O365 - managing calendars
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I find that the OWA interface looks and works a lot more like Outlook these days. I still prefer Outlook (ugh... God, I can't believe I just said that...) because it feels less clunky, and more stuff is available just a click away.
If my employer suddenly mandated that we had to use OWA (we are on Office 365 here), I'd be slightly upset, but wouldn't lose much functionality that I can think of that would be detrimental.
You could actually have a few folks try the OWA out for a little bit and see how they like it. They may actually enjoy having another browser tab open for their email. I'm so used to Gmail that doesn't bother me any more, lol.
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I use OWA exclusively and have for a few years now. I start to forget that Outlook even exists, honestly.
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I bought my own Small Business account on O365 (not an E1 level so I miss out on the cool toys that Scott's always posting about) to try it out.
I've only ever used OWA for accessing that account - I have all of my personal accounts forwarding to that, so I do live in it pretty much all day, well that and my actual work account.
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OWA is really great. Several times better then traditional Outlook in my opinion. The only reason I still use Outlook is to test settings and make sure things are working as expected for users.
You are going to get a lot of resistance... I've recommended a few people use OWA instead of Outlook and every time (except two so far) I've gotten a vehement response on why Outlook is better then OWA and that they can't possibly use something else. One of them said that he isn't getting paid to learn a new piece of software.
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@coliver said:
One of them said that he isn't getting paid to learn a new piece of software.
You could correct him that he actually is... but that that could be adjusted if he doesn't want to be paid.
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@coliver what version of Outlook where they using when they moved to OWA?
I have Outlook 2103 mostly deployed here, with a small amount of Outlook 2010. I haven't updated my Exchange server 2013 yet, so having them use OWA on Exchange 2010 would be a step backwards.
Outlook 2013 and OWA 2013 look pretty close - I'm betting my users wouldn't care.
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@Dashrender said:
Outlook 2013 and OWA 2013 look pretty close - I'm betting my users wouldn't care.
Outlook 2013 is JavaScript in a browser. It's clear that they are preparing to merge the two products. I definitely find them to be incredibly similar.
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I use a lot of Outlook Connectors to CRM and various other programs. So Outlook on my desktop is essential for me. However with how about 99% of people use Outlook OWA is great. I do use it when traveling and don't have too many issues except for having to a bit of work manually that is just a button on Outlook.
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@scottalanmiller said:
@coliver said:
One of them said that he isn't getting paid to learn a new piece of software.
You could correct him that he actually is... but that that could be adjusted if he doesn't want to be paid.
A case of "Pick your battles"...
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@Dashrender said:
@coliver what version of Outlook where they using when they moved to OWA?
I have Outlook 2103 mostly deployed here, with a small amount of Outlook 2010. I haven't updated my Exchange server 2013 yet, so having them use OWA on Exchange 2010 would be a step backwards.
Outlook 2013 and OWA 2013 look pretty close - I'm betting my users wouldn't care.
Outlook 2013. I've also had a user who was using OWA but was told it was wrong by a different employee and went to using Outlook... then complained at how much slower her mail was.
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@coliver said:
A case of "Pick your battles"...
I'd say when staff refuses to do their jobs that's the battle to pick.
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@scottalanmiller said:
@coliver said:
A case of "Pick your battles"...
I'd say when staff refuses to do their jobs that's the battle to pick.
That isn't necessarily the place of IT though... that would be management or HR. In this case it wasn't a big deal we needed to rebuild their Outlook profile and it was going to take a significant amount of time to sync their 20 GB mailbox. So it was only a temporary fix.
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@coliver said:
That isn't necessarily the place of IT though... that would be management or HR.
Absolutely, if management or HR knew that they were saying that stuff and didn't take action I'd be shocked!!
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@coliver said:
@Dashrender said:
@coliver what version of Outlook where they using when they moved to OWA?
