by Steve Galloway | Mar 27, 2016
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.
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
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.
by Steve Galloway | Oct 17, 2015
For business users who want to send and receive email with the simplicity that comes with Windows Live (formerly Hotmail) and GMail, but without the dreary advertising, Office 365’s Outlook Web Access (OWA) comes with simplicity, no ads, and the same tools available to the corporate world that makes OWA a serious alternative to Outlook for Desktop.
Mentioning Outlook stirs memories of an awkward email client that is too complicated to use and impossible to back up. Nor is there a shortage of clients who have worn out two buttons in Outlook – check mail, and send: Many users are only interested in email; calendars, tasks, contacts, etc. are just bloat. If any of this sounds familiar to you, you are not in the alone, and something that many people have hoped for which provides an advertising-free webmail service for commercial use is available to Office 365 users – Outlook Web Access, or OWA.
OWA is the portal for Microsoft’s Office 365. OWA is a web version of Outlook for Desktop which provides to Exchange Email, a service providing 50 GB of email per user account which can be synced across 5 devices – including sent items, which you will never see with POP accounts. Calendars, contacts, and more are all there too, albeit ring-fenced from email. although they are bound to be there. OWA is Microsoft Exchange. Importantly, whereas Google users expose their email to data mining, Exchange email is a secure content system that restricts access to “your eyes only”. Among other reasons, this privacy feature is why Exchange email is used almost overwhelmingly in commerce.
Perhaps the niftiest trick in Microsoft’s web based email client is the facility to run their email in “offline” mode.
Wait a minute. Read that one more time. Offline? Managing email with your web browser – offline? Did Hotmail ever do that? No. Nobody else did, either. That is why everybody needed Outlook for Desktop, or Outlook Express, or Eudora or Thunderbird. In case you still do not believe the proposition, the illustration above shows how offline mode is not more than two clicks away.
Offline email management is a trump card. Do not expect to see an entire mailbox in offline mode, more like a few day’s worth of traffic, but enough to keep you with something to do on the road. It is one feature of many “gimme’s” Microsoft deploys from time to time to keep the corporate world so attached to Exchange.
The great thing about OWA is that if you only want to run email, the browser interface does just that, and beautifully so on iPads. OWA connects directly to Exchange 2013, though, so all the tools that high end users need like shared address books, distribution groups, rules, instant messaging, administrator tools like mail policies and even in-line archiving, are there if you want them too.
You might be disappointed that this does not mean the end of Outlook for desktops. Outlook still has a place, and if anything has upped the ante as a portal not only for email, but for user access to Office 365 to document folders and Sharepoint mind boggling services ..but that is for another few articles.
For a thirty trial of Microsoft Exchange and OWA, contact Steve Galloway on 07834 461 266 or Fred Dreiling on 07919 340 570. No credit card required for trial services.
by Steve Galloway | Sep 12, 2015
The simplest way to set up a network multifunction printer to send captured scans by email is by using SMTP client submission. It allows your printer to log in to an Office 365 mailbox and send mail just like Outlook Desktop does. Emails from your printer are then delivered to your hosted mailboxes or external recipients. This way avoids some of the problems associated with the other configuration options available which is covered here.
Print services: SMTP submission
If your printer has settings for an email address/username and password for the send to email feature, then there is a good chance that it can send using SMTP client submission. The settings needed for SMTP client submission to connect to Office 365 are:
Office 365 Printer Settings
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Limitations
Unless your printer is advanced enough to store multiple mailboxes login credentials, you can only send mail from one mailbox for this option. Also, Office 365 imposes a limit of 30 messages sent per minute for each mailbox.
Other configuration options
We have recently updated the comprehensive configuration document that details the three configuration options for setting up your printer. If the settings above to not work, you should visit the article for its more detailed explanations covering Microsoft’s 3 recommended process for printers/scanners/multifunction devices:
by Steve Galloway | Jun 5, 2015
Update your email account settings when your email account password changes, your mail server or the security settings change, or when you want to customize settings, such as how your name is displayed to other people.
