James Marshall

I recently blogged some thoughts about Empire Avenue, and I concluded at the time that unless real-world benefits were forthcoming, I didn’t see it holding my interest for long:

“What is true is that if Empire Avenue doesn’t do something to keep me interested soon, I might take my “eaves” elsewhere…”

I’d like to change that opinion.

As this graph shows, in the 21 days between 06-06-11 and 27-06-11 I’ve had pretty steady growth – it’s nothing to write home about, but my share price has been rising nicely. Something I aim to keep up!

Introducing Google+

This week I was given access to the new Google+ social network and I was immediately struck by how little I can ‘do’ with it by way of interaction with other networks. I really want to give Google+ a go, but I’m compelled by my Empire Avenue share price to make full and proper use of my other networks so that my share price will go up and I will become a better player of ‘the game’. (Not to be confused with ‘the game’ )

It has since dawned on me that I’m beginning to use only the social networks that I can connect to Empire Avenue in order that my efforts be recognised in a vaguely meaningful way: my share price.

As much as I think Google+ might not be a failure, I feel like I’m doing myself a disservice by not using Facebook instead.

Klout, Peer Index, etc…

It’s true, there are plenty of other grading sites out there that can tell you ‘how influential’ you are across your social networks but none of them has quite the same draw as the game-like style of Empire Avenue.

As a direct result of the gamification of Empire Avenue I’m improving the quality and frequency of use of my other profiles – I want to be CEO of my index and to get there I must use my networks properly. I know that ‘playing’ Empire Avenue has had a positive effect because since signing up my Klout score has risen 6 points to 54!

More things I’d like to see:

• More connectivity: Foursquare, Google+, heck even Reddit and Quora, etc.
• Mobile apps: They may only have 2.5 devs working there, but a Windows Phone app would be a blessing from heaven allowing me to use the service on the go; not just when I’m at a PC.
• Better Communities: Threading of posts is a little clunky and there’s no way for me to ‘like’ a comment – if a post gets lots of comments it can become difficult to follow very easily.
• More intuitive UI: So, it’s not so bad that my mum can’t use the site – but even so, it’s still sometimes difficult, slow and unintuitive to navigate.

Awesome news! The Windows Live team have re-launched SkyDrive and it’s looking great!

In the video below, Omar looks through some of the changes:

The whole change log is available to view online, and the Inside Windows Live post is a great read to find out how it’s changed.

Recently the Office 365 beta went public and finally allowed people who hadn’t already had a chance to sign up and get a feel for the new services.

Of course, if you want to find out the very latest – I mean the latest there is to know – then stay tuned to the Office 365 blog because on June 28th the Office 365 team is going to be holding a webcast to share the latest news with the world!

You can also follow @Office365 on Twitter, or on Facebook.

So, I have apparently succumbed to the latest “social game” that is the ever growing stock market and self-promotion engine of "Empire Avenue”; the place to go to invest in just about anything or anyone from Ford & BMW through to little old me. (Go and invest, you know it’s worth it!)

To those who don’t know: Empire Avenue allows you to create yourself in a stock market-type environment where you can invest fictional currency (eaves) in other users. You can also pay real money for more “eaves” but you can’t turn them back into real money. In order to increase your value you can hook up your other services including Twitter, YouTube, Facebook, LinkedIn, and even your blog with any activity being picked up by Empire Avenue and making you a potentially more attractive investment for others.

There’s a lot more to it that that, but as I’m not an expert I will leave you to explore yourself…

My question is “where’s this all going?” – you can’t turn “eaves” back into real money, and there’s no extra real-life kudos to be had for being CEO in your index either. At time of writing I’m Senior Manager on the Technology index, in case you were wondering.

At least with other “social games”, like Foursquare, there are real-life incentives for playing; like coffee and pizza. At the moment Empire Avenue is holding my attention because it’s new and exciting but apart from being a massive time suck, it’s not offering me very much.

I recently attended a talk on the gamification of websites; that is to say the application of gaming mechanics to a website in order to make it more appealing to users. The big message to come out of it was that users lose interest pretty quickly if there’s no real-life payoff for their efforts.

So, what would I like to see?

• Loans – the ability to loan eaves in order to make more investments.
• Banks – the ability to loan others your eaves at different rates of interest.
• The ability to go bust – so you lent some dodgy Sheikh all your eaves and now he’s disappeared… didn’t you check his…
• Credit history – have I been a good social citizen and paid back my (e)10,000 loan?

