A feature much-loved in Microsoft Live Meeting 2007 was the ability to shedule and manage meetings via a web interface. Unfortunatley it didn’t come across when Microsoft moved from BPOS to Office 365 and Lync Online – but now it’s back!
Read on in my post on BoxFreeIT: http://www.boxfreeit.com.au/Productivity/how-to-schedule-meetings-with-lync-online.html
Category Archives: BPOS
Manually migrating from BPOS to Office 365
UPDATE on September 21: Microsoft has begun transitioning customers to Office 365 through its internal process. Before attempting the below process, we suggest that you change your password in BPOS and try logging in to https://portal.microsoftonline.com. If you can – then the user account has already been copied across to the new tenant and therefore manual migration is not possible.
Original post:
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Recently we (Paradyne) performed a manual migration from BPOS to Office 365 to start using the amazing new features and functionality it brings.
The team over at MigrationWiz have written a great step-by-step instruction list, over at http://migrationwiz.zendesk.com/entries/20049337-how-do-i-perform-a-bpos-to-office-365-migration
We followed this to the letter and had no dramas at all.
The only slight difference was that we added an extra level of mail retention to ensure that nothing was lost during the transition or while waiting for FOPE to update.
Our difference was to use mail store & forwarding services from RollerNet. The service only costs $5 per month and is a month-to-month subscription, so you can cancel the service when you’re done.
Effectively what we did before following the MigrationWiz instructions was to change our MX record to point to the RollerNet mail hosts which were in turn configured to accept our domain and to forward it on to ‘mail.global.frontbridge.com’. Before removing our domain from BPOS we set the RollerNet service to simply hold our mail instead of forward it on.
Once we completed the steps listed in the MigrationWiz article we then pointed the RollerNet service to forward to the custom MX record provided to us by Office 365.
After we re-established mail flow and that everything was 100% functional we then changed our MX record to point directly at Office 365 – and happy times ahead!
Before entering into this process I must caution you to wait at least 90 minutes between steps 10 & 11, otherwise you may end up with a duplicate domain in FOPE which requires some PowerShell magic to clean up.
Note: attempting the above is not a supported practice by Microsoft and puts the onus of mail flow and uptime onto yourself. Please be a) careful, and b) extremely careful!
Ever wonder what a Microsoft data centre looks like?
See what’s powering your cloud: http://youtu.be/hOxA1l1pQIw
Outlook and OWA Version and Features
Over on the TechNet Wiki site there is a great comparison chart between Outlook 2003 through to Outlook and OWA 2010.
While the acronym for OWA has stayed the same over the years, the definition has changed from “Outlook Web Access” to “Outlook Web App” in 2010.
Have a look here: http://social.technet.microsoft.com/wiki/contents/articles/outlook-and-owa-version-and-features.aspx
BPOS to Office 365 Beta Migration
For those of you lucky enough to have access to the Office 365 beta – Jonathan Wise over at Microsoft has written a blog about moving from BPOS to Office 365 beta from an end customer perspective.
It does require some downtime while you wait for domain names to be cleared from routes, so I wouldn’t recommend doing this on a production domain.
Follow the steps here: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/jonathan_wise/archive/2011/04/22/bpos-to-office-365-beta-migration.aspx
Locating & recovering a missing folder in Outlook
If you’ve lost a folder in Outlook that you are sure was there before – don’t panic! Quite possibly it is still there, however is corrupt. This happened to me recently when I folder I knew to exist was no longer visible – but I could still do a search for items that existed in it.
Thanks to Glen Cai in the Microsoft BPOS support team, the fix was as such:
1. Download MFCMAPI from http://mfcmapi.codeplex.com/releases/view/59490
2. Extract the downloaded files and double click MFCMAPI.exe, click OK
3. Click Session->Logon and Display Store Table, select the your Outlook profile, click OK
4. Double-click your mailbox username
5. In the new window, expand to Root->IPM_SUBTREE
6. Check whether you can find the missing folder (eg. “MissingFolder”)
7. If you can find it, double-click to open the folder
8. Back in Outlook, create a new destination folder (eg. “MissingFolder2″)
9. Get back to MFCMAPI, select all the messages, right click, then Copy Message
10. Get back to Root->IPM_SUBTREE->Inbox, double click the new folder “MissingFolder2″ to open it
11. Right click , click Paste messages
12. Click OK
13. Go back to Outlook to ensure that the new folder “MissingFolder2″ contains the messages
14. After confirming the messages are there, then you can delete the “MissingFolder” folder in MFCMAPI and recreate it in Outlook
Happy hunting!
