Microsoft Lystavlen - the Online display board

Lystavlen is the danish word for 'the display board'. This blog is all about sharing the beauty of Microsoft Online Services

September, 2011

  • Office 365 - comparing P and E plans

    If you are looking for a comparison between the P1 plan and the E plans in Office 365 you might find this table of notes helpful.

    Please note that the table is without responsibility. It is compiled by myself and might not be accurate at the time you read it (things change). It should only be used as an inspiration as to which features you might want to take into considerations when comparing the P plan to the E plans.

    Change log

    1. Password Expiration (O365) entry removed - seems to be 90 days for P plan as well as E plans (10/13/11)
    2. Cancellation Fees (O365) entry added (10/14/11)
    3. Recipient Rate Limits (EXO) entry added (10/22/11)
    4. Workflow Actions (SPO) entry added (11/4/11)
    5. Domain management (O365) entry added (11/18/11)
    6. Free Feature Preview (SPO) update to PAL entry (12/9/11)
    7. Recipient Rate Limit (EXO) increased to 1500 for P1 (1/6/12)
    8. Business Connectivity Services (SPO) update to Enterprise Features (1/6/12)
    9. Understanding Storage Allocation in SharePoint Online (SPO) reference added to Buy Additional Storage entry (1/20/12)
    10. Access Services and Enterprise Features (SPO) clarifications (1/20/12)
    11. Unlimited Archive (EXO) new add-on option to E1/2 plan added (1/20/12)
    12. Online Meeting Attendants (LYN) now 250 in P plan also (2/24/12)
    13. Compliance capabilities (EXO) added (3/7/2012)
    14. Missing support for Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011 List Component for SharePoint (SPO) added (3/15/2012)
    15. Number of free Partner Access Licenses (PALs) entry (SPO) updated (5/23/2012)
    16. Communities Capability entry (SPO) corrected and added link (5/24/2012)
    17. Built-in workflows entry (SPO) added (6/16/2012)
    18. New article on the February 2013 release of Office 365 here (3/30/2013)

      

    Feature

    Plan P

    Plan E

    Service*

    Notes

    AD synchronization

    No 

    Yes

    365

    P plan customers are limited to managing their users in the Cloud Admin Interface. Many small businesses have Active Directory due to the success of the Small Business Server product line. E Plan subscribers can use the directory synchronization tool to replicate users, contacts, distribution lists, and other objects into Office 365 - P1 Plan users cannot. If you want directory synchronization, you must purchase an E plan.

    Fee When Cancelling Subscription

    No 

    Yes
    (
    see note)

    365

    Cancellations within the first 30 days are allowed at no fee (P plan is based on monthly payments, E on a 12-month subscription term). Cancellations within the last 11 months of the subscription term are allowed. You will be responsible for paying 25% of the remaining value of your subscription - see the Purchase and Support Guide for more - link

    Combine w/ K plan

    No 

    Yes

    365

    A combination of E and K workers might be less of a cost than all users on P (a 25 user scenario all on P compared to a 5 user on E1 and 20 on K1 will actually save 14%)

    Domain Management

    DNS manager on the Office 365 Admin page

    Domain registrar, or on premises 

    365

    A few but important differences exists in how you work with domains, set up public facing websites etc, in a P compared to an E subscription - link

    Max # Org Users

    50

    “No” limit

    365

    If you plan to grow beyond 50 people you should not opt for the P plan. You can not switch from P1 to E plan.

