Change Office 365/email password

Office 365 help series – Changing passwords using OWA

Password security

It is good practice to change email passwords occasionally. Sometimes, ComStat may ask you to change passwords if we suspect that a third party has compromised your account. If you have forgotten your password, we can force a password change.

Users are responsible for their passwords at all times. If we force a password change, users should log in to their email accounts and overwrite forced password changes with passwords of their own. Good passwords include:

  • 8-15 characters
  • Capital letters
  • Numbers
  • Special characters

Email passwords cannot be changed using your desktop version of Outlook. To change your email account password, login to your Office 365 online control panel with your email address and existing password with a web browser like Internet Explorer, Firefox, or Chrome.

There is more than one way to change passwords in Office 365. For instance, users can log into http://portal.office365.com and locate settings from the portal home page. Users are familiar with Outlook Web Access, so the tutorial here should be a convenient method.

Read this article first before you begin. Click open each step below to understand the steps you need to follow. If you need to contact us to force a password for you, get in touch with your usual network administrator or contact us using the information on our contact page.

Office 365 Home Page

Using your web browser, login to Office 365’s control panel at http://mail.office365.com.  Login with your email address and existing password. Your Office 365 home page looks like this:

 

Open OWA settings

Click open the settings icon on the right side of the toolbar at the top right corner of your screen. The seettings icon looks like a cog.select office 365 settings

Change password

Follow the 3 steps in the illustration below:

  • Click open Office 365 settings
  • Click on Password
  • Change your password and click submit in the last screen

screenshots for changing your password

Remember, you need to know your old password to create your new password, so you may have to ask us to force a password change for you. Also, changing your password will mean you need to update settings on any devices that connect to your Office 365 account, including desktops, laptops, tablets, or mobile phones. Lastly, you may be asked to authenticate your password change by verifying your mobile phone number and inputting a short code which your server will text you, so your mobile phone should be available.

Outlook calendar tools

Office 365 help series – Outlook calendars

Calendar tutorials

Learn how simple appointments can be built into powerful collaboration tools. Each video in this 10 part series builds on concepts to help you understand personal use, meetings, scheduling, tasks, public and private holidays, calendar sharing, and iCalendars.

These videos use Outlook for desktop to illustrate functions. The same tools are available in Outlook Web Access. (OWA). Click on the video headers to see bullet point summaries for each video.

1. Creating appointments
  • Appointments vs meetings
  • Creating appointments
  • Attaching files
  • Status, reminders, categories
  • Dragging appointments
  • Print preview and print
2. Calendar views
  • Calendar Views
  • Display preferences
  • Reading pane
  • Search
3. Calendar meetings
  • Inviting attendees
  • Attendee status
  • Categories
  • Rooms and locations
  • Acknowledging requests
  • Managing invitations
4. Scheduling assistant
  • Attendees and resources
  • Attendee status
  • Adding rooms
  • Editing times
5. Calendar sharing
  • Invitations to share
  • Merging
  • Sharing states/permissions
  • Public vs private sharing
6. Advanced tools
  • Calendar as a concept
  • Separating content
  • New calendars
  • Categories
7. Working with tasks
  • Updating events
  • Viewing options and overlays
  • Schedule view
  • Displaying task lists
  • Moving tasks to calendar display
  • Assigning tasks
  • To-do lists and categories
8. Working with holidays

Holidays are appointments that can be used for invitation/attendee/location functions. By assigning holidays to the “Holiday” category, holidays can be managed, published, and shared using the list view.

  • Adding regional holidays
  • Holidays as appointments
  • Deleting holidays
  • Holidays in list view
  • Sorting for duplicates
  • Sort by locations
9. Custom holidays

Birthdays and anniversaries, school dates, and company holidays can be added to calendars as “custom” holidays.

  • Private holidays
  • Business/anniversaries
  • Holidays as invitations
  • Adding to holiday category
  • Copying to calendars
10. iCalendars
  • iCalendar format
  • Content as a list
  • Copy to calendar
  • Save as iCalendar
  • Distributing and email

Using Office 365’s Delve

Office 365 help series – Delve

Delve - Grouping & Sharing

Delve is a an Office 365 app that helps users find documents from a variety of locations in Office 365.

As users store more documents in Office 365, conventional search tools become more inefficient. Delve simultaneously searches multiple data locations and allows to group, share, and collaborate with others. In many ways, it is the front end of your data store.  Watch the video for a quick tour and see the tutorial below for help on grouping and sharing documents in Delve.

Grouping and sharing documents with Delve

Create a board and add documents

After you get used to using Delve to search for documents for your own purposes, like perhaps invoices, you can use Delve’s grouping and sharing features to create “boards” which other people in your organization can browse. In the case of invoices, for instance, you can “pin” invoices you know others are interested in to a board which you can share with others.

You create boards directly from content cards in Delve.

