Microsoft Teams Video

Microsoft has added  Teams App a few months back   to Office 365 Productivity Platform. To help you understand Teams, I have created a short video which explains how you can increase your Productivity

To know more about Office 365, visit our Office 365 page 

Please leave your valued feedback by clicking  here

with warm regards

 Suresh Ramani

Blog www.CloudChangesEverything.com

YouTube : http://www.youtube.com/user/techgyani/videos

Azure Files and Azure File Sync

Azure Files and  Azure File Sync  

Most of the Companies , Large and Small, have File Servers . Microsoft has  released couple of great applications to manage Files in the Cloud. These are Azure Files and Azure Files Sync.

Azure File Service

Azure files are fully managed File shares in the Cloud. When you have a local network, you can attach a NAS box so that all users in a network can access the files. Inside a cloud service, unfortunately , this is absent. This need is fulfilled by Azure File Service.

Azure Files use cases:

1.   Replace On Premise file servers or supplement with Azure File sync

2.   Lift and shift applications. If you are moving any application to the Cloud , the using Azure Files, you can move both Application and Data to the Cloud. Or you can implement Hybrid scenario where application runs On Premise and Data resides in the Cloud. If you have an app that works with your on-premise file server, moving it to Azure means rewriting it, or setting up a file server in the cloud. Azure Files is perfect for that.

3.   Shared Application settings. If you are running a Distributed application at multiple locations, and there is a need for these multiple applications to access common  application settings , these can be on Azure Files

4.   A Cloud Application can write logs , metrics, crash dumps on Azure files. Then using Azure File Sync  these will be replicated on local Server periodically.

Azure File Sync

Azure File Sync syncs file shares to Storage Account using Azure File Service.

Features and Benefits

1.   Multiple File Servers at multiple locations. Sync all to single Azure File Storage. Commonly used files are cached on local server . If local server goes down, quickly install another Server or VM and sync Azure files to it.

2.   The older , rarely accessed files will move to Azure thus freeing your local file Server .

3.   Sync Group helps to manage locations that should be kept in sync with each other. Every Sync Group has one common Cloud Storage. So a Sync Group will have one Azure End point and multiple Server end points. There is a 2 way sync so that changes to Cloud are replicated on local server within 12 to 24 hours. But changes on a local server are replicated to all end points within 5 minutes.

4.   An agent is installed on the Server end point . There is no need to change or relocate data on a different volume. Thus it is non-disruptive type of agent.

5.   Every Server end point creates an Azure file share in the storage account. End user experience is unchanged

6.   When a particular local file is getting synced , then it is locked. But this is only for a few seconds.

7.   A Disaster Recovery Solution for File Server. If local File Server is destroyed, set up a VM or physical server , join to the previous sync group and you get “rapid restore”.

8.   When a file is renamed or moved, the meta data is preserved.

9.   Its different from One Drive .  One Drive is for Personal Document management and is not a general purpose File Server. One Drive is primarily meant for collaborating on Office files. Not optimized for very large files , CAD drawings, multimedia development projects.

10.Azure File Sync works with On Premise AD  and not Azure AD.

Use cases for Azure File Sync:

1.   Company with multiple offices having a need to share files with all offices.

2.   Branch Office backup of files. In real world, the files of branch offices rarely get backed up.

3.   Disaster Recovery Solution in case File Server goes down.

4.   New Branch Office setup . You can setup new Server and connect to same Azure Storage.

5.   Move old data automatically to Azure . This is Cloud Tiering. The non used data will move to Azure. The files will have greyed icons with an offline O file attribute to tell user that this file is only on Azure.

Please leave your valued feedback by clicking  here

with warm regards

 Suresh Ramani

www.TechGyan.in

YouTube : http://www.youtube.com/user/techgyani/videos

Microsoft MVP 2009
Microsoft Worldwide Partner of the Year 2011 & 2007

IAMCP Worldwide Gold Award Winner 2016

Document Management with Office 365

One Application which has played a huge role in the popularity of SharePoint Technologies is Document Management System ( DMS) . Whether you are a small Company with 5 Computers or a large Enterprise with hundreds and thousands of Computers , managing Documents is an important task.  

