Category Archives: Microsoft Online Services

Get Familiar With Windows Azure – It’s Here To Stay

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Windows AzureWhen you access any data from the cloud, it’s easy to forget that there needs to be a cloud computing platform that houses remote applications. But the cloud computing platform is often one of the most critical portions of a solid business cloud solution strategy. Many vendors offer cloud platforms – including Google, IBM, and Amazon. But experts like Deb Shinder from Tech Republic are expecting Windows Azure to lead the future of online cloud platforming, and site specific benefits to help business owners make an educated decision.

Reduce Costs, Reduce Efforts With Windows Azure

Windows Azure reduces organizational costs in several ways. For example, Windows Azure solutions from Vorsite:

  1. Allow business owners to take advantage of off-premises resources like IT administration.
  2. Utilize Pay-as-you-go models that allow organizations to scale up computer processing time and storage as needed.
  3. Cut down on on-site costs, including allowing employees to work from home using custom online apps.

In addition, Windows Azure can help streamline company processes, like:

  1. Reducing on-site resources used to distribute, build, and modify scalable applications.
  2. Easing large-volume storage needs, large-volume computations, and batch processing.
  3. Debugging, distributing, testing, and creating web services.
  4. Speeding up time-to-market for development efforts.

A Familiar OS Environment Makes Programming For Windows Azure Simple

Since Azure code is based on the popular Windows operating system, there’s a good chance that programmers will have no problems picking up programming for Windows Azure. In face, Azure uses the same languages — C#, C++, and Visual Basic — as Microsoft Windows. If you don’t have developers available but expect to outsource to or hire programmers at any point, Windows Azure makes it easier to find qualified candidates. Open standards and protocols supported by Azure include:

  • REST
  • HTTP
  • Java
  • Ruby
  • XML
  • PHP

To make the task of adding new applications to your cloud network even easier, Azure streamlines cloud versions of existing Windows applications. One of the most popular online apps derived from a Windows OS app is also a favorite Vorsite product – Office 365.

Unparalleled Security Makes Azure Perfect For Most Businesses

Windows Azure incorporates two security services to help keep businesses’ sensitive data safe:

  • .NET Access Control Service: allows users to integrate identities
  • Security Assertion Markup Language: tokens utilized by apps to allow or deny user access.

Microsoft designed Windows Azure to meet all current regulatory requirements, and undergoes annual audits for HIPAA, PCI DSS, and SOX compliance.

Ready to give Windows Azure a try for your small or medium-sized business? Need more information? Find out more about Vorsite and Windows Azure on our website, or contact us at any time.

911-Like Mobile Business Efficiency

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If you have a medical emergency, nothing is as important as knowing that help will arrive as quickly as possible. Some 911 emergency medical providers already use a complex system of crowd sourced text, photos, and geo-tags called Next Generation 9-1-1 to send medical professionals to your location within minutes. What if your business could respond to emergencies just as quickly? How would this access to quick, efficient solutions impact your bottom line?

Using Mobile Solutions to Expedite Business Services

With mobile solutions from Vorsite, your business can use the Mobile Application Platform to access state-of-the-art data transmissions from anywhere you have a cell phone signal. Most 9-1-1 centers currently only allow voice emergency calls, which transmit only a limited amount of information to responders, such as Automatic Number Identification. But the Next Generation 9-1-1 environment will allow the public to transmit other data to responders, such as:

  1. Images to help responders better prepare for and assess emergencies.
  2. Text messages for the hearing impaired or better clarity.
  3. Automatic messages from safety personal safety devices like Advanced Automatic Collision Notification systems.

Your business can take advantage of this same technology through mobile development using a Mobile Enterprise Platform. Using this technology, you can quickly create socially integrated mobile apps to help you reach customers on any common mobile device. Originally launched as part of the Next Generation 9-1-1 project, Vorsite is proud to offer the same solutions to small and mid-sized businesses for truly dynamic apps at a fraction of the cost.

What’s Possible With Mobile Solutions From Vorsite?

Vorsite using Microsoft Mobile Application technology to give small to mid-sized business owners the edge in connectivity with customers and staff. They have handled projects related to Next Generation 9-1-1 mobile apps such as:

  • Mobile UI: a vision control system designed to enable keynote presentation theaters. The system was deployed not just on a variety of mobile devices, but also on desktop computers for control technicians. Built using the Cloud Enterprise Platform.
  • Mobile Alert System: a social networking solution perfect for schools, families, neighborhood watches, government organizations, and businesses. Allows users to send alerts to users is a specific geo-location or throughout a network. Send alerts to your staff by pressing a single button, or edit existing alerts with new information.
  • Secure Videoconferencing: perfect for government organizations, the secure videoconferencing system is developed on the Cloud Enterprise Platform to give agencies secure, cloud-based videoconferencing capabilities without the need for on-site servers or security. This project has already been approved and is currently deployed at multiple US-based Federal Government entities.