    Phone support

     No

    Yes

    365

    P plan customers in need of support will have to search for answers on the Community section of their Office 365 portal (or call their partner if they have a support agreement)

    Single Sign On

    No 

    Yes

    365

    With single sign on the customer need only to provide the domain password

    Administer AV/AS

     No

    Yes

    EXO

    Administer FOPE (white list, black list)

    IRM/RMS

     No

    Yes

    EXO

    IRM provides online and offline protection of e-mail messages and supported attachments. IRM protection can be applied by users in Outlook or Outlook Web App, and it can be applied by administrators using transport protection rules and Outlook protection rules. IRM helps administrators and users control who can access, forward, print, or copy sensitive data within e-mail messages. Note that IRM requires that you have an Active Directory Rights Management Services (AD RMS) server deployed in your on-premises organization

    Direct Offboarding/
    deprovisioning

     No

    Yes

    EXO

    The ability to do direct offboarding to Exchange 2003 or 2007 or 2010 on-premises (requires Exchange 2010 CAS server)

    Recipient Rate Limits

     500

    1500

    1500

    EXO

    The maximum number of recipients that can receive e-mail messages sent from a single cloud-based mailbox in a 24 hour period - see "Understanding Recipient Rate Limits"

    1/6/12 - in December 2011 the P1 plan increased from 500 to 1500 - link

    Rich coexistence (Hybrid)

     No

    Yes

    EXO

    If you already have an Exchange Server on prem and needs to maintain some of the users there

    Transport Rules

     No

    Yes

    EXO

    Transport rules let you control the flow of and apply messaging policies to e-mail messages sent within your organization and sent in to and out of your organization. Using transport rules, administrators can define specific message attributes, or conditions, and the actions to apply to any message that contain those attributes. For example, you can use transport rules append a disclaimer to message sent outside your organization or prevent e-mail communication between specific groups of users. Transport protection rules let you use transport rules to IRM-protect messages by applying an AD RMS rights policy template.

    Disclamers - see this article

    Journaling

     No

    Yes

    EXO

    Journaling can help your organization respond to legal, regulatory, and organizational compliance requirements by recording inbound and outbound e-mail communications. Journal rules are used to record, or "journal", the e-mail messages sent to or from specific recipients. When a message matches the criteria defined by the journal rule, a journal report that contains the original message is generated and sent to a journaling mailbox

    Litigation Hold

     No

    Yes (E3/4)

    EXO

    You can put a litigation hold, also known as legal hold, on a mailbox to preserve e-mail messages and other mail items for an extended period. Litigation hold also prevents items from being permanently deleted. When a user's mailbox is put on litigation hold, the user can purge items from their mailbox but the items are retained indefinitely on the servers in the Microsoft datacenter. Litigation hold also maintains the version history for items that are modified

    Multi-Mailbox Search

     No

    Yes

    EXO

    Discovery harnesses Multi-Mailbox Search, a GUI-based tool that allows legal and human resource professionals and other discovery managers to search primary and archive mailboxes across your organization for messages that match specified criteria. Because discovery searches don’t require full administrative permissions, you can assign regular users the necessary permissions to search mailboxes and limit the scope of mailboxes that a person can search. The results of a multi-mailbox search can be printed or exported to a .PST file by using Microsoft Outlook.

    Personal Archive

     Yes

    Combined total size of 25 GB for primary and archive mailboxes

    Yes

    Combined total size of 25 GB for primary and archive mailboxes for E1/2*

    100 GB default quota for E3/4**

    EXO

    You can create an archive mailbox, called a personal archive, for a user's primary cloud-based mailbox. Users can use the archive mailbox to store historical messaging data by moving or copying messages from their primary mailbox to their archive mailbox. Administrators and users can use MRM (Messaging records management) features to automatically move messages that reach a certain age to the archive mailbox. Because items in a user’s archive mailbox are indexed, archive mailboxes are included in a multi-mailbox search

    *E1/2 will be able to add compliance archive to the subscription as an add-on

    **a default quota of 100 GB is set on the personal archive, which will generally accommodate reasonable use, including the import of one user’s historical email. In the unlikely event that a user reaches this quota, a call to Office 365 support is required. Administrators cannot adjust this quota upward or downward.

    No option to add compliance archive to P plan

    Unified Messaging

     No

    Yes (E3/4)

    EXO

    Voice Mail in the Inbox (no need to call up the voice mail service from your phone)

    Lync Rich Client

    Yes

    E3/4 rich client via OPP

    LYN

    A limited time offer gives one licensed copy of Lync 2010 at no cost to every trial or paid E1, E2 and Lync Online standalone subscription license.

