The access to all of the Microsoft Online services is done through something called the “Sign In” application.  You have to download it and install it on desktops that want to use email, livemeeting and sharepoint.

The first thing you need to do is to create a user account in the Administrator Portal and give them a license to use the service.  Begin by logging onto our Administration Portal, and clicking "Create New User" from the homepage, or under the "Users" tab.  Run through the New User wizard, and be sure to write down the user name and password you've given the user.

The next step is to download the Sign In client and install it on your desktop.  Again, from the Administration Portal, click on “Support” then “Downloads”.  Download the "Sign In" tool from there and install it.  It will ask you to login... use the login and password for the user you just created.  Then it will ask you to change the password to something more memorable (our temporary passwords are terrible... I know!).  The next step is for you to auto-configure your desktop.  This will create a new outlook profile for you, and then allow you to start USING your services.  For instance, if you click the little "down" arrow next to "Email and Calendaring" you will then see "Microsoft Office Outlook Web Access", clicking on that will take you to OWA.

Any questions, please feel free to drop me a note!  caseymck **_at_** microsoft dot com

One of the new features we're working on for the next release of Microsoft Online Services is the ability to bulk import up to 500 users into the system so you can get your company up and running with our service.  We're debating internally one aspect of our design and I would be interested in hearing from IT people around the world what they think.

 Our current design is as follows:

- You upload a CSV file and we create the user accounts for you

- Then you select those users and can activate them using our activation wizard

- The activation wizard gives these users passwords and assigns them a license

 
The debate is whether or not we should combine the import/creation process with the password creation and license assignment functionality.

Here are the pros/cons as I see them:

Pros:

- You get your users running with a single wizard

Cons:

- This wizard will need to be about 6 steps as opposed to 3 during import and 3 during activation

-  You have to assign the same licenses to all of the imported users, and you dont get the flexibility to assign certain users certain licenses

-  If you import 500 users, you may not want to create 500 passwords right away, instead you might want to activate 100 users at a time, or do it by department.

 All that said, I would love to hear what you think.  Your ideas here can influence our design!
 

I'm the User Experience Program Manager for Microsoft Online, and am constantly researching design principles and guidelines.  I'm going to start adding links to news articles I find to my blog. Hope you enjoy them...

	Debunking the myths of UI design:

One of the first things you will want to do to get up and running with Microsoft Online is to start creating a few users in your system.  The first thing I would say is that I recommend you create an Admin account for yourself, and delete the default "admin@" account that gets automatically created for you when you sign up for the service.  That first administrator doesnt have a license automatically assigned to them, and it can be difficult sometimes when trying to give him licenses, or when trying to access services before giving him a license.  Let's walk through the process of creating your first "clean" admin account.

Logging In 

 Login using the credentials that were provided from the "Microsoft Online Customer Portal"  (We call this "MOCP" internally), this account will look something like admin@mycompany.microsoftonline.com. Navigate to the Admin Center (http://admin.microsoftonline.com) and input your login credentials.  It will ask you to change your password to something personal.. note that you have to give a password that contains letters, numbers, uppercase & lowercase, as well as at least one "special" character (!@#$%^&*, etc.).  Now that you've logged, lets create the user.

Creating the User

From the homepage, click on "Users" in the top-level navigation, now click on "User List", you will see the full list of users in your company (like just one person at this time, "admin@").  Now click "New User" in the Actions pane on the right, and the "New User Wizard" will appear.  On the first page, you will enter all of the user personal information.  In the "username" field, enter a nice alias that that user will want to have, this will be their email address, so make it something short and easy and 8 characters or less.  Using their firstname and their first initial is probably good enough for a small company.  In the domain drop-down you will see something that looks like "mycompany.microsoftonline.com" which will do for now, but you will want to add your own custom domain to this drop-down for most of your users.

NOTE:  Once you give someone a username & domain, this CANNOT BE CHANGED!  So please be thoughtful about the username and domain you're giving to the user.

