During cloud migration press, there are several challenges that the organizations face. Some of the topmost cloud migration challenges are listed in this article:

Top 3 Major Cloud migration challenges and solutions

• Lack of Well-defined migrations strategy

It’s very common that businesses take the decision to make the shift to the cloud without a decent cloud migrations strategy. Every cloud migration is based on the particular requirements of the businesses. So, it is important to identify the application types like mission-critical apps or non-mission-critical apps.

Solution:  Every migration must be planned.

• Ambiguity in Cloud costs

This arises mainly due to a lack of planning. Cloud vendors are smart people who know how to do business. The problem arises at the clients’ end when they can’t calculate the cloud migration phases costs and thus it results in cloud sprawl. At some point during the migration, the costs get out of hand.

Solution: The best way to overcome this is to Manage costs to avoid Cloud sprawl. This can be done by creating a cost center within your organization and handing the task of cost measurement to them from day 1.

• Resistance to Cloud adoption

The number one cloud migration challenge is the resistance to change. Cloud is a huge environment where everything from infrastructure to apps and management is an integrated thing. The cohesion amongst the various aspects of cloud make it complex for newbies and the business officials might experience resistance from the working employees. 

Solution: The best solution for this is to train them well before expecting them to work with it.  Regular training sessions must be planned and held during office timings.

MachSol offers the best-in-line Enterprise Migration Services

Whether you are looking for a migration service to assist you in your next cloud migration task or you wish to migrate to Office 365 with MachPanel, MachSol Enterprise Migration Services has got you covered.  A transparent migration process awaits you with MachPanel that guarantees minimal downtime and seamless up-gradation. 

With MachPanel, you can get hassle-free migration services for Microsoft Exchange, Microsoft Dynamics CRM, Microsoft SharePoint, Hyper-V & Office365. The MachSol team is ready to discuss your requirements and the process of migration with proper planning and careful deployment.

Get started with MachSol Enterprise Migration Services to experience easy migration with state-of-the-art migration tools. Contact a MachSol Expert today.

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The post Top 3 Major Challenges of Cloud Migration and Avoiding Techniques appeared first on MachSol Blog.

Many IT organizations look at cloud orchestration to enhance the pace of delivering services and minimizing cost. Cloud orchestration helps in automating the management, organization of complex computer systems, coordination, and services. To minimize personnel engagement, orchestration excludes the chances of error in scaling, provisioning, and other processes of the cloud. Orchestration confirms the transmission of cloud resources to the end-users which involves a self-service model which lets the user demand resources without any IT’s involvement. Offering multiple moving parts in the cloud, orchestration comes with high availability, dependency management, scaling, and various other attributes in a single process which amazingly reduces the effort of staff.

Orchestration assists IT organizations in standardizing templates and enforcing security policies. It also provides effective defense for VM sprawl granting visibility into, implicitly cost, cloud resources, and control over. Another considerable benefit of orchestration is that it manages the interaction of multiple elements of an application stack, it can handle the connections and the communication from a workload to other applications, it also confirms the links are properly maintained and configured correctly. Orchestration platform has a centralized nature which allows to better review and enhance the scripts automation. Advance organizations can use cloud orchestration as software as a self-service to deploy resources, after that administrations become able to trace the organization’s reliance on different IT offerings. 

Orchestration at an enterprise level is a process of designing, delivering, and analyzing end-to-end service providing in an automated way. To become a suitable service provider for an enterprise solution, the service provider should offer should provide services beyond connectivity. Cloud orchestration is the foundational capability to be provided to the application ecosystem. Cloud orchestration assists service providers to get stable in the new ecosystem and provide values beyond connectivity. 

• Connection to various application ecosystems and organize workload among multi-cloud and multi-vendors. 
• Enhancing the speed of delivery of services by reducing the time to minutes from months or days with the help of agile service design. 