In an increasingly mobile world, emergency workers and businesses alike are constantly seeking ways to expedite data transmissions and improve workplace productivity. Vorsite and Microsoft mobile solutions can help your business stay competitive on multiple devices, while keeping overhead costs and on-site data storage at the minimum.

3 Little-Known Uses for SharePoint Online

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Most business owners know the power of SharePoint Online for team collaboration and document sharing. But did you know that there are many more uses for this vital part of the Office 365 Suite? Together with Vorsite and Microsoft, you can unlock the power of the cloud in three easy, timesaving ways.

Cut Down on Web Development Costs with SharePoint Online Websites

SharePoint Online is specifically designed to help small business owners streamline website creation, allowing them to focus on marketing their business to attract new customers. There are plenty of advantages to using SharePoint Online to build your own business website, including:

  1. SharePoint Online websites are easy to set up and painless to maintain.
  2. In addition to being public-facing, SharePoint Online websites have a truly professional appearance.
  3. Choose the default custom URL for your domain, or use a different domain name you already own through the DNS settings built into Office 365.
  4. Instantly add more resources like storage space with the click of a button.

SharePoint Online allows you to create professional websites that appear no different than websites other businesses waste countless time and money developing. If you’re familiar with WordPress, Joomla, or any other content management system, you’re already ready to take advantage of professional website development solutions from Vorsite, powered by SharePoint Online.

Streamline Company Updates and Information

If you’re struggling to find an easy-to-use system for keeping your team up to date on company news and updates, SharePoint Online could be the perfect time management solution for your business. Intranet sites allow you to easily sort vital documents and employee information in a safe, accessible web environment. Using Intranet sites, you can also:

  • Launch and participate in discussion forums
  • Edit and view routine business operations
  • Collaborate on time-intensive projects
  • Set events and reminders

Vorsite and SharePoint Online empower business owners to cut down on email use, instead delegating important tasks and reminders to the Office 365 private cloud space.

Add Custom Code to Any SharePoint Online Module

If the powerful document and content management solutions offered by SharePoint Online aren’t enough for your business, you can also access a Sandbox solution that allows your developers to upload custom code. This allows you to change almost anything you want about your website’s appearance and functionality. You can also take advantage of a number of easy-to-use features like:

  1. Office Web Apps
  2. Silverlight Web
  3. Visual Studio
  4. Microsoft Office Integration
  5. Excel and Access Services

Remember that, with Vorsite, you can unlock the true power behind Microsoft’s cloud solutions. Partnering with some of the most successful companies in the world allows you to cut business costs and wasted work time; focus on what really matters – growing your business.

Vorsite Services Can Revolutionize Workplace Efficiency

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Based on a July 2012 survey by Salary.com, 21 percent of employees waste five hours of work time each week browsing the web and performing other tasks unrelated to their jobs. With substantial lost time to factors that project managers have a difficult time controlling, why lose further time and money on decreased workplace efficiency, something you have full control over?

Vorsite’s on-site evaluation by a team of experts can help you prepare a cost analysis and make recommendations to save you the most money possible during your hosting migration. How much money is decreased workplace efficiency costing your company?

Do You Trust Your Hosting Provider?

Backed by the familiar name of Microsoft, Office 365 does not scan your emails or documents. In addition, you can count on the following benefits when you choose Office 365 cloud solutions from Vorsite:

  • World-Class Industry Standard Compliance (FISMA, HIPAA-BAA, ISO-27001, EU Model clauses)
  • Complete data storage transparency – know where your files are, who can access them, under what circumstances
  • 15-years experience in data security and stopping malicious behaviors

When you manage your customer and employee data on-site with Vorsite cloud solutions, you can rest easy knowing your files and sensitive information are 100% safe and backed by world-renowned brands.

You Can Try All Vorsite Services For 30 Days Free

Vorsite is proud to offer a 30-day free trial on the following services:

  • Microsoft Office 365: Bundles multiple services, including Office Professional Plus, Exchange Online, SharePoint Online, and Lync
  • Microsoft Windows Intune: Mobile security and IT management solutions
  • VorApps for SharePoint Online: Designed with Email Enabled Lists and Document Libraries in mind.

Try any one of our leading products at no risk to you for a full month before paying anything. We’re confident that you’ll see the full value in each of our services after only 30 days of complimentary testing.

