Office 365 - Exchange Online Limitations 

A few facts about Exchange Online which may be of interest.

• Each Exchange Online mailbox can send to a maximum of 1500 recipients per day
• A single email message can be addressed to a maximum of 500 recipients per day
• Each mailbox will only send up to 30 messages per minute
• These limits apply to emails sent within an organisation, as well as externally
• Distribution groups stored in the Global Address Lists (for example, All Trident) counts as one recipient. 
• In a personal distribution group each recipient is counted separately

Office 365 - Save Money with Kiosk Workers

Office 365 - Kiosk Workers

Many companies have staff who do not have a dedicated computer, and only use the company IT systems sparingly, Microsoft terms these users 'kiosk workers'.


Although these users do not need IT systems for their day to day job, many companies would still like to provide them with company email addresses and access to the company documentation such as HR documents.


To allow companies to accommodate kiosk workers Office 365 provides a specific subscription license for these users, providing a cut down service at a reduced cost.


Kiosk Worker K1 Plan: £2.60 per user per month

• 500Mb Email Storage
• Mobile connectivity via Pop3
• Outlook Web App for PC access
• Access to view the Company SharePoint Site
• Office Web App's (View Only)

Kiosk Worker K2 Plan: £6.50 per user per month

• As above, with Office Web App's - Full version

MS Office Professional Plus - Free for 30 Days

Office 365 - Office Professional Plus - Free Trial

If you need to get the latest version of  Microsoft office, this is a great way to get it, just sign up to the trial below and you will have full access to the latest version of Microsoft Office for 30 days (for up to 25 users).


Once the trial has ended you can simply uninstall the software or sign up to the service for 12 months.  The ongoing cost is just £8.00 per month and offers full upgrade rights for the length of your subscription.  If Microsoft release a new version of Office, you can install the new product at no additional cost.

Office Professional Plus - Trial Link
Office Professional Plus provides Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneNote, Outlook, Publisher and Access 2010.
 

Office 365 - Are you compatible?

Office 365 Software Compatibility list

This article lists the operating systems, browsers, and applications that are compatible with Microsoft Office 365 for enterprises.

Supported O/S and Software

Operating system type	Supported operating systems	Supported software	Supported browsers
Windows-based	Windows XP with Service Pack 3 (requires Internet Explorer 8 for Microsoft SharePoint Online), Windows Vista with Service Pack 2, Windows 7 (requires Internet Explorer 8 or 9), Windows Server 2008, or Windows Server 2008 R2	Microsoft Office 2010; Microsoft Office 2007 with Service Pack 2	Windows Internet Explorer 8, Mozilla Firefox 3 or 4; Google Chrome 6, 7, 8, or 9 (for OWA Light only) Note Internet Explorer 7 is supported with Windows Vista with Service Pack 2, and Internet Explorer 9 is supported with Windows 7 or Windows Server 2008.
Macintosh-based	Mac OS X 10.5 or Mac OS X 10.6	Microsoft Office 2008 for Mac or Microsoft Office 2011 for Mac	Safari 4 or 5

Supported O/S and Software - NOT SUPPORTED

The following operating systems and software versions will not work with Office 365.

• Windows XP Home and Media Center
  
• Microsoft Office 2003
  
• Microsoft Office Outlook 2003
  
• Microsoft Internet Explorer 6
  
• Microsoft Office Communicator 2007
  

Office 365 - How to reset your password?

How to reset your password?


A common problem for BPOS and Office 365 users is the good old password reset.  If you do not use federated Active directory the only people who can reset your Office 365/BPOS password are the internal company administrators.  If the administrators are not available to reset your password, this can be very frustrating.

Who should users turn to?
If you are a standard Office 365/BPOS user, you will need to find one of your internal Office 365 administrators to reset your password for you.  We strongly advise that companies create multiple administrators to allow for holidays, sickness etc.


Who should administrators turn to?
If you are a company administrator and you have forgotten your password, you will need to find annother administrator to reset this for you.  If you are the only administrator, you are in trouble!

If you follow the instructions it tells you to create a support request, sadly you need to sign into the portal before you can create one.... but you cant do that so you are stuck.

Fortunatley we have found the following link that you can use to request help from Microsoft and get your account up and running again: Office 365 Support Request

P.s You can use this if you are a standard user and no admins are available too.

We would be really interested to see how you get on with this.

A different way to license Microsoft Office

A different way to license Microsoft Office


If you currently license your Microsoft Office licenses using OEM (bought with a new machine) or Microsoft Open license, you might want to take a look at Office 365 Office Professional Plus.

Why?
If you are looking to use Office 365 you need to be aware that it runs a Now -1 support policy for Microsoft Office.  In English, this means that Microsoft only support the current version of Microsoft Office and one previous version.  At the time of typing this means that Office 2010 is supported along with Office 2007.

This doesn't mean that previous versions wont work, but you are not getting the most out of the product, and there are no guarantees from Microsoft,

Because of this, it makes sense to have a solution in place to keep your Microsoft Office software up to date.

How?
Office 365 offers an Office Professional Plus Subscription as a stand alone service (no need to sign up to any other plans), for £8.00 per user per month, the equivalent to £96.00 per year.