    Online Meetings # participants

    50
    250

    250

    LYN

    Online meetings – e.g. product presentations/launches

    2/24/12 updated to 250 for P also - link

    Integration with Messenger

    (Temporarily removed)

    Yes

    LYN

    Temporarily removed to avoid users using vanity or custom domain (i.e. yourcompanyname.com) with both Office 365 and Messenger being unable to access their Messenger accounts.

    Microsoft Support will post updates to this article

     

    Office Web Apps

    Yes

    Yes – but no
    editing in E1

    OfWA

    The Office Web Apps in the E1 plan only allows for read only access to the documents

    # Site Collections

    1

    300

    SPO

    If you have projects that need to be isolated from each other, you should create separate site collections for them. For example, it might make sense for the engineering department to have a site collection that’s separated from the legal department. 

    Each site within a site collection shares attributes inherited from the site collection such as templates that can be applied, permissions, and other settings that flow down from the site collection to the sites.  

    Having one site collection will probably not create a large impact for most small businesses of 25 users or less. Multiple site collections are useful when unique teams want their own workspace and separate security settings. You can still control security within sites, but there are considerations to manage, such as giving external users access to sites, which can give them access to the entire site collection.

    Access Services

    Yes

    Yes*

    SPO

    P plan customers can publish Microsoft Access databases to SharePoint Online and share them with other users. Reduce database versioning problems, and simplify deployment of Access forms and reports, while reducing governance risks.

    *E1 and E2  users are not allowed to access Enterprise Features of SPO, whereas E3 and E4 users can build and visit Access-based webpages

    The missing InfoPath option in P can be mitigated by the Access Forms options

    Buy Additional SPO storage

     No

    Yes

    SPO

    You may need more storage at some point in time. On the E plan you can purchase extra storage up to 5 TB 25 TB in total. P1 limited to 35GB.

    3/8/12 updated to 25 TB

    See also: Understanding storage allocation in SharePoint Online

    Communities Capability (Tags, Ratings and more)

     No*

    Yes

    SPO

    The ability to tag content (metadata) and rate content for easy discovery

    *most features unavailable, but blogs and wikis supported, see: Comparing features in SharePoint Online across Office 365 Service Plans for more

    Dual Rights

     No

    Yes

    SPO

    E plan users are licensed to access information on on-premises SharePoint servers (important in hybrid scenarios).

    Whitepaper: "Hybrid SharePoint Environments with Office 365" - link

    Enterprise Features like Forms Services, Excel Services, and Visio Services as well as Business Connectivity Services (BCS)

    No 

    Yes*

    SPO

    Many business productivity scenarios opens up with the Enterprise capabilities (Electronic Forms for e.g. Timeregistration, simple BI like performance indicators, process support like Workflows and Workflow visualization)

    *E1 and E2 users are not allowed to access Enterprise Features of SPO. E3 and E4 users can view and upload Visio diagram, build and view embedded Excel graphs and create/publish, fill in and submit InfoPath forms.

    Business Connectivity Services (BCS) in SharePoint Online enables customers to connect to external data sources via Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) Web Services endpoints in both read and write modes (implemented in SPO Nov 2011) - link

    See also: Comparing features in SharePoint Online across Office 365 Service Plans

    Number of free Partner Access Licenses (PALs, "External Users")

    500

    no ability to increase cap

    10,000

    ability to
    increase cap

    SPO

    The "Extranet" capability is very attractive to many Office 365 customers.

    The P plan does not include the ability to increase the cap beyond 500 PALs.

    My Site

     No

    Yes

    SPO

    The My Site can be positioned as “your new C: drive – a central yet private location for your personal documents”.