Perhaps those ideas are utterly unworkable – perhaps not. What is true is that if Empire Avenue doesn’t do something to keep me interested soon, I might take my “eaves” elsewhere…

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When users of Live@edu first login to their accounts they are presented with the following screen:

Your Live@edu users will only see this screen once, however many administrators do not want to give their users the scope to pick the wrong locale! The question begs: how can I set this for all my users so that they don’t have to choose?

PowerShell to the rescue!

It is possible, through Windows PowerShell to configure regional and language settings for individual mailboxes. It is also possible to apply this to every user. For example:

To set an individual user to English (UK), and GMT Standard Time:

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Set-MailboxRegionalConfiguration <mailbox-id> -Language en-gb –TimeZone "GMT Standard Time"

To set all users in the tenant to English UK, and GMT Standard Time:

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Get-Mailbox –Resultsize unlimited | Set-MailboxRegionalConfiguration –Language en-gb –TimeZone "GMT Standard Time"

To retrieve settings for all users in the tenant:

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Get-Mailbox | Get-MailboxRegionalConfiguration

Depending on the number of users in the tenant this may take several minutes to process, and some warning messages may be displayed to inform you that you’ve exceed your Throttling Policy budget; this is just a warning and the command will complete. Once these settings changes have been made users will not have to make these choices at first login, or at any subsequent login. Users will still have the option to manually change them through their Options panel at any time. Simple!

Users created after running this command will still get asked to choose; so it’s probably a good idea to run this every time you create a new batch of users to ensure the new users are set correctly.

Microsoft Live@edu offers every user Outlook Web Access as a method of accessing their email in a branded, web-based environment. This is great because it means users can gain access to their information from practically any web-enabled device with a browser. In a school environment it may be beneficial for students and staff to access their Live@edu account using the Microsoft Outlook client as part of the Office suite of applications.

Luckily there is a way to configure Outlook automatically for your users so when they run it for the first time they will be ready to go!

Requirements:

• A Microsoft Windows server running Active Directory
• Access to modify your DNS entries for your Live@edu domain
• Outlook 2007 or 2010
• Some patience

Step One: Configure Autodiscovery

The piece of magic that makes this all come together is Autodiscovery. In Live@edu you can use a CNAME record to let your Outlook clients connect to Live@edu using the Autodiscover service. If you want to use Outlook clients with Live@edu, you have to configure a CNAME record in your domain.

The Autodiscover CNAME record must contain the following information:

• Alias     autodiscover
• Target   autodiscover.outlook.com

For more information on how to configure CNAME records, see: http://bit.ly/aXuw8U

Step Two: Configure Active Directory

In order for this to work effectively you need to ensure that your users in Active Directory have their Name, Email, and Password fields filled in. When Outlook client is run it will look to populate fields with this information automatically. If your users to not authenticate with Active Directory they will need to fill in this information themselves when Outlook asks for it.

Step Three: Test!

This short clip shows an example student user opening Outlook 2010 for the first time, clicking through the wizard and having his details automatically filled in by the system. In a matter of seconds our student has his Outlook client fully configured for use with Live@edu.

Moving to the cloud is a big step for a lot of schools, colleges and universities. “How do I manage Live@edu?” is one of the biggest questions asked by people unfamiliar with the cloud. A common misconception is that cloud services are zero-admin and that once you hand over responsibility of hosting to a cloud provider you ultimately lose control over your own data and services. Some people even view the cloud as a threat to their jobs. This could not be further from the truth…

Management in the happy Cloud, not nuclear Cloud!

While Live@edu doesn’t provide all the same management features as on-premise Exchange, that doesn’t mean it’s like a nuclear bomb to manage.

Live@edu is managed in a number of ways: via Windows PowerShell, the Exchange Control Panel, and the Service Management Portal. Some legacy functionality is still handled through the Windows Live Admin Centre, too.

Windows PowerShell provides a really great set of cmdlets to perform all the usual tasks and is often the only method to perform certain tasks (such as Dynamic Distribution Group management). The Exchange Control Panel provides web-based GUI access to a wide variety of tasks for day-to-day maintenance and the Service Management Portal provides access to managing your domain, accepted domains, co-branding and DNS settings.

