| We just introduced a range of changes to the way we handle subscription on LeapBackup. The changes are designed to make it easier for you to be able to try LeapBackup, and then, if you like it, gives you many more options around the size of your backup. No Risk Trial First of all, there a two important improvements. Firstly, when you try LeapBackup now, you no longer have to subscribe to our base plan with PayPal before you can get started. In the past, even though your first month was free, we still asked that you set up a monthly payment schedule. Now, once you log in, we take you straight to the “Start Backup” button, and only ask you to subscribe after your first month. Secondly, we have upgraded the starting plan. What was previously 1GB for USD $9.99 is now 10GB for USD $9.99. So, here is what you can expect once you sign in to LeapBackup for the first time: 
New Subscription Tiers When we introduced the product we had just the single tier, and we’re the first to admit it was just too small. So, we are now pleased to announce a much broader set of options when it comes to the cloud storage space you have available for SharePoint backups. Once you are logged in, you only need to visit the “Upgrade Plan” option, available on the left to select from the following: 
We really hope this meets your requirements, but as always we are keen to hear from you, and are happy to take feedback. Just send us an email support@leaphq.com |
| See also: LeapMessages and LeapBackup LeapPDF is a super simple way to convert Office documents that are stored in an Office365 SharePoint Document Library to PDF. We set up a Document Inbox and a PDF Outbox, then, everything you drop into the Inbox is automatically converted to PDF and placed into the Outbox. It’s that easy. We setup everything you need with just a couple of clicks. There is no need to install a SharePoint App, and no SharePoint technical experience is necessary. We take care of everything. Take a look for yourself in the video below, or you can try it for free, with the first 5 conversion on us: [youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tW4weTNTbvY[/youtube] Introduction to LeapPDF First of all head on over to http://www.leaphq.com, there we have our existing backup and text messaging services. When you’re ready, click on the "PDF” link in the top navigation and then try it out through the “Sign Up” button. 
The first thing you will notice is that we use your Office365 credentials for logging in, rather than make you remember a new set. You might want to create a special set of Office365 credentials specifically designed for performing tasks like PDF conversion. Note that the account you use will need Site Administrator privileges. 
After signing up, you will be presented with our dashboard. It gives you an overview of LeapPDF, your subscription status, number of conversions remaining, your conversion history and more. 
As previously mentioned, we give you 5 free conversions so you can try out the service. However, before you can get started, you need to complete the one time setup process. This involves creating the document libraries inside your SharePoint site that are used to manage the conversion process. Click on the “One Time Setup” button. 
After clicking on the “One Time Setup” button, we provide a clear message that describes what happens when you confirm the action. In this case we will be creating two document libraries, an Inbox and an Outbox, inside your SharePoint site. This is not a big deal, but we want to make sure you don’t get any surprises. Click on the confirmation button, and after a short pause you will see the following. 
LeapPDF has now created the required libraries on your SharePoint site, you can visit them by clicking on the links shown, or by visiting the site directly. 
The PDF Inbox is a standard SharePoint document library. To get converting, all you need to do is upload the document you wish to convert to the Inbox. 
As you can see above, the document is currently “Pending”, which means it’s waiting to be picked up by the converter. After around 5-10 minutes, it will swap to “In Process” before finally changing to “Converted”, and a visit to the PDF Outbox should reveal the PDF version of the converted document. 
Returning to the dashboard, you can see the conversion event has been added to the history at the bottom, and you’re done. 
It’s simple. It does the trick, and it brings a very nice new super power to SharePoint on Office365. Let us know what you think. daniel@zevenseas.com and stay tuned, we have more to come. |
| I will be presenting on Social Computing (no surprise there) at the Australian SharePoint Conference in Sydney. Look forward to seeing you there. 
