Microsoft 365

Audio Conferencing with Microsoft Teams

Richard Green on 29th October 2020

As the usage of Microsoft Teams continues to grow across organisations around the world, our reliance on PCs and digital devices grow. Under normal circumstances, that’s all well and good but what if you’re internet goes down? Microsoft Teams isn’t all about the app and that’s why dial-in Audio Conferencing with Microsoft Teams is an important and often overlooked facet of the service.

Whether your Internet is down, you live in an area with poor mobile data coverage which means you can’t use a mobile device with the Teams app, or whether you need a screen break but still want to participate, Audio Conferencing could be your ticket.

Sharing Templates and Logos with an Organisation Asset Library

Richard Green on 30th July 2020

At Arcible, we love our brand and we want to make sure that it gets used correctly. We have standard document templates, high-quality versions of our corporate logo, and more. We want these to be used and used correctly. If there isn’t an organisation asset library that is easily accessible to users then they are more likely to go off-piste and make up their own. When you’ve worked hard to create and design a brand, you want to make sure that users stay on it.

With Microsoft 365, we have various ways that users can author content and access information so making sure that our asset library is accessible to them across all of these modalities is important. This is where the SharePoint Online organisation asset library feature comes in.

Free Calling Plan for Microsoft 365 E5 Customers

Richard Green on 17th July 2020

Until this announcement, Microsoft 365 E5, the gives you everything plan for Microsoft 365 excluded one critical piece: a Calling Plan. The Microsoft 365 E5 license included the Phone System license and the Audio Conferencing license. This mean you had the licenses to use PSTN Audio Conferencing and to receive incoming calls but you would either need standalone Calling Plans for Microsoft 365 or pay Communication Credits for calls.

With the news of a Calling Plan for Microsoft 365 E5 customers, you will be able to, at no extra charge, get a 120-minute Domestic Calling Plan for each of your licensed E5 users.

Microsoft 365 Enterprise Voice Plans and Pricing

Richard Green on 17th July 2020

People talk. Whether it be one-to-one or many-to-many, people talk. If you want to be able to give users the ability to make and take phone calls to non-Teams users then you need to enable voice elements of the service. Without these voice elements, Microsoft Teams users are only able to perform Teams-to-Teams calls. If you’ve come from a Skype for Business background, this is the same as the choice between PC-to-PC calling and Enterprise Voice. Microsoft 365 Enterprise Voice Plans are here to simplify things and hopefully make them cheaper too.

Migrate File Servers to SharePoint and OneDrive

Richard Green on 8th July 2020

File servers are something that almost every organisation has at least one of. They also can be one of the easiest things to migrate to Microsoft 365 and biggest benefits to your users so long as you do it right so what tools and knowledge do you need to migrate file servers?

The price of a single disk may be cheap enough these days but managing storage at an enterprise level with storage arrays, managing disk tiers and caching, redundancy, and backup all to think about not to mention the cost of the file server operating system upkeep and maintenance, is there a another way that’s cheaper for you to run as a business and gives the users’ a better, more modern service?

Using the Office Configuration Service

Richard Green on 12th June 2020

Hands up if you’ve just wanted to get Office deployed or updated on a bunch of machines but struggled with writing the configuration XML file for it? What about remembering to add all the required properties or what the attributes available for each one are? Difficult right? Sounds like the Office Configuration Service is just for you then.

At Arcible, we’ve talked about the Office Configuration Service in passing before and we really like it not only because it simplifies the creation of the XML files for us but also because it saves all the files generated through the service within the Tenant making them available to access again-and-again and acts as part of our documentation.

The Problem with using Documents as Templates

Richard Green on 5th June 2020

We could make this the shortest blog post ever and simply say that you should not be using documents as templates but that wouldn’t make for a very engaging post or explain what we’re talking about or why.

If you’ve worked in the business for any amount of time you will have come across templates that people share. They could have come from HR, from Marketing, or from someone in your team trying to help everyone standardise. The trouble is, these templates helpfully shared often aren’t templates and they lead to unforeseen problems down the line.

Limiting Access to Large Distribution Lists

Richard Green on 18th May 2020

Email reply to all storms aren’t a new thing and they’ve happened to the biggest and best of organisations. Microsoft had an incident in 1997 referred to as the Bedlam DL3 incident. In 2018, the NHS in the UK had a similar issue.

Microsoft recently introduced a new feature into Exchange Online discussed in their blog post at https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/exchange-team-blog/reply-all-storm-protection-in-exchange-online/ba-p/1369811 and it’s great that feature is now there, however, has the solution to reply to all storms been there the whole time?

Update Channels Change to Microsoft 365 Apps

Richard Green on 13th May 2020

In the ever changing landscape of Microsoft 365, there’s more news and this time it’s a change regarding the names of the Microsoft 365 Apps Update Channels and cadence. Two weeks ago, we posted about the formal product name change from Office 365 ProPlus to Microsoft 365 Apps. Following this change, we now have another change and that is in the Update Channels mechanism for the products.

Previously there were three Update Channels: Monthly, Semi-annual Channel Targeted, and Semi-annual. Monthly meant you got the latest features every month. Semi-annual Channel (SAC) meant you got updates every six months. Semi-annual Channel Targeted (SAC-T) meant you got updates every six months but that you were in the first wave to get the SAC update slightly ahead of everyone else but that all changes now.

Microsoft 365 Apps Name Change and What it Means for You

Richard Green on 30th April 2020

The change from Office 365 ProPlus to Microsoft 365 Apps for Enterprise was announced and published as part of a Microsoft Docs article on April 21st at https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/deployoffice/name-change.

On face value you might be inclined to think that the change is superficial and that it’s only going to impact the user experience of a few dialog boxes that end-users will see, however, the change goes deeper.