MachPanel – The Multi-Cloud Service Orchestration Platform

MachPanel provides the full automation either you have standalone or multi-datacenter Exchange Deployment, it allows service providers to manage, sell and bill fully divided and complete orchestration system. MachPanel offers the best opportunity for the service providers to have a seamless RDS experience with service delivery to multiple clients also with end-to-end automation. MachPanel is under active advancement and appears with astonishing after-sales support. It provides the multi-tenant Control Panel which is known for its user-friendly, flexible, and extensive functionality to control mail domains, distribution lists, public folders, mailboxes. All these features make MachPanel an ideal option for Hosting Service Providers. MachPanel simplifies the management and provisioning of multiple requests for various clients. MachPanel also makes billing very simpler along with unified invoicing all in one package for multiple RDS services. With the availability of self-service management in the cloud, you can easily request and manage multi-tenant RDS services with complete control. MachPanel is a Microsoft Verified Multi-tenant Control Panel which also supports all the existing versions of Active Directory Synchronization, Skype for Business, Hyper-V, Microsoft SharePoint, Microsoft Exchange, and Window Web hosting.

The post Cloud Orchestration Best Practices for Cloud Performance Management appeared first on MachSol Blog.

The Problem

Many times, customers reach out to know more about Excel workbooks. Presently, SharePoint online offers a script editor or content editor to make users display Excel workbooks in an iframe. It is quite possible to write a jquery code within the script web part and dynamically set the excel workbook to iframe’s src. This comes with an issue that continuously displays the O365 Global Suite Navigation bar of the Excel web app. There was no way to hide that with the help of CSS or jquery while loading Excel web parts dynamically until the following solution came up.

The Solution

The solutions use Excel Web Access Web part and list view web part. These two web parts are connected So the list view web part sends the URL to view into the Excel Web Access Web part with a filter via the JSLink. The steps to follow are as follows:

1. Create a Document Library and a View named MyExcelFileView. Add various fields including “Created By”
2. Create a web part page (You can also use any existing Wiki page), edit it, and add 2 web parts.
3. Upload javascript files to the SiteAssets library.
4. Edit List view web part. Under Miscellaneous option, set JSLink;
5. Set desired Appearance layouts and select what to display. The field “Created by” must be a part of the view
6. All the workbooks of the logged-in user will be filtered.
7. While the page is in Edit mode, you need to add Excel Web Access web part from Business Data
   1. Goto Connections> Get Workbook Url from -> A popup will load. Select Field Name “Document URL” and save the excel web part.
   2. Uncheck the box “Title Bar”
   3. Save Web part, page and publish

You can now see excel is already loaded in the excel web part.

MachPanel Automation Platform for Microsoft CSP

MachPanel is an end-to-end business management platform that offers provisioning and management of M365 services. It supports CSPs with Microsoft Security requirements for the Secure Application Model for CSP Integration. With MachPanel, CSPs can offer SharePoint offerings, Exchange Online offerings, and Deliver the goods with smooth M365 provisioning. With MachPanel, you can bring more bangs for the buck and experience simplified licensing, simplified billing process. It is easier to showcase, bundle, and sell. It also offers complete control over subscription and plans.

Get Started with MachPanel and experience best-in-line provisioning and management along with lucrative CSP offerings and SharePoint automation for your business.

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The post Tips to use Excel Web Access Web Part effectively appeared first on MachSol Blog.

Another way to create FAQs in SharePoint is through the Discussion Board Web part. It provides some interesting user interface capabilities like allowing the users to list conversations in the form of a forum. The FAQ can thus become a social platform to discuss the question at hand.

To create knowledge bases, there is an option to create Wikis. In this way, there is an option to add text, images and other multimedia into the post. To get help with your next SharePoint FAQs compilation, feel free to contact a MachSol representative.

The post How do I create a FAQ in Microsoft SharePoint? appeared first on MachSol Blog.

In the past couple of years, having a centralized server and managing documents and collaboration was considered a more tech-savvy approach. However, with the rapid adoption of the cloud, more cloud-based collaboration platforms have emerged. These are adopted by companies at their own pace.

