Archive for Office 365

OneDrive Files On Demand

Posted by Lynn Dye

· Thursday, May 25th, 2017

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The SharePoint Virtual Summit (held May 16th), contained some important news about changes coming to OneDrive For Business and Consumer. The biggest announcement was the introduction of OneDrive Files On Demand – the long awaited Placeholders update/replacement.

We’ll focus here on the OneDrive and SharePoint news. If you want a recap on the entire Virtual SharePoint Summit, here you go.

OneDrive Files On Demand

“OneDrive files on demand is the way anyone can see, access and open their files from their desktop – and not actually have that file stored locally on their hard drive.”

image courtesy Microsoft

How does that differ from what you have now – selective sync? With selective sync, you choose which folders and files you want to sync to your computer or device(s). Then when you look in Windows Explorer or Finder (for Mac), you see only the documents you’ve chosen to sync.

With OneDrive files on demand, you will see all your folders and files from within Windows Explorer or Finder, but you actually won’t have to have any of them on your local computer.

You’ll be able to tell which are local and which are cloud by the icon. Of course, you will need an internet connection to take advantage of this feature. So keep that in mind as you decide which files you want to sync.

The three OneDrive sync icons are:

Green check mark – stored on your computer
Cloud – stored in the cloud
Green check with filled green circle – currently syncing to your computer

Fixing OneDrive/SharePoint Sync Issues

Posted by Lynn Dye

· Thursday, September 8th, 2016

· No Comments

When you’re using the Groove sync client, it’s easy to get sync error notifications. Sometimes they are an easy fix and sometimes you can spend a lot of time trying to first locate and then correct issues. A quick way to fix OneDrive For Business/SharePoint sync issues is to stop syncing the affected folder, renaming it (you’ll see why), and then sync it fresh.

It can be a bit scary to stop syncing a folder the first time. You wonder if anything will happen to the contents of that folder. Here’s what happens:

you’ll get a message/warning that your files won’t sync anymore – say OK. This is what you want to do.
you’ll notice the ‘S’ icon disappears and there is just the regular folder icon. This means it’s not syncing anymore, but all your files are still in there – see the graphic.
it’s a good idea to rename the folder because when you start your fresh sync from on-line, it’ll put a ‘1’ at the end of the folder name. This is because you can’t have 2 folders with the same name.
after your site is synced fresh again, you can take the time to compare the folder size to the now unsynced folder and make sure all files are there. You can even open specific documents to check this out.
When you are synced up again, then you can delete the old folder, or save it for a while, if you wish.

All The Steps are In the Video

Watch the 4-minute video for all the steps to get your folders in sync again. The distinguishing among the sync clients is near the beginning.

It’s an easy way to quickly get your folders back into sync. One thing that happens when you do a resync – all the folder dates will then default to the current date. Some people really don’t like that feature – not sure if they are working to eliminate this or not.

How To Do An Initial OneDrive For Business Sync

Posted by Lynn Dye

· Thursday, September 1st, 2016

· No Comments

If you are putting Office 365 along with OneDrive for Business and SharePoint on a new computer or workstation, this video will show you how to start your first OneDrive For Business and SharePoint sync. (Windows 10.)

I’ll outline the general steps below, but check the video to catch all the detail. This video deals with how to do the OneDrive For Business & SharePoint syncs only.

Steps To Do An Initial OneDrive For Business Sync

I start with ODFB first, so log into microsoftonline.com and sign into your account and click on the ‘OneDrive’ icon
Click the ‘Sync’ at the top and click through the prompts (you’ll probably have to sign in again)
Choose which files/folders you want to download
Click to view your windows explorer and see the files and folders start to populate
If you’re on Win 10, click the window in the lower left and type in ‘OneDrive For Business’, and then click on the desktop app and it will start it up and you should now see your blue cloud in your system tray.
Now to back to the portal (on-line), click on SharePoint and go through the same steps to start syncing your SharePoint Sites. You’ll need to do them one by one (your sites).

Bonus Tip – Look at How To Tell Which Sync Engines Are Running on your Computer

Last week, I wrote about what’s going on with ODFB, Groove and which sync engine am I using. At the end of the video, I show you how to look at your own computer and see what you have running.