I have Outlook 2103 mostly deployed here, with a small amount of Outlook 2010. I haven't updated my Exchange server 2013 yet, so having them use OWA on Exchange 2010 would be a step backwards.
Outlook 2013 and OWA 2013 look pretty close - I'm betting my users wouldn't care.
Outlook 2013. I've also had a user who was using OWA but was told it was wrong by a different employee and went to using Outlook... then complained at how much slower her mail was.
LOL! That's cacheing for you!
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@scottalanmiller said:
@coliver said:
That isn't necessarily the place of IT though... that would be management or HR.
Absolutely, if management or HR knew that they were saying that stuff and didn't take action I'd be shocked!!
That happens all the time here, and management does know.. and no action is taken.. but I'm not in a good example.
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@Dashrender said:
The biggest concern I have to moving to hosted Exchange is two things - first HIPAA. With an internal server, and encryption setup everywhere I little concerns here. Moving to a hosted solution concerns me. Sure MS will give me their boilerplate HIPAA compliance, but I have no idea if it's good enough for court.
It's better for the court, right? Unlike your own HIPAA compliance which is nothing more than "Dashrender said so", this is a big vendor standing behind it and presumably being tested on it all the time. If I was the business owner, I would demand to be on Office 365 solely for this reason - running email in house without a huge vendor indemnifying me feels unreasonable. It's a risk I'd be unwilling to take on. Getting Microsoft to verify that they are HIPAA compliant and carrying that responsibility would be the single biggest decision making factor for me.
What could be better in court than this? What's the alternative that doesn't scare you?
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@Dashrender said:
Now, that said, I know that OWA has had huge improvements and one such improvement is the ability to see multiple calendars without having to 'log in' as the desired user like OWA of the past. So one possible solution would be to move everyone to using OWA instead of Outlook on the desk - this actually solves another issue by moving to O365 - I wouldn't need Office licenses on the majority of my desktops anymore, this could save me a bundle!
This is my take on it... explain the necessity for both business (money, practicality, protection) and HIPAA (legal protection) needs to management. Explain that you need to move people to OWA and that this will be an update to the very latest that you don't have internally yet. You can demo it for them if they want. Get them to sign off that this is what is happening, period. Don't do this without them.
Then have management present this as the plan going forward. People who don't like it... tough, you don't only do the parts of your job that you want to do or like. Everyone has to do something at work that they dislike or else they wouldn't need to get paid for it.
It's all about management buy in and support. If management doesn't care, don't bother. Literally, if they don't care you should not care. If they do care, get them involved and let them do their portion of the job and this should be easy. When the boss says "use OWA" it would be a pretty crazy person that refuses.
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I'm all about hosted email, I believe in it strongly - as the right thing to do for a business. But I also understand that tons of small businesses, especially those in the medical sector, have a tradition of not treating themselves seriously as a business (many actively lose a fortune and continue to operate because they literally don't care about losing the money) and may not care at all that you have a solution that could improve things for them. So the biggest thing that it seems like you need is a the business to support the decision. Once they support it and understand why it is "needed", it doesn't seem like the other issues exist, right? It is only in trying to move to hosted email as a grassroots movement, rather than top down, that user buy in or HIPAA indemnification come into play?
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I'm not really worried about the move to OWA since you can now see multiple calendars at once just like in Outlook.
I guess if Microsoft is signing something saying they are HIPAA compliant, that really is all I need.
My concern grows from the fact that we currently use email between internal users as our way of 'securely' communicating with each other about patients. They have been unwilling to pay for secure text messaging and email has more or less solved this - save those who refuse to participate (owners always get to do whatever they want no matter how much risk they put the company at - no stock holders other than owners).Yeah I'm sure I'll be making this move when SA expires.
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@Dashrender said:
I guess if Microsoft is signing something saying they are HIPAA compliant, that really is all I need.
My concern grows from the fact that we currently use email between internal users as our way of 'securely' communicating with each other about patients.How does this change?