SharePoint Online is the tool of the future

If there’s one capability that SharePoint has: It can transform the way you do business. It provides the resources needed to create websites with pages on the company’s intranet so that critical cloud-based business information is organized, stored, and easily shareable and accessible.

What are the Microsoft SharePoint online benefits for business?

Let’s have a look at SharePoint online benefits for cloud-based business:

• Improve data management

With SharePoint, you get a golden ticket to modern data management approaches. Today, employees have to deal with data, all the time. May it be checking and responding to emails, or dealing with customer support requests, generating marketing reports or meeting minutes. SharePoint provides the gateway towards a more organized data management approach. Plus, sharing the data with others on a team, or across the team isn’t much of a problem with SharePoint.

• Simplify business functions

The typical business functions include activities like collecting feedback, tracking issues, routing documents for approval, and many more. SharePoint provides out-of-the-box approaches and workflow designs that automate these processes. They can be integrated into web browsers for consistent user experience.

• Regulate Compliance and Security

Compliance regulations and security is a thing of today. While companies grow, there are more compliance requirements and security methods that need to be kept under check. Consequently, you can’t just trust any new software in the market. But no, SharePoint Online is secure and it has been around for a long time, thus, fully trustworthy for business use.

• Optimize Content Delivery

While companies look for new ways to optimize content, that continues to grow at a high pace, they also look for solutions that perform document tracking, keep revision histories, and provide a robust content control. All of it comes with SharePoint. SharePoint online benefits include Content approval, editing, maintaining and publishing is a smooth process now.

• Increase Productive

Apart from a Centralized Administration, there are many more content management methods that make you increase productivity and provide benefits for business. Manager can keep their SharePoint Site organized so that they can have a quick look at the content before making a decision. When content is organized, you get more time stuff other than just hunting down your systems for data.

ALSO READ: NEW MICROSOFT 365 FEATURES FOR REMOTE COMMUNICATIONS

MachPanel automation module for Microsoft SharePoint

MachPanel is born-in-the-cloud robust cloud provision and business automation platform. Since it is designed for business, MachPanel inherently understands your business automation needs. Its automation module for SharePoint provides Complete Orchestration for Hosted SharePoint Service Providers and Enterprises. With MachPanel, you get to have a simplified approach towards billing, management, and reporting. This gives you ample time to work on the focused areas rather than get indulged in messy billing. With MachSol’s turnkey services for Microsoft SharePoint, you get all the expert support for design and deployment, planning and migration, reliability, and scalability.

Get started with MachPanel and keep your cloud-based business aligned with modern and simplified SharePoint services.

Lets TalkRequest a Demo

The post 5 Exciting SharePoint Online Benefits for Business appeared first on MachSol Blog.

The improved virtual meeting experience with Teams

Microsoft 365 has recently introduced various features for improved virtual meetings within the Microsoft 365 family. With additional features in Microsoft Teams, online meetings can become more focused, and provide the best collaborative experience to Teams users. Following are a few features that have been carefully crafted keeping real-time requirements in mind.

• Real-time noise suppression

It makes you able to focus on the meeting better since this feature minimizes background noises like a keyboard typing. Virtual meetings software equipped with a noise suppression keeps the flow of remote communications intact.

• The raise-hand feature

For a large number of people within the meeting, it sometimes becomes harder to raise a point when you have got one. The raise-hand feature lets you chime into the remote communication meeting and have your say.

• Bookings app in Teams: IT can be used to schedule, manage and execute virtual appointments during remote communication.
• Offline and low-bandwidth support: for people having internet connectivity issues, this feature lets them access their chats and messages even without the internet.
• Emergency events: the new crisis management Site in SharePoint lets organizations take hold of the news and related resources in one place.
• A cloud-based print solution: Universal Print is a cloud-based print infrastructure to facilitate employees with a secure printing experience alleviating the heavy server-based installations of printing services organization-wide. It is another dimension of remote communications.
• Cloud files management with SP and OneDrive: Mover is now available to Microsoft 365. So, users can now seamlessly migrate cloud-based files into Microsoft cloud to OneDrive and SharePoint.

