We mentioned this last month but wanted to be sure that everyone is aware that Office 365 prices have decreased by about 20%. Current clients will see the price decrease as your contract renews. Most noticeably, additional SharePoint has gone from $2.50/GB/month to $0.20/GB/month.

Office 365 Community

The Office 365 Community website has a wealth of resources for Office 365 administrators. Having a problem or need an answer? Search the Community website first to see what you can find.

Office 365 Resources
We maintain a list of Office 365 Resources that are helpful to our clients (and to BEI staff!) For the entire list check here, but we’ve highlighted a few below:

• Office 365 Portal (Purchasing & Administration) – login in here for all administrative functions.
• Office 365 Service Descriptions – these are detailed descriptions of all the Office 365 services. Answers to many common questions can be found here.
• Microsoft Online Services SLA – the Service Level Agreement for all Microsoft Online Services
• Office 365 Trust Center – a wealth of information about Office 365 privacy and security practices.

SharePoint Online – External Users
Did you know that you can invite external users into your SharePoint site? They don’t have to have an Office 365 license, and can be setup to “read only” or for “read and write” access. Check out this article for details on how to set this up. You can have up to 50 external users right off the bat, and can add more if you need to via a call or ticket to Microsoft support. Of course, if you are a BEI client you can call us and we can help with setting this up for you.

Office 365 – the “P” Plan
We feel strongly that BEI clients on Office 365 should use the Enterprise or “E” plans. “P” stands for Professional, and we think it is suitable for casual users but not for businesses that depend on email. The primary reason is that the “P” plans do not include telephone or ticket support. Support for the “P” plans is provided via online help, blogs and articles. Our clients depend on email to run their businesses and we think that phone and ticketing support is critical in this environment. This article explains some of the limitations of the “P” plan.

Big Easy Rebate
The Big Easy Rebate is available to give you funds to help with your Office 365 migration or purchase other products or services.

BEI will be staffing the beer booth on Friday night, so please come by and we’d love to serve you!

Wufoo – an application for building forms. We use it for seminar registration and collecting information from clients and prospects. The basic plan is free, but you are limited to 100 entries per month. But – the free version is certainly enough to get you started and help figure out if it will do what you want it to do! We’ve found the email support to be great – you get answers back within a couple of hours. We have a plan that is priced at $29.95/month. (Note from Ellen Jennings – I also use Wufoo for some non-profit organizations that I volunteer with and have found that the payment integration works great. Non-profits get a 50% discount.)

MailChimp – a newsletter design and mailing application. We use MailChimp to send out this newsletter, our Healthcare IT Newsletter and various seminar invitations. Using a third party to send out any emails that are going to a large group of subscribers is highly recommended. MailChimp takes care of maintaining the list and tracking results.

Survey Monkey & Survey Gizmo – internet applications for surveys. We’ve used both of these to for surveys, quizzes and to gather information as part of the RFP process. Both work well and are easy to use. Survey Gizmo had more capabilities to score results at the time, but that may have changed in the last few months.

As a note, there are also free versions for most of these applications but most of the free versions are supported by ads.

You’re working on a document and love the way that your heading (or paragraph or imate or…) is formatted. Format Painter allows you to copy ALL of the formatting associated with that part of your document to a new section. Simply:

• Select the text or graphic or cell that has the formatting that you want to copy. If you want to copy only text formatting, select a portion of a paragraph. If you want to copy text and paragraph formatting, select an entire paragraph, including the paragraph mark.
• On the Home tab, in the Clipboard group, click Format Painter. The pointer changes to a paintbrush icon. Note: Double-click the Format Painter button if you want to change the format of multiple selections in your document.
• Select the text or graphic that you want to format.
• To stop formatting, press ESC.

You can read about how to properly implement Office 2010 Styles here or take a look at this information from addictivetips.

• Calculator – type an arithmetic expression in the search bar and you’ll get your answer. No need to hunt for a calculator!

• Find a restaurant, movie or weather if you know the town or zip code. For example – “The Hunger Games” and the zip code will find the top results (location and show times) for that movie in that zip code.

• Find out when a flight will be landing. The airline and flight number will give the current status for the flight today.

Want to learn more? Google has an excellent reference page.

Price Decrease
Microsoft has announced a price decrease of approximately 20% on most Office 365 services – making these great offerings even more attractive. The most significant – and in our opinion overdue – price decrease is on the SharePoint additional storage. Adding additional storage to SharePoint Online was $2.50/GB and is now $0.20/GB, making online file storage with SharePoint Online much more practical.

Pricing for the most popular Office 365 options is below:

• Exchange Online – $4/user/month
• E1 Suite (Exchange, Lync, SharePoint) – $8/user/month
• E3 Suite (Exchange, Lync, SharePoint, Office Pro Plus) – $20/user/month

The following links have pricing for all Office 365 Services and Office 365 Suites.

Big Easy Rebate
In addition, the Big Easy Rebate is available to give you funds to help with your Office 365 migration or purchase other products or services.

Kiosk Suites
Lastly, the Kiosk suites have been upgraded to include:

• Active Sync support for mobile devices
• 1 GB Email storage (was 500 MB)
• Support for Exchange Online Archiving (optional)

New Exchange Online users in March should have this support for their kiosk users. Existing users will start seeing these updates late-March/early-April.

We expect that Windows 8 will be adopted early by those who need/want it for a tablet computer. Several of us at BEI use Windows 7 phones, which are based on the same “Metro” user interface as Windows 8. We love it!

• Freeze top row or left column – this is very straight forward. Select View – Freeze Panes – Freeze Top Row or Freeze Left Column. Now when you scroll the top row or the top column (whichever you have selected) will always be visible.

This is great as long as what you need to do is freeze either the top row or the top column. What if you want to freeze both, or need to freeze the top two rows, for example?

• Freeze Panes: this allows you to freeze EVERYTHING that is above and to the left of a cell that you select. Consider the example below. We want to scroll through the data while ALWAYS being able to see the top row of column headings and the two left columns – Practice Name and # Physicians.

To do this select cell C2 (because we always want to be able to see Row 1 and Columns A&B) and then select View – Freeze Panes – Freeze Panes. A cross-hairs will appear on your spreadsheet and everything in above and to the left of the cross hairs will be visible as you scroll.

Notes:

• This article gives a good overview of other ways to do this.
• These instructions are written for Excel 2010, similar capabilities ar available in earlier versions of Excel.