please note — you still need to complete PIN verification before the page will start showing up in Google Maps and across other Google properties.

If you’ve got an unverified local Google+ page (made using Google+ in the local business/place category), then we still encourage you to PIN verify this page so that it can start appearing in Google Maps and across other Google properties.

If you’re creating a local Google+ page (using Google+ selecting the local business/place category) for a business that we think is already in Google Maps, then you may need to go through both PIN verification and our admin request flow before you can manage the page.

Source:

http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2327744/Google-Warns-Local-Businesses-You-Have-3-Weeks-to-Save-Your-Places-Listing

4 Best Practices for Maximizing SharePoint ROI

With SharePoint, organizations are able to build intranets storing, searching and managing documents in a central location. In addition to facilitating better collaboration, SharePoint reduces emails and duplicated work while increasing employee engagement.

However, when it comes to maximizing their SharePoint return on investment (ROI), many organizations—such as those in the healthcare industry, for example–are only scratching the surface and lagging behind other industries.

To help, we’ve compiled a list of four key tips and best practices for those looking to reduce SharePoint total cost of ownership, efficiently operate complex models, utilize the tool beyond a content store, and use SharePoint efficiently without the risk of compromising security or violating regulations. Although especially useful for healthcare organizations, they’re also pertinent to many industries where SharePoint ROI lags.

1. Save up to 40 percent by consolidating or eliminating legacy systems, dead websites and duplicate documents

The ease of access to content that SharePoint provides can also lead to the development of bad habits when it comes to routine maintenance and cleaning out the system.

Keeping sites that are minimally or no longer in usefiz1, content that is no longer utilized and items that are duplicated is simply wasting space and forcing redundant work from the SharePoint tool. By identifying unused sites and addressing data redundancy, organizations can save up to 30-40 percent in level-1 disc space — a significant costs saving for any organization.

2. Get to know SharePoint’s built-in functionalities

Apart from being a content store, SharePoint offers several functionalities for enterprise content management, collaboration, search-driven application creation, social engagement and business intelligence. Key functionalities that support richer utilization of the tool include:

Portals – Portals simplify access as a single gateway to enterprise applications, allowing the creation of a virtual desktop which can be accessed from any device, at any location.

Enterprise Search– With Enterprise Search users can not only sift through content within the SharePoint repositories, but also documents and external content stores. It can even be extended to include external applications.

Dashboards– Dashboards allow users to expose reports, key performance indicator metrics and other analytics in a simple manner to improve the visibility of performance indices, providing the key ingredient to an improvement feedback loop within the organization.

Workflows– While the built-in configurable workflows are fairly simplistic, by utilizing commercially available third party add-ons, the power and utility of workflows can be greatly enhanced to enable the creation of complex business process applications such as Case Management and Clinical trial management.

By leveraging the built-in functionalities provided by SharePoint, organizations can reduce the number of custom applications – along with the time, effort and cost for their development and maintenance — while improving and standardizing user experience and greatly simplifying the enterprise technology sprawl.

3. Create a centralized SharePoint “control center”

While SharePoint’s flexibility sets it apart from other development tools, it also can make it difficult to manage.

Organizations should have a centralized team capable of providing infrastructure, application development and maintenance support, along with an operating unit level analysis, training and administration team to support departments and projects.

SharePoint governance must span the entire spectrum of expertise from hardware and infrastructure to content management. These hyper-focused “SharePoint champions” and managers provide a cost-effective operational team that continues to address business needs and administer the environment.

4. Deploy a compliance policy reinforced by auditing and monitoring tools

All too commonly, we see users inadvertently accessing and uploading documents containing sensitive data, which in healthcare can include patient data or protected health information.

This violates security and audit requirements mandated by HIPAA and ultimately will get an organization into legal trouble.

As part of the control center mentioned above, a person or team must be dedicated to designing and enforcing a compliance policy and best practices that ensure the system is managed efficiently and run in accordance with regulations.

Coupled with customizable reactive audit and proactive monitoring solutions, the SharePoint compliance governance must be supported by a tactical, technically competent team in order to implement the policies to keep SharePoint up and running.

By eliminating wasteful systems and files, utilizing built-in functionalities, creating a dedicated control center and deploying a compliance policy, organizations can reap the full benefits of their SharePoint investment.

Microsoft Lync: Making the most of your investment

Lync is heralded as a complete unified communications solution for business that brings together a number of technologies in one easy to use application – small wonder that many organizations have decided to invest in the technology.

According to Microsoft, organizations can expect to see

• 5-30 percent reduction in travel expenses

• 30- 95 percent reduction in audio conferencing charges

• 15- 30 percent savings on real estate and facility costs

However, the reality is that many organizations are not reaping the rewards from the deployment.

To use Microsoft Lync effectively requires a cultural change in order to embed the new ways of working into the organization that Lync creates. One of the best examples is email. Emails have become the defacto way to communicate in many organizations and Lync could be a great way to reduce the number of emails per day and improve efficiency. How? By sending an instant message (IM) instead of an email. People tend to respond quicker to an IM than an email. And remember that an IM can be recorded within Microsoft Exchange so governance can easily be maintained.

Another great feature is presence. It enables you to see when colleagues are available and how best to contact them. Industry statistics claim that using presence management in Lync equates to a saving of 30 minutes per person per day – that’s 16 man days per person per year!

Once you have Lync you can become part of the ‘Lync Federation’. Lync Federation allows you to connect with customers, suppliers, and partners who already have Lync but for those organizations that don’t, you can use the Lync Web App to ask them to join a Lync Meeting. The system offers a range of communication modalities to choose from – you can escalate an IM to a VoIP call or set up a video meeting. And you can move seamlessly between these modalities as they are all part of the Microsoft Lync platform.

Lync is also now entering the meeting room. Microsoft’s internal studies have indicated that it takes an average of eight to 12 minutes to begin a meeting using technology. Little wonder than solutions such as SMART Room System for Microsoft Lync have come along that reduce the start-up time for an active session with full access to audio, video and presentation data to just a single click of a button! The system has proximity detection – an innovative feature enabled by sensors that automatically detect user movements to turn the display on when you enter the room and power off when not in use.

The solution simplifies the collaboration experience for both virtual and face-to-face participants and provides seamless online collaboration through sharing of real-time video, voice and data. After all, what’s the point of being able to hear and see each other if one party still has to write everything up on a flipchart or dry whiteboard and then wait till the others on the videoconferencing call see it and then write their comments on their flipchart/dry whiteboard? Seems archaic doesn’t it? Using a SMART Board, presentations can be annotated over using digital ink and all participants can share and add their contributions in real time. At the end of the meeting, the annotated notes can be sent out immediately. Meetings become more productive and effective.