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Showing posts from 2017

The Year in Review (2017)

It's just over 12 months since we made our first forays into the Office 365 space and I'm convinced that we made the right call at the right time.  Any earlier and it would have been wrong because SharePoint hadn't gained traction and OWA was undeveloped. Any later and we'd have lost our unique position.as innovators in this space.  It hasn't all been smooth sailing and many of our legacy systems are still on IBM Domino. The approach to migration was rushed and flawed but I'm looking forward to 2018 when the dust settles and we can begin to move forward in a more orderly manner.  All things considered though, I'm proud to have been part of the technological achievements of the year which included a complete revamp of the hardware and software in the office; including the replacement of all desktops with Microsoft Surfaces and Apple MacBooks, the replacement of our meeting room systems with Microsoft's Surface Hub technology, an office move, a rebrandi

How to Duplicate the Mircrosoft Surface Hub's Screen on another Hub

So, you've got yourself a few Surface Hubs and now you're having a big meeting. Big enough to need to use both hubs together. So... how do you do it? The Problem In our case, we have two meeting rooms, each with a Microsoft Surface hub on the wall.  The rooms have a removable partition which enables it to be opened up into a large board room. Unfortunately, when this happens, the meeting participants can't always see the "master screen".  The ideal solution to this would be to have the display of the master screen duplicated on a "slave screen".  The diagram below illustrates this need. Two Methods There are two ways in which the screen can be duplicated.  Method 1 involves skype. It's fairly easy to set up and requires no cabling. Unfortunately, because of generally slow internet speeds, it doesn't cope with high motion slideshows -- and it certainly doesn't cope with video. The other method involves cables. In this pos

Getting Started with SharePoint Lists

SharePoint lists are a great way to build quick "applications" and registers.  If, like me, you've migrated from IBM Domino, and you were wondering where the Office 365 development functionality is, this is where it starts.  For everyone else, who has never heard of domino, don't worry, I'll explain what SharePoint lists are and why they're a great tool for you.  What Are SharePoint Lists? SharePoint lists are essentially a "cloud way" to store data that you want to share and search. You can put documents into lists but the best use of lists is to store and update "data". Essentially, SharePoint lists are a kind of database. They're not incredibly powerful, like SQL server but they're usually going to be powerful enough to replace a lot of the things you might have in Microsoft Access. One of the easiest ways to determine what applications are a good fit for SharePoint lists is to look at your spreadsheets.  Spreadsheet

Fixing up those Pesky # Filenames for Importing into OneDrive and SharePoint

Once you're used to the new way of working, OneDrive and SharePoint are great file storage systems. The biggest problem is getting your files into them. Sure, it's usually just a case of drag and drop but the real problems are related to some tighter controls on the file names. The worst offenders are the ampersand and the hashtag. In fact, it seems to be really common for people to name their files with a hashtag in financial circles. For example: "Invoice No #675853.pdf" OneDrive and SharePoint will "spit the dummy" if you try to upload a file that breaks these rules. Interface Problems What's worse is that while the upload tools will happily report all of the errors, it doesn't give you a chance to correct them and it doesn't tell you exactly where in the path the offending file is. What's more, you can't copy the log of errors to the clipboard and I haven't seen any signs of any other forms of logging - not that I'

SharePoint works if you start working the NEW way

It's been a long road from drive letters to SharePoint but I feel quite comfortable in this space now. It's all a matter of perspective -- and of course, resisting the urge to rebuild the old world in the new space.  SharePoint works extremely well with files but there's a disturbing trend that I've seen amongst my users.  They use Sync to create a local replica of the entire of their SharePoint file libraries on their computers. Apart from being extremely dangerous, this also introduces a lot of complications. One of the biggest complications is that many of the limitations that don't exist or are reduced in SharePoint, particularly folder structure (long path and file names) are still present in Windows 10. This means that if you sync a large SharePoint library you may find it difficult to save files in the lower levels on your PC. When you think about it, syncing everything is just a way of trying to bring the old world into the new. A way to continue u