As always, there is a fantastic line up of speakers, and with the release of SharePoint 2013 this is the right time to accelerate your learning by taking in the broad range of topics offered. So head on over and register, and don’t forget to say hello! |
| See also: LeapBackup and LeapPDF LeapMessages is a super simple way to send a text messages to mobile phones directly from SharePoint in Office365. It uses standard SharePoint interfaces to turn a SharePoint list into a Text Message outbox, turning a simple list item into Text Messages. We set up everything you need with just a couple of short clicks, no need to install a SharePoint App, and no SharePoint technical experience necessary, we take care of everything. Why would you need it? Lots of reasons, here are just a few: - Quickly, and easily allow a group of people in your organisation to send text messages directly from their browser.
- Add the ability to send a text message from SharePoint Designer workflows, for example notifying people on their phones when a step is complete.
- Create a reminder on a SharePoint calendar that automatically reminds people of their meetings. Great for making sure people don’t forget appointments.
The best bit is you can try it for free, your first 10 messages are on us. [youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uZHa5eFYKZ4[/youtube] Introduction to LeapMessages First of all head on over to http://www.leaphq.com, there we have both our backup service, and this new text messaging service. When you are ready, click on the "Messages” link in the top navigation and then try it out through “Sign-up”. 
The first thing you will notice is that we use your Office365 credentials for logging in, rather than make you remember a new set. You might want to create a special set of Office365 credentials specifically designed for performing tasks like sending text messages. Note that the account will need Site Administrator privileges. 
After signing up, you will be presented with our dashboard. It gives you an overview of LeapMessages, your subscription status, number of messages remaining, message history and more. 
As previously mentioned, we give you 10 free text messages to try out the service, but, before you can get started, you need to complete a one time setup. This involves creating the lists inside your SharePoint site that have been especially designed for sending text messages. Click on the “One Time Setup” button. 
After clicking on this button we provide a clear message which tells you that by confirming this action, we will go ahead and create a new list inside your SharePoint site. This is not a big deal, but we want to make sure you don’t get any surprises. Click on the confirmation button, and after a short pause you will see the following. 
LeapMessages has now created a new list on your SharePoint site, you can visit it by clicking on the link shown, it looks like this. 
It’s a standard SharePoint list, one designed just for sending text messages. You can see fields for the recipient, the message content and the status of the text message. All you need to do now is create a new list item, correctly completing the mobile number (international format) and the message text, before clicking save and sitting back to relax. 
Above you can see a list item in progress. After around 5-10 minutes, you should find that the text message has been delivered to the recipients phone. Returning to the dashboard, you can see the message sending event has been added to the history at the bottom, and that’s it. 
It’s simple. It does the trick, and it brings a very nice new super power to SharePoint on Office365. Let us know what you think. daniel@zevenseas.com and stay tuned, we have more to come. |
| I’m very pleased to be announcing the launch of new set of solutions for Office365. We call it Leap, and it all about bringing superpowers to SharePoint in Office365. Over the next two weeks we will be introducing the first two new powers. LeapBackup:- A one-click, super simple, cloud backup for Office365 (SharePoint). While we know the cloud never crashes, a simple way to backup your sites means you can offer better recovery options, more easily move from on-prem to cloud, and well, just sleep more easily. [youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WochFlS5QE8[/youtube] Read more about it here: http://community.zevenseas.com/Blogs/Daniel/Lists/Posts/Post.aspx?ID=151 Coming Soon!
LeapMessages:- A super simple way to send a text message, to phones around the world, by doing nothing more than creating a list item in a SharePoint list. You can use it to send reminder to customers about appointments, co-ordinate tasks with people on the move, and much more. [youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uZHa5eFYKZ4[/youtube] So head on over to LeapHQ for a closer look, sign up (with your Office365 credentials), and then let me know what you think. daniel@zevenseas.com More powers to come…. |
| See also: LeapMessages and LeapPDF LeapBackup is a one-click, super simple, cloud backup for Office365. It uses standard SharePoint interfaces to create a complete backup of your SharePoint site, and then stores it securely on the Microsoft Azure Storage service. Once securely stored, your backup history is available for you to: - Download it, perhaps so you can restore it on-premise.