Boards are open to everyone in your organization, and you can see, add documents to, or remove documents from any board in Delve. If a board has documents that you don’t have access to, those documents will not show up for you. If you create a board and add documents that only you or a few people have access to, no one else will see the documents, but they may see the board name.

On a card you want to add to the board, enter a board name in the box at the bottom of the card.

card

As you start typing, you will see the names of existing boards.

  • To create a new board and add the card, type a board name that doesn’t already exist.
  • To add the card to an existing board, type or select the name of that board.

When you add documents to a board, documents will show up for other users within a few minutes. Also, they will show up only for those people who have access to the documents.

Note: Not all content types can be added to boards. If Add to a board isn’t available on a card, you can’t add that content type to a board.

 

 

Add board to Favourites

You can keep track of boards by adding them to your favorites.

750128eb-5fab-44a6-a996-cbb548da422b[1]Click Add to favorites at the top of a board.

  • When you create a board, or add new content to one, the board is automatically added to your favorites.
  • Click a board name on a content card to see board contents.
  • If the card has been added to several boards, click on more on the card to see them all.
  • Boards are also listed under options in the left menu.
  • To add a document to your Favorites, click the star in the upper right corner of the card.

favourites

 

 

Share with others

To send a link to a board through email, click Send a link at the top of the board.

email

Type in the email address, change the message if you want, and send.

When you share a board, the people you share it with will only see the documents they have access to.

Sharing within Delve

 

To share a document with others from within Delve, click the Who can see this? icon on the content card, and then click Invite people.

share with people

When you open documents in Office Online, your colleagues can open them at the same time. That means you don’t have to wait for someone to finish adding information to a document before you can enter yours.

You can post documents to Yammer from Delve. You can also talk about the document on Yammer, or view existing conversations. Yammer conversations can be viewed by your colleagues both from Delve and from Yammer.

 

Office 365 and Dropbox

Office 365 help series – Dropbox and Office 365

Dropbox and Office 365

Office 365 users can link to Dropbox accounts to browse, open and edit Word, Excel, and other MS Office files. Users can also create new files in Office Online and save them directly to their Dropbox account using Windows, iOS, and Android devices.

Watch the video for a quick tour and browse the tutorial below to understand how Dropbox and OneDrive work together.

Dropbox and Office 365

Managing files in the Cloud

The most important consideration when planning Cloud storage is the bandwidth you rely on for your Internet access. Users often have several gigabytes of files which can be difficult to manage online with minimum cost broadband subscriptions. It is important to manage data. Files which are no longer necessary cause “bloat” which impedes network performance, and poorly optimimized files which users cannot access with mobile telephony can reduce productivity. Bear in mind these guidelines to help facilitate network performance:

  • Bandwidth availability vs user needs
  • File retention policies to manage redundant data
  • File naming conventions and keywording
  • Plan for document sharing, custody, and versioning
  • File size optimization
  • File synchronisation policy

Lastly, consider your legal obligations to protect data when sharing and distributing files. When you share files with others, you may not be able to control what happens to that data, and you may be liable at law for consequential data leakage or data loss. For instance, if employees use their own mobile devices for storing business files consider if you sufficient services to manage devices which you would not normally consider to be part of your conventional computer network.

Using Dropbox with Office 365

Toggle through the notes below by clicking open the headings to find out how you can improve your experience with Office 365 and Dropbox.

Dropbox Desktop App

Dropbox provides desktop apps for Windows, Android, and iOS to synchronise files locally. Dropbox is useful for simple file storage.

The easiest way to manage documents stored in Dropbox from using desktop versions of Office – Word, Excel, etc. – is to open documents from your local Dropbox folder. You can drag locally saved documents to your Dropbox folder, too.

dropbox desktops for windows, iosDocument Sharing

Dropbox provides tools for users to share documents and folders. However, for collaborative work where users need to manage document custody or manage versions, Office 365 provides tools in OneDrive and Sharepoint. Also, Office 365 document storage provides antivirus control, telemetry, mobile device management, and litigation lock.

Getting Started with Dropbox

To find out more about Dropbox’ desktop client, download Getting Started with Dropbox.

Save new Office 2016 documents to Dropbox

One way to save new documents to Dropbox is to save them to a file location like Desktop, and then drag the document to your Dropbox bin. There is a more efficient option. Dropbox users who have installed the Dropbox synch tool for Windows can pin their local Dropbox file store in Office 2016’s file location “favourites”. This section explains how to pin Dropbox as a Favourite file location in your Office desktop apps.

Configure Dropbox as a file location in Office 2016

To save the Dropbox folder as a target in file locations, Dropbox needs to be configured in one desktop app. Office 2016 will update other apps in the software wuite to include Dropbox.