Thoughts on the Microsoft Surface Book 4

I've spent the last couple of months on Microsoft's Surface Book 4 (i7) and I've had enough time to form an opinion. I generally hate laptops but I've found the Surface Book to be fast enough and easy enough to do the majority of my work on. The touchscreen is very responsive and I love being able to detach the tablet from the base - though admittedly, I rarely have a good business reason to do it. We ordered around 45 of the devices all at once. One was DOA and another had batteries in the base that worked but dysfunctional batteries in the screen.  At around 4% failure it's probably still a reasonable return rate for hardware. In terms of general use, the keyboard and trackpad are fine and the display is very clear. The processing power of the device is good and multi-touch on the trackpad and display are great too. The pen is currently a little useless and gimmicky but I've recently discovered that it works with the current version of Corel, so I may

How to Split SharePoint Document Libraries to Simplify Synching

In my last post, I talked about how you need to split your SharePoint document libraries into smaller chunks in order to synch them. In this post, I'm going to assume that you made the same mistake that I made and put too many documents into the one document library. In my case, I have an IT Team SharePoint site which holds all of our IT documents. It makes sense to keep all our IT documents together. For the most part, the site doesn't need to be synched anywhere because it's mostly a storage mechanism.  For example, our Finance and Invoices sub-folder is a place where we save invoices.  It's not a place where we go to edit them. One area that I do need to be able to synch however is our projects and strategy area. Our projects are always needing updates and modern day IT strategy needs to be increasingly agile. It's always in a state of change. Step 1: Add a New Document Library The first step is to add a new document library. One of the great things

Using SharePoint with OneDrive as a File Server (for Ex-Domino Admins and Traditionalists)

Over the past few months, I've been looking at a whole range of options to do with file storage on the basis that Microsoft's OneDrive simply doesn't do what we need. The whole time of course, I've been unable to shake the feeling that Microsoft should be offering something that already covers this space. After all, file sharing is one of the major "tentpoles" in most Windows networks.  As it turns out, SharePoint is the answer to this - and it works well if it's playing nicely with OneDrive.  My initial investigation of SharePoint was flawed for a number of reasons. Firstly, it appears that I was looking at an "old version".  The "new" version has really only started to come out over the last few months but it's light years ahead of its predecessor. The second reason that SharePoint was overlooked was because I really didn't have a great understanding of how (or why) it works. I was trying to compare it to IBM Domino a

Migrating Mail from IBM Notes and Verse to Microsoft Outlook on Office 365 - Part 2

Last time on Real World Computing, I talked about migrating mail from IBM Notes and Verse to Microsoft Office 365 . Now it's time for Part 2.  Mail Routing We did routing in two parts. Initially we had MX records for both IBM and Microsoft with Microsoft having the higher number (which means lower priority). After the cutover date we switched the priorities so that Microsoft Office 365 had the higher priority. One of the cool things about Microsoft’s setup is that they give you two domains, one is your own and the other is an @mycompany.onmicrosoft.com one. When we first saw this we thought it was a “bit wanky” but as it turned out, it was very useful indeed.we quickly discovered that we couldn't send mail to our internal colleagues on outlook from notes and that all of the agents in our Domino applications were only delivering internally. Changing these to point to the onmicrosoft addresses fixed that problem. As far internal mail, we just added a mail rule to f

Migrating Mail from IBM Notes and Verse to Microsoft Outlook on Office 365 - Part 1

It was always just a matter of time. Eventually we were going to have to make the jump from IBM to Microsoft. It's not that IBMs software isn't good. It's very good. It's simply that IBM is the Beta to Microsoft's VHS. Technically the IBM product line is far superior but on the surface, IBMs poor UI will never match the incredible pull of Microsoft's polished Office 365 offerings. We're just finishing a mail migration from IBM Notes/Verse to Microsoft Outlook, which we did entirely in-house and I thought it would be worthwhile going over the method we used. The Before Status Prior to the migration, all of our users had the IBM Notes client on their desktops. We had three production servers and two test/dev servers. All of our user mailboxes were on the IBM Cloud and we had a split with some users on Verse and some on Notes. We were also running an extensive extranet with a myriad of centrally controlled expansive security options. Our address books