To do this, simply do a Ctrl+alt+del and this brings up your Task Manager and shows you what is running. Now click on the ‘Details’ tab. Scroll down – every running process is listed alphabetically. Here’s a look at mine.

I’m running 2 Groove sync engines – one on each identity. I should probably go and log out of the other identity so it doesn’t continue to run and take up resources, but that’s how you know what you’re running.

Simply click the ‘X’ in the upper right corner to exit – it won’t affect your system.

So that’s how to get started, or restarted with getting your sites synced up. Leave a comment with any comments or your suggestions.

office 365 subscription service advantages

Office 365 Home and Office 2013 Subscription Services

Posted by Lynn Dye

· Wednesday, April 20th, 2016

· No Comments

What software are you using for your email, spreadsheets, writing text and more? The two big dogs are Microsoft’s Office 365 (O365) and Google’s Google Apps. We’re going to look at Office 365 Home subscription services and give a run-down of what it is, what you get and what it costs.

Subscription services, sometimes called SaaS (software as a service), are pretty mainstream. How many of us have a monthly or yearly subscription to services such as Netflix, Amazon, Hulu, Hootsuite and more? Office 365 Home is a subscription you buy yearly for $99, not monthly.

With the Office 365 Home subscription, you get the software and service not only for you, but you can share it with up to 4 other people.

What You Get With Office 365 Home

The graphic below shows that you get Office 365 Home for 5 people. Each person gets:

the full installed Office 2013 on their local computers (automatic software updates for everyone)
they can use the 1 install across all their devices if they use the same login Microsoft account
they each get 1TB online storage – this is a major benefit because everyone with the consumer OneDrive is being notified from Microsoft that their storage is going down to 5GB. Simply having O365 boosts you to 1TB of OneDrive storage
60 minutes of Skype each month (this would be calling from your computer to any phone)

What You Get With Office 2013

You get the full installation of all the Office 2013 products on your computer, Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneNote, Outlook, Publisher and Access. Updates are automatically handled via your Windows Updates.

Here’s something I noticed about the Office 365 subscription I bought – looking at my account page, I’m noticing I can share an Office 2013 install with 4 other people AND I can share Office 365 with 4 other people.

The image below shows two parts of my subscription that can be shared separately. Right now, 4 people are using the Office 2013 installation and a different 4 people are using the Office 365.

Confusing? This is what I’ve discovered…

The people I shared an Office 2013 install with but not the Office 365, do not have the 1TB of storage or the Skype minutes.

Look at the two images below – the first image says 4 have installed Office 2013 on their PC/Mac and 4 have Office 365. They are not the same 4 people.

Sharing Office 365 Home and Office 2013 Separately

I started investigating the O365 and Office 2013 differences when I heard from my sister that she’d gotten the email from Microsoft saying she was using over 11GB of OneDrive storage and in July, she’s going to lose all but 5GB of that storage. Since she has an Office 2013 subscription, I couldn’t figure out why she wouldn’t have the 1TB of storage. That’s when I started looking into my Office 365 and Office 2013 subscriptions and found I could share O365 and Office 2013 separately!

I found I had shared only the Office 2013 install with my brother-in-law’s email address and that’s why my sister did not have the extra storage.

To fix this, I’m sending to my sister’s email address, a sharing link for Office 365. When she gets the email, clicks on the link and signs in with her Microsoft account (that I set up for her), then her storage will increase to 1TB. She is already using OneDrive to automatically upload and store her iPhone camera pictures and this will give her all the space she needs – even with taking pictures and videos every day of her new granddaughter!

Office 365 Home – A Bargain!

For $99/year, using Microsoft’s SaaS makes a lot of sense – I’m getting the latest Office software updated regularly. I have 1TB of storage for all of my stuff times 5. If you have multiple Microsoft accounts as I do, you can share the other storage or installs with those accounts, or you can do as I have and share them out.

Take a look at the Microsoft site and compare and contrast the offerings and choose what’s right for you. Leave a comment about O365, Google Apps or whatever is working for you.

Office 365 Adds Auditing and Storage Upgrades

Posted by Lynn Dye

· Thursday, February 25th, 2016

· No Comments

The Office 365 Team published a blog article on Feb. 16, 2016 about auditing features and storage upgrades just added to Office 365. We’re going to look at the auditing features administrators can get, how our storage limits have increased and a larger size upload for documents.

