Level 300 – Advanced

Are you considering moving your business to Office 365?  Well the www.office365.com website does a good job of explaining at a high level what you get for your dollar – but for some of us that isn’t enough information.

What if you want to get down to the fine detail before making a decision to go to Office 365?

Well luckily Microsoft have published what the call “Service Descriptions”.  These documents outline exactly what you get, explain the differences between all the plans, and ultimately help you decide what plan is right for you.

The Office 365 for Enterprise Service Descriptions include:

• Microsoft Exchange Online Archiving Service Description
• Microsoft Exchange Online for Enterprises Service Description
• Microsoft Lync Online for Enterprises Service Description
• Microsoft Office Professional Plus Service Description
• Microsoft Office Web Apps Service Description
• Microsoft SharePoint Online for Enterprises Service Description
• Office 365 for Enterprises Service Description
• Office 365 Identity Service Description
• Office 365 Mobility Service Description
• Office 365 Security and Service Continuity Service Description
• Office 365 Support for Apple Mac and iOS Devices

You can find all the information here.

‘till next time!
TNP

One of my favourite things about Office 365 is that by using the SharePoint Online functionality that comes with it, you can quickly create a secure extranet to share documents, collaborate, and communicate with people outside your organisation.

In fact, depending on the Office 365 plan you are on, you can invite up to 50 people who are not on your Office 365 environment to participate!

Not only that, the best part is that it only takes a couple of minutes to set up, and once you have, it is even faster next time you want to create another extranet (maybe for another customer or supplier)

So how do you do it?

1) Go to the Office 365 Admin Portal (portal.microsoftonline.com, and click on “Admin”)

2) Click on “Manage SharePoint”

3) Click on “Manage Site Collections

4) Click on “Settings”

5) Click “Manage External Users”

6) Click “Allow” and “Save”

7) Go to the site collection (the site that will be your extranet) then click “Site Actions”

8) "Click “Site Settings”

9) Look for “Site Collection Administration” and click on “Site Collection Features”

10) Look for “External User Invitations” and click “Activate” (if it isn’t activated already)

11) Go to the site you want to share, click “Site Settings”

12) Click “Share Site”

13) Type in the email addresses of the folk that you want to invite to participate in your new Office 365 / SharePoint Online extranet!!!!

Now one thing that you should note is that at the time of writing this article, your external parties need to use a Hotmail ID, or a Microsoft Online Services ID to log into your extranet.  In the future you should be able to use any email address which will make it even easier.

So there you have it – a fully functioning, secure extranet in just minutes using Office 365!  How good is that!!!!

‘till next time!
TNP

Are you one of the thousands of businesses around the word looking to use Microsoft’s Office 365 “cloud” service, but don’t know where to start?

Well Microsoft Press have made available a free e-book which helps you get started.  Called “Microsoft Office 365:  Connect and Collaborate Virtually Anywhere, Anytime.”

I like this book for a few reasons.  Firstly – FREE!  Secondly, it covers a lot of the questions you probably have about Office 365 and gives you some pretty good answers.  It covers topics like:

• Getting Started with Office 365
• Administering an Office 365 Account
• What your team can do with Office 365
• Creating your Team Site with SharePoint Online
• Posting, Sharing and Managing Files
• Adding and Managing Workflows
• Working with Office 2010 Web Apps
• Going Mobile with Office 365

It is a good blend of technical content for the folk that need to set up and run Office 365 for others, plus a little bit of user content to help you understand exactly how Office 365 works under the covers, and how you can use it to work better, faster, and stronger!

You can download the free Office 365 ebook from Microsoft here.

Did you know that Outlook 2007 saves drafts of your emails as you type them?  This is great if you accidentally close the email window before sending, or start an email and then the power goes out.

By default Outlook will save a draft every three minutes.  But if you are paranoid about losing your work… or don’t care that much… you can change the timeframes in which the auto-save occurs.