Open Word, Excel, or Powerpoint, and create a new document

Click Save As, and then click Browse, and use Windows file finder to locate Dropbox – the Dropbox folder is usually stored at the same directory level as Desktop and Documents. Click on Dropbox, name the document, and then click Save.

saving a document

Next, in the document, go back to Save As, and under recent file locations, find Dropbox and scroll your cursor over it. Look for the icon of the pin, and click the pin.

pinning dropbox to favourites

In future, when you want to save a new document to Dropbox, open Save As, click on This PC, and then find and select Dropbox in the Favourites list:

dropbox in favourites

When you configure Dropbox as a file location in on Office 2016 app, the file location will be included in your other Office 2016 apps.

Configure Office Online to save to Dropbox

To use a Dropbox account with Word Online, Excel Online, or PowerPoint Online, add Dropbox to your places list. Once it is saved as a storage location you can open, create, edit, and save files to Dropbox.

  1. From OfficeOnline.com, open Word, Excel, or PowerPoint Online.
  2. Under Open from OneDrive, click Add a place.
  3. Click Dropbox. You will see Open from Dropbox appear in your places list.

office online dropbox file location

Tips for using Dropbox with Office Online
  • Whenever you select Open from Dropbox to open a file from your Dropbox account, the file will be saved to Dropbox.
  • To create a new file in Dropbox once you’ve added Dropbox to your places list, choose New in Dropbox. (Dropbox will already be selected if it is the last place you used.)

opening Dropbox files from O365

  • To open Dropbox files you have recently worked on, select them in your Recent list.
  • To edit files in a Dropbox for Business account using Office Online, you need an Office 365 account that includes Office applications (the desktop versions of Word, Excel, PowerPoint, etc.). If you are not already signed into your Office 365 account, you will be prompted to sign in before you use your files.

Office 365 and OneDrive for Business

Office 365 help series – OneDrive Sync

OneDrive for Business Sync

You can sync OneDrive to your workstation or laptop to handle your files “on the go”. OneDrive for Business provides a minimum storage capacity of 1TB. If you spend time away from your Internet connectivity, Onedrive Sync is a useful tool.

Watch the video for a quick tour of OneDrive synch and browse our notes below to find out about important considerations and Sync tools.

OneDrive for Business

About OneDrive for Business Sync

OneDrive for Business is Office 365’s principle file storage service for users. OneDrive for Business users are allocated 1TB of storage.  You can manage files using OneDrive Online at portal.office365.com. Also, you can synchronise files locally, so that you can access files without Internet access to Office 365 services.

Tablets and mobile devices might not have sufficient capacity to store more than 2-4GB, whereas OneDrive supports 1TB. Syncing is most useful when you need access to files that you might temporarily be without Internet access for. In addition to browser based management Windows 10 supports a built-in OneDrive sync client, and there are tools for managing OneDrive files within Outlook.  Recent OneDrive for Business features include:

  • Large file uploads – 10GB
  • Selective sync
  • Configurable options for network administrators

Files can be shared in OneDrive to other licensed users internal and external to an orgnization, and OneDrive includes tools for document custody, tracking, versioning, antivirus, and even litigation locks. For documents which need to be shared between groups, users should consider Sharepoint.

OneDrive for Business - considerations

Managing files in the Cloud

The most important consideration when planning Cloud storage is the bandwidth you rely on for your Internet access. Users often have several gigabytes of files which can be difficult to manage online with minimum cost broadband subscriptions. It is important to manage data. Files which are no longer necessary cause “bloat” which impedes network performance, and poorly optimimized files which users cannot access with mobile telephony can reduce productivity. Bear in mind these guidelines to help facilitate network performance:

  • Bandwidth reliability and availability vs user needs
  • File retention policies to manage redundant data
  • File naming conventions and keywording
  • Plan for document sharing, custody, and versioning
  • File size optimization
  • File synchronisation policy

Lastly, consider your legal obligations to protect data when sharing and distributing files. When you share files with others, you may not be able to control what happens to that data, and you may be liable at law for consequential data leakage or data loss. For instance, if employees use their own mobile devices for storing business files consider if you sufficient services to manage devices which you would not normally consider to be part of your conventional computer network.

Using OneDrive with Office 365

Toggle through the notes below by clicking open the headings to find out how you can improve your experience with Office 365 and OneDrive.

OneDrive Sync

About OneDrive for Business file sync

You can use OneDrive for Business or Sharepoint site libraries to synchronise folders and files to your computer and then access your files from Windows File Explorer instead of using a web browser to manage files. All subsequent updates you make to files saved in OneDrive locally sync to OneDrive for Business or site libraries whenever you are online.

OneDrive is built in to Windows 10, so Microsoft has retired the Windows app. Open File Explorer to browse your OneDrive files.

Apps for Android and iOS are available from their respective stores.

https://onedrive.live.com/about/en-ie/download/

Office 365 Service Provisions

Office 365 Service Descriptions

Office 365 Service Descriptions provide an overview of all available services, service features, and includes details about license plans and on-premises vs. online versions:

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