Here’s a 4 minute video I’ve done that gives a tour of these three areas I’ve detailed below.

Files Up To 10GB Can Be Uploaded to O365

The promised increase in per-file limit uploads has finally happened. Now users can upload files up to 10GB into SharePoint 2013, Groups, OneDrive for Business and Sites. Nice.

O365 Increased Storage Limits

Everyone’s storage limits should already be increased to the 1TB level (unless you’re an Enterprise client, then I believe you have unlimited storage). I checked mine by going to: Admin>SharePoint>Settings. My tenant now has 1TB of storage of which I’ve only used 2.46GB.

New Auditing and Investigative Services in O365

The new auditing features are quite an upgrade for admins. Previously, anyone could see who last revised a file or who is currently working on the file (from the web interface).

Now admins can dig much deeper, looking at who may have created a particular group, who shared a document with someone externally, who moved a file from one site to another and so much more.

Below is just a snippet of all the items that can be audited. This article has tutorials on the various O365 searches that can be performed.

You do have to opt-into start auditing, or nothing will happen. After you opt-in, then auditing will start from that point going forward. When you first go to this site, you’ll see where you click – it’s not seen below because I’ve already opted in.

Since menus and options change rapidly from within the Office 365 interface, the fastest way to get to the auditing features are to go to http://protection.office.com. As long as you’re signed in, you should come to a menu like the one below. Then click on Search and Investigation and then audit log search.

The new Office 365 Reporting Center has tools for eDiscovery, governance and so much more. Check it out, opt-in to have Office 365 monitor the behind the scenes goings-on for you and be informed.

Office 365 Clutter Feature

Posted by Lynn Dye

· Tuesday, October 6th, 2015

· No Comments

The Office 365 Clutter feature is a machine learning software that silently watches your email habits in the background and then after a while, starts moving emails it has noticed you’re not opening and moves them to the Clutter folder.

Clutter came out in November, 2014 and was originally turned off for every user. As of June this year (2015), this feature is now automatically enabled for everyone. If you’re an Office 365 user, you may or may not have noticed a Clutter folder under your inbox. It took me a while to notice it was there as I have quite a few folders as sub-folders of my inbox.

Here’s a look at my Clutter folder and the contents. Clutter noticed that I never opened up any of my birthday email reminders, so now they all go in there. In a way, I like it as I don’t do much with them. In another way, I have missed some people’s birthdays because they all go in there. After all, it would be kind of spooky and creepy if Clutter knew who my close friends are! So a shortcoming of Clutter is that it could move some emails we don’t want moved. Also, I have my email set with a reading pane on the right, so I don’t need to open all emails. This could also cause some ‘mistakes’ for Clutter.

Train Clutter

Clutter is trainable. You can take an integral part in training Clutter. Yes, Clutter emails me every week or so and asks me to take some time to check my folder and if there are things in there that shouldn’t be, just drag them back into the inbox and Clutter will learn to not put them in anymore – smart.

Conversely, if there are emails you don’t want to see, drag them into the Clutter folder and Clutter will learn from your actions.

If you are the administrator of your office’s Office 365 tenant (account), you have the power to turn Clutter off and on for all or selected users. This article has more information on that.

End-User Has Power Over Clutter Too

The end-user still has control over using Clutter or not. Now that it’s been turned on by default, here are the steps for turning it off.

Log into your web O365 account and click on ‘Mail’.
Click on the gear icon located in the upper right part of the page.
Click on ‘Options.
Click on ‘Clutter’ in the list and make your selections.

As you see from my Clutter options below I’m having Clutter continue watching my email and I’m getting weekly notifications about what’s been moved.

Depending on your email volume, Clutter may or may not save you a lot of time. Since it’s now on by default, you might as well take a look inside your Clutter folder and see what is or isn’t working for you.

