In this article you will learn the fundamentals of publishing an Access 2010 database application to the Web by using Windows Server 2008 R2 and SharePoint Server 2010.

If you have deployed SharePoint Server 2010 with the Enterprise license to your organization, then you can purchase the Office Web Apps (OWA) add-on to provide your SharePoint portal users with browser-based editions of Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and OneNote.

In case you wondered, “But what about Access?” don’t fret. Access Services is included with the SharePoint 2010 Enterprise license. The coolest thing about Access Services and OWA is that you can host Microsoft Office documents in your SharePoint portal and your users don’t have to have the full-blown Office applications installed on their computers; the only requirements on the client side are (a) a Web browser; and (b) access to the SharePoint portal.

By the end of this brief article you will understand how to publish Access 2010 databases to your SharePoint portal with a minimum of muss, fuss, or greasy aftertaste.

Back-end setup

The first thing we need to do to get Access Services on its feet is to ensure that the Access Services service application is installed in SharePoint, and that the related server service is running.

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We’ve reached the final part in this eight part overview of Microsoft’s Office 365 and here we’ll look at SharePoint Online, which features are missing compared to SharePoint 2010 and how it can be customised along with an overall verdict.

SharePoint (SP) is a versatile application, a bit like a Swiss army knife and that probably accounts for its amazing popularity in businesses all around the world. In SP 2010, and thus SP online the aim is to cover the entire spectrum from personal sites (blogs and Mysite), team and project collaboration sites to intranet / internet publishing sites.

Introduction to SharePoint in Office 365

If you need to share your SP sites with the world you have two choices, either you can share externally with selected users who are invited and who have to login with a Live ID. Alternatively you can create a public facing website with anonymous access.

An excellent feature in SP is support for taxonomies, terms and words that can be used to tag content for better structure. Custom taxonomies, adapted to the businesses or department, can be created at the tenant level and also at the site collection level. For better document management you can attach a document ID to a particular document, this number will always follow this particular document throughout its lifecycle, no matter where in SP it’s moved to.

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We’re now up to the seventh part of this eight part article series on Microsoft’s Office 365 and here we’ll look at Lync Online and its capabilities. Instant Messaging and how it can be federated with users outside your business is explored as well as how video and web conferencing works, which clients are available, necessary network configuration and how Lync Online is administered.

Lync 2010 is Microsoft’s enterprise voice solution and on premise it offers IM, presence, video conferencing, VOIP as well as phone integration and even the ability to completely replace internal PABX systems. In 0365 Lync Online offers most of this functionality with the ability to connect phones and calling ordinary phones sadly missing. Presence information for co-workers is displayed in Outlook, Office, SharePoint and OWA and there’s “click to call” integration.

Lync client applications & IM federation

Today there’s no Lync client for your smartphone but an app for iPhone, Android and Windows Phone 7 is coming before the end of the year. Just like most other IM clients you simply search the directory to add buddies and their presence is displayed. Unlike Live Messenger and Facebook this presence information is gathered from your Outlook calendar as well as when you manually set it. The Lync client is a separate installation to Office Pro Plus and you need to run the Desktop Setup tool after its installation to configure settings. There’s also a Lync Web App (LWA) that is supported in IE, Firefox and Safari which requires Silverlight. LWA offers IM and desktop sharing but there’s no audio and video support.

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This is the sixth part in our eight part series on Office 365, in this post we’ll look at what the hybrid migration scenario brings to the user experience, how archiving and journaling works as well as the Information Rights Management integration.

Hybrid email in Office 365

The integration in an O365 hybrid environment is remarkable, the following features work across mailboxes in the cloud and on premise: Free / Busy information is checked in real time for meeting scheduling, message tracking, multi mailbox searches and MailTips and Out of Office messages work. If you have delegates for a mailbox they need to be on the same side as the mailbox. If your in-house environment is Exchange 2003 you need to add the mailbox role to the on-premise Exchange 2010 server so that it can house the public folders that is used for Free/Busy calendar scheduling. In your planning for a hybrid environment take special care to determine the different namespaces that you need to setup and read through the instructions for setting up Exchange Federation and the organisation relationship with the Microsoft Federation gateway.