Lots to do, but no tin to do it with…

By farming your users out to the cloud you reduce the number of physical (or virtual) servers you need to manage which in turns reduces your power consumption, and data storage requirements, while giving you more time to actually manage the service. With a 99.9% target uptime you can afford to spend more time doing the fun things.

So “how do I manage Live@edu?” – the answer is simple: largely the same way you manage your on-premise Exchange but without the worry of maintaining a box in your server room.

With Microsoft’s announcement yesterday that its Business Productivity Online Suite (BPOS) and Live@edu would eventually converge into the new Office 365 for enterprises and Office 365 for education offerings it also expanded on some of the benefits that will be available for education customers when it becomes available sometime next year.

Ray Fleming (@RayFleming), Microsoft’s education marketing manager, blogged last night about some of the changes over on the UK Schools Blog, but I’ve summarised some of the key benefits for education below.

Benefits:

• Large 25GB mailboxes and the ability to send attachments up to 25 MB
• Anywhere access to e-mail, important documents, contacts and calendar on nearly any device, including PC, Mac, Windows Phone, iPhone, Android and BlackBerry
• Works with the programs students know and use most — Microsoft Outlook, Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote
• Student access to Office Web Apps for viewing, sharing and light editing of documents
• Team sites to share, manage and search for information and resources
• Industry-leading, always-up-to-date anti-virus and anti-spam solutions
• Optional student access to 25 GB of free online storage on Windows Live SkyDrive
• Latest version of Microsoft Live@edu, which has thousands of schools and millions of student users today

I’m really excited to see the suite in action – Live@edu is already used by tens of millions of users in more than 100 countries. In my opinion Office 365 for education represents are real step forward in offering cloud-based solutions for schools, colleges and universities in the UK.

Microsoft has announced the imminent arrival of Office 365 and Office 365 for education.

The announcement states that Office 365 for education will be available “later next year”, and because Microsoft is simplifying its productivity services under the Office 365 brand, Office 365 will replace the Microsoft Business Productivity Online Suite (BPOS), Office Live Small Business and Live@edu.

Keep an eye out over the coming weeks and months for more information as it is announced. Certainly consider registering for the 2011 BETT exhibition in London where there’ll undoubtedly be more information.

In the meantime you can find out more at http://www.office365.com, by following @Office365 on Twitter, and by reading the Office 365 for education factsheet.

BT were recently censured for a mistake by their communications agent Porter Novelli where hundreds of customer email addresses were leaked by their accidental inclusion on the To: and CC: lines instead of Bcc:. To rub salt in the wound further, Porter Novelli issued a statement claiming the original message had been recalled (practically impossible with such a large audience) which both angered and insulted the intelligence of the recipients. The privacy and anonymity of all those recipients was violated by one eager mailer who forgot Bcc…

Microsoft Live@edu provides email to millions of students, teachers and alumni across the world – the privacy of users, particularly in schools, is often high on the agenda of IT managers. Accidentally leaking the email addresses of parents and pupils would be a disaster, yet sending mass emails to staff, pupils, and parents is an increasingly common practise.

Introducing Bcc

Bcc – or Blind Carbon Copy – is a method of adding recipients to an email in a way that means they cannot be seen by other recipients. By using Bcc you avoid the classic “Reply All” spam-storm that can happen when someone clicks the wrong button, not to mention the privacy afforded by remaining anonymous.

By using Bcc you can still send emails out to multiple recipients, but maintain their individual privacy too.

There are some simple things you can do to minimise the risks:

Top Tips

• Write your email before adding recipients. That way you cannot accidentally hit send as soon as you’ve finished writing and you have to consciously think about who you’re mailing.
• Think: who needs this email? 1:1 email messages are easy, but if you’re mailing a few people consider using To:, CC:, and BCC: to split up the intended recipients into sensible groups.
• Consider a distribution group. Is this a list of users who you mail regularly – could you add them to a group to avoid having to add each address manually.
• Use BCC! If you’re mailing people who do not know each other, or may wish to remain anonymous, use the BCC: line.
• Check before you send. Sounds obvious, right? It’s always worth a second glance at your recipients to make sure you don’t end up being the next Porter Novelli!

More Info

• Use Bcc effectively – http://bit.ly/bgi0H2
• Send broadcast messages to all students – http://bit.ly/ad7XKu