Now I am still working with Office 365. I am still try to test all the features and also the support for mobile devices like the iPhone or Windows Phone 7. As a Windows Phone 7 developer I could get the beta for the next update of Windows Phone 7 called Mango. Now Mango will support Office 365. You can simply add your Office 365 account on your phone and this will connect you to Exchange Online and SharePoint Online.

What is missing in first beta of the Windows Phone 7 Mango update is Lync, but Microsoft is working on that.

Microsoft released a developer beta of the next Windows Phone update codename “Mango” last week. Mango brings a lot of cool new features to the Windows Phone platform like Facebook and Windows Live Messenger chat integrated in the Messaging hub, Internet Explorer 9 and a lot of other improvements.

One of the smaller improvements is the capability to use SharePoint 2010 without a UAG (Forefront Unified Access Gateway). This will alow you to use Hosted SharePoint products like the offering from Genotec.

More about Windows Phone Mango:

You can simply manage and administrate Office 365 from your Powershell prompt or with your own Powershell scripts.

Here is how you can connect to Office 365 with Windows PowerShell:

First create a object with your Windows Live Credentials. This command will open a Windows in which you can enter your Windows Live Credentials for your Office365 Accout. In my case tmauer@tmaurer.onmicrosoft.com and my password.

$LiveCred = Get-Credential

You can open a new Session:

$Session = New-PSSession -ConfigurationName Microsoft.Exchange -ConnectionUri https://ps.outlook.com/powershell/ -Credential $LiveCred -Authentication Basic -AllowRedirection

Now join the session with:

Import-PSSession $Session

To close the Session:

Remove-PSSession $Session

Now if you join the PS session with Enter-PSSession you can now work online and run commands like Get-User. More about working with Powershell and Office 365 in the next posts.

In the last days I started to work with the Microsoft beta of Office 365. After testing it for a while I think this could be a great solution for small & medium businesses. And its a really hard competitor to Google Apps. There are a lot of advantage which Office 365 has agains Google Apps and I think because it is a Microsoft Solution for a lot of companys this is the better way to go, if they already used Microsoft Products or have a Microsoft enviroment.

• More options and features instead of  Google Apps, for example in Exchange or Forfront which protects Exchange and SharePoint Online for free.
• Microsoft Solutions – the most people and companys already use them.
• Powershell - This is a really cool feature. You can administrate  the whole Office365 online serivce with Windows Powershell.

In the next few weeks I will post some blog post about how to use Office 365 and some Powershell How To posts.

If you use a Hosted SharePoint 2010 and you try to open a Word Document or try to open a Document Library with Explorer SharePoint prompts for login credentials even you are already logged in. To stop this behavior in Internet Explorer you can simply add your SharePoint Site to the Local Intranet Zone.

This is because SharePoint uses Windows Authentication. We deiced to use Windows Authentication because only Windows Authentication allows you to easily use the full feature set of SharePoint Foundation 2010.

1. Open Internet options and click on the Security tab and choose Local Intranet
   
2. Now click on Sites. On the first Windows choose Advanced
   
3. Now add your SharePoint Site URL
   
4. Restart Internet Explorer

When you try to create a three-state workflow in SharePoint 2010 and SharePoint Foundation 2010, the state fields are maybe grayed out like in this screenshot below.

The reason for this is that there is no column to show the states for the documents of the document library. You can simply solve this issue, by adding the “choice” column to the document library.

1. Choose the document library in which you wanna create the workflow and click on the Library button in the Ribbon
2. Click on create Column
   
3. Choose the type “Choice” and make sure you add three states
   
4. Now these states are available in the three-state workflow.

Some days ago, I made a post about “How to use Microsoft Sharepoint Workspace 2010 with Genotec Hosted Sharepoint“. If you work on a Mac you can also use Microsoft Document Connection for Mac, which is included in Microsoft Office 2011 for Mac.

This shows you how you can use Document Connection for Mac with Hosted Sharepoint from Genotec.

1. Start Microsoft Document Connection and connect to a SharePoint Site
   
2. Add the  Addresse of your hosted Sharepoint Site
   
3. Add your Credentials
   
4. And now you are connected to your Site Collection
   

This guide will show you how to add a Genotec Hosted Sharepoint 2010 to your Sharepoint Workspace 2010.

1. First Startup Microsoft Sharepoint Workspace 2010
   
2. Add a new Sharepoint to your Sharepoint Workspace
   
3. Add the Domain of your hosted Sharepoint (sharepointhosting.ch, Hostedsharepoint.ch or your own Domainname)
   
4. Add your User Account and Password. Its Important that you add the Domain before your Username (CP\username)
   
5. Now wait until your Site is synced with your computer
   
6. Now you can see your Sharepoint Site Collection in the Launchbar and you can start working with Microsoft SharePoint Workspace.
   

Thats how you can connect a Genotec Hosted Sharepoint 2010 to your Sharepoint Workspace. I recommend that you use the “Remember my credentials” checkbox because your computer is not in the same Active Directory Domain.

In the last days we had a customer ticket which was escalated because a user in our Hosted Sharepoint 2010 environment had the following problem. He could not upload multiple documents because the button was grayed out and he got the message “This control is currently disabled”.

This is a feature which is a client integration component, which is available on machines with a installed Office 2010 client. So if you have a Windows 7 PC and Office 2010 installed you get the following:

1. The first time you navigate on the Document Library you get asked about a ActiveX Control Object
   
2. You can accept that
   
3. Maybe you get asked again
   
4. Now you can use the Upload Multiple Documents Button
5. And choose the Office Files
   

I found this solution in the technet forums

Okay for a real backup solution you should use a backup software like Microsoft System Center Data Protection Manager or Symantec Backup Exec. But maybe you have customer which needs a backup of his Sharepoint Site Collection. You also could use the Backup Tool in the Sharepoint Central Administration, but if you need to automate that, you will need Powershell.

Backup a Site Collection:

Backup-SPSite -Identity "http://sharepoint.company.com" -Path "C:\Temp\backup1.bak" -Force

Restore a Site Collection:

Restore-SPSite "http://sharepoint.company.com" -Path C:\backup1.bak -HostHeaderWebApplication "http://WebAppname" -Force -Confirm:$False