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We’ve now reached the fifth part in this eight part article series on Microsoft’s Office 365 and here we’ll look at the different migration options: cut over, staged and hybrid as well as things to consider during the planning.

If a business has an on premise Exchange infrastructure today and they want to move to O365 there are a few ways to go about it. The easiest one, suitable for smaller (up to 50 or so) environments is a simple cut over. On Friday its in-house mail, on Monday it’s all been migrated to the cloud. This requires changing the MX record for your email domain to point to O365.

Email migration overview

The next option is a staged (known as simple co-existence in early O365 documentation) migration which offers a unified Global Address List (GAL) but without sharing Free/Busy calendar information. The third option is a hybrid (formerly known as rich co-existence) deployment with sharing of all information between on premise and the cloud. This is also the only model that allows off boarding (moving a mailbox from the cloud back to on premise), all of them of course involve on boarding. Both hybrid and staged leave the MX record for your email domain pointing to your on premises Exchange server. In a hybrid environment you need an Exchange 2010 SP1 server on premise (running the Client Access Server and Hub transport server roles); the license for this is part of the O365 subscription.

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In this series of articles on Microsoft’s Office 365 we’ve come to the fourth part of eight and here we’ll explore Exchange Online, what’s included and how to administer it as well as how voice messages can be integrated through Unified Messaging.

Introduction

The email service behind Office 365 is built on Exchange Server 2010 which brings all the power of this messaging and collaboration powerhouse to users without requiring complex in-house infrastructure. As part of the service you get anti-spam and anti-malware courtesy of Forefront Online Protection for Exchange (FOPE); you can still continue to use an existing email filtering solution if you want to. Most features of Exchange 2010 that are available on-premise such as multi mailbox search and transport rules are also available in Office 365. Remote PowerShell can also be used but since Office 365 is a multi-tenant environment cmdlets that work forest wide aren’t available. Role Based Access Control (RBAC) is a very powerful feature for configuring what people can do in the environment based on their job role and it’s fully implemented in O365.

What’s in and what’s not in Exchange Online

Some differences between Exchange 2010 on premise and O365 are that the private or public computer choice in Outlook Web App (OWA) isn’t available. If you’re using the full Outlook client it has to be either 2007 or 2010, Outlook 2003 isn’t supported. You can’t segment your Global Address List (GAL) and there is no public folder support in O365 at all, there’s also no S/MIME support.

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In this third part of eight in our series on Office 365 we’ll cover user accounts and how you can integrate O365 with Active Directory, how the Dirsync tool is used and how to enable Single Sign On through Active Directory Federation Services 2.0.

There are three flavours of user authentication in O365: Microsoft Online credentials separate to on premise accounts, Directory Synced (Dirsync) accounts which requires Active Directory (AD) but which still keeps separate password policies or Rich Coexistence which needs AD; Dirsync and AD Federation Services 2.0 (ADFS).

Authentication and user accounts

The first flavour is eminently suited to small businesses; there’s no correlation between the on premises login and the login for cloud services. Note that the BPOS sign in client isn’t available for O365 so users simply enter their password in the individual applications that connect to O365 (Outlook, Lync etc.). This will also work very well for really small businesses that don’t have on premises AD as they’ll only need to maintain the O365 user accounts.

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The second part of eight of this Microsoft Office 365 review will cover system requirements, the included Office Professional Plus subscription what the Desktop Setup tool is used for as well as the PowerShell integration in Office 365.

Please also read part 1 one which covers Office 365  pricing.

System Requirements

The requirement for client machines to use Office 365 are; Windows XP SP3, Vista SP2 or Windows 7; Mac OS is supported in the 10.4, 10.5 and 10.6 versions. If you’re using an existing version of Microsoft Office to interact with O365 it needs to be Office 2007 or 2010 on Windows, with Office for Mac version 2008 or 2011 supported. If you’re using Office for Mac 2008 make sure you have deployed the web services version of Entourage. There’s no included Office for Mac subscription.

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This first part of an eight part overview of Microsoft Office 365 explains what it is, what benefits it can bring and outlines Office 365 pricing.

