Save a couple $grand$ on email every year…

For the past several months, we’ve been converting some of our customers over to Office365.  In fact, we’ve been able to prove savings of $2k to $5k per year for each customer (over 3 years), depending on the number of users converted.  This product is a serious cost-savings tool.  And now, Microsoft is making it easier than ever to switch.

Until June, Microsoft’s Big Easy 8 sale is going on.  This means you can get a E1 plan (Exchange, Sharepoint, and Windows Live meetings) for just $8 per user, per month (less than $100 per year per user!).  Or, if you also could benefit from upgrading all users to Microsoft Office 2010, then get the E3 plan at just $20 per user, per month.  This means that for price of Office 2010 (Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, and Access) you get hosted Exchange and Sharepoint for free!  Microsoft will even give you some additional cash back to use for future training like our Outlook Productivity training for Sales and Operations staff.

We’ve been using Office365 here for about a year.  We switched from Lotus Notes.  For us its a no brainer – we no longer are in the “support” business for our email, and can just get after the business of helping our customers.  We’ve even done it in such a way that we still leverage our Lotus Notes applications as-is – only our email is switched to Office365.  And its been rock-solid reliable, just like Lotus Notes was for us.  (Why did we switch from Lotus?  Simple – momentum.  Most of our customers switched to Exchange/Outlook, so we needed to better support and train them.  The best way to do that is to use what they use.  Sad for Lotus - their job is marketing, our job is helping customers.)

If you haven’t checked out Office365, or haven’t seen a demo, click on our link here to start a free trial.  It will basically set you up with a 25 user E3 account so you can see how easy it is to use its online collaboration features (Sharepoint) for your team.  You can even setup temporary email accounts to test the email features as well.

Or, if you would like someone to just walk you through it, please do not hesitate to give me a call or shoot me an email.

Get more value from Microsoft Outlook…

Meet Chuck:

He’s your “average employee” – struggling to navigate today’s wild-wild-west of daily information, and simply get his work done.  His problem?  He hasn’t been taught how to do that.  He’s been given Microsoft Outlook to be more productive, but unfortunately has only gotten as far as sending emails and booking meetings (lots and lots of meetings!)

Fortunately, we can help.  We have recently developed a class for sales, service, and support teams that helps them immediately become more productive.  The class is delivered in both On-Site or Video/Webinar format – so we can help companies in any location, not just in Michigan.  It is designed to help teams organize their world, get more done, and spend more time “working” – instead of searching for information and drowning in Inbox Overload.

If your team or company may benefit from some low-cost Outlook training, please give us a call.  It’s a quick-win, with topics such as:

Organizing your world 

• Email & Calendar – Setting & Using Categories to track open items for Customers and Projects
• Email – Organize Sent email (not just Inbox) before it goes out
• Email – Creating Cool Rules to cut rough Inbox Overload
• Email – Creating Search Folders to build action lists
• Email – Setting up your Favorites for quicker access
• Calendar – Adding all tasks as “Time” for better productivity
• Email – Junk Filtering for less non-value-add email

Working with people

• Email – Tracking and Managing incoming and outgoing follow-up
• Email & Calendar – Exchanging calendars with external customers and internal teams
• Calendar – Working with multiple calendars, and creating and sharing Team calendars
• Email – Polling users with Yes/No tracking, Approve/Deny, and other Voting

Other Magic

• Email – Multiple signatures for condensed Reply/Forward, new prospects, and more
• Email – QuickParts – Creating, managing email templates for sales, service
• Email – Making custom QuickSteps to automate repetitive actions
• Email – Emailing your vCard, making a QR Code, and other quick tips
• Email – Quickly adding screen prints to emails

Lessons Learned with Office 365

Lessons learned

1. We noticed very slow performance when accessing a secondary mail file from Outlook 2007.  Upgrading to Outlook 2010 corrected the problem.
2. Upgrade of Office 365 from the professional version to enterprise version is not easy.  See Lisa’s Blog for details.
3. We noticed two problems with both Outlook 2007 and 2010:
   1. Calendar reminders do not show up.
   2. Unread email messages with the following information:

11:37:00 Synchronizer Version 14.0.6025

11:37:00 Synchronizing Mailbox ‘Rayan Hanoudi’

11:37:00 Synchronizing local changes in folder ‘Drafts’

11:37:00 Uploading to server ‘CH1PRD0402.mailbox.outlook.com’

11:37:01 Synchronization of some deletions failed.