One of our most popular services, SharePoint Online, is an online business collaboration platform where you can empower your staff to work more intelligently and more effectively every day. An extensive suite of tools allows for personal expertise, organizational knowledge, and information sharing. When you take advantage of our 30-day free trial for SharePoint Online, you’ll gain access to the following exclusive benefits:

  • Protect information with easy-to-use security features.
  • Get started with SharePoint Online immediately with minimal training.
  • Use advanced social computing tools to collaborate and innovate.
  • Monitor and analyze data real time.

SharePoint Online is available through our 30-day free trial of Microsoft Office 365, which also includes valuable office applications like Lync, Exchange Online, and Office Professional Plus. Finally, if your organization struggles with IT management and mobile security, you can take Microsoft Windows Intune for a month-long test drive.

Changing your Office 365 Plans

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Changing your Office 365 Plans

You can change your Office 365 Plans for ALL or a subset of USLs any time during the term of your subscription. For example, if you had a component plan, e.g.,. Exchange Online (Plan 1), subscription with 100 USLs and you wanted to move all users to a suite plan, e.g., Microsoft Office 365 (Plan E3) subscription, you would take the following steps:

  1. Purchase a new Microsoft Office 365 (Plan E3) subscription with 100 USLs through the Microsoft Online Services Portal.
  2. Go to user management in the portal and transfers users from the Exchange Online (Plan 1) subscription to your Microsoft Office 365 (Plan E3) subscription.
  3. Call support to cancel the Exchange Online (Plan 1) subscription.

If you want to change plans for only a subset of the users (e.g., in the above example you want to change plans for only 50 users) then you would still perform steps 1 and 2. In step 3 you would call support to reduce 50 USLS in the Exchange Online (Plan 1) subscription. Our support agents will waive cancellation fees when these changes are related to an upgrade in your plans.

Additional Resources: Office 365 Support Guide

SharePoint 2010 – Fixed width, center-aligned layout

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As a web designer there are many unique challenges you’ll face when customizing a SharePoint site that you probably won’t experience anywhere else. Tasks that sound simple can sometime take hours to get functioning correctly, and other seemingly complicated feats can be accomplished in a matter of minutes through your browser interface.

Recently I’d been working on a SharePoint site that posed some unique challenges.  One of my biggest challenges turned out to be creating a fixed width, center-aligned layout. More specifically, the site needed to be optimized for an 800×600 screen but would also need to scale to 1024×768 for the occasional user on a higher resolution monitor.

So, a “semi-flexible,” center-aligned website layout. Simple, right? This actually proved to be somewhat of a challenge. Capping the width of certain SharePoint elements prevented some elements from scaling, put scroll bars in weird areas, and cut off certain areas of text. Frustrating! But after some research plus a lot of trial and error I got it to work. The solution is actually pretty simple after all!

I added this to my CSS:

#s4-bodyContainer {

max-width: 1024px !important;

margin-left:auto;

margin-right:auto;

}

This code tells the container element to not grow any larger than 1024px wide.  SharePoint does the rest because out of the box the site will scale down to about 800px wide.

Here’s what you see at 800×600:

At 1024×768:

And at 1280×768:

Downside:   If you have a lot of content (for example a bunch of columns in a Document Library) some of those columns might overflow the container.  This isn’t optimal, but you do get a horizontal scroll bar to view this long line of text.

That said; just remember this constraint when building your site.  A fixed width design may or may not be the best solution for your intranet site.  Intranets are meant to be fluid because users are constantly uploading and changing content.   A fixed design might not be adaptable enough to handle these changes.

 
Bonus: Want the top ribbon to align with your content, too? Add this to your CSS:

.ms-cui-ribbonTopBars {

max-width: 1024px !important;

margin-left:auto;

margin-right:auto;

}

.ms-cui-ribbonTopBars > div {

border-bottom:1px solid transparent !important;

}

Here’s what you get:

 

Note: This will not center the rest of the content in the ribbon–only the top bar.

Well, how do you center the entire ribbon, then? My advice is don’t. Attempting to center the entire ribbon will only cause you headache. You’ll be left with broken behaviors and wonky button layouts. The ribbon is just too important to mess with. Leave it alone!

Problems logging on to SharePoint Online sites:

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When recently working with a customer we ran across a problem where a user wasn’t able to access their SharePoint online sites.  When accessing a SharePoint site collection the user reported the screen “flickered” and then it displayed an error message.  Upon further investigation we found the “flickering” was actually the browser bouncing back and forth between URL’s in the address bar.  The address bar also changed its background color from white to green which gave it a flicker or flash effect. The error displayed was:

Microsoft Online Services is unavailable from this site
for one of the following reasons:

  • This site may be experiencing a problem
  • The site may not be a member of the Windows
    Live Network

You can:

  • You can sign in or sign up at the other Microsoft
    Online Services site, or try again later at this site

Here’s a screenshot of the error:

My translation of the error message is this: the security settings need to be changed in your browser…

The solution to this problem is to add https://*.microsoftonline.com and https://*.sharepoint.com to Trusted Sites in IE.

