SharePoint Online Services Updates Announced

Today, Microsoft officially announced that SharePoint Online will be receiving an update over the next couple of days.  The long-awaited changes include upgrades to Office Web Apps that improve editing, collaboration and mobile devices.  Official support for Internet Explorer 7 will be ending at the same time, as many of the updated features require functionality only available in IE 8 or later web browsers.  IE 7 will continue to work with SharePoint Online, just not with the new features.
Here's the full text of the announcement:

Office Web Apps update improves editing, collaboration and device support; IE7 support endsWithin the next 24 to 48 hours, we will begin delivering a service update of new features to SharePoint Online. Organizations on Office 365 will receive this update seamlessly. However, individual users who are still running Internet Explorer 7 may have a diminished user experience after the update.

New features in Office Web Apps Using web-based versions of Word, PowerPoint, Excel and OneNote you can view, edit, and work together on Office documents from nearly anywhere. And with the latest update, you’ll get more editing and formatting controls, co-authoring support across the web apps and expanded device support, including editing from tablets. Learn about the new features.

What to expect during the service update There are three things you may encounter during the planned maintenance period between 07 November 2012 and 14 November 2012. There may be moments when administrative functions (such as granting permissions or creating new document libraries) will be temporarily disabled. These should be brief, but could last up to 30 minutes. New documents that are added to SharePoint between 07 November 2012 and 14 November 2012 won’t be indexed for searching during the maintenance period. Indexing will resume on 14 November 2012, and documents that were added during the maintenance period will be indexed at that time. SharePoint content will be read-only for up to 30 minutes. This will only happen once.

End of support for Internet Explorer 7 Internet Explorer 7 is not compatible with the updates to Office Web Apps. For the best user experience, Office 365 users should use a modern web browser.Our system reports indicate that you have 1 person in your organization who connected to Office 365 with Internet Explorer 7 between 01 August 2012 and 01 September 2012. We urge you to upgrade this user to a current version of Internet Explorer immediately to preserve the user experience. Instruct this user to run Windows Updateto upgrade the browser.See the Admin Task Wiki for information about support for Internet Explorer 7.

Questions about this service update? Visit the Service Update Wiki for all the answers.

Sincerely, The Microsoft Office 365 Team

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Office 365 Service Update for October

Three significant Office 365 updates were announced in Microsoft's latest revision notice released on Wednesday of last week.  If you don't receive the update, one of the items is pretty exciting... something that people have been asking for for a very long time...

Update #1: Password Policies!
You can now set your password expiration policy for Office 365 through the web admin portal!

As you can see in the screenshot above,  a new option has appeared on the Office 365 Users management page.  When you click the link a new window pops up:

Update #2: Third Party Single Sign On
Another important but slightly less exciting feature was released this cycle as well: interoperability with third-party identity providers for single sign-on.  Yes, that's right, there's an alternative to Active Directory Federation Services!

For larger enterprises ADFS 2.0 is still far and away the best solution.  It gives you identity federation using your own Active Directory and will work with many services, internal, external, custom and box solutions.  This is possible due to Microsoft's WS-Federation and WS-Trust protocols and the recent SAML & Shibboleth authentication support.

Microsoft announced two initial solutions and tested federation with them successfully:

• Optimal IDM Virtual Identity Server Federation Services
• PingFederate® 6.10

I've been tracking a couple other identity management solutions that promise SSO functionality for Office 365 as well:

• OKTA
• OneLogin 

I have not tried any of these solutions as of yet but may evaluate each and come up with a comparison - time permitting.  Most of these hosted identity management providers use a web page for initial login to their account and then their account is federated with the services of your choice.  In addition, some of the providers will synchronize your Active Directory objects (using a locally installed agent generally) to their service.  Some will even let you use your Active Directory password to log in to their service.

What I haven't verified is whether any of the solutions have a locally installed program that provides single-sign on across multiple applications (or just with your network login).  When I have more information I will report back.

