As more an more content gets loaded by customers into SharePoint Online it is important to monitor the ongoing storage usage for a variety of reasons:
- site collection performance
- reaching quotas for either the site collection or tenant
- finding out where your all your space has gone
- avoiding having to pay for additional storage if you don’t need it
In my latest piece for BoxFreeIT I go through a few different methods of keeping an eye on your SharePoint Online storage usage.
To further help people realise that there are many great solutions to enhance their Office 365 experience I’m starting a new series of blog posts called Focus on Functionality.
In this series I’ll be calling out the amazing 3rd party solutions available in the marketplace to do almost anything an Office 365 user could potentially want.
To kick off the series I’m going to tell you about an amazing piece of software called harmon.ie – something that really bridges the divide between the Outlook & SharePoint experiences.
This article was actually written for BoxFreeIT – read more here.
A few small conversations have resonated with me lately around public cloud offerings.
The first conversation went like this…
Person: I hate Go_gle Docs sometimes, the formatting is just terrible.
Me: Why don’t you try Office Web Apps as part of Office 365? They do a great job of maintaining document fidelity while presenting you with rich formatting options.
Person: Only when they make it free.
Me: Try Windows Live / Hotmail then, it also includes Office Web Apps but doesn’t cost anything.
Person: (silence)
The second conversation went like this…
Person: I want to share documents with my team, we use Dropbox at the moment because it’s free but it’s not as functional as I want it to be.
Me: Have you heard about SharePoint Online as part of Office 365? It’s great for managing & sharing documents, as well as improving the collaboration between team members and the sharing of data through some amazing out of the box features.
Person: But does it cost anything?
Me: Yes, but only around the same price as a sandwich per person per month.
Person: Not interested, it can’t beat free.
Those aren’t the only two conversations I’ve had like that, and unfortunately it’s a culture we’re starting to live in now – where you can get things for free.
Unfortunately a lot of free service users don’t realise that their provider is generally using one of two models:
Freemium – where a subset of functionality is free but the moment you want any of the good features or more space you will need to pay.
Advertising supported – this doesn’t always mean you’ll see the ads, as your information could simply be mined for trends and patterns which is then sold on to advertising partners and may follow you to other sites.
Something that consumers of services (business or personal) need to realise that if they are not paying for the service then they’re not actually the customer – THEY ARE THE PRODUCT!
In the first of my pieces for Dynamic Business I talk about the differences between paid cloud versus free services.
A couple of months back I wanted to move our Lync services from a hosted provider that we were not happy with, back to Lync Online under Office 365.
While this was a relatively simple task the challenge for me was to preserve my contact list as I have over 200 contacts on there, split up into multiple groups.
The only methods available to export or import contacts is to use either a Visual Basic script which connects directly to the SQL database behind Lync or via PowerShell cmdlets. Unfortunately neither of these would help me getting my contacts IN to Lync Online.
I also was running a pilot project for Microsoft Australia which involved deploying Lync for doctors in rural areas of Australia – and we wanted to pre-populate each of their contact lists with all of the pilot participants. Unfortunately there isn’t a way to do this with Lync Online as again – no access to the SQL server or ability to run PowerShell.
So I had a tool built that could achieve both functions – the Lync Contact Migrator.
As far as I know it’s the only tool of it’s kind that supports Lync Online and performs the various functions including multiple account support, groups, and template creation. And especially at such a low price.
Let me know your thoughts and if you’d like to see any additional features in the future.
P.S. Yes – this was a plug for my own product. 
If you’ve been living under a rock these past few years you would be excused for not knowing that a tablet these days refers more to an iPad or Android slate as opposed to a Windows-powered notebook than rotate & fold it’s screen (until Windows 8 comes along and changes the game).
While I personally am not a fan of the iPad I have resigned myself to using one because of the convenience, but one of the important features I require is the ability to go offline.
My latest article in BoxFreeIT talks about how you can use a variety of apps to take SharePoint Online content offline with your iPad.
Key among many of the benefits of Exchange Online as part of Office 365 is the backup & disaster recovery functionality that is part of the service.
Most people are appeased when reading the Office 365 Service Descriptions to know that Microsoft will look after their data for them.
There will always be the odd few people who are happy to go all in to the cloud but still want to maintain their own mailbox backups. Call them old fashioned, paranoid, or just extremely cautious – there aren’t any easy ways to perform backups against Exchange Online unless you build your own application calling Exchange Web Services and drawing down the data that way.
The mumblings of one of these old fashioned / paranoid / cautious people got me thinking, which got me Binging and to my amazement I found a pretty solution packaged up in some freeware!
The product is called MailStore Home and is simple and easy to use, and is free for non-commercial use. There is also a paid server version for those who want to use it in their corporate environments.
While I put my faith in Microsoft to look after the integrity of my mailbox data – for those that don’t (and really are you “all in” if you don’t want to?) there’s your solution.
Enjoy!
This latest post on BoxFreeIT comes from a recent personal experience that I felt I had to share.
The piece is about staff being able to work anywhere any time and how sometimes that can work against employers.
While cloud enables this to occur even easier than before – cloud is not to blame for it. Certainly it’s not a new concept for staff to check personal emails, use printers/copiers/phones or even access remote personal systems while at the office, however now rich cloud productivity suites enable those same people to completely immerse themselves in personal business or side projects.
Again this is not a fault of the technology – but simply comes down to the individual.
In my case it was a case of misplaced trust and faith.
Read more at BoxFreeIT and please feel free to share your experiences or views.
Many times in the past two years since I started helping customers get into the cloud with Microsoft Office 365 (and BPOS before that) one of the challenges whenever there was any impact to the service was knowing if it affected you specifically. It wasn’t uncommon to get a call from a customer or even one of my own team who said they couldn’t get into their email – but it worked fine for others.
Because public cloud services are so large – it may not always impact every customer or even user the same way. While one customer may have issues – others could be completely fine.
It can go so granular to the point where not every users mailbox is even sitting on the same server.
My latest piece in BoxFreeIT talks about the recent improvement to the Office 365 Service Health dashboard which helps you identify if there is any impact to YOUR Office 365 environment.
Amazon announced on the weekend that their Amazon Web Services (AWS) Free Usage Tier now includes Windows Server – allowing customers to run micro instance for upto 750 hours per month without cost.
That announcement blew my mind. Certainly the server will be very limited in resources, but to get access to a Windows Server license + resources without it costing you a cent? That’s just amazing value.
For those who aren’t aware the Free Usage Tier is available for new customers for a year and is a great way to test out AWS without committing to big monthly spends.
You can read more about the announcement at the Amazon AWS site.
During the battles for how much functionality vendors can deliver online (or in the Cloud) sometimes people forget how important it is to access content offline.
Unfortunately Internet connectivity is not absolutely everywhere. While it is certainly approaching a point of everywhereability (yes, I’m coining a new word for being able to do whatever you want online from wherever you are), there’s still a lot of times and reasons users will go offline and need their content.
My latest piece in BoxFreeIT talks about using Outlook and SharePoint Workspace to go offline with SharePoine Online.
