Category: Office

First time I saw Office 2013 I thought “damn that’s very white”. It’s actually painfully white. As a picture, it lacks contrast (dark colours being closer to black, and light colours being closer to white) and a tonal range (because it’s almost all white by default).

I googled for a solution and nothing official from Microsoft appeared but I did find instructions in a forum.

1. Open up an Office 2013 program
2. Click on File –> Office Account or File –> Account, depending on the program you’ve launched
3. Change Office Theme from White to one of the two other options.

Here’s how the default setting looks in Office Account:

That appears like this:

Changing the Office Theme to Light Grey has this effect:

That’s subtle. If you want more contrast/tone then go with Dark Grey:

My main e-mail was had been Gmail since I joined the beta way back when.  I never really used it for storing contacts because of how Gmail can figure out email addresses from the contents of the inbox.  My repository was the phone.  When I got an iPhone, it became phone & Outlook (synced by iTunes).  Then I got an iPod and it was in sync with them … when ever I would connect it up to the laptop (rare enough to be honest because I charge it separately).

Last night I made a big change to my email habits.  I switched from Gmail and Hotmail to Office 365.  I connected up Outlook and set Office 365 as my primary mail account.  This morning, I hooked up my phone to sync up some podcasts for the commute to work.  After work I came home, synced the iPhone again (which backed up the phone and erased the previous iTunes data backup), and I got a call (the first of the day).  No name came up … but it was my Mom.  Hmm, she hadn’t changed numbers or phone.  Why the frak did that happen.  Then I checked my contacts … well …  I checked the now empty repository of contacts.  Yoiks!

Panic stations.  No one likes every one of their contacts being blasted away and the lot being synced as zip.  Somehow, the Outlook switch over decided that my contacts should not merge my contacts between the phone and my new mail account, but should in fact reset them to zero.  Well I suppose it would be interesting to make a whole new set of friends and family

I had an idea to rescue my contacts.  My iPad hadn’t been synced.  I fired it up and there were the contacts sitting pretty.  iCloud would rescue me.  I’ve never used it before.  I’ve never even tried it before. 

1. Did an iCloud backup of the iPad.
2. Configured iCloud to sync my calendar and my contacts.
3. Logged into iCloud and verified that they were all there.
4. Disabled iCloud sync on the iPad (to keep the data safe) and left the data on the iPad (no delete)
5. Disconnected my iPhone, and configured it to sync with iCloud.  My contacts and calendar entries were back.
6. Removed all trace of my now redundant Gmail account (IMAP) from Outlook and from the iPhone.
7. Closed and restarted Outlook and iTunes.
8. Disabled iCloud sync on the iPhone, leaving the data on the phone.
9. Connected up the iPhone to the laptop and let iTunes sync with contacts (verify this is set up in the Phone – Info area).
10. Dismissed the dozens of meeting alerts that appeared for past reminders.
11. Checked Outlook Contacts and there they were … rescued.

Phew!

I set up my first trial of Office 365 last year during the beta.  It was a pretty smooth process for E-Mail, requiring an MX and confirmation.  I didn’t really care too much about SharePoint.  Lync … well … Lync requires a lot of DNS stuff, none of which was possible to do myself in my registrar’s control panel.  For a trial, it wasn’t worth getting them to set up the records for Lync manually.

Before the Christmas holidays, I signed up for another trial, this time choosing the P plan for professionals and small businesses.  The 25 GB mailbox was tempting … I’ve a number of email accounts (personal, MVP stuff, Microsoft stuff) and it’s been annoying for me to use, and some folks I know just send 1 email to all of them to get me – my clear delineations weren’t clear to others.

Problem: Partner Selection

This morning I decided to subscribe to the P plan.  Payment was easy.  The issue I had with the signup process was from the channel point of view (I work for a distributor).  Way off to the side, almost invisible, was the option to Add Partner.  This was where I could optionally choose to add a qualified Office 365 partner.  I thought “I’ll do that and choose one of our customers (a reseller) that has signed up with our O365 distribution channel”.  Up popped a screen and it asked me for the partner ID of the reseller.  Huh!  I’m pretty sure folks in Microsoft think that every MSFT partner lives in the Microsoft Partner Network website and can shout out their numeric partner ID like a soldier does their serial number.  Not quite!  When faced with this, I did what any customer will do – I clicked cancel and completed the payment without specifying a partner. 

Email Setup

First thing was to get my email address configured.  The MX was set up last year.  But my account (the default administrator) was set up with a damned onmicrosoft.com address.  I configured my sign-in to use my domain but the sent email still used the MSFT domain.  I edited my account in Admin –> Users –> <Select Account> –> More –> Change Mailbox Settings, and removed the “other address” from Email Options.

Email Migration

I wanted to import a Hotmail and a Gmail account.  Hotmail was smooth and easy.  I went into Options – See All Options –> Account –> Connected Accounts.  Here I added the details of my hotmail account.  All the folders and email were imported nice and smooth.

Gmail is a different beast.  You have to enable POP access in your Gmail account (Settings –> Forwarding And POP/IMAP).  That beast is importing 1.5 GB of email right now, and it appears to have 2 issues:

• My 10 year old folder structure in Gmail is being ignored.
• Read emails are being marked as unread.

Both are very unhelpful.  And no, I was not going to set up mail rules – why the frak should I have to do that to recreate a 10 year old folder structure?  I’m in the midst of trying to find a realistic alternative.  No, I won’t be installing Exchange to do this (COME ON MAN!).  This seriously impacts the migration of customers from Google Apps to Office 365.  Try tell any user that you’ll only import their Inbox, their folders will be lost, and all their email will be marked as unread.  You’ll be lucky if your not flayed alive.

EDIT#1

It appears that the only option I have (that doesn’t include paying for a 3rd party tool) is to configure Outlook to connect to both Gmail (to create an IMAP connected PST) and O365.  Then I can import the Gmail PST into O365.  That will take a wee while (1.5 GB of email).  So much for cloud computing easing my bandwidth demands during migration.  MSFT has been talking up a “soon to be released” PST Capture tool since October 2011.  It is not available yet.

Remember: Office 365 primarily sells to small and startup businesses.  They don’t have Exchange.  They probably have nothing or are on Google Apps.  Office 365 seems to have forgotten that.

Office 2010 activation has gone the way of Windows and now supports both MAK and KMS.  This download gives you an update for KMS activation.

“An Office 2010 KMS host is required if you want to use KMS activation for your volume licensing editions of Office 2010 suites or applications, Microsoft Project 2010 or Microsoft Visio 2010. When Office 2010 volume edition client products are installed, they will automatically search for a KMS host on your organization’s DNS server for activation. All volume editions of Office 2010 client products are pre-installed with a KMS client key, so you will not need to install a product key.

This download contains an executable file that will extract and install KMS host license files. These license files are required for the KMS host service to recognize Office 2010 KMS host keys. It will also prompt you to enter your Office 2010 KMS host key and activate that key. After this is done, you may need to use the slmgr.vbs script to further configure your KMS host”.