By the way... none of these is supported by Microsoft really... they're just officially allowing the integration.  You'll need to work with the provider for any assistance.

Update #3: Directory Synchronization Scoping & Filtering
You could do this before... it was unsupported though.  Maybe that has changed?  They announced this like it was a new feature, but the link provided in the announcement didn't work for me.

To make these changes now requires a dive in to the DirSync back-end, Federated Identify Management (FIM).

I'm hoping this update means that the actual DirSync tool is getting an update or that Office 365 will have a configuration option in the web interface to scope and filter objects.  If this is just Microsoft acknowledging that we can use the FIM tools I'm going to be disappointed.

I'll post an update when I learn more.

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Google Thinks its Time to Ditch Microsoft Office, Customers Say They're Wrong

Image via CrunchBase

In September, Google announced that Google Apps would cease exporting to the older Microsoft Office document formats: .doc, .xls and .ppt.  The change was to take effect October 1st.  Google Apps would still be able to export to the newer open .docx, xlsx and .pptx file formats, but only Microsoft Office 2003 and newer can open those files without conversion.

On Wednesday of this week after many complaints from its users, Google backpedaled and delayed the deadline to January 31 of 2013.  It shouldn't be a surprise that Google wants to discontinue supporting these older Office formats, Microsoft has been trying to retire older versions of Office for years and will probably accelerate that process even more as Office 2013 nears release.  I'm sure Google would love to have customers remain in and share from Google Apps and stop supporting Microsoft Office exports altogether.

Why you should be concerned...

1. The Google announcement was made with only 4 business days (announcement on 9/26 of the feature change on 10/1) to prepare, and thousands of users and businesses that depend on Google Apps to interact with customers on older versions of Microsoft Office would have been left in the lurch, with no way to collaborate and exchange files.
2. Google provided no transition period and offered little in the way of guidance on alternatives.  They did recommend Microsoft's conversion utility, the Microsoft Office Compatibility Pack, that enables newer versions of Microsoft Office to read and save to the older file formats.  While this utility could be used to enable conversion for those left in the lurch by Google's change it would require installation of the tool on many computers.

Microsoft gives notice month's ahead of time when it makes changes to applications and then as a matter of routine offers an extended and unsupported time period before a product, format or feature is officially "retired."  As a matter of fact, Microsoft just released Office 2013 compatibility content for the Office Resource Kit... including a nice easy poster (see below) that talks about how to retain compatibility with older Office versions even as Microsoft releases Office 2013.

This is yet another demonstration for why organizations should take a long hard look before depending on Google, a service that was developed by a search company organized to create advertising revenue, to keep and protect their business data and reliably provide critical cloud infrastructure services.

What other Microsoft products could you be using that Google plans to stop supporting?  Internet Explorer 8!

The alternative cloud service from Microsoft, Office 365, continues to gain traction in large and small organizations around the world, announcing new enterprise customers almost daily.  Office 365 provides many more options for customers with packages ranging from some that include features similar to Google Apps all the way up to a suite that comes with a full desktop version of Microsoft Office Professional Plus 2010.

With Microsoft releasing new versions of both Office 365 and Microsoft Office (2013) in the next few months, the gap between the features that Google includes in its Apps product and what Microsoft provides should widen even more.  For organizations that demand the state of the art in productivity software there is still only one viable choice in the market, Microsoft.

Similarly to Google Apps, Microsoft's Office 365 is a pay-as-you-go subscription billed monthly and by the number of users.  For a flat monthly fee, users gain access to features including e-mail, a company intranet and instant messaging features among others.  All of the applications are designed specifically for business, not for home users like Google Apps was (see Gmail).  With a history that began with writing software for customers, not selling advertising, Microsoft has a credibility that Google can only wish for.

To try Office 365 visit Microsoft at http://www.office365.com.  To preview the latest upcoming changes with both Office 365 and Office 2013 you can sign up for the preview trial at http://www.microsoft.com/office/preview/en/whats-new.

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