How to Set up Rooms Properly in Office 365 - Part 2 (Extending Booking Time)

Following on from Part 1 where I talked about how to get rooms to show up in the room list, here's the next step where we extend the booking time from the default of 180 days. Why is there a limit? In most circumstances, a limit makes perfect sense. It stops employees from booking meeting rooms for years in advance and then leaving the company. In our case, it's actually fairly common to book the meeting schedule up to about 18 months into the future - so the 180 day (6 month) limit is quite restricting for us. I decided to change the limit to 730 days. Essentially two years.  The Steps I'm going to assume that you're familiar with PowerShell by now... I wasn't when I wrote Part 1 but now PowerShell is my friend. If you're unsure about how to execute the steps, please go back and check Part 1 as there's only a couple of commands at the end that are different. So, without further ado; Start PowerShell as Administrator (Local Admin Rights

How to use PowerShell to Change the Email Address of Office 365 Groups

One of the odd things about Office 365 is how much you have to resort to PowerShell to get things done. That's currently the case with the Office365 Groups, a recently introduced type of group that works particularly well across all of the Office365 applications.  I've been setting a few things up with Office365 groups lately and I've had two instances where I needed to do some renames. Once was when the people who asked for the group changed their mind about the name and the other was when I wanted to rebuild an existing sharepoint site (and reuse the name). In both cases, I was able to change the name but the email address itself was greyed out.  The Solution is to use PowerShell Start Powershell by clicking Start and typing PowerShell, then Right-click on the icon and run as Administrator. In the console that appears, type; Set-ExecutionPolicy RemoteSigned This elevates some privileges. You'll need to choose Y and press enter.  Next, you

How to Set up Rooms Properly in Office 365

You'd think that setting rooms up in Office 365 would be a simple matter of going to the Office 365 Admin console, expanding Resources, clicking on Rooms and Equipment and then using the Add Button This works but it doesn't do everything. If you want your rooms to appear in the Room List (and to show available times), you'll have to use PowerShell to put them there. Finding Answers So... I spent a while trying to find the answers without a whole lot of luck. I think that coming from the Notes/Domino world and not being familiar with the outlook terminology hindered me a bit in this regard.  In any case, big thanks to IT for Dummies btw whose page called " Create Room List Office 365 " made very little sense to me but helped me to explain to Microsoft Support what it was that I was looking for.  BTW: Microsoft support can be reached via the Support and then Service Requests options in the Admin Center. I've found their support to be excel

Solving Some Azure Active Directory User Synchronisation Issues on Office 365

We started moving over to Office 365 quite a while before we decided to ditch Notes mail and move to Outlook. It was also my plan to get rid of our internal active directory server and rely solely on the cloud for authentication.  As it turned out, management wanted to keep the AD server a little longer, so we've had to synchronise our onsite accounts with the Office 365 ones. The synchronisation processes immediately created duplicates (and sometimes triplicates) of users.  The journey to resolve this issue was time consuming and data destructive, so I thought I'd let everyone know how to fast-track it. What Causes the Problems Microsoft's Office 365 users have unique ID's much like the objects in the Active Directory. When you create a user from scratch on Office 365, you create them with a unique ID. While there are tools that will let you change these unique IDs, we've found that they generally do more damage than good. Deleted people are another pa

OneDrive to Rule them all ... or perhaps not.

Microsoft OneDrive is great! It's easy to use too and has some really great integration into Office 2016 - which means that when you go to save or open files, instead of displaying a file dialog, it renders the folder names right into the panel. Sadly the sharepoint integration in Office 2016 is still dialog-based.  On the surface, it looks like a great files storage solution but as it turns out, just like Tolkien's OneRing, beneath that shiny surface, OneDrive is mostly evil.  At work, we're still using an old file server which allows people in the company to save files into public, personal or restricted access areas. It's a great browsable structure with the main drawbacks being that it's on a local file server (which means ageing infrastructure and semi-manual backup procedures) and security because it needs a VPN to get to our internal systems. Many of our users still find a VPN too complex to set up and it's hard to get a VPN that runs on all flavo