Using the Lync Online Meeting Browser Plug-in

We use Lync in our office as part of our Office 365 deployment. This makes it easy to share screens with others. Meeting attendees don't even need to have the Lync client installed to participate (or a Lync account). They will get asked to install the Lync Web App (basically a browser plug-in) when they join their first meeting.

I put together the following video to show what the user experience for the installation process looks like. This is using a Windows 7 PC and Internet Explorer 10. The experience is likely to be different depending on your operating system and browser version.

In the video, you may notice that I needed to run the installation twice. For some reason, the installation didn't complete the first time. This seems to be a common problem.

Uploading 5,000 files to Office 365 using SkyDrive Pro

I've just uploaded 5,000 files to an Office 365 environment using SkyDrive Pro. The files were small - 8 KB each, but I thought it would be interesting to look at the transfer rate. It looks like it averaged 26 files a minute over 2 hours 24 minutes. Not the fastest way to get files up, but handy if you aren't in a rush. It looks like SkyDrive Pro throttles the upload so that your machine/bandwidth/server isn't maxed out. I'm based in Sydney, Australia. More than likely, the server is based in the Singapore data centre. YMMV.

Our Office 365 Service Upgrade is coming

My company has had an Office 365 subscription for about a year now. This is based on the SharePoint 2010 functionality. Today we received a notification that we will soon be upgraded to the SharePoint 2013 platform, exciting times! We are based in Sydney, Australia, so more than likely we are being hosted out of the Singapore data centre. I'm looking forward to getting onto the latest and greatest.