Related: Update your business continuity plan checklist with Remote Desktop Software

MachPanel – The all in one business automation platform

MachPanel automates businesses with its robust cloud-based automation solutions. Its automation modules like Automation module for Dynamics 365, Remote Desktop Services, Skype for Business, Automation module for Microsoft Exchange, Automation module for Microsoft SharePoint and Automation module for Hyper-V provided businesses the necessary cloud-first approach to businesses. Its cloud admin center is a complete platform for Management, Delegation, and Reporting & Auditing for Office 365 services.

Get MachPanel and discover endless opportunities for business success and growth.

Lets TalkRequest a Demo

The post New Microsoft 365 features for Remote Communications appeared first on MachSol Blog.

Even today, Microsoft CSPs often experience an obstruction in cloud computing services business growth which leads to lesser margins. In order to increase business growth, it is important to highlight the processes that can be automated and are currently being carried out manually. Here, we highlight a few such processes that every Microsoft CSP must know to in order to automate for better business growth.

1. Changing margins due to change in Microsoft’s Prices

Let’s face it. We’ve all been in a situation where we think again on what sales price to quote to the customers for a better profit margin. It is due to the fact that Microsoft frequently changes its Azure and Office 365 cost prices, leaving every Microsoft CSP in confusion. For better revenue it is essential that your account manager is updated with the Microsoft’s latest pricing spreadsheets. Let’s say, a quote for a service can give you better margins in January but not the same good margin the next month! With manual checking, you’d need a huge team to just keep checking for the updates every now and then from Microsoft. The sane solution would be: Go for automation and change quotes accordingly for better profit margins.

2. ERP overload due to manual updation of License Quantities

A manual creation of new sales order each time a customer’s buys something from your business service, the ERP would stay sane for a couple of thousand orders but once your revenue stream goes up, by say 50 thousand USD, the process would become extremely laborious. In order to cater for that, every Microsoft CSP must assess new automation approaches to simplify complex tasks in your cloud computing services.

3. Invoicing your customers (The mess has just begun)

Even today some CSPs are going through manual invoicing, where you add the customers costs. Depending upon your setup, you might have another person handle the suppliers like Microsoft. These are two different jobs but have a huge impact on your business revenue if not done in harmony.

The person handling manual invoices must create invoices based on the billing system and calculate costs. Thu number of updates makes the process more messy depending upon the billing cycle for each customer. At the end, nobody is sure that the final invoice is exactly what it should be, since it is a manual generation.

4. Microsoft Cost Reconciliation and resulting Discrepancies in costs

The manual systems get more complicated when the business has to pay the supplier like Microsoft right away. You might notice after a few cycles that there is no reconciliation between the supplier invoice for a billing cycle and the customers’ payments for the same billing cycle. Since you can’t say no to a supplier (ever), your cloud computing services business suffers because of manual invoicing practice.

5. The struggle to deliver cost-transparency

Customers demand cost-transparency. That is not really possible if the data is managed manually. With a larger customer base, this is practically impossible without an automated approach.

ALSO READ: 3 ways MachPanel can boost your business profits

Fast-track your business with automaton processes with MachPanel

The process you are carrying out in a manual approach, surely hinder your business growth one day as your customer base grows. You should never let these manual processes impair your business productivity. It is therefore important to synchronization and consolidation between business systems and processes. Adopting business process automation services is the key to solve this problem.

MachPanel provides you all the necessary tools and an integrated platform to automate your cloud business through a pool of business process automation services. With integrated invoicing, automated billing and different automation modules for business productivity like Microsoft SharePoint, Microsoft Exchange, and Microsoft Skype for Business Server, Microsoft Work Folders, Microsoft Directory Sync, Microsoft Hyper V and Microsoft Dynamics 365, you get the required tools needed for a 365 degree business automating.

