While many of the Mac people I speak to use products like VMware fusion or Parallels to run Windows-based applications, for the purposes of my Life with a Mac experiment I tried to stay as native as possible. Unfortunately this meant my experiment was extremely short lived.

Why? Because to be quite frank – when you are as tightly integrated into the Microsoft ecosystem for your business, working with any competing products just doesn’t cut it.

Let’s start with the iPhone.

As mentioned in my previous post I used both an iPhone and an iPad for quite some time so am very familiar with it. During the course of the experiment I really understood why the term “there’s an app for that” is so relevant – because the phone needs apps to do anything smart.

With my Windows Phone I am able to do a great many things without apps. In all honesty I hardly use any of the apps installed my phone as the operating system provides most of the functionality I need.

What did I really miss? The lock screen was by far the biggest issue. Out of the box the Windows Phone will display my next appointment as well as the number of missed calls, text messages, emails, Lync and Skype IMs, and a slew of other notifications I can chose from. The iPhone did not tell me anything about my day ahead or currently waiting messages. While the messages displayed I had to unlock the phone and go into the application to get anything useful beyond what was displayed in the active area.

The second thing I missed was the tiles of Windows Phone. Live action, constantly updating, displaying content without requiring me to load the app. I could unlock my phone and see what was pertinent as well as the details. By comparison with the iPhone again I had to actually get into the application to see anything.

The third thing I missed was the ability to pin multiple inboxes to the start screen. I run 4 different mail accounts (personal, @Paradyne.com.au, @Xstran.com, @Microsoft.com). On the start screen I could see the number of messages per mailbox, without having to actually go into the mail application. If my tile was big enough it would actually show me a preview of the messages in that relevant mailbox.

In summary: Focusing on the purpose of the experiment it wasn’t too bad. Exchange works well, there are plenty of apps for SharePoint, the Lync Mobile 2013 client is a beautiful experience, OneNote was there, as are the apps around Xbox and other areas of the Microsoft ecosystem.

Usability-wise though I felt my IQ dropped 20 points when I switched back to the iPhone after using the Windows Phone. It really felt like using Windows 3.1 after being on Windows 7 and 8. Realistically each to their own, but using the iPhone for only a few days gave me withdrawal symptoms. I was irritable due to the extra buttons I had to press just to get the information I was accustomed to simply being displayed. My Windows Phone is not just a smartphone, it is my personal assistant.

The Mac!

Using the Mac I lasted longer than I expected, but only because I very quickly figured out the shortcomings and worked around those. Unfortunately I couldn’t avoid them forever. Very quickly I needed to use Visio for process diagrams or to review customer networks – ba-bow!! As I mentioned in my first post I use OneNote very heavily. While similar platforms such as Evernote exist that doesn’t work for me as I’m already heavily involved with OneNote and integrate it with SharePoint.

Having used the Apple GUI many (many!) years ago getting around the Mac wasn’t too hard but this is where I found the experience to be nowhere near as enriched as on iOS. While apps were available for Mac OS X, the story still wasn’t as good as on the iPhone when connecting to Office 365.

To be honest I lay the blame here at Microsoft’s feet in terms of the lifecycle around Office for Mac. While many of us in Windows-land are already using Office 2013, Apple users are still on Office for Mac 2011. This is comparatively like being on Office 2010 – which even more users and organisations are still on. The issue however is that Office for Mac won’t be updated until 2014. By that stage however Office for Windows most likely will be.

It is because of the fact that Microsoft treats the Mac as a second class citizen that its users will always be exactly that. I understand that Microsoft needs to protect its Windows market but my recommendation would be that they look at what Google has done recently with its support of Windows Phone by blocking access to several services.

Updating products like Office for Mac, making available other products like Project and Visio for Mac would make Microsoft many friends in the Apple world and help preventing them from moving to Google Apps.

My 2c from this short-lived experiment:

- Apple needs to update iOS. It hasn’t innovated since 2007 allowing Google and Microsoft to leave it for dead. While Microsoft is in a distant third place I am seeing more people giving Windows Phone a chance and discovering what they’ve been missing out on.

- Microsoft needs to treat Apple Mac users as their friends. While they may not be as equal as a Windows user, there are a lot of them who use Google Apps because the experience is downright better. While the Vista + Office 2007 slogan of “better together” may not necessarily apply here, “better than Google” would certainly ring true.

I fully respect that this was not a scientific experiment by any stretch of the imagination. They key objective was to see what it was like being an Apple user in a Microsoft world. My conclusion: it’s not good.

In selling Microsoft cloud solutions a very common question I hear is “when is Microsoft building a datacentre in Australia”? To date I have not been able to answer the question, however this is no longer the case. Earlier today Microsoft announced that it will be bringing its Windows Azure services to Australian soil by way of a new datacentre.