    See also: Comparing features in SharePoint Online across Office 365 Service Plans

    SSL

     No

    Yes

    SPO

    SSL encrypts the traffic between your computer and the Microsoft data center hosting SharePoint Online. Since SSL is not available with SharePoint Online in the P1 plan, documents you transmit to and from the Microsoft data center are transmitted “in the clear”. This may be an important consideration in your choice of plans.

    In addition, the unavailability of SSL affects several SharePoint Online features : 

    • Open in Windows Explorer
    • Import a Microsoft Excel worksheet
    • Save a new document (that was derived from a content type template document associated with a specific document library) to the site from which it was created
    • Create a meeting workspace from Outlook
    • View Lync presence information for other users
    • Connect to a site from the Office Hub on your Windows Phone 7

    More information here under the heading “Plan for SSL considerations”

    Built-in Workflows

    1

    5

    SPO

    The Three-state workflow is built into both plans

    The following four workflows are built into the E plan, but are not supported in the P plan: Approval, Collect Feedback, Collect Signatures, Disposition Approval

    See also: About the workflows included with SharePoint

    Workflow Actions

    Some Unsupported

    Yes

    SPO

    You can create and customize workflows in SharePoint Designer. The following workflow actions are not supported in the P plan:

    Start Document Set Approval Process, Capture a Version of a Document Set, Send Document Set to Repository, Set Content Approval Status of the Document Set, Start Approval Process, Start Feedback Process, Start Custom Task Process, Declare Record, Undeclare Record, Lookup Manager of a User, End Task Process, Set Content Approval Status (as author), Wait for Change in Task Process Item, Set Task Field, Rescind Task, Append Task, Delegate Task, Escalate Task, Forward Task, Insert Task, Reassign Task, Request a Change, Send Task Email - link.
    No workaround is available.

    To use these SharePoint workflow actions, you must have the E plan - link

    Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011 List Component for SharePoint

     No

    Yes

    SPO

    No support for Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011 List Component for SharePoint in the P plan

    In the E plans Sharepoint Online supports full integration as well allowing document management of your CRM created customers/contacts to be held within your Sharepoint online site

    *service: SPO = SharePoint Online, EXO = Exchange Online, LYN = Lync Online, OfWA = Office Web Apps, 365 = Office 365

  • Office 365 passer på dine mails

    Er du kommet til at slette en mail og ydermere kommet til at tømme papirkurven ("Deleted Items")?  Fortvivl ikke - i Exchange Online kan du selv gendanne en 'slettede slettede' mails.

    En slettet mail vil blive gemt i din ”Deleted Items” mappe indtil den manuelt fjernes af dig (en såkaldt soft delete), eller bliver fjernet automatisk ifølge dit firmas Retention Policies. Det sidste er som standard efter 30 dage (men kan ændres).

    Efter en mail er blevet fjernet fra ”Deleted Items” mappen kommer den over i en mappe kaldet ”Recoverable Items” hvor den ligger i yderligere 14 dage før den fjernes permanent. Denne 14-dages periode kaldes for Retention perioden.

    Sålænge din slettede mail ligger i "Recoverable Items" kan du selv gendanne mailen ved hjælp af funktionen Recover Deleted Items i Outlook Web App eller Outlook (se ovenfor).  Hvis du manuelt har renset mailen ud af mappen ”Recoverable Items” (kaldet en purge) kan en administrator gendanne mailen indenfor det samme 14 dages vindue, ved hjælpe af en funktion kaldet Single Item Recovery (muligt, idet purgede emails gemmes i en undermappe kaldet ”Purges”).

    Hvis du ønsker at ændre Retention perioden for slettede mails i din virksomhed, skal du kontakte Office 365 support. Retention perioden kan ændres til hvad som helst, men hvis du ønsker at bevare slettede mails i mere end 30 dage, skal den pågældende mailbox have en Exchange Online Plan 2 user license.

    Læs evt mere her.

