Category: Limitations

Limit To Sending Emails

Michael Bratley / / Limitations, Office 365

As Office 365 is cloud based, Microsoft controls elements such as the size of your email inbox and the maximum size of email attachments. However one interesting point that stood out in a blog post was that you could only send 30 emails per minute. This raised the question as to whether it would be possible to send an email to a large group, for example ‘All Staff’. We have not tested this on a very large scale, but we have been able to send more than the 30 emails per minute limit, we were able to send in excess of 60. We did not reach a point where we could not send anymore however. Currently we are limited to 15 users, so a large scale test is not possible. The post specifically mentioned the Enterprise version, and I would be surprised if there was such a limit in place, say 30, 50 or 100, as a large Enterprise business could have more than a thousand users that you may wish or need to email.

It turns out that there is a limit of 30 emails per minute, however if more are sent they are still delivered. They may be queued on the server to prevent overconsumption of system resources though.

Handling Customisations When Upgrading

Michael Bratley / / Capabilities, Limitations, Migration, Upgrades

Should you be upgrading from SharePoint 2003 to 2007 or 2010, you may need to consider how to handle any customisation you have implemented on your current site.

There are a three options that are available for consideration:

  1. Keep the customisations.
  2. Replace the customisations.
  3. Redo the customisations.

The first option is to keep the customisations in place, which will allow you to keep the same look and feel as the current system, however you would not be able to take advantage of any new capabilities at this stage. If this is the option that would best suit you, there are three options; complete an in-place upgrade, do a gradual upgrade and keep the site in the previous version environment (do not upgrade the site) or you can do a gradual upgrade and upgrade the site , but don’t reset any pages to the site definition.

The second option to replace the customisation is a good option if you are planning on a complete site redesign or significantly changing the information architecture. You can accomplish this is one of two ways; one is to complete an in-place or gradual upgrade and then reset all the pages to the default pages from the site definition. The other way, if you do not need the structure or content is to start a complete fresh.

The final option is to redo the customisation. This method allows you to take advantage of the new capabilities and modify the design slightly if that is required and make it more manageable. You could take advantages of the new master pages to apply your design, rather than customise each individual page. There are three ways to redo the customisations. The first is to complete an in-place or gradual upgrade and do not reset the pages to the site definition version. After the upgrade, modify the appropriate master pages and page layouts of the upgraded site to take on the previous version’s look and feel, and then reattach the page layouts to all customised pages. The next option is to complete an in-place upgrade and do not reset the pages to the site definition. After the upgrade, open the site and copy the customisations, and then reattach the page layouts and reapply your customisations to the master pages and page layouts as appropriate. The final way to complete this method is to complete a gradual upgrade and, in the upgraded site, reattach the page layouts. Then transfer the customisations from your original site to the master pages and page layouts in the upgraded site by using Office SharePoint Designer.

 

The full article can be found at: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-gb/library/cc263203(office.12).aspx

JQuery and Office 365

Robert Everatt / / Limitations, web design

Now, my skills in JQuery are very minimal, never really used it much but I have just started picking bits up so I’ve decided to start using it where I can, so there is probably an easy way round this that I am unaware of.

In previous blogs we have described the difficulty in editing the public facing website outside of the sandbox tools,and  not being able to locate let alone edit the root.master page. Since then we have discovered more permission settings that were only available to Tim, we now have majority access to the files containing the public facing site, including root.master. I thought this might be a nice time to add some JQuery in after opening the master page in advanced settings and inputting/referencing the JQuery library I clicked save, Sharepoint Designer asked me if I was sure as this would change it from the site definition (I was aware of this, after all, I did just add some extra code in). Before adding any actual JQuery into the site pages I decided to check the site in the browser, it didn’t load, for some reason it wont accept any variation of the root.master page, it has to be to the site definition so I was forced to reset the root master page. Now I could create an entirely new master page mimicking the root master, but this would be time consuming and quite annoying.

There must be a better way to add Java into the site as recreating the root master doesn’t seem like the right way, it shouldn’t be so difficult, the only thing I am wondering is if it would be any easier for the Enterprise version of 365 as the P1 plan claims that no IT professionals are required, so obviously that leads to very little customization beyond the sandbox.

RE

Small Business Version Update – Problems

Michael Bratley / / Limitations, Office 365

Over the last few days Rob and I have come across some issues using the Small Business version of Office 365. The main problems arise when you wish to customise the  Team Site. You are however able to make certain modifications to the master page and the css files. But you do not seem to be able to edit the default headers and footers of the pages. The default Microsoft headers and footers are bright orange, and no matter how you customise the css file, the orange headers and footers just do not go. There are some .ascx files referenced in the master pages that could be related to the default header and footer, but there is no way to view these files or edit them that we know of at this time.

We have also been experiencing a ‘403 Forbidden’ errors. These have been occurring sporadically when clicking on links, and it’s not just happening on specific links. This issue has been ongoing over the last couple of days, and as of yet there has been no explanation of this issue. There has not even been any acknowledgement of this problem in the service health within the admin options.

A little update on Microsoft’s development roadmap

Michael Bratley / / Capabilities, Limitations, Office 365

In an article by Ed Bott, who attended the Office 365 Launch Conference, asked a few questions at the launch, one of which stood out to me. He asked about the development roadmap of the system and in particular SharePoint Online. As it stands SharePoint Online does not have the same feature set as the standalone on premise version (SharePoint Server 2010). John Betz (Microsoft’s Director of Online Services) is quoted as saying that Office 365 will be updated every 90 days, and that their ultimate goal is for SharePoint Online to have the same feature set as SharePoint Server 2010.

For more details check the article at: http://www.zdnet.com/blog/bott/office-365-three-questions-for-small-businesses/3503?tag=search-results-rivers