Traditionally , the only way Companies managed Documents was to store them in My Documents folder of their PC or on their File Server under Folders. But SharePoint Technologies allows Companies to do a much better Management of Documents . In fact the features available in SharePoint make it a better DMS when compared to dedicated Document Management Systems . No wonder Companies are moving to SharePoint Technologies in order to manage their Documents.

To understand how you can use Office 365 in general and SharePoint in particular to do effective Document Management, visit 

http://www.techgyan.com/Pages/DMS.aspx

Please leave your valued feedback by clicking  here

with warm regards

 Suresh Ramani

www.TechGyan.com

YouTube : http://www.youtube.com/user/techgyani/videos

Microsoft MVP 2009
Microsoft Worldwide Partner of the Year 2011 & 2007

IAMCP Worldwide Gold Award Winner 2016

Carry files and documents in your pocket with SharePoint Mobile App

SharePoint Online is a very important workload of Office 365, the World’s BEST Productivity Platform. Companies , Large and Small  use SharePoint for many applications like Document Management , Workflow Applications, etc. 

The good news is that Microsoft has launched a versatile SharePoint Mobile App which gives allows users to leverage the power of SharePoint using a regular Mobile Phone.

To know more about the features of SharePoint Mobile App , visit  SharePoint Mobile App

Please leave your valued feedback by clicking  here

with warm regards

 Suresh Ramani

www.TechGyan.com

YouTube : http://www.youtube.com/user/techgyani/videos

Microsoft MVP 2009
Microsoft Worldwide Partner of the Year 2011 & 2007

IAMCP Worldwide Gold Award Winner 2016

Copy files from Office 365 OneDrive to SharePoint

Office 365 Productivity Platform comes with 2 major Workloads for managing Documents:

SharePoint Team Sites are a great way to store Documents which are relevant to Teams like Sales, Admin, etc.

OneDrive for Business is the place where a User creates and stores documents relevant to him and which he occasionally shares with his colleagues within and outside the Company.

As a part of the work process , a user usually starts creating a document in his OneDrive . However , later he may realize that this document is also needed by Team members . So he would need to copy this to the Document Library of the relevant SharePoint Team Site.

To facilitate this , a User can directly do a Cloud to Cloud copy of a Document from his OneDrive to SharePoint Team site .

To know about the process visit : Copy files from OneDrive to SharePoint

Please leave your valued feedback by clicking here


with warm regards

Suresh Ramani

www.TechGyan.com
YouTube : http://www.youtube.com/user/techgyani/videos
Microsoft MVP 2009
Microsoft Worldwide Partner of the Year 2011 & 2007
IAMCP Worldwide Gold Award Winner 2016

Access SharePoint Document Library from One Drive for Business in Office 365

Office 365 Productivity Platform comes with 2 major Workloads for managing Documents:

SharePoint Team Sites are a great way to store Documents which are relevant to Teams like Sales, Admin, etc.

OneDrive for Business is the place where a User creates and stores documents relevant to him and which he occasionally shares with his colleagues within and outside the Company.

Till now, if a user had to work on his documents , he had to go to his One Drive Portal. And for accessing files stored on SharePoint Team Sites, he had to visit the SharePoint Portal and access the relevant Team Site.

Recently , the Office 365 folks have done some interesting integration work  between these 2 workloads . To know more ,  click here   

What this integration does for the User is that it speeds up the access to relevant file, whether stored in One Drive or in SharePoint Team Site . And since a lot of work for any user involves interacting with various documents , this simple integration adds up to a time saving of multiple minutes per day per user . That’s Productivity for You !