  • Office 365 - nem extranet lignende funktionalitet

    Mange har fået øjnene op for hvor nemt og billigt det er at arbejde sammen med eksterne samarbejdspartnere ved hjælp af SharePoint Onlines extranet lignende funktionalitet. Du kan dele en eller flere site collections (og dermed dokument biblioteker og dokumenter) med folk udenfor din egen organisation - og dermed slippe for at sende dokumenter og informationer rundt i emails eller bruge andre distributionsmetoder.

    For at dele en site collection med eksterne kræves blot to simple trin: et kryds i Admin settings ("Manage External Users" - se ovenfor) og den rette feature aktiveret i site collection features ("External user invitations" - se nedenfor). Herefter er du klar til at invitere eksterne indenfor via email ("Share Site" - se nedenfor). De første 50 eksterne er gratis (vi tæller unikke besøgende på én måned). Skal du bruge flere kan du købe flere til (på E planen). [Opdatering 16. november 2011; indtil næste større version af Office 365 er det tilladt at invitere op til 1.000 eksterne ind uden beregning - et såkaldt "feature preview". Herefter er det muligt at Microsoft indfører betaling herfor.]

     

    De eksterne brugere kan - via deres egen Office pakke - oprette dokumenter og uploade dem til SharePoint sitet (og efterfølgende redigere dokumenterne forstås). Skal de blot se et dokument på SharePoint sitet kan de tillige anvende vores Office Web Apps.

    Læs evt mere i SharePoint Online Service Descriptions, som du finder på siden med alle vore Service Descriptions her

  • Office 365 på din smartphone

    Office 365 giver den bedste produktivitet i Skyen på tværs af din PC, smartphone og browser. Office 365 er designet med nutidens mobile brugere for øje, og det at være produktiv er nu om dage ensbetydende med at kunne arbejde når du på farten, også når du er uden din PC.

    For dig der er på farten, er det afgørende at kunne arbejde med din Indbakke, din kalender, dine kontaktpersoner og dine opgaver for at du kan være produktiv. Om det så er at tygge dig igennem dine e-mails i en taxa eller finde plads til endnu et møde i din kalender – så betyder det at kunne presse det meste ud af hvert minut du er på farten, at du er bedre forberedt, bedre informeret og på forkant med din Indbakke.

    Office 365 understøtter Active Sync, en fælles e-mail-protokol, der giver mulighed for tovejssynkronisering af dine informationer på tværs af de fleste smartphone platforme, herunder Windows Phone, iPhone, Android, Blackberry og Nokia (Symbian). I tabellen nedenfor kan du se hvilken funktionalitet der understøttes på de enkelte smartphone platforme:

    Feature

    Windows 
      Mobile 6.x

    Windows 
      Phone 7

    iOS
    iPhone/iPad

    Nokia 
      (Symbian)

    Android 
      2.0

    Palm OS

    BlackBerry 4.X
    and above
     

    Push Email

    Yes

    Yes

    Yes

    Yes

    Yes

    Yes

    Yes

    Email Sync

    Yes

    Yes

    Yes

    Yes

    Yes

    Yes

    Yes

    Calendar Sync

    Yes

    Yes

    Yes

    Yes

    Yes

    Yes

    Yes

    Contacts Sync

    Yes

    Yes

    Yes

    Yes

    Yes

    Yes

    Yes

    Tasks Sync

    Yes

    No

    No

    Yes

    No

    Yes

    Yes

    Remote Wipe

    Yes

    Yes

    Yes

    Yes

    Yes

    Yes

    Yes

    Sync Multiple Folders

    Yes

    Yes

    Yes

    Yes

    Yes

    Yes

    Yes

    GAL Lookup

    Yes

    Yes

    Yes

    Yes

    Yes

    Yes

    Yes

    SSL Encrypted Transmission

    Yes

    Yes

    Yes

    Yes

    Yes

    Yes

    Yes

    Auto-Discovery

    Yes

    Yes

    Yes

    Yes

    Yes

    No

    Yes

    Pin Reset

    Yes

    No

    No

    No

    No

    No

    Yes