Microsoft Online Services Team Blog : Tips and Tricks

Should you be using SharePoint Designer?

JimGlynn — Fri, 30 Oct 2009 23:21:00 GMT

You probably already know that you can use Microsoft SharePoint Online to store, share, and manage files as well as build collaboration solutions for your organization. Have you ever wished that you could:

Customize the content and layout of SharePoint Online pages to look exactly the way you want?
Create views and forms that use the data view Web part to integrate with external data sources?
Use custom workflows to automate your business processes without writing code?

Microsoft Office SharePoint Designer can help you with these and many other tasks, and the SharePoint Online Developer Guide is a good resource for instruction and tips for using the Designer to customize your SharePoint Online collections.

SharePoint Designer 2007 provides the powerful tools you need to deliver compelling and attractive sites, workflow-enabled applications, and reporting tools on the SharePoint Online platform. SharePoint Designer 2007 is available as a free download from the Microsoft Download Center.

For more information about SharePoint Designer 2007, see:

Trial Guide for Microsoft Online Services is Published

paulenglis — Tue, 05 May 2009 23:36:00 GMT

A new Trial Guide for Microsoft Online Services has been published and is available from the Microsoft Download Center.

If you are considering the Business Productivity Online Suite from Microsoft Online Services and want to start a 30-day trial of the services, the Trial Guide will help you get started with the trial and work through several common administrative and end-user tasks. The guide provides step-by-step instructions for several scenarios, including:

· Setting up a 30-day trial account in the Microsoft Online Customer Portal (MOCP)

· Basic account administration

· SharePoint Online administration

· Setting up the end user experience

· Converting a trial account to a paid subscription

Frequently Asked Questions About Microsoft Online

arvindsuthar — Tue, 17 Mar 2009 12:08:00 GMT

Our Support and Documentation teams scoured the TechNet Forums for the attached set of frequently asked questions.

We expect to add to this list over time based on your questions. Let us know what you think through our feedback form or in the comments below.

Arvind Suthar

Director, Service

Microsoft Online

Customize your Microsoft SharePoint Online experience. Read the new Developer’s Guide

Lori - Microsoft — Tue, 13 Jan 2009 00:13:00 GMT

In the new Microsoft SharePoint Online Developer’s Guide find out how you can customize your company’s SharePoint experience so that it answers your specific business needs. Learn the key steps to installing and customizing SharePoint Online applications, ways to integrate live data; provide your team with custom no-code workflows, and learn how to extend SharePoint online with Microsoft Silverlight.

Transferring account ownership

arvindsuthar — Fri, 19 Dec 2008 07:10:00 GMT

The person who signs up for Microsoft Online may not be the person who purchases it. And the person who purchases Microsoft Online may not be the one who renews it. As a Program Manager on the Microsoft Online team, Ruchi is focused on the Microsoft Online Customer Portal and the platform that our customers and partners use to sign up for and purchase online services. I have asked Ruchi to describe the process for transferring ownership of a Microsoft Online account. - Arvind

An account in the Microsoft Online Services Customer Portal (MOCP) belongs to a single account owner and is associated with a unique Windows Live ID. In case you need to transfer subscriptions from one Windows Live ID to another, we have a process in place to enable that. Read on.

Step 1: To request a transfer of ownership

If you are either the current or future account owner, call Support at 1-866-MSONLINE or submit a request to Support using your Windows Live ID e-mail address. The information you provide support should include:

The name of your organization
The name and Windows Live ID of the current account owner
The name and Windows Live ID of the new account owner

The Microsoft Online Services Customer Portal will verify the organization and the current account owner, and will confirm the request by e-mail with both the current and new account owners.

Tip

In order to receive these notifications without delay, add both msonlineservicesteam@microsoftonline.com (Microsoft Online Services Team) and mailwc.custhelp.com (Microsoft Customer Service) to your Safe Senders list.
The process of verification takes much less time if the original owner requests the transfer. If the request is initiated by someone else, we conduct more thorough verification of the transfer request, for your protection. This process can take a few days. So it is preferable to have the original account owner initiate the transfer, if possible.

Step 2: To take ownership of a transferred account

1. Ensure that you have:

Windows Live ID. If you do not have a Windows Live ID, create one here.
A completed profile on the Microsoft Online Services Customer Portal. For more information, see the Help article Create My Profile.
Note: Be sure you know the original account owner's country/region and shipping address. The Country/Region in the Contact Information and Shipping Address you enter must be the same as those in the original account owner's profile.

2. After you have created your profile, you will receive an e-mail notification from Microsoft Customer Service containing the link to the Account Transfer wizard. Click on this link.
3. This will launch the Account Transfer wizard.
On the login screen, sign in with your Windows Live ID.

On the second screen, verify the information you see and click Continue.