Please leave your valued feedback by clicking  here

with warm regards

 Suresh Ramani

www.TechGyan.com

YouTube : http://www.youtube.com/user/techgyani/videos

Microsoft MVP 2009
Microsoft Worldwide Partner of the Year 2011 & 2007

IAMCP Worldwide Gold Award Winner 2016

SharePoint Audit Log

SharePoint is one of the very important Workloads of the hugely popular Office365 , the Cloud Productivity Suite from Microsoft. One extremely important use case for SharePoint is its rich feature set which enables it to act like a complete Document Management System.

SharePoint also comes bundled with extensive Audit Logs which assist in Document Security  and Compliance .

To know more about the SharePoint Audit logs , click   here.

Please leave your valued feedback by clicking  here

with warm regards

 Suresh Ramani

www.TechGyan.com

YouTube : http://www.youtube.com/user/techgyani/videos

Microsoft MVP 2009
Microsoft Worldwide Partner of the Year 2011 & 2007

Partial Offline Sync of Cloud files in One Drive For Business

Office 365 Productivity Platform comes bundled with One Drive for Business which can store One Terabyte of Documents . You can also sync the One Drive For Business ( ODFB) with your PC . However , so far the issue was that the complete ODFB would sync offline. A common feedback from Customers was that it would be great if they could selectively sync the folders offline as they were not keen to have their full ODFB synced. This functionality was always present in the Consumer One Drive .

The good news is that the selective sync is  finally available on ODFB

To know more about how it works  here.

Please leave your valued feedback by clicking  here

with warm regards

 Suresh Ramani

www.TechGyan.com

YouTube : http://www.youtube.com/user/techgyani/videos

Microsoft MVP 2009
Microsoft Worldwide Partner of the Year 2011 & 2007

OneDrive for Business now with One Terabyte Cloud Storage

 

Sometime back, I had blogged about OneDrive for Business . Recently Microsoft has announced that it will be significantly enhancing the service:

1) Users will get 1 Terabyte of Cloud Storage

2) OneDrive for Business will also be available as a standalone service @ Rs. 150/= per month

3) All OfficePro Plus subscribers of Office365 , will soon get OneDrive for Business free with their account.

To know more about OneDrive for Business , visit

http://www.techgyan.com/Pages/OneDriveForBusiness.aspx

with warm regards

Suresh Ramani

www.TechGyan.com

Blog: www.CloudChangesEverything.com

Microsoft MVP 2009
Microsoft Worldwide Partner of the Year 2011 & 2007

What is SharePoint

 

SharePoint Technologies, is one of the best Technologies for Collaboration to come out of the Microsoft Stable. However , many people are quite confused about the capabilities of the same. It means different things to different people. And Microsoft has not made it easier for people to understand SharePoint .

In order to help people understand SharePoint , I have created a short 5 minute video which explains what is SharePoint . It gives a broad overview of SharePoint . So once you have seen the video, you will be clear on the capabilities of SharePoint . And then you can focus on that aspect of SharePoint which is most appealing to you.

Have a look at the video which appears on the link below:

http://www.techgyan.com/Pages/Collaboration.aspx

You can also watch the video on our YouTube channel at :

http://youtu.be/EzzYGK5DRiM

Let me know if there are any questions on the same after you have seen the video .

So get going and implement SharePoint and reap the benefits of Collaboration.! Now !

with warm regards

Suresh Ramani

www.TechGyan.com

Blog: www.CloudChangesEverything.com

Microsoft MVP 2009
Microsoft Worldwide Partner of the Year 2011 & 2007

Office365 plans compared and decoded

 

Office365 , the Cloud based Business Productivity Service from Microsoft is getting more and more subscribers with every passing day.

Since one size does not fit all and the needs of different users is bound to be different , Microsoft has introduced a variety of plans . This has caused some confusion among the users who are not sure as to which plan is most suitable for them .

