Office 365 Grid Archives - Daniel Glenn

External SharePoint Online Users: Associate an email address with a Microsoft account (Windows Live ID)

Daniel — Mon, 10 Dec 2012 02:03:49 +0000

Contents: – Invite External Users – SharePoint Online – Associate External Email Address with Windows Live ID – Login to SharePoint Online with a Windows Live ID Account With SharePoint Online, site administrators have the ability to share their site with internal users, users who are within the same company and have an Office 365 account, as well as up to unlimited external users per Office 365 tenant. External users are defined as partners who are not a member of your company or your company's affiliates. External users can use their existing Microsoft Online Services ID, if they themselves have an Office 365 subscription, or a Windows Live ID, which includes usernames in the Hotmail.com, MSN.com, and Live.com domains. The details on how to turn on external sharing in SharePoint Online is documented on Microsoft's site here: http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/office365-sharepoint-online-small-business-help/share-a-site-with-external-users-HA101850586.aspx The missing link in the documentation however, is detail on how external users are to associate their existing email address with a Windows Live ID. In step two of these directions, you will get those details with screenshots, as well as the correct URL used to associate IDs (the URL in Microsoft's documentation, namely the SharePoint Online service descriptions, is incorrect). After external sharing has been enabled, both from within the SharePoint Online Portal and then turning on the Site Collection Feature, as a site owner you will be able to share your site using the “Share Site” link shown in the image below. Step 1 (Share Site – Invite new users to your site) You will then be prompted to enter the external users email addresses into the invite. As you can see from below, you can add the external users to the default Visitors or Members groups. One item to note is you cannot change the subject of the email the user(s) will receive. (Invite for external users) The user will receive an email from Office 365 asking them to accept your invitation. (Example of the email users will receive when invited to a SharePoint Online site) Step 2 At this point, external users should not accept your invitation unless they already have an account to sign-in – see the start of this post for acceptable accounts. If the external users do not have an account as described above, they will need to associate their existing email address to a Windows Live ID. It may be most convenient for them to associate their company’s email address. NOTE: The service description for SharePoint Online, (located here: http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=136020) lists the incorrect URL to perform the association. The correct URL is: https://signup.live.com/ After loading the signup.live.com site, as long as the user is not logged in using an existing Windows Live ID account, the user will be presented with a form to create an account, while associating their existing email address. If a different page loads, i.e. a Hotmail inbox, the user needs to use the logout feature on the page that loads. Then, go back to https://signup.live.com so the page below loads. The full form: Upon successful completion of the form, the user will be warned that they must verify their email address. The user will receive the email shown below. They will need to click the ‘Verify' button in the email to complete the setup of their Windows Live ID account. A confirmation window will be displayed in the user's browser. Step 3 It may take some time for Microsoft's servers to sync with the new account. After waiting, the user should go to http://login.live.com and ensure they are logged in – only then should the user click the “Accept your invitation!” link in the original invite email from your SharePoint Online site. The account type selection web page will then open. The user will select the “Microsoft Online Services ID” icon to use their new ID. Since the user is currently logged-in on the http://login.live.com website, the login page after clicking the “Microsoft Online Services ID” icon should look similar to the one below. They need to now click “Sign in at Windows Live” under their email address. The user should then be taken directly to your SharePoint site. NOTE: the email address you sent the invite to and the email address they used to associate with a Windows Live ID must be the same. If the user sees the page shown below, they should use their new ID to login.

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Branding the RSS Feed Web Part for Office 365