If the transferred subscriptions are being charged to a credit card, and there is no credit card on file for the new account owner, a Payment Information page will appear. Enter your credit card information here.

Note: if the new account owner already has one or more credit cards on file, the new subscriptions will be charged to one of the existing credit cards. If the new owner wishes to change the credit card, they can do so through their MOCP online account, once the transfer process is complete.

Next you will see a confirmation page. Read the text carefully. Click Finish. You will receive an e-mail informing you that the transfer is still pending.

Note: At this point, the account transfer process is not yet complete. Please do not attempt to make any modifications to the transferred subscription until you receive a final notification that your subscriptions have been transferred.
4. MOCP transfers your account and sends you a notification that the transfer is complete. This notification also contains pointers to useful information on how to manage your subscriptions and contact partners of record (see below).
5. After the transfer of ownership is complete, you might want to notify the partners of record on the transferred subscriptions that the change has been made.

A few points to note:

Once the ownership is transferred, the previous account owner can no longer access the subscriptions in the transferred account.
Subscriptions cannot be selectively transferred. All the subscriptions associated with the original account will be transferred to the new account.

Ruchi Chopra

Program Manager

Microsoft Online Commerce Platform

Verify Microsoft Online Services Transport Layer Security (TLS) E-mail Delivery

Ryan J. Phillips — Thu, 23 Oct 2008 21:29:00 GMT

To secure e-mail message delivery between your on-premise and Online environments first, follow the steps on how to configure your on-premise messaging environment.

Next, determine whether Transport Layer Security (TLS) was used during Message Delivery. Assumption: Your on-premise SMTP Connector has been configured to request a TLS Session.

Send a test message from your on-premise environment to a Microsoft Online Services mailbox.
Log in to your Microsoft Online Services mailbox by opening Office Outlook.
Open the test message that you sent from from your on-premise sender, and then click the small down-arrow in the options section:
Review the Header information for TLS, which indicates that the message was delivered using TLS:

Note: Perform this test in the opposite direction to make sure TLS is being used in both directions

Exchange Hosted Services (EHS) front-ends all Microsoft Online Mail and uses Deterministic TLS when sending/receiving messages, which means that it will attempt to send/receive mail via TLS (issuing EHLO statements to understand the message servers capabilities).

On-Premise à TLS à EHS à TLS à Microsoft Online Services

Microsoft Online Services à TLS à EHS à TLS à On-Premise

Note: IF TLS is not available anywhere along this path, delivery will fallback to SMTP port 25 and deliver in clear-text.

If a customer requires full TLS Messaging Transport capabilities, they will need a TRUSTED certificate (a certificate that can be verified and is trusted – Verisign, GoDaddy, etc.) on their On-Premise Exchange Bridgehead Server, so when MS Online/EHS delivers mail, it can properly negotiate the TLS session. ALSO, the On-Premise Exchange Admin must configure their SMTP Connector to use Outbound Security – TLS, in order to request a TLS session for any Address Namespaces (i.e. contoso1.microsoftonline.com) defined for that Connector.

Mac/Entourage: Connect OS X 10.5 and Entourage 2008 12.1.2 to Microsoft Online Services

kevw@microsoft.com — Wed, 24 Sep 2008 23:59:00 GMT

For our international release, please use the following Exchange server addresses depending on where you bought Microsoft Online Services.

North America - https://red001.mail.microsoftonline.com

Europe - https://red002.mail.emea.microsoftonline.com

Asia - https://red003.mail.apac.microsoftonline.com

This is an update to our previous post about Mac connectivity to our service. The setup is similiar, and somewhat easier.

What you need:
Mac OS X 10.5
Entourage 2008 12.1.2
Safari 3.1.2

For Beta, the the password changes will still have to be done in the Sign In Application.
When the service is officially released, the user will be able to change their password on the user company portals from a web browser.

File->New->Account. Make sure you have already changed your given password using the Sign In application on a PC or the web portal first if this is a brand new account.

In the pop up box, hit the button in the lower left hand corner that says “Configure Account Manually”.

Email address is the email address you use to sign in with the Sign In application.

Account ID is the name that you get when you use the Sign In application. This should be the same as your EMail address.

Exchange server is the OWA address + “/exchange/” + user email address. For bob@contoso.com, it would be contoso.mail.microsoftonline.com/exchange/bob@contoso.com

Make sure you check the box right below it "This DAV service requires a secvure connection".

NOTES:

There is no Free Busy information because we don't deploy public folders, and no GAL lookups since we don’t expose our LDAP servers publicly.

We have gotten a few questions about getting some sort of work around for GAL lookups using Entourage with Microsoft Online Services. While a couple of Mac users within our team have written a GAL lookup add on for Entourage, we cannot officially release it as a Microsoft product due to various reasons.