FOPE in Office 365 Feature Differences
Want to see the differences in FOPE between BPOS, Live@Edu, and Office 365 (beta)?
Have a look here: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/gg685488.aspx
Podcast on the TalkingOffice365.com site
Sure I may post a wealth of free technical advice and information on this site, but that’s not where my experiences and knowledge end.
Recently I was interviewed by the TalkingOffice365.com site for their podcast series. In the interview we spoke about my experiences with BPOS, how this affects business, and where we’re going with Office 365.
Have a listen here: http://www.talkingoffice365.com/03-loryans-office-365-lessons-learnt-from-working-with-bpos/
Spotlight on Simplicity: synchronizing passwords with BPOS
Something commonly forgotten about when setting up BPOS for a customer that uses Active Directory – is that a new set of password management exists in BPOS.
This can exist in scenarios where the customer already has an on-premise Exchange and is now using Exchange Online, or even for peer-to-peer networks with no central password management.
What the users end up with is two passwords – one for their PC (local or AD authentication), another for BPOS.
Something new customers and partners moving to and using BPOS may not be aware of is the fact that the Directory Synchronization tool does not actually synchronize passwords – just users and groups.
So what are our options? Sure you can get everyone’s current password and match this in BPOS – however there is a default password expiration of 90 days. Very quickly you can see how this would be an inconvenience to users, and quite confusing the first time around.
Another option is to log a support case and request to disable password expiration – however this is not recommended due as it weakens your security.
Something we as a business (Paradyne) have found useful is the MessageOps Password Synchronization tool.
It is free and easy to use, and will run on your domain controller to keep passwords synchronized for your users.
This allows your BPOS environment to adhere to your existing password security policy, keep your organization & data more secure, and overall keep you users happy.
While Office 365 will support Active Directory Federation Services (ADFS) – you will require significant on-premise infrastructure to support this, so it is more relevant for large businesses and enterprises.
The MessageOps tool will still be the way to go with smaller organisations that cannot support the ADFS requirements or large businesses and enterprises that can’t or don’t plan to utilise ADFS.
Happy password synchronizing!
Spotlight on Simplicity: moving file systems to SharePoint Online
One of the challenges that we as a business (Paradyne) encountered early on with BPOS was moving customers file systems over to SharePoint Online.
In a traditional on-premise SharePoint scenario there are many 3rd party tools to migrate files structures over to the SharePoint environment, however these generally require extensions to be installed on the target server.
As this is not possible with SharePoint Online we started to look at another way. One simple approach is to simply open up a SharePoint library with Windows Explorer and just drag your files over, however this can run into a couple of fairly sizeable roadblocks:
- a character in the filename that is not allowed in SharePoint
- file transfer fails due to timeout, network conditions, or is interrupted by an inaccessible file or an illegal character in the file name
So what are our choices?
Doing a lot of research, we came across a BPOS partner in the UK that had written a tool to address exactly this challenge.
Enter Files to Go from Thinkscape!
Files to Go is so simple to use that even our non-technical customers have been able to follow the instructions and successfully migrate their files over to SharePoint Online.
It effectively creates a queue of files to be migrated and performs any illegal character changes on the fly, then simply processes the list and copies your files across.
You can either migrate your files into a single library, or run several migrations into different libraries. The folder structure of your file system is kept intact during the migration so that when you open the library in SharePoint Online you are seeing a replica of your file system.
Files to Go also creates its own site within SharePoint Online where you can track the status & progress of the migration as well as view any errors that have occurred.
Overall it is an extremely simple product to use, from the instructions through to the interface. Support is also an email away!
Files to Go currently works with SharePoint Online (under BPOS) and will also be supporting Office 365 upon its release.
Happy migrating!