- Restore it, you can restore it directly back to where it came from, or into a new site where you can access and manually restore individual documents.
Since the cloud never crashes, why would you need a backup solution for Office365? Here are a few good reasons: - You may want a simple way to backup your Office365 environment so you can restore it on another SharePoint environment, perhaps for testing, development, or redundancy.
- Office365 retains backups of SharePoint content for only 14 days. Meaning if you delete something, and only realize 2 weeks later, then you are out of luck. LeapBackup can go back as far, and as often as you need.
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WochFlS5QE8[/youtube] Introduction to LeapBackup First of all, head on over to http://www.leaphq.com. Take a look around, and when you are ready to give it a try, click on the “Sign Up” button. 
The first thing you will notice is that we use your Office365 credentials for logging in, rather than make you remember a new set. You might want to create a special set of Office365 credentials specifically designed for performing tasks like backup. Note that the account with need Site Administrator privileges. 
After signing up, you will be presented with our dashboard. It gives you an overview of LeapBackup, your subscription status, space consumed, backups taken, and restores made. As you can see below it also tells you how large your site collection is, and how much storage you are using on the cloud (Azure). 
Since this is the first time we have logged in, you will first need to subscribe to the service. Payment is handled through Paypal and is a pretty straight forward process. The first month is free, so if you want to try it out, or decide it’s not for you, then you can cancel your subscription anytime within that first month and not pay a cent. 
After completing the subscription you are all set to perform your first backup. It’s super simple, and one-click, all you need to do is press the large, imposing “Start Backup” button. 
After clicking it, a number of things start running in the background. The solution is designed so for “fire and forget”, so you can start the backup and then go about your business, we will email you when it’s done. If you wanted to hang around though the dashboard will update you through the various stages. Here it is starting… 
Backing up…
 Storing the files on the cloud (Azure)…
 And then completing.
 You can see above that the dashboard has updated to show the space consumed in the cloud, and logged the backup activity in the history. And that’s all there is to it, you are backed-up. Your entire SharePoint site is securely stored on Azure, and you can create as many backups as you can click “Start Backup”. Of course, we recommend you test your backups, as that is not something we can do for you. Which neatly brings me onto restore. With your backup stored away, you can click on the “Backups” link to find a list of all the backups you have performed. From there you can drill into the backup, where you will find the restore button. 
Now, restoring the site is not always straight forward, and it depends on the subscription you have signed up to. But there are two basic options. For P Subscriptions, we support restoring back over the top of the original site. For E Subscriptions, we support restoring back to a new site collection. Leap is smart enough to know which option is applicable to your subscription. Here is a restore from the E subscription perspective. 
Once restored to a new Site Collection, you can dig into it and get any files you need. Here is the restore process. 
Of course the other thing you can do is download the backup file. It is just a standard SharePoint .CMP file, and so you can restore it to any SharePoint environment you like, including development machines, or on-prem test machines you might have. And that’s it. It’s simple. It does the trick, and it brings a very nice new super power to SharePoint on Office365. Let us know what you think. daniel@zevenseas.com |
| This blog post is well overdue, but I’m very excited to announce our release of “Xbox Kinect for SharePoint”. Some of you may have seen it demonstrated at both the SharePoint Evolution conference (Don’t miss it next year) in the UK, or the SharePoint Australia/New Zealand conferences (don’t miss ‘em!). The basic idea was to have a bit of a play around with both (a) Kinect as an interface for SharePoint and (b) a metro UI for SharePoint. It was a Zevenseas Lab project by Mayur Tendulkar and Tinu Thomas (who I’m sure will have a Twitter account soon) and you can try it yourself through our Codeplex project. http://kinectexplorersp.codeplex.com/ The Xbox Kinect for SharePoint project transforms this:  
Into this: 
  
Enjoy, let us know how it goes, and maybe even contribute back. |
| 
Next week I will be heading along to the SharePoint Conference, and I can’t wait. As usual there is a fantastic line-up of speakers, and I’m looking forward to catching up with old friends. I just heard that Robin will be there, while not in a Zevenseas shirt this year, we still talk. Andrew Fix (time to blog mate) will be there from Zevenseas Australia, and Harold Punter from Rapid Circle/Zevenseas Holland. I’m particularly excited this year because for the first time we will be having our own booth, and for the first time we will be really coming out with something we have been working on for a long time. Stay tuned for more information over the next week. 