However, there are a couple of Apple Scripts on the internet similar to our internal solution that will enable GAL lookups for Entourage connected to Microsoft Online Services

http://www.entourage.mvps.org/exchange/exchangelookups.html

http://www.xutils.com/owagalsearch/

Note: The above information is provided as-is and is NOT supported by the Microsoft Online Support Team at this time.

How to Configure Active Directory User Settings in a Non-messaging Environment Using the Microsoft Online Services Directory Sychronization Tool (DirSynch)

Ryan J. Phillips — Fri, 29 Aug 2008 20:12:00 GMT

If you are running in a non-messaging (Exchange 2000 or higher) Active Directory environment, and you want to use the Microsoft Online Services Directory Synchronization Tool, you must configure certain Active Directory User attributes if you want the User Login User Principal Names (UPNs) to be consistent with what is being used in the on-premise Active Directory environment.

For Example: an on-premise Active Directory using the Domain Namespace of Contoso.com that has users with a login UPN of user@contoso.com. There is no Exchange 2000 messaging environment within this Active Directory, however user objects have their MAIL attribute configured, so they are mail enabled. This MAIL attribute is used in a Non-Exchange AD environment when running DirSync wheto create new Microsoft Online Users.

To mirror the on-premise User Login with what is used in the Microsoft Online Company environment

Create a Microsoft Online Service Domain name. Use the same name as the on-premise environment, e.g Contoso.com
Verify this Microsoft Online Service Domain name, which proves ownership and allows a Microsoft Online Services administrator to create new users for this Domain, and to provide or add SMTP addresses for existing users.
Set this Domain name as Default. As new users are created and/or Directory Synchronized, their accounts and email address will use this Domain (Online user's will always have a secondary Email Proxy address of companyX.microsoftonline.com, which is provided as a Default Routing Domain, created during the Online Company's Provisioning process).
Modify/Add on-premise Active Directory User object's MAIL attribute with an e-mail address that was previously created and verified (e.g. user@Contoso.com)
Run the Microsoft Online Services Directory Synchronization Tool, which will replicate all Mail and Mailbox enabled users/groups into the Microsoft Online Company as Deactivated Users.

Note: From this point, a Microsoft Online Services Company admininistrator can Activate these users. They will granted services by the Online administrator. Their Login UPN and default SMTP address will be user@contoso.com instead of the default user@Contoso1.microsoftonline.com.

Mac/Entourage: Connect a Mac using Entourage 2008 to Microsoft Online Services

kevw@microsoft.com — Wed, 16 Jul 2008 04:57:00 GMT

Hi All,

We have heard a few requests as to how to connect a Mac to our service.
For Beta, the the password changes will still have to be done in the Sign In tool.
When the service is officially released, the user will be able to change their password on the user company portals from a web browser.

This only works in Entourage 2008.
Note: There is no Free Busy information because we don't deploy public folders, and no GAL lookups since we don’t expose our LDAP servers publicly.

File->New->Account. Make sure you have already changed your given password using the Sign In tool on a PC first if this is a brand new account.

In the pop up box, hit the button in the lower left hand corner that says “Configure Account Manually”.

Email address is the email address you use to sign in with the Sign In tool.

Account ID is the name that you get when you use the Sign In tool to start LiveMeeting (on the upper left hand corner). Usually, the “@” is replaced by “_”. If your user name is "bob@contoso.com", it would probably be changed to something like "bob_contoso.com".

Domain is the very first part of the OWA address after the "https://", in the beta, that would be red001.

Exchange server is the OWA address + “/exchange/” + user email address. For bob@contoso.com on beta it would be https://red001.mail.microsoftonline.com/exchange/bob@contoso.com.

UPDATE:

However, there are a couple of Apple Scripts on the internet similar to our internal solution that will enable GAL lookups for Entourage connected to Microsoft Online Services

http://www.entourage.mvps.org/exchange/exchangelookups.html

http://www.xutils.com/owagalsearch/

Note: The above information is provided as-is and is NOT supported by the Microsoft Online Support Team at this time.

Mac/iPhone: Connect the iPhone to Microsoft Online Services

kevw@microsoft.com — Tue, 15 Jul 2008 21:41:00 GMT

The new iPhone 3G that came out last week final enabled Exchange ActiveSync support. As a result, you can now connect your iPhone 3G or the older iPhone with the new 2.0 firmware to connect to Microsoft Online Services.

Simply goto Settings->Mail, Contacts, Calendars->Add Account->Microsoft Exchange.

Email: enter your email address
Username: enter your email address
Enter your password and description for the mailbox.
Click Next

Accept the verify certificate pop ups.

You will now see a new screen with an extra blank entry for Server. Enter the OWA address. In beta, this is "red001.mail.microsoftonline.com".

Select the information you want to synchronize, and click on Save.

Note: The above information is provided as-is and is BEST EFFORT supported by the Microsoft Online Support Team