With Microsoft releasing a new version of office approximately every 3 years this, becomes a very cost effective option, even against OEM which would cost approximately £210.00 for a copy of Office Professional.  OEM also has lots of software restrictions such as no transfer rights, upgrade rights, etc,

The Office 365 E3 Plan includes Office Professional Plus, you can get a 30 day trial on the following link:
https://portal.microsoftonline.com/partner/partnersignup.aspx?type=Trial&id=8b1ae17f-78a6-45c1-a8c3-02b2a7dae3fe&msppid=334708

Office 365 Cost Calculator

Office 365 Cost Calculator 


 365 Cost Calculator / Price Calculator uk, office 365  ROI TCO total cost of ownership
 

Microsoft have released a really useful tool for calculating your monthly outgoings on the Office 365 platform. You can mix and match your requirements including different E Plans, Kiosk workers, Professional Plus/Exchange Online/Lync/Share-Point subscriptions and other additional services.

Take a look here: http://www.microsoft.com/business/office365tools/estimator/cost-estimator.aspx?culture=en-gb&data=gb

Don't forget that you can sign up to a free 30 day trial of the E3 plan here: 

https://portal.microsoftonline.com/partner/partnersignup.aspx?type=Trial&id=8b1ae17f-78a6-45c1-a8c3-02b2a7dae3fe&msppid=334708

SBS 2011 Essentials: What is required?

SBS 2011 Essentials: What is required?

As detailed in my previous post, SBS 2011 Essentials is a really cost effective way for small businesses (up to 25 users) to provide a comprehensive network solution when using Office 365, providing great solutions for remote working, file access, back-up, security, printing, etc.

Below I have highlighted the required hardware and approximate costs for implementing a solution of this type.

Potential solution

PowerEdge T110 Tower Server                                           £1,000.00

Intel Xeon X3430, Quad Core, 2.40GHz Processor

8GB Memory, (4x2GB)

RAID 1

2x 500GB, Hard Drive (Offering approx. 500Gb of disk space)

Microsoft SBS2011 Essentials (No user licenses required)

Dell 3 Year Basic Hardware Warranty

Firewall (SonicWALL TZ100)                                              £300.00

http://tinyurl.com/6kvfbxm

24 Port Switch                                                                       £190.00

http://tinyurl.com/5vw2faa

1500va UPS                                                                           £320.00

http://tinyurl.com/6y2kvsh

2x 500Gb USB Hard-disks for Back-up                              £100.00 (£50.00 each)

http://tinyurl.com/6zmjsxc

3 Year SSL Certificate for Secure Remote Access            £150.00 (£50.00 per year)

Blending Office 365 & SBS 2011 Essentials

Office 365 & SBS 2011 Essentials:

The perfect blend for small business

Although Office 365 provides a comprehensive set of features for all sizes of business, there are some IT issues which still need addressing.  Below I have listed some common concerns:

File Data:

Although SharePoint Online is a great tool for collaboration it is not ideal as a file server so:

·         If our file data is not stored in the cloud, where do we keep it?

·         If our file data is not stored in the cloud, how do we back-it up?

·         If our file data is not stored in the cloud, how do we access it remotely?

Network/Remote Access

·         How can I provide internet access and network connectivity for my internal staff?

·         How can I provide remote staff access to applications on their office computers?

·         How can we provide a secure, simple to use printing solution?

Applications

·         How can we ensure that our ‘line of business’ applications (Sage, etc) are available for all users? How can remote users access this?

·         How can we back-up the data for these line of business applications?

Security/Access

·         Can we increase our control over user security and access to our services?

Blending

For the majority of business, it is likely that at least one of these issues will mean that a local server of some sort is still essential. This is where a blended approach makes perfect sense.

If your company has 25 or less employees and you are interested in the benefits offed by Office 365 then SBS 2011 Essentials is the perfect solution. This will provide you with a low cost local server which is specifically designed to integrate with Office 365 and provide the functionality and guaranteed uptime of hosted services with the security, management and performance with an ‘on-premise’ solution.

SBS 2011 Essentials will provide all of the following

Integration; SBS 2011 essentials is designed to integrate with Office 365 seamlessly, allowing you to make local changes and for these to be replicated to the cloud automatically.  For example, if you delete a local user account the associated Office 365 account will also be removed.  It also provides ‘Single sign-on’ meaning that users only have to log in once, and will have access to all of their local and hosted services.

Active Directory; to help you to manage your user accounts, permissions, passwords, etc, linked seamlessly with Office 365. 

Files and Folders; can be stored, secured and backed-up locally or remotely  and linked directly to your SharePoint Online service for collaboration.

3^rd party Application Support; allows you to install your important business applications onto a fast, reliable and secure local infrastructure

Remote Access Services; allowing users to view files and folders remotely and access applications installed on the server

Cost Effective; there are no user licenses (CAL’s) required in SBS Essentials 2011, just the cost of the hardware and the server license.

In summary, if you have 25 users or less and are interested in moving to Office 365, you should definitely consider a blended approach using SBS 2011 essentials.

More information can be found here: http://www.microsoft.com/oem/en/products/servers/Pages/windows_sbs_2011_essentials_overview.aspx

Or email Office365UK@gmail.com