Category Archives: Office 365

Free Download: SkyDrive Pro Client

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When SharePoint 2013 and the new SharePoint Online was released there was a new capability included called SkyDrive Pro.   This capability is similar to the consumer SkyDrive solution, however, it is based upon SharePoint and can be managed by the enterprise organization.

Up until now to use SkyDrive Pro you needed to deploy Office 2013 on the desktop.  Although many customers have Enterprise Agreements or are Office 365 customers, they are just not quite ready to deploy Office 2013.   This means that they can’t take advantage of the SkyDrive Pro capability.

Recently Microsoft released a free standalone SkyDrive Pro client for Windows that can be installed side by side with previous versions of Office.

Visit the Microsoft Download Center to learn more and to download the SkyDrive Pro Client.

New Book: Microsoft Office 365 Administration Inside Out

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I am excited to announce that a few of my co-workers have written an Office 365 Administration book which is available for preorder at Amazon.com.

O365AdminBookSPM

The book titled Microsoft Office 365 Administration Inside Out provides hundreds of timesaving solutions, troubleshooting tips, and workarounds.  Within the books 800 pages the following topics are covered:

  • Implement Office 365 in the enterprise, including Directory Synchronization and Single Sign-On
  • Monitor and manage Office 365 with System Center
  • Understand Office 365 PowerShell automation
  • Learn to implement hybrid Exchange models
  • Manage and protect Exchange Online
  • Administer SharePoint Online
  • Deploy and administer Lync Online
  • Learn about Office Professional Plus subscription

If you or your organization is planning to deploy Office 365, this is the book for you!  Learn how to manage Office 365 directly from the experts.

The authors:

Julian Soh is a Microsoft Office 365 Enterprise Architect. He works with enterprise customers to evaluate, understand, plan, and design their Office 365 adoption. Julian has held several positions in Microsoft that cover the breadth of Microsoft technologies such as Active Directory, System Center, SharePoint, and Exchange. Prior to joining Microsoft, Julian worked in IT and operations, holding technical and management positions.

Anthony Puca, MVP, Datacenter Monitoring with Microsoft’s System Center Operations Manager, is a Microsoft Datacenter Specialist, He consults with US state and local government accounts on Microsoft Windows Server, System Center, Private, Public and Hybrid Cloud Technologies.

Marshall Copeland has dedicated the last 10 of his 20-year IT career working with Microsoft customers in the support of Microsoft Windows Server and System Management technologies.

How to preorder the book:

Currently Amazon has the release date for this Microsoft Press book at October 22, 2013.  You can pre-order it now from Amazon here.

Get Started Building Apps for Office 365, Office 2013 and SharePoint 2013

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If you are interested in developing apps for Office 365, SharePoint 2013 or Office 2013, grab the new Office Developer Tools for Visual Studio 2012 here:  http://www.microsoft.com/visualstudio/eng/office-dev-tools-for-visual-studio

Once installed you will find two new project templates in Visual Studio;  App for Office 2013 and App for SharePoint 2013.  These two templates provide the necessary plumbing to help you get started building new apps quickly.

Building custom solutions using SharePoint 2010 required a local installation of the server software.  The new app model for SharePoint 2013 has changed the way developers will build out their environment.  Instead of using a local installation of SharePoint 2013, app developers can use a remote SharePoint 2013 server or SharePoint Online tenant.  This new capability reduces the complexity of the developer workstation and reduces the amount of memory and software that needs to be installed.  MSDN has a great article explaining how to setup a development environment for building apps for SharePoint on Office 365.  I would recommend that developers build solutions using the new SharePoint app model instead of the traditional server-side object model based farm or sandboxed solutions.

Server-side object model based farm or sandboxed solutions can still be created if necessary. If you plan to build solutions using the server-side object model then you will still require a local installation of SharePoint 2013.   Because of this requirement, the developer workstation will need at least 16GB of RAM;  24GB is recommended.  Steps to setup a local instance of SharePoint 2013 for development can be found on MSDN here. 

Organizations that are using SharePoint 2013 on-premises can use their SharePoint instance for development.  Steps for configuring your development environment and your on-premises SharePoint environment for creating SharePoint apps can be found on MSDN here.

Microsoft has provided very good documentation and samples for developers to learn how to build apps using SharePoint 2013.  I would recommend starting with the article titled Build apps for SharePoint.  Additional documentation and samples can be found at http://msdn.microsoft.com/sharepoint

Don’t forget that apps you create for SharePoint 2013 can be published to the SharePoint store where you can make money!   You can learn more about publishing your apps by reading the MSDN article titled Publish apps for SharePoint.

Leave me a message below or using the Contact Me! link above if you have published a SharePoint app in the store.  I am very interested to see what solutions are created.