No worries ! I have tried to simplify the complex plans in a manner which will help you understand the various options . Have a look at the various plans and features at the link given below:

http://www.techgyan.com/Pages/Office365PlansComparison.aspx

I would also suggest that you have a look at the link given below which will help you in understanding of the plans and give you a quick overview:

http://www.techgyan.com/Pages/Office365Plans.aspx

I hope that you would have a much clearer picture of the Office365 plans once you have reviewed the information. If you still have questions , feel free to ask .

So get going and implement Office365 in your Company ! Now !

with warm regards

Suresh Ramani

www.TechGyan.com

Blog: www.CloudChangesEverything.com

Microsoft MVP 2009
Microsoft Worldwide Partner of the Year 2011 & 2007

What is SkyDrive Pro

 

Greetings !

In my last post, I discussed about my personal Cloud which is SkyDrive . Today I shall talk about SkyDrive Pro .

 

Difference between SkyDrive and SkyDrive Pro

The first question which will come to anyone’s mind is how’s SkyDrive Pro different from SkyDrive ? So here we go:

1) SkyDrive is your Personal Cloud which can be used to store your documents, pictures, videos , songs . SkyDrive Pro on the other hand is your Professional Cloud. And it is primarily to store your documents since in our professional work , we mainly work with documents .

2) SkyDrive Cloud is hosted as a free service on Microsoft Servers. SkyDrive Pro Cloud on the other hand, is hosted on SharePoint , whether On Premise or Online, as a part of Office365 Cloud Service . So it is essentially a part of your Company Intranet .

3) The document storage in SkyDrive is simple storage without any version control. The documents in SkyDrive Pro have built in capability of version control.

4) You can add ratings feature to your SkyDrive Pro document library . This is not available in SkyDrive .

How do you get SkyDrive Pro

SkyDrive Pro comes in 2 parts

a) A component of Microsoft SharePoint , either SharePoint Online or SharePoint Server

b) Client component of Office 2013 Pro Plus .

So when you install Office 2013 Pro Plus , the SkyDrive Pro gets auto installed . But kindly note that unless you have SharePoint , the SkyDrive Pro does not have much use. So it would be correct to state that SkyDrive Pro = SharePoint + Office Pro plus 2013

This is My SkyDrive Pro

Now let me deep dive into my SkyDrive Pro . Given below is the screen shot of my PC. I have highlighted 2 icons a) SkyDrive b) SharePoint . The SkyDrive icon is my SkyDrive . The SharePoint icon is actually the SkyDrive Pro icon.

Now let me go inside my SharePoint ( SkyDrive Pro ) folder :

As can be seen , I have 6 folders in my SharePoint folder . Of these , there are 2 Admin folders , 2 Marketing folders , 1 Sales folder , 1 Jobs & Hiring folder .

Now let me go one level deeper into the Techgyan Events folder within Marketing:

As is seen above, I have highlighted the path . Within the Techgyan Events , you can see 6 folders representing 6 events which we have recently hosted. Against each folder on the left , you can see a green tick indicating that the folder is in sync with the Cloud. These folders are all on my PC. And where is the Cloud? Lets see that :

The Cloud is on our SharePoint which is part of our Office365 Service hosted and managed by Microsoft .I have highlighted few portions as follows:

1) The Internet path where our SharePoint is located

2) The Marketing Team site

3) TechGyan Events

And within TechGyan events are the same folders which appear above on my PC as local folders.

So the way I use SkyDrive Pro is that I have offline access to various document libraries of different Teams in our Company like Sales, Admin, Marketing . These folders are shared with the respective Team members . So whether I am in office or outside, I am actually working on files available on the hard disk of my local PC . This gives me great speed as I work on files which are locally available and NOT on the Internet nor on my SharePoint site .

 

SkyDrive Pro usage scenarios

So having understood the above , SkyDrive Pro gives rise to various interesting scenarios :

1) If I go to outstation and I do not have access to Internet continuously, I need not stop my work. I would continue to work . And as soon as the PC senses Internet connection, it will automatically sync the changes to my SharePoint Server . And it will only sync the delta changes , making it extremely fast .

