Microsoft Office365 – A Journey to the Cloud

What is office 365?

Office365 is a cloud-based technology service from Microsoft which includes all popular applications from this family for collaboration and communication for businesses of almost every organization. Office365 helps organization to save  time, money and less utilization of resources . office365 is accessible from any part of the globe using internet.

It helps SMB to use costly communication and collaboration solution like Sharepoint server, Exchange server from Microsoft without purchasing and deploying them into their own server. All that they need is to have an internet connection with office 365.com and a login ID.

MS Offerings

Microsoft offers Office 2010 Plus, Exchange Online, Sharepoint Online, and Lync in this cloud based solution.

Features

Office 2010 Plus and Web Apps offers the working environment  familiar with the office application  in office365.com and create and manage their document as they do in the desktop version using web browser with some real time authoring capability between multiple users. It also provide social connector for Outlook to get most of your social collaboration into lights.

Through Exchange Online Office365 offers 25GB of Mailbox with Outlook web access and voice mail capability.

SharePoint online offers Teamsite and collaboration functionality which also includes integration of custom development components. SharePoint online will definitely change the way of collaboration for all sort of customers, methinks.

Lync online helps customer to real time communication via chat,voice call and video call. Users can arrange online conference and link their landlines with Lync and enable them to call via Lync. Lync will replace Live meeting and Office Communication Server (OCS).

Microsoft Office 365 features

How to deploy SharePoint 2010 Solution Package – the wsp file

What is a Solution Package?

A solution is a deployable, reusable package that can contain a set of Features, site definitions, and assemblies that apply to sites, and that you can enable or disable individually. You can use the solution file to deploy the contents of a Web Part package, including assemblies, class resources, .dwp files, and other package components. A solution file has a .wsp file extension.

How to add the solution to the sharepoint farm and then deploy it to a particular web application is discussed below.

1. Adding solution package to the server

stsadm.exe -o addsolution -filename myEventCalendarList.wsp

OR

Use the complete location of the file, for example:

stsadm.exe -o addsolution -filename “C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\Web Server Extensions\14\BIN\Solution\myEventCalendarList.wsp”

Deploy solution package command

2. Deploying the Solution

Deploy the solution using the following command:

stsadm -o deploysolution -name myEventCalendarList.wsp  -url http://sp-dev/ -local  -force

Here( -url) means the web application where to deploy the solution.

OR

Goto, Central Administration > System Settings >Manage farm solutions

Now click your solution from the list (for example, myEventCalendarList.wsp).

Manage farm solutions

a)  Now click Deploy Solution and select the web application where you want to deploy the solution (example, http://sp-dev here), Click OK when you are done.

Click Deploy Solution

Select web application where you want to deploy

b)  And finally you will have your solution deployed status like the following.

solution deployment status

You are done with deployment.

OPTIONAL STEP (You can do it when necessary):

Now you have to enable this feature at the website to use it. To do it follow these steps:

3.  Enable the features at the website>>

Go to your Site settings> Site Collection Administration > Site collection features

And activate the feature (myEventCalendarList ,for example)  that you have installed. And add that webpart  to your site to test.

Hope it helps.