Exchange and Outlook have, for years, been great collaboration platforms, where our customers could share information easily with others. One of the things that came to light when a lot of our customers adopted Office 365, is that many often have trouble matching their business needs to actual features in the product (stuff they would see in user interfaces and need to configure). In a purely on-premises world, the internal helpdesk and training can help bridge that gap. For those of our customers that have moved to the Office 365 world (especially smaller organizations), this can be a bit of a challenge.
We have worked to understand what most commonly looked for (and not found!) sharing scenarios are, and have leveraged the Guided Walkthrough (GWT) framework to help guide customers to correct features they need to get them enabled, taking into the consideration various clients and editions of service they might have.
It is worth mentioning that scenarios and steps listed in these GWTs apply to both Exchange Online and on-premises Exchange Server deployments. Typically, the on-premises workflow is the same as can be found if one chooses the “Enterprise Edition” option in those GWTs. Because many of these scenarios are what end-users can accomplish, I would be interested to hear your feedback whether a purely on-premises version would be useful, seeing that on-premises organizations are likely to have resources such as internal help desks and training. Please elaborate a bit in comments if you can, in case you see the value is separate versions?
Here are the new GWTs:
- Sharing calendar and contacts in Office 365
- Setting up a mailbox that multiple users can access and use in Office 365
- Sending email from another person's mailbox or from a group in Office 365
- Accessing other people’s mailboxes in Office 365
- Creating and managing resource mailboxes (conference rooms/equipment) in Office 365
It has become a bit of a tradition to thank people who worked on GWTs when we announce them, so not to disappoint, I’d like to thank: Nagesh Mahadev, Jon Bradley, Charlotte Raymundo, Jon Hoerlein, Kweku Ako-Adjei, Sharon Shen, Chen Jiang as well as Scott Vidican, Adam Dudsic and Victor Zhang (ECO).
Hope you find this useful. You can give us feedback on Exchange GWTs by either posting a comment in this post (if it is about the 5 GWT listed above) or emailing ExchGWTfeedback AT microsoft.com if it's about any Exchange GWTs.