2) If my Office Internet has slowed down for any reason, I don’t have to slow down as I am working locally on my PC . All my edits will get auto synced with my SharePoint server depending on the speed of my Internet. But that does not affect my work as I continue to work with the locally available SharePoint files.

3) This also is a great way to have an offline backup of my SharePoint data .

Hopefully I have been able to explain to you what is SkyDrive Pro. Trust me, its an awesome technology once you start using it . This one piece of Technology can improve your productivity by leaps and bounds. Seriously !

with warm regards

Suresh Ramani

www.TechGyan.com

Blog: www.CloudChangesEverything.com

Google Apps vs. Office365

 

Greetings !

With Cloud Computing gaining momentum with every passing day , one question which the Customers have is how should they start their journey on the Cloud. Their first question is which applications to consider shifting first to the Cloud.

The easy answer is to first shift Email, Collaboration & Communication to the Cloud . The benefits of shifting these applications to the Cloud are HUGE as compared to an On Premise Model.

Next question is which Solution is the BEST ?

Frankly , for Cloud based Email and Collaboration , there are only 2 vendors that matter : Google Apps from Google and Office365 from Microsoft.

I have created a short 4 minute video which compares Google Apps with Office365 . This will help you in your evaluation. Please click here for the same: http://youtu.be/GKacjb08aCI

For a more detailed feature by feature comparison between Google Apps and MS Exchange , I have created a 20 minute video . Click here http://youtu.be/HL5LdfF6ThI

I would love to hear on on these videos,

with warm regards
Suresh Ramani

www.TechGyan.com
Microsoft MVP 2009
Microsoft Worldwide Partner of the Year 2011 & 2007

Cloud Computing … IT Just Works

Greetings !
A lot of vendors are offering Cloud Services as a cheaper option to the On Premise Solution . In my opinion, the biggest advantage of Cloud Computing is that you get a Solution which is very reliable , hassle free . In short it just works !  So this was the theme of a video which was prepared recently : Cloud Computing…. It Just Works !.
This short 3 minute video explains Cloud Computing and then goes on to say why the Microsoft Cloud Service Office365 is better than Google Apps . It also features Testimonials of our Customers who are using Cloud Services like Exchange Online , SharePoint Online , Lync Online and MS Office on subscription .

The video is available on the Microsoft website  . To watch the same, click here .

This video is also uploaded on our YouTube Channel . Click here for the same .

I would love to get your feedback on this video.

with warm regards
Suresh Ramani www.TechGyan.com
Microsoft MVP 2009
Microsoft Worldwide Partner of the Year 2011 & 2007

Document Management using SharePoint

Greetings ! Collaborating on Documents is one of the biggest challenges for Companies, large or Small ! But since it is essential to Collaborate on Documents, the one solution which people rely upon is emailing documents among the various people in the Team . This method has many pitfalls

1. Version control becomes impossible
2. It leads to unnecessary Email traffic
3. Its always a challenge to identify the conflicting versions.
4. Such documents can be easily mailed out of the Company thus leading to document leakage.
5. Its difficult to identify the right documents as the process of document search is a nightmare.

This is where SharePoint Technologies comes into picture . To understand what is SharePoint, please click here .

To understand how Document Management can be done , using SharePoint, we have created a short 12 minute video . Watch the video here.

The SharePoint solution  not only removes the bottlenecks given above, it also introduces a few wonderful concepts on Collaboration like: a) Document Workflow b) Access and edit documents  from any device like PC, laptop, Tablet, Smartphone. c) Ability to work offline .Later when Internet is available, the changes made get synced automatically . d) Search by keywords. e) And much more …. To know more about SharePoint Online, click here .

Let me know what you feel about using SharePoint as a Document Management System


with warm regards
Suresh Ramani
www.TechGyan.com
Microsoft MVP 2009
Microsoft Worldwide Partner of the Year 2011 & 2007