The icing on the cake: MachPanel Automation Platform for Microsoft CSP

With this module, you can fully automate and manage entire lifecycle of your Direct and Indirect CSP Business with MachPanel. You own and control the billing, along with the freedom to showcase bundle and sell integrated offers with a hybrid marketplace. The platform provides easy ways to Provision, Manage, support & Bill Microsoft CSP.

Go the extra mile with Automation and experience hassle-free Reselling. Get started with MachPanel today.

Lets TalkRequest a Demo

The post 5 process to automate for better Microsoft CSP Productivity appeared first on MachSol Blog.

MachPanel is a robust platform that favors cloud providers and makes them do more with less. With MachPanel, Resellers can boost up their business profit and increase their revenue stream like they wish. Following are three ways how MachPanel can boost business profits and reduce overall business costs.

Utilize tailored approach

MachPanel experts make sure that each reseller is dealt in a unique and special manner. That is why, MachPanel offer services according to your business type. Nevertheless, the road to success doesn’t only require implementing cutting edge technology to your business environment, but also to implement that in the most efficient manner to stay ahead of the curve. MachPanel provides that efficiency and so you can utilize MachPanel’s offerings according to your business niche to increase business profits.

Powerful integrated tools

MachPanel is equipped with best in line integrated tools for cloud computing that foster cloud provider’s business ideas and turn them into reality. With a wide variety of integrated tools like invoicing and billing, Power BI, hybrid marketplace, MachPanel makes it easier for cloud providers and resellers to resell their offerings. There are multiple Automation modules offered at MachPanel like Automation module for Microsoft SharePoint, Automation module for Microsoft Exchange, Automation module for Mycroft Skype for Business, Automation module for Microsoft Hyper V, Automation module for Microsoft Dynamics,  Automation for Work Folders,  Multi-Tenant Remote Desktop Services and many others that help Cloud provider with the tools and modules they need for better productivity of their cloud business.

24/7 technical support

MachPanel experts are there to provide you 24/7 technical support. With a huge number of Customer Representatives on board, you can always rely on your customer’s technical problems being solved from MachPanel experts. This way, your customer base increases and so does your revenue stream.

ALSO READ: Improve Business Productivity with Remote Desktop Service

MachPanel Automation module for Microsoft CSP

With MachPanel Automation module for Microsoft CSP, you get all the tools needed to fully automate your cloud business. With this module, you can easily manage the entire lifecycle of your Direct and Indirect CSP Business. You can showcase, bundle and sell integrated offers and services under the white-lablelled customized storefront. There is complete business automation of Microsoft O365 & Azure.  Recurring subscriptions and easy billing make MachPanel the favorite cloud business automation platform of Cloud Providers.

Get on board with MachPanel and discover the full potential of your cloud business.

Lets TalkRequest a Demo

The post 3 ways MachPanel can boost your business profits appeared first on MachSol Blog.

SharePoint Admin center allows you to adjust SharePoint online external sharing settings according to your business requirements. You can control settings at Organization level and at Site Level. To enable Organization level settings, you must turn on SharePoint online external sharing from the SharePoint admin center. Site Level settings provide the privilege to restrict the content to share on a site-by-site basis. Site Owners can’t change external sharing settings for a site, only global admins or SharePoint Admins can do that.

SharePoint site Basic Options

Regarding SharePoint Online basic options to share are the following:

• No external sharing
• Existing guests
• New and existing guests
• Anonymous sharing

No external sharing: with this option, site users are not able to share any site content externally. For communication and classic site, this is the default option.

In the admin center Select Active Sites under Sites option > Select Proper sites > Click Sharing > Select only people in your organization > Click Save.

Existing guests (Authenticated): with this option, you can share content with users present already in Azure Active Directory. Users can either be added manually or already exist due to accepting a previous invitation.

In the admin center Select Active Sites under Sites option > Proper Sites > Sharing > Existing Guests > Save.

ALSO READ: SharePoint Online integration with Microsoft Teams

New and existing guests (Authenticated):

The existing site content can be shared with anyone externally if they are added to Azure AD. Once sharing is enabled, Site Owners are able to share files and folders with external users. An email with a link to invitation is sent to the external collaborator.