11:37:01                         [80040115-514-80040115-130]

11:37:01                         Network problems are preventing connection to Microsoft Exchange.

11:37:01                         Microsoft Exchange Information Store

11:37:01                         For more information on this failure, click the URL below:

11:37:01                         http://www.microsoft.com/support/prodredirect/outlook2000_us.asp?err=80040115-514-80040115-130

11:37:01           1 item(s) deleted in online folder

11:37:01 Done
I found a fix on the office 365 community forum: http://community.office365.com/en-us/f/160/p/11060/48912.aspx

We had to:

1. Quit Outlook, delete the OST file and start Outlook again and have it rebuild the file.
2. Quit Outlook, Turn off “Use Cached Exchange Mode”, start Outlook.  Exit Outlook and enable “Use Cached Exchange Mode” again.
3. There is still on outstanding issue with an unread email that shows up all the time:

9:49:36 Synchronizer Version 14.0.6109

9:49:36 Synchronizing Mailbox ‘Rayan Hanoudi’

9:49:36 Synchronizing local changes in folder ‘Drafts’

9:49:37 Uploading to server ‘CH1PRD0402.mailbox.outlook.com’

9:49:37 Synchronization of some deletions failed.

9:49:37                   [0-130]

9:49:37    1 item(s) deleted in online folder

9:49:37 Done

Many people are having this same exact issue, see this blog post:  http://community.office365.com/en-us/f/146/t/3437.aspx

Finally! Move your calendar entries and contacts from Lotus Notes to Office 365

When we migrated from Lotus Notes to Office 365, we had to move our calendar entries manually to Office 365. After some digging around, I have found out how to migrate your calendar entries and of course your contacts.

In Lotus Notes, go to your calendar and under the lists view click on calendar entries.

• Highlight all of the entries that you want to move over.

• Click File, then export.

• Navigate to where ever you would like to save the file.

• You want to change the ‘save as type’ to Calendar Entry (.ics)

• Put in a name you want to give the file and make sure that you put .ics after the file name. (This is to make sure it exports as a .ics)

• Click Export.

Now, you need to have Outlook set up on your desktop. (The client version, not OWA)

For Outlook 2010:

• Click File, then open.

• Click Import.

• Choose import iCalendar (.ics)

• Navigate to the .ics file you just exported and click open.

• You can either choose to import it in a new calendar or import it into your own calendar. (I chose to import in my current calendar).

Once I did that, my calendar entries imported. Note that in Lotus Notes, if you have some reoccurring entries they may not import into outlook because it contains a recurrence pattern that Outlook doesn’t support.

Onto importing your contacts. Make sure that you copy all of your contacts to your local address book database. They will export better this way. Once copied over do the following:

• Click File, then click export contacts.

• Fill in the name of the file you want to give it and make sure it is saved as a .csv file

• Pick which options you want as far as what contacts you want exported.

• Click Export.

You will now see the csv file where you saved it. Open it up and clean up the columns.

When that’s cleaned up. Go to your Outlook and import them. Your contacts can be imported through Outlook or OWA.

For Outlook 2010:

• Click File, then open

• Click Import and choose import from another file or program.

• Choose comma separated value (Windows) or which ever applies to you.

• Find the csv file you just exported and click next.

• Under your mailbox find ‘contacts’ (or where ever you want the contacts to import at) and click next.

• Click Finish.

It should import your contacts.

To import your contacts through OWA:

• Go to your mailfile and click on contacts.

• Right above the search your contacts box there is an import button. Click on that.

• Navigate to the file where your exported contacts are.

• Once you click next it will import your contacts.

Part 2 of 3: Steps to finalize the upgrade to Office 365

After following the pre-migration steps, we followed these steps to finalize the upgrade:

1. Verify that Office 365 is working correctly and we can send and receive emails.

2. Create forward rules from Lotus Notes to Office 365. We still have many Lotus Notes applications that were not migrated at the time of the email migration. We setup a forward rule in Lotus Notes’ address book to forward to office 365 addresses.

3. Import external contacts from Lotus Notes directory to Office 365 using PowerShell script. The external contacts are clients or vendors email addresses and phone numbers that we share between the team. Since there is no UI tool to allow us to do import the contacts in Office 365, we had to write a PowerShell script to import the contacts.