By doing this Microsoft aids what is a somewhat a cloud-averse country by localising data and offering many more services within our borders.

When I say that Australia is somewhat cloud-averse this does not mean that we as a country are not adopting the cloud by any stretch – in fact the contrary. Microsoft solutions like Office 365 have in excess of ten thousand customers in Australia and growing rapidly. Cloud providers such as Amazon, Google, Rackspace and others are also experiencing a boom in that the logical choice now for new infrastructure and solutions is to look at the cloud first.

This approach however is not necessarily adopted by all industries, nor is it applicable for all workloads.

Having been running a cloud engineering firm Paradyne for over 3 years I have come across many objections to moving with Office 365 or other solutions due to the datacentre being outside of the country. There were two primary reasons for this:
- data sovereignty / residency
- latency

For some customers we have had to split their cloud workloads between offshore services such as Office 365 and local hosting providers. For those customers they have ended up between a mixture of Exchange Online and Lync Online, with SharePoint hosted on an Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) platform. This is a common scenario I see when working with Telstra customers as it allows the organisation to keep the critical data in-house, while allowing more transactional solutions such as email and IM to be operated out of Australia’s closest Microsoft datacentres in Singapore and Hong Kong.

Going beyond SaaS and IaaS, Windows Azure provides organisations the capability for Big Data solutions – except in the case where that data is sensitive either from a commercial or privacy point of view and is not allowed to leave Australian shores.

Recently Rackspace and Amazon have made inroads to Australia, so what does a local Windows Azure datacentre mean? Far more than just IaaS and hosted applications.

By opening a Windows Azure datacentre in Australia Microsoft opens the doors for local organisations to be free of the last barriers preventing cloud adoption or moving to a Microsoft cloud platform. Australian customers will soon be able to subscribe to Windows Azure services such as:

• websites
• IaaS
• mobile services
• cloud applications
• Big Data
• media streaming
• storage
• SQL databases
• server backups
• disaster recovery
• content distribution
• identity management
• geo-replication
• and more to come in the future

While some may not be satisfied that Office 365 is not hosted in Australia yet – this is not ruled out as an option as Microsoft has indicated previously that they plan to build Office 365 on top of Windows Azure. This is already somewhat true with the availability of Windows Azure Active Directory being the identity management solution that powers Office 365.

Realistically the options are endless with Windows Azure, and having them available locally in Australia means that local organisations and business don’t have to reach as far to harness the power of the cloud.

I’ve been using a MacBook Pro and iPhone 4S for the past 4 days now and have found the changeover a bit challenging.

What has been interesting has been hearing people tell me that once I go Apple I won’t go back. They don’t know the depths to which I am integrated into the Microsoft ecosystem.

However on the other hand – many people don’t know my history with Apple. While on the surface I appear to be all pro-Microsoft, people who know me well enough also know that I am able to recognise their shortcomings and recognise the advantages of competing products.

So while I currently live in a Microsoft world, my history is not so singular:

- My first computer was an Apple IIGS, and most of my school years were spent on Apple IIe computers as they were the de facto
- I have an iPod connected to my car, and have since it since 2006
- My wife uses my iPad 2 which I have had for 2 years
- My iPad 2 was replaced with a “new iPad” (which was subsequently replaced by my Surface RT)
- Before Windows Phone existed I was a happy iPhone 3S user

So where does this leave me now?

Using the Mac plus iPhone for the past few days has been more than challenging. The switch has not been easy as the user interface between the Microsoft and Apple worlds is so different.

As mentioned in my first post – the thing I miss the most so far is OneNote.
The second thing I miss is Lync 2013. The ability to have tabbed conversations does not exist in Lync for Mac 2011, as it didn’t in Lync 2010. This has been my first real exposure to the gap in release cycles between Office for Windows and Mac platforms, and an understanding of what Mac users experience working with Office 365.

I will be building a list of what Mac users can’t do with Office 365 so stay tuned for regular updates!

Many of my customers at Paradyne have Apple Mac devices in their environments.
While we know that Office 365 and many Microsoft solutions “work” with Mac devices – the experience can sometimes be frustrating for those users.

As we progress in our technological world it is becoming quite clear that what works best is to choose a walled garden and live within it.

What does this mean?

Google people work best with a Chromebook (or at least Chrome as their browser), an Android-powered phone and tablet, powered by Google Apps.

Apple people work best with a MacBook / iMac with an iPad, and iPhone and iCloud.

Microsoft people work best with Windows 8 as their desktop/laptop/tablet, and Windows Phone.