Daniel — Tue, 03 Jul 2012 15:00:00 +0000

If you have attempted to use the RSS Viewer web part in SharePoint Online (part of Office 365), you will notice that it doesn’t work! Rene Modery has done a wonderful job creating the RSS Feed Web Part for Office 365 and with his latest release (June 29, 2012), you should put this on your list of must-have sandboxed solutions for Office 365. If you have used it before and had issues with SSL (Plan 2), Rene has fixed those issues with this release. The web part can also be branded via CSS, and in this post I will show you how. The original posting for the web part shows the layout of the output. In the latest release, Rene also includes a new CSS file (WhiteBlue.css) in the solution and that is where I will start with my branding effort. Let’s change the hover colors – these are the colors displayed when you hover your mouse over an item displayed in the reader. There are two colors that will need to be changed in the .rssRow:hover style: background-color and border-left. Change them to any color you wish – I chose two orange colors (#E87E01 and #D84A00), which matched my overall site branding. NOTE: Make sure the background-color complements the color attribute in the same .rssRow:hover style – which defines the color of the text in the body of the item you are highlighting. It is #FFF (white) in my CSS, so it works well with the orange colors I picked. Of course, you can change any of the other visual aspects of the solution just by changing the CSS. There are two general ways to make the changes on your site: Make a CSS file and upload it to a document library (such as the Style Library). Within the Miscellaneous section of the web part properties, enter the URL for the CSS file you upload. Add the CSS to your master page (not preferred) or reference a custom CSS file within your master page. Here is the result of my branding effort: Here is the CSS I used to create what you see above: 1: .rssFeed { 2: font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; 3: margin: 2em 3em; 4: color: #888; 5: } 6: .rssFeed a, .rssFeed a:link, .rssFeed a:visited { 7: color: #000; 8: text-decoration: none; 9: } 10: 11: .rssHeader { padding: 0.2em 0; } 12: 13: div.rssHeader a, div.rssHeader a:visited { 14: font-size: 1.2em; 15: color: #00ADEE; 16: } 17: 18: .rssBody { border: 1px solid #999; } 19: .rssBody ul { list-style: none; } 20: .rssBody ul, .rssRow, .rssRow h4, .rssRow p { 21: margin: 0; 22: padding: 0; 23: } 24: 25: .rssRow:hover 26: { 27: background-color: #E87E01; 28: color: #fff; 29: border-left: 5px solid #D84A00; 30: } 31: 32: .rssRow 33: { 34: padding: 0.8em; 35: background-color:#fff; 36: } 37: 38: .rssRow h4 { font-size: 1.1em; } 39: .rssRow div { 40: margin: 0.2em 0 0.4em 0; 41: } 42: 43: .rssRow .rssMedia { 44: padding: 0.5em; 45: font-size: 1em; 46: } You can download the CSS file here.

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SharePoint Online and External Users

Daniel — Mon, 05 Mar 2012 14:00:00 +0000

Microsoft’s Office 365 allows you to not only host your company’s email, files, and website outside of the restrictions of your firewall in a highly available, secure way, but it also makes it easy to share information with your customers. One way you can share content with your customers is to use the free public site given to you when you sign-up for an Office 365 subscription or with an unbundled SharePoint Online plan. This is a great site for small to medium-sized businesses, especially if you are paying another provider to host your content. Consolidate and save! Modifiable templates are provided that get you started fast and to which you can add all your company’s website information including pictures and video. Office 365’s SharePoint platform gives you the ability to also add external users to your “private” SharePoint sites so they can gain access to the information you have selected. For example, these external users can be customers who you want to have access to collaborate on a proposed change to their contract. If you allow, the customer would be able to make changes, upload more documents, take part in online discussions, add important dates to their site, and so on. Once you send the invite and the outside user accepts, you manage their access to your SharePoint sites like any other user by adding them to site groups, or applying permissions directly to sites, list, libraries, or individual items. I was asked recently why you would want to give access to an external person through the “Share Site” method in SharePoint versus creating a user account either directly in Office 365, or in your Active Directory and letting it sync into Office 365. My answer was two-fold: First, if you add the external user by creating an Office 365 account for them, you will have to pay for their Office 365 license. If you are using SharePoint Plan 2 (without bundling with other Office 365 services), you will be paying $10.25US per month for that user to gain access to your site. That is not extremely expensive, but Microsoft gives you the ability to invite 50 external users for FREE, so in that regard, the $10.25US is very expensive. Also, if you make this your default behavior for inviting external people to collaborate, that monthly cost can soon get out of control. Second, once you create the user account for Office 365 for the external person, you now have to manage that account. So, when that user forgets their password, who will they call? That’s right, they will call you. Don’t you have enough to worry about with your current employees? Why add another user you have to support?! If you invite them through the Share Site feature, they use a Microsoft account (more on this in a later post) that they maintain and if they forget their password, that is between them and Microsoft. Adding External Users To allow external users access to your site, a SharePoint Online administrator must allow access by going to the Manage Site Collections screen within the Office 365 management site, selecting the Settings menu, and then the Manage External Users menu item (as seen in the picture below). Manage Site Collections menu The External Users window will open – select Allow and then click Save to start allowing Site Collection Owners the right to enable external user sharing (see the picture below). Allow or Deny External Users window At this point, site Owners will not be able to invite external people. Site Collection Owners must enable the External user invitations feature. You do this by navigating to the Site Collection Features screen and clicking the Activate button by the feature (see the picture below). External user invitations SharePoint feature Now any SharePoint user who had been given the Manage Permissions permission level (out of the box, only Site Owners have this permission, but it can be added to any role) on any SharePoint site within the Site Collection can invite external users to join a site group. To invite the external users, select the Share Site link on the Site Actions menu (see the picture below). Site Actions Menu – Share Site When the Share your SharePoint Site window opens, type the email address of the user you want to invite into either of the groups shown. Out of the box, the groups available are the Visitors and Members groups, but the names of the groups can be changed so yours may be different from the ones shown. Click the Share button to finish (see the picture below). Share your SharePoint Site Window The external user will get an invite to your site and after going through the sign-in process (UPDATE: Associate an email address with a Microsoft account), they are added to the SharePoint group you designated.

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