Installing Lync for Mac on Office 365

1) Log into https://portal.microsoftonline.com using your Office 365 credentials.

2) After you have logged in, click on this link: https://portal.microsoftonline.com/download/default.aspx and download Lync for Mac 2011 (#2 on this webpage).

3) Download Lync to your Mac and then click on the blue L to begin the install.

4) Accept all of the defaults as you continue through the install.

5) You may get prompted for Lync to become your default for making telephone calls and conferences. Accept these prompts.

6) At the Lync for Mac application page, you in your Office 365 credentials (it’s your email) then click Advanced.

7) Change the button to manual configuration and enter in the information as outlined below. Press ‘Ok’ and then sign in on the next page.

We often get the question: “How can we make sure that our attendees can quickly get into our Lync sessions so that we don’t spend the first 15 minutes of any session having them download ‘stuff’?”

When you send your attendees a Lync invite there is a hyperlink in their meeting that says “First Online Meeting”? This will take the users to a page where they can prepare for the meeting – but the key is the third link that says “meeting readiness”.

Have your attendees click this link prior to the meeting and the page will make sure they have the appropriate items installed (based on their OS type and level of administrative privileges).

Here is the link.

If you are using a SharePoint Online Document Center (you are using one to help manage documents, right?) – you may upload several documents at once.  If you have turned on force check out – all of these documents will be uploaded but they will be left in a checked out state.  That’s not good if someone else wants to edit them.

You can easily check them all back in with just a few clicks.

1) Go to your document center and click the checkboxes beside the documents you wish to check in.

2) Go to the Documents portion of the ribbon and look for ‘Check In’.

3) Click ‘Check In’.

We had a new Office 365 user who wanted to delete a document from a document library and wasn’t sure how to do it.

To delete a document from a library – hover your mouse over the file (and a little to the right) and the down arrow will appear. Click the down arrow and the property dialog box will appear with your options, then choose ‘delete’.

We recently had a customer that was having a hard time updating his time zone for Exchange Online in Office 365.  Here are the instructions on how to set this up. 

1. Log into Outlook Web Access

2. At Top Right click on “Options”

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4. Then choose “See All Options” which will take you to a different screen

5. On the left hand side click “Settings”

6. Then click the icon which says “Regional”

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8. Then choose your time zone the drop down and save.

We were recently engaged by a large construction and engineering firm to help with ‘SharePoint Training’.  I put that into quotes because the organization had a general idea of what they thought they wanted us to do.  Their approach: come in and ‘train us on SharePoint’.

The problem: they had no idea what they really wanted to accomplish.

We could have very easily just sold the engagement and done ‘training’ but it would have set the organization up to fail. We follow a very specific implementation methodology when it comes to SharePoint:

Step 1: Meet with the Core Team and go through the functionality in SharePoint.

Step 2: Identify the areas of functionality where the quickest wins can be recognized (Document Libraries are always a good start).  Map those areas of functionality to the functional silos (lines of business) of the business (sales/marketing, HR, legal, finance, executive team).

Step 3: Meet individually with the subject matter experts for the previously defined lines of business.  Design the SharePoint platform to meet those requirements.

Step 4: Customize the SharePoint environment to match the functional requirements of each line of business.  These include custom lists, SharePoint workflow implementations, integration with 3rd party applications, KPI creation.

Step 5: Meet with each line of business owner and review our customizations.  Make modifications as needed.

Step 6: Finalize the SharePoint training documentation.  Present to the executive team.  Finalize SharePoint roll out and complete end user training – including ‘cheat sheets’ for functional areas.

If we can help you with your Office 365 or SharePoint roll out – contact us today!

We recently worked with an Office365 client who had a ton of contacts.  They wanted us to help them create contact lists in Office 365 for each ‘type’ of contact so that people could easily track down the person they were looking for.

The problem with this approach was that it would:

A) Create lots of lists of contacts in SharePoint (one for each type)

B) Leave it up to the user to determine which type of contact the person is prior to creating a new contact – which could lead to them choosing the wrong type and placing them in the wrong list, thus slowing down the collaboration process (isn’t that why you use SharePoint?)

Instead – we used one contact list in SharePoint Online and then added a custom column that included their three different types of contacts (vendor, client, contractor).  We also modified the ‘new’ form so that the type would always be at the top. 

We then created three views that filtered the contacts based on their type. 

Then the client needed the ability to quickly upload the new contacts.  The pages from their training manual on how to do this are below.

Choose Allow.

Choose Yes.

Go back to SharePoint list, then Click List.  Then choose datasheet view.

Then change the contact type to the preferred contact type (vendor, contractor or client).  It’s easiest to do this in datasheet view because you can make a bunch of changes at once.

Finally – you can modify what you are looking at by choosing ‘List’ and changing the view.

If you want to use some of the advanced features of SharePoint Online or Exchange Online – it’s important that you have the right organization hierarchy set up. This isn’t applicable to a 3-10 person business – but to the upper end of SMBs, this is very applicable….especially if you want to use some of our custom workflows for Exchange Online.

To set up your organizational hierarchy in Office 365 – log in as the administrator for your Office 365 account and then choose ‘Manage’ for Exchange Online.

Then highlight the person’s name that you want to manage and choose details.

Navigate down to Organization and then browse out to their manager.

Sometimes it’s easier to create a meeting on the fly rather than schedule them directly through Outlook (or perhaps you are just using Lync Online from Office 365 and are not a full subscriber). This process walks you through how to do just that.

Open your Lync Client and choose Meet Now.

Enter in your Audio Information (or choose none if you don’t plan to use audio).

In the conversation windows – choose ‘Join Information and Meeting Options’.

Copy the information from the link and send it out to your participants.

If you are using SharePoint Online in Office 365 under a P1 plan – you may be wondering where you can view your total storage used. It’s buried – but it’s there!

Simply point your browser to: http://yourdomain.sharepoint.com/_layouts/usage.aspx and you will see the amount of storage assigned, how much has been used, how many folks are assigned to your site collection.