Microsoft Online Offering – First Impression
I was fortunate enough to get access to the Microsoft Online Services before it actually comes to the UK. I will be sharing my impressions of the service as I try out the various offerings. Getting signed up was very easy, I did have to create a US based Live ID to get around the country location restrictions.
Fellow SharePoint MVP Tobias Zimmergren has done a great post introducing the online services, so rather than restate this I’ll recommend you take a look at his SharePoint Online – First Look. Come back and I’ll dig into some of my first thoughts and a few of the additional configurations I went through.
Single Sign In
This is one of the holy grails for any hosted solution, the ability to sign in once to all of you applications. Microsoft provides a client installation for this and reading the help documentation it states that the service is not supported without which is interesting for an online service.
My first real question, can I run this on my main machine? I already have hosted Exchange 2007 and don’t want to break this. I’ backed out of trying this upfront and being a good IT person I followed the list of Tasks I was told need to do.
Add a domain
I have a few domains registered so picked one I liked and started the domain registration, I’m not dealing with Exchange migration so the process was fairly straight forward. The verification process requires you to add a new CNAME (this was my first problem!). My domain was parked at UKReg and they have little or no DNS management capabilities so I could not enter a CNAME. I had to move my domain Name Servers to a place where I had flexibility to manage them properly. It is supposed to take upto 72 hours to complete, but I gave it a few minutes to see.
I added the CNAME and Alias provided and waited 15 minutes before continuing the verification process. I pressed the Verify button in hope..
I waited, but alas the domain could not be verified, I was then told that it could take up to 48 hours for a CNAME to record to be visible to the internet. I think I was being a little too optimistic with Name Server and CNAME changes – have to revisit this in a future post.
Add a SharePoint site collection to set up portal
This is really what I was looking forward to! Heck I’ve had hosted exchange for like forever! Its worth noting here that anonymous access to this SharePoint site is not currently supported and there is nothing that I can see that suggests this will change any time soon. If like me you were hoping to get your company web site up on SharePoint this is a real shame.
Site Collection creation looks simple enough. The 5GB site collection quota is a decent amount, was expecting a lot less.
Also it seems odd that the remaining storage is 5GB but the max you can allocate is 50 GB? This is down to the total storage available in your package as shown in the summary page.
The Site Templates available really tell us we are dealing with WSS only here, no MOSS for you online people. Perhaps another reason for no anonymous internet access.
Accessing my site
I did see the warning that the site may not be available immediately, and that was the case navigating to the site or the admin site resulted in errors in being able to find the page. Perhaps this is down to the single sign on application I need to install.
Adding Users
The trial provides 20 users, adding these is pretty simple and it also supports addition through the use of import files which will make life easier for people doing this for larger companies.
I like the way the service auto generates a password for the user and you have two simple options, are they and administrator and is the account enabled.
The next step is all about Exchange, you just allocate some storage space. The space here is separate from the SharePoint storage. Confirm the settings and send a confirmation email which has the url and password to the user(s).
I did notice the My Company Portal as the title, where in the steps was I told to change this ?
I will follow up with my impressions, learnings and experience of using Microsoft Online Services.
