Early this year I had my first experience with Microsoft
Office 365, in particular with SharePoint Online, and I have to say the
experience was excellent. To set the
stage, due to the nature of most of our customers at the time (primarily
military and government) I typically worked with on-premises SharePoint
deployments, but I was researching the capabilities offered by SharePoint
Online for a specific project I was assigned and I needed to get up and running
quickly.
The setup process was simple, fast and without any hassles. It took about 45 minutes to get a new Office
365 tenant setup and using SharePoint Online.
SharePoint Online is part of Microsoft Office 365 and your first step to
getting setup is to purchase an Office 365 subscription, which can be done
here: http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/business/compare-office-365-for-business-plans-FX102918419.aspx.
As it was my first experience, I signed up for a free trial which is also
possible at this site. When purchasing a
subscription there are several plans to choose from, starting as low as $5.00
per user per month (for the Small Business subscription) and ranging up to
$20.00 per user per month (for a full blown Enterprise E3 subscription). There are several levels available between
those depending on your needs and your business.
Once you’ve registered for a trial or purchased a
subscription, you’ll be taken to an Administrative Center portal page. This page allows you to manage all
administrative functions for your shiny new Office 365 tenant. It contains a number of tasks you need to
perform to get setup – these include:
·
Adding Domains
Adding a domain is one of your first
steps. If you already own a registered
domain name you may use it. The
Administrative Portal guides you through the process of verifying ownership and
setting up the appropriate DNS records to point to your Office 365 tenant.
·
Adding User Identities
Next you’ll need to add users to your
Office 365 deployment. You can add users
one at a time, specifying various attributes for each user. Alternatively you can add users in bulk by
uploading an appropriately formatted CSV file.
As well, depending on your subscription you can Active Directory
Synchronization to allow existing users to use their existing AD credentials to
access SharePoint Online (only available with an Enterprise level subscription
plan). As well, you can enable Single
Sign On through Active Directory Federation Services (ADFS) to allow users to
access SharePoint Online using their existing credentials and not requiring
them to enter their credentials again. In order to enable Active Directory
Synchronization and Single Sign On there are a number of steps to complete, and
you should follow the Microsoft guidance provided on these very helpful articles: Prepare for Single Sign On http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/jj151786.aspx
and Using Active Directory with Microsoft Office 365 http://channel9.msdn.com/Events/TechEd/NorthAmerica/2011/SIM320.
·
Configuring a SharePoint Team Site and Web Site,
or Adding Additional Sites
Once SharePoint Online is setup it will
contain 2 sites by default: a team site and a web site. A team site is an internal SharePoint site,
where teams and groups of users can exchange documents, connect with one
another, store and retrieve content and generally collaborate. A web site is a SharePoint site which
represents a public facing web site for your business, where external partners
and customers can retrieve information about your organization. SharePoint Online provides both sites by
default, and allows you to create additional SharePoint sites as needed from
the available templates. These default
sites as well as new sites can be configured as needed, with additional
libraries, lists, views, apps, web parts, etc.
At this point you can configure the default sites, or add additional
sites for various purposes.
·
Creating Groups and Configuring Permissions
Once end users are created it will be
necessary to configure those users with the appropriate permissions to access
the content they need to perform their daily tasks. The simplest and most manageable strategy to
accomplish this is through the use of groups.
As opposed to assigning permissions to users directly, it is recommended
that administrators create security groups, they add end users to those groups
and then assign permissions to the groups. When first starting out with
SharePoint Online this is an effective strategy to allow administrators to more
easily track of which users have access to specific sites or content. Security groups can often represent teams or
roles within the organization that have certain types of access to content –
for example, finance team members can be part of a “Finance” group that has the
Full Control permission level assigned to the organization’s financial
documents.
SharePoint Online uses the same permission
model as on-premises deployments. So,
administrators can expect to work with permission levels which are assigned to security
groups or users and to content, and which are made up of predetermined
permissions like View, Open, Edit, etc.
As well, they can expect to work with permissions that are inherited
from libraries, lists and sites, or with unique permissions that are assigned
to specific information objects like documents.
·
Configuring External Access (if required)
If required by the business, an
administrator can configure SharePoint Online to allow external users to access
the organization’s SharePoint Online sites.
This can be configured through the Administration Center portal by
accessing Settings and selecting Manage External Users. Once configured here than individual site
collection administrators or site owners are able to configure external users
to access to their site collection’s sites (it is still disabled by default and
must be configured for each site collection).
They must provide the email address of each external user that is to be
granted access, and they are able to send email invitations to these users to
access content which has been shared to them.
This is an extremely useful option if you have business partners outside
of your domain that you wish to have access to specific content within some
specific site collections.
·
Adding Content to SharePoint Online
At this point you’ll likely want to start
moving content into SharePoint Online.
Once you’ve figured out which content needs to move into SharePoint, you
have several options available for uploading content: uploading a single document at a time,
uploading multiple documents at one time, accessing SharePoint through the
Windows Explorer view to add multiple files and folders at one time, or
dragging and dropping multiple files onto a SharePoint 2013 library in the web
browser. Typically, you need to think
about moving other forms of content as well, such as announcements, contacts,
lists, business data, databases, appointments and even business workflow.
There are of course many other options available during the setup process which are not discussed here, including configuring Microsoft Exchange for business email, Microsoft Lync for unified communications such as online chat and Skype, as well as enabling mobile access. As well, it’s important to understand that before proceeding to get your entire organization up and running with Microsoft Office 365 and SharePoint Online, many of these steps require careful planning to ensure that they fulfill the business needs of the organization - for example:
·
Understanding which features are included with
each subscription and selecting the plan is right for your business
·
Determining which users need access to
SharePoint Online, which user attributes are important to configure for those
users and determining if single sign on is a real requirement for the business
·
Determining which types of team sites are needed,
and by which user communities
·
Determining if all corporate content needs to
move to SharePoint Online, or if some content that has not been accessed for a
long periods of time can be archived instead
·
Etc…
The main point I wanted to get across in this article is
that Microsoft has made the process of getting up and running with Office 365
and SharePoint Online extremely easy. As
I started off mentioning, I was able to easily get a demonstration SharePoint
Online instance up and running, with some users, some required customizations
and some sites and content in about 45 minutes following many of the
configuration steps mentioned above. This
was possible even without having much knowledge about Microsoft Office 365 and
SharePoint Online to start off with.
I highly recommend you go through the process yourself and
learn all that Microsoft Office 365 has to offer – you can begin here: http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/business/compare-office-365-for-business-plans-FX102918419.aspx.
-Antonio
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