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.

Migrating in the opposite direction

Robert Everatt / / Migration, Office 365, SharePoint 2010

After reading some blog posts we were concerned about some of the questions these bloggers had asked and never got an answer to. One of this questions was “what happens if you want to leave Office 365 for something else?”, this could be problematic as we wouldn’t want to loose all our data if we wanted to migrate back to SharePoint 2010 (When we do upgraded I don’t think we would go back to SharePoint 2003 ever again). After asking the question in the community forum I quickly got an answer. It is possible to migrate back to SharePoint 2010 but only through a migration tool such as MetaVis, Quest or AvePoint.

I’m still not sure why Microsoft are getting people to rely on 3rd party migration tools so much, even they rely on them for migrating their own systems. You would have thought they create their own migration tools, at the very least they could have made some more money from it.

RE

Office 365 Suffers Outage

Michael Bratley / / Office 365

Microsoft suffered an outage of its Office 365 platform yesterday (17th August). The outage affected North America and was offline for a number of hours. The problems at the particular data centre affected some of Microsoft’s other services too such as, CRM Online and SkyDrive. It shortly became aware that the problem was only affecting email services, SharePoint Online and Lync remained operational. Microsoft later said in a statement that it took any service disruption very seriously and that any customers affected would be reimbursed their service charges per the conditions in the service level agreement.

More details on the story can be found here.

SharePoint Workspace

Michael Bratley / / Features, Office 365

SharePoint Workspace is an easy to use tool that offers complete synchronisation of your SharePoint site to your desktop computer. This enables greater flexibility of how you access the things you need for your day to day work. This also means that you can access files when on the go and don’t have an Internet connection. If you made any edits to any documents while you are disconnected these will be queued for synchronisation until your Internet connection is restored. Another great feature is that when changes are made to a document, only the changes are synced back up to the server, meaning smaller and quicker upload times. Workspace also provides the ability to save to direct folders on SharePoint Servers as if they were folders on your local machine, making it both familiar and easy to save documents to the cloud with no new skills to learn. With it’s great integration with Windows you can even search for documents located on SharePoint through a Windows Explorer window, which makes it really easy to search for those all important documents.

However it does not support all content. There are some instances where data will not be synchronised depending on the way that it is stored on the SharePoint site, for example in a custom list.

Microsoft Use Third Party Tool To Help Their Own Migration

Michael Bratley / / Migration, Office 365

In an article published by SharePoint Pro Mag, Microsoft themselves have used a third party tool to assist them with an upgrade from SharePoint 2007 to 2010.

“Just this week, it was announced that Microsoft itself, the Microsoft Technology Centers, migrated from dedicated SharePoint 2007 to SharePoint 2010 on an internal cloud hosted by MSIT (Microsoft IT), and even the MTC’s turned to a third party migration tool (by AvePoint) to migrate content to the cloud while maintaining metadata and configuration.”

I am very surprised that Microsoft has turned to a third party tool to complete their migration. I’m not sure if it’s just me, but it does not give their customers much confidence in what they (Microsoft) do, if they have to turn to another company for help regarding one of their own products. This potentially shows that using a third party tool to help with a companies migration should not be considered as shameful or cheating or using the ‘easy’ option.

The full article can be found at: SharePoint Pro Mag.