The "Display Name" field is what will show up in Outlook when someone gets an email from this user, so be thoughtful about that as well.  Typically, users will want to see their full name in the "Display Name" field such as "Bob MacKenzie" or "Alanis Morissette".

The second screen is all about security.  The first think you'll see there is the user's password, but dont worry about writing it down... at the end of the wizard you will have an option to email this user account information to yourself, the person's manager, or the user themselves if they already have an existing email address with another system.  On this page you can also make this person an administrator, which would give them access to the Administration Center.  Dont give anyone access to the Admin Center that you wouldnt want playing with user accounts, Exchange, SharePoint, etc... admins hold a lot of power and things can go wrong if someone who means well starts making changes you're not aware of.  You can also disable this persons account so they cannot login yet.  For the average user, you'll just want to write down the password, and leave the settings at their default.

The next page is assigning Services to the user.  In our current Beta, there's only one license to assign, and EVERY USER MUST HAVE A LICENSE.  So make sure you click the checkbox next to the "Suite" license, otherwise an error will be shown when you try to create the user.  Once you've done that, click "Create".  Now your user is created, and they are ready to login!  They will have access to email, SharePoint, and Livemeeting - how exciting!

 Stay tuned to our next article where I will talk about the joys of SMTP Domain Verification!

 Casey

Today Bill Gates announced our project at the big SharePoint Conference here in Seattle.  Our very own John Betz even gave a demo of our user experience which we've been working on for over a year!  

SharePoint Online allows our customers with small and midsized companies (between 50 and 500 PCs) to get all of the rich functionality of sharepoint wihtout having to host and manage it  themselves.   Microsoft is now hosting SharePoint in their datacenters, and we make it super-simple to manage all of your users and SharePoint sites using our Administration Center. 

 Simultaneously, we're also launching Exchange Online which is a hosted version of Exchange available as part of our "Business Productivity Online" offerring.  Now you can get all of the rich functionality in Outlook without having to host or manage your own exchange servers.  We're also including LiveMeeting in this package, and its integrated into the system as well. All this is wrapped into an easy-to-use experience that integrates the functionality of each of these offerrings and makes user management and licensing for these items very simple.

My role on this project is as the User Experience Lead which helps define the user interface, information architecture, and flow.  I've been working on this particular team for about 1 year, with a total of 5 years at Microsoft in various "systems management experience" projects.  There's going to be a lot more talk on this blog about how to use the service, and I will answer any questions you have about this new service.

If you're interested in learning a bit about the project I'm working on, we now have some "marketing-level" information posted online at Microsoft's website:

 http://www.microsoft.com/online/default.mspx

We're working specifically on the "Online" portion of Microsoft's upcoming service offerrings.  For instance, here's the part about our "Benefits" to IT managers in mid-sized companies:

Online services help optimize your business by providing:

I would love to hear from you about what your thoughts are on these benefits, and if there's one area in particular that you think will have the biggest impact on your business.

I cant even tell you about the program its so top secret!  But if you're interested in participating in a technology adoption program as part of Microsoft's future "Software + Services" offerring, drop me an email (caseymck at microsoft dot com ).

We're looking for IT Administrators in United States companies with up to 500 employees to participate in this program.  If you're at all interested, just drop me a line, with verifiable information about your company (industry, company size, current network platform, etc). and I can give you some background information. 

One of the features I'm working on will allow you to establish a user profile for email, which will do things like limit their email quota, set their max send and receive size of email messages, and if Outlook web access should be enabled/disabled.  There's a bunch of other settings as well, but you get the point.

 My question for you, as a mid-sized business IT person, if these settings were grouped into a set of pre-defined templates, how many templates would you feasibly need for your company?  Here's a sample of what I mean...

Let's say you have an "Executive" template, which allows for a 3 GB mailbox size, a big send limit, and use of OWA.  And then you have a "Factory worker" template with a 500 MB mailbox size, a 3 MB send/recieve limit, and no acecss to OWA.  How many of these templates would you need?  What would they be?

 Thanks in advance for your participation in this very un-scientific survey.