by Steve Galloway | Mar 31, 2016
Office 365 help series – Outlook, Sharepoint, and Harmon.ie
1. About Harmon.ie
Emails are increasingly used as documents of record for project management, task management, and work orders. Emails are stored separately from other kinds of documents, however, and are difficult to search and manage as users’ and organizations’ email volumes grow. These videos here explain how modern tools like Harmon.ie combine emails with other document types in a unified location to help individual users and teams access email and documents together. The last section demonstrates Harmon.ie’s features.
2. Connect to Harmon.ie
Harmon.ie is a third party tool that runs in Outlook desktop to help users distribute files to Sharepoint and OneDrive within the Outlook Desktop. Using Harmon.ie, users can:
- navigate Office 365 Sharepoint sites
- navigate Onedrive
- find files
- link files to emails
- upload files, and download files.
This save users having to navigate their Office 365 portal to perform these tasks. Watch this video to learn how to link Harmon.ie to a Sharepoint site. You can find your Sharepoint site in your site settings.
Finding Onedrive/Sharepoint Content
Once Harmon.ie is added to Outlook for Desktop you add a SharePoint “site” to Harmon.ie to find manage files saved in OneDrive or SharePoint. Most small business users rely on OneDrive to store their documents. OneDrive is an app which sits within Sharepoint, so users add their Office 365 Sharepoint site to Outlook, which in turn includes their OneDrive location.
Here is a an overview of Harmon.ie desktop for Outlook. For more detail, click here.
by Steve Galloway | Mar 27, 2016
Office 365 help series – Outlook for Desktop
Outlook for Desktop
This video below explains how to connect desktop versions of Outlook to Office 365’s Exchange Online email service. Business Premium and Enterprise users can download the Office 2016 App suite from the Office 365 portal.
For guidance on using the browser based web app, Outlook Web App (OWA), click here.
This tutorial uses Outlook 2016 for desktop. The method is the same for Outlook 2013 and 2010, although navigating to Outlook’s settings might differ from one version to another.
Establishing an Outlook email account, or “profile”, will also connect you to other services like Contacts, Calendar, and Tasks. Most of the features available in Outlook for desktop are available in Outlook Web Access (OWA). The advantage of using Outlook for Desktop are:
- more tools for composition and editing
- local copies of email, calendars, and tasks
- tools for connecting to local file stores using Outlook’s desktop
- tools for connecting to OneDrive and Sharepoint
OWA is still an important feature. For instance, use OWA settings to change passwords.
Click on the “best practice” video tutorial below to find out how to connect workstations and laptops to Office 365, GMail, and other tasks.
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 | Mar 26, 2016
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
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.