I will be at the Attini booth talking and demoing our new suite of Social products. If you are keen to make SharePoint better at Blogging, at Video or News, or you would love to see SharePoint do Microblogging, then please drop by to say hello, love to talk. Of course I will also be talking Zevenseas, happy to share our Indian experience and explain how it lets us build better SharePoint solutions. See you there! |
| If you haven’t checked out Sharevolution (http://www.sharevolutionhq.com), the worlds (maybe even the universes) only AppStore for SharePoint, then this post means you have run out of excuses. I have put together a short screencast that drills into some of the key aspects of the store, most importantly, our 1-click install technology. Take a look: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7nPxWM8sJ5E |
| Thought I would drop a quick post to let you all know about some great blogs that members of the Zevenseas team have started getting out the door. Cas Van Iersel (http://www.twitter.com/casvaniersel and http://community.zevenseas.com/Blogs/cas) cranked out: Using SharePoint 2010 Taxonomy Picker out of context
Tagging in SharePoint is great. A while ago I wrote about using the TaxonomyField in Publishing pages but this time I needed the control in an application page with no Content Type attached (of any other form of context). The case is to build a configuration page for creating a new SiteCollection. On this page is a form where a user can put in a name, description and Tags from the Term Store Taxonomy Cross Site Content Aggregation in Office 365
As we all know in Office 365 developers are bound to the Sandbox which is limited to his own Site Collection. The information living in other Site Collection is hard to get from code. Even with ECMA script the possibilities are very limited too. With an on premise SharePoint 2010 farm the first thing that comes to mind when talking about cross site aggregation is Search. Luckily the possibilities to use Search over Site Collections is present in Office 365. Mark Overdijk (http://www.twitter.com/MVOverdijk and http://community.zevenseas.com/Blogs/mvoverdijk) dished up: Choose your Office365 wisely
There are three versions for Office365; Small Business, Enterprise and Education. I'm leaving out Office365 for Education, for it's a version for Education only.
The Enterprise edition comes in 4 flavors (E1 - E4), while there's only 1 Small Business plan (P1). However both versions are very similar, there are some differences, which can have a huge impact. Akhilesh Nirapure (http://www.twitter.com/AkhileshN and http://community.zevenseas.com/Blogs/Akhilesh) pitched in with: Declaratively Setting Audience Targeting property for Publishing Page
I was looking as to how can i Declaratively set the Audience Targeting property for my Publishing Pages while creating them, well i knew we could do it using Object Model and feature receiver, but i was looking something we could set as configuration, for e.g "ContentType", "PublishingPageLayout" which could be specified as configuration and sharepoint infrastructure handles it for us. And finally, Vardhaman Deshpande (http://community.zevenseas.com/Blogs/Vardhaman) chimed in with:
Get HTML from page using the SharePoint Client Object Model
Here is how to get the RAW HTML of a Web Page on your SharePoint Site using the Client Object Model
Office365 beta and the SharePoint 2010 Client Object Model
I just got my Office365 beta license and configured a new Team Site in Sharepoint Online. Then I thought of accessing this new team site through the SharePoint 2010 .NET Client Object Model when I got the 403: Forbidden error code. Great stuff guys, awesome to see the contributions you are making, keep them coming! |
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