The problem with this picture is that while a Google person can largely exist within their ecosystem without venturing out, an Apple person cannot as while the company has a “cloud” offering – it is aimed at consumers and has no business functionality.

So for the next month I am conducting an experiment – living in a Mac world connected to a Microsoft cloud. This means I will be using both a MacBook Pro and iPhone 4S as my primary devices – leaving my beloved Surface Pro and Nokia Lumia 920 to gather dust, only to be turned on in case of emergency.

In the first hour I managed to get my MacBook Pro running, installed Office for Mac 2011 and Lync for Mac 2011 from Office 365.

The Office experience was relatively good to get Outlook connected, however Lync required manual configuration and then proceeded to take 4 minutes to sign in.

So far this has been somewhat acceptable as I am able to now use Exchange Online and Lync Online without issue, as well as CRM Online via the Safari web browser.

What was very hard to deal with was the lack of OneNote application. While available for Windows 8, Windows Phone, Android and iOS – there is no application for the Mac. This will be quite a problem for me being a heavy OneNote user – especially as I use it both from SkyDrive and SharePoint Online.

I will be posting my adventures over the next month, featuring the good, the bad, and the things that make me want to cry. Stay tuned!

My Surface Pro gets quite a lot of attention wherever I go either because people have heard about them and are amazed to see it in real life or because they’ve never seen or heard about it and are amazed to see such a device. At the end of my explanation of what it is and how great it is – they always want to buy one.

While I was lucky enough to be in the US at the time they were released, many of my fellow Australians are not so lucky. Some have chosen to ship them via freight forwarding companies in the US to get around the shipping restrictions, others are now purchasing them from a number of grey import suppliers.

Today on the Surface blog Microsoft announced it is expanding the launch of the Surface Pro before the end of May.

I look forward to seeing more people out there with Surface Pro units being productive mobile workers, and loving Windows 8.

One of the small challenges faced by organisations adopting Office 365 and other Microsoft Online Services offerings is the loss of custom URLs and naming conventions that their staff have become familiar with.

For example where previously an organisations URL for SharePoint may have been http://intranet internally and http://intranet.contoso.com externally – this was only possible through the use of Alternate Access Mappings (AAM) in SharePoint.

In the world of Office 365 and SharePoint Online this URL becomes https://contoso.sharepoint.com which is somewhat easy to remember if you were successful in securing a tenant domain that resembles your organisation name. Unfortunately not every organisation is lucky enough, and tenant domains on Office 365 are consumed on a first-come-first-serve basis. That may mean that while Contoso in the US registered for Office 365 first and now has https://contoso.sharepoint.com, Contoso Australia would have to choose a different URL – possibly https://contosoau.sharepoint.com or https://contosooz.sharepoint.com. Either way it’s not idea.

Where this gets a bit confusing is adding in URLs for Outlook Web Access – http://mail.office365.com or http://www.outlook.com/contoso.com. Then add Dynamics CRM Online with https://contoso.crm5.dynamics.com.

All of these URLs can be a bit much to deal with for the average user who just wants to get on with doing their job and not have to remember all these URLs.

If your website is hosted externally (ie. not on Office 365) and happens to be on cPanel then you’re in luck as you can use a combination of subdomains and 301 redirects. What is a redirect? Redirects allow you to make a specific web page or URL redirect to another page or URL and display the contents of that page. In a nutshell if we create a subdomain of intranet.contoso.com and create a redirect to point it to https://contoso.sharepoint.com this will allow the user to type in one URL and have it end up at another.

For Paradyne I have created a series of redirects to make it easy for our staff:

Why can you not simply use a CNAME in DNS to achieve this? Because when a CNAME hits the Microsoft web server that is providing the relevant service the URL it will ask for is the original friendly URL. Because Microsoft doesn’t know about http://intranet.paradyne.com.au it won’t know what to do with the request.

When all the redirects have been put in place within your cPanel environment, you must then create A records in DNS to point all of those friendly URLs to the IP address of your web server – as it is doing all the redirecting.

The downside of this means that a bit of traffic goes through your web host, but these days data is all but free so it shouldn’t make an impact.

The upside means that users don’t have to remember different URLs and domains for each of the services they want to access – just the word in front of your domain name.

(An alternative method would be to use a friendly URL of http://www.contoso.com/intranet/ and re-direct that instead, which means no DNS entries required. The choice is up to you.)

Do you like the cloud?

Have you heard of Windows Azure and want to know what it is, how it works, and play for yourself?

Do you live in Melbourne? (or Sydney, but we’ll get to that later)

Along with Visual Studio ALM MVP Mitch Denny I will be helping to deliver the Global Windows Azure Bootcamp at Microsoft Melbourne on Saturday April 27th.