There’s been a lot of noise around the beta and subsequent launch of Microsoft’s Office 365 recently. Touted by some as late coming competition to Google Docs and by others as the best productivity cloud service on the planet there’s no doubt that O365 (as I’ll call it in this article) is a great improvement over the Business Productivity Online Suite (BPOS ).

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Both options to activate Office 2010, KMS and MAK, have their up- and downsides. This article discusses a few things you have to consider when you decide for the activation method in your organization.

Now that you have an overview of the Office 2010 KMS activation and MAK activation, I can address the question of whether KMS or MAK is the better option to activate Office 2010. Most of the arguments also apply for Windows Vista and Windows 7 activation.

Microsoft recommendations

You need at least 5 Office 2010 installations if you want to activate Office 2010 with KMS; however, Microsoft recommends using MAK activation if your network has fewer than 25 computers. If you have more than 50 Office 2010 machines, Microsoft recommends going for KMS.

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This article summarizes the most important facts about Office 2010 MAK activation. Among other things, you will learn about the ways to deploy the MAK key, about MAK independent activation and MAK proxy activation.

In the last post of this series, I discussed Office 2010 KMS activation. Today, I will have a look at the second option that Microsoft provides for volume activation—the Office 2010 MAK activation. Like in my previous post, I will only list the most important facts you have to know.

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This article summarizes all important facts about Microsoft Office 2010 KMS activation. Among other things you will learn which software you need, how to activate the KMS host and what things you have to keep mind if you use KMS activation.

Many admins who still haven’t upgraded to Vista or Windows 7 will first have to deal with volume activation when they deploy Office 2010. Microsoft’s documentation about Office 2010 volume activation is quite comprehensive. Today, I will summarize the key facts about Office 2010 KMS activation. In my next post, I will cover MAK activation, and in the last post of this series I will compare Office 2010 KMS and MAK activation.

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Office 2010 activation is a new topic that many users and admins face. This article explains how you can activate Office 2010 and rearm Office 2010.

This article explains how you can rearm Office 2010 and for what you need this feature.

Office 2010 is certainly the best Office suite out there. However, compared to Office 2007 it has one major drawback: Like Vista and Windows 7, Office 2010 has to be activated. However, Office 2010 behaves a little different than Windows if it is not activated. Rearming Office 2010, that is resetting the grace period, works similar as rearming Windows.

Office 2010 Reduced Functionality Mode

Retail versions of Office 2010 will only run in Reduced Functionality Mode (RFM) after the grace period of 30 days has been exceeded. In RFM Office, documents can only be viewed but not modified.

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Originally I planned to write an article about the most important new features in Office 2010. But when I skimmed over the numerous “what’s new in Office 2010 reviews” out there, it soon became clear that such an article is rather pointless. I am trying Office 2010 myself and the enhancements I liked most were not even mentioned in these articles.

I came to the conclusion that a fairly objective review of such a complex product isn’t possible. There are simply too many new features. And choosing among the many improvements will always be highly subjective. Even though you may be interested to know what I like about Office 2010, such information is of little value when it comes to the question about whether deploying Office 2010 in your organization makes sense because I am probably not a typical end user.

Another approach would be to list all new features and functions. This would allow you to find out which, if any, new features would justify an upgrade. If 4sysops were a blog for Office users, this would indeed be an option. I tried something comparable with all new Windows 7 features.

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This second part of the Office 2010 32-bit vs. 64-bit article addresses the advantages and disadvantages of Office 2010 64-bit.

In the last article I looked at the installation of the 32-bit and 64-bit versions of Office 2010. In this part I’ll cover the important considerations in choosing which platform to go with. This principally comes down to the advantages and disadvantages of Office 2010 64-bit.

Office 2010 64-bit advantages

Apart from the general ability to address more physical memory, the main advantages of using the 64-bit version of Office 2010 will be experienced by power Office users, who, for example, might use Excel spreadsheets which reference massive amounts of data, or who regularly work with Office files greater than 2GB in size. Microsoft Project also benefits, with the ability to handle large, multiple subprojects contained with the main project.

64-bit machines also have a security advantage via mandatory hardware-based DEP (Data Execution Prevention) for native 64-bit applications. With the 64-bit version, this protection is now available to Office.

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