The settings you can change vary by account type. For example, if you’re using an Exchange account, only the Exchange server admin can change your name as it appears to other people. To manage an email account:
1. Click File > Account Settings > Account Settings.
2. Select the email account you want to change, and then click Change.
Update your email account password
If you want to change the password used to access your mail server, follow the instructions provided by your email account provider. After your password for the mail server changes, then change the password saved in Outlook.
Under Logon Information, in the Password box, type your password.
If you don’t want to be prompted to enter your email account password each time you send and receive messages, select the Remember password check box.
If you select the Remember password check box, your account is accessible to anyone who has access to your Windows computer account.
Update your email address
Occasionally, your email address might change. For example, anne@contoso.com might become anne1@contoso.com. You can update the server setting in your account settings.
1. Under User Information, in the Email Address box, type your email address.
2. Click More Settings.
3. On the General tab, under Other User Information, if you specified an email address in the Reply email address box, make sure it’s still correct. If you leave Reply email address blank, when people reply to your email, the address you entered in step 1 is used.
With an Exchange account, only your Exchange admin can update your email address.
Update your email server
Sometimes the server you connect to in order to receive and send email might change.
For example, your ISP notifies you the outgoing mail server is changing from outgoing.example.com to smtp.example.com. You can update the server setting in the account settings. Your email provider can give you the correct server names.
- Under Server Information, in the Incoming mail server and Outgoing mail server boxes, type the server names. The name can be the same for both, but usually is different.
Change the way your name is displayed to other people
- Under User Information, in the Your Name box, type your name the way you want it to appear to other people.
With an Exchange account, only your Exchange admin can update your name.
Additional settings
- Click More Settings, and then you can change the following (options vary by account type):
- On the General tab, under Mail Account, type the name you want to show in the Folder Pane and the From box (if you have added multiple email accounts).
- If you are using an IMAP email account, you can control when items are deleted. Under Purge Options, check or uncheck Purge items when switching folders while online.
- On the Folders tab, you can choose where mail you send from this account is saved.
- On the Outgoing Server tab, you can specify whether your outgoing SMTP mail server requires authentication. This is almost always required if your ISP allows you to send email messages through your ISP email account when you are not directly connected to the ISP network. For example, if you want to send an email message with your home ISP email account and you are away from home connected to your work network, you usually must select this option.
- On the Connection tab, you can configure how Outlook connects to the mail server.
- If you are instructed by your ISP or email admin to change the port numbers or encryption method used by your email server, you can make the change on the Advanced tab.
Exchange accounts have these options:
- On the General tab, under Mail Account, type the name you want to show in the Folder Pane and the From box (if you have added multiple email accounts).
- On the Advanced tab, you can specify additional Exchange mailboxes to open. This can be used if another person has given you access to some of his or her Exchange folders or someone has granted you Delegate Access permissions.
- To reduce the size of your offline Outlook Data File (.ost), on the Advanced tab, click Outlook Data File Settings, and then click Compact Now.
- Security settings can be changed on the Security tab. Don’t change these settings unless instructed to do so by your Exchange admin.
- When you’re away from the office, Outlook Anywhere enables you to connect Outlook to your Exchange account from any Internet location without a using a virtual private network (VPN) connection. To turn on Outlook Anywhere, on the Connection tab, under Outlook Anywhere, check Connect to Microsoft Exchange using HTTP, and then click Exchange Proxy Settings. Your Exchange admin must enable this feature and provide you the proxy settings
by Steve Galloway | Apr 27, 2015
Email signatures are included at the end of emails to disclose contact information like trading names, addresses, and other useful contact information. Signatures are created individually for email accounts. Users who rely on desktop clients like Outlook should create email signatures using Outlook. Users who manage email should create signatures in Outlook Web Access (OWA) should create their signatures in OWA. Users who use both Outlook and OWA should create signatures in both Outlook and OWA.
This article shows how to create a signature using OWA. Follow these steps:
– log into Office 365 at http://mail.office365.com
– open the apps dashboard on the left of the toolbar and click open Mail in the dropdown menu
– next, click open the setting icon on right side of the toolbar, and click ope “Options” in the dropdown menu:
– look down the options in the next page and click open “Signatures”. Complete the signatures using the editing tools. Also, depending on the operating system you use, you may be able to copy and paste content from Word. Save the the signature when completed.