In the admin center Select Active Sites under Sites option > Proper Sites >Sharing > New and existing guests > Save.

Anonymous sharing: with this option you can share your documents, folders and files externally with anyone who has the link through an anonymous link that can also be shared freely online. With this option, you need to be very careful that there is no information of sensitive nature that must not be shared to people outside the organization.

In the admin center Select Active Sites under Sites option > Proper Sites > Sharing > Select Anyone > Save.

MachPanel Automation Module for Microsoft SharePoint

MachPanel offers complete Orchestration for Hosted SharePoint Service Providers and Enterprises. With a single integrated Control panel, you get simplified billing, provisioning, and management with built-in multi-tenancy and segregation for Microsoft SharePoint 2019 and older versions for cloud delivery and on-premise setup. IT is a complete business automation solution that can provide the competitive edge that your business requires. MachPanel Provides expert assistance for on-premises SharePoint setup and also if your business requires selling of fully segregated multi-tenant hosted SharePoint environment.

Get on board with MachPanel and unlock the potential of a segregated multi-tenant hosted SharePoint environment.

Lets TalkRequest a Demo

The post 4 Major SharePoint online external sharing configuration options appeared first on MachSol Blog.

So, a SharePoint blog is like an out-of-the-box ready thing that you can just tailor it according to your niche requirements (pretty much like pre-cooked pasta that you can quickly toss into your favorite sauce, if that makes sense). On the other hand, a SharePoint Publishing Site is a more structured authoring and publishing site that is typically used to create a sharing and communication portal amongst enterprises.

Here’s a quick take on features of a blog and those of a Publishing site.

SharePoint Blog Site

As mentioned earlier, a blog can get you started with minimum amount of effort. You can just add your content, for which the SharePoint blog was initiated in the first place. Blogs can be easily integrated with Microsoft Word which makes them easy to publish Live directly from Microsoft Word. You won’t even have to specifically include pictures and videos if there are any, the integrated system does that for you automatically.  In addition to this, blogs have a commenting system built into them, so a blog is well-suited in the time when you plan to add comments and activity or discussions over your content. This becomes a drawback if you don’t wish to add a commenting system to your blog. Furthermore, there’s an option to add categories to your blog, so you can upload content for more than one type and that gets easier to navigate your blog. SharePoint also offers Views by categories feature.

SharePoint Publishing Site

A Publishing site is particularly useful if you need to generate content form a content hub. So, you can specify content types and have the control to manage the blog page fields. Using a Publishing Site, you can also create your own Page Layouts, design the page yourself and make changes of layout and fields whenever you wish. With this method, you can build everything yourself according to the company needs. So, with a Publishing Site, you are n more control of what is displayed and how is it displayed on-screen.

ALSO READ: SharePoint CMS new features for better collaborative environment

Final thoughts…

After the overview of both options, it can be concluded that if you want a more personalized approach, Sites must be your choice. Nevertheless, Blogs prove beneficial when you want to start quickly without much design-oriented hassle.

MachPanel Automation Module for Microsoft SharePoint

MachPanel is a born-in-the-cloud business automation platform which provides Complete Orchestration for Hosted SharePoint Service Providers and Enterprises. With MachPanel, you get the control to deploy hosted SharePoint solution on the cloud with simplified billing, management and provisioning. It includes built-in multi-tenancy and segregation for Microsoft SharePoint 2019 and older versions for cloud delivery and on-premise setup. Experts at MachPanel are there to help you with your deployments and post-deployment issues. MachPanel offers Multi-tenant deployments, Groups Management, Vanity & SSL Site Collection, Automated Host header entries, Site Management, DNS Records, Multiple Domain Handling, SharePoint Users management in a site collection and many more features that can prove fruitful for any cloud business

Head over to MachPanel to cater for your SharePoint deployment and needs for a successful SharePoint for business provision and management.

Lets TalkRequest a Demo

The post SharePoint Blog Site vs. Publishing Site: Know the difference for a successful deployment appeared first on MachSol Blog.