Category Archives: Office 365

Handy Outlook Web Access 2013 tips

imageOutlook Web Access (OWA) 2013 has a nifty new view that really helps make it a lot more touch friendly.

Normally when you log into OWA 2013 you would see something like this:

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If you are using this on a touch device you wouldn’t be the first to think that it’s not the greatest of experiences.  The folder nav etc… on the left is small and hard to tap with a finger etc..

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OWA 2013 actually comes in three varieties:

  • Phone mode (MS calls this 1-Wide because its only one column of information)
  • Desktop/Laptop mode (3-wide)
  • Tablet mode (2-wide)

You can force OWA into these modes by altering the URL in the browser as follows:

Phone Mode /owa/?layout=tnarrow
Tablet Mode /owa/?layout=twide

Here is that same folder showing Tablet Mode:

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And now in Phone mode:

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So to get this append the appropriate parameter on the end of your OWA URL … something like this:

https://pod51037.outlook.com/owa/?layout=twide

I personally like forcing my OWA to the twide mode on any touch enabled device. For example the new IE in Windows 8 seems to default to the normal OWA for me … but I like it in the touch friendly twide mode.

Offline mode
Final tip for the day is setting OWA to work offline.  This only works in new browsers like IE10.  It lets you access your email while not connected to a network.  This is handy if you don’t have Outlook on your machine and want to access things out of the office.

To set it up start by clicking the “cog” image and picking “Offine Settings”. You are then walked through a series of steps to setup the offline store.

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Very handy if you have a Surface or an iPad and like using OWA for email instead of those devices terrible native email client apps (IMHO YMMV Smile).

Enjoy!

-CJ

Office Apps are sweet

Typically when I talk to people about Apps for Office their reaction is along the lines of “meh … yeah they are cool … but I don’t really see what the fuss is all about”.  I have to admit, I was kinda the same when I was introduced to them by Rolando on the Office team during a super early sneak preview of what the Office engineering team were doing for Office 2013.

Today our Office 365 tenant was upgraded to the new stuff … and along with that Exchange 2013.  That means finally I get to use Apps for Office in a real life, production system that I live and breath in everyday.  And they ROCK!

A bit of background (skip this if you already know what apps for office are all about)Apps for Office are the new way developers can extend Office applications (Word, Excel, Outlook and PowerPoint).  They are mini web applications that are embedded in the Office app.  They communicate over a provided JavaScript API to the “host” application.  For example an app for Outlook can read the recipients, subject, parts of the body of the message & attachment information when you use that app on a particular email message.  That app might do something like show you information about that person from LinkedIn or show you their Twitter profile etc…

You install these apps from the Office Store or you can also side load them if you build one just for a particular use and you don’t want to offer it to other people.

When you say “apps” most people think of apps for iPhones and so on, but what really peaks my interest in apps for Office are the private apps that can be built to assist companies offer new experiences for their workers.  For example you could build an app that integrates with your line of business system that tracks customers orders.  When a support email comes in the support person could instantly see the orders that were placed by that person.  The options are limitless.

If you are interested in developing an App for Office I recommend starting here:  Overview of apps for Office

Anyway … Provoke Solutions runs it’s email in Office 365 … so today we got upgraded and started to see some of this new functionality popping up in our apps … like Outlook.

image002By default you get the “Bing Maps” app in Outlook.  This little guy will detect addresses in an email and then map them on a map for you.  Pretty handy! 

However, even better are some of the others you can get from the Store

In particular I like the LinkedIn one that detects people on the email and shows you their LinkedIn profile. It also lets you connect with them.

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Another out of the box app in Outlook is when it detects someone talking about setting up a time to meet.  It will offer to create a meeting invite for you!

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There are loads of others for things like creating tasks for actions and so on.

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What only really stuck me fully today about these is how useful they really will be.  In the past I was only ever looking at demos and most regular people would have tuned it out given they have little to no control over the version of Exchange their company runs. 

But today when they started showing up in Outlook for me (they work in Outlook Web Access too) it really dawned on me how useful they will be.

No doubt in a couple of days I will wonder how I ever survived without them 🙂

-CJ

Puget Sound SharePoint User Group presentation – Stop! Yammer Time.

Last night i was fortunate enough to present to the local Puget Sound SharePoint User group at the Microsoft offices in Bellevue.  I titled my presentation “Stop!  Yammer time”.

It was all about Yammer (no surprise there).  I ran through where I thought things were at with regards to the current overlap and confusion between the out of the box SharePoint social features vs. those in Yammer, some roadmap information about what to expect over the next year with regards to the integration of the two products and also a few bits for developers on what APIs are available.  I also demoed a sneak peak of an app for SharePoint Online that we are publishing shortly that lets people post information to Yammer from SharePoint (more on that soon in a future post).

I was also a little antagonistic (trying to get people questioning and thinking a bit more) with my analogy between SP vs. Yammer and the Matrix movies Red pill vs. Blue pill decision that Neo has to make.  Blue pill, stay blissfully ignorant that Yammer isn’t the future of all things social in SharePoint and other Microsoft products, or the Red pill, take the painful truth of reality now and get ready for the future albeit painful and a bit messy for the time being.

It was a fun session and i really enjoyed the opportunity to present.

My slides are below if you are interested in taking a look.  (they don’t really articulate a lot of what i spoke about outside of the slides, but hopefully it helps a little)

-CJ

Exchange online archive awesomeness

There are two kinds of people in this world when it comes email management:

  • Pilers (derived from pile … warning not a real word)
  • Filers

Pilers – just let their inbox grow to monumental size and rely on search etc… to find things.  There are loads of these people around.  Their inboxes grow to multiple GB and they never file or clear anything out.

Filers – once they read an email and do whatever they need to do they delete it OR file it in a folder somewhere. They rely on both folder hierarchy and search to find email.

I am a filer. I like having a folder for a particular project etc… I cant really say why … but it seems to work best for me.

Now to the point of this post 🙂 …

At Provoke we use Exchange Online for our email system. It rocks. MS look after it for us.  We get 4GM mailbox sizes.

4GB !?!?!? you might say … how on earth do you cope with only 4GB?!?!? That’s what I said. (That is about 1 yr of email for me)

In Exchange Online E3 you can get this nifty feature called an Online Archive.  It lets you stick all sorts of stuff in there and it doesn’t go towards your mailbox quota. 

I have 100GB of this archive which is awesome.

The other thing you need is a way to get mail into that archive.  Enter policy!

When you select a folder in your mailbox in Outlook you can tap the Set Folder Policy button:

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And then set a Policy to move mail to the archive after it gets to a particular age.  Policies inherit so you don’t have to do this on every folder. 

Then you set the Online Archive setting to a time period after which you want to move email to the archive. In my case I like 6 months.

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You access it via outlook or OWA just as you normally would.  It shows up along side your mail mailbox.

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Another cool thing about this is that it frees up space in your offline mail store (OST) on your computer.  The Online Archive is online available online … not when you are offline.

No more email mailbox quota problems.  NICE!

-CJ.