Contest Results for My Email Subscribers

You may recall the book give away contest announced last week. Well, since there were no responses, either the give away wasn’t very enticing or my questions were asking too much of you all or you aren’t a very chatty group 🙂

So I’ll think about making it easier for you to answer questions – because I do want to write about what you are wanting to hear about.

contest from last week

Share Your Microsoft Documents Without The Cloud

Posted by Lynn Dye

· Tuesday, July 1st, 2014

· No Comments

There are continual updates to Office 365 and OneDrive. One of them is a streamlined way to send documents without having to log into your cloud account as long as your documents are stored in OneDrive. Streamlined meaning you don’t send the document itself, instead you’re sending the recipients a link. We’re going to step you through how to do it.

Before this update appeared, if you wanted to share a document with someone, you had to log into the OneDrive website, then navigate to the file(s) you wanted to share and then click the checkbox next to the file name and click ‘Share’, then either fill out the form that would pop up, or get a link from the pop-up form and insert it in your own email client. That’s a lot of steps and an interruption of your work flow.

I wish I could say it was as easy as being in the desktop Outlook client and clicking the ‘insert attachment’ to get a link and send the link out. (Now this will be a feature very soon in the web Office 365 Outlook client, but not desktop). It’s a bit more work than that, but you won’t have to log into the OneDrive web app. I’ve tested this when selecting documents from my OneDrive for Business and my regular OneDrive. Both work the same way.

Send a Sharing Link From Microsoft Office

So I have a PowerPoint document that I’m ready to send to someone. From PowerPoint, I click on ‘File’, this takes me to the backstage area of PowerPoint. Now click on ‘Share’. Over to the right, you’ll get the ‘Invite People’ pop-up. From here, it functions pretty much like if you’re in the cloud. Type a person’s email address or get a link. There’s a box for you to type in a message and also a check-box if you want the person to be able to edit the document.

Then you can either send the document from the backstage area or get the link and go to your email client and send from there – either works. So you’ve saved yourself a bit of time not having to go to the cloud to send your doc or get your link.

In order for this to work, you will have had to have your OneDrive app or apps (there’s a separate app for OneDrive for Business), downloaded and set up. To give you a look at how it looks set up, I’ve got a snippet of how I have my computer set up.

The first icon represents my SharePoint storage with Office 365 and OneDrive for Business. The second icon (both have ‘S’ for SharePoint’, represents my personal storage with OneDrive for Business. By the way, my storage limit will go up to 1TB in July, 2014!

The other two icons are my consumer OneDrive storage accounts. I have 2 Microsoft accounts that I use and I set them both up so I can save to either account. Nice.

Sharing documents with a link, especially large docs, is the best and fastest way to get documents to friends or co-workers. It doesn’t have to be Microsoft documents, you can share just about any kind of file with OneDrive.

Is your computer set up to use OneDrive? There are apps for Windows, iOS, Android, tablets and phones. It’s great to open my OneDrive app on my Surface and all my documents are there, just like they are on my desktop, laptop and phone. Save it on one device and it gets saved everywhere.

Archive for Office 365

OneDrive Files On Demand

OneDrive Files On Demand

The three OneDrive sync icons are:

Fixing OneDrive/SharePoint Sync Issues

All The Steps are In the Video

How To Do An Initial OneDrive For Business Sync

Steps To Do An Initial OneDrive For Business Sync

Bonus Tip – Look at How To Tell Which Sync Engines Are Running on your Computer

Office 365 Adds Auditing and Storage Upgrades

Files Up To 10GB Can Be Uploaded to O365

O365 Increased Storage Limits

New Auditing and Investigative Services in O365

Office 365 Clutter Feature

Train Clutter

End-User Has Power Over Clutter Too

Contest Results for My Email Subscribers

YouTube Channel

Categories

Archive for Office 365

OneDrive Files On Demand

The three OneDrive sync icons are:

All The Steps are In the Video

Steps To Do An Initial OneDrive For Business Sync

Bonus Tip – Look at How To Tell Which Sync Engines Are Running on your Computer

What You Get With Office 365 Home

What You Get With Office 2013

Office 365 Home – A Bargain!

Files Up To 10GB Can Be Uploaded to O365

O365 Increased Storage Limits

New Auditing and Investigative Services in O365

Exchange/Public Folder for Calendars

How to Find Public Folders and Public Folder Mailboxes

Train Clutter

End-User Has Power Over Clutter Too

Contest Results for My Email Subscribers

Send a Sharing Link From Microsoft Office

YouTube Channel

Categories