by Brett

Here's an interview with the infamous Gary Denvendorf on the Office team at Microsoft. He demos some of the cool stuff in Access that let's you build an application then publish it SharePoint Online!

by Brett

Click here to register for this free webinar hosted by O'Reilly Press

A year in the making, Working with Office 365 by Brett Hill, focuses on the Small Business and Professionals Office 365 plan.. After a brief overview of the Office 365 services and solutions, you'll learn:

• Why this plan is such a great value
• Plan's limitations to be aware of
• Important new features to the services that have been released in the last few months

Join us for the informative dicussion on the Office 365 plans and features as well as side by side comparison of the Office 365 Small Business Plan and E plans.

by Brett

Microsoft recently updated the Administration  portal to include a new feature – unattended  password reset for administrators.  This feature has been a LONG time coming and I’m sure the support staff at Microsoft is happy about it. Until now, you had to call Microsoft tech support to get the admin password reset.

Here’s how the password reset works.

The administration portal now has a new field for administrator’s – alternate email address:

 
 To start the process, you can request a password using the sign in page by clicking on Forget your password?

This link has been present since the release of Office 365 but just went a page that said you need to contact support.

Also, you can encounter this link if you try to sign in too many times with the wrong password. This is new as well:

Clicking on Forgot your password takes you to:

If you are not an administrator, you see a page message that says to contact your administrator. So this feature only works for Office 365 admins. Let's hope that adding this for users is on the roadmap.

Next you prompted to provide your email address and solve one of those fuzzy-number-and –letters-jumbled-up-so-you-can-almost-not-make-it-out puzzles. They kind of went wild on this one with an 8 character puzzle and case seems to matter as well. BTW, check out the audio puzzle. It’s interesting.

You’ll get an email sent to your alternate email address.

There is evidently a short timeout on the provided link so reply promptly or you have to start again.

Now we see part 2 of the reset plan. “Have your mobile phone ready, you will receive a text message for resetting your password”. Where do they get the mobile phone number?  All users have a mobile phone field in the user settings in the Office 365 portal. So take a note: THE MOBILE PHONE FIELD FOR ADMINSTRATORS MATTERS.

After entering the Security Code sent to you phone via Text message, you are allowed to change your password.

After this you are back to the login page and can now sign in with your new password. Yeah!

Thanks Microsoft for continuously rolling out improvements. They continue to add value and that’s a good thing  for everyone. But I must add that it’s kind of bittersweet to say “hey, the self service password is a great new feature of Office 365” -  as it begs the question,  “you mean you couldn’t do that ?”

by Brett

Wouldn't it be cool to assign a drive letter to a document library? You could then use command lines and code to interact with your SharePoint Online documents as if they were a local drive. For those using the E plans, you can do this pretty easy!  Amaze your friends and cusomters with this simple but useful tip.

by Brett

Outlook Web Access as provided by Office 365 has a feature called Connected Accounts that makes it easy to import mail from other services. This demonstration shows you how to create a connected account and troubleshoot a common problem when using GMail as the source mailbox. Also, there is a disucssion about how to move a domain name from Gmail to Office 365.