Here are the steps to accomplish this:

  1. In Internet Explorer, on the Tools menu, click Internet options.
  2. Click the Security tab, click the Trusted sites zone, and then click Sites.
  3. Verify that the following entries are listed in the Websites list:
    https://*.sharepoint.com
    https://*.microsoftonline.com
  4. If these entries are not present, add them to the Trusted sites list of websites.
  5. After you’ve added the sites, click Close and then Ok in the Internet Options window.
  6. Close and re-open the browser and try logging on again.

With these sites added to the Trusted Sites zone the appropriate security settings are configured to allow for a user to login to the SharePoint Online sites.

 

Connecting PowerShell to Office 365

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Last week we looked at Managing Passwords with PowerShell, this week we look at connecting PowerShell to Office 365.  There are scenarios where the Admin Center and Exchange Control Panel won’t have the option you need to configure (e.g. configuring send-as or send on behalf) and using PowerShell is the only option available.  When you open PowerShell from your computer it’s running a local client-side session with only the basic commands.  When connecting to the Office 365 datacenter servers, the remote server-side session downloads all the available PowerShell commands that allow you to manage your Office 365 environment.  Assuming PowerShell is installed, configured and working correctly, here’s the three lines you can use to connect a computer to Office 365 – simply copy/paste each line:

$LiveCred = Get-Credential

$Session = New-PSSession -ConfigurationName Microsoft.Exchange -ConnectionUri https://ps.outlook.com/powershell/ -Credential $LiveCred -Authentication Basic -AllowRedirection

Import-PSSession $Session

The first command captures the login identity and will initiate the username and password login window.  The second command uses that identity to login and connect to the remote PowerShell server.  The third command downloads the available PowerShell commands for Office 365 to your local computer.

Next time we’ll look at successfully installing and configuring PowerShell to run on your local computer…

Vorsite Cloud Security Solution

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Security Barriers to Adopting Office 365

Secure sensitive data in real time, before it’s sent to the cloud.
Use format & operations-preserving encryption and tokenization.
Eliminate data security, privacy, residency, & compliance concerns.

  • Encryption Preserves
    Data Formats & Operations
  • Keys Retained by Our Customers
  • No Impact on Usability
  • Unified Policies Across Clouds
  • Email, calendar, contacts, and tasks stored encrypted
  • No changes to user experience
  • Works with ActiveSync for mobile
  • No desktop software or plugins

Supported Public Cloud Services:

  • Office 365 E1
  • Office 365 E2
  • Office 365 E3
  • Office 365 E4
  • Exchange Online P1
  • Exchange Online P2
Legal/Regulatory Issue Requirement Met With Vorsite Cloud Security Solution
Data Residency Transfer of personal data outside of a country restricted  Met With Vorsite Cloud Security Solution
FERPA Access to student information must be controlled Met With Vorsite Cloud Security Solution
GLBA Account and other personal information must be secured Met With Vorsite Cloud Security Solution
HITECH Patient information must be encrypted or destroyed Met With Vorsite Cloud Security Solution
ITAR Defense materials cannot be accessed by unauthorized non-US persons Met With Vorsite Cloud Security Solution
PIPEDA Personal information in Canada must be secured Met With Vorsite Cloud Security Solution
Patriot Act non-US data privacy laws limit access to personal data Patriot Act allows Met With Vorsite Cloud Security Solution
State Data Breach Laws Breach of unencrypted personal information requires notification Met With Vorsite Cloud Security Solution

Contact (anettles@vorsite.com) Vorsite today to learn how Office 365 can meet your security needs.

Managing Passwords with PowerShell

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In Office 365, PowerShell enables many options to manage your users, their mailboxes and domain settings. One of those options is to set a password for an account to never expire. This does not restrict a user from changing their own password, but simply removes the policy that forces a user to change their password. Here’s some examples of PowerShell commands used to manage passwords:

Set a password to never expire:
Set-MsolUser -UserPrincipalName -PasswordNeverExpires $true

If you want to see if a password is set to never expire then run this:
Get-MSOLUser -UserPrincipalName | Select PasswordNeverExpires

Another option is to set all users passwords to never expire, to accomplish this run the following:
Get-MSOLUser | Set-MsolUser -PasswordNeverExpires $true

This is how to manually configure the password for an account and force them to change it at next log on:
Set-MsolUserPassword -userPrincipalName -NewPassword ‘password’ -ForceChangePassword $true

These are a sampling of the commands, to see more type ‘Get-Help Set-MsolUserPassword’ in PowerShell or get-help before any other command to see what’s available.