To increase or decrease the auto-save time for draft emails in Outlook 2007:

1) Click “Options” from the menu

2) Make sure you are on the “Preferences” tab”

3) Click the “E-mail Options…” button

4) Click the “Advanced E-Mail Options…” button (about half way down the window)

5) Beside the first checkbox (“AutoSave items every:”) change the number to the number of minutes you would like the interval to be

6) Click OK 3 times to close all the windows

To find the drafts that Outlook saves, just take a look in your drafts folder

‘till next time!
TNP

Does your Junk Mail folder in Outlook 2007 seem to continually build up with… well… junk mail?  If you are confident that no important mail ever ends up in your junk mail folder, you can set Outlook to automatically delete junk mail instead.

To automatically delete junk mail in Outlook 2007:

1) Click on “Tools”

2) Click on “Options”

3) Make sure you are on the “Preferences” tab”

4) In the “E-mail” section, click on the “Junk E-mail…” button

5) On the “Options” tab, look half way down for a checkbox that says “Permanently delete suspected junk e-mail instead of moving it to the Junk E-mail folder”.  Check that check box.

To stop the automatic deletion of junk mail, repeat the process, and just uncheck the checkbox in step 5

‘till next time!
TNP

If you have ever printed handouts for your PowerPoint presentations before, you know that they can be pretty bland.  Just the slides all stacked up on a page, with plenty of whitespace.

Well did you know that you have complete control over how those handouts actually look?  You can add your company logo, or a copyright statement, or remove the date or the page numbers.  You can do whatever you want!

All of this is controlled from what is called the “Handout Master”.  Those of you familiar with the “Slide Master” will know exactly what we are talking about.  The easiest way to describe the handout master is that it is the template for all the handouts printed from the presentation.

To access the Handout Master in PowerPoint 2007:

1) Click on the “View” tab in the ribbon

2) In the “Presentation Views” group on the left hand side, click on “Handout Master”

Once you are in the master, you can control all manner of different things, including the page setup, the handout orientation (portrait or landscape), the slide orientation on the handouts, and how many slides will appear on each page.

To get out of the “Handout Master” view… simply click the “Close Master View” button on the right hand side of the ribbon

‘till next time!
TNP

Word 2007 has some fairly powerful translation features that can help you quickly understand what a word is in a different language.

By using the “Translation ScreenTip” you can see the translation of most words simply by moving the mouse over them!

Translation ScreenTip works for the following languages:

• Arabic (Saudi Arabia)
• English (United States)
• French (France)
• Spanish (Spain, International Sort)

To turn on Translation ScreenTip:

1) Make sure you are on the “Review” tab of the ribbon

2) Look for the “Proofing” group

3) Click on “Translation ScreenTip”

4) Select the language you want to see the translation for, or click on “Turn Off Translation ScreenTip” to turn the translation off.

‘till next time!
TNP

Is there a section of text in your document (or your whole document!) that isn’t “English (United States)” or another language.  Well to make sure that your spelling and grammar checks in Word 2007 work well, you need to make sure that text is marked as the right language.

So how do you mark a section of text as a different language?

1) Select the text

2) Make sure you are on the “Review” tab of the ribbon

3) Look for the “Proofing” group”

4) Click “Set Language”

5) Select your preferred language

Now you can be confident that spell check is doing the right thing!

‘till next time!
TNP

Have you ever built an awesome slide with lots of different objects?  Well then I am sure you will understand how frustrating it can be when you need to select an object that is behind 3 or 4 other ones!

Did you know there is a great tool you can use called the “Selection Pane”, that will help you select those pesky, hard to get to objects?

Selection Pane simply lists all the objects that are on a slide, in a simple to use task pane to the right hand side of your PowerPoint 2007 screen.  Using Selection pan you can quickly select any object, not matter how far to the back of the slide it is.

To turn on the selection pane:

1) Make sure you are on the “Home” tab of the ribbon

2) Look for the “Editing” Group – you will find it on the far right hand side of the ribbon

3) Click on the little arrow beside the “Select” button

4) Click on “Selection Pane…”

‘till next time!
TNP

Did you know in Word you can automatically select all the text in a document that shares the same formatting?

For example, you can select all text that is Arial, 12pt.  Very handy if you are not using styles, yet want to apply a formatting change across select blocks of text.

To select text with similar formatting in Word 2007:

1) Select some of the text you want to select

2) Make sure you are on the home tab of the ribbon

3) Look for the “Editing” group on the right hand side of the ribbon

4) Click on “Select”

5) Click on “Select Text with Similar Formatting”

‘till next time!
TNP