4. Previous calendar entries had to be manually created in Outlook for each user.

5. Configure the Outlook/mobile device client for each user

6. Setup user signature in Outlook

7. Setup rules in Outlook

8. Import/manually enter personal contacts that were created in Lotus Notes.

Part 1 of 3 – Migration from Lotus Notes to Office 365

Migration from Lotus Notes to Office 365

I wanted to document our process that we followed to migrate from Lotus Notes to Office 365. We have had to do quite a bit of research on how this process should go. Since we have found bits and pieces all over the internet. These are the step that we took pre-migration.

1. In our case, we changed the company name from Ebiz Technology to TractionCRM. We ended up purchasing a new Internet domain to be used in Office 365

2. Purchase new office 365 accounts from http://www.office365.com

3. Setup all mail files ahead of time on Office 365

4. Enable IMAP on the Lotus Notes server

5. Update firewall rules to allow IMAP from the Internet to access Lotus Notes IMAP.

6. We used the IMAP connector to synchronize the email messages between Lotus Notes and Office 365.

7. Calendar entries do not migrate when using POP/IMAP. We had to make a copy of the calendar entries and manually create those entries in Outlook.

8. Turn off out office agent and rules from Lotus Notes

9. If the end user used mail rules. Those rules had to be manually created on the Outlook side

10. Setup “Connected Account” in Office 365 to fetch emails every hours from Lotus Notes. In our case, customers still sent emails to our ebiz email address and the connector fetched those emails automatically every hour.

11. On migration day, we delegated DNS to office 365 name servers

Things to know when migrating from the P1 plan to the E3 plan in Office 365

A couple of weekends ago I migrated our office 365 plan from the small business (P1) plan to the Enterprise (E3) plan. To start off, Microsoft cannot migrate you between plans. They say the two plans are on different platforms and there is no way migrate between the two.

In order to get onto the E3 plan, I had to delete our P1 account and create an E3 account. Yes, that means that we had to find an alternative source to collect our emails. Otherwise we would lose all emails that came in through out the weekend. Since we had to delete our P1 account, that means we had to change our nameservers back to our hosting company and then re verify our domains in our new account.

This is the interesting part between the two plans that I had discover: In the Small Business plans, you HAVE to fully redelegate your DNS in office 365. In the Enterprise plans, you CANNOT fully redelegate your DNS in office 365. I had not known about not being able to fully redelegate our DNS in the E3 plan and unfortunately, they do not have the best of documentation for that either. I had spent a couple of days working with Technical Support trying to fix the issue with Fully redelegating our DNS in the E3 plan. They were unable to help me with this issue because they did not know about this in the Enterprise accounts.

Office 365 has a spot for forums for any issues anyone is having. I had to read a couple of forums and to be sure, post a forum myself. One of their moderators had responded with the answer within an hour.

Once that was discovered, I was able to enter in the DNS at my hosting company and it started working right away.

Office365 – 2 months in…

So far so good.  We are 2 months in.  We had 1 outage for about 3 hours – but only really affected us during the last hour of the work-day.  Other than that, it is working as expected.

It is essentially what you expect it to be:  Calendar/Email/Scheduling without the associated hardware.

We have used Sharepoint a little – but since the “drive space” is limited in the Online version, we have used our internal Sharepoint more.  So that really isn’t on our radar right now.  We tend to hog a lot of space with code, documentation, pictures/graphics, and “backups”.

Lynx is kinda a waste for us – everyone in the office is fairly accessible to each other.  They can essentially just “turn around” and talk to one another.

A couple of “downers” – a lot of the extended Exchange features require Powershell to set up.  So you will probably need an Admin/Techie if you want to setup a shared email box, or “delegate” reading/writing access to your calendar.  Also, Web Outlook works very well, but cannot “convert an email into a calendar item”.  Instead you have to copy/paste.  Pretty frustrating – this is easily do-able inside the Outlook client.

We are still a heavy Lotus Notes user for our operations.  The good news is its a seemless switch to Outlook/Exchange.  The doclinks all work as expected – so our “alerts” and newsletters for our support and operations systems come in through Outlook, and we can link directly back into Lotus Notes like we were using Notes email before.

 

Office365 here we come…

 

Today marks our switch to Office 365 as a company.  So far so good – some points to notice:

1. If you aggregate “multiple accounts” using POP or IMAP into Office 365, polling only happens once per hour.  This means a delay in “old email” if you don’t switch over the mail domain pointer.
2. Adding a “global address book” is a klunky process (you need to use PowerShell).  Not as easy as an “export/import” function.
3. Functionality on my iPad is actually quite good.  I can pretty much do all of the Web Outlook functions, which is very nice.

We’ll keep you posted…  If you have any specific questions, ask away…