You can register here: http://gwab-melbourne.eventbrite.com/. Our companies Readify and Paradyne are sponsoring the event so there will be some giveaways and freebies.

The Global Windows Azure Bootcamp is a innovative approach to learning – with the same content being delivered in multiple places around the world!

If you’re in Sydney my Paradyne colleague and Windows Expert – IT Pro MVP Mark O’Shea  will be presenting alongside Windows Azure MVP Mick Badran of Breeze.net.

If you’re anywhere else in the world I’m sure you can find a location close to you – https://globalwindowsazure.azurewebsites.net/?page_id=151

Since Office 365 vNext / Wave 15 / service update was made available on February 27 this year the hottest question has been “when will my tenant be upgraded?”.

I can tell you as a Office 365 MVP and one of it’s top partners there was a certain sense of entitlement that my company’s (Paradyne) tenant would be upgraded early.

It would make logical sense wouldn’t it?

Speaking as a MVP I thought that as an advocate of the platform it would make sense that I be using the latest and greatest. And as a partner we need to be on the latest releases so we can demonstrate them to our customers.

Those points are true – but the service update has a process to be followed and there are no exceptions.

I have heard customers and partners saying the process is rigged against existing customers. That’s simply not true.

Think of a car fleet – people who sign up now get the current model, those who signed up previously have to wait until they are scheduled for a refresh.

There are countless analogies that can be used but at the end of the day they all hold one thing true – there is a process that needs to be followed, and it was set as such for very specific reasons.

We have had customers approach us as they cannot wait and want to be manually migrated to a new tenant. The thought has crossed my mind for my own production tenant as we have done this before when the BPOS transition was felt to be too slow (for both customers and ourselves). There are pros and cons for this approach and each organisation has to think about how it applies to them before simply leaping forward to use the shiny new version.

I won’t be doing a manual transition to a new tenant for Paradyne as it is a business platform that needs to be fully functional – rather than have access to the latest bells and whistles.

Do I feel slighted by Microsoft that my tenant isn’t being given priority? No. We are part of a global update process, one that I chose to be a part of when I signed up for the service and shut down our own infrastructure.

Fellow Office 365 MVP Sean McNeill has written a great blog post addressing those who criticise the upgrade process. As people who represent Microsoft as both MVPs and partners we have access to inside information. We also have priority access to technologies. Sometimes however we are part of the system and have to be content to be treated as such. Sean’s speaks to that.

Thinking of attending the Australian SharePoint Conference in Sydney on the 10th and 11th of April but haven’t made your mind up yet?

Here’s a sweetener for you: as a presenter I’ve been given a discount code for $50 off, bringing the price down to $912.50.

Register now before spaces run out, and use the promotion code “PARADYNE”.

The issue surrounding Office Professional Plus 2013 running under Remote Desktop Services (formerly known as Terminal Services) or in a Citrix environment still appears to have much confusion – and unfortunately there isn’t an official line from Microsoft on exactly how this works.

One of my previous blog posts talking about how Office Professional Plus 2013 can be installed in a RDS/Citrix environment spoke purely to the technical capabilities of the installer. Bear in mind that this was written when the product was still in beta so was not to be taken definitively.

A great post by Jesper Osgaard at Microsoft explains the Product Use Rights customers get when subscribing to Office Professional Plus 2013 as a standalone licence or as part of E3.

There’s been much discussion around this topic in the Office 365 Community, and a recent thread had some great points shared by Chris Clark.

The short version:

- Subscribing to Office Professional Plus 2013 either via standalone Office 365 subscription or as part of the Office 365 E3 suite allows you to use it in a RDS / Citrix environment as one of the 5 allowed licences.

- The installer from Office 365 cannot be used in a RDS / Citrix environment – you can only use Volume License media

- You need to purchase a single licence of Office Professional Plus 2013 via your Volume License agreement in order to obtain the installation media

- This is only available for Enterprise licences not the P2 plan as it uses a small business variant, or the M plan as RDS exceptions don’t apply – however the M is a bone of contention as RDS is not listed as an option in the Service Description but is in the Product Use Rights listing (I am seeking clarification from Microsoft)

UPDATE 1: Another useful link from Microsoft at the US Partner SMB&D TS2 Team Blog on this topic

UPDATE 2: If you obtain Office 365 via a syndication partner (eg. Telstra in Australia) then Reseller Use Rights override the Product Use Rights, and the above does not apply – you cannot use your Office 2013 Professional Plus licenses. You can read more at the Australian Partner Team blog. This is probably the first time I will publicly voice my utter dismay and disappointment with Microsoft on this licensing issue, especially given their recent bad press with regards to their pricing in Australia.